Happy New Year to all this blog’s readers

Baxter Xmas tree 2013I know that it is customary to do so on the first of January but why get stuck with tradition? Besides which, yesterday was rather chaotic at home with my daughter and son-in-law’s flight back to California being cancelled and the replacement one being repeatedly delayed, all due to the bad weather in this part of the country. In addition, we had a plumbing emergency that required a lot of messing around so I decided to give blogging a miss.

So after a frazzled start to the new year, now things are back to (almost) normal, so Baxter the Wonder Dog and I wish all of this blog’s readers all the best for 2014.

What do I wish for in 2014? I hope to see the end of drone murders by the Obama administration, the addition of many people who have access to affordable health insurance, worldwide outrage at the global spying network by the US and UK that lead to real reforms, Edward Snowden finding a permanent home safe from the vindictive and lawless US government, more whistleblowers being inspired by him to reveal government wrongdoing, more principled judges reining in government excesses, a hike in the minimum wage to at least $15 per hour, a rise in the maximum tax rate to somewhere around 75%, elimination of the cap on income taxed for Social Security, defeats of religious extremists and their associated racists, sexist, and homophobic agendas, and a rise in secular thinking all over the globe.

I realize that this is a far more modest list than peace on Earth but I thought that I would try to be at least faintly realistic. There are many more things I wish for but these are enough for the moment.

More blockbuster NSA revelations

Today comes a story about a talk that privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum gave at a conference where he says that the NSA has the ability to tap into everyone’s iPhones.

Independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum on Monday told a hacker conference in Germany that theNSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren’t online.

Appelbaum told hundreds of computer experts gathered at Hamburg’s Chaos Communications Conference that his revelations about the NSA’s capabilities “are even worse than your worst nightmares.”

“What I am going to show you today is wrist-slittingly depressing,” he said. [Read more…]

The real difference between polygamy and bigamy

Bigamy, the act of one person getting formally married with a civil marriage license to two different people, is a crime in the US and most countries. I had always thought that polygamy was the same act carried out with three or more people. No doubt I had been swayed by the parallel with mathematics where the prefix ‘bi-‘ signaled two and ‘poly-‘ signaled an indeterminate number that was more than two. [Read more…]

How nice behavior evolved

RadioLab had a good program this week on altruism and how nice behavior could emerge out of natural selection. The first part dealt with the tragic story of George Price, the eccentric but brilliant scientist who developed an equation that showed why someone might sacrifice their life for another. But he personally could not deal with the conclusion that all altruism was not a freely chosen act. [Read more…]