Songs without Words

Recently, there have been articles lambasting the spending on the Oscars ceremony as being excessive and insensitive.  While it is a pity that so much is pouring into the posh of the few who don’t need it, I think that the argument that being frugal will benefit the economy is misguided.  The economy thrives on consumer spending, and if everyone in the U.S. now suddenly stopped buying goods, that would for certain spell the doom of the market.
In my view, it makes little sense to throw money into the management and administrative ends of businesses.  If you want to revitalize a crippled American car economy, why bleed money when the government could buy off the endless inventoried vehicles and put them to use in one way or another?

While I’m not spending a ton of money, I’m also not spending much less than ever before.  Economic plans focus on unemployment and big “key” companies, but there must also be an effort to keep the small owners’ businesses alive, and that is most easily achieved by simply patronizing those businesses.  Consumption tends to be a self-sustaining process since quality goods promote further business; the endpoint of tax cuts has to be in this realm, and if people just hoard their money, nothing is going to change.

A related article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/business/worldbusiness/22japan.html?_r=1&hp

This paragraph just flung out of my mind, and although it sits oddly in the paper, I think I like it.

Metastasis is a daunting subject, probably because of its immense scope which requires the expertise of so many different branches of biology – and because despite valiant efforts, it is hard to conceive of a reasonable method of treating metastatic disease.  As horrific as classic warfare was, it was at least “winnable;” the latter half of the last century saw the rise of guerilla warfare and terrorism, blurring the lines between civilian and military and making millenia of military tactics and technological extravagance decidedly irrelevant.  The parallel between this new battlefield which knows neither boundaries nor conventional rules and the campaigns to halt and cure metastatic cancer is considerable.  In both cases, our capacity to destroy far outstrips our capacity to renew; given that curing metastasis through the death of the patient is highly unacceptable, it is clear that any solution must diplomatically engage both destruction and renewal, thus requiring the full knowledge of life as we do and do not understand it, from embryogenesis to apoptosis and necrosis.

The entire body of human knowledge has long since surpassed the point where any one person could ever hope to understand any significant proportion of it. This is apparent from the greater and greater levels of specialization in people’s everyday lives, despite surface appearances that the general populace is becoming more well-rounded in its knowledge. The truth is, people individually do not know much more (in quantity) than people really have; the knowledge that is gained of new technologies and such replaces knowledge that is perhaps less useful. What passes as broad knowledge is actually the accessibility to that knowledge, not the possession of it: humans are learning more methods of archiving and subsequently finding information, rather than better methods of retaining it within the mind.

The externalization of knowledge is hardly a new innovation. As I have often mentioned in conversations, I believe that evolution works in self-similar stages – think of the zooming-out sequence in Men in Black or, if you’ve seen it, the narrated preview for the upcoming game “Spore.” Basically, single cells, each of which used to know everything about day-to-day cell life, came together in a cooperative society, and the repository of knowledge turned into the ganglion or brain of the larger animal. The ganglion cells themselves – the brain cells – have no intrinsic knowledge of the knowledge that they store; the other cells access and use this information through signals, but they do not hold the knowledge within themselves.

Likewise, multi-organismal society is now at a point where it can no longer be like a brainless jellyfish. What is arising naturally are large repositories of knowledge, such as libraries, succeeded now by the larger internet. Knowledge is not only a sitting body but a dynamic conversation that exists on a time-scale and size-scale so large that people may view it as being a fixed entity.

The current methods of information exchange are very nice, but there is one fatal flaw: no meta-analysis outside of our own selves, the fundamental “cells” of the organism of humankind. The genius of human existence is the ability to take the “wikipedia” of inputs from all the five senses, compounded over many years, and distill out higher-level conclusions and theories.

Current knowledge databases such as, say, PubMed or ISI, which compile more research than any person could ever hope to even click on, not to mention read or understand, are rapidly becoming unwieldy. In the rush to create knowledge, there is not enough sustained effort to remold it. I am confident that many secrets and patterns of humanity and human disease already have enough research put in, if only that research were combined effectively and the correct connections made. And if the published literature is insufficient, then it is the combined knowledge and observations of the researchers themselves that would hold the answers. The “scientific hero” model dating from just a century ago, and epitomized by the Nobel Prize, is completely out-of-date, and the gradual lifting of the proprietary attitude towards science through the greater availability of full text publications, wikis, copyleft / free software, and wide-ranging collaboration confirms that the new era of knowledge will be built not by forefathers upon marble pedestals but by the average Joe.

Who, then, will be charged with the requisite meta-analysis that I alluded to earlier? In my belief, the entity to serve such a function is none other than a computer. Robotics has its triumphs in automated arms and belts that power current manufacturing by rapidly and accurately processing raw materials towards the production of just about every product – this is the only way production has been able to keep up with design and demand. The corresponding state-of-the-art for data which exists virtually rather than physically (virtual information being both encoded in computers and in human minds) is basically only indexing and searching. Wikipedia does not, to my knowledge, try to sift through its cross-references to discover the meaning of human existence or better ways for physics to inform biology or evaluate the best system of government. But the data is already there! For a human being, it takes so many years to write a single dissertation which looks upon a sliver of the pie of knowledge, and in turn is read by only a sliver of the people who ought to be reading it.

What is needed for this project is not artificial intelligence that mimics human thought, per se – the brain does not think in the manner of cells. What is needed is a new paradigm of thought, which is simpler yet more powerful than human thought. Whereas cells are concerned about the minutiae about particles and neighboring cells and fluid flows, the brain ignores most of that and considers the hunger level of the entire body, the status of sheep in the meadow which none of the cells know about, and the relative attractiveness of members of the opposite gender, which certainly cells would not understand at all. Not just the scale, but the nature of the thoughts transcend the capabilities of any contributing member of the knowledge.

The idea of a “brain” for an entire species has been entertained many times before, but usually in the context of some dominating hive-queen. There is nowhere in the description above that suggests that such a central unit would ever have to be dominant in function; nor that it even has to be “alive” in the way we understand it. It is just that, now with humanity trying to deal with problems of the entire body of its billions of people and with the Earth as a whole, there must be a better way of thinking globally than using our feeble minds which have yielded brazenly useless solutions such as the recent agreement to cut emissions by 50% by 2050 (what human can conceive of 42 years of future events? And why is only one small part of the problem being addressed)? Without a guiding mind that can at least put together the crises in fish, bees, the atmosphere, forests, rivers, trash, toxic chemicals, radiation, soil quality, and so forth, in a meaningful way, how will the environmental issue ever be tackled effectively?  All of these issues are interconnected, but people only become interested in them one at a time, or in all of them with no particular plan or comprehensive understanding.  Synthesizing the next layer of knowledge is probably the only way the human race can make peace with the world and with itself.

Apparently, today’s dorm meeting revealed the worst of the recent trend in hostilities – there were apparently people near tears, and the housemaster was visibly upset.  There are allegations that a particular floor embezzled $2,600 from the dorm under the guise of a particular drinking party, and a good portion of hostilities exchanged today were about inappropriate handling of an audit of dorm and floor money matters.  To top it off, one of the floor chairs was successfully impeached and removed from office following his unpopular opposition to the appointment of a second auditor who was not politically linked to the accused floor in question, on the grounds of dorm constitutional law.  I’ve known, ever since becoming acquainted with finances, that corruption begins here, on the small scale, justifying robbery as being “for the floor.”  “For the floor” then becomes “for my friends” and then “for my family” and, at long last, “for myself.”  Even if it means changing the law to do so, we have to stub out corruption – it is almost too late, if it is true that about 10% of the dorm’s budget suddenly became a bonus to the most undeserving floor.

Iraq is a mess.  A friend once told me he may have begun to support the war, a week after the military operations began, because of its apparent speed and success — but I was much more weary and skeptical.  It is one thing to destroy a country, and another thing entirely to create one.

But I feel that at least one small step has been made forward … .  It is of no surprise that sports can bring together people of a city, people of a country, people of a country who have migrated to other parts of the world.  Victory in a match is one of the few treasures that can be vicariously taken on by each and every citizen and yet still not diminish in magnitude.  And that’s why I think it’s mighty good news that Iraq has pulled off the Asian Cup championship [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/world/middleeast/30iraq.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin] in soccer with a team that bridges sects and regions.

Of course, I’m still a skeptic, and the recent violence associated with the games proves that there’s no such thing as a miracle happy ending.

A lot of things have been happening lately. Pretty big things. Pretty big setbacks.

The Senate actually bothered to get together on a Saturday to give a symbolic vote against the ridiculous notion that pouring in more and more troops into Iraq would somehow be the panacea for a ridiculously outdated battle strategy that’s sixty years too old. Remember how putting half a million troops into Vietnam worked out? But the vote failed, and we’re left wondering, what does it mean when Bush can still throw around a Democrat-controlled Congress?

The Hamas party has somewhat reconciled with Fatah, and the prime minister resigned in order to make way for a “National Unity” government. Absolutely shocking to me, although diplomatically logical.

A train blast killed more than sixty people in India, threatening a very fragile Pakistan-India truce.

Now imagine a newspaper where the most widely-read articles make the front page. The internet is supposed to facilitate the free diffusion of knowledge, right?

I can picture the newspaper right now – heck, people all around are talking about these world-changing events! Here’s the full line-up – high-impact news that *matters* to people:

OMG, Britney shaved her head! Tom Brady’s ex-girlfriend is *pregnant* with his baby, the outrage! Let’s all plan a trip to the Bahamas to check out the late Anna Nicole Smith’s house w00t.

[Correction: apparently, the new headline is that Anna Nicole Smith’s body is decomposing.]

Sorry for ranting on a topic I’ve largely beaten to death in the past, but it just seems like every moment the common people wallow in ignorance, the less and less likely it seems that the miracle that could salvage the world slips farther and farther out of reach …

Yay, I know what I’m taking this term now.  Uhuhu, Google Calendar is my friend~~

So here’s something intriguing: the Barack Obama facebook group is trying to get 1,000,000 members.  Now, normally, facebook groups are trivial and silly – like “I tried to ford the river, but my oxen died” or groups with 2 members, both of which are fictional characters.  Nevertheless, I wonder what this group can do – if they can convince 1,000,000 students to go out and vote, that’s no longer something trivial at all.  The total number of people who voted in the 2004 elections was 122 million, for reference.

Of course, most of these “activist” facebook groups end up creating lots of buzz because of the ease of joining, while nothing actually ever comes out of it.  I’ll wait and see how this plays out.  Noting that the current debate is about nothing other than “omg, they changed the goal dates for 1,000,000 members,” I guess I should be at least a bit skeptical.

Hrm, I want to see full sheets of candidates’ stands on every issue from environment to gun control to death penalty to cross-straits issues before endorsing any particular person.  Not that anyone cares a whit about who I’d like to see as president, anyway ^^;;

I’m slowly leafing through the billions of candidates running next year … I swore to myself after failing to vote in 2004 that I would vote next time (or forever renounce my place in this country).  Although it’s somewhat of a moot point to read up extensively, since it’ll boil down to 1 Dem and 1 Republican again (and I know that I would vote along party lines no matter what), I still think that I should keep myself informed.  There are lots of interesting personalities and, as many articles have pointed out, quite a lot of diversity.  While popular coverage tends to focus on statements of platform and such, I’m more interested in digging up the candidates’ performance in Congress / as governor / etc.  There are a lot of great catch-line platforms already, but can they really deliver?  Mm .. I refuse to be cynical just yet ..

Kweh.

… even in an article about how John Bolton has resigned from the UN (thank goodness for that).

In the English-language BBC article online, the paragraph describing the opponents’ opinions reads, “Mr Bolton’s critics said a man who once declared there was “no such thing” as the UN was hardly a suitable choice to join the body.” Factual, true, and utterly dry.

But now hop over to BBC Afrique, French edition, and what do we have? This literary masterpiece: “Au siège de l’ONU comme à Washington, le sentiment dominant est que ce dernier est l’antithèse du diplomate épris de multilatéralisme et qu’il se comporte au Conseil de Sécurité comme un éléphant dans un magasin de porcelaine.”

I translate: “In the UN, as in Washington, the popular opinion is that the aforementioned [Bolton] is the antithesis of a diplomat in love with multilateralism and that he carried himself in the Security Council like an elephant in a porcelain shop.” The drama! Not just an opponent, but an antithesis, a moral opposite, a Darth Vader to the multilateral cause! And the imagery of the elephant in the shop of china! If only English news were written this interestingly, the news sites wouldn’t have to resort to reporting on bats biting a woman decorating a Christmas tree (see http://www.cnn.com/ in the next hour or so; it should be there under “Top News”).

[I highly recommend this article, found via AppleGeeks: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/10/19/125148/65.  It covers a similar topic regarding the “news” these days]

I really regret forgetting to register to vote (why does NC have such an early deadline for absentee ballot application?? Geh, I’m definitely going to remember to register for the 2008 elections!).

Congress right now has really been nothing but disappointments. There are two dimensions on which I can respect Congress – first, obviously, if that Congress supports my views on various issues; but secondly, too, if that Congress gets something done, shows devotion to its principles, and has some sense of ethical behavior. But the GOP majority is safely incorrigible on both accounts. In terms of laws, I see almost nothing happening – just hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into a war that should be over, leading to one of the most hilarious and sickening ironies – the party that’s supposed to be fiscally conservative and thus capable of lowering taxes has managed to raise a humongous deficit. There’s no doubt that the solution, sooner or later, will be the same that Reagan arrived at – taxes will need to be raised. So Bush doesn’t have any argument when he says the Dems want to tax every breathing thing. Taxes are only one dimension – what the government gives back is what determines if the taxes were collected for a purpose or in vain.

But even policies aside, the Republicans in Congress have managed to set a new feat: having more scandals than laws passed (an exaggeration, but it really seems that way, doesn’t it?). For a party that represents the Evangelical Right, it sure seems to be somewhat lacking in the faith. Taking bribes and coveting everything left and right? Having pedophilic homosexual relationships with kids? It makes the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage seem like a plea of denial, not of adherence to faith. (Do note that it is the extramarital and pedophilic nature of that sex scandal that bothers me, not the homosexual part.)

In any case, despite all of this, I recently looked at a news site’s prediction table for the outcome of these elections, and there isn’t a guaranteed usurp on the part of the Democrats. Despite outrage at the hopeless nature of the Republicans, many voters are probably ideologically unable to switch their votes to a party that, while perhaps more effective, would be pursuing exactly the opposite agenda. Nevertheless, I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this. As much as I dislike those bizarre people on the streets who spread sensationalist propaganda about conservatives in government, we really need to oust this incompetent set of people I wouldn’t even call Congressmen(/women).