Beware Insulting Government Officials on Facebook/Twitter

Thailand's government has warned Facebook users they could face criminal prosecution "if they press 'share' or 'like' on images or articles considered unflattering to the Thai monarchy."

Even more alarming, this was used against a Thai-born US citizen who wrote a book about the Thai monarchy while living in the US, then was arrested when he visited Thailand for medical reasons. (Via /.)

A few related stories from the NYT:

"American Arrested for Insulting Thai King", 27 May 2011
"A High-Tech War Against Slights to a Centuries-Old Monarchy", 2 Oct 2011
"20-Year Sentence for Text Messages Against Thai King", 23 Nov 2011

The closest I've found here in the United States is this story in Forbes: "High School Student Punished For Joking Tweet About Governor Brownback".

She insulted Kansas governor Brownback saying, "Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked".

In the Kansas case, the punishment would administered by the school in response to a complaint from Brownback's office. According to the Forbes piece, she has considered submitting to the school punishment "because she didn’t want a disciplinary action on her transcripts and have it affect her ability to go to college. But she is rightfully unapologetic in real life."

Update: Kansas governor Brownback has apologized on behalf of his staff: "My staff overreacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize... Freedom of speech is among our most treasured freedoms." The student likely won't have to submit to the proposed school punishment.

Bonus from Diana, because, as Justin said on Facebook, "the Thai king is a dickhead":

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Oh, Those Wacky YouTube Translations

What happens when you put a simple conversation through YouTube's closed-caption translation feature... twice? Pure comedy gold, baby!

Caption Fail 1:



Caption Fail 2:

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Open Letter to Apple: My iPad and My Hip Fracture

Dear Apple:

I've been a happy iPad2 owner since March 2011, but I never fully appreciated its value until I recently broke my hip in a bad fall and required subsequent hospitalization.

I am a physician, so I had already been using my iPad for my work, reading PDFs of medical articles, communicating with my colleagues via e-mail, etc. But when I broke my hip in an accident a few days ago, the iPad became my lifeline to the outside world:

Because I had my iPad with me at the time of the accident, I was able to immediately notify my friends and family of what had happened once I arrived in the ER.

In the ER, the iPad also helped keep my spirits up as I checked e-mail, followed my friends on Twitter and Facebook, and followed the regular world news. When my orthopedic surgeon presented my treatment options to me, he also e-mailed me some relevant medical literature in the form of PDF files which I could digest at my own pace on the iPad. And of course, I was also able to perform Google searches on my various surgery options, the complication rates, postoperative care requirements, etc.

Because of the specific nature of my fracture, I had to choose between two treatment options, each with its own pros and cons. I found it enormously helpful to be able to gather the relevant medical information literally "at my fingertips". Because of the iPad, I was able to more quickly make an informed treatment decision that I was comfortable with.

I did briefly leave my iPad with my wife during the surgery itself, but she gave it back to me immediately after the surgery. Other than that, it did not leave my side while in the hospital.

While in the hospital after my surgery, I used the iPad to read eBooks, check my e-mail, surf the internet, and keep up my regular blogging. It was a real morale booster to be able to continue as much of my regular online routine as possible, despite my impaired physical condition.

My wife also had her own iPad with her while I was hospitalized, which allowed her to update our friends and family in real time on my condition, as well as keep her occupied while I was asleep or in surgery.

And now that I'm at home recovering, my iPad is still at my side!

For someone such as myself with limited physical mobility, the iPad2 with its light weight and long battery life was perfect. A laptop computer simply would not have worked while in the hospital. The iPad was literally an emotional, medical, and physical lifeline for me during a difficult time in my life.

I know Apple has been in the news lately because of Steve Jobs' decision to step down as CEO. I just wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank Mr. Jobs and Apple for creating such a wonderful, life-enhancing product.

In your advertisements, Apple has touted the iPad as "magical" and "revolutionary". To that, I would add the term "life-saver".

-- Paul Hsieh, MD

[Crossposted from GeekPress.]

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Hsieh in AT: Thank You, Steve Jobs

The 8/25/2011 American Thinker published my short piece: "Thank You, Steve Jobs".

He became wealthy offering value for value. In the end, we and his customers (and his employees and the people who wrote iPad apps, etc.) all won. This is why free market capitalism is a wonderful, moral system.

On a related note, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a nice interview with former BB&T CEO John Allison on how the government caused the financial crisis and why capitalism is the only moral economic system:

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The Bizarro Online Market for Stolen Credit Card Numbers

The NPR show Planet Money recently aired a fascinating story about the underground online market for stolen credit card numbers. (Click on the link to listen to the audio file.)

Basically, this underground market has many features of legitimate online sales websites (such as eBay or Amazon), but with some curious inversions.

For instance, you can't get an account unless two other current members (who are also criminals) can "vouch" for you as also being a fellow criminal.

However, to do any kind of "business" they still have to rely on some of the same mechanisms that honest marketplaces use. For instance, there are rating systems for buyers to give feedback on sellers of these stolen credit cards. Getting a good A+ rating as a seller is critical to this sort of "commercial" success. Many sellers also have FAQ's ("Do you offer discounts for bulk purchases?", etc.) that mirror the sorts of FAQs one sees on eBay.

Of course, the transactions are conducted not via credit card (heh), but through other forms of secure digital currency.

Other funny/bizarre tidbits:

• The site moderator warns users not to use ALL CAPS in their posts, otherwise, they'll be banned.
  
  
• To get in, you also have to click on a "Terms of Use" box that states you're not a journalist nor a law enforcement officer. In other words, they are relying on the "honesty" of the bad guys. (Of course, the story was aired by an NPR journalist working with an FBI agent who quite appropriately "agreed" to those terms without any moral qualms.)
  
  (Update: SteveD points out that the Terms of Use are relying on the honest of the good guys, not the bad guys. Yes -- quite right!)
  
  
• Many of the big operations end up functioning like real businesses, hiring employees, etc. In other words, they "successful" bad guys have to work hard for their ill-gotten gains -- which makes one wonder why they don't just get honest jobs.

As I listened to the story, it really struck me how the bad guys were in so many ways parasitical upon methods and practices of genuine honest producers.

The full story lasts about 30 minutes and I highly recommend listening to the whole thing! (Download the audio file.)

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Crowdsourcing Benefits of Personal Genetic Testing

At FuturePundit, Randall Parker described how "Crowd Sourcing Identifies 2 Parkinsons Disease Genes".

Here's an extended excerpt from his post:

The folks at personal genetic testing company 23andme.com recruited Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients from mailing lists and other means and compared their genetic variants with a group of 23andMe customers who also got their genetic variants tested by 23andMe.

They used the resulting data to discover 2 more genetic variants associated with Parkinson's Disease. The results demonstrate the speed, low cost, and power of web-based recruiting to do genetic research outside the traditional academic framework.

We conducted a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) of Parkinson's disease (PD) with over 3,400 cases and 29,000 controls (the largest single PD GWAS cohort to date). We report two novel genetic associations and replicate a total of twenty previously described associations, showing that there are now many solid genetic factors underlying PD. We also estimate that genetic factors explain at least one-fourth of the variation in PD liability, of which currently discovered factors only explain a small fraction (6%–7%). Together, these results expand the set of genetic factors discovered to date and imply that many more associations remain to be found.

Unlike traditional studies, participation in this study took place completely online, using a collection of cases recruited primarily via PD mailing lists and controls derived from the customer base of the personal genetics company 23andMe.

Our study thus illustrates the ability of web-based methods for enrollment and data collection to yield new scientific insights into the etiology of disease, and it demonstrates the power and reliability of self-reported data for studying the genetics of Parkinson's disease.

You can read the whole open access Plos Genetics research report at that link.

What's cool about this: Using a web site and cheap genetic testing services people can volunteer themselves as research subjects on a scale that historically has taken far more effort to organize. This approach can scale into the hundreds of thousands, and even hundreds of millions of people. There's a big network effect where the more people who get tested the more useful genetic testing becomes.

Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing is what made the study above possible. Whether we will be able to continue to get our DNA tested without paying for a doctor's visit and additional testing mark-ups remains to be seen. In the United States the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is taking a dim view of DTC genetic testing.

(Read the rest of Parker's post: "Crowd Sourcing Identifies 2 Parkinsons Disease Genes".)

Here's the full PLOS Genetics paper: "Web-Based Genome-Wide Association Study Identifies Two Novel Loci and a Substantial Genetic Component for Parkinson's Disease".

I completely agree with Parker. Proposed FDA controls over the growing consumer genetic testing market not only deprive individuals of the right to learn the content of their DNA, but could also stifle the growth of new discoveries (and downstream therapies) made possible only by this sort of innovative free-market "crowdsourcing".

The FDA has no business stopping people from voluntarily sharing their genetic information with others in hopes that they might reap life-saving benefits.

(See also my July 2010 PajamasMedia piece, "Should You Be Allowed To Know What's In Your DNA?")

Note from Diana: I got my 23andMe genetic test results back last week... with some useful but worrisome results. I'll blog about that soon-ish.

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What Is This Internet Thing?

Classic video clip from 1994 in which Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric struggle to figure out what this "internet" thing is all about:



Here's the image Gumbel was puzzling over:



(Via BBspot.)

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It All Makes Sense At The End

Via David Rehm: A great song about Wikipedia: It All Makes Sense At The End.

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Tracking of OLists

I'd like to do some better tracking of statistics for my OLists so that I and the other OList Managers can easily monitor their health.

In particular, I'd like to know at a glance, for each list:

• How many subscribers does the list have now? How many has it had over the last month and year? If applicable, how many subscribers are lurkers versus posters?
  
• How many new subscribers have been added to the list in the last month and year?
  
• How many messages have been posted to the list over the last day, week, month, and year?
  
• How many different subscribers have posted messages over the the last month and year? What's the distribution of posts by author for the last month and year?

I'd like those statistics displayed as a nice graphs and tables, so that the month's statistics are broken into days and the year's are broken into months.

Then, for all lists:

• For any given member, what lists are they on? How often do they post on those various lists?

Right now, I can piece together most of that information, but it's very inefficient. I'd like to have it all at my fingertips, more or less. Some of it is private to me as the list manager, and so I figure that I might need to manually download that information so that the requisite statistics can be generated.

So... does anyone know of a program that will allow me to do that? It has to work with Google Groups somehow, as I don't intend to move the OLists off that platform.

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The Joys of Hearing

An eight month old hears for the first time as his cochlear implant is turned on.

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Spider

One of my favorite television miniseries is the HBO production, "From The Earth To the Moon". This series details the saga of the Apollo space program, with the goal (in President Kennedy's words) of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth".

Although I'm not a supporter of government-funded science for the same reasons Ayn Rand laid out in her essay "Apollo 11", like Rand I still marvel at this tremendous achievement which was a triumph of man's reason and courage.

Of the various episodes in the series my favorite is probably episode 5, "Spider".

"Spider" depicted the development of the Lunar Module (LEM) by Grumman Aircraft, led by engineer Tom Kelly. Kelly and his team solved engineering challenge after challenge through a combination of reason, ingenuity, creativity, intellectual integrity, and above all an utmost respect for the facts of reality. The episode is upbeat and nicely captures the joy of engineering.

The whole episode is superb and worth watching. But I was especially glad to find this short excerpt of the final 5 minutes on YouTube:



Kelly's musings about how each LEM has a "soul", consisting of the souls of all the men who built her, designed her, and dreamed about her was very reminiscent of Dagny Taggart's musings in Atlas Shrugged during the first run of the John Galt Line when she thought that the motors running her engines were alive -- operated by remote control by the souls and minds of the thinking men who designed them.

This excerpt also contains one of my favorite short pieces of television music, the "Eagle" theme by composer Mason Daring.

Daring's piece captures a uplifting combination of hope, yearning, solemnity, and pride in wanting to meet great challenges and overcome them.

The musical theme to the series (at the beginning and end of each episode) by Michael Kamen is also very nice:



(The video track just above is from a different television show, but the audio track is from the HBO series.)

I've always thought of these as wonderful musical concretizations of the optimistic American sense of life that was so widespread and normal just a few years ago.

So if you find yourself getting depressed over current events, just remember that many Americans still retain that marvelous implicit sense that life is good, happiness is desirable and attainable, and great achievements are possible to men. And as long as we still have that, this country still has a chance.

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Small Mistake, Huge Consequences

Wow, I'd never heard of this amazing case of the disappearing lake until my father sent me this video:

Lake Peigneur Sinkhole Disaster



The property damage was huge, but thankfully, no one died.

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My New Musical Obsession: Mika

I've found a new musical obsession to temporarily displace my beloved Lady Gaga: Mika. (That's pronounced "me-ka.") He's an up-and-coming British pop singer. His music is super-happy-fun-complex pop -- which I love love love. I'm most myself when in a state of crazy, wild joy at the mere fact of my own fabulous existence, and I connect with that feeling with Mika's music. Oddly, Vivaldi's Violin Concertos and String Symphonies give me the same feeling. (In college, I bought the fantastic ten-disc Vivaldi Collection by Shlomo Mintz and Israel Chamber Orchestra. I still adore it.)

In this post, I'll tell you how I came to acquire Mika's albums. The story is rather awesome for hooray-for-technology reasons. However, if you hate super-happy-fun-complex pop, please don't torture yourself by hitting any of the "play" buttons below.

I first read about Mika in a post on Trey Givens' blog: Straight Privilege. The post wasn't even about his music, but instead about his sexuality. For some unknown reason, I googled him, then listened to the first track that came up: "Grace Kelly."

Grace Kelly - Mika

I liked the song quite a bit from the get-go. That's unusual for me, as I'm almost always somewhat slow to warm up to music that I like. I can tell the stuff that I don't like immediately, such as Rush.

Then I checked out some of his videos on YouTube. Here's "Grace Kelly," for example:



Bonus! He's cute! (Gay or straight or whatever, I enjoy gazing on tall, wiry guys with longish dark curly hair and large, angular facial features.)

And here's "We Are Golden":



Here's "Love Today":



Here's more of a ballad, "Happy Ending":



After I decided that I wanted to buy some of his music, I checked his discography on Wikipedia, and then bought his two albums -- "Life in Cartoon Motion" and "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" -- on iTunes. Then I thanked @TreyPeden on Twitter. (Trey might not be a fan; I don't know.)

Since then, I've been listening pretty obsessively, as I always what I do with a new album that I like. Like with Lady Gaga, I enjoy every song on these two albums; that's definitely a rarity. I'd only call a handful of the albums in my rather vast collection "perfect" in that way. So far, my favorite song is "One Foot Boy":

One Foot Boy - Mika

So why is that story remarkable? Just fifteen years ago, I couldn't have done any of that. Back in those stone ages of the internet...

• Blogs didn't exist.
  
• Google didn't exist.
  
• Lala didn't exist.
  
• YouTube didn't exist.
  
• Wikipedia didn't exist.
  
• iTunes didn't exist.
  
• Twitter didn't exist.

As depressed and worried as I often get about the direction of this country, I'm so happy that the fabulous innovators, capitalists, and workers of this country make my life so much more awesome on a regular basis.

Hooray!

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The Resurrection of Flight 1549

This video shows the unsung hero of the so-called "Miracle on the Hudson" -- namely the plane -- being battered by ice, then raised out of the water. On seeing it, I keep having to remind myself just how huge the plane is. I'm so impressed that something so enormous could be raised from the water at all.

Posted on Kontain.com - [Flight 1549]

Here's what the creator of the video says:

Exclusive unseen time lapse video footage of the Miracle on the Hudson, US Airways flight 1549 as it is struggling to stay afloat and avoid the barrage of an ice attack. An unsung hero was the Airbus A320 which survived a crash landing, sinking and safely contained 155 Humans.

I shot these clips from a cheap compact Canon camera. The plane came to a strop outside my apartment here in NYC. Most of the footage on TV from CNN, NY Post, NBC and ABC was filmed from my apartment over those 3 days.

(Via Kelly)

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Bomb-Proof Wallpaper

This wallpaper is not for the homes of ordinary folks, I don't think.



Wow.

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Cool New Technology -- Of 1983!

You have to love the "breathless awe" of this promotion for the cool new technology of 1983:



And of course, "home robots" are just around the corner!

But I can't help but wonder how cheesy our current iPhone ads will look in 2035...

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Paul's Kindle DX Review

Diana has already posted her own thoughts about the Kindle, and I wanted to note that I have a vastly more positive opinion of my Kindle DX. The Kindle DX is the larger version with a 9.7-inch screen, whereas Diana's Kindle has the smaller 6-inch screen.

For my purposes, the Kindle DX is nearly ideal. I use it mostly as a travel machine. It used to be that whenever I went on an out-of-town trip, I had to decide which 3 radiology journals and which two books to pack. But given the Kindle's storage capacity, I can load it up with dozens of books and PDF files.

I have no major complaints about the e-Ink technology. The major positives include:

1) It is very easy to read in direct sunlight (as opposed to a backlit system such as a netbook or an iPhone).

2) It draws very little power (and hence the Kindle requires infrequent recharging)

3) It's easier on the eyes than any backlit system.

The only relatively minor negatives to the e-Ink technology are:

1) The slower refresh rate when turning a page compared to a typical LCD computer screen.

2) The display is greyscale only (no color). For most books that's a non-issue. It only really affects me when looking at medical articles, which often include color illustrations.

The Kindle interface is also generally fine for my purposes. The issues that bother Diana simply aren't a significant problem for me. I don't rely on the Kindle for notetaking. Nor am I bothered by what she regards as a "Heraclitean stream of words". I'm in the process of also reading Tara Smith's book Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics, and have had no problems with reading it.

The three small UI (user interface) nuisances for me are as follows:

1) The inability to sort books and PDFs into folders.

2) The absence in some (but not all) Kindle books of markers that indicate how far one is within the chapter when viewing the progress bar on the bottom of the screen. (The reader can easily tell how far along he or she is with respect to the book as a whole).

3) The inability to alter the font size in PDF files. (One can easily alter font sizes in purchased Kindle books, documents converted using the Kindle free service, or any .mobi files one creates or downloads.)

If a PDF text is too difficult to read in portrait mode, I typically rotate the Kindle 90 degrees and view the document in landscape mode. The software enlarges the file to fit the full width of the screen (which is now along the long axis of the Kindle), but then only one half of the page is visible and one has to use the Page Up/Page Down buttons to toggle back and forth between the two halves of the PDF page.

Because I have the larger Kindle DX (9.7-inch screen), rather than the smaller Kindle (6-inch screen), most PDFs are easy to read in portrait mode. Only a few require shifting to the landscape mode.

I don't use the Kindle to replace all reading of physical books at home. But when I'm away from home because I'm travelling out of town (or simply just leaving the house for a few hours but anticipate some downtime where I might want to read a book), then I routinely take my Kindle. It takes up very little space in my backpack.

I currently have over 100 books and 100 PDFs loaded onto my Kindle DX. Both categories include a mixture of work-related and recreational reading. About half of my Kindle content is free material (public domain books, PDF articles I've found online, etc).

I do think that if a company like Apple had designed the Kindle (rather than Amazon), then they would have done a better job with the user interface. But for my purposes, the drawbacks of the Kindle are relatively minor and are more than outweighed by its virtues of readability and portability.

It's simply damned cool to have nearly the entire non-fiction corpus of Rand and Peikoff in one place, along with Tara Smith, Lord of the Rings, Dune, a dozen radiology articles, a few radiology, orthopedic surgery, and emergency medicine textbooks, PDF versions of unread Objective Standard articles, classic novels from Victor Hugo and other public-domain authors, and a miscellany of purchased fiction and non-fiction books.

And although there aren't (yet) Kindle versions of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, most of Rand's greatest essays from those novels are available in For the New Intellectual, including Galt's speech, Francisco's money speech, etc.

Note: I haven't spent much time with the various Kindle competitors such as the new Barnes & Noble Nook or the various Sony Readers. But for two fairly detailed Kindle-vs-Nook reviews, see Walter Mossberg's, "Nook E-Reader Has Potential, but Needs Work" (Wall Street Journal, 12/10/2009) and David Pogue's "Not Yet the Season for a Nook" (New York Times, 12/9/2009).

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Trusting Your Technology

This cool video shows the SawStop safety device at work:



The SawStop system uses electrical conductivity to tell the difference between wood and human flesh, allowing it to cut the first, but not the second. The technology is impressive, but the most jaw-dropping section of the video is the super slow-motion demonstration where the inventor places his own finger into the path of the saw to show how well it works.

I personally think that it was unnecessary risk for the inventor to take. But there is a similarity to the scene in Atlas Shrugged where Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart had sufficient confidence in their judgment to ride the first train on rails made of Rearden Metal.

More information on the technology can be found at the SawStop website.

(Via Maximizing Progress.)

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Hong Kong Vs. Typhoon

This time lapse video of "Typhoon 'Nangka' over Hong Kong" made me appreciate the power of storms -- and the power of men's ability to build cities capable of withstanding them:



The final minute when the lights of the Hong Kong come alive is especially beautiful.

Plus it made me think of Francisco d'Anconia's words to Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged, Part 1, Chapter 5:

"It's a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain," said Francisco d'Anconia. "This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man..."

"You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel -- because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren't for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain..."

(Video link via Maximizing Progress.)

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Be the Local Computer Expert!

Oh, this one is soooo going to all of my relatives... :^)



[from www.xkcd.com/627/ HT: JasonG]

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