Resource Scarcity vs. Human Ingenuity

Humans have been quite adept at finding solutions to the problem of scarce natural resources: finding more abundant substitutes for various natural resources, exploration for and discovery of new reserves, recovery and recycling of materials, and, perhaps most importantly, the development of new technologies that economize on scarce natural resources or that allow the use of resources that were previously uneconomical. _Krautkraemer2005PDF

Predictions of resource scarcity and accompanying doom have become common among late 20th and early 21st century pseudo-intelligentsia. And yet predictions of doom with fixed due dates invariably fail.

In 1980, Julian Simon, the recently deceased economist and author of The Ultimate Resource, offered to environmentalists a wager based on his assertion that the price of any raw material would indefinitely decline on a future date. The wager was taken up by Paul Ehrlich, author of the best- selling 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," which predicted that during the 1970s "the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death...

"In October 1980, Ehrilch and Simon drew up a futures contract obligating Simon to sell Ehrlich the same quantities which could be purchased for $1,000 of five metals (copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten) ten years later as 1980 prices," writes Ronald Bailey in his book EcoScam. "If the combined prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon. Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07 in October 1990." During the 1980s the combined prices of the metals selected by Ehrlich declined by over 50 percent. Simon easily won because he knew that the supply for resources was not becoming more scarce but more abundant, since the economic history of predominantly free capitalist nations had demonstrated how the prices of most major commodities have declined over time.

While Simon was proven correct, Ehrlich went on to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant -- based on his career of fantastic apocalyptic predictions that never came true. _Capmag

Human ingenuity in the face of resource scarcity is an old story, dating back many tens of thousands of years, at least. A fascinating ongoing chapter in this story involves a fantastic new field of chemistry that is enticingly close to "alchemy":

According to the authors of the paper, it is possible to mimic certain properties of precious metals as platinum and palladium using combinations of far more mundane materials. And that opens up the prospect of replacing expensive strategic metals in many industrial applications by much cheaper alternatives.


...Now the team is working its way across the big central block of the Periodic Table, consisting of so-called transition metals from scandium – used in aerospace alloys – to gold. Their aim is to discover other superatoms, and to gauge the extent of their similarities to standard atoms.


Not surprisingly in view of the commercial implications of success, the Penn State team is not alone in its quest. Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University recently announced that a cluster of eight caesium atoms plus a vanadium atom mimic the magnetic strength of manganese. The research team has also predicted that superatoms of gold and manganese will be magnetic while not conducting electricity – a combination making them useful in some biomedical applications.


Such discoveries suggest we are witnessing the birth of a whole new branch of chemistry, and one that could not have arrived at a better time – for many critical technologies are crying out for a breakthrough in material science. _TheNational

Julian Simon's book, "The Ultimate Resource 2:People, Materials, and Environment" is free online and worth a look.

A look at "The Ingenuity Gap"

China's Economy: More Bubbles Than Lawrence Welk

China needs to depend more on improved efficiency for growth. But instead, the recent trend seems to be going the other way. Rising costs and weak demand are making manufacturing less profitable. Hence, capital investment is weak, as reflected in weak equipment import data.

Most local governments seem to embrace property development as a growth savior. But shifting surplus capital into property is likely to lower future growth by decreasing average capital efficiency. This deters consumption development by increasing property expenditure expectations, and threatens financial stability by increasing loan levels, using overvalued land as collateral.

...Xie says that China’s growth model is unsustainable because it produces what I would call a Latin American style distribution of income where the middle class is quite small. These comments echo thoughts from former Xie’s Morgan Stanley colleague Stephen Roach, who sees an economic safety net as critical to increasing domestic demand and forming the middle class of which Xie speaks.


Bottom line, China’s economy is a bubble economy right now. And bubbles do not deflate; they pop. _SeekingAlpha

...China’s educational system, despite all the money it receives, remains inappropriate for a modern society. Hu Jintao, China’s leader since 2002, has been reinvigorating Marxist education and reinforcing orthodoxy. That’s great, but only if you want to know what Engels or Mao thought about the value of labor or why the Communist Party must maintain a monopoly on power.


...Today, the failure to properly assess the output of small business is resulting in an overestimation of GDP because these enterprises, which tend to be more dependent on exports, are suffering more than the larger ones.

...Economic reform has stalled because China has progressed about as far as it can within its existing political framework.

Further economic reform would threaten the power of the Communist Party, so the Party will not sponsor much more change.

A true market economy, for example, requires the rule of law, which in turn requires “institutional curbs” on government. Because these two limitations on power are incompatible with the Party’s ambitions to continue to dominate society, China cannot make much progress toward them, at least as long as the Communist Party is around.

... _Forbes (Gordon Chang)_via_BrianWang

 Another skeptical look at China's economy

China's economy has prospered based upon several unsustainable factors. Among them are very low wages, foreign investment on a monumental scale, a huge export market, the willingness to ignore environmental quality in favour of all-out industrial expansion, the iron discipline of the party maintaining a national sweat-shop imbalance of power, relatively low energy costs (up until 2008), etc. Foreign companies continue to invest many billions into Chinese projects, but China's tendency to steal technology from business partners is becoming annoying to some badly burned corporations.

The situation (of technology theft, piracy, and nationalisation) is not nearly so bad in China as in Russia and other parts of the kleptocratic third world, but that could change quickly.

Top down, command economies are unsustainable in the long run. Without huge outside investment, China would not have grown even 1/10th the rate it has grown. If outside investment flees China for one reason or another, we will see just how unsustainable the CCP dictatorship truly is.

The current bubbles in commodities and real estate will reveal the brittleness of China's economy, when they burst. That will have most unfortunate repercussions.

Government vs Private Economy: Ongoing Saga

...the modern-day path to the middle-class runs through the government, and government can only create so many jobs. SeekingAlpha

you need to understand that government cannot expand indefinitely--at some point, the people paying into the system (i.e., the private sector) will be unable to support the number of people deriving a direct salary from taxpayer dollars (i.e., government workers). If government directly or indirectly created most of the jobs in the last decade, where is the private sector growth that will sustain these new jobs?

...It used to be that a union job was the ticket to the middle class; however, union membership has been declining, except in the government sector, where many government employees have demanded and received substantial benefits unavailable to the general public (e.g., pensions, lifetime medical care, etc.). It's not surprising that unions have been losing members--as manufacturing declined, so did union membership. These days, unions tend to focus on low-level service workers, like hotel staff and janitorial workers, to fill their membership rosters.

Janitorial work, now increasingly linked to a union, has become a better ticket to the middle class than many other available non-union jobs.

...Meanwhile, public employees--government lawyers, teachers, prison guards, police, etc.--have kept their eyes on more serious issues. Although the rights and wages of an average private sector workers have been declining for decades, government workers received generous pay raises and pensions. According to Steve Malanga, "A study...by the Employee Benefit Research Institute estimated that the average public sector worker earns 46% more in total compensation than his counterpart in the private sector, largely because government employers spend 60% more per worker on benefits than counterparts in the private sector." In addition, according to the BLS, approximately 36% of government workers are represented by unions vs. 7% for non-government employees. Government workers were also nearly five times more likely to belong to a union than were private sector employees. As they say, membership has its benefits. SA

As long as government employees can vote, and as long as government employees are likely to vote for an ever-growing government, the government will keep growing at the expense of the private, productive sector.

Of course it is unsustainable. Naturally, it is irrational and doomed to catastrophic failure. And yet, the US elected the Obama - Pelosi administration with the full knowledge that something like this could very well happen.

Too late to take it back, America. You have chosen the path to the next civil war.

Portrait in Duct Tape Competence

A group of fishermen chartered a plane into the Alaskan wilderness. They left a cooler full of fish and bait on the seat of the plane. While they were gone, a bear caught the scent, and clawed its way to the fish inside. Needless to say, the airplane was in no condition for flying back home.
But the plane's radio still worked, so the pilot radioed for help. Another pilot flew in 2 new tires, 3 full cases of duct tape, and some plastic sheeting.

After a bit of creative taping, the pilot was able to fly the plane home, where a more permanent repair could be performed.

Story via ImpactLab

Whose idea was it to store fish inside a plane in the middle of bear country? No matter. All's well that ends well. Competence in duct tape -- plus a few other odds and ends -- might get you out of a tough spot.

New Robotic Companion Does It All

A company called True Companion is displaying a companion robot named Roxxxy at the Adult Entertainmnet Expo in Las Vegas.   Roxxxy was designed by Douglas Hines, an expert in artificial intelligence who formerly worked for Bell Labs. 

She stands (with assistance) 5' 7" and weighs 120 pounds.   And ... she can talk!   According to her inventor, Hines, she can talk about anything a person is interested in.    She has wireless access to the internet, so that once she learns what her significant other is interested in, she can do a bit of research on the side.

Depending on your mood, you can assign the robot different personalities such as Frigid Farrah or Mature Martha, who will respond differently based on the personality you choose. For example, if you hold Mature Martha’s hand, she may say “I love holding hands,” whereas if you touch Frigid Farrah she may say “What are you going to do with that hand?” _Voxy

True Companion has plans to create a male companion, called Rocky. The question of whether Rocky is capable of knocking out his significant other every time a bell rings, was not discussed by company officials.

The initial concept for the current sex robot began with a conversation several years ago. A friend and Douglas Hines were remembering a dear friend who passed away [inside Tower 1 at the World Trade Center on 9/11 - Ed.]. Douglas thought that it was sad to not be able to ever talk to him again. He said “wouldn't it be great if I could create a robot with artificial intelligence and have it hold someone's personality and preferences - this way, we could talk to the robotic version of that person and ask it questions whenever we wanted?" We thought it was a great idea though we both agreed that it would be a very big undertaking. _Dscriber

Al Fin cognitive scientists have been quoted as saying that Roxxxy is not likely to be intelligent enough to take out to a nice restaurant. Maybe Taco Bell, but nothing classy or expensive. Al Fin writers have been quoted as saying that the story about 9/11 inspiring a sex robot is hokey to the point of questioning the mental integrity of the person telling the story. Al Fin social coordinators have jokingly remarked that True Companion is the first company that can offer true computer dating.

More at PC World

Roxxxy will be sold in a price range between $7,000 and $9,000.

Cross-posted to Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!

Well, Dam the Arctic Ocean Anyway!

Okay, not the entire Arctic Ocean. Just build a dam across the Bering Strait. If you do that, you can control the climate of the entire Arctic! Once you have the dam, you can either make the Arctic colder -- or make it so warm that the ice cap melts and the Greenland ice sheets begin melting in earnest.

Back in the cold, icy 1950s and 1960s, Soviet climatologists were told to devise a plan for melting the Arctic ice cap. They came up with several ideas, including damming the Bering Strait and pumping cold Arctic water out into the Pacific, drawing warm Atlantic water into the Arctic.

But now in the 21st century, climatologists are oriented toward preserving the Arctic ice cap and the Greenland ice sheets. Here is a proposal involving the damming of the Bering Strait, in order to save the Arctic ice cap (see PDF report at bottom). (via Global Warming)

A recent modeling study at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) supports the idea that the Bering Strait has been at the center of significant climate changes -- most recently at the end of the last glaciation.

The computer simulations showed that North America and Eurasia warmed significantly during the times when the Bering Strait was open, with the tropical and subtropical Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as Antarctica, warming slightly. _Physorg

Remember that at least twice during the most recent glaciation, sea levels were low enough to create a land bridge across the Bering Strait. This allowed the migration of Siberian tribesmen (and perhaps other groups) across the strait from Asia into North America.  Here is a scientific examination of the effect of the Bering Strait -- open vs. closed -- on the Arctic climate.

Intentional damming the Bering Strait is an example of geoengineering. Fear over the prospects of catastrophic global warming has spawned a variety of ideas for geoengineering the planet. Here are 10 (via WattsUPWithThat):

10. Ocean Iron Fertilization


“Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age” ~John Martin, discoverer of the Ocean Iron Fertilization Idea.


Introduce iron into the ocean’s upper layer and increase the amount of phytoplankton (plant plankton) in the ocean. This in turn will increase the amount of food for ocean life, strengthen the ecosystem and most importantly, take in CO2 and release oxygen. The problem however, is not just the process but the scale on which it has to be done to make an impact.


9. Cloud Reflectivity Enhancement


Making clouds whiter. How? Apparently the “viable plan” by Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh is to have 1500 special ships known as Flettner ships to spray ocean water into the atmosphere. The ocean spray would work within a concept known as the Twomey Effect.


8. Scatterers – Stratospheric Sulfate Aerosols


Release microparticles into the atmosphere at the rate of 1 million metric tons a year through the use of jumbo jets and military artillery. The idea is to reflect some of the sunlight entering our atmosphere, thus reducing warming effects and helping us keep nice and cool.


7. Sun-blocking Space Crafts


Some people have been watching way too many movies; Stephen Schneider of Stanford University to be precise. He suggests building 60,000 shiny space crafts and putting them into orbit. This is yet another proposed process to avert some of the sun’s rays (10% to be exact) and cool the earth. Cost: $100 billion a year.


6. The CO2 Scrubber


Like the concept of terraforming was introduced in the movie Total Recall, the idea here is to create 250,000 C02 scrubbers and deploy them around the world. The greenhouse gases would be stored underground and used to fuel industries.


5. Artificial Trees


The concept of building artificial trees around the world and allowing them to filter out the carbon monoxide is just the ticket.


4. The Sulfur Dioxide Hose


The idea is to loft baloons into the air and have them just floating around. The huge balloons would have several air hoses attached to them that would spray sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere creating a nice red hue at sunset.


The technology is available right now and could be readily deployed.


3. Space Frisbees to Save Earth


The idea has been proposed to shoot millions of reflective disks into orbit around the Earth. We’re talking in the neighborhood of 80,000 discs per minute over the course of years. Hasbro, an American Toy maker, is firmly behind this idea, as are skeet shooting clubs around the world.




2. The Volcano Idea


To create manmade volcanoes and use them to spew forth enough particles to help cool the Earth: This is an ongoing project by the British Royal Society that would require an eruption every few months for the rest of our time here on Earth or at least until we can figure out how to reduce our emissions and clean up what we’ve already done.


1. The “Farting Tank” for Cows


Though this isn’t strictly Geo-engineering, Scientists figure that one steak dinner for a family of four equals the same amount of greenhouse gas emission as a long drive in a SUV. The thought is to either figure out a way to reduce the methane production of cattle or reduce the amount of cattle being herded. One proposed way to reduce the gas production of cattle is to feed them garlic. Another is to attach plastic tanks to the cow to encapsulate its farts. _TotallyTop10

Yes, the writers at TotallyTop10 were attempting to be humorous, at least in part. But the 10 ideas presented have likely involved hundreds of scientists, and many millions of dollars in grant money. Some of the projects listed would cost $billions to implement, if not more.

When taxpayers sit down to write the check for the actual project, the time for asking themselves "is all this really necessary?" may have long passed. Al Fin climatologists suggests that taxpayers not wait to study the issue for themselves.

Small Steps Toward the Next Level

To reach the next level, humans need to make significant progress on many fronts. Humans need to become more intelligent (and wise), they need to learn to live much longer (and wiser) lives, and they need to learn to survive outside the benign surface of home planet Earth.

While we are working on becoming more intelligent -- and long thereafter -- we will probably need the assistance of intelligent machines. Currently, the memristor approach is seen by Al Fin cognitive scientists as the best approach to machine intelligence. Here is an update on the best current idea for building a machine intelligence PDF (via Brian Wang)


How to save rocket fuel for orbital launches: start high

Here is an exciting method for genetic modification of stem cells (and other cells).
This technique may eventually prove very useful for improving the genetic complement of stem cells used for growing new organs -- not to mention the gradual, over the decades, cell by cell replacement of organs such as liver, lung, heart, kidney, and brain. Cell by cell replacement over time utilises the pre-existing scaffold structure in place.

Advances in molecular manufacturing could put an end to scarcity,  and open up all of the world's real estate to comfortable, prosperous, sustainable living.  Say good-bye to kleptocrats, community organizers, investment bankers, bureaucrats, and most lawyers.

Having sex twice a night may help us avoid heart attacks and live longer.
[voice from next room]"Al! The article talks about having sex twice a week, not twice a night!"

[AF] "Oh, sorry.  My mistake." ;-)


Longer-lived people tend to collect more experiences and gain a broader perspective, than freshly hatched chicklings of 70 or 80 years.  Imagine living 500 years, but feeling as strong and vital as a 25 year old.  Imagine having the mind of a brilliant and creative scientist, and not having to worry about your brilliance fading for hundreds more years.  Consider having the resources of the entire solar system (and beyond) to work with.

Normal humans dislike limits.  They particularly dislike the arbitrary limits placed upon them by a corrupt , vampirish political class.  Some settling of contents may occur before opening.

Tea Leaves and Crystal Balls

US Employment May Never Recover

US Lost 1 Million Workers in November - December 09

US Employment Collapsing Toward Historical Lows

Next Real Estate Bust

ClimateGate scandal reveals urgent need for transparency and integrity in science

US Government and Media Merge Strengths in Holy Wedlock

Unemployment has now become a leading economic indicator -- just as Al Fin predicted a year ago. Unemployment drives mortgage defaults which drive bank failures which drive lower credit, lending, and economic startups down, down, down.

Best bets for employment at this time include the federal government and elite financial organisations such as Goldman Sachs. Fox News also seems to be doing fairly well, as the only network willing to point out a few of the many weaknesses of the reigning US reich.

Remember: Social Justice doesn't mean that anyone does well. Social Justice simply means that everyone receives an equal slice of an ever-shrinking pie.

Seamounts of the World, Unite! New Nations Arise

Seamounts are literally undersea mountains rising from the bottom of the sea that do not break the water's surface. Scientists generally define them as as steep geologic features rising from the seafloor with a minimum elevation of 1,000 meters and with a limited extent across the summit. _EncyclopediaofEarth

Seamounts are undersea peaks rising from the ocean's floor. These submerged mountaintops could be used to tether floating seasteads + their floating breakwaters. More interestingly, seamounts could be used as building platforms for giant towers -- part underwater, part above water.
How would you build a tower with a foundation hundreds or thousands of feet under the seafloor? This discussion from seasteading.org looks at a few of the issues involved.  But taking into account advances in undersea construction technology related to deep sea oil drilling, and future advances in nanotechnological construction methods, it is likely that we will be able to build undersea tower-foundations capable of supporting significant above-the-surface tower structures.


Exclusive Economic Zones
As long as you avoid building within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of an existing nation, it is unlikely that any existing nation could prove a claim against your structure.

To visualize what a nano-assembled foundation might look like, visualize a gigantic  Eiffel Tower, with about 1/3 of the structure submerged.  The tower would be built molecule by molecule, using materials resistant to the corrosive effects of seawater -- such as  tough hybrid diamond / silicon compounds.   Creative use of floatation would allow for surface level expansions.    An alternative design might look like a fractal pyramid -- a 3-D Sierpinski triangle.  The idea is to provide a strong, broad foundation fixed to the seamount, capable of supporting an appreciable above-surface construction.

Such mid-ocean de novo nations could provide the nucleus for duty free economic zones, experimental medical procedures, mid-ocean space launch, tourism, deep ocean mining and drilling, oceanic research institutes, and a nascent seastead construction industry.

Sun Takes Unprecedented Holiday

As the theory goes, lower magnetic activity of the sun lets more GCR’s into our solar system, which produce microscopic cloud seed trails (like in a Wilson cloud chamber) in our atmosphere, resulting in more cloud cover, resulting in a cooler planet. Ric Werme has a nice pictorial here.

When I saw the SWPC Ap geomagnetic index for Dec 2009 posted yesterday, my heart sank. With the sunspot activity in December, I thought surely the Ap index would go up. Instead, it crashed. _WUWT

Many of us were hoping that the modest resumption of sunspots in mid December -- after a few years of very rare sunspots -- would signal the sun's intention to "power up" to full strength. Unfortunately, an important measure of solar activity -- the geomagnetic index "Ap" -- has recently crashed to unprecedented levels. Ap is now too low to measure, for all practical purposes.

With the Ap index dwindling to a wisp of magnetism, it bolsters the argument made by Livingston and Penn that sunspots may disappear altogether by 2015. See Livingston and Penn – Sunspots may vanish by 2015....The theory goes that once the magnetic strength falls below 1500 gauss, sunspots will become invisible to us. _WUWT

According to the Svensmark cosmic ray theory, it is a low geomagnetic index -- such as we see now -- that allows galactic cosmic rays to penetrate the heliosphere, reaching Earth's atmosphere and inducing more cloud formation. More clouds tend to block solar rays, leading to a cooler climate. NASA has already predicted that the next solar cycle -- cycle 25 -- will have very low activity, as the solar conveyor slows. What NASA failed to see was that cycle 24 would have such low activity.

If multiple long, slow solar cycles begin to line up in a row -- like airliners waiting in a queue at Chicago's O'Hare -- Earth's climate may be in for a long, cold few decades.

Entire World's Population in Montana: Big Sky Living

Josh Hall was inspired by the recent opening of the world's tallest building in Dubai. Josh feels that if 5,000 people could live in high luxury in a tower with a footprint of under 2 acres, then a taller tower (1 mile high) with a footprint of 5 acres could house 40,000 people in luxury.

Now, if you place a mile-high tower inside a square mile section of land, with its 5 acre footprint taking up less than 1% of the land area, you could put everyone currently living on Earth into a land area the size of the state of Montana. Virtually all of the surrounding land would still be available for farming, industry, parks -- or solar and wind farms if you really enjoy wasting money.

The point is that with advanced construction methods, it takes very little land area to house large numbers of people. I admit that it would be a challenge to provide food, water, power, and sanitation to such a concentration of population. But providing broadband communication and high speed rail transport to everyone in the world would suddenly get easier.

The graph above shows the trend in tallest buildings on Earth, over time. Josh suggests that by the year 2065, the tallest building on Earth should be about a mile in height. Read the whole thing.

More on recent large tower construction from Brian Wang

Another great article from Josh compares autogeny to autopoiesis. One goal of nanotechnology is the creation of useful machines that can self-replicate. Another goal of nano is to put a "replicator" in every home -- no matter how humble. Such replicators would be able to turn garbage and dirt into new homes, automobiles, airplanes -- even spacecraft. Tiny nano-tatoos would capture sunlight and recycle waste CO2 in the blood  -- along with the nitrogen and oxygen in the air -- into carbohydrates and protein and fat so you would rarely have to eat -- a multi vitamin / mineral tablet would suffice.  Losing weight would be a snap.  Drinking water requirements would be minimal -- thanks to  super-efficient nano-boosted kidneys.

An autopoietic system is a process,not an object. It can not only make its own parts but does so constantly, replacing the ones it’s made of (“continuously regenerate”). It has an identity that is more like that of the Ship of Theseus than a simple object. You and I are autopoietic on a number of different levels: Our cells constantly rebuild and replace themselves on the molecular level; our minds constantly learn and re-integrate the ideas they’re made of — memories not regularly used and re-remembered tend to fade. _Nanodot

The imaginations of a Josh Hall and an Eric Drexler are immense. Nanotechnology is on the brink of acquiring real traction in the world. Once that begins to happen, expect a new generation of imaginative minds to leap into nano.

It might change the entire concept of economics.

Sex Differences in Math Ability Real and Important

Image Source

The talent required to do mathematics at the level of a Fields Medalist is extraordinary. The pool of competitors spans the adult population of the world not yet turned 40 on January 1 of the year Medals are awarded -- approximately 2 billion....On average, there are three Fields winners per award year, so that the ratio of competitors to slots, N /NS is approximately 7 x 108. From this we estimate the minimum mathematical ability of Fields Medalists to be an incredible 5.8 SD greater than the male population mean. Approximately 1.3 percent of the Medalists will be women. Since the prize is conferred quadrennially, we expect a female Fields Medalist to emerge approximately once every 103 years, that is, every 4/[3(0.013)] years. None has yet surfaced. _SexDifferencesMathAptitude

Image Source
A recent study claiming to find "few gender differences in math abilities" is a good example of deception by "science headlines." Published in the most recent "Psychological Bulletin" (an APA publication), the study looked at TIMSS and PISA scores for almost 500,000 students aged 14-16 years, in 69 countries. Although differences in math abilities between boys and girls do not develop most strongly until well into puberty -- around age 16 to 18 -- and grow larger thereafter, the Villanova researchers chose to look at younger students. Even so, the study found consistent differences in math aptitude between boys and girls.

SAT scores in the US consistently show a significant gap of almost 40 points between males and females who take the test.

Sex differences in math and spatial abilities go deep -- to the genes. Billions of dollars have been spent over the past few decades to bring the numbers of female math PhDs and Fields Prize winners into parity with male numbers. To no avail.

Men and women exhibit other behavioral differences which are apparent almost from birth. To some extent they mirror sex-differentiated behavior in animals. Boys are more aggressive, girls more nurturing. Female babies react more to facial expressions, males to moving objects. By adolescence these behaviors have morphed into girls' interest in social relationships, and boys' interest in machines and devices. Obviously, such divergence of interests influences career choices. Girls lean more toward fields like psychology, while similarly talented men incline toward engineering or physical science. A study6 by Lubinski and Benbow followed the careers of mathematically precocious youth from age 13 to 23. All were in the top 1% of mathematical ability. At age 23 less than 1% of the girls were pursuing doctorates in mathematics, engineering, or physical science, while almost 8% of the boys were. Equal aptitude not withstanding, girls pursued doctorates in biology at more than twice the rate of boys, and in the humanities at almost three times the rate of boys. For all these reasons, we should regard 29% as an upper bound to the percentage of women in the technological work force. In practice, their numbers will be significantly less. _Source

Even the relatively few girls who are genetically endowed with superior math talent tend to choose non-mathematical pursuits in life.  In the modern free choice era of education, there can be no doubt that women make these life choices because of their own inner desires.

Of course, there are also innate gender differences that work to the advantage of women.   These differences are celebrated by feminists, not denied. ;-)

While women have been able to approach 50% of math BA's and math MA's, the genetic ceiling seems to be holding down the proportion of math PhDs for women near 25%. (2005 Gallagher, Kauffman) As easy as PhD's can be to get at some institutions-- and as desperately as women are recruited to these programs-- the low level of math PhDs for women suggests either a shortage of interest or a shortage of aptitude.  The same phenomenon is evident in the more math intensive and theoretical areas within physics, chemistry, computer science, and engineering.  And if you look at elite institution PhDs, the differences are even greater.

Denial of innate differencs in aptitude between men and women, and between various ethnic groups, is an important structural support of leftist egalitarian philosophies and politics.  But genuine honest science continues to reveal these important differences.  No amount of leftist resource misallocation  will change the underlying nature of the facts.

Morgan Stanley Guru: Buy a Gun & Lots of Ammo

When top economic prognosticators are recommending buying a safe haven away from the city, providing your own food supply, and buying guns and ammunition to protect it -- you should know that we may be facing some difficult times.  Here are a few predictions:

Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson warns:

"We're running out of time ... to prevent a true depression." He says unless we break Wall Street's "stranglehold" we will be unable prevent the Great Depression 2.

Morgan Stanley research guru turned hedge fund manager Barton Biggs, who called the market rally, advises that you buy a farm a good distance away from a city and, he advises, make sure that your doomsday safe-haven:
Be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food...Be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc.

And get a gun, he says, because "a few rounds over the approaching brigands' heads would probably be a compelling persuader that there are easier farms to pillage."

Mark "Gloom Boom Doom" Faber also recommends buying farmland. Our society has peaked and is on the decline, he says:

"Once a society becomes successful it becomes arrogant, righteous, overconfident, corrupt, and decadent ... overspends ... costly wars ... wealth inequity and social tensions increase; and society enters a secular decline." _BusinessInsider

More predictions from Marketwatch

Best Online Television Websites

Cable and satellite television providers are finding it more difficult to compete with internet TV. Here are 5 reasons why:

Go straight to the networks. ABC, the CW, MTV, VH1, and many others offer full episodes, almost as soon as a program airs, on their websites. And NBC offers current shows as well as classics like “Alfred Hitchcock Hour” and “The A-Team.”

Hulu has name recognition for a reason. The site brings together offerings from more than 190 content companies, meaning that you get current shows the morning after they air, plus loads of old shows, movies, documentaries, and web originals.

CastTV is well organized with shows and movies listed by title rather than genre. Find a show and click on it to see all available seasons and episodes. I’ve sneakily been keeping abreast of “Friday Night Lights” here since it’s not airing on NBC for several more months while the season is already mid-way through on DirecTV.

Streamick doesn’t look like much, but it’s a site that allows you to live-stream 263 channels in real time, including NBC, BBC, ESPN, and Cartoon Network. The site eventually hopes to boost the number of available channels to 900.

TIOTI, an abbreviation of Tape It Off The Internet, is part television hub and part social networking site. You can watch your favorite TV shows and share episodes you like with friends. Plus, they have a section for entertainment news. _Frisky

Then of course, YouTube and all the other video sharing sites compete for your time with an ever expanding inventory of user-provided content.  Hardware manufacturers are making it easier for people to combine television and the internet.  Gateway and Apple were among the first, but the stampede is now on -- including popular game players and smart phones.

Web television history and trends

The trend is toward "billion channel television" with increasing fragmentation and individualisation of markets.  This presents product marketers with a bit of a challenge, but for those of us who like unlimited choice, the trend is favourable.

Measuring IQ Objectively: Brain Scans +

Psychometricians have developed paper-and-pencil tests of general intelligence that tend to predict performance on a wide range of other tests and a number of life outcomes, like salary. Neuroscientists have used modern imaging methods to discover the neural correlates of intelligence as measured by these widely used tests. Many of these studies have examined the relations of IQ to brain anatomy, generally finding that greater grey matter volume or thickness across many brain regions correlates with higher IQ scores. Others have looked at functional measures taken while people perform tasks, generally finding that bilateral frontal and parietal regions are most often associated with performance on intelligence tests.


But now, for the first time, functional measures of the resting brain are providing new insights into network properties of the brain that are associated with IQ scores. In essence, they suggest that in smart people, distant areas of the brain communicate with each other more robustly than in less smart people. _SciAm

Scientists are discovering new ways of objective measurement of brain intelligence, using brain scanners. These new methods bypass all possible cultural and language biases, and correlate well with IQ tests, which in turn correlate well with life accomplishments. And now, researchers can even measure brain intelligence while a person's mind is resting.

In a recent paper, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led by Ming Song, examined how resting brain networks differ between people who have superior versus average IQ scores. They used graph theory to quantify the network properties of the brain, such as how strong the communication is among distant brain regions. A graph is a mathematical representation that is composed of nodes (or brain regions) and connections between them (functional connectivity or temporal correlations), and can be used to characterize neural networks. Like prior researchers, they found that the posterior cingulate cortex is the hub of the human brain – it is the most widely and intensively connected region of the human brain at rest. Moreover, the strength of connectivity among distant brain regions was greater in people with superior than average IQ scores. Another 2009 study came to a similar conclusion, and noted that the strongest relations between resting connectivity and IQ were observed in the frontal and parietal brain regions, which have been most associated with performance on IQ tests.


Thus, remarkably, the strength of long-distance connections in the resting brain can be related to performance on IQ tests. We are often impressed when people make creative connections between ideas – perhaps long-range connectivity in the brain empowers such mental range. _SciAm

The denial of the importance of IQ is an important pillar of modern leftist egalitarian thought.   But if brain intelligence can be measured independently of IQ tests, and correlated with IQ tests plus life accomplishment, there can be little doubt in the minds of honest persons that the egalitarian redistributionist paradigm is invalid.  Such proof would come none too soon, since it is egalitarian redistrubutionist policies that have come close to destroying the developed world's economies.

An Alternative to Conventional Politics: C A S

The US is in a deep economic morass, and the smarter people have come to understand that more conventional politics will only make things worse. The federal government's problems and sovereign debt is bad enough, but the problems at the state level are even worse -- and more problematic to Joe and Jane Voter.

The federal bailout and stimulus were supposed to help, but there are limits to what politics can accomplish. Public sector employees are increasingly unionised, heavily supporting Democratic Party candidates and causes. Mr. Obama attempted to reward the states and cities under particularly strong union control, but has little to show for the $trillion spent.

Public sector unions are causing some serious -- probably intractable -- problems for many states. For example, public sector unions are killing California. Illinois' public employee unions are not doing that state much good either. Thanks to public employee unions, across the nation state and local pension plans are on a path for failure.   There are perhaps $2 trillion in underfunded pension promises at the state and local level.

State and local governments are never going to come up with that $2 trillion. The federal government doesn't have that kind of money either -- outside of IOUs. And even if the federal government bailed out the state and local pension funds, such a bailout would only encourage politicians and bureaucrats to play out the same scenario over and over again -- until no more bailouts were forthcoming.

So what is the big alternative to conventional politics? If the problems of modern politics have grown too complex for public planners to deal with, maybe they are working with the wrong paradigm. Eric S. Raymond suggests that complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory offers answers that conventional politics is fresh out of.

The answer is, I think implied by three words: Adapt, decentralize, and harden. Levels of environmental complexity that defeat planning are readily handled by complex adaptive systems. A CAS doesn’t try to plan against the future; instead, the agents in it try lots of adaptive strategies and the successful ones propagate. This is true whether the CAS we’re speaking of is a human immune system, a free market, or an ecology.


Since we can no longer count on being able to plan, we must adapt. When planning doesn’t work, centralization of authority is at best useless and usually harmful. And we must harden: that is, we need to build robustness and the capacity to self-heal and self-defend at every level of the system. I think the rising popular sense of this accounts for the prepper phenomenon. Unlike old-school survivalists, the preppers aren’t gearing up for apocalypse; they’re hedging against the sort of relatively transient failures in the power grid, food distribution, and even civil order that we can expect during the lag time between planning failures and CAS responses.


CAS hardening of the financial system is, comparatively speaking, much easier. Almost trivial, actually. About all it requires is that we re-stigmatize the carrying of debt at more than a very small proportion of assets. By anybody. With that pressure, there would tend to be enough reserve at all levels of the financial system that it would avoid cascade failures in response to unpredictable shocks.


Cycling back to terrorism, the elite planner’s response to threats like underwear bombs is to build elaborate but increasingly brittle security systems in which airline passengers are involved only as victims. The CAS response would be to arm the passengers, concentrate on fielding bomb-sniffers so cheap that hundreds of thousands of civilians can carry one, and pay bounties on dead terrorists.


Yes, this circles back to my previous post about the militia obligation. I’m now arguing for this obligation to be seen as, actually, larger than arming for defense (although that’s a core, inescapable part of it). I’m arguing that we need to rediscover CAS behavior in politics an economics — not because financiers or bureaucrats are dangerous or evil, but because even with the best will in the world they can’t cope. The time when they could out-think and out-plan the challenges of the day operating as an elite has passed. _ESR

This is actually an intriguing sketch -- although it needs a great deal of fleshing out. Al Fin political scientists have long argued that the US government is too large and too centralised to deal with the most important needs of its citizens -- protection from violence, fraud, and coercion. In fact it is the federal government itself that often represents the greatest threat to the US citizen of violence, fraud, or coercion.

De-centralising government, and focusing a citizens attention more toward local problems and obligations would be a helpful preliminary step toward better governance.   Empowering each citizen to defend himself, his home, and his locality, is another important preliminary step -- but one that will involve a significant change in psychology from mainstream acquired helplessness, psychological neoteny, and dependence upon authority.

Just as the USSR collapsed from its inability to command an increasingly complex society from the top down, so will the USA collapse if the current agenda of Obama - Pelosi reforms toward hypercentralisation of government are allowed to run their course.

Most university educated persons of our age have been academically lobotomised into a mindset of dependency upon a central authority.  That is the only way an absurd, counterfactual quasi-religion such as carbon hysteria could come so close to taking over much of the economy and politics of the developed world.  That is the only way that citizens of advanced western countries -- in the midst of one of the greatest demographic collapses in history -- could see their nations as suffering from overpopulation, and turn to anti-natalism as a remedy.   That is the only way that indigenous citizens of advanced nations could allow themselves to be held hostage to the unreasonable and hostile demands of illegitimate newcomers.  And it is the only way that productive citizens could allow themselves to be sucked dry -- to the point of being virtually incapable of supporting a family -- in order to support non-productive residents who are often illegal aliens, sometimes criminals, and almost never held responsible for their own actions.

Something radical will happen to change the current trends, regardless of how you vote in the next few elections.  There is no need for peak oil doom, no need for global warming doom, no need for eco-doom in any form.  All that is needed is for present trends of mis-governance to continue a little while longer.  Then, threads will fray and supports will snap apart.

You can prepare for that, if you understand what is going to happen, roughly speaking.  But there is no predicting how long the chaos of transition will last.  That makes a difference, in terms of preparation.

Al Fin historians and sociologists have been expecting this unraveling for a long time.  The election of Barack Obama is not the cause of it.  His election, along with the elections of large numbers of like-minded politicians at all levels of government, simply facilitated the excesses which accelerate the process.  Perhaps it is for the best, since it would have happened sooner or later.

But now, we need to face the facts that politics as usual -- regardless of which politician is elected or which party is in power -- will no longer be able to hold things together.  The forces of dissolution are too strong.

More on this topic in a later post.

An Ever-Changing Brain

Human brains -- like the climate -- never stop changing. Experiences sculpt their effects on the brain for good and for ill. Scientists at Washington University (St. Louis) and the University of Chieti (Italy) have demonstrated measurable changes in the brain's "background noise activity" just hours after the brain has learned a new task. The study is published in PNAS.

At the start of the experiment, Corbetta, graduate students Chris Lewis and Antonello Baldassarre and their colleagues in Italy used functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging to scan the spontaneous brain activity of 14 volunteers as they sat quietly.

Next, researchers scanned the subjects as they spent one to two hours a day for five to seven days learning to watch a display inside the MRI scanner for the brief presence of an inverted "T" in a specific part of the screen. Two sets of brain areas were particularly active during the task: part of the visual cortex that corresponded to the portion of the visual field where subjects were looking for the "T", and areas in the dorsal part of the brain involved in directing attention to the location on the screen.

After the visual training, scientists again scanned the subjects' brains while they did nothing.

When the subjects rested at the start of the experiment, spontaneous activity in the two parts of the brain that are important to the visual task was either not linked or weakly correlated, with the two regions involved in the upcoming task only occasionally being active at the same time. After learning, though, each region was more likely to be active when the other region wasn't. Subjects who were more successful at the task exhibited a higher degree of this "anti-correlation" between the two regions after learning.

Corbetta suggests this learning-induced change in the brain's spontaneous activity may reflect what he calls a "memory trace" for the new skill. The trace makes it easier to use those parts of the brain together again when the same challenge recurs. _SD

Very interesting. By identifying the neural pattern of successful learning, researchers may well be laying the groundwork for advanced neurofeedback-based "superlearning" -- a potentially fruitful approach to breaking through the mental blocks of learning that stop so many promising young students.

Researchers at Rockefeller University's Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology have demonstrated changes in DNA methylation of rat hippocampal tissue following brief, 30 minute stressful exposures.

Richard Hunter, a postdoc in Rockefeller University's Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology, found that a single 30-minute episode of acute stress causes a rapid chemical change in DNA packaging proteins called histones in the rat hippocampus, which is a brain region known to be especially susceptible to the effects of stress in both rodents and humans.

The chemical change Hunter examined, called methylation, can either increase or decrease the expression of genes that are packaged by the histones, depending on the location of the methylation. He looked for methylation on three regions of histone H3 that have been shown to actively regulate gene expression. In experiments published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he shows that methylation of one mark, H3K9 trimethyl, roughly doubled in the hippocampus. Methylation of a second mark, H3K27 trimethyl, dropped by about 50 percent in the same area. Changes associated with the third mark were minor.

"The hippocampus is involved in episodic memory, so you would expect it to be sensitive to episodic experiments like this, more so than the motor regions, for instance," says Hunter, who worked on the project with Rockefeller scientists Bruce S. McEwen and Donald W. Pfaff.... _SD

So we see once again, that experiences can alter gene expression -- sometimes permanently. Interestingly, Prozac was able to reverse some of the genetic changes associated with chronic stress. No doubt other pharmacological agents will prove superior for that purpose.

Al Fin Neuro-Behaviouralists prefer non-pharmacological approaches to therapy whenever possible -- such as electromagnetic stimulation, hypnosis, and neurofeedback, for example. But as better targeted drugs come along and better means of drug delivery are developed (nanotechnology), it is likely that pharmacology will be a big part of the better brains revolution.

Robert Rapier on Peak Oil Doomers

Robert Rapier is a chemical engineer working in the energy sector and a well respected energy blogger. Robert has his own website, and has written many articles for The Oil Drum -- a place where many peak oil doomers hang out. Robert's views of Peak Oil Doomers are worth reading:

I have been highly interested in what is going on with Saudi oil production for a long time. Saudi has a tremendous amount of economic leverage because of their oil production, and if their production declined sharply, then a lot of doomer points would start to look more plausible. Thus, I am keenly interested in understanding the true situation in Saudi. This was one of my primary motivations for reading Twilight in the Desert.

Twilight was published in 2005, and argued for a near-term collapse in Saudi oil production, with an inevitable price shock to follow. Following publication of the book, Matt Simmons made a $10,000 bet with New York Times columnist John Tierney that oil prices in 2010 would average over $200/bbl (see the Simmons-Tierney bet). This bet is useful for understanding the time frame Simmons had in mind for a Saudi collapse; certainly by now we would be in the midst of a full-fledged Saudi production collapse.

Given his message, it should come as no surprise that Simmons has gained quite a following among the doomers. He is held in very high regard by many at TOD, and a number of people have used his work as a jumping off point for their own claims of a Saudi collapse.

...Look at what has happened since Stuart's post. When Stuart wrote Nosedive in March 2007, production (C+C) in Saudi was 8.6 million bpd (Data from the EIA). I predicted that the declines would stop by summer, and little did we know that when Stuart published that essay, declines had just stopped and would be stable until late summer before beginning to rise.

The Saudis had production back above 9 million bpd by December 2007, and by July 2008 they had production at 9.7 million bpd - the highest level in almost 30 years (and without the aid of some of the major new projects that were expected to bump production a little). Their production then pulled back after prices collapsed. Just the fact that production flat-lined for 7 months with no new major projects coming on says without a doubt they were sitting on spare production when I was arguing that they were. If they hadn't been, they would have declined a bit each month and could have only reversed that by bringing new projects online.

One argument that many people made for a permanent decline was that if Saudi had spare production they would have brought it online in 2006-2007 as prices climbed. As I replied at the time "Not if inventories are full."

...One thing is clear now in hindsight: Saudi did not go into terminal decline in 2005. Proponents of that theory have now shifted their position to "I will give up the idea that 2005 was the peak when the January-December average production exceeds that of 2005." That's wrong on two counts. First, production in 2008 rose hand in hand with oil prices, and by July when prices hit record levels the production rate was at the highest level in almost 30 years. If 2005 was the peak, no way would that have been possible.

Second, they seem to forget their argument. Assume for a moment that Saudi produces at only 90% of the 2005 rate, but do it for the next 40 years. Will the 2005 peakists maintain that 2005 was the geological peak? As I pointed out recently to someone who made that argument ("I am correct that 2005 was the peak until production for a calendar year exceeds 2005 production") - Saudi production in 1980 and 1981 were both higher than for 2005. By their logic, I must conclude that 1980 was the Saudi peak.

I think ridicule and loss of credibility is inevitable if you are out making predictions based on shoddy analysis - which I felt was the basis for many of the imminent Saudi decline predictions. I believe when you are wrong about something, you try to learn from it so that future projections are better. If you simply rationalize away wrong predictions, you will likely continue to make them. _RSquared

Shoddy analysis is what has made both Peak Oil Doom and Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming such laughing stocks among persons with both open minds and sound logic.

The only kind of peak oil we have at this time is political peak oil brought on by the destructive policies of an Obama - Pelosi reich. Take a fantasy -- catastrophic climate change -- and use it as a pretext to create a genuine crisis -- political peak oil. That is the enviro-leftist echo choir in a nutshell. PS: echoes in a nutshell are really loud.

Still, the concept of peak oil can be useful as a motivator for behaviour change. Eventually the finite world will have to make some hard decisions about energy flows. And as far as Peak Oil Doom goes, if extreme visions are what it takes to cause a person to prepare for unpredictable disasters, then so be it.

Obama - Pelosi: Laying the Tracks for 10 Yr Depression?

The Next Decade Will Be Hell .... Peter Schiff

US Economy to Perform Poorly over Next Decade .... WSJ

US Growth Prospects Bleak Next Decade .... Reuters

Apocalypse 2010 .... Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Is Obama Screwing Up the Economy? ...... Eric Schmidt

US Government Expansion Threatens Recovery .... WSJ

Another Bubble Decade ... BigMoney

Obama Turns Away from Growth Policies to Pursue European Collapsism . . . NYTimes

European company executives pessimistic . . . . EuroIntelligence

US Dollar and Treasury Bonds at Risk via New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Debt Monetization ..... Market Oracle

Obama Presides over a Futility Economy .... Jim Kuntsler

Will Americans Revolt over Government Incompetence and Corruption? .... Nat. Review

Peak Oil Dooms Us All ..... Randall Parker

Who Has a Clue What to Do? .... Robert Rubin in Newsweek

American Economists Cannot Agree on Proper Course Out of Obama Depression .... WSJ

Peak Oil Doom Can be Useful, Even if Not True

The concept of "Peak Oil Doom" is alive and viral in the blogosphere and on the conspiracy theory circuit. Although Al Fin thinks the doomers of peak oil are wrong on most of their assumptions, he understands that the concept of peak oil can be useful well beyond the trivial truth of a finite planet. Take this recent posting from peak oil doomer Jim Kuntsler (via In Mala Fide)

The great muddlement out there, this inability to form a coherent consensus about what's happening, is especially frightening when, as is the case today, even the intelligent elites appear clueless or patently dishonest, in any case unreliable, in their relations with reality. President Obama, for instance - a charming, articulate man, with a winning smile, pectorals like Kansas City strip steaks, and a mandate for "change" - who speaks incessantly and implausibly of "the recovery" when all the economic vital signs tell a different story except for some obviously manipulated stock market indexes. You hear this enough times and you can't help but regard it as lying, and even if it is lying ostensibly for the good of the nation, it is still lying about what is actually going on and does much harm to the project of building a coherent consensus. I submit that we would benefit more if we acknowledged what is really happening to us because only that will allow us to respond intelligently. _Kuntsler

Peak Oil doomers appeal to an innate sense of scarcity that most humans appear to possess. The message of peak oil doom penetrates deeply into the emotions, where meaningful action often originates. In the article above, Kuntsler properly describes President Obama as someone who is not trustworthy. To a doomer, any person who fails to speak doom incessantly (and implausibly?) is not worthy of trust.

In this case, the lack of trust in Obama may be for an inaccurate reason, but lack of trust is the proper attitude to take toward Obama nevertheless.

The same logic applies to survival prepping. Peak Oil doomers are able to convince a lot of people of the importance of prepping for surviving the severe economic downturn that is supposed to occur alongside peak oil. But even if peak oil doesn't happen, or is not associated with the severe economic downturn predicted, it is still good for people to be prepared for disasters and catastrophes -- many of which cannot be timed or predicted.

In fact, wisdom often arrives in strange and unlikely packages. Humans think in metaphors, narratives, and paradigms -- all of which are probably wrong at some level. But the failures of a narrative, metaphor, or paradigm do not make these crude roadmaps useless to us. We muddle on regardless of the lack of precision in our thinking -- or perhaps partly because of it.

As absurd as the modern peak oil movement may appear to those who are willing and able to look deeper into the underlying dynamics, the prolific and profit-taking doomers involved at the head of Peak Oil doom may be providing a useful service.

The same reasoning applies to religion, as viewed by a thoughtful atheo-agnostic such as Al Fin. Non-violent religions such as modern Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism etc. are based upon many fallacies. Yet they serve a useful purpose among large masses of people, in providing a focus for the spiritual and moral life of the individual. Shared religious beliefs provide a societal cohesion, and a useful moral level of interaction separate from the state's legal apparatus.

Humans are incapable of visualising n-dimensional space, or quantum mechanical phenomena, among a large number of other scientific concepts. Yet a large number of useful -- but imperfect -- analogies and metaphors are used in science education which allow the student to progress to a deeper understanding than he would otherwise have had.

In fact, our entire lives are made up of these useful but imperfect metaphors. No matter how deeply you may try to follow them, you will eventually lose the metaphorical chain at or before the point where the verbal becomes pre-verbal. Understanding pre-verbal metaphors is beyond most students of psychology.

So, if the very essence of human existence rests upon a house of slippery metaphors, who are we to deny the usefulness of metaphors such as Peak Oil Doom, which may have a large number of huge garage-sized holes in them? Perhaps instead we should begin to focus on the useful aspects of the ocean of faulty metaphors that we float upon. Well -- as much as we can.

It's Gonna Be Cold Outside, Campers

...we are at the start of an EVEN sun-spot cycle (number 24) which are generally colder than odd cycles even when there are lots of sunspots. Other factors also come into play – such as lunar effects; but CO2 is not one of them. The theory of man-made CO2 driven Global Warming & climate change is failed sciencebased on fraudulent data and it has no forecasting power or value”, he said.“This winter marks the end of any credibility in the theory of man-made CO2 driven Climate Change of global warming zealots; and the beginning of continuing general decline in world temperatures which will stay below recent levels for at least 100 years (6). Honest greens who want to defend nature’s bounteousness had best bail out now or they will get dragged down with the fraudsters. _ClimateRealist_via_TomNelson

In October, the UK Met Office predicted a mild winter. Of course, the Met Office is in bed with the UEA CRU climate grifters -- the central figures of ClimateGate manipulation of IPCC reports, hiders of the decline, and censors of what is published in peer review. If you want real predictions you have to go elsewhere than the official gatekeepers. In other words, be skeptical and have a lot of sources for your information.

In other climate news, Burt Rutan -- revolutionary aerospace engineer and designer -- is working on a personal report dealing with climate data used by climatologists. Rutan had no reason to be skeptical of official carbon hysteria -- until he started looking at the details behind the headlines and pronouncements. Then he became concerned.

The climate scientist’s problem of proving his human-caused GHG crisis theory seemed, to my engineering mind, impossible. This is what attracted me to study the raw data and to see if there was fraud in its summary presentations, since the slightest changes in the data, such as abit of cherry picking tree rings or even an ‘innocent’ selection of a truncated temperature data set, is all that would be needed to alarm the naive non-scientific audience. It is important to note that those who write UN summary reports and those who make energy policy decisions do not look at the raw data; they only see the summary presentations. My conclusion is that, if the analysis (yes, the analysis by climate scientists) had been required to pass a typical engineering preliminary design review,
the crisis theory would have never been passed on to the non-technical audience.


...those scientists that claimed that warming is human-caused and catastrophic, tended to be the ones who sought out the media to proclaim their views (an unusual behavior for scientists immersed in the proper scientific procedure). The larger group of scientists that did not agree tended to be mute. This, of course gave the media and some politicians an impression that there was scientific “consensus”, even though it did not exist. _Burt Rutan PDF Introduction

Rutan's final report on his analysis of climate change data should be out within the next 3 months.

Understanding the Brain / Mind: Key Concept Videos

Understanding how the human mind works is one of the key steps to self-liberation. Exciting discoveries in cognitive science, neuroscience, and machine "cognition" are paving the way to a powerful comprehension of who we are and what we can do. The following links go to different cognitive science and neural science conferences on video. Think of them as hidden gold mines of mental treasure.

Almaden Institue 2006 Cognitive Computing

2007 Brain Network Dynamics Conference at UCB

Almaden 2007 Cognitive Computing at UCB

2008 Holiday Lectures Making Your Mind: Molecules, Motion, and Memory

NIH Neuroscience Videos and Podcasts

A very good set of links to Online Neuroscience Lectures (Kilgard UT Dallas)

A good set of links to mind / brain lectures from 2006

Free Online Cognitive Psychology Courses from Top Universities

A lecture is only a tiny bite of knowledge, needing to be fleshed out by careful study, using several sources. Contradictory sources are best because they force one to think in order to resolve the contradictions, if possible.

We are fortunate that politics has largely ignored the subjects of cognitive science and neuroscience. Freedom from political correctness and political restraints in funding allows a science to progress more or less naturally over time.

In other areas of study, such as gender and ethnic differences in cognitive abilities, or climate science, the political constraints prevent the necessary open free for all, the give-and-take that good science requires.

Getting past political correctness is one significant goal of the next level project. To do that, we must understand the human mind in isolation and in groups.

Prepping for the Coming Ice Age

An Ice Age is an example of a long term survival setting. If you are prepared to survive an ice age, you are prepared for almost anything. But the chances are that you are like the residents of New Orleans during Katrina -- not even prepared for a few days without electrical power, ATMs, and supermarkets. Where do you go to learn to prepare, beyond the silly mainstream media offerings of "survival-lite"?

Preparedness Pro is a website that offers good articles on survival and preparedness, as well as on-site, hands-on preparedness classes. For example: Are you interested in a backup generator for your home or cabin? Backup Power Generators: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 take you through the selection process and tell you where you can obtain them for the best price.

Survival Blog is a well-known and respected personal effort by James Wesley Rawles. Survival Blog offers a wide range of survival advice -- much of it provided in letters and emails relating first-person experiences with different devices and approaches to surviving difficulties.

The Survivalist Blog is another well-known preparedness blog. Here is his "Best of 2009 Survivalist Articles".

The Prepper E-Book site offers practical articles from The Survival Mom on a wide range of "be ready" topics. Example: this posting provides links to 9 articles on the topic of "bugging out / evacuating" in a hurry. By preparing ahead of time, you can have what you need, where and when you need it. There is also a prepper forum where people can compare experiences and recommendations with others with similar concerns.

Tactical Intelligence is a site that deals largely with "gear" -- survival implements that are either ready-made or improvised.

The sites above usually have links to other prepper and survival websites and services. There are at least hundreds of them, but it is generally best to start with those that are well known that serve a wide audience. You can find fairly decent free online survival videos at YouTube and other "how-to" video sharing sites listed on the Al Fin sidebar in the "Reference" section.

So, how would you prepare for an ice age, anyway? Ice sheets have been known to grow miles thick. How does one live, stay warm, grow food, maintain transportation networks, and provide schools, health care, power, sanitation, and other essential services when the land is covered with ice 1 mile thick?

First, you need a large source of combined heat and power -- a nuclear plant is ideal, a coal or bitumen / kerogen plant might also work. You would need plenty of fuel to last hundreds of years. (You should begin to see the advantage of a nuclear plant, thinking of fuel volume for that length of time. Remember that next level humans will live hundreds of years or longer, on average.)

Second, you need a method of distributing heat over a large area, preventing that area from accumulating snow and ice on a year-to-year basis (winters may last 9 or 10 months). Al Fin ice age architects recommend redundant systems of conductive, convective, and radiative transfer of heat. A village-sized geodesic dome incorporating a network of heat-pipes should provide safe shelter for the community itself. Similar structures for croplands should extend the ice-free area well beyond the residential zones. (Crops and living zones will require artificial lighting most of the year -- confirming the wisdom of locating a nuclear power plant close by. Imagine trying to survive an ice age with solar and wind power!)

Third, you need to provide a wide range of human expertise for your community -- and sound means of transferring that expertise to new members. The community will need to provide its own power, water, farming, health care, education, defence, sanitation, entertainment, maintenance, construction, search and rescue, clothing, and a wide range of other services generally overlooked.

Fourth, although the coming ice age is unlikely to progress to "Snowball Earth" -- when the ice reached the equator from both North and South -- it won't hurt to plan for extremes. To achieve a Minimum Viable Population, plan for a village of about a thousand breeding pairs -- or a group of villages whose combined populations provide a thousand breeding pairs. (Most geneticists may recommend a founder population of at least 10,000 breeding pairs, but Al Fin geneticists have discovered that 1,000 breeding pairs should be sufficient for most situations where "time-to-discovery" of other compatible human populations is no longer than 10,000 years.)

Fifth, follow a plan of expanding the "ice-free zone" around your village(s) and agricultural / industrial / power generation zones. Always incorporate your ice-melting infrastructure into any new construction. Nature will never stop trying to defeat your efforts, so you must never stop using your brain and body to assert your own intentions.

Prepare yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally to be a survivor. Then begin prepping for yourself, your family, your closest associates. Learn, teach, experiment. Always think in terms of "what could go wrong, and what could I do about it?" That should teach a bit of humility, and hopefully provide motivation for what you will have to learn to know and to do.

More: The Lifeboat Foundation has several projects dealing with existential risks which might be helpful in the event of a glaciation, including space habitats and "lifeshield bunkers." Josh Hall has devised a "weather machine" concept that would have the power to throw the Earth into an ice age, to bake the planet beyond livability, or anything in between.