Crisisville

Death by iPhone

Don't get me wrong, I love Steve Jobs. I love him so much I even love fake Steve Jobs. I have an iPhone tattooed on my iPhone.

And, Steve lover that I am, I can't help but notice that he's now pronounced the death of the written word. Here is real Steve, dissing the Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

And, so, I think the iPhone the sign of the apocalypse. The issue is multi-tasking and focus. Focus is a meta-power. It helps to align and lift up other powers, like reason and problem-solving and other powers I would remember if I weren't also texting right now.

See, multi-tasking, it turns outs, downshifts your brain both temporarily and permanently. Your brain literally atrophies (shrinks - size matters) from the stress of mental shifting. So it's a lot like blowing the transmission on your Porsche - only there's no dealer left. Anywhere. And so you're just sitting there screwed in the driveway until your metaphor runs out of steam.

Multi-tasking makes you more prone to hypnosis and can precipitate huge tactical errors. See the immortal Richard Armitage quote that fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan would be like walking and chewing gum at the same time. Sure, it's fine when you're drinking coffee while driving 90 MPH south on I-75 and texting the babysitter not to give the kids sugar. But sometimes, things might get dangerous, you know?

The real trick is that we don't think that it's getting is. We still feel like we're in control of our full capabilities, because we're conscious of concentrating. But thinking about concentrating saps some of our brainpower. It's like keeping the TV Guide up on the screen. It feels like we're watching TV, but there's no way to actually get into the show.

Pretty soon, one of those days will come when the sky falls - storm, invasion, etc - and our brain will have literally forgotten how to focus. And we just won't have that rigid determination of mind anymore that has saved the ass of humanity quite a few times until now.

God, I love my iPhone. But it could just be the most beautiful objet d'art that ever caused my self-annihilation. Sometimes, I can feel my brain just dissolving as I switch between candy icons.

Anyway, maybe I'll buy a Kindle, dive into a deep book, something by Kierkegard. It only displays four shades of gray. That can't be too distracting, can it?

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Reprisal Against Non-State Actors

It could just be me, but it seems like one of the key constitutional questions of our time is how to circumscribe military action against non-state actors. That is, how far can the President dive into warfare before before being brought up short by Congress. The War Powers Act doesn't seem to be doing the job in the current rapid age, and various bodies have been flailing for a solution.

Now, one of the last times that non-state actors threatened state security, they came in the form of pirates. Not just your Keith Richards-style Caribbean scalawags, either, but Malay pirates (and others ) who appropriated whole swaths of the sea that became unavailable to nation-state warships.

The Constitution, wise document that it is, contains specific language that deals with this issue, right there in Article 1. Ten points if you know what it is.

Disease Tipping Points

I look to Malcolm Gladwell for advice in all things. Except hair care. And the central tenet of his The Tipping Point is that almost inconsequential things can create huge outcomes.

This is a key idea that hasn't been fully translated yet to the study of pandemic flu--which is ironic, since much of Gladwell's work is based on epidemiology. Scientists and talking heads keep discussing vaccines and treatments--which are very important concepts, to be sure. But there's very little discussion of the actual healthcare situation that will occur in a pandemic.

Let's look at three key factors: sanitation in healthcare, antibiotic resistance and biomedical waste after the jump.

Giving mudslinging a bad name

Mudslides (like the tragic one in the Phillipines), it turns out, are the 7th most common natural disaster. Even in more developed areas, they're tricky to plan for because they have particularly chaotic risk assessment factors. Devastating but unpredictable, they'd never show up as a key immediate threat in standard emergency management risk assessments.

Which is, by the the by, immensely frightening if you dwell on, near, or--conceivably--in mud.

The key point for me is the global increase in these sorts of events due to deforestation and modern agricultural methods in the developing worlds. So far, while our risk models have only taken into account the direct results of these processes, nature seems to be increasing risk exponentially upon them.

That is, it ain't just the effects of deforestation that are the problem. The deforestation causes mudslides causes loss of usable land and infrastructure. This kind of value-added destruction may well increase the casualty rates we see from global development.

Planning Section Aftermaths

This Time article on the Marcos overthrow brings up two key disaster management points for me. The need for citizen volunteers and the need for a proactive rebuilding plan.

Read about it after the jump...

It's been a bad hajj, please don't take my picture.

This week, I've gotten a lot of questions about the massive, deadly riots that have rolled through the Islamic world since the cartoon of the Bomb Turban Muhammed appeared last week in the Danish weekly Jyllands-Posten. Basically, they fall into the “Why kill people over a cartoon?” camp.

Now, the short answer is that the cartoons have served as a catalyst for governmental protests that have been roiling for a while. But it's instructive to look at the Islamic resistance to representational imagery, too, since it shows some of the cultural translation issues that create tension between these two ephmeral societal networks.

Nanotech threat assessment

VOA, citing Science says that Nanotechnology - the science that employs particles smaller than 1/1000th the diameter of a human hair - is an emerging field with limited knowledge of its toxic effects..

I'm only posting this now so we'll know what will be ready to kill us in ten years.

Hey, remember that scene in Prey where the nanobots sucked the life out of the guy's wife, turned her into the queen bitch of the self-reproducing world, and then he had to kill her? Yeah, that was, um, awesome. But fortunately, little nanobots will be cute and cuddly (not at all deadly) and that gray goo stuff would be wicked hard to design.

They're coming to get you....

From the BBC: Children may kill...

Scientists in St Louis want to test the vaccine, made from an inert form of the potentially lethal H5N1 virus, on 120 children aged between two and nine.Director of the centre in St Louis Dr Robert Belshe said it was crucial a vaccine was designed particularly for children as they are more susceptible to flu and have a different pattern of immune response to adults. [drum roll please] It is also thought that children are a key link in diseases spreading to pandemic proportions.

This, of course, confirms my belief that preschools are wretched hives of scum and viruses.

When the Pan Flu comes, vaccinate the children. This isn't even affection talking although, god knows, I would break into Julie Geberding's fridge to get meds for my daughters.

See, kids will be network hubs for any flu-like outbreak, just like the promiscuous are for STDs. It's a scary policy choice to vaccinate the hubs first, rather than doing random population grabs. It's never been done for HIV, and might have cut infection rates dramatically. But for pan flu, vaccinating the hubs could be the different between a calamitous outbreak and a catastrophic one.

BTW, this is a picture of my daughter (Emma) chasing me on Jekyll Island in Georgia. My wife took it; she's a photographer. I don't think Emma was infectious at the time...but I can't know for sure.

How do you spell terrorist?

From VOA News:

The Washington Post newspaper reports Wednesday that the U.S. government database of alleged international terrorism suspects and their associates now contains 325,000 names......Counterterrorism center officials say the actual number of people on the list is approximately 200,000, because the same person may appear under different spellings or aliases.

It could be me, but I think a great use of the $42.7 billion dollar homeland security budget would be hiring good spellers who could figure this out. I think spelling, in fact, would be a key counter-terrorism skill.

It sounds silly, but this is exactly the scope of some problems in the preparedness sector. Huge budgets lead to uncreative thinking, which leads to silly mistakes in infrastructure that's really needed. I mean, this is standard ducks in a row sort of stuff--although I'm sure there are mitigating factors, huge obstacles, people wanted to have lives, blah blah blah.

Mo money, mo problems, as a wise man once said.

Netbreaker; Ballbreaker

This is from a PDF of a PowerPoint at the Sante Fe Institute. And, you know, I love stuff like this because I'm a nut about complexity and adaptive systems. But this diagram--and most of the theoretical substance of the talk--doesn't seem to address complexity.

The network diagrams are based on pre-Barabasi graph theory, and they don't mentioned hub structures. Maybe the software is advanced, and these guys are certainly 99.44% pure scientists, but complexity is sexy cause it's messy by nature. The mess is what we can use, and that's what I want to see focus on. So, let's dirty up complexity! Ph.D. mud-wrestling, whoo!