Youtube, books, movies -- a very rich life

I watched "The Sorrow and The Pity" this week. Long documentary about the occupation of France. Interviews with every part of the political spectrum, and also the German Captain of the Wehrmacht who ran the occupying force.

Very powerful. First, the camera work and the interviewer are very good. People can't lie very well, the camera reveals every twitch of their mental squirming. Second, I don't see how a Jew can stand to learn French. France was the only nation in all of Europe that collaborated with the Nazis as a government. Cooperated enthusiastically in the case of rounding up the Jews for deportation to slave camps and gas chambers.

Finished "The Bridge At Remagen" by Ken Hechler. Presidio War Classics for WWII. Very good at explaining what a huge handicap a dictator of a totalitarian government is when it comes to fighting a war. Good story of how US Army allowed lower levels to have the initiative and how higher command backed it up to the extent of changing the grand strategy for the invasion of Germany. Very good discussion of problems the Germany army was having managing the retreat and attempt to regroup in the face of Hitler's orders to fight to the last man.

About 25 years ago I worked for a company in Palo Alto that was headed by a Ph.D. EE. The guy had worked for military/industrial group doing proof of concept prototypes for weapons electronics. In one of the conversations over lunch, he commented that it was very difficult to understand how Germany could have lost, given that it had all of the advantages of a Dictatorship. Some school in his life should be deeply ashamed. The company was bought by Murdoch's News Corp, and Stan ascended to corporate executive-dom. No doubt he learned a lot.

Finished "New Drugs -- An Insider's Guide to the FDA's New Drug Approval Process" by Lawrence T. Friedhoff. He is a consultant helping companies through the approval process. I "Inside the FDA" by Fran Hawthorne a couple of months ago.

Friedhoff has a vested interest in the FDA and its elaborate process. He has no particular criticism of it. Hawthorne is generally approving, discusses the evolution of the FDA, differences in approach between the various divisions, etc. Neither tackle the very difficult question of "what is the real cost of this regulation?" In fact, the cost of a new drug is $500B to $1000B. When I took drug development courses 10 years ago (the 2001 recession), the first thing the instructor said was that no drug could be considered unless it had probable sales of $1B per year. It would require twice that now.

There are relatively few diseases with a market that large. Thus, no drugs are developed to cure them. For example, the drug companies are forced to develop broad-spectrum antibiotics. As bacteria now become resistant to those within 3-5 years, it no longer pays to develop antibiotics.

We now die of no drugs or no profitable drugs, rather than unsafe drugs. Examples abound : The reovirus, and about 10 other viruses, kill 2/3rds of all cancers due to an inherent metabolic defect in the cancer cell. The reovirus itself, when injected IV, might make you feel under the weather for a week or so. However, there is no way a drug company can make a profit on a natural herb or virus, so clinical trials are small and slow. Smoking has been known to cause disease since about 1950. For all that time, the FDA has prevented sales of other ways of delivering nicotine. As nicotine has effects on the rain similar to ritalin, and is extremely important for some people to work, smoking has declined very slowly. The FDA is responsible for the 50% of all deaths that are related to smoking. There are many, many other examples. DCA, artimisinin, ...

As a large part of the world's drug research is done in the USA, the FDA is a leading cause of death around the world. Quite a perverse result, but a normal outcome for attempts of government to regulate.

I watched a lot of Youtube over the last few weeks : David Angus A New Strategy in the War on Cancer Cancer treatment hasn't improved the statistics very well. This is one of the rare people from inside the profession that is critical of the situation. Dealing with my mother-in-law's MDs, I see a lot of specialists who have deep knowledge, can't see over the edges of the rut they are in. The treatments are much more sophisticated, much more expensive, and the MDs make much more money. Perhaps they don't want to see the big picture, it would be too dismal.

Patients Like Me
Jamie Heywood The Big Idea My Brother Inspired
This is a complete replacement for the FDA. It only requires MDs and patients put their records into this analytical system. I am sure this could be done anonymously.

Some might object that this abandons the scientific method, exemplified by the FDA's double-blind clinical trials. Before the 1960s, drugs that had been tested in-vitro and using animal models were first tried on the sickest patients. These people bore the most risk because they had the most to gain. As cures were observed, the drug was given to less-sick, etc. Medicine progressed quite far using this model, even without much quantitative analysis. Given the new tools, it is hard to see what is gained by double-blind trials, and easy to see that the delays cost lives.

Eric Dishman Take Health Care Off The Mainframe Nice discussion of low-tech alternatives to hospital-centric medicine, and how much more quantitative info can be collected. This is the kind of thing that the whole gov-funded and gov-regulated system of medicine prevents. Nobody is really concerned with costs, the system operates with the same rules as cost-plus contracts.

Was reading a far-beyond-my-ken math paper just to see what I could understand. Good quote : "A good mathematician sees analogies between proofs, but a great mathematician sees analogies between analogies." Atiyeh

Sam Harris Science Can Show What Is Right
Very nice discussion of science providing moral values. He takes on the Moslem religion because that is easy (Moslem fundamentalists have retained barbaric customs and legal remedies longer than the other major religions) and popular. However, the argument applies to religions in general, and I think his audience gets that. This talk makes a better impression than I got from his book.

I had heard, and marveled at, the various Youtube videos of 'Canon Rock'. Finally learned the history: Wikipedai Canon Rock
NYTimes list of URLs

These people are immortalized to the same extent as Beethoven, I think. Once something gets N-million views, it becomes a permanent meme just because others will want to watch something that has N-million views, now become N-million + 1 views.

'Canon Rock' is also a great example of how culture builds, mixes, re-aggregates. The composer was Japanese. FunTwo, the kid who did a better version and gained a NYTimes article at about 10 million views, but now has 71 million, is Korean. The meme spread around the world very quickly, and there are now dozens of versions on all sorts of instruments.

I was also involved in a long thread on one of the political groups I follow. An apparently sincere fundamentalist Christian asked how to reconcile his very conservative social beliefs with a libertarian stance. A net-friend did a very good reply, was immediately attacked by 2 rabidly anti-gay posters. I was one of half-dozen who dealt with that. We were quite polite, given the substance and style of their arguments.

Toward the end, I re-read Lysander Spooner's "Vices Are Not Crimes - A Vindication Of Moral Liberty”, important for any high schooler. I realized that educated people could not have had the debate about whether to pass laws controlling moral behavior 100 years ago. In Spooner's time, the intellectual life of the nation was mostly handled by theologians. The brightest minds therefore became preachers and theologians. Now, the brightest minds go to science and technology, theology is a backwater. Our ideas of religion and God have devolved. Karen Armstrong has written about this.

I made 3 arguments I like. “Anti-gay bigots are sinning within their own belief system. Christians have gay children at the same rate as the rest of us. Many Christian gay children kill themselves as a direct result of the hostile environment they are raised within. For me, it is a sin to consciously make the world a worse place for anyone.” “Believe what you like, but you can't think what you like. Thinking and thinking about thinking have a very long history and have achieved great sophistication. Our entire civilization rests on that foundation. You may not invent new facts, new logic or new rules of evidence to support your point of view, as you will weaken that foundation.” “We are opposing you because you are promoting an anti-human agenda, not because you are Christian. You want to confuse those two issues.” Also, of course, the standard “this is an issue of human rights, and no entity has the standing to reduce anyone's human rights for any reason”. Not quite true, that, as there are diminished-capacity exceptions.

I have been doing a lot of research and thinking about education, which will be put into another post.

David Drake : “The Military Dimension”. Short stories, mostly good, mostly with a Vietnamese War thread. The VN references and slang probably make it unsuitable for my 13-year-old.

E.L.Doctorow's “Ragtime”. Very impressive writing I thought, and now find it is rated as one of the 100-best American novels by Time magazine. That counts against it, IMHO. Lots of real historical figures, so good for A. He will need to do a little research to figure out who is real and who isn't.

Charles Stross's “Iron Sunrise” and “Accelerando”. Both excellent. Accelerando is probably best. Both fairly advanced SciFi, “Accelerando” is a must-read.

Stephen Coonts' “Fortunes of War” and “Saucer”. “Saucer” is a boys coming-of-age book, A. likes it a lot. “Fortunes of War” is outdated in its future, interesting view of the technology of fighter jets.

Several other TED talks seemed important :
Neil Gershenfeld Ted Talk
This describes MIT's FabLab. They have a good web page, description of the software and hardware tools they use. I wonder if there is a business in running such a lab, charge $N / hour for use of the machines. Connections with schools ? I think they don't have funds these days.

Explorations of the net, books

I spent a lot of time on Youtube for the last couple of weeks. EDU channel is amazing : that and all of the other on-line sources of educational material remove that from the teacher's tasks. So, more of a teaching assistant role : labs, discussions, grading assignments, ... No wonder home schooling is a trend.

Will and Maeva dancing Boogie Woogie style are amazing. Went through a lot of boogie woogie piano, lots of duets are very good. Again, there are many mixes with other genres happening.

I normally read slashdot.com every day : only a few of the articles are normally interesting, but I scan them all. Ditto news.google.com and digg.com. Al Jazeera and Haaretz every few days. Al Jazeera English is far more honest / unbiased than almost any US media, at least I don't know of better. Haaretz has a lot of opinion pieces which are ditto. Anti-semitic, I guess 8).

I want to go through all of the biggest online info sources .

A.C. Clarke's and S. Baxter's "Sunstorm". Book 2 of "A Time Odyssey". Interesting info on the Sun's behavior. OK story, not a must read.

Robert J. Sawyer's "Calculating God". Very good, a must read. SciFi is a literature of ideas, this exemplifies that.

Jerry Pournelle's "Exile to Glory". OK, not a must read. Kid's story, tho. Standard future dystopia, Pournelle off on his tirades about the trends to a socialist/collectivist future, escape to space. Saved by super-wealthy, etc.

David Drake "The Sharp End". Good story, but you have to read other of the "Hammer's Slammers" series to grok this one. The armaments and tactics based on that technology are interesting in these stories, but I can do without so much violence in my reading. He anticipated the violence-porn that is common in the video games. Deficiency of his early stories is that the shock outweighs the story and the characters are not developed, tho "The Sharp End" is a bit better.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer". Very good, nearly a must-read. Good for teenage boys, at least. Post-apocalypse society trying to rebuild. I had a hard time believing that a nuclear power plant could sustain itself without constant deliveries of critical parts, but otherwise didn't have to suspend dis-belief dozens of times as I do with every single Hollywood movie.

Gregory Benford's "COSM", ...

I just this moment finished Benford's "COSM". A most excellent story, fictional (but ever so real) physical phenomena driving a story of academic science in a high-energy physics environment. Lots of wonderful quotes. I don't know that academic environment, but it fits with my (probably biased and stereotypical of people who hold some { meta, }-libertarian position) understanding of that world.

I spent a couple of days this week pursuing YouTube music. Russian opera singers via G., and via searches for opera sopranos, ... I noticed that Emma Kirkby wasn't listed, my favorite soprano of all times. (Second soprano in Hogwood's Society for Ancient Music recording). It turns out that those genre's don't mix. So far as I can find, Kirkby has never done grand opera. Very strange in an era in which so many cross-overs (I can name dozens, e.g. Huun Huur Tu and Angelite ) are happening. The state-space is growing exponentially, as every distinctive sub-genre is a new dimension. HHT is one of those dimensions, Angelite is another. They are both playing across a wide variety of genres.

This intersection is, IMHO, quite good : Fly, Fly, my Sadness

Consequently, only 4 books: Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson "The Lifeship". I have to think about why this novel is such a big step above what came before it, and why the step to Kim Stanley Robinson, McLeod, ... is another. There was something incomplete about the alien's mental universe. Cherryh does a much better job of revealing the evolving mental universe of the 'Adelman', effectively a slave owner. 3 = OK, but not a 'must-read'.

Jack mcDevitt's "Odyssey". Another "Priscilla Hutchins" ( 'Hutch' ) novel. This was good, nice mix of hard scifi, genuine logistics, a lot of well-drawn characters and insights into social roles and people. Very well written, IMHO. More than OK, not a 'must-read'.

A.R.Homer's "The Sobs of Autumn's Violins". WWII English counter-espionage as D-day happens. 2 = Marginal, didn't learn enough, characters weren't real enough.

Gordon R. Dickerson's "The Human Edge". A dozen short stories, each with some example of outside-the-box thinking. A good book for high-schoolers?

Dickson and Asimov

I stopped reading Gordon R. Dickson's "Time Storm" after about 200 pages. He went into the 'mental powers' mode, indistinguishable from Fantasy. I didn't find any serious ideas in this book -- definitely not 'hard scifi'.

Finished Asimov's "Positronic Man". 1993. Asimov died in 1992, so this was published after his death. Silverberg finished it, according to Wikipedia, tho there is no hint of this in the Bantam paperback I have. Good ideas, something my kid should read. A reasonable story, but obviously 'old style' SciFi in the Campbell mode. Long explanations via stilted dialogs are the main diagnostic for this.

Started reading "Cancer" by Bill Sardi. Sardi is mostly scientific, but, in some of his writing, is willing to rely on a single case to make his points. The book I bought has a 16-page addendum that presents a lot of research, good context for concluding that there is a lot that can be done to reduce the chances of dying of cancer.

Also, I found this while watching TEDMED :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMSGP2ONfBc.

This technology is a complete replacement for the FDA.

Finished 2 books by David Brin : Heart of the Comet -- essence is how easy it is for humans to form factions. Glory Season -- essence is how completely society would change if we had different sex drives and associated reproductive patterns. Both very good, "Glory Season" is easiest / best for my teenager, IMHO.

Finished 2 books by Orson Scott Card. I didn't realize how many different kinds of books he has written. "Empire" is a political / military thriller. He does a very good job of presenting the POVs of military people/culture. "Lovelock", with Kathryn H. Kidd, is told from the POV of a genetically- and surgically-enhanced capuchin monkey, mute, but of extraordinary intelligence, who comes to realize that he is a slave.

Currently reading Card's 'Sarah, Women of Genesis'. Historical novel, I don't know enough history / archaeology of that era to judge, but it seems plausible. Engaging, I am 150 pages into it, certainly want to keep reading.

Both "Lovelock" and "Sarah" detail the ways people manipulate others, small-scale social interactions making for social influence, popularity, etc. Sarah is 1990, Lovelock is 1994, so this is something Card was doing on his own, although Lovelock is much sharper in its insights about people. It will be interesting to see if this is interesting to my son, and at what age.

I watched 2 movies this week. "The Fifth Element" -- SciFi and "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are dead". Element was a much better script than Hollywood usually gives SciFi movies. Rosenkrantz is a movie about a play pretending to be a movie about Shakespeare's Hamlet. Read some more about the question of who wrote Shakespeare.

Read a lot of stuff on the net in the last week. Lind's essays on 4th generation warfare, lots of articles off of Lew Rockwell's site. Some older articles by his authors. A bunch of economic info, e.g. The Automatic Earth. Also listened to a lot of new music, some from YouTube. Celtic, Klezmer. Klezmer bands need Uillieann pipes, IMHO. Maybe a digeridoo also. They aren't keeping up with the times. Lots of Nordic bands have digeridoos. 8).

Got onto some thread involving religion, found a great quote by Maimonides: "One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good - he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad - he and the world is destroyed. "

Very high standards for dealing with others. "Do unto others" with eternity at stake. Also found Karen Armstrong and her "Charter for Compassion".

Books and other things

I just found a Harvard Course on Justice.

Interesting discussion of the cabin boy's being killed and eaten. Nobody in the discussion knows enough medicine to understand that thirst was the problem, not being hungry. People last 30 days without food, 7 - 9 without water. The cabin boy, having drunk sea water, would soon die, the others a day or so later. Thus, their life-expectancy was very short, barring rain or a ship. Puts an entirely different perspective on their actions.

Also, quoting one of their diaries ("Had breakfast") 4 days after they killed the cabin boy to indicate lack of remorse is quite unfair. What would their note have been in that situation?

So, overall, the professor and students all displayed a lack of ability to fully understand the context. "Justice" is all about context.

I finished CJ Cherryh's 'Cyteen' a few days ago. Re-read that after her new 'Regenesis'. These are, IMHO, her best work. I have read all of her 'hard scifi' except the last in the 'Foreigner' series.

I am now reading Varley's "Steel Beach'. Interesting takes on sex, suicide, ... I am about half-way through, definitely worth reading.

I am re-reading a lot of SciFi, partly for my own pleasure, partly to select good books for my son.

I have been watching TED talks, TEDMED. Just saw Craig Ventner's latest talk on engineering a new species. Also, hplusMagazine, Singularity Hub , and Wired Magazine . Lots of interesting articles in all of these.

I am installing Skype today, with the webcam. Linux x86_64, Kubuntu 9.10. Skype promises to open source some of its code, will make installing and using the tool much easier.

2010-02-11 Beginning my Journal

This is a journal, recording some of my thoughts, books read, plans and execution. It is also a way of learning blogging tools, which may be useful in other ways.

My next task is to understand how to make new links, to make archives for each year and month within the year.