Nuclear Renaissance vs. Obama Pelosi Energy Starvation

USNEF
From coal to oil sands to oil shale to shale gas to offshore oil to arctic oil to nuclear energy -- the Obama Pelosi regime has been focused on shutting down all forms of reliable, large-scale energy to US industry and the US economy. The nuclear renaissance -- the sprouting up of large numbers of new, clean, safe nuclear power plants -- is a direct threat to the regime's plans. What are those plans? To force the US into the dead-end boondoggle of unreliable big wind and big solar, the quicksand suffocation death of the US economy.

The 6th blog carnival of nuclear energy is up at NEI Nuclear Notes (via Brian Wang). The 6th Carnival takes a look at the nuclear renaissance, among several other topics. Dieoff leftists will resist any form of abundant, clean, and reliable energy. But outside the US, it is no longer up to them. From the Carnival:

 Barry Brook at Brave New Climate set the record straight on the world nuclear renaissance:

Despite what some may like you to believe, the nuclear renaissance is upon us. Don’t let anyone get away with telling you otherwise — they are badly misleading you.

…

How about this for some supporting statistics: 29 new reactors, totalling 26 gigawatts of electricity output (operating at high capacity factors without the need for energy storage/backup), will start operation in 13 different countries in the 2010 — 2012 period – that’s within the next 3 years (average reactor size is 880 MWe).

Brian Wang at Next Big Future (the leader of these nuclear carnivals) took to town the bogus claims made by a Stanford Professor:

In a debate between Stewart Brand (pro-nuclear) and Mark Jacobson (anti-nuclear), Mark Jacobson tries to make the case that we can generate all of the energy that we need without nuclear power (and without fossil fuels) … one of Jacobson's main distortions is that nuclear power is slower to develop than solar and wind.

…

I am all in favor of building more solar and wind, but it is wrong to say that building a lot of it is faster than building nuclear power. Nuclear power increased by 300% since the 1980s in the United States. Since 1987 the US alone has added 345 TWH of nuclear which is more than the entire OECD has now for solar, wind and geothermal.

The nuclear renaissance is on -- but not in Obama Pelosi's US. The reich is focused upon energy starvation for the US, and nuclear power just provides too much energy and is too sustainable for too long -- particularly when Gen III and Gen IV reactors are combined in complementary fuel and power generation.

Gen III and Gen IV reactors will do away with the problem of persistent nuclear waste. And just in case you are worried about nuclear weapons proliferation from nuclear waste -- don't be. Reactor grade plutonium in nuclear waste is not weaponisable (via Charles Barton).

The only hope for the US to break out of the Obama depression and energy starvation is to erase the regime and start again with a clean slate of more rational actors.

Go to the Carnival of Nuclear Energy #6 for more ideas and links.

Adapted from an earlier posting at Al Fin Energy

Live and Breathe Underwater Indefinitely In Personal Sub or Habitat

Once you get your hands on your personal submarine, you will probably want to be able to stay submerged for long periods of time -- especially if something unpleasant awaits you at the surface. You will first need to power your sub with a super-safe and efficient small nuclear reactor. Such a reactor could power your craft while submerged for years without re-surfacing.

But you will also require clean air -- free of built-up exhaled CO2. CO2 from expired air will build up in a sub or underwater habitat if not scrubbed regularly. That is where a collaboration between Bath University chemical engineers and Duke University mechanical engineers may be very helpful indeed. Their idea promises to allow subs to stay submerged for as long as the power and food supply hold out. In involves the use of "Dixon Rings" (see below) packed in a column.

Sea water and ship air are circulated in counter-current fashion, allowing the seawater to absorb the CO2 in the ship's air.

Based on technology developed in 1948, Dixon rings consist of a fine wire mesh folded into a ring of approximately 3mm in size. The space in the wire mesh provides an extended surface area for the absorption of the CO2.

Many rings are packed into a column, through which gas and liquid flow in a counter-current direction. The combination of salt water and Dixon rings form a compact gas scrubbing unit, which removes CO2 from a closed-circuit breathing environment before safely discharging it into the sea.

Using this system, chemicals to absorb CO2 will no longer be needed in the submersible environment and time spent on the sea bed could be extended.

Prof Kolaczkowski said: ‘Chemical engineers are excited about using Dixon rings in applications where gaseous or volatile species are transferred between gas and liquid phases, and where the device needs to be compact.

‘With the Computational Fluid Dynamic modelling skills at S and C Thermofluids, we will make rapid progress with developing novel and compact gas scrubbers. The removal of carbon dioxide from exhaled air is a great application. There will be many more possibilities to consider.’

Dr Lew Nuckols of Duke University said: ‘An estimated 90 per cent of human-produced carbon dioxide is absorbed by oceans. The research at Bath, in partnership with us, could revolutionise techniques to remove metabolically produced carbon dioxide from subsea operations.’ _Engineer

When perfected, this technology will make permanent seafloor habitats and colonies possible. Eventually, similar technology may even allow for rebreathers that allow humans to swim free underwater for long periods of time, without coming back inside the habitat for air.

Of course you may also want to learn to grow CO2 utilising plants or algae insider your sub or habitat, which can also perform part of the job of CO2 scrubbing. Saltwater plants may do best. Since you will need a lot of food for an extended underwater stay, learning to grow plants in your undersea living space is not such a bad idea anyway.


Dixon rings are used in other separation processes as well -- such as the separation of heavy water from ordinary water.

Monolithic Dome: The Most Disaster Resistant Home?

Monolithic domes have survived hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters that can easily destroy most other types of structures. Domes have been shown to possess remarkable strength due to their shape and their construction design. Monolithic domes can even be safely buried under up to 30 feet of earth.

These domes are far more energy-efficient than most forms of construction, and are perfectly suited for a full range of climates from extremely warm to extremely cold, with very low expense for heating or cooling.

Other dome designs to consider besides the monolithic design, include the Domeshell from Australia. Domeshells are constructed from prefab shaped sandwich sections, with a dense polyurethane inner fill. They are said to provide similar resistance to fire, earthquake, and hurricane as the monolithic dome, and similar energy efficiencies.

From Japan comes the International Dome House. This design uses prefab shaped sections of thick expanded polystyrene, which allows for assembly of a complete structure in just a few hours. The dense polystyrene is fire resistant, and an excellent insulator. It should also provide excellent earthquake resistance. Resistance to hurricanes or tornadoes is probably inferior to the monolithic dome, due to the lighter weight of materials. Even so, as long as the structure is well secured to the foundation, it should be more secure in a severe storm than a standard construction house, due to the rounded shape.

Dome homes are becoming more popular around the world for many reasons. Ease and speed of shell construction, plus much lower energy costs, plus greater survivability in most natural disasters = a lot of reasons to choose a dome home.

Some survivalists may choose the monolithic dome for its ability to be safely positioned three stories underground.

H/T TWAWKI

Murder of the US Constitution? Suicide by Government?

WSJ
US states and municipalities are drowning under a tsunami of public sector debt.

So what does the US Congress do about it? The Democratic Party controlled Senate is rushing to pass a law to force ALL US states to give public sector employees the right to collective bargaining -- even if the states have explicitly chosen not to do so! Despite the looming catastrophe hanging over virtually all the states and cities that have allowed these workers to unionise, the Obama Pelosi regime is pressing a knife to the throat of states that are already struggling to survive economically.

The Senate is moving closer to passing legislation that would require states to grant public-safety employees, including police, firefighters and emergency medical workers, the right to collectively bargain over hours and wages.

The bill, known as the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, would mainly affect about 20 states that don't grant collective-bargaining rights statewide for public-safety workers or that prohibit such bargaining. State and municipal associations, as well as business groups, oppose it, saying it will lead to higher labor costs and taxes, at a time of budget deficits.

...The House passed a version of the bill in 2007. If enacted, the legislation would be a significant victory for unions, which are smarting over the failure of Democrats to pass a separate, broader bill that would have made it easier for unions to organize workers, especially in the private sector, where union membership has been in decline for years.

...If the bill becomes law, state and municipal associations expect legal challenges, saying the legislation might violate states' constitutional rights.

"If states and localities have chosen not to go in the direction of collective bargaining, that should be their right to do so," said Neil Bomberg, a lobbyist for the National League of Cities. Currently, 15 states don't grant collective-bargaining rights to public-safety workers on a statewide basis, two states, Virginia and North Carolina, prohibit such workers from bargaining, and four states allow collective bargaining for firefighters but not for police.

Mr. Bomberg said the National League of Cities is "neutral" on collective bargaining, but that the bill would be "a huge problem" for cash-strapped municipalities to hire staff or contract with collective-bargaining experts to negotiate with unions. _WSJ

Clearly, the US Congress is an ass -- a suicidal ass at that. The US Constitution was meant to limit the federal government to a few specified functions. The states were meant to be sovereign over most procedural matters of state government. The passage of this bill would simply add to the ongoing death knell for the constitution, and the US economy.

Such a simple thing, an innocent sounding thing. Until you understand the implications of how it is being done, and what the ultimate effect will be in the long run. Then it becomes absolutely devastating.

More: The US federal government itself is exploding in debt. That means we can expect more huge new spending proposals from Obama Pelosi. The strategy appears to be to overload the US economy with overwhelming debt which is programmed to snowball within a few short years to unimaginable proportions. By that time, most of the perpetrators within the Obama Pelosi government may wisely choose to take a wealthy retirement in Costa Rica.

John Robb's Resilient Communities: Could They Survive EMP?

John Robb is an author, blogger, former special ops pilot in the USAF, author of "Brave New War", public speaker, entrepreneur, and futurist theorist on "open source warfare", "resilient communities" and more.

Al Fin's cousin Abu recently looked at an interview that John Robb gave to BoingBoing.  Abu asked the question: "Could A Different US President Have Prevented What Is Coming?"  But perhaps a more relevant question might be:  "Can Communities be Made Resilient against Collapse from Many Causes -- Including EMPs?

Here is how Robb describes resilient communities:

Communities that offer energy independence, food security, economic prosperity, and protection. What are the global drivers that make resiliency important? Simply: stability, prosperity, and security is going away. You will soon find you are on your own, if you haven't already. If you do nothing, you will suffer the predations of gangs, militias, and corrupt bureaucracies that will fill the void left by retreating nation-states. If you want to avoid this fate, you can build resilient communities that not only allow you and your family to survive intact, but to thrive. __From Interview In BoingBoing

Robb is writing a book about local resilience, which will describe how to create a resilient community from scratch. Detailed plans for resilience, such as Robb is promising, are badly needed. Survival is better guaranteed by prepared communities possessing multiple competencies, than by single individuals, couples, or other small groups of limited resources and manpower.

Robb is predicting a coming economic crash that will be worse than 2008. As time goes by, Robb expects the societal fallout from successive economic collapses to grow exponentially worse, due to rapidly expanding cultural schisms in multicultural societies. On his blog, he is providing information to help in providing various sorts of community resiliency.

But take it up another notch -- further perhaps than even Robb is looking. What happens to a deeply fractured society, already in economic depression, when it is hit by an EMP or similarly destructive attack on the power grid and energy infrastructures?

Clearly if 90% of US residents could be expected to die within 1 year of an EMP attack under ordinary circumstances, far more would probably succumb within the cultural setting that Robb describes.

Individual and small group preparation for disaster is vital and necessary -- but not sufficient in the long run. For long term survival, we need prepared communities. Most collapse situations will not require something as elaborate as the Society for Creative Apocalyptology. Robb's Resilient Communities might be more than sufficient for most catastrophic disruptions. They are certainly a good place to start.

5th Carnival of Nuclear Energy at NextBigFuture

Liquid Fuel Nuclear Reactors

View more webinars from Robert Hargraves.

Brian Wang hosted the 5th Blog Carnival of Nuclear Energy last weekend at NextBigFuture. There has been a desperate need for such an updated collection of the best nuclear blogging, and Brian and other nuclear bloggers have stepped up to the plate.

2. Nuclear Fissionary has an article on energy density and waste comparison of energy production.

3. India's long term nuclear development plans at Nucleargreen.

Much more from the 5th Carnival of Nuclear Energy at NextBigFuture -- including new nuclear fusion research breakthroughs and news about Cold Fusion and Blacklight Power.

Shimizu Modular Seastead Tower Concept

This cross sectional view illustrates the full height and depth of the tower, both above and below the sea surface. The apparent top-heaviness may require additional ballast below the center -- such as an inverted tower with adjustable ballast tanks.

This near-aerial view demonstrates the surface extent of the floating island in comparison to the size of the central tower. Such a large surface area allows for significant wave control.

The modular view illustrates the potential for growth when multiple cells and modules are combined. Since greater size will reduce surface mobility, it will be important to enhance wave control to compensate for inability to move away from large storms.

Cross sectional view emphasizes functional components of the design.

Step by step construction is illustrated by this view. The solution to the ballast problem becomes apparent as one proceeds through the steps.

Previously published at Al Fin The Next Level

via Pink Tentacle

Escaping the Apocalypse In Style

When everything falls apart at once, you do not have time to transfer from one type of escape vehicle to another. You need a vehicle that can move quickly out of the danger zone, and covertly past those who might want to appropriate your assets, or do you personal harm.

The U-010 Undersea Yacht is designed to travel submerged or on the surface, depending upon the needs of the moment. Surface travel is by diesel. Simple controls allow you to switch to electric power for undersea movement.

Luxurious fittings allow you to forget that the world is falling apart around you. Just pack plenty of provisions and fuel so that you can get where you are going.

More photos

Via Impactlab

Electronic Armageddon on National Geographic Tuesday Night

Check out "Electronic Armageddon" Tuesday 15 June at 10 PM on National Geographic Channel. The 4 minute teaser above provides a brief introduction.

What do future presidents need to know about existential dangers this country could face? Explorer investigates the science behind the dangers of a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or HEMP. Picture an instantaneous deathblow to the vital engines that power our society, delivered by a nuclear weapon designed not to kill humans but to attack electronics. What could happen if an electromagnetic pulse surged to earth, crippling every aspect of modern society's infrastructure? _NG

It is fairly certain that if President Obama was unprepared for an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, he is unlikely to be up to the challenge of an Electronic Armageddon. But then, maybe we'll be lucky, and it won't happen.

EMPACT America -- information clearing house on EMP attack

Nuclear weapon EMP effects from FAS

"One Second After" site -- web headquarters for William Forstchen's exciting novel graphically describing the effect of a surprise EMP attack against the US, from the perspective of one semi-rural community.

Links to a number of reports from the US EMP Commission

As Iran and North Korea hone their nuclear explosive and warhead delivery skills, the risk for an untraceable surprise EMP attack against Europe or the US is not subsiding at all. And with Hugo Chavez expressing a wish to join the nuclear club, the problem potential oozes ever closer to North America.

Up to 90% of the US population could be dead within 1 year of an effective EMP attack that destroyed large scale equipment underlying the US electrical grid, without massive outside aid. That is how much modern societies depend upon electricity for their survival. But how realistic would massive outside aid be, if the world was suddenly plunged into global war at the same time?

15June2010 More: The US Congress is working on bills to protect the US energy grid from an array of attacks -- including hacker attacks, and solar storm hazards. But there is no sign that their efforts are anywhere proportionate to the threat.

Slouching Toward Idiocracy

The most reliable way to establish an Idiocracy is to populate your nation with low IQ people. That approach has worked for Haiti and a number of other nations easily identified by the graphic above.

As you can see from the graphic above, low IQ societies will do well to keep the garbage and excrement off the streets. You cannot expect them to be global drivers of invention, commerce, and advanced technology.

A dumbing down of popular culture and intellectual fodder is another path to an Idiocratic future. Even the means by which information is propagated may exert an Idiocratic effect on large numbers of practitioners.

Another tried and true method of establishing an Idiocracy is by dumbing down the schools. This approach takes longer, but if you can force most students to matriculate through the dumbed-down system, your Idiocracy is certain to arrive eventually.

Not that formal education can ever guarantee success. But the time that is spent in school should be time well spent, not time wasted by an incompetent educational system.

GNXP

For a number of reasons, the population average IQ for the world has been declining -- and is projected to continue to decline for the foreseeable future. This ongoing drop in average IQ combined with cultural and societal trends which restrict a person's use of whatever innate intelligence he may have, will double the detriment on the street level.

You can speed up the IQ decline in your country by opening the door to a massive influx of low IQ immigrants from countries with low average IQ.

Another way that intelligent action can be restricted is through risk-aversion -- the extreme fear of making a mistake. If people are so afraid of making a mistake that they never take a chance, they are unlikely to accomplish much, or to solve many pressing problems. And so the problems keep piling up, until before you know it the average IQ of the first world has slumped to the previous average level of the third world. And then you have arrived at what is likely to be a very long-lasting Idiocracy indeed.

It took tens of thousands of years for humans to evolve into distinct breeding populations, with different traditions, strengths, interests, and capacities. It may take not much over a century for the world's human population to erase whatever gains those tens of thousands of years of evolution may have seen. Certainly far less than the 500 years that humans in the movie took to establish a lasting Idiocracy.

This will not be a smooth transition. From the Muslim reconquista of Europe to the La Raza reconquista of the Southwestern US -- and dozens more "liberation movements" from Central Asia to Africa to China to Southeastern Asia to New Zealand to Canada to Latin America -- it is certain to be a bumpy ride.

If you have a better way of maintaining wealth than gold -- use it. If you know of a better way of protecting your loved ones and your property than public sector union employees -- bring it about. If you are sure of a location better suited for a more secure and prosperous future than you can presently foresee -- start preparing to move there.

The many tumultuous changes that will occur due to the few trends pointed out above will not happen uniformly, but will instead be focused mainly in certain areas. Take that into account when making your plans.

Making a Habit of Blowing One's Monkey Mind

Most humans never rise above "First Order Thinking" -- basic goal oriented behaviours, reading, computing, memorising, and fitting acquired comprehensions within a pre-existing, culturally inherited mental frame. At the most, a typical human will achieve "Metacognition," where he monitors his progress in first order thinking, and grades his progress. It is the unusual human who breaks through to "Transformative Learning."

The capacity for transformative learning develops in middle to late adolescence, although few persons truly experience it, and fewer still achieve mastery of the transformative process. Transformational learning involves breaking through cultural and paradigmatic constraints, to richer conceptual fields beyond.

The academic theory of transformative learning is almost entirely restricted to the field of "adult learning", because that is the field of learning where the theory originated and developed, for the most part. And perhaps those who teach adolescents and young adults in conventional institutions of education are just a bit too happy and complacent with the way things are in conventional education.

Transformational learning is not easy or comfortable -- for either teacher or student. But it is necessary, and those who care about the fate of humans in this part of the galaxy will begin to take it seriously.

Personal transformations often follow  the following phases:

1. Experiencing a disorientating dilemma, paradox, enigma or anomaly
2. Feelings of fear, anger, guilt, or shame
3. Questioning one's assumptions
4. Recognising the need for personal transformation
5. Exploring new roles, relationships and actions
6. Planning a course of action
7. Acquiring new knowledge and skills
8. Provisional trying of new roles
9. Building confidence in new roles and relationships
10. A re-integration of a new perspective into one's life

Ref. Mezirow, Jack et al. (2000) Learning as Transformation

_Hent.org

Most people do not take kindly to being "disoriented." Feelings of "guilt, shame, anger" etc. are not the half of it, for most ordinary monkey-minds. The full play of emotions can enter the dynamic process of transformative learning. Not exactly how you remember school? Join the club.

When a fundamentally disconfirming experience or a disorienting dilemma challenges our frame of reference, we are presented with the opportunity to dive to the deepest level of learning in an effort to make meaning of the catastrophic experience. So powerful is this kind of learning that Mezirow described it as "emancipation from libidinal, linguistic, epistemic, institutional or environmental forces that limit our options and our rational control over our lives, but have been taken for granted or seen as beyond human control." This experience can cause us to critically reflect on our beliefs and presuppositions, resulting in either a transformed way of pattern recognition, or, at the deepest level, a totally transformed framework. _ Learning to Think Strategically

Emancipation? Yes, and much more. Release from constraints plus the motive power to go beyond previous limitations.

Many animals can be trained to remain within a limited perimeter of physical or behavioural space. Then, when the real constraints are surreptitiously removed without the animal's awareness, the animal continues to limit itself as if the constraints remained. Monkey men are just like those animals. Transformative learning wakes them up.

For learners to change their "meaning schemes (specific beliefs, attitudes, and emotional reactions)," they must engage in critical reflection on their experiences, which in turn leads to a perspective transformation (Mezirow 1991, p. 167). "Perspective transformation is the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world; changing these structures of habitual expectation to make possible a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrating perspective; and, finally, making choices or otherwise acting upon these new understandings" (ibid.).

...Transformative learning has two layers that at times seem to be in conflict: the cognitive, rational, and objective and the intuitive, imaginative, and subjective (Grabov 1997). Both the rational and the affective play a role in transformative learning. Although the emphasis has been on transformative learning as a rational process, teachers need to consider how they can help students connect the rational and the affective by using feelings and emotions both in critical reflection and as a means of reflection (Taylor 1998). _ericdigests

Very few theorists have come to understand the centrality of grief to the process of learning and growing. Manfred Clynes is one such researcher. Robert Boyd is another. To understand why meaningful learning and transformation should involve grief, is to begin to appreciate how profoundly important being a human (as opposed to being a monkey) truly is.

There is an innate drive in all humans to understand and make meaning of their experiences. It is through established belief systems that adults construct meaning of what happens in their lives...Developing more reliable beliefs about the world, exploring and validating their dependability, and making decisions based upon an informed basis, is central to the adult learning process. _PraegerHandbookVol2

Most pseudo-intellectuals in academia, media, law, politics, and environmentalism are perfectly content to forego the exhausting work of transformation. Their time is filled with a daily routine of monkey games, which is as satisfying as they seem to require.

But those who wish to step beyond the ordinary shite fight and mudslinging of monkey play, into the larger universe of human, trans-human, and "posthuman" possibilities, it's going to take a lot of work, pain, and grief. Over and over, as long as you continue wanting to go farther.

Good little self-satisfied monkeys would never tolerate anything like that.

This is important: The crucially important and helpful techniques of transformative learning can be twisted -- are being twisted every day -- by professors, workshop leaders, propagandists, politicians, and others who shape the minds of others for their own benefit, rather than helping the person shape his own mind for purposes of personal and professional growth. This perversion of the transformative process is called brainwashing, or sometimes "consciousness raising." The goal of brainwashing is to confine the mind -- the opposite of liberation or emancipation.

Anyone who has experienced genuinely liberating and empowering transformation will detect the attempt at false and perverted "transformation" fairly easily. And it will make him very, very angry to see it.

More on this topic later.

How Can It Be A Surprise When You Knew It Was Happening?

Population Reference Bureau
Humans took millions of years to evolve into their different distinct population groups across the globe. As the array of breeding populations experimented with the spectrum of political and economic systems, a set of likely winners and perennial losers grew more distinct. But a funny thing happened on the way to the awards ceremony: the winners started disappearing, and in their place popped up growing colonies of the perennial losers.

PRB
More advanced societies grew to reach relatively comfortable limits with the resources around them. Less advanced societies -- with technological and financial aid from more advanced societies -- continued to grow well beyond sustainable limits.

A lower rate of childbirth among ethnic European women, for example, meant fewer future workers to pay into the welfare state pyramidal schemes. Europeans subsidised the dysfunctional third world, helping to bring down death rates remarkably. In payment for that subsidy, millions of third worlders have moved to Europe to build Europe's future.

Of course Europeans themselves, having been relieved of the need to provide for their own defense in 1945 at the end of WWII, have been somewhat subsidised themelves. And research and development into advanced sciences and technologies also shifted away from Europe somewhat as Europe focused internally on itself. That would be another sense in which Europe has been somewhat subsidised from the outside.

The US has always had more immigration than most other nations, since its beginning. In the second half of the 20th century, the US government chose to favour non-European immigration -- with predictable results. With almost all US population growth coming from third world immigrants or the children of third world immigrants, the human capital of the US is becoming more problematic.

Can the US sustain and improve its infrastructure -- when the people within the nations supplying its future population certainly could not do so? California gives us a preliminary glimpse:

"More of the country is going to be like California," said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. Minorities make up 57% of the population in California. _LATimes

If the new voters of California can pull the state back from the brink of economic collapse, that will be a sign of hope for the demographic transition hitting the rest of the country. But if the new residents of California bring the corruption, violence, dysfunctionality, and incompetence so prominent in their countries of origin, with them to California -- the inference will prove more ominous.

Debt and potentially dysgenic demographic change make a potent combination. Try not to be too surprised when the potent effects impact you and your life.

There Is No Cure for What Ails the Undeveloped World

This is a world map highlighting the "developing world nations." Often referred to as the "third world" or the "undeveloped world", but more accurately seen as the "unraveling world." But why is the poor world unraveling? Why does the undeveloped world not improve with the trillions of dollars worth of aid that has been showered on its nations and people?

This map looks like a mirror image of the undeveloped world. It highlights penetration by the internet. It is the connected world.

This map looks at average population IQ by country. There is a clear correlation between chronic poverty and low population mean IQ. There is also a good correlation between internet "connectedness" and mean IQ.

This map combines the mean population IQ with a measure of national GDP. The correlation between national production and population IQ is made more obvious using such a combination graph.

This map shows the parts of the world that receive remittances from migrants who work outside the country and region. It is a reflection of the "brain drain" of the impoverished world, and the compensatory flow of wealth back to the home countries.

This map is a graphic portrayal of HIV rates. HIV rates have stabilised in the western world, but continue to rise in the third world.

World tuberculosis rates tend to be high in areas of limited or low quality medical care. As the demographic makeup of European countries changes to reflect the rapid growth of third world populations, Europe will not be able to fend off many diseases which were previously quite rare.

There is no cure for low population IQ, once basic nutritional and early childhood needs have been met. There is no cure for chronic bad government, violent and self-defeating behaviours, and bad infrastructure -- which directly derive from low population IQs. There is no cure for the diseases of inbreeding common to Arab lands -- including Gaza, the picture boy of suicidal government and culture.

Marvelous schemes have been devised to pull the third world up by its bootstraps, but unless these schemes address the deeper innate problems of the undeveloped world, they will come to nothing. Far from being a cure for chronic third world backwardness, rapid urbanisation will only focus the blights of the third world into a concentrated area.

Europe cannot afford to support the third world any longer -- it is becoming the third world. China is moving into the third world, but the people may not be as happy about that development as the elites who take the bribes.

The maps are all in play, all will change over time. As parts of the first world come to more closely resemble the third world in demographic makeup, they will increasingly take on more other characteristics of the third world.

China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan -- all had times of poverty. But when given the opportunity to pull themselves up, the people of East Asia rose to the challenge. Of course, some of these countries are caught in the same demographic implosion as large parts of Europe and Russia. There is a point of no return for a shrinking population -- particularly if it is being replaced by a less capable substitute population.

The trend will not go in the other direction without the same type of evolutionary forces which caused some groups to grow out of the chronic third world condition in the first place.

Artificial intelligence and nano-fab cornucopias will only shift the trend to dysgenics more quickly -- as the human brain becomes more of a vestigial organ. The singularity as envisioned by many of its devotees, is simply a high tech trap.

Humans of the advanced world must have challenges in order to stretch their abilities to the limit. Challenges AND opportunities. The welfare state is the opposite of the sort of environment that encourages growth.

It is an existential problem, in a world of shrinking mental capacities.

Galapagos?

There's More than One Way Home

The ability to diagnose and treat brain dysfunction without surgery, may rely on a new method of noninvasive brain stimulation using pulsed ultrasound developed by a team of scientists led by William "Jamie" Tyler, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University. The approach, published in the journal Neuron on June 9, shows that pulsed ultrasound not only stimulates action potentials in intact motor cortex in mice but it also "elicits motor responses comparable to those only previously achieved with implanted electrodes and related techniques," says Yusuf Tufail, the lead author from ASU's School of Life Sciences. _Physorg

PLoSOne
Scientists are developing better methods for using ultrasound to diagnose brain disorder, to treat serious brain pathologies such as tumours, and to stimulate more optimal brain function in diseases such as Alzheimer's and epilepsy. There are so many possible uses for ultrasound in the brain, that a person could get lost trying to get a mental grasp all of them.

"Scientists have known for more than 80 years that ultrasound can influence nerve activity," observes Tufail. "Pioneers in this field transmitted ultrasound into neural tissues prior to stimulation with traditional electrodes that required invasive procedures. Those studies demonstrated that ultrasound pre-treatments could make nerves more or less excitable in response to electrical stimulation.
"In our study, however, we used ultrasound alone to directly stimulate action potentials and drive intact brain activity without doing any kind of surgery," Tufail says. _Physorg

Ultrasound can also affect growth factors -- such as BDNF -- and patterns of nerve discharge. This opens the door to cognitive therapies using ultrasound.

In addition to advancing hope for noninvasive treatments of brain injury and disease, the groups' experiments in deeper subcortical brain circuits also revealed that ultrasound may be useful for modifying cognitive abilities.

"We were surprised to find that ultrasound activated brain waves in the hippocampus known as sharp-wave ripples," Tufail says. "These brain activity patterns are known to underlie certain behavioral states and the formation of memories."

The scientists also found that ultrasound stimulated the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the hippocampus -- one of the most potent regulators of brain plasticity.

Tyler says the fact that ultrasound can be used to stimulate action potentials, meaningful brain wave activity patterns, and BDNF leads him to believe that, in the future, ultrasound will be useful for enhancing cognitive performance; perhaps even in the treatment of cognitive disabilities such as mental retardation or Alzheimer's disease. _SD

PLoS study (2008) by William Tyler et al looks at some basic science of the technology.

Technology Review article on brain ultrasound therapeutics

An IEEE Spectrum look at using ultrasound for brain stimulation

Short review article describing ultrasonic deep brain stimulation

Synsonix, tech startup which includes William Tyler among its founders.

More information from Brain Stimulant

Ultrasound is only one of many technologies for intervening safely in brain dysfunction and pathology. Other methods include transcranial electromagnetic stimulation and the implantation of electrodes and transducers deep within the brain itself -- intracranial stimulation. Ultrasound has the advantage of being fairly well studied in most body tissues, so that the limits of diagnostic and therapeutic uses of ultrasound are fairly well known in general.

Getting approval from the ethics committee to study ultrasonic brain stimulation is much easier than getting permission to implant electrodes and transducers into deep brain tissue -- or even just under the dura.

That is one of many reasons why the study of ultrasonic brain stimulation should advance fairly quickly. Stay tuned.

Relief Well Reaches 14,000 Feet Depth, More Spill News

"It takes time to dig a relief well safely and efficiently, which is what we're trying to do," Capt. Lee Crowe says. "Our goal is to stem the flow of oil -- the long-term solution, not the short-term solution."
As of Thursday, BP says the drill for this relief well has reached a depth of 13,978 feet. _CNN

Once the relief well intersects the Macondo bore, BP will be able to secure the well, and stop the spill permanently.

The operation is enormous, the equipment and technicalities overwhelming. In meeting rooms, screens monitor progress and maps dot walls. The diagrams the Coast Guard admiral draws to help explain matters leave a journalist's head spinning. But he tries to explain in simple terms.
"The intention is to intercept the wellbore, well down below the surface near the reservoir, then pump heavy mud in to counteract the pressure of the oil coming up," Allen says. "That will allow them to basically plug or kill the well. Once that's done, you could do things like remove the blowout preventer, bring it to the surface and try to find out what happened." _CNN

Meanwhile, BP is extending its oil recovery efforts at the well head. The current LRMP cap will be slowly ramped up from a current 15,000 bpd recovery rate to about 18,000 bpd -- the limit of the surface ship that receives the oil/gas/methanol flow. By adding a second surface ship capable of handling a further 10,000 bpd (received through the BOP's choke and kill lines via the "top kill manifold"), the total possible oil recovery via the combined system will approach 28,000 bpd.

"If we can get this thing up to 28,000 barrels a day, that's where we want to be," Allen said.

Using the same tubes and pipes put in place to try the failed "top kill" method of stopping the oil by pumping mud into the blown-out Maconda well, engineers will instead suck oil out of the well and to a ship, called the Q4000, on the water's surface. The Q4000 was also used in the top kill process.

Since that method failed, the Q4000 has been retrofitted with a flaring system that is capable of burning oil. Allen said the goal is to keep oil out of the water by either collecting and processing it or burning it. To date, oil has not been burned as part of the containment process.

The 28,000 barrels-per-day figure is derived by combining the up to 10,000 barrel-per-day capacity expected of the Q4000 containment system with the 18,000 barrel-per-day capacity of the Discoverer Enterprise, the vessel now collecting oil via the Lower Marine Riser Package containment system, or containment cap, put in place June 3. _NOLA

In the meantime, more people are becoming aware that there is more to the calculation of an ecological catastrophe than the mere volume of oil spilled:

"Very large spills have had minimal impact and small spills have had a devastating impact," says Judy McDowell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, one of the authors of a 2003 National Research Council report that reviewed lessons from previous incidents.

Consider three vastly different spills (see timeline, right). In 1979, the Ixtoc I well off Mexico's Gulf coast spewed 530 million litres of oil into shallow waters - three times the worst current estimates for Deepwater Horizon. Five years later, "we had to look hard to see any lasting effects", says Arne Jarnelöv of the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm, Sweden, who led a UN team sent to monitor the area.

The Exxon Valdez spilled far less, 40 million litres, yet Alaska's Prince William Sound is still recovering. And 700,000 litres spilled by the oil barge Florida at West Falmouth on Cape Cod is still affecting species 40 years on. Why such variation? It all comes down to the type of oil and the habitats involved. _NS

Light crude in the warm waters of the Gulf is quickly evaporated, dissipated, emulsified, weathered, and eaten up by prolific bacteria that have adapted to the oil-rich waters of the ever-seeping Gulf of Mexico.

More on the relief wells from SciAm

Update 13June2010: The hysterical bleating of journalists, academics, activists, attorneys, politicians, and celebrities of all sorts, has been completely lacking in meaningful content or perspective. A look back at the Ixtoc oil spill -- the largest spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- would be instructive for those still in possession of their critical faculties.

We Are Marching to Utopia, We Will Soon Be There...

...optimists and idealists -- with their ignorance about the truths of human nature and human society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed -- have wrought havoc for centuries....instead of utopian efforts to reform human society or human nature, we [should] focus on the only reform that we can truly master -- the improvement of ourselves through the cultivation of our better instincts. _OUP Review of "Uses of Pessimism"

Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. _Captain Malcolm Reynolds

There is something deep in human nature which has resisted change -- despite the best efforts of crusaders, utopians, religionists, and wishful thinkers -- for many [tens of?] thousands of years. After countless failures to reform the human spirit, most utopians are unfazed. If they can only grab enough power and control over how resources are distributed, they are sure that they can bring perfection to the land, under their own benevolent leadership. "The land will heal, the sea levels will begin to subside, and every man will say to every other man, you are my brother." And so on.

Philosopher Roger Scruton -- author of The Uses of Pessimism -- takes a somewhat more reluctant view:

The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of our most generous emotions, awaiting their chance. Those who invest their hopes in the moral improvement of humankind are therefore in a precarious position: at any moment the veil of illusion might be swept away, revealing the bare truth of the human condition. Either they defend themselves against this possibility with artful intellectual ploys, or they give way, in the moment of truth, to a paroxysm of disappointment and misanthropy. Both of these do violence to our nature. The first condemns us to the life of unreason; the second to the life of contempt.

...In order to see human beings as they are, therefore, and to school oneself in the art of loving them, it is necessary to apply a dose of pessimism to all one’s plans and aspirations. _GloomMerchant

In another piece, Scruton presents a paradoxical recommendation for how to teach children to think for themselves, logically and clearly:

...children are drawn to magic...they spontaneously animate their world with spirits and spells...they find relief and excitement in stories in which the heroes can summon supernatural forces to their aid and vanquish untold enemies – these facts reflect layers of deep settlement in the human psyche. But they also remind us that, in the life of the child, belief and imagination are not to be clearly distinguished, and that both serve other functions than the pursuit of truth.

...humanists should wake up to this point, and be careful when they seek to deprive their children of enchantment, or to replace their spontaneous fantasies with the cold hard facts of empirical science. It could well be that religion is a better discipline than pop science, when it comes to shaping the rational intellect, and that [we can offer our] children more in the way of a solid foundation, by anchoring their imagination in sacred stories and religious doctrines, than they are likely to be offered by those “Darwinian fairy tales’” as David Stove has called them, which have gained such currency in the wake of Dawkins and Hitchens.

In response to a child’s metaphysical curiosity grown-ups can say that everything has a scientific explanation. But they will know that this is a lie. The proposition that everything has a scientific explanation does not have a scientific explanation – it describes an amazing fact about our universe, a point where reasoning falls silent. There are many such points, as anyone who has children knows: why is there anything? Why should I be good? What existed before the Big Bang? What is consciousness? You can wrestle with these questions through philosophy, but science won’t answer them.

Children have an inkling of this. They also recognise that behind these questions lies a huge void – an emptiness which must be filled with love and reassurance, if their existence is not to seem like an accident. _Art_of_Certainty

Utopians try so hard to purge their children's minds of falsehood and "error", to create the perfect children of rational thought, capable of seeing through all the corrupt fables of the past. Except...children will be who they will be. You cannot make boys into girls or girls into boys without destroying who they are. And you cannot make humans into angels without ruining the essence of what they are. And still the utopians continue to try -- until they finally throw their hands up in complete exasperation at and condemnation of the utter evil of those who do not think along the same lines as themselves, the utopians.

The disgusted dismissal of homo rapiens and all his works that we find spelled out by John Gray in Straw Dogs is not a form of pessimism. It is an attempt to dismiss humanity entirely, as a kind of plague on the face of the earth. That kind of misanthropic nihilism is of no use to us. It removes the ground from all our values, and puts nothing in their place. _GloomMerchant

At that point, they often begin to plot and fantasize the great dieoff, to cleanse the otherwise pristine Earth of the incorrigible human demons who infest the lands and oceans. Fortunately, utopians are as incompetent in planning the great dieoff as they are in most other aspects of their lives.

The point is not to resist all change or improvement of humans. But any lasting change for the better is likely to happen from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Nothing illustrates the different approaches to a better world than the contrast between the French and American revolutions of the late 19th century.

The primary difference in causes that led to the American Revolution and the French Revolution was based in the world view of the innate goodness or innate evil of man. _Hyperhistory

Not all utopians believe in the innate goodness of men -- sometimes they only believe in the innate perfectibility of men. But utopias born of such ideas all come to a bitter end.

Every child has to learn to think for himself, from the beginning. But he must have a beginning from which to start.

The need for foundations is quite clearly an adaptation, and these foundations must provide the promise of protection and love, if they are to fit the new organism for its brief time in the world. If that is so, you are not going to eliminate the need for faith: the best you can do is to withhold all objects of faith, so that a child goes hungry into the life to which he or she is destined. More often than not, a humanist education will leave a child exposed to massive and mind-clogging superstitions of the Harry Potter and Star Wars kind. But these superstitions contain far less in the way of insight than is contained in the first chapter of Genesis.

Religious stories are also the result of natural selection – though selection at another level: they have come down to us because they have fulfilled a moral need. They have survived refutation because they contain, beneath their superficial falsehood, the moral truths that people need, when they must order their lives by good examples. _The Art of Certainty

This is true not only of religious stories, but of all the mythology and lasting moral fables from antiquity. Children must have some kind of foundation that transcends deductive logic, because that is how minds begin. Then, later, when they choose to either reshape or reaffirm their beliefs, they will have a sense of having decided for themselves, and feel stronger for it.

Yes, humans can make choices that make them better. Improved nutrition of mother and child can make humans stronger, smarter, taller, and sometimes capable of clearer thought. But a power structure that attempts to legislate morality, to engineer the moral and ideological purity of the human souls of its citizens -- that power structure is morally bankrupt, and deserves to die quickly. If it is allowed to continue, its leaders will eventually decide that the recalcitrant citizens do not deserve the benefit of the leaders' great wisdom. Then, beware.

This question has been acquiring an ever greater urgency over the past century -- even longer. It is now coming to a head in the demographic and economic crises of many of the world's most advanced nations. A culture that has rested on its own laurels, that has comforted itself with mental images of its own progressive improvement, is soon to be reawakened to a coarse and unruly history.

A Remarkable Scientific Quick-Clean Solution to Oil Slicks

An engineering professor at the University of Pittsburgh has devised a novel quick filtering approach to cleaning up surface oil slicks -- such as the one in the Gulf of Mexico. It involves a cotton filter that has been coated with a chemical polymer that allows the passage of water, but blocks the passage of oils.

The researcher reports that the filter was successfully tested off the coast of Louisiana and shown to simultaneously clean water and preserve the oil.

Di Gao, an assistant professor and William Kepler Whiteford Faculty Fellow in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering in Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering, created his filter as a possible method to help manage the spreading oil slick that resulted from the April 20 explosion of BP's "Deepwater Horizon" drilling platform. Gao has submitted his idea through the Deepwater Horizon Response Web site managed by the consortium of companies and government agencies overseeing the disaster response.

Gao's filter hinges on a polymer that is both hydrophilic -- it bonds with the hydrogen molecules in water -- and oleophobic, meaning that it repels oil. When the polymer is applied to an ordinary cotton filter, it allows water to pass through but not oil. The filter is produced by submerging the cotton in a liquid solution containing the polymer then drying it in an oven or in open air, Gao explained.
For the massive slick off the U.S. Gulf Coast, Gao envisions large, trough-shaped filters that could be dragged through the water to capture surface oil. The oil could be recovered and stored and the filter reused. Current cleanup methods range from giant containment booms and absorbent skimmers to controlled fires and chemical dispersants with questionable effects on human health and the environment. _SD

Gao has several other inventions to his credit which will be useful in real world situations. Researchers such as Gao are a saving counterpoint to the uselessness of academics in other departments, such as the social and political sciences, and in queer and ethnic studies.

Entrepreneurs Push the Outer Limits

Update 9June10: Be sure to check out the Carnival of Space #157 at Out of the Cradle, via Brian Wang: "Over 100 links and 6 embedded videos."

Discovery
Entrepreneurs want to be best, first, and biggest, and are willing to take risks to get there. The entrepreneurial mindset is world's away from the risk-averse attitude of bureaucrats, academics, and attorneys. The most difficult part of getting humans into space was creating an atmosphere that allowed entrepreneurs into the game. Thanks to the multiple booms of the 80s and 90s, a few high-flying entrepreneurs acquired enough wealth to help start developing their own space programs in the late 90s and the 00s.

"Commercial space is the only way forward. If we go with super-expensive government development, in the absence of some massive increase in the space budget, we will never do anything interesting in space. It's not a path forward. It's the only path forward." _SpaceX's Elon Musk, quoted in Discovery

The successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket into orbit last week once again pushed the private space race back into the spotlight. While the Falcon 9 is slated to begin carrying cargo to the International Space Station, it is also designed so that it could one day carry human passengers as well. With the Falcon 9 making it to orbit on the first try, it undoubtedly gave a boost to the private space industry.

There are several companies currently developing a wide range of space products that could one day fill in for what has so far been left to a few big nations. From the delivery of payloads to orbit and lunar landers, to space hotels and sub-orbital tourist rides, the private space race spans a wide range of opportunities. _Wired

One of the companies most eager to get into space and start making money in "the final frontier", is Bigelow Aerospace.

At the Bigelow Aerospace factory here, the full-size space station mockups sitting on the warehouse floor look somewhat like puffy white watermelons. The interiors offer a hint of what spacious living in space might look like.

“Every astronaut we have come in here just says, ‘Wow,’ ” Robert T. Bigelow, the company founder, told Kenneth Chang of The New York Times. “They can’t believe the size of this thing.”

Four years from now, the company plans for real modules to be launched and assembled into the solar system’s first private space station. Paying customers — primarily nations that do not have the money or expertise to build a space program from scratch — would arrive a year later.

In 2016, a second, larger station would follow. The two Bigelow stations would then be home to 36 people at a time — six times as many as currently live on the International Space Station.

If this business plan unfolds as it is written — the company has two fully inflated test modules in orbit already — Bigelow will be buying 15 to 20 rocket launchings in 2017 and in each year after...

...A habitat called Sundancer, with an inflated volume of about 6,400 cubic feet, would launch first. A separate rocket would then carry two Bigelow astronauts to take up residence in Sundancer as additional pieces — a second Sundancer, a larger habitat of about 11,700 cubic feet, and a central connecting node — are launched. The modules are to dock by themselves with the astronauts present to fix any glitches.

Once the stations are up, Bigelow still needs to demonstrate that it can juggle the logistics of supplying food, water and air, as well as fix the inevitable glitches that will arise. Mr. Bigelow said that he would hire people with the needed experience and skills, and that space stations were not all that different from hotels.

“I’ve had four decades of serving people, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people, all over the southwest part of the United States,” he said. “I have four decades of building all kinds of things. The principles are the same.”

As a private company, Bigelow can operate space stations much more efficiently than NASA and its governmental partners can operate the International Space Station, Mr. Bigelow said. _NYT

Other companies, that plan to take humans into suborbital space, include Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Armadillio Aerospace and Space Adventures. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin should also be ready for suborbital spaceflights -- with manned suborbital flights as early as 2012.

And then there is the great-grandpappy of commercial space startups -- Orbital Sciences. Orbital Sciences is no longer small, and is positioned to ride the entrepreneurial wave much higher.

You may never have heard of Orbital Sciences, despite the fact its revenues topped $1.1 billion back in 2008. The company was founded in 1982 by David Thompson, Bruce Ferguson and Scott Webster, and has had many successes in space and missile technology since then.

It's the other company tapped by NASA to develop cargo-capable rockets to supply the ISS, and it's also responsible for the launch-abort escape rockets of the only surviving bit of the Constellation program, the Orion manned capsule. In March of 2010 Orbital bought General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems Satellite Division for $55 million, retaining the 325 employees and planning on using the tech to further the company's space science and engineering expertise.

Orbital's future is bright, and though some of its missions will be high-profile, like those supporting the ISS, other parts of its business (like its Missile Defense Agency test launches) may ensure it doesn't occupy the same sort of limelight that SpaceX or the other enterprises here will. _FastCompany

These entrepreneurs -- many of them self-made billionaires -- are looking beyond the initial toeholds they are digging out. They are looking for some very big payoffs, as a reward for being among the first private companies to offer space to the public.

And beyond that? The thing about congenital entrepreneurs is that they're never satisfied. They are always scheming, always looking for the next sky-wide opportunity. And the more they achieve, the more they want to achieve.