We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Intel is keeping up the pace established many decades ago in Gordon MooreŠ› eponymous law:
The chips are the first to become available from any company with features as small as 22 nanometers (the finest details on today’s chips are 32 nanometers), allowing transistors to be smaller and packed more densely. Ivy Bridge chips offer 37 percent more processing speed than the previous generation of chips, and can match their performance while using just half the energy.
I personally believe it is one of the reasons why Socialist efforts at Global Domination have been spiked. It is damned difficult to control the flow of information when individuals have this kind of power in their hands.
I am on the email list about new technologies that “Mr Singularity”, Ray Kurzweil, puts out. And this one caught my eye:
The onslaught of ultra-tiny technology is giving rise to the idea of “printable spacecraft” consisting of electronic circuits, power generation, sensing, fluid handling, propulsion, telecommunications and mobility subsystems — all integrated onto a single substrate, Leonard David at Innovation News Daily reports. The project, if successful, could allow scientists to one day pepper other worlds with atmospheric “flutterflyers” as well as “flutterlanders” — devices the size of postage stamps or confetti that reach a surface imbued with sensor smarts.
Research on the notion of printable spacecraft is being scoped out under the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program — one of many novel space initiatives detailed late last month at a NIAC symposium in Pasadena, Calif.
“Flat-sheet spacecraft” with printed chemical sensors can be deployed high above a target world and flutter to the surface like a leaf, eliminating the need for large and complex landing systems. The spacecraft would see a low-G impact at touchdown.
From the Radio Times, about a programme this evening on BBC3 TV, entitled I Woke Up Gay:
Documentary about Chris Birch, who used to be a rugby-playing lad with a girlfriend and a job in a bank. However, his life was radically changed by a stroke when he was just 21, and he is now a gay hairdresser with an interest in fashion and interior décor.
The question I ask with my title is of course an attempt to get a smile, if not a lol, but it is also serious. Has anyone gay suffered a stroke and emerged from it straight, with the overwhelming desire to ditch the hairdressing and instead to get a girlfriend and a job in a bank and to take up rugby? Either way, I think the answer would be interesting. Seriously, is this kind of thing a one way street, or can it work in both directions?
Neither answer would obey the gods of Political Correctness. If a stroke can turn you gay, but not make you straight, that would suggest that gays are, at least in some sense, the result of something a lot like brain damage. They are, sort of, a mistake. If a stroke can turn you straight, then maybe those crazy Christians who say that they can straighten out gays may after all be onto something.
A relative of mine recently had a stroke. He lost his peripheral vision and can no longer drive, but otherwise no change. Still no interest in fashion, or not that anyone in the family has heard about.
All this reminds me of that Woody Allen movie (I can’t recall which – they’re all a blur) where someone gets a smack on the head and wakes up right wing.
I entirely realise that strokes are frequently very unfunny. I’m sure we all know about friends or relatives who were not as lucky as my relative, or as Chris Birch was, kind of. I certainly do.
The programme airs at 9pm, and is repeated at 12.30pm in the very small hours of tomorrow morning. I will record it.
Fin out more here.
Although, all it does is solve Rubik Cubes faster.
Does something that can do that have any real world uses?
WUWT has a posting about how Jim Hansen of NASA says that the skeptics are winning the argument, i.e. the argument against him and his fellow CAGW-ers. In the midst of the largely agreeing comments at WUWT (yes you are losing you jackass, and it serves you right, etc.), there was, on the other hand, this from Peter Donaldson (April 10, 3.19am):
I disagree with Hansen, he might believe not enough is being done to reduce CO2 but the global warming concept has been accepted globally, it is rarely challenged in the media it is accepted generally by the media and “saving the planet” and “reducing carbon footprint” are bandied about everywhere, and are foremost in the design of all new product be they cars, buildings, airplanes whatever. There is a huge global industry of solar energy devices and it is expanding rapidly.
The skeptical view is sidelined, reserved for oddballs, at least that is the public conception. It seems to me that this is now a bandwagon rolling on and nothing will stop it, even if warming has stopped or if there was cooling.
The punctuation is a bit sketchy, but the point is a good one. There are times when I suspect that Donaldson will be proved right, and that although winning the argument at the merely intellectual level is totally necessary to overthrowing the vested interests excused by the CAGW scare, these interests may just prove to be too firmly entrenched.
And then I read this, also at WUWT, about how many of Hansen’s colleagues (and not just any old colleagues) at NASA have come out publicly in favour of climate skepticism, and against the bogus certainties of the CAGW tribe:
49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week admonishing the agency for it’s role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.
The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily on complex climate models that have proven scientifically inadequate in predicting climate only one or two decades in advance.
If NASA changes its public tune, that has to be big.
It’s Hansen who is now starting to look like a sidelined oddball. As Instapundit (that’s him linking to the same WUWT story) would say: well, good.
Let’s hope the political decisions and the money decisions now start to tell the pessimistic Peter Donaldson that he is being too pessimistic. I’m sure he would be delighted if that happened.
EMC2, the company founded to advance Dr. Bussard’s fusion technology to a practical state, has been flying so under the radar that you really have to hunt to find out what is going on. They are still moving ahead and the technology has not hit any major road blocks that I have been able to find out about. The US Navy ONR is still funding them and is the reason for keeping the profile low. This bit on Wikipedia is the only bit of really current news I have been able to find:
During 4Q of 2011, EMC2 modified the electron injectors to increase the plasma heating. The higher plasma density in WB-8 prompted the need for higher heating power. They plan to operate WB-8 in high beta regime with the modified electron injectors during 1Q of 2012.
This game is still afoot.
Have any of us mentioned here that Friedrich Hayek died exactly twenty years plus one week ago, i.e. on Friday March 23rd 1992? I believe not.
Sam Bowman, in a posting on March 23rd 2012, ensured that the ASI Blog was responsible for no such omission. He marked the occasion with a couple of Hayek quotes, from The Constitution of Liberty.
I particularly liked the second one:
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
One of the contrasts in the contemporary world that I keep banging on about here is how different the designing and making of high tech gadgetry (which still benefits – and almost miraculously so – from exactly the sort of dispersed knowledge and dispersed intelligence that Hayek was talking about) is from the management of the world’s financial system (the higher reaches of which are notorious for depending on the good judgement of a tiny few supposedly wise but actually all too fallible political appointees).
As Sam Bowman said, a week ago:
Hayek died twenty years ago today. His profound insights into economics and social philosophy might be more important than ever.
Indeed they might.
Two weeks before the next election, turn off all coal-fired power stations and give the American public a good hard look at their long bleak future.
– commenter “old44” (March 28 5.14am) on a posting at WUWT entitled New EPA rule will block all new coal-electric generation
Last year, physicists discovered that red wine can turn certain materials into superconductors. Now they’ve found that Beaujolais works best and think they know why.
– The Physics arXiv Blog (with thanks to the ever alert Instapundit – how does he keep doing it?)
“To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine – despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.”
– Matt Ridley
A couple of months ago now, I went ahead and bought that new camera that I had for quite a while been thinking about buying. The circumstance that provoked me into making a decision earlier than I otherwise would have done was a trip, early in February, to Paris. Yes, it was cold:
That’s a water feature, somewhat frozen when I photoed it, in La Défense, the big clump of modern architecture in the west of Paris.
The thing that clinched it for it, in favour of the Panasonic Lumix FZ150, was how reviewer after reviewer used phrases like “an all round winner” and “all round best”, as in best for the sort of camera that I wanted, when writing about it. Such talk suggested to me: excellence in what I knew I wanted (zoom, picture quality, good video recording) together with excellence in other areas that I would only learn about after I had started using the thing. So it is proving.
The other camera I was considering buying was the Canon SX40 HS. I can’t compare my new Lumix with that, and will presumably never know for sure if I made the exact right choice. But I can compare my new Lumix with all the previous cameras I have ever owned, and in particular with my most recent previous camera, a Canon S5 IS. And I can now tell you that I am a very happy snapper. Could I have chosen even better? Perhaps. Have I meanwhile chosen well? It certainly feels that way now.
The x24 zoom supplied by the new Lumix is wonderful, just as I expected it would be. The Canon SX40 HS has x35 zoom, but I reckoned that x24 would suffice for my purposes and so it is proving:
That’s a snap taken last week from Primrose Hill. On a typical London day, the limits of how far your camera can see with clarity are set not by its lens but by the clarity of the air, which is mostly set at: not very. So I am very happy with my new zoom superpower.
Other improvements on my old Canon were not quite so expected. → Continue reading: My new Panasonic Lumix FZ150
According to a news brief from a Janes newsletter, the move into the realm of what was once science fiction weaponry continues apace:
US Navy receives EM railgun prototype.
The US Navy (USN) has taken delivery and started testing a prototype electromagnetic (EM) railgun from BAE Systems as the service continues to develop a surface ship gun that can fire a projectile 50-100 n miles (93-185 km) without using propellants. General Atomics is due to deliver its competing prototype to the USN’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) in April
The future is here.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
