Prefrontal Cortex Needs Time--Maturation to Cognitive Richness

Younger brains lack the prefrontal function for good judgment and rich memory. If the prefrontal cortex is damaged in infancy or later in life, sensitivity to future consequences and social/moral behaviour is compromised. Drinking alcohol in adolescence leads to smaller prefrontal cortex.

A recent MIT study demonstrates that a mature pre-frontal cortex facilitates richer memories.

In the August 5 advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience, the MIT team reports that children rival adults in forming basic memories, but adults do better at remembering the rich, contextual details of that information. The MIT study provides new insights into how children learn that are not only theoretically important, but could also inform practical learning in everyday settings.

The ability to remember factual information - who, what, where, when - emerges gradually during childhood, and plays a critical role in education. The brain systems underlying it have been extensively studied in adults, but until now little was known about how they mature during child development.

The MIT study indicates that a more developed prefrontal cortex (PFC) - an area of the brain long associated with higher-order thinking, planning, and reasoning -- may be responsible for creating richer memories in adults.

“Activation in the PFC follows an upward slope with age in contextual memories. The older the subjects, the more powerful the activation in that area,” explains senior author John Gabrieli of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

“That makes sense, because there's been a convergence of evidence that the PFC develops later than other brain regions, both functionally and structurally.... But this is the first study that asks how this area matures and contributes to learning.”

For the study, Noa Ofen, a postdoctoral associate in Gabrieli's lab, forewarned 49 healthy volunteers ranging in age from eight to 24 that they would be tested on their recognition of 250 common scenes, such as a kitchen, shown to them as they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. She recorded their brain responses as the volunteers tried to commit each picture to memory. Shortly after the volunteers left the scanner, she showed them twice as many scenes. Had they seen each one before, and if so, how vividly did they recall the scene"

Ofen then went back to the brain activation patterns. In both children and adults, several areas in the PFC and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) showed higher activation at the time when subjects studied a scene they would later remember. No age-related differences showed up in the activation patterns of the MTL regions in children and adults, but differences did appear in the PFC when looking at pictures that were later correctly recognized.

Those age-related differences related to the quality of the volunteers' memories.

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The poor judgment exhibited in adolescence and early adulthood is generally accompanied by immature prefrontal cortex. The inability to anticipate future consequences of current actions is a hallmark of youth. Poor planning, poor judgment, and other limitations in function associated with poor functioning of PFC are stereotypical characteristics of most high school and college aged youth.

The MIT finding that rich contextual memories are also functions of maturity help to further round out the picture of mental maturation.

In the arab world, PFC-immature youth are prone to joining jihadi movements. In the western worlds, most radical political movements center around universities, and recruit their most devoted adherents in university. These are all different versions of youth gangs. If not for youth, militaries would have far fewer members.

High testosterone levels of young males combined with slow maturation of their PFCs makes for a lot of excitement. No doubt that is one reason why young females are drawn to young males--for this unpredictable excitement.

The problem that I see with current western child-raising methods, is that the PFCs of youth may never truly mature, when held in a the neotenous environment of educational institutions, segregated from the responsibilities of the adult world, confined with only their PFC-immature peers during these formative years. No meaningful rites of passage. Thanks to the ideological straightjackets of most universities, these neotenised youth are isolated from a diversity of ideas and viewpoints. This makes them academically lobotomised.

Being raised in smaller families often with only one sibling--or no siblings at all--leads to narcissism, an unwarranted, unearned feeling of entitlement and specialness.

Narcissism, psychological neoteny, and academic lobotomy. The magic modern trio of decadent child-raising. Leading to an opposite society from the next level. We need to do something about this.

Washington Post: American Blacks Can't Handle the Truth

In this Washington Post article, the authors claim that american blacks suffer from paranoid conspiracy delusions that spread freely through black communities via black talk radio.

A 1990 survey by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference found that one-third of black American churchgoers believed that AIDS was a form of genocide. One-third also believed that HIV was produced in a germ-warfare lab, and 40 percent of black college students in Washington, D.C., agreed. An even higher percentage of blacks polled said they thought that crack cocaine was custom-made to be planted in African American communities to keep them crime-ridden and poor and that the government deliberately targeted black elected officials to drive them from office.

These beliefs keep some black Americans from having their children vaccinated, from receiving AIDS tests and early medical treatment, and from practicing safe sex or using clean needles, as Patricia A. Turner and Gary Alan Fine note in their book, "Whispers on the Color Line." They also make seeking the truth an uphill battle.
...

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When conspiracy theory becomes community gospel, it becomes difficult to rise above the myth. While such myth-mongering may be profitable for a ragged band of black talk radio stations, the long term consequences of immersing entire communities in paranoid delusional thinking appear ominous.

The Washington Post is a newspaper for a greater metropolitan area that likely hosts more than one such talk radio station. How many other large US metropolitan areas containing a large per centage of black citizens have an editorial staff brave enough to buck prevailing community delusions? It will be interesting to find out.

If This Man and His Friends Try to Kill 90% of Earth's Humans, Where Can We Go to Escape Them?

The man pictured above is Eric Pianka, a University of Texas ecologist who suggests repeatedly in public appearances that viruses such as Ebola should be modified so as to be able to kill off 90% of earth's human population. He claims to advocate these extreme measures in an effort to save the planet. Among radical left environmentalists, Professor Pianka is not alone, and may even be considered a hero.

I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

...One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”

Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.

...Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

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So where could we go to escape madmen who try to carry through on Pianka's "bold" plan to save the earth? Robert Shapiro of the Lifeboat Foundation advisory committee recommends pursuing a course that leads to human settlements on the moon.

When we face a brand new situation, such probabilities are impossible to calculate. Countermeasures against each individual threat can of course be taken, but we would also be prudent to back up our civilization and our species. We need to place a self-sufficient fragment of society out of harm’s way, which for practical purposes means off the Earth. A buffer of empty space would protect that sanctuary from virtually all of the catastrophes named above.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, and a number of others, have called for humanity to spread out to distant planets of our Solar System. But there is no need to go so far to protect ourselves. After a few decades—centuries at worst—dust and ash will settle, radioactive materials will decay, and viruses will perish. Earth will once again become the best home for humanity in the Solar System. Return would be easiest if a safe sanctuary were nearby. In the more probable instance that only a limited disaster took place, that nearby sanctuary could also play a valuable role in restoring lost data and cultural materials, and coordinating the recovery. And of course, construction of the rescue base will be much easier if it is only days, rather than months or years, away.

We do not have to build the base from scratch, in an environment of emptiness, as we are attempting to do with the space station. A suitable platform has been orbiting our planet ever since its formation. On most clear nights, we need only look up to see it. If I employ the same arithmetic that I use when I insure my home, the cost of the lunar base can easily be justified.

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To build a sustainable lunar base, we will need to find water there, and be able to build and extract whatever else we need from lunar materials together with abundant sunlight. We can easily bring the genetic material for the living plants, bacteria, and animals we will need. Eventually, using molecular engineering and nanotechnology, we will be able to design and engineer whatever we need as long as we have water and planetary or asteroidal mass.



Knowing that many members of the radical left support what Pianka is advocating is not reassuring. Particularly when one of the major political parties in the US currently is being strongly influenced by the radical left.

The fever pitch to which anxiety over "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming" is being sold to students and members of the public no doubt pushes some people over the brink. The same thing applies to "peak oil" doomsday theories that circulate among many university students and other pseudo-intellectuals. What is essentially an economic problem of managing scarce resources becomes another apocalypse.

This tendency to create doomsdays where no doomsday are justifiable, twists the minds of those who are caught up in the perverse excitement associated with such fictional apocalypses. It is not surprising that many true believers take doomsday theories a step further--to propose bringing about doomsday themselves.

As if they cannot stand the suspense of waiting for doomsday to happen--they simply must concoct it for themselves.

Hat tip Michael Anissimov.

Update 5 Jan 08: Several people in comments and emails have made the claim that Eric Pianka was misquoted by Forrest Mims in Mims' account of the 109th meeting of Texas Academy of Science in Austin. Such a claim is unlikely, given the fact that Mims' written account is the only "transcript" of that particular talk by Pianka. Since all recording devices were required to be turned off for the talk in question, we must depend upon written accounts.

Support for Mims' account can be found here. Apparently others besides Mims' can remember that Pianka referred fondly to the idea of a virulent strain of Ebola (or other microorganism) reducing the population of earth by 90%.

The sad thing is that some of the apologists and deniers for Pianka probably agree with his point of view, but simply do not wish it to become more broadly known. Unfortunately for them, the people who need to know about the Pianka perversion have already been informed.

Exploration and Development in Space: Men vs. Robots

How will the actual movement of humans into space eventually play out? Will humans develop a rocket version of the Conestoga Wagon, or the Mayflower? Or will humans even play a part in the next century of space development, when robots may make far more sense for initial exploration?

Nanotechnology and autonomous robotics research should make it possible for robots to do preliminary exploration and data collection. Orbital probes and planetary explorers are only first steps. Next, microbots and robots using nanotech assembly need to be able to prepare planetary surfaces for human habitation and work.

In the long run, it will be humans working along with robots, that will allow the fastest movement of humans into space.

A previous Al Fin posting dealt with the choice between war and exploration, for societies with excess populations needing food and resources. Both war and exploration push the envelope of science and technology, and technology developed for one may often be used for the other. This current posting is inspired by a comment, by Will Brown, on the previous posting.

Here is a fascinating look at using self replicating technology dropped onto the lunar surface to create a lunar factory out of lunar materials.

Robert Zubrin--author of many books and articles on space exploration--presents his preferred direction of future projects here.

Future robot explorers will be diverse and often counter-intuitive to many. Some will flitter through atmospheres, like butterflies. Some will hop around like grasshoppers. Some will swim like fish. They will possess mass spectrometers on micro-chips, and micro-actuators for drilling and sampling. Some will be self-replicating for a pre-set time period, to cover more ground.

We cannot do it without robots. We cannot do it quickly without self-replicating nano-technology. We cannot do it easily without improved machine "cognition".

It is easy to fixate on the robotics, the nanotechnology, or the machine cognition, and forget about the important thing--the growth and expansion of human knowledge, wisdom, and potency. The long term advance of more wise, knowledgeable, and competent into the extra-terrestrial realm.

So let's send out the flocks of autonomous and self-replicating robots, then not waste any time following behind.

Space Colonisation as an Alternative to War

As supplies of conventional energy resources begin to plateau--while demand continues to grow wildly--prices will rise, sparking territorial disputes over energy supplies. As demand for biofuels grows, crop prices will grow, sparking territorial disputes over prime cropland. Humans fight over any number of things, and until abundant (fusion?) energy is ubiquitous and nanotechnology provides near-universal affluence, humans will fight over whatever is there to fight over. Unless . . .

Consider:

* If the materials in the single largest asteroid, Ceres, were used for orbital space settlement construction, we could build territory equal to over 200 times surface area of the Earth (1). This is enough to provide every single nation as much territory as if they conquered the entire Earth. Furthermore, conquering Earth is probably impossible, whereas building space settlements is merely incredibly difficult.
* The total energy resources of this solar system are about 2.3 billion times the energy available on Earth. This is simply the Sun's energy output -- and the Sun is an enormous nuclear fusion reactor that works perfectly right now, today, and is perfectly safe -- or at least isn't going away. Furthermore, we know, more or less, how to exploit space solar power .
* There are thousands of asteroids in orbits that cross Earth's, and just one of them, 3554 Amun, contains roughly $20 trillion dollars worth of precious metals.

Space settlement can make resource wars a thing of the past, something we only read about in history books, because space settlement can deliver far, far more resources at far, far less cost. Less money, less death, less destruction, and infinitely less stupidity.

Resources and territory are not the only reasons for war, but they cause a lot of them. The U.S. has spent far more defending oil access in the Mid-East than it would cost to build space settlements. Perhaps it's time to change direction. Perhaps it's time to make Earth a bit healthier for children and other living things. Perhaps it's time to choose life over war. Perhaps it's time to start building space settlements.

Space

The resources of the solar system and its neighborhood are incomprehensibly vast. Would humans only learn to develop the tools of surviving and thriving in the space environment, there would be no resource scarcity.



The energy of testosterone laden young males needs an outlet. That outlet can be either exploration or war, unless the young male devotes most of his energy to work and family life.

When you look at India and China, you see two populous countries with tens of millions of excess males each. Muslim countries that allow polygamous marriages likewise produce an excess of non-marriageable males.

As women in more parts of the world devote their lives to careers instead of raising families, more men find themselves with abundant time and energy on their hands. After a generation or two of this, the population begins to drop, and the number of excess males will decline. Western Europe, Japan, and Russia have populations that are imploding rapidly. For those, the drive toward war and exploration may be declining, currently.

Fighting the Population Implosion the Natural Way--Sans Artificial Wombs, Sans Parthenogenesis

The celebrated population implosion in the developed world is being resisted by a few brave and stalwart men and women. Lacking the re-population tools of artificial wombs and parthenogenesis, they attack the population decline the natural way.

The Duggars are a family living in a 7,000 square foot home in Arkansas, that recently welcomed their 17th child into the world.

Jennifer joins the fast-growing Duggar brood, who live in a 7,000-square-foot home in Tontitown. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are taught at home.

The oldest is 19 and the youngest, before Jennifer, is almost 2 years old.

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The mother claims it took her only 30 minutes to deliver, once her labour progressed.

Such news will displease many of the proponents of Peak Oil and Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming--who coincidentally are also advocating a large human die-off of five billion people or more.

Update: Here is an interesting Q & A between a feminist and a mother of 11 children, on the pros and cons of large families.

World Without Men?The Immaculate Conception--Stem Cell Parthenogenesis By Mistake. Accidental Virgin Births May be Next

South Korean researcher Hwang Wu-Suk was declared a fraud and laughed off the stage of stem cell research, but the much maligned scientist may have accidentally created the first human embryo-by-parthenogenesis.

Hwang Woo-Suk was found in a 2005 documentary to have conducted cloning experiments using eggs donated by junior staff in his own laboratory, and fabricated the results data. He was charged with fraud and embezzling money from those who funded his research, forcing him to resign in disgrace.

However, according to a US study into his work published last night, the professor inadvertently created cells that were derived by "parthenogenesis", a method by which unfertilised eggs start to divide to form embryos asexually.

Parthenogenesis derives from the Greek for "virgin birth", and is the means of reproduction among all fungi and many plants and animals, including lizards, bees and some fish.

Researchers at the Harvard University Stem Cell Institute and Children's Hospital Boston Stem Cell Program believe the dismissed scientist may have stumbled across the discovery without noticing it.

...Parthenogenesis involves chemically tricking an egg into developing without being fertilised by sperm. Dr Daley's team has done this in mice, and he said researchers recently succeeded in humans. He and his colleagues have now devised a set of standards to analyse the DNA of embryonic stem cells that allows researchers to determine how they were made. They used this method to analyse the South Korean stem cell line. "We now know unequivocally that they are human parthenogenetic stem cells," he said.

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A world where men are no longer necessary for the propagation of the species, has long been a dream of feminists--in academia and in science fiction. I have speculated about such worlds in fiction and non-fiction myself.

In a world where almost 60% of undergraduates are female, where approximately half of medical students and law students are female, where 70% of graduate psychology students are female--a world without men is not so difficult to imagine, at least within academia and some professions.

In the high tech world where most technological breakthroughs come from elite mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science--where females are significantly more rare--a manless world is a more unlikely scenario.

The worlds of energy production and transmission, heavy construction, infrastructure maintenance, big agriculture, transportation, etc. etc. may be at least as dependent on male manpower as the high tech professions.

In reality, a world without men would be a much different world than feminists imagine. It would not simply be a world with little crime, warfare, and domestic strife. Such a world would be a world where large span bridge collapses would become commonplace, and other large scale infrastructure breakdown would likewise occur.





[satire]

Outspoken feminist professors Letitia Snotsberry and Nadine Bullsnort were unavailable for comment as of this writing. Other influential university feminists who asked Al Fin not to reveal their identities have expressed their unalloyed delight at this news of sperm-free embryogenesis.[/satire]

Space Carnival #14

The Carnival of Space #14 is online, thanks to Universe Today blog. It is packed full of fascinating space and astronomy postings. My favourite two are this one from Brian Wang about safe and powerful nuclear rockets, and this posting on extracting oxygen from lunar rock. But the other postings are worth a look, so go ahead.

All of human history up until now, is simply the story of a tumultous human infancy and the terrible tantrums of toddlerhood.

If we want to live beyond our adolescence, we as a species will have to survive our rite of passage into the larger universe. For that to happen, humans will need to stop fighting over the mere trinkets and symbols of wealth that we find on this planet. Instead we should look toward the immense, essentially infinite riches and spaces of the larger universe outside our planetary cradle.

The old world primitivist outlook of Islam and other third world ideologies must be shaken off, like the tired restraints they are, so as to free ourselves for the huge challenges in front of us. Certain political ideologies--such as Marxist socialism--and dysfunctional philosophies such as postmodernism, must be discarded as garbage to allow the more wholesome and functional development of human potential.

Large amounts of human capital and resources will be squandered pursuing the impossible promises of enforced egalitarianism. That is inevitable. What matters is how the more enlightened individuals and groups use their resources to meet the future.

Religion and Transcendent Art for the Confirmed Atheist

What can an atheist learn from religion, to become a better artist?

Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

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Like Camille Paglia, I have chosen my own path, away from religious and political groupthink. Although I do not believe in the god of any religion, I am quite capable of feeling the same awe and wonder that is inspired in the heart of any devout believer. My awe and wonder is inspired by music, beauty in the natural universe, and inspired art and literature, not religious belief.

When I see the current obsession with tearing down icons of religious belief simply to replace them with empty cynicism, I feel sadness for the deluded pseudo-liberation that is taking place. But these are the choices we must all make.

If we want to create great art, music, and inspired literature, however, we must be inspired by something. Something greater than ourselves--at least greater than our working concept of ourselves.

Cynicism grows and becomes all consuming, if allowed. The proper end of cynicism is to come full circle--until cynicism becomes cynical of itself. That moment is one doorway to enlightenment.

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

Well, you can see the water, of course! If you can see the water already, by the time these young folks are ready to retire, their home will be several hundred feet under water!

It simply goes to show you that global warming denialism is all about profit, pure and simple. Look at all the huge mega-developments erected along the US South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Everyone knows that global warming is heating up hurricanes to apocalyptic proportions! Why would real estate agents be willing to sell retirees and others these precariously located domiciles, if not for denialist profit and callousness?

Is it too late for the Americans to elect Al Gore, and make up for all their past mistakes?

Large Scale Renewables

This is an interesting approach to large scale wind power suggested by Brian Wang at Advanced Nanotechnology.

Here is the MagTurbine site, which gives more information about the concept.

Here is a Discovery Channel video of the planned mega-scale Australian solar tower, using hot air updraft to drive multiple wind turbines. Click on some of the other large scale projects on the same page, for more information.

If renewables are to assist nuclear energy in replacing large scale burning of fossil fuels for energy, they will have to be scaled up significantly--to the gigawatt scale, cumulatively. Geothermal energy is particularly promising in that regard. Biomass also promises large scaling potential.

Solar energy can be scaled to megawatt ranges using light concentrating mirrors. This German company is working with China to build the world's first gigawatt solar facility.

Wind energy is generally more difficult to scale than some other renewables. Energy in the wind increases as the square of the area swept by a rotary blade, and as the cube of the velocity of the wind. That is why many "flying wind generators" have been proposed--tethered turbines floating or flying thousands of feet in the air. Unfortunately, besides the obvious flight navigation hazards, suitable tethers for such turbines do not exist currently.

CAGW Orthodoxy: How Do The True Believers Know They're Not Wrong

A recent article in Live Science provides a great example of "begging the question." Entitled "Global Warming: How Do Scientists Know They're Not Wrong," the article is a model of journalistic credulity. Quoting historian Naomi Oreskes extensively, author Andrea Thompson demonstrates why journalists, and the people who take them seriously, cannot think.

The title of this posting is meant to reflect the technique of "begging the question" that the title of the Live Science article utilises. The title of an article can be an almost subliminal persuader. "Scientists?" What "scientists?" Thompson does not really say, other than to quote Oreskes, an historian. When she does quote Richard Lindzen--an MIT atmospheric scientist of high esteem among peers--Thompson hastens to quote historian Oreskes again, in order to neutralise Lindzen's short quote.

Of course this blog is entitled to rhetorical flourish, since its theme is the coming singularity/apocalypse and what lies on the other side. A supposedly neutral article of science journalism in Live Science and other "Science" websites is supposed to reflect the reality of the subject matter--not to use logical fallacies to convince the unpersuaded to adopt the author's viewpoint.

Here is Oreske's essay in Science where she makes the claim of scientific consensus in climate research.

Here are criticisms of Oreskes study from Benny Peiser, and from Viscount Monckton.

Read the links above and consider how "consensus" is arrived at in science. Does science arrive at consensus by "shutting down the debate?", as Oreskes has attempted in a rather underhanded and dishonest way?

Or is "consensus" arrived at (if ever) by allowing all theories to attempt to prove themselves in a public forum--without editorial bias or other forms of intentionally skewing access to ideas?

The future of science, and how humans utilise their minds to arrive at closest approximations of truth, is at stake. If humans forget what "begging the question" means--the fallacy it represents--they have tied part of their brains behind their backs.

Truck Mounted Laser--For Shooting Down Rockets and Mortar Shells

Directed energy weapons will be more common on the battlefield, for shooting down incoming rockets, missiles--even artillery shells. Boeing was recently awarded a contract to develop a truck-mounted laser weapon for defending ground forces against incoming explosive ordnance, such as rockets, artillery, and mortar shells.

The High-Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator (HEL TD) Phase I contract contains options that would call for Boeing to build and test a significant component of the HEL TD system, comprised of the BCS integrated on a vehicle platform, and to refine requirements for the entire HEL TD system. The options would increase the contract cost to approximately $50 million.

The HEL TD program is intended to demonstrate that a mobile, solid-state laser weapon system can effectively counter rocket, artillery and mortar projectiles.

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Laser and particle beam weaponry will receive a large amount of military funding in the coming decades. Eventually, anti-satellite and anti ballistic missile weaponry will be mainly directed energy weapons, due to their accuracy and speed.

Personally, I would like one of these mounted on the back of my car, for dealing with tailgaters. Which suggests that humans may not be ready for advanced technology after all.

Seriously, directed energy weapons are another example of revolutionary weapons technology--including nano-weapons, bio-weapons, nuclear weapons, and electromagnetic weaponry--that may dramatically alter the way society is structured.

It is only a matter of time before a highly virulent, almost universally contagious engineered bio-weapon is loosed into modern populations. It is likewise only a matter of time before invisible yet deadly reproducing nano-weapons are allowed to escape into the environment.

Nuclear weapons technology is propagating deeply into militant Islam and other enemies of modern civilisation such as North Korea. Nukes will be used against large populations of civilians in surprise attacks. The repercussions from such attacks are frightening and unpredictable.

If directed energy weapons technology escapes into the general population of arms dealers, safe air travel may become impossible in certain parts of the world, such as Europe.

Electromagnetic weapons include electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMPs), electronically activated and timed conventional weaponry, hypersonic electromagnetic rail weaponry, electromagnetic ballistic cannons--including suborbital and orbit capable weapons.

And that is only scratching the surface.

Many of these weapons can make large areas of Earth's surface virtually uninhabitable to densely packed human settlements such as modern cities. Some of these weapons can lay waste to large areas of planted cropland, triggering mass hunger. And so on.

Given the modern predominance of narcissism, psychological neoteny, and academic lobotomy, it is unlikely that most modern persons will know how to react to the coming of these brave new weapons.

But you will know, won't you?

Update: Those of you who believe in the Peak Oil Theory are already thinking along these lines. Big cities with their surrounding suburbs and country bedroom communities full of commuters will not be viable in the age of ultra-expensive gasoline, and oil.

The jury is still out on that theory. Fossil fuels will certainly be more expensive, forcing some hard choices. But that is not really on the same level as mass-death from plague or out of control nano-killers, is it?

Consider looking into the Lifeboat Foundation, or the Society for Creative Apocalyptology. Think about surviving into the next level.

On Losing Your Depression Quickly

Conventional antidepressants may require from a few weeks up to a few months to achieve their antidepressant effect, when they are effective. Depression is a very common condition worldwide, very expensive in terms of lost time and lost lives. A quicker way to lose one's depression would be quite useful.

A new study has revealed more about how the medication ketamine, when used experimentally for depression, relieves symptoms of the disorder in hours instead of the weeks or months it takes for current antidepressants to work. While ketamine itself probably won’t come into use as an antidepressant because of its side effects, the new finding moves scientists considerably closer to understanding how to develop faster-acting antidepressant medications – among the priorities of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Ketamine blocks a receptor called NMDA on brain cells, an earlier NIMH study in humans had shown, but the new study in mice shows that this is an intermediate step. It turns out that blocking NMDA increases the activity of another receptor, AMPA, and that this boost in AMPA is crucial for ketamine’s rapid antidepressant actions. The study was reported online in Biological Psychiatry on July 23, by NIMH researchers Husseini K. Manji, MD, Guang Chen, MD, PhD, Carlos Zarate, MD, and colleagues.
...Almost 15 million American adults have a depressive disorder. During the long wait to begin feeling the effects of conventional medications, patients may worsen, raising the risk of suicide for some. Depressive disorders also affect children and adolescents.

By aiming new medications at more direct molecular targets, such as NMDA or AMPA, scientists may be able to bypass some of the steps through which current antidepressants indirectly exert their effects – a roundabout route that accounts for the long time it takes for patients to begin feeling better with the conventional medications.

While ketamine appears to achieve this, it is an unlikely candidate to become a new treatment for depression, because of the side effects it can cause in humans, including hallucinations. It is approved as an anesthetic by the Food and Drug Administration at much higher doses than those given in the study, but its use is limited because it may cause hallucinations during recovery from anesthesia.

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Of course ketamine would be an absurd choice for routine antidepressant treatment--it is administered by injection, incapacitates an individual for a period of time, and often subjects an individual to horrific nightmares on emergence from the drug.

And yet if scientists and clinical researchers can learn from the effects of ketamine on the brain and on subsequent mental states, why not?

Ampakines are drugs under development by Cortex Pharmaceuticals (Amex: COR) that also affect the AMPA receptors. And like ketamine, some ampakines also have an antidepressant effect.

I suspect that we are due for a breakthrough in therapy for depression, given how long it has been since any significant progress has been made in that area of neuropharmaceutics. Looking at glutamate receptors in that regard can certainly not hurt. If we accidentally stumble across better therapies for Alzheimer's and other neurological conditions in the process, vive le serendipity!
;-)

Mass Producing Babies--Toward an Artificial Womb

There is a strong need for reliable artificial wombs in the developed world. Women are as deeply immersed in work and careers as men--not to mention just as vain about their appearance as men. They do not wish to sacrifice the time, and the wear and tear, that pregnancy and childbirth entails.

Teruo Fujii of the University of Tokyo in Japan and his colleagues are building a microfluidic chip to nurture the first stages of pregnancy. They hope, eventually, to create a fully automated artificial uterus in which egg and sperm are fed in at one end and an early embryo comes out the other, ready for implanting in a real mother. They say using such a device could improve the success rate of IVF.

.... Fujii’s team has created a “lab on a chip” that is 2 millimetres across and 0.5 millimetres high, in which up to 20 eggs can be fertilised and then grown until they are ready for implantation. Endometrial cells, which line real wombs, are also grown in the device, so that the chemicals they produce can reach the embryos and help them grow.

“We are providing the embryos with a much more comfortable environment, mimicking what happens in the body,” Fujii says.

Experiments in mice suggest that the chip is more successful than traditional IVF at producing embryos that will grow into healthy fetuses. Of 50 fertilised eggs grown on the chip, 30 developed into early embryos, compared to 26 out of 50 fertilised eggs grown through “microdrop” IVF. Here a drop of mineral oil is used to cover the fertilised egg and a small volume of culture fluid to stop the egg drying out. In a separate experiment, Fujii’s team implanted embryos grown on the chip into mice and found that 44 per cent of them developed into healthy fetuses, compared to 40 per cent of those grown in microdrops. “It’s not just about more embryos surviving to be implanted, they also seem to be doing better once they are implanted,” says Wheeler.

....For now the sperm and eggs are still prepared for fertilisation manually but the researchers are working towards automating those steps too. Wheeler’s team has already automated them, but has not compared his chip-grown embryos with ones produced by conventional IVF, nor grown endometrial cells on a chip. He suggests that combining his approach with Fujii’s might produce even better results.

The chip could also be used for growing genetically modified animals, stem cells and cloned embryos, he adds.

Source

For now, these chip-conceived embryos will be implanted into a living female host. Eventually, living wombs outside the bodies of females will receive the embryo implants. Further on, completely artificial wombs designed and grown for this purpose would act as recipients of embryos, and incubators for the developing fetus.

When the fertilisation process is automated, and the subsequent pregnancy takes place entirely in an artificial womb, pregnancy will be within the reach of anyone who possesses both sperm and egg--or anyone who can afford to buy them.

Sperm is successfully frozen and used years later. Egg freezing will eventually reach the same degree of reliability. Certainly embryos themselves can be frozen for years before being implanted. The entire process of fertilisation, pregnancy, and childbirth are being revolutionised before our eyes.

Eternal Mindshine of the Spotless Sun

We take the sun's light and heat for granted, particularly during the summer. But the sun's activity is cyclic. Today is the fifth day without a sunspot.

The 11 year long solar cycle is marked by two extremes, solar minimum and solar maximum. Solar minimum is the period of least solar activity in the solar cycle of the sun. During this time sunspot and solar flare activity diminishes, and often does not occur for days at a time.

When spots begin to appear on the sun once again, scientists know that the sun is heading into a new season of extreme solar activity. At the cycle's peak, solar maximum, the sun is continually peppered with spots, solar flares erupt, and the sun hurls billion-ton clouds of electrified gas into space.

Source

If you are interested in monitoring solar activity, check in with Solar Cycle 24.

Analysis of Solar Active Regions and Activity from 22/2100Z to 23/2100Z: Solar activity was very low. The visible disk remains spotless.

Solar Activity Forecast: Solar activity is expected to remain very low.

NASA scientists tell us that the solar conveyor, which helps determine solar activity, is expected to continue slowing--possibly triggering decades of sub-normal temperatures beginning around 2015 to 2020.

The Little Ice Age, from which we are still recovering, was thought to have been triggered by a solar minimum similar to the one we are expecting within the next decade or so. We need our Sunshine for warmth and food.

How ironic would it be for the sun to "fade" when oil supplies were beginning to plateau, and so many of the developed nations are firmly fixed in a politically correct prejudice against nuclear power? So many neotenates of pristine mind, who have never experienced hunger, cold, or deprivation. What in their experience could possibly have prepared them for the difficult decisions they will need to make?

Why, nothing at all. Which is why they will not be able to think the thing through, and make good decisions.

Simulated Childbirth--Quite Painless, Really

Medical and surgical simulators are becoming an indispensable part of the education process for physicians and nurses. Now birthing simulators are good enough to become an important part of a medical students' and midwife's curriculum.

"It gives us the opportunity to learn and practice but do no harm," said Dr. Kay Daniels, a clinical associate professor who trains students at Stanford University.

Interactive simulation robots first became popular in the 1990s after scientists developed them for anesthesiologists in training. They've since been designed for various types of medical training and even for veterinary students, who work on dog mannequins.

Unlike commercially available birth simulators, this one has a pelvis that mimics soft tissue which allows for better training in matters of maternal manipulation.

The fetal model is equipped with bioengineering instrumentation that allows measurement of the effect of clinician-applied force on the fetus. The nylon-lycra glove has pockets sewn into it to house force-sensors, which measure the traction in delivery. Wires emanating from the sensors are connected to a computer-based data-acquisition system that stores and then processes the data on a laptop.

Video.

From an earlier story.

High quality simulators and virtual reality training scenarios make it more likely that the University of Phoenix or another clever educational entrepreneur will soon offer credible medical training online, including all pre-clinical and quasi-clinical content.

Dangerous Ideas--Bring Them On!

What are some of the dangerous ideas that you are afraid may be true? You are so afraid that these things may be true that you are willing to suppress them--stamp them out?

In modern intellectual circles, there are many such "dangerous ideas."

Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?

Were the events in the Bible fictitious -- not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires?

Has the state of the environment improved in the last 50 years?

Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?

Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?

Do men have an innate tendency to rape?

Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy and morally driven?

Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?

Do African-American men have higher levels of testosterone, on average, than white men?

Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?

Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?

Is homosexuality the symptom of an infectious disease?

Would it be consistent with our moral principles to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?

Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?

Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?

Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?

Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?

Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?

Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?

Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?

Should people have the right to clone themselves, or enhance the genetic traits of their children?

....Though academics owe the extraordinary perquisite of tenure to the ideal of encouraging free inquiry and the evaluation of unpopular ideas, all too often academics are the first to try to quash them. The most famous recent example is the outburst of fury and disinformation that resulted when Harvard president Lawrence Summers gave a measured analysis of the multiple causes of women's underrepresentation in science and math departments in elite universities and tentatively broached the possibility that discrimination and hidden barriers were not the only cause.

But intolerance of unpopular ideas among academics is an old story. Books like Morton Hunt's The New Know-Nothings and Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate's The Shadow University have depressingly shown that universities cannot be counted on to defend the rights of their own heretics and that it's often the court system or the press that has to drag them into policies of tolerance. In government, the intolerance is even more frightening, because the ideas considered there are not just matters of intellectual sport but have immediate and sweeping consequences.

More at Source

Pinker is quite right about that last part. Academics will defend their own dogma all the way to the death of free inquiry. Such academic and societal intolerance dates back to Socrates and beyond.

Universities as mental cookie cutters? Perhaps that is not so unusual, historically. What is unusual, perhaps, is that so many children are pushed toward a university education, without a careful analysis of the intellectually stifling atmosphere on campus toward free inquiry. For that, parents come in for most of the blame.

The modern social sciences, ethnic and women's studies, language studies, political sciences, and liberal arts departments are the academic areas most likely to be supremely brittle in terms of dealing with dangerous ideas. The university is rife with "insider mentality," bent on exclusion of the "other," the dangerous idea.

Given the western leanings toward freedom of expression and inquiry, combined with an ascendancy of scientific research and technological innovation, the ingredients for conflict are present in large portions.

Do You Know What it Means to "Beg the Question?"

Am I the only person who is getting tired of people using the term "begs the question" when what they actually mean is "invites the question?" It is the type of breaking down of the language of logical reasoning that typifies the practice of academic lobotomy for psychological neotenates that is so prominent in university classrooms.

Here is what "begging the question" actually means:

Begging the Question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true. This sort of "reasoning" typically has the following form.

1. Premises in which the truth of the conclusion is claimed or the truth of the conclusion is assumed (either directly or indirectly).
2. Claim C (the conclusion) is true.

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because simply assuming that the conclusion is true (directly or indirectly) in the premises does not constitute evidence for that conclusion. Obviously, simply assuming a claim is true does not serve as evidence for that claim. This is especially clear in particularly blatant cases: "X is true. The evidence for this claim is that X is true."

Source

Wikipedia has a short discussion of this issue on this page.

Even professional writers, who certainly should know better, are guilty of misusing this phrase. But doing so telegraphs a logical illiteracy that shouts "uneductated!" to persons better trained in verbal logic.

So if you find yourself guilty of this misuse, consider using the term "invites the question" next time you are tempted to perpetuate the error. And learn what "begging the question" really means. You can certainly surprise the hell out of a lot of logical illiterates--perhaps your professor--if you do.

The Utopian Delusion--Wishful Thinking for Academically Lobotomised Neotenates

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream. Nathaniel Hawthorne

Source

During the early 1990s, it was fashionable in the west to declare "the end of history." Now that Eastern Europe had been liberated from its oppressive autocratic yoke of tyranny, many western academics and intellectuals believed that liberal democracy would continue to spread, to topple the fortresses of autocracy scattered thickly across the globe. Alas. The future they imagined was not to be.

The assumption that the death of communism would bring an end to disagreements about the proper form of government and society seemed more plausible in the 1990s, when both Russia and China were thought to be moving toward political as well as economic liberalism. Such a development would have produced a remarkable ideological convergence among all the great powers of the world and heralded a genuinely new era in human development.

But those expectations have proved misplaced. China has not liberalized but has shored up its autocratic government. Russia has turned away from imperfect liberalism decisively toward autocracy. Of the world 's great powers today, therefore, two of the largest, with over a billion and a half people, have governments that are committed to autocratic rule and seem to have the ability to sustain themselves in power for the foreseeable future with apparent popular approval.

Today the competition between them, along with the struggle of radical Islamists to make the world safe for their vision of Islamic theocracy, has become a defining feature of the international scene.

The differences between the two camps appear on many issues of lesser strategic importance -- China's willingness to provide economic and political support to certain African dictatorships that liberal governments in Europe and the United States find odious, for instance. But they are also shaping international relations at a more fundamental level. Contrary to expectations at the end of the Cold War, the question of "regime" or "polity" is once again becoming a main subject of international relations.

...Neither Russia nor China has any interest in assisting liberal nations in their crusade against autocracies around the world. Moreover, they can see their comparative advantage over the West when it comes to gaining influence with African, Asian, or Latin American governments that can provide access to oil and other vital natural resources or that, in the case of Burma, are strategically located. Moscow knows it can have more influence with governments in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan because, unlike the liberal West, it can unreservedly support their regimes. And the more autocracies there are in the world, the less isolated Beijing and Moscow will be in international forums such as the United Nations. The more dictatorships there are, the more global resistance they will offer against the liberal West 's efforts to place limits on sovereignty in the interest of advancing liberalism.

The general effect of the rise of these two large autocratic powers, therefore, will be to increase the likelihood that autocracy will spread in some parts of the world. This is not because Russia and China are evangelists for autocracy or want to set off a worldwide autocratic revolution. It is not the Cold War redux. It is more like the nineteenth century redux. Then, the absolutist rulers of Russia and Austria shored up fellow autocracies -- in France, for instance -- and used force to suppress liberal movements in Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain.

....It is no longer possible to speak of an "international community." The term suggests agreement on international norms of behavior, an international morality, even an international conscience. The idea of such a community took hold in the 1990s, at a time when the general assumption was that the movement of Russia and China toward western liberalism was producing a global commonality of thinking about human affairs. But by the late 1990s it was already clear that the international community lacked a foundation of common understanding. This was exposed most blatantly in the war over Kosovo, which divided the liberal West from both Russia and China and from many other non-European nations. Today it is apparent on the issue of Sudan and Darfur. In the future, incidents that expose the hollowness of the term "international community" will likely proliferate.

....Today there is little sense of shared morality and common political principle among the great powers. Quite the contrary: There is suspicion, growing hostility, and the well-grounded view on the part of the autocracies that the democracies, whatever they say, would welcome their overthrow. Any concert among them would be built on a shaky foundation likely to collapse at the first serious test.

American foreign policy should be attuned to these ideological distinctions and recognize their relevance to the most important strategic questions. It is folly to expect China to help undermine a brutal regime in Khartoum or to be surprised if Russia rattles its saber at pro-Western democratic governments near its borders.

....The United States should express support for democracy in word and deed without expecting immediate success. It should support the development of liberal institutions and practices, understanding that elections alone do not guarantee a steady liberal democratic course.


....Today radical Islamists are the last holdout against these powerful forces of globalization and modernization. They seek to carve out a part of the world where they can be left alone, shielded from what they regard as the soul-destroying licentiousness of unchecked liberalism and capitalism. The tragedy for them is that their goal is impossible to achieve. Neither the United States nor the other great powers will turn over control of the Middle East to these fundamentalist forces, if only because the region is of such vital strategic importance to the rest of the world. The outside powers have strong internal allies as well, including the majority of the populations of the Middle East who have been willing and even eager to make peace with modernity. Nor is it conceivable in this modern world that a people can wall themselves off from modernity even if the majority wanted to. Could the great Islamic theocracy that al Qaeda and others hope to erect ever completely block out the sights and sounds of the rest of the world and thereby shield their people from the temptations of modernity? The mullahs have not even succeeded at doing that in Iran. The project is fantastic.

The world is thus faced with the prospect of a protracted struggle in which the goals of the extreme Islamists can never be satisfied because neither the United States nor anyone else has the ability to give them what they want. The West is quite simply not capable of retreating as far as the Islamic extremists require.

If retreat is impossible, perhaps the best course is to advance. Of the many bad options in confronting this immensely dangerous problem, the best may be to hasten the process of modernization in the Islamic world: more modernization, more globalization, faster.

....In the 1990s serious thinkers predicted the end of wars and military confrontations among great powers. European "postmodernism" seemed to be the future: the abandonment of power politics in favor of international institutions capable of managing the disagreements among nations.


...Perhaps it was these grand expectations of a new era for humankind that helped spur the anger and outrage at American policies of the past decade. It is not that those policies are in themselves so different, or in any way out of character for the United States. It is that to many people in Europe and even in the United States, they have seemed jarringly out of place in a world that was supposed to have moved on.

As we now know, however, both nationalism and ideology were already making their comeback in the 1990s. Russia had ceased to be and no longer desired to be a "quasi-member" of the West, and partly because of NATO enlargement. China was already on its present trajectory and had already determined that American hegemony was a threat to its ambitions. The forces of radical Islam had already begun their jihad, globalization had already caused a backlash around the world, and the juggernaut of democracy had already stalled and begun to tip precariously.

Much more at the Source

Most people have come to realise that the forces of history continued unabated, undiminished throughout the 1990s to the present day. But the temptation remains to declare that the natural state of humanity is a harmonious community of nations with common aims and goals.

It is almost irresistibly tempting to blame the imperfect state of the world on a single person, a group of persons, or an entire nation. Without this person, these people, the world would revert to its natural perfection and harmony.

That is the delusion of utopia, in the service of petty politics in the mind of a lobotomised neotenate.

Iran's Ahmadinejad Finds Himself A Bit Overextended

Iran's provocative president is finding it difficult to pay for his long wish list. Ahmadinejad wants to be the Middle East's biggest of big men, but he has not done well with his domestic economy.

According to the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), monthly inflation rates since January 2006 have varied between 2.8 and 3.2 percentage points, making for an annual rate that could reach the 30 per cent mark next year. Theoretically, in an oil-based economy the government has a built-in interest in inflation. The problem, however, is that Ahmadinejad has presided over a massive increase in public expenditure. Part of this is due to an estimated 21 per cent rise in the budgets of military and security services in preparation for a war with the United States.

....Ahmadinejad has also increased expenditure on his so-called “exporting the revolution” programme. Syria has received almost $3 billion in cash and cut-price oil. The Lebanese branch of Hezbollah has been rewarded with $1.8 billion while the Palestinian Hamas movement has collected almost $1 billion. A further $3 billion has been spent on financing anti-US political and armed groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The government has also made provisions worth $4 billion to cope with emergencies in its quest to dominate Iraq in case the Americans run away.

....Fears that the nation’s economy may be heading for the rocks prompted 57 of Iran’s best-known economists to publish an open letter to Ahmadinejad, warning that his policies were making for disaster. The letter, circulated and widely discussed throughout the country, forced Ahamdinejad to invite the signatories to a debate.

In the event, some 40 economists turned up but there was no debate. Instead, Ahmadinejad treated them to a gallimaufry in which obscurantist religious beliefs were mixed with half-understood economic concepts. He told the critics that his administration feared no economic meltdown for two reasons. The first was that the “Hidden Imam” would not abandon “the world’s only truly Islamic regime,” at a time it faced a war with the American “Great Satan.” The second was that the government was launching a massive privatisation programme to raise billions of cash.

Source

Unfortunately for the common Iranian, Ahmadinejads "privatisation plan" is eerily reminiscent of Vladimir Putin's privatisation plan in Russia--a corrupt "giveaway to presidential cronies" at the expense of the public.

One is forced to wonder what the mullah-kings of Iran think about the upstart president's plan. Their high living style depends upon the profits of state-owned enterprises. If Ahmadinejad sells some of the more profitable businesses to his friends, that would represent a significant shift in power for the Islamic Revolutionary state.

30% annual inflation will not destroy the government, but it will not make it more popular with common Iranians on fixed incomes. With popular dissent steadily increasing, the clumsy and corrupt handling of Iran's economy may make for more interesting domestic times than Ahmadinejad is planning for.

Carnival of Space #12 and Water in Space

The Carnival of Space #12 is hosted at Music of the Spheres blog. I have been quite impressed at the high caliber of postings that have been consistently appearing on the COS.

Centauri Dreams blog has an intriguing post on the possibility that the Kuiper Belt objects may possess more liquid water than all the water on Earth.

Wherever humans go, they will need a reliable source of water--for drinking, for making fuel, for making oxygen to breathe, and for crops--even if grown aeroponically--the most efficient means of growing crops known, water-wise.

If the lunar pole craters contain water, that would make the moon a good staging area for further advance--given its lower gravity than Earth's. If Mars contains as much water as expected, then that planet would be a good staging area for the asteroid belt and the gas giant moons. If the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud are as rich as it appears they may be, they would be a good staging area for going beyond the solar system to the neighboring star systems.

Humans need to learn to live in extra-terrestrial environments, sustainably. While we can take excellent care of our home planet, we will never be perfectly safe from existential risks. So while we continue to make this planet safer and cleaner, we must also make our move outward.

TV Host Avi Lewis Receives a Much Deserved Humiliating Spanking from Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Hirsi Ali is a refugee from Islam who is grateful to be living in freedom. Avi Lewis is an unintelligent television host who plainly cannot hold his own with someone of Hirsi Ali's caliber.

Lewis must still be applying the diaper rash balm after receiving this "pants-down spanking" from the erudite but plain speaking Ali. The thrashing must have been ten times more painful for Hirsi Ali's soft-spoken and gently smiling delivery.


Avi, you total fucking moron. Do you even have the wits to realise when you are outclassed?

Husbands for Rent: Not a Gigolo Service

What do you do when your "Honey-do" list is long, but your honey doesn't have the time or the skills to do what needs doing? You rent a husband.

The Husbands for Rent handyman service is available to perform all those little and big jobs around the house like putting dry wall or plumbing kitchen and bathrooms.

Owner Anthony Storelli’s crew of husbands is currently rehabbing a house that realtor Margaret Zecher will then sell. Zecher, who is single, first hired the company work at her own house.

"I love it! I know I can call Husbands for Rent and they will be there within 24 to 48 hours and the job will be done," she said

Storelli said no job is too big or too small and their clientele runs the gamut.

Source

This concept seems to be catching on across the continent--in fact it is being franchised extensively.

Todd Recknagel, brand president of Mr. Handyman, headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, announced the opening of the 250th Mr. Handyman franchise unit.

"We're celebrating this milestone because it validates the market opportunity, our franchise model, and the passion that's shared by our entire Mr. Handyman team," said Recknagel.

According to the U. S. Census Bureau, six out of ten homeowners have home improvement to do's, and most Americans have an eye on seven or more projects at any given time. For millions of homeowners, tending to these nagging repairs while balancing work and family has created a thriving demand for professional, reliable and reasonable home-repair services.

The Mr. Handyman concept is squarely positioned to capitalize on this critical market need and is recognized as one of America's fastest-growing, service-oriented franchise systems. Entrepreneur magazine ranked Mr. Handyman the #1 handyman service in their January 2007, issue.

Source

The question of whether men across North America are becoming "less handy" was tossed around here.

Are men getting less capable when it comes to traditional male skills? We’ve debated about outsourcing household chores before on the Juggle. In this case, I’m talking about traditional “dad” tasks, such as replacing a light switch or resodding the lawn.

...Readers, have you noticed a decline in the level of handiness? If so, why do you think it’s happening? Alternatively, do you see more women handling these tasks, or are these chores getting outsourced to professionals?

More at the Source, including fascinating comments

In modern day North America, society stresses university education and professional level jobs, but rarely do we see the important message that "it is good to be handy." No matter how high your salary, if you are employed by someone else, you can be fired or laid off. While you are "between jobs" it might be nice if you could deal with unexpected expenses, rather than having to dip into your savings time and again.

On a recent trip to a region where I once lived, I found myself helping a friend remodel a rental property, helping with landscaping at another place, and doing several household repairs for another friend. There is something satisfying about being of use, when you are not particularly expected to be.

Personally, I think men are becoming less handy, overall. It goes along with the trends toward narcissism, psychological neoteny, and academic lobotomy--for the university educated.

I suspect that much of the problem with drug addiction, depression, and illegal immigration, derives from the unholy trio of incompetent helplessness mentioned above. Remember--if you are a worthless incompetent fool, you are not supposed to feel good about yourself.
;-)

We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

Many people own luxury yachts and houseboats, but very few people own luxury submarines for living aboard. That is the way the world's militaries would like it to remain, but times are changing nonetheless.

US Submarines builds a variety of civilian subs for many purposes. Their most luxurious sub, priced at US $80 million, is the Phoenix 1000. Now that is a sub that almost anyone could live aboard. US Subs Seattle 1000 is smaller, costing only US$20 million.

The Integrity Subs model 68 also provides comfortable living conditions for a far lower cost, around US$ 5 million. Operational depth and range are more restricted than with the US Subs luxury submersible, however.

As the world sees more billionaires--particularly ones with a sense of adventure intact--you can expect to see them trying to outdo each other in adventure and luxury. This will take them places most people never go, such as the underseas, the high atmosphere, and into outer space.

Here is an interesting description of a US Submarines design for an "ambient pressure undersea habitat." Such habitats would not require special breathing gases nor decompression time. They would have to be designed differently than typical undersea habitats up until now, but the advantage of allowing untrained personnel to inhabit them would no doubt draw a large tourist crowd.

The undersea world contains many riches. Not nearly as many as the asteroid belt and the rest of the solar system, but then the undersea world is more accessible. It is likely that some of the billionaires who approach the submarine world as a novelty, may decide to invest there more seriously.

Generation Seed Ships for Colonising Space

Unless science discovers a workable faster than light drive in the next century or two, it is likely that humans will attempt to launch generation ships to cross the interstellar gulf between star systems. On a generation ship, a voyage between star systems may take several millenia. For the many generations growing up, living, and dying aboard these ships, the destination becomes secondary to the journey itself.

Centauri Dreams blog discusses this issue, using a Michael Anissimov posting as a launch pad:

Noting Marshall Savage’s projection that the asteroid belt could theoretically house 7,500 trillion people if exploited in its entirety (this is drawn from the latter’s The Millennial Project), Anissimov goes on to ponder the motivations for space exploration itself. Here’s one relevant bit:

Why expand into space? For many, the answers are blatantly obvious, but the easiest is that the alternatives are limiting the human freedom to reproduce, or mass murder, both of which are morally unacceptable. Population growth is not inherently antithetical to a love of the environment - in fact, by expanding outwards into the cosmos in all directions, we’ll be able to seed every star system with every species of plant and animal imaginable. The genetic diversity of the embryonic home planet will seem tiny by comparison.

That is a very good point.Our very own solar system possesses resources that would allow humans to build a prolific base of operations for launching into the interstellar spaces. The best way to go beyond the asteroid belt and the Oort/Kuiper regions, is to build a sustainable/expandable infrastructure in those very regions first.

The best raw material for a generation ship is an asteroid or comet. The inertia/mass would be large for initial acceleration out of the system, but the raw materials would be indispensable for the long voyage outward. Tunneling into the interior of the asteroid/comet provides a protected living and working environment. Aeroponics would provide a good method of growing crops. Nuclear energy would be the most logical method of propulsion and energy supply--fusion if available.

Here is more on:

Colony Ships

Interstellar Travel

Space Colonisation

And why the surface of a planet may not be the best place for humans to evolve further.

For more mind expanding thoughts on expanding human existence, check out the latest postings at Accelerating Future and Advanced Nanotechnology blogs. Both Michael and Brian have posted some extraordinarily thoughtful posts recently.

Climate of Fear: Exposed on CNN

Interesting look at Al Gore and the rest of the climate debate. Actually, it's far wider in scope and more interesting than Al Gore, but you can judge for yourself.

When Al Gore was Vice President of the US, he said the US would never ratify Kyoto until [China and India] were required to follow Kyoto mandates. Conveniently, he has forgotten that truth. But other people have not forgotten, nor have they forgotten that Bill Clinton never sent the Kyoto accord to the US Senate for ratification. Yes, that's right. Clinton signed the paper, but never sent it on to be ratified. What was up with that empty gesture?