society

An excerpt from a Social Security Agency press release about popular baby names of 2007:

For reasons likely to puzzle baby name experts around the world, American parents have become infatuated by names, particularly for their sons, that rhyme with the word "maiden." These names for boys include: Jayden (No. 18); Aiden (No. 27); Aidan (No. 54); Jaden (No. 76); Caden (No. 92); Kaden (No. 98); Ayden (No.102); Braden (No.156); Cayden (No.175); Jaiden (No.191); Kaiden (No. 220); Aden (No. 264); Caiden (No. 286); Braeden (No. 325); Braydon (No. 361); Jaydon (No. 415); Jadon (No. 423); Braiden (No. 529); Zayden (No. 588); Jaeden (No. 593); Aydan (No. 598); Bradyn (No. 629); Kadin (No. 657); Jadyn (No. 696); Kaeden (No. 701); Jaydin (No. 757); Braedon (No. 805); Aidyn (No. 818); Haiden (No. 820); Jaidyn (No. 841); Kadyn (No. 878); Jaydan (No. 887); Raiden (No. 931); and Adin (No. 983). This startling trend was present, but less pronounced, with girls names: Jayden (No. 172); Jadyn (No. 319); Jaden (No. 335); Jaiden (No. 429); Kayden (No. 507); and Jaidyn (No. 561). Social Security spokesman Mark Lassiter indicated that the agency would resist any legislative efforts to standardize the spelling of these names.

I remember when we were taking Sophie home from the hospital in 2000, that a duo of new mothers were discussing their babies' names. One was "Jayden," the other "Craydon." Why Craydon? Because "Kayden" was already taken by a cousin!

This story about a pre-Edison sound recording is really interesting:

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable -- converted from squiggles on paper to sound -- by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

...

On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit" in a lilting 11-note melody -- a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

You can listen to the short recording as an MP3. I'll say it's no American Idol -- in fact, you really can't understand the words, but the overall effect is haunting as the story describes. Of course, this is after an awful lot of processing and enhancement: it's a hint of a song, but not a practical archive.

I would say it's the phonographic equivalent of those "ghost-capturing" photographs. Very spooky.

The BBC is carrying an interesting article that shows cultural anthropologists and software developers working together to document and preserve the history of some indigenous peoples of Australia. The challenge is that not just any person is permitted to view certain images:

Dr Christian, who is an assistant professor based at Washington State University, stumbled across the idea of the archive by chance after meeting a group of missionaries who had digitally archived photos of the Warumungu community since the 1930s.

After loading them onto her laptop, she took them back to Tennant Creek and set up a slideshow - where she noticed that people turned away when certain images came up on screen.

For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.

The technology to do this sort of database is straightforward -- it's the same sort of thing that allows different people at a university to have access to student records depending on their needs and rights level. Making it user-friendly and automatic can be a challenge, and I think it's wonderful that anthropologists and computer developers could forge a partnership in this way.

Umm...what can I say to this? I'm speechless.

America's Fastest-Growing Salaries

Here are 20 jobs with the highest salary growth, according to data from CareerBuilder.com, in conjunction with CBSalary.com and SalaryExpert.com. The percentage listed is the rate of salary growth for each occupation nationally. The data is based on data collected on an ongoing basis, and comes from several different sources, including the Occupational Employment Statistics provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and ongoing surveys conducted by Salary Expert.

15. Anthropologists study the origin, cultural development and behavior of humans, while archaeologists recover artifacts to gather information about humans.
Salary growth rate: 4.9 percent
Salary: $66,861

Uhhh...ummm...really? Because I think I would have noticed.

Look, I advise all my students that there are great career opportunities in anthropology. But jeez, 4.9 percent? Maybe I can take out a loan against my future salary.

I have to direct you to this article on the front page of today's NY Times about Smith Center, Kansas, and their football team:

They are a high school football team, a superb one that has won 51 games in a row and three consecutive state championships, and has outscored opponents this season, 704-0. They are more than that, however, to the 1,931 people here who all know one another's names: The Redmen are proof that hard work and accountability still mean something.

The trading cards, for example, are not about hero worship. Each player and cheerleader signs a contract pledging to remain alcohol-, drug- and tobacco-free. If they break that promise, they must go to the elementary school to explain to the children why they were kicked off their team, and their cards are revoked.

My hometown, Norton, gets a quick mention in the article -- we have been one of Smith Center's rivals for many years, although in the past few they have no rival.

Leave it to the Times' fact-checkers, though:

The nearest McDonald's is 90 minutes away...

Yeah, except for the ones in Norton, Russell, Beloit, and Hastings, Nebraska!

I'll tell you what, though, I do love the Jiffy Burger.

It's this part that's incredible to me:

Barta is not even sure that this is the best Redmen team he has had. Not that long ago, Smith Center had more than 80 players and was in the bigger and more competitive Class 3A. In 1985, its conference, the Mid-Continent League, had three of its members win state championships - Norton (4A), Plainville (3A) and Victoria (2-1A).

Now, there are 46 Redmen, and they are playing in Class 2-1A. Two other Mid-Continent league schools will drop to the next and lowest class, eight-man football.

We were the big league -- there being lots of smaller schools interspersed among these towns that already played 8-man (or sometimes even 6-man!) football. But the bigger school districts are shrinking now. The demographic change is amazing.

A lot of blogs have been pointing to this Washington Post article, where young idealistic DC postgrads bemoan how difficult it is to find long-term paying work in the charity and international development field.

But now the 29-year-old faces a predicament shared by many young strivers in Washington's public interest field. After years of amassing so many achievements, they struggle to find full-time employment with decent pay and realize they might not get exactly what they set out for. Hanley, a think tank temp who dreams of aiding the impoverished and reducing gender discrimination in developing countries, is stuck.

The tenor of the comments is well reflected by Rand Simberg's opening on the subject, "Boo hoo." I'm linking to Simberg because he gives an intelligent opinion, and also has an interesting comments section. Simberg's opinion is simple -- you can make a lot more difference by making some money and then applying it to a problem, than you can by nibbling at the problem in an NGO.

But the real problem is that many of these policy types, particularly at the NGOs, want to engage in the type of do goodery that the supposed beneficiaries aren't necessarily asking for, and don't value that much (or perhaps value negatively). And in the cases in which they do, they don't necessarily have the money to pay for it.

Some of his commenters are incensed at the idea that "liberal arts and social science types" find it difficult to "make a difference" in the way Simberg proposes -- by gaining some skills and making some money.

I think that a lot of the conversation is short-sighted, in that there are ways to attain both goals at once. A lot of young people want to make a difference in developing countries, and the Post article discusses some of the problems. But I don't understand why any of these people would have thought that Washington DC was the place to accomplish their goals.

It seems to me that if you want to help in the world in that way, you should get trained in the medical or engineering fields, and go to the place you want to help. Building things, devising more efficient distribution processes, coordinating work -- all these things require technical and administrative training.

Maybe you think you're not the best at engineering or medicine. Maybe you're used to getting passing grades with no effort in the liberal arts, and you're afraid to work hard for C's and D's as an engineer. Maybe you don't want to spend the six years in school it would take to get dual training in engineering and a language (and may I suggest some anthropology?).

But finishing with the right training -- even if you barely squeak through -- will make you a heck of a lot more useful to the people you want to help! Even if you aren't the best engineer in the world, you can use your training to help in the area you want. And you can combine technical training with the areas you want to make a difference in -- maybe natural resources, languages you will need in the area of the world you choose, or, may I suggest, anthropology?

This path comes with the bonus of making you employable. The choice we are talking about is between (a) spending two more years in school to get the right training, followed by employment with advancement potential, or (b) spending ten years or more competing for a series of temporary jobs where you never see the people you are "helping."

If you think that more investment needs to go to a country, then make it possible by being the kind of worker that a company can use to make the investment happen.

Peter Magnusson has been reading reports from the International Labor Organization, and finds this to be the most significant part:

Worldwide, in 1996 agriculture employed 42%, industry 21%, and services 37%. In 2006, the numbers are 36%, 22%, and 42%. So in the period, services has overtaken farming on a global scale.

To me this stuck out as the news of the day. This is a tremendous milestone. In the west we're accustomed to the farming sector being 4-6% or so, but that certaintly not true in most of the world. You might think the industrial revolution was a long time ago, but the reality is that more people have continued to work in farming. Until sometime in these past few years that is.

And thus passes a tremendous milestone in the history of our species. Farming, invented around 8000 BC, quickly dominated human activity and has so continued to for the following 10,000 years (give or take a few). And we even find that the tradition agriculture->industry->services transition doesn't hold up globally. The industry segment simply isn't big enough, so many workers skip to services.

In other words, today more of the world's workers are catering to other people, via the services industry, than are producing food. That really is earthshaking.

What a great concept for a column by Virginia Postrel: the way that TV is changing the image of the scientist. Her opening: a 1957 survey of images about scientists carried out by Margaret Mead:

The number of ways in which the image of the scientist contains extremes which appear to be contradictory -- too much contact with money or too little; being bald or bearded; confined to work indoors, or traveling far away; talking all the time in a boring way, or never talking at all -- all represent deviations from the accepted way of life, from being a normal friendly human being, who lives like other people and gets along with other people.

This is a clever leaping-off point to write about Gil Grissom and Charlie Epps, the two TV scientists who most put the humanity back into the Vulcan-like image of the scientist.

Rather than releasing the Monsters of the Id, science provides a bulwark against them. "You spend your life uncovering what goes on beneath the surface of civility and acceptable behavior," the insightful dominatrix Lady Heather tells Grissom in the first of her recurring appearances, "so it's a release for you to indulge in something like high tea, where it seems, if only for a moment, the world really is civilized." People don't need science or advanced technology to do terrible things to each other.

Well, most scientists don't keep a dominatrix around their lab for tea, but this is still a nice twist on the old Frankenstein theme. In her blog post about the article, Postrel points to Carl Zimmer's continuing scientific tattoo series as an object lesson in the new scientific chic.

It sounds like the evil stepsisters, but it's a line from the Times of London, describing "the wilder shores of La-La Land", cosmetic foot surgery:

It is 8 o'clock on a serene blue morning in Beverly Hills and Dr Ali Sadrieh, a podiatrist, has just performed a 45-minute operation on a client, cutting a section of bone out of her toe to shorten it. She was awake during surgery, watching a film; next week Sadrieh will do the same thing to the second toe on the other foot. There was nothing medically wrong with the toes, but his patient didn't like the way they protruded over the lip of her high-heeled Manolo Blahniks.

It is funny to me, as an anthropologist, because the feet are one of the parts of the body with the most adaptive plasticity -- the soles thicken with use and the toes and metatarsals remodel during development to adapt to shoe wear. As an adult, some of your foot form is inherited from your parents, but for a large part of it you have the feet that you developed for yourself. The shoes you wore, the distances you walked, the athletics, foot care, and even the pedicures -- they all add up to your adult foot shape.

And there is all that variation among people in relative toe lengths. It has been relatively understudied — evidently, it is hard to measure toe lengths in a standard way without (a) straightening them out, so they can't be measured from scans, or (b) unacceptable tickling. Still, since finger lengths in humans and digit lengths in animals have to do not only with genetics but also prenatal hormone exposure, the toes are true products of epigenetic phenomena.

So now you can cut out a segment. Just in case you don't like that terrible toe-hanging-over-the-sandal look. Here's a description of the "full foot lift":

"In each case, they cut a V in the bone on my big toe, which was deviating to one side, and screwed it straight, shaved the bone on the outside of my pinky, opened up the sides of my second, third and fourth toes and took out part of the middle joints to straighten and shorten them. Oh, and I had fat reduction as well."

Should unhappy people just resign themselves to their feet? Since feet have evolved to respond to the environment, they are going to have a lot of dimensions of variation. And that means that it is just silly to think that people's feet can conform to a single ideal of beauty, because there are so many directions that they can deviate.

I suppose it's unlikely that people will start wearing Earth shoes on the red carpet...

Cottage industries have a way of becoming real industries, and one of the more surprising instances of such a transformation is the phenomenon of the "gold farming" factory. These businesses, mainly in China, are paid for gold — not real gold, but the virtual "gold" pieces used as currency in online role playing games like World of Warcraft.

Gold farming operations have been around for a decade or more, and as the business has grown, they have become more and more interesting as objects of economic research. There are many interesting anthropological angles on the industry — for instance, what drives people to pay someone else for status in a game instead of undertaking the work themselves. But this week's New York Times Magazine has an in-depth article on the opposite side of the industry: the young Chinese men who take home a meager paycheck from gold farming, "leveling" and even more elaborate systems of in-game services.

First, a note on the economics:

For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers' dorm, a half-hour's bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items.

This is a long article, and gives a close look inside the industry. Two surprising (maybe) facts: First, many gold farmers, after spending 12-hour shifts in the game world, spend their off-hours ... in the game world. Playing the kinds of strategies that get a lot of gold is very time-consuming, but doesn't touch many of the parts of the game that are the most engaging. So they go to internet cafes after hours and play their own campaigns.

Second, the resentment of the majority of game players who don't buy gold leads to abusive language and online predation:

It isn't that WoW players don't frequently kill other players for fun and kill points. They do. But there is usually more to it when the kill in question is a gold farmer. In part because gold farmers' hunting patterns are so repetitive, they are easy to spot, making them ready targets for pent-up anti-R.M.T. hostility, expressed in everything from private sarcastic messages to gratuitous ambushes that can stop a farmer's harvesting in its tracks. In homemade World of Warcraft video clips that circulate on YouTube or GameTrailers, with titles like "Chinese Gold Farmers Must Die" and "Chinese Farmer Extermination," players document their farmer-killing expeditions through that same Timbermaw-ridden patch of WoW in which Min does his farming — a place so popular with farmers that Western players sometimes call it China Town. Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like "vermin," "rats" and "extermination") between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.

The end of the article presents a kind of reductio ad absurdum case of the arbitrary online line between thrilling excitement and endless tedium, as one Chinese company experiments with long, coordinated tours of duty for their online warriors.

That was just too precious, in this New Scientist story about research into making your skeleton a sound-transmitting data bus:

Bone is known to be a great conductor of sound, but so far it has only been used to transmit analogue signals in applications such as checking how bone is healing after a fracture, and in hearing aids that transmit sound from outside the skull to the auditory nerve.

To see if bone could transmit digital signals over longer distances - to a headset, say, from a sensor worn on the wrist - the team applied a small vibrator to various parts of the body....

...They found the skeleton conducted even low-power vibrations from one location to another with surprisingly few errors. "This is quite amazing because all the links involved multiple bones and many joints," [Lin] Zhong told a conference on body networks in Florence, Italy, this week.

They go on to suggest that data could be transferred between "body networks" by a firm handshake. Well, I suppose some data already are...

Ummm...

Daughters of Eve in DNA paintings

Artist Ulla Plougmand-Turner said the experience was "amazing"
An artist has created portraits of the "Seven Daughters of Eve" using paint containing reconstructed ancient DNA.

Danish artist Ulla Plougmand-Turner mixed sequences of ancient DNA, produced in an Oxford laboratory, into paint to create the images.

The pictures represent seven women, from whom it is thought the majority of Europeans can trace their DNA line.

Described as "a fusion of science and art", the paintings went on exhibition on Monday at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Uhh...

Who knew?

Termites actually social cockroaches

...

Researchers added that the cockroach penchant for coprophagy, or eating feces, could very well have led termites to evolve in the first place.

Yeeeaaah!

Please let me take a moment away from my usual anthropology content to direct your attention to this Washington Post story, "Pearls before breakfast," in which the newspaper set up world-famous violinist Joshua Bell in the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station to play for quarters, to see if anyone would notice.

I won't give the story away, but this paragraph about broke my heart:

"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."

It's a long article, and maybe you'll think it's sappy, but I think this is one of the best newspaper stories I've ever read.

This is that Superbowl time of year when everybody's thinking about advertising, so I thought it appropriate to point to this post (Ron Rosenbaum) about those Geico commercials with the cavemen.

Roast duck with mango salsa. I never got tired of the delivery of that line.

But then they topped it with the Fox cable parody, where the faux-tough announcer who filled half the screen said "Face it you guys have had some trouble evolving". And the caveman in the upper right quadrant delivers another iconic rejoinder with exasperated fashion-intern snark: "You know I'm not a hundred per cent in love with your tone." In a tone that's a hundred per cent in love with its own sarcasm. Followed by, "Yeah, walking upright, discovering fire, inventing the wheel creating the foundation of civilization - sorry we couldn't get that to you sooner."

Genius!

Following which, in the lower quadrant, we get the Liz Cheny [sic] type tartly observing, "Sounds like somebody got up on the wrong side of the rock."

Rosenbaum is less impressed by the current ad, where the caveman is talking to his therapist. Personally, that one always cracks me up -- first, because the therapist is played by Rocky's Adrian, Talia Shire; and second, because you can see the look of realization in her face at that moment just before the caveman says, "What? Stupid?"

Maybe the print ad does take it a little far, though:

Still, the whole caveman ad campaign has this great sensibility that seems just right for Neandertals. Even the Neanderphiles patronize them!

It makes me sad that I now feel complete revulsion for Richard Dawkins. I don't often comment on world affairs, but his op-ed in the LA Times is, at least in my opinion, simply wrong:

Saddam should have been studied, not executed

Sparing Hussein and studying his makeup could have provided valuable research.

...

Imagine that some science-fiction equivalent of Simon Wiesenthal built a time machine, traveled back to 1945 and returned to the present with a manacled Adolf Hitler. What should we do with him? Execute him? No, a thousand times no. Historians squabbling over exactly what happened in the Third Reich and World War II would never forgive us for destroying the central witness to all the inside stories, and one of the pivotal influences on 20th century history. Psychologists, struggling to understand how an individual human being could be so evil and so devastatingly effective at persuading others to join him, would give their eyeteeth for such a rich research subject.

Kill Hitler? You would have to be mad to do so. Yet that is undoubtedly what we would have done if he hadn't killed himself in 1945. Hussein is not in the same league as Hitler, but, nevertheless, in a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.

I think irrespective of any other issue, including one's opinion on capital punishment, psychological experimentation on prisoners is beyond the pale.

Am I overreacting? Dawkins doesn't say that Hussein should have been tortured, or that psy-ops methods should have been applied -- he describes "psychological research" in nothing but the most neutral terms. A charitable interpretation is that he just means that psychologists should be kept talking to Hussein, sort of Hannibal Lecter-like?

I say "charitable" because an uncharitable interpretation involves the imagery that foreseeably results from the words "dictator," "prison," and "research" in one paragraph. What Dawkins would envisage in the scope of his "psychological research" is an unanswered and important question.

I guess the reason why I am so revulsed is that Dawkins explicitly sets his interest in scientific inquiry above the cause of justice. Dawkins rationalizes this choice in several ways: the research can value society, prevent more mass-murdering dictators from rising to power, provide evidence to convict his own Prime Minister of war crimes, etc. In these rationalizations, he attempts to align his preference (study, not execute) with a "higher" sense of justice -- he writes, "These questions are not just academically fascinating but potentially of vital importance to our future."

I don't think these rationalizations work. Saddam had minimal, if any, scientific interest -- unless I've been missing all the valuable studies based on Manuel Noriega's prison diaries. It's not like his blood had a serum to cure Ebola.

I'd say that far more important to our future is the value of justice over science. Certainly, many people believe that Saddam's execution did not serve justice. But scientific value should not be part of that calculation. A society where a curious scientist can play "get out of execution free" cards is hopefully a vestige of regimes like Saddam's, not part of an "enlightened" future.

UPDATE (1/6/2007): Chris at Mixing Memory has a similar take, but check out the comments where his dark, dark readers lay into him.

It is very creepy to read these. Apparently for many people, as long as Dawkins isn't advocating vivisection, anything goes!

Gene Expression's p-ter has his own post on the topic. He offers a thought experiment -- should science run randomized trials on punishments? -- and I show up in the comments.

Well, now you can have bone rings grown from your own bone tissue:

"I do think it's interesting that I've only been in contact with bone when it's been in my dinner," said Harriet, "So it's intriguing to have my own bone, my own matter objectified in this way and made into something precious and symbolic.

Her partner Matt told BBC News: "When you think about it for a while, it's like ivory but more ethical, and the material has never been part of Harriet, just grown from her code taken from her body.

Mmmm.... Doesn't it seem likely that they'll be offering custom cranial knobs and whatnot before long?

Is it time to abandon Earth?

Stephen Hawking has been saying for the past few years that humans should colonize space. Another story came out last week after he was awarded the Copley medal -- flown in space by NASA for his benefit -- so it is a timely story:

"Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out," said Professor Hawking, who was crippled by a muscle disease at the age of 21 and who speaks through a computerized voice synthesizer.

"But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe," said Hawking, who was due to receive the world's oldest award for scientific achievement, the Copley medal, from Britain's Royal Society on Thursday.

This isn't a new idea for him; for example, check out this 2001 story:

"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars."

I can understand the sentiment. Certainly, a nearby supernova could easily blast through our solar system, taking us with it. Hawking has gone a bit far in his worrying -- in recent talks he has been stressing dangers like global warming, which -- although probably very inconvenient and costly -- is almost certainly not going to wipe us out. I think we stand a pretty good chance of surviving most meteor hits, and a bit of preventative space medicine might be enough to avoid them entirely. Yes, in a few billion years the sun is going to envelop us when it goes red giant, but a few billion years is a long time.

I guess for me, the important aspects of the question are all anthropological. Is space colonization going to fix anything, or is it going to make matters worse? I don't accept the space boosters' position, because we hear so little about the downsides of space colonization. There is a good argument that colonizing space will make things worse for most of humanity.

It takes incredibly high energies to propel people through space. The higher the velocity, the higher the energies. Get up to a reasonable fraction of light speed, and it begins to take more power than the entire power produced by all sources on Earth, at least currently.

Now, we can imagine that technology will improve, that Earth may produce more energy, or that we will harnass energy from some other astronomical source. But the fact remains that we have a tradeoff -- we can accelerate a few people very fast, or a lot of people very slowly.

Nobody is suggesting that we will ever have the transport potential to evacuate the Earth completely. By midcentury we will be looking at a global population of 10 billion people. If we colonized Mars with only 10,000 people it would be a major accomplishment, costing trillions of dollars. If we send 10,000 people to another star system along with a millenia-enduring habitat and seed DNA and facilities to terraform a distant planet, it would be enormous -- an investment far greater than the current energy and wealth production of the Earth.

It is unquestionably true that successful space colonies would allow humanity to survive the destruction of the Earth. Indeed, a colony sent to a distant star system might -- if it succeeded -- ultimately proliferate to numbers comparable to the Earth's population.

But the people on Earth who would pay for these ventures derive little direct benefit from them.

Consider: a colony of 10,000 people fly to a distant star, a journey that takes them several hundred years. The distant descendants of those people will spend thousands of years terraforming a planet. The colony that they establish may be in relatively constant communication with Earth, although with a several decade delay, so we might learn much about this distant planet and the travails of space colonization.
But these people, at the time that they leave, are only a tiny fraction of humanity -- around 1 in a million people. How will we choose them? Do we take whoever wants to go?

Should we choose the most genetically variable sample of people? There is a rationale for this -- they will have the most alleles to deal with new environmental challenges. Also, they will be more representative, on average, of the genetic variation of people on Earth.

Or maybe we should choose people who have genes suited for long spaceflight. Maybe people who are unlikely to suffer from claustrophobia, or who can deal with the cardiovascular risks that come from a special long-term exercise regimen. Maybe they need to be people who get the most energy out of the limited number of food species that can be grown in their space habitat.

The point is, that whoever we choose, they will have a miniscule genetic relationship to most of the people on Earth. These are not our children; they are somebody else's children. They have a chance of immense genetic success when they reach their destination. They certainly bear a risk -- their ship might explode, or any number of other things. But the capital costs of their mission will be paid by our children and grandchildren, possibly for many generations. Why should our great-great grandchildren live in the world diminished by the exodus of a lucky few?

There is certainly no direct benefit to people left behind in the event that the Earth really is destroyed! Sure, a few Earthlings will have scattered elsewhere, but that is cold comfort to those who face the asteroid impact. We would be better off spending the money to destroy or deflect near-Earth asteroids!

In other words, the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" argument makes a very unrealistic assumption. The question here is whether it is better to (a) put all but one of your eggs in one flimsy basket and put one egg in one incredibly expensive Kevlar basket, or whether it might be better to (b) use the same money to reinforce the one flimsy basket.

If the choice is still difficult, try to remember that you and your children are in the flimsy basket, no matter what!

I can't imagine a situation where it is better to make my grandchildren pay for a hugely expensive space mission than it would be for them to pay for a hugely expensive overhaul for Earth's energy supplies, or a hugely expensive asteroid deflector system, or any number of other things to protect the 10 billion people at home. Sure, there are some risks that we can probably not prevent, like a supernova shock wave. But these are risks that we can't escape by colonizing nearby star systems. They will get hit by the supernova, too!

Establishing colonies on the Moon or Mars is much less expensive, and people on Earth might actually get to go there sometime during their lives. A Martian colony might send resources back to Earth, and people might choose to travel there to help build it. Or maybe they want to spend their retirement in lower gravity that hurts their joints less. Maybe terraforming Mars will give us scientific knowledge to help control our own climate.

But whatever comes from these efforts, it is hard to imagine that the same amount of money wouldn't be better invested here on Earth. Remember that a single mission to Mars by a small group of astronauts is likely to cost upwards of 40 billion dollars. I don't see global warming as a threat to humanity. But even supposing that it could wipe us all off the map, 40 billion dollars spent to research it would be far better spent than 40 billion dollars spent on a Mars trip. "Better spent" because the people paying the 40 billion dollars -- our children and grandchildren, again -- will be far more likely to benefit from the increased knowledge of global warming, than they are to benefit from shipping 5 people to Mars for a few weeks.

It seems ludicrous to spend a few trillion on a serious Mars colony, when the same few trillion might combat global warming, establish a series of asteroid deflectors, and find an effective means of harnassing fusion energy. Especially since the few thousand people in that Mars colony will be incapable of surviving themselves over the long term if Earth was suddenly destroyed. Even terraforming is at best marginal in its ability to make Mars habitable over the long term.

And remember the genetic interest argument. Suppose people sent to another star system get there, establish their colony, and start to succeed. They have an increasingly tiny genetic relationship to our own descendants here on Earth. They will see on Earth's television signals how many people are interested in making the journey to their new paradise, taking up resources from their own descendants.

How long will it take them to realize that they have all the equipment to come back to Earth, wipe humans out, and terraform it to their own liking?

Outside my usual topics, but this is too weird:

FORT WORTH - Two British-based pilots set off into a blue Texas sky Tuesday on their second attempt to fly around the world via the North and South poles in a helicopter, one of the last great unaccomplished feats of aviation.

At what point do "great unaccomplished feats of aviation" become trivial unaccomplished feats of aviation?

One of the longest stretches of the flight -- and one of the most perilous -- will be more than 500 miles over open water between the tip of South America and Antarctica.

After reaching the South Pole, the pair will double-back along the same Antarctic route but will fly over new territory in South America.

That's not around the world! That's down the world and back up again. These people crashed once trying, so it's unquestionably a challenge, but hmmm...

This article was so cool I had to point it out:

US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires.

...

The team from MIT is not the first group to suggest wire-less energy transfer.

Nineteenth-century physicist and engineer Nikola Tesla experimented with long-range wire-less energy transfer, but his most ambitious attempt - the 29m high aerial known as Wardenclyffe Tower, in New York - failed when he ran out of money.

It's not for broadcasting power around the world -- it's for charging up devices and, potentially, nanotech. Which is logical but ironic: on the macro scale wires are cheap, but on the micro scale they are bulky and expensive!