evil does not announce itself

It was a week or so ago and we were feeling self-congratulatory. The comically bad SOPA bill had been stopped by popular appeal to the Congress.

Google, Inc. was a notable advocate against the bill and used their considerable voice to drive people to be aware of the issue, come to their own decisions and petition their government for redress of grievance. Google was congratulatory of the 7'000'000 US citizens who stood with them to defeat this in the name of "liberty".

But back in Google's own yard, liberty was being threatened not by the Congress but by Google themselves. In a strongly worded statement to a poster on YouTube, Google used language I'd not previously seen used by the firm whose motto had been "Don't be Evil.":

the second great depression

You usually find the seed-crystal of a complex of ideas in the most unlikely places. The other day I overheard an old rant by Penn Jillette where he made a passing reference to the First Great Depression implying that there was or would be a second. Within the last hour I've seen multiple G+ posts about the reported troubles and closures of Sears Holdings stores, and over the last few months I've been thinking about #Occupy, over the last 4 years about the Second Great Depression, and over the last 20 years about what has happened to the global society that has brought us such malaise.

Even if the Fed cannot bring itself to say so, we are in the Second Great Depression; naming the phenomenon something else is just a rhetorical game.

So in the context of all that, I found myself reading the most profound book review that I can recall. As no clear-headed thinker could dispute the simple, self-evident truth of Darwin's explanation, this little book appears to reveal the fundamental cause of what we have allowed the 0.05% to do to the entire world in my lifetime.

I can't read this review for you, and I've not fully wrapped my head around it yet, but this is big, requires no conspiracy, no secrets, no deep cleverness. You may, like me, have to gloss over the initial football analogy, but I'm not even sure that Denning grasps the importance of this.

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This post was ripped in its entirety from my post on Google+ because there is little permanence to be found in streams. I still have not fully understood the implications of the idea contained therein, but there are hints of this being an explanatory framework that can be applied to systems larger than just Wall Street.

a snail trapped in a man's body

Ever since I was a child, I've been filled with the certainty that I wasn't like other boys. When other boys wanted to play baseball, I felt that bi-pedalism was just not right for me. When told it was bath time, I felt only dread that my protective mucus coating would be stripped from me and I worried yet more about the salt content of the bathwater. When teased by classmates, I tried to retract into my shell only to be frustrated to discover that I didn't have one. But perhaps the most cruel insult was the discovery that did not have both a penis and a vagina and the gonads to match. Fortunately, with the assistance of a support group and a surgeon sympathetic to my plight, I am scheduled for experimental shell transplantation as soon as a suitable donor is found. If you think this is hard to read, think about what it must be like to know that you've been born into the wrong phylum.

Except you can't think about what it is like to be transphyletic, not only is it philosophically problematic, it is a patently absurd claim to even make. So too are the claims of people who believe themselves to be transgender; to say that they are mistaken is generous because to merely be mistaken assumes there could exist a world in which they were correct.

many rivers to cross

Update: Dr. Mesibov was kind enough to review my amateur analysis and has filled in some guesses I'd had to make with hard data. Please see his comment attached to this posting. As the primary point of my note here — the role of hyperbole in popular science writing — seems uncontested I am leaving the post as it was until I can better incorporate his well received corrections.


Someone asked about a story posted in the Science News Blog with the enticing title Mysterious Border Between Two Millipede Species Runs for Over 140 Miles. I've never been able to understand why headline writers need to spice up what is actually interesting science as if someone who is going to read about carrion eating millipedes really needs to be titillated into paying attention. A quick search of the Science News Blog article title shows that the story has already been picked up by multiple outlets.


The article summarizes a paper describing a methodology for gathering data. Although the observation by Dr. Mesibov is of the form “that's a slightly surprising result, I wonder why?” the Science News, like too many popular science accounts tries to sex up a rather mundane story (which is kinda funny for a class of animals that are most easily distinguished by microscopic examination of their penises).

Assuming Mesibov's data are correct (and Mesibov certainly knows his Tasmanian millipedes) it is just a notably  long measurement of the well known phenomenon of parapatric speciation.

As usually happens when a parent species splits into two, hybridization between the species is severely penalized by selection because the mixed genes don't work together as well as those of either species separately. A common example is the human guided hybridization of horses and donkeys to produce mules which are almost always sterile (where sterility is the ultimate penalty in natural selection). Humans have to cause the interbreeding because although horses and donkeys share a common ancestor and are so closely related that they can produce viable offpring they don't — of their own free will — interbreed. In the course of their speciation, selection retained preferences in each that made them want to mate with their own and not across species lines.

I expect Mesibov's preliminary discovery is a result of a few factors: The total range of T. compitale is small (125 hectares, or about the size of a US single family farm) so the ability to gather specimens is particularly good. Contrastingly, although a zone of parapatriation of 100m may sound narrow to us, to a 15mm millipede that's a long distance. 

There isn't a ton of data on home ranges of small earth dwellers because it's kinda difficult to catch-mark-release-repeat with bugs the size of a fingernail. Picking the beetle Abax parallelepipedus as a reasonable arthropod stand-in (biased by ecology to likely having a larger home range than tasmaniosomans) our friend the Black Ground Beetle never makes it much father than 10m from where it hatched over the course of its entire life. So, if you are a Tasmanian millipede with extremely goal directed ancestors, it could take ten generations or more to cross that 100m boundary zone. This multi-generational journey would be rather difficult because somewhere in the middle you're going to have one hell of a time finding a mate.

Is it interesting? Sure. Is it “mysterious”? No. “As yet unknown” is a more accurate description of the phenomenon that Dr. Mesibov reported.

a public apology to a child pornographer

see note below for important disclaimer

It is with reluctance and remorse that I have had to report Brian Rose, self-described Community Manager of the Google+ Photo project for:

1. Knowingly creating and publishing a photograph of a child, apparently in restraints, on a service intended to distribute said image to multiple recipients across the several States.
2. Suspicion of production and distribution of similar works for possible distribution among child pornographers clandestinely through the internet, a known mechanism for trafficking in such contraband.

I do deeply regret that Mr. Rose will likely be subject to:

1. Seizure of his personal effects including his photographic gear and computing devices for use as evidence against him. This seizure may also include the taking of assets at his home and work even if they don't belong to Mr. Rose on the basis that he may have used these devices for criminal ends and that to leave them in situ would give opportunity Mr. Rose or his confederates to destroy evidence of wrong doing. 
2. Police investigation of his at his place of employ and residence, including vague interview of his colleagues, superiors, neighbors, and friends which hint at the possibility of malfeasance, and even the broad nature of the offense to society, while coyly declining to name the suspected offense.
3. Release of Mr. Rose's name and likeness to the press by the police to accompany the allegation of his actions in child pornography. This release will likely be made in order for the police to demonstrate that they are vigilant and dutiful regarding possible threats to our vulnerable children.
4. Personal notoriety resulting from the reported allegations which will become known to his friends, family, community, and business associates present and future.
5. Trial in the "court" of public opinion prior to even being indicted for the allegations.

I do also regret that I am unable to include the offending material or link to said material lest I myself run afoul of applicable law. I understand that this affects the reader's ability to make their own judgment regarding the allegation, but I am quite afraid of having a charge of trafficking in child pornography leveled against me which could severely impact my standing in my community and workplace.

It is an reasonable question as to why I have made this allegation against Mr. Rose despite the pain, expense, incarceration, and corruption of his subsequent life as a registered sex offender that may result. My primary motivation is a poster on a wall in Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil:

Don't Suspect Your Friend… Report Him

which I have long taken to mean that I shouldn't presume to judge my fellows but to instead yield that responsibility to the state because they can always be trusted to do the right thing. I also do feel for Mr. Rose as being the public face of Google+ photographic policy, in particular being charged with promoting community in the face of Google's confusing and confused photographic censorship policy. It is my hope that through my actions Mr. Rose will be empowered to act in accord with his titular responsibility.

Finally, I think it the duty of concerned citizens of the world to speak out against evil where they suspect it as a means of promoting the general welfare.

Some people, noting the sardonic tone of this essay will conclude that I did not actually file formal allegation against Mr. Rose, and they're almost certainly correct^†. However, times being what they are, I could be the sort of person that I satirize herein, but you don't know.

Like the capricious and arbitrary policing by Google of their service, the lack of transparency, trial by allegation, the stance of "guilty until proven innocent, unless we decide to reverse ourselves at whim" and Google's history of tying their determination of in one realm (G+) to that of unrelated properties (e.g. Gmail and Docs) that is the problem. No, Google is not the government, does that mean they should strive to that minimal standard of "just" or should they aim higher?

^† I did not, and would not, make formal allegation against anyone for expressing their views. I did intentionally mischaracterize the unnamed photograph in Rose's stream for rhetorical purposes; it is a good photo and not harmful to anyone under any rational perspective. Of course, as a citizen and parent if I truly did believe that there was any child who was being abused in any way that I could mitigate through my actions I would be obliged to do so, but to reiterate, Mr. Rose did not do anything that hints at malfeasance or even mere impoliteness. To the best of my knowledge, and by my presumption, he is as fine a person as anyone can hope to be. The photograph that accompanies this essay is not mine but has been copied from his public profile under US terms of Fair Use for criticism and commentary in accordance with 17 U.S.C. § 107, the rights-holder cannot be determined.

what censorship really looks like

For the last couple of weeks, I have been receiving notifications from concerned organizations of what "the internet will look like if SOPA passes". Although attention getting, they don't present the most accurate picture. And then hours before the Stop Online Piracy Act is passed by the fair Congress who calls the entertainment industry "master", an abuse of existing bad law shows up on my virtual door step. This is what SOPA style censorship would look like, except far more ubiquitously:

Here's the problem. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 is also considered to be a bad law written and paid for by the entertainment industry. Under the terms of the DMCA, a company need merely claim they hold a copyright interest in the infringing material, and the hosting service is obliged to "take-down" that content or lose their defense that they were merely unwittingly transporting alleged infringing material. Note the key word "alleged". Prior to the DMCA, a copyright holder would have to provide some evidence that the material was infringing their copyright; after the DMCA their word was considered good enough.

What has been censored here? You have no idea, and if SOPA passes, you'll might not even be able to find out at all. Fortunately as of this writing, a smaller body than YouTube is still hosting Tech News Today 391 so you can still see what the kerfuffle is about. At about minute 26 in TNT#391 there are three journalists talking about the abuse of the DMCA in the takedown of a different video.

And here's the kicker, UMG then told YouTube that the journalistic criticism of UMG by TNT infringed UMG copyright. What have they infringed? TNT doesn't know, because they didn't have to be told, I don't know, and we might never.

The long standing Fair Use Exemption (17 U.S.C. §107) of the US Copyright Act of 1976 has carved out an exception “… for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting…” where one doesn't need to have permission of the rights holder to make a news report critical of the material. But the DMCA is being abused to abridge that provision of law. Remember the take-down displayed above is not for the original material but journalistic discussion about the original material.

This will almost certainly get worse when SOPA is passed. I thank Tom Merrit of Tech News Today for bringing this to my attention.

Occupy Ignorance

photo courtesy of larry rippel

In today's editorial titled "Occupy Elsewhere", the PIttsburgh Post-Gazette unwittingly demonstrates exactly why OccupyPittsburgh ought not and will not vacate the public space that BNY/Mellon claims dominion over. They manage to completely undermine their own claim by the simple expedient of having no idea at all about the core issue underlying the worldwide Occupy movement and the reasons why peaceful protest and a functional free press is essential to the operation of a democratic republic.

The specific ignorance shown by the Post-Gazette pervades the editorial but is highlighted in a single sentence:

The movement's fight against economic inequality and corporate greed is laudable and justified, but there is little to suggest that the Pittsburgh group's continued presence in Mellon Green will advance its agenda.

If the movement were fighting against inequality and greed, it is possible that this claim by the editors could be true. Unfortunately, given a brief three months in which to study the movement, the Post-Gazette has somehow failed to understand the purpose and meaning of Occupy. It would be easy to claim that the last remaining newspaper of daily circulation in the city was deliberately playing the fool regarding their public duty, but I'm going to afford them the greatest possible charity and assume that their specific ignorance is a result of the editors having watched too much television.
OccupyPittsburgh is insufficiently entertaining and therefore must be irrelevant. Ironically, this same cause has largely been blamed for the impending death of the American newspaper.