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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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.
…
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.
The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
– David Deutsch
I found it via engadget and The Raw Feed, but I might have found it in the Guardian. The Raw Feed reported it this way:
In the belief that the world’s most surveilled society isn’t surveilled enough, eight London cops are getting HEAD-MOUNTED VIDEO CAMERAS to record their run-ins with drunks, soccer hooligans and unrestrained American tourists. The battery-operated cams will record police interactions, and may be used in court.
I do not see this as a problem. But what if the day ever comes when only government employees may use such gadgets? If present trends continue that may become the rule, especially when you consider that in a few short years time, we will be talking about devices that are pretty much invisible.
Next step, having to have a license.
I do not know (I seldom do) whether this is original or not, but it sounds like a very significant achievement, which these people have at least copied and marketed quite well, or, better yet, may actually have semi-invented.
Gizmodo reports:
An amazing innovation in the software world today: ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) is a program that takes a look at digital images, applies some fancy math and then spits out a list of appropriate tags for the picture. It isn’t perfect, but the designers claim it has a 98 percent accuracy rate. They’ve been letting it dig through Flickr and the software has matched at least one user-defined tag almost every time.
As a constant searcher for photos, I have often found myself exclaiming “I wish you could search pictures!” By that I do not mean merely search the titles and wording that people have attached to pictures. I mean search the actual pictures themselves. It would appear that this process is now well and truly under way.
But, does this stuff have a dark side? How soon before you can take a photo of someone, and say to the internet: Show me all the other photos you can find of this person. You could learn a lot, including quite a few things he might not want you to know. Imagine that kind of thing combined with searching through pictures like these, which I like to take of London tourists.
I have been browsing through John Battelle’s book The Search (no problem finding books on the internet) in recent days, and he has interesting stuff on the privacy-invading potential of this kind of thing. (And oh look, Battelle’s Searchblog reports on something very similar to the ALIPR thing, by the sound of it.)
Oh dear. The original idea of this posting was to be writing about something good, to counter the relentless temptation of those who want the world to get better but cannot help noticing all the ways in which it is getting worse. Never mind. Gizmodo has lots of other stuff like this. (Now you can do your work on one screen, and have crazy pictures on the other.)
As does this blog, which I also recommend. Sample quote:
Women aren’t even trying to pretend they don’t like having sex with robots any more.
More bad news. But the good news is that if you want more pictures along those lines, they just got easier to find.
The advances in robotic vehicles due to the DARPA challenge prizes over the last few years has been nothing short of astounding. I am therefor slack-jawed at the congressional stupidity which has brought about this addition to the DARPA Urban Challenge press release:
UPDATED, October 2, 2006: Congress has changed the Secretary of Defense’s authorities and
DARPA no longer has authority to carry out programs to award cash prizes. Therefore, DARPA
has announced that the top three teams to finish the 60-mile Urban Challenge course in less than
six hours will receive trophies rather than cash prizes. Track B participants will not receive
cash prizes for completing qualifying events, but will be eligible to compete for the trophies to be
awarded in the final event. Track A participants will continue to receive up to $1 million in
technology development funds for achieving key technical milestones.
I presume the problem with prizes is anyone from anywhere can enter and win it. This limits the usual opportunities for congressional corruption, or as I like to think of it, “Stevensing” (as in Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Ubercrook).
I do hope some sanity breaks out in the Washington asylum. There are other Grand Challenges going on which have been generating simply amazing results.
Tim Blair links to a critique of the ubiquitous Stern Report, written by Bjørn Lomborg. Perhaps his most damning (and least surprising) criticism of the Report is that it is “unrealistically pessimistic”, and considering its wholesale adoption by the Green lobby, I have no doubt that this is true. The article is well worth a read as an antidote to all the hand-wringing the Stern Report’s tabling has inspired. However, Lomborg’s rejoinder only receives two cheers from me.
Whilst Lomborg’s most famous publication – The Skeptical Environmentalist – was enormously refreshing, I found many of his remedies to the world’s problems uncomfortable. He really seems to believe that solving these crises is as simple as throwing a pre-determined mega-amount of cash at them – x billion dollars here will provide clean drinking water for those who currently have no access to it, x billion dollars there will defeat malaria. In this latest article of Lomborg’s, he ambitiously declares that all of the major problems of the poverty-stricken world can be solved by spending x billion dollars per year, claiming:
Spending just a fraction of this figure [$450 billion p.a. to cut carbon emissions, as recommended by Stern – JW] – $75 billion – the U.N. estimates that we could solve all the world’s major basic problems. We could give everyone clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education right now.
Really? Who is going to disperse this cash, and how? Lomborg does not say, but such a project has the State’s fingerprints all over it. Where else could Lomborg expect to get this sort of sustained funding from? Only an entity with the coercive power to extract resources from countless others would be able to volunteer a sum like 75 billion dollars year in, year out. Are we talking about government – or a coalition of governments? Of course we are! Surely only governments (or an intergovernmental body like the U.N.) are trustworthy enough to distribute such a volume of resources fairly and efficiently. Only governments would utilise these resources in the single-minded purpose of lightening the burden of the world’s poor, unadulterated by the agenda of other forces. An organic, non-governmental response is simply not organised; not holistic enough. Consider how well large-scale state planning has served us this past century or so.
Not buying it?
Well, I think we can all agree that the record of government and the U.N. in the field of aid distribution and poverty alleviation is really quite something. So whilst Lomborg is a useful resource if one is hosing down the wilder claims of the Global Climate Change mullahs, his obvious faith in government action should remind all liberals that he is not one of us. His solutions to the world’s problems are ultimately as futile as those proposed by the environmental industry, although Mr Lomborg’s are admittedly rather less demanding on the wallets of long-suffering taxpayers.
Great article by Brendan O’Neill on the attempts – vain, I hope – to silence folk who dare contest the Truth of Global Warming.
Right, it is Friday evening, I have a life, so have a good weekend and try not to think about English football.
Tom Clougherty, the new face at the Globalisation Institute, linked earlier today to a fascinating Wired piece about a new way of extracting drinkable water from “thin air”.
Clougherty is wise enough to use the phrase “If reports are to be believed” when talking about the huge benefits that this invention might have. So, the question is: will it work?
It being, approximately, and give or take a big dollop of industrial (and presumably military) secrecy this:
“People have been trying to figure out how to do this for years, and we just came out of left field in response to Darpa,” said Abe Sher, chief executive officer of Aqua Sciences. “The atmosphere is a river full of water, even in the desert. It won’t work absolutely everywhere, but it works virtually everywhere.”
Sher said he is “not at liberty” to disclose details of the government contracts, except that Aqua Sciences won two highly competitive bids with “some very sophisticated companies.”
He also declined to comment on how the technology actually works.
“This is our secret sauce,” Sher said. “Like Kentucky Fried Chicken, it tastes good, but we won’t tell you what’s in it.”
He did, however, provide a hint: Think of rice used in saltshakers that acts as a magnet to extract water and keeps salt from clumping.
“We figured out how to tap it in a very unique and proprietary way,” Sher said. “We figured out how to mimic nature, using natural salt to extract water and act as a natural decontamination.
“Think of the Dead Sea, where nothing grows around it because the salt dehydrates everything. It’s kind of like that.”
The 20-foot machine can churn out 600 gallons of water a day without using or producing toxic materials and byproducts. The machine was displayed on Capitol Hill last week where a half-dozen lawmakers and some staffers stopped by for a drink.
More about this at engadget, where there is comment on the same Wired piece.
Do any of our more tech-savvy commenters have any other news concerning this apparently wondrous gizmo, or any opinions about whether such a thing is, in principle, likely to work?
I do not as yet know a great deal about this. It appears that some company has managed a court order requiring the domain name for spamhaus.org to be taken down.
Spamhaus.org are one of the better anti-spam sites and supply an excellent real time blocking list to anyone who wants it. Their service has been free and voluntary and much appreciated by many harried network system administrators, among whose ranks I have from time to time been included.
I know nothing about this ‘Ensight’ but I can think of no reason for a legal attack on the Spamhaus folk other than as a means of stopping the information about your current spam hosts from getting distributed to all those who voluntarily wish to block you.
Whether Ensight is or is not run by a bunch of spammers I do not know. If anyone has any more information on the events leading up to the court order, feel free to comment.
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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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