Fascinating medical research

Physical gender is apparently more fluid than we anticipated. New paper from NIMR: they showed that knocking out the Foxl2 gene from the ovaries of adult mice not only made the ovaries stop working as such, but they switched over and started to become testicle-like. Not actually manufacturing sperm, but they do start manufacturing male rather than female hormones.

NB that was in adult mice; apparently some of the key sex-differentiation pathways don’t shut off after the basic organs are built. Which isn’t entirely surprising given the existence of sex-changing fish, but still pretty damned surprising given that these are mammals.

This has some very interesting potential applications, especially for those with gender dysphoria. (Imagine being able to switch some parts over in situ rather than needing regular hormone injections?) It also really increases my curiosity about gender dysphoria; now that we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the various stages involved in determining physical gender, it would be really interesting to see if anomalies in any of these stages were correlated with dysphoria later in life.

Published in: on June 11, 2010 at 17:18  Comments (1)  
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Analyzing proposition 14

(Paraphrased, with some modifications, from a comment in ‘s journal)

Prop 14 has been characterized — I’d say mischaracterized — as opening up the primary system, or allowing people to vote in primaries other than their own. It really does something much deeper: It replaced the primary / general election system with a general / runoff system. The round 1 election is now not a party matter, but rather a general election; the top two finishers meet in a November runoff.

My thoughts on where this will lead, quoted from the thread:

But the measure isn’t about allowing non-party-members to vote in party primaries; it’s a wholesale conversion of the primary / general system to a general / runoff system. It means that we no longer have a phase 1 election which has a low turnout and is dominated by party bases; an interesting open question is whether the new phase 1 election, which is the one which behaves a lot more like a many-way general election, will start to draw the same participation levels that old general elections used to pull.

It’s definitely true that this will reduce the number of minor candidates; absent a cheaper primary phase, people need to run a working general election campaign in the first phase, and fewer people will do that. For candidates who are running inside a party infrastructure, that probably increases the effective power of party bosses, since their choice of which candidate to back is now being done before a primary season which could have given a seemingly minor candidate a chance to make a visible impact and garner attention. For candidates running outside of any hope of getting party backing, this just further marginalizes them, but to be honest they weren’t ever going to be major players in the general election, so that’s a smaller change.

So what I would expect to see now is: pre-election, there’s more internal party politicking over which candidates will get party backing. The first-round elections will be dominated (as in current general elections) by people with party backing or people with sufficient independent resources to mount their own campaigns. There will be a lot more noise around these elections, and probably turnout somewhere between current primary and general numbers. In most cases we’ll probably see the top two be from the two major parties, but the big exceptions will probably be when a big-money candidate comes in and challenges the party picks; those are going to be Interesting Years.

Then we’ll have a “general election” which is really a runoff election. Not yet sure what those are going to look like, since we don’t have much experience with those in California.

There’s a Washington Post article arguing that this won’t do much to moderate California politics. I think this is actually wrong; if the power of party insiders goes up at the expense of base voters, parties have an even stronger incentive to pick a candidate who has a strong chance of both making it to the runoff and then winning in a two-person general election. Candidates on either fringe will both have less ability to influence their own parties and less ability to run on their own effectively.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Honestly, I’m not sure. I’ve generally suspected that, in a country of this size, there are benefits to moderate governance; on the one hand this slows down reforms that I’d like, but it also slows down crazy people that I don’t like, and having seen what happens when crazy people end up in broad power, I’d say that avoiding this is a reasonable tradeoff. California has a slightly different calculus than the US as a whole; the state is traditionally a testing ground for new political ideas from both left and right, and so letting crazy people from all sides run the state is… well, the status quo. That has its merits and flaws (as seen in our lovely state budgeting process) but it does give the country a good way to field-test experimental ideas on only 1/8th of its population.

On the other hand, what better place to field-test a new election system? I say we give it a run and see what happens. Cthulhu knows, this state won’t be afraid to change it to something else if it doesn’t work out. Or even if it does.

Published in: on June 9, 2010 at 14:57  Comments (9)  
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WisCon 34 Schedule, or, Gods! Money! Artificial Minds!

I’m going to be attending WisCon this year, and have a fairly interesting schedule — two panels and a talk:

Defining God (Panel; Sunday, 1 – 2:15 PM, Room 634)
Moderator: P. C. Hodgell; F. J. Bergmann, Chibi-Evil, Richard S. Russell, Yonatan Zunger

Atheists are often asked, “What would it take to get you to believe in God?” The stock response is “Well, you’d need to start with a good definition, so I’d know what to look for.” OK, let’s get started. What sort of superpowers does it take to rise to the level of godliness? Would a really smart computer qualify? If you just had a creature who could create a whole universe, but was pathetic in many other respects, wouldn’t that still be pretty godlike?

Economics of the Future (Panel; Sunday, 4 – 5:15 PM, Conference 5)
Moderator: Benjamin Rosenbaum; Fred, Christopher Davis, Gayle, Yonatan Zunger

Science fiction has posited a wide range of economic models, from total abundance to mean scarcity, from plutocracy to collectivism. What happens when goods are freely available to all? What happens when long–lasting food rations are worth killing for? Which books actually talk about economics (whether capitalist or socialist or some other sort) without handwaving it all away?

AI’s: The Current Reality, the Future Possibilities (Talk; Monday, 10 – 11:15 AM, Room 629)

AIs have the possibility of being very interesting from a narrative perspective because they can be a fundamentally different kind of intelligence that nevertheless shares a world with us. The basic evolutionary pressures that drove our brains to work the way they do are completely different from those that would act on them. And indeed, the AIs that we’re starting to see in the real world—from search engines that understand our intentions to cars that drive themselves—look very different from the positronic brains we once imagined. In this talk, Yonatan Zunger will discuss the ways in which AIs are developing today and various possibilities for future directions.

I think this should be a really interesting con; the panels look ripe for spirited, and intelligent, discussion, and the talk should be fun. I guarantee mention of BrainPals and of the religious tendencies of artificial intelligences. Because that’s the real future of AI: theologically-minded brain implants.

ETA: Dates, times and rooms are kinda useful information. Added!

Published in: on May 13, 2010 at 14:26  Comments (12)  
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A complete waste of time!

So a few days ago, I got an amusing idea for an interview question which I realized was totally pointless as an interview question, because it has no practical value whatsoever. So instead, I’m going to post it on my blog, as a way to help waste the time of all my CS friends. There is no prize whatsoever for a correct answer, except for the satisfaction of having avoided work for a while solved an amusing problem.

Here are two really bad ways to sort an array:

  1. Random sort: Repeatedly select a random permutation and apply it to the set. Stop when it becomes sorted.
  2. Brute-force sort: Iterate over the set of all permutations of N elements. Apply each in turn. If the list is now sorted, stop.

The question is: which of the two is less efficient, and (the trickier part) by how much?

(Clarification: For the latter, “how much” in terms of average [mean] time to sort. You can also average over a large number of possible inputs)

Published in: on April 30, 2010 at 10:39  Comments (16)  
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A note on interface design

While reviewing some code today, a principle of software design somehow distilled itself to clarity in my head.

When designing your system, think of every major system1 upon which your own system directly depends2 as a bug.

By “think of it as a bug,” I mean that sooner or later, you are going to come to truly hate this dependency. It won’t do what you want, or it will turn old and crufty, or it will get outdated, or your system will outgrow it. Perhaps it already stinks. And therefore, think about what you are going to have to do to take it out and replace it with something better, and possibly not even having similar API’s.
Yes, you should have your code sufficiently factored and modular that such a replacement will be minimally invasive. But more importantly: if that replacement requires any change in the API’s3 by which the outside world is using your system, then there is something wrong with your design. Stop and fix that immediately.

1Both external dependencies and major subsystems of your own code. Both will suck in time, I promise you.
2If the systems upon which you directly depend have done this properly, you don’t need to worry about your indirect dependencies. If they haven’t, then you should consider replacing them now, because you are obviously dealing with the work of madmen.
3Or UI’s, if your software is at the top of its software stack. UI’s are just API’s for communicating efficiently with humans. (Or perhaps API’s are just UI’s for communicating with computers?)

Published in: on March 18, 2010 at 20:45  Comments (7)  
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Now that’s hardcore.

Washington DC just legalized gay marriage; the local archdiocese responded by ending all spousal health benefits to its employees.

Now here’s an organization with the courage of its convictions. Rather than let a single gay partner get benefits from them, they will let each and every one of their people’s spouses die. None of this Christian charity bullshit for these guys!

Published in: on March 3, 2010 at 11:52  Comments (6)  
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A stupid quote

From the Washington Post today:

Authorities and people familiar with the drug trade say violence in Mexico and increased enforcement — symbolized by the Flores case — are having a dramatic effect on Chicago street sales, at least for now. The wholesale price for a kilo of cocaine — about 2.2 pounds — has spiked over the past 18 months, from $18,000 to $29,000 and often more, according to authorities.

I wonder if the unnamed “authorities” in question are being deliberately misleading, or if they simply lack the sense to notice what they just said. The increase in the wholesale price of cocaine ends up, as such increases normally do, in the pockets of the people selling it.

What they have just said is that increased enforcement has increased profits for drug lords dramatically.

Published in: on December 30, 2009 at 17:46  Comments (7)  
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Read this book!

Back from Montreal. No energy to try and write a con report right now… but it was a hell of a Worldcon. Paul Krugman’s two talks were definitely high points, as were several panels, and a great deal of meeting some very interesting people.

But something better than a con report is a book report! Paolo Bacigalupi has a novel out (released just this Friday, Amazon doesn’t seem to realize it yet) called The Windup Girl. This is the best new SF (not fantasy, not spec fic) novel I’ve come across in the past few years. It takes place in an intricately thought-out near-future Bangkok, where the consequences of genetic engineering of crops, climate change, and political shift have all taken their toll. It follows four different protagonists: an American expat working for an agribusiness conglomerate, trying to get access to Thai seed stocks; a Chinese refugee of a Malaysian genocide, working for this American while trying to build a life for himself; a captain of the Thai environmental ministry, which is locked in a complicated war with other factions of the government; and the title character, a genetically engineered “new woman” created to be a personal secretary, now abandoned in Bangkok and living in a brothel.

This book works out the consequences of the SFnal ideas in it as thoroughly as Charles Stross works his out; but what will grab you about this book are the rich characters, their deep and conflicting motivations, the depth of realization of the world. It has one very interesting structural feature: although there are four protagonists, and the chapters cycle points of view, this book doesn’t do the usual (and IMHO, slightly annoying) multi-PoV thing of having four separate stories that one is bounced between. Instead, each chapter leads seamlessly into the next; the camera simply moves to follow one character, and then the next, as they all move through the same (very gripping) plot.

If you’re at all in to serious SF, this is a book worth picking up. It manages to combine the conceptual rigor of the best hard SF with the characterization and writing of… well, of a really damned good book. Go read it.

P.S.: The publisher, Nightshade Books, is putting out a lot of other interesting stuff lately. For example, if you are interested in vampires, or post-apocalypses either with or without zombies, they can set you up.

Published in: on August 11, 2009 at 15:01  Comments (1)  
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Get out and vote!

America just doesn’t take its elections seriously enough. Our last two elections, we got about 55% of the voting-age population going to the polls, and that was unusually high.

Now take a look at Iran. Why, in some towns, their voter turnout was as high as 141%. Now that’s a country that takes its democracy seriously.

Published in: on June 17, 2009 at 14:56  Comments (6)  
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Fiat 500 coming to America.

The Fiat 500 will soon be sold in the US. (Well, “soon” by auto industry standards, a mere year and a half from now. I have no idea what takes this much lead time.) And they’re planning on reintroducing Alfa Romeos, as well.

But they’ve hastened to reassure people that the new Chrysler acquisition doesn’t mean that we’ll be seeing lots of Fiats; we can keep expecting Chrysler design and engineering:

“Chrysler will not be producing Fiat models, but new Chrysler models based on Fiat technology (platforms, drivetrain, suspension) clothed in a pure Chrysler style,” [Fiat spokesman Richard] Gadeselli explained. Chrysler will design and engineer up to six of its own small or midsize vehicles based on Fiats.

“There is a misconception that Chrysler is going to build cars like the Fiat Bravo and just stick a Chrysler badge on it,” he added. “Actually, the vehicle architectures will be based on our stuff, and there will be some shared powertrains. But the vehicles will be U.S. vehicles, designed for U.S. customers by a U.S. company.”

I’ve seen Chrysler’s design and engineering. I’d rather have a Fiat.

Published in: on June 4, 2009 at 16:13  Comments Off on Fiat 500 coming to America.  
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