Rhinocrisy

For some reason, terrorist cells’ rosters, complete with Social Security numbers, never seem to show up on stolen hard-drives for sale at the local flea market. Nor do their troop assignments, target lists, or memos that could prove embarrassing to governments that help them out. Why do I mention this? Because it happens to the committed, security-conscious “best fighting force in the world.” Oops!

A reporter recently obtained several drives at the bazaar that contained documents marked “Secret.” The contents included documents that were potentially embarrassing to Pakistan, a U.S. ally, presentations that named suspected militants targeted for “kill or capture” and discussions of U.S. efforts to “remove” or “marginalize” Afghan government officials whom the military considered “problem makers.”

And here I thought one of the lessons of Vietnam was that you can’t beat people who care more about their fight than you care about yours.

Oh, I’m sorry, did I say “lessons of Vietnam?” Did I imply that humans are capable of learning from experience, the divine ability that differentiates us from pit bulls and phytoplankton? Sorry, I misspoke. Those who want to feel different will have to satisfy themelves by staring in differentiated awe at their opposable thumbs.

If you are in San Francisco or the East Bay this week and you have 2 hours to enrich your life, turn off the computer and get thyself to a movie house. From the moviemakers:

Sir! No Sir! tells the story of one of the most vibrant and widespread upheavals of the 1960’s-one that had a profound impact on American society, yet has been virtually obliterated from the collective memory of that time. Like the Vietnam War itself, the GI Antiwar Movement started small and within a few years exploded into a force that altered history. Between 1966 and 1975, groups of soldiers emerged to challenge the war and racism in the military. Group action and individual defiance, from the 500,000 GIs who deserted over the course of the war to the untold numbers who wore peace signs, defied military discipline and avoided combat, created a “Fuck the Army” counter-culture that threatened the entire military culture of the time and changed the course of the war. Sir! No Sir! chronicles the GI Antiwar Movement using vividly told stories from individual participants and never-before-seen Super-8 and 16mm film footage of events that capture the mood, politics and culture of an increasingly polarized America during wartime. (83m)

(emphasis mine) The film will open nationwide next week. The filmmakers said they are more like to get wider distribution if their opening weeks do well here in the coastal enclaves, so get out there and get you some learning. As someone who has read a fair bit about the Vietnam War and activism against it, this was still almost all new. Who knew that there was a prison riot at the Presidio of San Francisco stockade followed by a mutiny trial for 27 anti-war soldiers? Not me! (He knows lots of things.)

The film opens in New York April 17 and in Denver and Madison on the 28th.

Usually, I think I know how to speak and read English. Then I come across a couple paragraphs like these and I wonder whether I missed a day of vocabulary class.

Iraq observed “Freedom Day,” a holiday that commemorates U.S. Marines tearing down a statue of
Saddam Hussein as Iraqis cheered in Firdous Square on April 9, 2003, marking the collapse of Saddam’s regime.

Meanwhile, at least 15 people were killed Sunday, including eight suspected insurgents shot by American soldiers in a pre-dawn raid north of the capital.

Freedom (vree’-dome): (n) 1. The right to blow up one’s self and neighbors in an attempt to affect geopolitics. 2. The right to be blown up in one’s home by young men from a far-off country who for one reason or another consider one to be an insurgent. (See: misery)

Good news: Via Americablog, I learn:

Bush has caused a worrisome officer shortage in US Army:

The Army expects to be short 2,500 captains and majors this year, with the number rising to 3,300 in 2007. These officers are the Army’s seed corn, the people who 10 years from now should be leading battalions and brigades.

“We’re ruining an Army that took us 30 years to build,” Republican maverick Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., told a group of reporters at a recent conference….

The Army denies the shortage is a crisis, but its top civilian, Francis J. Harvey, acknowledged concerns, telling the Washington Post: “We are worried.”

Americablog, being a posse of Democratic Party partisans who find it more important to attack George W Bush than to think about what they consider good for the world, is predictably concerned. Oh no, they write. Now how will we invade Iran? For my part, I think the decline in military recruiting is great news.

Bad news: A country that lacks troops and officers but has thousands of nuclear missiles might not be such a good thing after all.

A standard trope of evolutionary psychologists is that differential mate selection between the sexes is driven by competing sexual interests. Men will seek out younger women, who can bear them many children, and women will be attracted to the men who command more resources and power, who will be able to provide for them in adversity. The fact that this theory bears out a rather misogynist view of the sexes is probably just a coincidence. I mean, this is science, right? What’s sexism got to do with it?

Like a lot of evolutionary psychology, I think this is trash. Drawing conclusions about why particular features evolved is extraordinarily difficult, especially since in this case you have to assume that there was a particular selective pressure at all. Not necessarily true; not everything is adaptive, and not everything that is adaptive need have emerged. Last I checked I can’t shoot stinging foam into anyone’s eyes.

Evolutionary psychologists proceed by taking their cues from the real world. Observe existing human behavior and draw conclusions about our evolutoinary past. These are usually ridiculous, overblown conclusions entirely unsupported by any actual evidence. E.g. this absurd Just So story about why men like blonde women better. Socialization is never admitted as a factor.

My favorite example is of a pair of ev psychologists who attempted to raise their child in a “gender-neutral” fashion, but found, to their dismay, that little Johnny liked playing with guns anyway, and concluded this was because of an evolutionary predisposition. Yes, that’s right. Men evolved to love guns. You idiots.

This is not atypical. You can open any issue of most evolutionary psychology journals to find such flatulent conclusions. As a sample, here is an abstract I pulled up from the latest issue of Evolution and Human Behavior (the same one that contains the above “blonde cavegirls” study). It concludes, on the basis of a slight difference in answer to survey questions asking about people’s preferences regarding their partners’ senses of humor, that:

In summary, our results augment prior studies on the sexual selection of humor. We provided further evidence that sexual selection may have influenced humor production because it is specifically preferred by women in relationship partners. Furthermore, men’s reported preferences for humorous partners may be the result of sexual selection shaping male preference for partners who signal sexual interest through humor appreciation.

There is ZERO discussion of differential socialization and its possible influence. Egad, you say? Hold your surprise. This is nothing new.

So, getting to the punchline, the same journal is going to publish a study showing that the apparent evolutionarily-determined mating preferences outlined above (guys like young hot girls, girls like rich guys and don’t really give a shit about appearance) are, well, not necessarily true. It seems that they may have been the result of, um, social circumstances, and as women gain more financial independence, their attitude towards what they want in a partner changes. “Quid?” an imaginary evolutionary psychologists cries, popping his head out of the underbrush. “The patterns we’re observing might be contingent on the particular culture we’re observing rather than on evolutionary dynamics? Alack-a-day!”

Unfortunately I doubt publication of stuff like this is enough to shut down an entire field due to embarassment, but a boy can dream.^*

I learned, to my dismay, that kids no longer sit “Indian style”, they sit “Criss Cross Applesauce”. What the fuck?! We invented that shit, man! Give credit where credit is due. All you white people wouldn’t know how to sit on the ground if it weren’t for us!^*

An Ohio town, during and after the blackout.

My friend John Hayden wants an annual holiday celebrating the night sky, complete with a universal blackout (of lights, not necessarily of power). He arbitrarily proposed August 4th as the date, although precedent suggests the better date is August 14th, the anniversary of the 2003 blackout that covered most of northeastern North America and left 40 million people in the dark. For romantic reasons I’d prefer Midsummer (traditionally celebrated June 24; coincidentally, the 25th is a new moon this year).

Financial considerations mean any such holiday would be impossible, since the enormous enjoyment people would derive from being able to see the stars would not result in any growth in GDP^*, and thus is, from a capitalist perspective, a useless activity not worth engaging in, and the total loss of consumption in a single night would probably amount to many billions of dollars worth of trade. Not to mention safety considerations (shutting down streetlights on highways, e.g.), enough to scare away even the wildest & craziest of municipal authorities.

This is unfortunate. Personally, stars are the closest thing I have ever come to worshipping, and the idea that one could, in the past, have been casually awestruck simply by gazing upwards at night both frustrates and inspires me. Sometimes I’ll catch the moon in a moment like that - it’s the only thing left that can still do this, and I think it’s difficult for it to bear the weight of the job that the entire firmament used to accomplish. But when it’s full and the sky is clear (or better, if there are only a few tufts of clouds), it can still quite take your breath away.

So light pollution is something of a nemesis of mine; even if its ecological impact is not that great, I believe it’s quite spiritually damaging to us. Heaven is one of the most awesome sights available; a huge body of myth certainly testifies to that. I think I can say quite safely that we have produced nothing that compares to it, and we never will. Our spirits are left bereft and weaker because of that absence, and our devotion to nature is probably also consequently smaller. This may come across as mystic garbage, but I mean it quite seriously; we should take some care as to how our environment reflects on our souls.

There are groups dedicated to fighting light pollution, of course, the best known of which is the International Dark Sky organization. There’s also this group of Neo-Luddites who in the past celebrated the anniversary of the 2003 blackout (though now no longer, maybe). On the other hand, if we want to be more pro-active, an enterprising group of individuals with some high-powered rifles could probably simultaneously knock down enough high-voltage power lines that they would trigger cascading power failures and take down a substantial portion of the electrical grid… but this sort of talk is quickly going to get me into trouble, so I’ll end here.

I don’t write about video games much; I don’t think I have ever, actually. And I don’t really play them all that much, since I find most modern games boring. There’s only so many variations on Wolfenstein-3D you can play before you realize that Id pretty much sucked the FPS genre dry by the mid-90s.

Anyway, so I was pretty excited by this video of Will Wright (creator of SimCity and The Sims) presenting a game called “Spore” at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference. He’s managed to fold together many different games into a single one - SimCity, the Sims, Civilization, Pac-man, Space Invaders, etc. But what’s really neat is the introduction of what he calls “procedural” elements. E.g., much of the game involves designing creatures. In an editor you may fiddle around with creature design, add body parts, reshape skeletal structure, etc. The behavior of your creature is then computed by the game itself - that is, if you build a creature with five legs, the game will figure out how a five-legged creature will walk and build on that. This makes the game incredibly fluid in terms of what you can create - and in fact in the game is populated by creatures taken from a player-created database (it’s asynchronous, not massively multiplayer, though - you just download other people’s creations and the game animates and controls them), meaning that an intricate world grows out of your own (and other’s) creativity and interaction with the game itself, not from armies of unimaginative animators.

Pretty cool. If you’re not up for watching a 35-minute video, this Gamespy article has a good summary.

Forbes published their list of the 2000 largest companies in the world for 2006. An interesting list - in the top 20, banks (or other investment groups) and the oil industry predominate, taking up 16 of 20 slots. In the top 100 this drops to a mere 46 out of 100 being oil & gas or investment. The same groups account for 11 of the top 20 most profitable groups (not surprising considering they’re so large).

After getting my nose bloodied on this Crooked Timber thread,^* I did a little reading on coal to liquid technology. Pretty neat stuff, it turns out, far neater than I would have (or had) imagined. (I let this post languish for a week or so, but in the interim someone else e-mailed me about it, so I thought it was sufficiently intriguing that it merited completion).

The essence of the technology is the Fischer-Tropsch process, invented in Germany in the 1920s. The Fischer-Tropsch reaction is, basically, to begin with a mixture of H₂ and CO and burn it along with a catalyst into the hydrocarbon of your choice (controlled by temperature/pressure conditions and the ratio of CO to H₂).

The mixture of CO and H₂, called “syngas”, can be produced by a number of methods. The most popular rely on natural gas or coal gasification. The latter involves simply controlled heating of coal in a low-oxygen environment. Gases, of course, are much easier to separate than petroleum fractions, especially simple gases like the ones in question. The Fischer-Tropsch process thus produces fuels of impeccable quality - you can make almost perfectly pure hydrocarbons, which makes them some of the highest-grade fuels in the world. And the process can be controlled to produce pretty much whatever you like - waxes, oils, kerosene, etc. You can read more about the process from smart people here.)

Unfortunately for its proponents, the economic viability of coal-to-liquid projects rests somewhere around $40/barrel of oil, which means that to date there’s only one large coal-to-liquid producer in the world, the South African company Sasol, which has produced in this manner for decades so that South Africa can retain energy independence, even at great economic cost. Fortunately for them, now that oil is at $65/barrel, coal-to-liquid is definitely profitable and likely to remain so. Sasol is now entertaing offers from around the world to build coal-to-liquid plants. (Now might be a good time to buy Sasol stock…)

The governor of Montana has proposed implementing this technology in the States (with his own state’s copious coal stores) and thereby winning energy independence. Seems eminently plausible, in fact, in a world of expensive oil.

The downside to all this is, of course, ecological. Coal is simply disgusting technology, one of the most destructive things you can mine, and there is considerable CO₂ waste from coal gasification, which means a much higher GHG burden from coal-to-liquid than even from normal petroleum-based gas-guzzling. On the upside, it seems plausible to me that this technology could be adapted to employ waste biomass, which would one-up even these guys.

^† Shit, that’s not much of a defense!