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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Austin Meyer, author of the X-Plane flight simulator, has posted a picture showing a mockup of a home computer from 1954. I particularly like the “easy to use Fortran interface”. But then I would… I started off as a Fortran hacker.
I must admit thinking this is what the (one, only) home computer of 2004 would have looked like had it been a government operation as space flight has been.
Ooops: I got taken in, as did Austin: Snopes had it. Found out minutes after hitting the publish button. We catch things fast here on the net! But it is a cute image and my final point does still stand, faked photo or not.
I yield to no-one in my enthusiasm for space flight and in my admiration for men like this guy who are now so magnificently pioneering it, but I yield to anyone who challenges me on the technicalities of it. However, I do wish myself to challenge this man (thanks to Instapundit for linkage to this argument). Alexander Tabarrok, in a recent TCS article questioning the immediately future of space tourism, put, among other things, this question:
The space shuttle has a slightly better record of safety – it was destroyed in two of 113 flights. There are lots of millionaires willing to spend one or two million dollars for a flight into space but how many will risk a two to five percent chance of death?
I would not have noticed this very rhetorical question had Rand Simberg not also singled it out, so particular thanks to him also.
As I say, I know next to nothing of how quickly the costs of space travel are going to plummet (other than that they will plummet, just as Simberg says) as more people want to get in on it, but one thing I do know is that if those are now the death odds you face, the queue is going, contrary to what Alexander Tabarrok says with his question, to be a very long one.
Tabarrok has a very limited idea, it seems to me, of what a millionaire is these days. Presumably when he typed in his question, he had in mind a rigidly rational calculator of odds, sitting at his dull desk, wearing a dull suit, fully 42 and more than usually plain for his age, who spends his entire life looking at boring safety graphs (Tabarrok features a boring safety graph at the bottom of his piece) and who never so much as sets a foot on a water ski, let alone anything at all seriously risky. But what of the millionaires of a more fun loving and risk friendly disposition? Has he never met any of those?
Above all, what of the millionaire sons of the world’s now really quite numerous billionaires? This is a notoriously risk embracing group. These people are famous for taking hair-raising risks, if only to impress all the girls they so like to chase after. They cannot out-earn dad, but they can at list out-stunt him. The now highly established (and now insufferably safe) sport of motor racing owes its entire existence to a couple of generations of nineteen thirties and nineteen fifties (they spent the nineteen forties killing each other) young tearaways with more money than sense, or to put it another way, with a bit of imagination when it came to spending money. What on earth makes Tabarrok think that death odds of a mere five per cent a pop would put off young men of that sort, and what makes him think that the world is not now massively fuller of such wacky racer types than in was in the nineteen thirties? One in twenty are the kind of odds that will actually make the queue longer. They certainly will not shorten it much.
Hell, a one in twenty chance of a quick and glorious death (already, I would surmise, far more dignified and far cheaper than a long spell of Alzheimer’s), but a nineteen out of twenty chance of one of the great Bragging Rights of the early twenty first century, would be enough to entice me into space, if only I could afford the ticket.
Tabarrok’s headline is a similarly timid pseudo-question: “Is space tourism ready for take-off?” Damn right it is.
What distinguishes libertarians from other political obsessives is that our goals are rather more long-range than merely the next round of Senate elections or the fiscal policies some mediocre politician.
The presentation of the X-prize today to Burt Rutan is the portender of greater things to follow than the inauguration of either a President Bush or a President Kerry. The launch of an annual contest (the X Prize Cup) is a sign that the rate of private space technology growth could be about to grow exponentially.
Those who might reasonably argue that without the right policies in Washington, commercial space flight would never happen are missing the broader picture.
It is no longer a question of if, but when and where the launch sites will be. The USA could almost close down tomorrow, the technology is out there and people will get out of this planetary orbit. One could almost say that the US has achieved its historic purpose. Once spread out among the stars, it will take centuries to bring all the colonies to a statist heel, if ever.
I do not believe that this excellent rant against clueless corporate drones’ plans for the internet can be linked to enough. There is lots of juicy goodness there, and the entire thing should be read, but this is certainly worth keeping in mind:
If you actually had even the faintest glimmering of what reality on the net is like, you’d realize that the real unit of currency isn’t dollars, data, or digicash. It’s reputation and respect.
Learn it, live it, love it. As the author says, If you don’t understand right now, don’t worry. You’ll learn it the hard way. We’ll be there to help you learn, you filthy corporate guttersnipes.
And for those who are reading this and scratching their heads, wondering what a Samizdatista might have against big business, here is some worthwhile background reading: Big Business is often the enemy of capitalism.
Portable phones are wonderful things, but not, it is widely agreed, wholly wonderful.
Have you ever been at something like a church service or a classical music concert, and found your attention diverted by portable phones ringing?
Help is at hand.
MONTERREY, Mexico – It was the reporters who noticed first. Unable to call their editors while covering the weddings of the rich and famous, they asked the priest why their cell phones never worked at Sacred Heart. His reply: Israeli counterintelligence.
In four Monterrey churches, Israeli-made cell phone jammers the size of paperbacks have been tucked unobtrusively among paintings of the Madonna and statues of the saints.
The jarring polychromatic din of ringing cell phones is increasingly being thwarted – from religious sanctuaries to India’s parliament to Tokyo theaters and commuter trains – by devices originally developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and thwart phone-triggered bombings.
Jamming other people’s portable phones is one of many practices where you need strong property rights in place to enable disputes about the rights and wrongs of it to be easily decided. But even in an age of weakened property rights, this device will surely prove to be a great boon in protecting the rest of us from compulsive communicators and their irritating noises.
Human problems are hard to fix. So instead, fix the machines they are using to cause the problem.
I get paid to write the occasional article about environment issues. One story which intrigues me is the often repeated claim that “Half of all living bird and mammal species will be gone within 200 or 300 years”. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the source of much of this garbage.
Because half of all the world’s mammal species are supposedly in Australia, this equates to five species of mammal becoming extinct every year, or one mammal extinction every 2.4 months.
Not only can I find no reports of five mammals becoming extinct each year in Australia, but in 2003 a previously extinct species of wallaby was re-introduced to Australia from New Zealand. The UNEP media releases site contains no references to species becoming extinct, concentrating on announcements about hiring bureaucrats and how they spend money on studies. At least UNEP is honest about its priorities.
Are there really no mammals becoming extinct in Australia these days?
This is a great story:
British researchers have trained dogs to detect bladder cancer by sniffing human urine, opening up the possibility that dogs – or electronic noses modeled on their snouts – may one day be used to detect the disease.
The study, published in the British medical journal BMJ on Saturday, is the first to demonstrate scientifically that dogs can detect cancer through smell, its authors said.
Animals. Diseases of the rich. What more could you ask for in a news item? I agree that sex, celebrities, bad behaviour by an American Presidential candidate, Nazis and football are all absent, but several of these themes could be woven into this yarn in due course.
At the risk of being accused of saying that Chinese people are dogs, which is not at all what I am trying to say, I have long understood that Chinese doctors use smell – of urine, breath and so on – as a major diagnostic tool. So it does not surprise me a bit that dogs, with their famously keen sense of smell, might have a lot to contribute to medicine. This is not a “How very odd” story. It is not odd at all. I am only surprised that no one has thought to study this possibility sooner. I suppose such research depends on moderately cheap diagnosis by other means to be researchable without enormous expense. On the other hand, if the other diagnostic methods were already very cheap, there would be no need to bother with dogs.
My favourite bit of this New York Times report is this one:
In an intriguing side note to the British study, all six of the dogs detected cancer in the urine of a man who was thought to be cancer-free and was used as a control. When he was tested further, he was found to have a kidney tumor, and his life was saved.
That is the best sort of scientific evidence: the killer (to use a wildly inappropriate metaphor) anecdote.
More here, with links to the BMJ article and to a BBC report last week.
I will be the first person to admit I do not greatly enjoy driving a car and trying to map read at the same time. I am one of those folk who get on a lot better in a strange place when I have a passenger with the intelligence to give me decent directions. So one of the great boons of technology for a chap like me has been the developing use of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) navigation technology.
I have just returned from a terrific holiday in the USA. During the first week – staying at the northern California home of long-time pal and libertarian blogger Russell Whitaker – I rented a nice big saloon complete with GPS. It was a Magellan device and in my opinion, worth every cent. You can choose from a menu of different languages and the machine either enables you to take the fastest route home, or the most scenic, as well as pinpointing interesting places to visit. On balance I estimate I saved several hours that would have been otherwise spent trying to use a map. On only about three occasions did I get lost. In one case the GPS was wrong footed by a roadwork, and in another by a bad traffic jam. (And er, human error is not removed by GPS). But on the whole, my message to anyone who wants to avoid getting lost is to get GPS.
GPS is now widely used, not just by motorists but also by hikers, bikers, yachtsmen and powerboat users, as well as by the armed forces. GPS started out as part of the US Defence Dept’s satellite system to make it easier for America’s military to identify and hit targets. This point will of course be mentioned by those who want to argue that GPS would never exist without Big Government backing. However, given that launch costs can be radically reduced if only we let that happen – as suggested by the CATO Institute, it seems to me implausible to argue that a system like GPS can only get under way in the State sector. It strikes me as entirely plausible to imagine a rich businessman like Bill Gates, say, launching a few satellites and creating a luxury product of GPS that could eventually drop radically in price while also extending its range. GPS, like other breakthrough technologies, could have started as a high-end luxury good and gradually expand in scope and fall in cost like pocket calculators, DVD machines or jet travel.
There are also civil liberties issues to do with the government use of GPS, and I recommend that it is probably not a good idea for users to programme their individual street address into rented GPS machines if they can avoid it. And also do not imagine that this technology renders older methods redundant. For example, any yachtsman who puts to sea without the right charts, compasses and knowledge of navigation is asking for trouble. Oh, and remember that handheld GPS machines run on batteries, which run out.
Okay, anyone want to buy me a machine for Christmas?
I have been doing more chucking out of old paper today, mostly of old newspaper and magazine articles that were vaguely interesting, but not interesting enough to be worth the bother of keeping them for another decade and a half. My life having worked well enough without me having read any of them during the previous decade and a half, out they went. Demand for black plastic bags in the Pimlico area has definitely surged lately. I am that surge.
The irony is, however, that much of the space thus liberated is going to be used to store … books. Remember them? Piles of paper in little heaps, glued or sewn together at one side. I find that the difference between an actual heep of articles just piled up, in an almost random order, and articles joined at the hip, so to speak, and then – and this is absolutely crucial – labelled at the edge, and on the outside, is: all the difference. Books do not merely contain lots of printed verbiage. Crucially, they also include their own automatic filing system built into them. Books still matter. Why, we even review them here, from time to time. Come to think of it, my last posting but one here was about a book. And nobody thought that odd for a blog to be publishing. (My next posting here could well be about another book.)
The mere disembodied article, like all those Libertarian Alliance articles that I chucked out a week or two ago, has now almost entirely migrated to the Internet. It may have a brief paper infancy, but then it enters the world of virtuality, only to return to print if a computer owner decides to print it out. But this print out soon dies. But books refuse to hide among the electrons. They remain, stubbornly, on their shelves, this being one of the most famous Internet businesses on the planet.
What this leads me to want to learn more about is not just the history of the printing press as such, but about the history of book binding. Who worked that out? And who invented the idea of books having a spine at the side, and having a title on the outside? When were hard cardboard covers decided upon, so that books could be stored vertically, in shelves. I did some googling a day or two ago, and got to this generic piece about what a wonderful advance books would be if they had only recently been thought of. But I could find nothing about the details of who sorted out binding, spines, outside titles, etc., and where, and when. My googlincompetence, no doubt.
The person I would normally ask about such things is my friend Sean Gabb, who writes this. But he is away just now. So instead I ask the Samizdata commentariat, a group of people who are, I believe, at their best when asked exact, technical questions about matters of fact, preferably technical or better yet technological fact.
And when we have sorted all that out, we can discuss whether the compact disc has any future. (I have been making new CD shelves also.) If the CD does have a future, it is, I think, because the CD is rather book-like. It has a spine, pointing outwards, and stores easily, vertically, and can be found with relative ease, especially when you consider that, unlike books, CDs are all the same size and thus do not cry out to be sorted into clumps that are merely the same size (as happens with books – mine anyway) but can instead be ordered rationally and hence retrievably. No, I am not really serious about that. But if the CD (and its proposed higher-tech successors) does stagger on for a few more years before it is engulfed by all our hard discs, it will be because it is like a book. And that is an entertaining irony, I think.
Having recently completed Edward O. Wilson’s flawed tome on updating the Enlightenment: “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge“, I was struck by the passages that he wrote on colour perception. To summarise Wilson’s description, there appear to be four basic units of colour if a wide range of languages are compared: red, yellow, green and blue. However, these units are either incorporated or discarded within the range of human languages.
Human cultures are so diverse that the range of colours or shades within languages stretches from two to eleven. The science of colour perception has now settled upon a consensus that endeavours to construct “a model of the evolution of color terminology systems that attempts to derive the typology and evolutionary trajectories of basic color term systems from facts of color appearance“, as declared by Paul Kay, a distinguished scholar in this field. This school is opposed by the empiricists who follow Piaget’s argument that colour perceptions are learned as part of the environmental stimuli and by the culturalists, who argue that all colour representations are culturally constructed. Both the empiricists and the culturalists reject any role for biology in the formation of colour representations.
One of the most famous and controversial examples of a culture where colour perceptions were limited to two terms was the Dani tribe of New Guinea. They had two terms for what they saw: mola (white) and mili (black), although further study demonstrated that they were able to perceive the full range of colours despite the lack of colour terms in their language. Current experiments conclude that perceptions of colour are not as naturally determined as biological determinists have argued and that perceptions can be altered through linguistic categories, though not to an extent that would justify the conclusions of the empiricists or the culturalists.
At the opposite end of the range is the English language. Wilson concludes that English has eleven terms to describe colour, although others have only identified eight: red, blue, green, pink, purple, orange, yellow and brown. In addition, the Russians have an additional blue hue. Yet, as an Englishman, the question arises how additional colour perceptions in language may influence the culture. As a foundation, one could argue that a language which supports more complex partitions of colour perception may predispose the speakers towards a greater use of simile, description and metaphor: that it aids language, and possibly music, as well as the visual arts. This is a mere speculation. Yet this aspect of the English language, with its panoply of colour perceptions, must have enriched rather than disabled our culture and its impact appears to be unknown.
The Royal Society has published its government sponsored report on nanotechnology. Professor Ann Dowling, the chair of the working group that wrote the report, produced a positive response in the press release:
The report does not find any justification for imposing a ban on the production of nanoparticles.
However, since these new technologies are uncertain and dangerous, the Royal Society called for the death of a thousand regulations. The Report concluded that all products including nanoparticles should be regulated by EU chemical regulation and the Health and Safety Executive:
Because of their novel chemical properties, the report recommends that nanoparticles and nanotubes should be treated as new chemicals under UK and European legislation, in order to trigger appropriate safety tests and clear labelling. Furthermore they should be approved – separately from chemicals in a larger form – by an independent scientific safety committee before they are permitted for use in consumer products such as cosmetics.
As the EU wishes to implement a new EU Directive (the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals legislation – REACH) that introduces the precautionary principle to all chemicals produced within its borders, this sounds the death knell for nascent nanotechnology within Europe. The government has obtained the authority of the scientific profession (most of which works within the public sector) to justify conforming with EU regulation.
Will Europeans lynch their leaders when they realise they have been cheated out of an Age of Miracles?
This is the New York Times quote of the day, from Stephen Hawking, he of the technologically enhanced vocal chords:
“I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.”
Until now I have taken it for granted that any idea that black holes might ever make a contribution to long haul transport was black pudding in the sky. But now I am not so sure.
I do not know exactly what Hawking means about information being preserved, just as I am seldom completely clear what he means about most things, but the rest of this quote reads so very like those it-will-never-float it-will-never-fly only-six-computers-will-ever-be-needed electric-guitar-groups-will-never-catch-on prophecies which are periodically gathered together into anthologies of Things They Wish They Had Not Said, that I suddenly find myself becoming more optimistic about the possibility that one might one day be able to hail a Black Hole Cab and take a trip to another universe.
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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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