Do something for Darfur

This is a great idea. Help light up the Darfur Wall. Donate one dollar or more to turn a number from dark gray to brilliant white and honor one lost life. 100% of the proceeds go to four Darfur relief organizations.

Not the naughties

"Oh Adso, you dolt," my alter ego corrected me,
"These first years of the century, they're not the 'zeros' or the 'naughties'."
"They're the Double-O's."
"And next year is '007!"

Undermining Sydney's food security

In the SMH this morning ("How do you cook Kellyville max?"), Elizabeth Farrelly points out that by creating the North West growth centre from Mulgrave to Bidwell, the NSW govt is encouraging developers to pave over Sydney's best food-growing lands.

Sydney is expecting maybe a million blow-ins over coming decades (though figures are revised downwards all the time) and they have to live somewhere. But here? In Sydney's vegie basket?

At the same time the Public Service Association reports that, following the recent resignation of Minister Craig Knowles, the NSW Government has decided to split the Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources (DIPNR) in two. Ian McDonald will become Minister for Natural Resources (he's also Minister for Primary Industries) and Frank Sartor will take control of Planning. Should be interesting to see what strange policies will be borne of that arrangement.

Smarter computers

Rather than trying to understand people as computers, what if we reversed the analogy - not in order to wonder whether computers really think or feel (what sort of person wonders in this way about other people?!). When one sets that question aside, the most interesting difference between human agent-perceiving-deliberators and their silicon counterparts is the relative poverty of the world in which the latter live.

But how do we enrich the worlds of computers? How do we teach them to handle that enrichment? Then again, how do we enrich our world? How do we make sure future generations, or distant neighbours, can handle the enrichment?

How, in other words, do we "raise" "good" computers? How do we make computers so that they can be "well-raised"?

They make a wasteland, and call it peace

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

* Translation: They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.

Tacitus, Agricola, ch. 30

Junk, Delilo & DNA

Could the study of junk reveal a continuity between biological and social evolution?

A few years ago, I read Don Delilio's incredible homage to the second half of the 20th century, Underworld. No, it's got nothing to do with Vampires or Kate Beckinsale - sorry, Richard.

The novel is a study of junk, beginning with a certain baseball, and centred on a garbage disposal consultant, Nick Shay, who specialises in highly-toxic waste. Nick's friend and colleague, Jesse Detwiler, is famous for stealing J. Edgar Hoover's garbage, and has a distinctive take on trash, that can be read as the underlying message of the book.

"See we have everything backwards," he said.
Civilisation did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage came first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics. ...
Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.

Now, that's probably interesting enough for one blog post. The idea of philosophy and culture in general being a response to a big-o Other is not new. It goes back as far as Hegel, probably further. But notice how, in this picture, the other is not passive. Garbage pushes, it spreads. It incites culture.

Liz Grosz has been working on this idea lately, and what comes next is partly for her, because there's an analogue in the biological sciences, in the thick of our genetic code.

You know that the human genome has been sequenced, but did you know that only 3% of all that DNA code goes into producing proteins? Only about 25,000 genes actively contribute to the functioning of the human body. What's more remarkable is that mice have a similar number of active genes, yet we're far more complex organisms than mice. We can't explain that complexity in terms of the number of active genes, so how do we explain it? Well, as you may have guessed, the answer seems to have to do with the amount of junk. Only 80% of a mouse's genetic code is inactive, while junk DNA makes up 97% of our DNA - more than any other species.

Remarkably, it seems we're biologically more sophisticated than other species because of how much DNA we throw away. (Would it be too lame to say it's the DNA humanity rejects that makes it the best?) But this junk DNA isn't quite "thrown away", is it? We still carry it around in our genetic code. It's still all there, even if it doesn't do anything. So, we'd be better off saying that the key difference between mice and ourselves is the amount of junk DNA we can live with.

Hopefully, that's starting to make the parallel clearer. If the parallel holds, it seems that we ought to say that humanity's complexity is the result of finding a way of living with more junk than any other species. Put that way, a continuity between genetic adaptation and social evolution starts to seem plausible, don't you think?