Lee's Blog

Well, I’m officially snowed in. Or at least iced in. This was a record-breaking snowfall, which is on top of the freezing rain and sleet that preceded it. I’ve been outside, and there is ice everywhere that there isn’t snow on top of ice. At last report the Interstates in and out of OKC were still closed, so I couldn’t get there even if I could get to the nearest paved road, which I don’t think I can.

I read various unkind comments about Oklahoma’s preparedness, but seriously — we don’t have storms like this. If we had infinite resources, sure, we’d have sanding and salting trucks to deal with one such storm in fifty years, but we don’t, so we don’t. We just have to deal with this with what we’ve got.

We have a real, live white Christmas today. I read on the Internet (and is not the Internet always right) that this is only the sixth white Christmas in 106 years. Hmm, I guess my recollection that we never had a white Christmas when I was growing up is probably accurate. I do recall a white Thanksgiving, and even one white Halloween, however.

My bedroom is unusually dark this morning, due to the snow stuck all over the windows. The temperature is below freezing, though not much below, and predicted to stay that way, so I’m not sure how safe it’s going to be, trying to drive to the City.

On the other hand, at least I’m here, safe in my own home, unlike one of my friends, who’s sitting in a hotel room in Houston. All flights to OKC were cancelled last night, and the first two flights in from Houston this morning are cancelled too.

… but I was hoping for some snow.

I concede that the ground is turning white, though. Enough sleet has piled up to cover it pretty well. I suspect that we won’t get any snow until the howling winds die down.

Not that I’m complaining, however. I’m snug in my house, and I know it’s much worse in most of the rest of the country.

Archaeologists of the Nineteenth Century dug up a lot of stuff. They discovered cities that had been lost, sometimes even forgotten, for millenia. They advanced human knowledge a lot. 

They also destroyed a huge amount of knowledge that we might have gained. They shoveled up whatever covered their target, and if there were bones, or ashes, or even potsherds in the dirt, big deal. We’re looking for gold, you know!

Today, those bones and ashes and potsherds would be carefully identified, located on a grid, subjected to tests that Nineteenth Century archaeologists could not have imagined, like carbon-dating, and generally used to give us all kinds of information that we could never get by haphazardly digging up flashy artifacts. 

The CRU crew had raw climate data that was collected all over the planet for a period of decades. They destroyed it. 

I can understand why they discarded the old paper tapes and punch cards and whatever that the data arrived on. Quite likely neither they nor anyone else today has equipment that could read those things. However, they had originally been able to read those things; they got the data out and they processed it, and then they discarded it without keeping any record of the original data or the transformations they had applied. If they had even recorded the transformations, it might well have been possible to back out the original data from their “cleaned” data. But they didn’t, so we can’t recover the raw data.

Who knows what subtle climate signals might have been in that raw data? If we had it, perhaps some of the data issues that CRU had could be solved by “crowdsourcing” — asking everyone on the Internet for help. Who knows what old maps, diaries, or personal recollections might have turned up to help nail down some of the issues they encountered?  But of course, no one ever will know, because they destroyed the raw data.  

I find it hard to see CRU as anything other than those Nineteenth Century archaeologists, hacking their way through invaluable and irreplaceable data in search of a few shiny baubles for their CVs.  

Orac, whom I respect a lot, commented on the vindication of all kooks, by which he meant the enthusiasm with which various pseudoscience devotees (creationists, homeopaths, and the like) greeted the revelations of the CRU emails. 

The pseudoscience devotees’ position is that, since the CRU people were manipulating the peer review system and conspiring with editors to suppress dissent, therefore all scientists have manipulated the peer review system and conspired with editors to suppress all pseudoscience: vindication!

This is wrong, of course.  In a way, it’s like the argument that “science has been wrong before”. Well, indeed it has, but you still have to prove it’s wrong in your particular case. And so here, these so-called scientists worked hard (whether successfully or not) to suppress dissent in their field, but if you claim that your research has been suppressed, you still have to prove it. 

On the other hand, it doesn’t help when I read commenters observing that there’s nothing unusual in the emails; that’s just business as usual for scientists. No it isn’t, and that claim is a slander against all of the honorable scientists who are out there. This is the flip side of the vindication of all kooks: the defense of all scientists. Some scientists really are in the wrong, even though the bulk of science is right, and there’s no justification for defending them as if the reputation of all scientists depended on the reputation of each and every scientist.  

CRU does, I think, fall in the category of scientists who are in the wrong. 

Years ago, I read a book about, among other things, the origin of human intelligence. The book pointed out that human beings, uniquely among primates, can throw hard and accurately. See, for instance, baseball pitchers. 

Now, the book explained, the ability to throw hard and accurately is not an easy ability to acquire. Other primates don’t do it naturally and can’t even be taught to do it. Not that all of us can do it either, of course, but we can generally be taught to do it better than the other primates.

The difficulty with throwing is that you cannot use feedback. If you wish to pick up a cup, say, you could watch your hand move toward the cup and, when it got close enough, you could stop it and change to a grasping motion. That is, you could use feedback from your eyes and the sensations in your hand to tell you when to change your motions. 

You can’t do that if you want to throw hard. To do that, your hand and arm must move very fast; so fast that your nerves cannot carry the visual signal from your eye to your brain and the motor signal from your brain to your arm quick enough to change your motion and release the ball when you see that your hand is in the right position. Instead, you must “program” your arm to swing *this* far and then release. To do that, you need an accurate timer. Given that you have only neurons to work with, many neurons are required to make a good timer, and more neurons make a better timer. So the suggestion was that pre-humans started throwing things in the course of hunting – not very accurately, of course, because apes do not throw accurately, but well enough to eat. There was then selection pressure within the population to throw more and more accurately, so brains got bigger and bigger.

But in between hunts, those big brains were just sitting there, not really accomplishing anything. They began to occupy themselves with other things, like language and culture … and here we are. 

I rather like this hypothesis, though I don’t know how it’s stood the test of time. My friends who were pro and semi-pro baseball pitchers especially like it. But perhaps it’s wrong. 

Still, it seems to me that something like this happened with the iPhone. Cell phones have to be computers, since they have to keep track of various cell phone towers and switch seamlessly from one to another. Making them programmable is nice since it allows you to patch them on the fly, and people like pretty colors … and once you’ve got all that, it seems a shame to let all that capacity sit unused when the owner isn’t talking. So, turn it into this multipurpose device.

Presented for your approval: the theory of the evolution of the iPhone.

My experience with blizzards is fairly limited — I am from Oklahoma, after all — but I have to say that this would probably qualify. Visibility is down to perhaps two blocks, and at that distance all I can see is lights, not anything illuminated by the lights. The wind is howling and even though I am in the lee of the building (heh), the wind swirled up and hit me with a very cold and snowy blast when I went outside. I heard some children laughing and shouting earlier; I guess they were having a snowball fight, but I could not see them.

I was reminded of this question by something or other today. It is the question that Enrico Fermi raised about the absence of any alien contact. Given the number of Sun-like stars in the Galaxy, any reasonable estimate of the probability of habitable planets around those stars, any reasonable estimate of the likelihood of life evolving, and most estimates of the probability of intelligent life evolving, it seems that there should be many, many civilizations out there. So, where is everybody?

In early science fiction, especially science fiction from the Forties and Fifties, which I read growing up, the answer seemed more or less obvious: they aren’t there because they all destroyed themselves through nuclear war, as it appeared likely that the human race would destroy itself. In the Sixties and into the Seventies, the answer still seemed obvious: if they didn’t destroy themselves through war, then they destroyed themselves through ecological disaster.

By the time I read those stories, it seemed less obvious to me that every intelligent species would destroy itself. After all, if war or ecological disaster threatened, shouldn’t reasonable beings start setting up colonies off their home planet? Colonies that could survive, with however much difficulty, regardless of what happened back home? So the question remained, where is everybody?

But then, one day I heard someone say, “If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we do X?” and someone else answered, “But we can’t put a man on the Moon today; we don’t have the resources.” I don’t remember the exact context because my mind instantly wandered to this: Here may be the explanation to the question of “where is everybody?”

It occurred to me that the Earth is probably unusual in a couple of ways. For one, it has two continental masses: the Old World, which is Eurasia plus Africa, together with the island of Australia (not normally included, but it is for my purposes); and the New World, the Americas. The intelligent species (there were a group but they were all closely related and we are the only survivors) arose in the Old World and spread out over it. This is why I include Australia as part of the Old World, since human beings reached it about 70K years ago.

Over time, the intelligent species developed more and more advanced technology, which they used to extract and utilize more and more resources. With more and more resources, the population grew and grew, and more and more resources had to (and have to) be devoted just to keep all the population alive. Every advance in technology, every new resource discovered, produced a population increase that ate up all the new resources, so that the average person was no better off, and often less well off, than their ancestors had been.

But then, there was the New World. Human beings had spread there too, but much later and with a very small founding population, so they had had a low technology base when they got there, and hadn’t had the same large population exchanging knowledge. So they had begun to use up their resources, but to a comparatively small degree. And then the advanced civilizations of the Old World happened upon the New World. Suddenly they had a massive, instantaneous influx of resources, without the population growth that had always accompanied the slow resource increases in the past. Suddenly, for one of the few times in history, there could be civilizations that were truly wealthy, that is, that had far more resources than people. This was a civilization that might be able to expend the resources to travel to another astronomical body.

And that brings me to the second way in which the Earth is probably unusual. We have the Moon. It is big and it is, relatively speaking, close. It has lots of resources, even water, which had long been expected and was recently proven. It has a respectable gravity, so although living there would take some adjustment, it would take a lot less adjustment than would be needed for a satellite like, say, Deimos. We could have established a colony there and from there spread out into the Solar System and ultimately perhaps to the stars.

Could have. Forty years ago perhaps we could have. But forty years ago the Earth’s population was less than three billion and now it is pushing seven. Population has grown to absorb all the resources of the New World, and, as any number of people have been pointing out during the Copenhagen Conference, our descendants will be far poorer than ourselves.

We don’t have the spare resources anymore, and it seems probable that we never will again. We had a chance — a sudden massive influx of resources into a relatively technologically advanced civilization, and a nearby satellite that is almost perfect for colonization — and we blew it. We will never reach the stars.

Other civilizations, on other planets, likely didn’t have the Old World/New World split, so they had probably filled up their entire planet by the time they developed enough technology to think of reaching for the stars, and they never had the spare resources. Even if they had, they’d likely have been looking at either colonizing a tiny satellite like Deimos, or making a big jump equivalent to a Mars shot as their first extra-planetary trip. Either way, they couldn’t do it.

Where is everybody? Trapped on their planets forever.

Just like us.

1:06pm EST: The Verrazano Narrows bridge just almost disappeared, but the Statute of Liberty is still clearly visible.

1:08: The bridge has disappeared entirely and the boats are visible only because they have lights. Still see the Statue.

I expected it would not snow here, because I am here and it never snows where I am.

1:10: The New York shore is fading out. The Statue is beginning to fade. New Jersey in front of me is still perfectly clear. The boats in the harbor beyond the Statue are invisible even with their lights.

1:13: It must be lightening up. I can see the boats again, and the Statue is clearly visible again.

1:17: Still no snow.

1:19: Snow! Well, sort of. Tiny, tiny flakes — it looks almost like dust, but it is definitely white stuff falling from the sky. I can still see the Statue clearly, though.

1:22: I still have to concentrate to see the few tiny flakes blowing around, but the Statue is fading and the boats are invisible.

1:24: The tiny flakes are more noticeable now.

1:28: I’d say this could probably fairly be described as snow. No one in their right mind would call this blizzard conditions, however.

1:40: There is no doubt that it is snowing now. I can barely see the Statue and the New York coast. So far it doesn’t seem to be sticking to the rooftops, even though it is 26 degrees so you’d think the roofs at least would be cold enough.

1:47: It’s seriously going to have to do better than this to impress me with East Coast winter weather.

1:52: And now it’s stopped again.

Norton Internet Security came with this computer, just like Vista did. I haven’t been hating Vista too much lately, because I somehow managed to get it to deal with the two monitors properly (I have no idea how). But I do hate NIS.

For one thing, it crashed the computer if the scheduled scan started up while I was doing … something. I don’t know what. It wasn’t just being online, but that was part of it. At any rate, it was causing the computer to crash several times a week. But I can live with that. I probably spend too much time online anyway.

Yesterday, NIS updated itself. Cool. Maybe it won’t cause crashes anymore.

Well, it didn’t cause crashes. That is a true statement. It did, however, hang. It would scan 7634 files and then go into an infinite loop. It would not stop the scan, though it had a stop button and it asked if I really wanted to stop. It could not be shut down. I finally had to reboot the computer to get it to stop running the hard drive.

This morning, I told it to do a complete scan. It scanned 7634 files and then went into a loop. Okay, I’ll be fair. Maybe it just needed more time. So I went to work. When I came back ten hours later, it was still scanning the same file for the same virus. And it wouldn’t shut down. Time to reboot again.

At this point I was completely disgusted and decided to uninstall it. Ha, ha. The uninstall program hung. It wouldn’t progress and wouldn’t shut down. Great. Reboot the computer again. Oh, look, the computer won’t shut down either! I had to shut it down by holding down the power button. I was about to turn off the surge suppressor when it finally gave up.

When I rebooted the computer, NIS was still there.

I tried to kill NIS with the TaskManager. Access denied. I tried to stop the service. Access denied. What do you mean, “access denied”? It’s my machine. I’m the administrator. If I want to kill a service, that’s my prerogative. Snarl.

NIS had a button to send you to Norton Account. Maybe this would help? This wanted me to log in with my email and password. What password? I didn’t remember any password. But fortunately there was a button to click if you forgot your password. Or rather, it would be fortunate if the button actually did anything! Which it didn’t.

I got to Norton’s website and gave them some feedback on their on-line form. They had a place to indicate how likely you were to recommend their product. The lowest rating was 1 out 10, so unfortunately I couldn’t give it a negative rating. I don’t dislike anyone enough to recommend Norton to them.

It eventually occurred to me to google for “uninstall norton internet security”. I was thinking in terms of an anti-virus program to remove the virus that is NIS, but actually this took me to Norton’s own uninstall utility which, for reasons that escape me, apparently isn’t supplied with the program. Perhaps they think no matter how useless their program, you won’t uninstall it if it takes hours to do so. This does not seem like a good business decision to me, but YMMV.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of increasing frustration, I have successfully removed NIS from my machine. At least, I’m pretty sure I have — I don’t see any traces of it.