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O Solo Veto

The world is going to the crapper in the Middle East right now, so in a way part of me wonders why I’m obsessing over this issue, but it’s important. Like everybody else I’m wondering how President Bush has managed never to veto a single thing in all his years in office.

I mean, if you’d hired a quality control officer in your company and, unlike every q.c. officer before him, he’d not found a single bit of quality to control and said “well I got the factory to change everything to my specifications before it got to the point where it had to be sent back” would you be suspicious? I would. Either the guy is a genius who just reinvented your quality capabilities or he’s slacking. And there aren’t that many geniuses in the world.

Anyway, this stem cell thing … there are many reasoned arguments on both sides. I’ve heard some very decent and rational people explain how, if you define life as beginning at conception, an embryo is a human being and therefore should be protected under the law. Fair enough. But if that’s the case, why do we dispose of so many of them?

According to the legislation that was vetoed, there are thousands of them disposed of every year. The legislation only sets boundaries saying we can use the ones that would’ve been disposed of for research, and only if the donors agree to it. These would never be implanted in a woman. If they’re all human life, why are they being disposed of to begin with?

Part of U.S. Congressman Mike Castle’s letter to Bush:

* The stem cells were derived from human embryos that have been donated from in vitro fertilization clinics, were created for the purposes of fertility treatment, and were in excess of the clinical need of the individuals seeking such treatment. Prior to the consideration of embryo donation and through consultation with the individuals seeking fertility treatment, it was determined that the embryos would never be implanted in a woman and would otherwise be discarded.
* The individuals seeking fertility treatment donated the embryos with written informed consent and without receiving any financial or other inducements to make the donation.

This logic goes unmentioned in the administration’s denouncements.

What we’re really witnessing is a calculated pandering to ignorance. I don’t think Bush is pandering, though — I think he really believes each blastocyst is a human child crying out for a uterus. He’s swallowing whole the dogma spoon fed to him by Rove, especially. (Rove, who has been distorting the science to begin with — and we know Bush won’t actually read anything for himself, so whatever Rove says, Bush takes as gospel.)

This is frightening to me because of the implications — that even with a Republican majority in Congress passing this bill, the President still sees it as his responsibility to be the voice of his version of God for our nation. I can’t find the link right now, but it’s on record that at least four senators who spoke against the bill invoked God’s name saying the Creator would be very displeased and would do bad things to America if we passed it.

Ben Franklin and the rest of them are rolling in their graves.

The pandering is possible because of the semantics involved. What do we mean by “life” and “child”? Who gets to decide if a blastocyst is a child or not? Obviously, in reality, it’s more complicated than “cell a plus cell b equals Junior.” Nature doesn’t treat it that way; even the Bible doesn’t treat it that way (it refers to life as “breath” not blastocysts; so much of scripture is misquoted, mistranslated and misinterpreted to support all kinds of views that I’ve given up trying to even discuss it in those terms with anyone). And evidently our own laws don’t treat it that way either, because the law allows the discarding of these blastocysts in fertility clinics.

This is a way for an administration that has championed so much death to doubletalk their way into being all about life, to hold onto their shredding political base by pandering to the ignorant, superstitious and misguided who keep putting them in office.

I don’t necessarily mean “ignorant” as an insult, either. Everybody can’t be an expert on everything. People are busy with their regular lives. In an information saturated world, we depend on sound bites to navigate the terrain. I confess that, listening to the bits and pieces coming over the airwaves, I too figured using embryos for research sounded creepy to me. But being informed about it with an open mind goes a long way toward understanding it’s not so simple, especially when you weigh the benefits.

The NIH has an excellent overview here.

Over four hundred thousand blastocysts are out there, frozen, and a tiny fraction of them are ever “adopted” for attempted impregnation. Plus, if I understand Castle’s letter quoted above, only cell groups that are flagged by donors as ok for research would ever be used.

It’s a slippery ontological question: who decides a group of cells is a human person and who doesn’t? If someone is brain-dead, and the family insists the person is alive enough to still be the person they knew, should the government be allowed to pull the plug anyway? Probably not. Then why would the government be allowed to decide the converse — that a microscpopic blastocyst is a person when the people who created it say it isn’t? It’s uncomfortable to discuss, but necessary.

However, rational discussion is impossible with the rampant disinformation and ignorance being spread (by both sides, in some instances, but the *science* and logic are on the pro-research side, it seems to me). The most ridiculous stuff is coming from the silly portion of the right wing, such as Limbaugh claiming that you have to have abortions to get stem cells.

Why am I angry about this? Because of the same reasons that most of the country should be up in arms about it. Because I have people I love who could be helped by this research — the brightest light in the dark tunnel of medicine for so many people with diseases that don’t respond to anything as simple as a miracle vaccine. It’s the same reason Arlen Specter breaks with his more extreme Republican brethren on the issue on the Senate floor. Because for him it’s a matter of life and death, but not in the sense of superstition and theory:

There are some 400k frozen embryos, and the choice is discarding them or using them to save lives; Sen. Brownback and I had a debate where he challenged me on when life began, and I retorted, suffering from Hodgkins cancer myself, the question on my mind was when life ended, and life will never begin for these embroys because there are 400 thousand and notwithstanding millions of dollars appropriated to encourage adoption, only 128 have been adopted; so those [potential] lives [of the remaining embryos] will not begin, but many other lives will end if we do not use all the scientific resources available.”

This is real-world thinking. The kind of thinking that stands up and makes adult, difficult choices about the reality of the world around us. My stepfather (with Alzheimer’s disease) and others close to me with things like immunological disorders could be helped by this research. My daughter and I just sent flowers to a funeral of a loved one who died from complications after a stem-cell procedure that could’ve been improved if the research hadn’t been stymied for the last five years.

But any such morally responsible thinking is precluded by the insidious manipulative drivel piped into the conversation by dogmatic fundamentalists who believe the cells from our bodies belong to the government, not us. And they’re so effective at this twisting of logic, that even my own mother (my ailing stepfather’s wife, who has to face their last years together under the weight of Alzheimer’s) is convinced that her President is a saint who would never do her wrong.

Yeah, that’s why I’m angry.

The Science Of Desire

The beauty of ethnography, say its proponents, is that it provides a richer understanding of consumers than does traditional research. Yes, companies are still using focus groups, surveys, and demographic data to glean insights into the consumer’s mind. But closely observing people where they live and work, say executives, allows companies to zero in on their customers’ unarticulated desires. “It used be that design features were tacked on to the end of a marketing strategy,” says Timothy deWaal Malefyt, an anthropologist who runs “cultural discovery” at ad firm BBDO Worldwide. “Now what differentiates products has to be baked in from the beginning. This makes anthropology far more valuable.”

Ubiquitous computing research from AIGA

AIGA – Augmenting the City: The Design of a Context-Aware Mobile Web Site

The produced solution augments the city through web-based access to a digital layer of information about people, places and activities adapted to users’ physical and social context and their history of social interactions in the city.

I ran across a new article in Wired about Ray Kurzweil’s ideas about immortality — using technology to transform ourselves into everlasting containers of our essential being — and it occurred to me that the concept behaves much like the horcrux from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
Maybe Arthur C Clarke was right about technology and magic?

This is a terrific article: The Believer – Interview with Jonathan Haidt

Haidt makes some thought-provoking points: the evolutionary origins of morality; why some people find some things repugnant and others not; the difference between moral pluralism and moral relativism; and other great stuff.

He also reminds us not to objectify people with whom we may not agree, and not to make too many assumptions (usually to our own detriment):

First, it would help if liberals understood conservatives better. If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated—everyone except for psychopaths. Everyone else is morally motivated. Liberals need to understand that conservatives are motivated by more than greed and hatred. And Americans and George Bush in particular need to understand that even terrorists are pursuing moral goods. One of the most psychologically stupid things anyone ever said is that the 9/11 terrorists did this because they hate our freedom. That’s just idiotic. Nobody says: “They’re free over there. I hate that. I want to kill them.” They did this because they hate us, they’re angry at us for many reasons, and terrorism and violence are “moral” actions, by which I don’t mean morally right, I mean morally motivated.

Some people will read Haidt and immediately dismiss him because they reject a scientific (i.e. evolutionarily based) point of view on matters of human morality and ethics. But whatever. That’d be too bad, because it actually gives some solid, rational reasons for the “left” to be a lot more tolerant and understanding of the “right.” (Even if they don’t agree.)

Ok, I posted about this because it sounded so convincing, but then read criticisms of it (such as this one) … I’m leaving my original post up below here because, well, it’s what I posted, but I’m really curious to see what else comes up about this — some of the criticism seems to focus on one or another bit of Roberts’ ‘theory’ but not the whole thing.

Anyway… Here’s my original post.

I just read a paper written by a psychologist at Berkeley. He builds on the accepted concepts that the brain has a certain ‘setting’ where it wants to keep each individual person’s body fat, and that it can be affected. He proposes that it’s the relationship between the stimulus of taste (which has to be very similar from one meal to the next) closely followed by caloric intake registering in the brain, which causes the brain to pump out the chemistry that keeps fat on our bodies.

A food is fattening (raises the set point) to the extent its flavor is associated with calories.
The strongest flavor-calorie associations will occur, learning research implies, when four things are true: (a) the flavor is strong and complex flavor; (b) the food is digested quickly; (c) the food is eaten repeatedly; and (d) the flavor is exactly the same from one instance to the next. These four traits combine in a multiplicative way in the sense that if one is entirely absent, the food will not raise the set point at all.

It’s confusing reading in places, but it’s amazing — it starts making more sense about 5-6 pages into it, when the examples are more concrete and there’s less quoting of previous academic stuff.

Here’s the article: http://freakonomics.com/pdf/whatmakesfoodfattening.pdf

The article that pointed me to it was on the Freakonomics website:
http://freakonomics.com/times0911.php

It explains why the South Beach thing works (and explains why the South Beach explanation for why it works isn’t the whole story, though I don’t think they ever really say South Beach? — they just talk about low-GI diets in general)

Basically, your brain will choose one kind of food over another if it gives a quicker/higher caloric boost and it also tastes better. In the US, there’s such an abundance of this kind of food, especially fast food and most grocery store branded products, that our brains naturally gravitate toward this stuff. The sameness of the food from one eating to the next is very important too: even some slight differences in taste can throw this mechanism off. But because so many foods (even in groceries and non-fast-food restaurants now, like Chilis and whatnot) are available nation-wide or in every neighborhood and always taste the same, our brains can avail themselves of this experience in ways unprecedented in human history until recently.

In low-glycemic-index (low GI) foods, they may taste great even, but because they take longer to digest and the calories take longer to hit the bloodstream and register in the brain, the effect isn’t the same (it’s the overlap between taste and calorie-registering that over time bumps up the brain’s need to eat certain foods to keep fat stores high, because we’re evolved to keep them high in times of plenty). I’m way over-simplifying this, but anyway, it makes so much sense!

The paper goes on to explain why it used to be that the poor in the US were thin while the rich were fat, and why it’s reversed. (Although in most countries the poor are still pretty thin.)

And yet, there are still news reporters standing out there in parkas with nerf-covered microphones.

Louisiana – Non Precipitation Warnings

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK. POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

The Onion nails Intelligent Design with this bit of satire. What I find disturbing is that the story sounds completely believable, which only illustrates how crazy the real situation is to begin with.

The Onion | Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

ACM Queue – A Conversation with Alan Kay – Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk—and much more.
He’s the guy who says great stuff like “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” as well as this chestnut that describes so perfectly the phenomenon so many of us experience in corporate life:

It’s not that people are completely stupid, but if there’s a big idea and you have deadlines and you have expedience and you have competitors, very likely what you’ll do is take a low-pass filter on that idea and implement one part of it and miss what has to be done next. This happens over and over again.

My daughter and I listened to Hitchhiker’s Guide and some of Restaurant, read by Douglas Adams, on our car trip this week. It made me think a lot about who this guy was and what genius he had at explaining perspective, relative meaning, etc.
In the current climate of “intelligent design” claptrap, I thought this a lovely bit related by Dawkins:
Edge: LAMENT FOR DOUGLAS By Richard Dawkins

To illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must be somehow pre-ordained for us, because we are so well-suited to live in it, he mimed a wonderfully funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the depression uncannily being exactly the same shape as the puddle. Or there’s this parable, which he told with huge enjoyment, whose moral leaps out with no further explanation. A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box. manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”

I’ve been pondering lately how complex something can be with only a few facets of adjustment. How very simple choices or factors can render near-infinite sophistication. And then I see this:

Wired News: Humans Aren’t So Complicated

A refined map of the human genome shows that humans have even fewer genes than previously thought — less than 25,000, about the same as a mustard green.

How is it that I’ve gotten so out of the loop that I missed this book? I ran across a link to it in Peter Morville’s excellent article (itself worthy of a few thorough readings) and was glad to see somebody else putting into much better and more complete expression something I’ve been inarticulately grunting for a long time: that things like ‘artificial intelligence’ or even complex human systems — you know, like, corporations — are going to have to somehow embrace biological structures, organic methods. Whatever those are.

I only just started reading this book, but it sounds like it’s making a great case for this point of view. Looks like a really fun read too.

Kevin Kelly — Chapter 1: The Made and the Born

For the world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it. That is, the more mechanical we make our fabricated environment, the more biological it will eventually have to be if it is to work at all. Our future is technological; but it will not be a world of gray steel. Rather our technological future is headed toward a neo-biological civilization.

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