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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The truth about Linux is finally out. Kenneth Brown, president of AdTI (Alexis de Tocqueville Institution), claims that Linux is based on intellectual property often taken or adapted without permission from material owned by other companies and individuals. Torvalds comes clean:
OK, I admit it. I was just a front man for the real fathers of Linux: the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. They (for obvious reasons) couldn’t step forward to admit that they had gotten bitten by the computer bug and had been developing a series of operating systems on their own during the off-season.
But when they started with Linux (which they originally called Freax—they do feel like outsiders, you know, and that’s a whole sad story in itself), they felt that they could no longer just let it languish in obscurity.
They started to look for a front man, and since Santa Claus is from Finland, and thus has connections to Helsinki University, and the Easter Bunny claimed, ‘He’s got good ears, if a bit small,’ I got selected.
Since then, I’ve lived a life of subterfuge, always afraid that somebody would find out the truth. I’m actually relieved that it’s over, and that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has finally uncovered the lie. I can now go back to my chosen profession, the exploration of the fascinating mating dance of the aquatic African frog.
Why can’t all press-releases be like this…? The world would be a happier place.
Nigel Meek, contibuting to the Libertarian Alliance Forum, translates the first paragraph of a Swissinfo news story from its original French, thus:
Hungarian researchers have announced the discovery of a remedy for hay fever. “Rhinolight”, a natural therapy, comprises the direction of “specific light” on the mucous membrane according to specialists at the University of Szeged.
What exactly might “specific light” mean, in this context? And is “Rhinolight” some kind of brand name, or is it a technical term? And: “natural therapy”. In Britain that sounds like: will not work.
But, if this report turns out to be true, I agree with Nigel’s comment:
Hooray!
Indeed. Nigel is a hay fever sufferer himself, as I have so far not been. But I am always pleased about creative, helpful, basically good news stories such as these. The other side, it seems to me, to stories along the lines of “here are some politicians and they have just done/presided over/caused something idiotic/cruel/destructive this” is not: “oh no they haven’t”, or maybe: “well here are some other politicians who are doing better. It is: “well maybe the politicians are making a mess, but there is also good stuff happening in the world being done by quite other people.”
Any comments on this, either from people with better French than me (not very hard), or with better medical science (even easier)? And, is there any news of this that we can read about in English?
UPDATE: Commenter number one reveals that “Rhinolight” is a brand name, and says: here is the link. But the other question still remains: Is this treatment any use?
Problem: beer cans that get too hot. Answer:
… scientists have come up with a solution: the self-cooling beer can.
Slightly longer than a normal drink can, it simply needs a twist to cool its content down. It can, its inventors claim, cool a beer to the perfect temperature of 3C within three minutes.
The I C (Instant Cool) Can works by using water evaporation. The top half is surrounded by a layer of watery gel. The base contains a water-absorbing material in a vacuum, and a special heat-absorbing chamber.
When the bottom is twisted, a seal between the two halves is broken. The vacuum draws the gel, and the heat, into the base. The gel is absorbed by the material, the heat is absorbed by the chamber – and the drink gets cold.
You see? Now why didn’t anyone think of that before? Because they were too busy thinking about big insoluble problems instead of small(er – hot beer is no small problem) soluble ones is why.
I spent last night pondering, among other things, Europe’s demographic decline. What the hell can I do to stop that? Have some kids? Maybe, but not nearly enough kids to solve the problem. And I never really have been one for actually solving problems, even small ones. What I can do is salute those who do solve problems. On the whole, they are called “capitalists”.
My thanks to Dave Barry. Quite what the impact of self-cooling beer cans will be on Europe’s demographic decline is beyond the scope of this posting.
Further to this posting here, here is Instapundit on the same subject:
I DON’T KNOW WHETHER Amazon is going to replace brick-and-mortar merchants, but I notice that I’m buying more and more stuff from them. And in a related development, my wife heard from a real-estate person that small commercial-office space is in a glut because a lot of people are running their businesses out of their home, given the ease of doing so that comes from the combination of Internet, cellphones, and UPS. I suspect that there’s more of this kind of thing going on under the radar.
The point about UPS is interesting, I think.
There are lots of good reasons why working at home all round the clock is difficult. Add up all these reasons and you have the answer to the question: Why do “offices” exist? But there is especially potent reason, at any rate here in Britain with its particular sort of postal system, why working at home is easier, and that is that you are actually at home when the man from UPS (or whoever) knocks on your door with a parcel that is too big and valuable looking to just leave lying around outside. → Continue reading: There are other reasons for working at home besides the miseries of travelling
I think I smell another variant of the real-work-unreal-work fallacy. You know the one I mean. It said, a few centuries ago, that making real, edible food was real work, but fiddling about with bits of metal was unreal. Then when fiddling about with metal starting to move to faraway places, fiddling about with metal (especially if it was heavy enough or hot enough to do you serious damage if you mishandled it) was real, but shovelling paper this way and that was unreal.
But now, hear this, a comment from Neal of Margate on a BBC report about the rise in Britain of working at home, made possible by the rise of broadband. I have already commented on this report at my Education Blog, because it will surely make home education easier, but that is another story. Here is Neal of Margate:
This infuriating subject is back, is it? Please do tell me, how should dustmen work from home? Street sweepers, can they work from home? Factory workers? District nurses? Casualty department staff?
The only people who can work from home are those who do an unnecessary job. Can surgeons work from home? Ambulance drivers? Firemen? If you can work from home full time, you have a pointless job.
Maybe not, yet. (Although, give it a century or two …) But an offshore banker can work for the whole world from a West Indian island, on the beach, let alone at his mere home. But according to Neal, pure information manipulation counts for nothing. It has to be combined with, you know, doing something.
This Neal character has just got to be rabidly anti-capitalist. You couldn’t believe in the benefits of markets and of the division of labour and believe stuff as daft as this.
So, it is good to know that something as seemingly benign as some people being able to get a day’s work done without spending a couple of hours of what is left of the day stuck in traffic jams or crammed into metal tubes makes this particular anti-capitalist’s brain hurt.
One of the great things about blogging is that you can make a very small and modest point about a very large and immodest matter. Maybe X has something to do with Y, possibly. Maybe a large truth could be found by combining P and Q. I don’t know what that something is, nor what that large truth might be. I’m just saying: maybe something, maybe some truth.
In that spirit, and provoked by this article about the rights and wrongs of genetic cloning, may I offer the thought here that the elaborate and highly developed tradition of thinking associated with the notion that the central planning of a national or even a global economy is not such a good idea as it once seemed to intelligent people, because of … all the usual reasons that readers and writers here are familiar with, might have something to say about the wisdom, and in particular the unwisdom, of genetic engineering.
Michael J. Sandel senses that there is something dodgy about going beyond the elimination of specific genetically inherited badnesses, that is to say illnesses, and into the territory of genetically programmed goodnesses, in the form of such things as greatly enhanced musical ability or much stronger muscles. I think he may well be right. Genetic goodness may turn out to be a lot more tricky – a lot more problematic, as modern parlance has it, to induce than many perhaps now assume.
I have always thought that genetic engineering will enable us to learn a lot. I now suspect however, that much of what we learn will of the sort that goes: “Well, that we should not have done!”
This distinction between genetically induced badness and angenetically induced goodness reminds me strongly of the distinction, familiar to most of us here, between the idea that government is okay when it sticks to removing or restraining obvious badnesses from society, such as crimes or foreign aggressions, but a lot less okay when it moves into the territory of encouraging goodnesses, in the form of such things as economic success, and (the big one now) health (by which I mean “public” health, a general disposition to be healthy in the whole population). Encouraging goodness in individual human bodies and minds by genetic means seems to me likely to be a process which will turn out to be illuminated by rather similar intellectual categories.
In short, our books about political philosophy may turn out to be great not just on the subject of political philosophy, but also to have a great and rather unexpected future in the area of “genetic philosophy”.
Please do not misunderstand this as the claim that individuals do not have the right to genetically engineer their own genes. It is not that sort of statement. What I am getting at is that certain sorts of genetic alteration may prove to be extremely unwise, in the same kind of way that ‘positive’ planning of the economy has proved unwise. Economies are too complicated to be planned. Individual human bodies (and minds), I surmise, might, for genetic engineering purposes, prove similarly complex and intractable.
(As far as individual rights are concerned, one of the reasons I favour the right to genetically engineer is precisely to enable the world to discover the dangers of genetic engineering on a small scale, rather than on the kind of scale that might result from centralised government control of the process. Positive government planning, of societal goodness, plus genetic engineering done in a similarly optimistic spirit, strikes me as a uniquely toxic combination of policies, and “toxic” might not even be a metaphor there. The usual argument nowadays is that genetic engineering is too dangerous to be left to individuals. I say it may be too dangerous not to be.)
In my head, this is not even a half-baked idea. Insofar as it has merit, I am sure that others have had the same sort of idea. Insofar as it does not, I say in my defence: it was just a thought.
Remember that scene in that dreadful movie The Phantom Menace where Anakin’s mother explains that slaves have tracking devices implanted to prevent them escaping?
An American company has developed such technology, and they have more then just slaves in mind.
The process is oh so easy:
Once implanted just under the skin, via a quick, simple and painless outpatient procedure (much like getting a shot), the VeriChip can be scanned when necessary with a proprietary VeriChip scanner. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the individual’s unique personal verification (VeriChip ID) number. The VeriChip Subscriber Number then provides instant access to the Global VeriChip Subscriber (GVS) Registry – through secure, password-protected web access to subscriber-supplied information. This data is maintained by state-of-the-art GVS Registry operations centers in Riverside, California and Owings, Maryland.
And the implications are oh so scary….
This story from The Register gives a fairly ludicrous story of overreach from some German police. Seeing a young man in a railway station using an Apple iBook plugged into a power outlet belonging to Deutsche Bahn, they came to the conclusion that the laptop must have been stolen and arrested him. Upon discovering that the iBook was not stolen, rather than apologising and letting him go (and maybe leaving themselves open to a lawsuit), they charged him with “voltage rustling”, that is with stealing electricity worth €0.002 from the owners of the railway station. (Actually I would think that “current rustling” or even “power rustling” would better describe that actual physics of it, but that might be just me).
Eventually (and hopefully inevitably) sanity prevailed and the charges were dropped and the man released. All I can say is that however much respect I have for the property rights of German railway companies, and even if he is a “Greenpeace activist”, I have great sympathy for him.
Although battery technology is far better than it was a decade ago, as more and more things go wireless, portable batteries are more and more the weak link in our modern electronic world. And for a certain type of individual (that includes me) keeping an eye out for accessible power sockets is just something you do. If you are the sort of person who spends most of your time at home, at work, or commuting between the two places, you are not likely to be terribly familiar with this problem, but if you are instead the sort of person who travels a lot, or is constantly on the road (or, sadly, who does not presently have a job and likes to work in coffee houses) then this rapidly becomes one of the major problems of modern life. With laptop batteries still running down in only a few hours, accessible power outlets are like clean public toilets in New York City: you take advantage of them when you can. Topping up your laptop batteries when you have the opportunity is just something you do.
If you are not away from home, the key time period is really the time between when you leave the house in the morning and when you come home in the evening. → Continue reading: The new wild west of voltage rustling.
In the latest (April 2004 – paper only so far as I can tell) issue of Prospect, there is an excellent letter about private investment in space exploration, from Stephen Ashworth of Oxford, in response to this article by Oliver Morton in the March issue:
Oliver Morton (March) is misleading Prospect readers with his implication that Nasa spaceflight is the only kind that matters. His statement that Nasa’s new direction “marks the end of the era in which the goal of spaceflight is to become routine” will be seen in retrospect as the exact opposite of the truth.
The government space agencies’ monopoly on manned spaceflight is about to be broken. Twenty-seven industrial teams, mostly in North America and Britain, are competing to be the first to fly private passengers to the edge of space in a commercially-operated reusable spacecraft. Their immediate goal is to win the $10m X prize (see www.xprize.org). In America, aircraft designer Burt Rutan is almost ready to claim the prize. In Britain, Steve Bennett’s Starchaser Industries has been building and test-firing large rocket engines and test-flying a reusable piloted capsule, as well as touring schools with Starchaser 4, which in 2001 became the largest rocket ever flown from mainland Britain.
If our civilisation is to make the leap from a one-planet to a multi-planet one, then, just as when it made the leap from a European to a global civilisation, the ultimate drivers will not be government programmes (of Prince Henry the Navigator, Ferdinand and Isabella, Kennedy and Khrushchev). Progress will rather depend upon commercial enterprises which serve public demand (the East India company, the Cunard line, the embryonic space tourist companies).
It would not surprise me if the first astronaut on Mars were not a government employee, but a visionary entrepreneur like Burt Rutan or Steve Bennett, a CEO of a space tourism company with a string of orbital and lunar hotels. That outcome would take much longer than a focused Apollo-style push. But, unlike any past or future Nasa programme, it would not run ahead of the market or the technology in the way that Apollo did.
This letter was worth reproducing in its entirely here not just because it is a good letter, but also because it appeared in Prospect. I like Prospect. It is often leftism, but it is not nearly so often knee-jerk leftism, and often, as here, it is not leftism at all.
I particularly like the comparison between NASA and its political paymasters, and Henry the Navigator and Ferdinand and Isabella. We are told with wearisome frequency nowadays that “technology is moving so much faster these days”, but even the time scales of space exploration have an early navigation feel about them.
It will be interesting to read what Dale Amon has to say about this.
The first year of the DARPA Challenge race was held a few days ago and as expected, except by journalists, no one completed the 142 mile course. The prize of $1 Million will go to the first team to make it to the finish line. What makes this special is the vehicle must drive itself, off road, for 142 miles… with no human intervention. This is so far beyond the current state of the art it hardly bears discussion. The prize, while large, will not even cover the costs of one contestant for one year. They are out for the Challenge of doing something which ‘cannot be done’. The possibility of recognition gives them the excuse to do it… and helps win sponsorships.
Now, as to the home team… Regular readers doubtless know I am a Carnegie-Mellon engineer and that I spent a good chunk of my life in and around the place for one reason or another. In particular, I was a staff member of the Robotics Institute for awhile, so I must admit to a desire to cheer when I discovered the computerized Humvee of the Red Team of Dr Red Whitaker travelled the furthest (7 miles) of all but one of this years contestants. Only SciAutonics II managed the same distance.
If you look more closely at the times you will notice rather less equality in the performances. Red Team travelled the seven miles in about 40 minutes or so while SciAutonics II required two hours more. Seven miles in 40 minutes may be a bit slow, but seven miles in in two hours and forty minutes is positively glacial.
The race will be held again in one year and I predict we will see spectacular technical advances in autonomous robotics and a winner before the end of the contest in 2007.
CMU will win the prize of course.
I carry a Swiss Army Knife around with me on my keyring. I find the blades, scissors, and bottle opener in particular to be very handy. (Some of my friends and I have an ongoing personal joke about whether anyone has ever found a single purpose for the “multi-purpose hook” feature, however. I favour the climber model, and I must have had about five of these over the last fifteen years. I have lost my keys three times that I can think of (always in really stressful situations) and I have also had a Swiss Army Knife confiscated at Heathrow once. None of my knives have ever worn out: they do seem to be very well made. On every occasion I have bought another one of the same model. (I once attempted to buy a blue one instead of a red one, but the shop was sold out). I have had the current knife just over 18 months, I think, and hopefully it will last much longer. But, whenever it happens I need a new one, I may have to consider a different model. That’s right, it’s a USB Swiss Army Knife. What is even more scary than the existence of this is that having a built in USB Flash Drive on my knife is something that I would actually find useful.
 Yes, a scary thought is going through my head. Unlike certain other strange USB devices I genuinely do want one of these.
Link via Slashdot. (Where else, really?)
Surprise surprise:
The renewable energy industry suffered a setback today with the publication of a report showing that electricity from offshore wind farms will cost at least twice as much as that obtained from conventional sources.
According to research carried out by the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE), the cheapest electricity, costing just 2.3 pence per unit, will be generated from gas turbines and nuclear power stations, compared with 3.7p for onshore wind and 5.5p for offshore. The Academy also emphasised the need to provide backup for wind energy to cover periods when the wind doesn’t blow. The study assumed the need for about 65% backup from conventional sources, adding 1.7p to the cost of wind power, bringing its price up to two and a half times that of gas or nuclear power.
The other alternatives are: coal, which is about to get blamed for frying the planet and to be made illegal, here anyway; and: nuclear power, which is horrid horrid horrid and will never be allowed no matter how sensible they manage to make it.
Accordingly, it won’t be long before we all freeze to death. And since there will not be any electricity, we will not even be able to blog about it.
Prediction: the idiots who between them achieved this will then blame capitalism, for, er, exploiting people’s desire to stay warm, that is to say, not exploiting it enough, er, drivel drivel, shiver shiver, …
Actually, this is not all bad news. The bad news would be if there was no news about it all, and it was just happening. The story here is not merely that environmentalists are driving us all enviro-mental with their idiotically contradictory policies. It is that boring sounding people like the Institution of Civil Engineers are starting to get nervous, and even rather angry.
Nuclear engineers are getting in on the act too. Here is a bit lower down in that Guardian story:
RAE vice-president Philip Ruffles acknowledged that the findings may sound surprising, especially as the cost of nuclear decommissioning had been included in the research.
“The weakness of the government’s energy white paper was that it saw nuclear power as very expensive,” he said. “But modern nuclear stations are far simpler and more streamlined than the old generation and far cheaper to build and run.”
But the mad hippy lunatic scumbag tendency has no time for talk like that:
The British Wind Energy Association, who last year gave full backing to the government’s wind, questioned the reliability of the data which the RAE used: “BWEA assumes that the figures quoted for nuclear power are based upon reactors that are yet to be built and is not aware of any market experience that proves the costs claimed by the Royal Academy of Engineering,” it said.
But the reason there is no market experience of wind farming, surely, is because no one has yet expressed any desire for its product, give what it costs. With talk like that, the more lunatic your entrepreneurial scheme, the more it would be entitled to government money, so that it could acquire ‘market experience’. But maybe I have misunderstood the man.
Be that as it may, the real reason I included that last bit was the presence in it of the glorious phrase (from which a word must surely be missing): “gave full backing to the government’s wind”.
Here at Samizdata, we never give full backing to the government’s wind.
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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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