Finally someone explained why Sweden has so much better IT infrastructure than the US

Ran into this article about why Sweden has so much better internet connectivity than the US. I've been complaining about this for years that even now 10 years later I am still paying more for less bandwidth than I had before I moved in Sweden (And this is unfortunately the norm, not a fluke). The reason is quite simple that government here don't dare to tread on the toes of large entrenched economic interests.

Antonin Scalia Does Not Believe in Molecular Biology

In an opinion that boggles the mind written by Antonin Scalia on a recent the case regarding the legality of patenting genes he apparently does not believe in anything that he does not have first hand knowledge on or can experience with his own senses.

Although he agrees with the court decision that naturally occurring genes should not be patentable he disagrees in why this is the case. In his views it shouldn't be patentable because he doesn't believe in genes at all. Makes me all fuzzy inside to think that this is the guy that is one of nine final voices in legal matters in the worlds currently only super power.

Americas most epic undertaking started 50 years ago to this day

It is today 50 years ago that John F Kennedy gave his inspiring we choose to go to the moon speech. With this speech started the most epic of scientific achievements probably in the history of mankind to this date.

It is important to remember how the USA was the nation that accomplished this amazing feat as we are slipping in international rankings for math and science educations. It saddens me that we are not still prioritizing this frontier more. For instance we seem poised to spend more than a quarter of the entire NASA budget this year just on the presidential election campaigns. Wouldn't it be better if we had some campaign finance reform to reduce the ridiculous money spent in US politics and use that money more wisely. And in the process we might also end up with politicians that are more interested in the common good than special interest.

I recommend everybody to watch the entire speech below. It is very inspiring and still hugely relevant.

Obama & Romney answer questions on science

In case you haven't already read it check out the current presidential candidates response on scientific questions over at the Scientific American.

Highlights include Mitt Romney still not thinking global warming is serious enough to warrant any actual response. In the same vein Obama is pointing to his huge ($90 billion) investment in renewable energy, however Romney does rightly point out that so far we have precious little to show for it.

This should should be required reading for everybody who plans to vote!

The difference between religion and morals

Not believing in god doesn't mean that you don't have morals or ethics. Same as being religious does not mean that you do have morals. For instance the concept of Karma is perfectly valid with or without a deity to keep the score. It is just common sense that if you are nice to people, people will generally be nice back to you. Also if you would just be nice to people when you thought you could get something back from the them, other people you interact with would see through you pretty fast. So even without a god it just seems like a good idea to follow the golden rule.

To me it seems atheists are less likely to commit truly horrific crimes than religious people simply because there is no potential payoff after this life that could be used to entice the act. I also think there are fewer beliefs that an atheist would hold so strong that they think it would be worth to do violence against other people to promote them. I don't know of any atheist equivalents to Al-Qaeda, Ku Klux Klan or the current Anti-abortion activists in the USA.

The problems arise when a specific religion tries to inflict a certain arbitrary set of moral rules on the rest of the population. This becomes especially bad when the religion has a majority and start enforcing their rules on the minority. This includes for instance gay marriage or women's reproductive rights. I also find it troubling when it leads to trying to replace science education with theology.

It is even worse when it leads to just straight wanting to not educate children at all, like in the attacks on female schools in Afghanistan performed by the Taliban. Unfortunately this kind of thinking exists even here in the USA as is shown by the Texas Republican Party coming out against teaching children critical thinking. The bottom line is that an ignorant and uneducated person is so much easier to lead than someone who thinks for themselves. Then again perhaps they were right in The Matrix. Maybe ignorance is bliss!

Why the Apple verdict against Samsung is bad for you

Last week Apple won a lawsuit against Samsung and was awarded over $1 billion in damages. Obviously this is bad for Samsung, but I would argue that it is also bad for all of us, the consumers.

The patents that Samsung was found infringing on were either extremely obvious (Bounce back when scrolling for instance) or just weird (Design patent on a rectangle with rounded edges). It gets even worse when you hear the jurors talk about how they came to the verdict and it is obvious that they have no idea of what they were doing (Which is understandable given that this stuff is very complicated). For instance they decided to skip the discussion about prior art on the patents because "It was bogging us down". Groklaw also has a good rundown on some of the inconsistencies in the jury's verdict.

What will probably happen now is that Android phones will have to jump through a bunch of hoops trying to work around Apple's patents instead of concentrating on adding new awesome features even if Google themselves are trying to down play the significance of the verdict. Also Google has already started to leverage its newly acquired patent portfolio from its acquisition of Motorola so we will see more of this nonsense from all sides. And none of this will get us any better phones because technology is not improved by lawyers, it is improved by engineers.

I would contend that the reason why we have such awesome phones these days is not thanks to either Apple, Samsung or Google. It is thanks to all of them and the fact that they are all trying to put out the absolute best products they can so that they are better than the competition. As Steve Jobs himself was fond of saying "Good artists copy, great artists steal" (In fact even the quote itself is stolen from Pablo Picaso). The copying also goes both ways, tell me the new notifications in iOS wasn't inspired by Android's implementation.

Research and innovation has always been a matter of standing on the shoulders of giants. And most importantly as has happened over and over in the history of science, what happens is that once the body of knowledge gets to a certain point the next step becomes obvious and once anybody thinks about it the next step is usually not that hard and so should not be patentable. I am not saying that there aren't ground breaking leaps of new knowledge that is thought of (Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics stand out), but they are exceedingly rare and for instance inventing a square with rounded corners is not it (In fact if the jury had considered prior art they would have seen that Samsung had prototypes looking like that before the iPhone was released).

Gizmodo does have a different take on this where they are hoping that this will mean the end of the mere copying and the beginning of true innovation. I wish they are right, but I highly doubt it. Also, as they point out, there are quite a lot of innovation already happening in the mobile space. I don't think this will change that either way except that more resources will now be devoted expressly trying to not be similar to the competition instead of trying to make the best possible product.

Violent crime is down 80% from it's peak in Los Angeles

You might not now know it watching the news these days but violent crime in Los Angeles is down to around one fifth of what it was at its peak in 1992. Even more surprising is that this trend has actually accelerated since 2008 even though you would expect there to be more crime as more people lost their jobs.

Even better this trend holds true to most of the USA. Part of this is improved techniques employed by the police, some of it is also due to a demographic shift as we are growing older. Also the fact that we are having more immigration also generally leads to lowered crime rates. Yes, you read that right! Increased immigration can possible lead to lower crime rates (Although that relationship is by no means certain).

Now if we could only figure out that perhaps we shouldn't incarcerate such a ridiculous percentage of our population, I think we could really have something here! Did you know that the USA incarcerates 5 times higher percentage of its people than China or 20 times more than India. Said another way, the USA has 5% of the world population but 25% of the worlds inmates, and I don't think it is because Americans have a natural higher propensity to turn to a life of crime.

Mexico achieves near universal healthcare coverage

Mexico has in less than a decade increased it's health care coverage from around 50% to near universal coverage. And they did it through scientifically informed incremental changes to an existing system.

Why can't we do that here in the United States of America?

I don't understand the Chick-fil-A kerfuffle

I don't understand the current upset about Chick-fil-A that is going on right now. First of all, the owners of Chick-fil-A have always been very upfront with their bigotry. If you don't believe me just check out Google News with the search "Chick fil A gay" before June this year and you will still find a bunch of hits detailing for instance how Chick-fil-A state "We Explicitly Do Not Like Same-Sex Couples" from January last year.

This is the reason that I have boycotted them ever since they got established down here is Southern California. And it is completely in your right if you agree with their bigoted ways to eat more there to support them. It's the way of capitalism and free enterprise and I am all for it.

What I don't understand though is how anybody can think that it is a good idea for the city of Chicago to not allow them to establish a restaurant simply because they disagree with the proprietors political or religious views. Given how crazy everybody in this country seems to be about free enterprise, how can a business be denied to operate just because their owners are idiots? That seems more like something that would happen in a country that practice state capitalism (For instance China or Russia).

I guess I won't be going to Arizona anytime soon

Due to Arizona's new immigration laws H-1B workers (Which includes myself) are now advised to always keep their papers on them to avoid risk of detention.

For those who doesn't know the papers involved that you need to keep on you include, your passport and also your labor certification. A big letter sized paper that is both important and not in any way protected from wear and tear. All in all pretty hard to keep on your at all times for 3 years without destroying them in the process. How would you go running for instance?

I know the rule that in any argument where you invoke the name of Hitler you automatically lose the argument, but this is pretty scarily close to WW2 Germany isn't it? Land of the free indeed?

What's wrong with US Politics: Part 5, Filibustering

One thing that is odd about current US politics is that they somehow have moved from needing a majority to make any sort of decisions to needing 60% to pass anything in either chamber in Congress. For those not that interested in politics this is because of something called Filibustering.

Filibustering used to mean that you need a 60% vote to stop somebody from talking in Congress and you can not vote while somebody is still holding the floor so anybody who felt extremely strongly about a subject he (Or she) could simply walk up to the podium and keep talking. For example Strom Thurmond talked for over 24 hours straight in an attempt to stop civil rights legislation in 1957.

This kind of Filibustering kind of makes some sense to me. Not only is it fairly strenuous but you will also look like a complete idiot standing on the floor of Congress reciting the dictionary or your favorite recipes or anything else you can think of to keep talking so it comes with a definite cost and you wouldn't do it unless you were really passionate about something.

These days the rules have changed so now someone just has to say that he is Filibustering and everybody goes home. So unfortunately both Democrats and Republicans have started doing this almost as a rule for everything which means that you now need a 60% Filibuster proof majority to get anything through Congress since doing so really doesn't come with any real cost like it did before.

The fix for this is easy. Just go back to the old system of actually needing to perform the Filibuster and stand up there talking like an idiot. I doubt it will happen though since same as everything I've suggest before it would make the life of the people who needs to pass it slightly harder.

How do you fix education when 70% of 4:th graders are failing writing?

How do you fix your education when 70% of your 4:th graders are failing their writing tests? In Florida they decided to make the test easier to pass instead of actually teaching kids how to read and write properly. Even though I am not a parent reading things like this just makes me sad. I'm pretty sure kids today aren't more stupid than previous so something else must have changed, but this is not the way to fix it.

What's wrong with US Politics: Part 4, The electoral college

The electoral college is an old throwback to when it was tricky to count votes over such a populous and dispersed country as the USA. It allowed each state to elect a set of people that would travel to the capital and cast the actual vote for the president. There are many problems with this, the obvious one is that the president isn't actually elected by gaining the most amount of people to vote for him. In fact a president could be elected with almost as little as 25% of the vote (Highly unlikely obviously). Other problems with the electoral college is that different states have different number of delegates per votes. For instance Rhode Island has 4 delegates for roughly 1 million people (1 delegate per 250 thousand) while California has 55 delegates for roughly 38 million people (Less than 1 delegate than 600 thousand).

The cool thing about this problem is that this might actually already be on the way to be solved by the Popular Vote Compact that is already adopted in many states. The whole idea is that once enough states to represent more than 50% of the electoral votes have joined the compact all the states under the agreement pledge that all their electoral delegates will vote not to the winner of the states election, but to the winner of the popular vote. Since each state's legislator can decide how its delegates should be assigned this can be done without any change to the US constitution (Although most states would need to change their constitutions). The last state to join the compact was California and with this 132 of the needed 270 electoral votes have been pledged to the compact so we are already almost halfway there.

If you live in a state that has a very strong bias to either the right or left this is good news for you. Until now your voice has been largely ignored during the presidential elections since usually all delegates in a state goes to whoever gets more than 50% in the state and since the state already has a strong bias the money and effort to win your state is better spent in other states that are more closely contested. With the compact however, every vote counts the same regardless of which state it comes from so all of a sudden a vote converted to Republican from Democrat in California is worth as much as one in Texas. If you are from a populous state you will also get more say given that today there are a lot less votes per delegate in smaller states than larger states and with the compact every vote will count exactly the same.

What's wrong with US Politics: Part 3, Voting is too hard

When designing how the democracy in the US works it seems that who ever though it out really went out of their way to make it as complicated as possible.

Something that has always struck me as odd in regards to how voting works in the US is that you have to "register" to vote. This means that sometimes months in advance of an election you have to remember to register with the government your intention to vote. Even more incomprehensible is that you when you do this declare what you intend to vote?!? To me this is completely absurd and I don't understand at all what the purpose of this could be except to keep people from voting.

Before someone start complaining about that the reason for this is to keep voter fraud down I have to call bullshit on that. First of all there seems to be plenty of voter fraud going on already so it doesn't seem to work (Not to the point where it actually changes the outcomes of elections normally though so I don't think it's a big deal). Secondly, in todays age of computers what can you possibly check during a period of a few weeks that you can't check instantly? And I can't imagine that the check being done now to check if someone is eligible to vote is longer than it can't be done on the spot while voting. You don't hear about throngs of people being hired to check voter registration forms around elections do you (Not like the sensus).

The only thing I can think of why this is being done is to keep people from voting. And if statistics is any indication it seems to be working since even in a presidential election usually no more than around 50% of all who can vote do so. This is the lowest voting rate of all countries in the entire world that have "free" elections (Free is in quotes because some of the elections included in the list are not necessarily that free, like for instance Venezuela). From the previous link you can also see that almost all "Western Democracies" have a voter turnout of at least 75% except for the US.

Another thing that I'm sure keeps people away from the polls is that there is simply too many things to vote on. Looking over the ridiculous list of propositions that every voter is subjected to during each election here in California I am not surprised why people opt to stay at home. Even more so at least here in California a proposition doesn't have to be balanced. This means that if there is a referendum you get to choose between two well defined choices, both of which have merit. So here you can have a proposition that just says "Vote yes for lower taxes" with no mention of what needs to be cut in the budget to achieve these lower taxes, or the opposite "Vote yes for more money to schools" without any mention of how to fund it. Who wouldn't say yes to either of these?

In the same vein I find it odd how many petty state functionaries are elected here. For example "City Comptroller", "School Board", the list goes on and on. Most people would probably not have any idea of what most of these posts even do, much less who are running for the posts. Because of this few people vote in these elections which leads to a small but dedicated minority can sometimes completely derail an election by making sure they all vote for a person that hold their minority view. The obvious example of this to me is religious groups banding together to elect people to the School Board who make sure that it is mandated to teach Intelligent Design and other such nonsense as science in schools.

I think the US would be better off if we just elected the politicians with a few occasional balanced referendums (At the very most one or two per election but preferably less) and then let the politicians deal with actually weighing the pro's and con's of the budgets and such problems. And we should definitely stop electing people to posts that would better be filled by bureaucrats. Finally we need to stop this nonsense with registering to vote, it should be enough if you just show up on voting day.

What's wrong with US Politics: Part 2, Money & special interests

You jokingly hear the quip "America, the best democracy that money can buy" every once in a while and I wish dearly that it wasn't so true. For those of you not paying attention, currently corporations in the US have no rules or limits on how much money they can contribute after a US Supreme Court ruling last year.

To me this is easily fixable. Given the whole notion that corporations are people. Why not take it to it's logical conclusion and apply the same limits on corporations contributions as is done on personal contributions (And of course any wholy owned subsidiary does not count since otherwise it would just be too easy to circumvent). Currently any person is limited to donate no more than $2500 per candidate in a federal election, you are also allowed to donate no more than $5000 to a Political Action Committee (PAC). I would be totally OK with Haliburton, GM and JP Morgan being able to donate each to a presidential campaign instead of the untold millions I am sure they are all currently sinking into the campaigns.

Finally we just have to stop the Super PACs, not only do these currently have no limits on how much can be donated to them, they also don't have to explain where the money comes from or even how it is being spent. Russia, Iran or China could be funding a Super PAC to help elect the next president of the US and we wouldn't even know it. Am I the only one who gets a little bit queasy about that?

But same as always the people who needs to change this are the people who are benefiting the most from the current system so I am not confident that anything will be done soon about this.

California bans employer from prying into your Facebook

Even though the federal bill is still a long way off from becoming law if you are lucky enough to be living in California you are already set to keep your Facebook account private as the California State Assembly just passed a bill to ban employers from mandating that employees hand over their passwords to their favorite social network.

Source The Verve

Why would it be so bad to cut US military spending?

Republicans in the House of congress are now try avoid the mandatory spending cuts to the military that were part of the deal struck for last years increase of the debt ceiling. What I don't understand is why it would be so bad to cut the US defense budget.

According to Wikipedia the US spent roughly $711 billion dollars on the military in 2011. Not only is this the highest percentage of GDP of any larger world economy except for Saudi Arabia but it is also almost half of all military spending in the world (The total is $1630 billion). Also if we look at the top 15 list of countries that spend the most on the military only Russia and China are not either members of NATO or staunch allies of the US. The number two on the list China spends less than 20% of what the US spends on the military. Would it really be so bad if we only outspend every country in the world with just 100% instead of 400%? That change would save us at least $400 billion a year. Sure, we wouldn't be able to run around the world starting wars all the time like we are doing now, but would that really be so bad?

Given that I know this will not come to pass because the US will never willfully give up it's current military hegemony I also like this article in the Wall Street Journal who talks about business leaders meeting with congress to impress on them the importance of actually starting to talk to the people on the other side of the isle and figure out a solution to this problem that will probably be hard to swallow for either side since it will probably need to contain both hard budget cuts and raised taxes.

Did you know the US under invests in infrastructure by almost $100B a year?

The US is apparently under-investing at an estimated $94 billion dollars a year currently. This means that every year, our roads, bridges, airports and sewage systems to name a few are getting worse than they were the year before. This will manifest itself in a more polluted environment, more congestion and more frequent delays. This article in The Economist estimates this will cost every household in the US an estimated $10600 over the course of the current decade.

The article also goes on to talk about several ways to get the private sector to help filling this gap of which the federal government is currently not doing any. Obama has been trying but congress is, as usual, standing in the way.

Iran's web censorship censors Khamenei’s fatwa on online censorship

Gotta love the irony that apparently Ayatollah Khamenei's fatwa last week confirming the country's new online auto filtering tools got filtered by same tools so none of it's citizens were able to see it because it contained the word "antifiltering".

What's the difference between Sunni & Shia Muslims

I'm sure you all have heard the words Sunni & Shia Muslims, but do you know the difference. Originally the split occurred when Mohammed died. The Shia's believe that the leader of the Muslim nation (At the time both a religious and political entity) should be kept among the direct descendants of Mohammed. The Sunni on the other hand believe that the leader should be chosen among those who are capable. This was what actually happened when Abu Bakr, not a descendant from Muhammed became the first Caliph after the prophets death. The word "Sunni" in Arabic comes from a word meaning "one who follows the traditions of the Prophet.".

The Shia belief is also that the descendant of Muhammed who is elected as the new leader is appointed by god and infallible. To me the easiest similarity that I can draw from this is that the Shia faith is similar to the Catholics in Christianity where the one world wide leader is the equivalent of the pope. One difference between Christians & Muslims in this regard is that there does seem to be a lot of strife between the two branches of Islam. The Economist recently ran this article about the current status of the infighting between the two branches. Not that Christians haven't been doing a lot of infighting in history, but most of that was settled a few hundred years ago.

You can read more about the differences between Shia & Muslims on About.com.