February 2003 – Page 3

A death examined

I think this may be the most heartbreaking reporting to come out of the Columbia disaster:

“The communication checks continue. So does the silence. A radar station near the Kennedy center then says it is putting its radar in a “search mode.”

“We do not have any valid data at this time,” said Jones. He said there was a “blip” but it was bad data.

Then a long pause, a silence of despair. Then Cain says the final words, the phrase that marked the lack of hope: “Lock the doors.””

Space.com has this useful FAQ

NASA’s official page on the disaster investigation.

The extraordinary image of Columbia, taken when she was still over 200,000 feet up, was taken using a hobbyist’s telescope and an 11 year-old Mac.

Steven Pinker is a Pub Darwinist. We all know at least one – the guy for whom there’s no greater pleasure than locating the long hidden adaptive explanation for this or that phenomenon – wife beating, drinking, losing your car keys, droning on about natural selection… they all confer some adaptive advantage in the Pub Darwinist’s reductive caricature of natural selection.

H. Allen Orr is Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester. His NYRB review of Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, is tough and subtle. He’s particularly hard on Pinker’s tendency to find adaptive explanations everywhere:

“Pinker seems never to have met an adaptive tale he doesn’t like. Rape is likely an adaptive strategy pursued by low-status males who are “alienated from a community” and “unable to win the consent of women.” A gene that predisposes such males to rape will spread. Neonaticide, the killing of newborns, reflects the evolutionary calculus of conflict between parent and offspring. A gene that predisposes mothers to kill newborns when times are tough, saving resources for reproduction when times are better, will also spread. Weak armies may march suicidally into battle because of natural selection. Evolution favors bluffing in confrontations (an opponent might, after all, back down) which in turn favors some self-deception (you’re a better liar if you believe your own lie). Psychopaths may walk among us because of an esoteric evolutionary phenomenon called frequency-dependent selection. A gene that predisposes one to lie, cheat, and manipulate may enjoy an advantage when rare (since most people are trusting and thus vulnerable) but not when common. And so it goes.”.

Evolution

My latest Guardian column is up today. It’s about the creeping reabsorption of the net by mainstream society and the end of our fantasies of living in a parallel world by our own rules.

From behind the firewall

From the mind-boggling insight department. A weblog from within Saddam’s Iraq, kept in defiance of Government firewalls and intimidation by a young man possibly named Raed. I think a lot of people are going to be reading this very carefully (thanks to just about everybody for the link).

This is how it starts

Adam Wishart has written the best book about the dot.com lunacy yet and now Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing has picked up on it. He says it reads like “an early Gibson novel”. High praise. The book’s called Leaving Reality Behind (co-written with Regula Bochsler) and it’s not your standard airport business book – involving, as it does, not only the usual cast of feckless dot.com chancers and witless bankers but also a group of Swiss Dadaist artist-anarchists, a cast of thousands of pissed-off media hackers, the domain name system… and Bill Gross. It really should be a movie. Declaration: Adam is a friend of mine.
Buy the book from amazon.co.uk or from amazon.com

Napoleon

Even if you’re pro-European like me it’s impossible to read Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s first draft of Articles 1 to 16 of the proposed European Constitutional Treaty without the word ‘Napoleonic’ forming silently in your head. Amid the careful discussion of ‘competencies’ and ‘subsidiarity’ you can make out a continent-spanning centralising instinct which must, sooner or later, be faced down. Local opt-outs are no substitute for getting the structure right now but it’s difficult to see how decentralising voices can make themselves heard against the clamour of enlargement. The irony is that a genuinely federal structure would probably permit a proper devolution of power but British repugnance for the word means that it comes up only once in the document – often enough to trigger a tabloid scare, though.
[Danny found an ascii version]

Why should I bother?

Bill Thompson, the Grizzly Adams of the UK net community, has written up Esther Dyson’s exasperated apologia for ICANN at the Oxford ‘Politics of Code’ conference Thursday so I don’t need to bother. ICANN was born out of such a narrow political/ideological context (American geek-libertarian) that it was always bound to struggle to acquire legitimacy outside of the USA but I’ve always been more sympathetic to the project and to its early leaders than cynics like Bill. ICANN was and is the first ever attempt at Global Governance (unless you count Alexander the Great). We should support the latest attempts (by ICANN itself and by outside critics like Dyson) to assemble an ICANN 2.0 from more diverse materials – even if only to see what you get when you try to legislate for an essential resource at the planetary level without a Government in sight.

Code is law, pictures are rubbish

I put up a few pictures from yesterday’s Oxford conference, The Politics of Code. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try some words.

Need a decent Lighting pun here

Jane Lighting has won the top job at Channel 5. Story from The Guardian. I’m making a serious attempt to link to newspapers other than The Guardian for media stories these days but this would be easier if they weren’t all so badly designed and flakey! Come on guys! A string of 404s from The Independent, stories delivered in pop-ups at The Times, an impenetrable log in at The FT. Stories at The Telegraph are at least accessible but I can’t be sure they’ll still be there in a few months, thus neutralising the ‘outboard brain’ function of my blog.

Month: February 2003