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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Having spent £13,000 on installing a wind turbine at his home, John Large is disappointed at the return on his investment, which amounts to 9p a week.
At this rate, it is calculated, it will take 2,768 years for the electricity generated by the turbine to pay for itself, by which time he will be past caring about global warming.
The wind turbine was installed at the engineer’s home in Woolwich, southeast London, four weeks ago and has so far generated four kilowatts of electricity. An average household needs 23kw every day to power its lights and appliances.
Mr Large said that his difficulties highlighted the problems faced by consumers who wanted to buy wind turbines to save money and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
– from the Times today (hat tip Bishop Hill)
I am going through a gadget blog phase just now. It is good to remind oneself of the wonders that capitalism is cranking out by the hour, especially if one reads Samizdata daily and is hence liable to be depressed, about ID cards, Islamofascism, etc..
Today at engadget, there is a torrent of mobile phones to be seen, of which this posting is only the most torrential of many. There have been about half a dozen other mobile phones featured at engadget only today, far too numerous to bother linking to indvidually. Go there, scroll down, and you will soon see what I mean.
I yield to nobody in my admiration for the mobile phone industry, and for the good it is doing to the world. The entire international aidocracy could drop dead, and on balance that would probably improve things, but if all the world’s mobile phones were suddenly to vanish, that would be a true catastrophe. In Africa, the impact of the mobile phone is proving to be literally epoch making.
But, I get a bit bored with mobile phones. Of engadget’s gadgeterial offerings today, my favourite is a robotic bird, designed to seduce real birds:
Apparently male sage-grouses, like some people, really aren’t picky enough about their mates to discern between the real deal and a dolled up machine. Unlike 90% of other, monogamous birds, it’s that oversexed sage-grouse libido that’s fueling UC Davis researcher Gail Patricelli’s project, designed to learn the innermost secrets about the game birds’ mating rituals. The fembot bird (no Austin Powers jokes, please) wheels – head bobbing – around all dolled up, just waiting for males to approach and do their mating ritual. Apparently something’s working right, too: Patricelli said of her coquette, “The males liked her quite well.” We’d rather not dwell on what “quite well” must mean in her line of work, but we’re happy for her – and her cold-hearted fembot – all the same.
The attempted humour of that is, for me, leaden. For better jokes about gadgets, I recommend Idiot Toys. But joking aside, is that not an interesting device?
I have often thought that computers and robots have a great future in enabling humans to communicate better with animals, in all kinds of ways. A computer/robot could turn the posturings of an animal into a stream of consciousness emotional commentary. It could offer a human a menu of simple statements that it is capable of passing on to the animal or bird, rather like Arnold Schwarzenegger choosing what line to say off a screen of computerised alternatives. Now I grant you, the first major applications for such gadgetry would probably be in making doomed animals more accepting of their doom (as with that woman who knows how to make cows less nervous), but at least it might cheer up their lives a bit in the meantime. And we will learn all manner of surprising things.
Maybe certain animals (pigs?) will become so likable to us that we will be unable to eat them any more, the way that we here in Britain (anyway) already prefer not to eat dogs, cats or horses.
Björn Lomborg:
This is especially interesting since it [the IPCC report] fundamentally rejects one of the most harrowing scenes from Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. In graphic detail, Mr Gore demonstrated how a 20-foot rise in the sea level would inundate much of Florida, Shanghai, and the Netherlands. The IPCC report makes it clear that exaggerations of this magnitude have no basis in science – though clearly they frightened people and perhaps will win Mr Gore an Oscar.
All credit to the Guardian for risking accusations of heresy for publishing such impious sanity.
Nicolas Chatfort foresees the coming Holy Inquisition… albeit a rather innumerate Inquisition it must be said
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its long awaited pronouncement last Friday in Paris and I am informed by the media that this most definitive of all documents closes the debate on anthropogenic climate change. Now is the time for action, no more discussion will be allowed. I have read the document, and most assuredly it does use uncompromising language ascribing recent global warming to human activity. The science in the document, which I am told was reviewed by 300 eminent scientists, at first sight appears to be impeccable, but I must admit that was a little perturbed to find on page 5 that 0.16 + 0.077 + 0.21 + 0.21 = 0.28 rather than 0.657. I must not fully understand that esoteric form of mathematics known as addition. This level of ignorance on my part clearly shows that I am incapable of judging the merits of the science on my own and I give thanks to the IPCC for taking this burden off my shoulders.
With the debate now settled, what are we to do with those scientific heretics (deniers is a much too mild a term for these dangerous individuals) who continue in their error and refuse to accept the teachings of the UN’s ecumenical council of scientists. David Roberts has already called for climate change heretics to be put on trial, but he goes too far as he appears to want to punish people for heretical statements they made prior to the issuance of the latest UN writ. After all, as the earlier pronouncements from the UN’s ecumenical council were not as definitive as the current one and the debate not yet closed, these unfortunate souls must be given a chance to repent from their errors before they are punished.
Following enlightened historical precedence (see Galileo), I humbly suggest that the UN create an office to be known as the Permanent Tribunal of Universal Inquiry to investigate into the views of scientists on climate change. Those who publicly repent from their errors would be given leniency, but those who maintain their heretical positions should be handed over to civil authorities for proper punishment. In times past the penalty for the crime of heresy was burning at the stake but, regretfully, this would release too many greenhouse gases, so another form of punishment must be found.
Lord Monckton should be one of the first of the heretics to be brought in front of the tribunal of inquiry. I cite his recent critique of the IPCC report only as evidence with which he condemns himself. He has had the audacity to continue to publish his heretical views even after he was duly informed that the debate was officially over. His critique of the IPCC report is comprehensive and it could cause weaker minds to question the infallibility of the IPCC.
As for other scientists whose views remain suspect, helpfully Canada’s National Post has recently provided a survey of some of the more prominent scientists who have veered from the true path in the past. These individuals are particularly dangerous as they all have reached such high levels of respectability in their professions that they will most certainly pollute the minds of the impressionable if they are allowed to continue to publish their heretical views. I will cite just a few of these scientists to show how much damage these individuals can do.
The first of these is Dr. Edward Wegman, professor at the Centre for Computational Statistics at George Mason University and chairman of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. Dr. Wegman’s crime is that he verified the McIntyre and McKitrick critique of Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” graph, and has also complained that climate change scientists have routinely made basic statistical errors and insists that climate scientists actually consult with professional statisticians when using statistics in their work. I do note that the IPCC, quietly and without comment, has dropped the use of Dr. Mann’s graph from its latest report. The IPCC’s current global temperature graph, which only starts in 1850, will hopefully stop all the embarrassing distractions on the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
Then there is Dr. Henrik Svensmark, director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute. Dr. Svensmark presents an alternate theory on climate change that involves the sun’s magnetic field, cosmic rays and cloud formation. Dr. Svensmark has even conducted experimentation to support his theory. As the IPCC report concedes that cloud formation and feedback remains a major source of uncertainty and its discussion of the role of the sun is limited to solar irradiance, it is clear that an alternative theory that attacks the weakest parts of the IPCC dogma must be silenced.
An what are we to do about Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the Russian Academies of Sciences’ Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg and head of the International Space Station’s Astrometry project? He comes to the puzzling conclusion that the simultaneous global warming on Mars, where there are no man-made (or martian-made) greenhouse gases, shows shows that the sun rather than man’s industrial activity, is the main cause of warming on the Earth. The very fact that the IPCC report did not address Mars warming shows how irrelevant this argument is for global warming on the Earth. Another of his heresies is that the IPCC has the cause and effect backwards, that it is the Earth’s warming that causing the release of CO2 from the world’s oceans, rather than rising CO2 causing the warming. He also points out the surface layers of the world’s oceans are actually cooling. Allowing the dissemination of such information will only cause confusion.
I will stop my indictment of prominent climate change heretics at this point, the reader can follow the link to the National Post if more information is desired. Furthermore, I do not want to leave the reader with the mis-impression that these are the only heretics within the scientific community, there are many more. Although the media is doing their best to keep these unsound views from the public, they can not do the job alone. Now that the debate is over, I urge the UN take immediate steps to set up the tribunal of inquiry so we can rest easy at night and not worry that we may have to weigh the merits of these arguments for ourselves, knowing that superior minds are taking on this awesome responsibility on our behalf.
We cannot but be astonished at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles
– Frédéric Bastiat
Following on from Thaddus’s recent posting about how politicians are trying to enlist children in the Green agenda, it is worthwhile pondering why environmentalism, even the more scientifically credible sort, is often depressing, puritanical and unpleasant. Let’s face it, a lot of libertarians’ hostility to Greenery is a suspicion that the Greens are “watermelons” – green on the outside, and socialists on the inside. Socialism, in as much as it has ever been a coherent political and economic point of view, has been economically if not entirely intellectually discredited. It has been a failure, with varying degrees of nastiness, ranging from the stifling if relatively benign version of Sweden through the to mass killing fields of Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. So if you hate capitalism and material wealth then the Green agenda comes in very handy.
There is a danger in this approach, however, and not just because ad hominem points about the motives of one’s ideological opponents often put off the uncommitted. The fact may be that the planet is genuinely getting warmer and that human activity has helped to cause that. Pollution of the air, seas and rivers is a problem for someone who is polluted. The destruction of ancient woodlands and the loss of flora and fauna is bad. So I can see why environmentalism appeals not just to anti-capitalists, but to conservatives and liberals who want to live the good life and ensure there is plenty of that good life around for future generations. There is in fact a school of environmental thought that harnesses ideas of property and markets to make its case.
Another point I’d make is this: why cannot the Greens, or at least the more sensible ones, throw off the image of po-faced puritanism that so often hangs around their pronouncements. His Supreme Blogness, Glenn Reynolds, has interesting thoughts here on how technologies like electric cars and so forth should be sold not as a sort of “hair-shirt” consumer gesture but because such technologies might be fun and interesting for people.
Fun – that is a word one does not hear much about when discussing technological fixes for our planet. Perhaps we should hear it a good deal more.
Statists the world over jumped for joy today when the UN released yet another report stating that global warming is due to human activity rather that cyclical solar factors.
Watching the BBC reports about this, one could be forgiven for thinking not a single scientist or logical thinker demurred from that notion. Medieval Warm Period? What Medieval Warm Period? Oh, THAT Medieval Warm Period! No, the approved experts have spoken and no heresy shall be suffered to be reported.
What particularly made me laugh was when the BBC voice over said “and the fact over one hundred governments have endorsed this report will add to its credibility.” So let me get this straight… the fact one hundred states which exercise political power over people have endorsed a report that will be used to justify imposing even more political control over people, and that makes this more credible? I wonder if the BBC would report a pro-tobacco report endorsed by tobacco companies the same way? What do you think?
Sir Richard Branson is an excellent example of the pitfalls of branding, and how reputational risk is not as disastrous as some consultants would make out in search of their paycheque. Public relations is important, and Branson is a past master at exploiting the attraction of novelty. One of his most risky and perhaps adroit moves is the extension of the Virgin to new potentailly radical technologies that will have a visible impact. Trains are not included within this structure, though it is interesting how the poor performance of Virgin trains has not yet impacted on the wider reputation of the name.
Now Branson wishes to capitalise on the potential of stem cells and is providing a vital service, by storing the umbilical stem cells of newborn babies. This is a nascent and growing industry:
Public cord storage is becoming more common, particularly in the U.S., but there is also a growing private industry taking advantage of the promise of these cures. However, the industry is extremely controversial because the chances of developing a disease that stem cells can cure, such as leukemia, is small while the new cures may never materialize. Some anti-abortion groups believe that any use of stem cells will lead to human cloning.
Private storage of stem cells is unlawful in France and Italy and is opposed by the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, which is a European Commission body.
This has not stopped more than 11,000 families in the UK using stem-cell storage facilities. The services typically cost about £1,500 for collection of the blood and about £100 a year for cold storage. A number of celebrity parents are reported to have used these services including Thierry Henry, the Arsenal footballer, and Darcey Bussell, the dancer.
Trust the European Commission to recommend banning something which has the potential to do some good and possibly liberate individuals from a date with disease.
The man tipped as the Labour Party’s next-leader-but-one has made what could be a career-threatening mistake. He has sided with rational evidence against a popular delusion. David Miliband has said in an interview with The Sunday Times that ‘organic’ food is “a lifestyle choice”, and that there is no evidence it is any better for you than the other stuff.
As agriculture minister he may have been trying to be generous to the farmers he works with who are not on that particular bandwagon: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.” But it can not be too long before he has to apologise to the green lobby.
There’s a large chunk of the British middle-class that ‘just knows’ organic is good for you, nutritionally and morally, even if they rarely buy it. And as for the Hampstead elite among whom he grew up… Is he suggesting Poppy is stupid paying £6 a jar for strained bio-dynamic baby vegetables to feed little Rufus?
Will Hutton has an article in the Guardian called 2006: a vintage year for ideas that will change our world that is right on the money about the importance of that triumph of free expression, ‘Web 2.0’. Or as I would put it, the web is the tool that will break the old meta-contextual basis of old thinking… and then the rest of Hutton’s article then piles on wave after wave of ‘old think’ completely locked into the orthodoxy of a statist meta-context.
For two or three decades, economists and philosophers have questioned whether technology and rising wealth automatically mean greater well-being. In 2006, we finally realised that we are too inattentive to what makes us happy, a crucial step forward. Happiness is about earning the esteem of others, behaving ethically, contributing selflessly to human betterment and assuaging the need to belong. We have finally understood it is not economic growth that delivers these results – it is the way we behave. David Cameron caught the mood by saying that the object of the next Tory government would be greater well-being. The Observer published Professor Richard Layard’s Depression Report, arguing that because one in six of us suffers from anxiety or depression, the greatest contribution the government could make to promoting well-being is to prioritise the improvement of mental-health care.
Hutton quotes Richard Layard as if his conclusions and support for some very creepy totalitarian policies are self-evident and widely accepted outside the Benthamite circles in the two main UK political party HQs, which is not the case (although perhaps his use of ‘we’ means ‘Guardian & Independent readers like me’). Moreover it has probably not occurred to Hutton (i.e. he is locked onto meta-contextual assumptions that society must rotate around the state) as it is clearly an axiom for him that ‘well-being’ is something within the government’s power to dispense, that perhaps it is the decay of civil society and growth of the state, rather than a lack of ‘correct’ state policies at imposing happiness, that might be the problem. My view is that the likes of Dave Cameron can only be a solution to the purported ‘crisis of unhappiness’ if they all start acting like lemmings and go jump off a high cliff. Seeing that would certainly make me very happy.
But the web is indeed the future, not the Tory or Labour parties, nor the Guardian or Telegraph or BBC. Why? Because there are inherent dis-economies of scale when it comes to the web. By this I mean I can set up Samizdata and the Guardian can set up their own blogs (and fine worthwhile blogs they are… the Guardian is really one of the few newspapers in the world which really ‘gets’ the Internet), but in spite of their brand and wealth, it costs me a tiny fraction ‘per eyeball’ to get hundreds of thousands of readers per month compared to them. Sure, more people read their website than read Samizdata but in terms of bang-for-buck, I win hands down and a lot of people do read us… and there are a lot more blogs than newspapers. Likewise a worthy outfit like 18 Doughty Street can put together excellent podcasts and do top class vlogging, but a significant cost and investment in infrastructure and salaries… and Brian Micklethwait can put up very effective podcasts for more or less nothing.
The implication of this ‘dis-economy of scale’ is something that will have little effect in the short run but will change everything in the long run. It means that although the Internet can be used by huge corporations and even huger governments, individuals motivated by something other than accountants have intrinsic advantages. Most importantly I think this points the way to how civil society will eventually redress the balance of power vis a vis the state and those who feed off the state, and abruptly reverse the trends of last century of moving towards Rousseau’s goal of suppressing the free and several interactions of civil society and replacing them with politically mediated regulatory formulae.
Now that is future-think.
This is bloody clever:
Italcementi, which spent 10 years developing its TX Active, said the building material is capable of reducing urban pollution by more than 40 percent, the Italian news agency ANSA reported Tuesday.
Tests on a road near Milan showed TX Active cut the level of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide by as much as 65 percent.
I came across this story while browsing through the weekly magazine, The Business (which has been re-launched from its previous format of a Sunday newspaper). The story says that the cement’s amazing properties were discovered quite by accident and emerged from nanotechnology research undertaken by an EU-funded project (good grief, something positive via the EU, Ed). The Business article says that the photocatalytic cement building materials can get rid of up to 80 percent of air pollution.
The applications of the new kinds of materials technologies coming out from the worlds of nanotech and beyond are legion. I particularly like the idea that concrete, which normally turns a sort of gunky, greyish colour in Britain’s damp climate, could stay a more pristine colour thanks to stuff like this. One of the reasons why so much modern architecture is so crap is not just the basic shapes of the buildings but the materials they are composed of.
I wonder whether it gets rid of grafitti, though.
(Update: another story on the subject)
It is a reflexive tic among libertarian types to describe Britain’s NHS as ‘Stalinist’, in reference to its vast monolithic structure and institutional preference for central state planning. Now some indications that the parallels run a little deeper.
The Department of Health’s first reaction to the campaign for people to opt out of the “Spine” medical records database, that I mentioned a couple of days ago, is not to attack it as ‘irresponsible’ as I was expecting. It is to demand that doctors report any patients who try to the authorities. “Let us deal with them,” it appears to be saying.
The Guardian reported yesterday:
The Department of Health provoked uproar among doctors yesterday by asking GPs in England to send in correspondence from objectors who do not want their confidential medical records placed on the Spine, a national NHS database.
Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said letters from patients who want to keep their private medical details out of the government’s reach should be sent to Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, for “full consideration”.
You will recall that such suggested letters were personal communications with doctors, asking them personally to do something: to code patients records so that they would not be uploaded to the Spine. That’s something that can only (as I understand it) be done locally. “Consideration” by the Secretary of State defeats it.
It also seems to me that it would be a fundamental breach of confidentiality, and if the letter were posted, possibly a criminal offence contrary to the Postal Services Act 2000, for the letter to be forwarded to the Secretary of State without patient consent.
But neither law nor morals may stand in the way of the great plan.
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BBC Radio 4 had another example this evening. Its File on 4 programme considered endemic MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacteria in NHS hospitals. It interviewed a couple of epidemiological specialists who said with the current control regime slow progress was to be expected and the government target of 50% reduction in MRSA infections by 2008 is unrealistic. Andy Burnham MP, usually characterised as one of the brightest and best of the Primrose Hill group of New Labour heirs presumptive, was asked to comment. He said the complacency and defeatism of the clinical scientists was unacceptable: there was a target and the Health Service would meet it.
This looks like it would swallow up my entire living room wall:
Move out that old armoire and clear off the living room wall – it will soon be time to make room for that new 70-inch LCD television.
With 42-inch flat-panel TVs flying off retailers’ shelves this holiday season as prices dip below $1,000, brokerage house Sanford C. Bernstein said in a research note on Tuesday that 70-inch TVs could be the “right size” in 2009.
“We decided to investigate the optimal screen size for high definition viewing,” wrote analyst Jeff Evenson in the note. “We conclude that 65 inch to 75 inch is the right size for a 10 foot viewing distance.”
Mind you, given my income levels, I am happy to stick to my modestly-sized flatscreen for the forseeable future.
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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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