Exponential Growth

Kevin Kelly has a very interesting and very extensive discussion of Moore's Law and a number of other laws of technical growth. He was an editor for Wired magazine and is a prolific author. My favourite book by him is Out of Control.

Here are some key bits from Kevin Kelly's article "Was Moore's Law Inevitable":

Secondly, even a cursory glance reveals the astounding regularity of Moore's line. From the earliest points its progress has been eerily mechanical. Without interruption for 50 years, chips improve exponentially at the same speed of acceleration, neither more nor less. It could not be more straight if it had been engineered by a technological tyrant. Yet, we are to believe that this strict nonwavering trajectory came about via the chaos of the global marketplace and uncoordinated ruthless scientific competition. The line is so straight and unambiguous that it seems curious anyone would need convincing by Moore and Mead to "believe" in it. The question of faith lies in whether one believes the force of this "law" lies within the technology itself, or in a self-fulfilling social prophecy. Is Moore's law inevitable, a direction pushed forward by the nature of matter and computation, and independent of the society it was born into, or is it an artifact of self-organized scientific and economic ambition?

In any case, at some point on our planet, or any planet, the curve will plateau out. Moore's law will not continue forever. Any specific exponential growth will inevitably smooth out into a typical S-shaped curve. This is the archetypical pattern of growth: after a slow ramp up, gains takeoff straight up like a rocket, and then after a long run level out slowly. Back in 1830 only 37 kilometers of railroad track had been laid in the US. That count doubled in the next ten years, and then doubled in the decade after that, and kept doubling every decade for 60 years. In 1890 any reasonable railroad buff would have predicted that the US would have hundreds of millions of kilometers of railroad by a hundred years later. There would be railroad to everyone's house. Instead there were fewer than 400,000 kilometers. However, Americans did not cease to be mobile. We merely shifted our mobility and transportation to other species of invention. We built automobile highways, and airports. The miles we travel keep expanding, but the exponential growth of that particular technology peaked and plateau.

Much of the churn in the technium is due to our tendency to shift what we care about. Mastering one technology engenders new technological desires. A recent example: The first digital cameras had very rough picture resolution. Then scientists began cramming more and more pixels onto one sensor to increase photo quality. Before they knew it, the number of pixels possible per array was on an exponential curve, heading into megapixel territory and beyond. But after a decade of acceleration, consumers shrugged off the increasing number of pixels; the current resolution was sufficient. Their concern shifted to the speed of the pixel sensors, or the response in low light -- things no one cared about before. So a new metric is born, and a new curve started, and the exponential curve of ever-more pixels per array will gradually abate.

Moore's Law is headed to a similar fate. When, no one knows. "Moore's Law, which has held as the benchmark for IC scaling for more than 40 years, will cease to drive semiconductor manufacturing after 2014," Len Jelinek, the director of a major semiconductor manufacturer, claimed in 2009. Carl Anderson, an IBM Fellow, announced at an industry conference in April, 2009 that the end of Moore's Law was at hand: "There was exponential growth in the railroad industry in the 1800s; there was exponential growth in the automobile industry in the 1930s and 1940s; and there was exponential growth in the performance of aircraft until they reached the speed of sound. But eventually exponential growth always comes to an end." But IBM has been wrong several times before. In 1978, IBM scientists predicted Moore's Law had only 10 years left. Whoops. In 1988, they again said it would end in 10 years. Ooops, again. Gordon Moore himself predicted his law would end when it reach 250 nanometer manufacturing, which it passed in 1997. Today the industry is aiming for 20 nanometers. In 2009, Intel CEO Craig Barrett said "We can scale it down another 10 to 15 years. Nothing touches the economics of it."

...

I suspect Moore's Law is something we don't have much sway over, other than its doubling period. Moore's Law is the Moira of our age. In Greek mythology the Moira were the three Fates. Usually depicted as dour spinsters, one Moira spun the thread of a newborn's life. The other Moira counted out the thread's length. And the third Moira cut the thread at death. A person's beginning and end were predetermined. But what happened in between was not inevitable. Humans and gods could work within the confines of one's ultimate destiny.

Go read the whole article. It is absolutely fascinating!

Michael Greenberg's "Hurry Down Sunshine"

I really enjoyed this book. It was extremely well written and the "story" was gripping. (It's a biography, so I put story in quotes.)

Not only was I fascinated by the lives, I loved the use of language (the daughter has "dystopic mania" with an obsession with words and the idea that she has reached a blessed state shared only with young children). This was a very human story. It was real. It had ups and downs. It had many characters with good and bad interactions. There were "plot" twists. There was a Hollywood ending with a tempering that points out that a "good life" was several pegs down from what most people would hold up as ideal.

I was completely engrossed in the story and gobbled the book up. That's always a good sign of a great read.

Dowd on Gates/Crowley

Here's Maureen Dowd in a NY Times op-ed giving an excellent opinion on the Gates/Crowley flap:

Being obnoxious isn’t a crime.

As we reflect on the arc of civil rights dramas from Jim Crow to Jim Crowley, my friend John Timoney, the police chief of Miami, observes: “There’s a fine line between disorderly conduct and freedom of speech. It can get tough out there, but I tell my officers, ‘Don’t make matters worse by throwing handcuffs on someone. Bite your tongue and just leave.’ ”

As the daughter of a police detective, I always prefer to side with the police. But this time, I’m struggling.

No matter how odd or confrontational Henry Louis Gates Jr. was that afternoon, he should not have been arrested once Sergeant Crowley ascertained that the Harvard professor was in his own home.

President Obama was right the first time, that the encounter had a stupid ending, and the second time, that both Gates and Crowley overreacted. His soothing assessment that two good people got snared in a bad moment seems on target.

It escalated into a clash of egos — the hard-working white cop vs. the globe-trotting black scholar, the town vs. the gown, the Lowell Police Academy vs. the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Crowley told a Boston sports station that Gates “seemed very peculiar — even more so now that I know how educated he is.”

Gates told his daughter Elizabeth in The Daily Beast: “He should have gotten out of there and said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, good luck. Loved your PBS series — check with you later!’ ”

Gates told me Crowley was so “gruff” and unsolicitous “the hair on my neck stood up.” Crowley says Gates acted “put off” and “agitated.” But the strong guy with the gun has more control than the weak guy with the cane. An officer who teaches racial sensitivity should not have latched on to a technicality about neighbors — who seemed to be outnumbered by cops — getting “alarmed” by Gates’s “outburst.”

From Shakespeare to Hitchcock, mistaken identity makes for a powerful narrative.

A police officer who’s proud of his reputation for getting along with black officers, and for teaching cadets to avoid racial profiling, feels maligned to be cast as a racist white Boston cop.

A famous professor who studies identity and summers in Martha’s Vineyard feels maligned to be cast as a black burglar with backpack and crowbar.

Race, class and testosterone will always be a combustible brew. Our first African-American president will try to make the peace with Gates (who supported Hillary) and Crowley (whose father voted for Obama).

It looks to me that this situation is coming to a reasonable conclusion. Obama is doing the right thing to give both of them (and himself) a way to climb down. They won't exactly "kiss and make up" but they will all probably issue a statement that they understand the complexity of the situation and the fact that things can be seen from many viewpoints and that all have agreed to respect those viewpoints. In other words, a truce.

In the real world -- unlike Hollywood -- a truce is usually the best "victory" that can be had. Everybody gets to walk away and live to fight another day.

Sotomayor

I just came across this. It is a very nice accusation of the bland racism of the Republicans when it comes to "considering" the Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court. Here is Eric Martin at the Obsidian Wings web site:

It was odd to see the way the GOP turned the Sotomayor confirmation hearings into the "wise Latina" show - opting to focus, monomaniacally, on a few words from a speech delivered over 7 years ago, while virtually ignoring the output of one of the longest judicial careers of any recent Supreme Court nominee. Jim Henley summed it up succinctly:

If Sonia Sotomayor is so great, how come she only ever said one thing in her whole life?

But aside from how strange it was to see politicians questioning a potential Supreme Court justice - incessantly and repetitively - about one passage in a speech, and not her jurisprudential outlook/body of work (which belies the accusation of bias as supposedly evidenced by that excerpt), the essence of Sotomayor's supposedly controversial commentary shouldn't really be all that controversial.

Judges whose life experiences differ from the white male norm that has dominated the Supreme Court since its inception, would, I "hope," be able to make better informed decisions on cases for which being white and male may increase the likelihood of certain blindspots, and being a member of a minority group might provide certain insights.

Further, while a minority will likely be well-versed in the dominant culture of a given society (by virtue of it being dominant and all), a member of the majority group is less likely to be familiar with the culture of that minority group. Due to this myopia, sometimes the dominant group just doesn't get it - or at least, has a harder time of it. Much of the rest of the GOP's performance during these hearings (and in previous weeks) provided ample evidence for that proposition.

Stephen Colbert, once again, nails it (via):

For instance, take the Dred Scott case. Those justice's life experience, being white men in pre-civil war America some of whom owned slaves, in no way influenced their decision that black people were property. And, their personal backgrounds had nothing to do with the all-neutral court decision that it was legal to send Japanese Americans to internment camps in 1942. Imagine how the life experience of an Asian judge would have sullied that neutrality.

Now, in a perfect world, judges would be colorblind and infinitely empathetic such that absolute neutrality, and the total usurpation of personal bias and the influence of life experiences, was not only an attainable framework for judging, but a commonplace one. But since we live in this world instead, diversity provides a helpful check on the inevitable effects of judges' personal contexts and histories - especially when those personal histories have tended to be relatively uniform, thus increasing the risks of certain lapses.

Yep... those Republicans don't want any of that "empathy" stuff. Who wants a black man on the court for the Dred Scott decision or the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. Why right now you can see how rational and empathic white folks are by how they are handling the Gates/Crowley brouhaha. They've looked at it and said "ain't no racism here, why let us just finish trussing this uppity black boy up, let us hang him from the highest tree, and sho 'nuff won't be no more racism here".

Krugman Presents the Argument Against Private Health Care

Paul Krugman is famous for clarity, for putting complicated problems into simple English. From his blog, here is his argument why "free markets" can't provide cost-effective health care:

There are two strongly distinctive aspects of health care. One is that you don’t know when or whether you’ll need care — but if you do, the care can be extremely expensive. The big bucks are in triple coronary bypass surgery, not routine visits to the doctor’s office; and very, very few people can afford to pay major medical costs out of pocket.

This tells you right away that health care can’t be sold like bread. It must be largely paid for by some kind of insurance. And this in turn means that someone other than the patient ends up making decisions about what to buy. Consumer choice is nonsense when it comes to health care. And you can’t just trust insurance companies either — they’re not in business for their health, or yours.

This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view — they actually refer to it as “medical costs.” This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care. Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there’s a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need — not everyone agrees, but most do — this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities.

The second thing about health care is that it’s complicated, and you can’t rely on experience or comparison shopping. (”I hear they’ve got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary’s!”) That’s why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners.

You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don’t trust them — they’re profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost.

Between those two factors, health care just doesn’t work as a standard market story.

All of this doesn’t necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence.

That is as clear and straightforward a presentation as you will ever read. Sadly, most people will read the above and still not "get it". They are so haunted by a message they have been sold over the years by special interests that they just won't read the above and accept the clarity and persuasiveness of the message. It reminds me of the old saw: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Tragically, many a horse has expired of thirst standing in front of a big 30 gallan vat of cool, clear water. Tragic!

Hypocrisy

I have a real hard time with moralists. I find that those who get up and harrangue others on some moral topic are usually guilt-ridden, sinful creates who want to tell others to "just say no" but can't say no to themselves. Here's an example from TMP Muckracker:

Abstinence-Supporting GOP State Lawmaker Admits To Sex With 22-Year-Old Intern

By Zachary Roth

Meet Tennessee state senator Paul Stanley. He's a solid conservative Republican and married father of two, who according to his website is "a member of Christ United Methodist Church, where he serves as a Sunday school teacher and board member of their day school." (Check out the religious imagery on the site -- the sun poking through clouds, as if manifesting God's presence -- which of course shows Stanley's deeply pious nature.)

Stanley recently sponsored a bill designed to prevent gay couples from adopting children. And when a Planned Parenthood official recently sought his support for family planning services for Memphis teens, Stanley told her, according to the official, that he "didn't believe young people should have sex before marriage anyway, that his faith and church are important to him, and he wants to promote abstinence."

So far, so far Republican. But you can see where this is going...

In a sworn affidavit, a Tennessee state investigator has said that Stanley admitted to having a "sexual relationship" with a 22-year-old female intern working in his office, and to taking nude pictures of her in "provocative poses" in his apartment.

Things started to unravel for Stanley, it seems, in April, when he received a text message reading:

Good morning sir, how are you this fine day? McKensie and I have been talking and I feel that I have a video and some pictures you might be interested in seeing. This is her boyfriend, that guy you met outside Walgreens.

That was the start of an effort by the girl's boyfriend to blackmail Stanley, which ultimately led to Stanley going to the cops. The boyfriend is now charged with trying to extort $10,000 from Stanley.

Oh, bonus! Stanley works as a financial adviser for the Stanford Financial Group, whose founder, Allen Stanford, has been charged with orchestrating an $8 billion scam.

Wonder if Stanley stays at C Street when he's in DC.

Late Update: It gets worse. In 1994, Stanley's first wife, Judy Martin, filed for a restraining order against him, charging that he had physically assaulted her three times. She wrote: "He was going out the door to leave our house and he hit me with a tremendous blow and then he proceeded to turn and run away from me outside the garage to the street." Stanley and Martin divorced the following year.

According to the Nashville Post, Stanley met his current wife, Kristi Stanley, soon afterwards, while both were working for Bill Frist's U.S. Senate office in Memphis. She was working as -- an intern.

I have nothing against moralists and religious people. What I don't like is the hypocrisy of them "preaching" at me while out doing hideous things that they claim to condemn. I find the hypocrisy disgusting. In my mind, good people do good things quietly.

Jesus made a comment about the ridiculousness of "pious" people sitting ostentatiously at the first pew in a synagogue, and about people making loud protestations of their piousness. He tried to put them in their place by saying "he who is last among you shall be first". In other words, shut up and lead an exemplary life. Good acts, not loud words, and certainly not the verbal haranguing that moralistic poseurs enjoy inflicting on the rest of us.

Think Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Baker, or Ted Haggard.

And the list of Republican politicians who "sell" themselves to the religious right and then get caught in sex scandals like Paul Stanley are endless. When will people learn to not trust these snakes-in-the-grass.

Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens

The flap over the Cambridge Massachusetts cops arresting a Harvard professor just doesn't stop.

Here is a most interesting blog entry. It was posted to point out that all those protestations of "racial sensivity" by the cops in the Gates/Crowley affair maybe aren't as honest with us as they claim to be:

After Barack Obama said Cambridge cops "stupidly" arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates on the front porch of his own home, the police said they "deeply resent the implication" anyone would think they're racists. Maybe clue this Cambridge cop in.

At around noon today, the same time Sgt. Dennis O'Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, gave his press conference trying to push back against perceptions that the Cambridge cops aren't exactly racially enlightened, Harvard student Seth Bannon spotted this cop pull up to a deli on Massachussetts Ave. in what appears to be his personal SUV with a hilarious license plate: WHY-TEE.

We asked Bannon, who first Twittered the picture, to tell us more:

I was eating breakfast at the Gourmet Express Market and Deli (1868 Mass Ave, Cambridge), when around NOON the black SUV pictured backed into that space and parked illegally. The police officer pictured exited the SUV, walked into the Deli, ordered a sub, got back into the SUV, and drove off. I took the picture as the officer was getting back into the SUV.

I'm not nearly as disturbed by the (entirely unnecessary) illegal parking job as I am by the utter crudeness of the plates, especially in the aftermath of the Gates debacle.

I've attached two additional photos I snapped. In one you can see the officer holding the delicious sub he purchased.

Cheers,

Seth Bannon

Gee... could it be that the Cambridge cops are not as innocent as their protestations would lead us to believe. Or do they just have a more subtle sense of humour that the rest of us haven't yet risen to a level to appreciate?