Comes the Cold, and Let Slip the Dogs of War!

When earth's climate was even warmer than today's--during the medieval warm period--humans grew plentiful crops in areas considered marginal today. If we are lucky enough to continue the current warm period, we can expect a similar cornucopia from the world's breadbaskets.

But if the weather should turn cold, beware! Drought, pestilence, and widespread warfare await the cold.

warfare frequency in eastern China, and the southern part in particular, significantly correlated with temperature oscillations. In fact, almost all peaks of warfare and dynastic changes coincided with cold phases. Zhang speculates that in times of such ecological stress, warfare could be the ultimate means of redistributing resources.

Zhang concludes that; "it was the oscillations of agricultural production brought by long-term climate change that drove China's historical war-peace cycles." Looking to the future, Zhang and colleagues suggest that shortages of essential resources, such as fresh water, agricultural land, energy sources and minerals may trigger more armed conflicts among human societies.

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So if war is often driven by the threat of loss of food resources, it is logical to expect more wars of this type to occur during cycles of cold weather--when the growing season becomes perilously short, and surplus populations are expected to starve.

Those are the cold hard facts of life that capitalism, medical science, and large scale farming, refrigeration, and transportation have hidden from our pampered selves.

We live in a complex house of cards civilisation. If we lose transportation or electric power for refrigeration, we will lose a lot of food--and people. If our economic system breaks down, the basis for long distance trading and markets will disappear, and a lot of people will die.

Think of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, except on a worldwide scale. There will be no cavalry riding to the rescue. It will be cold, hungry, and violent. That is the natural variation of climate, which humans will never learn to deal with as long as they are chasing phantasms of imagination such as CAGW.

It will not require a nuclear winter--although nuclear war is far more likely should the nuclear powers suffer a loss of productive cropland in a cooling climate. These are the things we should be thinking about and working to prevent, or at least mitigate. The things that kill, such as cold.

Space Mining and Carnival #11

Space Carnival #11 is up at Space for Commerce blog.

It is another fine collection of space postings, but my favourite is this posting on asteroid mining from the fine space blog, Colony Worlds.

With most of these invaluable asteroids tens of millions of miles away from the nearest colony world, asteroid miners will find themselves heavily dependent upon supplies for food and water. Their isolation will also make them prime candidates for space pirates, not to mention feuding powers from Earth, Mars and the Jovian systems.

Unless these outposts are protected by a space fleet, they may soon find their boring schedule filled with being invaded by unwelcome guests.

Another danger of asteroid miners will be radiation. Since most (if not all) asteroids lack a magnetic field, asteroid outposts will be at the mercy of the Sun's wrath, not to mention cosmic rays from abroad. Although outposts will probably have magnetic shields surrounding their bases, this does not guarantee that the rocks that they mine upon are free from being radioactive.

....asteroid miners also face the dangers of micrometeorites piercing holes through their suits and stations, or (even worse) encountering a meteor shower from an incoming comet.

Future outposts will probably have to rely upon the eyes (and scientific "ears") of astronomers to warn them of the dangers of nearby comets, although they may have to "take a gamble" when dealing with incoming space pebbles as armor may prove useless against these solar bullets.

But despite the fact that these dangers surround future asteroid miners, there presence in our star system will be desperately needed. Asteroids have the potential of supplying invaluable resources, and the purity of metals could be worth up to $500,000 a ton.

In fact, it is possible for an asteroid mining venture to net US $21 trillion or more from a single asteroid. The terrestrial value of mineral resources contained in the asteroids is incalculable. Compared to the payback, the expense of mounting a commercial venture fades to insignificance--after the payback, that is.

When will we see asteroid mining start? Well, it will only become viable once the human-presence commercial in-orbit economy takes off. Only then will there be a market. And that can only happen after NASA ceases acting as a near-monopolist launch provider and thwarter of competition, and reverts to being a customer instead.

A developing in-space economy will build the technical capability to access NEAs, almost automatically. And regardless of the legal arguments about mineral claims in outer space, once the first resource recovery mission is successful, what's the bets on a surge in interest similar to the dotcom-boom and biotech-boom?

The first successful venturers will develop immense proprietary knowledge, and make a mint. And some as-yet unidentified (but almost certainly already discovered) NEAs will be the company-making mines of the 21st century.

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In fact, most of the expensive ventures that Luddites are always whining about--orbiting solar platforms, moon bases, Mars missions, space stations, etc., become instantly affordable with "pocket change" once asteroids start sending their wealth earthward.

People such as Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other high rolling tycoons may have just caught a whiff of the possibilities.

Most politicians are relatively clueless, however--which may be a good thing. While the nations of Earth might warrant a healthy tax chunk of some of the profits from space mining and enterprise, there is not a nation on Earth that should control all of space and all space assets.

So far, the only Earth nation that has demonstrated space weapons intent and capability is China--with its irresponsible kinetic kill of one of its obsolete satellites having created dangerous space debris in orbit. The US has many projects and plans for using space as part of coordinated defense. Military spy satellites themselves are vital to US defense plans. Russia, like China, would like to control space, and no doubt would, if it could.

The next few decades will be critical, in determining whether the future of space will be free to enterprising individuals and groups, or closed by nation-states with the military clout to lock everyone else on Earth.

Advance Look at Top Secret iPod Killer

Here, at last, is the technology destined to make iPods obsolete. Built into the case of a watch, it could not be more convenient. The advanced waveguide sound system eliminates the need for unsightly ear buds! All in all, a victory for advanced audio design.

Academic Lobotomy: The Public Slowly Becomes Aware

Freedom of speech has grown rare on university campuses, over the past two or three decades. Until recently, however, the general public seemed unaware of the academic crusade against intellectual freedom. The secret scandal of widespread academic lobotomy may finally be leaking to the public at large.

a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Nearly six in 10 - 58% - said they see it as a serious problem, with 39% saying it was a "very serious" problem.

....Men were much more likely than women to see the bias of professors as a problem - 64% of men agreed, while 53% of women said the same.

Whites were twice as likely to call it a "serious problem" as African Americans, the survey showed.

The survey also showed that an overwhelming majority also believe that job security for college professors leaves them less motivated to do a good job than those professors who do not enjoy a tenured status - 65% said they believe non-tenured professors are more motivated to do a good job in the classroom.

Asked whether they think the quality of a college education today is better or worse than it was 25 years ago, 46% said they think it is worse, while 29% said it is better. Another 16% said the quality now is about the same as it was a generation ago.

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When you combine psychological neoteny, academic lobotomy, and runaway narcissism, today's university student has hardly a chance to learn to think for him/herself, and mature into an independent person of solid judgment. It is a shame to lose an entire generation. But if members of the public--including parents and financial supporters of academia--can wise up at last, intellectual freedom may be allowed back on campus.

Climate Quest: The Mysterious Missing Carbon Sink--A Multi-Billion Dollar Quest for a Phantom Grail of IPCC Climate "Science"

First of all, how long does CO2 stay in the atmosphere?

Until recently, the world of science was near-unanimous that CO2 couldn't stay in the atmosphere for more than about five to 10 years because of the oceans' near-limitless ability to absorb CO2.

"This time period has been established by measurements based on natural carbon-14 and also from readings of carbon-14 from nuclear weapons testing, it has been established by radon-222 measurements, it has been established by measurements of the solubility of atmospheric gases in the oceans, it has been established by comparing the isotope mass balance, it has been established through other mechanisms, too, and over many decades, and by many scientists in many disciplines," says Prof. Segalstad, whose work has often relied upon such measurements.

Why is it important to IPCC modelers to have CO2 stay in the atmosphere longer?

Climate change scientists began creating carbon cycle models to explain what they thought must be an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These computer models calculated a long life for carbon dioxide.

Amazingly, the hypothetical results from climate models have trumped the real world measurements of carbon dioxide's longevity in the atmosphere. Those who claim that CO2 lasts decades or centuries have no such measurements or other physical evidence to support their claims.

Neither can they demonstrate that the various forms of measurement are erroneous.

"They don't even try," says Prof. Segalstad. "They simply dismiss evidence that is, for all intents and purposes, irrefutable. Instead, they substitute their faith, constructing a kind of science fiction or fantasy world in the process."

Very Curious. What happens if the IPPC modelers' blind faith is misplaced?

In the real world, as measurable by science, CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean reach a stable balance when the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. "The IPCC postulates an atmospheric doubling of CO2, meaning that the oceans would need to receive 50 times more CO2 to obtain chemical equilibrium," explains Prof. Segalstad. "This total of 51 times the present amount of carbon in atmospheric CO2 exceeds the known reserves of fossil carbon-- it represents more carbon than exists in all the coal, gas, and oil that we can exploit anywhere in the world."

But that would defy logic, would it not?

Also in the real world, Prof. Segalstad's isotope mass balance calculations -- a standard technique in science -- show that if CO2 in the atmosphere had a lifetime of 50 to 200 years, as claimed by IPCC scientists, the atmosphere would necessarily have half of its current CO2 mass. Because this is a nonsensical outcome, the IPCC model postulates that half of the CO2 must be hiding somewhere, in "a missing sink." Many studies have sought this missing sink -- a Holy Grail of climate science research-- without success.

"It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere," Prof. Segalstad concludes.

"It is all a fiction."

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If it is all a fiction, it is a very high-priced fiction--taking in many billions of dollars a year in its support and propagation.

Or is it possible that a mysterious missing carbon sink is out there, just waiting for the right model, the right number of billions of dollars, the right political has-been crusader to find and display in triumph? Stay tuned.

Hat tip Green Watch.

One Pill to Stop Smoking AND Drinking? How'd They Do That?

Smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol go together like sweating and mowing the lawn. So is it really so surprising that a pill that is approved in the US for smoking cessation, may also work as an aid for alcoholics to stop drinking?

The drug, called varenicline, already is sold to help smokers kick the habit. New but preliminary research suggests it could gain a second use in helping heavy drinkers quit, too.

Much further down the line, the tablets might be considered as a treatment for addictions to everything from gambling to painkillers, researchers said.

....Pfizer Inc. developed the drug specifically as a stop-smoking aid and has sold it in the United States since August under the brand name Chantix. Varenicline works by latching onto the same receptors in the brain that nicotine binds to when inhaled in cigarette smoke, an action that leads to the release of dopamine in the brain's pleasure centers. Taking the drug blocks any inhaled nicotine from reinforcing that effect.

A study published Monday suggests not just nicotine but alcohol also acts on the same locations in the brain. That means a drug like varenicline, which makes smoking less rewarding, could do the same for drinking. Preliminary work, done in rats, suggests that is the case.

"The biggest thrill is that this drug, which has already proved safe for people trying to stop smoking, is now a potential drug to fight alcohol dependence," said Selena Bartlett, a University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist who led the study. Details appear this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pfizer provided the drug for the study, but was not otherwise involved in the research.

....Several experts not involved in the study cautioned that there is no such thing as a magic cure-all for addiction and that varenicline and similar drugs may find more immediate use in treating diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

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This is rather fascinating, when you think about it. Of course we all know there is no cure-all for addiction. Otherwise, the inventor of such a cure-all would now be the world's richest person, and we would all have read about it.

Nevertheless, there are few drugs on the market that affect the brain's nicotinic receptor system directly--other than nicotine itself--and this drug is interesting if for no other reason than that. This drug may actually prove to be more effective for treating Alzheimer's Disease than for treating alcoholism--time will tell.

The exact mechanisms of the reward systems in the brain, and how nicotinic receptors are involved, is still being worked out. But the brain's reward system is very central to human motivations and behaviours. This drug and analogs of this drug should prove very useful in ongoing research to tease out the intricacies of these systems.

Hobie Makes a Kayak Trimaran With Pedal Propulsion

This nifty one-person sail kayak has trimaran stability and pedal/flipper drive. The outriggers are retractable and the sail is fully reefing.

The Hobie Mirage Adventure Island is a 16-foot, single-person “Sail/yak” that combines the Hobie MirageDrive pedal-propulsion system with a 5.38 square meter sail and two amas (outriggers) that provide stability on the water and fold back into the hull for docking and beaching.

The newest edition to the Hobie line-up has a mast height of 15’2” (4.62m), weighs 115lbs (52.16kg) when fully rigged and can carry 350lbs (159kg). With the amas extended the craft is 112” (2.84m) wide, reducing to 42” when folded.

....The Hobie MirageDrive system employed in the company’s range of kayaks is a pedal/flipper mechanism that swings laterally underneath the hull like a penguin's fins to produce forward drive. Steering is via a hand-controlled rudder that can be retracted to the horizontal when not in use.

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Check out this video from Hobie that demonstrates the sail-yak in action!

I'm looking forward to getting one of these fun toys in the surf and seeing how she handles.

After Synthetic Biology: Comes the Plague?

Synthetic biologists such as Craig Venter, are optimistic about their future. They believe that once they have mastered the art of forcing nature to do their will, the good life will follow--for everyone.

Synthetic biologists, as they survey all the new genes and control elements whose DNA sequences are now accumulating in data bases, seem to feel extraordinary power is almost within their grasp.

“Biology will never be the same,” Thomas F. Knight of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory wrote recently in describing the new engineering discipline he sees as emerging from it.

....“Grow a house” is on the to-do list of the M.I.T. Synthetic Biology Working Group, presumably meaning that an acorn might be reprogrammed to generate walls, oak floors and a roof instead of the usual trunk and branches. “Take over Mars. And then Venus. And then Earth” —the last items on this modest agenda.

Most people in synthetic biology are engineers who have invaded genetics. They have brought with them a vocabulary derived from circuit design and software development that they seek to impose on the softer substance of biology. They talk of modules — meaning networks of genes assembled to perform some standard function — and of “booting up” a cell with new DNA-based instructions, much the way someone gets a computer going.

The first practical applications of synthetic biology may not be so far off. “The real killer app for this field has become bioenergy,” Dr. Collins says. Under the stimulus of high gas prices, synthetic biologists are re-engineering microbes to generate the components of natural gas and petroleum. Whether this can be done economically remains to be seen. But one company, LS9 of San Carlos, Calif., says it is close to that goal. Its re-engineered microbe “produces hydrocarbons that look, smell and function” very similarly to those in petroleum, said Stephen del Cardayre, the company’s vice president for research.

Synthetic biologists are well aware that, like any new technology, theirs can be used for good or ill, and they have encouraged open discussion of possible risks at their annual meetings.

One possible danger is bioterrorism.

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Bioterrorism. For western scientists looking for all the good things in life for themselves and others, bioterrorism is not first on their minds. Yet for hundreds of millions of religious fanatics and apocalyptics, the possibility of ending man's reign on earth offered by a perverted synthetic biology must be too strong to resist.

Most of us simply do not want to think about it. Why not simply dwell on all the good things biotech, nanotech, advanced computing, robotics, and molecular fabs will bring to our living rooms and workshops? Why think about a potential hell when we could be thinking about a potential utopia?

Because we like to think about the apocalypse. There is no apocalypse like a "plague apocalypse." Remember 12 Monkeys, or 28 Days Later? How about the classics Earth Abides, No Blade of Grass, or Andromeda Strain?

In a plague apocalypse, the victims can die as long and as painfully as the author desires. Victims can even pass into a zombie state to prey on survivors and the uninfected. Or instead of humans dying from plague, they can die from starvation when diseases attack food crops--destroying the entire food chain from the bottom up.

The White Plague is a revenge tale, about a scientist who loses his wife to terror and embarks on a far more lethal campaign of terror himself. Why not? Scientists are as human as anyone else. Anyone who has not witnessed the passion of a scientist probably just doesn't know any scientists very well.

The point is, synthetic biology makes synthetic plagues--aimed at people or plants--possible. And given the rampant religious apocalyptic fanaticism that possesses the young burgeoning populations of certain countries, it is likely that many of these fanatics will take up biological science as a profession. In other words, it will happen if we let it.

What will our world be like if we get sloppy, and allow the secrets of synthetic plague to slip into the hands of fanatic apocalyptics? To visualize that, you must use your imagination. Reading some of these books might help. Or you may want to read some of these. After all, apocalypses share many consequences among them.

Facing these possibilities is what organisations such as the Lifeboat Foundation and the Society for Creative Apocalyptology are all about.

It is not inconceivable that the future will belong to the city-state, rather than to the nation-state. A city-state can trade with other city-states and with the surrounding countryside, but is more defensible than the nation-state--having shorter borders.

The US-Mexican border will not keep out a deadly plague. Neither will the long border of the Mediterranean Sea between much of the third world and Europe. Chinese military officials have threatened to devastate the US west coast with nuclear weapons, but why bother when a simple microbe will do even more damage?

Round the world cruises and air travel are custom made for spreading deadly plagues. It is quite possible that we will look back on these days as a time of extraordinary freedom to travel and experience the world. In the future, many unknown perils wait.

This is not a time for academic lobotomies or psychological neotenates. It is a time for teaching children basic skills of living and survival, as a matter of course. Think of life in an orbiting colony or on a moonbase. Think of how children would have to be raised in order to deal with the deadly hazards existing right outside the door.

Then start thinking realistically about what life on Earth could easily be like in a decade or two. And stop wasting generations of human life by dooming them to incompetent neoteny and frivolous helplessness.

Robert A Heinlein Birth Centennial--A Bold Author in a Timid World

Robert A Heinlein was a prolific author who left a legacy in writing and endowment. For many readers here, Heinlein was too far before their time (born 7 July 1907, died 1988) to have been exposed to very much of what he wrote. For you, there is the book navigator pulldown menu, for brief synopses of most of his novels.

I had the privilege of hearing Heinlein speak shortly before he died. Although he had undergone surgery for occluded carotid arteries, and was nearly 80 years old, his mind was crystal clear and his voice was strong. It was fitting that Heinlein's mind was sharp at the end of his life, after a brief interlude of carotid vascular insufficiency. He was able to make the farewell tour and appreciate how much he was admired, respected, and loved.

Heinlein was one of the first authors I read, when I started reading science fiction. Along with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Poul Anderson, Heinlein introduced me to the far imaginings and possibilities of speculative fiction--fictional worlds with no boundaries but science.

Heinlein was not afraid to face his critics, who were typically people who did not want to learn from another person's experience. When Heinlein stood before a large crowd during the Vietnam War era and declared "there will always be war," he was soundly booed, and branded a fascist by psychologically neotenous mind-children yet to experience real life. Naturally, Heinlein was able to take their measure and place their criticism where it belonged.

Heinlein was controversial and bold. He spoke his mind and stayed around to confront anyone who wanted to debate ideas reasonably, based upon logic, science and history. Most of his critics were not up to the task, but rather sniped at him from a safe distance. Unfortunately, it was these cowardly critics and their like who took over most of the universities and still control them today--still smothering campus atmosphere with lockstep PC oppressiveness.

My favourite RAH novels include Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Tunnel In the Sky.

[Tunnel In the Sky] is the story of a High School graduating class's final examination. Course 410 is an elective senior seminar called Advanced Survival, and the students must successfully complete (i.e., survive) the final field exam to pass. Rod Walker and his classmates receive 24 hours notice to prepare themselves before being blindly transported to an unspecified planet, with unspecified climate and terrain -- and unknown hazards. At moments reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, this is a must read, really!

Tunnel In the Sky is similar to Alexei Panshin's "Rite of Passage." It is true that the "rite of passage" theme is used in science fiction frequently, which is one reason that I favour using science fiction as reading material for young teens--the scientific constraints of good science fiction teach logical thinking, and the frequent use of teenaged characters placed in trying circumstances allows SF to entertain teens as it educates.

Citizen of the Galaxy is another good example of Heinlein's use of the "rite of passage."

Citizen is an impassioned plea for life-long education. In many of Heinlein's books, a principal character is portrayed over time, beginning in relative ignorance, learning from experience, receiving the benefits of tutelage from an authoritative source, and then using those teachings to resolve subsequent problems. A formula, but one that works very well, repeatedly, in the hands of this master story teller.

Citizen portrays this young man's education in four stages: a disenfranchised child tutored by a man of wisdom, an adolescent in an artificial space-faring culture that may prefigure tomorrow, a young recruit in the Guard, and an unwilling adult but youthful player in economic, social, political, and legal machinations that clearly satirize 20th Century America's corporate civilization.

Heinlein's life is the antithesis of psychological neoteny. He took responsibility for himself and his ideas, and proceeded to find his forte` and pursue it without apology. He left his critics in the dust, forgotten. One of the lessons of his life is that anyone who chooses can do the same.

Employment Outlook Good for US Graduates

For recent university graduates in the US, employment prospects could not look much better.

"If you want a job and you're a college grad, you can get one," is the smart—only somewhat overstated—observation that Roy Krause, head of staffing company Spherion, just imparted to me over the phone. Indeed, college grads had just a 2 percent unemployment rate in June, according to new Labor Department data, vs. 3.5 percent for those with "some college," 4.1 percent for high school grads, and 6.7 percent for those who did not finish high school.

More good news came from the June income numbers: Real wages for workers—not managers—increased by 3.9 percent, year over year. Deflate by the core May inflation rate of 2.3 percent—the latest numbers available—and you get real wage growth of 1.6 percent. Not too shabby. Right now, Wall Street recession expectations are pretty low. "The threat of recession has abated, as job and income gains provide the wherewithal to support consumer spending," is the analysis of former Federal Reserve governor Lyle Gramley. In fact, the Big Money Crowd is more worried about China than U.S. housing as a source of future trouble.

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In reality, it is very possible for high school dropouts in the US to become millionaires within 20 years, if they use discipline and good sense. Of course, those are not attributes generally applied to high school dropouts. The sad truth is, however, that a high school dropout or graduate could easily achieve a higher paying job than many college/university graduates by learning a useful trade and traveling to where the high paying jobs are. In other words, in the US economy, being useful can easily be more important than having a lot of letters behind your name.

In fact, in a general atmosphere of academic lobotomy and psychological neoteny, the sooner a strong-minded and ambitious person strikes out on his/her own, the better. Parents should consider what they would want their children to know, should they step out into the real world at the age of 18 or 20, and begin teaching them when they are young.

Rethinking Climate Forecasts: IPCC Climate Models Take Hit in Credibility

Here is a fascinating Wharton Business School audit of the reliability of climate forecasting by GCM models. The image of climate modelers becomes more tarnished, the closer one looks at their methods, apparently.

In apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides “projections” and not “forecasts, the word “forecast” and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and “predict” and its derivatives occur 90 times in the body of Chapter 8. Recall also that most of our respondents (29 of whom were IPCC authors or reviewers) nominated the IPCC report as the most credible source of forecasts (not projections) of global average temperature.

....Global climate is complex. Scientific evidence on many key relationships is weak or absent; e.g., does increased CO2 in the atmosphere cause high temperatures or do high temperatures increase CO2 (e.g. Jaworowski 2007)? Measurements of key variables such as local temperatures and a representative global temperature are contentious in the case of modern measurements, because of possible artifacts such as the urban heat island effect, and often speculative in the case of ancient ones, such as those climate proxies derived from tree ring and ice-core data (Carter 2007). Finally, it is difficult to forecast the causal variables.
The already high level of uncertainty rises rapidly as the forecast horizon increases.

While the authors of Chapter 8 claim that the forecasts of global mean temperature are well-founded, their language is imprecise and relies heavily on such words as “generally,” “reasonable well,” “widely,” and “relatively” [to what?]. The report makes many explicit references to uncertainty. For example, the phrases “. . . it is not yet possible to determine which estimates of the climate change cloud feedbacks are the most reliable” and “Despite advances since the TAR, substantial uncertainty remains in the magnitude of cryospheric feedbacks within AOGCMs” appear on p. 593. In discussing the modeling of temperature, the authors wrote, “The extent to which these systematic model errors affect a model’s response to external perturbations is unknown, but may be significant” (p. 608), and, “The diurnal temperature range… is generally too small in the models, in many regions by as much as 50%” (p. 609), and “It is not yet known why models generally underestimate the diurnal temperature range.” The following words and phrases appear at least once in the Chapter: unknown, uncertain, unclear, not clear, disagreement, uncertain, not fully understood, appears, not well observed, variability, variety, difference, unresolved, not resolved, and poorly understood.
Given the high uncertainty, the naïve method for this situation would be the “no-change” model. Remarkably, nowhere does the IPCC Report address the issue of forecastability. It should have been addressed prior to spending enormous sums on complex forecasting models.

In effect, given the current state of uncertainty regarding climate, prior evidence on forecasting methods suggests that attempts to improve upon the naïve model might increase forecast error. To reverse this conclusion, one would have to produce validated evidence in favor of certain methods. Such evidence is not provided in Chapter 8 of the IPCC report.

....It is not clear to what extent the models produced by the IPCC are either based on, or have been tested against, sound empirical data. However, some statements were made about the ability of the models described in Chapter 8 to fit historical data, after tweaking of their parameters. Extensive research has shown that the ability of models to fit historical data has little relationship to forecast accuracy (See “Evaluating Methods” in Armstrong 2001.) It is well known that fit can be improved by making the model more complex. The consequence of increasing complexity to improve fit, however, is to decrease the accuracy of forecasts. The 12 authors of Chapter 8 appeared to be unaware of this principle.

....A list of the 72 violations of forecasting principles by the authors of IPCC Chapter 8 is provided on the Public Policy Special Interest Group Page at forecastingprinciples.com. The many violations provide further evidence that the authors were unaware of evidence-based principles for forecasting. If they were aware of them, it would have been incumbent on them to present evidence to justify their departures from best forecasting practice. They did not do so. We conclude that because the forecasting processes described in the Chapter overlook scientific evidence on forecasting, the IPCC forecasts of climate change are not scientific.

...History is filled with the poor treatment of those who attempt to introduce science into arenas where emotions are high and vested interests are threatened. Galileo springs to mind. Scientists in the West at least no longer face death when presenting their findings. Nevertheless, the scientific review system currently acts to prevent the publication of research findings that conflict with commonly held beliefs (for a review of research on this matter, see Armstrong 1997).
We recommend the use of objective evidence-based (scientific) procedures to assess the validity of global warming forecasts. Our belief is that science will win out in the long run. The problem is that we may waste enormous resources over a short-run that might last for the next few decades.

Read much more at the Source

For a closer look at this audit of the recent IPCC report, and for a particularly lively discussion in comments, go here.

None of this incriminating information is news to those who follow the more credible climate sites, such as Climate Science and Climate Audit. But for those who pliantly believe that RealClimate.org is the final word on all things climate, the future is rife with disillusionment. Many billions of dollars are at stake, in research grants, carbon credits, Al Gore movies and rock concerts, and other areas.

This is not a time to place your faith in another corrupt UN agency. Although most recent university graduates (last 10 to 15 years) are academically lobotomised, thus compromised in their ability to think independently, this is definitely a time to think for yourself.

The Ampere Strikes Back

The world is not about to start using less energy. Just our energy use for entertainment, communications, and other electronics will soon amount to over a third of the average household's energy use. That is only going to increase--particularly with India, China, and other populous nations beginning to ride the affluence train of internationalist trade. After all, they want their energy slaves too.

When someone discusses the amount of energy used to produce, harvest, transport and distribute a head of broccoli to a store three thousand miles away, the energy used can be expressed in terms of the number of energy slaves required to do that work.

If we replaced a car engine by human slaves cycling, the most modest subcompact car (a Twingo), with 42 kW of engine power (that is about 60 HP), would consume as much as 90 people cycling like hell, and, in terms of mechanical power, given the very poor efficiency of the human machine (10% at best when a thermal engine reaches close to 50%), it's rather 500 people cycling that it represents ! Another parallel might be used : knowing that a HorsePower used for an engine really represents the equivalent of a horse in terms of power, it means that any worker paid at the minimum wage, in France, can buy - then feed - the equivalent of 60 to 80 horses with 6 to 8 months of salary. And oil would be expensive (ter) ?

When flying, any passenger consumes 1 kWh for 2 km on average. A return flight from Paris to Rome, that anyone can afford today, represents 2.240 km, thus 1.100 kWh of energy. A single flight in Europe represents as much energy as 6 pairs of legs over a full year...

Even a small 50 cm3 moped, with its 2 ou 3 kW of engine power, is already the equivalent of 15 to 20 human beings

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We experience lives of ready affluence because of the energy servants placed at our disposal by our technological societies. The scientists, engineers, electricians, construction workers, maintenance workers, factory workers, truckers, dock workers, railroad workers, workers in shipping and receiving--all those and more keep our energy slaves functioning constantly. Most of us could not imagine life without our slaves.

Energy conservation is not good enough. We must have more energy sources, to feed the growing number of servants we acquire.

However, it is clear that energy conservation alone cannot solve the increasing global demand for energy. Thus, it is now more imperative that ever to foster research into new and alternative energy sources. Research into fuel cells, wave power, wind power, photovoltaics and micro-turbines with combined heat and power capability is now of critical importance to the development of modern sustainable electrical power systems. Indeed these sources may well have an impact on the fundamental structure of such systems in the future with the possibility of increased medium power dc transmission networks to accommodate smaller local distributed generation units.

Source

There are many solutions to the convergence of increasing energy demand with plateauing supplies of some fossil fuels such as sweet light crude oil. The first step is to stop denying the need to solve the problem.

Conservation alone will not solve it. Renewables such as solar and wind will not be in a position to put a dent in the problem until much better storage options (such as utility scale redox flow cells) are online. We can no longer afford to look at nuclear energy as unworkable. Once we accept that nuclear electric generation is a necessary bridge to a more renewable future, we can set about making nuclear energy safer and more economical/reliable in all the stages of its life cycle.

Over the next 20 to 30 years, the almost unlimited energy resources of geothermal , solar, wind and sea, will be more available. Perhaps within 50 years, nuclear fusion will be ready to provide large scale energy. But in the meantime, people are not going to give up their energy slaves, no matter how much lip service they give to conservation and cutting down "greenhouse gases." When it comes to their own comfort, these people will not go down gently.

Many people who call themselves "environmentalists" are actually dieoff.org sympathizers. They want to see billions of Earth's residents removed, or "cleansed," from the planet. Leaving them in charge of a pristine Gaia, of course.

Swarming and Flocking--Learning from Natural Behaviours

Swarming behaviour is typical of animal populations--from insects to fish to birds to mammals. But is it possible for humans in the developed world to learn something from the swarming behaviours of animals?

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

Source

People are indeed learning from the swarming behaviours of ants, bees, birds, caribou, and other animals. The article above has the details.

Another fascinating look at how humans can learn from swarming and flocking behaviour is the book "Out of Control" by Kevin Kelly. You can read Kelly's excellent book online at the above link. If you have been feeding your mind mostly on either junk food or dry scholarly work, consider taking regular recreational breaks to read portions of Kelly's entertaining and provocative work.

Information scientists and engineers are looking at swarms as models for artifical intelligences and robotics controllers. This is a form of biomimetics, from the bottom up. Rodney Brooks and Hod Lipson typify this bottom up research for robotics and AI.

One of the key points to draw from the effectiveness of swarm behaviour in the animal world for predator and prey, is that it depends upon the individual competence of the members of the swarm. If too many of the individual members are incompetent, the swarm cannot function.

This is the danger of dysfunctional institutions of education, for human society--which has its own swarm-like behaviour. Dysfunctional schools and universities ruled by dysfunctional ideologies, create dysfunctional and vulnerable societies. That is the problem with an excessively narcissistic, psychologically neotenous, and academically lobotomised society. It is incompetent on such a large scale that it can no longer defend itself from either internal or external threats.

Snowcrash' Carnival of Biosingularity

This excellent video on retroviral mechanisms is just one of a wonderful carnival of 4th of July postings from our old friend Snowcrash at Biosingularity. Check them out.

Blog Carnivals for All

A new Carnival of Climate Change is out, containing a link to another Al Fin posting.

Tangled Bank #83 is up at Aardvarchaelolgy blog.

Brain Blog #12 is up. This carnival is the clinical counterpoint to the neurocognitive carnival Encephalon.

Here is the Cavalcade of Risk #29, on the many uses of risk in the real world.

Here is Cosmos #1, a carnival about the cosmic mysteries.

Finally, here is the Carnival of Space #10, hot off the presses and full of excellent links!

Blog carnivals are great ways to be introduced to new blogs that could easily become new favourites.

DNA Video: Wrapping and Replication

Online Science Video Sites:
Free Science Videos and Lectures

Free Science Online

101Science.com

Redwood Center Neurolectures

Vega Science Trust

And many others available through video searches on YouTube and GoogleVideo. Also look under the main sidebar at alfin2100 under audio/video archives.

Small Energy News

Speaking of small energy, this vibration powered micro-generator is a clever idea for operating sensors and monitoring devices placed around vibrating locations such as roadways, rotating machinery, and objects vibrated by winds and waves.

Here is a look at some of the near-term improvements for automobile batteries.

And we all know that supercapacitors fill an important gap in the attempt to replace the internal combustion engine. The very high power density of the supercapacitors is a fine complement to the high energy density of storage batteries and fuel cells.

Speaking of fuel cells, most efficient fuel cells are sized for industrial uses--in the tens and hundreds of kilowatts range and above. But these little fuel cells are for toys, and progress is being made on better residential and automobile fuel cells. Even short range aircraft will soon be powered by fuel cells.

It is important for developed nations to come up with clean, sustainable energy technologies for all scales of use--from the terawatt to the microwatt. It is not possible for an advanced culture to progress without highly centralised energy technologies such as nuclear, at this time.

But as storage technologies improve, much of the renewable energies that are currently wasted--solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, etc--will be put to better use. This will limit the demand placed upon large scale, centralised projects, and fossil fuels such as coal, oil, bitumens, and gas.

Kamchatka Volcano Honours US 4th of July

Kamchatka is so much like Alaska--where I spent part of my childhood--that it takes my breath away at times. The Klyuchevskoy Volcano seems to be reflecting that similarity--providing geologic fireworks in time for the US celebration of the 4th.The Ring of Fire includes portions of Kamchatka as it includes portions of Alaska. Alaska and Kamchatka could almost be mirror images if looked at in a certain way.

When one contemplates the rapidly shrinking ethnic Russian population--and the reasons for the collapse--one cannot help but wonder about the future of the Russian Empire. The future of Siberia in particular, is in question.

For while Russia has a vast and advanced nuclear strike capability, its conventional forces are sadly decrepit, corrupt, and ineffectual. If faced with strong pressure from China to give up large sections of Siberia, as time passes Russia will have less and less deterrent.

How much of Russia's natural wealth resides in Swiss bank accounts registered to ex-KGB bureaucrats and operatives? More every day.

As Russia's muslim population grows, and its ethnic Russian population suicides, emigrates, and shrivels, what good will all those nukes do when China comes demanding? What good will all those billions of dollars in the Swiss accounts of Putin cronies do for the common Russian citizen?

Putin cannot control the periphery of the empire any longer. The days of the empire are numbered.

Encephalon #26

Neurophilosophy Blog has moved to Science Blogs, and to celebrate is hosting the 26th Edition of Encephalon. If you have not yet visited Neurophilosophy, or waded through an edition of the Encephalon blog neurocarnival, I strongly encourage you to jump in without delay.

Mind The Enchantment

The human mind is subject to various forms of enchantment. Not a magical enchantment, but more like a trance, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.

Because our minds are "self organised", they are subject to falling into distinctly different states, at particular "bifurcations."An illustration of this phenomenan is the "bistability" of particular images. Following the series of images above, can you say exactly where the transition occurs? What if you saw only that one image?

But the deeper you dive into the mechanisms of consciousness, the larger the number of possible mind states, so that bistability becomes tristability and so on. Just the single topic of synaptic plasticity quickly acquires a complexity to confound most scientists.

Hypnosis takes advantage of the inherent ambiguity of consciousness, and "adjusts the weighting" of various competing states of mind. Since mind is inherently a self-organizing, ongoing trance-like process, it is often likened to "riding the wave," or staying on the "bucking bronco." From the moment of waking to the release of sleep, that "blinking cursor" of consciousness compels us to provide answers and solutions, even to unknown or nonexistent problems.

For anyone who is curious about some of the underlying neurophilosophy of consciousness, I suggests looking over this article by Edelman and Tononi--two prolific and respected students of consciousness. Or look over this overview of Models of Consciousness from Scholarpedia.

Understanding human consciousness is difficult enough. But a lot of people wish to create intelligence in machines. This dream goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But since the computer age beginning in the 1940s, multiple generations of ingenious scientists of mind and computation have dashed their skulls against the wall of computational complexity (not to mention a lack of understanding of the complexity of human cognition or intentionality).

Each person experiences a consciousness of an enchanted mind. Not a mind of equations and computations. Rather a mind of metaphor and narrative. An entranced mind where real world expediencies intrude on waking dreams. Complex trances of strange attractors and slippery bistable conscious surfaces.

There would be no point in trying to emulate all of that in a machine. Not unless that is the only way we can find to create a conscious machine. Perhaps it is better to settle for machines that only seem conscious or intelligent, as viewed by a simple Turing test. After all, we are only looking for help in making better decisions and devising a better world for smarter, healthier, longer-lived people.

We may be entranced, but why burden our machines with all of that? It is our trance that we wish to enjoy far into the future, not the trance of a machine.

Singularity Summit in San Francisco 8,9 September 2007

Michael at Accelerating Future announces several upcoming Singularity Events. One of these is the Singularity Summit II: AI and the Future of Humanity, September 8,9 at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco. Go here for photos and bios of the speakers.

The Singularity movement is fascinating, but it is not new. Long before Kurzweil, there was Timothy Leary's SMI2LE, and before Leary there was Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, and so on and on.

Here is a quote from the overview page of the Summit, attributed to Kurzweil:

this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life.

Notice how similar to a religious (or quasi-religious) conversion experience this sounds. It is described as an external event that forces a psychological discontinuity on intelligent beings.

Although it will be difficult to "drop out" of the Singularity, it is inevitable that many people will try. Certainly North Korea's Kim will try, and many muslim groups will also try to avoid the singularity tsunami.

I strongly suspect that most "connected" humans will adjust their time frames, or internal clock speeds, to compensate somewhat for the accelerating change.

There is always a time lag between the inventive idea and the real product of change. That time lag has been reduced by advanced telecom and powerful software/hardware tools. Once high speed personal prototypers are widely available, and particularly once molecular manufacturing is available, the time lag will shrink even more.

Many singularitarians believe that better-than-human-brain machine intelligences will be necessary before the pace of technological change becomes breathless enough to be called "the singularity." More likely to my mind is that more hyper-specialised machines and software will be developed that will act as "augments" to particular areas of research and development. These specialised machines will not be intelligent in the general sense, any more than championship chess playing computers are intelligent outside their narrowly designed and programmed specialty.

When very clever designs for hardware are combined with well crafted software and specialised physical actuators, machines can be an enormous help without having general intelligence.

The idea that all that is needed is faster processors or more clever algorithms is more probably slowing down the actual achievement of general machine intelligence. It is called chasing the wild goose.

It is clear to me that the modularity of the human brain will have to be imitated in hardware, before humans can build anything that possesses human-like intelligence. It is also clear to me that going from a chimp-like intelligence to a human-like intelligence to a superhuman-like intelligence will not be an almost instant process.

The actual hardware involved will be far more complex than any "thinking machines" that humans have devised up until now. Trying to achieve this with Von Neumann style digital computers is a laughable proposition, in my opinion. More later.

Global Warming Regulations Choking Germany's Economy

It is one thing to regulate industry in the interest of clean water and clean air. Regulating pollution and toxic emissions is a necessary part of the government's role in protecting the populace--just as protecting the people from religious terrorists is a necessary government role.

Clear thinking persons understand that Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant, but rather a vital constituent of Earth's atmosphere/biosphere. What is the price Germany is likely to pay for the fundamental misunderstanding of CO2 on the part of Germany's planners and government regulators? 500,000 or more jobs lost in high-energy utilisation industries. Since Germany is already losing professionals and scientists in the hundreds of thousands, it can ill afford to lose these engineering and technology jobs.

The government's aim of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 40 pct by 2020 are 'illusory,' Schulz told the newspaper.

'Excessive regulations can have serious consequences for Germany's economy,' he said.

He said the government should take into account the reasonable doubts of the country's industrial players on the costs of shutting down nuclear power plants and reducing emissions.

Source

Global warming predictions are being skewed by tainted data. In the US, much of the surface station data being used to predict future climate is tainted. This scandal has been kept under wraps so far, at least from the general public that does not keep up with things. Dr. Pielke at Climate Science would like to pull the wraps off the scandal.

The debate is not over, but is rather just beginning. Billions of dollars in research funding is at stake, and millions of industrial and high technology jobs in the western world. Europe stands to lose big, if it continues with its commitment to an unproven remedy to an unproven problem.

Climate Science Grows Up

Global Circulation Models (GCMs) of climate are still at an early, primitive, infantile stage of development. As science gets better at filling the many large gaps in knowledge about the many factors influencing climate, the models will eventually become more trustworthy. NASA's Tropical Composition Cloud Coupling study is designed to fill one of the huge gaps in climate comprehension--understanding the chemical, dynamic, and physical processes occurring in the tropical upper troposphere and tropopause transitional layer.

the Tropical Composition Cloud Climate Coupling (TC4) field campaign will examine a somewhat mysterious layer of the atmosphere that could provide a crucial link to climate change. To better understand how ozone-depleting pollutants move from earth to the vulnerable, ozone-rich stratosphere, about 100 scientists will study the space between: the tropical tropopause transition layer (TTL), which can funnel air and its pollutants much faster than other atmospheric movements.

According to TC4 program scientist Dr. Brian Toon, air involved in a cloud convection column can take “only 10 or 20 minutes to move from the ground level to the top of the troposphere. An airplane can’t follow it up—I’ve tried.” During these violent updrafts, storm-type clouds nearer the earth’s surface containing very fine particles and pollutants transfer their cargo into tiny ice crystals—on the order of microns—that balloon into extremely long-lasting, expansive, often sub-visible clouds in the stratosphere.

To track the debris as it passes through the TTL, the high-tech research team in Costa Rica will be the first to extensively utilize and verify data collected by the so-called “A-train,” a recently completed group of five satellites launched to gather complementary data profiling the earth’s atmosphere. The newest of these satellites, launched last year, come equipped with radar and special “LIDAR” sensors, which measure laser light pulses and reflections to help draw conclusions about atmospheric chemistry.

In addition to these indirect measurements from above, several air-sampling balloons and three high-altitude planes will develop the first three-dimensional, contact-based understanding of the TTL. The airplanes, including a civilian-science version of the Air Force’s U-2 reconnaissance platform, are capable of flying at the edge of space—so high that pilots and scientists must begin breathing pure oxygen an hour before flight in order to acclimate, and must wear space-suit-style pressure suits to protect them in the otherwise fatal event of cabin depressurization.

Source

The tropospheric temperature anomaly is one of the many things that GCM's cannot get right--and it strikes at the very heart of the reliability of the models (or lack thereof). But honestly, there are so many problems with the IPCC's well funded but unreliable models, that only someone without good scientific instincts would even hint at basing economic, industrial, and environmental policy on the failed models. Much better to allow the infant science of climatology to grow up and learn to walk.

Smelling Cancer With Nanotechnology

We have known for years that dogs are capable of smelling cancer on a person's breath or urine. Now scientists are developing nanotech protein sensor arrays for "smelling" cancer--as early screening tests.

To create the protein sensors, the scientists used six gold nanoparticle–fluorescent polymer conjugates. These particles serve as both selective recognition elements as well as quenchers for the polymer. The subsequent binding of protein analytes displaces the dyes, regenerating the fluorescence.

....By modulating the nanoparticle–protein and/or nanoparticle–dye association, distinct signal response patterns can then be used to differentiate the proteins. The fluorescent indicator displacement assay does not require special instruments, and its sensitivity (due in large part to the high surface area provided by the nanoparticles) and speed facilitate protein detection.
Rotello points out that real-world applications require identification of proteins at varying concentrations and of unknown identity. "Varying protein concentrations would be expected to lead to the drastic alteration of fluorescence response patterns for the proteins, making identification of proteins with both unknown identity and concentration challenging. To enable the detection of unknown proteins, we have designed a protocol combining LDA and ultraviolet (UV) measurements."
In their experiments, the researchers also used a series of unknown protein solutions for quantitative detection. The unknown protein solutions were submitted to the testing procedures: of the 52 unknown protein samples, only three samples were incorrectly identified, affording an identification accuracy of 94.2%.
"Our overall goal is to develop a more holistic approach to detecting diseases" says Rotello. "The plan is to monitor levels of proteins in the body, as opposed to looking for just a single marker." Of course, the key question is whether disease can effectively be 'smelled' – are there detectable differences in the relative ratios of proteins that can be used for diagnostic purposes?"

Source

Hat tip Our Technological Future and Nanotechnology Now.

The potential for near-term development of nano-sensors for health care, research, and industrial safety and process control, is enormous. In ten years it will be difficult to imagine life without ubiquitous nano-sensors, just as it is difficult now to imagine life without cell phones, wireless internet, and mp3 players.
;-)

Inexpensive urine tests and breath tests will provide physicians and practitioners with early alerts that should save tens of thousands of lives a year, at the least. As the technology improves, the utility of these nano-sensors will grow as their dimensions shrink.

Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Image hat tip Numberwatch.

Much more detail here.

Sometimes you simply must go back to quantum theory.

Update: Here's more on the effects of the sun on climate.

Futurism: Thomas Frey vs. The Idiocracy

Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute, has inspired leaders of government and industry with his revolutionary vision of the future.

ET: What technologies do you think would be with us in the future?

Thomas: 1. Binary power is the concept where two otherwise harmless beams of energy will intersect at some point in space, creating a source of power.

To better explain binary power, think in terms of two invisible beams intersecting in a room and the point at which they intersect as a glowing point of light. Binary power will eventually replace all light bulbs. And lest you think it can only be used for intense forms of power, it will also be used to create ‘points’ of sound, eliminating the need for speakers and headphones.

2. Proof has to be demonstrated on two very fundamental levels before there is reason to think that time travel is truly possible. The first is to be able to communicate across time, and the second is to be able to view things across time. If we cannot first communicate across time, or view real life images of another time, how can we possibly imagine sending people across time?

So the ‘viewing things across time’ technology that I think most promising is – viewing the past. Think in terms of setting up sensors around a room and being able to replay images of past events, as much as 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

3. Disassembling matter. Imagine a technology capable of breaking all of the molecular bonds in any given material. As an example, place a rock on a table, focus a beam on the rock and visualise all the molecules in the rock separating and falling in a pile onto the table.

....Thomas: In the past, computer programming has been focused around architecting the flow of electrons. In the future, nanotechnology will be focused around architecting the flow of matter.

Laboratories in the future will be akin to thought factories where the outputs will be visualisations with several million permutations. Inventions will happen so quickly that few people will understand the line between what is real and what is still only imagined.

What would the PC of tomorrow be like? Will the PC even be around or is it just going to be 'ubiquitous' computing in the full sense of the word—every object being a computer, the whole environment being the user interface, etc?

Thomas: Our goal will be to make the interface between information and our brains as seamless and as invisible as possible. Presently, the PC is a rather clunky way of making that connection.

PCs will go away within the next 10 years and a variety of devices will be created to take their place. But we eventually would not want to be bothered by physical devices.

I like to think in terms of information swarms – invisible particles that hover around us, communicating with our minds whenever we desire to ‘plug in’. While much of the information swarm will communicate directly with our minds, we will also have visual interfaces that float in space in a way that is only viewable by us.


....In my mind, patents are only useful when they move the state of the art forward. Too much of what is going on today is nothing more than corporate gamesmanship.
As an example, a typical cell phone will touch on as many as 200-300 patents. If every patent required a $5 royalty, our cell phones would cost a fortune. Many of our emerging technologies will not be able to make it to market because of too many demands on the revenue streams. Once the patents expire, the products become affordable.

ET: On a lighter note, by when do we expect the DaVinci Institute to have its branch on Mars (read: migration to other planets)?

Thomas: Travelling to Mars will be measured in decades, but colonising other planets will likely begin close to a century from now. The first human colony on another planet will be called – Colony 42, because 42 is the meaning of life.

Source

Contrast Frey's visions here and at previous posts, with the mainstream idiocratic view of "futuristic scenarios:"

To be honest, we didn't find the positive scenarios to be all that interesting. So we decided to consider: what if it all went wrong - even horribly wrong?

One possible future we envisioned was "gridlock". The left-right split of today's politics gave way to a deeply divisive standoff between "naturals" and "enhanceds". Enhanceds used all the tools of science to make life better, with intelligence-enhancing drugs and genetic screening of embryos for positive or negative traits (such as a predisposition to cancer). Naturals, a novel alliance of science sceptics from the old left and religious fundamentalists from the right, rejected enhanceds' "meddling" with nature

The worst world we envisioned we called "No Glue", where the financial, political and even social bonds of society all came apart. We considered a rapid evolution of virtual worlds that completely outpaced the ability of governments and international institutions to cope. Financial markets moved quickly into these virtual worlds because they were a much more efficient way of doing business than in the past. Virtual currencies became the medium of exchange. As nations declined and virtual worlds rose, offline social bonds frayed and people lost trust in each other. War and terrorism declined but the world was plunged into constant low-level conflict.

The latter view of "the future" clearly exposes the lack of "grist" contained in the imaginations of mainstream thinkers. These products of conventional educational brain-binding could not possibly dream up a possible future, in their wildest imagination. Because, frankly, their imaginations are hardly wild at all. This is the problem with modern journalists and academics. No grist. No imagination. They are laying the perfect groundwork for the coming Idiocracy.


The fly in the ointment for the architects of the Idiocracy, is that contrary-minded thinkers have access to advanced technology of communication, computation, and correlation. With modern communication, entire new fields of study can arise and thrive overnight, just as entire new fields of commercially viable enterprise arise virtually overnight.

This is extremely bad news for those who wish to control all sources of instability in a society. Bad news for dictators, bad news for religious control freaks, bad news for ideologues and politically correct thought police.

Stay tuned to the undertow.

Democracy is the Art of Getting Votes from the Poor and Campaign Contributions from the Rich . . .

. . . by promising to protect each from the other. With apologies to Oscar Ameringer. The inherent contradictions in "democracy" should be apparent to anyone who looks closely. It is only when a political system protects citizens from democracy, that democracy becomes workable.

Most people erroneously believe that democracy is equivalent to "freedom," "rule of law," and "constitutional republic." Nothing could be farther than the truth.

The controversy over "basic human rights" brings this issue into the clearest focus. The American concept of human rights is based upon freedom from oppression by a tyrannical government. The US emerged from an era where governments were relatively unconstrained by rules or laws limiting their action against citizens. The US Constitution was an attempt to delimit the rights of governments and the rights of citizens--to clarify the freedoms from arbitrary governmental oppression for the citizens of the new country.

Freedom from arbitrary governmental oppression was the basis of the US Constitution and the founding of the US republic. For over 200 years, such freedom from oppression defined human rights. One way to summarize this view would be: "the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law."

The view of human rights has changed significantly in much of the rest of the world, outside the US. For example: The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

The UN definition of human rights is open-ended, and more subject to wildly varying interpretation. In other words, while a constitution based upon the 18th century American view of human rights might survive for many centuries, a constitution based upon the UN view of human rights would be unlikely to survive a single century. Simply put, laws based upon insubstantial enthusiasms can not be adjudicated.

Which brings us to the problem of pure democracies. A pure democracy is not constrained by hard-headed principles of rule of law. A pure democracy very quickly devolves to a "people's democracy", administered by a "servant of the people" such as Idi Amin, Hugo Chavez, or Robert Mugabe, "presidents for life."

It could not be any other way. Fuzzy headed concepts of benevolence toward all, that are not backed up by adjudicable law, inevitably decay to dictatorship. Unconstrained democracy is always dangerously unstable, except on a very small scale--such as the intentional community. But even in the small intentional community, a well thought out set of community by-laws must be strictly adhered to.