I Am Lord Richardson!

I feel the need to warn the world about a potential threat to our very existence. I suspect that former Governor Bill Richardson may in fact be Lord Voldemort.

Anna has been listening to the Harry Potter books on CD while doing such mundane activities as fixing dinner, cleaning the house, caring for our children, etc., and while she listens to the books I do productive things like sit on my skinny ass and play poker on the iPhone. It was while listening to the books that I have come to the horrifying realization that Bill Richardson is Lord Voldemort.

As as I am sure you are aware, Pres. Obama first picked Richardson to be Secretary of Commerce but a silly grand jury got in the way when it indicted him for breaking campaign finance laws. At this point, Lord Richardson could no longer be the Commerce Secretary and Head Master Obama was forced to find another individual for the post. If you have been following the news, you are also aware that this has been a very difficult task. Obama is now on his third nomination for the post and the newest pick is having troubles.

Does this sound familiar? Of course it does. We all know that Lord Voldemort wanted to be the Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts and when he was refused the post, he placed a curse upon same and no one else was able to hold the position for more than a year. It now looks like the same curse has been placed on the Secretary of Commerce.

Obviously, muggles would never make this connection; therefore, it is up to Harry Potter fans to spread the word. I keep hearing Sean Hannity refer to Pres. Obama as "The Chosen One", so we must do everything we can to help him locate and destroy Lord Richardson's horcruxes. I considered editing Bill Richardson's wikipedia page to warn the world about his true identity but Lord Richardson has probably put the moderators of Wikipedia under the Imperious Curse and I don't want to have my wikipedia account banned because then I wouldn't be able to warn the world about the alien lizard people living in underground government bunkers that are secretly controlling the Illuminati.

An Anthropolgical Study of Parents.

Tonight Pres. Obama will deliver his not-quite State of the Union address but it seems that few people are paying much attention to this speech. My best guess is that the Union is in a state of shock and nobody wants to hear how crappy things have gotten. So I am going to jump on the bandwagon and ignore it as well.

I have been meaning to write this post for some time (I had an earlier draft written about six months ago) but never got around to finishing. What is the topic that I want to discuss? The changes that having a small child brings about in otherwise normal adults.

Let us examine some of the behavior that I have observed in Anna and I.

1. You clap and celebrate such amazingly spectacular events like a character in a television show singing a song. Or putting on pants. Or pooping in a toilet. These events produce an applause usually reserved for rock stars, but Goofy can receive a standing ovation for saying “Garsh!” So can Mommy.

2. Once 1000 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, drinking mimosas, four star hotels and the like were considered the height of luxury but now being able to finish a meal is a luxury seemingly only reserved for royalty.

3. Our bathtub has become a repository for toys and a canvas for graffiti.

4. Due to the evil manipulations of Elmo and his kin, we now normally refer to ourselves in the third person. Daddy is going to work. Mommy loves Sophie. Not entirely sure what psychological ramifications exist because of this behavior; but, they can’t be good.

5. When trying to teach your small child things like doing somersaults, you do things with your body that should have been forgotten years ago. Seriously, they are a bad idea.

6. Going to bed at 9:00 seems like a really good idea.

7. The idea of finding ourselves without any orange juice in the house gives me cold chills.

8. Going to the grocery store requires outfitting yourself like a Sherpa scaling Everest, complete with bags, provisions and spare supplies.

9. Duct Tape once was the tool that could solve almost any problem but it has been replaced by the band-aid. Scrapped your knee. Here is a band-aid. Bumped your head. Here is a band-aid. Your tummy is sore. Here is a band-aid. The Wildcats lost three games in a row. Here is a band-aid.

I would love to hear any other anthropological changes that you have observed in either yourself or others because of the addition of small children.

EDIT: OK, some people are thinking about the speech. Read this excellent piece by George Lakoff via Fivethirtyeight. Really, go read it. It is good.

The Perfect Cheeseburger.

My wife makes the perfect cheeseburgers.



Half a pound of beef, cheese, lettuce, bacon, caramelized onions and a fried egg.

One step removed from Nirvana.

Buckle Up!! It is going to be one hell of a ride.

A couple of days ago I mentioned in passing the possibility that we are approaching the singularity. It was one of those throw-away words that I didn’t give much thought and as consequence I have heard others mention it numerous times since I wrote that post.

For those of you not up on your futurism and/or science fiction (some would claim they are the one and the same) let me give you a little primer. The singularity is a theoretical point in the future wherein technology advances to such a degree that we experience an unprecedented burst of innovation and advancement. The theory is that once we have machines that achieve near-human intelligence, those same machines will be able to design even more intelligent machines, which design even more intelligent machines, and … well you get the idea. While the rise of intelligent machines is the first domino, intelligent machines alone don’t bring about the singularity. E.O. Wilson in his wonderful book Consilience argues that Science is advancing to the point where we are approaching a unity of knowledge.

This isn’t some crazy notion concocted by a bunch of sci-fi nerds, but is a theory supported by some of the brightest minds in the world. Carl Sagan believed that we would be approaching the singularity by 2030. Ray Kurzweil has basically devoted his life to the idea and made it his goal to live long enough to witness such. Even business people like Jack Welch and Bill Gates are saying it is inevitable. Google and NASA have partnered to create a think-tank devoted entirely to the subject.

So what does the singularity mean for you and me? Nobody knows and that is the whole point. We are talking about such a rapid change in both technology and society that predictions would be impossible. We are talking about a change so great that a good analogy would be like taking a person from the year 1000 and dropping them in the middle of 2009, except we would have change that drastic every 10 to 20 years. Our dreams of flying cars and Rosie the Robot may seem quaint within our lifetime. Kurzweil wrote in 2001: “The Singularity is technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. Some would say that we cannot comprehend the Singularity, at least with our current level of understanding, and that it is impossible, therefore, to look past its "event horizon" and make sense of what lies beyond.”

Do I have anything interesting to say on this subject? No, not really. For those worried about being able to adapt I don’t really have any advice except to read more science fiction. Those sci-fi nerds may just be your best bet for being able to adapt to whatever new paradigm is over the horizon.

Happy B-Day Old Man!!!

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!!

One of my many, varied, nuanced and irrationally passionate pet-peeves are the idiots (and yes you are an idiot if you have drank this particular brand of Kool-Aid) who believe (yes I am using the word believe) in Intelligent Design. It really gets my blood boiling because of their insistence in wrapping their particular pile of dog shit in scientific mumbo-jumbo and passing it off as Science. If these nut-jobs stopped there it wouldn’t be so bad because the peer-review process of modern science would weed these kooks out; but, they use the levers of democracy to try and out flank real science by inserting their poison into public schools.

Ok, the point of this post isn’t to rail against modern day “Earth is flat” morons, but to celebrate Darwin and his contribution to our understanding of how the universe works. Most people know that Evolution and its underpinning description of reality that is Natural Selection is the foundation for modern Biology; however, his theories have profoundly “evolved” many branches of science. One example that I have learned about (thanks Scientific American) is Superorganism Dynamics. My feeble amateur explanation would be to describe it as the evolutionary process happening on a macro-scale. Think of a colony of ants evolving as if it was a single organism. The interesting part is that this has implications for very non-biological systems as well. The same rules seem to apply to traffic patterns and how memes spread through the internet.

Cultural evolution and the study of the evolutionary processes that accompany human language are two more areas where evolution has had a profound impact on non-biological areas of study. My point is that Charles Darwin’s theories have had a more profound impact on our understanding than any other individual since Aristotle. And since it was nearly 2000 years before Aristotle’s ideas began to really blossom and move us exponentially forward, I think that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the impact of Mr. Darwin’s theories.

200 years ago today Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born. If you know me at all, you know that I am a huge Lincoln fan; but, Pres. Lincoln doesn’t hold a candle to the impact upon the world that Charles Darwin has had.

Take a moment and raise a glass to Darwin.

EDIT: If I have offended you with this post, sorry. I am not really sorry but I felt like I should apologize just the same.

The Man kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank!

Obama has been President exactly three weeks and in that time he has accomplished quite a bit that I can be proud of. He has ordered a suspension of the "trials" for Guantanamo prisoners, refunded stem cell research, signed an executive order making it clear that we will not torture, signed the fair pay act, ordered the DEA to stop raiding medical marijuana dispensaries, thereby ending the stupid constitutional conflict between the Feds and the States, and many other things.

There is one thing that President Obama has done that I don't agree with and think is very counter-productive. Mere days after being sworn into office, he authorized an attack on the tribal region of Pakistan using unmanned drones.

I am not arguing that these attacks were bad from my position as a pacifist; but rather, from the pragmatic position that these attacks actually hurt our mission in the area. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and tops the list (along with Mexico, believe it or not) of nations most likely to suffer a complete collapse of government. To the people of these tribal regions, unmanned drone attacks are the cowards way of fighting a war and help foster hostility towards the US and by extension the existing Pakistani government.

Obviously, sending manned bombers increases the risk to soldiers lives; but, war shouldn't be easy. When fighting a war (or playing a game of chess) you have to keep your ultimate objective in mind when making any move. The use of unmanned drones might kill the target you are looking for; but, if doing so increases the number of radicals and further destabilizes the Pakistani government, then you are winning the battle while losing the war.

War is a dirty, nasty, messy (and yes, evil) enterprise; but, I shudder to think that we as a nation might arrive at a day where we can wage a war without risk to American lives. It seems to me that one of the last checks on America's military power is the public's aversion to body bags.

So in short, unmanned drones are bad, not only because they undermine your primary objective, but also because they give the untruthful impression that they are without cost.

Would you like the Red Pill?

Do you hear that? That sound of breaking glass is human’s place as the smartest creature on the planet being shattered. IBM has just announced that the Department of Energy has placed an order for a computer to be installed in 2012 that will process 20 petaflops a second. This is pretty remarkable because it has been less than a year since we built the first computer that can do 1 petaflop a second.

Estimates of the computation power of the average human brain ranges from 10 petaflops to 1000 petaflops. So Sequoia, the name of the new computer, will be the first machine ever built that has the possibility of equaling a human brain in terms of raw computational power. Obviously the human mind is a complex machine that very well may be far more than raw computational power; however, the truth is that we don’t really know if there is more to it than raw power. But we are about to find out. Even if the computational power of the human brain is more in the 1000 petaflop range, we should be able to reach it in five years or so.

In addition, if the laws of diminishing cost continue to hold, you should be able to buy a computer with the same computational power for about $1,000 in less than 10 years. At that point, we should be only a few years away from building a computer that will have the computational power of every human mind on the planet combined.

What does all of this mean? I could get all Ray Kurzweil on you and start talking about the singularity (although Google and NASA believe in the singularity enough that they just announced that they are partnering on a research facility dedicated to it) but I think at the least, we are about to find out if consciousness is truly “unique”.

So, do you want the Red Pill or the Blue Pill? You may have to decide sooner than you think.

Escape to Neverland

It has been an interesting week. Once the envy of the world, Iceland's economy is now on the fast track to being one of the world's worst. Mogadishu is collapsing. Renewed violence in Gaza. Not to mention the "greatest natural disaster" to ever strike Kentucky. At least according to our governor.



However that is not a mountain of snow, it is beautiful white sand in Florida. While my beautiful Commonwealth was being battered by snow and ice, the family and I packed up to worship the Corporate Mouse.



The weather was about 80 and sunny all week. We went swimming and relaxed at the resort. Here is the view from our balcony.



The kids had a blast.





Disney World is a huge place and the attractions are numerous and varied; but, I think these last two pictures of Dumbo and Sophie sitting in Pluto's house, sum up the vacation very well.





A week in the sun and warmth while not reading the news has been very good for the soul. Alright, I had better go and call an electrical contractor to fix the storm damage and then take apart the toliet. Too bad the magic couldn't follow us north.