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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In the days before accurate timekeeping, determining your longitude was an extremely difficult task, requiring extremely accurate timekeeping. The British Admiralty expended enormous resources and considerable sums of money on the problem until it was solved by John Harrison in 1761. These days, we just turn on electronic devices and communicate with satellites.
This is particularly useful when, as this afternoon, one is in a place where one couldn’t possibly discover the longitude any other way.
The Royal Greenwich Observatory no longer exists as an institution, having been abolished in 1998 (after moving its last astronomical faclities away from Greenwich in 1957), and the observatory buildings are today part of the National Maritime Museum, which has its main facilities in the former Greenwich Hospital buildings at the bottom of the hill below the observatory. I provide a picture merely because the view is nice.
Alas, the statue at the top of the hill does not seem right. The statue is of General James Wolfe, who captured Quebec City for the British in 1754. Whilst I do not begrudge Gen. Wolfe his statue, it seems wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, why is the statue in pride of place in Greenwich, a place of great maritime heritage, a General rather than an Admiral. Secondly, given the history of the place, there is another figure who to me should be the man standing there. → Continue reading: Satellite navigation is a wonderful thing
Introducing the world’s grooviest washing machine. Mind you, ironing is still going to be a chore. (Hat-tip: Gizmondo).
I quite like iTunes, finding the ‘look and feel’ better than any other music players for both my Mac and PC… however I made the mistake of upgrading to iTunes 7 the other day and found its ugly, laggy and above all the sound quality was dire with crackling and buzzing sounds clearly audible.
Looking on the internet I see I am far from the only person this has happened to. How Apple could release such a pox ridden piece of software is a marvel. Avoid at all costs until it is well and truly patched. I have gone back to the previous version with which I am entirely happy and will probably stick with it for some time now unless I can find an alternative player that I like.
The journey from environmentalism to sanity may not be so far after all:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has reversed a 30-year policy by endorsing the use of DDT for malaria control.
The chemical is sprayed inside houses to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
And about bloody time too! The prohibition of DTT was a product of wrong-headed, fashionable green dogma and Lord only knows how many people in the developing world have paid for it with their lives. Just how many neural transmitters do you have shut down in order to hand-wring about poverty and premature death in the developing world while simultaneously campaigning against everything and anything that stands a chance of tackling them?
I sincerely hope that the greenslimers are seething with thwarted rage. In fact, I hope their blood boils until they have a collective stroke. I wish a pox on them (before they unleash a pox on the rest of us).
Exxonmobil is a global vandal. They’ve invested millions of dollars in to trying to confuse the public and muddy the science on climate change.
– Don Henry, Australian Conservation Foundation
Libertarians should not be denying scientific fact. We should instead spend our time combatting the religious impulse of people to think the modern world is evil and that we must repent for our sins by living cruddy lives and waiting for (in their minds) our inevitable and justified doom at the hands of a wronged Gaia.
– Perry E. Metzger
Reading the cyberpunks in the 1980s or watching Cronenburg’s eXistenZ, provided visions of a noir future where brain computer interfaces were commonplace and you could jack into cyberspace, virtual reality, or whatever hyped up term was collecting reputation dust. In the current world of information chop suey, it is hard to detect truly important developments. Here is one.
Harvard scientists have moved closer to an effective neural interface with engineered silicon nanowires “that detect, simulate and and inhibit nerve signals along the axons and dendrites of live mammalian neurons.” They are able to attach a non-invasive wire to a single nerve cell as a hybrid synapse and allow signals to travel between wire and cell. The next step in the research programme is the development of larger scale contacts between wires and nerve cells. As Charles Lieber, Professor of Chemistry at Harvard speculates:
This work could have a revolutionary impact on science and technology,” Lieber says. “It provides a powerful new approach for neuroscience to study and manipulate signal propagation in neuronal networks at a level unmatched by other techniques; it provides a new paradigm for building sophisticated interfaces between the brain and external neural prosthetics; it represents a new, powerful, and flexible approach for real-time cellular assays useful for drug discovery and other applications; and it opens the possibility for hybrid circuits that couple the strengths of digital nanoelectronic and biological computing components.”
(Hat tip: Betterhumans)
Kevin Lafferty, a United States Geological Survey scientist at UC Santa Barbara has recently published a speculative article in ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society Biology’. Lafferty draws attention to a small parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, that reproduces in cats and alters the behaviour of small rodents as part of its life cycle.
The typical journey of the parasite involves a cat and its prey, starting as eggs shed in an infected cat’s feces, inadvertently eaten by a warm-blooded animal, such as a rat. The infected rat’s behavior alters so that it becomes more active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite completes its life cycle. Many other warm-blooded vertebrates may be infected by this pathogen. After producing usually mild flu-like symptoms in humans, the parasite tends to remain in a dormant state in the brain and other tissues.
Once the parasite has entered the human host, there could be a tendency towards mass neurosis if a large proportion of the population is infected. This is a fascinating theory, though one remains daunted by the experimental hurdles that the speculation would have to conquer, in shifting from observed psychological effect to becoming a statistical cause in cultural patterns across large population samples.
If this is true, then Freud may never have invented psychoanalysis, if the neurotics that he studied had not loved cats.
I’ve been re-reading the report of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee – Identity Cards Technologies: Scientific Advice, Risk and Evidence in preparation for an interview this evening. It is full of wonderful sarcasm couched in parliamentary politeness, and I recommend it to you, if you care to understand how Britain is governed and/or have a taste for black comedy. MPs are as much bemused spectators as the rest of us.
Nobody knows what the Home Office is up to, because it refuses to tell anyone – even select committees – any more than it can get away with. It does have 180-odd people now working on its Identity Cards programme. But I begin to wonder if they themselves know what they are about…
In case you think I am exaggerating, this is from section 30 of the report:
In written evidence, Microsoft said that “the current phase of public consultation by the Home Office has primarily focused on issues of procurement”. Jerry Fishenden [NTO for the UK] from Microsoft elaborated that “every time we came close to wanting to talk about the architecture, we were told it was not really up for discussion because there was an internal reference model that the Home Office team had developed themselves, and that they did not feel they wanted to discuss their views of the architecture”.
I suppose it had to happen. As global temperatures supposedly rise – and it is not difficult to accept that claim right now in my sweltering apartment – certain groups are playing the victim card by suing governments and other agents for causing global warming and hence hurting their livelihoods.
As I write this, I am reading a Reuters report saying that Britain could have the highest temperatures in recorded history later this week – possibly up to 39 degrees Celsius as warm air from Continental Europe moves north. Phew. Whatever the cause for a run of hot summers in recent years, there is no doubt now that working in Britain during the summer months would be a lot less pleasant were it not for the invention of air-conditioning. Mind you, it seems that Britain still has not quite figured out how to manage AC systems properly. In my time working in London, the systems have been frequently unreliable although my modern office in London’s Docklands is excellent. London’s Tube does not have it (the excuse I hear is that the tunnels are not large enough for the technology to work efficiently). Even so, the use of air conditioning seems to be spreading, although I don’t have reliable statistics to hand but just personal experience over a decade or more of going to different offices in town. Here is a story about how a hospital in Belfast is supposedly the first major building to use AC. (Belfast?)
→ Continue reading: Thank goodness for artificial cooling
One of the science fiction predictions, that has not yet come to pass, is the ability to categorise individuals by measuring certain thoughts or actions, with implications for individual freedom and status. That time may have drawn slightly closer. A forthcoming study, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuro-imaging responses to Extreme Outgroups” published in “Psychological Science”, the Journal for the Association of Psychological Science, claims that prejudicial states can be measured through the imaging of the brain.
Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) brain imaging determined if the students accurately chose the correct emotion illustrated by the picture (according to pretest results in which a different group of students determined the emotion that best fit each photograph). The MPFC is only activated when a person thinks about him- or her-self or another human. When viewing a picture representing disgust, however, no significant MPFC brain activity was recorded, showing that students did not perceive members of social out-groups as human. The area was only activated when viewing photographs that elicited pride, envy, and pity. (However, other brain regions – the amygdala and insula – were activated when viewing photographs of “disgusting” people and nonhuman objects.)
Emotions themselves were not responsible for generating this brain activity. Rather, it was the actual image viewed that produced a response.
One article does not count as evidence that people viewed as “disgusting” are subjected to a process of dehumanisation, reinforced by social interaction. It is an interesting example of how neuroimaging can inform our understanding of the entanglement between emotion, perception and prejudice, although the study only reveals the complexities of this area. By implication, one must keep the broadest definition of humanity.
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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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