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 contemplating where things stand regarding the threat of terror attacks on our homes from radical islamic groups, we have tended, perhaps understanderbly, to overlook sources of trouble closer to home. An article
in the wonderfully revamped website of the American Spectator, a conservative leaning journal, describes the aims and methods of extremist environmental groups. It makes for worrying reading.
Like their better-known terrorist brethren who hate America and its capitalist system, ELF undertakes actions it knows will have no direct consequence beneficial to its stated goals. It merely looks to inflict harm, hoping that will cow people into living in teepees and biking to work. ELF members are sustained by hate against infidels who don’t share their extremist religion, and are eager to commit violence against their “enemies.” So far that violence has been targeted against property, but as the more radical members come to realize that burning down a few houses and vandalizing SUVs aren’t accomplishing anything, and fueled by their demonizing rhetoric, violence against people is not far off.
There is no great surprise in this. Witness what happened to the staff working for the Huntingdon Life Sciences business. Witness the constant vandalism of genetically modified crops. If you are in the grip of an ideology that holds “nature” and its creatures as inviolable, and believe that all sentient creatures have “rights” then it is perhaps inevitable that some folk are going to resort to physical violence to get their way.
As Virginia Postrel noted on her blog some time ago (cannot find the exact article, I am afraid), we need to hear from mainstream green lobbies about how much they deplore violent acts. So far, I have heard diddely squat from any such group on this matter.
I do not believe I am being hysterical in suggesting that it is only a matter of time before quite a few folk are going to get killed by enviro-nuts. There is not much we ourselves can do apart from show vigilance. However, what we can and must do is to constantly challenge their ideology and continue to champion the achievements of reason, science and technology that have lifted us up from the swamps. These nutters would have us return whence we came.
Bernie Greene wonders just how scientific is the science behind the smoking debate?
Epidemiology began with a fellow called John Snow investigating to find the cause of a cholera epidemic in London in the 19th Century. He had the idea that it might be coming from contamination in a well. So he took a map showing the locations of wells and plotted the incidence of the disease on the map. Sure enough they were mostly in close proximity to one particular well. He had the well put out of service and there were no more new cases of cholera. That is a simple story of logic and surveying intelligently applied to test a theory.
It is very unfortunate that it was so simple to solve. He might then have left a better example for his followers.
What if he had found that the 166 1 total cholera cases were scattered all over the map pretty evenly but that they all had pink carnations on their coats? One hundred thousand people wore pink carnations and 99,874 did not get cholera.
What does he do now? Well if he were a tobacco investigator he would petition the government to do something about pink carnations. But let’s say he is a brighter boy.
He decides to go and interview the cholera cases in more depth. → Continue reading: Honest science or propaganda?
Plato’s Utopia has long served as a double-edged sword to any aspiring totalitarian. Many of the world’s greatest adventurers, explorers and thinkers have sought the fabled Lost City of Atlantis, coming up with many convoluted theories as to where and how it really existed. Now an expedition to the Strait of Gibraltar may solve one of the world’s greatest mysteries.
Next month, an expedition to hunt for its remains among submerged Gibraltarian islands will be unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society, London, by a renowned geologist, Prof Jacques Collina-Girard, and the leaders of the Titanic expeditions. Prof Collina-Girard believes that generations of Atlantis obsessives overlooked the most obvious location: Plato’s account suggests Atlantis lay before the Pillars of Hercules – today’s Strait of Gibraltar.
Plato said the island kingdom was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was paradise: peaceful, cultured and unspoilt. A golden age continued for centuries, but eventually corruption got the better of its inhabitants and the gods punished them by submerging Atlantis.
In our fast-paced modern times, the EUropean utopia skipped the golden age to move directly to the corruption phase. If gods wish to retain any shred of their shattered credibility, a total submerging of all EU institutions would be well in place. And they’d better hurry, or they will have their work cut out by the European Directive on Submerging, Flooding and Destroying Continents that is soon to be approved by the EU Commission.
Directive 03/360BC/UTOPIA specifies that any destructive activities by the certified Deities, defined as protest to the political, social and cultural developments of Mortal Citizens (EU Directives 98/3740BC/NOAH and 99/2350BC/SOD&GOM), are to be closely monitored by the relevant agencies using the consolidated global experience and drawing on a long-term state-funded research of such occurrances. Or they could just apply retrospetive fines to penalise Mr Plato for unclear, inconsistent and misleading labelling of his products and services and insufficient specification of their location.
Natalie Solent links to news of this new discovery:
A team of researchers led by Dr. Daniel Kwok and Dr. Larry Kostiuk in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta has discovered a new way of generating electric power from flowing water.
When a liquid such as water is passed through a small channel, a physical phenomenon called charge separation occurs. The surface of the channel becomes ionically charged and opposite-charged ions in the liquid are attracted to it.
At the same time, like-charged ions are repelled from the surface. This results in a thin liquid layer with a net charge. This region, known as the Electric Double Layer (EDL), ranges from several nanometres to a few micrometres thick.
To harness this phenomenon, the research team constructed a microchannel with a diameter similar to the EDL itself and then forced the liquid through the channel. This resulted in only one type of ion in the EDL being transported downstream, creating a current and hence a voltage difference across the ends of the channel.
An external electric circuit was constructed by placing electrodes at the ends of the channel, and electrical energy was extracted from the device as current flowed between the electrodes.
I am impressed, I think. Or I will be as soon as I am convinced that this is not just wishful thinking in techno-babble.
I am not so impressed by the Calgary Sun’s reporting of the story. They regard the “response from the international community” as being more significant than the workings of the invention itself, which is to get it the wrong way around, I think. But after they have given us a few paragraphs about all the phone-calls and e-mails that have already flown around concerning this new gadget, they too get around to describing what it does…
With the help of two graduate students, the two professors were able to light a small bulb by simply squeezing a syringe of ordinary tap water through a glass “filter” with microscopic-sized holes they call microchannels.
They invented their “electrokinetic” water battery by harnessing the natural energy that is created on a very tiny scale when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface, creating an electrical charge. Water forced through a microchannel results in the movement of positive and negatives ions in such a way that one end becomes positive and the other negative.
…and how significant it might be:
The inventors are particularly excited by the fact the electricity is produced cleanly and involves no moving parts.
The discovery could in a matter of years lead to batteries for everyday items such as cellphones and calculators being powered by pressurized water.
The Green Movement will be appalled. How can they be expected to prevent all forms of technological progress and take humanity back to the Stone Age, if even Canadians are doing stuff like this?
More seriously, is this the technology that might finally make electric cars a serious proposition?
And: what kind of water is involved here? Does it get used up by the process? Will salt water suffice? Tap water? In fifty years time will the World Economy be yanked this way and that by WPEC?
Time for the Samizdata commentariat to do their stuff.
Glenn Reynolds pointed out an interesting discussion over at Heretical Ideas: are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics moral?
I started off writing a comment of my own but it rapidly grew to the point at which it really ‘wanted’ to be a Samizdata article in its own right. I feel I have some standing to speak on this topic because I actually have the creds. In short, Dr. Herbert Simon, the father of AI, was my grad school mentor and I’ve worked for the CMU Robotics Institute as a member of the research staff.
→ Continue reading: I, Puma Arm
This looks really interesting, from one of the constantly excellent not-so-political pages of the New York Times:
Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer.
In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys’ brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys’ thoughts.
The achievement is a significant advance in the continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be a great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements.
As seems to be the usual practice nowadays, a technology fraught with general implications for mankind and his ever increasing power to manipulate his environment is first presented as a mere trick to enable cripples to do just a bit less badly. But okay, if that’s what it takes. And I suppose that this is where the first big money for this stuff has come from and the first money-making applications will be applied.
That trivial grumble aside, just think of it … Soon we’ll all be able to put on our Telekinesis 5.2 helmets and do the washing up while still at the office just by thinking about it. We will be able to live our entire lives without ever getting out of bed.
I gave up believing a long time ago that robots would ever be much use at telling themselves what to do other than in the case of totally repetitive tasks like car making. Any job requiring initiative, like pouring out a cup of tea, say, or flower arranging or doing a half decent blog posting, needs a human in charge. If, in the future, Metal Mickeys get to push vacuum cleaners around our houses this will be because real men (well maybe not Real Men but you know what I mean) are operating them in some House Cleaning Control Office nearby.
And now that day is nearer, because our ability to communicate our wishes to the Metal Mickeys just got better.
The Skeptical Environmentalist
Bjorn Lomborg
Cambridge University Press, 2001
This is not exactly a book of surprises for me, since I have read Julian Simon, Donald Bailey, et al., but apparently it has caused a stir and much hostility, which I can only assume is because all the other sources haven’t attained the same (desired) publicity. It is a big book – 352 pages plus 160 pages of notes etc., divided into six sections:
- The Litany – the media consensus that things are getting worse. Lomborg sets out to counter this in his section “Things Are Getting Better” and examines “Why Do We Hear So Much Bad News?”
- Human Welfare – population, life expectancy, food stocks, general prosperity, leading to the conclusion: unprecedented human prosperity.
- Can Human prosperity Continue? The “Are we living on borrowed time?” worry, is answered reassuringly in the sections following on food, forests, energy and raw materials, water.
- Pollution – air pollution (decreasing in the developed countries, correlated with increased prosperity), acid rain (a false scare), indoor air pollution (greater everywhere than outdoors, resulting in allergies and asthma), water pollution (exaggerated and decreasing), waste disposal (not a problem as far as enough space is concerned).
- Tomorrow’s Problems – exaggerated fears over chemicals and pesticides causing cancer etc., also over biodiversity loss and species extinction, the last from figures grabbed from the air, and a long section of global warming (pp. 258-324). This may be the section that has caused most trouble. Lomborg does not deny that “anthropogenic” additional carbon dioxide may have caused, be causing or will cause global warming but he does make clear the variation possible and the excessively alarmist nature of some of the forecasts. He also points out that money spent on reducing the earth’s temperature could be better spent and that the dislocation of the world economy would reduce the expanding prosperity that makes possible the necessary efficiency needed to bring about the desired results.
- The Real State of the World is a generally hopeful one, basically summarising the message of the rest of the book and including a section on GM foods. There is also a discussion of the costs of protection measures; thus the Environmental Protection Agency (in the US) spends $21.4 billion to save 592,000 life-years (though how this figure was attained isn’t clear to me). A Harvard study estimates that 1,230,000 life-years could be saved for the same money. This is a good source-book, with something interesting on every page. I find it pretty convincing.
Nowadays the gadgetry available even to quite non-rich people is advancing at a hectic rate, and the people in the shops selling these gadgets can’t keep up with it. The very thing that makes you want to go back to the shop to ask them how the hell it works is the exact same reason why they can’t help you. They can’t keep up with what’s in all their boxes any more than you can quickly work out what’s in your box. If the bloke in Dixon’s was smart enough to explain all the nuances of digital radio or Norton anti-virus software, he wouldn’t be working in Dixon’s, now would he?
So what do you do? Read the manual? Yes, but only as a last resort. The real trick with new technology is to watch what your friends are using, and if it works, get one of those yourself. That way, any new discoveries made by any of you about whatever it is can become common knowledge for the entire group of you. You can also share things like discs and data cards. This is how standards emerge in the free society. They aren’t imposed. People buy them, by buying what their friends also have. And people are being smart. Other things being equal, which they often are, get the same stuff as your mate down the road.
I mention this now because a user group may be starting to form in my little bit of the blogosphere, around one of the Canon range of digital cameras, the Canon PowerShot A70. → Continue reading: Buy the Canon PowerShot A70 and explain it to me – that’s what friends are for
About a year ago I posted this wondering how much data there was in a truck. Dai Davies, director of Dante, has answered my question (via the BBC)
Before now the highest data transfer speed was achieved by putting the tapes in a van and driving them to where they need to be analysed. Delivery vans can carry lots of tapes at the same time which means that Europe’s roads have a relatively high bandwidth.
You can send a few hundred megabytes per second through DHL
I am still waiting for an answer to how many trucks there are though.
This seems interesting, from the BBC on Monday:
China, South Korea and Japan are to boost joint research into a new computer operating system to rival Microsoft Windows.
The project, expected to be open-source software, was proposed by Japan and is intended to give a helping hand to Windows rivals, such as Linux.
The Japanese Government has already earmarked one billion yen (US$85.5m) for the project.
The Japanese Government, contrary to collectivist myth, has a record of earmarking billions to computer schemes which later prove to be embarrassing failures. Remember that “Fifth Generation” fiasco? And then, of a more private sector (but “cooperative”) nature, there was that amazing moment around twenty years ago now when every Japanese electronics conglomerate there was produced a near-identical version of the same doomed games console/Sinclair computer clone, only bigger and clunkier than the Sinclair. (Remember Sinclair? Oh dear, I’m showing my age.)
Even so, I’d be interested to hear what our more computer-literate commenters think of this. I suggest we try to avoid reprising the usual Linux (good, ridiculous) Microsoft (good, tyrannical) arguments. I’m keen to learn whether this particular announcement is likely to make any difference to anything.
A commenter (“Tregagle”) on a previous smoking-related posting here mentioned this. Here’s the story, from the Independent:
A hormone that signals when the stomach is full has been found to cut the appetites of both fat and thin people by one-third in an experiment that could signal an important advance in the treatment of obesity.
Professor Stephen Bloom, of Imperial College London and Hammersmith Hospital, who headed the team that made the discovery, said it was the first time in 20 years that they had identified a compound with such potential. The finding is published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
And I wonder if this research might have a bearing also on the plight of at least some of those unhappy people who eat too little? Maybe they are producing too much of this stuff naturally. Just a thought.
Look out Atkins Diet. Here comes the Bloom Diet. Just take one of these half way through your meal, and the dog can have the rest.
In twenty years time, everyone will look like supermodels. Everyone will be beautiful. But the Marxists will then say that beauty is relative, that the only-rather-beautiful ones will be the new uglies, and that capitalism should still, as always, feel thoroughly ashamed of itself, this time for having dared to turn willpower into a commodity. Plus, the vilified Bloom will be held responsible for diminished sales of Third World agricultural produce, and for the depressed state of and mass unemployment in the sticky bun industry.
I first came across this story in the dead tree Times, and although the virtual Times probably has it too, we have a policy here at Samizdata about linking to that which is that we don’t.
So here is the same story from canada.com:
Researchers have discovered a genetic glitch that makes some smokers up to 10 times more likely to develop lung cancer than others, a finding that may explain why only 10 per cent of heavy smokers develop the deadly disease.
A simple blood test that will be able to detect which smokers are at an especially high risk of developing lung cancer could be on the market within three years, researchers told the Times of London.
Ah look, they got it from the Times too.
In other words, it will separate ordinary, high-risk smokers from extra high-risk smokers.
It will be interesting to see what the anti-smoking lobby makes of this. They ought to rejoice. But I think they will be angry.
Their starting axiom is that cigarettes are evil. If this discovery makes it that cigarettes actually do less harm than hitherto, that will be bad. They will react like hellfire preachers who have been informed that hell, for many sinners (now identifiable in advance), is not as hot as they had previously supposed, and that sin is accordingly less frightening for these particular sinners to indulge in.
Overall, smokers with low levels of the DNA-repairing enzyme were 120 times more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers with normal OGG levels. Smokers with the genetic risk factor were also five to 10 times more likely to develop the disease than smokers with normal DNA repair activity.
So smokers with normal levels of DNA-repairing enzyme will now be sinning like there’s no tomorrow. Bad. Very bad.
It’ll be fun to watch.
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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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