Physics Makes Aging Inevitable, Not Biology (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/physics-makes-aging-inevitable-not-biology <comment><USER2> The headline's premise does not square with the fact that there are organisms that don't age and whose life span is only limited diseases, accidents and predation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence)

That strongly points toward a biological reason for aging. I mean, sure, the heat death of the universe is inevitable, but that is not even remotely on the same time scale as the life span of complex organisms.

<comment><USER3> That none of the longest-lived organisms are warm-blooded squares well with the article's premise that physical heat damage causes aging.

<comment><USER4> Then how do you account for mole-rats.

[http://experimentalbiology.org/getattachment/2014/About- EB/P...](http://experimentalbiology.org/getattachment/2014/About- EB/Press/Press-Releases/Rodriguez-Buffenstein-Release-FINAL.pdf.aspx)

<comment><USER5> My best guess would be that they are so because they are eusocial.

As I posted in a comment below somewhere, I think it is the complexity of the nervous system that drives a tradeoff with repairable bodies. A brain does not want to have to retrain itself, but the history it stores makes it entropically very energy intensive to maintain. I think this drives most of what we see here: things without complex nervous systems (pyramidal neurons and such) have no disincentive in persisting indefinitely, because their relatively simple nervous system does not take increasing amounts of energy to maintain, and thus they can budget their energy for growing and other evolutionary benefits.

Most mammals have to budget their energy such that they can maintain the state of their brain, and thus have a disincentive for eternal aging: we either need to start forgetting earlier memories, which could potentially be bad, or we have to start paying the energy price of maintaining a very complex system. Energy usage tends to get optimized by evolution, so then, we end up trading off longevity.

Mole rats, however, being eusocial, have a different evolutionary strategy than most mammals. Since the entire colony effectively behaves as a single metaorganism, losing its experienced members is particularly painful if they have valuable institutional memory. Thus, there is stronger evolutionary pressure to pay the cost of maintaining these systems.

(I realize that isn't really what you were commenting about, but it does give a thermodynamic reason for their longevity, but not one simply based on temperature.)

<comment><USER2> > Thus, there is stronger evolutionary pressure to pay the cost of maintaining > these systems.

... which implies that it is biologically possible to maintain them, which implies in turn that aging is a biological trade-off and not a physical inevitability.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I agree. I guess the question is what is meant by inevitable. The meanings of biological and physical in this instance aren't really all that different, if the biological problem is a limitation of the underlying physics. Ultimately, the scarcity of usable energy is driving this trade-off, which is a physical limitation of the universe. It becomes 'possible' in the sense that a O(n^100) algorithm is 'feasible' (see Arora and Barak, section 1.6.2). If maintaining a youthful state indefinitely increases our energy consumption hundredfold entirely due to the cost of maintaining a low entropy state in a highly complex system, is that really 'possible'? If we have to pay an ever increasing energetic cost to maintain ourselves, it is both a biological trade-off and a physical inevitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure what is the message of the author here.

Entropy always increase in closed systems, but we are not talking about a closed system here.

My understanding is that, from the point of view of physics, there is not a reason for not being possible to decrease entropy in the body increasing entropy outside (expending energy).

Also, this is untrue: "DNA can only be repaired when there is an intact replica to copy".

If you have, for instance, three incorrect copies of a DNA sequence you can compare them in order to get the original sequence. The probability that the copies are damaged at the same point being very small.

<comment><USER7> There are also some theories on proton decay, which could be considered a source of "physical" aging, but the timescales are extremely large.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, if we get to the point where humans (or whatever our evolutionary progeny are can't imagine it'd be anything resembling humans today) are still around when that starts happening at 10^28 years which is ~10^17 years from now I'll consider that a job extremely well done as a species/civilization.

<comment><USER9> 10^28 years is ~10^17 years from now? I think you either typoed or your math is faulty...

<comment><USER8> I just messed up the math. It should be 10^19. Either way it'd be an unqualified success.

<comment><USER9> I still think you're incorrect. If we're at 10^13 years, then 10^28 minus 10^13 is, essentially, 10^28 years from now.

> Either way it'd be an unqualified success.

Certainly. I'm just picking nits on the math.

<comment><USER8> Oh wow yeah. Well too late to edit the original now. My math mistake shall live on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is outside my area of expertise, but it seems that the author may not have presented Medawar's argument correctly. As I understand it, Medawar's theory of aging was not so much based in physics as based in evolution. The author presents it here as random DNA transcription errors building up mutations which eventually cause the animal to die.

But I think that Medawar's argument was that all animals are subject to random accidents, predation, disease, etc. This will produce an exponential distribution of lifetimes. As a consequence, beyond a few half-lifes, there will be exponentially few members of the species. So if there is some mutation in the DNA which causes the animal to die beyond that time, there will be so few members of the species around to exhibit it that there will be effectively no selection pressure to keep this mutation out of the population. As a consequence, even if you started out with a population that could in theory live forever, it will very quickly become riddled with mutations which start to kill the animals after a couple of half-lifes. From the outside, it would appear as though the animals were "programmed" to die at a certain time.

George Williams presented a similar argument, but also claimed that some mutations can increase an animal's fitness early in life at the expense of decreased fitness much later in life. If the animal will likely have died of some accident by that time anyway, this trait effectively has no downside and will be selected for.

</comment><comment><USER11> Senescence is a biological, not oxidative or thermodynamic, phenomenon.

More oxidation, more metabolism, and more turnover gives you more chances to break down/accumulate mutations/shorten telomers, but that's an artefact of cells running out of their means for rapid growth. These can be modified. Look, for example, at the countless immortalized cell cultures.

It is a biological problem with roots in statistical and biomolecular physics, like literally everything else in biology.

</comment><comment><USER12> So how is it that green land sharks can live 400 years? Or the Great Basin bristlecone pine is like 5K years? And what about [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality)

<comment><USER13> Land Sharks? Help!

<comment><USER14> [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sUOifHlxGiw/hqdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sUOifHlxGiw/hqdefault.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > it is difficult to see how natural selection could have selected for > senescence, because we don't reproduce in our elderly years and natural > selection is driven by differences in reproduction rates

That's an entirely backwards way to look at the problem: selection works with living organism and the only reason an organism lives or performs a particular function is that it was evolutionary useful to do so for it's genes. Aging therefore is something natural selection can't discern on: at some point, the number of additional offspring that can be produced becomes negligible compared to the exponentially increasing probability of death from environmental causes (just like the test tube example); so organisms that quickly reproduce young are much more successful than long lived organisms.

It's easy to see then, why the long term accumulating damage, irrelevant for a young organism, can't be evolved out of. We are essentially "single use" from an evolutionary standpoint.

Therefore, advanced age (anything exceeding useful reproductive life) is something outside evolution. Anything happening at senescence time is simply a byproduct of the mechanism selected for ensuring success at young age, a system that continues to work by momentum and not design or selection, up to the inescapable moment when entropy catches up to it.

But there is no fundamental physical reason for it, and it stands to reason we could create biological machines that maintain the power to self repair indefinitely, given suficient outside energy. It's just enormously more complex than "curing aging", it means artificially redoing billions of years of evolutionary choices that were good enough for reproduction. It's a God level task.

<comment><USER16> There are second-level effects where longevity can increase gene frequency: In a social species like humans or some whale species, the presence of parents and even grandparents can have positive effects on the survival of offspring, long after the older generation has stopped producing offspring.

I don't know evolutionary biology enough to estimate how big of a selection pressure that is, though. Maybe much lower than first-order effects, maybe not so much.

> But there is no fundamental physical reason for it, and it stands to reason > we could create biological machines that maintain the power to self repair > indefinitely, given suficient outside energy.

Agreed.

<comment><USER15> I agree, I would say there is a strong second order effect for parents to see their siblings to reproductive age. As more generations stack up, any longevity effects quickly become negligible, maybe with the exception of hiper-social species with a learned culture like ourselves. Since this development is very recent, I don't think it could affect such a fundamental thing like aging.

Per Google, our closest living relatives, chimps and gorillas, very rarely display grandparenting behavior and have comparable lifespans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Totally wrong from the get go. Cells do not use thermal energy to "ratchet" order out of chaos. That would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Cells create order by using energy from an already-ordered source, namely the food you eat. This source is in turn ordered ultimately by exploiting a very high temperature differential, namely between the sun and earth temperatures. Usable energy can be extracted from differentials; it cannot be extracted from a heat bath at one temperature. But since we do have the virtually unlimited energy from the sun, and some other sources, we can lower entropy in a fixed region as much as we like. There is no physics barrier to repairing every single atom of aging damage in a human body.

</comment><comment><USER18> Each cell in our body is derived from a cell that existed 3 billion years ago. It seems twisted argument that some how cell in an individual body must die but can renerate for billions of years if it only met with other damaged cell. There are fair amount of examples such as a-sexual bacterial reproduction where cell essentially survives for ever. There are many species known to live on for multiple of 100 years.

</comment><comment><USER19> We can worry about physics based aging when we've gotten biological aging under control.

<comment><USER20> This article argues they are one and the same.

<comment><USER21> Well, you know, peel away enough layers of abstraction and everything is "just physics."

<comment><USER22> FTFY: ...everything is "just mathematics." ;) [https://xkcd.com/435/](https://xkcd.com/435/)

<comment><USER19> Math makes aging inevitable, because every moment that passes increments the amount of total time we've been in existence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "If this interpretation of the data is correct, then aging is a natural > process that can be reduced to nanoscale thermal physics—and _not a > disease_. " (my italics).

To me this is the main problem with this article. The (ever more common) notion that aging is a disease should be combated with philosophical arguments, not shaky physics such.

<comment><USER24> Half-serious, half-joking, but I think that procreation and death are nature's way using the _" have you tried turning it off and on again?"_ approach to evolving multicellular life. It's probably the most cost-efficient, all things considered.

<comment><USER25> Most cost-efficient for what purpose?

<comment><USER24> For change and adaptation to new contexts. Unless you know of a way to turn an elephant into a fly and back. I mean that literally.

For battling decay. It can be easier to grow a new body from a single cell, than to keep patching up a running one.

A desire for immortality is the individual point of view. In the big picture of things, there is little to no selection pressure for immortality. There is plenty of selection pressure for adaptation and change, and death and rebirth are effective tools for that.

<comment><USER26> > For battling decay. It can be easier to grow a new body from a single cell, > than to keep patching up a running one.

And we do the same in IT. Sometimes the old system has piled on so many hotfixes and customizations that in order to upgrade, you can only build up a new system next to it and transfer your data to it. Then you shutdown the new system. That's procreation, learning, and death.

<comment><USER24> That's my line of thought too: look closely and see indirect empirical evidence of this happening in all kinds of other systems. Life is no different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While it is obvious that everything decays, it is equally obvious that you can repair it.

For me eternal youth will happen sooner or later, probably 100 years in the future,50 years,200, but it will happen when we understand biology and could repair tissues, something that we could not do today. Today we don't heal a bone fracture, we let nature do it, because we really do not control or understand the process deeply. The body knows how to kill viruses, we do not. Only bacteria after copying nature with antibiotics is under our control but we do not control or understand the process again.

This is not being immortal, people will die in wars, or accidents, or being killed, but they will be young all our lives.

For this people will probably have to go to a place that resembles the uterus and spend some time there as the body repairs itself:

[https://pm1.narvii.com/6320/0940afb810563b4c4b67c4efb773adc0...](https://pm1.narvii.com/6320/0940afb810563b4c4b67c4efb773adc00b0de312_hq.jpg)

After that you will be 20 years younger. Not different from repairing a car.

<comment><USER28> We can't even repair our own machines to the point that they last forever. I doubt we'll reach eternal youth any time soon, so I do think that we can lengthen life span quite a bit (low-hanging fruits) before we hit a wall that take even longer to surpass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Many researchers studying specific diseases, cellular systems, or molecular > components would like to see their favorite research subject take the mantle > of "the cause" of aging. But the sheer number of possibilities being put > forward refutes the very possibility. They can't all be the cause of aging.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause)

</comment><comment><USER30> I think if one is to pose this as an acceptable theory on aging they must explain why it doesnt apply to germ cells. The germline of an organism manages to escape these fundamental laws of physics to achieve 'immortality' simply by having more efficient DNA repair mechanisms than somatic cells. And so, imo, we are back to a biological explaination of aging.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think they've got the evolutionary argument backwards. Rather than the older generation aging and dying because there is some evolutionary reason why they should, I think there is simply not a strong enough reason why they shouldn't. Why fix the remaining aging bugs when you already live long enough to reproduce and pass on knowledge?

<comment><USER32> Both arguments exist, although I don't think the "ageing was actively evolved" argument has ever gained a lot of mainstream traction: it's not very parsimonious (all the available evidence can also be explained by the simpler model).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Two points:

(1) I haven't seen this article mentioned here:

[https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your- body-...](https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-wasnt- built-to-last-a-lesson-from-human-mortality-rates/)

I am not sure if the article addressed this model in particular, but I found it compelling.

(2) It occurred to me that most of us don't fear death as much as becoming increasingly useless as we become older due to ill health and physical weakness.

It would be not much fun living to be 200 if the last 120 years were spent in a bed or wheelchair.

So what we want is not to increase the lifespan but to prolong the amount of time we can spend in relatively physically prime condition. I am sure this is not an original thought, but something worth mentioning.

<comment><USER34> > It would be not much fun living to be 200 if the last 120 years were spent > in a bed or wheelchair.

While I agree (and while I additionally think any plausible advancement of that degree would necessarily need to increase _healthy_ lifespan), I'd also say that it'd be inherently preferable to dying, and it would give 120 more years to solve those problems. We can come up with a lot of medical advancements in 120 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Thermodynamics and entropy, while causing decay in the long-term, have nothing to do with human decay over the span of 80-90 years. Arguing that entropy is THE fundamental cause of death just shuts down the conversation.

<comment><USER36> A "causation" is an illusion. We can think, for example, that cause of ageing is in the evolution: those species who lives longer have slower evolving rate, and they lose a competition with other species who have shorter lives. But this causation does not contradict to the thermodynamic one, it just make thermodynamic not the "fundamental cause" but the mechanism of ageing.

A causation is the way to describe reality, not the fundamental feature of the reality. And so, the causation should follow the goals of researchers. While searching for ways to live forever, we will not benefit from evolutionary explanation (we cannot fix evolution to get longer lives), but thermodynamics explanation could be useful (if its true, of course). So, thermodynamics is a good candidate for the role of "fundamental cause".

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Complete bollocks. Molecules don't age and everything in your body is molecules. If a molecule breaks down, in some cases the body has mechanisms to replace it with a shiny new one. Those mechanisms are themselves made of molecules. And if those mechanisms to stop working, in some cases those mechanisms can also be replaced. Nothing in fundamental physics makes aging inevitable.

From what I can tell, the reason why aging is so prevalent is that most species haven't had time to evolve the mechanisms that solve the problems that appear later in life. If there's some truth to this, you'd expect that the species that are better at this also tend to be the simpler ones, since for those simplicity also means smaller diversity of things going wrong.

<comment><USER37> > If there's some truth to this, you'd expect that the species that are better > at this also tend to be the simpler ones, since for those simplicity also > means smaller diversity of things going wrong.

I doubt it.

IMO, aging is just a way to ensure that dying occurs.

And dying is necessary for evolution, as it's easier to replace the old with a new generation that understand better the reality than changing the current generation.

Old habits literally die hard.

<comment><USER38> Interesting. So by that line of thought, aging would be an evolved trait giving certain species an evolutionary advantage over others without aging.

<comment><USER39> Looks like evolution has decided that death is the winning strategy for long- term survival.

All species that didn't die of old age (if there were any) have disappeared regardless.

<comment><USER40> That's untrue, there are a number of biologically immortal creatures[0]. Most recently found being the naked mole rat.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Exactly. Some tortoises as well can live a few hundred years, as well as wales, urchins, sharks, quahog clams, and as someone else mentioned– jellyfish.

Though you won't see any of them developing rockets and space-stations. To what extent that is an evolutionary advantage on our part I'll leave to general consensus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> A friend did his PhD in the thermodynamics of open systems -- the sort of thing that describes, say, the long-term evolution of a "thing" that occasionally consumes and rejects energy. One thing he mentioned to me was being contacted by lots of crackpots, each with their own new idea wrt what open system thermo means about living organisms. It's a very new and very difficult field and there aren't hard results yet. I would take this article with a shaker of salt, and perhaps some tequila, lime juice, and Grand Marnier.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is an interesting article, but the core argument that aging is an inevitable result of physics and not biology has a counterexample. It's the biologically immortal hydra: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_\(genus\))

</comment><comment><USER43> Sometimes, you can improve the software best by patching, sometimes by reefactoring. And eventually, as it gets older and bad traits accumulate, it becomes easier to do The Big Rewrite. That doesn't mean that it is impossible to fix the legacy code, just that at some point you're better off starting from scratch, but with the old one as a pattern to go off of.

Aging and reproduction feels like the same pattern. Sure, you may be attached to the legacy code, but sometimes it makes more sense to do the big rewrite instead. Legacy code performed well for its time, now it is time to retire it.

</comment><comment><USER44> One thought I had was that species evolved to maximize the survival of the species, not the individual organism. Once an organism is too old to reproduce or contribute to the survival of the species, it's probably better to die than becoming a burden to the rest of the members of your species. It sounds cold hearted and brutal but that's just how nature works. Maybe it is possible for an individual organism to reproduce and live forever someday but that would be very hard to achieve and we're probably stuck in a local maxima.

<comment><USER10> That doesn't really answer the question, though, of why animals get too old to reproduce. Surely it would be evolutionarily advantageous for an animal to be able to reproduce for its entire life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Note this relevant comment from the author of the article:

'My original title was: "Aging: where physics meets biology". Nautilus changed the title to the above more provocative version, which seemed to have worked - judging from the number of responses!'

Comment URL: [http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/physics-makes-aging- inevitab...](http://nautil.us/issue/36/aging/physics-makes-aging-inevitable- not-biology#comment-2682776102)

</comment><comment><USER46> We don't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. We're still increasing entropy, but we're processing so much fuel that the equations are still balanced when we locally increase order.

Comparing lifespan to the bonds of a molecule is also pretty cringey. :-/

Obligatory link to Aubrey de Grey: [https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_a...](https://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging)

</comment><comment><USER47> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11684718)

</comment><comment><USER48> Nobody wants to live forever...just until the universe ends. I would gladly give the physics gods back my particles so that they can start a new big-bang!

</comment><comment><USER49> I never dared to ask- but- do cancer cells age? How does a tumor behave if he gets to live longer then its own behaviour would allow to expect?

<comment><USER50> Cancer is a _strange_ beast. Some types of tumors do not 'age' like usual, some are 'hyper aged', some die off at incredible rates, but reproduce at even higher rates.

Really, cancer cells are so wracked with errors and DNA damage, typically, that they really aren't the species that they grew up in anymore.

For one instance, some tumor metabolisms are _radically_ different than what is 'normal', more different than even what is seen in even prokaryotes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think this is a subject that is ripe for appeals to consequence.

People concerned about aging would really, really prefer there was a biological cause for aging. If it's biological, there's a chance there's a trivial fix (gene therapy, supplements, ...) for it, or at least a trivial incremental fix that will get you an extra ten or twenty years while you wait for the next incremental fix to be developed for the next problem down the line.

If the problem is physical, caused by the wear and tear of your metabolism, the problem becomes significantly harder. Not _impossible_ (after all, cell _lines_ can be immortal, trivially, we have an unbroken line of single celled organisms dating back billions of years), but you are potentially looking at rebuilding mammalian life from the ground up before you make even incremental progress. And the only maybe-possible-but-the-animal-models-are-mixed incremental fix we have is to lower your metabolism by living your entire life on a calorie-restricted diet, or maybe by being just a _little_ too cold all the time.

I'm all for still devoting a healthy amount of resources to trying to find easy biological fixes to aging, because I'm old enough now that probably nothing else would happen fast enough to keep me, personally, alive, but if it turns out most of the problems are physical, we shouldn't shy away from acknowledging that just because it makes the work of beating death harder. We aren't trying to beat aging because it seemed like an easy thing to do.

</comment><comment><USER52> Entropy arguments for the primacy of aging are fairly silly. For one, there are actually species that appear to be essentially immortal. Secondly, the germline. Cellular systems are clearly capable in principle of indefinitely maintaining themselves against entropy by either asymmetric division in which molecular waste is partitioned into one child cell (single cell life) or leveraging asymmetric division to replace worn parts with good parts (multicellular life). To explain why aging exists and is so prevalent in biology one has to look at the level above physics, and that debate largely takes place in the overlap between evolutionary biology and molecular biochemistry.

The germline and hydra must be brought forward every time someone says that aging is an inevitable, universal consequence of thermodynamics:

[http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_press/press_releases_1916/f...](http://www.demogr.mpg.de/en/news_press/press_releases_1916/forever_young_4396.htm)

The common perception that the bodies of all living beings age, is wrong. This has now been proved by a long-term experiment with the freshwater polyp Hydra, a microscopic animal. In a unique long-term experiment researchers created artificial conditions for the tiny water animals with their flimsy tentacles, which were free of fatal natural threats like predators. For almost ten years they have cared for of about 1,800 of the Hydras. Overall, the team has counted 3.9 million observation days of individual Hydra. The number of natural deaths per year, however, can be counted on one hand. On average there have been only five. When a Hydra passed away it was mostly due to laboratory accidents, such as a polyp sticking to the lid of its bowl and then drying up or simply having been dropped on the floor. From of the few natural deaths that remained researchers calculated Hydra's mortality. It is so low that even several lifetimes of researchers would not suffice to observe the end of the lifecycle of the polyps. Even after 500 years five percent of a cohort will still be alive. For two out of twelve of the Hydra cohorts under investigation, the risk of death was actually so small, that it will take 3,000 years until only five percent of the polyps remained. "Hydra apparently manages to keep its body young because it does not senesce by accumulating damages and mutations, as most other living beings do. Hydra are probably able to follow a special self-preservation strategy, as its body and cellular processes are rather simple." For instance, Hydra are capable of completely replacing parts of the body that are damaged or are somehow lost. It can even fully regenerate if its body is destroyed almost completely thanks to a high number of stem cells. Stem cells are capable of developing into any part of the body at any time. Additionally, as Hydra replaces all of their cells within only four weeks, it regularly and quickly expels all cells that have been changed genetically by mutations. Thus, damages have little chance to accumulate.

Current thinking on why near all species fail to behave like hydra looks somewhat like this:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4649](http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4649)

Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will propose a model for aging based on assumptions that are compatible with evolutionary theory: i) competition is between individuals; ii) there is some degree of locality, so quite often competition will between parents and their progeny; iii) optimal conditions are not stationary, mutation helps each species to keep competitive. When conditions change, a senescent species can drive immortal competitors to extinction. This counter-intuitive result arises from the pruning caused by the death of elder individuals. When there is change and mutation, each generation is slightly better adapted to the new conditions, but some older individuals survive by random chance. Senescence can eliminate those from the genetic pool. Even though individual selection forces always win over group selection ones, it is not exactly the individual that is selected, but its lineage. While senescence damages the individuals and has an evolutionary cost, it has a benefit of its own. It allows each lineage to adapt faster to changing conditions. We age because the world changes.

<comment><USER5> If all of a hydra's cells are replaced every four weeks, I would say that the hydra has a life span of about four weeks. Ship of Theseus and all that.

But even if you don't subscribe to that particular view of what constitutes a consistent identity, the issue is still fundamentally thermodynamic. It is not a task of just maintaining a particular dynamic system indefinitely, but maintaining one with memory. If the hydra is storing absolutely no information about its past states, then it isn't evolving, and it is completely at the mercy of its environment. This makes it more akin to fire or a piece of iron rusting than life: just a consumptive chemical process. This harmonizes exactly with your last paragraph, things need to store some amount of memory of past failure if they are to adapt. This storing process is exactly aging, but how it manifests in different organisms can obviously be very different. Landauer's principle, then, tells us that since information is thermodynamic, so too must be aging. However, I don't really think the author of the original article was arguing at that deep of a level. In humans, many of the processes that we consider to be the detrimental effects of aging do occur because the components that make us do have memory effects. One particular example would be the cross-linking of elastin, causing degradation of vascular system efficiency.

But aging truly is an inevitable consequence of thermodynamics, it's just that since everything is a consequence of thermodynamics, it's not a particularly illuminating argument.

<comment><USER53> > If all of a hydra's cells are replaced every four weeks, I would say that > the hydra has a life span of about four weeks. Ship of Theseus and all that.

Most of our cells in our bodies are renewed in a few months or something. Yet people don't assimilate this to death.

Now, you may object that neurons don't follow this rule, so our subjective identity is not concerned by this. To this I will say that when people are concerned about ageing, they are indeed concerned about what happens to their brain (that is, neuro-degenerative diseases), but certainly not _only_ that. The state of all the other tissues is at stake : the heart, the bones, the skin and so on. Yet all of these are renewed on a regular basis. That renewal is not perfect though, and it's that imperfection they blame on ageing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't forget the latest research on mole rats.

[http://experimentalbiology.org/getattachment/2014/About- EB/P...](http://experimentalbiology.org/getattachment/2014/About- EB/Press/Press-Releases/Rodriguez-Buffenstein-Release-FINAL.pdf.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER54> Maybe infinite aging is not the solution here. The probability that you die from an accident or cancer when your age is infinite is 100%. Brain backup, and brain uploading into a new body is a perfect solution.

It might be harder but it cuts through the issues of aging and accidents.

</comment><comment><USER55> It would be interesting to simulate a little world with species that evolve via genetic crossover. And let them have an aging gene that is just a number: The average lifespan.

Wonder what evolution in the simulation would come up with as the best lifespan.

Could be a fun weekend project.

<comment><USER56> I think the main reason we haven't seen many life forms evolving long life spans is that the biological cause of aging may be closely tied to other important things. So it may be difficult to evolve long life without some other disadvantage like slower growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> We age for the same reason that code bases go bad over time - the accumulated cruft of tech debt overwhelms the ability of different parts of the system to work together well. This is a problem of any dynamic system, not something related to physics.

</comment><comment><USER58> Evolution has selected for tons of different mechanisms and strategies for combating the decay and dissolution of organic molecules. This author doesn't seem to have read a lot of literature on how powerful these DNA repair proteins can be.

</comment><comment><USER59> We tend to think of parents having offspring, but in a very real sense offspring use their parents as an entropy dump.

Feynman's Lectures on Computation are a great read that explores the physical limits of computation and information.

</comment><comment><USER60> > Nanoscale thermal physics guarantees our decline, no matter how many > diseases we cure.

If that is true, I wonder what the total live expectancy for our species is. I mean shouldn't stem cells be affected by that too?

</comment><comment><USER61> its silly to seperate biology and physics, seems to me that biological systems are also physical systems.

other then that, stress causes aging. people who reduce stress keep their mind younger and often live longer and are less effected by diseases common among aging biological systems.

ofcourse, stress then isn't the root cause of aging... as stress takes many forms, what causes stress is. so the answer to what causes aging is probarbly not a single point or item, but a combination of factors which all cause some form of stress on the system.

</comment><comment><USER62> I wish I could download this because it is so wrong. There's been a lot of amazing work in biology explaing why aging exists. It has nothing to do with physics

</comment><comment><USER39> If we manage to reset the age of our biological cells, their DNA may change over time but that doesn't mean it's infeasible or a dead end.

</comment><comment><USER63> This article is very informative about the challenges that biology contends with, but it doesn't convince me that the headline is true.

</comment><comment><USER64> See [http://www.sens.org](http://www.sens.org)

</comment><comment><USER65> That's like saying: given a flowchart where A->B->C, A leads to C, not B.

</comment><comment><USER66> Because sometimes systems need a start-from-scratch rewrite to progress.

</comment><comment><USER67> Well if you really want to talk hard-core Physics... isn't aging inevitable because of the eventual heat death of the universe?

</comment><comment><USER68> This (headline) is the one of the most idiotic things I've ever read on HN, regardless of the content of the article.

</comment><comment><USER69> Nautil.us seems to have a tendency to publish pesudo sciency article with grand claim and irrelevant random thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER70> Physics Makes Flying Impossible, Not Biology

</comment><comment><USER71> If this were true how would we reproduce?

</comment><comment><USER72> Our life is an oxidation

</comment><comment><USER73> I always considered biology, chemistry, ... to ultimately be applied physics. So nothing new here :]

<comment><USER74> By the same logic economics is applied physics. This fallacy is called "reductionism".

<comment><USER75> Your comment prompted a web search and I ended up here: [https://www.quora.com/Why-is-reductionism-a-logical- fallacy](https://www.quora.com/Why-is-reductionism-a-logical-fallacy)</comment></comment></comment>


Is Domestically Produced Ethanol Worth the Cost? - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ethanol-domestic-fuel-supply-or-environmental-boondoggle

<comment><USER2> A million times yes, there needs to be more awareness of how ridiculous corn ethanol is.

Corn ethanol is more an indirect way of converting coal to something your car can run on. There are many other more efficient plant sources that do not require large doses of fertilizer and herbicides, usually drawn from coal energy.

<comment><USER3> I'm not going to defend corn ethanol, but I do think this debate is misguided. The problem is not the corn _ethanol_ , the problem is the _corn_.

 _Corn_ is an indirect way of converting oil into sugar. It is just as inefficient at making food as it is at making fuel (though that's less obvious because the end product doesn't have the same units.) There's a great article in an old issue of Harper's called "The oil we eat" (<http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915>).

I find it amazing that people are complaining that diverting corn to make ethanol raises food prices, when you can make the same argument that diverting corn to feed cattle raises food prices. Making beef via corn is an extremely inefficent method that's only viable because of cheap oil.

If the real concern is _feeding_ people, you eat vegetarian. From a food supply point of view it's pure waste to feed cattle food that humans can eat directly. (Letting cattle eat grass on land not suited for agriculture is different.) The _only_ reason it's sustainable to raise cattle the way it's done in the U.S. is because of an abundance of cheap corn due to cheap oil.

<comment><USER4> > If the real concern is feeding people, you eat vegetarian.

It is counter intuitive, but this statement is not exactly a fact. The corn->protein process via chickens is actually quite efficient. I'll give some sample numbers:

1 acre corn -> 150 bushels corn -> 10,000 lbs of corn -> 4000 lbs of chicken -> 1500 lbs of protein.

1 acre of peanuts -> 3000 pounds of peanuts -> 750 lbs of protein.

So the corn->chicken process is twice as efficient at producing protein as growing peanuts which are pretty efficient. Sure, a soy protein diet is the most efficient, but who wants to exclusively eat tofu?

Eating beef is wasteful, but chicken is comparatively efficient to eating vegetarian. Most vegetarians I know eat lots of tree nuts, avacados, etc, which from a food supply point of view, is far worse than getting protein from chicken or pork.

<comment><USER5> Interesting analysis. We've bred chickens, cows, and pigs to all produce more meat for a given diet, but I guess we've done this better with the chickens. Maybe we need to focus on breeding the cows into creatures that have no legs, fit within tightly packed rectangular cages, and don't need as much internal organ space dedicated to processing food, so that the space can be devoted to tender juicy muscle instead.

<comment><USER6> I don't even see the connection, other than that you're an incredible cynic perhaps making a reference to _Oryx & Crake_.

It's not about pounds of meat per animal, it's about input energy to output energy. Chickens are simply better at harvesting energy from their food, and not because we've "engineered" them to be.

<comment><USER5> I have no idea what Oryx & Crake is.

You think chickens aren't engineered? American farm chickens are entirely different creatures than you'll find in parts of the world where the chickens are allowed to breed freely. Even on American farms the egg-laying chickens are very different from the for-meat chickens. The for-meat chickens, in particular, are bred to be very efficient at turning food into meat.

My tongue-in-cheek proposal was that we need to breed cows to use less energy in their day-to-day lives, so they can use that energy to produce more meat. Lots of their energy goes towards creating, fueling, and maintaining their legs so they can walk around, so that seems like the first thing that can go. We'd have to selectively breed the shorter cows, and keep going while their legs get shorter and shorter over the generations until they become too short for the cow to walk when it grows up. These essentially-legless cows can then be kept in cages.

The other thing cows spend a lot of energy on is their digestive system, which is the typical multi-chamber system needed for hard to digest grasses. Most American cows don't eat wild grass anymore (unfortunately), they eat what we choose to feed them. If we feed them easier to digest food, they don't need the complex stomach anymore. This is tougher to breed for, so some genetic engineering may be necessary to kick-start the process. But eventually we can get cows with minimal digestive systems that are only able to digest some kind of highly nutritious and easily digestible paste, which we can pump right into a tube in their neck since they're cage-bound anyway. So that'll reduce the energy they need for most of their digestive system, which can be diverted to producing more meat instead.

Now, at this point, their heads and tails aren't really of much use anymore, and eliminating most of their senses and higher brain functions would probably be a blessing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Corn welfare must END (and I am very liberal/progressive if that matters).

But considering it's Iowa we are talking about, most politicians if they want to be president won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Ethanol is destroying small engines (generators, lawn mowers, etc) and most definitely reduces mpg by 10%

       a gallon of ethanol costs approximately 17 percent less than that of a gallon of gasoline

That is why gas distributors love it - they not only get goverment welfare for using ethanol, it allows them to dilute the less profitable gasoline (to 'cut' it).

(and yes, I use "subsidies" and "welfare" interchangeably because it's corporate welfare)

       Researchers at U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory

Let's get INDEPENDENT scientists not funded by the oil industry or government to write an article and I'll trust it.

<comment><USER8> > Ethanol is destroying small engines (generators, lawn mowers, etc) and most > definitely reduces mpg by 10%

Yes it does. I took a trip cross country (florida to california) this past may. Ethanol infested gas killed MPG by at best 10%, at worst 20%. It wasn't even that much cheaper, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As much as I'd like to see us move away from oil, everything I've seen has pointed to corn ethanol not being very good for the task.

<comment><USER10> A very promising technology I've had the chance to work with is called SwiftFuel. It's based of switchgrass, which is far more sustainable.

The FAA, due to pressure from the EPA, is looking to switch the entire aviation industry to SwiftFuel from low-lead fuels.

More info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#Swift_fuel>

SwiftFuel has the advantage of being able to run, in theory, in most/all aircraft engines without modification. (Fuel pumps need to be replaced, however)

<comment><USER11> One problem, land that is ready to grow such crops is finite in supply not infinite..ie same land that corn was used..which will also impact food supplies..

<comment><USER12> Biofuel researcher here: The nice thing about switchgrass is that it's a much hardier plant, meaning that you can get it to grow on marginal lands, which means land that wouldn't otherwise be used for crops.

Getting people to grow anything for biofuels is a bit of a double-edged sword, as you want the feedstock to be as cheap as possible, but you also want it to be profitable for the farmers to actually produce so that you can get enough of the biomass. If you improve the yield of viable biomass from the plants that'll go part of the way to solving this.

<comment><USER13> If the stuff is efficient enough as a source for gasoline replacement generation to be worth making gasoline from, subsidies shouldn't be necessary to ensure a sufficient stock. If it requires subsidies, that indicates a big problem with that plan. Unless the main goal is to reduce foreign oil independence. But I'm skeptical that that goal is remotely feasible with biofuels without making serious compromises in food-generating land. We should be spending this effort and funding on improving battery tech and creating business models that make electric vehicles appealing (swappable leased batteries, for example), as well as improving nuclear power tech to feed those vehicles.

EDIT: Algae seems like it could be promising, assuming we could find a way to mass farm it without disturbing ocean food cycles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article and its implications is worth reading in its entirety. Corn-based ethanol is a farm subsidy, an inefficient energy solution, and it's bad for the environment (corn is grown as a monoculture) and its growth takes up a lot of water. Corn just grown for ethanol (with 10% in our gas) takes up 115,800 square miles -- or more than the entire state of Arizona! Imagine other things we could do with that land. With talk of increasing it from 10% to 15%, that's another half a state of Arizona dedicated to corn. It increases the cost of land. Growing corn involves adding nitrogen fertilizer, tractors, transportation, and the net yield of energy is barely more than the energy put into growing it. And yet our dysfunctional country can't seem to get enough of this terrible idea. How do we stop it?

<comment><USER3> _How do we stop it?_

If oil prices reflected the true cost of using it, it would disappear by itself. Without cheap oil it's not cost efficient.

<comment><USER14> Minnesota signed into law that cars should require 20% ethanol (I think federal law requires 10%): Source: [http://www.mnsu.edu/news/read/?paper=topstories&id=old-1...](http://www.mnsu.edu/news/read/?paper=topstories&id=old-1115755777)

Anyone here good with changing laws? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> american biofuels: subsidized food burning.

<comment><USER16> To be fair, most Americans consume way too many corn-derived calories already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ethanol itself is far superior to petroleum distillates for internal combustion engines, especially small displacement turbocharged ones. This point needs to be made /extremely/ clear to everyone before pursuing the political end of the discussion.

<comment><USER18> I don't see why that needs to be extremely clear for this discussion. But regardless:

Where the octane number is raised by blending in ethanol, energy content per volume is reduced. Gasoline has an energy density of almost 10,000 Wh/l and pure Ethanol only 6,000.

Ethanol is inferior compared to basically any combination of gasoline + non- ethanol octane booster.

<comment><USER17> Volumetric energy density isn't the only consideration for fuels though. Ethanol burns cooler, faster, and with more stability. When you raise the octane rating to reduce detonation you also reduce wear on the internals, allowing the manufacturer to use cheaper components. The same is true for the lower exhaust gas temperatures with exhaust values and turbo inlets. Current mileage standards have also caused manufacturers to jack up cruise-area ignition timing to extract a more complete burn before TDC from gasoline, which risks increased knock, and isn't as much an issue with ethanol. I also can't fail to mention the disgusting layer of grease and soot that covers the inside of engine, gas tank, and exhaust components (and the rear end of your car) from gasoline. Again, not much of an issue with ethanol.

These strengths are almost never written about or discussed. I agree with many of the points of the article in terms of the production efficiency issues, and corn being a weak production candidate, but I can't stand if/when this becomes an ethanol-substance bashing bonanza.

I also can't stand (in the overall discourse on the matter) when the article's points are used against the adoption of ethanol over petroleum. These aren't reasons against ethanol, they're reasons to work towards optimizing the means of production.

<comment><USER3> _I also can't stand (in the overall discourse on the matter) when the article's points are used against the adoption of ethanol over petroleum. These aren't reasons against ethanol, they're reasons to work towards optimizing the means of production._

I agree, but I actually thought the article was pretty careful about specifying that it was ethanol produced from corn and sugarcane that they were talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Some counterpoints to the article

[http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/06/five-ethanol-myths- bust...](http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/06/five-ethanol-myths-busted-2/)

<comment><USER20> That reads like an industry press release designed to confidently befuddle.

For example, addressing the concern that ethanol production crowds out food production, it simply states that a different kind of corn is used... ignoring that the same land and other inputs _could_ be used for food crops.

Addressing the concern about greenhouse gases, it mainly talks a bunch about 'vehicular gaseous hazardous air pollutants' and carbon monoxide – not the same as 'greenhouse gases'. The only reference to "life cycle analysis" is a sentence-fragment quote from an unnamed study with unclear context.

And 'myths' #4 and #5, that ethanol takes more water to produce and results in lower gas mileage? Well, this 'debunking' actually concedes both those 'myths'.

Not an impressive ethanol defense.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I kind of agree on this.

That said, the guy is a mechanical engineer at ANL, so I wouldn't take it as a sanctioned response from ANL. Claiming that the other corn isn't used in food production is disingenuous by the guy, since it is being used, but just via animals.

If you look at the lab biofuels splash page (<http://biofuels.es.anl.gov/>), you'll see they're working on things like water, nutrients and algal biofuels to improve the process.

There's a lot of work going into making 2nd generation biofuels actually viable, using cellulosic biomass and crops that can grow on marginal land. People are even working on producing fuel molecules that aren't ethanol (e.g. butanol).

We have a saying at work: Ethanol is for drinking, not for driving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "But even setting subsidies aside—after all, every energy source in use in the U.S. today continues to receive federal tax benefits, among other incentives—there's the simple economic cost of building all those corn mills, stainless steel fermentation tanks and other infrastructure needed to churn out ethanol on the tremendous scale of transportation fuels."

Maybe the subsidies should go there, to promote job creation in those areas for the infrastructure buildup.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't know. I do know that upping ethanol levels in gas will not make all the motorcycle riders out there happy.

<comment><USER3> Because they will require tuning? I guess this is one benefit of the cat requirement for cars, the lambda sensor takes care of that problem.

<comment><USER22> A potentially serious problem with ethanol is that it can be incompatible with older rubber compounds. Also in higher concentrations it can cause corrosion to steel and aluminum that is a part of older motorcycle fuel systems.

<comment><USER3> I know that US regulations for cars have required ethanol-resistant materials for fuel for quite a long time, like several decades IIRC. Do you know if motorcycles are exempt from those regulations? If not, it seems the issue should be the same as with (ie no more serious than) old cars.

<comment><USER6> In general, motorcycles trail the automotive world by about 10-20 years in all respects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That reminds me; the saison I've got going in the secondary needs to be bottled this weekend.

(Didn't read the article)

</comment><comment><USER24> I tried the foreign stuff: It also gave me a hangover in the morning.</comment>


Portland's Disgraceful Anarchy - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/html/portlands-disgraceful-anarchy-15606.html <comment><USER3> I've been to Portland, and I live in SOMA. SOMA and the Mission in SF are way worse than Portland. The article author has no idea how much more anarchy American progressives are capable of countenancing. SF is faaaaaar worse than Portland, and there really isn't any political backlash against city officials. The teenagers in the Bay Area call SOMA "pooptown". When I first came to learn of this nickname, I was about to protest as a resident, because I thought it was offensive and didn't reflect the neighborhood, with all its restaurants and fancy employers. But then I thought about it some more. And I remembered how on my first day at work in 2014, I stepped in human feces and tracked it over the office. And I thought these kids are visiting the neighborhood from other, cleaner suburbs. It makes sense that their primary impression of the neighborhood would be the large amount of human feces everywhere ... which would really stand out to them. As residents, we just walk around the poo, and don't think much about it.

Anyway, I have to agree, we do live in a crime-ridden, feces smeared neighborhood.

But there's a couple of positives too. First, the crime is almost all non- violent. And, second, the city cleans up the poo very quickly, if you call them.

<comment><USER4> As a non-local, I had to look it up, but presumably you're talking about the Mission District ("The Mission") and South of Market (SOMA) neighborhoods in San Francisco, correct?

<comment><USER5> Yep, that's what he was talking about. Here's the San Francisco poop map - showing where people pooped in the streets the most there: [http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/](http://mochimachine.org/wasteland/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the author aware that by cracking down on homelessness, all you're doing is spending taxpayer resources to move them somewhere else?

It's not like you enact some anti-homeless policy and the homeless throw their hands up in disgust, defeated by the swift arm of the law, then pull a resumes out of their back pocket, and then land some middle-class job.

<comment><USER7> Your comment assumes that relocation 1) is bad, and 2) is the only step being taken to fight homelessness.

In response to the second one, the city may be taking a number of steps to fight homelessness. Shelters, mental health facilities, drug rehab programs, and counseling can all help the issue without relocation.

Also, I'm just not sure relocation is completely a bad thing. Portland is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, with rent being prohibitively expensive to the lower class unless several people congeal in a single apartment. Not everyone can do that. How is it bad if they are relocated to a cheaper part of the country?

<comment><USER6> > Your comment assumes that relocation 1) is bad, and 2) is the only step > being taken to fight homelessness.

Relocation does not solve the problem, it simply moves it. Yes, technically, mass-relocation of homeless could solve _Portland 's_ homeless problem, but it simply shifts the burden somewhere else.

Second, the article specifically mentions the mayor's inaction to utilize the police and to enforce a ban on tent cities. It doesn't talk about shelters, mental health facilities, drug rehab, or counseling.

<comment><USER7> > Relocation does not solve the problem, it simply moves it.

Why didn't you argue against my point that the cost of living varies massively between regions? Why shouldn't we send homeless to a lower cost of living area?

<comment><USER8> >Why didn't you argue against my point that the cost of living varies massively between regions? Why shouldn't we send homeless to a lower cost of living area?

Why shouldn't we send you somewhere that you don't want to live? They're people - not cattle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Despite the title, this has nothing to do with anarchy in Portland. Disorder, perhaps, anarchy, no.

<comment><USER10> At several points, the wording also appears to suggest that being homeless is in itself a criminal act. There may well be a big problem, but this active seems quite callously written.

<comment><USER11> It's written by an Ayn Randian conservative think tank, so I wouldn't be that surprised by the tone.

<comment><USER12> They sell all those Rand books in Portland, at Powell's. Every one of them. It's no wonder that Portland is a hotbed for libertarian thought and free market propaganda. It's awful. Don't move there.

<comment><USER13> What you did in this thread is vandalism in its own right. Trying to defend one community by dropping crap in another doesn't seem very civil. Neither is the ingroup/outgroup subtext that seems to me to underly this sort of posting.

Edit: since you've done this before on HN, I've banned this account for trolling. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email email@example.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the site rules in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surely homelessness is, in and of itself, a symptom of a much deeper rot? I'm not trying to excuse the behaviour of these people, but if you feel that society has shat on you, and robbed you of your dignity, might you not want to return the favour? Homelessness is rarely a chosen situation; every homeless person has a story, often a dire set of circumstances that landed them on the streets. It may be personal problems, substance abuse, or mental issues - <USER2> things people need help and treatment for. Many of these things are, at the root, down to lacking education or social support structures; symptoms of a society that doesn't care.

Don't get me wrong, the affected businesses are justifiably angry, but their anger is misdirected; sometimes the perpetrators of crime are not the root cause. In small part, maybe _they_ are part of the root cause.

<comment><USER15> So, would you be okay with someone shitting in front of the front door of your house or apartment? What would you do, personally, to help resolve the root issues that led to that shit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it really this bad in Portland? (I've never been)

Based on the number of people moving there and the hype, I can't believe open defecation and rampant crime are tolerated? Is it really so bad? (And is it getting worse?)

<comment><USER17> Yes, Portland is both growing very fast (high rise condos are popping up everywhere) and descending into a hell hole (Google springwater corridor) at the same time.

Portland has established itself as a safe haven for homeless and down trodden folks due to it's mild weather, abundance of services, and general lack of enforcement. I've lived here under two mayor's and both have been horribly ineffective at tackling this issue. I'm not sure there is another downtown metro area as bad as Portland when it comes to homelessness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Better solutions for homelessness are badly needed. The best evidence based solution is called "housing first", pay to get people into housing then address their needs. It works out to be cheaper and also is more likely to fix the problem w/o the quality of life issues talked about here

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First)

San Diego is dealing with a huge Hepatitis outbreak caused by open defecation around homeless encampments, 20 deaths last I looked.

[http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/sd-me- hepati...](http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/sd-me-hepatitis- update-20171031-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> > Meanwhile, the city has been reluctant to deploy the crime-prevention > resources that it already has at its disposal to address the homelessness > wave.

...

> She added that, "the police came and then he came back four minutes later > after they left."

</comment><comment><USER20> The Bay Area's finest export. Rising property values and the accompanying homelessness. Why not build some toilets? Has anyone tried? There are designs for public restrooms that are essentially self cleaning (hole in the ground with high pressure water nozzles in the ceiling). If you can't even have enough decency to build a place for someone who has been thrown out by every other part of society to poop, it seems entirely fair that they choose to do so on your stoop.

<comment><USER21> > Why not build some toilets? Has anyone tried?

Yes: [http://theloo.biz/](http://theloo.biz/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> City Journal is published by the Manhattan Institute.

> The Institute's research seeks to develop and promote free-market ideas.

> [The institute] argued that the welfare state had fostered a culture and > cycle of dependency that was to the detriment of both welfare recipients and > the United States as a whole.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Poli...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research)

<comment><USER7> How is this relevant? How does this fact invalidate any of what the article stated?

<comment><USER23> Funny how attribution brings out defensiveness. Do you also think all bylines should be removed from articles?

It doesn't appear to me that the OP was saying anything about invalidation.

<comment><USER7> People naturally form us-vs-them tribal mentalities, and the fact that this is the top comment of this post indicates that its a tribal mentality that's leading it to be upvoted.

It's like saying on a Roy Moore post that the investigation was carried out by CNBC: it leads to Republicans invalidating any finding of the investigation. This default of ignoring any information from the Other Side is what almost got Roy Moore elected.

This us-vs-them mentality needs to be noted. The fact that this comes from a think tank does not immediately mean they don't raise a good point.

<comment><USER23> I agree that tribal bullshit has hit a dangerous fever pitch. I also agree that the product of think tanks are not inherently incorrect.

But, if you wanted to bet me I couldn't guess what Americans For Prosperity thinks of the tax bill without reading anything from them about it, I'd take that bet in a heartbeat.

You don't fix this by ignoring attribution or yelling at people for noting it. You also don't do so by attacking strawmen.

<comment><USER24> How about just, you know, addressing the points the article made?

<comment><USER23> \- Because nobody ignores attribution.

\- Not only is life it too short to pretend outfits that exist to promote a particular agenda are, in fact, neutral arbiters _this_ time around, but doing so is actively empowering bad actors arguing in bad faith.

Puzzle me this: a person you know to be con-artist wants you to do something. You can't figure out an angle, but it is a weird-seeming thing to ask.

Do you ignore what you know about this person in making your decision?

<comment><USER24> The wonderful thing with multi-user forums like this is the crowd-sourcing aspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Portland is terrible. Don't move here. There's nowhere to park. There's homeless everywhere. There's no real tech companies. There's no VC. And the air smells like pot.

Don't move here. Trust me. Stay in California. You think it's bad but you have no idea what happens here. Your children may be kidnapped by Sasquatch.

Did you know that meat might even be illegal in Portland by 2019? And they still listen to rock music, cassettes, and guitars. Don't move to Portland.

Disgraceful anarchists. Car hating thugs. Dirty homeless people. It's terrible. The author has no idea how bad it is.

They don't fluoridate water. You can't pump your own gas. They shut down roads for cars and only allow bikes. It's going to be illegal to drive your own car. You can't do anything to your property if there's trees in it.

And there's hippies. Real smelly granola types. They all smoke pot all the time.

Don't move to Portland. It'll ruin your life. The homeless are everywhere.

<comment><USER13> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15982187](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15982187)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> SOMA is So Mach Better than Portland. You can meet other people who work in your field. No one looks at you weird when you get on the bus for work. You can get a real burrito. You can find a bathroom. Don't move to Portland. It's awful.

</comment><comment><USER25> Sensational title, and the article does not provide insights from other business owners to show any sense of pervasiveness.

<comment><USER26> A friend of mine manages a large business on the outer edge of Portland. He pulls into work early one morning to find a couple of the homeless living in the community behind his office dragging a decent amount of power tools into the vegetation of the greenbelt. We're talking weed-eaters, chainsaws, etc..., that type of stuff. All rather expensive kit, organized and arranged in a very methodical manner, maybe 20 items or so. A call to the police results in a transfer to a third-party mediation team, as the police can't directly interact with "campers" in a situation of this type. There are several articles out there commenting on the "legal quagmire" that are Portland's policies dealing with the homeless community.

<comment><USER25> That may be the case, but I was talking about the article.</comment></comment></comment>


Too few motherf$%kers on board - <AUTHOR> https://no-kill-switch.ghost.io/too-few-motherf-kers-on-board/ <comment><USER2> This reads like someone who watched Glengarry Glen Ross and thought it was full of good workplace ideas.

</comment><comment><USER3> People have started to change the jobs more often. They do not spend much time in their company so they start to see less value in creating long-term friendships with they coworkers.</comment>


Ignore the news - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/i-m-h-o/297e47e6f78b <comment><USER3> As a former newspaper person, I'm inclined to say "But oh, knowing current events is our civic duty"...and it _is_....but consuming journalism isn't the same as consuming news, and reading a lengthy in depth story about an event that happened last month or last year or even the last decade is likely more helpful than staying abreast of the 24 hour news cycle.

This has been said before, but I'd also argue that the constant news cycle is just harmful, period. The most recent manifestation of this for me was the Boston Bombings...it was a terrible event, but not being in Boston, there was literally no benefit I could gain from listening to the minute by minute coverage. But I did it anyway, even checking it late in the night and early in the morning. When that situation was resolved...all those accumulated hours of listening didn't mean a thing. News shouldn't be consumed like a TV series, in which the point _is_ the journey, rather than the conclusion.

I think it's better to think of the breaking news phenomenon in psychological terms, rather than content. It's not that you're necessarily obsessed with shootings, bombings, and celeb drug rehab, but that the constant stream of dilemma and reward (when a new turn unfolds) must have a similar effect to other endorphin-releasing habits.

And while I'm just throwing pop psychology out there...it is indisputable that the news covers the novel and unlikely, that's why it is "news". Consuming too much of it will distort your reality and perception of what's "normal". After doing cops reporting, I couldn't help but feel extra paranoid when walking certain streets when off the job..."This is where people get shot" is an entirely irrational way to judge a neighborhood, but it won't seem irrational if that's your primary or first acquaintance with the area.

<comment><USER4> "all those accumulated hours of listening didn't mean a thing."

This is exactly it.

I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years (so a whole heck of a lot of time to kill), and frequently spent hours every day reading the news. One day I asked myself, "What have I learned?"

I couldn't come up with anything.

After that, I quit reading the news and started reading classics like "The Prince" and "The Brothers Grimm" and "The Grapes of Wrath." Much better use of free time than reading the same rehashed stories of shootings and stabbings and rapes and murders and robberies and earthquakes and bombings and shark attacks over and over again with only slightly different details.

<comment><USER5> _I had an 8-hour a day office job with about 10 minutes of actual work a day for a couple of years_

I know this isn't really relevant to the main topic under discussion, but _thank you so much_ for posting this. I thought I was the only one in the world. I work eight hours a day and I have between 10-30 minutes of real work to do each day, mainly fairly dull administrative stuff and answering the occasional email.

I'm not underperforming, I do everything that's asked of me and plenty more besides, but there's just not enough for me to do. I can't even surf job sites or anything, to find something a bit more stimulating, because my screen is overlooked by colleagues. The workplace is poorly organised and unstructured - there are no performance reviews, no targets, nothing.

I end up spending most of the day reading HN in my browser (because it's a 'safe' text based site that I can read without it being eye-catching to colleagues/the boss) and other sites in elinks in a terminal (to prevent images, huge fonts, etc). I also listen to a lot of speech radio, because that's invisible and still stimulating.

I don't know why I really wrote this comment, but I just wanted to say how appreciative I am that I know I'm not the only one. It's been 18 months now...

(Throwaway because my real account is under my real name.)

<comment><USER6> You know what, I had a job like that for a while. It's called being a sysadmin at a medium size company, because after a while, if you're competent, you basically automate yourself out of any regular work. Every now and again would be something irregular - an urgent update, hardware failure, X or Y, but the vast majority of the time there was nothing to do at all.

For the first year or two it seems cool to be paid to do nothing but after a while I realised I was literally idling away my life, so I switched to actually building things instead.

<comment><USER5> This could also be my story - when I started here, things were set up so inefficiently that it was a full time job. Now, I've scripted and automated most stuff so it just happens, and all I have to do is check that it's happened, and fix it if it hasn't.

Sometimes I consider breaking things, just so I've got something to do to fix them...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying." --Bruce Schneier [<http://www.schneier.com/essay-171.html>]

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll settle for an 'ignore medium.com' button.

<comment><USER9> What's the deal with all the medium.com spam recently? I sometimes feel like they are thinking each morning "with what made up bs headline can we bait HN users today".

<comment><USER10> Exactly! What is this? The front page is loaded with medium.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _There are lots of new ways of filtering and understanding the news emerging so that you don't have to suffer the constant barrage, and yet still be informed enough to be able to understand._

You don't need technology to do that.

You can just stay informed by buying a high quality newspaper or news magazine and read that. For example, (personal choices ahead), you could read The Economist once per week. Or, since he appears to be in the UK, you could have a quality daily paper (e.g. Daily Telegraph weekdays and the Observer on Sundays).

<comment><USER12> On the subject of your personal choices: why the Telegraph/Observer combination, when both papers have more similar sister publications to cover the other days? I would imagine than Daily Telegraph + Sunday Telegraph or Guardian + Observer are much more common combinations.

<comment><USER11> It brings some semblance of balance given the different politics of the papers and I prefer the Observer's 'weekend' coverage (e.g. things like their coverage of arts, travel, ...)

The Telegraph is pretty conservative and the Observer fairly liberal. The two views are interesting. I don't think I could take The Guardian every day. And given that I also have Le Monde as well that's plenty of centre-left stuff.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough - I just don't think I've previously come across breaking down like that over the week, most people I know who want multiple points of view do so on a daily basis.

Do you read Le Monde because of its language or would you still read it if it were in English?

<comment><USER11> I speak French and one of the ways I learnt the language was to read Le Monde. When I moved to France I got a subscription and read at least part of it every day. I still read some of it regularly, but I don't get it every day any more. The downside of Le Monde is that it reports pretty deeply about French politics (which is either your thing or it isn't).

One other thing about the Telegraph on a daily basis that's important to some people: the crossword.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like all of this except for "Watch satirical shows that poke fun at the news, and get the gist about what's going on in the process."

Absolutely not. All you're doing is trading one form of emotional manipulation for another.

I understand what's going on by 1) scanning written commentary. Oddly enough, when the emotional manipulation is out in the open, it has much less effect, and 2) watching CNN's "Reliable Sources", a somewhat unreliable account of the business of news reporting. The meta story -- what editors and reporters decide to cover and why -- gives me the big news stories _and_ the way they were slanted on different outlets.

Don't substitute comedy for this 24-hour-news mishmash. Bad. Idea. Comedy is always about biting satire and conformity, many times directed at large groups of people. All you're going to learn is how to fit in with some kind of group the comedian is a member of, and we need a lot less of us vs. them in the world.

</comment><comment><USER14> Quoting Taleb (<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb>)

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers."

Of course this assumes that you're not in the business of knowing what other people know. If it's important being in the zeitgeist than you have to keep track of the drivel. This is one downside of working in Sales. :-)

</comment><comment><USER15> Aaron's words on the same topic - <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews>

</comment><comment><USER16> I think we will have this kind of epiphany on a front page every time someone turns 30.

</comment><comment><USER17> I remember laughing at the story about the judge who asked "Who are the Beatles?". Now I find them a very wise person indeed :)

<comment><USER18> link? If he'd said this in 1964, yeah, it might make sense. Otherwise, probably not so much.

Ahh: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340891/Judge- James-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1340891/Judge-James- Pickles-said-didnt-know-The-Beatles-dies-aged-85.html)

Doesn't say when he said it though.

<comment><USER12> One journalist in 2007 wrote _"'Who are the Beatles?' is the most famous such question. I'm sure it was never asked. I have spent an inordinate proportion of my journalistic life trying to trace it. I've searched newspaper archives and, over the years, asked literally hundreds of lawyers active during the 60s if they could point to a judge who said those words."_ <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/may/21/uk.law>

It seems that if James Pickles did ask that question, it was probably later than that, since he was a judge from 1975 to 1991 (and that Daily Mail obit. says "From the mid-1980s onwards, he became a household name for his colourful opinions and remarks").

Interesting side-notes that his sister was the actress playing the mother of Ross and Monica on Friends, and he seemed to have a rather modern view on drugs: _"Cannabis never killed anybody and it's use is widespread. You can't stop it. The law defeats itself because all the efforts to stop drugs coming in only drives up the prices and then gangsters move in to push the drugs. If they legalised there wouldn't be gangsters and huge profits..."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Growing up the muppets came on at the same time as evening news. The muppets always lost. After the news, my parents would answer our questions and then start debating some some relevant topic. As I got older, I'd participate more in this process. As a result, I have an intellectual curiosity for world news and strong critical thinking skills. Something kids today could use more of not less.

Also, by choosing to get his news from Twitter over let's say NPR, this idiot is choosing to be misinformed. Of all the hoax or inaccurate stories that I've come across this year, Twitter take the crown followed by news aggregators and email. The only false NPR story I can think of was the TAL retraction of the story on work conditions in Apple factories. According to my twitter last week "NASA disproved global warming"

<comment><USER20> _I have an intellectual curiosity for world news and strong critical thinking skills._

And apparently, a penchant for throwing around insults.

 _choosing to get his news from Twitter over let's say NPR_

<https://twitter.com/nprnews>

 _Of all the hoax or inaccurate stories that I've come across this year, Twitter take the crown followed by news aggregators and email._

Twitter is just an aggregation technology. If you get inaccurate stories, it's due to your own choices of sources.

<comment><USER19> Cute, except the article stated he was getting them from "people" NOT news outlets.

Sorry if my insults offended you, but this article was link bait trash designed to make the misinformed, filter-bubbled, over-protective moms feel better about themselves. I call it how I see it.

<comment><USER20> _Cute, except the article stated he was getting them from "people" NOT news outlets._

"People" (usually) don't create news, they filter them from other sources, such as news outlets. Some republish crap, others distort those news when tweeting them, others mostly just filter the irrelevant and republish the useful.

Getting crap is a consequence of your own choices, not of the underlying technology.

 _Sorry if my insults offended you, but this article was link bait trash designed to make the misinformed, filter-bubbled, over-protective moms feel better about themselves. I call it how I see it._

<http://xkcd.com/386/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, ignoring the news seems like a bad idea since it makes you totally uninformed. For me I just started reading the news instead of hearing or watching it. CNN spends 72 hours on a tornado when I can learn all I really need in a few hundred words.

<comment><USER22> How exactly does being informed about the tornado improve your life, unless you live in the area which may be affected?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been doing this for a long while. I don't see any value in the typical "daily news". Instead I read books, or articles from a selection of sites. And of course HN. Daily news is a waste of time.

<comment><USER24> Hacker News doesn't fall under "daily news"?

<comment><USER23> Well, some might be daily. But I separate between daily mainstream news and job professional articles. I only read the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I completely agree with the sentiment, and I further extended it to aggregators (reddit and HN). However my solution to the problem was quantizing the content into regular planned intervals. For example I use LeechBlock for reddit and HN, which allow me to access it for 1 hour a day, and I read 2-3 good weekly periodicals to keep in touch with non-tech news (economist). This broke my "refresh every 5 minutes to find something new" habit and greatly enhanced self contemplation over what I consume.

</comment><comment><USER26> I also dislike reading the news. I picked up this habit 2 months ago and i feel it wastes so much time.

However its not 100% waste. At least here in Argentina, what I read on the newspaper have direct consequences on economic decisions in the every-day life. Literally, from going to the super market, to spending with your credit- card to buying illegal currency.

On the other hand, Argentina is going through the middle of a political- economical crisis so the news become a very relevant termometer.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like a good plan. People nowadays are far too exposed to media everywhere. News is 99% indoctrination or just flat out crap filling the hole between new horror-stories. Social media has even lower quality except for a few select sources. But the signal-to-noise ratio in social networks is low enough that it's only a waste of time (just like TV).

Now, that doesn't mean i did what the author did. Respect for that, i'm a little envious of him.

</comment><comment><USER28> and this is how you build the perfect bubble around you.

ignore the news is the new oh we don't own a tv. or oh i don't listen to "popular" music.

<comment><USER29> Everyone already has a bubble around them. The difference is whether you consciously choose to let information/ideas/people/news in or not.

Making the conscious choice to filter to your preferrences is important and liberating because it enables you more control over the kind of life you want to live.

<comment><USER28> i question the placement of the filter.

by filtering at the source, you will never be exposed to something outside your bubble. the NYT front page (as an example) is great as it covers such a wide array of topics, just browsing over them gives you the chance to learn something new.

if your current interests and beliefs act as filters, then how will you ever develop new ones?

or, coming down to the core topic of this site, how will you know how your audience/target group/customers tick if you never see the world through their eyes? look at all the nerd-startups solving nerd problems (asana?...) - <USER2> how frustrated they all get by the success of tumblr, instagram, etc.

good retail CEOs watch fox news and read the ny post (or equivalents) to get a feel for their customers world.

<comment><USER29> You're right however part of the freedom comes from choosing where your bubble ends. Consciously choosing where you filter what you allow into your bubble be it NYT front page or fox news etcetera.

>if your current interests and beliefs act as filters, then how will you ever develop new ones?

This partly comes down to being another personal choice and also consider that many things are linked in a way that enables you to develop new interests and beliefs.

One example of this is Wikipedia. Starting from pretty much any point of interest, you can find a great depth of chain linked resources to information you can choose to read and allow influence your interests and beliefs

>or, coming down to the core topic of this site, how will you know your audience... ?

Best to start by building what you know however I realise that's unrealistic. After that you just accept that you can't filter everything because somethings you want in your bubble have baggage. "Every rose has its thorne" as the saying goes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I hope we all start to move past this phase. Is it really worth the energy of starting and maintaining a "news diet" when you already know what's wrong with news? I went through a phase where I thought no news would be good for me. Then I grew out of it. I realized that if a person understands what's wrong with news they're really not the ones who need to abstain. It's everyone who hasn't realized it yet.

I read a lot about this "no news/news is bad for you" meme going around the past few years and I have to admit it's getting a little lame. How about just taking the news for what it is and take in what you want and leave the rest. Am I odd in that I don't have any emotional reaction when I hear of a rape, murder, or most other tragedies on the news? I was in Europe during the Oklahoma tornadoes and when I heard about it on the news when I came back I thought "hmm, so this is the new big story for the next week" before falling asleep. It's not that I don't care, but I also kind of don't care.

</comment><comment><USER31> Never had the habit in the first place.

<comment><USER32> What's worse? Wasting your time by consuming the news, or posting pointless comments on it?

<comment><USER31> Sometimes, as a minority, it's important to affirm your presence.</comment></comment></comment>


Somebody is just paying $5000 for you to work on any project of your choice - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nayafia/5-000-no-strings-attached-9e7b95d33e50 <comment><USER2> It'd be fascinating to see what ideas she gets sent. I'd love to know what a bunch of people think are reasonable $5000 projects.

<comment><USER3> Well, you can post on medium saying that you will give away US$ 5,000 and surely you will have a lot of reasonable (and I believe quite a few unreasonable) such ideas/proposals. ;)

More seriously I would be more curious about the story of the original 36K (ten years ago) the Author received by the Compton foundation for a non better specified "project around climate change investing", how were they spent, what came out of it, etc. Should be this one:

[http://www.comptonmentorfellowship.org/index.cfm?page=viewfe...](http://www.comptonmentorfellowship.org/index.cfm?page=viewfellow&fellowid=83FFC77A-3048-78A9-2FF8998110106256)

"Project Summary Nadia will combine research with advocacy to publicize and promote successful efforts by foundations to use their investments to tackle climate change. Project goals include creating a handbook that identifies the untapped power of endowment portfolios to combat climate change, supplementing resources on active shareholder practices. The handbook will be distributed to foundations, investment managers and advisors, and serve as the basis for convening experienced foundations with those new to to the field to discuss concrete strategies and address concerns."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm 5 hours.. they probably have dozens of applications.</comment>


In building the brain, cell pedigree matters - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-brain-cell-pedigree.html <comment><USER2> Is there no link or reference into the article itself in the article?</comment>


Intel's Kaby Lake is a must have for 4k Video - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/3113457/components-processors/intels-kaby-lake-chip-is-a-must-have-for-4k-video-fiends.html <comment><AUTHOR> I think the really interesting tidbits are somewhat buried here, first that Intel stuttered on the 10nm node, the so called tick tock tock. Another indication that Moore's law is at its nadir. And that the choice to "spend the transistors" on video hardware rather than on additional instructions or pipelines etc.

That second bit is the evolution of the microprocessor into something more System-on-Chip (SoC) like and perhaps the first real hint that general purpose CPUs are obsolete.

The driving "buying" decision for many people on their hardware has been battery life for a while, surpassing weight. And the best way to boost battery life is to look at all the things people do with their laptop or tablet and power optimize with special circuitry all the things that consume the most power. Phone companies have been doing it with their SoCs for years and years.</comment>


Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RTM - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/03/30/visual-studio-2015-update-2-rtm/ <comment><AUTHOR> Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 RTM is full of bugs! Read the comments on the blog.

1\. People are getting BSOD as soon as one opens VS.

2\. VS crashes inexplicitly for no reason.

3\. Errors related to Unicode conversion.

4\. The Git component is buggy.

5\. Extensions no longer function.

6\. Even if one attempts to rollback, VS no longer works.</comment>


SEC says no to Amazon bid to stop shareholders voting on use facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/08/amazon_shareholders_should_get_to_vote_on_facial_recognition_tech_says_sec/ <comment><USER2> I spent a minute sorting out that double negative headline.

<comment><USER3> It's made harder by the fact that HN title is missing a word: "use _of_ facial recognition".</comment></comment>


Jailhouse Tech Sniffs Out 'Cell' Phones - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/04/electronic-warf.html In prison, the cellphone is a deadly weapon: Inmates can use contraband phones to plot more crime, intimidate or kill witnesses or plan escape. But the introduction of the Safe Prisons Communications Act of 2009 -- which would amend federal law to allow jamming technology to block smuggled cell phones -- has prompted a showdown between jamming advocates and wireless communications companies.
Jammers, however, are not the only tool for battling contraband cellphones. Several companies are marketing cellphone detection as a smarter alternative to jamming. The principle is straightforward: instead of blocking signals, prison authorities can use a network of sensors to detect cellphone transmissions, measure their use and triangulate their location.
I spoke recently to Terry Bittner of ITT Corporation, which markets a system called Cell Hound. It's currently installed in some state and federal institutions. According to Bittner, a system like Cell Hound is more of an intel tool. Illicit phones are often hidden with other contraband -- and detectors can not only locate phones, but track the patterns of the callers. "You need to study the habit of the phone -- who uses it most of the time, how it got in there," he said. "They will never store the phone in a cell where they use it. They rent it out to other inmates. In some cases they won't use the phone." Cell Hound scans for the most common cellphone radio-frequency signatures in North America; a central server then maps the location and gives a visual alert on a corrections officer's workstation.
ITT is not the only company in this game, however. Israeli prisons also have a major issue with contraband phones (pictured here); Israeli electronic warfare firm Netline also markets a cellphone detection system with a central control. Cellphone detection could potentially have other applications, too: Detecting illicit cellphone use inside secure conference facilities, or to aid a network in pushing marketing messages or alerts to mobile phones.
Typically, law enforcement and intelligence agencies don't like to advertise what kinds of tools they use to counter or detect illicit communications. ITT, for instance, initially marketed Cell Hound in a very low-key fashion; but pending legislation in Congress, as Bittner described it, forced the company to "come out of the closet" with its technology. <comment><USER2> Arrested, but not convicted, the only way to talk to my brother in law in jail was to pay a few $ per minute when he called us collect. I have read descriptions of why the jails should limit calls thusly, with contracts to providers that pay a lot of money to the jails to give them the monopoly telephone service, and they are BS!

I'd love to see how much problem jails had with contraband cellphones if they provided monitored telecom to any prisoner on a fairly abundant schedule for free. I bet most of that contraband cell phone is there at all because the "legal" communication is so onerous.</comment>