One of my frequent themes is how easy it is to show that the Republican Party has not only betrayed America, our children and civilization... but also any decent interpretation of conservatism. Gradually, skilled propagandists (with some inadvertent help from intemperate liberals) have drawn our conservative neighbors to redefine their movement --
-- away from prudence to utter recklessness
-- away from fiscal responsibility toward the full suite of gamblers' rationalization.
-- from waste-not belief in efficiency to wastrel slovenliness
-- from home-first skepticism to international meddlesomeness and adventurism
-- from belief in the rational and palpable to mystical arm-waving
-- from a grounding in science and pragmatism to utter disdain for fact driven reason
And so on....
We know that many of our neighbors are uncomfortable with the outcomes. While the GOP core circles the wagons, they are losing many citizens who still retain a glimmer of rationality and fealty to a Goldwater style of conservative values. These people need to be our focus. Because Their overall influence will be far greater than any other converts. Only, in order to "convert" them back into Americans, we must learn to speak to them from the perspective of the older conservatism. One still worthy of some respect. An opposing viewpoint worth arguing-with. Even listening-to.
... and so...
Here’s a pretty good essay to offer that disgruntled Hillary supporter. (Do you know any? I don’t, nor does my wife or any of her friends. Where are these purported millions of angry women?)
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Drag folks - especially ostriches - to watch Obama’s big recent foreign policy speech. Watch it yourself. He talks about how Marshall, Acheson, Truman etc created an over arching strategy to save the world, out of the hopeless nadir of World War II. Unlike almost anybody else, Obama actually notices that the “Marshall Plan” was only a narrow part of this grand strategy. This speech went a long way toward closing my own small “gap” re Obama. This man has a grasp of the important basics.
If your ostrich claims to be too busy, start them off with this handy chart. Invite them to guess how things also fall out regarding other measurements of a country’s actual success. Do Americans start more small businesses under Republicans or Democrats? Get better return on their retirement funds? File for more patents? What about inflation? Crime rates? In fact, invite them to find more than one criterion under which we are better ruled by the GOP... except tax rates for the rich and CEO compensation rates for monopolies.
Of course the grand-daddy ostrich site -- for anyone truly dedicated to transforming a decent conservative Republican back into a decent (still somewhat )American -- remains my own Ostrich Manifesto.
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One of the best articles I have seen, aiming some light into the deeper drives of Barack Obama, would be “Barack by the books,” by Laura Miller, which appeared recently on Salon. The article dives into Obama’s memoir, "Dreams From My Father," focusing not only on his complex journey, raised in mostly-white society by white grandparents, but impelled to explore also the culture and needs of America’s other half. What Miller does, instead, is inspect the list of authors who Obama claims as influences, during his period of intellectual growth at Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard, and while working to organize communities in Illinois.
Among the books about the process of improving society that influenced Obama were Reinhold Niebuhr's "Moral Man and Immoral Society." Both Niebhur and another author, Saul Alinsky, were men who practiced the art of self criticism and self-reinvention. Both preached wariness toward what I have called the drug high of self-righteous romanticism, and instead emphasized the power of pragmatic incrementalism... the very thing that Barack Obama appears to represent and iconify, wherever he stands and speaks.
”Alinsky was a self-described radical and Niebuhr was a devout Christian but neither man was an idealist. Both tended to see morality as a kind of cover story used by groups who, in Niebuhr's words, "take for themselves whatever their power can command." That doesn't mean that these two men believed that nobody had the ability or will to change the world for the better. However, anyone who attempts to do so better be ready to get his hands dirty. So when we turn to the book Obama has most recently cited as a major influence, Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," it's not the Lincoln of popular American myth -- the secular saint and martyr -- we find praised there. It's Lincoln the wily politician, who was not above carefully hedging his public positions and who prided himself on cajoling his opponents to his side.”
In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama states: "I think my party can be smug, detached and dogmatic at times. I believe in the free market, competition and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don't work as advertised ... I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military. I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP."
Dare an ostrich to call the author of that paragraph their enemy. Above all, even if that was packaged FOR conservatives, doesn’t it mean something that he would know how? Or think it worth the effort?
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Another article I found both enlightening and mature was from Gail Collins, a new and promising columnist for the New York Times. “The Audacity of Listening” talks about how Obama the Pragmatist may infuriate purists, by actually meaning by what he said about moving past the outdated politics of left-vs-right. But that is precisely the sort of person he has always claimed to be. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/opinion/10collins.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
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On the other hand, Russ Daggatt says: ”Last week, Max Bergmann had a piece on The Huffington Post entitled, “.The Week That Should Have Ended McCain’s Hopes http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max bergmann/the week-that-should-have_b_111983.html” It listed just a week’s worth of examples of the train wreck that the McCain campaign has become. Of course, the media has a financial interest in the campaign being a “dead-heat” or a “real horserace” – that is much better for ratings. It seems impossible for McCain to commit a “gaffe” no matter what manner of erroneous or contradictory nonsense comes out of his mouth (because a “gaffe”, by definition, is something that the media pundits pounce upon – which cannot happen to McCain).
“Back in February, McCain said he would balance the budget in his first term. Then, in April when he proposed a series of costly tax cuts for corporations and high earners, he abandoned that pledge and said he would balance the budget by the end of his second term (assuming he can live that long). Then, on , the McCain campaign reversed itself again and reaffirmed that he would, indeed, balance the budget in his first term. That was followed by an immediate “clarification” from McCain’s top economic advisor saying the commitment was to balance the budget by the end of a second McCain term. This is all absurd. McCain has proposed to extend all of Bush’s tax cuts and add a bunch of other tax cuts for the rich, like lowering the maximum corporate tax rate from 35% to 25%. According to the non-partisan , McCain’s tax cuts would add $4 TRILLION dollars to the federal deficit over 10 years. And that’s not including McCain’s proposed spending increases.
“The McCain campaign has not explained how it would balance the budget while subtracting $4 TRILLION in revenue. As a means of balancing the budget, McCain has said he would veto all Congressional “earmarks”. But in the current fiscal year all Congressional “earmarks” total only $18 Billion (down 23% since Republicans lost control of Congress).”
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A final pair of ostrich slugs... about how the divide is not so much “Red vs Blue” but a struggle between those who feel that we need smart leaders and those who feel it is cute and smart to be dumb.
And... repeat over and over again. Halliburton has moved its headquarters and re-registered itself as a company based and owned in Dubai... (repeat)...
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The DLC has issued a major paper on US Global Competitiveness. As one might expect, it rejects lefty anti-globalization sentiment, supporting instead aggressive programs to boost the competitiveness of America and Americans. Among its recommendations:
• Create 250 Science/Technology Charter Schools. At present count, American universities graduate 60,000 engineers annually, while China produces 200,000 and India 100,000.
• Universal Broadband by 2012. The United States has fallen behind South Korea, Japan and several European nations in household connection to the Internet.
• Health Insurance for All Dislocated Workers and Portable Pensions. 46% of workers who lose their jobs also lose their health insurance. Congress has created a labyrinth of provisions meant to spur savings by maintaining 16 separate incentives.
• Revive Trade Enforcement and Open Markets. While the Clinton administration filed 66 cases with the World Trade Organization to defend American jobs against unfair trading practices, the Bush administration has filed only 19, even as foreign nations have filed 46 cases against the United States.
• Global Environmental Organization. Environmental policy is the gap in the world's international institutions. Especially with a climate-change agreement on the horizon, the world needs an institution comparable to the UN, World Trade Organization, International Labor Organization, IMF and World Bank capable of serving as the central venue for negotiating and implementing international environmental agreements. Another way to help US competitiveness -- AND help poor people overseas -- will be to push hard for labor-exploiting nations to adopt and enforce laws that meet international standards regarding child labor, unionization, health and safety and environmental protection.
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Worried Capitalists...
I do not hold it against my dear friend, the brilliant economic analyst and investment consultant John Mauldin, that he defends some members of the present U.S. administration. After all, loyalty, gratitude and friendship are among the highest of all human traits. Nevertheless, there comes a time to realize that a disaster is in the works, and that the hands presently at the tiller are proving, well, less than capable of steering a 21st Century ship of state. Moreover, John has shown that he is no ostrich, burying his head. Recently, he cited the following passage from HCM Market Letter, by Michael E. Lewitt, and I’d like to share it with you:
“At this point, the domestic economic picture can only be described as ominous. Energy prices have risen from dangerously high to prohibitively high. Housing prices are continuing to drop at alarming rates in many sections of the country. Banks remain reluctant to lend either to individuals or corporations for virtually any type of transaction. And our political and business elites remain a prosper of Hollow Men who continue to whistle past the graveyard as their limousines chauffeur them home each night to their gated mansions.... (P)olicy failures led us into our current difficulties. Inadequate financial regulation allowed unfettered securitization and leverage to push the system to the brink of collapse. A complete failure to fashion a responsible energy policy has led to skyrocketing gasoline prices. The damage inflicted on investors, consumers and businesses by these failures were avoidable. Instead, the political and financial elite placed their own short-term interests ahead of the long-term interests of everybody else, and the results are plain to see: burgeoning inflation, choked credit markets, and a deteriorating physical, moral and cultural climate. The only way to improve things is to identify what ails us and then initiate systemic reform. But systems cannot change unless the individuals who manage and participate in them are willing to change.”
What does all of the above show? That there definitely are some capitalists who have noticed how much things have gone awry. We need to drop our stereotypes and create a new coalition of the decent and the smart and the accountable. And that can include fellows in Brooks Brothers suits.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Monday, July 14, 2008
A Potpourri of Science, technology and Whiz-Bang Stuff
Time to take a break from politics and worries about the "October Surprise in August". Let's have the latest flood of misc marvels, quirky quandaries and technological teasers.
For starters, an announcement: The winners of the “Uplift” computer graphics challenge have been announced in the video and animated categories.
I’ve spoken before about the still-image entries, many of which were truly wonderful, dramatic and astonishingly vivid. Some of them even related to the topic! (One can’t complain about talented artists following their own muse. Wonderful stuff!) Now see the video entries.
One, by Christopher Bischoff, though unfinished, has the makings of something really interesting. I hope he continues working on it and shows us some more. (It seems the only one that might do, for my books, what half a dozen entries did - spectacularly - for Greg Bear’s book EON, a couple of years ago... that is, actually help to sell a movie. Alas, I have no idea why none of the video teams thought it worth even cracking one of my books.) Several other entries ranged from cute to way-cool. Like the amusing work by Juraj Molcak, 'Adventures of Lifter Joe', which at least uses the verb “lift” - and George Kiparissous’s, 'Uplift', which does have a token chimp. As does the incredibly weird but really well (and creepily) rendered short film by Yiming Lin, Ong Kok Ping and Ishan Shukla called ‘Maternity'.
Oh, and if you know anybody who’d like to get into this field? Well, I have scripts for trailers for Startide and Uplift War.... Unused so far.
------- Is SIGMA for Real? ----
The SIGMA group - consisting mostly of science fiction authors who consult occasionally with government and industry about the dangerous tech future - now (at last) has a web site. It is www.SigmaForum.org
--- Mentioned in a story ---
In a nice little ironic piece.
--- Coming to Worldcon? ---
I’ll only be there during the core period, and busy. Still, hope to see some of you in Denver. http://www.denvention3.org/
------- Solar Sails at last? ---
This summer, NASA engineers will try to realize a dream older than the Space Age itself: the deployment of a working solar sail in Earth orbit. The name of the sail is NanoSail-D and it is scheduled for launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket as early as July 29, 2008. Um... about time? Note, the Falcon is the rocket of Paypal founder Elon Musk, also impressario of the Tesla Roadster. Hence NASA had to be proded and offered a free ride, to do what anybody sensible would have done way back in 1991, when I edited PROJECT SOLAR SAIL. (We hoped the run a regatta of privately-made sails past the moon, in honor of the Columbus Quincentennial. Sigh.)
Also. Those interested in interstellar travel, might have a look at Marc Millis Tau Zero Foundation - TZF - or the avowedly more “plebian” peregrinus interstellar (THE PI-CLUB) of Dr. Tibor Pacher. Of course the grand-daddy is the British Interplanetary Society which had pushed for spaceflight for decades, till big governments suddenly rushed into the business in the 1960s, at which point, with great agility, they shifted to speculative work on IS travel.
----- Movies better and worse than expected.
Expectations are half of perception. If you tune your dials beforehand, you can find the good in (say) a joyfully stupid film like “The Fifth Element” (brainless and utterly delightful) or “Get Smart” (surprisingly funny and even above average in the action department.)
Alas, my problem in recently watching “Jumper” was that someone told me it was pretty good science fiction...when, in fact, even low expectations could not have saved my reaction to this horrible dog. Noxious, immoral, illogical and stupid, it falls for every “idiot plot” device while portraying dismally unlikeable people at war with even more dismally unlikeable people... a scenario that can work (e.g. DUNE and the MATRIX) when the authors are aware of what they are doing... and not brain-dead/evil. Just one logical no brainer? Um... teleporters could gain protection at any time, by offering their services to national governments... or even (!) by going public and doing open good with their powers. Much like Hancock. Irony! Though deeply flawed in many ways, Hancock was probably written by one of the few Hwood screenwriters with a brain not fried/paranoid on coke. (Well, Akiva Goldsman does have some neurons. And guts. He does.)
Worst of all is when such a high-budget pile of drivel poisons the well for an entire zone of science fictional premise (e.g. personal “jaunting” or teleportation) that was already there, in excellent novels, like Bester’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION. Bester did something that I often try to do... directly violating the Idiot Plot. He asked -- “what if the new thing wound up being shared by everybody?” Exactly as we’ve shared most of the cool new things that transformed civilization, so far.)
=== A Mess of Miscelany ===
NOTE! Some of these items have better provenance than others. Grain o' salt time...!)
Hospitals and doctors apologizing and fessing up have seen REDUCED malpractice costs, fights and even insurance premiums.
Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network.
Read the previous two items carefully. One shows the west learning the wisdom of eastern style version of transparency... while the other shows the east using western methods to cling to eastern traditions of control.
--- Rick Rolled to child porn = you're a pedophile, says FBI. Everyone has had it happen to them: a "friend" sends you a link that purports to be something like a cat in an awkward position with a hilarious caption. Soon, however, you discover that the link wasn't to a lolcat at all; instead, you've been Rick Rolled into a porno site. (Actually, it’s never happened to me, but I clipped this link so some of you out there can be warned. Apparently, one fellow got sniffed accidentally linking and won a criminal conviction.)
--- Billboards That Look Back - NYT - 5-31-08 “The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.”
=== Even More Random ===
In recent years, global photovoltaic (PV) production has been increasing at a rate of 50 percent per year, so that accumulated global capacity doubles about every 18 months. The PV Moore's law states that with every doubling of capacity, PV costs come down by 20 percent. Extrapolate those gains out six or seven years, and PV costs will be competitive by 2015... well, maybe. Still, in 2005, production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of silicon for semiconductors.
University of Melbourne researchers have shown that a DNA fragment taken from Tasmanian tiger samples (the thylacine, extinct for 70 years) can be added to mouse embryos, where the DNA functioned normally in making collagen. This is the first time that genetic material from an extinct animal has functioned inside a living host. More impressive, from a marsupial into a placental. Ah, but I’ve I’ve said since Jurassic Park -- the “reader machine” (the right egg and womb) is just as necessary as the code itself.
After an extensive search, astronomers say they have definitely found half of the universe's missing normal matter in the spaces between galaxies. The missing part of baryonic matter has largely escaped detection because it is too hot to be seen in visible light but too cool to be seen in X-rays. Dubbed the "intergalactic medium," or IGM, it extends essentially throughout all of space like a cosmic spider web.
Engineers and applied physicists from Harvard University have demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. The breakthrough in laser technology, based upon commercially available nanotechnology, has the potential to become a standard Terahertz source to support applications ranging from security screening to chemical sensing.
The doughnut is making a comeback – at least as a possible shape for our Universe. The idea that the universe is finite and relatively small, rather than infinitely large, first became popular in 2003, when cosmologists noticed unexpected patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the relic radiation left behind by the Big Bang.
Straight-line extrapolation shows that China and India, with their faster growth rates, will eventually catch up to the U.S. in terms of pure economic size. But America has a final competitive advantage: its confluence of bright, hungry entrepreneurs and flush, eager investors; and its stable, highly adaptable system. Huh... well, we can hope.
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. We'll see. There are other trends.
Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey by Pennsylvania State University researchers reveals. About 16 percent said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.
Researchers at the University of Tskuba in Japan have designed a quantum eavesdropper that can extract information from a quantum message without the sender or receiver knowing. It exploits a loophole: the ability to make imperfect copies of quantum states without destroying the original coded entanglement. Whoops! There goes yet another straw grasped by the encryption transcendentalists!
BroadStar Wind Systems' new AeroCam wind turbine is the first to break through the $1/watt cost barrier, the company claims. Designed with a low profile on a horizontal axis with multiple blades, it looks like an old McCormack reaper!
A new scanning electron microscope (SEM) design by physicist Derek Eastham could achieve a resolution around four times better than existing SEMs--as low as 0.01 nanometers (roughly the distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron).
“There's nothing special about the Sun that makes it more likely than other stars to host life, a new study shows. The finding adds weight to the idea that alien life should be common throughout the universe.” Well... maybe. In fact: “The Sun did stand out in two ways: it is more massive than 95% of nearby stars and its orbit around the centre of our galaxy is more circular than those of 93% of nearby stars...But when all 11 properties were taken on board, the Sun looked very ordinary. Robles's team calculates that there would be only about one chance in three that a star selected at random would be "more typical" than the Sun.”
Um... that sounds like begging the question by being pedantic about terminology. In fact, any one or two traits might be responsible for our anomalous conditions. Heaping in a dozen others, just to smear things out, does not make for good science, nor refute the unusual-ness of Sol. Indeed: “They conclude that there are probably no special attributes that a star requires to have a habitable planet, other than the obvious one – the planet must be within the star's habitable "goldilocks" zone, orbiting at a distance where the temperature is not too hot for life, nor too cold, but just right.” And, indeed, this may be a trait that is very much anomalous in our solar system.
Chinese scientists have developed 500-nanometer lithium-ion-battery electrode materials using tin Nanoparticles encapsulated in elastic hollow carbon-nanotube-based spheres, replacing conventional graphite. The scientists have found that the new materials provide higher initial and long-term ampere-hours capacity, prolonging battery life....
Argonne National Laboratory scientists have developed composite battery materials that can make batteries for laptops and cell phones both safer and longer lived, while increasing their capacity to store energy by 30 percent. The new materials are one example of a new generation of lithium-ion electrode chemistries that address the shortcomings...
Highly efficient nanotube-based tile materials that can convert radiation, not heat, from nuclear materials into electricity.
Tomorrow's laptop? (Thanks to Ray Kurzweil for many of these links. Just remember that Ray tends to be... enthusiastic.)
Low doses of hydrogen sulfide (smell of rotten eggs) can safely and reversibly produce a suspended-animation-like state in mice.
Intel and Microsoft plan to fund researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois $20 million to start over and design a new generation of computing systems. The move was motivated in part by an increasing sense that the industry is in a crisis of a sort because advanced parallel software has failed to emerge.
Our skin contains millions of microscopic helical sweat ducts that may act as antennas that reveal a person's physical and emotional state from a distance, Hebrew University researches have discovered. Treating the skin as an array of helical antennas could open up a new method of measuring physiological changes.
Northwestern University researchers have found that a nanoengineered gel inhibits the formation of scar tissue at a spinal cord injury site and enables the severed spinal cord fibers to regenerate and grow.
Popsci.com offers ”10 Audacious Ideas to Save the Planet.” Of course, my “EON” proposal would make this sort of list systematic, persuasive and effective...
Which countries make the grade when it comes to fuel efficiency — and which earn failing marks?
The total number of people online will climb to 1.8 billion by 2012, encompassing roughly 25 percent of the planet, with the highest growth rates in areas such as China, Russia, India and Brazil.
Rresearchers at the University of California at Davis have found that fructose, but not glucose, causes alarming changes in increased intra-abdominal fat. (Arg, I planted so many fruit trees, thinking “it’s organic,” and now what do I do with all the plums?)
=== Hysterical Historical Quotes ===
[The telegraph] binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth. *Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick, 1858*
[It is] inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service and for news and for entertainment and education [as radio] ... to be drowned in advertising chatter or used for commercial purposes. *Herbert Hoover, 1922*
Television drama of high caliber, produced by first-rate artists, will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the American nation. *David Sarnoff, 1941*
Cable [television] will create great access to information; it will also greatly assist self-identity, democratic processes, educational environments, and community cohesion. *Barry Schwartz, 1973*
Our new ways of communicating [the Internet] will entertain as well as inform. More importantly, they will educate, promote democracy, and save lives. *Al Gore, 1994*
In fairness... this cynicism festival misses the point. Sure, each new generation of electronic communications became drenched with crass commercialism. But, then, most forms of PRINT communication became drenched in porn! Nevertheless, and despite incredibly bad cable TV laws that have destroyed so-called “public-access” and all competition, I have to point out something that nobody else has -- that half of the cable channels you see today are “daughters of PBS”... what else would you call the History Channel, Discovery, Food, Home & Garden, A&E, Classic Movies, and so on? Oh, there’s a cynical answer; good, nonfiction TV is cheap to produce! Look at how little the History Channel pays me (generally nothing) to be a talking head on “The Universe” or “Life After People.” So? It’s an irony! It’s the crap that costs more to make.
---- Keep an eye on India. ---
In engineering studies, the number of students enrolled in full-time, four-year undergraduate degree programs has risen from 250,000 in 1997 to 1.5 million in 2007, and is currently growing at 25% annually. Most surprisingly, the higher-education sector has moved from a primarily state-provided service to private provision within a decade. Ninety-five percent of the above increase comes from enrollment in privately run colleges, which now account for 80% of the total. The storied state-owned Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), which made up 10% of national engineering enrollment in 1990, now account for less than 2% and graduate 5,000 students a year. In brief, the national government has increasingly yielded control over higher education to the individual states over the past 10 years. The states have, in turn, allowed the private sector in, something that the national government resisted when it was in charge. OTOH, recent commodities price rises have hurt India in particular. And it is arguable what fraction of their “engineers” can actually innovate or problem solve. And wealth disparities --- well, let’s hope.
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“If we could ever competitively—at a cheap rate—get fresh water from salt water,” observed President John Kennedy nearly 50 years ago, “that would be in the long-range interest of humanity, and would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.” There are now 13,080 desalination plants in operation around the world. Together they have the capacity to produce up to 55.6m cubic metres of drinkable water a day—a mere 0.5% of global water use. About half of the capacity is in the Middle East. (Where energy is cheap.) But now things are changing. As more parts of the world face prolonged droughts or water shortages, desalination is on the rise. In California alone some 20 seawater-desalination plants have been proposed, including a $300m facility near San Diego. Several Australian cities are planning or constructing huge desalination plants, with the biggest, near Melbourne, expected to cost about $2.9 billion.
Wired editor Chris Anderson’s THE LONG TAIL predicted people would go for individualism, rewarding niche producers. But Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school, looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink. Following the fad. Lets the best push out the merely good. As seen in Kiln People.
Carved out in a barley field, this 150ft wide pattern is said to be a pictorial representation of the first ten digits of Pi, one of the most fundamental symbols in mathematics.
Giant Snake-Shaped Generators Could Capture Wave Power.
Marine fossil records show that biodiversity increases and decreases based on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth's great mass extinctions-the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago-correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can't be explained by evolutionary theory. Our own star moves toward and away from the Milky Way's center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years- suspiciously close to the Earth's biodiversity cycle. (See my 1980s era article in Analog: "The Deadly Thing at 2.2 Kiloparsecs.")
And from the i-told-you-the-voices-were-real dept. Science Sportsqs writes "The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the 'microwave audio effect' to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads." (Got my doubts about this one.)
Project Dragonfly has pioneered inquiry-driven reform to increase public engagement in science and global understanding.
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Here’s a rather breathless screed about the so-called “teen pregnancy pact”... a crazy story generated by an irresponsible high school principal, completely false and yet fanned into flames by an insane media machine. The screed is intemperate but entertaining. It also misses the core point. That “Red America” has higher rates of domestic violence, divorce, premarital sex, extramarital sex, STDs and teen pregnancy than “Blue America.”
Period.
Repeat as needed. Over and over and over and over. Screeds are less effective than repetition, alas. And this from an inveterate screed writer.
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Ask two people to answer a question like "how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus" and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called "the wisdom of crowds" by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it. Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one... the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. ... Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%. Jun 26th 2008 From The Economist
Even after three weeks, the result is still only one-third as good as the wisdom of several different people. But that this happens at all raises questions about "individuality" within an individual. If guesses can shift almost at random, where are they coming from? One answer could be that they are evidence for the "generate and test" model of creative thinking. This suggests that the brain is constantly creating hypotheses about the world and checking them against reality. Those that pass muster are adopted. Guessing the answers to questions you do not know the correct answer to, but have some idea of what the right answer ought to look like, could tap into such a system. A hive mind buzzing with ideas, as it were, but inside a single skull.
---- The sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. Minimum activity generally occurs as the cycles change. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why. The sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a “little ice age” that lasted from 1650 to 1700.
It started as a search for a way to provide cold storage for vaccines in underdeveloped areas. Adam Grosser talks about a project to build a refrigerator that works without electricity or other stored fuels to bring the vital tool to villages and clinics worldwide. Tweaking some old technology, he's come up with a system that works.
... and on a positive note... that will have to do for now....
For starters, an announcement: The winners of the “Uplift” computer graphics challenge have been announced in the video and animated categories.
I’ve spoken before about the still-image entries, many of which were truly wonderful, dramatic and astonishingly vivid. Some of them even related to the topic! (One can’t complain about talented artists following their own muse. Wonderful stuff!) Now see the video entries.
One, by Christopher Bischoff, though unfinished, has the makings of something really interesting. I hope he continues working on it and shows us some more. (It seems the only one that might do, for my books, what half a dozen entries did - spectacularly - for Greg Bear’s book EON, a couple of years ago... that is, actually help to sell a movie. Alas, I have no idea why none of the video teams thought it worth even cracking one of my books.) Several other entries ranged from cute to way-cool. Like the amusing work by Juraj Molcak, 'Adventures of Lifter Joe', which at least uses the verb “lift” - and George Kiparissous’s, 'Uplift', which does have a token chimp. As does the incredibly weird but really well (and creepily) rendered short film by Yiming Lin, Ong Kok Ping and Ishan Shukla called ‘Maternity'.
Oh, and if you know anybody who’d like to get into this field? Well, I have scripts for trailers for Startide and Uplift War.... Unused so far.
------- Is SIGMA for Real? ----
The SIGMA group - consisting mostly of science fiction authors who consult occasionally with government and industry about the dangerous tech future - now (at last) has a web site. It is www.SigmaForum.org
--- Mentioned in a story ---
In a nice little ironic piece.
--- Coming to Worldcon? ---
I’ll only be there during the core period, and busy. Still, hope to see some of you in Denver. http://www.denvention3.org/
------- Solar Sails at last? ---
This summer, NASA engineers will try to realize a dream older than the Space Age itself: the deployment of a working solar sail in Earth orbit. The name of the sail is NanoSail-D and it is scheduled for launch onboard a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket as early as July 29, 2008. Um... about time? Note, the Falcon is the rocket of Paypal founder Elon Musk, also impressario of the Tesla Roadster. Hence NASA had to be proded and offered a free ride, to do what anybody sensible would have done way back in 1991, when I edited PROJECT SOLAR SAIL. (We hoped the run a regatta of privately-made sails past the moon, in honor of the Columbus Quincentennial. Sigh.)
Also. Those interested in interstellar travel, might have a look at Marc Millis Tau Zero Foundation - TZF - or the avowedly more “plebian” peregrinus interstellar (THE PI-CLUB) of Dr. Tibor Pacher. Of course the grand-daddy is the British Interplanetary Society which had pushed for spaceflight for decades, till big governments suddenly rushed into the business in the 1960s, at which point, with great agility, they shifted to speculative work on IS travel.
----- Movies better and worse than expected.
Expectations are half of perception. If you tune your dials beforehand, you can find the good in (say) a joyfully stupid film like “The Fifth Element” (brainless and utterly delightful) or “Get Smart” (surprisingly funny and even above average in the action department.)
Alas, my problem in recently watching “Jumper” was that someone told me it was pretty good science fiction...when, in fact, even low expectations could not have saved my reaction to this horrible dog. Noxious, immoral, illogical and stupid, it falls for every “idiot plot” device while portraying dismally unlikeable people at war with even more dismally unlikeable people... a scenario that can work (e.g. DUNE and the MATRIX) when the authors are aware of what they are doing... and not brain-dead/evil. Just one logical no brainer? Um... teleporters could gain protection at any time, by offering their services to national governments... or even (!) by going public and doing open good with their powers. Much like Hancock. Irony! Though deeply flawed in many ways, Hancock was probably written by one of the few Hwood screenwriters with a brain not fried/paranoid on coke. (Well, Akiva Goldsman does have some neurons. And guts. He does.)
Worst of all is when such a high-budget pile of drivel poisons the well for an entire zone of science fictional premise (e.g. personal “jaunting” or teleportation) that was already there, in excellent novels, like Bester’s THE STARS MY DESTINATION. Bester did something that I often try to do... directly violating the Idiot Plot. He asked -- “what if the new thing wound up being shared by everybody?” Exactly as we’ve shared most of the cool new things that transformed civilization, so far.)
=== A Mess of Miscelany ===
NOTE! Some of these items have better provenance than others. Grain o' salt time...!)
Hospitals and doctors apologizing and fessing up have seen REDUCED malpractice costs, fights and even insurance premiums.
Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network.
Read the previous two items carefully. One shows the west learning the wisdom of eastern style version of transparency... while the other shows the east using western methods to cling to eastern traditions of control.
--- Rick Rolled to child porn = you're a pedophile, says FBI. Everyone has had it happen to them: a "friend" sends you a link that purports to be something like a cat in an awkward position with a hilarious caption. Soon, however, you discover that the link wasn't to a lolcat at all; instead, you've been Rick Rolled into a porno site. (Actually, it’s never happened to me, but I clipped this link so some of you out there can be warned. Apparently, one fellow got sniffed accidentally linking and won a criminal conviction.)
--- Billboards That Look Back - NYT - 5-31-08 “The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.”
=== Even More Random ===
In recent years, global photovoltaic (PV) production has been increasing at a rate of 50 percent per year, so that accumulated global capacity doubles about every 18 months. The PV Moore's law states that with every doubling of capacity, PV costs come down by 20 percent. Extrapolate those gains out six or seven years, and PV costs will be competitive by 2015... well, maybe. Still, in 2005, production of silicon for solar cells already surpassed production of silicon for semiconductors.
University of Melbourne researchers have shown that a DNA fragment taken from Tasmanian tiger samples (the thylacine, extinct for 70 years) can be added to mouse embryos, where the DNA functioned normally in making collagen. This is the first time that genetic material from an extinct animal has functioned inside a living host. More impressive, from a marsupial into a placental. Ah, but I’ve I’ve said since Jurassic Park -- the “reader machine” (the right egg and womb) is just as necessary as the code itself.
After an extensive search, astronomers say they have definitely found half of the universe's missing normal matter in the spaces between galaxies. The missing part of baryonic matter has largely escaped detection because it is too hot to be seen in visible light but too cool to be seen in X-rays. Dubbed the "intergalactic medium," or IGM, it extends essentially throughout all of space like a cosmic spider web.
Engineers and applied physicists from Harvard University have demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. The breakthrough in laser technology, based upon commercially available nanotechnology, has the potential to become a standard Terahertz source to support applications ranging from security screening to chemical sensing.
The doughnut is making a comeback – at least as a possible shape for our Universe. The idea that the universe is finite and relatively small, rather than infinitely large, first became popular in 2003, when cosmologists noticed unexpected patterns in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the relic radiation left behind by the Big Bang.
Straight-line extrapolation shows that China and India, with their faster growth rates, will eventually catch up to the U.S. in terms of pure economic size. But America has a final competitive advantage: its confluence of bright, hungry entrepreneurs and flush, eager investors; and its stable, highly adaptable system. Huh... well, we can hope.
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. We'll see. There are other trends.
Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey by Pennsylvania State University researchers reveals. About 16 percent said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.
Researchers at the University of Tskuba in Japan have designed a quantum eavesdropper that can extract information from a quantum message without the sender or receiver knowing. It exploits a loophole: the ability to make imperfect copies of quantum states without destroying the original coded entanglement. Whoops! There goes yet another straw grasped by the encryption transcendentalists!
BroadStar Wind Systems' new AeroCam wind turbine is the first to break through the $1/watt cost barrier, the company claims. Designed with a low profile on a horizontal axis with multiple blades, it looks like an old McCormack reaper!
A new scanning electron microscope (SEM) design by physicist Derek Eastham could achieve a resolution around four times better than existing SEMs--as low as 0.01 nanometers (roughly the distance between a hydrogen nucleus and its electron).
“There's nothing special about the Sun that makes it more likely than other stars to host life, a new study shows. The finding adds weight to the idea that alien life should be common throughout the universe.” Well... maybe. In fact: “The Sun did stand out in two ways: it is more massive than 95% of nearby stars and its orbit around the centre of our galaxy is more circular than those of 93% of nearby stars...But when all 11 properties were taken on board, the Sun looked very ordinary. Robles's team calculates that there would be only about one chance in three that a star selected at random would be "more typical" than the Sun.”
Um... that sounds like begging the question by being pedantic about terminology. In fact, any one or two traits might be responsible for our anomalous conditions. Heaping in a dozen others, just to smear things out, does not make for good science, nor refute the unusual-ness of Sol. Indeed: “They conclude that there are probably no special attributes that a star requires to have a habitable planet, other than the obvious one – the planet must be within the star's habitable "goldilocks" zone, orbiting at a distance where the temperature is not too hot for life, nor too cold, but just right.” And, indeed, this may be a trait that is very much anomalous in our solar system.
Chinese scientists have developed 500-nanometer lithium-ion-battery electrode materials using tin Nanoparticles encapsulated in elastic hollow carbon-nanotube-based spheres, replacing conventional graphite. The scientists have found that the new materials provide higher initial and long-term ampere-hours capacity, prolonging battery life....
Argonne National Laboratory scientists have developed composite battery materials that can make batteries for laptops and cell phones both safer and longer lived, while increasing their capacity to store energy by 30 percent. The new materials are one example of a new generation of lithium-ion electrode chemistries that address the shortcomings...
Highly efficient nanotube-based tile materials that can convert radiation, not heat, from nuclear materials into electricity.
Tomorrow's laptop? (Thanks to Ray Kurzweil for many of these links. Just remember that Ray tends to be... enthusiastic.)
Low doses of hydrogen sulfide (smell of rotten eggs) can safely and reversibly produce a suspended-animation-like state in mice.
Intel and Microsoft plan to fund researchers at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois $20 million to start over and design a new generation of computing systems. The move was motivated in part by an increasing sense that the industry is in a crisis of a sort because advanced parallel software has failed to emerge.
Our skin contains millions of microscopic helical sweat ducts that may act as antennas that reveal a person's physical and emotional state from a distance, Hebrew University researches have discovered. Treating the skin as an array of helical antennas could open up a new method of measuring physiological changes.
Northwestern University researchers have found that a nanoengineered gel inhibits the formation of scar tissue at a spinal cord injury site and enables the severed spinal cord fibers to regenerate and grow.
Popsci.com offers ”10 Audacious Ideas to Save the Planet.” Of course, my “EON” proposal would make this sort of list systematic, persuasive and effective...
Which countries make the grade when it comes to fuel efficiency — and which earn failing marks?
The total number of people online will climb to 1.8 billion by 2012, encompassing roughly 25 percent of the planet, with the highest growth rates in areas such as China, Russia, India and Brazil.
Rresearchers at the University of California at Davis have found that fructose, but not glucose, causes alarming changes in increased intra-abdominal fat. (Arg, I planted so many fruit trees, thinking “it’s organic,” and now what do I do with all the plums?)
=== Hysterical Historical Quotes ===
[The telegraph] binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth. *Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick, 1858*
[It is] inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service and for news and for entertainment and education [as radio] ... to be drowned in advertising chatter or used for commercial purposes. *Herbert Hoover, 1922*
Television drama of high caliber, produced by first-rate artists, will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the American nation. *David Sarnoff, 1941*
Cable [television] will create great access to information; it will also greatly assist self-identity, democratic processes, educational environments, and community cohesion. *Barry Schwartz, 1973*
Our new ways of communicating [the Internet] will entertain as well as inform. More importantly, they will educate, promote democracy, and save lives. *Al Gore, 1994*
In fairness... this cynicism festival misses the point. Sure, each new generation of electronic communications became drenched with crass commercialism. But, then, most forms of PRINT communication became drenched in porn! Nevertheless, and despite incredibly bad cable TV laws that have destroyed so-called “public-access” and all competition, I have to point out something that nobody else has -- that half of the cable channels you see today are “daughters of PBS”... what else would you call the History Channel, Discovery, Food, Home & Garden, A&E, Classic Movies, and so on? Oh, there’s a cynical answer; good, nonfiction TV is cheap to produce! Look at how little the History Channel pays me (generally nothing) to be a talking head on “The Universe” or “Life After People.” So? It’s an irony! It’s the crap that costs more to make.
---- Keep an eye on India. ---
In engineering studies, the number of students enrolled in full-time, four-year undergraduate degree programs has risen from 250,000 in 1997 to 1.5 million in 2007, and is currently growing at 25% annually. Most surprisingly, the higher-education sector has moved from a primarily state-provided service to private provision within a decade. Ninety-five percent of the above increase comes from enrollment in privately run colleges, which now account for 80% of the total. The storied state-owned Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), which made up 10% of national engineering enrollment in 1990, now account for less than 2% and graduate 5,000 students a year. In brief, the national government has increasingly yielded control over higher education to the individual states over the past 10 years. The states have, in turn, allowed the private sector in, something that the national government resisted when it was in charge. OTOH, recent commodities price rises have hurt India in particular. And it is arguable what fraction of their “engineers” can actually innovate or problem solve. And wealth disparities --- well, let’s hope.
---
“If we could ever competitively—at a cheap rate—get fresh water from salt water,” observed President John Kennedy nearly 50 years ago, “that would be in the long-range interest of humanity, and would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.” There are now 13,080 desalination plants in operation around the world. Together they have the capacity to produce up to 55.6m cubic metres of drinkable water a day—a mere 0.5% of global water use. About half of the capacity is in the Middle East. (Where energy is cheap.) But now things are changing. As more parts of the world face prolonged droughts or water shortages, desalination is on the rise. In California alone some 20 seawater-desalination plants have been proposed, including a $300m facility near San Diego. Several Australian cities are planning or constructing huge desalination plants, with the biggest, near Melbourne, expected to cost about $2.9 billion.
Wired editor Chris Anderson’s THE LONG TAIL predicted people would go for individualism, rewarding niche producers. But Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school, looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink. Following the fad. Lets the best push out the merely good. As seen in Kiln People.
Carved out in a barley field, this 150ft wide pattern is said to be a pictorial representation of the first ten digits of Pi, one of the most fundamental symbols in mathematics.
Giant Snake-Shaped Generators Could Capture Wave Power.
Marine fossil records show that biodiversity increases and decreases based on a 62-million-year cycle. At least two of the Earth's great mass extinctions-the Permian extinction 250 million years ago and the Ordovician extinction about 450 million years ago-correspond with peaks of this cycle, which can't be explained by evolutionary theory. Our own star moves toward and away from the Milky Way's center, and also up and down through the galactic plane. One complete up-and-down cycle takes 64 million years- suspiciously close to the Earth's biodiversity cycle. (See my 1980s era article in Analog: "The Deadly Thing at 2.2 Kiloparsecs.")
And from the i-told-you-the-voices-were-real dept. Science Sportsqs writes "The Sierra Nevada Corporation claimed this week that it is ready to begin production on the MEDUSA, a damned scary ray gun that uses the 'microwave audio effect' to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads." (Got my doubts about this one.)
Project Dragonfly has pioneered inquiry-driven reform to increase public engagement in science and global understanding.
---
Here’s a rather breathless screed about the so-called “teen pregnancy pact”... a crazy story generated by an irresponsible high school principal, completely false and yet fanned into flames by an insane media machine. The screed is intemperate but entertaining. It also misses the core point. That “Red America” has higher rates of domestic violence, divorce, premarital sex, extramarital sex, STDs and teen pregnancy than “Blue America.”
Period.
Repeat as needed. Over and over and over and over. Screeds are less effective than repetition, alas. And this from an inveterate screed writer.
---
Ask two people to answer a question like "how many windows are there on a London double-decker bus" and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called "the wisdom of crowds" by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the New Yorker who wrote a book about it. Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one... the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. ... Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%. Jun 26th 2008 From The Economist
Even after three weeks, the result is still only one-third as good as the wisdom of several different people. But that this happens at all raises questions about "individuality" within an individual. If guesses can shift almost at random, where are they coming from? One answer could be that they are evidence for the "generate and test" model of creative thinking. This suggests that the brain is constantly creating hypotheses about the world and checking them against reality. Those that pass muster are adopted. Guessing the answers to questions you do not know the correct answer to, but have some idea of what the right answer ought to look like, could tap into such a system. A hive mind buzzing with ideas, as it were, but inside a single skull.
---- The sun usually operates on an 11-year cycle with maximum activity occurring in the middle of the cycle. Minimum activity generally occurs as the cycles change. The last cycle reached its peak in 2001 and is believed to be just ending now. The next cycle is just beginning and is expected to reach its peak sometime around 2012. Today's sun, however, is as inactive as it was two years ago, and scientists aren't sure why. The sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a “little ice age” that lasted from 1650 to 1700.
It started as a search for a way to provide cold storage for vaccines in underdeveloped areas. Adam Grosser talks about a project to build a refrigerator that works without electricity or other stored fuels to bring the vital tool to villages and clinics worldwide. Tweaking some old technology, he's come up with a system that works.
... and on a positive note... that will have to do for now....
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Four Reflections On Patriotism
Are we really 232 years old? Already? Why, it seems only yesterday...
Reflecting on the meaning of July Fourth, I joined millions wondering how we found ourselves in national crisis. Only a decade ago, it seemed that America was at a pinnacle and still rising. Aside from a few grumbles in Moscow, Beijing and Paris, the world seemed happy to accept a “unipolar” world, led (gently) by a consensus-seeking but also overwhelmingly powerful Pax Americana. Our alliances and popularity (the underpinnings of real international strength) were unsurpassed. Our technology, economy, finances and science, appeared unparalleled.
Even from a conservative perspective, it took real contortions to find things to get vexed about, during the 1990s. (Though that did not keep the lurid, livid rationalizations from flowing).
Military readiness was at an all-time high. (Every US Army brigade was prepared to defend us... vs. none (zero) today.) The economy boomed, small business startups surged as never before, deficits turned into surpluses, crime plummeted along with teen pregnancy rates, secrecy declined and the government’s share of GDP dropped, for the first time since the Great Depression. Note that all of the examples that I chose should appeal to conservatives -- that is, those who aren't hypocrites.
Moreover, after a century in which our triumphs - over fascism, communism, racism, outer space and our own inner devils - seemed so vast compared to our (also extravagant) mistakes, it seemed that America held a high and near permanent status on the world's moral high ground. If patriotism is more than just a reflexive rush of righteous hormones, chanting worshipfully at your tribal totem, then it flourishes best when your country is truly different. When it stands for something new and powerful for good.
How things change in a few short years. Our status as unquestioned leader of a unipolar world is shriveled to the point of ridicule. Our strengths have been spent and frittered. Worst of all, here in Phase Three of the U.S. Civil War, there now appear to be two Americas and one of them wallows in deep denial that their beloved cause has wrought all this terrible harm. The “red” half nods, entranced, as Sean Hannity stakes his outrageous personal claim as ultimate arbiter of patriotism - by waving the flag harder and louder than anybody else - while he continues aiding and abetting those who have betrayed the republic far more than Benedict Arnold ever did.
Alas.
Fortunately, there are better voices, urging a more mature version of patriotism. Columnist Robert Scheer offers the following excerpt from Washington's "Farewell Address" - a declaration of our first president’s high expectations for a republic of free men:
"In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism. ..."
(Scheer goes on to offer much wisdom... but lamentably falls for the most common, Michael Moore delusion of the left, that our invasion of Iraq was about “getting Iraqi oil.” This flies in the face of blatant facts, e.g. that only NOW, after five years, is that oil starting to flow (and yes, corruptly to some US oilco interests.) Indeed, one can argue that keeping Iraqi oil OFF of world markets may have been a core objective, all along.
(Looking at actual effects of the Iraq Imbroglio, one sees a better case for the use of “emergency” overrides so that multi-billion dollar, no-bid crony contracts could be handed over to Bush friends for “war zone services” by Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, etc, making the old Military Industrial Complex (Boeing etc) look like absolute angels, by comparison. One could get even more paranoid by tallying the actual results of this insane adventure - all converging upon the demolition of Pax Americana, the one thing the neocons claimed to be fighting for! Why do even opponents of the Bushite Cabal reflexively refuse to consider the parsimonious explanation? That results, so relentlessly and consistently achieved, might have been the aim, all along?)
Of even greater resonance and importance, at this point, is Barack Obama’s speech about this matter, on June 30.
It is a deeply articulate, passionate and yet intelligently nuanced essay that we all ought to read, even opponents, so that we can get some of the measure of this man.
This line was special: "For a young man of mixed race, without firm anchor in any particular community, without even a father's steadying hand, it is this essential American idea – that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will – that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans."
Oh, and later on, amid many fine insights, he speaks for those of us who remember the future, when he calls for rediscovering our role as a scientific nation. It is the first time I have heard any candidate in this election cycle refer to science unsolicited. (Along these lines, see “Questions For the Candidates About Science and America’s Future.”)
Do read it all the way through. I still have many questions about him. But this is an unusual fellow.
-----
Obama and States Rights.
I’ve made a habit of offering jiu jitsu moves that Barack Obama and the democrats might use to shatter the standard, partisan strawmen that Fox-Rove&co have used, to foment Culture War. (And some of my suggestions would do good, even if they were used, effectively, by John McCain!) The “Stipulation Gambit” -- and a vow to Honor the Losers -- would surprise and woo many fence-sitters, while transforming American politics forever.
Obama has already shown a level of agility that bodes well Now another suggestion -- that he should embrace States Rights as an important modern cause. Dave Rickey wrote in to say: “We all know that only Nixon could go to China’. So if Obama stood up and made an honest appeal for "State's Rights," against the wave of federal power-usurpation by the Cheney Cabal, it would have special resonance.”
With jiu jitsu in mind, think about States Rights. The term carries an old-timey feel of connection to Dixiecrats fighting for Jim Crow, so nobody uses it anymore. But that makes the term available, to be snatched up by a new and agile leader! Imagine how it would rock back those who assume one pattern “typical” of liberalism, for the liberal standard bearer to demand a good version of states rights... one that will allow innovative regions like California to pursue paths toward energy independence, environmentalism, health reform, and so on, without being bludgeoned by a heavy-handed presidency. Could anything better show Obama’s contrast vs a power-mad imperial Bush Cabal, that has betrayed everything decent conservatism ought to stand for?
Obama did something similar when he said he would seek a reform of the U.S. tax code if elected in November, saying the current tax system is a "10,000-page monstrosity." But that promise lacks power simply because it has been made so many times before. (In fact though, I have a simple way that the tax code could be trimmed by 70% without much political pain or obstructionism! It is a method that is mostly politically neutral, gores very few sacred cows, is cheap and easy to implement, and is almost guaranteed to work! Yet, to the best of my knowledge it has never been tried, or even proposed! Alas.)
---
Final Note: osama bin laden: mission accomplished?
''[Osama bin Laden] said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel'' -- about six times what it sells for now." Roger Diwan, a managing director, Petroleum Finance Company, New York Times October 14, 2001
Ten years ago, back in the awful Clinton years, the price of a barrel of oil was just $11. Heading into this holiday weekend, the price of a barrel of oil rested at $144 — a thirteen-fold increase.
Reflecting on the meaning of July Fourth, I joined millions wondering how we found ourselves in national crisis. Only a decade ago, it seemed that America was at a pinnacle and still rising. Aside from a few grumbles in Moscow, Beijing and Paris, the world seemed happy to accept a “unipolar” world, led (gently) by a consensus-seeking but also overwhelmingly powerful Pax Americana. Our alliances and popularity (the underpinnings of real international strength) were unsurpassed. Our technology, economy, finances and science, appeared unparalleled.
Even from a conservative perspective, it took real contortions to find things to get vexed about, during the 1990s. (Though that did not keep the lurid, livid rationalizations from flowing).
Military readiness was at an all-time high. (Every US Army brigade was prepared to defend us... vs. none (zero) today.) The economy boomed, small business startups surged as never before, deficits turned into surpluses, crime plummeted along with teen pregnancy rates, secrecy declined and the government’s share of GDP dropped, for the first time since the Great Depression. Note that all of the examples that I chose should appeal to conservatives -- that is, those who aren't hypocrites.
Moreover, after a century in which our triumphs - over fascism, communism, racism, outer space and our own inner devils - seemed so vast compared to our (also extravagant) mistakes, it seemed that America held a high and near permanent status on the world's moral high ground. If patriotism is more than just a reflexive rush of righteous hormones, chanting worshipfully at your tribal totem, then it flourishes best when your country is truly different. When it stands for something new and powerful for good.
How things change in a few short years. Our status as unquestioned leader of a unipolar world is shriveled to the point of ridicule. Our strengths have been spent and frittered. Worst of all, here in Phase Three of the U.S. Civil War, there now appear to be two Americas and one of them wallows in deep denial that their beloved cause has wrought all this terrible harm. The “red” half nods, entranced, as Sean Hannity stakes his outrageous personal claim as ultimate arbiter of patriotism - by waving the flag harder and louder than anybody else - while he continues aiding and abetting those who have betrayed the republic far more than Benedict Arnold ever did.
Alas.
Fortunately, there are better voices, urging a more mature version of patriotism. Columnist Robert Scheer offers the following excerpt from Washington's "Farewell Address" - a declaration of our first president’s high expectations for a republic of free men:
"In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism. ..."
(Looking at actual effects of the Iraq Imbroglio, one sees a better case for the use of “emergency” overrides so that multi-billion dollar, no-bid crony contracts could be handed over to Bush friends for “war zone services” by Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, etc, making the old Military Industrial Complex (Boeing etc) look like absolute angels, by comparison. One could get even more paranoid by tallying the actual results of this insane adventure - all converging upon the demolition of Pax Americana, the one thing the neocons claimed to be fighting for! Why do even opponents of the Bushite Cabal reflexively refuse to consider the parsimonious explanation? That results, so relentlessly and consistently achieved, might have been the aim, all along?)
Of even greater resonance and importance, at this point, is Barack Obama’s speech about this matter, on June 30.
It is a deeply articulate, passionate and yet intelligently nuanced essay that we all ought to read, even opponents, so that we can get some of the measure of this man.
This line was special: "For a young man of mixed race, without firm anchor in any particular community, without even a father's steadying hand, it is this essential American idea – that we are not constrained by the accident of birth but can make of our lives what we will – that has defined my life, just as it has defined the life of so many other Americans."
Oh, and later on, amid many fine insights, he speaks for those of us who remember the future, when he calls for rediscovering our role as a scientific nation. It is the first time I have heard any candidate in this election cycle refer to science unsolicited. (Along these lines, see “Questions For the Candidates About Science and America’s Future.”)
Do read it all the way through. I still have many questions about him. But this is an unusual fellow.
-----
Obama and States Rights.
I’ve made a habit of offering jiu jitsu moves that Barack Obama and the democrats might use to shatter the standard, partisan strawmen that Fox-Rove&co have used, to foment Culture War. (And some of my suggestions would do good, even if they were used, effectively, by John McCain!) The “Stipulation Gambit” -- and a vow to Honor the Losers -- would surprise and woo many fence-sitters, while transforming American politics forever.
Obama has already shown a level of agility that bodes well Now another suggestion -- that he should embrace States Rights as an important modern cause. Dave Rickey wrote in to say: “We all know that only Nixon could go to China’. So if Obama stood up and made an honest appeal for "State's Rights," against the wave of federal power-usurpation by the Cheney Cabal, it would have special resonance.”
With jiu jitsu in mind, think about States Rights. The term carries an old-timey feel of connection to Dixiecrats fighting for Jim Crow, so nobody uses it anymore. But that makes the term available, to be snatched up by a new and agile leader! Imagine how it would rock back those who assume one pattern “typical” of liberalism, for the liberal standard bearer to demand a good version of states rights... one that will allow innovative regions like California to pursue paths toward energy independence, environmentalism, health reform, and so on, without being bludgeoned by a heavy-handed presidency. Could anything better show Obama’s contrast vs a power-mad imperial Bush Cabal, that has betrayed everything decent conservatism ought to stand for?
Obama did something similar when he said he would seek a reform of the U.S. tax code if elected in November, saying the current tax system is a "10,000-page monstrosity." But that promise lacks power simply because it has been made so many times before. (In fact though, I have a simple way that the tax code could be trimmed by 70% without much political pain or obstructionism! It is a method that is mostly politically neutral, gores very few sacred cows, is cheap and easy to implement, and is almost guaranteed to work! Yet, to the best of my knowledge it has never been tried, or even proposed! Alas.)
---
Final Note: osama bin laden: mission accomplished?
''[Osama bin Laden] said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel'' -- about six times what it sells for now." Roger Diwan, a managing director, Petroleum Finance Company, New York Times October 14, 2001
Ten years ago, back in the awful Clinton years, the price of a barrel of oil was just $11. Heading into this holiday weekend, the price of a barrel of oil rested at $144 — a thirteen-fold increase.
Monday, June 30, 2008
So Many Ways Obama Could Use Jiu Jitsu...
The LA Times recently presented an unusually insightful editorial about ”Obamacain” -- relating to the few - but noteworthy - areas in which the two candidates overlap or share important views.
“It has been a refrain during the exhausting battle for the Democratic presidential nomination that once Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama emerged as the party's choice, we could finally dispense with the personality battles and get down to nitty-gritty policy differences. Indeed, now that Obama seems to have the position locked up, he and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain will have plenty to argue about. But some might be surprised at the breadth of issues on which they largely agree.”
The editorial goes on to cite surprising consensus in areas of National Security, Immigration, environment and social issues. The Times suggests that the thought of consensus, instead of Fox-style reflexive opposition, ought to be attractive, now and then.
Alas, the Times essay stops short - way short - of taking this notion to its logical conclusion. If a majority of voters in both major parties have already pledged general allegiancve to one of two presumptive nominees, haven’t we already voted, many months before the general election, to trust their wisdom enough to listen... tentatively... to areas where they both agree change is needed?
One of the very worst immaturities to be foisted on America by the culture warriors has been the oversimplification of reflext opposition. If your side likes something I must be against it. If you open your eggs at the small end, I must open mine at the big end. The biggest actual result of this wretched reflex has been to ensure that very little gets done. We’re doing fine, vetoing each others agendas. But to actually move ahead, we’ll have to re-learn how to negotiate, sometimes compromise, or else let your opponents have the part of their agenda you object to least... in exchange for them doing the same for you.
Above all, where ae actually agree, should it not be politically safe to actually say so?
I go into this in some detail in an essay that I have recycled during each of the live FIVE presidential elections... Why The Candidates Should "Stipulate"...
... proposing that a contest between two mature and intelligent adults does not have to be entirely about a battle of opposites. America and the world might benefit most by hearning where they have discussed a certain matter, and reached a consensus - a stipulation - that it is time to stop the rigor mortis inaction that arises from rigid opposition, and to start talking about how -- rather than whether -- to act on a major problem.
“One of the chief flaws of our electoral system is that real candor is punished. Both sides may rail against each other, but they'll never aim bad news at us. Even if both nominees believe in their hearts that the public needs to face some hard truth, neither will dare be first to say it, lest the other side take advantage.... only now consider this. There is no political cost to telling voters what you really believe... if your opponent has agreed, in advance, to say the same thing.
“The process is called stipulation... as when the attorneys representing opposite sides in a trial agree to agree about a set of points. By stipulating these points, they help move the trial forward, focusing on areas where they disagree. Consider this year. For all of his faults, McCain has done this sort of thing before. So has Senator Obama. In fact, the only ones to object would be those at the extremes, in both parties.”
I go on to cite the greatest-ever example of this kind of bipartisan maturity, in the 1940 Roosevelt-Wilkie election, in which both candidates agreed to support aid to Britain, instantly undercutting the isolationists in both parties. Of course this suggestion was pure fantasy during the poisonous atmosphere of the last eight years, while one of the major candidates represented nothing but stupidity, lunacy, compulsive deceit and rabid partisanship. But if we really are returning to an era (as in the Clinton-Dole contest) when grownups might argue sensibly, then this idea really needs another look. So please do...and possibly spread the word!
And while we’re at it, see another - somewhat related - idea that might also restore civility, consensus, negotiation and mutual respect back into the lexicon of American political life. In fact, this idea is - at one level - simply common courtesy and would score points to whichever candidate made the pledge that I suggest.
“Originally, the Constitution awarded a prize for second place -- the Vice Presidency. If little else, at least the electoral runner-up got a bully pulpit. But after near-disaster in the flawed election of 1804, the system was amended to make the Vice President more of a deputy, chosen by the winning party. Nevertheless, this precedent does show what the founders had in mind. They always intended for the losing side to get something. Might there be some way to acknowledge the losing minority in a presidential election, without grinding their face in humiliation, making them determined to do the same thing, when their turn comes around?”
Check out an original suggestion for how this miracle might be accomplished -- in a way that might also make your side’s candidate seem vastly more statesmanlike and mature.
.
---- ANNOUNCING ---
The latest Armageddon Buffet is out! See some wonderfully inflamatory (and yet twistedly wise) articles that leap out from the rest. http://www.armageddonbuffet.com
.
---- From the Transparency Front ---
The US & EU will let security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The potential agreement, as outlined in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, would represent a diplomatic breakthrough for American counterterrorism officials, who have clashed with the European Union over demands for personal data. Europe generally has more stringent laws restricting how governments and businesses can collect and transfer such information.
---- FOR THE OSTRICH FILES ---
Here’s a news item that I have re-written in the form of “what if Clinton had done this?” -- as part of my continuing series offering you bait for that “decent conservative” or Ostrich, who might yet be lured out of that hole of denial, rousing him or her to recall that he or she is an American first, and a Republican second.
“Imagine how a Republican might feel if - late in the Clinton Administration - the Justice Department's own Inspector General reported that Clinton's White House staff had meddled with nearly all Justice Department hiring decisions, ending the traditional practice of hiring and promoting on advice from neutral commissions and instead applying blatant political tests, transforming the U.S.J.D. into a massive, private law firm serving one political party... relentlessly ignoring crimes by their "side" and pursuing vendettas against the other.”
If this happened under Bill Clinton, and only fiercely partisan liberal Democratswere allowed inside Justice, would you have called it a scandal? But the Inspector General says that this did NOT happen under Clinton. It happened under Bush and the Republicans. So where's your righteous sense of anger?
While you’re at it... try rephrasing the following items the same why! “What if Clinton and the liberals had...?”
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq. “For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources. ...A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations..... And example cited in the article: “In the run-up to the invasion one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth seven billion that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company, which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president. Unusually only Halliburton got to bid - and won.”
Now look back at how thr far-right howled over the UN’s “Oil for Food” program and some possible graft that might have added up, over a decade, to a billion dollars. Where is the same indignation over theft that directly betrayed our troops in the field, amounting to tens and even hundreds of times as much?
While we’re at conspiracy explanations for the , go see this intervirew with Vanity Fair editor Craig Unger on the Bush family feud, neoconservatives and the Christian right. Unger is author of House of Bush, House of Saud, which traces the intense links between those two royal families, which helps to explain why the Saudis and the Iranians are the only real winners to emerge from the neconservative era. Unger’s latest book The Fall of the House of Bush tracks the civil war between Bush Sr.’s moderate republican circle and the neocons who (metaphorically) hijacked his son. See an interview with Unger that, except for some flickers of Israeli conspiracy fetishism, are deeply informative, fascinating and rather scary.
---
And what would Timothy McVeigh have said? That is... if liberals did this? The Senate’s subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on “Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government,” chaired by Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis. Growing use of secret law “is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans. ... Secret law excludes the public from the deliberative process, promotes arbitrary and deviant government behavior, and shields official malefactors from accountability.” At this very Senate hearing, John R. Elwood, the Office of Legal Counsel’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General, provided a startling example of the Bush administration’s justification for the imperious essence of secret law. As reported in the May 1 New York Times, Elwood “disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities.” The Bush administration believes, he said, “that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.”
----
Next time... why Obama should do several more “jiu jitsu moves”... including a bold statement in favor of “states rights.” Now it’s blue-staters who want relief from an overbearing central government that takes their taxes, returns little, and quashes every attempt to make progress at the state level.
The ul;timate irony will come when liberals add gun ownership to states rights, as positions that suddenly make sense from THEIR perspective... while the far right consinues being hereded toward defense of authoritarianism.
But then, ironies are generally overlooked till theyhit people on the head...
“It has been a refrain during the exhausting battle for the Democratic presidential nomination that once Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama emerged as the party's choice, we could finally dispense with the personality battles and get down to nitty-gritty policy differences. Indeed, now that Obama seems to have the position locked up, he and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain will have plenty to argue about. But some might be surprised at the breadth of issues on which they largely agree.”
The editorial goes on to cite surprising consensus in areas of National Security, Immigration, environment and social issues. The Times suggests that the thought of consensus, instead of Fox-style reflexive opposition, ought to be attractive, now and then.
Alas, the Times essay stops short - way short - of taking this notion to its logical conclusion. If a majority of voters in both major parties have already pledged general allegiancve to one of two presumptive nominees, haven’t we already voted, many months before the general election, to trust their wisdom enough to listen... tentatively... to areas where they both agree change is needed?
One of the very worst immaturities to be foisted on America by the culture warriors has been the oversimplification of reflext opposition. If your side likes something I must be against it. If you open your eggs at the small end, I must open mine at the big end. The biggest actual result of this wretched reflex has been to ensure that very little gets done. We’re doing fine, vetoing each others agendas. But to actually move ahead, we’ll have to re-learn how to negotiate, sometimes compromise, or else let your opponents have the part of their agenda you object to least... in exchange for them doing the same for you.
Above all, where ae actually agree, should it not be politically safe to actually say so?
I go into this in some detail in an essay that I have recycled during each of the live FIVE presidential elections... Why The Candidates Should "Stipulate"...
... proposing that a contest between two mature and intelligent adults does not have to be entirely about a battle of opposites. America and the world might benefit most by hearning where they have discussed a certain matter, and reached a consensus - a stipulation - that it is time to stop the rigor mortis inaction that arises from rigid opposition, and to start talking about how -- rather than whether -- to act on a major problem.
“One of the chief flaws of our electoral system is that real candor is punished. Both sides may rail against each other, but they'll never aim bad news at us. Even if both nominees believe in their hearts that the public needs to face some hard truth, neither will dare be first to say it, lest the other side take advantage.... only now consider this. There is no political cost to telling voters what you really believe... if your opponent has agreed, in advance, to say the same thing.
“The process is called stipulation... as when the attorneys representing opposite sides in a trial agree to agree about a set of points. By stipulating these points, they help move the trial forward, focusing on areas where they disagree. Consider this year. For all of his faults, McCain has done this sort of thing before. So has Senator Obama. In fact, the only ones to object would be those at the extremes, in both parties.”
I go on to cite the greatest-ever example of this kind of bipartisan maturity, in the 1940 Roosevelt-Wilkie election, in which both candidates agreed to support aid to Britain, instantly undercutting the isolationists in both parties. Of course this suggestion was pure fantasy during the poisonous atmosphere of the last eight years, while one of the major candidates represented nothing but stupidity, lunacy, compulsive deceit and rabid partisanship. But if we really are returning to an era (as in the Clinton-Dole contest) when grownups might argue sensibly, then this idea really needs another look. So please do...and possibly spread the word!
And while we’re at it, see another - somewhat related - idea that might also restore civility, consensus, negotiation and mutual respect back into the lexicon of American political life. In fact, this idea is - at one level - simply common courtesy and would score points to whichever candidate made the pledge that I suggest.
“Originally, the Constitution awarded a prize for second place -- the Vice Presidency. If little else, at least the electoral runner-up got a bully pulpit. But after near-disaster in the flawed election of 1804, the system was amended to make the Vice President more of a deputy, chosen by the winning party. Nevertheless, this precedent does show what the founders had in mind. They always intended for the losing side to get something. Might there be some way to acknowledge the losing minority in a presidential election, without grinding their face in humiliation, making them determined to do the same thing, when their turn comes around?”
Check out an original suggestion for how this miracle might be accomplished -- in a way that might also make your side’s candidate seem vastly more statesmanlike and mature.
.
---- ANNOUNCING ---
The latest Armageddon Buffet is out! See some wonderfully inflamatory (and yet twistedly wise) articles that leap out from the rest. http://www.armageddonbuffet.com
.
---- From the Transparency Front ---
The US & EU will let security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The potential agreement, as outlined in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, would represent a diplomatic breakthrough for American counterterrorism officials, who have clashed with the European Union over demands for personal data. Europe generally has more stringent laws restricting how governments and businesses can collect and transfer such information.
---- FOR THE OSTRICH FILES ---
Here’s a news item that I have re-written in the form of “what if Clinton had done this?” -- as part of my continuing series offering you bait for that “decent conservative” or Ostrich, who might yet be lured out of that hole of denial, rousing him or her to recall that he or she is an American first, and a Republican second.
“Imagine how a Republican might feel if - late in the Clinton Administration - the Justice Department's own Inspector General reported that Clinton's White House staff had meddled with nearly all Justice Department hiring decisions, ending the traditional practice of hiring and promoting on advice from neutral commissions and instead applying blatant political tests, transforming the U.S.J.D. into a massive, private law firm serving one political party... relentlessly ignoring crimes by their "side" and pursuing vendettas against the other.”
If this happened under Bill Clinton, and only fiercely partisan liberal Democratswere allowed inside Justice, would you have called it a scandal? But the Inspector General says that this did NOT happen under Clinton. It happened under Bush and the Republicans. So where's your righteous sense of anger?
While you’re at it... try rephrasing the following items the same why! “What if Clinton and the liberals had...?”
A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq. “For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC's Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources. ...A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations..... And example cited in the article: “In the run-up to the invasion one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth seven billion that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company, which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president. Unusually only Halliburton got to bid - and won.”
Now look back at how thr far-right howled over the UN’s “Oil for Food” program and some possible graft that might have added up, over a decade, to a billion dollars. Where is the same indignation over theft that directly betrayed our troops in the field, amounting to tens and even hundreds of times as much?
While we’re at conspiracy explanations for the , go see this intervirew with Vanity Fair editor Craig Unger on the Bush family feud, neoconservatives and the Christian right. Unger is author of House of Bush, House of Saud, which traces the intense links between those two royal families, which helps to explain why the Saudis and the Iranians are the only real winners to emerge from the neconservative era. Unger’s latest book The Fall of the House of Bush tracks the civil war between Bush Sr.’s moderate republican circle and the neocons who (metaphorically) hijacked his son. See an interview with Unger that, except for some flickers of Israeli conspiracy fetishism, are deeply informative, fascinating and rather scary.
---
And what would Timothy McVeigh have said? That is... if liberals did this? The Senate’s subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on “Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government,” chaired by Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis. Growing use of secret law “is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans. ... Secret law excludes the public from the deliberative process, promotes arbitrary and deviant government behavior, and shields official malefactors from accountability.” At this very Senate hearing, John R. Elwood, the Office of Legal Counsel’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General, provided a startling example of the Bush administration’s justification for the imperious essence of secret law. As reported in the May 1 New York Times, Elwood “disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities.” The Bush administration believes, he said, “that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.”
----
Next time... why Obama should do several more “jiu jitsu moves”... including a bold statement in favor of “states rights.” Now it’s blue-staters who want relief from an overbearing central government that takes their taxes, returns little, and quashes every attempt to make progress at the state level.
The ul;timate irony will come when liberals add gun ownership to states rights, as positions that suddenly make sense from THEIR perspective... while the far right consinues being hereded toward defense of authoritarianism.
But then, ironies are generally overlooked till theyhit people on the head...
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The (far) Future We Are Fighting For
First a quick offer. I have five tickets (3 adults and 2 child) for the July 6 re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysgurg, at the Gettysburg site. We were rained out two years ago. Now we cannot use these rain-checks. Combined with special grandstand seating, these are worth a total of $150. Look into this wonderful show... then contact me.
Oh... another small matter... we are seeking a couple of teachers or librarians who live in the Denver areaa who happen to be friendly to science fiction! There’s an event they may be interested in connecting with.
=== And Now... ===
As part of the push for a National Science Debate, SEA and fourteen other science organizations have come together to ask the 2008 congressional candidates seven questions on science and technology policy. There is also a handy clickable zipcode search to help you find your local Congressional candidate and to urge him/her to answer the questions. (A special hint -- they give the address of your local representative and opponent. Drop by both, and see if one of them pleases you enough to offer some help!) This is important. Help show the politicians that a top issue is whether America will be an advanced and forward looking civilization.
-----
Startling Prescience...
Here are excerpts from JD Bernal's unbelievably farsighted essay -- The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, published (astonishingly) in 1929!
The whole thing is well worth reading, carefully, but here are some pertinent excerpts:
.
-- from THE WORLD
Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant....
However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere....
As the globes multiplied they would undoubtedly develop very differently according to their construction and to the tendencies of their colonists, and at the same time they would compete increasingly both for the sunlight which kept them alive and for the asteroidal and meteoric matter which enabled them to grow. Sooner or later this pressure, or perhaps the knowledge of the imminent failure of the sun, would force some more adventurous colony to set out beyond the bounds of the solar system. The difficulty involved in making this jump is probably as great as that of leaving the earth itself. Interstellar distances are so large that high velocities, approaching those of light, would be necessary; and though high velocities would be easy to attain - it being merely a matter of allowing acceleration to accumulate - they would expose the space vessels to very serious dangers, particularly from dispersed meteoric bodies. A space vessel would, in fact, have to be a comet, ejecting from its anterior end a stream of gas which, meeting and vaporizing any matter in its path, would sweep it to the sides and behind in a luminous trail. Such a method would be very wasteful of matter, and one might perhaps count on some better one having been devised by that time.
Even with such velocities journeys would have to last for hundreds and thousands of years, and it would be necessary - if man remains as he is - for colonies of ancestors to start out who might expect the arrival of remote descendants. This would require a self-sacrifice and a perfection of educational method that we could hardly demand at the present. However, once acclimatized to space living, it is unlikely that man will stop until he has roamed over and colonized most of the sidereal universe, or that even this will be the end. Man will not ultimately be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them and organize them for his own purposes.
.
-- from FLESH:
If a method has been found of connecting a nerve ending in a brain directly with an electrical reactor, then the way is open for connecting it with a brain-cell of another person. Such a connection being, of course, essentially electrical, could be effected just as well through the ether as along wires. At first this would limit itself to the more perfect and economic transference of thought which would be necessary in the co-operative thinking of the future. But it cannot stop here. Connections between two or more minds would tend to become a more and more permanent condition until they functioned as a dual or multiple organism. The minds would always preserve a certain individuality, the network of cells inside a single brain being more dense than that existing between brains, each brain being chiefly occupied with its individual mental development and only communicating with the others for some common purpose.
Once the more or less permanent compound brain came into existence two of the ineluctable limitations of present existence would be surmounted. In the first place death would take on a different and far less terrible aspect. Death would still exist for the mentally-directed mechanism we have just described; it would merely be postponed for three hundred or perhaps a thousand years, as long as the brain cells could be persuaded to live in the most favorable environment, but not forever. But the multiple individual would be, barring cataclysmic accidents, immortal, the older component as they died being replaced by newer ones without losing the continuity of the self, the memories and feelings of the older member transferring themselves almost completely to the common stock before its death.
Whew! Some people are simply ahead of their times. Though it truly is noteworthy that Bernal's essay was widely published and discussed, back in the 1930s... and no, the Harry Bellafonte movie simply used the provocative title, nothing more.
A note on Bernal’s approach to interstellar travel. Of course we would recognize the overal concept as the vast community of rotating space colonies projected in the 1970s and 1980s by Gerard O’Neil -- leading eventually to some of this vast, living “cells” leaking - as if by osmosis - intothe interstellar realm. If this gradualistic approach works, then human colonies will expand outward in a natural, even organic way. And, once the first ones are established, sending further colonies onward, the pace should accelerate. Simple calculations suggest a migration rate that might fill the galaxy with our descendants within just 60 million years.
The relevance to SETI is obvious. Why haven't aliens already done this? If they had -- and even if the Earth were missed or bypassed or set aside by those predecessors... then would we not have seen or heard signs of them by now?
Still, dig it. “The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul,” by J. D. Bernal 1929. Ninety years ago they were talking about something that seems to have slipped completely our of our own lexicon. The “rational soul.” As Ghandi might have said -- what a quaint idea! http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/
---
While we’re dipping in the past...
- Look up the prescient speech by Vannevar Bush, after WWII, forecasting many of the advantages of computers and advanced communications in the coming world.
- In 1934, Belgium visionary Paul Otlet sketched out plans for the the Mundaneum - a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes") that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "reseau," which might be translated as "network" or "web." He laid out his vision of a "mechanical, collective brain" that would house all the world's information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network, using telegraph messages. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas.
.
--- More Misc Stuffs!
Spore has arrived! Well, part of it. Stefan reports: “Maxis released the first module, the Creature Creator, last week. Here is Joel Johnson's "straight" demonstration: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/13/video-a-few minutes.html I once joked on Slashdot that SPORE wouldn't really take off until Wright pursued the Sims demographic with the Spore Interplanetary Brothel module.”
It's two years since Wright had me and Sheldon Brown over to his Berkely shop, to show him our exorarium concept (www.exorarium.com) Sheldon and I felt flattered that Wil was even remotely worried about us! How could we know that the wonderful Spore prototype we saw that day would be delayed two years?
Oh, a cute moment came when we pointed out that - while our approach uses evolution - Wil's Spore is clearly Intelligent Design.
-------
Another (pressure driven) hit?
Here’s an obscure one for the “predictive hits” registry. Scientists have found that the superconducting state in so-called "high temperature" superconductors can be induced by high pressure as well as low temperature.
Um... duh? I considered this to be so obvious that I made it a major plot element in EARTH. When I realized that the most common mineral state in our planet’s mantle layer -- perovskite -- happens also to be the mineral state of some of the best “high temperature superconductors.” Of course “best high temperature superconductors” in 1990 still meant only a few dozen degrees above absolute zero... and the Earth’s mantle is many thousands of degrees hot. So, the two domains should have zero overlap, right? Except for the intense pressure, down in the mantle! Should this -- might it -- result in occasional highly-conductive domains down there, deep below the surface? The mere possibility led to one of the most , well, unusual plot veers in any science fiction novel. (Or so I’m told.) It seemed reasonable (to a sci fi author) to ponder that vast, vast zone crisscrossed with conductive domains that might imprint with all of human knowledge in a very short time... bringing Earth itself to consciousness.
------
More Misc..... (sorry, inactive links)
See an excellent article about why scientists need help from rhetoricians to foil the machinations of today’s malignant sophists.
For anyone interested in the long, long road of libertarianism, as it wrestles with its oversimplifying demons and creeps slowly toward adulthood, there is a new site.
A global effort to develop an open-source "self-replicating" machine that ‘prints’ three-dimensional objects, is celebrating after the prototype machine succeeded in making a set of its own printed parts. (I betcha they don’t include chips and print heads.)
NASA's Solar Probe+, a heat-resistant spacecraft, will plunge deep into the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand, by 2015. Trajectory of Solar Probe+ The two mysteries prompting this mission are the high temperature of the sun's corona and the puzzling acceleration of the solar wind.
Holocene related -- Researchers conducting brain scans of people listening to multiple sounds, say that the secondary auditory cortex -- located in the temporal lobe at the side of the head -- does much of the work in filtering out a single thread of conversation from a tangle of similar background noises (the "cocktail party. And why has almost no effort been made, to provide the same services to folks online?
Botnets control just over a million hacked computers on the Internet and are capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages every day.
HP has announced an under-$500 laptop computer called a "Mini-Note" that weighs less than 3 pounds, with a screen that measures 8.9 inches diagonally (prices go up for Windows Vista models with faster processors). The Mini-Note will compete primarily with Intel's Classmate PCs, Asustek's Eee PC.
Vivaty of Menlo Park, California, is creating a hybrid of conventional social networking sites such as Facebook and virtual worlds like Second Life. To be offered to Facebook users, Vivaty users will get access to a virtual room where they can adorn the walls with photos, watch a virtual television that plays YouTube, invite friends...
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun and about 5,000 light-years away.
---
And More (thanks to Ray Kurzweil).....
Twins' DNA can differ due to copy number variants (different number of copies of the same gene). These differences in identical twins can be used to identify genetic regions and genes that coincide with specific diseases due to copy number changes. Differences between identical...
Columbia University scientists presented evidence today that desert heat, a little water, and meteorite impacts may have been enough to cook up one of the first prerequisites for life: The dominance of left-handed amino acids, the building blocks of life on this planet. The finding suggests a higher probability that there is life somewhere similar to ours.
Now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain's left hemisphere, Daniel Pink, author of "A Whole New Mind," argues that it's time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.
NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometers across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing...
Harvard Medical School and Boston College researchers have found that taking music lessons can strengthen connections between the two hemispheres of the brain in children, but only if they practice diligently. For the children who practiced at least 2.5 hours a week, a region of the corpus callosum that connects movement-planning regions on the...
-------
No link necessary
85 per cent of the 4.3 billion available Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which identify devices connected to the net, are already in use. Within three years they will all be used up.
Researchers at IBM and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin have demonstrated a prototype that integrates a water-based cooling system into 3-D chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack. The method is one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance in "3-D chip stacks" beyond its predicted limits
Decreased levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin increases emotional response to a perceived unjust or unfair situation. Volunteers who had their serotonin levels temporarily lowered were much more likely to reject unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game. So, Oxytocin increases trust susceptibility and serotonin makes folks less skeptical...
Wow! No wonder we really need that National Science Debate!
Oh... another small matter... we are seeking a couple of teachers or librarians who live in the Denver areaa who happen to be friendly to science fiction! There’s an event they may be interested in connecting with.
=== And Now... ===
As part of the push for a National Science Debate, SEA and fourteen other science organizations have come together to ask the 2008 congressional candidates seven questions on science and technology policy. There is also a handy clickable zipcode search to help you find your local Congressional candidate and to urge him/her to answer the questions. (A special hint -- they give the address of your local representative and opponent. Drop by both, and see if one of them pleases you enough to offer some help!) This is important. Help show the politicians that a top issue is whether America will be an advanced and forward looking civilization.
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Startling Prescience...
Here are excerpts from JD Bernal's unbelievably farsighted essay -- The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, published (astonishingly) in 1929!
The whole thing is well worth reading, carefully, but here are some pertinent excerpts:
.
-- from THE WORLD
Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant....
However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere....
As the globes multiplied they would undoubtedly develop very differently according to their construction and to the tendencies of their colonists, and at the same time they would compete increasingly both for the sunlight which kept them alive and for the asteroidal and meteoric matter which enabled them to grow. Sooner or later this pressure, or perhaps the knowledge of the imminent failure of the sun, would force some more adventurous colony to set out beyond the bounds of the solar system. The difficulty involved in making this jump is probably as great as that of leaving the earth itself. Interstellar distances are so large that high velocities, approaching those of light, would be necessary; and though high velocities would be easy to attain - it being merely a matter of allowing acceleration to accumulate - they would expose the space vessels to very serious dangers, particularly from dispersed meteoric bodies. A space vessel would, in fact, have to be a comet, ejecting from its anterior end a stream of gas which, meeting and vaporizing any matter in its path, would sweep it to the sides and behind in a luminous trail. Such a method would be very wasteful of matter, and one might perhaps count on some better one having been devised by that time.
Even with such velocities journeys would have to last for hundreds and thousands of years, and it would be necessary - if man remains as he is - for colonies of ancestors to start out who might expect the arrival of remote descendants. This would require a self-sacrifice and a perfection of educational method that we could hardly demand at the present. However, once acclimatized to space living, it is unlikely that man will stop until he has roamed over and colonized most of the sidereal universe, or that even this will be the end. Man will not ultimately be content to be parasitic on the stars but will invade them and organize them for his own purposes.
.
-- from FLESH:
If a method has been found of connecting a nerve ending in a brain directly with an electrical reactor, then the way is open for connecting it with a brain-cell of another person. Such a connection being, of course, essentially electrical, could be effected just as well through the ether as along wires. At first this would limit itself to the more perfect and economic transference of thought which would be necessary in the co-operative thinking of the future. But it cannot stop here. Connections between two or more minds would tend to become a more and more permanent condition until they functioned as a dual or multiple organism. The minds would always preserve a certain individuality, the network of cells inside a single brain being more dense than that existing between brains, each brain being chiefly occupied with its individual mental development and only communicating with the others for some common purpose.
Once the more or less permanent compound brain came into existence two of the ineluctable limitations of present existence would be surmounted. In the first place death would take on a different and far less terrible aspect. Death would still exist for the mentally-directed mechanism we have just described; it would merely be postponed for three hundred or perhaps a thousand years, as long as the brain cells could be persuaded to live in the most favorable environment, but not forever. But the multiple individual would be, barring cataclysmic accidents, immortal, the older component as they died being replaced by newer ones without losing the continuity of the self, the memories and feelings of the older member transferring themselves almost completely to the common stock before its death.
Whew! Some people are simply ahead of their times. Though it truly is noteworthy that Bernal's essay was widely published and discussed, back in the 1930s... and no, the Harry Bellafonte movie simply used the provocative title, nothing more.
A note on Bernal’s approach to interstellar travel. Of course we would recognize the overal concept as the vast community of rotating space colonies projected in the 1970s and 1980s by Gerard O’Neil -- leading eventually to some of this vast, living “cells” leaking - as if by osmosis - intothe interstellar realm. If this gradualistic approach works, then human colonies will expand outward in a natural, even organic way. And, once the first ones are established, sending further colonies onward, the pace should accelerate. Simple calculations suggest a migration rate that might fill the galaxy with our descendants within just 60 million years.
The relevance to SETI is obvious. Why haven't aliens already done this? If they had -- and even if the Earth were missed or bypassed or set aside by those predecessors... then would we not have seen or heard signs of them by now?
Still, dig it. “The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul,” by J. D. Bernal 1929. Ninety years ago they were talking about something that seems to have slipped completely our of our own lexicon. The “rational soul.” As Ghandi might have said -- what a quaint idea! http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/
---
While we’re dipping in the past...
- Look up the prescient speech by Vannevar Bush, after WWII, forecasting many of the advantages of computers and advanced communications in the coming world.
- In 1934, Belgium visionary Paul Otlet sketched out plans for the the Mundaneum - a global network of computers (or "electric telescopes") that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a "reseau," which might be translated as "network" or "web." He laid out his vision of a "mechanical, collective brain" that would house all the world's information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network, using telegraph messages. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just to draw static links between documents, but also to map out conceptual relationships between facts and ideas.
.
--- More Misc Stuffs!
Spore has arrived! Well, part of it. Stefan reports: “Maxis released the first module, the Creature Creator, last week. Here is Joel Johnson's "straight" demonstration: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/13/video-a-few minutes.html I once joked on Slashdot that SPORE wouldn't really take off until Wright pursued the Sims demographic with the Spore Interplanetary Brothel module.”
It's two years since Wright had me and Sheldon Brown over to his Berkely shop, to show him our exorarium concept (www.exorarium.com) Sheldon and I felt flattered that Wil was even remotely worried about us! How could we know that the wonderful Spore prototype we saw that day would be delayed two years?
Oh, a cute moment came when we pointed out that - while our approach uses evolution - Wil's Spore is clearly Intelligent Design.
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Another (pressure driven) hit?
Here’s an obscure one for the “predictive hits” registry. Scientists have found that the superconducting state in so-called "high temperature" superconductors can be induced by high pressure as well as low temperature.
Um... duh? I considered this to be so obvious that I made it a major plot element in EARTH. When I realized that the most common mineral state in our planet’s mantle layer -- perovskite -- happens also to be the mineral state of some of the best “high temperature superconductors.” Of course “best high temperature superconductors” in 1990 still meant only a few dozen degrees above absolute zero... and the Earth’s mantle is many thousands of degrees hot. So, the two domains should have zero overlap, right? Except for the intense pressure, down in the mantle! Should this -- might it -- result in occasional highly-conductive domains down there, deep below the surface? The mere possibility led to one of the most , well, unusual plot veers in any science fiction novel. (Or so I’m told.) It seemed reasonable (to a sci fi author) to ponder that vast, vast zone crisscrossed with conductive domains that might imprint with all of human knowledge in a very short time... bringing Earth itself to consciousness.
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More Misc..... (sorry, inactive links)
See an excellent article about why scientists need help from rhetoricians to foil the machinations of today’s malignant sophists.
For anyone interested in the long, long road of libertarianism, as it wrestles with its oversimplifying demons and creeps slowly toward adulthood, there is a new site.
A global effort to develop an open-source "self-replicating" machine that ‘prints’ three-dimensional objects, is celebrating after the prototype machine succeeded in making a set of its own printed parts. (I betcha they don’t include chips and print heads.)
NASA's Solar Probe+, a heat-resistant spacecraft, will plunge deep into the sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, where it can sample solar wind and magnetism first hand, by 2015. Trajectory of Solar Probe+ The two mysteries prompting this mission are the high temperature of the sun's corona and the puzzling acceleration of the solar wind.
Holocene related -- Researchers conducting brain scans of people listening to multiple sounds, say that the secondary auditory cortex -- located in the temporal lobe at the side of the head -- does much of the work in filtering out a single thread of conversation from a tangle of similar background noises (the "cocktail party. And why has almost no effort been made, to provide the same services to folks online?
Botnets control just over a million hacked computers on the Internet and are capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages every day.
HP has announced an under-$500 laptop computer called a "Mini-Note" that weighs less than 3 pounds, with a screen that measures 8.9 inches diagonally (prices go up for Windows Vista models with faster processors). The Mini-Note will compete primarily with Intel's Classmate PCs, Asustek's Eee PC.
Vivaty of Menlo Park, California, is creating a hybrid of conventional social networking sites such as Facebook and virtual worlds like Second Life. To be offered to Facebook users, Vivaty users will get access to a virtual room where they can adorn the walls with photos, watch a virtual television that plays YouTube, invite friends...
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own. They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun and about 5,000 light-years away.
---
And More (thanks to Ray Kurzweil).....
Twins' DNA can differ due to copy number variants (different number of copies of the same gene). These differences in identical twins can be used to identify genetic regions and genes that coincide with specific diseases due to copy number changes. Differences between identical...
Columbia University scientists presented evidence today that desert heat, a little water, and meteorite impacts may have been enough to cook up one of the first prerequisites for life: The dominance of left-handed amino acids, the building blocks of life on this planet. The finding suggests a higher probability that there is life somewhere similar to ours.
Now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain's left hemisphere, Daniel Pink, author of "A Whole New Mind," argues that it's time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.
NASA engineers are testing out a giant, six-legged robot that could pick up and move a future Moon base thousands of kilometers across the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to explore much more than just the area around their landing...
Harvard Medical School and Boston College researchers have found that taking music lessons can strengthen connections between the two hemispheres of the brain in children, but only if they practice diligently. For the children who practiced at least 2.5 hours a week, a region of the corpus callosum that connects movement-planning regions on the...
-------
No link necessary
85 per cent of the 4.3 billion available Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which identify devices connected to the net, are already in use. Within three years they will all be used up.
Researchers at IBM and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin have demonstrated a prototype that integrates a water-based cooling system into 3-D chips by piping water directly between each layer in the stack. The method is one of the most promising approaches to enhancing chip performance in "3-D chip stacks" beyond its predicted limits
Decreased levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin increases emotional response to a perceived unjust or unfair situation. Volunteers who had their serotonin levels temporarily lowered were much more likely to reject unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game. So, Oxytocin increases trust susceptibility and serotonin makes folks less skeptical...
Wow! No wonder we really need that National Science Debate!
Monday, June 16, 2008
Cool Signs of an Ongoing Enlightenment
Dousing the Politics Lamp - a bit - here’s a survey of what progressive innovators, entrepeneurs etc are up to! Remember, leader-politicians are important, but they can only help a civilization and citizenry who are helping themselves!
But first, a challenge and a puff item:
Whatever your politics... sign a petition for the great big National Science Debate! Make the candidates tell us how they’d make the U.S. once again a leader in science & tech-innovation for improving the future.
Also see the winners the still-image part of the “Uplift” Computer Graphics Challenge. There’s a LOT of vivid, skilled and imaginative talent out there! Check Michael Dashow’s 2nd place winner. It’s not a scene from any book of mine, but it’s uplift! And way fun. And now I have an idea for this story....
Next to be judged - the "video trailers"... promos for science fiction films that have never been made... yet...
....and now more cool items... plus some "brinmaterials" at the very end.
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IEEE Spectrum’s special issue on “The Singularity” is singularly worth a look. With deeply insightful articles by my friends Vernor Vinge, Robin Hanson and Ray Kurzweil... and an interactive article letting you add bionic components to a futuristic “shopping cart”... it is exceptionally useful & entertaining.
Dave McCabe writes in to say “There’s a group having a stab at doing something like your Disputation Arenas.” Another approach to improving online argument is this worthy effort. Of course this is the focus also of my Google Tech Talk. We can hope that projects like this get some leverage.
Meanwhile, GadgetTrack and other technologies that let your possessions communicate across the web are having the incidental effect of catching thieves. Ah transparency.
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Brin heads into space! No... a different Brin. Google Cofounder Sergey Brin will also take a personal step into space as one of two space tourists on a 2011 private Soyuz flight. Brin has already put down a $5 million down payment towards his future flight as the first member of the newly established "Founding Explorer" group. "I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space," Brin said in a press statement. (Huh! Well, maybe I can get him to take one of my books along. Grumble. “Brin in space.” Have fun Sergey! ;-)
Stefan reminds us... Sign the petition for the great big national Science Debate! Get the candidates to step forward and discuss how to make this country, once again, the leader in science and technology and innovating for the future.
Kevin Kelly’s latest article on the advantages of an era when information is infinitely copyable... and how to still make a proft.
Have a look at a summary of this year's Future in review Conference (FiRe), where Vinod Khosla was delightfully contrarian optimistic about our coming ability to develop cellulosic fuels and solar thermal energy.
"It is not every day that you get to hang out with Noble prize winners, top climatologists, renowned science fiction authors, CTOs of Fortune 100 companies, top researchers in medicine, broadband, environment, and fuels, #1 VC on the planet, friend of every Chinese leader since Mao, and more – and all within 48 hours. Well, Future in Review (FiRe) conference last week in San Diego provided such a thrill." Alas, the author of the writeup only mentions one "famous science fiction author" -- guest Bruce Sterling, who was entertainingly ornery, interviewed (by my arrangement) by the great tech artist Sheldon Brown. Um, the SF writer in residence at ALL of these conferences, organized the "Architechs CTO Innovation Challenge"!
Some fascinating companies touted or highlighted at the recent FiRe Conference? http://www.ecoverdance.com, http://www.tscombustion.com, http://www.uboost.com, http://gizmo.calit2.net To see these events as podcasts, from by the FiRe site, drop by over the course of the next few months. http://www.futureinreview.com/ And see the FiRe site for more...
But seriously, are we a community or not? If Khosla is right (and he often is) then we should be looking very closely at solar thermal companies and trying to figure out which ones are the winners. Because Khosla thinks this field will boom like crazy in just three years. Go research & report back! (Otoh, Elon Musk sees a coming surge in photovoltaics. Let’s hope this rivalry between optimists really goes!
------- behave boys! A study shows that a big part of the flight of well-traiuned women from science and technology-related fields (where trained workers are desperately needed) is not just the old choice between career/family. No, around ages 30-40 much of it seems to revolve around workplace sexism, which may be worse among nerds than in the military! So watch the jokes and innuendos and ham-handed flirting, guys. Turns out it’s unpatriotic as well as uncool.
---- Other cool horizon techs.
- an aluminum-gallium alloy which, when combined with water, releases hydrogen for energy use. Basically you buy this compact energy source, then any supply of water can be poured in to become hydrogen fuel. Although the technology is still in its infancy, envision its use as a supplemental source of energy in hybrids and diesel-electric freight trains.
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- using carbon credits to cut greenhouse gases through financing the installation of anaerobic digesters on dairy farms across the U.S. The digesters capture methane (currently 10% of all greenhouse gases) released by cattle and turn it into electricity for farm use.
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- new computerized pen, which captures and digitizes written text with the option of translation into other languages. Go back and touch the pen to anything it wrote (even on a regular paper pad) and it will playback any sound recorder when that text was first scribbled. I kid you not.
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- cell phones will soon use their cameras to scan barcodes , which will bring up information about a product via mobile Internet, along with the ability to wirelessly purchase and ship that product.
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- an Intel team in Beijing that has developed a parallel app that watches television, for those who don’t have enough time to watch TV, saying that Tivo goes only so far. The computer can create a highlight reel...
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- Sensors/implants, such as “smart wireless band-aids” – biosensors in a peel & stick package with a radio and processor – can be applied throughout the body and can then talk to another device, such as a mobile phone, another piece of medical equipment, or an access point on a wall in a hospital.
----------- Refreshing candor from a capital player Anyone who thinks all capitalists are dogmatic fools should have heard Bill Janeway of Warburg-Pincus: ”People who have been [complaining] about politics and politicians and the political process, and why don’t we just let the market solve it all, are again in the process of learning why we have politicians, why we have political processes, so that there are avenues of appeal from the market – not just for the losers, when the market works well, but for everyone, when the market ceases to work at all.”
Also sobering: “We do not know how deep and long the recession will be. We know that in Japan, it was 10 years, not two years – 10 years of slump, of rebuilding the financial health of the banking system, which is still somewhat problematic... with massive amounts of bail-out money for corporations.” The crux? Markets are marvels of the Enlightenment and the greatest generators of positive-sum wealth ever seen. But they not magical and they do not work well “blind.” FIBM (Faith in Blind Markets) is armwaving Juju, incanted by fools, or else by manipulators who really want less government-based accountability, but want plenty of government handouts and assumption of costs and risks.
Other insights
Ricardo Salinas-Pliego reminded us to consider the “bottom of the pyramid” and the millions upon millions of people who inhabit it, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His suite of companies, Grupo Salinas, is focused on bringing this demographic into modern financial systems, beyond microcredit, including offering accessible payment and savings systems. This is a demographic that also needs broadband, Internet access, and social action.
There are about 300 billion square feet of buildings in the U.S., and at least another 150 billion are expected to be built in the next 30 years. Additional projections: 50 billion will be demolished and 150 billion renovated – meaning that 75% of our built environment will be new or renovated. Now consider that buildings today consume 50% of energy in the U.S. in construction, operations, and maintenance, so if we can reduce demand by 50%, it will be like removing the entire transportation industry (25%) from the equation. Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, of which Mark Foster is a Partner, is working hard to push the concept of “net zero” energy use. The annual energy budget for your building or site will be the annual incidence of its solar radiation. “Live with that,” as Mark phrased it, with good cheer. Your annual water budget will be the precipitation that falls on your site.
From 60 year China hand Sidney Rittenberg: “In 1943 Mao had applied to come to Washington to meet with President Roosevelt to talk about postwar China. An intense nationalist, he had never previously left Chinese soil. And here he was, appealing to us, to invite him to go to Washington, during the war, in 1943. And to all of this, we turned a deaf ear. We rejected his request for an invitation; we wouldn’t talk with him about loans, or about anything else. I think that if we had not been so ideologically driven – so narrow – we would not have had to fight the war in Korea or the war in Vietnam.”
We just gotta do better at foresight. At not letting dogma drive us. At believing we can make a more open and better world.
--- Ah, but in the short term?
A key hint to what’s going on is the disappearance of scores of oil tankers. Not in some thriller or sci fi plot. They are simply waiting, full, near ports. Speculators seemed to be storing oil in very large tankers and "slow steaming" them to port in a bet that prices would rise. When everyone is on the same side of the trade, the time is right for a reversal. This is especially true when there is a large potential supply sitting on the sidelines. It seems a good bet there’ll be an oil price plunge sometime soon, though a “dip” may be more like it. I wonder if it will be timed in oder to make it seem Bush or McCain were somehow responsible. Analyst John Mauldin also thinks that regulators may discourage some of the speculation that has driven up other commodity prices.
----- Critical Matters from the Transparency Front
A brilliant activist shared this confidentially: Researching chemical surveillance turned up a federal project called SensorNet. The following information was taken off the web and not yet otherwise verified, but the overall pattern is clear. The system is not merely proposed; it is being actively tested. SensorNet is planned to be the information infrastructure for a nationwide sensor web collecting of a wide variety of information with complete data integration and access by law enforcement and other government personnel at all levels: "a standards-based comprehensive incident management system available to Federal, state and local governments and the private sector for the real-time detection, identification, and assessment of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) hazards." [2]
Purposes listed include terrorism detection, environmental monitoring, enhanced weather analysis and prediction, traffic control, aircraft surveillance, inventory tracking, earthquake monitoring, and the measurement of atmospheric gases in urban areas. [2] Locations planned include government buildings or bases, commercial facilities [3], and other "strategic sites" such as national parks and sports arenas [4]. Some sensing would be limited in time; other locations would perform continual sensing. In the "near future", the mobile version of SensorNet will be made as small as a PDA or cell phone.
Initial testing has been carried out at "numerous" sites including Washington, DC; New York; Nashville; Knoxville; Oak Ridge; Chattanooga; Memphis; and Fort Bragg, NC. Similar tests have been done in Boston, San Francisco, and Miami. Sensor technologies are expected to include nanotechnology and MEMS; the chips to be used are planned to detect "thousands" of substances. Communication/software technologies and tools being used, or planned to be used, include Linux, XML, Java, digital certificates, peer-to-peer networking, SourceForge, Web 2.0, Second Life VR software, and wikis.
Deployment cost has been estimated at $2 billion over four years to deploy in 120 major U.S. cities. The cost is relatively low and the time relatively short because much of the proposed infrastructure is already in place (e.g., cellular towers and cellular basestations).Although the system is described as "open", this appears to refer to the architecture, not who has access to the data.
Now tell me this. If this frightens you, how do you plan to stop it? Ban or delay it, and it will only return again with sensors that are harder to detect. "Privacy laws simply make the bugs smaller." -- Robert Heinlein.
Anyway, each time something bad happens, the government will blame it on not having been able to see. These sensor nets WILL come. The only question is who will have access and who will be empowered. Again and again I explain -- the only way we'll keep a little privacy is (ironically) if we all can see. Oh, and that is how our protectors will be able to see enough to do their jobs, while remembering they are guard dogs, not wolves.
=== Misc stuff! ===
Doritos' 2008 contest winning space-ad entitled 'Tribe' was voted for by the British public The message is being pulsed out over a six-hour period from high-powered radars at the EISCAT European space station in the Arctic Circle, directed at a solar system just 42 light years away from Earth, in the 'Ursa Major' or Great Bear Constellation. The cleverly created advert features a tribe of Doritos escaping from the pack and sacrificing one of their own to the God of Salsa, as soon as there are no humans around. It can be viewed online from today at www.doritos.co.uk.
Oooog. What an image to represent us! Fortunately, to detect the signal, ET would need an antenna 25km across. Idiots.
But Bandit reports: “..just for fun ... they even have pocket protectors!!“
---- The Lifeboat Foundation discusses ways to ensure survival of human civilization vs “existential threats.” Now they are looking for a safe, capacious and reliable server to host their increasing website traffic.
Speaking of which... energy fears looming, new survivalists prepare, a la The Postman?
Along ironically related lines... are there still uncontacted tribal peoples on Earth? I have to really doubt it. Still, have a look at this.
And here are some clues as to how we might fail with a whimper. Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research. Related, of course, to what I said in The Transparent Society about “the end of photograpohy as proof.”
But then, some things Can’t Be Copied... or so Says Kevin Kelly, who explains eight "generatives," things that can't be copied and so still hold value on the Internet: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability.
See a plan to create autonomous, extranational retreats for the rich, in the open ocean. And yes, this is reminiscent of the "Sea State" in Earth... and an item for the prediction wiki... though the version that I envisioned was propelled by the poor and disenfranchised, while this one is apparently an endeavor by some of the world's richest men to both continue to benefit from and (when convenient) abandon global civilization. (To see another (more interesting) attempt to begin deep oceanic fish farming in a big way... with giant, 200 meter buckeyball enclosed habitats. www.hioceanictech.com)
In my new novel-in-progress, "shoresteading" is a refuge for some of the poor... laying claim to abandoned beachfront mansions, lost to rising tides.
See the nightmare “author” who runs a small POD (publish on demand) empire produing “books” that compile public source documents into tomes on narrow subjects... 200,000 of them so far.
First time an orbiting spacecraft ever caught a snapshot of another one landing.
For the Predictions wiki... "A Japanese brewery Tuesday said it was planning the first "space beer," using offspring of barley once stored at the Space Station. Researchers said the project was part of efforts to prepare for a future in which humans spend extended periods of time in space -- and might like a cold beer after a space walk." Well, it’s not exactly the “Slingshot” brew I describe in “Tank Farm Dynamo,” but still....
---- Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers report that brain activity can be used to predict the likelihood of someone making an error about six seconds in advance, with gradual changes starting as much as 30 seconds ahead of time. The team used an imaging machine to scan the brains of a group of volunteers who performed a task in the presence of distracting information. When performing correctly the volunteers' brains showed increased levels of activity in those parts associated with cognitive effort, as would be expected. However, these areas gradually became less active before errors were made and at the same time another set of regions in the brain became more active. These regions are part of a so called "default mode network" and show increased use when people are resting or asleep[PDF]. While imaging machines are far too big and complex to be used in workplaces to monitor the brain activity of people engaged in important tasks, the team hopes to correlate errors to changes in electrical activity in the brain with electroencephalography (EEG), using electrodes placed on the scalp. If EEG features can be found that correspond to the change in brain activity, then a hat that gives warning of an imminent mistake might one day become reality. Could of used that hat while dating! Brrrrr!
------- If you aren’t an Ayn Rand fan, but have done the requisite reading (because she IS important enough to read), you will find this astonishingly consistent and cogent and biting and well worth the time. If you are a devotee... you may not be amused.
Blogunity member Tracy McSherry does motion-capture animation. See his latest - a funny satire of the Clinton-Obama debates.
And that will just have to do for now...
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." JFK - January 20, 1961
==========
ADDENDUM of brin-focused matters:
While we're at it, like audio-told tales? A bright and fun site for science fiction audio podcasting is Tony Smith’s Starship Sofa where one of my shortest works (precisely 250 words long) has just been posted. To hear just the (very short, but complicated) story, click.
Meanwhile, one of my speeches has been podcast. In this one -- between allergy sniffles -- I talk about "Horizon Analysis" while dealing with a world of accelerating change.
Were any of you among those I sent copies of Colony High part one: Sky Horizon, (by email) to critique? We’re still interested and if you finish that one, a select few will get to read an early draft of New Mojave.
But first, a challenge and a puff item:
Whatever your politics... sign a petition for the great big National Science Debate! Make the candidates tell us how they’d make the U.S. once again a leader in science & tech-innovation for improving the future.
Also see the winners the still-image part of the “Uplift” Computer Graphics Challenge. There’s a LOT of vivid, skilled and imaginative talent out there! Check Michael Dashow’s 2nd place winner. It’s not a scene from any book of mine, but it’s uplift! And way fun. And now I have an idea for this story....
Next to be judged - the "video trailers"... promos for science fiction films that have never been made... yet...
....and now more cool items... plus some "brinmaterials" at the very end.
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IEEE Spectrum’s special issue on “The Singularity” is singularly worth a look. With deeply insightful articles by my friends Vernor Vinge, Robin Hanson and Ray Kurzweil... and an interactive article letting you add bionic components to a futuristic “shopping cart”... it is exceptionally useful & entertaining.
Dave McCabe writes in to say “There’s a group having a stab at doing something like your Disputation Arenas.” Another approach to improving online argument is this worthy effort. Of course this is the focus also of my Google Tech Talk. We can hope that projects like this get some leverage.
Meanwhile, GadgetTrack and other technologies that let your possessions communicate across the web are having the incidental effect of catching thieves. Ah transparency.
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Brin heads into space! No... a different Brin. Google Cofounder Sergey Brin will also take a personal step into space as one of two space tourists on a 2011 private Soyuz flight. Brin has already put down a $5 million down payment towards his future flight as the first member of the newly established "Founding Explorer" group. "I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space," Brin said in a press statement. (Huh! Well, maybe I can get him to take one of my books along. Grumble. “Brin in space.” Have fun Sergey! ;-)
Stefan reminds us... Sign the petition for the great big national Science Debate! Get the candidates to step forward and discuss how to make this country, once again, the leader in science and technology and innovating for the future.
Kevin Kelly’s latest article on the advantages of an era when information is infinitely copyable... and how to still make a proft.
Have a look at a summary of this year's Future in review Conference (FiRe), where Vinod Khosla was delightfully contrarian optimistic about our coming ability to develop cellulosic fuels and solar thermal energy.
"It is not every day that you get to hang out with Noble prize winners, top climatologists, renowned science fiction authors, CTOs of Fortune 100 companies, top researchers in medicine, broadband, environment, and fuels, #1 VC on the planet, friend of every Chinese leader since Mao, and more – and all within 48 hours. Well, Future in Review (FiRe) conference last week in San Diego provided such a thrill." Alas, the author of the writeup only mentions one "famous science fiction author" -- guest Bruce Sterling, who was entertainingly ornery, interviewed (by my arrangement) by the great tech artist Sheldon Brown. Um, the SF writer in residence at ALL of these conferences, organized the "Architechs CTO Innovation Challenge"!
Some fascinating companies touted or highlighted at the recent FiRe Conference? http://www.ecoverdance.com, http://www.tscombustion.com, http://www.uboost.com, http://gizmo.calit2.net To see these events as podcasts, from by the FiRe site, drop by over the course of the next few months. http://www.futureinreview.com/ And see the FiRe site for more...
But seriously, are we a community or not? If Khosla is right (and he often is) then we should be looking very closely at solar thermal companies and trying to figure out which ones are the winners. Because Khosla thinks this field will boom like crazy in just three years. Go research & report back! (Otoh, Elon Musk sees a coming surge in photovoltaics. Let’s hope this rivalry between optimists really goes!
------- behave boys! A study shows that a big part of the flight of well-traiuned women from science and technology-related fields (where trained workers are desperately needed) is not just the old choice between career/family. No, around ages 30-40 much of it seems to revolve around workplace sexism, which may be worse among nerds than in the military! So watch the jokes and innuendos and ham-handed flirting, guys. Turns out it’s unpatriotic as well as uncool.
---- Other cool horizon techs.
- an aluminum-gallium alloy which, when combined with water, releases hydrogen for energy use. Basically you buy this compact energy source, then any supply of water can be poured in to become hydrogen fuel. Although the technology is still in its infancy, envision its use as a supplemental source of energy in hybrids and diesel-electric freight trains.
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- using carbon credits to cut greenhouse gases through financing the installation of anaerobic digesters on dairy farms across the U.S. The digesters capture methane (currently 10% of all greenhouse gases) released by cattle and turn it into electricity for farm use.
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- new computerized pen, which captures and digitizes written text with the option of translation into other languages. Go back and touch the pen to anything it wrote (even on a regular paper pad) and it will playback any sound recorder when that text was first scribbled. I kid you not.
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- cell phones will soon use their cameras to scan barcodes , which will bring up information about a product via mobile Internet, along with the ability to wirelessly purchase and ship that product.
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- an Intel team in Beijing that has developed a parallel app that watches television, for those who don’t have enough time to watch TV, saying that Tivo goes only so far. The computer can create a highlight reel...
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- Sensors/implants, such as “smart wireless band-aids” – biosensors in a peel & stick package with a radio and processor – can be applied throughout the body and can then talk to another device, such as a mobile phone, another piece of medical equipment, or an access point on a wall in a hospital.
----------- Refreshing candor from a capital player Anyone who thinks all capitalists are dogmatic fools should have heard Bill Janeway of Warburg-Pincus: ”People who have been [complaining] about politics and politicians and the political process, and why don’t we just let the market solve it all, are again in the process of learning why we have politicians, why we have political processes, so that there are avenues of appeal from the market – not just for the losers, when the market works well, but for everyone, when the market ceases to work at all.”
Also sobering: “We do not know how deep and long the recession will be. We know that in Japan, it was 10 years, not two years – 10 years of slump, of rebuilding the financial health of the banking system, which is still somewhat problematic... with massive amounts of bail-out money for corporations.” The crux? Markets are marvels of the Enlightenment and the greatest generators of positive-sum wealth ever seen. But they not magical and they do not work well “blind.” FIBM (Faith in Blind Markets) is armwaving Juju, incanted by fools, or else by manipulators who really want less government-based accountability, but want plenty of government handouts and assumption of costs and risks.
Other insights
Ricardo Salinas-Pliego reminded us to consider the “bottom of the pyramid” and the millions upon millions of people who inhabit it, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His suite of companies, Grupo Salinas, is focused on bringing this demographic into modern financial systems, beyond microcredit, including offering accessible payment and savings systems. This is a demographic that also needs broadband, Internet access, and social action.
There are about 300 billion square feet of buildings in the U.S., and at least another 150 billion are expected to be built in the next 30 years. Additional projections: 50 billion will be demolished and 150 billion renovated – meaning that 75% of our built environment will be new or renovated. Now consider that buildings today consume 50% of energy in the U.S. in construction, operations, and maintenance, so if we can reduce demand by 50%, it will be like removing the entire transportation industry (25%) from the equation. Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, of which Mark Foster is a Partner, is working hard to push the concept of “net zero” energy use. The annual energy budget for your building or site will be the annual incidence of its solar radiation. “Live with that,” as Mark phrased it, with good cheer. Your annual water budget will be the precipitation that falls on your site.
From 60 year China hand Sidney Rittenberg: “In 1943 Mao had applied to come to Washington to meet with President Roosevelt to talk about postwar China. An intense nationalist, he had never previously left Chinese soil. And here he was, appealing to us, to invite him to go to Washington, during the war, in 1943. And to all of this, we turned a deaf ear. We rejected his request for an invitation; we wouldn’t talk with him about loans, or about anything else. I think that if we had not been so ideologically driven – so narrow – we would not have had to fight the war in Korea or the war in Vietnam.”
We just gotta do better at foresight. At not letting dogma drive us. At believing we can make a more open and better world.
--- Ah, but in the short term?
A key hint to what’s going on is the disappearance of scores of oil tankers. Not in some thriller or sci fi plot. They are simply waiting, full, near ports. Speculators seemed to be storing oil in very large tankers and "slow steaming" them to port in a bet that prices would rise. When everyone is on the same side of the trade, the time is right for a reversal. This is especially true when there is a large potential supply sitting on the sidelines. It seems a good bet there’ll be an oil price plunge sometime soon, though a “dip” may be more like it. I wonder if it will be timed in oder to make it seem Bush or McCain were somehow responsible. Analyst John Mauldin also thinks that regulators may discourage some of the speculation that has driven up other commodity prices.
----- Critical Matters from the Transparency Front
A brilliant activist shared this confidentially: Researching chemical surveillance turned up a federal project called SensorNet. The following information was taken off the web and not yet otherwise verified, but the overall pattern is clear. The system is not merely proposed; it is being actively tested. SensorNet is planned to be the information infrastructure for a nationwide sensor web collecting of a wide variety of information with complete data integration and access by law enforcement and other government personnel at all levels: "a standards-based comprehensive incident management system available to Federal, state and local governments and the private sector for the real-time detection, identification, and assessment of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) hazards." [2]
Purposes listed include terrorism detection, environmental monitoring, enhanced weather analysis and prediction, traffic control, aircraft surveillance, inventory tracking, earthquake monitoring, and the measurement of atmospheric gases in urban areas. [2] Locations planned include government buildings or bases, commercial facilities [3], and other "strategic sites" such as national parks and sports arenas [4]. Some sensing would be limited in time; other locations would perform continual sensing. In the "near future", the mobile version of SensorNet will be made as small as a PDA or cell phone.
Initial testing has been carried out at "numerous" sites including Washington, DC; New York; Nashville; Knoxville; Oak Ridge; Chattanooga; Memphis; and Fort Bragg, NC. Similar tests have been done in Boston, San Francisco, and Miami. Sensor technologies are expected to include nanotechnology and MEMS; the chips to be used are planned to detect "thousands" of substances. Communication/software technologies and tools being used, or planned to be used, include Linux, XML, Java, digital certificates, peer-to-peer networking, SourceForge, Web 2.0, Second Life VR software, and wikis.
Deployment cost has been estimated at $2 billion over four years to deploy in 120 major U.S. cities. The cost is relatively low and the time relatively short because much of the proposed infrastructure is already in place (e.g., cellular towers and cellular basestations).Although the system is described as "open", this appears to refer to the architecture, not who has access to the data.
Now tell me this. If this frightens you, how do you plan to stop it? Ban or delay it, and it will only return again with sensors that are harder to detect. "Privacy laws simply make the bugs smaller." -- Robert Heinlein.
Anyway, each time something bad happens, the government will blame it on not having been able to see. These sensor nets WILL come. The only question is who will have access and who will be empowered. Again and again I explain -- the only way we'll keep a little privacy is (ironically) if we all can see. Oh, and that is how our protectors will be able to see enough to do their jobs, while remembering they are guard dogs, not wolves.
=== Misc stuff! ===
Doritos' 2008 contest winning space-ad entitled 'Tribe' was voted for by the British public The message is being pulsed out over a six-hour period from high-powered radars at the EISCAT European space station in the Arctic Circle, directed at a solar system just 42 light years away from Earth, in the 'Ursa Major' or Great Bear Constellation. The cleverly created advert features a tribe of Doritos escaping from the pack and sacrificing one of their own to the God of Salsa, as soon as there are no humans around. It can be viewed online from today at www.doritos.co.uk.
Oooog. What an image to represent us! Fortunately, to detect the signal, ET would need an antenna 25km across. Idiots.
But Bandit reports: “..just for fun ... they even have pocket protectors!!“
---- The Lifeboat Foundation discusses ways to ensure survival of human civilization vs “existential threats.” Now they are looking for a safe, capacious and reliable server to host their increasing website traffic.
Speaking of which... energy fears looming, new survivalists prepare, a la The Postman?
Along ironically related lines... are there still uncontacted tribal peoples on Earth? I have to really doubt it. Still, have a look at this.
And here are some clues as to how we might fail with a whimper. Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research. Related, of course, to what I said in The Transparent Society about “the end of photograpohy as proof.”
But then, some things Can’t Be Copied... or so Says Kevin Kelly, who explains eight "generatives," things that can't be copied and so still hold value on the Internet: Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability.
See a plan to create autonomous, extranational retreats for the rich, in the open ocean. And yes, this is reminiscent of the "Sea State" in Earth... and an item for the prediction wiki... though the version that I envisioned was propelled by the poor and disenfranchised, while this one is apparently an endeavor by some of the world's richest men to both continue to benefit from and (when convenient) abandon global civilization. (To see another (more interesting) attempt to begin deep oceanic fish farming in a big way... with giant, 200 meter buckeyball enclosed habitats. www.hioceanictech.com)
In my new novel-in-progress, "shoresteading" is a refuge for some of the poor... laying claim to abandoned beachfront mansions, lost to rising tides.
See the nightmare “author” who runs a small POD (publish on demand) empire produing “books” that compile public source documents into tomes on narrow subjects... 200,000 of them so far.
First time an orbiting spacecraft ever caught a snapshot of another one landing.
For the Predictions wiki... "A Japanese brewery Tuesday said it was planning the first "space beer," using offspring of barley once stored at the Space Station. Researchers said the project was part of efforts to prepare for a future in which humans spend extended periods of time in space -- and might like a cold beer after a space walk." Well, it’s not exactly the “Slingshot” brew I describe in “Tank Farm Dynamo,” but still....
---- Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers report that brain activity can be used to predict the likelihood of someone making an error about six seconds in advance, with gradual changes starting as much as 30 seconds ahead of time. The team used an imaging machine to scan the brains of a group of volunteers who performed a task in the presence of distracting information. When performing correctly the volunteers' brains showed increased levels of activity in those parts associated with cognitive effort, as would be expected. However, these areas gradually became less active before errors were made and at the same time another set of regions in the brain became more active. These regions are part of a so called "default mode network" and show increased use when people are resting or asleep[PDF]. While imaging machines are far too big and complex to be used in workplaces to monitor the brain activity of people engaged in important tasks, the team hopes to correlate errors to changes in electrical activity in the brain with electroencephalography (EEG), using electrodes placed on the scalp. If EEG features can be found that correspond to the change in brain activity, then a hat that gives warning of an imminent mistake might one day become reality. Could of used that hat while dating! Brrrrr!
------- If you aren’t an Ayn Rand fan, but have done the requisite reading (because she IS important enough to read), you will find this astonishingly consistent and cogent and biting and well worth the time. If you are a devotee... you may not be amused.
Blogunity member Tracy McSherry does motion-capture animation. See his latest - a funny satire of the Clinton-Obama debates.
And that will just have to do for now...
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." JFK - January 20, 1961
==========
ADDENDUM of brin-focused matters:
While we're at it, like audio-told tales? A bright and fun site for science fiction audio podcasting is Tony Smith’s Starship Sofa where one of my shortest works (precisely 250 words long) has just been posted. To hear just the (very short, but complicated) story, click.
Meanwhile, one of my speeches has been podcast. In this one -- between allergy sniffles -- I talk about "Horizon Analysis" while dealing with a world of accelerating change.
Were any of you among those I sent copies of Colony High part one: Sky Horizon, (by email) to critique? We’re still interested and if you finish that one, a select few will get to read an early draft of New Mojave.
Friday, June 06, 2008
All right, then, how can we help?
Finally! Clarity. And now, each of us can find ways help to carry this revolution forward.
One way -- simply add a little to the tsunami of small donations to Senator Obama's campaign... and contributing to the Democratic Party, so the fight can be taken down to the level of Congressional and state districts, where the real transformation awaits. Seriously, if you donate to one, please match with the other.
Nevertheless, it is both futile and unamerican -- as well as rather pathetic -- to yearn for salvation at the hands of some charismatic leader-politician. That sends the wrong message, especially to the politicians! At another level, this ye
One way -- simply add a little to the tsunami of small donations to Senator Obama's campaign... and contributing to the Democratic Party, so the fight can be taken down to the level of Congressional and state districts, where the real transformation awaits. Seriously, if you donate to one, please match with the other.
Nevertheless, it is both futile and unamerican -- as well as rather pathetic -- to yearn for salvation at the hands of some charismatic leader-politician. That sends the wrong message, especially to the politicians! At another level, this ye