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from Hacker News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi1johHhYlY
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
Monday, October 30, 2023
NASA can't open its asteroid capsule
The team behind Nasa’s Osiris-REx mission is struggling to open fully the container holding the bulk of the sample from asteroid Bennu. Since the 4.5 billion year-old sample landed in the Utah desert earlier this month, scientists have already managed to collect 70.3 grams of rocks and dust lying on the outside of the container, as well as some from inside the sampler head. But last week they realised that two of the 35 fasteners on the head could not be removed with the current tools approved for use in the Osiris-REx glovebox – where the work is performed under a flow of nitrogen to prevent contamination through exposure to Earth’s atmosphere. Nasa said the team is working on finding a new procedure to extract the remaining material. This might delay the process by a few weeks. Not too bad for a seven-year mission that might help explain the origins of life on Earth.
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Show HN: I made a web app that tells you if your food is spicy?
Check if your food is spicy or not ?
from Hacker News https://dieornot.com/
Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand
Press the 'f' and 'd' keys randomly. As randomly as you can. I'll try to predict which key you'll press next.
Keep pressing!
A rolling mean of my accuracy in predicting what key you'll press. (I'll start predicting once I get a few keypresses from you).My last guesses (most recent at top):
What's going on here? This is an Aaronson Oracle.
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Sunday, October 29, 2023
Hiroshima and the Myths of Military Targets and Unconditional Surrender (2020)
Every year, in early August, new articles appear that debate whether the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 was justified. Earlier this month, the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, was no exception.
The New York Times published Anne Harrington’s moving story about Maj. Claude Eatherly, the pilot of the reconnaissance plane for the Enola Gay, who spent the rest of his life haunted by his role in what he considered an immoral attack. The Wall Street Journal, in contrast, published an op-ed by former Los Alamos laboratory official John C. Hopkins, who claimed that the bombing saved an estimated 5-10 million Japanese civilians and 400,000-800,000 American soldiers who could have died in an invasion and was therefore “the lesser of two evils.”
The Hopkins claim was the most recent inflation of estimates building on what Rufus Miles called the “myth of half a million American lives saved.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson originally claimed in his famous 1947 Harper’s article that an invasion was expected to produce “over a million American casualties [wounded and killed] to American forces alone” (emphasis added). Winston Churchill, in his memoirs, claimed instead that the invasion would have produced one million American fatalities and an additional 500,000 thousand allied fatalities. But the serious historians studying this issue come to a different conclusion, finding that the range of estimates of U.S. deaths in the 1945 military records was significantly lower than the mythical half a million figure.
In our recent article, “Why the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima Would Be Illegal Today” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we focus on a slightly different set of questions. What role did law play in the decision in 1945, and would such an attack be legal today?
Our analysis exposes two other common myths about Hiroshima.
The first myth was started by President Harry Truman when he announced on Aug. 9, 1945, that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base … because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” Truman argued, in other words, that Hiroshima was a military target. Although Hiroshima contained some military-related industrial facilities—an army headquarters and troop-loading docks—the vibrant city of over a quarter of a million men, women and children was hardly “a military base.” Indeed, less than 10 percent of the individuals killed on Aug. 6, 1945, were Japanese military personnel.
We find no evidence that anyone within the Truman administration undertook a formal legal analysis of the attack options in 1945. Nonetheless, intuitive moral concerns and background legal principles were often raised, especially by Stimson. But the archival record makes clear that such concerns were muted and rationalized away. Killing civilians was the primary purpose of the Hiroshima bombing.
Two committees—the Target Committee and the Interim Committee—were convened to advise U.S. leaders on the atomic bomb. The prioritization of maximizing the bomb’s psychological impact on the Japanese population and leadership is the common thread that binds the recommendations of the two committees. The Target Committee ultimately advised leadership “to neglect location of [military] industrial areas as pin point target, since … such areas are small, spread on fringes of cities and quite dispersed” and instead “to place first gadget in center of selected city.” Mindful of norms against the intentional killing of civilians, the Interim Committee headed by Stimson instead “recommended that … [the bomb] should be used on a dual target, that is, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage.”
But the identification of military objectives by the Interim Committee was a rationalization meant to obscure the true aims of the Hiroshima bombing. The Interim Committee’s recommendation was an endorsement of terror bombing with a legal veneer.
At bottom, Stimson wanted to kill as many workers and their families possible. And he made no effort to ensure that the Interim Committee’s recommendation about dual targeting was followed. Ultimately, the crew of the Enola Gay was permitted to pick the aim point and chose the Aioi Bridge at the center of Hiroshima. More than 70,000 men, women and children were killed immediately. In a cruel irony, the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed.
And then there’s a second myth that still looms large in discussions about the bombings.
Commentators who continue to claim that the Hiroshima bombing was the lesser evil rely on a flawed assumption: that unconditional surrender was the only acceptable outcome. Those who perpetuate the myth of unconditional surrender forget that U.S. decision-makers in 1945 considered other ways of ending the war with Japan. Weighing the lives lost from the atomic bombings against the potential lives lost in an American invasion of Japan ignores the possibility that the war could end with neither an invasion nor nuclear attacks.
At the Potsdam Conference, Stimson recommended that the U.S. modify the unconditional surrender terms to signal to the Japanese government that Emperor Hirohito would not be put on trial. Truman rejected this advice, and the Potsdam Declaration instead stated that “[t]here must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest” and warned that “stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals.”
This decision to insist on unconditional surrender in the Potsdam Declaration was critical. After the atomic bombings and the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese government stated that it was ready to surrender, but only on the condition that nothing in the peace agreement “prejudices the prerogatives of his majesty as a sovereign ruler.” Through a carefully crafted letter, Truman signaled to the Japanese that the emperor would not be subject to war crimes trials. Hirohito, understanding that a private deal had been offered, joined the “peace party,” and called for his government to surrender immediately.
As is true with all counterfactuals, we can’t know with certainty whether the Japanese government would have surrendered without the dropping of the bomb if this compromise had been offered when Stimson suggested. Among the many tragedies of Hiroshima, however, is that Truman refused to try this diplomatic maneuver earlier.
The international law of armed conflict has evolved considerably since 1945, and an attack like that against Hiroshima would be illegal today. It would violate three requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions: to not intentionally attack civilians (the principle of distinction); to ensure that incidental damage against civilians is not excessive compared to the direct military advantage gained from an attack against a lawful target (the principle of proportionality), especially where, as here, the value of the identified military targets in Hiroshima was modest; and to take all feasible precautions to minimize collateral damage against civilians (the precautionary principle). Although the U.S. is not a party to Protocol I, it has long accepted that these core principles reflect binding customary international law, and declared in 2013 and 2018 that the law of armed conflict applies to all U.S. nuclear operations.
Evaluating the military advantage of an attack under jus in bello principles must be assessed in light of a state’s overall war aims, which are themselves subject to legal and moral constraints. Admittedly, the principles governing the terms that states may impose as conditions for ending war—whether under the framework of jus ad bellum proportionality or jus post bellum—make up one of the least well-developed areas of the law of armed conflict. But there are limits on the ends states may seek in terminating wars. As the Defense Department Law of War Manual notes, “the overall goal of the State in resorting to war should not be outweighed by the harm that the war is expected to produce.” This principle applies at the end of a war as well. Because it would have entailed the awful human costs of an invasion, Truman’s demand for Japan’s unconditional surrender to end the war was indefensible. Seeking to avoid the larger losses that would flow from an unjust demand for unconditional surrender cannot justify the Hiroshima attack.
Although a Hiroshima-like attack today would be illegal, there is no guarantee that a U.S. president would abide by the law. In a future crisis, it is not difficult to imagine grim scenarios in which there could be great pressure to use nuclear weapons. Public opinion would not necessarily act as a constraint—polling suggests that most Americans do not believe in a nuclear taboo. These observations should serve as a reminder that the U.S. needs senior military officers who fully understand the law and demand compliance. And this underscores the importance of electing presidents who care about law and justice in war.
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Medically assisted deaths constituted 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada
A new Health Canada report says the number of medically assisted deaths in 2022 was more than 30 per cent higher than the year prior.
Medically assisted deaths constituted 4.1 per cent of all deaths in Canada last year, said the report, which was published on Tuesday.
The report is a comprehensive overview of Canada's medical assistance in dying (MAID) law and its effects. The law is set to extend access to medical assistance in dying to those whose sole medical condition is a mental illness in March 2024.
Experts and advocates who spoke with CBC News questioned whether the MAID growth rate and the percentage of deaths should be causes for concern. Some cited perceived gaps in the data.
The report says 13,241 people received medically assisted deaths in 2022 — a 31.2 per cent jump over 2021.
It says 44,958 people have received medically assisted deaths since the introduction of federal legislation in 2016.
Rebecca Vachon, the program director for health at the non-partisan Christian think tank Cardus, described the year-over-year MAID growth as "alarming."
To access MAID, an individual must have a serious illness, disease or disability which causes irreversible decline and unbearable suffering that "cannot be relieved under conditions [the patient considers] acceptable," says the federal government.
"We should be ensuring that we never get to that point because we have better care available," Vachon said.
Jocelyn Downie is a professor at Dalhousie University who researches end-of-life law. She was also a member of the legal team representing Lee Carter and other appellants in Carter v. Canada, the Supreme Court case which ruled people with grievous and irremediable medical conditions should have the right to ask a doctor to help them die.
Downie said she doesn't think the year-over-year MAID growth is unexpected or disturbing.
"When you have something that's illegal, and it becomes legal, you are going to have an increase in the numbers," she said. "And it's going to take a little while for the numbers to settle."
Downie also said that if the only people accessing MAID are those with a "grievous and irremediable medical condition, which is what the evidence shows, then it's not a bad thing to have more of that."
Critics question strength of data
Vachon also criticized the portion of the report that focuses on palliative care, and called for greater investments so patients don't feel the need to request "premature deaths."
According to the report, palliative care is a holistic approach that treats people with serious illnesses. It includes "physical, social, psychological, and spiritual needs as well as emotional support," the report says.
In 2022, MAID practitioners reported 77.6 per cent of MAID recipients — 10,169 people — received palliative care. Nearly half received it for a month or more.
Vachon said the report doesn't explain the quality of palliative care and instead uses the term as a "checkbox" to indicate it has been provided.
The report does not provide any metrics on the quality of palliative care, but does say that 87.5 per cent of MAID recipients who did not receive palliative care — 2,250 people — were reported to have access to the service.
The report also says more information about where palliative care was received and the types of care offered are to be included in a follow-up report in 2024.
Downie said the federal government can pursue "parallel tracks" by allowing MAID access while also improving care and other social services.
"One thing is just the moral argument that you don't hold individuals hostage for systemic failings," she said.
Dr. Sonu Gaind, psychiatrist-in-chief at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, expressed concern about how the report describes people who accessed MAID whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable. According to the report, 3.5 per cent of all MAID recipients — 463 people — did not have reasonably foreseeable deaths.
"The proportion of MAID recipients whose natural death was not reasonably foreseeable continues to remain very small compared to the total number of MAID recipients," the report says.
In 2021, just 2.2 per cent of MAID recipients — 223 people — were patients whose natural deaths were not reasonably foreseeable. Gaind said the report "completely minimizes the numbers."
Gaind also said the report contains no data related to equity and diversity issues or marginalized populations. According to the report, that information will be included in the 2024 report.
"They're saying that won't be recorded until next year's report," Gaind said. "And yet, we're still going ahead with further expansion."
MAID expansion set for March 2024
The new report comes as the federal government prepares to expand MAID eligibility to those whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness.
The expansion originally was planned for 2023. The federal government tabled a bill delaying the move until March 2024 to provide more time for provinces, territories and doctors to develop guidelines.
Some advocates are still concerned about the additional delay. Dr. Chantal Perrot is one of them; she's a MAID provider and board member with Dying with Dignity Canada, a charity committed to protecting end-of-life rights.
"It doesn't seem to be that there's really a will on the part of the government to follow through with this," Perrot said, adding government committees "are started and then stopped" on the issue.
Vachon, who said she was "very concerned" about the planned expansion, cited September polling data from Angus Reid in partnership with Cardus. In that poll, 82 per cent of respondents agreed that "MAID eligibility should not be expanded in Canada without improving access to mental health care first."
Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre has said a government led by him would repeal MAID for the mentally ill.
WATCH: Poilievre supports withholding MAID from people suffering solely from mental illness
Featured VideoLeader of the Opposition Pierre Poilievre says he is ‘pleased to support’ Conservative MP Ed Fast’s private member’s bill ‘that would ensure that medical assistance in dying is not the solution to people suffering with their mental health.’
Conservative leader supports bill to withhold MAID from those suffering solely from mental illness
Downie said the upcoming expansion is "essential" because she thinks excluding people with mental disorders on the basis of their diagnosis is "discriminatory."
"To exclude in that way is stigmatizing, it's paternalistic," Downie said. "I don't think there's any justification for the exclusion."
Downie said she expects an "incredibly small number" of people with mental disorders will get access to MAID due to the request and assessment processes.
"Many will be found not to be eligible, many will be diverted by actually getting access to different kinds of services and supports," she said.
People suffering solely from a mental illness will be eligible for MAID as of March 17, 2024.
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Saturday, October 28, 2023
Sedition Hunters: how ordinary Americans helped track down the Capitol rioters
For one rioter at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, wearing a Caterpillar hoodie proved a bad fashion choice. Admittedly, with an American flag-patterned cap and some shades, the garment helped shield his identity as he manhandled a police officer. Yet it came back to haunt him. Investigators used an app and facial-recognition technology to zero in and eventually got their man: Logan Barnhart, a construction worker in Michigan with a passion for fitness. His résumé included bodybuilding and modeling for romance novel covers. While hitting a punching bag in a workout video, he wore some familiar attire: a Caterpillar sweatshirt. Cue the Dragnet music.
There was something else remarkable about this investigation: the sleuths were ordinary Americans, part of a spontaneously formed citizen network volunteering their time to track down Capitol rioters. Now their story is shared in a book that takes its name from the movement, Sedition Hunters: How January 6 Broke the Justice System, by Ryan J Reilly, an NBC News justice reporter.
“They were really just random Americans who got together and decided they wanted to do something about what happened on January 6,” Reilly says.
Those random Americans did not just identify Barnhart. They sought and found other rioters who stormed the Capitol after Donald Trump refused to accept his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden and invited supporters to rally in Washington on the day Congress was to certify the results. Now, one of the Sedition Hunters, Forrest Rogers, is using his talents to siphon out misinformation of a different sort – as a journalist reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a newspaper based in Zurich.
In the wake of January 6, the citizen sleuths proved invaluable to the FBI, which Reilly describes as reeling from the fallout of the riots and overwhelmed by the subsequent federal investigation, the largest in American history, as an initial estimate of 800 rioters entering the Capitol ballooned to more than 3,000.
While the FBI approached the task with antiquated technology, the Sedition Hunters had all the latest tools, including the app that helped catch Barnhart, which was designed in a garage by one particular sleuth, known only as Alex in Reilly’s book. Many others did such critical work. Like Alex, “Joan” used an article of clothing to pin down a suspect. In her case, it was a blue-and-white sweatshirt from a school in her home town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, worn by a Capitol window-smasher. Its wearer had also been seen inside but all she had was a nickname: “Zeeker.” Joan searched the school’s Facebook page. Zeeker turned out to be Leo Brent Bozell IV, scion of a conservative dynasty.
By the time of Bozell’s arrest, two other people had identified him to authorities. Both knew him. Although there are occasional mentions in the book of people who turned in rioters they knew, the Sedition Hunters focused on tracking down hard-to-find individuals who they had never met.
“It was easy to get the person virtually if they posted their own crime, built their own case on a social media post,” Reilly says. “Some of them were making efforts to hide their identity in some way.”
In his hoodie, baseball cap and sunglasses, one of many faces in a mob, Barnhart was tough to identify. Alex’s app proved a gamechanger. It created a virtual library of images of the attack collected by the Sedition Hunters, which they could now search to unmask the culprit. Each suspect was given a relevant nickname: Barnhart was “CatSweat”, for his Caterpillar garb. Ironically, an image from the rightwing social media platform Parler delivered the coup de grace. Facial recognition technology confirmed CatSweat as Barnhart. His social media accounts yielded further confirmation: a hat he wore in one photo matched his headgear on January 6. On Twitter, he promised Trump he would “be there” at the Capitol that day.
Asked if any of the Sedition Hunters were secretly FBI agents, Reilly discounts the possibility with a quip: “They were way too skilled.” More seriously, he adds: “I think that really is what they brought to bear.”
The Sedition Hunters sometimes outperformed their professional counterparts. The FBI made some wrong hits. John Richter, a Biden campaign worker, shared his name with a rioter who reached the Senate floor. Guess who was apprehended first? Although the Democratic Richter convinced them they had the wrong guy, with help from his puppy, two years would pass before the feds arrested the actual rioter.
“This guy worked for Joe Biden, got him elected,” Reilly says. “He was probably not the man to look for … Stopping the election of a man he worked for did not make a lot of sense.”
Reilly also notes that conservative elements within the FBI supported Trump and were lukewarm on investigating those who rioted for him.
“Despite what we heard the past seven or eight years from Donald Trump, at its core, it’s a conservative organization,” Reilly says. “A lot of people generally lean conservative. It does not mean they’re all Trump supporters, but there was a lot of whataboutism in the FBI after the Capitol attacks.”
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Reilly does provide many examples of FBI personnel acting on tips from the Sedition Hunters. After Joan made her initial identification of Zeeker as Bozell and communicated this to the bureau, she kept scanning images from the riots for that blue-and-white sweatshirt. This uncovered further evidence of his violent actions, which she also transmitted. A special agent thanked her, promised to update prosecutors and made good on that vow, an additional charge against Bozell being brought within 24 hours.
Reilly is mindful of some developments still on the horizon. There is a five-year statute of limitations for Capitol rioters – 6 January 2026 – so the window to bring remaining fugitives to justice is about two and a half years wide. There’s a wild card too: what happens if Trump wins the presidency again and decides to issue pardons?
“I think it’s very real,” Reilly says of that possibility. “He said he’s going to. To me, it really depends on what the extent is going to be … You can easily see him pardoning everybody who committed misdemeanors, something like that.”
Of more serious charges, he adds: “I don’t know across the board.”
Who knows what will happen. For now, readers can savor the unheralded work of the Sedition Hunters, best summed up in Joan’s reflection about helping bring Bozell to justice: “He probably would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling sleuths.”
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Designing a Movie for Sound (1999)
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© by Randy Thom 1999 The biggest myth about composing and sound designing is that they are about creating great sounds. Not true, or at least not true enough. What is Sound Design? What passes for "great sound" in films today is too often merely loud sound. High fidelity recordings of gunshots and explosions, and well fabricated alien creature vocalizations do not constitute great sound design. A well-orchestrated and recorded piece of musical score has minimal value if it hasn’t been integrated into the film as a whole. Giving the actors plenty of things to say in every scene isn’t necessarily doing them, their characters, or the movie a favor. Sound, musical and otherwise, has value when it is part of a continuum, when it changes over time, has dynamics, and resonates with other sound and with other sensory experiences. What I propose is that the way for a filmmaker to take advantage of sound is not simply to make it possible to record good sound on the set, or simply to hire a talented sound designer/composer to fabricate sounds, but rather to design the film with sound in mind, to allow sound’s contributions to influence creative decisions in the other crafts. Films as different from "Star Wars" as "Citizen Kane," "Raging Bull," "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," "Never Cry Wolf" and "Once Upon A Time In The West" were thoroughly "sound designed," though no sound designer was credited on most of them. Does every film want, or need, to be like Star Wars or Apocalypse Now? Absolutely not. But lots of films could benefit from those models. Sidney Lumet said recently in an interview that he had been amazed at what Francis Coppola and Walter Murch had been able to accomplish in the mix of "Apocalypse Now." Well, what was great about that mix began long before anybody got near a dubbing stage. In fact, it began with the script, and with Coppola’s inclination to give the characters in "Apocalypse" the opportunity to listen to the world around them. Many directors who like to think they appreciate sound still have a pretty narrow idea of the potential for sound in storytelling. The generally accepted view is that it’s useful to have "good" sound in order to enhance the visuals and root the images in a kind of temporal reality. But that isn’t collaboration, it’s slavery. And the product it yields is bound to be less complex and interesting than it would be if sound could somehow be set free to be an active player in the process. Only when each craft influences every other craft does the movie begin to take on a life of it’s own. A Thing Almost Alive The Basic Terrain, As It Is Now What follows is a list of some of the bleak realities faced by those of us who work in film sound, and some suggestions for improving the situation. Pre-Production Serious consideration of the way sound will be used in the story is typically left up to the director. Unfortunately, most directors have only the vaguest notions of how to use sound because they haven’t been taught it either. In virtually all film schools sound is taught as if it were simply a tedious and mystifying series of technical operations, a necessary evil on the way to doing the fun stuff. Production There is rarely any discussion, for example, of what should be heard rather than seen. If several of our characters are talking in a bar, maybe one of them should be over in a dark corner. We hear his voice, but we don’t see him. He punctuates the few things he says with the sound of a bottle he rolls back and forth on the table in front of him. Finally he puts a note in the bottle and rolls it across the floor of the dark bar. It comes to a stop at the feet of the characters we see. This approach could be played for comedy, drama, or some of both as it might have been in "Once Upon A Time In The West." Either way, sound is making a contribution. The use of sound will strongly influence the way the scene is set up. Starving the eye will inevitably bring the ear, and therefore the imagination, more into play. Post Production The dismal environment surrounding the recording of ADR is in some ways symbolic of the secondary role of sound. Everyone acknowledges that production dialog is almost always superior in performance quality to ADR. Most directors and actors despise the process of doing ADR. Everyone goes into ADR sessions assuming that the product will be inferior to what was recorded on the set, except that it will be intelligible, whereas the set recording (in most cases where ADR is needed) was covered with noise and/or is distorted. This lousy attitude about the possibility of getting anything wonderful out of an ADR session turns, of course, into a self fulfilling prophecy. Essentially no effort is typically put into giving the ADR recording experience the level of excitement, energy, and exploration that characterized the film set when the cameras were rolling. The result is that ADR performances almost always lack the "life" of the original. They’re more-or-less in sync, and they’re intelligible. Why not record ADR on location, in real-world places which will inspire the actors and provide realistic acoustics? That would be taking ADR seriously. like so many other sound-centered activities in movies, ADR is treated as basically a technical operation, to be gotten past as quickly and cheaply as possible. Taking Sound Seriously Writing For Sound It seems to me that one element of writing for movies stands above all others in terms of making the eventual movie as "cinematic" as possible: establishing point of view. The audience experiences the action through its identification with characters. The writing needs to lay the ground work for setting up pov before the actors, cameras, microphones, and editors come into play. Each of these can obviously enhance the element of pov, but the script should contain the blueprint. Let’s say we are writing a story about a guy who, as a boy, loved visiting his father at the steel mill where he worked. The boy grows up and seems to be pretty happy with his life as a lawyer, far from the mill. But he has troubling, ambiguous nightmares that eventually lead him to go back to the town where he lived as a boy in an attempt to find the source of the bad dreams. The description above doesn’t say anything specific about the possible use of sound in this story, but I have chosen basic story elements which hold vast potential for sound. First, it will be natural to tell the story more-or-less through the pov of our central character. But that’s not all. A steel mill gives us a huge palette for sound. Most importantly, it is a place which we can manipulate to produce a set of sounds which range from banal to exciting to frightening to weird to comforting to ugly to beautiful. The place can therefore become a character, and have its own voice, with a range of "emotions" and "moods." And the sounds of the mill can resonate with a wide variety of elements elsewhere in the story. None of this good stuff is likely to happen unless we write, shoot, and edit the story in a way that allows it to happen. The element of dream in the story swings a door wide open to sound as a collaborator. In a dream sequence we as film makers have even more latitude than usual to modulate sound to serve our story, and to make connections between the sounds in the dream and the sounds in the world for which the dream is supplying clues. Likewise, the "time border" between the "little boy" period and the "grown-up" period offers us lots of opportunities to compare and contrast the two worlds, and his perception of them. Over a transition from one period to the other, one or more sounds can go through a metamorphosis. Maybe as our guy daydreams about his childhood, the rhythmic clank of a metal shear in the mill changes into the click clack of the railroad car taking him back to his home town. Any sound, in itself, only has so much intrinsic appeal or value. On the other hand, when a sound changes over time in response to elements in the larger story, its power and richness grow exponentially. Opening The Door For Sound, Efficient Dialog In recent years there has been a trend, which may be in insidious influence of bad television, toward non-stop dialog in films The wise old maxim that it’s better to say it with action than words seems to have lost some ground. Quentin Tarantino has made some excellent films which depend heavily on dialog, but he’s incorporated scenes which use dialog sparsely as well. There is a phenomenon in movie making that my friends and I sometimes call the "100% theory." Each department-head on a film, unless otherwise instructed, tends to assume that it is 100% his or her job to make the movie work. The result is often a logjam of uncoordinated visual and aural product, each craft competing for attention, and often adding up to little more than noise unless the director and editor do their jobs extremely well. Characters need to have the opportunity to listen. Picture and Sound as Collaborators The contrast between a sound heard at a distance, and that same sound heard close-up can be a very powerful element. If our guy and an old friend are walking toward the mill, and they hear, from several blocks away, the sounds of the machines filling the neighborhood, there will be a powerful contrast when they arrive at the mill gate. As a former production sound mixer, if a director had ever told me that a scene was to be shot a few blocks away from the mill set in order to establish how powerfully the sounds of the mill hit the surrounding neighborhood, I probably would have gone straight into a coma after kissing his feet. Directors essentially never base their decisions about where to shoot a scene on the need for sound to make a story contribution. Why not? Art Direction and Sound as Collaborators It’s wonderful when a movie gives you the sense that you really know the places in it. That each place is alive, has character and moods. A great actor will find ways to use the place in which he finds himself in order to reveal more about the person he plays. We need to hear the sounds that place makes in order to know it. We need to hear the actor’s voice reverberating there. And when he is quiet we need to hear the way that place will be without him. Starving The Eye, The Usefulness Of Ambiguity Let’s assume we as film makers want to take sound seriously, and that the first issues have already been addressed: 2) Locations have been chosen, and sets designed which don’t rule out sound as a player, and in fact, encourage it. 3) There is not non-stop dialog. Here are some ways to tease the eye, and thereby invite the ear to the party: The Beauty of Long Lenses and Short Lenses Dutch Angles and Moving Cameras Darkness Around the Edge Of the Frame Slow Motion Black and White Images Whenever we as an audience are put into a visual "space" in which we are encouraged to "feel" rather than "think," what comes into our ears can inform those feelings and magnify them. What Do All Of These Visual Approaches Have In Common? We, the film makers, are all sitting around a table in pre-production, brainstorming about how to manufacture the most delectable bait possible, and how to make it seem like it isn’t bait at all. (Aren’t the most interesting stories always told by guys who have to be begged to tell them?) We know that we want to sometimes use the camera to withhold information, to tease, or to put it more bluntly: to seduce. The most compelling method of seduction is inevitably going to involve sound as well. Ideally, the unconscious dialog in the minds of the audience should be something like: "What I’m seeing isn’t giving me enough information. What I’m hearing is ambiguous, too. But the combination of the two seems to be pointing in the direction of a vaguely familiar container into which I can pour my experience and make something I never before quite imagined." Isn’t it obvious that the microphone plays just as important a role in setting up this performance as does the camera? Editing Picture With Sound In Mind Walter Murch, film editor and sound designer, uses lots of unconventional techniques. One of them is to spend a certain period of his picture editing time not listening to the sound at all. He watches and edits the visual images without hearing the sync sound which was recorded as those images were photographed. This approach can ironically be a great boon to the use of sound in the movie. If the editor can imagine the sound (musical or otherwise) which might eventually accompany a scene, rather than listen to the rough, dis-continuous, often annoying sync track, then the cutting will be more likely to leave room for those beats in which sound other than dialog will eventually make its contribution. Sound’s Talents
At any given moment in a film, sound is likely to be doing several of these things at once. But sound, if it’s any good, also has a life of its own, beyond these utilitarian functions. And its ability to be good and useful to the story, and powerful, beautiful and alive will be determined by the state of the ocean in which it swims, the film. Try as you may to paste sound onto a predetermined structure, the result will almost always fall short of your hopes. But if you encourage the sounds of the characters, the things, and the places in your film to inform your decisions in all the other film crafts, then your movie may just grow to have a voice beyond anything you might have dreamed. So, what does a sound designer do? This dream has been a difficult one to realize, and in fact has made little headway since the early 1970s. The term sound designer has come to be associated simply with using specialized equipment to make "special" sound effects. On "THX-1138" and "The Conversation" Walter Murch was the Sound Designer in the fullest sense of the word. The fact hat he was also a Picture Editor on "The Conversation" and "Apocalypse Now" put him in a position to shape those films in ways that allowed them to use sound in an organic and powerful way. No other sound designers on major American films have had that kind of opportunity. So, the dream of giving sound equal status to image is deferred. Someday the Industry may appreciate and foster the model established by Murch. Until then, whether you cut the dialog, write the script, record music, perform foley, edit the film, direct the film or do any one of a hundred other jobs, anybody who shapes sound, edits sound, or even considers sound when making a creative decision in another craft is, at least in a limited sense, designing sound for the movie, and designing the movie for sound.
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Friday, October 27, 2023
Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom
Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom
You should spend more time being bored.
I spent twenty minutes staring at a wall. Was it worth my time? Yes. Did I look a little bit crazy doing it? Maybe a little.
My friend Josh Shipton recently talked about the Power of Embracing Boredom, and how boredom is needed for your mind to process your thoughts. One exercise he recommends is to sit down, and stare at a wall. I had my doubts, but after one session of staring at a wall, I found it extremely rewarding.
The exercise is quite simple to do:
- Set up a timer for ten to thirty minutes
- Stare at a wall
I found the exercise to be most effective with twenty minutes and a white wall.
Unexpected Insights
During my walling session, a scene from The Lego Movie unexpectedly came to mind: the moment when the old wizard and the emo girl discover Emmet's profoundly empty mind. While they initially mock him for this and crush the idea of a double-decker couch, their laughter is cut short upon witnessing the vision of 'The Man Upstairs'.
Master Builders spend years training themselves to clear their minds enough to have even a fleeting glimpse of The Man Upstairs.
- The Old Wizard Guy
This exercise taps into the same power that many meditation practices aim for - an uncluttered mind. When our minds are clear, they become fertile grounds for introspection and fresh ideas. In just twenty minutes, I generated more insights and processed more unfinished thoughts than if I had simply tried to write them down at a desk.
One aspect I appreciate is how simple this exercise is. In the past, I've tried other meditation techniques, only to feel lost as if I was somehow meditating incorrectly. But sitting in front of a wall? There's some unexpected beauty to it. The sheer emptiness seems to prompt the mind better than just closing my eyes and thinking. And the slight discomfort of staring at a wall for twenty minutes provides just enough sensation to anchor you to the present. It's the perfect nudge to keep you grounded in the moment.
Don't get Lost in the Sauce
During my "walling" session, I reflected about the importance of Taking a Step Back - we should schedule times in the future to take a step back to make sure that we're not losing sight of the bigger picture or becoming too obsessed with minor details - essentially, not getting "lost in the sauce".
Lately, I've become interested in entrepreneurship and how startups work - reading books like The Lean Startup, Zero to One and The Mom Test. While they've offered invaluable insights, I find myself at a crossroads. Should I continue grokking knowledge through reading, or is it time to take the leap and start building a startup?
Take "The Lean Startup" for instance. It emphasises that startups operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty. The key to succeeding is to write down the riskiest assumptions and validate or invalidate them with MVPs (Minimal Viable Products). This insight alone has probably saved me a huge mistake in the future. Yet I'm left wondering: Would diving into more books be as beneficial as actually building and bringing my startup idea to life? Are there insights in the next chapter that could supercharge my performance? It's hard to say.
While staring at the wall, I realised that just as it's easy to get lost in thought, it's also easy to get lost in endless reading and preparation. Sometimes, we need to step back, reflect on what we've learned, and take action. Reading about startups is helpful, but at some point, we need to start building one.
Final Thoughts
I think you should stare at a wall at least once. If that doesn't suit you, go on a walk and deliberately plan to be bored. Leave your phone at home. Don't bring your headphones. Simply immerse yourself in your surroundings, free from distractions. Lose track of time and appreciate the world around you.
You should spend more time being bored.
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A small warning about UDP based protocols
The Gemini protocol has inspried others to implement “simple” protocols, like Mercury (alternate link), Spartan (alternate link) and Nex (alternate link). But there's another protocol being designed that has me worried—Guppy (alternate link), which based on UDP instead of TCP.
Yes, UDP is simpler than TCP. Yes, you can get results with just one exchange of packets. But the downside of UDP is that you will be exploited for amplification attacks! I found this out the hard way a few years ago and shut down my UDP QOTD service. Any time you have a UDP-based protocol where a small packet to the server results in a large packet from the server will be exploited with a constant barrage of forged packets. That's one reason for the TCP three-way handshake.
Also, the Guppy protocol spec states, “it's an experiment in designing a protocol simpler than Gopher and Spartan, which provides a similar feature set but with faster transfer speeds (for small documents) and using a much simpler software stack,” but there's a downside—you can easily over-saturate a link with data, which is another reason UDP is popular for amplification attacks. Congestion control is one reason why TCP exists (some say it's the only reason and the other benefits, like a reliable, stream-oriented connection is a side effect of the design).
My intent here isn't to discourage experimentation. I like the fact that people are experiementing with this stuff. But I do want to pass along some painful experiences I had when playing around with UDP on the open Internet.
You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.
The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:
https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01
You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.
You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.
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Thursday, October 26, 2023
Yugoslavia's Digital Twin: when a country's internet domain outlives the nation
The archives of Nettime, an early internet mailing list, have preserved emails from addresses with a suffix you don’t see around anymore: .yu, for Yugoslavia. Many of them, such as the email from insomnia@EU.net.yu above, contain first-hand accounts from the Yugoslav Wars, one of the earliest conflicts documented on the internet. Most of these digital artifacts from the former Eastern European country have disappeared from the web, falling victim to failed server migrations and ever-changing institutions. The greatest loss was perhaps the .yu domain itself.
The story of .yu begins in 1989, when computer scientist Borka Jerman-Blažič and her team in Ljubljana began their multi-year endeavor to connect Yugoslavia to the internet. At the time, the question of which communication protocol would result in the best computer networks was the subject of fierce debate among computer engineers. On one side were the proponents of the internet, who championed a decentralized approach focused on practical connectivity and collaboration: “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code,” scientist David Clark famously said in 1992. On the other side were advocates of competing communication models such as Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) and X.25, who wanted a more complex and bureaucratic protocol that emphasized reliability and security. Jerman-Blažič, who is now 76 years old and lives in Ljubljana, told me that she liked the simplicity of the internet, but the funding for her lab came from European initiatives that supported X.25. She came up with a way to use both: wrapping the internet messages into the X.25 format and, with the help of friends, sending them via the X.25 network to the closest node that could translate them. “I asked my Austrian colleagues to allow me to use the leased line from Vienna to CERN [an intergovernmental research institute in Geneva], and my German friends to use the EASYnet lines from CERN to Amsterdam,” she said. In Amsterdam, the X.25 messages would get converted back into internet to reach their final destination, the U.S, where Jerman-Blažič’s colleagues could read and respond to her emails, share software and research, and more. It took two years of bargaining with government officials to get permission to set up the entry point for the Yugoslavian network in Jerman-Blažič’s lab in Slovenia.
Just months before the internet connection went live in 1991, Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia. The country for which .yu was created was falling apart. Though .yu outlived Yugoslavia by two decades, Jerman-Blažic and her colleagues became the first to contend with an unprecedented set of questions that remain relevant to this day: As nation states rise, fall, and change shape, who decides whether and when to retire a country’s domain? When a domain is deleted, what happens to all of the websites and mailing lists under it, and all of the knowledge they contain?
✺
A domain name is an address that points to a website, such as “thedial.world.” Domains are assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which from 1983 until 1998 was run by two computer scientists from California — Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds. Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense from 1988-1998, IANA’s role was to keep track of who was who on the internet. The letters after the last dot of domain names, called top-level domains (TLDs), are meant to help users understand the nature of the website they’re about to visit. There are several types of TLDs, including generic ones like .com (commercial business) and .world, and country codes such as .yu (Yugoslavia) or .uk (United Kingdom). When a country code is established, all of the information on that domain is managed by the respective national government or a designated entity within that country.
The political implications of country code domains, which have essentially baked borders into the internet, were not considered by IANA when they were established. In fact, the organization made a point of distancing themselves from the politics of domain management entirely. “Concerns about ‘rights’ and ‘ownership’ of domains are inappropriate,” Jon Postel wrote in a memo in 1994. “It is appropriate to be concerned about ‘responsibilities’ and ‘service’ to the community.” Further, he adds that “The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country.” To this day, the organization allocates domains based on the international standard ISO 3166-1, which assigns a two-letter code to each of the United Nations member states. (Kosovo, for example, is still not a member of the U.N. and, as a result, does not have an official TLD.)
When IANA delegated .yu to Jerman-Blažič in 1989, ethnic and national tensions in Yugoslavia were escalating due to economic difficulties and a constitutional crisis in the region. The country, officially known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, emerged after World War II and included several constituent republics: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia. As a socialist federation, Yugoslavia pursued a policy of non-alignment during the Cold War, maintaining independence from both the Eastern and Western Blocs. Despite initial unity, the state ultimately fell apart as nationalism rose in each of the republics. Slovenia and Croatia were the first countries to declare formal independence in June 1991.
If they wanted to access the internet, they either had to wait for the name disputes to be resolved and get assigned a new domain, or to somehow get .yu back.
Jerman-Blažič’s newly established international line was instrumental in documenting the Ten-Day War that followed Slovenia’s declaration of independence. Slovenian scientists used the network to send email updates on the war, including summaries of daily press conferences held by the Slovenian government, to all of the universities and academics they worked with. Jerman-Blažič told me that the emails inspired her colleagues at Columbia University in New York to write to the White House in support of Slovenian independence and, she believes, helped shape public opinion on the issue.
Theoretically, the life of .yu should have ended with Slovenia’s independence. When the country joined the United Nations a year later it received a new domain from IANA — .si — and the Slovenian government established a new entity to manage it, the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES). While the scientists at ARNES were waiting for .si to go live, however, they needed another way to get online. On a Sunday in July 1992, Jerman-Blažič told me that ARNES, which included some of her former colleagues, broke into her lab, copied the domain software and data from the server, and cut off the line that connected it to the network. “Both ARNES directors had no knowledge of internet networking and did not know how to run the domain server,” she said. Though they only used the network for email, ARNES secretly kept .yu running for the next two years, ignoring requests from a rival group of scientists in Serbia who needed the domain for their work.
Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro adopted the name “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” in an imperialist aspiration to become its sole legal successor. The succession claims were rejected by the U.N., which imposed war sanctions on the new state, including a ban on scientific and technical cooperation, and required it to re-apply for membership. Serbian scientists were subsequently cut off from all international network traffic. If they wanted to access the internet, they either had to wait for the name disputes to be resolved and get assigned a new domain, or to somehow get .yu back. Because ARNES refused to cooperate, scientists at the University of Belgrade ended up emailing Jon Postel, the IANA founding manager, directly to override the regulations. After nearly two years of correspondence, Postel agreed to transfer .yu to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1994. In the name of global academic cooperation, .yu lived on.
As the former states of Yugoslavia were being reconfigured and reshaped, IANA was going through a transition of its own. In the late 90s, as the project was growing in importance, Postel and many members of the internet community called for a more transparent, institutionalized approach to network governance. This led to the creation of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in late 1998. IANA became a function of ICANN, which has been the subject of countless heated discussions and restructuring efforts over the years, to address the legal and technical challenges of running an international entity that functions independently from governments, while making sure its governance structure is resilient to bad actors and takeovers.
In 2002, Serbia and Montenegro officially agreed to stop using the name Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, but .yu remained in use. When Montenegro declared independence in 2006, ICANN created two new domains: .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro, under the condition that .yu would be “retired.” After years of bureaucratic delays, the domain was finally shut down in 2010. Over 4,000 websites, some of the earliest examples of internet culture from the region, suddenly became inaccessible via their original domain. For many, the deletion of .yu represented the final loss of the former country, the erasure of its digital identity.
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Limewash (2005) [pdf]
This article is a link to a PDF. Download the PDF: https://www.lime.org/documents/lime_basics/limewash.pdf
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My Left Kidney
A person has two kidneys; one advises him to do good and one advises him to do evil. And it stands to reason that the one advising him to do good is to his right and the one that advises him to do evil is to his left.
— Talmud (Berakhot 61a)
I.
As I left the Uber, I saw with horror the growing wet spot around my crotch. “It’s not urine!”, I almost blurted to the driver, before considering that 1) this would just call attention to it and 2) it was urine. “It’s not my urine,” was my brain’s next proposal - but no, that was also false. “It is urine, and it is mine, but just because it’s pooling around my crotch doesn’t mean I peed myself; that’s just a coincidence!” That one would have been true, but by the time I thought of it he had driven away.
Like most such situations, it began with a Vox article.
II.
I make fun of Vox journalists a lot, but I want to give them credit where credit is due: they contain valuable organs, which can be harvested and given to others.
I thought about this when reading Dylan Matthews’ Why I Gave My Kidney To A Stranger - And Why You Should Consider Doing It Too. Six years ago, Matthews donated a kidney. Not to any particular friend or family member. He just thought about it, realized he had two kidneys, realized there were thousands of people dying from kidney disease, and felt like he should help. He contacted his local hospital, who found a suitable recipient and performed the surgery. He described it as “the most rewarding experience of my life”:
As I’m no doubt the first person to notice, being an adult is hard. You are consistently faced with choices — about your career, about your friendships, about your romantic life, about your family — that have deep moral consequences, and even when you try the best you can, you’re going to get a lot of those choices wrong. And you more often than not won’t know if you got them wrong or right. Maybe you should’ve picked another job, where you could do more good. Maybe you should’ve gone to grad school. Maybe you shouldn’t have moved to a new city.
So I was selfishly, deeply gratified to have made at least one choice in my life that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt was the right one.
Something about that last line struck a chord in me. Still, making decisions about internal organs based on a Vox article sounded like the worst idea. This was going to require more research.
III.
Matthews says kidney donation is fantastically low-risk:
The risk of death in surgery is 3.1 in 10,000, or 1.3 in 10,000 if (like me) you don't suffer from hypertension. For comparison, that’s a little higher and a little lower, respectively, than the risk of pregnancy-related death in the US
. The risk isn’t zero (this is still major surgery), but death is extraordinarily rare. Indeed, there’s no good evidence that donating reduces your life expectancy at all [...]The procedure does increase your risk of kidney failure — but the average donor still has only a 1 to 2 percent chance of that happening. The vast majority of donors, 98 to 99 percent, don’t have kidney failure later on. And those who do get bumped up to the top of the waiting list due to their donation.
I checked the same resources Matthews probably had, and I agreed.
It was my girlfriend (at the time) who figured out the flaw in our calculation. She was both brilliant and pathologically anxious, which can be a powerful combination: her zeal to justify her neuroses gave her above-genius-level ability to ferret out medical risks that doctors and journalists had missed. She made it her project to dissuade me from donating, did a few hours’ research, and reported back that although the risk of dying from the surgery was indeed 1/10,000, the risk of dying from the screening exam was 1/660 .
I regret to inform you she is right. The screening exam involves a “multiphase abdominal CT”, a CAT scan that looks at the kidneys and their associated blood vessels and checks if they’re all in the right place. This involves a radiation dose of about 30 milli-Sieverts. The usual rule of thumb is that one extra Sievert = 5% higher risk of dying from cancer, so a 30 mS dose increases death risk about one part in 660. Further, there are about two nonfatal cases of cancer for every fatal case, so the total cancer risk from the exam could be as high as 1/220
.I discussed this concern with transplant doctors at UCSF and the National Kidney Foundation, who seemed very surprised to hear it, but couldn’t really come up with any evidence against. I asked if they could do the kidney scan with an MRI (non-radioactive) instead of a CT. They agreed
.The short-term risks taken care of, my girlfriend and I moved on to arguing about the longer-term ones. One kidney starts out with half the GFR (glomerular filtration rate, a measure of the kidneys’ filtering ability) of two kidneys. After a few months, it grows a little to pick up the slack, stabilizing at about 70% of your pre-donation GFR. 70% of a normal healthy person’s GFR is more than enough.
But you lose GFR as you age. Most people never lose enough GFR to matter; they die of something else first. But some people lose GFR faster than normal and end up with chronic kidney disease, which can cause fatigue and increase your chance of other problems like heart attacks and strokes. If you donate one kidney, and so start with only 70% of normal GFR, you have a slightly higher chance of being in this group whose GFR decline eventually becomes a problem. How much of a chance? According to Matthews, “1 to 2 percent”.
The studies showing this are a bit of a mess. Non-controlled studies find that kidney donors have lower lifetime risk of kidney disease than the general population. But this is because kidney donors are screened for good kidney health. It’s good to know that donation is so low-risk that it doesn’t overcome this pre-existing advantage. But in order to quantify the risk exactly, we need to find a better control group.
Two large studies tried to compare kidney donors to other people who would have passed the kidney donation screening if they had applied, and who therefore were valid controls. An American study of 347 donors found no increased mortality after an average followup of 6 years. A much bigger and better Norwegian study of 1901 donors found there was increased mortality after 25 years - so much so that the donors had an extra 5% chance of dying during that period (ie absolute risk increase). But looking more closely at the increased deaths, they were mostly from autoimmune diseases that couldn’t plausibly be related to their donations. The researchers realized that most kidney donors give to family members. If your family member needs a kidney donation, it probably means they have some disease that harms the kidneys. Lots of diseases are genetic, so if your family members have them, you might have them too. They suspected that the increase in mortality was mostly because of genetic diseases which these donors shared with their kidney-needing relatives - diseases which may not have shown up during the screening process.
Muzaale et al investigate this possibility in a sample of 96,217 donors. They were only able to follow for an average 7 years, but used curves derived from other samples to project up to 15 years. They found 34 cases extra cases of ESRD (end-stage renal disease, the most severe form of kidney disease) per 10,000 donors who were related to their recipients, compared to 15 cases per 10,000 for donors who weren’t (the difference wasn’t statistically significant, but I think it’s still correct for unrelated donors to use the unrelated donor number). They estimated a total increased risk of 78/10,000 per lifetime; although I can’t prove it, I think by analogy to the earlier statistic this number should plausibly be ~halved for unrelated donors. So I think that if anything, Matthews is overestimating how worried to be - the real number could be as low as an 0.5 - 1% increase.
On the other hand, I discussed this with my uncle, a nephrologist (kidney doctor), who says he sees suspiciously many patients who donated kidneys 30+ years ago and now have serious kidney disease. None of these studies have followed subjects for 30+ years, and although they can statistically extend their projections, something weird might happen after many decades that deviates from what you would get by just extrapolating the earlier trend. I was eventually able to find Ibrahim et al, which follows some kidney donors for as long as 30-40 years. They find no negative deviation from trend after the 20 year mark. Even up to 35-40 years, donors continue to have less kidney disease than the average non-donor.
This isn’t controlling for selection bias - but neither was my uncle’s anecdotal observation. So although it does make me slightly nervous, I’m not going to treat it as actionable evidence.
Still, my girlfriend ending up begging me not to donate, and I caved. But we broke up in 2019. The next few years were bumpy, but by 2022 my life was in a more stable place and I started thinking about kidneys again. By then I was married. I discussed the risks with my wife and she decided to let me go ahead. So in early November 2022, for the second time, I sent a form to the University of California San Francisco Medical Center saying I wanted to donate a kidney.
IV.
Something else happened that month. On November 11, FTX fell apart and was revealed as a giant scam. Suddenly everyone hated effective altruists. Publications that had been feting us a few months before pivoted to saying they knew we were evil all along. I practiced rehearsing the words “I have never donated to charity, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t care whether it was effective or not”.
But during the flurry of intakes, screenings, and evaluations that UCSF gave me that month, the doctors asked “so what made you want to donate?” And I hadn’t rehearsed an answer to this one, so I blurted out “Have you heard of effective altruism?” I expected the worst. But the usual response was “Oh! Those people! Great, no further explanation needed.” When everyone else abandoned us, the organ banks still thought of us as those nice people who were always giving them free kidneys.
We were giving them a lot of free kidneys. When I talked to my family and non-EA friends about wanting to donate, the usual reaction was “You want to what?!” and then trying to convince me this was unfair to my wife or my potential future children or whatever. When I talked to my EA friends, the reaction was at least “Cool!”. But pretty often it was “Oh yeah, I donated two years ago, want to see my scar?” Most people don’t do interesting things unless they’re in a community where those things have been normalized. I was blessed with a community where this was so normal that I could read a Vox article about it and not vomit it back out.
This is surprising, because kidney donation is only medium effective, as far as altruisms go
. The average donation buys the recipient about 5 - 7 extra years of life (beyond the counterfactual of dialysis). It also improves quality of life from about 70% of the healthy average to about 90%. Non-directed kidney donations can also help the organ bank solve allocation problems around matching donors and recipients of different blood types. Most sources say that an average donated kidney creates a “chain” of about five other donations, but most of these other donations would have happened anyway; the value over counterfactual is about 0.5 to 1 extra transplant completed before the intended recipient dies from waiting too long. So in total, a donation produces about 10 - 20 extra quality-adjusted life years.This is great - my grandfather died of kidney disease, and 10 - 20 more years with him would have meant a lot. But it only costs about $5,000 - $10,000 to produce this many QALYs through bog-standard effective altruist interventions, like buying mosquito nets for malarial regions in Africa. In a Philosophy 101 Thought Experiment sense, if you’re going to miss a lot of work recovering from your surgery, you might as well skip the surgery, do the work, and donate the extra money to Against Malaria Foundation instead
.Obviously this kind of thing is why everyone hates effective altruists. People got so mad at some British EAs who used donor money to “buy a castle”. I read the Brits’ arguments: they’d been running lots of conferences with policy-makers, researchers, etc; those conferences have gone really well and produced some of the systemic change everyone keeps wanting. But conference venues kept ripping them off, having a nice venue of their own would be cheaper in the long run, and after looking at many options, the “castle” was the cheapest. Their math checked out, and I believe them when they say this was the most effective use for that money. For their work, they got a million sneering thinkpieces on how “EA just takes people’s money to buy castles, then sit in them wearing crowns and waving scepters and laughing at poor people”. I respect the British organizers’ willingness to sacrifice their reputation on the altar of doing what was actually good instead of just good-looking.
I worry that people use suffering as a heuristic for goodness. Mother Teresa becomes a hero because living with lepers in the Calcutta slums sounds horrible - so anyone who does it must be really charitable (regardless of whether or not the lepers get helped). Owning a castle is the opposite of suffering - it sounds great - therefore it is fake charity (no matter how much good you do with the castle).
This heuristic isn’t terrible. If you’re suffering for your charity, then it must seem important to you, and you’re obviously not doing it for personal gain. If you do charity in a way that benefits you (like gets you a castle), then the personal gain aspect starts looking suspicious. The problem is the people who elevate it from a suspicion to an automatic condemnation. It seems like such a natural thing to do. And it encourages people to be masochists, sacrificing themselves pointlessly in photogenic ways, instead of thinking about what will actually help others.
But getting back to the point: kidney donation has an unusually high ratio of photogenic suffering to altruistic gains. So why do EAs keep doing it? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll speak for myself.
It starts with wanting, just once, do a good thing that will make people like you more instead of less. It would be morally fraught to do this with money, since any money you spent on improving your self-image would be denied to the people in malarial regions of Africa who need it the most. But it’s not like there’s anything else you can do with that spare kidney.
Still, it’s not just about that. All of this calculating and funging takes a psychic toll. Your brain uses the same emotional heuristics as everyone else’s. No matter how contrarian you pretend to be, deep down it’s hard to make your emotions track what you know is right and not what the rest of the world is telling you. The last Guardian opinion columnist who must be defeated is the Guardian opinion columnist inside your own heart. You want to do just one good thing that you’ll feel unreservedly good about, and where you know somebody’s going to be directly happy at the end of it in a way that doesn’t depend on a giant rickety tower of assumptions.
Dylan Matthews wrote:
As I’m no doubt the first person to notice, being an adult is hard. You are consistently faced with choices — about your career, about your friendships, about your romantic life, about your family — that have deep moral consequences, and even when you try the best you can, you’re going to get a lot of those choices wrong. And you more often than not won’t know if you got them wrong or right. Maybe you should’ve picked another job, where you could do more good. Maybe you should’ve gone to grad school. Maybe you shouldn’t have moved to a new city.
So I was selfishly, deeply gratified to have made at least one choice in my life that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt was the right one.
…and it really resonated. Everything else I try to do, there’s a little voice inside of me which says “Maybe the haters are right, maybe you’re stupid, maybe you’re just doing the easy things. Maybe you’re no good after all, maybe you’ll never be able to figure any of this out. Maybe you should just give up.”
The Talmud is very clear: that voice is called the evil inclination, and it dwells in the left kidney. There is only one way to shut it off forever. I was ready.
IV.
You might not be a masochist. But hospitals are sadists. They want to hear you beg.
After I submitted the donation form, I was evaluated by a horde of indistinguishable women. They all had titles like “Transplant Coordinator”, “Financial Coordinator”, and “Patient Care Representative”. Several were social workers; one was a psychiatrist. They would see me through a buggy version of Zoom that caused various parts of their body to suddenly turn into the UCSF logo, and they all had questions like “Are you sure you want to do this?” and “Are you going to regret this later?” and “Is anyone pressuring you to do this?” and “Are you sure you want to do this?”
After clearing that gauntlet came the tests. Blood tests - I think I must have given between 20 and 50 vials of blood throughout the screening process. Urine tests - both the normal kind where you pee in a cup, and a more involved kind where you have to store all your urine for 24 hours in a big jug, then take it to the lab. “Urinate into a jug” ought to be the easiest thing in the world, but some of the labs have overly complicated jugs that I, with my mere MD, couldn’t always get right - hence my experience accidentally pouring urine on myself in an Uber.
Then came the big guns. Echocardiogram. MRI. One of my urine tests was slightly off, so I also got a nuclear kidney scan, where they injected radioactive liquid in me and monitored how long it took to come out the other end (I remember asking a friend “Can I use your bathroom? My urine might be slightly radioactive today, but it shouldn’t be enough to matter.”)
Finally, five months after I originally applied, I got a phone call from the Transplant Coordinator. The test results were in, and . . . I had been rejected because I’d had mild childhood OCD.
This was something I’d mentioned offhandedly during one of the psych evaluations. As a child, I used to touch objects in odd patterns that only made sense to me. I got diagnosed with OCD, put on SSRIs for a while, finally did therapy at age 15, hadn’t had any problems since. I still go back on SSRIs sometimes when I’m really stressed, and will grudgingly admit to the occasional odd-pattern-touching when no one’s looking.
But it’s nothing anyone would know about if I didn’t tell them! It was mild even at age 15, and it’s been close-to-nonexistent for the past twenty years! Now I’m a successful psychiatrist who owns his own psychiatry practice and helps other people with the condition! I told them all this. They didn’t care.
I asked them if there was anything I could do. They said maybe I could go to therapy for six months, then apply again.
I asked them what kind of therapy was indicated for mild OCD that’s been in remission for twenty years. They sounded kind of surprised to learn there were different types of therapy and said whatever, just talk to someone or something.
I asked them how frequent they thought the therapy needed to be. They sounded kind of surprised to learn that therapy could have different frequencies, and said, you know, therapy, the thing where you talk to someone.
I asked them if they actually knew anything about OCD, psychotherapy, or mental health in general, or if they had just vaguely heard rumors that some people were bad and crazy and shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions, and that a ritual called “therapy” could absolve one of this impurity. They responded as politely as possible under the circumstances, but didn’t change their mind.
I wasn’t going to waste an hour a week for six months, and spend thousands of dollars of my own extremely-not-reimbursed-by-UCSF money, to see a randomly-selected therapist for a condition I’d gotten over twenty years ago, just so I could apply again and get rejected a second time.
This was one of the most infuriating and humiliating things that’s ever happened to me. We throw around a lot of terms like “stigma” and “paternalism”, and I’ve worked with patients who have dealt with all these issues (it’s UCSF in particular a surprising amount of the time!). But I was still surprised how much it hurt when it happened to me. Being denied the right to control your own body because of some meaningless diagnosis on a chart somewhere is surprisingly frustrating, even compared to things that should objectively be worse. I thought I was going to be able to do a good deed that I’d been fantasizing about for years, and some jerk administrator torpedoed my dreams because I had once, long ago, had mild mental health issues.
So I gave up.
I spent the next few weeks unleashing torrents of anti-UCSF abuse at anyone who would listen. This turned out to be very productive! When I was unleashing a torrent of anti-UCSF abuse to Josh Morrison of WaitlistZero, he asked if I’d tried other hospitals.
I hadn’t. I’d assumed they were all in cahoots. But Josh said no, each hospital had their own evaluation process. Weill Cornell, a hospital in NYC, was one of the best transplant centers in the country, and had a reputation for fair and thoughtful pre-donor screening. Why didn’t I talk to them?
NYC was far away, and I hate to travel, but I was just angry enough to accept. At this point I’d forgotten whatever good altruistic motivations I might have originally had and was fueled entirely by spite. Getting my kidney taken out somewhere else felt like it would be a sort of victory over UCSF. So I went for it.
Cornell was lovely. They tried to do as much of the process as they could via Californian intermediaries, so that I only had to fly to New York twice. Their psychiatrist evaluated me, listened to me explain my weak history of OCD, then treated me like a reasonable adult who tells the truth and can handle his own medical decisions. They were concerned that I sometimes self-prescribed Lexapro to deal with anxiety. But we agreed on a compromise: I found another psychiatrist, let her give me the exact same prescription of Lexapro at a much higher cost to my insurance, and that resolved the problem.
So in late September 2023 - ten months after I started the process - I finally got fully cleared to donate, surgery set for October 12.
V.
I knew, in theory, that anaesthetics existed. Still, it’s weird. One moment you’re lying on a table in the OR, steeling yourself up for one of the big ordeals of your life. The next, you’re in a bed in the recovery room, feeling fine. The operation - this thing you’ve been thinking about and dreading for months - exists only as a lacuna in your memory. Not even some kind of fancy lacuna, where you remember the darkness closing in on you beforehand, or have to claw yourself back into consciousness afterwards. The most ordinary of lacunas, like a good night sleep.
There was no pain, not at first. The painkillers and nerve blocks lasted about a day after the surgery. By the time they wore off, it was more of a dull ache. The hospital offered me Tylenol, and I wanted to protest - really? Tylenol? After major surgery? But the Tylenol worked.
Some people will have small complications (I am a doctor, pretty jaded, and my definition of “small” may be different from yours). Dylan Matthews wrote about an issue where his scrotum briefly inflated like a balloon (probably this is one of the ones that doesn’t feel small when it’s happening to you). I missed out on that particular pleasure, but got others in exchange. I had an unusually hard time with the catheter - the nurse taking it out frowned and said the team that put it in had “gone too deep”, as if my urinary tract was the f@#king Mines of Moria - but that was fifteen seconds of intense pain. Then a week afterwards, just when I thought I’d recovered fully, I got bowled over by a UTI which knocked me out for a few days. But overall, I was surprised by the speed and ease of my recovery.
A few hours after the surgery, I walked a few steps. After a day, I got the catheter out and could urinate normally again. After two days, I was eating “SmartGel”, a food substitute that has mysteriously failed to catch on outside of the immobilized-hospital-patient market. After three, I was out of the hospital. After four, I started easing myself back into (remote) work. After a week, I flew cross-country.
. . . and then I got the UTI. If this section sounds schizophrenic, it’s because it’s a compromise between an original draft where I said nothing went wrong and it was amazing, and a later draft written after a haze of bladder pain. Just don’t develop complications, that’s my advice.
Still, I recently heard from the surgeon that my recipient’s side of the surgery was a success, that my kidney was in them and going fine - and that put things back into perspective. To a first approximation, compared to the inherent gravity of taking an organ out of one person and putting it in a second person and saving their life - it was all easy and everything went well. When I look back on this in a decade, I’ll remember it as everything being easy and going well. Even now, with some lingering bladder pain, modern medicine still feels like a miracle.
VI.
In polls, 25 - 50% of Americans say they would donate a kidney to a stranger in need.
This sentence fascinates me because of the hanging “would”. Would, if what? A natural reading is “would if someone needs it”. But there are 100,000 strangers on the waiting list for kidney transplants. Between 5,000 and 40,000 people die each year for lack of sufficient kidneys to transplant. Someone definitely needs it. Yet only about 200 people (0.0001%) donate kidneys per year. Why the gap between 25-50% and 0.0001%?
Some of you will suspect respondents are lying to look good. But these are anonymous surveys. Lying to themselves to feel good, then? Maybe. But I think about myself at age 20, a young philosophy major studying utilitarianism. If someone had asked me a hypothetical about whether I would donate a kidney to a stranger in need, I probably would have said yes. Then I would have continued going about my business, never thinking of it as a thing real-life people could do. Part of this would have been logistics. I wouldn’t have known where to start. Do you need to have special contacts in the surgery industry? Seek out a would-be recipient on your own? Where would you find them? But more of it would have been psychological: it just wasn’t something that the people I knew did, and it would be weird and alienating for me to be the only one.
This is going to be the preachy “and you should donate too!” section you were dreading all along, but I’m not going to make a lot of positive arguments. If 90% of the people who answer yes on those surveys are lying to feel good, then only 3 - 5% really want to donate. But bringing the donation rate from 0.0001% of people to 3 - 5% of people would solve the kidney shortage many times over. The point isn’t to drag anti-donation-extremists kicking and screaming to the operating table. The point is to reach the people who already want to do it, and make them feel comfortable starting the process.
20-year-old me was in that category. The process of making him feel comfortable involved fifteen years of meeting people who already done it. During residency, I met a fellow student doctor who had donated. Later, I got involved in effective altruism, and learned that movement leader Alexander Berger - a guy who can easily direct millions of dollars at whatever cause he wants - had donated his personal kidney as well. Some online friends. Some people I met at conferences. And Dylan Matthews, who I kept crossing paths with (most recently at the Manifest journalism panel). After enough of these people, it no longer felt like something that nobody does, and then I felt like I had psychological permission to do it.
(obviously saints can do good things without needing psychological permission first, but not everyone has to be in that category, and I found it easier to get the psychological permission than to self-modify into a saint
.)So I’m mostly not going to argue besides saying: this is a thing I did, it’s a thing hundreds of other people do each year, getting started is as simple as filling out a form, and if it works for you, you should go for it
.When I woke up in the recovery room after surgery, I felt great. Amazing. Content, peaceful, proud of myself. Mostly this was because I was on enough opioids to supply a San Francisco homeless encampment for a month. But probably some of it was also the warm glow of having made a difference or something. That could be you!
VII.
The ten of you who will listen to this and donate are great. That brings the kidney shortage down from 40,000 to 39,990/year.
Everyone knows we need a systemic solution, and everyone knows what that solution will eventually have to be: financial compensation for kidney donors. But so far they haven’t been able to get together enough of a coalition to overcome the usual cabal of evil bioethicists who thwart every medical advance.
My kidney donation “mentor”
Ned Brooks is starting a new push - the Coalition To Modify NOTA - which proposes a $100,000 refundable tax credit - $10,000 per year for 10 years - for kidney donors. There would be a waiting period and you’d have to get evaluated first, so junkies couldn’t walk in off the street and get $100K to spend on fentanyl. No intermediate company would “profit” off the transaction, and rich people wouldn’t be able to pay directly to jump in line. It would be the same kidney donation system we have now, except the donors get $100,000 back after saving the government $1MM+.(I’m a libertarian and would normally prefer a free market, but “avoid taxes by selling your organs” also has a certain libertarian appeal)
This came up often when I talked to other donors. They all had various motivations, but one of the things they cared about was being able to advocate for these kinds of systemic changes more effectively. I personally have been wanting to push this in an essay here for a while, but it seemed hypocritical to play up the desperate kidney shortage while I still had two kidneys. Now I can support NOTA modification whole-heartedly . . . full-throatedly? . . . it’s weird how many of these adverbs involve claims to have still all of your organs.
This is also one of the answers to the question I asked in section IV: how do you balance acts of heroic altruism that everyone will love you for vs. acts of boring autistic altruism that will make everyone hate you, but which will accomplish more good in the end?) Coalition To Modify NOTA is full of previous living kidney donors, who are using the moral clout and recognition they’ve gotten to get attention and change the system in an unglamorous way. I find this an admirable way of squaring the circle: do the flashy heroic things to gain social capital, then spend the social capital on whatever’s ultimately most important.
If you get one takeaway from this, let it be that those guys who bought the castle were good guys. Two takeaways, and it’s that plus modify NOTA. Three takeaways, and you should feel permission to (if you want) donate a kidney. You can sign up here.
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