I’m jumping up and down and squealing

Ridley Scott brings back his Blade Runner scribe to adapt The Forever War [Forever War]
[Via io9]

We know Ridley Scott’s plate is full what with the Alien prequel movies, a Monopoly film, Huxley’s Brave New World, and a Youtube flick. But his choice of writer just pushed his Forever War to the top of our list.

Joblo spoke with the Forever War author Joe Haldeman, who says Scott is bringing in Blade Runner and Twelve Monkeys scribe David Peoples to write the Forever War script. Sure, Peoples has been pretty inactive over the past few years, but he did have a good ear for the science fiction world, and a difficult-to-adapt novel like Forever War is going to need all the help it can get.

The book is set in the future and follows a soldier, Mandella, who is part of an elite fighting squad sent into space to do battle with Earth’s new alien enemy, the Taurans. But for every year he’s away that time doubles on Earth. So when the soldiers return after a three-year battle, decades have passed. Making it very difficult for the soldiers to adapt to their new home. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for this war epic.

[More]

One of my favorite books taken to the silver screen by one of my favorite screenwriters under the wings of a great director of science fiction.

It’ll probably never happen but I can dream.

Messages to my mother II

My Mom and I have some great email discussions – which are at least coherent. Our phone conversations usually operate on a wavelength of shared communication that render them virtually impossible for others to follow or understand. In person it is usually even worse for bystanders. One of the many reasons I love discussing things with her – she understands me, even when she disagrees with me.

She usually throws out some great remark that sends me out to the web in order to refute it (always the most fun for me) or admit she was right (always the most fun for her).

My mother and I had another nice email dialogue about my previous post today dealing withPhoenix, mistruths and Cargo Cult Worlds. I’ve edited my reply for clarity and hope you like it.

My Mom explained that what she was more focussed on was the real problem of women being abducted off the street, raped and then dumped. That may not show up in any statistics, particularly in Phoenix, but is still kidnapping.

I replied:

---

That is exactly what I am talking about. People have taken a narrative – girls getting kidnapped off the streets of Phoenix and America – that is horrible and needs to be addressed. But the statement that is used use to support this narrative – Phoenix is the kidnapping capital of America – is not based on any facts. It is not based on anything that exists in the real world. It is completely made up.

Thus the Cargo Cult World. One where people try to create a reality, a narrative, based on facts that are not real. And, it should be obvious that constructing a Cargo Cult World is not only seen in one political party or one economic class. I think it comes from an attempt to understand something quite complex by applying simplifications and metaphors that just do not work. Much as the Pacific Islanders did not understand the principles and facts behind air flight but thought that building replicas of planes would recreate the reality they saw during World War 2.

Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing patterns and at constructing fairly complex metaphors in order to survive. I personally think that this ability is one of the things that has made us such a potent species. But sometimes the metaphors get scrambled, the narrative describes a false reality. That seems to happen when societies are undergoing some fundamental changes such as from agrarian to industrial. We have a ton of actually stories that reflect this, from The Jungle to The Grapes of Wrath to Cry the Beloved Country. Each describes creating a new societal narrative as the old one crumbles away, and the social strife that destruction entails.

Humans and societies produce narratives to help their members understand the world and how to react to it. But when things are changing, when new narratives may need to be produced, well these are the most dangerous times. That is when Cargo Cult Worlds come into existence for many people, where false narratives are used to create only a simulacrum of reality.

I just do not understand how anyone can honestly create an argument using untruths and falsehoods, especially one dealing with such a potent horror as kidnapping and raping girls. Wouldn’t the best solutions in the real world involve using real facts, not lies? Why not create a narrative based on facts? That is actually quite easy.

Why not just say that many vulnerable women in the undocumented population are being kidnapped and raped and we need to discuss ways to stop it? How does continuing to discuss a false narrative help solve that problem?

---

My mother and I have had some great back and forth on this. One upshot is that she does not like the term narrative as, to her, it implies a story which is obviously made up and not true. But any really good fictional story is true. It may be based on events that have not occurred but it describes something about ourselves that touches truth or requires us to examine our own truths.

I’m using it more in the psychological, cognitive sense as the stories and metaphors we create to deal with the world, to make sense of the reality we experience. They are our best attempts to say something true, even as the best made-up stories try to say something true.

Even made-up stuff can be useful if leads to truthful revelations. But basing stories and narratives on lies can never lead to truth in a deeper sense.

Humans create rules of thumb and heuristics to deal with the world. They are usually in the form of pithy sayings, stories and narratives. Good ones allow us not only cope but make very fast decisions based on ‘common sense’ because they do a good job describing the real world.

However, narratives based on lies will result in ‘common sense’ solutions that are not based on reality and will likely lead to poor results. It will lead to a Cargo Cult World which only mimics reality.

If my rule of thumb is that all felines are docile, loving and playful creatures that would never hurt me, then I am in trouble if I approach a cat with an arched back, fur on end and snarling. I am even more in trouble if I approach a wild tiger for the first time.

Doing our best to make sure that the personal narratives that we use to support our view of the world are based on truthful data and not lies will be necessary if we hope to solve the tremendously complex problems that the real world is now throwing at us.

Because those problems are much more complex than what to do when a tiger crosses our path.

Apple’s iTunes Remote app was developed by one person – report

Apple’s iTunes Remote app was developed by one person – report
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple’s iTunes Remote application for the iPhone has not been updated in over 8 months because the software was written by just one person, and he is currently busy with other projects, according to a new report which describes Apple as “a huge startup.”

[More]

Here is how he describes the way Apple runs things:

Apple doesn’t build large teams to work on every product they make. Instead, they hire very few, but very intelligent people who can work on different projects and move around as needed.

One day you might be working on the Remote app, and the next day you might get pulled on to another project that needs your help.

The engineers on the Mac OS and iOS teams move back and forth between the two projects based on release cycles and what needs to ship next.

That is how we worked at Immunex – whatever was on fire got the bucket brigade approach. we all worked on multiple projects at the same time, allowing us to drop something that was going slow and pick up on something that needed more attention.Once we had gotten our role done, we handed it off to the next member of the bucket brigade and picked up another project.

In order to make this work well, there needs to be constant vetting of the progression by everyone involved. Any bumps in the road can be smoothed over if more eyes are on the prize.

Thus everyone feels a part of a successful project, even if they had a little part. Immunex’s great drug was Enbrel. I had a very small part working on that molecule quire early. While only peripheral to the amazing work done by others, I felt every bit as proud of its success.

Plus this approach keeps smart people interested and helps prevent empire building, which can be a real detriment to the rapid actions a small team needs to make.

Any company basing its success on the creativity of its employees needs to have a management style closer to Apple’s or Immunex’s.

Thank goodness for bad genes

by popofatticus

Developmental buffering, or how to live with your bad genes
[Via The Panda's Thumb]

Mutate. Select. Repeat. Mutate. Select. Repeat. You can’t understand evolutionary biology if you don’t get the significance of that process. And yet, if you think that’s all there is to it, you’re way off track. PZ explained this very nicely here last week. Let’s focus on one simple point that he made, and look at some recent and significant work on that subject that shows just how misleading some of the common simplifications of evolutionary biology can become.

Here’s PZ on simple views of mutation and selection:

Stop thinking of mutations as unitary events that either get swiftly culled, because they’re deleterious, or get swiftly hauled into prominence by the uplifting crane of natural selection. Mutations are usually negligible changes that get tossed into the stewpot of the gene pool, where they simmer mostly unnoticed and invisible to selection.

I think this is an extremely important point, both for those seeking to answer creationist propaganda and for anyone else trying to understand the process of evolutionary change. The common picture, painted all too often by commentators of various stripes, depicts a world in which mutations run a harrowing gauntlet of selection that is likely to foolishly discard both the gems and the proto-gems of biological function. Oh sure, the cream eventually rises to the top, but only through the magic of seemingly endless eons and limitless opportunities.
I hope that most readers of the Panda’s Thumb are annoyed by this crude caricature, but it’s the standard tale, and when the narrator only has a paragraph, it’s the one we’re most likely to hear.

To improve the situation, we might first add the concept of random drift. And that helps a lot. Then we would emphasize the selective neutrality of the vast majority of all mutations, as PZ did. And that helps a lot, too. Let’s look at another helpful concept, one from the evo-devo playbook, almost crazy at first glance but remarkably interesting and important.

Suppose that one reason many mutations are selectively near-neutral is because genetic systems are able to tolerate mutations that have the capacity to be strongly deleterious. Suppose, in other words, that organisms are robust enough to live with seriously nasty genetic problems. This would mean that such mutations could escape selection, and that populations could harbor even more genetic diversity than our simplistic account would seem to suggest.

[More]

I mentioned this the other week but the point can not be hit home enough – most mutations have little selective effect on an organism, even if they have a tremendous on the activity of the mutated protein. When I was at Immunex, we noticed this when we deleted the gene for Interleukin-2 in mice. This gene codes for a protein that is required for the growth of important immune cells called T-cells. Yet mice lacking IL-2 seemed normal and healthy.

Few proteins absolutely require the optimal activity to work. There is a lot of redundancy, allowing mutated genes for damaged proteins to stick around. The animal bearing them does not immediately lose the battle of natural selection.

This means that all sorts of altered proteins can be maintained in a population of animals, increasing their genetic diversity. For a species, the best approach for dealing with changing environments is to have a lot of genetic diversity, so that it is likely that at least some of the members of the population will bear genes that now help. Thus, when the environment changes, a species of goby can infiltrate a new ecosystem and thrive.

The work discussed in this post reveal more details about the buffering abilities of genetic systems. It makes sense – organisms that did not have redundant systems would die off easily with just normal mutations. But those which developed ways to cope with suboptimal proteins would continue to thrive.

So, while natural selection would seems to drive a population to a single set of perfect genes, the best response for many species is to find a way to maintain a lot of genetic diversity, especially diversity that can not immediately be selected against. It is a eternal dance between the specificity driven by natural selection and the diversity needed for survival. I’ve discussed how the red deer in Scotland is managing this balance – by interbreeding with another type of deer and spreading those genes amongst 4 possible species instead of one. Or, more accurately, 4 new subspecies representing one type of deer. It has increased genetic diversity, allowing itself to have a greater chance that some of the population will survive a changing environment.

Genetic buffering has been seen in many species. These recent papers have elucidated the process better, giving us further ideas of how an animals genome can buffer itself against deleterious mutations and preserve diversity.

And some of those genes with deleterious mutations may end up being useful in the future, under the right conditions.

I wonder if many species that are having a hard time adapting to the changing environmental conditions seen today have lower levels of genetic and developmental buffering. Perhaps, after this extinction event, most species will have advanced buffering capacities, as that would seem to be the ultimate survival trick.