All posts by Bob Igo

I am human.
Humor, Philosophy

Another Way To Look At It

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Have you ever wondered why cars stop running when they run out of gasoline?  “Because cars use gasoline as fuel,” I heard someone say.  Certainly, this is the conventional wisdom, but people who say that are just sheep, parroting what they learned in liberal elite engineering school.  I figured out the truth because I am not burdened by education.

Everyone’s car is built with a demon inside it, and the demon’s job is to stop the car from running.  The demon either can’t or won’t do this in the presence of gasoline, however.  Anyone who has ever run out of gasoline knows this to be true: The car was running fine until the last of the gasoline ran out, and they experienced sputtering, loss of power, and finally a full stop.  While this seems plausible on its own, it does not explain where the gasoline goes, and why it only goes away when the car is in use.  There is some speculation that the demon gets motion sick while the car is moving, and drinking the gasoline makes it feel better.  Another idea is that the demon’s attempts to stop the motion of the car are counteracted by a proportional amount of gasoline, thereby consuming it as a side-effect of the demon’s work.

Now that it seems obvious that demons are used in cars, let’s all agree that it makes no sense to invest in more fuel-efficient cars.  The engines have nothing to do with how much fuel is used.  What we need to do is get rid of the demons, or at least use more efficient demons.  And it should be clear now that the future of cars is not electrical; if you’ve ever wondered why electric cars are so slow, it’s because they have no gasoline in them to stop the demons.  The only reason they move at all is because car demons are forbidden from stopping golf carts but required to stop cars.  Because electric cars lie somewhere in the middle, the demons slow the electric cars halfway “just in case.”  Won’t we be in for a nasty surprise when they figure things out!

Science

Genetic Domestication

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At one point, I was hoping to develop this idea into something patentable, but I lack the proper background.  So here it is for you and the rest of the internet to find and use.  I’d rather see the idea work than hold onto it.  First, some background. Those of you who watched Dogs That Changed the World will find some familiar information here, but my crazy proposal goes beyond it.

Wolves are a canid species, as are dogs.  Dogs are basically domesticated wolves, although there’s apparently no consensus on whether the selection was done by humans or by the wolves themselves, but we do know that there is a path from wolf to dog.  Wolf DNA and dog DNA are close enough that they can consistently breed and produce fertile wolfdog offspring, despite the fact that most dog breeds look very unlike wolves, and no dog breed behaves much like a wolf (at least in ways that determine their suitability as pets).  You also won’t find an adult wolf with traits such as floppy ears, “patchy” fur, blue eyes, or anything else we consider cute and doglike.

Another wild canid species is the fox.  Long ago, the animal portion of the Russian fur trade involved feeding and generally looking after lots of caged foxes prior to them being harvested for fur.  The problem was that foxes don’t like people very much, especially when the foxes are trapped in tiny cages, so they’d bite the workers any time they could.  The people in charge got the bright idea that they’d interbreed the foxes that attacked humans less so that the next generation of fur foxes would be easier to handle.  This process of breeding our aggression went very well and improved productivity, but then they hit a snag.  Several generations in, their fur foxes changed from a solid color to a black and white mix, which was simply no good for fur.  Many of them even ended up with floppy ears and blue eyes.  (Sound familiar?)  For more details, check out this video clip and these before and after pictures.

The foxes seemed to be domestication-ready just like wolves were.  Geneticists learned that in canids, genes that regulate certain appearance-related characteristics are associated with genes that regulate adrenal response.  Roughly speaking, this means that when one set of genes changes, it tends to drag another set of changed genes along with it.  This is why canids that look “cute” also tend to be docile because the genes that were selected for reduced adrenal response not only reduce the animal’s fear and aggression, but they’re tied to the “cute” genes.  This is why you tend to get docility along with “cuteness.”  Why we happen to think domesticated animals are cute is another question entirely, but it’s certainly useful that we associate a dog’s cuteness with docility.

It seems reasonable to conclude that the genetic basis of domestication in canids is either well established or could be, given a little effort.  I suspect it’d be possible to get a handle on a specific set of genetic changes that could turn any wild canid into a domesticated canid in a single generation, if gene therapy were used.  For canids, this might not be cost-effective, since it seems to be pretty easy to breed them into domestication in a few generations.  But maybe the process of genetically domesticating canids could be generalized to other animal families.  Like bears, lions, or tigers.

Pretend I’m not wearing my crazy man hat and hear me out.  There are species of bears and big cats that are threatened or endangered.  While we can try to save their habitats, a multi-pronged strategy seems to be less dangerous to me.  What if we could genetically domesticate bears and big cats?  People already attempt to keep big cats as pets, so there’s a demand for it.  Anyone who’s ever seen a baby polar bear could be persuaded to adopt one as a pet.  So why not create a pet breed for each endangered animal, encouraging people to adopt them as pets and get their numbers to grow?  When the time comes to introduce wild versions of them into their ancestral habitats, the genetic alteration could be reversed again in one generation.

If you still think I’m a crazy man, here are some data points that may convince you of the idea’s viability:

  • There are already more tigers in the US than there are in the wild, and not all of them are in zoos.
  • Only recently, a species of fox that lived on a Californian island dwindled down to 15 members.  There was a mad scramble to save them and breed them in captivity, which they ultimately did, but it was very expensive.
  • People try to own wild animals as pets anyway, so why not use their interest as a way of genetically banking wild animal DNA?  Just check YouTube for videos of pet foxes, pet anteaters, pet cougars, pet squirrels, pet monkeys, and so on.
Humor

Willpower

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ZZ Top’s drummer is the only member of the band without a long Santa Claus beard.  He must have felt pressure at some point to grow a crazy man beard like the others, but he kept his integrity.  I admire that.

Uncategorized

Treadmill Desk Update

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Several weeks ago, all that walking on my treadmill desk put me at 6 pounds below my starting weight.  I gained 1 back, which is probably a combination of muscle building and eating more.  Even with the gain, my pants are a little loose, so I really do think muscle buildup is at least a small factor.

I’m doing 6-8 miles per day, at speeds between 1.5 and 2.0 MPH, having ramped up from 4 miles per day a few weeks ago.  Once I max out my mileage, I may add ankle weights, except some paranoid part of me wonders if that’ll make people think I’m under house arrest and wearing tracking devices.

There’s this couch to 10k program that some friends of mine (only one with an online presence, AFAIK) have participated in, and I thought it’d be cool to see if I could catch up to them while working 🙂  It’s not exactly the same thing, since they actually run the 10k, and I’m walking it, but I’m a lot more productive during my miles than they are…

Uncategorized

Spawn

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Some of you knew this was in the works, but I just wanted to formally announce that Sun and I have proven that we’re of the same species and are expecting a baby girl in mid-April 🙂

Feel free to include name recommendations if you reply, though we’re leaning toward Daphne Kira.

Philosophy, Science, Technology

Conferring Immortality?

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Preface

Authors, philosophers, and scientists have explored these concepts in detail, and it’s my hope to introduce them to you, not to claim them as my own.

Feasible Immortality

There is a recent notion that some people alive today may achieve biological or technological immortality.  Biological immortality focuses on things like prevention and repair of cellular damage, immortality of cell lines, replacing aged organs with newly-grown ones, and removal of what I can best call “crud” that accumulates in your body as you age.  Technological immortality involves replacing failing biological components with artificial ones, replication of your personality, in essence porting it from wetware to hardware or software.  We do much of this now under the umbrella of general medicine, achieving longer and healthier lives.

What I want to explore is the philosophical question of whether or not immortality can be conferred on an individual, or if the conversion to immortality conceptually kills the original and produces an immortal copy.

Biological Immortality

While our structure remains relatively constant over time, the atoms that comprise us change regularly as cells replace themselves.  On average, you are made from completely different atoms every seven years.  If you define yourself based on the atoms that are in your body, or specifically your brain, then you’ve already been replaced Y/7 times if you’re Y years old.  Any memory you have from eight years ago was stored in cells that have died and left copies.  You can still access those old memories because cell replacement doesn’t change structure, assuming everything goes well.

If medicine did allow us to extend our cell lines indefinitely, avoid replication errors, fix or prevent inherited genetic diseases, and remove accumulated “crud,” we could live forever if we avoid the same things that can kill us prematurely now.  We’d still be ourselves – at least as much as we are ourselves now, with our atoms changing every seven years.

Technological Immortality

An immortality solution that emphasizes technology could eventually replace each part of your biological body with a piece of technology.  To jump ahead slightly, let’s assume every organ, including the brain, can be replaced with a modular piece of technology that performs like the original.

What if your biological brain were put in a technological body?  Simply doing this would significantly extend life, since a lot of things that damage the brain are caused by the rest of the body.  In conjunction with biological brain immortality, it could confer full immortality.

Would your real brain in a technological body still be you?  If you think of our brains as piloting our bodies anyway, then you’d probably say yes.  To me, this seems reasonable.

What if, instead of using your biological brain, some process scans your biological brain and produces an exact copy of it in hardware and/or software?  Does that confer immortality to you, or does it merely copy you?  What if the scanning process is destructive, resulting in some time when the pattern in your brain that is you isn’t complete?  Would that murder you and create a copy?  To me, I’d consider it murder for a scanner to tear my brain to bits as it studied the structure.

Those are the edge cases.  It gets trickier when you think of the middle ground.

What if there were a way to slowly replace the biological structures in your brain with technological ones?  Your brain already replaces cells on its own, and we don’t generally think of this as killing us, so how is it different for a technological process to take over?  One by one, neurons, axons, dendrites, would be replaced by functionally-equivalent nanotechnological components.  If we set the timescale for the conversion to be seven years, then we ensure that it happens no faster than nature.  Are you still you when one of your neurons is technological?  What about 100?  What about 10 billion (roughly 10%)?  One thing is assured: by the end of the seven-year process, your biological brain will be gone.

Wait, it gets creepier.

Let’s say you’ve made the switch to a nanotech brain, as above.  Assuming you still think you’re you, and not the murderer of your identical twin, what would happen if you converted your nanotech hardware brain into a software brain?  Is there a difference between two things if they behave the same?  As before, the conversion could be done gradually, over a seven-year period, slowly deactivating pieces of the hardware brain and activating equivalent software representations in a computer brain.  Would you still be you?  If the answer is yes, then what exactly are you now?  Are you the structure that the software represents?

It gets stranger, too.

One of the authors I’ve read suggests that if you’re ok with neurons being replaced by functional equivalents, then the physical geometry of these neurons in relation to the others doesn’t matter much.  Instead of direct physical connections, why not go wireless?  You could store parts of your brain in your house and keep just a small portion of it in your body for tasks like reflexes where latency is an issue.

Closing Thoughts

To me, the edge cases seem clear: I’ve had biological immortality conferred upon me if my brain is able to maintain its normal biological process indefinitely;  I’ve had an immortal copy made if someone reads and copies my brain in a single step, and I’m murdered if the read was destructive.  What bothers me is that I don’t know how I feel about something that slowly destructively copies my brain in place.  The continuity seems to be what throws me, because it would offer the same continuity as biological brain immortality, but the end result is that my biological brain will have slowly been destroyed.  Of course, if continuity problems bother me, I should stop sleeping.

Language

Spelling Errors We Should See

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The internet is so full of transpositions of its/it’s and their/they’re/there that I often have to re-read correct usages multiple times out of surprise.

I recently wondered why we don’t see whore/who’re transpositions.  Structurally, it’s similar to its/it’s, but I wonder if the pronunciation difference between the two (aside from some British dialects) allows people to keep them straight in their heads.

This message brought to you by the people whore attending the meeting.

Linux, Technology

Free Virtualization in Linux

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There are lots of ways to create virtual machines in Linux, and I heard about some of them at CPOSC.  In the course of helping someone learn ways to run Windows XP virtualized inside Linux, I found out about Virtualbox OSE.  It’s fairly easy to install and set up and start using.  Right now, I’m installing Fedora 9 on a virtual machine, just to see what the state of affairs is.

I know that lots of you out there use virtualization at home and at work, so I’d be curious to hear how Virtualbox OSE compares with the commercial and free solutions that you use.

UPDATE: Someone asked me on IRC if there was a server mode.  It does appear that there is.