Month: January 2016

Intelligent Evolution

A computer scientist and biologist propose to unify the theory of evolution with learning theories to explain the “amazing, apparently intelligent designs that evolution produces.” “This simple step from evolving traits to evolving correlations between traits is crucial; it moves the object of natural selection from fit phenotypes (which ultimately removes phenotypic variability altogether) to the control of phenotypic variability. Learning theory is not just a different way of describing what Darwin already told us. It expands what we think evolution is capable of. It shows that natural selection is sufficient to produce significant features of intelligent problem-solving.”

An Epidemic of Absence

This groundbreaking book explores the promising but controversial “worm therapy”—deliberate infection with parasitic worms—in development to treat autoimmune disease. It explains why farmers’ children so rarely get hay fever, why allergy is less prevalent in former Eastern Bloc countries, and how one cancer-causing bacterium may be good for us. It probes the link between autism and a dysfunctional immune system. It investigates the newly apparent fetal origins of allergic disease—that a mother’s inflammatory response imprints on her unborn child, tipping the scales toward allergy. In the future, preventive treatment—something as simple as a probiotic—will necessarily begin before birth.

our immune system is tuned for the presence of parasites. remove those, and it overshoots, creating allergies.

Symantec is anti-security

Why Symantec shouldn’t be trusted with anything, certainly not “security”

In this timeline of events, it becomes obvious that many examples selected were of a specific CA’s failures. This CA was intentionally chosen to show that these concerns are not isolated one-off incidents from a variety of unrelated CAs, but a long-term pattern of behavior. Unfortunately, a number of CAs have similarly problematic histories, so these issues are by no means limited to this single CA. The most vocal critics of the SHA-1 deprecation in the CA industry, and the most vocal advocates of ways in which to extend the dates, have repeatedly abused the concessions and delays afforded in the past, to the point of causing serious and long-lasting harm to the security of the Internet.

Visas need to die

Amid worries about the wave of asylum-seekers from Syria and elsewhere, governments in Europe and beyond will face pressure to keep making life hard for tourists and business travelers—even as other departments of those same governments spend heavily on promoting tourism and foreign investment.

They serve no “security” purpose and are pure arbitrage.

What is an adult, anyway?

“Adults lead anxious lives of quiet desperation. The classic post-World War II novels of adulthood by Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Philip Roth, and John Updike, among others, are tales of shattered dreams, unfulfilled ambitions, broken marriages, workplace alienation, and family estrangement.” He compares those to 19th-century bildungsromans, coming-of-age novels, in which people wanted to become adults. Maybe an ambivalence over whether someone feels like an adult is partially an ambivalence over whether they even want to be an adult.