Quick illustrations

Just testing my new Wacom Bamboo Splash graphic tablet. I don't know all the ins and outs of using it yet, but I do foresee that digital sketches and doodles will become part of this blog's raison d'être going forward. The above are (a) an alien being that might be discovered if the Kepler spacecraft is gotten to work again, and (b) a random guy that's not a self-portrait as I didn't have a mirror handy.

UPDATE 5/19: Posting may be light for a while.

View from above downtown

Taken 5/13/13 from the New York Academy of Sciences, 7 WTC, 40th Fl.

Libertarian vices

Via a tweet, I came across a very interesting 2006 Tyler Cowen post, titled "The Libertarian Vice." Back then, I would've still called myself a libertarian, albeit with some qualification about being a libertarian conservative or fusionist. Nowadays, I wouldn't (centrist or center-right being my preferred self-descriptions, and I recognize there's some tension between those two). Some background here. Getting back to Cowen's post, his central point is here:

The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed.  The libertarian also argues that the quality of government is typically low, and this is usually the bone of contention, but that is not the point I wish to consider.  Often that dispute is a red herring. 

If the quality of government is fixed, the battle is then "government vs. market."  Not everyone will agree with libertarian views, but libertarians are comfortable on this terrain. 

But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government.  The Finnish government has supported superb architecture.  The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state.  The Interstate Highway System in the U.S. was a high-return investment.  In the area of foreign policy, we have done a good job juggling the China-Taiwan relationship.  Or how about the Aswan Dam for Egypt?  You might contest these particular examples but I assure you there are many others.

Me: I agree that ignoring variability in the quality of government is a libertarian vice. I'm not sure I'd call it the libertarian vice, as I think there are others of comparable significance. Another libertarian vice, perhaps a cousin of the one Cowen describes, is to take the truth that government involves coercion and exaggerate it into a caricature--while pretending the private sector does not involve coercion. Consider this line from Brian Doherty's (overall very valuable) book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement:

For those who don't see the power of men with guns behind every law, libertarians say just wait and see what ultimately happens if you refuse to obey one, even the most picayune one.

Me: Actually, in practice, often nothing happens. But more to the point, what sort of thing happens if you don't meet obligations in a voluntary private-sector transaction--if you don't pay your restaurant bill, say? You're violating a law, yes, and men with guns might show up--but wouldn't that be true if the men were private security guards or officers of a private police force in an anarchocapitalist society? If you decide not to pay your landlord (or are unable to) how different is that from deciding not to pay your taxes (or not being able to)? In either case, people with guns may well get involved, and it's hard to imagine any society that would dispense with that contingency altogether. (A left-anarchist society that has neither government nor property rights would also involve coercion. Suppose I don't want the crops I planted to be used by the "voluntary" collective that's been substituted for private farming?)

Quacksalver

"Word of the Day: Quacksalver." I'd never heard it before. If I were worried about the brand identity of this blog, the similarity might not thrill me. Here's the definition of Quacksalver at jaivirdi.com:

quacksalver \KWAK-sal-ver\, noun.
1. a charlatan.
2. a quack doctor.

(Found via this.)

Robot overlords, etc.

Via Justin Green, here's Kevin Drum on machine intelligence. Excerpt:

This is a story about the future. Not the unhappy future, the one where climate change turns the planet into a cinder or we all die in a global nuclear war. This is the happy version. It's the one where computers keep getting smarter and smarter, and clever engineers keep building better and better robots. By 2040, computers the size of a softball are as smart as human beings. Smarter, in fact. Plus they're computers: They never get tired, they're never ill-tempered, they never make mistakes, and they have instant access to all of human knowledge.

And, Drum argues, while they may not try to kill or enslave us, they will cause massive unemployment. His piece is less lurid than some predictions, but I'm inclined to think there's a lot we don't know about intelligence, and replicating it is not going to follow the exponential path he aptly illustrates. A few of my relevant pieces from over the years:

"Are We Just Really Smart Robots?" Reason.

"Searching for Bobby Fischer's Platonic Form." TCS Daily.

"Masters of the Universe." Reason.

"Dear Posthumans." TCS Daily.

"Only Posthuman." Sciam Mind.

Screenshots of the news [Updated]

The CNN.com and FoxNews.com home pages. Screenshots taken simultaneously. Click to enlarge.

You might think they were covering different worlds.

UPDATE 4PM: Both sites have upped the ante, but a significant disparity persists.

Cosmic mediocrity reconsidered

Recommended reading: "Goodbye Copernicus, Hello Universe," by Caleb Scharf, in Nautilus. Excerpt:

There is something very old, deep, and, yes, significant that might challenge the notion of our mediocrity.

It starts because you’re made of the cumulative stuff of the cosmos. A little more than 3.8 billion years ago some part of you came crashing to Earth. It might have been a handful of your carbon, oxygen, or nitrogen atoms, or some of the many hydrogen nuclei that now exist in your molecules. Primordial things are these, the remains of a hot Big Bang that took place 10 billion years earlier. Pieces of the one-in-a-billion tailings of a universe filled with annihilating matter and antimatter.

Your heavier elements passed through the digestive system of other stars. Cooked up by nuclear fusion in 10 million degree stellar cores. Hidden from sight under seething cloaks of plasma that could be millions of miles deep, these tiny clusters of matter were eventually dispersed to interstellar space in supernovae explosions that could momentarily outshine an entire galaxy. Cooling in the chill of space, they inhabited nebular clouds, eventually once again succumbing to gravity’s relentless embrace to fall inwards to the tumult of a youthful swirl of matter surrounding a growing baby star. Going through this process just once is enough to make a smattering of heavier elements if the star is sufficiently massive, but it takes multiple stellar generations to enrich the universe enough to build worlds like ours, and us. We are well down the family tree.

Too much to summarize but a lot of fascinating stuff about astrobiology, Bayesian reasoning, the anthropic principle(s) and more. Whole thing here.

What to read: Phactum

Just received: the May/June/July issue of Phactum, the newsletter of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking. The newsletter is edited by Quicksilber reader-commentor Ray Haupt, whom I met when speaking to PhACT last year, and covers a fascinating variety of topics. The new issue, I see, deals with matters ranging from the Ape Boy of the Swamps, alleged to live in Philly's Heinz National Wildlife Reserve, to some sea serpent history (as it happens I just watched the excellent movie The Water Horse), to the deplorable connection of "psychic" Sylvia Browne to the Cleveland kidnapping case (I get a shout-out for calling that to Phactum's attention; glad to be of help, Ray).

Phactum's archives are online, but the current issue goes out by email and print first; more info here.

Reality watch

Two recommended readings:

"The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change." About time.

"400 PPM: Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Reaches Prehistoric Levels."

Psychic fallout

A lot of "psychic" advice is just harmless twaddle. Some is actually good advice, even if its provenance is fallacious. But some can be profoundly destructive. May Amanda Berry's reappearance put an end to the credulous attention anyone pays to "psychic" Sylvia Browne. Blog post: "Sylvia Browne is the worst person in the world," excerpt:

Like any parent, Louwana Miller was desperate for any news about her daughter, any tiny glimmer of hope. When all the authorities could tell he was that they were still hunting, she eventually turned to less orthodox sources for information and encouragement. A year and a half after Amanda's disappearance  Louwana Miller appeared on an episode of Montel Williams’ syndicated talk show with the self-proclaimed psychic, Sylvia Browne. In front of the live and broadcast audiences, Browne told Miller, "She’s not alive, honey." 

Miller was devastated  She took down her daughter's pictures, cleaned out her room, and gave away many of her belongings. When she died a few years later, her friends said it was of a broken heart.

Also see this article from 2004, just republished: "Amanda Berry is dead, psychic tells her mother on Montel Williams show."

What to do in NYC on a Monday night

Here are three events of note slated for this Monday, May 13, in New York City:

"Social and Emotional Learning: Preparing Our Children to Excel." New York Academy of Sciences, 7-8:30 PM. Moderated by Ingrid Wickelgren, my colleague for years at Scientific American Mind.

"Is America Over-Medicated?" Dionysium at Muchmore's, Williamsburg, 8 PM. Hosted by Todd Seavey, longtime organizer of a debate series in which I was a recurrent participant.

"Great Thinkers of Our Time--Alan Guth." Hunter, 7-8 PM. Distinguished physicist whose work figured in my long-ago piece here.

The times, as you see, overlap, but it's nice that people have lots of stimulating choices.

Economists' sex lives and long-term thinking

I'm unimpressed by Niall Ferguson's recent comments on Keynes' childlessness, homosexuality and putative disinterest in future generations; I'm glad Ferguson has apologized. Walter Olson has an incisive post here, and Andrew Sullivan a more forgiving take here. I'll just add that dubious sex-focused analysis has been deployed toward other economists over the years. An example comes from David Warsh's book Economic Principals : Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics, which I reviewed two decades ago for Reason. Excerpt from Warsh:

For my part, I can attest that becoming a parent has made me more attuned to the needs and well-being of children in general. I also perceive that being a parent has made me short-term-focused much of the time--there's just too much to do. Certainly, some of the really long-term thinking I did back when I was in my late teens or early 20s--mulling over the next few millennia, or even accelerating to the end of the universe--is a luxury/distraction I would not be inclined to indulge now. That may have as much to do with having a mortgage as having a child, and whether it's an improvement or not I won't opine.

Subtle butterflies

Things are busy and many ideas are brewing. More posting in the not-too-distant future. Pictured: Butterfly conservatory scene at the AMNH, visited yesterday.

Space capsule 5-1-13

I wrote recently that keeping tabs on space was something I wanted to spend more time on, with this blog serving as a good vehicle for that purpose. Well, there's certainly more than enough material for a semi-regular blog "space capsule":

-- NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope narrowly missed colliding with a defunct Soviet-era satellite.

-- ESA's Herschel Space Telescope ran out of helium coolant, bringing its mission to an end, as expected. This was not a result of the current political wrangling over helium, as an idea once touted of giving the spacecraft a helium refill was actually a joke.

-- The Russians upped the cost of a seat to the International Space Station to $70 million, while NASA announced a delay on its plans of getting there via the private sector. The technical term for this is "having us over a barrel."

Nautilus launch

There's a new science magazine: Nautilus, which will have a different topic each month and a new chapter each week. It's already sparked some wariness in that it's funded by the Templeton Institute, longtime seeker of an intersection of science and religion. That doesn't particularly bother me, as long as the magazine is good, which I hope and provisionally expect it will be. The choice of a first topic, "What Makes You So Special," makes for a promising start.

The Hermitage

Visited the Hermitage in Ho-Ho-Kus today, onetime headquarters of George Washington, house and wedding site of Theodosia Prevost and Aaron Burr. In the mid-19th century, architect William Ranlett was commissioned to expand it in Gothic Revival Style. The Rosengrant/Rosencranz family long owned the property, and final resident Elizabeth Rosencranz gave it to the State of New Jersey in the 1970s. It is now a museum and conference center (also available for weddings and other events).

How it looked in 1763.

The wrinkled tree in center dates to 1774.

Keeping tabs on space

Some space-related items:

-- There's a magazine called Space Quarterly. I didn't know this, even though I see it's been in existence a couple of years. Granted, that's partly a reflection on my attention to things extraterrestrial not being quite as focused as it was at some times past, but I think it also reflects that space these days just isn't getting the degree of attention it deserves. Maybe it's time for a space comeback.

-- "Not About Chechens: Future of U.S. Space Policy." Kudos to the Council on Foreign Relations for recognizing there are important issues to discuss "up there."

-- "Hubble Dreams: 1946 Paper Promoted Powerful Space Telescope." A notable example of big-picture, long-term thinking working out well.

-- "Bolden's Response to Late JWST Instruments: That's News to Me." Considerably less inspiring.

I've been thinking lately about the future of this blog. Quicksilber has, I think fair to say, a rather small group of regular readers, in most or all cases being people I know personally. Then it has gently lapping waves of traffic, as random visitors come in looking for particular, perhaps eccentric, topics, such as "Clinton Road New Jersey" or "five spiral crash." Then there are occasional big spikes in traffic, typically because someone with a major venue sends people my way.

This comes to mind in connection with the space links above in that I could imagine trying to keep some tabs on space as a purpose that this blog might undertake more regularly in the future. However, suffice it to say I have a broad range of interests and an open mind as to what Quicksilber's emphasis and purpose might come to be as the Earth undertakes its next few orbits around the sun.

Obscure bits of history

Some items of interest regarding history near and far:

"How Coffee Influenced the Course of History."

"Space Archaeology."

"The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay."

Quantitative links

Here are some math/physics-related items I have found interesting:

"Dust Off Your Math Skills: Actuary Is Best Job of 2013."

"Physicist Proposes New Way to Think About Intelligence."

"A View From the Top."

DeWitt at Green-Wood

DeWitt Clinton research continues apace. Here is his monument at Green-Wood Cemetery, which I and a few of his descendants visited this weekend. There will be some Erie Canal traveling in the near future, as well. All of this is pursuant to a book project, about which more as things develop.