I’m seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer … because the victims are all spammers.
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One of our commentariat mentioned ‘Bussard Fusion’ several times and I did not at first pay much attention. I assumed it was yet another of the long line of ideas which might work out but probably will not. Still, with the name Bussard attached to it, I thought a quick look might be worthwhile. It was. I did not realize that not only is Dr. Bussard still around: he has been developing his ideas with ‘under the radar’ money from the Navy for fifteen years and he took it far enough to show the physics is understood and works. They blew up the demo machine but when they analyzed the data they found it had managed to do what it needed to do before it performed its self-disassembly. Another interesting facet is the radiation free P-11B fusion path. I never paid any attention to it in my own readings because even the D-3He I am familiar with requires perhaps a hundred times the confinement constant of the D-T fusion everyone has been working on for 50 years. It turns out there is another way to fuse an atom. It is cheaper, smaller and avoids the basic problem which makes the whole Tokamuk family of fusion reactors into eternal research cash cows. If you want to learn more, not only about the physics behind it, but also of yet another way in which the State screws up everything it touches, set aside the next hour and a half and listen to “Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)” presented by Dr. Bussard himself. For those who have not spent a lifetime watching the world of Physics, Dr. Bussard is one of the elders of the field. He is no outsider and no crank. He is one hell of a serious physics dude. February 6th, 2008 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what we’re dealing with. – Steven Guilbeault, Greenpeace 2005, as quoted by Canada Free Press Afterwards, another activist clarified the remark by stating that of course taller can also be evidence of shortness, richer can mean living in poverty, baboons can mean chairs, giraffes can mean pencils and hello Ms. Robinson, your lacy trousers are well buttered with smoked trout, can you hear what I’m writing with my toaster? February 5th, 2008 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you are of a conspiracy orientation, you are going to love this report I just picked up off a network admin mail list:
Did anyone notice the NSA black-ops sub leaving the area (I should add a smiley here… I think)? More information can be found here. There has also been a suggestion this report may be an ‘echo’ of a previous report caused by mis-communication across language barriers. I have no idea myself. We now cue the Secret Squirrel theme and search for our tin hats as ‘The Galloping Beaver’ asks: “Where is the USS Jimmy Carter?” February 4th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the not-so-secret reasons why motor cars are popular, to the fury of some, is that some of the designs are just staggeringly beautiful. As with aircraft or yachts, the aesthetics of a perfectly designed machine should never be underestimated. At a time when much so-called Modern Art (the capital M and A says it all) is such empty, vacuous tosh, it is a fact that needs to be remarked that so much industrial design that we have today is outstanding, inventive, clever, even a bit naughty. This must surely be contender for one of the very best, courtesy of those clever men at Alfa Romeo. February 2nd, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The cover story in this weeks New Scientist is about how genetics determines political opinions. However, the story did have some odd assumptions. ‘Liberals’, who the New Scientist seemed to be defining as people who vote Democrat, were described as people who are “open to new ideas”. However, the basic characteristic of such a ‘liberal’ is that they are not “open to new ideas”. For example, they continue to support spending ever more taxpayers money on health, education and welfare programs, regardless of the evidence that this does not work and disregarding any argument for reforms. ‘Liberals’ have a set of assumptions that they never question – for if they questioned them they would no longer be liberals.
And so on and so on. So any group of ‘scientists’ who accept the assumption that “liberals are open to new ideas” are not scientists at all. Still I suppose the dream of finding an ‘anti-Progressive’ gene (or combination of genes) will continue – so they can seek to exterminate us. But then that might be interpreted as proving another finding of the studies “conservatives fear death more than liberals”. Hard to square this with the fact that conservatives are more likely to join the armed forces than liberals are. But then I think this form of ‘science’ (depending as it does on ‘surveys’ and so on) is best described as ‘crapology’. February 2nd, 2008 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a very interesting story in parts of the media today. Large parts of the Middle East and (in particular) India are suffering a major internet outage. It seems that a storm in Alexandria in Egypt has led to ships going off course and their anchors damaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG fiber optic cables connecting India with Europe and Asia, and capacity to India has thus been reduced. There are some older, lower capacity cables still in use, and there are cables to the US also, but these were the main connections to India. It seems at this point unclear whether the two cables were both ruptures near Alexandria, or whether one of the outages was off Marseilles. But in any event, two of the world’s key cables were damaged within a few hours. This seems quite remarkable. The TWO main cables between Europe and India were both damaged within a matter of hours. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. It may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence, and we will find out. However, as a science fiction fan and a reader of Wired Magazine, the mention of these two cables brings back a thought of one of the finest articles ever published in the magazine. In 1996, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame) wrote a long and wonderful essay for Wired Magazine entitled “Mother Earth, Motherboard”. This article was written as the 1990s telecoms boom was gearing up to great heights of enthusiasm, and in a period in which global telecoms at least appeared to be gaining new levels of competition. Stephenson wrote about travelling to a large number of locations around the world, watching the laying of an undersea fibre optic cable named FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe), or more specifically the section of it connecting Europe and Asia. He discussed the technologies, and the politics, and the history of communications and other related matters that went with it, and the history of the places he saw along the way. In return for paying what must have been a very considerable expense claim, Wired Magazine got a spectacular piece of writing, but Stephenson clearly got more than they did, as many of the locations that were researched for this essay popped up again in considerable detail in his novel Cryptonomicon, and to a lesser extent in his Baroque Trilogy that followed. Many of them cropped up in sections of those novels set in various eras in the past, particularly in the second world war. The list of places that Stephenson visited during the laying of FLAG has a very trading empire quality about it, and mostly a British trading empire quality about it: Alexandria, Port Said, Bombay, Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, places that contain, as Stephenson puts it, “British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalogue rolled into one building”. The reason for the confluence with the British Empire makes perfect sense when you think about it: the strongest parts of the British Empire were outposts to defend Britain’s control of trade routes, and so they are at key points on those trade routes. If you are laying an undersea cable, then you want to lay it along the shortest route that it can safely be placed. What is required is a mixture of minimum distance and political stability. The minimum distances for cables today are the same as the minimum distances for ships in the nineteenth century (and generally for ships today, also). Between Europe and Asia, there are two key bottlenecks through which you must travel, as the alternatives are either much longer or much less politically stable. Those two bottlenecks are of course through Egypt between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and through the Straits of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Hence Alexandria and Penang. Of course, these places have been strategic since long before the British Empire, which is why a lighthouse and a library were built in Alexandria, but the British Empire is recent enough for its mood to linger. → Continue reading: Some thoughts on India’s internet outage February 1st, 2008 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tomorrow evening we are doing a blogger bash and one of the Samizdatistas, Michael Jennings in a bout of generosity is bringing a whole leg of Serrano ham to share. Another blogging groupie is kindly bringing a ham stand and a knife. So the video below is particularly relevant and wonderfully silly: via dropsafe cross-posted from Media Influencer February 1st, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
My father told me a while back that I was distantly related to Henry Blofeld, landowner and legendary cricket commentator. The Blofelds are an old Norfolk landowning family. Well, if it turns out I am related to a family that has the same surname as one of the greatest Bond villains, then maybe I should invest in something suitably sinister. It may be cheaper than a hollowed-out volcano, if only slightly. Staying with the Bond theme, you can now, if you have the wealth, live in a beach resort in the same part of Jamaica as Ian Fleming’s old beachside home of Goldeneye. Back in 1956, during the Suez crisis, Anthony Eden, then prime minister, stayed at the Flemings’. January 31st, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Foresight Institute released its Nanotechnology Roadmap today. According to the Press Release:
You can find all of this and more here. January 29th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:
January 28th, 2008 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oscar Pistorius is a South African who has had the lower half of both his legs amputated, and participates in atheletic events with the use of artificial limbs. He has been banned from this year’s Olympic Games because the International Association of Atheletic Federations has rules that his artificial legs give him a ‘significant advantage’ over his able-bodied rivals. He uses carbon fibre blades to race.
This is a small but significant point where an athelete using artificial limbs now has an advantage over normal-bodied atheletes. I doubt that his artificial limbs give him an advantage in day to day life, but in this narrow field, Pistorius does seem to get an edge. I think this is going to be the start of a wider trend. January 15th, 2008 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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