Author: Aaron Weber

Creepy Moral Thought Experiments

Since it’s Friday and after five PM, here are some creepy thoughts that make for great barroom conversation:

If you have a clone, is it OK to have sex with them? Does that count as masturbation, or incest? Probably incest, since they’d be like an identical twin. But what if you had a body part, like an arm, cloned and grafted to you– would it be OK to use that for sex? How about if it wasn’t attached to you– just a spare organ poking out of a nutrient-delivery system?

Many people refuse to eat meat because the animals cannot consent to it. Even if the animal flesh were grown in some sort of a vat, the animal would not have consented to the use of its genetic material. But if you could give a few stem cells, and grow your own human-steaks in a vat, and then eat your own legs for dinner, that would not involve any violation of rights or taking of lives. Is that the most ethical meat-eating possible, or is it cannibalism?

What is the line between the commonly accepted practice of veterinary artificial insemination and bestiality? If you are a veterinarian specialising in artificial insemination technology, at what point do you enjoy your career a little too much? From the legal point of view my guess is that masturbating horses is not a crime as long as you have the permission of the horse’s owner and you plan to freeze the semen in liquid nitrogen.

IE

OK, so, my stylesheet-foo is not up to par. I managed to get the search bar not to break through the sidebar, but Internet Explorer users are still going to have to scroll horizontally in order to read this. But nobody who reads this uses IE– the top browsesr are Safari, Galeon, and various RSS aggregators. Yes, Soup, from the Evolution summary, is in the top five.

Hackers and Civilians

You can tell a programmer from a regular person by the way they ask and answer questions. Programmers give answers and ask questions like computers do: technically correct, but often totally irrelevant and beside the point.

For example, if you ask a regular person “do you know where Hynes Convention Center is?” they’ll try to give you directions. Programmers are likely to say “Yes.” They may occasionally elaborate, and describe the location. If they give you directions, they will have strange and often frightening details, such as longitude, cardinal direction, and the amount of time it will take, depending on whether you are travelling by African or European swallow. Or, in a meeting designed to tell new employees of a large corporation about insider trading laws, they will ask questions which do not apply to them (“If I were a foreign resident, what would the tax implications for…”) or will pick at inconsistencies in the ways that the rules are explained, despite the fact that the rules themselves are consistent.

It can be infuriating until you realize that these are the people whose thought process is what makes your world tick. They are able to see things in a way that you don’t, are able to imagine all the corner cases, the exceptions. Things that you take as common sense appear to them as arbitrary rules which have to be learned, because, frankly, that’s what they are. They’re just aware of it more than you are.

Flaming Plame

Well, the Plame thing is really getting picked up by a lot of people. Billmon has a great take on it: it looks a lot like a coup, honestly. The CIA is fighting the White House using the Justice Department.

Once, the Economist apologized for implying that Bush was actually elected, and noted that he was appointed, given that the election was too close to call. Today, an editorial there apologizes for defending any of the Bush team’s economic policies:

Underlying some of this column’s cheer these few weeks past has been an assumption that President George Bush and his administration were not as stupid, short-sighted, parochial and economically illiterate as they sometimes appear. Buttonwood now realises that this was a mistake and retracts this view as hopelessly optimistic and naive. Over the past couple of weeks, the risks to the world economy and financial markets everywhere have risen as the full force of their economic myopia has visited itself on the world stage.

Franken-Fries

Is bioengineering the greatest thing to happen to our environment, or the worst? A very well-written article that really looks at the issue from a number of angles, including several I hadn’t thought of before.

I read “The Botany of Desire” recently and that, along with this article, makes me wonder seriously about the way that we treat our earth. A few small changes in agricultural policy in the US and Europe would really go a long way toward improving things. For example, if you offered tax breaks for organic certification, not tax breaks to buy extra fertilizer and pesticide. If you quit subsidising the agricultural-chemical makers and started helping the smaller farmers. Big farmers would still exist, of course, but it’s the small ones need help anyway. It’d be good for the third world too.

It makes sense, it’d be less expensive, it’d be better for the environment, and it’d be better for the economy. It’ll never happen.

I can tell you’re lying…

Finally beginning to hammer on the lies and the lying liars who tell them. As the song goes, “Lies, lies lies lies lies lies lies.”

Maybe it was that I just had peanut M&M’s for lunch, but it makes me sick to my stomach when I see how we’re colluding in our own deception. A friend of mine had this to say:

I have always had trust in our country. I know that sounds retardedly patriotic. But I have always felt lucky to live here and now they have taken that away. And it pisses me off. This is my fucking country too you fucking assholes. QUIT FUCKING IT UP! What is going on with the people that we are letting this happen? Do people not realize? I had faith in the people at one point too.