Intrinsitivity

The “Genius Babies,” and How They Grew – By David Plotz – Slate Magazine

Graham promised parents smarter, better children than they could have naturally. He used the best science of his time (sperm storage and artificial insemination) to preserve and replicate what he saw as the most valuable genes in the world. New-genics will try to do much the same thing—though more precisely, more microscopically, more scientifically.

This might sound harsh, but hear me out. As a rule, parents want the best for their kids. They want to give their kids the best home, the best health care, the best food, the best friends, and, if they could, I suspect, the best genes. So there is nothing fundamentally immoral about wanting to give parents the best kids.

Genetic research will soon enable geneticists and medical doctors to give parents the best kids. Eugenics, while almost universally despised, primarily due to its association with Nazis, is exactly the philosophy of, again, as a rule, all parents. Eugenics is defined as “a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention.” That health care exists and is prized as a mark of civilization shows tacit approval of this philosophy.

While there are certainly important issues to consider, and consider quickly, related to the ability of a society to gain control of its reproductive success and, thereby, its evolutionary fitness, greater control is bound to be had and human beings are bound to improve. Our goal, as I see it, is not to prevent geneticists and medical doctors from making this improvement, but, rather, to educate ourselves about what this improvement entails, both scientifically and ethically.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Computers crack famous board game

A Canadian team has created a computer program that can win or draw any game, no matter who the opponent is.

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, unveils the Open Library, an online repository housing thousands of public domain books. I like several things about the Open Library:

1. A Clean Interface. The interface is super clean, which minimizes distractions when reading or scanning through books.
2. Reading Options. So you don’t like reading online. Send the book to Lulu.com, who will print the book you want and snailmail it to you for a very reasonable price. Or, suppose you don’t mind reading online but like to read ebooks on your PDA. In that case, just download a PDF version of your book and sync it over.
3. Audio Recordings. Soon you will be able to listen to an audio recording of any book at the Open Library, so you can choose to read along or just listen and let someone read to you.
4. Magnification. Text from scanned images can be painful to read. To make your online reading life easier, soon you will also be able to zoom into a page and magnify its text.

My only complaint is the missing home link. Otherwise, I am happy to see that Kahle and his friends at the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance are working to digitize books. Ideally, all books everywhere would be free for everyone, but until that time comes, and I doubt it will, this makes for a great start. And I can’t wait to see how Google responds given their recent efforts along the same lines.