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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Not only is Jacques Chirac, no matter what he thinks and says, NOT funding a French ‘Google killer,’ he “doesn’t even know what a mouse is”. And that comes directly from a guy who is a partner in the French non-‘Google killer’. Search expert John Battelle interviewed the guy, Francois Bourdoncle, and writes:
So what is [Chirac] funding? Well, according to Bourdoncle, there will be no single Quaero site. Instead, Quaero is a program, a long term effort to spur various European competitors toward creating better search related technologies. Participants will share R&D, for example, as well as become each other’s customers. In other words, this is a government funded attempt at pulling together a keiretsu of sorts.
Not exactly a European Google killer, I commented. Nope, Bourdoncle responded, and attempting to do that would be a pretty stupid move. I couldn’t agree more. Sounds to me, I thought to myself, that Quaero is simply a way for huge companies like Thompson to insure a steady flow of dollars from its government, and if using the Big Google Is Going to Kill European Culture meme helps along the way, so be it. Before I could even mention that idea, Bourdoncle addressed it head on, saying he was sure folks might see it that way, and he was not one to say if it was true or not. “I’m not really sure what (Thompson’s) strategy is,” he said. “They don’t tell me that.” Sounds like the keiretsu is shaping up nicely, no?
Mike Masnick, posting on Techdirt, notes an unfortunate development in U.S. politics: the adoption of network neutrality as a partisan issue. At which point the discussion starts to sound eerily familiar:
The only reasons the telcos are in the position to violate network neutrality are because they’ve pretty much been granted subsidies and monopoly rights of way – and part of that bargain was that to increase competition, there needed to be open and fair access. To suddenly claim that we need a hands off approach is ignoring the fact that there’s never been a hands off approach and the companies involved were granted special rights.
This neutrality dilemma reminds me a lot of similar discussions of free markets. The difference is that it is a less mature discussion – for now. We have been talking about markets for a long time now, and we no longer frame the debate in terms of whether a market is simply free or un-free, as all markets exist in a relative state of freedom at all times.
The debate on neutrality, being younger, so it still sounds, like a bunch of people agitating for or against a perect state of being known as ‘neutrality’. But like freedom, neutrality an ethos, not a state of being. As Masnick implies, there may be such a thing as objective reality (I like to think so), but there is no such thing as objective neutrality.
I guess creationists, or the Intelligent Design crowd, will not be too amused by this story.
Frank Furedi, the British sociologist who has already established a bit of a record for trashing doomongering of various types, lays into what he sees as the misanthropy of so many of today’s glum authors. I cannot do justice to it in one short comment, so make yourself a coffee or pour your favourite alcoholic beverage, sit back, and enjoy:
Human beings are not angels; on a bad day they are capable of evil deeds. But the very fact that we can designate certain acts as evil shows that we are capable of rectifying acts of injustice. And on balance we aspire to do good. Contrary to the fantasies of romantic primitivism, civilisation and development have made our species more knowledgeable and sensitive about the workings of nature. The aspiration to improve the conditions of life – the most basic motive of people throughout the ages – is one that has driven humanity from the Stone Age through to the twenty-first century.
If believing in the human potential is today labelled ‘anthropocentrism’ and ‘speciesism’, then I wholeheartedly plead guilty to subscribing to both of those views.
Hat-tip: Ronald Bailey at Reason’s blog. Bailey is also a profound techno-optimist with little time for the zero-sum economics or mentality of the latter-day Malthusians that Furedi hammers. This book is worth adding to your reading list. (As if I did not have enough, Ed).
Forbes magazine has a nice series on the 20 most important tools that Man has ever devised and used. For some inexplicable reason, it does not include the Swiss Army knife or the Callaway golf driver, but I am sure that was an oversight.
Jesse Walker has a nice piece in Reason magazine about whether U.S. state agencies like the FCC should ban cinemas from trying to jam calls to mobile phones. Seems a pretty clear-cut case to me – so long as the jamming is made clear to customers before they buy a ticket, then the cinemas, if they are commercial entities and privately owned, are entitled to do this. Cinemas that are privately owned can set whatever rules on the behaviour of customers that they like, including telling them, on pain of expulsion, to turn mobiles off or to silent, to observe minimal standards of dress code, and whatever.
In my own cinema-going experience in Britain and the United States, I have hardly ever been inconvenienced by mobile users, although I may have been lucky. Once, in a stifling hot cinema in Chelsea, I sat next to a rather annoying French couple, one of whom insisted on phoning her friends several times and who finally shut up after another customer told them to do so. Most people seem to get the message to turn the things off or to silent mode.
I guess what this story tells us is how people are almost surgically attached to their phones (one day that may literally be true, perhaps in a few decades time). I have occasionally gone out from my flat without a mobile phone and felt almost naked without it, but also experienced a certain freedom of being out of reach for an hour or so. It is almost as if I have forgotten what it is like not to be contactable instantly via these machines.
A final etiquette point is that I notice people are often less punctual for meetings sometimes because there is this assumption in the back of folks’ minds that they can just “phone ahead” and say that they are going to be late. Before mobiles existed, if people did not keep an appointment, it did not happen. Perhaps one side effect of mobile phones then is to make us less rigorous in sticking to a schedule. It is not a good or bad thing, but that seems to be the pattern.
Welcome news from the Telegraph yesterday, as a new clinic opening in Nottingham will provide test for genetic disorders in embryos. This ensures that the parents have the choice of selecting a healthy embryo and can bring the child to term. The price of the test is six thousand pounds. This will also allow parents to conceive “saviour siblings” who hold the potential for curing their sick brothers and sisters through transplants. It is overdue for such facilities to be established in Britain.
The opposition was opposed to family values. They accused any parents exercising this choice of eugenics.
But campaigners last night said it represents a further step by the IVF industry on the slippery slope towards eugenics and parents being able to choose characteristics for their children such as blue eyes or blond hair.
Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: “Paying £5 million for a state-of-the-art centre in order to eliminate more embryos with disabilities sounds like aggressive eugenics. We need to develop real cures for genetic diseases, not kill the carriers.”
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority continues to exercise unnecessary regulation on parental choice. They should have no say over this matter.
A spokesman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said: “A small number of centres are licensed for genetic screening but each patient’s case is approved separately by the HFEA, based on its own merits.”
On the British Airways flight from London to Shanghai yesterday morning, there were the usual announcements about recommended rental car partners and hotels and the like. With respect to getting into the city of Shanghai, they simply announced that “We recommend that you take a taxi”, as these are apparently cheap and relatively quick. I have a certain aversion to taking taxis in unfamiliar cities, as unscrupulous taxi drivers exploit tourists in many cities of the world, and I can never really tell what will happen if I get in one. (On the other hand, the recommendation from the airline probably suggests that a taxi caught from a rank at the airport in Shanghai would have been fine).
However, there was no chance I would take the advice. Because let’s face it, there are some things that I am not capable of resisting. A sign saying “Magnetic levitation train” is definitely one of them.
As a practical thing to build, the maglev to Shanghai airport qualifies as almost entirely useless. It cost some ridiculous sum of money, the railway station is a little too far from the airport terminal (and is badly signposted), the city destination is an obscure part of Pudong from where one has to get the subway or taxi to anywhere one might actually want to go to, and there is only one train every half hour on the maglev. If one has to wait for 25 minutes, then this rather negates the fact that the 30km journey into Shanghai only takes seven and a half minutes. It would have made far more sense to simply extend the subway line that goes to the city maglev terminal all the way to the airport. A train journey from the airport would have then taken perhaps an hour, but it would have been a sensible way to get to and from the airport. The maglev was built so that they could build a maglev. That was all it was.
However, this is just about the only transport journey I have made in my life that passengers have got excited about just because it was. Riding a Boeing 707 in 1958 was perhaps like this. There was an LED readout on the train giving the speed, and as the train really got going passengers got up and took photographs of the indicator. I was one of them.
Normally, I am nearly as bad as Brian Micklethwait. I take seeing people take photos of something as an invitation to take photos of them. However, in this case I did not do so. It was just the indicator itself I was interested in. For Christ almighty that was fast.
Fans of the great Stanley Kubrick satire, Dr Strangelove, will struggle to suppress a wry smile over this story:
Fluoride in drinking water – long controversial in the United States when it is deliberately added to strengthen teeth – can damage bones and teeth, and federal standards fail to guard against this, the National Academy of Sciences reported on Wednesday.
The vast majority of Americans – including those whose water supply has fluoride added — drink water that is well below the limit for fluoride levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Maybe all that stuff about flouride in the water being a crazy Commie plot may not have been so nuts after all. On the other hand…
Different people have described the Metabolite patent, currently under review by the US Supreme Court, as being about protecting a fact, but if you could patent the fact of homocysteine’s correlation to B12 levels, then we’d all owe Metabolite licensing fees just for existing in a state of B12 homeostasis.
To play devil’s advocate, I read the patent as applying to the observation of the relationship. As such, it is a bit as if Galileo had filed on his observation that the earth orbited the sun. At the time, his view certainly met the USPTO’s criteria of originality, utility and non-obviousness.
There is a dangerously bumpkinesque notion afoot, which holds that patents obstruct progress. This is (pardon the pun), patently false. Why is it that the most vociferous critics of the patent system, the citizens of the web – people who can understand that markets are conversations – can not seem to grasp that patents are conversations, too? Patents protect the free flow of ideas within our business, academic and entrepreneurial cultures.
Before we blitely trash the Patent Office, let us be clear on the actual ethos of patent protection. The point of patents is not to protect the patent-holders; it is to allow the rest of us to read the patents, adding to our collective knowledge base. The protection provided is a carrot. Nothing more… → Continue reading: The non-obvious utility of patents
This story about advances in creation of artificial limbs and muscles caught my attention:
Scientists have developed artificial, super-strength muscles which are powered by alcohol and hydrogen. And they could eventually be used to make more advanced prosthetic limbs, say researchers at University of Texas.
Writing in Science, they say these artificial muscles are 100 times more powerful than the body’s own. They said they could even be used in “exoskeletons” to give superhuman strength to certain professions such as firefighters, soldiers and astronauts.
As we ponder the flow of day-to-day news, it is easy to overlook the tremendous advances going on in fields like this. As the article mentions, applications of such medical technologies apply not just to repairing existing injuries or coping with the terrible effects of losing a limb (a sobering reality for victims of terror, car accidents, conflicts, etc), but even for perfectly healthy people looking to augment their physical strength.
The story demonstrates how blurred the boundaries now are between medical technologies that can be used to repair or heal injuries and those used to make what we have picked up in Darwin’s great lottery draw even better. The genetic fatalists will decry all this for tampering with God’s Will or whatever, but I don’t see any difference between this and say, laser surgery for the eye, or technologies to make it possible to vastly increase our hearing strength, or enhance our cognitive capacity, and so forth.
Mind you, it makes me wonder how this technology, if it really works, is going to affect sport. At the moment the sporting authorities controlling events like the Tour de France cycling event, say, or the Olympic Games, treat any form of human augmentation or performance enhancement as off-limits. I guess so long as participants agree in advance not to use such techniques, then they cannot complain if they are caught breaking the rules. But in some occupations like those mentioned in the story, such as astronauts experiencing the effects of zero-gravity environments, this sort of stuff might be a basic necessity rather than a luxury.
Meanwhile, here is an interesting story about nanotech and possible cures for blindness. And I can recommend this book by Ronald Bailey.
Makes a change from writing about Tony Blair, anyway.
I love this story:
Armed with nothing more than a couple of sensors, a robotic fish unveiled by Japanese scientists this week could one day be used to observe fish in the ocean or survey oil platforms for damage.
Modelled on the koi, a decorative strain of carp popular in Japan, the remote-controlled white, red and gold robot can manoeuvre its way around a fish pond with a realistic flick of its tail.
The 80-cm (32-inch) carp can also use sensors in its mouth to monitor the concentration of oxygen in water, a key to fish health, said project leader Tetsuo Ichikizaki of Ryomei Giken, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd <7011.T>, in Hiroshima, western Japan.
I wonder if this works with the great white shark.
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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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