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Isn't preparing for a flu pandemic something the health sector doesn't ordinarily do of its own volition?

So you think funding to prevent a flu pandemic from crippling the workforce isn't legitimate "stimulus spending"?

There's been a bit of an "I told you so" thing going on between Democrats and Republicans in regard to swine flu. Democrats originally included some $900 million in flu pandemic preparedness in the stimulus bill which Republicans successfully fought to remove as part of their newfound love of "fiscal responsibility". Democrats argument for including pandemic preparedness in the stimulus bill was simple: the effect of a flu pandemic on the economy would be disasterous and extremely damaging to economic recovery. Now the World Health Organization is telling us to brace for a potential flu pandemic. Perhaps this is a case where more spending would've been wise! That said: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2009/04/swine_flu_shows.html Obama is now advocating massive expansions of science funding, amounting to 3% of the GDP. Obama argues that more science spending will strengthen our economy, and help us prepare for potential disasters like flu pandemics. The speech also focused on how science took a backseat to ideology in the previous administration, specifically referring to the ban on embryonic stem cell research: What do you think?

Is it just me, or does the prosecution of the Bush administration actually seem to have a positive trend nowadays? I say this primarily because of the political and media buzz surrounding the recent release of the "Bush torture documents". Obama has expressed that he might be open to a fairly conducted bipartisan investigation of the Bush Adminstration. That's certainly more than we've been hearing out of him before. Are the winds changing, and Washington might actually begin to investigate what happened under Bush?

Wolfram Alpha launches on Tuesday. ReadWriteWeb did a review of it, and their take was quite positive: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolframalpha_our_first_impressions.php I expect this will become a rather useful tool for scientists and mathematicians alike (not to mention the general public)

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs. Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing. A writer must not shift your point of view. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with. Don't overuse exclamation marks!! Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. Always pick on the correct idiom. The adverb always follows the verb. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.

Well, that's a nice overriding principle and clearly your answer to everything. But does it really belong here? By that sentiment, shouldn't all business operate most efficiently as anarchosyndicalist enclaves rather than having any management at all? Then power is fully distributed. The same goes for having a government at all. Can't we distribute goverment power equally among all the citizens? I believe that's called anarchy. Why did the founding fathers switch from a government which distributed power more evenly across the states to one with a stronger federal government? What implied safety net? Where was the safety net for Bear Stearns? A company that's over a century old practically evaporated overnight. There was no safety net. The government conjured one out of thin air when they believed that the entire financial sector was on the brink of systemic collapse.

NewScientist recently did an article on it and other BCI: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17009-innovation-mindreading-headsets-will-change-your-brain.html

Well, yes, that would be an example of secular extremists, but they're not necessarily anti-religious... The people who are against religion mostly seem to be grown ups who use their words to express themselves.

If your attitude is "let them fail" so be it, but do you really think it's better to have a financial system governed by emergent properties which is subject to periodically collapsing, or do you think it would be better if some intelligence were put into the design of the system so risk were more evenly distributed? I'm certainly arguing for the latter. What, really, is the argument for the former? Well, my argument is with a little bit better planning risk would've been better distributed and the bailout would've been unnecessary. The bailout is, in effect, a bandaid on a problem which resulted from underregulation. If risk were more evenly distributed then parts of the system could fail without causing risks to the entire system. The reality is Bear Stearns turned into the financial sector's whipping boy, collapsed, and put the entire sector at risk for collapse. This is bad. Great, so how about you bring up some problems which would occur if the goverment required a more balanced distribution of risk in the financial sector? I'm sure there are cons but I can't think of any offhand. Well, the problem with a distributed power structure is no one's in charge. Having no one in charge does mean everyone is free but it means nobody's in charge of making sure things get done correctly and efficiently. On the flip side, we see that thanks to the distributed power structure we instead got consolidation of risk. Bear Stearns and AIG took on all the risk. Yep, I'm definitely arguing we should get rid of the "liberty" which allows corporations to set up completely unbalanced co-risk feedbacks. I think that's a "liberty" they probably shouldn't have.

Well, I think it's bad to call something a science before it's a science... People have certainly accused me of it re: memetics, and now I guess they're right.

Okay, I watched the video: To achieve the level of comprehension of the brain he's describing we'd have to create strong AI. There's no two ways around it... he's talking about using neuroscience to understand extremely high level behaviors which can't even be comprehended without a comprehensive model of how consciousness itself operates. It's the kind of cognitive science that couldn't take place until you had a complete model of the brain inside a computer to play with. At that point, huge parts of philosophy can actually start becoming sciences, particularly any that deals with human nature (and by extension the nature of conscious processes). Memetics could become a real science. But, I mean, he's quoting Hume, that's cool... it's better that what I was expecting based on how people were describing it. But seriously, he's talking about a science-to-be much in the same way that Stephen Wolfram talks about cellular automata as being a "New Kind of Science" or many who embraced memetics as a science. They're not really sciences at this point.

I guess it depends on how you define "extremism." If you try to define it in the same way that religious extremism is defined, then no. There are religious extremists who are willing to strap bombs to themselves or fly planes into buildings on suicide missions for religion. No anti-religious "extremist" is willing to do that. I'm not sure you're going to do much worse than someone like Richard Dawkins, and the totality of his "extremism" is to record television programs about why religion sucks.

Umm, kay, weird... Well duh, I think most scientists want to use science to make the world a better place... In terms of how morality benefits society, there cannot possibly be any better moral code than utilitarianism, which by definition seeks to maximize positive outcomes for the greatest number of people. I'll take a peek at the video, but really... I feel he's conflating two completely unrelated topics.

I guess... I can't imagine any arguments he could make which would convince me otherwise. However I'm not in a place where I can watch the video right now, so I can only guess. What is his argument connecting science to morality?

I haven't watched his video, but I don't really see how science enters into questions about morality. Morality is philosophical in nature.

Erlang's an interesting language to learn if you're interested in concurrent/distributed computing. That said it's pretty ugly and somewhat difficult to use for day-to-day programming tasks.

I don't think that question is particularly relevant to the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. From a utilitarian perspective that situation does not bother me as much. But it's not one we've seen in the real world.

... and sloppily, and more or less by yourself. You are in academia, and you are in a computer science department. Sloppiness and working in very small teams are almost a given. You seem to be rather confused about what I do. I don't work in a computer science department. I work for an Internet TV company. While I work with a small team (3 others besides myself involved on our core product) there is absolutely nothing sloppy about what I do. I am not in academia. I am in the real world, developing products that have real-world deployments. We have a rather rigorous approach to development with extensive emphasis on testing. We do both unit testing and integration testing, with a continuous integration testing tool checking all our code every time we check it in. Our software is modularized and packaged for automated deployment. Error reports in production are emailed to us automatically. What culture is it that you work in exactly? I suspect the environment I work in is much more rigorous and demanding than yours. We absolutely worry about reliability, which is one of the great things about working in a high level language: many of the problems which make systems unreliable are abstracted away. We're working on internet-connected televisions and set top boxes. These are the sorts of devices people turn on and expect to work, all the time. There is very little room for error. If there is a problem with our service then the customer will call one of our partners call centers, which costs them money. Our SLA stipulates 99.9% uptime for our services (e.g. 8 hours of downtime per year, total). That isn't exactly easy to achieve. Time to market is of immense concern to us. However, rapid development doesn't mean "slapping crap out quickly". It means using a more rigorous, test-driven approach to building your programs and keeping your debugging workflow as simple as possible. It also means working in a high level language that prevents the sorts of bugs that occur constantly in low level environments. We have many competitors, and Ruby on Rails gives us a decided advantage in terms of developing quickly. To quote Paul Graham, we are "beating the averages" by working in a high level language, although instead of Lisp we are using Ruby. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Au contrare: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2009-April/017050.html That's just one example...

From this diagram I think it's pretty obvious that this structure is not a stable one. It's also obvious why Bear Stearns collapsed, and why AIG would've collapsed without the bailout. Much like evolution, the free market does not produce optimal structures, because it is not an intelligently guided process, but one which operates according to the emergent behavior of the various systems involved. It seems like with a little regulation, putting more intelligence into how the system is designed, we could avoid having structures like this appear in our financial system. We paid $700 billion to avoid having this obviously unstable structure completely collapse. Given this, I really don't see why people advocate relying entirely on emergent behavior to let these structures evolve. It reminds me of creationists who look at the sort of weird systems evolution produces and think they're intelligently designed. This is a bad design, and one we paid dearly for.

As long as they were concerned about the deficit under Bush, they're not hypocrites. We had a period of prosperity and economic growth under Bush, even if it was unsustainable. This period also marked one of record deficits brought on by increased spending (including two expensive wars) and tax cuts. That would've been a great time to try to reduce the deficit. Bush didn't. He made it worse.

When strong AI happens, it's going to completely transform society. It's not just something you'd have chilling in your home.

Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck are still arguing that waterboarding isn't torture. Hannity has offered to be waterboarded, although I expect another strawman Fox News waterboarding where he lies down on an inclined board and they splash water on his face, as opposed to real waterboarding where he's tied down and they put a wet rag over his nose and mouth. We'll see, but I entirely anticipate the result is Hannity going "waterboarding is a-ok!"

Just for the record: simulated drowning is torture!