Wired has a list of what it regards as the top scientific breakthroughs of 2007. Some of the technologists and scientifically literate folk who read our blog might disagree, so comment away with your own suggestions.
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My knowledge of such things is close to absolute zero, but is not this, linked to by Instapundit (where more links and updates are even now accumulating) today, rather exciting?
Damn right. It seems to me that if that caught on, the rules of energy would be changed for ever. Traditionally, energy has been a huge, heavily politicised industry. If only for that reason, politicians everywhere will fight this like cornered rats.
I have always found the Samizdata commentariat to be at their best when educating the rest of us about high tech issues like this one. Is this plausible? Is it safe? Will it be that cheap? Is today really April 1st and not December 20th at all?
Bring it on. Never have I felt as optimistic about the future of nuclear power as I do right now, for this development turns nuclear power from a clunky, expensive mega-muddle that is totally dependent upon politics, to something that is small, simple, cheap and dependent only on the good sense of some people. Not everyone has to like this, and many will be flinging faeces in all directions about it. But not everyone has to. All it needs is a few countries, and a few people in those countries, to say yes. How about this as a way to sell it? If you oppose it, you are in favour of Islamist terrorism. That should loosen things up a bit. An Instapundit emailer says that this technology is old news, updated. So, it’s been around all along, has it? Do you get the feeling that some kind of political switch has been thrown? Rather than fighting like cornered rats, perhaps the politicians of the West who really matter are now willing to relax some of their their control over power supplies, if that’s what it takes to separate those pesky Muslims from their oil money. December 20th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I found this article by Edward L. Glaeser, about the city of Buffalo, very interesting. Both Buffalo’s rise and its current eclipse were caused by transport, first in the form of the Erie Canal, and then in the form of trains and lorries which made the canal less significant. Also important, at first, was proximity to Niagara Falls and its abundant energy supply. Later, when more efficient means of transmitting energy were developed, that proximity also counted for less. More recently, of course, the Federal Government has only made things worse by throwing billions into the bottomless pit of successive ‘urban renewal’ projects, like superfluous housing schemes to add to the already abundant housing stock, or a superfluous train system to add to the already abundant road system. Instead of trying to help the place, says Glaeser, the Feds should be helping the people, to have good lives. In Buffalo or wherever else they end up living. Buffalo, he says, should “shrink to greatness”. I think it would be even better if the Feds didn’t try to help at all, and just knocked it off the income tax, but then I would, wouldn’t I? All of which is very interesting, but I found this bit of Glaesar’s article especially intriguing:
I should guess that this consideration may have something to do with the relative stagnation of the north of England compared to the south of England in recent decades. But because the difference is less marked, this would presumably be harder to prove. Whether that particular effect is real or not, a lot now would seem to hinge on whether the weather is going to get warmer, as the current orthodoxy among the politicians and their preferred scientists says it will, or colder, as some heretics now prophecy. December 9th, 2007 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
With technology, ubiquity is a virtue. People use Microsoft Word because everyone else does. The CD-Rom became a more popular backup device than the Zip, Jazz or SyQuest disk because there were lots of manufacturers involved. And, of course, floppies took far too long to die simply because they were everywhere, despite being Today, in the current format war between Blu-Ray Disc and HD-DVD, it seems that (unlike two decades ago) the Sony-backed format is going to win. This is despite the fact that Blu-Ray discs cost more to manufacture (although, arguably, Blu-Ray is the better format). Why will Blu-Ray win? Because, firstly, Sony equipped every PlayStation 3 with Blu-Ray capability. Conversely, Microsoft (a major backer of HD-DVD) decided to only make it available as £100 add-on for its Xbox 360. Secondly, according to Wikipedia, as of late November there were 415 titles available in the US for Blu-Ray, compared with only 344 for HD-DVD. A search on WHSmith.co.uk brings up 259 results for “blu-ray”, but only 167 for “hd-dvd”. Yet over the coming years, some of the companies that have benefited from the economics of ubiquity may find it turns round and bites them. With OpenOffice only ever a free download away, will people keep going to PC World and paying for Microsoft Office? Schools are already questioning whether it is a good to teach on expensive proprietary software in the classroom, when if they were to use open source applications, all the pupils would be able to practice with the same software at home. December 9th, 2007 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday’s posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter. I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:
Yes, that Bishop Hill again.
Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack … , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold. Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth’s climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either. What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it. → Continue reading: There are cold times just around the corner! December 2nd, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you thought spiders and scorpions bigger than humans were just 1950’s B-movie creations caused by nuclear testing then think again. Paleontologists from Bristol University and Germany found a rather large scorpion claw in a German rock quarry:
This is not a critter you would want to find under a rock in your garden. Assuming, of course, you have very. very large rocks… December 2nd, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing. The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links – climate cuttings number 14, no less – with the following:
Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot. December 1st, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recently I have been teaching a small boy the ancient art of handwriting. Make the small Ts bigger! Careful with those zeros, they’re looking like sixes! Well done, it looks very neat! Yes I know it’s hard, but keep going! And so on. Thank goodness for pencils. But there is a problem here. Is handwriting really that important any more? It was in a comment on that posting from fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings that the handwriting question recently presented itself to me. Oh, I am sure that educational experts can correlate handwriting with achievement later on, just as in former times Latin went with being clever. But the fact remains that even highly-educated adults, and perhaps especially highly-educated adults, now hardly make any use of handwriting. We sign our signatures. If we are very pre-computer (as I still am in lots of ways) we write hand-written shopping and to-do lists, but more and more, people surely use electronic organisers for such things, if they use anything at all. And I find that the only stuff I remember now is stuff that I have blogged, because blog postings remain legible and are properly and accessibly stored, unlike my hand-written lists. If we are adolescents or young adults, we still use handwriting to take exams, in great intellectually sterilised halls, into which no information may be taken other than in one’s head. But is knowledge retention now the skill that really matters? Surely knowing how to use computers to acquire knowledge is at least as important. Recently a friend told me of her worry about her young sons neglecting their homework, but instead becoming utterly engrossed in some immensely complicated and long-drawn-out computer game. My hunch is that they are learning at least as much while obsessing for hour after hour about this game as they would if snatched away from their computer and forced to trudge through yet more school work for a few more tedious minutes each day. But is that right? I do not need persuading that reading remains an absolutely essential skill, with typing, in one form or another, having become almost as valuable. But: what use now is handwriting? I do not ask this in a sneering, it’s-useless way, as a merely rhetorical question. Maybe handwriting really does still have crucially important uses. If the teaching of handwriting is every bit as valuable as it ever was, I would love to be told this, and told why, so that I can proceed with my own current teaching duties with renewed enthusiasm? But, is it? November 28th, 2007 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 13th, 2007 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
About 120 years ago, Mme. Cadolle figured out that it made more sense for women’s breasts to be suspended from above than cantilevered from beneath. That is, she invented bra straps. So instead of walking around wearing the lingerie equivalent of the London Bridge, women could slide themselves into a Golden Gate. This was a huge relief – as anyone who has worn a strapless bra can tell you – because the London Bridge pretty much always falls down. – Belinda Luscombe in the course of asking Warren Buffet for better fitting bras – spotted by Amit Varma November 4th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have a theory about gadgets, which is that we all get fixated on a particular type of gadget, on account of the particular sort of life we lead, or were leading when the fixation struck. I now live a very settled life, so, although I love my favourite sort of music considerably more than life itself, the iPod now holds no appeal for me. When on the move I prefer to read books. But when I first got bitten by the computing bug (which rapidly became the computing necessity), I lived a very unsettled life, and I thus became fixated on the idea of a really good, but really portable, computer. My first computer was an Osborne, which I could just about shift from one work surface to another, or move from one house to another, every few months. But, not surprisingly, I yearned for something lighter. Much lighter. Laptops as currently understood have never enthralled me. Too expensive to take everywhere, and risk losing, to accident, forgetfulness or thievery. And still too big and heavy for my feeble arms. So it is that I have been tracking the Eee PC, ever since they first announced that they were working away at it to the point where they would be able to announce it for real, with things like specs, a price, and somewhere you could actually go and buy it. The trouble with all ultra-portable computers up until now is that the smaller they have been, the more expensive they have been. What I have always wanted is a proper computer small enough to fit into a big pocket – and by the way why don’t they make pockets bigger? – yet cheap enough to be purchasable out of semi-petty cash, and hence, at a pinch, if someone does pinch it, or if I drop it or something, I can just about afford to buy another without severe financial meltdown. So anyway, the news now is that I am apparently not the only one on this planet thinking like this. The Eee PC is about to become a runaway hit:
There’s nothing as cheap as a hit, and when you have a hit, make ’em queue round the block. Bloggers groaning? My oh my. But yes, me too. However, I will not be buying an Eee PC until I can physically handle one, either owned by a friend or in a shop. Or, you know, maybe I’ll meet a stranger with one and ask to have a go on it. I hope the keyboard is very small, so that it is. I have very small hands, and you know what that means. Finally, this may be of some advantage to me. November 3rd, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
At the recent Libertarian Alliance conference in London, one of my favourite speakers, Leon Louw, mocked the idea that water on earth is scarce. Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered with the wet stuff, in fact. What people mean when they say that water is scarce is not that there is a lack of H20, rather, there is a lack of drinkable, clean water. But the idea that water is scarce is, in and of itself, bonkers. As Leon said, if an alien from outer space talked to some ecological doomsters and heard their moans about water shortages, he would probably fly off in search of more intelligent life elsewhere. Heaven knows what an intelligent alien would make of George Monbiot. October 30th, 2007 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
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