Consequences

"But synthetic biology is a technique with potentially far-reaching consequences like environmental effects and misappropriation by terrorists."
"Scientists Transplant Genome of Bacteria" The New York Times. 29 June, 2007.

As the children I used to work with were inordinately fond of saying: "duh-hickey."

Here's a thought experiment. Remove the words "synthetic biology" from the above sentence and substitute "the storage of electricity in batteries," or "cellular telephony," or even "the use of fire." Is there really a significant technological advance that render that statement nonsensical?

Must we be reminded, every time a new technology is developed, that if we're careless with it, we could have a multi-year, multibillion dollar mess on our hands? Or that in the hands of the wrong people, it could be used to do harm? Do we really still have ANY expectation that someday someone will develop some whiz-bang technology that will be ONLY capable of helping people? All inovation involves a level of risk. While I can't claim to personally be the most imaginative person in the world, I'm pretty sure that given some research (or just the right people to ask questions of), I can come up with a way to make just about anything that Humanity has ever devised into a tool of death, destruction and/or environmental degradation unrivaled in your neighborhood. (Hey, it's best to start small, right?)

Perhaps even more annoying about statements such as the one that leads of this posting is that it also operates on another level, perhaps more honest that its literal reading - that of the fear of Science Run Amok. While there will be people who honestly worry about the environmental effects of synthetic biology, and a collection of paranoids whose job it will be to keep frothing religiofascists (and maybe even evangelopatriots) from using the technology to give us all a lethal case of the Sun Flu, you can bet that both of those causes will be co-opted by the next generation of Luddites - people who's main objection to technology is what it has always been - "Change is scary!"

So far, no technology has ever managed to completely de-legitimize segments of the population, rendering their marginalization or extermination morally necessary or correct. And with our modern ability to make the world smaller with global communications, interactions and relationships, the idea that anything will becomes even less and less likely (assuming one even holds that such an advance is possible). But bear in mind that the dissemination of information via a worldwide network of computers is a technique with potentially far-reaching consequences like environmental effects and misappropriation by terrorists. Just in case no one told you.

Mum's the Word, Then

Want to know a secret? Thoughts of fear and powerlessness among the people who died in Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks attracted them "to being in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"I think I'll sell a gazillion books" The Seattle Times

The buzz surrounding "The Secret" has lead to a few articles about the book. Not the least of which being this entertaining piece in Slate, in which Emily Yoffe dreams up a spiffy new kitchen floor. But the latest scuttlebutt around the book is centered the implication that if you think positive thoughts properly, bad things don't happen to you. Critics are lining up to give Rhonda Byrne, the author, a hard time about her blaming the victims of disasters for their misfortunes.

Perhaps more sensible is criticism of her for imagining a world in which positive and negative thinking combines with the Butterfly Effect to have absurdly far reaching consequences. If the dead and maimed from the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Gulf hurricanes thought too much about fear and powerlessness, what about their parents, spouses, children and other loved ones? If Daniel Pearl was murdered by Islamic extremists in Pakistan for negative thoughts, was Mariane Pearl attracted to him because she wasn't a positive enough thinker to marry someone more positive? If you have a hard time believing that each of the 15 children killed in America's Kids Day Care Center was so overwhelmingly pessimistic that the Universe answered their unspoken pleas by sending them to day care on a day when a truck bomb was apparently destined to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, do you then decide that the parents needed to be more positive, and the Universe, like Timothy McVeigh, simply regarded them as "collateral damage," when it gave the adults what they were unconsciously thinking? In December of 2005, Southwest Airlines Flight 1248 slid from a snow-covered runway at Chicago's Midway Airport, and killed a six-year-old boy, the only fatality of the incident. Who knew that a child so young could have been so fatalistic?

This is, as my father would put it, "a get-rich-quick scheme that will not work." But it's beautiful in the fact that it's non-falsifiable. If it doesn't work for you, clearly you didn't do it right. Since there's no objective way of measuring one's facility at thinking happy and positive thoughts, there's no way of objectively measuring how well it works. And what about two people who's happy thoughts are at cross-purposes? Do they have positive-thinking duels to see who hits the Powerball, and who dies in a fiery highway crash?

Shoulda Known

Cameron Diaz has landed herself in some hot water for wearing a messenger bag that she purchased in China while in Peru. It turns out that there was a Maoist insurgency in Peru in the 1980's and 1990's, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. As per the script, she has issued the expected apology.

"I don't think she should have used that bag where the followers of that ideology did so much damage."
Pablo Rojas, described as a "prominent local human rights activist."

This is where political correctness goes off the deep end. Who on Earth would have expected Cameron Diaz to be tuned in enough to the history of Peru to realize that a random piece of Chinese communist kitsch would be seen as expressing support for an insurgency that ended more than a decade ago? Most Americans who even remember the Shining Path are unlikely to be able to tell you much of anything about them, let alone their particular brand of Communism. While I think that putting Ms. Diaz in the role of victim is overstating it, she does seem to have become a useful conduit for attention. I'm pretty sure that thousands of tourists every year visit Peru and say, do, or have something that could remind people of the Shining Path. But since celebrities will generate international headlines, they're much better targets for hurt feelings.

Triggers

What sparks people to violence? All around the world people threaten others with violence as a means of expressing dislike, controlling behavior, self-aggrandizement, the list goes on.

The BBC reports that an Israeli was arrested for plotting a bombing. Not against Hamas or Hezbullah, but against the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade.

Just Say No

President Bush enacted only the third veto of his administration, against the same sort of legislation that he used his first veto against, broadening public funding of stem cell research.

Perhaps the reason why we have seen so few vetoes out of the President is that he's found an effective way around congressional actions that he doesn't approve of, through the widespread (and somewhat under the radar) use of signing statements. But it seems that signing statements are used by the President mainly to signal that he doesn't plan to enforce laws that he considers in violation of his prerogatives as President. Of course, unlike a veto, a signing statement doesn't give Congress another crack at things, through an attempt to override, and by not directly challenging the law directly, there's no avenue for the courts to become involved, and possibly disagree with the President's interpretation of the Constitution.