Thursday, October 27, 2005

posted 10/27/2005 01:21:00 PM by Daniel   0 comments

Harriet Meirs: Another scalp for the blogosphere

Yeah, I know, that’s probably an impolite way of putting it. But it’s nevertheless true. The blog echo chamber has resonated once again, and this time shattered a Supreme Court nomination.

It used to be that a powerful, well-connected person could say an idiotic thing or make a stupid mistake and still get away with it: Either no one would hear about it, or it would be covered up, or it would be spun away. Those days are gone. The old Main Stream Media has lost its grip, and the new media of the Internet is taking over.

Blogs pulled down Trent Lott from his perch as Republican Senate Majority Leader when he praised the 1948 Presidential candidacy of segregationist Strom Thurmond. Blogs vastly amplified (and encouraged funding for) the story of the Swift Boat Veterans, which fatally wounded John Kerry’s Presidential bid. Blogs torpedoed CBS News icon Dan Rather by revealing the 60 Minutes documents about Bush’s National Guard service to be crude forgeries.

Now President Bush has direct experienced the power of the blogs. What in the past would have been a few miffed voices crying in the wilderness instead turned into a huge interlinked outpouring of outrage. Blogs could investigate, analyze, comment on, and communicate every scrap of negative information about Meirs far faster than the White House could try to spin it in a positive light. Momentum against the Meirs nomination just kept building, and her chances of confirmation grew more and more hopeless.

I considered the Meirs nomination a terrible mistake right from the start. For example, here’s a comment I made on Instapundit:

One of the brighter spots of Bush's Presidency has been the high quality of individuals he has nominated to the federal courts. It comported with his promises while running for office, and was undoubtedly a decisive consideration for a significant number of voters.

Bush's nomination of John Roberts, a man of obvious intellect and experience and competence, further solidified my impression that Bush had established a very high standard for filling judicial vacancies. He sought the best nominees possible, confident that their qualities would make it difficult for the Senate to refuse to confirm them. And if the Senate nevertheless refused, the American people would hold Senators responsible, as they did in 2002 and 2004.

We neither need nor want the Supreme Court to be a super-legislative body consisting of nine life-time members accountable to no one. I just want the Supreme Court to fairly and objectively interpret the law and abide by the clear words of the Constitution. If a Justice truly acts as an "umpire", and truly applies the Constitution as it is written and was intended without inventing meanings which aren't in it, then I am happy. Because I'm confident that an honest and intellectually-competent Justice will in most cases arrive at the correct conclusion.

That's what makes the Harriet Meirs appointment so disappointing. In one stroke Bush has obliterated his prior record of seeking excellence. He has applied a "result-oriented" standard rather than a quality standard. He has validated the viewpoint that the Supreme Court is indeed a super-legislature, and that the only thing that matters is whether a Justice will "vote right".

This is why the Senate should reject the Meirs nomination. The damage to Bush has already been done; no one will ever again believe that his only concern is with quality and that his only desire is to choose the best person possible. But by rejecting Meirs' nomination, we can at least retain the ideal of a Supreme Court as an objective arbiter rather than a politicized legislature. Bush will be under enormous pressure to replace a rejected Meirs with a top-notch individual whose qualifications are beyond reproach.

If ever there was an occasion for the Senate to fulfill its Constitutional function of filtering out bad Presidential appointments, this is it.

Posted by: Daniel Wiener at October 10, 2005 10:20 PM

Without blogs, I fear that Harriet Meirs might have ultimately been confirmed. With blogs, she didn’t stand a chance.

And as with any political clash, there were winners and losers among bloggers and pundits (with the latter being elevated in importance by the blog links they received). Charles Krauthammer gets major credit for articulating the face-saving excuse for withdrawing the nomination which the White House ended up using. The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, with his inside sources and series of well-researched reports, owned much of this story. David Frum rallied opposition with a petition and a website, based on his personal knowledge of Harriet Meirs.

And the big loser was Hugh Hewitt, who went to the mat for Bush’s nominee primarily on the basis of Republican solidarity. Right up until the bitter end Hewitt professed to be absolutely certain that the nomination would not be withdrawn because Bush would not cave in to the pressure. And hence Republicans and conservatives should accept the fait accompli and rally behind the President rather than risk splintering the party and losing elections in 2006 and 2008. And this was coming from the author of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World in which he explained the rapidly growing power of blogs!

Now we wait and hope that Meirs’ replacement will be a person of quality and competence and sound judicial philosophy that we need on the Supreme Court. If not, the blogosphere will be here with enhanced reputation and power to fill the “watchdog” role which the Old Media used to rhetorically aspire to.

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

posted 9/27/2005 09:57:00 AM by Daniel   26 comments

Hurricanes, Space Elevators, Solar Arrays, and Supercomputers

(A modest proposal for killing Hurricanes in their infancy using advanced technology)

There have been lots of blue-sky ideas floated over the years for diverting or destroying hurricanes. Most such plans are quickly refuted, since the energies expended by Mother Nature tend to dwarf anything at the disposal of human beings. Even nuclear explosions are weak in comparison, and the side-effects of nukes are unacceptable.

Unabashed by others’ failures, I’d like to toss my own original idea up in the air and see if it orbits.

Well, actually it turns out that only part of my idea is original (very few ideas are). As I researched this, I ran across an article titled Controlling Hurricanes by Ross N. Hoffman in the October 2004 issue of Scientific American. In it he also suggests that hurricanes could be diverted by carefully perturbing their chaotic behavior with the aid of sophisticated computer models. And among the possible levers he proposes for such perturbation is the use of earth-orbiting solar power stations beaming down microwave energy at portions of hurricanes.

I would take this a couple of steps further. In addition to the possibility of solar power stations converting sunlight to beamed microwave energy, we might be able to construct giant solar mirrors hundreds of miles in area to focus sunlight onto portions of tropical storms while they are still forming. Cyclonic storms have a complex and dynamic structure, and interferring with that structure at key points may be sufficient to interrupt their development and cause them to dissipate.

Roughly 80 tropical storms develop every year, but only a few turn into massive and destructive hurricanes. The energies involved in a new tropical storm are orders of magnitude less than a fully-developed hurricane, and hence are much more amenable to human-scale intervention.

But is there any practical way to build the enormous space structures which would be required to collect and focus enough energy? This is where space elevators come in. As carbon nanotube material technology advances, we stand on the verge of cheap space lift capability if we are willing to invest a few tens of billions of dollars in the necessary infrastructure. Not only would solar mirrors and power stations become economically feasible, but so would a greatly expanded network of sophisticated satellites capable of gathering huge volumes of data on tropical storms using many frequency bands and advanced instrumentation.

Tying this all together would be a network of supercomputers running predictive modeling programs. Moore’s Law continues to provide exponential increases in computer power, which will allow us to process the vast amount of satellite data and provide real-time feedback for storm perturbation efforts.

I discussed this with my brother, who is a physics professor specializing in chaos theory. He refused to express a professional opinion of the idea (although he did demand a cut of the profits), but he pointed out that controlling chaotic systems requires a great amount of experimentation and refinement of non-linear mathematical models. It seems to me this is precisely what we would be able to do. We could experiment with focusing energy within the structures of early-stage storms, observe the effects, and continue refining our models until we were confident of being able to dissipate or redirect the storms.

With numerous observation satellites in orbit we could detect tropical storms in their formative hours, and with multiple mirrors and/or microwave-beaming stations in space we could disrupt several storms simultaneously. Once the infrastructure is in place, the marginal cost for killing each budding hurricane is minimal. The potential savings in lives and monetary damage would vastly exceed the cost of building space elevators and boosting these assets into orbit.

Up until now, communications satellites of all types have been the “killer app” for orbital space launches. They’ve been the one unquestionable commercial success. Nothing else has come along to justify the near-term high cost of exploring space.

Hurricanes are the “killer app” for space elevators and cheap space travel.

Avoiding one Katrina would pay for all the space elevators and solar mirrors and power satellites we could ever want. With the objective of preventing hurricane damage, it would become financially worthwhile for a consortium of insurance companies to finance the needed infrastructure. Their investment would ultimately be hugely profitable even without the hurricane aspect, but this is the shareholder justification hook which insurance companies can hang their raincoats on.

How about if we set ourselves the goal of eliminating all destructive hurricanes within the next ten years?

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

posted 8/02/2005 09:16:00 AM by Daniel   0 comments

Immortality Problem?

In response to my previous post "Should humans be allowed to live forever?" I received an email from someone named Adam which packed a lot of assertions into one paragraph, and I thought I'd respond to them:

Even if they find a way to allow humans to live forever on the cellular level, that would not stop people from dieing by other factors such as disease, accidents, etc. Therefor living forever is impossible.

Of course humans will still face the risk of dying from accidents or deliberate violence, but I see no fundamental barrier to eliminating disease and aging as biological science advances. "Forever" is a fairly long time, and the probability of living that long is low (although perhaps not zero) even if we were to reduce the chance of death in any particular year to an extremely small number.

But the phrase is only used metaphorically. The real question is whether human lifespans can be doubled, tripled, or extended by orders of magnitude over their current maximums. That would be a good intermediate goal for anyone preferring immortality. "Forever" can wait. Time enough to worry about that in another century or two.

Also I would think that any technology/medication/whatever to allow one to live longer than 100 years would cost so much money at first that only the rich and famous would be able to get the treatment. I want to see how well the general public reacts to that thought. Why should the wealthy live longer than the poor or even middle class? This would cause an uproar with possibly even mass murders out of pure jealousy and other such reasons.

I suppose that could be true if we're talking about a magic anti-aging pill which had to be taken every day and cost $5,000 a dose and hence was only available to the wealthy elite. But there's no reason to expect anti-aging therapies to follow such a trajectory. It's far more likely that treatments will be developed piecemeal to address different portions of the aging puzzle, and it will take awhile to verify that they even work. The early beneficiaries will likely be subjects in double-blind test protocols, just as they currently are with new drugs developed to treat diseases.

Will an anti-aging drug be expensive? Probably initially, just the way an anti-AIDS drug is. It requires a huge R&D effort and a huge investment to get past the regulatory barriers, so the sales price is set high to recover that investment (along with all the failed efforts) and still make a profit. But people are willing to pay that price, since they consider it better than the alternative of dying. In a few years patents expire, generics come on the market, and newer competitive drugs all drive the price down. Health insurance spreads the cost, and often governments step in to subsidize the cost.

How will the general public react? Probably with glee and public pressure to speed up the development of better therapies, not with pure jealousy and mass murder. Remember, for most people there is no immediate urgency. For most people aging is not a critical disease like cancer which can kill you in a matter of months. Most people anticipate many years of continued life, and will be quite content to wait until the bugs are thoroughly worked out of anti-aging therapies.

Now think about other countries reactions if the USA develops this first, and people all across America start using it. This is completely against so many religions, that I believe this would cause a substantial increase in terrorist activities, thereby resulting in even more loss of life.

Ah, the old "heckler's veto" argument: We better not allow something because it would incite violent opposition. Terrorism is our fault because the USA exports lewd movies and magazines and allows women to go half-naked and promotes religious tolerance and doesn't stone homosexuals and tempts young people with a materialistic, capitalistic secular lifestyle, etc. Now terrorism will be our fault because we're developing ways to let people live forever (oops, make that live indefinitely long without aging).

Yeah, there are a lot of religions which won't like the idea of halting the aging process. Most religions revolve heavily around the theme of comforting the dying and the ones they leave behind with the promise of eternal life everlasting in heaven. They won't be thrilled with the competition from eternal life here on earth (or other planets). I suspect that most religions will find ways to adapt, or else they'll find they have a dwindling number of adherents. But they won't be able to stop future medical advances, anymore than they've been able to stop past medical advances. The vast majority of people prefer to live.

Dr. Nuland does not have to do anything to prevent people from living forever, the people of the world, including uncontrolled factors would do the work for him. Humans living forever will never work even if we find out how to allow it.

Gosh, then there's no problem, is there? Dr. Nuland and Adam and anyone else who is frightened or repelled by the prospect of eliminating aging can just stop worrying about it, because it won't happen. We're wasting our time arguing.

But what if Dr. Nuland and Adam and others are wrong, and it begins to look like it will happen? What will they do to try to prevent it? If it's the equivalent of the end of the world, as Dr. Nuland thinks, is there anything they would not do to prevent it?

That is the fundamental question which none of the critics of anti-aging research are willing to address.

Sunday, July 31, 2005

posted 7/31/2005 10:18:00 AM by Daniel   3 comments

Should humans be allowed to live forever?

Back in its February 2005 issue (which arrived in January), the M.I.T. Technology Review magazine published a long critique by Dr. Sherwin Nuland of the work of Dr. Aubrey de Grey's Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), i.e., extending human life indefinitely.

Both Nuland and the Editor of Technology Review, Jason Pontin, made clear that they believe extending the human lifespan is a terrible thing which could adversely and irrevocably effect our species by transforming our nature in dangerous ways.

This topic seems to be growing a lot hotter, now that Jason Pontin has announced a $20,000 (or more) prize for "any molecular biologist working in the field of aging who is willing to take up the challenge: submit an intellectually serious argument that SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate." (Hat tips to Instapundit and Fighting Aging for alerting me.)

I therefore though it would be timely for me to publish an exchange of letters I had with Jason Pontin. (There did not appear to be anything in Jason Pontin's letter which suggested he would want it kept private or which would be embarrassing to him.) I submitted a letter to Technology Review in response to Nuland's article and Pontin's accompanying editorial. Jason Pontin sent back a thoughtful response, and I in turn responded to that. Neither of my letters made it into the Technology Review letters column. But then that's what personal blogs are for....

My January 22, 2005 letter:

To the Editor:

Sherwin Nuland, in his [Feb. 2005 Technology Review] article on Aubrey de Grey, and Jason Pontin, in his related editorial, both insist that transcending human mortality will not happen and would be a terrible thing if it did. Indeed, Nuland considers it a threat at the level of "the ultimate destruction of our planet", one that surpasses his earlier fears of nuclear immolation or a celestial catastrophe.

But their reasons for why human immortality "will almost certainly not exceed" are weak to non-existent, consisting mostly of repeated dogmatic assertions. I doubt that their knowledge of the future is more omniscient than, say, the pre-Wright authorities who once proclaimed that powered flight was impossible.

Nuland claims that many other authority figures share his fear and would "join huge numbers of thoughtful citizens in a counterreaction." But what exactly would they do? Ban immortality? This is the essential issue which both Nuland and Pontin tip toe around.

If they are correct that immortality cannot be achieved, then they have nothing to worry about. If they are wrong, will they be content to say "Oh darn, my mistake."? Will they rely on persuasion alone to convince their fellow human beings that indefinite life extension is a Bad Thing?

I would ask them two questions: Do they believe research into immortality should be forbidden? If such research is successful, will those of us who don't cower in terror at the prospect of living indefinitely have our individual choices closed off so that Nuland's and Pontin's nightmares can be avoided?

Daniel Wiener

Jason Pontin's January 23, 2005 reply:

Thanks for the letter.

I think you have identified a logical problem in Dr. Nuland's article: he thinks that the science is unlikely to be true, and yet at the same time he believes in it enough to be frightened of its implications. I should not speak for Dr. Nuland, but I suspect he would answer: if we could peturb human biology sufficiently to offer indefinite life to individuals it would backfire and destroy the human species.

For myself, I don't think de Grey's theories are science in any meaningful phrase. They are speculations. It might be possible to engineer cells so that they escaped senescence and apoptosis, violating the "Hayflick limit" which governs how many times a human cell can divide before it experiences some kind of genome instability. But I don't see how, in principle, you could reliably repair all the damage to our DNA from oxidative stress.

That said, you raise the issue of personal freedom. Does personal freedom--including the freedom to life--trump all other interests? Societies traditionally limit personal freedom, even the freedom to live, for any number of reasons. I am not saying this is a good thing--but I don't think the argument of "choice" can decide whether or not Immortality is a Good Thing.

Jason

My January 23, 2005 response:

Hello Jason,

Thank you for your reply.

Clearly Dr. Nuland is convinced that immortality would destroy the human species. That is a plausible belief, but one I don't share, and one that I doubt is shared by nearly as many other people as Dr. Nuland wishes.

That creates a bit of a dilemma for Dr. Nuland. If the consequences are as horrible as he imagines, then what lengths is he prepared to go to in order to prevent it from happening? Are there any limits whatsoever, considering the stakes?

Perhaps he need do nothing, and trust in his belief/hope that immortality cannot be achieved. This is analogous to the planet-killer meteor-strike default strategy: The probability is so low we can effectively ignore it, and besides there's not much we can currently do to prevent it.

On the other hand, the continued exponential advances in biological and related sciences could soon erode his confidence that immortality is impractical. What then? Will he try to pass laws against it? On what legal or philosophical grounds would our society restrict our individual freedoms and choices, so as to force human beings to die unnecessarily?

Dr. Nuland can speculate all he wants that indefinite life extension will be disastrous for our species, but that's all it is -- speculation. Lots of other people disagree completely, and think it will be a marvelous advance. We won't know for sure which side is right until it happens, and of course by then it'll be too late to prevent it.

Which brings us back to the central, unanswered question: What exactly does Dr. Nuland propose doing, if anything, to prevent his nightmare (and other people's daydream) from materializing?

Daniel Wiener

UPDATE: I've posted my response ("Immortality Problem?") to an email from Adam.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

posted 5/17/2005 08:19:00 AM by Daniel   0 comments

Filibuster Anticlimax?

For months now the battle over judicial nominations has been one of maneuver rather than engagement. Republicans and their core supporters are trying to remold the courts with conservative and originalist appointments. Democrats and their core supporters are trying to preserve what is left of their last bastion of strength in terms of activist judges who will defend and advance liberal policies. The stakes are incredibly high, and everyone knows it.

If Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist can keep 50 Republicans on board to support the nuclear/Constitutional option and abolish filibustering of judicial nominees, the road will be clear to confirm virtually everyone President Bush nominates. Most pundits now seem to believe that Frist has sufficient votes, and that the showdown is finally at hand.

Difficult negotiations rarely reach the serious stage until a deadline is staring everyone in the face. We can see the evidence in the intense last-minute negotiations which are underway among many Senators. Most Senators would just as soon avoid the issue rather than risk a metaphorical nuclear war. But indefinite avoidance is not possible; judicial nominees eventually must start coming to the Senate floor for a decision.

Then again, maybe indefinite avoidance is possible.

If Frist really does have the votes, and all compromise negotiations fail, the Democrats are left with only two choices: (1) Filibuster a nominee until Frist asks for a ruling from Vice-President Cheney which will abolish all future filibusters, or (2) Don't filibuster any nominees.

It seems to me that option # 2 is the obvious option to take.

Either way, Bush is going to get his nominees confirmed. Democrats can easily go back to their core constituencies and make that case, that they simply didn't have the votes AT THIS TIME to block the nuclear option and prevent the confirmations.

But this at least leaves open the door to future filibusters after the 2006 elections. If Democrats pick up even one seat in the Senate, it may be enough to neuter the nuclear/Constitutional option. Who cares if Bush replaces Rehnquist with another conservative? This gives Democrats some hope of blocking Supreme Court nominations during Bush's final two years in office.

My guess is that six moderate Democratic Senators will get together and announce that they are taking the path of avoidance, and for now they will vote with Republicans to close debate on pending judicial confirmations even if they subsequently vote against the nominees. The nuclear showdown will be avoided. Democrats will lose this battle but live to fight again.

And let's face it, avoiding difficult decisions would truly be in line with the great traditions of the United States Senate.

UPDATE -- 5/19/2005: Democrats Seek Avoidance "Deal"

Byron York at The Corner hears that Democrats "are backing down somewhat on the number of nominees they would insist on killing as part of any agreement." This immediately tells us that Frisk has the votes to prevail. If Democrats thought they could strip off enough Republican votes, they wouldn't be the ones making concessions during negotiations. Especially when Republicans don't seem to be agreeing to any substantial compromises.

If Frist indeed has the votes, then Democrats are reduced to seeking ways to save face, even as they surrender to the current reality. York says that the Democratic moderates will agree not to filibuster nominees except under "extraordinary" circumstances. In exchange, they want Republicans to forego the nuclear/Constitutional option through 2006. Republicans are countering that they'll refrain from going nuclear except under "extraordinary" circumstances.

If the final deal is that no current or future nominees will be filibustered except under "extraordinary" circumstances (which might also trigger the nuclear option) then that is exactly equivalent to what I described above: Democrats won't filibuster for now, in the hope that at some future time (e.g., after the 2006 elections) they'll have a better chance of avoiding nuclear emasculation.

UPDATE #2 -- 5/19/2005: More Corroboration

Mickey Kaus and James Taranto also see the logic in a Democratic back-down. If this meme picks ups steam, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Why should Republicans make any real concessions if the behind-the-scenes chatter suggests that Democrats will ultimately cave? The obvious increasing desperation of Democrats to cut a deal, any deal, just to be able to spin the outcome in a better light, just further weakens their negotiating leverage.