Telecom Immunity

Applogies to the few people that read my blog. This is turning into a political rant blog. I didn't intent that, but I guess like the scorpion, I can't fight my nature.

The ACLU is campaigning to keep the telcos from gaining immunity from prosecution under the FISA laws. Please send your own letter to congress. This is mine:

Subject: No backroom deals on FISA

To: The Honorable Anna G. Eshoo,

Below is the ACLU form letter about immunity for the telecom industry from the FISA laws. I agree whole heartedly with every word in it. However I have few of my own words to add.

I have been deeply distressed with how the government of the United States has been conducting it's self in the years since September 2001. It would seem that the terrorist attacks of 2001 have cracked the moral foundation of The Government and The People of the United States that elect it. From the very beginning of our fragile democracy, a few ideas have been held sacrosanct. A portion of them were written in to the constitution as the Bill or Rights. As you are well aware these were put in place to ensure that the abuses of the English, under the rule of (appropriately enough) king George, over the colonists were never to be repeated, especially by the newly formed government. These amendments formed the foundation of our government and have shaped it until very recently. As central as these principles maybe, there is one principle that more important. That is the of the rule of law.

The law maybe imperfect, it may not be applied uniformly at all times. It maybe unfair to people of differing situations. However the idea that their are rules and that the upmost efforts will be taken to ensure that it is applied as equally as possible is the bedrock of our society. Without it there can be no trust between The People and The Government nor between individuals.

It seems impossible that the Congress is proposing such a flagrant violation of the rule of law. Members of the telecom industry have knowingly violated the law. They have been caught doing it and now are attempting to buy amnesty. If they succeed, it is nothing short of the end of the republic. There will no longer be government of, for or by the people.

Bellow is the form letter from the ACLU:

In February, I was so proud of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and every representative who stood their ground against the Bush administration on FISA.

As negotiations continue, I urge you to remember the bottom line: your constituents and the Constitution must come before telecom companies and the Bush administration. Remember, your constituents will see through anything called a "compromise" that's really a cave-in to President Bush and his allies in Congress.

The House must continue to stand its ground. A bill with real judicial review and no telecom immunity should be the floor, not the ceiling of negotiations.

Any "compromise" on telecom immunity that puts at risk, or ends, lawsuits against telecommunications companies must be rejected, because lawsuits may be the only way to get to the bottom of crimes that may have been committed by phone and internet companies who willingly cooperated with Bush administration officials.

Americans understand that the Bush administration is trying to hold Congress hostage. Any blame for not resolving disputes over our spying laws lies squarely with the President and his allies in Congress.

Again, I was elated when the House of Representatives stood firm on FISA, and I will be equally outraged if Congress caves in now with a so-called "compromise" that sells our most fundamental rights. Please, do no harm to our Constitution, and remember that no one is above the law.

Proposal for a new form of government

As you must surely be aware, the United States Government is no longer of, for and by the people. It has irretrievably violated the Social Contract, the Constitution, and the foundations of jurisprudence. It is no longer fit to govern the people.

What should be done about it? Noting will, in all likelihood. Rather than dwell on that fact, I will modestly propose a new form of government that may not be as susceptible to corruption as our current form of representation democracy.

Based on the principle of The Wisdom of Crowds I propose forming a legislature consisting of 10,000 randomly selected, literate citizens over 18 and under 65. There would be no elections, instead citizens chosen by lottery would be compelled to move to the capital and serve their country for a term of 3 years. The terms would be staggered, 1/3 being rotated out each year.

Legislation would be collectively written by wiki. Instead of having each new law pile up on top of the old laws, the entire legal code would be determined by a "current state of the law" wiki. There would be a process for adding and deleting sections, requiring 2/3rds vote. Changes would require 1/5ths participation and 1/3rds vote to be merged into the current state wiki.

Thatss the basic concept. All of the details are missing, but I think it could be made to work.

Now imagine the consequences. Bribery would be nearly impossible. Bribing one member would be useless. Bribing many members would surely be noticed. Either way this would require the officially illegal type of bribery as opposed to the currently legal bribery that elected officials participate in currently.

The entire population would be represented, and it would be perfectly proportional. Anyone would be able to read the law and understand it. Have a question about what is or isn't legal? Look it up in the wiki.

Special interests would have very little sway. There would still be lobbying and testifying before congress, but trying to persuade 3000 lawmakers to support your special interest against the common good would be no easy task.

For every fossil found creationists get two missing links

It's only the second post and I am way off topic. Better to post off topic than not at all I guess.

This  debate (direct audio link) between biologist PZ Myers and Geoffery Simmons perfectly illustrates how the young earth creationist are logically challenged. Basically the creationist's claim is that there are no transitional fossils between animals. However when shown transitional forms they will then ask for the two missing forms that now go between previous forms and the newly discovered one. Like so:

YEC: There are no fossils that show the transition between animal A and animal Z.

Scientist: We went digging and found fossil M, happy?

YEC: You fool where are fossils G and S ? You have twice as much explaining to do now!

Simmons actually said that we know less now about evolutionary theory than in Darwins day. I guess when you consider that each new fossil found requires two more to justify evolution that we can only know less.

Creationists are apparently not above lying either.
Simmons claimed that there are no transitional forms between whales and land animals. Here they are. Blowholes and all.

Universe Hacking

The purpose of this blog is for me to have a place to record my project ideas. I have far too many projects running around in my head and never seem to be able to do much about them. At least this way I will have a record and maybe spur some discussion. 

The latest idea is for a book with the title of this blog. 

I was reading this article on the NYT's that mentioned the work of Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University. Dr. Bostrom presents the idea that it is statistically very likely that the universe is a computer simulation. If that is true then I wondered what would the specification of such a computer be? How many bits of addressable memory would be required to find the location of a particle in space for instance? What would the "clock speed" need to be. What evidence could support this hypothesis? Could some of the weirdness in the quantum world be explained by computational simulation? If so would there possibly be a way to exploit this knowledge?

I think that it would be a fun book to research and write. Knowing me I would get the research done and never write it. To be fair to my self, I would never have the appropriate motivation, time or resources to write the book. 

I'll end this first post with a possible answer to the question of the address space needed to place a particle in the universe. 

Planck length (the smallest length possible) is 1.61624 × 10−35 m
There are 9.46 X 10^15 m in a light year
The observable universe is 97 billion light-years in diameter.
Thus universe is about 5.678 × 10^64 planck length in diameter.

How many bits do you need to represent that many planck lengths? To find out take the log 2 of the number. That works out to be about 215 bits for one dimension. Round up to a power of 2 and the answer is that we would need a computer able to easily deal with 256 bit numbers, or larger.