Priceless treasure guide disguised as the confused ramblings of a misanthropic iconoclast. Seeking the next level is not a quest for the timid, not for the easily discouraged.
06 February 2012
Power Your Robots With Human Waste
Most people consider human excrement to be worse than worthless. But a new breed of robot is coming which sees human waste as its bread, butter, and milk of "life." Ideally, such a robot would be able to adopt the configuration of a toilet, to facilitate the "waste to fuel" transfer and transformation.
This combination toilet-et-robot allows you to visualise one possible example of waste-eating robot with a built-in fuel interface. But to be honest, the actual prototype looks more like the robot pictured below.
Tomorrow's new generation of self-sustaining robots might keep going nearly forever by grazing on dead insects, rotting plant matter or even human waste..."Robots that eat biological fuels could find enough fuel almost anywhere," said John Greenman, a microbiologist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, a joint venture between the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol. "There is organic matter anywhere on Earth — leaves and soil in the forest, or even human waste such as urine and feces."
...The EcoBot team's work with such technology has not gone unnoticed. They received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in late 2011 so that they could push the limits of stacking microbial fuel cells that help tackle sanitation and energy needs by turning human urine or waste into useful electricity for radios or other gadgets.
Human waste might also someday help power space robots that accompany astronauts on long-distance space missions or to planetary colonies, Ieropoulos said. On Earth, the robots might crawl through the debris of growing cities, or survive on their own for years in the great outdoors. _SciAm
Researchers are taking many approaches to the development of robots capable of roving the natural environment, and grazing off the landscape. The idea of recycling human waste directly, using waste-eating domestic robots which also clean the apartment -- and clean themselves while they are at it -- is a clever twist.
China is the world's largest producer of gold, but the middle kingdom actually imports considerably more than it produces! The appetite for gold in China appears to be enormous, and growing rapidly.
China is easily the world’s largest consumer of the metal, but we often forget they are also the world’s largest producer. For the year 2010, it produced 345 tonnes. Its output has increased by 62% since 2001 and it routinely breaks its own records for annual gold production. _Goldmoney via ob-research
China, already the world No. 1 gold producer, saw its output rise again this year. The country produced a record 360.96 tonnes of the yellow metal in 2011, a 5.9% increase, making it the world's top gold producer for a fifth consecutive year, according to the China Gold Association.
Meanwhile, the country has been importing record amounts of gold as well with the volumes coming in through Hong Kong, which are officially reported figures, climbing to over 100 tonnes in November - and by all accounts gold purchasing in China has been booming since then, so imports are likely to have remained at this kind of level in December and January as well. Estimates have suggested that China's total gold imports for 2011 will have been some 490 tonnes - double that of 2010, but this may well be an under-estimate, possibly a substantial one. _Mineweb
But -- just as with everything in China -- there is a lot more going on below the surface, which is not officially reported.
China's domestic gold mine output is, without a doubt, much higher than reported. Actual gold mine output could easily be close to 400 tons and possibly more for the following reasons:
The China Gold Association (CGA) numbers reflect production by their members only -- but omit gold mined by non-members. These include many small, unofficial mining operations some of which are illegal existing in the "underground economy". The CGA data also excludes production from mines owned and operated by the military, which is significant according to sources. Not to be overlooked is by-product output from copper, silver, and other metal mining activity. Again, this is significant though hard to know just how significant.
In addition to mine output, analysts and commentators seem to forget about secondary supply -- that is from recycling of jewelry, investment bars, and industrial scrap. Just to get an "order-of-magnitude" possibility, in recent years global secondary supply from scrap recycling has contributed roughly one-third of total worldwide supply. If scrap contributed only five or ten percent of China's total gold supply it would still be quite important.
Next, Western analysts are estimating that China's total gold imports last year were around 490 tons -- but no one talks about "illegal" imports -- that is gold smuggled into China. We know smuggling is quite significant in some countries -- Vietnam and India, for example. We can only imagine how many tons of gold in the form of tael bars, wafers, coins, investment-grade jewelry, etc. is carried into China each year by travellers and professional smugglers.
Legitimate imports of gold into China amount to hundreds of tonnes. But illegitimate imports -- gold smuggling into China -- is likely to reach significant amounts as well. (more)
Other nations experience serious levels of capital flight include Russia, Syria, Mexico, Argentina, India, Venezuela, Iran, and a large assortment of third world dictatorships and quasi-dictatorships.
Demand for gold is quite high, globally, for a number of reasons -- not least of which are Europe's twin disaster of debt and demographic decline, nor Obama's ongoing war against the US' private sector and energy producers.
This information should tell you something about popular global sentiment toward the current crop of national and international leaders. Trends are likely to continue until something remarkable occurs to change them.
A word of caution: Don't get caught up in the oil hoopla! Oil is not gold, nor is oil a reliable store of value. That is because oil can be substituted in many ways. (much more on this at Al Fin Energy) Gold has no such substitutes.
Humans, Apes, Addicts, and Microbes: Their Common Thread
The common thread that links life on Earth is the thin thread of DNA that coils, circles, and works its way through the generations, through the species, changing the face of the planet as it evolves.
Our brains are formed by our genes, working through the environment. Some genes control an entire platoon of other genes. The genes that determine how our brains grow and function are still evolving. If these "commander" genes evolve, remarkable changes can occur over a fairly short time span. The human species appears to be changing on a more rapid time scale than most scientists are willing to accept.
...human beings have suites of genes that probably cause their brains to be “plastic” and thus receptive to change far longer (to the age of about five) than is true for chimps or monkeys (whose brains are plastic for less than a year after birth). Moreover, Dr Khaitovich was able to work out how the expression of these modules of genes was co-ordinated, by looking at the switches, known as transcription factors, that turn them on and off.
Indeed, by comparing modern genomes with their discoveries about Neanderthals Dr Paabo’s group has found that the regulatory process for one of the modules came into existence after the modern human and Neanderthal lines separated from one another, about 300,000 years ago. _Economist
Some people may be born at a tremendous disadvantage, genetically speaking. Addictive and criminal behaviour appear to be at least partially heritable. Societies deal with these problems in different ways. There is always room for improvement -- beginning with the acknowledgement of the genetic component.
Humans have turned a corner in understanding their own genetics. They can now re-program the genes of living humans, and are on the verge of re-programming the genes of embryos and zygotes. Artificial evolution, in other words.
Humans are also making progress toward understanding the complex genetics of their environments -- the microbial world in which they are immersed. We live in microbial soup, which is quite difficult to sort out with the old genetic tools that required culturing organisms before their genomes could be sequenced.
To extract individual genomes, Armbrust’s PhD student Vaughn Iverson exploited skills that had he gained as a computer scientist designing video compression technology at Intel in Portland, Oregon. He developed a computational method to break the stitched metagenome into chunks that could be separated into different types of organisms. He was then able to assemble the complete genome of Euryarchaeota, even though it was rare within the sample. He plans to release the software over the next six months.
It’s a different tack from that taken by early marine metagenomics efforts, which began in earnest with Craig Venter’s Global Ocean Sampling effort in 20032. “Our survey offered a broad-stroke picture of microbial diversity and the dominant players in the world’s oceans,” says Kenneth Nealson, director of the microbial and environmental genomics group at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, California. “This clever approach demonstrates that they can pull out the sequence of uncultured organisms — information we need to get a clue as to how microbes share limiting resources in the ocean.” _Nature
We finally understand that it is necessary to understand the full complement and range of genomics, genetics, and epigenetics in which we live -- and how we interact with this milieu in order to work out our lives.
Genetics and evolution have been underrated and ignored by most human intellectuals. But no one -- including these neglectful intellectuals -- is ignored by the genetic universe we inhabit. Not one living thing.
Aerogel has proven to be a great insulator both on Earth, on Mars, under the oceans, and even in extreme expedition clothing, for use in both very cold and very hot environments.
Aerogels are finding wider use as insulators in the construction market, and have now reached the high end of home construction:
Over 70 years ago, scientists invented aerogel, the least dense solid known to man, and an insulator four times more efficient than fiberglass or foam. Famously, according to Dr. Peter Tsou of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "you could take a two- or three-bedroom house, insulate it with aerogel, and you could heat the house with a candle. But eventually the house would become too hot."
Unfortunately, aerogels remained so expensive and unwieldy that only NASA used them with any regularity. However, thanks to recent production advances, aerogel insulation is now available and affordable for consumer purchase.
Even after the price drop, aerogels remain more expensive than common insulating materials. But since aerogels are more plastic than fiberglass or foam, permeable to water vapor, and flameproof, the extra cost may well be worth the investment when insulating masonry, shingles, or curved surfaces. Plus, since they're so light and efficient, aerogels reduce other building costs as well. _PopSci
Aerogel is even used by sculptors as a sculpture medium, but for it to be used to construct very large self-supporting 3D structures on its own, it needs to be toughened up somehow. Chinese and Japanese researchers have collaborated to create a hybrid aerogel using cellulose and silica, which is much tougher than regular aerogels.
The researchers at Wuhan University (China) and the University of Tokyo (Japan) have now developed a special composite aerogel from cellulose and silicon dioxide. They begin by producing a cellulose gel from an alkaline urea solution. This causes the cellulose to dissolve, and to regenerate to form a nanofibrillar gel. The cellulose gel then acts as a scaffold for the silica gel prepared by a standard sol–gel process, in which a dissolved organosilicate precursor is cross-linked, gelled, and deposited onto the cellulose nanofibers. The resulting liquid-containing composite gel is then dried with supercritical carbon dioxide to make an aerogel.
The novel composite aerogel demonstrates an interesting combination of advantageous properties: mechanical stability, flexibility, very low thermal conductivity, semitransparency, and biocompatibility _Nanowerk
A truly tough aerogel would be an amazing material for use in a wide variety of applications. Ultra lightweight, strong, flame-proof, conforming to a wide range of shapes, super-insulating, with fairly good sound insulating properties as well.
This material is particularly interesting because it is composed of a dispersion of MWNTs which leave a honeycomb structure with controllable porosity. More-so, the aerogel has a large surface area and conducts electricity very well, but is a thermal insulator. This is an ideal characteristic for electronics.
Notably this is not the first aerogel made from carbon nanotubes (or CNTs for short if you’re hip to the materials crowd), nor is it the first CNT-based aerogel to exhibit amazing elastic properties. But it’s a new pathway to making CNT-based aerogels and the resulting materials are pretty cool. _aerogel.org
What you see above is a rapidly developing material category which is likely to expand rapidly, once it has toughened up enough to "go the distance."
A monolithic dome insulated with aerogel walls and windows should easily keep a family warm even in polar environs, for very little cost of heating. Similarly, undersea habitats, high altitude lighter-than-air ships, and outer space habitats could be kept comfortable without adding significant weight.
Al Fin seastead engineers have even suggested using future, highly toughened aerogels as insulation for pykrete seasteads, to minimise cooling expenditures for the massive free-floating island habitats. The advanced aerogels would be used in conjunction with layers of supercooled liquid gels and integral perfusion channels for the "counter-current" flow of super-cooled fluids, within the pykrete and liqui-gel layers.
The ability to use inexpensive materials, such as pykrete, to build massive structures such as large seasteads, should make the idea practical much sooner.
Despite rumours to the contrary, Britain has not rejected the fast reactor concept as presented by GE Hitachi (PRISM). Talks will continue for roughly 6 months, according to Nuclear Decommissioning Authority officials. The PRISM reactor is capable of consuming nuclear "waste" as fuel, vastly increasing the amount of energy contained within nuclear fuel rods, and extending the potential nuclear fuel available to the world by centuries or longer.
Britain's large stockpile of nuclear waste includes more than 100 tonnes of plutonium and 35,000 tonnes of depleted uranium. The plutonium in particular presents a security risk as a potential target for terrorists and will cost billions to dispose of safely...The engineering firm GE Hitachi has submitted [a] ... proposal based on their Prism fast reactor, which could consume the plutonium as fuel while generating electricity.
"It's a very elegant idea that we should try and use [the waste] as efficiently as possible. I definitely find it an attractive idea", said Prof David MacKay, Decc's chief scientific adviser.
Recent news reports have suggested this proposal has been rejected by the government and Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) on the grounds of being too far from commercial viability.
However, the Guardian has confirmed that talks between GE Hitachi, Decc and the NDA are continuing. MacKay told the Guardian: "My position as chief scientific adviser at Decc is that I think Prism is an interesting design and I'd like to see [details about its credibility] worked out." A spokesperson for the NDA said: "The statement that the NDA has rejected the GE Hitachi Prism reactor is completely without foundation." He added that the current round of discussions "might last about six months". _Guardian
Current commercial nuclear reactors generate large amounts of so-called nuclear waste, which is actually extremely valuable nuclear fuel. Advanced generations of nuclear reactors will be able to burn this "waste" as an integral part of their fuel.
If the material we have seen until now as waste is instead seen as fuel, it has the potential to solve three problems at once: the UK's contribution to climate change, possible future energy shortfalls and a significant component of the massive bill - and massive headache - associated with cleaning up the current nuclear mess.
The technology with the potential to solve these problems is the fast reactor, ideally the integral fast reactor (IFR), which I wrote about in December. It exploits the fact that conventional nuclear power plants use just 0.6% of the energy contained in the uranium that fuels them. IFRs, once loaded with nuclear waste, can, in principle, keep recycling it until only a small fraction remains, producing energy as they do so.
The remaining waste is both unusable for anyone who might hope to make a weapon from it and presents much less of a long-term management problem, as its components have half-lives of tens, not millions, of years. An IFR plant could melt down only by breaking the laws of physics: if the fuel pins begin to overheat, they expand, stopping the fission reaction.
GE Hitachi has offered to build a fast reactor to consume the plutonium stockpile at Sellafield, though not yet the whole kit (the integral fast reactor). It has offered to do it within five years, and to carry the cost if it doesn't work out. This is the proposal the government is now considering. I would like to see it go further and examine the case for the full works: an integral fast reactor (incorporating a reprocessing plant) that generates much more energy from the waste pile. _G.Monbiot
Monbiot is a curious example of the growing number of leftist greens who have adopted advanced nuclear energy as a viable path forward for human civilisations. While still believing in the orthodoxy of carbon hysteria, such pro-nuclear greens have seemingly rejected the "dieoff.orgiasm" of their brother and sister greens.
As for the integral fast reactor which Monbiot mentions, it is an idea that needs to be developed and put into commercial use as soon as safely possible. A well-planned and phased move from light water reactors to integral fast reactors, molten salt thorium reactors, and gas cooled reactors -- at all scales from the MW to the GW ranges -- would provide a safe and solid energy foundation under future societies and civilisations.
Japan is dying, and it has nothing to do with the Fukushima nuclear plant that was demolished by a massive earthquake and tsunami. Japan's death is due to debt and demographics -- the two twin demons of destruction sweeping through many of the world's most advanced nations, from Asia to Europe to North America.
As many as 1/3 of Japan's population will disappear by the year 2060, due to low birthrates.
In year 2060, Japan will have 87 million people. The number of people 65 or older will nearly double to 40 percent, while the national work force of people between ages 15 and 65 will shrink to about half of the total population, according to the estimate, made by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The total fertility rate, or the expected number of children born per woman during lifetime, in 2060 is estimated at 1.35, down from 1.39 in 2010 — well below more than 2 needed to keep the country’s population from declining. But the average Japanese will continue to live longer. The average life expectancy for 2060 is projected at 90.93 for women, up from 86.39 in 2010, and 84.19 years for men, up from 79.64 years. _TimesHerald
Young men and women of Japan seem to have lost interest in romantic relationships. Young men see relationships as "taking too much effort," and young women see contemporary young Japanese males as being "unmanly, mere boys."
A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found.
The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had "no interest" in or even "despised" sex. That's almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.
If that's not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.
If Japan's population fades away, what happens to the massive (but deeply in debt) Japanese economy? Will Chinese immigrants, fleeing a collapsing China, fill the gap?
Hundreds of millions of China's floating population are living in dire poverty, exploited by a startlingly wealthy Chinese elite, ignored by the Chinese social support system. This huge population of dispossessed people are at least partially responsible for the massive buying of gold in China. You can carry gold with you when you flee your home country, you see.
We like to think that things can continue on as they have done, generation after generation. Through good and bad, humans have muddled through and survived -- and even prospered in the more advanced parts of the world. But there is always a niggling of a doubt in the back of the mind: "What if this thing happens, or that? How would we survive the ultimate catastrophe?"
Certainly a nuclear war, a worldwide fatal contagion, or a global zombie apocalypse would all be difficult trials to endure. An ice age might push civilisation to the very brink. But Earth abides, and humans could too. In the near future, the only catastrophe that might require the complete abandonment of the planet, would be an extraterrestrial strike -- a comet, asteroid, or equivalent large scale impact.
A missile silo home such as the one above provides the convenience of an onsite rocket launch pad, with the added convenience of an on site airfield.
Should a majour planetary catastrophe occur, one would certainly wish to have a convenient launch pad capable of carrying one's self and significant others. One would also need a destination in Earth orbit, where one could "freshen up" and restore one's natural sense of vigour and vitality.
A well equipped full-sized space station can make all the difference, should your home planet suddenly become uninhabitable.
But you can bet that others will likely be thinking along the same lines of escape-to-orbit. Before long your space station could begin to look and smell like a regular refugee camp. Soon you will be thinking about moving on.
But since humans are much more comfortable on planetary surfaces anyway, you would probably already be thinking about relocating to Luna or Mars. The sooner the better, so as to claim the best real estate and avoid the land rush.
To assist your planetary habitat-building, special robotic apparatuses are being developed which will allow you to construct your Lunar or Martian habitat over a 24 hour period, using a robotic contour crafting robot.
Regardless, try to keep all of your options open. Most types of apocalypse will allow you to continue to reside on the most beautiful and life-loving planet in the solar system. But some types of doom will not permit that.
Open Courseware and Online Learning: A Dynamic Flux
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has agreed to join Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s (MIT) OpenCourseWare community...MIT’s OpenCourseWare currently has over 250 universities onboard and the prominent members include Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; Yale University; Peking University; Harvard Law School; University of Notre Dame; Tufts University; University of California, Irvine and Utah State University. The consortium claims to have published materials from more than 13,000 courses in 20 languages, available through its website. MIT had reportedly invited IIT to join its OpenCourseWare consortium in 2007 but IIT had apparently declined the invitation then, stating that their initiatives are still young to join the Open Source learning bandwagon, as stated by TOI. _Source
Udemy is a new addition to the list of online open courseware providers. Some courses are free, and others require a fee. Udemy provides something called "The Faculty Project" which aims to provide a wide range of free university level courses to online learners, as well as providing a technology platform for professors to create new courses.
The infographic below, from onlinecollegecourses.com, provides a quick snapshot of the rapidly changing entity known as open courseware. A year from now, the entire project is likely to have grown appreciably.
Via: Online College Courses Blog
Remember: Anything that moves education toward the open source model, is probably a good thing. Anything that moves education toward increasing dependency upon government and a highly centralised, top-down sanctioning of education, is probably a bad thing.
The Congressional Budget Office found Monday that federal workers are compensated 16 percent more than comparable private-sector workers on average.
..."While millions of Americans continue to struggle with stagnant wages and high unemployment, government bureaucrats in Washington continue to enjoy significant advantages over those whose tax dollars finance their compensation," House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) office said in reaction to the finding. _TheHill
Once new government agencies, departments, and bureaus form, they are forever. They grow and expand their mandates, jurisdictions, and budgets as quickly and widely as they can.
The US federal government will continue to expand to consume whatever the shrinking private sector can give it. Every time a US president, senator, or congressman makes a promise to supply a service to a taxpayer, he is inflating the problem by growing the government.
Federal benefits include:
More expensive health benefits.
Both a defined-benefit and defined-contribution pension plan.
Full retirement at 56.
Retiree health benefits.
Significantly more paid leave than private-sector workers. A federal employee with three years on the job receives all 10 federal holidays, 20 paid vacation days, and 13 sick leave days per year.
Federal employees enjoy job security irrespective of the state of the economy. Since the recession began, federal employment (not including the Postal Service) has risen by 230,000, or 12 percent. Federal employees are almost never fired for poor performance.
Federal employees demonstrate with their actions that they receive better compensation in the public sector than in the private sector: They quit their jobs at one-third the rate of private employees.
Policy Concerns
Taxpayers should not sacrifice so that federal employees can enjoy better pay and benefits than they could hope to receive in the private sector.
Many federal employees retire in their late 50s, collect their pension and retiree health benefits, and then take a second job in the private sector. Taxpayers should not have to subsidize this double-dipping.
The General Schedule does not connect pay and performance. Workers automatically receive step and grade increases in pay whether they work diligently or not. It is almost impossible to fire an underperforming federal employee. This reduces the productivity of federal workers. _Government Pay Is Inflated
We know that government does not create wealth or prosperity, and yet we sit by as government balloons and bloats itself in ways that disrupt and destroy genuine wealth creating, productive entities in the private sector.
The US government is a bloated and somewhat consolidated — but antagonistic — block of catering services, which prepare US taxpayers and private concerns to be eaten by fat, unscrupulous, and well-connected party-goers of the lifelong vulture persuasion.
One does not expect either competence or benevolence from such entities. One merely tries not to be utterly consumed before one is dead.
Global Cooling: A Return to the Age of a Frozen Thames?
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century. _DailyMail
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.
We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.
...According to a paper issued last week by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25 and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as, or weaker than, the ‘Dalton minimum’ of 1790 to 1830. In this period, named after the meteorologist John Dalton, average temperatures in parts of Europe fell by 2C.
However, it is also possible that the new solar energy slump could be as deep as the ‘Maunder minimum’ (after astronomer Edward Maunder), between 1645 and 1715 in the coldest part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when, as well as the Thames frost fairs, the canals of Holland froze solid. _DailyMail
Using the Livingston and Penn Solar Cycle 25 amplitude estimate, this is what the solar cycle record is projected to look like:
This graph indicates what global temperatures have done since 1997. Rather than shooting skyward as the "hockey stick" graphs of IPCC fame predicted, temperatures have rather plateau'd, and may be trending downward.
It is too early to predict whether the sun is approaching a multi-decadal "Dalton Minimum" type decline in activity, or whether it may be on the verge of a more extended "Maunder Minimum" type decline. The difference between the two could be quite important, and solar physicists and astronomers are beginning to take notice.
Because ocean temperatures exhibit a "thermal flywheel effect," ocean temperatures can continue to gradually warm for some time after incoming solar energy has declined. Water, with a 4X higher specific heat than air, takes longer to reverse a temperature trend.
Of course there is a lot more going on with the climate than solar cycles. But thanks to the impressive solar changes that we are witnessing, we may be closer to seeing who the big boss of the climate truly is.
But since many hundreds of billions of dollars in carbon taxes, carbon trades, carbon reparations, and carbon hysteria oriented research are at stake, do not expect the orthodoxy of climate alarmism to take all of this lying down, frozen Thames or no frozen Thames.
How Obama Could Help US Energy: Get His Energy Starvationist Government Out of the *&%# Way!
Without his nose growing visibly, the President claimed the government was behind the technological advances that led to the current shale gas boom, and even suggested that he might take credit for the rise in domestic oil production. In fact, Mr. Obama's administration has hampered and castigated oil companies at every turn. In the light of the hysterical grandstanding over the BP Gulf spill (whose impact proved to be greatly exaggerated), it was ironic indeed to hear the President now declare a great opening up of offshore exploration.
The industry has responded to attacks by becoming more innovative and productive. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, between 2007 and 2010, U.S. oil production grew from 5.1 million barrels a day (mbd) to 5.5 mbd. The agency predicts domestic production will hit 6.7 mbd by 2020, helping take imports down to 36% of domestic usage in 2035 from 60% in 2005. So much for peak oil. Meanwhile, the EIA also predicts that by 2016, thanks to the shale boom, the U.S. will be a natural gas exporter. _NatPost
In other words, the US oil & gas sector has grown and prospered despite Obama's agenda of energy starvation. Imagine how much healthier US energy and US industry would be without vicious governmental harassment and regulatory handicapping.
After taking credit for prosperity that has occurred despite everything he could do to shut it down, Mr. Obama goes on to promote the green energy scams which are helping to kill Europe, and which will certainly destroy any economy foolish enough to depend upon them.
One wonders if the President has the slightest clue about the flagging state of the wind and solar industries in Germany, or that what is boosting China's alternatives industry is government subsidies ... from other countries.
The President announced a plan to devote huge swathes of public land to the development of clean energy to power "three million homes." He also apparently committed the Navy to buying a chunk of this power, as if it weren't expensive enough to guard the Strait of Hormuz.
Mercantilist alternative energy strategies represent - as Jimmy Carter famously suggested - the "moral equivalent of war." The problem is that it is war on one's own economy. At least, with his partial ceasefire against the oil industry, President Obama is now only shooting himself in one policy foot rather than both. _NatPost
Obama says he is promoting clean oil technologies, and takes credit for the economic success of technologies which he has tried to kill, but more intelligent people can see through his endless crap. Obama's ongoing (although publicly undeclared) war against coal, oil sands, oil shale kerogens, shale oil & gas, advanced nuclear power, arctic oil, offshore oil, etc. etc. amounts to a total policy of energy starvation -- relentlessly pursued by the EPA, NRC, Interior Department, and a score of other agencies and politically controlled bureaucratic entities.
Is this a good thing for China, or does it portend the approach of an economic collapse for the celestial kingdom?
Amid the ongoing bubble watch in China’s real-estate sector, new research Wednesday showed the mainland is home to more than half of the world’s skyscrapers currently under construction.
Barclays Capital said that China is now flashing some of the telltale signs of a bubble on its Skyscraper Index, which is designed to track the correlation between tall buildings and an impending financial crisis.
Slightly over half of the 124 skyscrapers due to be completed in the next six years are in China, according to Barclays, which cited its own in-house research and website Skyscrapernews.
The construction binge will increase the number of skyscrapers in Chinese cities by 87% the report said, noting that the average height of buildings under construction is also increasing.
Barclays analysts said the frenzied activity in these lesser-known cities amounted to “evidence of the expanding building bubble,” adding that its Skyscraper index has acted as barometer of widespread misallocation of capital that can see instances of excesses dating back to before the Great Depression. _Marketwatch
Barclay's suggests that an economic collapse could occur in China as early as 5 years from now, if the past performance of "the skyscraper index" is any guide.
Chinese government officials believe high-rises "show their progress in terms of urbanization and modernism," spur wider development by boosting investor confidence, and symbolize "a city's desire to become modern and international," says Chiow, a Chinese-American based in China for the past 15 years. _USAToday_via_ImpactLab
Lawrence showed that in almost all cases the initiation of construction of a new record-breaking skyscraper preceded major financial corrections and turmoil in economic institutions. Generally, the skyscraper project is announced and construction is begun during the late phase of the boom in the business cycle; when the economy is growing and unemployment is low. This is then followed by a sharp downturn in financial markets, economic recession or depression, and significant increases in unemployment. The skyscraper is then completed during the early phase of the economic correction, unless that correction was revealed early enough to delay or scrap plans for construction. For example, the Chrysler Building in New York was conceived and designed in 1928 and the groundbreaking ceremony was conducted on September 19, 1928. "Black Tuesday" occurred on October 29, 1929, marking the beginning of the Great Depression. Opening ceremonies for the Chrysler Building occurred on May 28, 1930, making it the tallest building in the world. _Mises
Table 1: World's Tallest Buildings
Completed
Building
Location
Height
Stories
Economic Crisis
1908
Singer
New York
612 ft.
48
Panic of 1907
1909
Metropolitan Life
New York
700 ft.
50
Panic of 1907
1912
Woolworth
New York
792 ft.
57
——
1929
40 Wall Street
New York
927 ft.
71
Great Depression
1930
Chrysler
New York
1,046 ft.
77
Great Depression
1931
Empire State
New York
1,250 ft.
102
Great Depression
1972/73
World Trade Center
New York
1,368 ft.
110
1970s stagflation
1974
Sears Tower
Chicago
1,450 ft.
110
1970s stagflation
1997
Petronas Tower
Kuala Lumpur
1,483 ft.
88
East Asian
2012
Shanghai
Shanghai
1,509 ft.
94
China?
If large buildings are constructed due to high utilisation and strong demand for space, they can be very profitable over their lifetimes. But if a skyscraper is constructed as a symbol or monument to the "greatness of a nation's political structure," the building may remain the empty prayer of a cargo cult.
China is building 44% of the 50 skyscrapers to be completed worldwide in the next six years, increasing the number of skyscrapers in Chinese cities by over 50%, says Andrew Lawrence, an Asian property analyst at investment bank Barclays Capital.
China is already host to six of the 15 tallest, completed buildings in the world, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
..."The appetite in China for high-rises, in the last five years and the next five, is bigger than ever before in the history of building," says Silas Chiow, China director for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the U.S. architectural firm, founded in Chicago, responsible for the Burj Khalifa.
The firm is currently engaged in 50 China projects, including the tallest buildings in eight separate cities.
Chinese government officials believe high-rises "show their progress in terms of urbanization and modernism," spur wider development by boosting investor confidence, and symbolize "a city's desire to become modern and international," says Chiow, a Chinese-American based in China for the past 15 years. _USAToday_via_ImpactLab
China is already full of "ghost cities," "ghost housing projects," "ghost office complexes," and "ghost shopping malls."
There is no denying the huge number of people living in China -- many of whom could use better and larger living and working space. But the economic structure of Communist Chinese society is rife with the mal-allocation of resources and enterprise. Corruption permeates the culture, driving much of the "road to nowhere" construction frenzy. Too much of the GDP-inflating construction is of a shoddy nature -- certain to collapse far sooner than projected lifetimes suggest.
Will the "Skyscraper Index" prove prophetic for Potemkin China of the cargo cult, or will the middle kingdom defy the curse of the world's tallest buildings?
More: And just in case you are still thinking that China may be ready to lead the world, perhaps you should think again:
We hear constantly how China's economy has "leapfrogged" other nations and now ranks third in the world — still behind the U.S. — with a total GDP of $3.3 trillion. The truth is more complex.
China has 1.3 billion people. So you're spreading that economy among one-sixth of the world's humanity. As the chart shows, China's economy on a per-person basis — the real measure of success — doesn't even come close to ours. The average American produces over $42,000 a year in goods and services; the average Chinese produces $2,800. That's an enormous gap in productivity.
Moreover, in its recent rankings of economic freedom, the Heritage Foundation put China 135th out of 179 countries. The U.S., even with all its current problems, ranks ninth. Who's the leader?
Citizens in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai live a privileged existence, well-documented by the Western media. Deep inside rural China, however, hundreds of millions live in near-absolute poverty. This isn't a country ready for global economic leadership.
China's economic success has been driven by mercantilist policy of beggaring its own people in the interest of building up massive trade surpluses. Its foreign currency holdings now total $2.9 trillion, and most of that is in U.S. Treasuries and other dollar-denominated assets. That's China's hole-card in talks with the U.S. _IBD
China's ongoing construction boom may be evidence of an economic bubble getting ready to burst. Or it may be possible that China is wealthy enough to be able to afford this massive misallocation of resources into an "infrastructure to nowhere," and not pay a significant price. Time will tell.
Cross-posted from an article originally written for Al Fin Potpourri
Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.
This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.
Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.
Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically. _WSJ
Science is under assault from within by climate grifters and from without by climate opportunists.
Dedicated climate blogger Tom Nelson is on the front lines of the fight to expose the climate grifters, and to attempt to rescue science from the new dark ages of politically enforced neo-Lysenkoism being forced upon it by special interest groups which have a great deal of money and power on the line.
"One of the darkest periods in the history of science":
Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long.
But as wisely noted by both P. T. Barnum and Abraham Lincoln,
You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.
As an increasing number of highly qualified scientists slowly began to realize that the “climate science” community was a facade—and that their vitriolic rebuffs of sensible arguments of mathematics, statistics, and indeed scientific common sense were not the product of scientific rigor at all, but merely self-protection at any cost—the veil began to drop on what has already become clear as the greatest scientific fraud in this history of mankind.
This is one of the darkest periods in the history of science. Those who love science, and all it stands for, will be pained by what they read below. However, the crisis is here, and cannot be avoided. _Assassination Science
The whole episode would be laughable if not for the devastation that it is dealing to the funding and administration of science and science journalism, and to the economic sectors that intersect with the carbon hysteria orthodoxy -- such as energy. The threat of a massive multi $trillion redistribution of funds from Europe, North America, and other advanced regions to the kleptocracies of the third world -- via the corrupt United Nations infrastructure -- is no laughing matter, either.
The Rocket Men of Private Space: The Future, Finally?
Rocket Men and Futurists
Ever since Albert Gore Jr. took control of NASA funding in the 1990s, the US space agency has been on the decline, in terms of human exploration of space. Mr. Gore helped shift the emphasis of NASA funding over to climate research, and paybacks to powerful campaign backers -- shunting funds away from the type of programs that space enthusiasts wanted to see.
With the coming of President Obama, NASA is really and truly passing the baton of manned space travel and exploration to private entities -- and none too soon! Below are excerpts from a Reason Magazine article profiling the "Rocket Men," the men who are opening the new frontier of private space:
The Daredevil: Elon Musk
Musk, a Stanford grad school dropout who was born in South Africa, made his fortune—estimated at $670 million—as one of the founders of the online payment site PayPal. Then he founded Tesla Motors, where he led development of an all-electric sports car.
After the space shuttles were retired, NASA was forced to start paying Russians to ferry Americans and their gear back and forth to the International Space Station, at about $63 million per seat. Musk says SpaceX can do it for one-third the price. The added risk of throwing humans—or as Musk refers to them, “biological cargo”—doesn’t seem to worry him.
The Mogul: Richard Branson
Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson isn’t a rocket scientist, but he knows a good publicity stunt when he sees it. The Ansari X Prize, which offered $10 million in private money for the first nongovernmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft twice in a two-week period, brought a burst of public attention to the commercial space race in 2004. Branson quickly snapped up the rights to the winning vehicle, SpaceShipOne, and the team that went with it, including famous aviation whiz Burt Rutan.
Since then Virgin has been working on SpaceShipTwo, which would carry two pilots and six passengers a few miles above the Karman line (the generally accepted threshold 62 miles up that separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space) to check out the view and enjoy a brief period of weightlessness. Charging $200,000 per person (with a $20,000 deposit, please) Virgin Galactic already has 450 people signed up to fly as soon as the technology is ready and the regulatory hurdles have been cleared....
In August, NASA announced that it would be purchasing a full suborbital flight from Virgin, with an option for two more, to carry research payloads as part of the Flight Opportunities Program, a government initiative designed to “foster the development of the commercial reusable suborbital transportation industry.” The price for those three flights is a bargain at $4.5 million, about 1 percent of the cost of a single (orbital, to be fair) shuttle mission. Virgin was just one of seven companies to cut similar deals with NASA, but as is his wont, Branson grabbed the headlines.
The Dark Horse: Jeff Greason
“The technology that we’re missing is capitalism,”... at an April TEDx conference in San Jose. “The same thing that makes things work in every other arena of modern life.”
...Insiders see XCOR as an underrated rival to flashy players like Branson and Musk. XCOR has taken a gradualist approach, flying a succession of small but ever-larger rockets, including the aptly named EZ-Rocket. The current Lynx model is a two-seater that allows horizontal takeoff and landing but only goes up 38 miles, leaving the goal of outer space for the next generation rocket. But that distinction may not matter if Greason becomes the first entrepreneur to fly a paying customer on a rocket he built himself. At $95,000 for the Lynx’s single passenger seat, this small company is also offering the cheapest ticket on the market.
The Prize Giver: Peter Diamandis
Peter Diamandis is the chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, the nonprofit organization that dreamed up the Ansari X Prize—$10 million for a reusable suborbital launch vehicle—and is now offering prizes for everything from better oil spill management technology to rapid sequencing of human genomes. Richard Branson snagged the first winner, SpaceShipOne, to form the basis of Virgin Galactic’s program. But just as important, from Diamandis’ perspective, were the 25 losers. Collectively, the teams spent more than $100 million in pursuit of the prize. And that was precisely the idea.
The Hotelier: Robert Bigelow
Robert Bigelow knows hotels. He owns the Budget Suites of America extended-stay hotel chain here on Earth. But after a long rocket ride, when you need a place to crash—just figuratively, of course—Bigelow is your man. His Las Vegas company, Bigelow Aerospace, has launched two experimental orbiting modules, Genesis I and Genesis II, into space since its founding in 1996. Bigelow already has spent well over $200 million of his own money and says he’s ready to drop another $300 million on his quest to be the final frontier’s first hotelier and commercial real estate baron....
Bigelow isn’t just another space entrepreneur, he is also a client. Cheap, safe rockets are a crucial part of any plan to build while aloft. It’s big and empty up there, for the most part, so materials have to come from Earth. Bigelow sent up his test modules on Russian Dnepr rockets but has made no secret of his desire to use rockets from an American company for crew and cargo as soon as they become available.
The Rocketeer: John Carmack
The mascot of John D. Carmack’s rocket company is a cartoon armadillo wearing goggles and a scarf. It’s an oddly warm and fuzzy choice for such a nerdy founder. Armadillo Aerospace is the part-time venture of the lead programmer of Doom, Quake, and other 3D graphics-intensive video game megahits.
It’s also the leanest of the companies described here. Before he started Armadillo Aerospace, Carmack had very little experience in building spaceships, but his company went on to scoop up a couple of prizes that NASA was offering for building lunar landers while simultaneously working on suborbital (and eventually orbital) rockets. Armadillo’s strategy is physically different from those of most of its competitors, featuring a rapidly evolving form that adhered to Carmack’s credo to try out lots of options and abandon failures quickly—pretty much the opposite of NASA’s modus operandi. _Read the full article at Reason Rocket Men
There are a lot of valuable resources and real estate outside the Earth's atmosphere. The first human $trillionaire is fairly likely to earn his first $trillion via off-planet enterprises. Perhaps that is what attracts so many billionaires to space ventures.
Whatever US President Obama's reasons for opening part of the NASA budget to private space companies, the move is likely to spur a great deal of momentum toward a more economical and sustainable approach to space launch, space travel, space exploration and exploitation, and eventually space colonies. If only he would begin to shunt all of the NASA climate hysteria research funds to more productive private sector use!
Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas.
Algae
....Algae are at the bottom of the food chain but they are already eaten widely in Japan and China in the form of seaweeds, and are used as fertilisers, soil conditioners and animal feed. "They range from giant seaweeds and kelps to microscopic slimes, they are capable of fixing CO2 in the atmosphere and providing fats, oils and sugars. They are eaten by everything from the tiniest shrimp to the great blue whales. They are the base of all life and must be the future," says Edwards.
Artificial meat
It looks like meat, feels like meat and it is meat, although it's never been near a living, breathing animal. Instead, artificial or "cultured" meat is grown from stem cells in giant vats.
...Much of the research into artificial meat is being done in Europe with scientists in Holland and Britain developing edible tissue grown from stem cells in laboratories. But while the first artificial hamburger could be developed next year, it might taste of nothing at all...studies show that artificial meat wins hands down in the environmental stakes, using far less water, energy and land.
New crops
Few people have heard of Zhikang Li, but history may judge the Chinese plant breeder to be one of the most important people of the century. Last year, after 12 years' work with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, he and his team developed "green super rice", a series of rice varieties which produce more grain but which have proved more resistant to droughts, floods, salty water, insects and disease.
...Green super rice, which could increase yields in Asia enough to feed an extra 100 million people, will be rolled out in the coming years....Last year more than 350m acres – about 10% of global cultivated area, or the same area as Germany, France and the UK together – were planted with GM crops, but this mainly covered only three big foods – maize, oilseed rape and soya – most of which went to animal feed.
Desert greening
Much of the world is arid, with its only nearby water being the sea. So could a technology be found to green coastal deserts in places such as Chile, California, Peru and the Middle East using salt water?
Charlie Paton, a British inventor, has a vision of vast "seawater greenhouses" to grow food and generate power. The idea is simple: in the natural water cycle, seawater is heated by the sun, evaporates, cools to form clouds, and returns to earth as refreshing rain. It is more or less the same in Paton's structures. Here, hot desert air going into a greenhouse is first cooled and then humidified by seawater. This humid air nourishes crops growing inside and then passes through an evaporator. When it meets a series of tubes containing cool seawater, fresh water condenses and is then collected. And because the greenhouses produce more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants, some of it can be released into the local environment to grow other plants. [also see Sahara Forest]
Insects
Locusts, grasshoppers, spiders, wasps, worms, ants and beetles are not on most European or US menus but at least 1,400 species are eaten across Africa, Latin America and Asia. Now, with rising food prices and worldwide land shortages, it could be just a matter of time before insect farms set up in Britain.
Not only are many bugs rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol and high in calcium and iron, but insect farms need little space. Environmentally, they beat conventional farms, too. The creatures are far better at converting plant biomass into edible meat than even our fastest growing livestock, they emit fewer greenhouse gases and they can thrive on paper, algae and the industrial wastes that would normally be thrown away._Guardian
It is also worth revisiting the topic of "Aeroponics," a form of agriculture that requires no soil at all, can be built up in 3 dimensions, and is very thrifty with water. Aeroponics could be used on seasteads -- using "seawater greenhouse" techniques, on space stations and lunar outposts using recycled water, in polar colonies on Antarctica -- even on submarines or undersea habitats.
Sebastian Thrun, a [tenured] research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he has departed the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. _Chronicle Higher Ed
Thrun will continue to work at Google while starting up the online learning website, Udacity, with fellow computer scientist David Evans.
One of Udacity’s first offerings will be a seven-week course called “Building a Search Engine.” It will be taught by David Evans, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and a Udacity partner. Mr. Thrun said it is designed to teach students with no prior programming experience how to build a search engine like Google. He hopes 500,000 students will enroll. _Chronical Higher Ed
Free world-class online education sounds like a great idea, until you get around to asking, "Who will pay for it?"
Udacity looks great, and I can’t wait for it to be a revolutionary success, educating and empowering students around the world, especially in places like Africa and India, and, in those places, especially women.
...Stanford was willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building a new physical campus in New York City — but it isn’t willing, it seems, to help Thrun build a free virtual campus which could reach the whole world. That’s a dereliction of its educational duty. But where Stanford has failed, surely some other elite university will step in. Thrun is taking a bold step here. Let’s hope he soon gets the support, if not of Stanford, then of some other college. Like Harvard, or Yale, or Oxford, or Cambridge. They’re exclusive places now. But they don’t have to be, in the future. _Reuters
It may be asking too much to demand that Harvard, Yale, or Oxford contribute to the seeds of their own demise. But somewhere out there, someone must be interested in fanning the flames of the education revolution. I suppose that Google may kick in a few pennies, and perhaps the Bill and Mel Gates Foundation will toss in a dime or two. But they are already helping to support Khan Academy, as well as all of their other projects.
What would be great is if some of the oil sheikhs of the Persian Gulf were to stop funding the terrorist madrasas, and start funding some positive revolutions, meant to lay the groundwork for a peaceful and productive future.
IQ Matters: Understanding Your World So As to Predict the Future
Decades of genetics research have shown...that people are born with different hereditary potentials for intelligence and that these genetic endowments are responsible for much of the variation in mental ability among individuals. Last spring an international team of scientists headed by Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry in London announced the discovery of the first gene linked to intelligence. Of course, genes have their effects only in interaction with environments, partly by enhancing an individual's exposure or sensitivity to formative experiences. Differences in general intelligence, whether measured as IQ or, more accurately, as g are both genetic and environmental in origin--just as are all other psychological traits and attitudes studied so far, including personality, vocational interests and societal attitudes. This is old news among the experts. The experts have, however, been startled by more recent discoveries.
One is that the heritability of IQ rises with age--that is to say, the extent to which genetics accounts for differences in IQ among individuals increases as people get older. Studies comparing identical and fraternal twins, published in the past decade by a group led by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., of the University of Minnesota and other scholars, show that about 40 percent of IQ differences among preschoolers stems from genetic differences but that heritability rises to 60 percent by adolescence and to 80 percent by late adulthood. With age, differences among individuals in their developed intelligence come to mirror more closely their genetic differences. It appears that the effects of environment on intelligence fade rather than grow with time. In hindsight, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. Young children have the circumstances of their lives imposed on them by parents, schools and other agents of society, but as people get older they become more independent and tend to seek out the life niches that are most congenial to their genetic proclivities.
A second big surprise for intelligence experts was the discovery that environments shared by siblings have little to do with IQ. Many people still mistakenly believe that social, psychological and economic differences among families create lasting and marked differences in IQ. Behavioral geneticists refer to such environmental effects as "shared" because they are common to siblings who grow up together. Research has shown that although shared environments do have a modest influence on IQ in childhood, their effects dissipate by adolescence. The IQs of adopted children, for example, lose all resemblance to those of their adoptive family members and become more like the IQs of the biological parents they have never known. Such findings suggest that siblings either do not share influential aspects of the rearing environment or do not experience them in the same way. Much behavioral genetics research currently focuses on the still mysterious processes by which environments make members of a household less alike. _Linda Gottfredson
The general finding after over 100 years of studying intelligence and genetics, is that IQ is heritable over the lifetime to between 50% and 80%. Heritability of IQ tends to be lower in low socioeconomic groups and in very young children. As a person ages, the genes tend to influence intelligence more.
This graphic displays a simplified bell curve distribution overlap for 4 generalised human population groupings.
This graphic provides a general idea as to realistic occupational expectations for individuals whose valid IQ scores fall within a particular range of values.
This simplified time projection from the Fourmilab website: Global IQ 1950-2050, looks at the change in average "global IQ" over time, due to differential birthrates among distinct breeding groups, possessing different IQ.
Total fertility rates by country (via the EvoandProud anthropology site). By comparing the TFRs and national IQs, one can estimate the general trend for global IQ, as a falsifiable hypothesis.
What about the "Flynn Effect?" Unfortunately, the multiple and poorly defined underlying mechanisms behind the "Flynn Effect" are not strong enough to overcome the compounding magic of differential birthrates combined with heritability of IQ.
This graphic allows you to visually compare homicide rates with both total fertility rates and national IQ. Keeping in mind the heritability of IQ, this triple juxtaposition allows for some simple falsifiable predictions as to the future of both particular nations, and of the nations which are emigration targets for the excess from low IQ, high crime, high fertility populations.
