THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 140 February 12 - 18, 2001

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This is a day book. It's not all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't. I'll keep trying. See also the monthly COMPUTING AT CHAOS MANOR column, 4,000 - 7,000 words, depending.  (Older columns here.) For more on what this place is about, please go to the VIEW PAGE.

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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Highlights this week:

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Cleaning up. Getting ready for AAAS

Much ado about the AnnaKournikova Virus. Odd, I have nly got one copy. Some have got dozens. It looks like

And be careful

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Getting ready for AAAS. I will file a BYTE report, and I will also do a special report for subscribers. For all whose who have subscribed, thanks. Most of my effort goes to the public site, of course. I am reminded of KUSC (the classical music station here) which is having a subscription drive even as I write this. And yes, I send them my dues...

AAAS is the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is the showcase for a bunch of science stuff. The science press corps in this country is a lot smarter than what gets published would lead you to believe. What gets published is determined by editors, and editors are generally after the widest possible readerships. Anyway, AAAS is two shows, one for the general public, and another for the press corps. I've been covering AAAS since 1968 or so. It's a way to recharge my batteries...

I have an AMD Athlon system, built by AMD; it has a GeForce2 nVIDIA graphics board, and a sound system built onto the VIA motherboard. If there was a VIA disk supplied with the system I have misplaced it, alas. 

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We are in San Francisco. AAAS tomorrow. Mail later tonight.

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AAAS

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This week:

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AAAS Presidential speech last night. We stayed awake. I'll try to have something on that. And all day yesterday on nano-technology. That's definitely going to get a report.

More on nano-technology today. And a session on supercomputers. I'll write all this up when I can.

I have a dozen and more letters on this:

I can only conclude that Allchin took leave of his senses or that he was drunk. His case against open source software is silly, and I cannot imaging any legislature paying attention, nor of any court finding a way to enforce any laws coming from this in the unlikely event that Congress lost its mind and the President signed such idiocy.

In a word, I would take this as a joke if it were not reported as serious; and even now I wonder. It is an irrational thing for an intelligent person to say, and it certainly goes against what I have myself heard Gates say.

The problem with open source free software is that you get what people want to work on, which may or may not be what you need to have done. That can be a matter of importance, or may not. But Linux is certainly no threat to Intellectual Property and Allchin has to know that.

It's late and I have to get to bed, as there is an early session tomorrow. But this is goofy.

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Busy day. Human Genome Project announcements. At the Fellows Forum they had an induction as a Fellow of AAAS for Ben Bova. Also inducted was Robert Cowan, an old friend and colleague of the press corps from the Christian Science Monitor. Congratulations to both. Alas, when they made me a Fellow back in the Dark Ages they simply sent me a notice (and a dues change...) so I didn't get applauded at breakfast. I guess I'll just have to live. There was also an excellent speech by Norman Neureiter, Advisor for Science and Technology to the Secretary of State. He talked mostly about process and structure within the bureaucracy: which is good in that is makes science advice more integrated gets more attention paid, but also makes it part of the bureaucracy so that fads like political correctness tend to be perpetuated and impossible to remove. Note that last is my observation, not his. So long as the advice is in science I am all for it; when big science talks about 'the ethics of science' the voice is usually from people like Margaret Meade, who was certainly influential, but whose understanding of real science was colored by a number of preconceptions.

Session on biological warfare. Lunch with the DARPA bio war chief. I'll probably have a report on this later. It's a bit frightening, but the good news is that in 50 years there have not been real biowar incidents of the self=perpetuating self=sustaining kind. (I leave out "Yellow Rain" in Viet Nam which remains controversial; Meeselsohn was on the biowar panel; he calls that bee excrement rather than North Vietnamese/Russian biowar agent, but in any event at worst it was toxins not live infectious agents.)  Of course the people who have some incentive to biowar as the poor country's nukes have the problem that they are most susceptible to it. As in Palestine/Israel; the Palestinians have perhaps some incentive to biowar agents, but their own people are more likely to be harmed than the Jewish population simply because of public health and cultural hygiene matters.

Dinner with John McCarthy and Rolfe Sinclair.

McCarthy has written an AI robot short story. Interesting watching the robot think in LISP. His web site is http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/  He is very interested in the sustainability of human progress and thinks the earth can support 15 billion people forever. I learned about information utilities and much else that went into A STEP FARTHER OUT from him many many many years ago...

Roland tells us to expect more spam:

Unfortunately he is probably right.

Then there's this:

As I predicted indeed...

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See Saturday above if you didn't because I put a lot up there this morning

I have reports in preparation on genomes, patents, supercomputers, and the state of the sciences in the US.  BYTE will carry at least one. I'll have another here, and one will be mailed to subscribers (or the way to find it will be). But just now things are still going on. 

Good session this morning on genome and beyond, with Congresswoman Louise Slaughter speaking for her genetic non-discrimination bill. She urges passage. This raises questions that I have not time to answer this morning; but it is well worth a lot of thought and an essay. Should there be laws forbidding use of genetic information in insurance decisions? Federal? How much restriction on freedom and how much fairness?  She has horror stories about people losing insurance when they find they have genetic propensity for breast cancer. We may agree that a non-discovered and non-discoverable pre-disposition should not be the basis for termination of existing insurance. 

Should it be the basis for not issuing a policy in the first place? Or for doing so only with higher premiums?  If I think your chances of getting breast cancer are those of the general population, pretty low, should I charge you less than I charge someone who has a 40% chance of getting it due to hereditary factors?  If I charge all the same I must of course raise YOUR rates since I have to spread the risk over all, and I can't charge the high risk individual more than the lower risk.  These are current legal questions, and important, and the answers are not obvious since they go to what is government for? What is fair? What is insurance for? And so forth.

Can, for instance, a group of low risk individuals form a mutual company to have low rate auto and house insurance?  But that is precisely what USAA does, using the US military as the selection agency for determining who is low risk. Assume "LOW DEFECT INSURANCE COMPANY" is formed. It is a mutual company. To get in you must show you have no known genetic defects. It then has low premiums and high benefits. Should it be outlawed? Should it be forced to take in applicants in a "non-discriminatory way?"  Can it be punished or outlawed for DISCRIMINATION which is a hate phrase and possibly a hate crime?  These are non-trivial questions.

And now back to more meetings. (For some discussion on this see mail.)

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