Dana Blankenhorn

A Moore's Law for Evolution?

OK, Owls, now you've gone and done it.

A Moore's Law for Evolution?

Basically, yeah. A team under Michael Deem, who is a professor of both physics and biochemistry, has developed a mathematical model for evolution showing just how, and why, it seems to proceed faster-and-faster, faster-and-faster, just as is the case with Moore's Law.

The key is what Deem calls Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), which happens when DNA from one species is transferred into another by nature (as opposed to boffins). Past models have looked only at sudden point mutations or recombination, as happens in sexual reproduction.

Deem's model is the best explanation for how drug-resistant bacteria come about.

Channels

UPDATE: This phenomenon, confusing the creation of content with the right to control its distribution (and where it's seen) is widespread.

The network opposition to YouTube is brain-dead.

Cable networks like Comedy Central and MSNBC (and now Viacom) have been badgering YouTube to remove their content from its virtual shelves. Instead, they have been pointing people to their own copies of the same content, as in this example.

The idea is control. Before anything plays you have to watch their ad, a 30-second job that's even louder than its broadcast counterpart. (Can't wait until they find a way to disable my mute button.)

This is completely unnecessary. And it's counter-productive. The MSNBC site doesn't scale. I'm still waiting to see what I was promised 10 minutes ago, probably because of server contention. Google's system, being scaled, would not have that problem.  Not only that, but posting content on YouTube means it can be linked to from here -- increasing its distribution further, making me (or you) its distributor. 

A Sad Day for Computing

Today was a sad day for me.

The launch of Microsoft Vista represents, not the start of something, but its end.

It's bloatware, designed more for the corporate boardroom than for the individual. It does not empower, it controls. In an interview with Meredith Viera on Today, for instance, this was the heart of her concern, controlling what her kids do and securing her system against outside threats. It was the only question Gates could answer.

Sadder still, for me, was watching Bill Gates. He looks old. Yet he's five months younger than I am, and at least a year younger than Viera. But you look at his face and he looks like the weight of the world is on his shoulders, and when you find yourself tasked with the socially-correct spending of $60 billion on all the world's problems that can happen. (Or maybe it's having three kids. What were we thinking?)

More important, however, was that he had to work today at all. While his title remains Chairman, he's no longer either a line nor a staff officer at Microsoft. Yet he must remain the public face of the company because the actual CEO, Steve Ballmer, has become anathema to so many people.

Bell Fight Must be in Open Source Agenda

The fight against AT&T, both its horizontal and vertical break-up to guarantee market competition, must be an integral part of any progressive open source agenda.

Right now AT&T is an unregulated monopoly, which takes enormous subsidies from the taxpayer. It has now begun, with the cooperation of the FCC, to increase those subsidies.

That's what companies do. Poor man want to be rich, rich man want to be king, and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything, as the song goes. AT&T is now King of the U.S. Internet, and it won't be satisfied until it can do there what it does in cellular, namely sell bits through an eyedropper, control what the bits do, and take monopoly profit from each side of every transaction. This is no different from what an African PTT used to do back in the 1980s, and that's where our economy will go if we allow this.

This is a perfect set of issues in which open source politics can work. It involves the identification of Astroturf groups, bought-off research and other fronts. It involves  focusing the government on simple goals -- nothing less than a break-up will do -- and it involves keeping politicians' feet to the fire on this.

It's ironic that humor seems to be the best weapon against what we face (as above), but that's the way it is when democracy has been destroyed and utterly corrupted. Humor was the only weapon against Stalin, and when you have powerful corporations controlling state action calling the result democracy is just brain-dead.

Has the Recession Begun?

Business reporters aren't paying attention. They look at Wall Street, they look at the numbers government wants them to see, and the rest is show.

But here's something they should read. Now.

It's a regular Census Bureau report on housing vacancies, which is put out quarterly. This one is dated Monday.

The big number -- 2.8%. That's the percentage of non-rental homes currently sitting unoccupied. (Drive around and see if you can find some in your area.) The number has been rising steadily for over a year, and 2% is considered a danger sign.

Regionally things are worst in the South (3%) and worst in principal cities (3.6%). The number of homes for-sale and unoccupied was up nearly 50% in the quarter, to 2.1 million.

Now there are reasons why these numbers might be higher than normal. Katrina comes to mind. In my neighborhood, homes are sometimes bought as tear-downs, left empty while other lots are built-up, then torn down. Big condos and loft projects may have units sitting unoccupied for months -- as long as most are sold the seller can wait.

 

The Era of Symbolism

Each political generation in American history gave us a simple image:

• Jackson gave us the Era of the West
• Lincoln gave us the Gilded Age.
• Teddy Roosevelt gave us the Era of Progressivism.
• FDR gave us us the Era of Government.

This era, 1968-2008, could easily be called the Era of Symbolism.

It is through the manipulation of symbols that conservatives have held power. TV likes symbols. This is not news. We all like to complain TV prefers symbols to substance. The Silent Majority. The Gipper. The War on Terror. These are, and were, symbols, meant to identify the Republican side as good and their opponents as not-good.

Symbols are a vital piece of myth-making, of creating shared values from which power emerges. The political power of TV is the power to bring these together. Truth doesn't enter into  it.

There are many Democrats who are upset about this, yet feel powerless to do anything about it. The whole George Lakoff  "framing" game is meant to create new symbols which battle the old. And today Glenn Greenwald goes after the symbols themselves (his picture is from the Majikthise blog) showing by chapter-and-verse how little substance there is behind some of the Right's favorite symbols.

To a great extent, the desire to see through symbols, or to re-frame symbols, is a sucker's game. It's a sucker's game because it essentially looks backward, to the TV era in which the Nixon Thesis dominates, for its inspiration. And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Listen to your Rice

One of the dumbest trends of this decade has been to ignore the work of universities when policy makers found it convenient. It's so easy to claim that all universities have a "liberal bias," then disregard knowledge in favor of ideology.

Thus, at Rice (my alma mater), the hard work of writing the Iraq Study Group report was ignored. (The writing was done by the Baker Policy Institute at Rice.)

While you're thinking of how many Americans are going to die as a result of that, consider how many more Americans are going to die if we ignore another recent Rice report, done in conjunction with the Texas Medical Center. And how you might be one of them.

The report studied the outcomes from a particular kind of cancer surgery, the Whipple Procedure, and its inconvenient truth is that practice makes perfect.

"Hospitals and surgeons that have performed more of these procedures will have a lower mortality rate," said Dr. Vivian Ho, associate professor of medicine at BCM and the James A. Baker III Institute Chair in health economics at Rice University. "We may be better off by not allowing low-volume hospitals to perform these procedures; we should instead tell patients to go to high-volume hospitals."

The Unpaid Price of Moore

In all the excitement over Intel and IBM breaking through the 45 nm barrier, important facts are being ignored.

First, the breakthrough does mean the end of Moore's Law, in the sense Gordon Moore originally expressed it, and wanted it to be understood. Getting to 45 nanometers between circuit lines required the creation of a new type of material, dubbed High K.

The reason for the cute acronym? The new substance is based on hafnium,  an element similar to zirconium that is  also used to make control rods for nuclear reactors, because it absorbs neutrons so readily. It's not simple stuff and it's not cheap. Remember all those old commercials talking about how computer chips were made of sand? No more.

A Postage Stamp Platform

Move away from the hydrocarbons. (Image from William Robert Johnston.)

Maybe you have to use the small font to get that on a postage stamp. But it sure fits good on a postcard, big enough so that King George Bush can read it without his spectacles.

And it works in so many areas:

• Don't like Putin, or Chavez, the Saudis, or the mess in Iraq? Move away from the hydrocarbons.
• Worried about American competitiveness? Move away from the hydrocarbons, building American technology and production in the process.
• Worried about New Orleans, Florida, New York, the polar bears? Move away from the hydrocarbons.
• Worried about education? Science and engineering are what we need to do this. Move away from the hydrocarbons.
• Worried about health? Non-hydrocarbon fuels will do more to improve our health than anything. Move away from the hydrocarbons.

Jim Webb and the Sea of Stories

What's the point of stories that aren't even true?

They're the most important. In politics they're called myths.

One of the most disturbing trends of our time is that of liberals who live in the past.

It's a natural inclination. Liberalism was the dominant American political philosophy until 1968. Ever since we have lived under a conservative assumption. Liberals are prone to ask why, but when they do they wind up lost in another lifetime.

This is important to realize. Markos Moulitsas, the Kos of DailyKos, was born in September, 1971. He wasn't even a "gleam in the eye" of his parents when Nixon was first elected. He was a babe in arms when McGovern was nominated.

The same is true, sometimes more so, for most of today's Netroots activists. I know there are some oldsters around (like me). But we're not driving the train. We're sitting in the club car, sharing drinks and tales of the old days.

Here's a good example. Digby at Hullaballoo recommends Rick Perlstein's piece dissecting the 1972 election and (supposedly) proving that the anti-war forces were right, and popular, so the whole political myth we live under is bogus. 

Let me say this in words of one syllable.  Myths don't have to be true.  Most aren't. They're mixtures of truth, rhetoric, and imagination. George Washington didn't chop down the cherry tree, but the myth still had power. Abraham Lincoln wasn't born in a log cabin he built with his own hands, but the myth had power. Franklin Roosevelt didn't really overcome polio, but that myth was vital.

Nixon wasn't right about Vietnam but it's the fact that this is believed which makes it politically powerful. Still, the belief does not mean we must be eternally wedded to the past. When it's obvious the existing myths have failed (and I'd say a 30% approval rating is pretty obvious) then the time has come for new myths to emerge.

All of which makes Jim Webb incredibly important.

Webb is a writer and historian. He spent most of his life as a Republican, even serving as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. (You say that name like the Randolph Scott line in Blazing Saddles.) He has spent his life working on the politics of myth.

Webb's own conversion to the Democratic Party may be the most vital element in his myth, just as Reagan's conversion to the Republican Party was an important element in the Nixon-era myth.  Webb is very proud of his Scots-Irish ancestry, and became a Republican when, he felt, elite Democrats abandoned his people in social experimentation -- the damned hippies. Now there are no more hippies, and he sees the world with new eyes. He sees the practical result of Republican Class Warfare, he sees the Martial History of his people being wasted on a foreign shore, and he's Paul after Damascus.

But his story is not definitive. Jim Webb's story is just one thread in the streams of story. Yes, I'm about to go on a Salman Rushdie jag again.