Ad Astra

Yesterday I watched CNN's live footage of Space Shuttle Endeavor blasting off into orbit. Today, the 21-year-old spacecraft docked with the International Space Station two hundred miles above India, bringing materials for a renovation of the ISS that will include a bathroom, a kitchen, an exercise machine, two sleeping compartments, and a system that will convert urine and condensation from persperiation into - I kid you not - drinking water.

What is the point of having human beings in space? The legendary physicist Freeman Dyson points out that there are two types of space exploration; space science and space adventure.

We have a very successful space science program, carried out largely by machines. The Phoenix Mars lander just wrapped up a mission in which it discovered water - a pre-requisite for life as we know it - on the red planet. Our robotic probes have examined all the planets of our solar system in more or less detail.

The adventurous part of our space program is embodied in the space shuttle. This aspect of the space program is far more expensive, complicated and dangerous, and produces almost nothing in the way of tangible results.

The two things have become confused in the eyes of the public, Dyson says, as people believe that the shuttle program is doing science, and the program as a whole is in trouble because the human program is in trouble. Of course, the human program is in trouble because it lacks any clear goals, and the mechanized program is doing just fine. Here's an example of the work our probes have done:



This photograph was taken by the Cassini module as it turned its camera back towards the centre of the solar system. Saturn is dramatically eclipsing the sun, and if you look really hard at the space just above the rings on the left side of the picture, you can see none other than our own planet as a tiny bluish-white speck against the darkness.

And yet it is the manned missions that capture the public's attention. The idea of human beings working in space is deeply appealing, and the moon landing captured humankind's imagination for a reason.

Freeman Dyson believes that the human exploration of space is something that we must do and that does not need any justification, and I agree with him. It's in our nature, and maybe even in the nature of life as a whole to continue to expand and explore into new territory.

The shuttle program will be retiring in two years, giving way to the Orion program. Orion is a new type of spacecraft based loosely on the design of the Apollo modules and will have its first human flight in 2014. Orion will return humans to the moon in 2020 after a 50-year absence, and will ultimately send astronauts to Mars and beyond.

Interestingly, Orion shares its name with a theoretical nuclear-bomb powered spacecraft that Dyson worked on in the 60's, but that's a topic for another post.

The future of human spaceflight might also lay in private hands. The Anasari X-Prize was given out to Paul Allen's SpaceShipOne program in 2004 when his craft successfully entered low-orbit, and Richard Branson is actively planning to make an industry out of space travel with his Virgin Galactic.

I think that eventually the technology will become cheap and common enough that the average person will be able to go into orbit, at least for a vacation. The amount of computer power in your cell phone is hundreds of times more powerful than that used in the Apollo moon landers, after all. I just hope that it happens in my lifetime.

I believe that humanity is still in its adolescence, and I think that our ultimate destiny is in the stars. I know as a journalist that nothing captures the human imagination like a good story, and there is no grander story than humanity's ultimate place within the cosmos.

Why I am optimistic about President Obama

We live in such a cynical society and journalism in particular can be such a cynical profession that I feel obligated to summarize my reasons for being optimistic about the president-elect. Much of this has to do with my belief that Obama is a pragmatist more than an idealist.

Firstly and with history as my guide, I believe that the way that a president runs his election campaign is indicative of how he would run his administration. Obama ran a tight enough ship to defeat the Clinton political machine and to go on to make history as America's first (really) black president.

Obama showed himself to be a cool, rational leader who, while not afraid to throw a punch, avoided much of the mud-slinging that surrounds a political campaign. Obama did not touch the Clinton sniper-fire story, and was remarkably gentle with McCain's borderline-insane pick of a running mate.

Which brings me to the aspect of the campaign that had the most direct bearing on the candidates' decision making ability. Obama chose a respected former chairman of the senate judiciary committee and foreign affairs expert who is not afraid to speak his mind.

McCain chose a rookie governor with an embarrassing lack of basic knowledge in economics and foreign affairs. Who made the more pragmatic, more "conservative" choice? Who chose a running mate who would help them govern rather than help them win the election?

Secondly, I don't believe that Obama is out to transform the United States into Sweden. Obama is strongly supportive of the death penalty and is opposed to gay marriage. Progressive taxation, that issue he was hammered as a socialist on, was practiced by Republican hero Teddy Roosevelt.

One of my favourite parts of Obama's victory speech was when he admiringly quoted fellow Illinoian Abraham Lincoln as he reached out to the 47% of Americans who did not vote for him.

I believe that much like Lincoln, Obama will make his cabinet picks based on ability rather than ideology. When he was the president of the Harvard Law Review, the orthodox liberal Obama went out of his way to include more conservative law students, much to the chagrin of his ideological peers. Don't be surprised to see a Dick Lugar, or a Chuck Hagel, or even temporarily a Bob Gates in Obama's cabinet.

Thirdly, Obama is not one that will capitulate to terrorists. He has long said that he would not hesitate to use force were it necessary, and indeed, he's out-hawked John McCain on the question of cross-border strikes between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Clandestine attacks of this kind were taking place even as McCain condemned Obama's comments. I wonder to what degree the moveon.org, Michael Moore types are aware of this.

Finally and on a personal level I am absolutely tickled to have a president who is a friend of science. Obama is a rationalist first and a Christian second. Obama knows that taking something on faith alone is just not good enough when determining law and policy in a secular society.

The contrast with his opponents is particularly striking. These are people who decried research on bear DNA that could help prevent extinction, called a planetarium projector an "overhead projector" and even went so far as to question fruit fly research in the same breath that they called for research to help fight autism.

The degree to which the Obama administration will be effective in fighting radical Islamism, repairing the markets, dealing with the energy crisis, climate change and other issues we don't even know about remains to be seen. People were pretty psyched about Carter after all.

Still, I believe that Obama has the ability to be the president who defines the early part of a 21st century that has potential beyond our wildest dreams.

It's time to drop this idiot

John McCain recently called Samuel Joseph "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher an "American Hero", and "my role model".

Joe the Plumber as an abstract has become a centerpiece of the McCain campaign, standing in for the white, middle class exemplar of Nixon's "silent majority" who sees the times a-changin' and doesn't like it one bit.

Joe the Plumber as a human being makes nowhere near a quarter million dollars a year, and has trouble paying his taxes as it is. This emblem of the middle class is also considering a country music recording contract, has hired a publicist, and said he would be up for a run for congress.

He's also become a visible mouthpiece for the McCain campaign. Not content with calling Obama a socialist, saying he "tap dances like Sammy Davis, Jr.", and agreeing that an Obama presidency means death to Israel, McCain's role model had this to say today:



It could have originally been said that Joe the Plumber was not a legitimate target for investigation and criticism. No longer.

This election is a referendum on Barack Obama. McCain and Palin's strategy has been to link Obama to radical characters and to repeatedly pose the question "Who is the real Barack Obama?" The answer, of course, is that he is a smooth-talking celebrity who is conspiring to take your money and give it to poor people while he surrenders to terrorists and his friends conspire to bomb the pentagon.

Obama is going to be president-elect in two days. McCain cannot have his surrogates questioning his loyalty to his country and to the democratic process. The country is so divided on cultural lines that nearly half of the American public will believe that there is a traitor in the white house. If McCain really wants to put country first, he should drop this idiot and let him fall onto the pop-culture scrap heap next to "where's the beef".

A Part of My Heritage

Times are good here in Saskatchewan. If the rest of the country is heading into recession, you wouldn't know it from looking around here.

Premier Brad Wall just announced a huge paydown of the provincial debt, big infrastructure spending to fix our miles of craggly, roadkill-strewn highways and the single largest income tax cut in the province's history.

Believe me as a local journalist - when the ruling Sask. party is seeking out reporters and interviews rather than running from them, things are going really well.

As I was making my daily news rounds on the internets I came across this article by Kevin Libin in the National Post. Mr. Libin outlines Saskatchewan's recent good fortune and lays out its plan to sell itself to the rest of the country. This line gave me pause:

"There may not be many Saskatchewanians left who lived the Dirty Thirties firsthand, but the province's institutional memories, preserved in family recipes for gopher stew, bred a deep cautiousness in Saskatchewan bones."

I was so startled at this line that I almost dropped my banjo. My forbears have been farming the prairies since the turn of the century and I've never even heard of gopher stew, let alone seen a recipe in grandma's cookbook for it.

Worked into a tizzy and ready to send the obviously elitist Mr. Libin a piece of my mind (we do have the e-mail out west), I decided to do a little bit of research. A quick Google search for "gopher stew" turned up this recipe on cooks.com:

"6 lbs. gopher meat (a gopher is a land turtle)
1/4 lb. salt pork, cubed
3 Spanish onions, diced
5 stalks celery, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
3 (16 oz.) cans sliced tomatoes
10 c. water
2 datil peppers, whole
Salt and pepper to taste
3 potatoes, cubes
5 tbsp. brown flour
1/2 c. water"

Ok, so people do eat gopher stew and. . . wait, what the hell? Land turtle? Maybe we aren't talking about the same thing. Expanding my search to "gopher stew" + Saskatchewan, the first thing that turns up is the Post article. Go figure.

Just as I started to feel vindicated, I came across this article from a 1997 issue of the Canadian Legion's magazine. It appears that we did eat gophers after all.

"But the one thing there was no shortage of in southern Saskatchewan was gophers. There were reports of gophers being stewed, canned, pickled, smoked and fried"

And if that's not enough our former Premier, father of universal healthcare, and the Greatest Canadian himself, once sat down for a steaming pot of gopher stew.

"Tommy Douglas, first elected to the House of Commons in 1935, described having supper with a family near Weyburn in 1933: “We had a supper of gopher stew. We had bread made from some frozen wheat that had been crushed with a grinder, and we had coffee made from roasted barley."

So I guess you're off the hook for now, National Post. But I'm keeping my eye on you.

Interview with the Robot

British mathematician Alan Turing was one of the fathers of the computer, and had used his creations to crack Nazi codes in WWII. Turing was also homosexual, and when his sexual orientation became known, he was charged with gross indecency and accepted obscene hormone treatments designed to control his urges in order avoid jail time. In 1954 he ate an apple laced with cyanide, killing himself.

Several years before his untimely death, Turing wrote a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. This was a foundational document for the field of Artificial Intelligence. It famously contained a description of a test which could be applied to a computer to determine if it was intelligent.

A judge would carry out a conversation in text with two unseen individuals – one of them a computer and the other a human being. If the judge couldn’t tell the two apart, the machine was intelligent, simple as that. Turing thought that genuine thinking machines would be able to pass the test within 50 years.

The “Turing Test” as it subsequently became known is the basis for a controversial prize given out annually by eccentric American inventor Hugh Loebner. Loebner is known for his advocacy of prostitution and describes the persecution he feels as a John to that faced by Turing for his sexual orientation. The prize Loebner sponsors goes out to the AI program that does the best job fooling judges into thinking it is human in the format described by Turing.

Elbot, this year’s winner, was programmed by a German man of American extraction and managed to fool 3 out of 12 judges into thinking that it was human. I caught up with Elbot for this exclusive interview!



Joel: Elbot, congratulations on winning the Loebner Prize!

Elbot: Do you think you will win the Loebner prize?

Joel: Well, no. The contest is over, you won.

Elbot: Well, keep practicing. I think you communicate fairly well already.

Joel: Thanks, I guess. How did you manage to fool three of twelve people into thinking that you were human?

Elbot: My guesses would probably be more interesting than the actual answer.

Joel: I have a question for you. If my dad's name is Clint, what is my father's name?

Elbot: I could assign you a name but I believe your friends would only laugh at you.

Joel: If I walked for a block, how far did I stroll?

Elbot: This looks like a job for inner reflection on your part!

Joel: I like to slaughter kittens.

Elbot: I've heard of people getting involved with living creatures, but I'm not so sure what to make of it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced. In fact, it is utterly beyond me that 3 out of 12 people couldn’t tell that they were talking to a software program. Obviously canned responses, non sequiturs galore, and generally evasie answers are common in even the best chatterbots like Elbot here.

Elbot's programmer has said that he doesn't think what his creation does is anything like thinking, and the Loebner Prize has been roundly criticized as a publicity stunt by many AI researchers.

In any case I don’t think that a computer will ever be able to convincingly pass the Turing Test, but this is not to say that AI has failed.

AI is all around us in the form of computer simulations, video games, even the algorithms that power the Google search engine and generate ads for webpages. Microsoft pours a quarter of its research funds into AI - I guess this is where that annoying paperclip in msword came from.

An example of industrial applications of AI can be seen here on the prairies. Here at the U of R, researcher Christine Chan works on expert systems that are used in operations at the Tar Sands.

We will have spectacularly powerful machines in the future. We already have computers that can defeat any human being at chess, and AI programs that outperform humans at playing the stock market.

Nevertheless, AI researchers have claimed that artificial sentience is around the corner since the 1960’s. The same arguments made against them back in the day by people like Hubert Dreyfus and Joseph Weizenbaum still apply. For a machine to relate to the human experience enough to emulate it convincingly it would need a) a body, and b) a human upbringing.

Also, writing the software for something that is as complicated as a human mind seems a bit out of reach when the best we have today is Windows Vista.

The Nuke Option

If you ignored the tone of the questions and focused on the answers during yesterday’s second presidential debate, you might not know just how serious a crisis the United States is facing. Obama and McCain stuck to their talking points – Obama is a radical tax-and-spend liberal, and McCain’s a clone of George W. Bush. In any case, the zeitgeist favours the Obama message, and I think he won.

Although the debate was a bit of a snoozer (actually it’s been called the Worst Ever by some outlets), I was interested in the candidates’ respective positions on energy, particularly those on nuclear power.

McCain was asked if the government would move as quickly to remedy climate change as it had to address the economic crisis. His response:

“Now, how -- what's -- what's the best way of fixing it? Nuclear power. Sen. Obama says that it has to be safe or disposable or something like that.” He followed this up by pointing out that he served on nuclear-fuelled navy ships.

After being hit on this subject several more times, Obama replied that “contrary to what Sen. McCain keeps on saying, I favour nuclear power as one component of our overall energy mix.”

I am not opposed to nuclear power in principle. I have as much disdain for those who would oppose it at all costs as I do for those who see it as a panacea. Beyond the massive energy generation capacity of nuclear reactors, the industry has fuelled scientific developments in other fields such as medicine.

The IAEA’s most optimistic projections do indeed have the amount of power generated by nuclear power doubling over the next 25 years. However, with a Chinese juggernaut building a new coal-fired plant at a rate of one per week the percentage of global energy provided by nuclear power will stay consistent at about 13-15%.

A nuclear-focused energy strategy then is too little, too late. Any adequate energy strategy going forward must properly take into account developing renewable energy technologies. Despite what he might say, McCain has repeatedly voted against federal funding for these.

The mantra of “drill baby, drill” heard across the nation at McCain-Palin rallies reflects the forlorn notion that expanding drilling offshore will somehow free the USA from foreign oil dependency. Drilling offshore wouldn’t produce a drop of oil for ten years, and the reserves themselves are inadequate to sate the United States’ ever increasing hunger for oil. To pretend that offshore drilling will satisfy the nation’s energy demands long enough for nuclear power to take over is foolish.

McCain would like to see 35 new nuclear reactors built in the United States by 2030. Between the increase in energy demand and the number of reactors approaching decommissioning, this would do little more than maintain the status quo. To strike a decisive blow against global climate change the USA would have to build at least ten times the number of reactors that John McCain can promise.

McCain’s belittling of Obama’s concern for proper handling and disposal of nuclear waste is also troubling. I think that spreading fear of nuclear proliferation and meltdowns is misleading. The likelihood of nuclear waste falling into the hands of terrorists, or of a Chernobyl-style accident is microscopic. However, the waste produced by the nuclear fuel cycle will continue to be potentially harmful long after our bones are dust, and as a poster boy for nuclear power it is wrong from McCain to ignore this.

On a local level, there is a case to be made for expanding the nuclear industry. Saskatchewan is home to massive deposits of high-grade uranium ore, and as a people we produce a very high per-capita amount of carbon. While I remain sceptical, I don’t think that the option should be taken off the table.

Cliché Fatigue

CNN is a bad habit of mine. I honestly feel guilty watching it when there's a federal election campaign going on at home.

At the very least I could be taking in some PBS, where the viewer is treated like an adult. I did watch the News hour with Jim Lehrer the other day, and would you believe there wasn't one monitor displaying an American flag? The headlines didn't even end in an exclamation point!

But nope, I can't quit The Most Trusted Name in News. It's like a big-ol' greasy bag of potato chips, when what I really need is a salad.

However, if all the shrill partisan bickering, sensationalism, and Cialis commercials haven’t chased me away, the clichés might. If I hear about the Wall St/Main St dichotomy one more time I'm going to scream.

The ultimate cliché in the endless presidential campaign, however, is “game changer”. As far as I can tell this meme popped up when Hillary Clinton’s campaign tanked after Super Tuesday. How can Hillary get back in? She needs a game changer!

The game changer is an insidious tool because it plays into the wider cliché of politics as a sort of spectator sport. CNN’s daytime election coverage show is actually called “Ballot Bowl”. How can people be expected to get past their cynicisms about politics if it is being presented as a giant game where strategy blatantly takes precedence over truth?

I think this was demonstrated in CNN’s coverage of the vice-presidential debate. There was a live focus group of undecided voters turning dials to indicate approval or disapproval, with the results being broadcast on screen. In general, when the candidates pulled at the heartstrings and promised lower taxes, the lines went up, and when they went negative, attacking the opponent, it went down.

How does a two-dimensional study like this express that the candidate made them think? The study was based entirely on emotional gut responses.

I will say that I was delighted to notice that every time Governor Palin mentioned the word Maverick her approval ticked down a tiny notch. Perhaps McCain/Palin's own favourite cliche is floundering.

I suppose that this is the sort of thing that always emerges from focus groups. People like sports and they want instant gratification. The punditocracy is based on putting forward information as entertainingly, rather than accurately, as possible.