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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There is an interesting and deeply depressing article in Time Europe about how EUrope is falling behind the USA in the funding of scientific research. European scientists are flocking the research labs in the USA, where the money and conditions are far better.
The article reveals the usual EUro-procedure whenever catching up with America is the agenda.
Question asked by EUropeans: how much money is America spending? Answer: A lot.
Question not asked by EUropeans: where does all that American money come from in the first place? Answer: by having lots of trade, done by tradesmen.
Question also not asked by EUropeans: who is spending all this American money and how? Answer: American research money is, a lot of it, spent by those same tradesmen, who spend it quite sensibly, in ways that produce innovation and profits.
Next question asked by EUropeans: what is to be done? Answer offered by EUropeans: EUropean governments must spend a lot more on research than they do now. Result: EUrope as a whole has even less money for tradesmen to spend on anything, and research in EUrope becomes even less sensible and even more stupid. Total spending doesn’t grow very fast, which is just as well, because if EUro-governments spent as much as “America” (i.e. the American government and all those American tradesmen, added together) spends on research, that would bankrupt EUrope completely. → Continue reading: The decline of EUro-science
Arts & Letters Daily links to this Virginia Postrel article about Friedrich (and I’d thought I’d supply two links here, hence this interruption – I preferred all that to just putting “von”) Hayek.
Quote:
Hayek is fairly well known in Britain, where he spent much of his life, because of his influence on Margaret Thatcher. In the United States, however, well-educated, intellectually curious people who nod at mentions of Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault have barely heard of him.
Politics has a lot to do with that ignorance. Hayek drew on the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century liberal thought, leading critics to dismiss him as a man of the past. He defended competitive markets against the champions of central planning, noting that supposedly “irrational” customs, traditions, and institutions often embody the hard-won knowledge of experience. He advocated cosmopolitan individualism in an age of nationalism and collectivism.
But Hayek turned out to be ahead of his time, not behind it. Arguing with the social engineers of the mid-20th century, he grappled with problems equally relevant to the 21st century. He anticipated today’s rage for biological metaphors and evolutionary analysis, today’s fragmented and specialized markets, today’s emphasis on the legal institutions needed to make markets work, even today’s multicultural challenges.
Hayek’s 1952 book, “The Sensory Order,” often considered his most difficult work, foreshadowed theories of cognitive science developed decades later. “Hayek posited spontaneous order in the brain arising out of distributed networks of simple units (neurons) exchanging local signals,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. “Hayek was way ahead of his time in pushing this idea. It became popular in cognitive science, beginning in the mid-1980s, under the names ‘connectionism’ and ‘parallel distributed processing.’ Remarkably, Hayek is never cited.”
I can still remember how a paperback series called “Fontana Modern Masters” did not contain a Hayek volume in it, because the lefty academic in charge of the enterprise simply forbade it. Robert Conquest dissecting Lenin was acceptable. Lenin might be a bit bad, but he was at least important, you see. Anyone writing about Hayek, however critically, was beyond the pale. He was not part of the agenda. He didn’t count. It would seem that, thanks to the championship of people like Steven Pinker, he is seriously starting to. Evolutionary Biology is a bandwagon with too much momentum for a few clapped out Marxists to halt it, and if the Evolutionary Biologists decide that Hayek matters, he matters.
Prediction: in twenty years time most of the biologists will be better economists than most of the economists.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what it looks like on Mars.
That is the vista that will greet the first humans to set foot on that planet. I do not expect to be around to share in that experience but I still tingle with excitement at the prospect.
After returning to the office for a few hours, I spent the usual wasted minutes deleting scores of spam emails from my inbox. I expect the same goes for most of this blog’s readers. Anyway, in a continuation of my festive spirit and seasonal good cheer, here is a link to a rather amusing collection of ideas for knocking off the spammers, courtesy of those ubergeeks at Wired Magazine.
In conversation with Perry de Havilland of this parish some while back, he likened spammers to horse thieves. Horse stealers were dealt with harshly for threatening the very economic viability of the regions in which they acted, since horses were vital to life prior to modern locomotion. The Internet is just as vital now, so the argument runs.
Hang the spammers? Well, I am sure quite a few of us have thought on these lines. The Wired article has less draconian solutions. Enjoy.
Well, the truth is that at a party someone handed out a link to this dropping ball simulator, descibed by its author as using “physics simulation of elastic masses to make a controlled metaphysical musical system with simple rules that mimic nature”. Actually, my knowledge of physics suggests that it doesn’t mimic nature all that closely, but none the less it is possible to get some nice demonstrations of chaos like things and emergent behaviour if you try.
Plus of course it is more addictive than crack. That is our dirty little secret. The Samizdatistas have spent the last three days staring at our screens watching little white balls bounce backwards and forwards and listening to beeping noises. Occasionally something really extraordinary like the sound of a French woman’s voice or perhaps a cricket match is enough to rouse us briefly, but it doesn’t last long……
(Link via Bruce Sterling).
If anything odd happens to the weather, they blame Global Warming and say that therefore it will get worse and that we are to blame. We Brought It On Ourselves. But it must be admitted that it, in this case, is rather startling:
BARCELONA, Spain — A Spanish-American scientific team will be scanning the United States this winter for what might be one of the weirdest byproducts of global warming: great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
The baffling phenomenon was first detected in Spain three years ago and has since been reported in a number of other countries, including the United States. So scientists now plan to monitor in a systematic way what they call “megacryometeors” — or great balls of ice that fall from the sky.
“I’m not worried that a block of ice may fall on your head,” said Dr. Jesus Martinez-Frias of the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. “I’m worried that great blocks of ice are forming where they shouldn’t exist.”
Ice balls, which generally weigh 25 to 35 pounds but can be much bigger, have punched holes in the roofs of houses, smashed through car windshields, and whizzed right past people’s heads.
How very odd, as we say here. And as you constantly say if you are a regular reader of Dave Barry.
It’s tempting to start speculating where, and upon whom or what, we would most like one of these things to land.
Robert Mugabe, that noted expert on the alleviation of Third World poverty, has been holding forth at a UN meeting in Geneva about the Internet. He may have left the Commonwealth, but he hasn’t lost any of his certainty of his own rightness and wonderfulness.
Here is my favourite bit of this BBC report:
He said there was no point in providing poor people with computers unless they were also given electricity and a phone network to run them.
Good point. And come to that, what’s the point in people having computers if they are starving to death or being beaten up or killed by government thugs?
I also liked Mark Doyle’s nicely ironic final paragraph, inviting comparisons between the monster Mugabe and all the other tyrants down the years who have also been rather bad people …
Opposition leaders in Zimbabwe may condemn Mr Mugabe for acting oppressively at home; but here in Geneva, many delegates – whether they agreed with him or not – were impressed by a lively speech.
… but who have likewise softened their various blows by making lively speeches which impressed everyone, whether they agreed with them or not.
Another evening meal with a fellow Samizdatista, and out of it another question. The Samizdatista was Michael Jennings, and the question now is this:
If the cost of getting stuff into earth orbit is seriously reduced, what kinds of things will be done in space that are not done now?
I am not asking how this big price reduction will be contrived. (As I understand it, it’s either better rockets or a giant stepladder, but commenters: don’t bother with that please. As I recall, we’ve had that argument.) I am asking what the consequences will be if, as and when this reduction in cost is contrived.
The two big things done in earth orbit at the moment are, it seems, looking down on earth and seeing things (such as crops and crop diseases, military installations, urban growth, the weather), and: helping to send messages from earth persons to each other, via communications satellites. If that all gets cheaper, there will clearly be a lot more of it.
A reduction in the cost of getting stuff into near space will surely result in a surge of space tourism. Money must even now piling up in earth bank accounts, waiting for the day when day trips to space are available at, say, a million quid a throw.
If only because the increases in what is already going on will alone result in a far greater general human presence in earth orbit, it is to be presumed that many other activities will become possible and will follow.
So, what other things will soon be done in space that are hard or impossible to do on earth?
Switching off gravity on earth is hard, but contriving a vacuum is fairly easy by comparison, so vacuum based manufacture will accordingly still be easier to do on earth than in space. But just because switching off gravity where it is is so hard, going to where it isn’t may bring huge manufacturing benefits. In particular, Michael tells me, it may be far easier to make three rather than merely two dimensional computer chips (very desirable apparently) in zero gravity.
In general, nanotechnology, whatever that is exactly, is relatively easy to do in space, compared with other sorts of technology, on account of it being so small, and hence relatively cheap to get up there. What, in English, might nanotechnologists be able to do that they can’t do on earth, if earth orbit became as easy to get to as a desert is to get to now?
And another ‘in general’ is that, in general, anything involving space travel beyond earth orbit, whether manned or unmanned, will get massively easier to organise if the getting of stuff, human or mechanical, into orbit can be organised separately from the business of going beyond earth orbit. Or so it would seem to me. Two obvious applications? Space tourism beyond earth orbit (see above). And, filling the solar system with unmanned gadgets for looking at our neighbour planets in more detail than has hitherto been possible, in the manner of that gadget that plunged into Jupiter not so long ago, but more so.
Because of all this orbital activity, it is a sure bet that many space service industries will thrive, such as rubbish collection, which I assume to be quite an art in space. (Mishandle a piece of junk and it could vaporise you.) Will there be specialist construction companies? Specialist firms of spaceship cleaners? Where will the advertising industry fit in? Sponsors will surely be heavily involved in space? They’ll want their logos flashed about. Won’t they?
Back here on earth, much new activity will ensue in support of and in response to what is going on out there. There’ll be zero-gravity training courses for tourists, for media people, and for ceremonial visits by senior management and bigshot politicians. There will be vast new bureaucracies to process all the new information that will come flooding back to us, vast new industries made possible by those few magic components that can only be made in space. There’ll be …
Well, those thoughts were the result of about an hour of very casual cogitation. There must be cleverer answers to my question out there, and I’m looking forward to hearing a few of them.
Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest
Kim Sterelny
Totem Books, 2001
This relatively short book (156pp., no index) should, perhaps be taken at a gulp, which I have not done. Much is made of the ding-dong controversy between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould on the mechanisms and implications of evolution (“punch-ups … notorious for its intensity … savage battle …” – from the blurb), but unfortunately not in the words of the two antagonists. Instead Sterelny (a male, by the way) sets about describing what they disagree about. Perhaps unfortunately, as tends to be the way in Biology, it does not seem possible to set up some experiment, or look for a crucial observation, that will settle their differences.
In fact, these fall into two categories, one theoretical and technical, the other philosophical.
For the first, there is the disagreement between Dawkins’ theory of selection at the level of the gene as against Gould’s emphasis of the species as the selective unit (if I understand this aright). While Dawkins seems happy to accept the assumption of a gradual, steady, uniform pace of evolution, Gould has espoused the theory of “punctuated equilibrium”, in which selection acts in short concentrated bursts after some catastrophic alteration to the environment, such as the impact of a meteorite, which has resulted in the wiping out of most other species, as with the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous.
However, as Sterelny says, these disagreements are not adequate to explain the antagonism and in Chapter 12 (p. 123) he gets down to the more philosophical ones. “Dawkins is an old-fashioned science worshipper” he states (and lines up with him), while “Gould’s take on the status of science is much more ambiguous. … In Gould’s view, science is irrelevant to moral claims. Science and religion are concerned with independant domains.”
It should be said that Gould is as much an atheist as Dawkins, but whereas Dawkins sees religions as erroneous explanations of the world with usually unfortunate consequences, “Gould … interprets religion as a system of moral belief” and seems to think that science is in danger of being contaminated by its social milieu. Sterelny does not quite make the point that Gould is scared that science will lead him where he doesn’t want to go, but this is certainly implied by his statement, “Gould hates sociobiology.”
And surely this is simply the old Marxist dogma that human psychology and behaviour have no innate characteristics, but are infinitely plastic and manipulable, together with the social systems that have been and can be founded upon them.
Gould has died. Is that the end of the controversy? After all, as Max Planck said, he didn’t need to convince the opponents of his theory: “They died.”
A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the internet in just one day and using only a single computer has already produced some eye-catching images. The Opte Project uses a networking program called “traceroute”. This records the network addresses that a data packet hops between as it travels towards a particular network host. The project is free and represents a lot of donated time.
Click for larger image and enjoy
via Network Edge
Interesting legal issues are raised, I feel, by this story:
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Call it spam rage: A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.
In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made “road rage” famous, Charles Booher, 44, was arrested on Thursday and released on bail for making repeated threats to staff of a Canadian company between May and July.
Booher threatened to send a “package full of Anthrax spores” to the company, to “disable” an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their e-mail list, prosecutors said.
He used return e-mail addresses including Satan@hell.org.
In a telephone interview with Reuters on Friday, Booher acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.
Here’s what happened: I go to their Web site and start complaining to them, would you please, please, please stop bothering me,” he said. “It just sort of escalated … and I sort of lost my cool at that point.
I believe that Charles Booher speaks for many of us. In some ways, it strikes me, this resembles the Tony Martin case. The complaint against Martin was that he has shot one of his burglar-tormenters in the back. But since this burglar had attacked him repeatedly and since his latest attack provided yet further evidence that, if he could, he would be back, it made sense to me for Martin to shoot him in the back in self defence, against his next attack.
Booher requested, then demanded, that his computer to be left alone. But alas, Booher was unaware that his replies merely proved that he and his email were real, so the bombardments immediately intensified. But given that Booher was unlikely ever to catch these miscreants, was it not reasonable for him to threaten complete ghastliness in the unlikely event that he did? Had he known with certainty who they were, such bloodcurdling threats as Booher’s would have been excessive. More mundane remedies would have been sufficient. However, for people who behave as Booher’s tormentors behaved, is there not a case for the reintroduction of something like hanging, drawing and quartering? Or maybe crucifixion?
I agree, probably a bit over the top. But Booher’s rather extreme reaction does serve to remind us all of just what a problem spam is now becoming for many people, and that if the free market does not spread around some answers to the problems of people like Booher, governments will be only to ready to use his plight to impose their own much more draconian arrangements, in the form of alleged cures that will almost certainly turn out worse than the disease, but whose worseness will only become obvious when it is all in place and impossible then to reverse.
I for one would love to have a comment string explaining how ‘anti-spam,’ software works, what principles it follows, how it avoids stopping good stuff while still stopping the bad, and so on. Maybe Booher’s problem has already been solved, and the only problem that remains is telling him and everyone like him what this solution is.
This is big. I mean it is really big. It is so big I had to take time from paid work to pass it along.
A small entrepreneurial company, Changing World Technologies, has just extended the Petroleum age to infinity. That’s right. We aren’t going to run out of oil. Ever. To top it off, we won’t be adding more carbon to the atmosphere – we will just be recycling the same carbon stocks over and over again. Even better: we can tell OPEC to go rotate because fuel imports will become a thing of the past.
Does this all seem like fantasy? It did to me when I first heard about it, but the more I read the more convinced I am. The technology takes any carbon based waste, and I do mean any carbon based waste and turns it into high quality oil, water and some minerals at 85% energy efficiency. 15% of the output supplies enough energy to run the process. It’s not hype and vu-graphs either. They’ve got a real pilot plant going up beside the Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri. Oil from turkey offal.
They estimate the US could supply all of it’s oil needs from recycling. It’s not a technology likely to get buried either. The large oil companies can phase into the new technology with hardly a dropped dividend.
It is also of interest for the ‘Small is Beautiful’ crowd and those of us in the Space settlement community. The technology scales both up and down. If you live in the middle of the Australian outback, you can chuck your shite and animal carcasses into the hopper on one end… and fill up the old diesel RV from the other fifteen minutes later.
Julian Simon is giggling in his grave.
Carthage, Missouri Commercial Plant at Butterball Turkey factory is operational.
Photo: Changing World Technologies
The economic, strategic, social and libertarian implications of this are huge. I’ve not the time to write down the mass of thoughts whirling around in my head right now, but I am certain I can depend on our literate readership to expand on the possibilities and write them up for me. See you in comments when I’ve some spare time!
One of our readers has pointed out this article about the current status of the venture. The first plant is online and others are now funded and in planning.
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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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