Guns! Guns! Guns!

Good news: a Brazilian referendum to disarm law-abiding citizens was buried in a landslide. Better news: the anguished squealing of “anti-violence” natterers when the hippest country in Latin America voted square:

“The whole campaign (against the ban) was imported from the United States. They just translated a lot of material from the NRA,” said Jessica Galeria, a Californian who researches gun violence with the Viva Rio think tank, referring to the National Rifle Association. “Now, a lot of Brazilians are insisting on their right to bear arms, they don’t even have a pseudo right to bear arms. It’s not in their Constitution.”

The natives are demanding rights? Heaven forbid!

22:02 EST | permalink | /world/brazil

The 1918 flu virus plot

Two computer science pioneers have a column in the NY Times denouncing the publication of the genome of the virus responsible for the 1918 influenza epidemic. (Thanks, Instapundit.)

The pair imply a plot straight out a movie: al-Qaeda molecular biologists will manipulate the modern milquetoast flu virus to recreate the 1918 superbug. Epidemic. Horror. Panic in the streets. Megadeath. Film at eleven.

The authors, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, offer a non-solution solution:

The precise genome could potentially be shared with scientists with suitable security assurances.

It’s a non-solution because genome sequences are like software: anyone in the research lab — faculty, research assistants, graduate students, IT support staff — could steal it undetectably. If al-Qaeda has teams of biologists, pipettes a-glistening, just waiting for that genome, they assuredly can sneak someone onto the IT staff of an institution working with the virus.

I posit that embargoing the 1918 flu genome to “trusted” scientists would actually make us more vulnerable to the flu. Here’s why: much of the work in academic science is carried out by graduate and postdoctoral students — more and more of whom (especially in the sciences) come from abroad [1]. (For instance, 35% of MIT’s grad students are foreign.) If just looking at the genome requires a security clearance (not the quickest process, as or so I’ve been told), I imagine most virologists will choose to work on something with more funding and less bureaucracy.

To embargo the last really deadly flu genome because of a terrorist threat would be downright dangerous. The world faces a far more immediate threat from a deadly avian flu strain than it does from al-Qaeda virologists. Somehow, making flu research harder strikes me as a bad idea. K & J analogize viral genomes to atom bomb blueprints, glossing over the crucial difference: an atom-bomb blueprint won’t help you radiation-proof a human being. But a viral genome will help you devise a treatment.

Bruce Schneier noted that that terrorists “don’t do movie plots.” Angelo Codevilla observed that it would be dead easy (and would shut down the nation overnight) if terrorists coordinated synchronized Molotov-cocktail attacks on school buses across the country. Gasoline and glass bottles are a lot easier to come by than reagents, pipettes, and know-how.

Here’s how to reconstruct the 1918 virus on the cheap: go somewhere with cold soil and dig up a corpse. I saw it in a movie (“Virus Fugitivo”), so it must work. (Oops, did I just tell terrorists how to start an epidemic? My bad.)

09:51 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Startup School

I’m liveblogging from Paul Graham’s Startup School, which is best described as a nerd revival meeting. Highlights so far:

• Paul Graham: Brought down the house with (and I paraphrase, not so well) A metaphor is like a function with the wrong arguments – so presumably your brain must support dynamic typing.

• Michael Mandel, Chief Economist, Business Week: “People who start companies and are willing to fail are doing God’s work.” Loud applause. Whooping. (I wish – wish! – someone had screamed “Preach it, brother!” I should have.)

• Woz: high-speed 30 minute speech on the design of the Apple I and Apple II. I was rapt – my notebook reads “Woz. Amazing.” – so was everyone else. He got a standing ovation. I’m glad I didn’t have to follow that act.

About 99.5% of the audience (which filled Science Center D, a 500-seat audtiorium) is male.

14:59 EST | permalink | /computers

Oh, so that explains it

Malcom Gladwell’s latest article on elite-school admissions is well worth a read:

If you let in only the brilliant, then you produced bookworms and bench scientists: you ended up as socially irrelevant as the University of Chicago (an institution Harvard officials looked upon and shuddered). “Above a reasonably good level of mental ability, above that indicated by a 550-600 level of S.A.T. score,” Bender went on, “the only thing that matters in terms of future impact on, or contribution to, society is the degree of personal inner force an individual has.”

In the nineteen-eighties, when Harvard was accused of enforcing a secret quota on Asian admissions, its defense was that once you adjusted for the preferences given to the children of alumni and for the preferences given to athletes, Asians really weren’t being discriminated against. But you could sense Harvard’s exasperation that the issue was being raised at all. If Harvard had too many Asians, it wouldn’t be Harvard, just as Harvard wouldn’t be Harvard with too many Jews or pansies or parlor pinks or shy types or short people with big ears.

10:42 EST | permalink | /academics/academic-excess

The Tyranny of History

How appropriate it was … that the symbol of their state [the People’s Republic of China] was the main gate of the palace of the Ming and Qing autocrats. It is as if the French revolutionaries had taken Versailles as the symbol of their republic.
—W.J.F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History

18:16 EST | permalink | /world/china

I wonder if Miss Manners has an entry on this

I just got a short email from a reader of the UN-Internet-takeover article. I tapped out a reply, only to get this message back:

I apologize for this automatic reply to your email.

To control spam, I now allow incoming messages only from senders I
have approved beforehand.

If you would like to be added to my list of approved senders, please
fill out the short request form (see link below). Once I approve you,
I will receive your original message in my inbox. You do not need to
resend your message. I apologize for this one-time inconvenience.

Click the link below to fill out the request:

https://webmail.pas.earthlink.net/wam/addme?a=(rest snipped)

If someone sends me email expecting a reply, they ought to add my address to that “approved” list. Any non-brain-dead email software would do that automatically. It looks like the writer used a feature provided by the mega-ISP Earthlink, a company that really should know better. (As an aside to my correspondent, my apologies if your ISP forced this on you.)

I don’t plan to click – it just encourages this sort of thing.

11:05 EST | permalink | /computers/internet/email