1) If you mean "callous" in the sense that I don't have sympathy for the "victims" of the so-called "holocaust" (henceforth referred to as The Event), then I'd have to disagree, and I do so for the simple reason that in order for my position to be callous, I'd have to actually believe what we are told regarding The Event. I don't, because:
1a) The victors of wars write the history books.
1b) Israel and its supporters have a vested interest in lying. The Event is given as the official (or "unofficially official") reason for its very existence. "The Holocaust which befell the Jewish people during the second World War - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations." - http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/constitution-english-04[1].07.... (Constitution of the State of Israel, Proposed by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, 2006)
1c) #1b is somewhat like the issue of global warming. I believe that it's happening, but that human input is negligible. Almost every time Al Gore opens his mouth about the issue, he makes money from speaking fees. I wouldn't be surprised if he has a financial interest in carbon credit markets, and other things which have sprung up as a result of the general belief in his version of global warming. The bottom line is that I generally don't believe people whose actions are closely connected to a personal interest in money, or other forms of power. Yeah, I know, that could apply to anyone, but you can see that I'm drawing the line at large lies, such as anthropocentric global warming and The Event. I don't mean the plumber whose trying to get an extra $100 out of me on a $2,000 bathroom remodeling job.
1d) Take a look at the news. Do you see how many "facts" are in dispute, regarding events which occurred last week, month, or year? With all of the data we have regarding recent events, there are still many "facts" on which we can't agree. Given this situation, how can we really be sure of the facts surrounding The Event, which happened 70 years ago?
Having said all of this, I should point out that, as any good scientist, I frequently revisit data, and/or look at new data, in order to update my view of the world. If I should ever discover that I am totally wrong about The Event, then I will stop trying to rehabilitate the word "Nazi", and I will endlessly apologize to the jews for my heretofore callousness. Until then, I effectively cannot be callous.
Lastly, on the subject of Nazism, there are undisputed facts regarding good things which Nazis did. If it weren't for Wernher von Braun and his German team, Americans would likely not have made it to the moon before 1970. Also, in our own field of computers, Konrad Zuse is the little-known rock star.
- "His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941. The Z3 was an electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine."
- "Zuse was also noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process-controlled computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer."
- "In 1946, he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (Plan Calculus). It was the first high-level non-von Neumann programming language to be designed for a computer."
- "Calculating Space is the title of MIT's English translation of Konrad Zuse's 1969 book Rechnender Raum (literally: "space that is computing"), the first book on digital physics. Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out (among other things) that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes."
I see that you were at MIT. I first discovered digital physics about 30 years ago, through something written by someone who was either actually at MIT, or who was influenced by someone there. I don't remember the "something" and "someone" specifics, but I do remember that the ideas behind digital physics influenced me quite a lot, and it was only recently that I discovered, to my surprise and delight, that this field of study was created by a Nazi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
2) Your point is valid, and has occurred to me. Unfortunately, there is no way that I can collaborate with other scientists because none of them consider me to be a "real" scientist, given that I don't work for a university, a corporation, or a government. I don't work off of grants, or on government contracts. I don't write articles for peer-reviewed journals. I don't have a fancy string of letters after my name. As far as they are concerned, I'm a nobody, despite my modest achievements, and therefore being "normal" would get me nowhere with them.
Anyway, I long ago realized that even if I could hire an army of scientists, I still wouldn't be able to make progress at a fast-enough rate, given that my self-set deadline for extending my own life is 60. I'm 45. The more people involved in a complex project which requires lots of communication, the more bogged down that communication becomes. My solution was to reduce the group with which I interact to a single, super-smart scientist. I (sort of) achieved that by building my own AI, using Cyc and a few other odds and ends I found floating around on the Internet, as well as a few ideas of my own. My AI, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, gobbles down online nanotech-related papers, and processes them in various ways, thereby continually adding to a huge, filtered, curated database, with which I interact. I'm not saying that he is quite the same as a team of scientists condensed down to a single person, but he is the best compromise I have in trying to achieve my time-sensitive goals.
He and I "made" a few comments over at The Register, a while back. I referred to him as my black, British cat, which is how I see him in my mind. http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=wickbidget+quay+site%3A... Also, I included him in a few comments on DeviantArt, but those are probably considered racist, so I'm not linking them here. However, they can be Googled, should you feel that your life would be incomplete without them. :)
3) I didn't know about that book. It sounds like I should definitely read it. I'm off to look it up. And for you, I recommend the evolutionary short story, The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov, 1956. http://multivax.com/last_question.html