Speaking of happiness, here's some music

Got my brick of CDs from cheap-cds.com today. So far I've listened, with great pleasure, to:

• Stereolab's Peng!: truly brilliant. For context, so you know where I stand on the Stereolab canon: IMO Sound-Dust good, Dots and Loops not-so-good, contrary to the opinions of most critics.

• Spiritualized's Let It Come Down, also insanely beautiful. Nobody mixes krautrock, gospel, noise-rock, orchestral strings, and epic crises of faith like Spiritualized frontman J. Spaceman; from I Didn't Mean to Hurt You:

  I love you like I love the sunrise in the morning
  I miss you like I miss the water when I'm burning.

  When he sings it, it doesn't sound corny; it sounds glorious. It even gets to me in spite of the fact that I'm usually rather hostile to religion, which is one of J. Spaceman's major themes.

Shiny happy transhumans holding hands

In my previous posts on happiness, I said that people only value happiness if it's achieved in a fashion consistent with their ultimate values. To tie this back thematically to transhumanism --- this is yet another reason that some people will choose not to undergo radical alterations, regardless of how happy or powerful the transformed beings become.

Some people value their humanity, however "irrational" that attachment, and any future transhuman society must respect the choice of some people to remain "merely" human, or "merely" anything else. I'm pretty open to radical alterations --- I once told my friends that I thought it would be cool to have my consciousness uploaded into a star for a couple of billion years (yes, that's right, a star, as in a gargantuan flaming ball of plasma; assuming, of course, that you could build a computational substrate capable of supporting consciousness in such a medium) --- but even I have limits. I do not want to be forced to exceed those limits, either by direct coercion or by competition for the resources I need to survive. (Incidentally, the last of these requirements implies that an ethical transhuman society must, to some extent, provide a welfare state for ordinary humans; as I've noted previously, it seems probable that transhumans will outcompete humans in every field of endeavor, making direct economic competition ruinous for humans.)

Foolproof, reversible no-baby treatment for men

Finally. (Alternate link at ABC Australia; also look for this result in a forthcoming JCEM, though the relevant issue doesn't appear to be online yet.)

Well, it'll be some years before this treatment becomes "productized", but it's still heartening. By the time it's been through the development process, I also expect they'll have the implant and shot on synchronized schedules, so you'll only have to go to the doctor 4 times a year instead of 7.

Obviously, it doesn't do anything for STDs, requires advance planning, and likely has a relatively large up-front cost compared to more casual methods like condoms. Therefore (warning: layperson's wild-ass speculation coming up), it probably won't much reduce the societal incidence of unwanted pregnancy --- most people would only use this as the primary contraceptive in the context of a long-term relationship, in which case they'd generally already be using something else if this weren't available. But, it will make couples' lives easier, reduce the pressure on women to be "the responsible one", and give men a near-foolproof veto on unwanted paternity, all of which are good things.

Also, female chemical contraceptives have always had unpleasant side effects for a significant minority of women, probably because a woman's hormonal cycle and reproductive apparatus are simply more complex than a man's. Extended studies will probably uncover side effects for some men, but I'm willing to bet it will be a smaller fraction, with less serious side effects on average, than for women on the Pill or Norplant.

My main question: why did it take so damn long? The treatment doesn't sound too terribly complex. Why did biologists figure out the Pill decades ago? Is the delay a product of social forces or scientific limitations?

UPDATE: New Scientist has further coverage, including the following:

But Anna Glasier, at Edinburgh University's Centre for Reproductive Biology, says it remains to be seen how acceptable couples find such treatment. She and her colleagues carried out an international survey of men and women's attitudes to male contraception.

"We found that the majority of men would prefer a pill [rather than injection or implant], but testosterone cannot currently be made in this form. So, I am not sure how successful the Australian treatment would be," she told New Scientist.

Odd. I can see the appeal of not having to go to the doctor, but the sheer convenience of only dealing with contraception four times a year seems really attractive to me.

Anything Else

Saw Anything Else last night with SL, AM, and TM. I've seen most of the features Woody Allen's made in the past eight years (except: [1], [2], [3]), and this is the best --- which perhaps isn't saying much, so let me give it higher praise: it's genuinely funny, and although it's vastly inferior to his two late-70's masterpieces, it echoes them with a certain satisfying symmetry.

Unfortunately, the movie wasn't marketed properly, and hence has been a disaster at the box office. It didn't help that many of the reviews have been mysteriously vicious, which I will attribute to some kind of hype-driven critical groupthink: these days it's just not cool to have any opinion about Allen movies, besides "Oh, yeah, well, he's really lost his touch, hasn't he? Oh, and there's his embarrassing personal life."

Dorktober report

Spent the evening attending the fall's first Dorkbot Seattle meeting, at CoCA. Tonight's program, from the dorkbotsea-announce list:

This month, Seattle artist and weaver LAURA MACCARY and her father and collaborator, Spokane-based sculptor, poet and electronics expert LAWRENCE MACCARY will be talking about the hows and whys of their "Dialectric" series of interactive artworks, which all consist of an electronic component woven of conductive or resistive material and a circuit designed around the weaving (http://www.maccary.com/ ); TOBY PADDOCK will explore "Magnetic sensors for the unwashed and lazy:  using Hall Effect devices without learning very much".  inside a magnetic sensor is a lot of science, but outside they're small, cheap, rugged, have few wires and are easy to get along with (http://www.seanet.com/~tpaddock/).  Local experimental music duo PINKY & REX will discuss their re-contextualizing of thrift-store toys, toy instruments and electronic oddities to create symphonic walls of sound.

IMO Laura MacCary's weaving-based sculptures were very cool. Pinky and Rex's musical performance was intermittently interesting, though it dragged at times (inevitable, perhaps, with improv techno performed on toy electronic guitars). The rest of the program, so-so. Anyway, dorkbot's weird and unique enough that I think I'll be going to future meetings.