Blessed by the Potato

I’m off to Japan! I figured before I go, I might as well blog about some Japanese car makers… I hope to update a bit while I’m gone, but don’t count on any updates just in case internet access doesn’t work out. I’m really dreading this trip, and also really glad I called the hotel tonight to double-check my reservation. The clerk’s english was really terrible (I know, my Japanese was worse, but that sort of thinking doesn’t help me right now) but I gathered that they weren’t expecting me until the 10th. I think I’ve got it sorted out now. The next big thing will be payment; work paid in advance on the corporate VISA, but if this place is anything like the death trap in Cancun, they’ll probably try to bill me again after I get there… Anyhow, if I don’t make it back: remember that I thought it was a bad idea all along.

It looks like Honda is going to be dropping their Hybrid Accord.

I can’t say I’m too sad to see it go: the Accord was a “muscle” hybrid, the most powerful of the Accord options. It also didn’t save much in the way of gas. Which, I’m sure, is why it wasn’t selling very well. The Camry hybrid, by comparison, is slightly more powerful than the standard V4, but gets significantly better mileage. Of course, Honda didn’t exactly go out of their way to market the Accord and its unique offerings, instead sort of just hoping that as a hybrid it would sell itself (a tactic that has been working pretty well for most of the other hybrids). The Accord wasn’t the sort of hybrid I (and many others) thought they should be making, which of course worked against the “if you build it, they will come” hybrid marketing strategy. After all, people who go out of their way to buy essentially unadvertised hybrids are usually in it for the fuel savings or environmental benefits (low emissions), and the Accord didn’t really fit either of those criteria. But even though most hybrids are made for the eco-crowd, I think there were buyers out there for a high-tech performance car, yet they didn’t try very hard to market the car they did make. For starters, a performance hybrid completely tricked out would probably have done better with an Acura badge (and at the same price, might not even have seemed that much more expensive).

I am saddened by the fact that Honda isn’t reinventing it or planning on coming out with another mid-sized/full-sized hybrid option. I know the Prius and the Camry hybrid from Toyota are dominating the market, but if there was a more fuel-efficient Accord, I’d probably go for it (especially if they managed to sneak in a decent-sized trunk). Instead, Honda appears to be focusing on the really tiny, really fuel efficient cars (the Civic and their yet-to-be-officially-announced Fit-esque/Insight-replacement hybrid).

Toyota, on the other hand, has announced that it’s sold its one millionth hybrid car.

Why five? I don’t know, perhaps because I have five fingers on one hand. Actually, I have five fingers on both hands, but I really only care to count with the one a the moment. I’m just feeling a little random (as opposed to when I usually feel very random) and very sleep deprived, and decided to share these five with you:

1) Mandlebrot Set, by Jonathan Coulton. I laughed so hard when he came to the line “Mandlebrot’s in heaven… at least he will be when he’s dead. Right now he’s still alive and teaching math at Yale.” I laughed doubly hard when Wayfare heard it and couldn’t stop giggling either. She didn’t really seem to share my appreciation for Jonathan Coulton (I’ve loved him since I first heard Code Monkey) until that moment.

2) “What kind of pirate?”

3) The Great Outdoors with John Candy, Dan Akroyd, and others. I was a kid at the time, but when I first saw it and the shotgun blew the fur off the bear’s backside, I laughed for over 10 minutes straight. It was, as far as I can remember, my first uncontrollable, unstoppable laughing fit (that had no tickling involvement). I nearly fainted. It was so funny that even on the second, third, and fourth viewings I laughed hysterically (though not as much).

4) Blub by Dave Barry. This was my first experience with Dave Barry, who I found very funny right up until his retirement. This is still my favourite story from him, and I first read it as I was getting ready to go on the Grade 12 Jamaica scuba diving trip. In the middle of the night, with everyone in the house asleep I read it, and literally laughed out loud. “Motate” entered my vocabulary at that point (followed shortly afterwards by “Moseby”). Related to this, though separated by vast tracts of time, space, and media format, is the appearance of the seagulls in Finding Nemo. “Mine?” “Mine?” reminded me of Dave Barry’s fish, as well as being incredibly hilarious and spot-on for sea gulls.

5) Douglas Adams. He wrote a lot of stuff that I love, and still laugh at even after reading it many times over. It’s hard to pick just one quotation to serve as an example, but perhaps “Very strange people, physicists – in my experience the ones who aren’t dead are in some way very ill”. Which, of course, I read while in the depths of third year physics. Or “The light works,” he said, indicating the window, “the gravity works,” he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. “Anything else we have to take our chances with.” Which so perfectly describes life in a lab.

Interesting read (registration probably required) by Jim Baen, from the Robert J Sawyer mailing list.

We’ve long had the arguments that evolution does not really act on anything that happens after child-bearing age. By that point, whether an organism would survive to reproduce had been determined, and no matter how severe the problems (or how impressive the survival), the genes would have already been passed on. Huntington’s disease, for example, is one of the few diseases that’s controlled by a dominant allele. That is, you only need one copy of the disease allele to get the disease, and there are no carrier. Generally, dominant genetic diseases are very rare because there’s a lot of evolutionary selection against them; but since Huntington’s doesn’t strike until after the person has had a chance to have children and pass it on, that selection pressure isn’t there. Likewise, there isn’t a lot of benefit to living for 200 years if you can only have children into your 40’s, or if you get eaten or sick so long before your parts wear out.

Of course, that’s all in the past, some say, and the future may hold nothing but longer lifespans for humans. After all, with technology we can live much longer, achieve much more, build more wealth. With our society we can improve the lives of our children and their children, or even use frozen tissue or other fertility treatments to extend our reproductive years… if only we could keep our minds intact long enough for it to matter.

The interesting question is: maybe dying has some evolutionary advantage?

Extreme polygamy = bad (essentially reducing your gene pool since only a few males mate, increasing recessive traits). Older successful males are more likely to be polygamous in culture, so it’s possibly that death acts as a mechanism to stop the unbounded accumulation of wealth and mates by any one person — and the accumulation of recessive desease genes in their offspring. Violence may also be an issue in this hypothetical model: once you get one person with such a monopoly on mates, there will be a lot of pressure for others to try to take that (whether challenging to take it wholly, or sneaking a few mates away here and there).

Also, what about the higher order effects? Shorter generation times lead to more responsive evolution (that is, better genomic response to change). Of course, for that to work really well generally requires large “litters” with a large number of acceptable losses in each generation. As mammals, we tend to follow a different strategy where we have a small number of children and nuture them to maximum fitness. Plus, as humans we use culture and technology to adapt, and genes that help us accrue more knowledge and design better tools for a longer period of our life seem like they would be beneficial. Very beneficial. On the other side of the coin though, is the saying that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” If we don’t have people getting old and dying off to change our customs and beliefs, then that sort of toolmaking culture fails us as a mechanism of adaptation.

There was an interesting idea presented in Permanence (Karl Schroeder): technological/cultural adaptation is a very expensive way for a species to live. It allows for adaptation to a lot of environments, but always sub-optimally. A crocodile in a swamp, for instance, lives its life swimming and eating. A human attempting to live in the same environment would need a spear gun or net of some kind to catch food, a boat, and to get to the bottom some scuba gear, a few swim fins, and a wetsuit to keep warm. That’s a costly way to live, and while it may perform better than the crocodile in the short term, and work great if most of your existence is spent away from the swamp and you only really vacation there, it’s not really a way to live in a swamp on the scale of thousands or millions of years. All it would take is for some of that knowledge to be lost (how to fill an air tank, or how to sharpen a spear) and the survival ability goes way down.

Look at crocodiles. Humans might move into their environment—underwater in swamps. We might devise all kinds of sophisticated devices to help us live there, or artificially keep the swamp drained. But do you really think that, over thousands or millions of years, there won’t be political uprisings? System failures? Religious wars? Mad bombers? The instant something perturbs the social systems that’s needed to support the technology, the crocodiles will take over again, because all they have to do to survive
is swim and eat.

Permanence considers the decline of the million-year civilization. The thing about civilization, mass production and technology is that we can rely on the brilliance of a few to carry the rest of us, so we lose all selection pressure for brains. Eventually, no one can repair techological devices, or improve or alter a use to meet the needs of a new situation. In a society of users, when something eventually breaks, we all go extinct. This sort of idea is also present in Idiocracy as well, where a technological society, which cushions us from the realities of natural selection, no longer selects for the intelligent people that can maintain that society. Evolution by natural selection is based on a tautology:
“that which survives, survives”, as Douglas Adams put it. But it’s a profound tautology nonetheless. If, as in Idiocracy, people who are less intelligent breed more (much more) than others, then the human race will be brought towards that, the subtype which most sucessfully takes advantage of its environment.

What we found instead was that even though a species might remain starfaring for millions of years, consciousness does not seem to be required for toolmaking. In fact, consciousness appears to be a phase… We know now that [consiousness] evolves to enable a species to deal with unforeseen situations. By definition, anything we’ve mastered becomes instinctive. Walking is not something we have to consciously think about, right? Well, what about physics, chemistry, social engineering? If we have to think about them, we haven’t mastered them—they are still troublesome to us. A species that succeeds in really mastering something like physics has no more need to be conscious of it. Quantum mechanics becomes an instinct, the way ballistics already is for us. Originally, we must have had to put a lot of thought into throwing things like rocks or spears. We eventually evolved to be able to throw without thinking—and that is a sign of things to come. Some day, we’ll become… able to maintain a technological infrastructure without needing to
think about it. Without need to think, at all…

With a longer-lived species, despite the problems discussed earlier, we might be able to avert these sorts of problems. However, we would need to be immortal to continually look after our progeny through the eons. But eventually, of course, death in one of her many guises will find you. So the answer may be picking up and moving for greener pastures, no matter how long lived the species. As long as this happened often enough, we would likely not fall towards “direct adaptation” mechanisms, but maintain a technological adaptation. It’s only through constant challenges to survive, succeed, and breed that intelligence, consciousness and cultural adaption will be preserved in the species.

In fact, we may find that selection for a longer-lived species goes hand-in-hand with selection for intelligence in a technological society: it takes so long to learn what you need to survive and thrive (I’m 27 and still in school for years to come yet!), that only long-lived (and late-breeding) members are sucessful.

On the other hand, there may be another case where shorter generations may have a (meta)evolutionary advantage. It’s only as long as we’re willing to take risks and go to test the limits of our intelligence and ability to survive that we feel any kind of selection pressure, and when the phrase “you’ve got your whole life ahead of you” means so much more, risk aversion may become the norm. Also, with intelligence and consciousness comes senescence, dementia, and insanity. It’s possible that the chances of falling prey to these increase with age (unless a stable brain is selected for and has a chance to evolve).

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,
in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

Evil Dead: The Musical is, IMHO, the best musical comedy out there. For those who don’t know, it’s a combination of the first two Evil Dead movies, with a lot of the catch phrases from the third one thrown in for good measure. Oh, and it’s also the only musical I know of where the first three rows get drenched in blood.

I saw it for the second time on Thursday, and I’ve got to say that the first show we saw (2 years ago), while the whole idea was still experimental, was more enjoyable. It’s hard to be sure after 2 years of memory fog, but some of the songs have been changed (expanded for the most part; I’m pretty sure “look who’s evil now” has a different, more up-tempo instrumental, though Wayfare thinks it’s the same). The comedic timing also seemed to be off in this one, with the dramatic pause removed from the classic “Name’s Ash [cha-chunk], Housewares” as well as a few other points. In the first version, there were a lot of squirting blood special effects, so the first few rows “may” have gotten covered in blood, but for the most part the actors managed to keep it on the stage. The current show has increased the blood volume, and now actively aims for the audience (even handing out disposable ponchos during the intermission). The new theatre space is great: there doesn’t look to be a bad seat in the house, so don’t be afraid to buy tickets in the back if you’re afraid of a little blood.

I liked the Canadian cast; Wayfare bought the CD (which is I believe recorded from the New York group), and I really think the Toronto cast is a lot better (with the possible exception of Cheryl (? — Ash’s sister)). A lot of the songs are really clever and catchy: I think “Cabin in the Woods” is going to become mandatory listening for any future cottage trips. Now, Wayfare says the singers on the CD sound better to her, sounding like “obviously trained singers” but I think that’s what I like least about the recording: they sound like they’re just belting out the lines with very little feeling or humour, and sound like they’ve been trained to project their voices (which isn’t really necessary in this day of mics and speakers).

Of course, the biggest change to the show from when we saw it first is the ending, and that I didn’t really enjoy. Wayfare had a great suggestion for that: keep the original ending, close the curtain, then use the new ending as an encore.