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]
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David Lucas, commenting on a posting at my place sparked by the fact that a relative of mine by marriage is celebrating her hundredth birthday today, pours cold water on the likelihood of serious life extension much beyond a hundred:
I believe increased life expectancy is due to decreased rates of death, initially in childhood, later on in mid-life and now in tackling old-age diseases. There is remarkably little growth in people living significantly beyond 100-110.
The future pattern is likely to be most people living to around 100 and then dying of multiple organ failure.
Which I find bleak, but convincing. You read about occasional people of long, long ago living into very old age even by our standards, even as you wince at the tales of multiple infant death, then and later. The statistics of how medicine and food and hygiene have affected life expectancy until now are surely just as Lucas says.
But does that mean that it will always be like this? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe medical magic will trundle slowly onwards, from stopping half the babies dying, to stopping half the surviving adults dying with the onset of middle age, to stopping three quarters of the wrinklies from dying well before they are a hundred, to keeping everyone alive even longer, by means now not known about. Or perhaps now known about but not yet widely bothered about, because now too difficult and expensive, and crucially (to use a morbidly appropriate adverb), too uncomfortable.
In other words, the reason nobody now lives beyond about a hundred and ten is basically the same reason that nobody, two hundred years ago, ever travelled faster than a galloping horse. The techies just hadn’t got around to repealing this seemingly fixed law of nature. And then, one day – puff-puff – the techies got that sorted, and a few people did start travelling at twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred miles per hour, quickly followed by nearly everybody else who could afford it.
We’ll see. Well, I probably won’t see, but we as in humanity as a whole may.
And if people ever do routinely live to be four hundred or more, what will be the results of that? A crate of Tesco Viagra for whoever can come up with the most surprising yet likely consequence of mass super-longevity.
For a couple of centuries an “Advertisement” in Philosophical Transactions expressly forbade pronouncements by the [Royal] Society as a whole on any scientific or practical matter.
… it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject, either of Nature or Art, that comes before them.
That sensible “Advertisement” disappeared in the 1960s when a politically ambitious physicist, Patrick Blackett, was the President.
– From the blog of Nigel Calder, doyen of science writers, via Philip Stott, who does his bit to inject some climate realism into the Radio 4’s Home Planet.
The Royal Society should return to its former path of virtue. And The Lancet would benefit from that motto, too.
I’m not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released today.
The justice ministry said the survey found that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record-keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
It’s an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.)
For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to “support” those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off?
I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have.
Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher “suicide rate” could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal.
We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don’t think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention.
My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer.
But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes.
Instapundit has recently been noticing a little buzz concerning thorium, as an alternative energy source to put all the other alternatives in the shade. I have no idea how this works, or could be made to work.
Others seem also to be somewhat uncertain about the details. I shudder whenever I hear anyone recommending a new Manhattan Project to accomplish whatever it is they want. All they could be sure about when they embarked on the original Manhattan Project was a huge bill. I prefer the kind of technology that can start in a small, rough and ready way, in a hanger or a laboratory somewhere, and then spread gradually, improving all the while in cost and efficacy as it gathers viable applications, and only being rolled out big time, with big money, once it is clear that it has worked on a smaller scale. This thorium thing sounds to me like people taking refuge from huge difficulties in an even huger impossibility. If these thorium reactors are going to be so tiny, why can’t the first one be built in a shed?
But what do I know? And more to the point, what can our more tech-savvy commenters tell us about this?
Here:
Will very high res teleconferencing substantially reduce the need for business air travel?
My answer? It may, in some sense, reduce the need for such travel, but that doesn’t mean that it actually will reduce it. Face to face contact has a way of proving stubbornly superior to all the other kinds, for all kinds of weird reasons that you never saw coming. I can remember people saying that the internet blah blah would have us all working on the beech [sorry, see comments, when you get old your spelling goes into reverse] beach by around now.
But what do I know? And what does anyone else think?
It seems that the Saudis and the UAE have got upset about the use of Blackberrys for such evil purposes as enabling young men and women to get a date. Various so-called “national security” issues are also cited.
Sheesh.
According to a Janes newsletter:
US Navy successfully tests laser with close-in weapon. The US Navy has for the first time in a maritime environment successfully destroyed four unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) targets with a laser, essentially proving the basic premise of adding a directed-energy weapon to Raytheon’s Phalanx close-in weapon system. The trial was sponsored by the US Naval Sea Systems Command’s (NAVSEA’s) PMS 405 Directed Energy Weapons programme office and used the navy’s own Laser Weapon System (LaWS) equipment, developed in conjunction with the Dahlgren Naval Surface Warfare .Center Dahlgren Division, combined with a Phalanx weapon mount.
The era of the ray cannon has arrived.
An interesting piece about how the oil slick disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Something is getting attention: there is not as much of an oil spill as some might suppose. Apparently, in warm water like this, and due to certain acquatic organisms, the oil is gradually absorbed. It is, in a manner of speaking, gobbled up. (Belch).
That got me thinking that yes, oil slicks caused by human error are obviously going to cause a lot of anger and lead to tort lawsuits from affected parties, such as fishing businesses and owners of beachfront property, but then again, what about an oil leak that is caused by tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust? In some geological areas, oil leaks of its own accord, sometimes in very large amounts. Which suggests that oil-cleaning technologies are a useful thing to invest in even if there were no offshore drilling.
None of this should, of course, remove any heat off those oil firms and contractors responsible for this disaster – which is what it is – nor indeed of the US government for its tardy response. However, it might help if more folk acknowledged that oil is the stuff of nature, and you know what, this stuff tends to move around occasionally, even without Man’s assistance.
(Apols for my light blogging of late and thanks to the others for all the great articles. I have been incredibly busy of late).
Blogger Eric Raymond – who plainly is not on Steve Jobs’ Christmas card send-out list, points out the less-than-stellar launch of the new version of the iPhone.
What is noteworthy, however, is that at least when a product is brought to market and there are problems with it, then as demonstrated by the Eric Raymonds of this world, a swarm of bloggers, professional product evaluation writers and magazine journalists can weigh in. Capitalism will force Jobs and his colleagues to sort the matter out, in weeks, if not months, since otherwise the product and brand will be damaged with heavy losses.
Now compare this sort of process with say, a government project that involves spending billions of pounds of public funds on projects of questionable value, and consider how long it takes for a government to scrap such projects, admit they were wrong, etc.
Last Saturday, Michael Jennings, Rob Fisher and I went to the Farnborough Airshow, to which, of course, we all brought our cameras. The one with the cheapest and cheerfullest camera tends to take the most pictures, (a) because the pictures tend to be smaller and will fit with ease onto today’s infinite SD cards no matter how many you take, and (b) because with a cheap and cheerful camera you want to give yourself lots of chances to have taken some good snaps, in among the torrent of bad ones. So I took the most photos. There follows a very small selection of these compared to how many I took, and a very large selection compared to how many photos there usually are in Samizdata photo-essays. In the event that you would like to see any of them bigger, click on them. They are shown in chronological order.
Rob’s photos can be seen here. They include quite a few that show what it was like arriving. Rather chaotic, and aesthetically shambolic, in a way that really doesn’t suggest a great show of any sort. Farnborough only happens every two years, and I guess it just isn’t worth organising all the incidentals associated with the public descending on the place for just one weekend every two years, any better than only just adequately. The train from Waterloo (they’re very frequent) having taken about forty minutes (I bought a train-and-bus-included ticket to the show at Waterloo), there was then a satanically convoluted bus journey from Farnborough railway station, smothered in traffic jams of people trying to get to the same spot in their cars, a journey that caused us, in the evening, to prefer to take the same journey back to the station on foot. But we finally arrived at the airfield, where there was yet more too-ing and fro-ing, this time along improvised queue routes, bounded by temporary barriers such as you get around roadworks. We were herded along these tracks and into the show by men in flourescent tops shouting at us. Is this what pop festivals are like?
Mercifully soon we were in, and wandering past further aesthetic shambles, in the form of closely bunched exhibits with euphemistic signs on them about “all your force projection needs” (calling in an air strike when you get into a fight outside a pub?), “delivering ordnance efficiently” (killing people efficiently), “creative solutions” (killing people creatively), “mission specific solutions” (killing exactly the people you want to kill in exactly the way you want to kill them) and so on. Fair enough. The truth is too horrible to be faced head on.
Here was my favourite of these preliminary exhibits:
It’s this. Looks like a whale, doesn’t it? The twenty first century looks like being a golden age of unmanned flight. Who would have thought that model aircraft would turn into a grown-up industry?
Then on to join the main throng next to the runway, to confront sights like this:
This was the moment when I began to fear that I would be without food or water for the next six, hot hours. I could see lots of people, with their own picnic equipment, and lots of other guys with cameras. I could see a big runway, and distant hangers and airplanes. But what if I starved to death? I postponed such thoughts, because just as they were occurring to me, the main show (scroll down to Saturday 24th to see what we saw) was getting under way.
Item one, which I was really looking forward to seeing close up, having already photoed it from far below and far away, in central London, was this:
The A380 did a slow motion impersonation of a plane doing trick flying, going up too steeply and then down too steeply, and then tilting itself too steeply and cornering too much, all with the stately grace of the white elephant that I assume it to be. Beautiful. → Continue reading: At the 2010 Farnborough Airshow
Indeed. Bulletproof custard. Thank you Instapundit. The spirit of Q lives on.
This reminds me of a Winston Churchill story that Stephen Fry likes to tell. During Churchill’s last stint as Prime Minister, in the fifties, he was regretfully informed that one of his backbench MPs had been arrested the previous night for exposing himself on Hampstead Heath. After a pause, Churchill asked about the weather. Was it not very cold last night? Indeed sir, one of the coldest nights on record. Said Churchill after another thoughtful pause: “It makes you proud to be British.”
Allow me to put it another way, instead of scientists, these people were hedge managers, and they were found by an inquiry, run by fund managers and bankers, of not being involved in insider trading, but being part of a fan club. Moreover, though the figures they published for investors were misleading, the investors could have obtained the raw data and worked out that they were being sold a lemon on their own.
Would you be so forgiving?
– A commenter challenges George Monbiot on the subject of the Russell “Inquiry”, which found evidence of a failure to by communicate, but which didn’t find anything wrong with “climate science” on account of it not trying to. Recycled by “James P” in his comment here.
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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.
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