Mormon Women Project: Tana Flowers

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I’m a big fan of The Mormon Women Project in general, and I particularly liked last week’s interview with Tana Flowers. Tana Flowers has a very famous husband (Brandon Flowers, you might have heard him on your radio), but appropriately this article is sincerely about Tana’s life, not an excuse to ask more about her rockstar husband.

Lots of snippets from the short interview stick out to me, but without a doubt this is my favorite: “Heavenly Father blesses women. We have sensors and we know what’s going on.” That describes perfectly my wife’s ability to always know when I’m up to something!

Tana’s life is a little unique–we’re not all married to spouses who get their pictures on the cover of magazines–but learning about how the two of them work through the difficulties and stress of their life has really general applicability. In any case, it’s an interesting read so go check it out.

Standing Up for the Vulnerable

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Milo Castillo

There are lots of stories of people doing dumb, stupid things. Then there are stories of people doing the right thing. I like those kinds of stories. And I especially like stories of regular folks taking a stand for the defenseless.

Here’s how this one goes down:

Family goes to their usual restaurant with their little boy, Milo. Milo has Down syndrome.

Another family at the restaurant makes disparaging comments about how special needs kids should be separated from regular people. In response? The waiter refuses to serve them. Well played, waiter.

Story gets out, people flock to the restaurant to shake his hand and congratulate him. Well played, humanity.

Read the story here.

To Save Even One Child…

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There’s an old signature that I remember seeing from the days when I spent too much time debating on Slashdot that went something like:

I found the root password to the Constitution: “Think of the children”.

I’ve always felt ambiguous about that sentiment because I’m not comfortable with the increasingly diminishing gap between libertarianism and libertinism. The idea that laws can be amoral (e.g. based on some purely rational system of utilitarian morality based solely on the concept of harm) is misleading and dangerous.

While it’s true that you can’t “legislate morality”, you also can’t legislate without morality. The belief that we should have laws at all is a moral statement. Even if you try to assume that it’s a purely objective statement about how to maximize happiness (or economic output, or standards of living, or whatever) that is, itself, a moral position. Furthermore, “harm”-based legislation offers us a flimsy shadow of the real concerns with which a society must be concerned in establishing its rules. 

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Search Wars: Google vs. Facebook

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One of the things that is the strangest to me about following tech news these days is that it’s awfully darn hard to keep track of who is rivals with whom. The basic reason for this is that all the new technologies: portable devices, search, operating systems, advertising, and online retails are all interconnected. In the old days it seemed like the rivalries were pretty distinct: Apple vs. Microsoft for OS was more or less totally distinct from AMD vs. Intel for microprocessors.

These days none of that applies. One day Apple and Amazon are rivals (iPad vs. Kindle Fire) on hardware and the next it’s Google vs. Microsoft (with Bing, Microsoft’s entry into search), but in between it’s also Google vs. Apple. In a word: it’s one great big free-for-all and the prize is information about you and me.

So here comes the newest entrant into this melee: Facebook is taking on Google in search. It might not seem like an obvious battle at first, but an article at SearchEngineLand.com goes into the advantages Facebook has over Google (and, along the way, sheds new light on the launch of Google’s ill-timed G+ competitor to Facebook). The give the following kinds of searches that will be easy to do in Facebook, but virtually impossible in Google:

  • Restaurants run by employees of a particular cooking school
  • Pictures by friends who live in London
  • Friends who are friends with people who work for a particular company, say all the people at Facebook who know people who work at Apple
  • Product managers who have turned into company founders
  • Movies that your friends like

Even if the search wars don’t really get a new front, this is just one application of Facebook’s announcement that they are going to make their information available via Graph Search. At a minimum, you should finally be able to search easily for all photos you ever liked. That’s actually pretty awesome for me as a writer, because I’ve got well over 150,000 words on Facebook and a lot of the time it’s clear, focused writing that I’d love to find and then turn into articles, but it’s basically impossible for me to find anything I’ve written more than a couple of weeks ago.

If you’re interested in some more background on Graph Search announcement, Slashdot has an initial rundown.

New Asteroid Mining Company Launched!

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You know the future is really here when you get to write about not the first, but the second company founded to mine asteroids. I’m on the mailing list for the first, Planetary Resources, which was founded last April. The new one is called Deep Space Industries, Inc.

They plan “to launch a fleet of prospecting spacecraft in 2015, then begin harvesting metals and water from near-Earth asteroids within a decade or so.”  The plans are exciting, obviously, but I still remain a little bit skeptical. According to DSI the point is not to ship the raw materials back down to earth (those asteroids would have be pure platinum to make that worthwhile, I’m guessing), but instead to have the raw material ready for in-space cosntruction of more ships and habitats for more exploration. Sounds awesome, but now we not only need to figure out how to mine the asteroids, but also how to build an assembly line up there.

Still, given advances in robotics, this doesn’t sounds that far-fetched in terms of technical capability. It’s the economic profitability that has me wondering.

In any case, I can’t help but be excited!

Zack Snyder Rumors Show Extent of Star Wars Renaissance

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In an exclusive report, Vulture.com doubles down on their claim that Zack Snyder (director of Man of Steel and 300) really is involved in the production of a new Star Wars movie, but it’s not Star Wars VII:

Back in November, the Los Angeles Times reported that Man of Steel and 300director Zack Snyder said he had no interest in directing the hotly anticipated seventh Star Wars film. But Vulture has learned that while this may be specifically true — he won’t be doing Episode VII — it was a bit of misdirection: He is in fact developing a Star Wars project for Lucasfilm that is set within the series’ galaxy, though parallel to the next trilogy. It will be an as-yet-untitled Jedi epic loosely based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai, with the ronin and katana being replaced by the Force-wielding knights and their iconic lightsabers. (Go ahead, say it — you know you want to: “ … an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.” Felt good, didn’t it?)

Zack Snyder publicizing 300 at ComicCon wearing a gaming shirt. Man’s got some geek-cred, so that’s something.

Vulture cites an anonymous expert who claims that this isn’t going to be Star Wars VIII either. Instead of being any of the numbered sequences that tell the main story of the Star Wars universe, this is going to be separate, stand-alone project.

The fact that a project like that is already far enough along in the works to have a director attached is a good indication that the scope of Disney’s plans for the franchise are much, much bigger than just picking up where Lucas quit and carrying the series forward. My initial reaction? Thrilled excitement. It sounds innovative and a little artistic. What could be better than small, one-off pieces exploring specific aspects of the Star Wars universe? If the new movies are any good, then we’re not going to be able to get enough of them.

My second reaction? That’s a big “if”, and this could as easily be seen as a sign of just trying to cash out as opposed to showing us new perspectives on the world of Star Wars.

So here’s where I’m at now: the most successful franchise in the last couple of decades (off the top of my head, but I think it’s probably right) is Marvel’s Avengers, including all of the titles (Thor, Captain America, Iron Man 1, 2 and now 3) that tie into it. This must be the model for Disney, and it’s not a bad model to follow. Not only are they churning those movies out and raking in the dough, but they are doing it with high quality as well. Those are universally good–sometimes great–films. They are an exampl of corporate movie-making done right.

If the Marvel treatment is in store for Star Wars, I could be perfectly OK with that.

In a way, however, it doesn’t really matter. The fact that I’m typing this many words about it shows that they’ve already got me hooked.

How the World Really Works

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Institutional stupidity is the bane of modern human existence. As a customer, a citizen, a soldier, or an employee we all deal with organizations that behave in such a mindbogglingly idiotic fashion that it’s a wonder they survive. And yet they do. Why is that? Why is it that people in groups seem to be so much dumber than individuals? What happens to the wisdom of the crowd when you give them all cubicles?

Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons: one of the extremely rare known positive consequences of institutional stupidity.

As it turns out, there’s an answer. It’s not that people are dumb. It’s that they are doing work that they don’t really care about. 

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Podcast with A Thoughtful Faith

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Micah Nickolaisen enjoyed the series of posts that I wrote for Times and Seasons about epistemic humility, so he asked if I’d like to do a podcast for A Thoughtful Faith. After I got over the surprise that someone wanted to do a podcast with me, I said sure and the week before last we had a nice conversation.

If you liked the Times and Seasons articles, or if you missed out on them but are curious about epistemic humility, then please give this podcast a listen.

Air Pollution in Beijing is Crazy Scary

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You may have heard that air quality in Beijing is hitting an all-time, low. Here are the photos to prove it.

Natural-color satellite image of Beijing from Jan 3, 2013. Normal levels of pollution.

For reference, the photo above is from before the spike in pollution. Now, here’s what Beijing looked like on Jan 14, 2013 during the middle of the smog spike:

Natural-color satellite image of Beijing from Jan 14, 2013 showing the extent of the air pollution.

The US has its own sensors at their embassy, and so we can get some idea of just how bad the air quality really is. According to the article at NASA, Beijing had 291 micrograms of fine particulate matter (tiny particles small enough to get into the passageways of your lungs) per cubic meter of air. The safe level is considered to be 25. The air quality index at the time of the second satellite image was 341, while anything above 100 is considered dangerous to all human beings (not just those already sick), and a level of below 50 is considered healthy. That’s bad enough, but the peak was actually on Jan 12 (two days before the second satellite image) when there were 886 micrograms per cubic meter and the AQ was 775, which isn’t even on the scale the EPA uses.

Artist Creates Anti-Drone Stealth Hoodies

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Last year, British artist Adam Harvey created a line of facial makeup that can be used to foil face-recognition cameras. This year, he has created  a line of sweatshirts with thermal-blocking materials designed to hide people from drones.

According to the article:

Wearing the fabric would make that part of the body look black to a drone, so the image would appear like disembodied legs. He also designed a pouch for cell phones that shields them from trackers by blocking the radio signals the phone emits. For those airport X-ray machines, he has a shirt with a printed design that blocks the radiation from one’s heart.

Obviously the sweatshirts can’t make people invisible (not without cooking them by trapping all the thermal energy), and so I’m not sure if the hoodie is supposed to trick automatic tracking or just make people harder for human operators or drones to track, but with permits for domestic use of drones passing in the US it’s no wonder that libertarians and privacy activists believe it’s time for a little push-back.

It’s also interesting to think that the odd styles imagined by science fiction writers might emerge in part as a kind of arms race between surveillance states and their citizens. If only a few  people wear clothes or makeup like this, they will stand out. But if they actually gain even moderate acceptance, then we’ll be off to the races.