Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Scott Rosenberg

Archives

Here come the blind commissioners

by 2 Comments

There’s a colossal farce taking place over at the FDA. A group of commissioners there, faced with unimpeachable evidence of the reasonably safety of the emergency contraceptive known as Plan B, are desperate to find a rationale for delaying yet again a decision on approving the drug for over-the-counter sales. They’ve come up with a remarkable dodge.

We’d approve the drug for grownups, say the hapless commissioners, but we want to require women under 17 to get a prescription. And how could we possibly enforce that? “We cannot have an inspector in every pharmacy,” complains FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford. So let’s keep the drug, which has awaited approval for two years, away from everyone for a good while longer.

And yet…

Strangely, the government has not banned the sale of gin and rum to adults because it lacks the manpower to supply every corner store with a full-time ID checker. We do not despair of enforcing the age limit on driving, even though the government has yet to put a G-man in every back seat, demanding a birth certificate before you can turn the ignition. Homeland Security does not dispatch squadrons of troopers to every movie theater to enforce the R rating. Yet somehow, we muddle through.

Is it possible that our FDA commissioners have something else on their mind besides the welfare of those 15- and 16-year old girls? Is there a constituency to be placated? Are there evangelicals to be appeased?

Or, perhaps, do the legions of anti-abortion activists sense that a safe and easily obtainable emergency contraceptive pill could do far more to reduce the number of abortions in the U.S. than their own protests could ever accomplish — and hate the idea of losing that fire-up-the-base issue?

Inelegant design

by Leave a Comment

I had thought there was no way to top The Onion’s brilliant parody of Intelligent Design — “Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory.” But the Web’s hive brain has now done it, with the rise of the Flying Spaghetti Monster meme.

This “Open Letter to Kansas School Board” appears to be the source-point of the new cult of Pastafarianism (Wikipedia has more):

 

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

It is for this reason that I’m writing you today, to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories. In fact, I will go so far as to say, if you do not agree to do this, we will be forced to proceed with legal action. I’m sure you see where we are coming from. If the Intelligent Design theory is not based on faith, but instead another scientific theory, as is claimed, then you must also allow our theory to be taught, as it is also based on science, not on faith.

Darwin/Fish bumper-sticker designs on the Flying Spaghetti Monster theme are proliferating at an alarming rate over on BoingBoing.

Dosed

by Leave a Comment

Here’s a little tale of life in the 21st century.

As I suffered through a bout of the usual seasonal cold last week, I found that my supply of my remedy of choice — a generic over-the-counter combo antihistamine and pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) — was running low. As I ran errands, I searched for this variety on the shelves of local drug stores, but to no avail. Finally, this morning, at a Walgreen’s in downtown San Francisco, I found the precise medication, so I thought, gee, better stock up.

But when I plopped three boxes of “Walfinate D” on the counter, the checkout lady said, “There’s a limit of two on those.” She couldn’t tell me exactly why, but since all she wanted to do was ring box number three up separately, I didn’t pursue it.

Back at my desk, I decided to look for answers. I couldn’t remember how to spell “pseudoephedrine” so I just Googled “sudafed controls” and found this page, which pretty much answered my question: Pseudoephedrine is apparently a key raw material for the proprietors of meth labs, so the government wants to limit bulk sales.

First I was irritated that my need for cold relief was being made more inconvenient by the chemistry demands of speed freaks. Then I was delighted at how simple a matter it was, in these Google-powered times, to discover exactly why my cold medicine was considered a suspect substance.

My inconvenience was hardly severe. But if they try to ban my Sudafed, as the commentator on the above page proposes, they’ll have to pry it from my germy, sneezed-into hands!

Random links

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been sick all week with a miserable cold — no fun, but hey, it does wonders for catching up with RSS backlog.

## GQ is not normally where I turn for quality reporting on the Valley, but look — they got John Heilemann to write about Google, and, well, it’s a great read. [via John Battelle]

## In a recent Wired piece pegged off his new book, Daniel Pink explains why I no longer need feel guilty about dropping math in high school before calculus kicked in.

## Evolution and cooperation? How’d that happen? Some big questions briefly plumbed in American Scientist. [via Arts & Letters]

## This is the way the world ends: Or maybe not. Dozens of theories and ideas inspected. Good fodder for the next time my five-year-old son asks, “Could the earth ever explode?” — which will be soon. [via MeFi]

## Hypercard reverie: a tour through late ’80s monochrome multimedia. With more chapters here. [via Boingboing]

Gene genie

by Leave a Comment

There was considerable sense and occasional nonsense on tap last night at a panel discussion at UC/Berkeley inspired by a new essay collection titled “Living with the Genie: Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery.” (One of the book’s editors, Christina Desser, moderated.) The premise, as presented by panel introducer Michael Pollan, is that “we are on the threshold of vast technological changes” — in areas such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and advanced computing — that will alter “what it means to be alive and to be human.”

Our reactions to the prospect of these changes tend to fall into two categories, Pollan said: Either “it’s never gonna happen” or “it’s inevitable, it’s just a matter of time and the market.” Both reactions foster a passive stance; instead of the “ossified debate between techno-utopians and neoluddites,” can we “take the dialectic someplace new?”

Pollan’s challenge was a useful one. Howard Rheingold took it up by reminding us that the Internet as an open platform isn’t something we can or should take for granted: it needs to be actively defended, as digital rights management schemes and “trusted computing” checks begin to be baked into the hardware that we rely on to access the network.

Investigative reporter (and longtime Salon friend and contributor) Mark Schapiro suggested that as genetic manipulation becomes more widespread, it is outstripping our existing legal and political institutions — for instance, a maritime system that evolved to deal with 18th-century needs leaves us today in the position where no one bears responsibility when a ship full of deadly cargo founders.

Denise Caruso, who has spent recent years building the Hybrid Vigor Institute, said that as we “increase the complexity of our environment exponentially,” “innovation at any cost” is no longer defensible. She called for a new focus on active risk assessment. The appalling status quo is that most biotech innovations are released into the natural world with little care or forethought: Caruso cited the example of bioengineered, Monsanto-produced Bt Corn, which received government approval without any studies considering its impact on “non-target species” (like Monarch butterflies).

“This is not just hysterical Luddism,” she said. But it’s an uphill battle, because “government and industry like things the way they are right now.”

I found Caruso’s rigor and Rheingold’s speculative imagination provocative and helpful — particularly in contrast to the Panglossian presence of inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, the final panelist. Kurzweil was actually videoconferenced in from his Massachusetts home, and his larger-than-life image hung peculiarly over the proceedings, disembodied and disengaged. (Christian Crumlish has blogged a photo so you can see what I mean.)

Kurzweil’s speech was laden with statements like “Human knowledge in general is doubling every year” and “The rate of progress itself is doubling every decade.” Like some blinkered throwback to high-Victorian cockiness, Kurzweil blithely assured us that “continued progress is inevitable.” I understood he was referring to empirical measurements of processor speed, storage, telecommunications bandwidth and the like. (You can read a detailed exposition of Kurzweil’s notions of the coming “singularity,” in which artificial intelligence will surpass the human brain, here.)

But there’s a deep chasm between the notion of precisely-measured technical advancement and the subjective concept of qualitative “progress.” Evidently, Kurzweil — like some Bugs Bunny character who’s charged off the edge of a cliff but hasn’t yet realized there’s air under his feet — has failed to notice this divide. That leaves his vision of the future as disconnected from the messy, intractable realities of human behavior as the speaker himself was from the ebb and flow of last night’s conversation, by virtue of his own virtuality.

When someone coming from such a rhetorical perspective starts talking about “expanding our knowledge” through “intimate merger with our technology,” you want to run to the wash room and toss water on your face. In such company, the clarity of skeptical optimists like Caruso and Rheingold helps keep us sane.

Dept. of primordial ooze

by Leave a Comment

I am not nearly enough of a physicist to understand the full implications of the possible creation at the Brookhaven National Laboratory of “a primordial form of matter” known as quark-gluon plasma. As reported in today’s Times, this “goo” last existed during the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.

What I can say for certain is that the term “quark-gluon plasma” is a winner. Science is learning not to label things with latinate polysyllables. Today’s physics is powered by short, chewy, phonically rich terms that fire the imagination.

Quark-gluon plasma! I can just see Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead, polka dots pulsating, chanting the words like an offering to the void.

If u cn rd ths msg u r jst lke vryne lse!

by 1 Comment

Today’s hot meme in the blogosphere is this notion, now heavily Slashdotted, that readers can easily make sense of passages of verbiage in which the words’ letters have been scrambled as long as the first and last letters of each word are left intact. Try it — everyone else in blog-land has!

Waht tihs tlles us, of csuore, is taht cxonett is ideblrnciy intmorapt to our criepoehmnosn of txet.

(And that, as you can see from the above sentence, this approach is tougher to use as the length of words increases.)

This novelty occasioned a few thoughts:
(1) The human brain is much more forgiving than most software, at least today’s software. Fuzzy math may help. Google is getting good at suggesting what you really meant when you misspell a query.

(2) This is why we miss typos. I spent a significant portion of my college years proofreading newspaper paste-up boards, and still spend a lot of time editing on computer screen, and if you’ve ever done this sort of editing work properly, your eyes behave differently from the normal reader, and you notice tiny transpositions and goofs that a typical eye will simply pass over. (This is why Don’s Amazing Puzzle was not amazing to me. I caught it the first time I looked at it back when Dave Winer first presented it. Not because I’m a sharpie but because I’ve worked as a copy editor.) For anyone who reads this way, interpreting words scrambled in this fashion can actually be harder — because you’re trained to see what’s actually there, not what your eye thinks should be there.

(3) Reading slowly is a dying art. As our world pushes us inevitably towards more speedy skimming of information blasting at us through a dozen different protocols, we scan more than we read. That makes it easy for us to parse near-gibberish, and that capability is a wonderful thing. But reading slowly is a wonderful thing, too. It is an art we still need in a number of areas. Reading poetry requires the ability to read slowly. If you read a poem the way you read your e-mail, you might as well not bother. Oddly enough, working on computer code requires a similar ability: Both because the computer is far more unforgiving of typos, bad punctuation and garbled verbiage than the human eye, and also becaause in good code, like good poetry, every word counts, and you need to be able to notice the patterns the words establish.

(Catch the typo in that last sentence?)

Big Red

by Leave a Comment

Every now and then, very rarely, we encounter a story that is simply all good news. Such was this bit from yesterday’s New York Times, reporting on a paper that is supposed to be online in Nature (but I couldn’t find it just now). The online headline — “Study Spurs Hope of Finding Way to Increase Human Life” — lacks the critical piece of information that readers of the paper newspaper were treated to in the sub-headline: “Chemical Found in Wine May Hold the Key.”

Not just wine — red wine. The chemical, resveratrol, is found in higher quantities in pinot noir than in cabernet sauvignon (Burgundy devotees can rejoice), and grapes grown in more “difficult” circumstances — colder, more trying climates — seem to have more of it than grapes that had an easier time of it.

This news, of course, fits in with other research on the so-called “French Paradox” (low rates of coronary heart disease in European and Mediterranean cultures whose cuisine isn’t necessarily low fat or low cholesterol). It is also simply cause for celebration for those of us who like our glass or two of wine with dinner. In vino, veritas — and extra years, too.

Walk right in

by Leave a Comment

Sometimes good reporting is about just walking in. That’s what Noah Shachtman did over at Los Alamos National Laboratory: “There are no armed guards to knock out. No sensors to deactivate. No surveillance cameras to cripple. To sneak into Los Alamos National Laboratory, the world’s most important nuclear research facility, all you do is step over a few strands of rusted, calf-high barbed wire.” Shachtman has more over on his blog, Defensetech.org.