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]
|
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.
As somebody whose inbox was besieged by MSBlast worms (all ‘quarantined’ fortunately), I would just love a quiet word with this gentleman:
Authorities in America have charged an 18-year-old youth with spreading the crippling MSBlast internet virus.
Jeffrey Lee Parson of Hopkins, Minnesota, is accused of “intentionally causing and attempting to cause damage to a protected computer”.
If found guilty, Mr Parson faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Only ten years?
This needs to be read here:
I’m still reading this blog, and I’m still not feeling like blogging for it. And I’ve finally figured out why. It’s a boys’ club. Not that I don’t love boys, but it’s one thing hanging out in the bar with them and quite another trying to get them to take you seriously when you’re talking, um, golf, with them. Digital ink, ID cards, government inquiries, Mars, US politics, transport … it’s a man’s world. And frankly, I am not man enough to go up there and start talking about shoes. Don’t interpret any of that as insulting: I read Samizdata every day, and find it not only interesting and righter than lots of other places, but diverse and entertaining as well. In a very very male kind of a way.
Hm. Yeah. Good point, er, what did you say your name was again? Alice. Yeah. So. Tell us about shoes then. How are they designed? – do they use the latest materials for those super-thin high heels? – you know, the ones the Space Programme made for the outsides of Shuttles, I bet they do, and get those acrylic surfaces, first used in the automobile industry I believe (although I’m open to correction on this – I’m not any sort of techno-fanatic you understand), for the Ford Psychopath ZPX100 Concept Car in 1971 which never made it into production but which looked really cool, like a Dan Dare rocket …
That’s enough about shoes. Get a load of this:
Shaped like a giant jellyfish and sheltered from the sun beneath its own artificial clouds, the world’s first underwater luxury hotel is to open beneath the waves of the Persian Gulf within three years.
The 220-suite Hydropolis Hotel in the Arab emirate of Dubai will cost £310 million to build. It aims to charge guests up to £3,500 per night and to provide them with the last word in undersea luxury.
It will be built of toughened, clear plastic Plexiglas, concrete and steel. Guests will be able to experience the sensation of sleeping in the sea by booking a bubble-shaped suite – including a clear glass bath tub – offering views of the sea life all around.
For those worried about terrorist attack, it will boast a high level of security, including anti-missile radar. If disaster does strike in one section, it can be sealed off with watertight doors.
Babe magnet or what?
Actually, Alice might quite like a night in that.
Ever since Instapundit pointed out, during all that faking of stories scandal, that the NYT may be politically all over the place on pages one, two, etc., but that on page n as n tends to infinity it has great technology coverage, I’ve been making a point of looking at that, and he’s right.
This, for example, from the New York Times today, sounds really interesting:
Standing on four metal legs, under two banks of fluorescent lights, was what appeared to be a modest-size billboard, measuring about 9 feet wide by 4 feet in height. Across its face, which looks like paper under glass, was a full-color advertisement for a soft drink maker. A few moments later the ad disappeared and was digitally replaced with a different one, and then another, like a screensaver cycling through images on a laptop computer screen.
But the surface of this billboard is not a liquid crystal diode screen – the energy-hungry display common to laptops and increasingly to cellphones, digital cameras, digital organizers and flat-screen computer monitors and television sets. Neither does this billboard share the light-emitting-diode technology that makes million-dollar-plus video screens light up the night in Times Square, Las Vegas and sports arenas around the world.
What makes the electronic billboard in Jersey City possible (and those installed for trials in London, Tokyo, Toronto and Panama City, among other locations) is an innovation by a New York-based display technology company whose name, Magink, is a combination of the words magic and ink. Its approach to imaging departs from the way most text, graphics and images are electronically presented, including the way expensive plasma screens work, as well as cathode-ray tubes, the old workhorses still found in most television sets and desktop computer monitors.
By creating a paste made of tiny helix-shaped particles that can be minutely manipulated with electric charges to reflect light in highly specific ways, Magink can produce surfaces that look like paper but behave like electronic screens, rendering high-resolution, full-color images without ink – or, as Magink executives like to refer to the process, with digital ink.
Ran Poliakine, chief executive of Magink, said the idea was to create visually compelling ads that could be replaced frequently – perhaps hourly, based on consumer response – and could be controlled remotely, all with far less energy and at a far lower cost than a video billboard.
It looks like paper. It’s cheaper than the usual screens, and easier to update. “Digital ink.” Wow.
I’m not any sort of techno-buff, but it sounds as if this technology differs radically from the usual screen technology in that it starts out being pretty big, but is rather hard to make small enough to fit on my desk. But they’ll get there, surely.
I don’t know about you, but when I am faced with a twenty page article on the internet, I do a print-out. Paper is just so much nicer than that screen shining so brightly at you. It’s the difference between reading something on the surface of a torch, and reading something on a surface. This stuff doesn’t shine light at you in an exhausting glare. It just reflects it, the way paper does.
It often happens that advertising cleans out the tubes of a new way of presenting messages, if only because novelty itself is the lifeblood of advertising – it gets your attention even if it does look cranky, because it looks cranky. Ten years later, it isn’t so cranky anymore and the advertisers are losing interest. But the R&D has had a big early contribution and Western Civilisation marches onwards. Just one more reason to love advertising.
Because what this really sounds like to me is the future of … reading!
I was in a dilemma this morning. I was just coming up to the last chapter of Mr Steven Pinker’s seminal work, Blank Slate, and reckoned I needed another 20 minutes to finish it. Unfortunately, my usual Tube journey takes me about 15 minutes. So what to do? Ha ha, I thought, I’ll take the Circle Line instead. This is always full of delays.
But then a Circle Line train pulled up almost immediately, full of empty seats, and raring to go. Foiled! I thought, once again, by a socialised transport system which even fails to be late when that’s what you require. So, resigned to getting to my client’s office on time, I set about the last chapter. However, I was not to be disappointed.
For there was a delay getting into Edgeware Road station! Oh, yes. → Continue reading: Pinker, or bluer, or freer?
There can be few afflictions more tragic and debilitating than blindness.
So I sincerely hope that this qualifies as some sort of breakthrough:
A blind man can see again after being given a stem cell transplant.
Mike May, of California, had been blind for 40 years since an accident at the age of three where he lost one eye and was blinded in the other.
The operation transplanted corneal and limbal stem cells into his right eye.
My very best wishes to Mr.May and to medical team who restored his sight. The possibility that this technique can be used to help blind people everywhere is something that is worth hoping and praying for.
Is this a case of ‘Do as we say, don’t do as we do‘?
Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux is not fit for the enterprise. But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service attacks.
According to a post on the Netcraft Web site, Microsoft changed its DNS settings on Friday so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft’s own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux.
An Akamai spokeswoman declined to comment, except to confirm that Microsoft is a customer.
Or just a case of ‘sleeping with the enemy’?
[My thanks to Boris Kuperschmidt who posted this item to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
If I were a shareholder in Anglo American plc, the owner of de Beers, the world’s biggest diamond firm, I would be having a few sleepless nights over the cover story of Wired magazine, about a team of entrepreneurs working to produce artificial diamonds.
I am not a scientist, but this article makes it pretty clear that the technology to create high-quality gems is getting closer. Diamonds, of course, have all kinds of uses, not just in jewellery, but also in industrial applications such as in ultra-hard lathes, cutting equipment and so forth.
It also suggests that scientific advances are bringing us closer to enjoying all kinds of incredibly light and strong materials, of a sort that are bound to be useful for activities such as aerospace, space travel, construction, and possibly also for the military.
This is another welcome reminder that despite the daily news of political dishonesty, terror bombings and the antics of dysfunctional celebs, smart folk out there are hard at work producing all kinds of new and amazing stuff.
A thought struck me last night while reading Mr Stephen Pinker’s excellent book, The Language Instinct, and its chapter, Language Organs and Grammar Genes. This discusses the direct effect of genes on the human cerebral cortex. Here’s an annotated quote from that chapter which kicked off my own cerebral cortical units into a bit of a grey-matter spin:
Could there really be a gene for sneezing in elevators? Presumably not, but there does not have to be…First, a single gene does not build a single brain module; the brain is a delicately layered soufflé in which each gene product is an ingredient with a complex effect on many properties of many circuits. Second, a single brain module does not produce a single behavioural trait. Most of the traits that capture our attention emerge out of unique combinations of kinks in many different modules…Perhaps the sneezing-in-elevators gene complex is the one that specifies just the right combination of thresholds and cross-connections among the modules governing humour, reactions to enclosed spaces, sensitivity to the mental states of others such as their anxiety and boredom, and the sneezing reflex.
Which begs the immediate question; is there a Liberty gene? Or a Liberty gene complex? Some researchers claim that up to thirty thousand genes are used to create the human brain. Could there be some regular patterning of this combinatorial soufflé process to create libertarians? → Continue reading: The Liberty gene
Who would have thought it? One of the main nutrition-industry opponents of the Atkins diet has had some of her research sponsored by the flour industry. Remarkable.
They really don’t like it up ’em, do they?, these nutritionists, who for years have been ordering us all to eat more low-fat (i.e. high carbohydrate) foods. And the Atkins diet is the bayonet up the bum they all secretly dread. For an entire industry of do-gooders, sponsored by the NHS and other tax-funded bodies, have made a fabulous living in the UK over the last two decades by sticking their noses into the things we eat, the fluids we drink, and the way we live.
And the news they don’t want anyone to hear is that it may be their advice, which has been causing all of the increasing obesity, because of their obsession with low-fat food. Manufacturers pack out these products with sugar, rice, and all the corn-syrup they can get their hands on. These overwhelm the poor old insulin-creating Islets of Langerhans, in the pancreas; the effects of this, according to Dr Atkins, are that we pile on weight and become addicted to carbs (sweets, beer, etc).
As well as causing obesity, particularly amongst children, the nutrition industry may also have created the huge rise in that dreadful silent killer disease, diabetes.
It’s not a pretty picture. And neither was I. Just after Christmas this year I topped 17st and 10lbs, and I was exhibiting what doctors call a pre-diabetic tendency (e.g. chain-eating packets of sweets). By God, that was some stomach, and in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase, that was some neck. But now, because of the late Dr Atkins, I’m 16st and 1lb. I was even better than this, at 15st 10lbs, but a recent reversion to ‘normal’ carb-loaded eating sent me back over the dreaded 16st barrier. So it’s back to Atkins, starting today, till we hit my fighting weight of 14st, though I’ll probably have some carb-relapses on the way, involving lager and curry, and it may take me a while.
So, to any anti-Atkins nutritionist, is it better I be nearly 18st, pre-diabetic, under blood pressure strain, and eating carb-laden low fat snacks, or 16st, not eating carbs, and a with significantly decreased obesity-related health risk? Hmmm…it takes me about 3.9 nanoseconds to work that one out. → Continue reading: Anti-Atkins do-gooder working for the flour industry
Watching the news on the ITN television channel last night, the lead item was about the current high temperatures we are experiencing at the moment. What I thought was interesting was the way in which presenter David Suchet announced that “global warming is happening” as if it were no more controversial a statement than to say that night follows day.
Over at the BBC website, meanwhile, you can read all about climate change. Again, the main page presents climate change as a given assumption. There is no place for dissent, scepticism or doubt. For that you have to delve into places like the recent book by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, etc.
Now, unlike some red-blooded defenders of free enterprise, I do not challenge the Greenhouse Effect case as something being put around by neo-luddite technophobes and control freaks. It may just be that the Greenhouse Effect is genuinely occuring. If so, then a good question for the likes of liberty-loving folk is to ask what, if anything, can citizens in a liberal order do about it?
It seems to me that this is a more interesting way to present our case rather than simply say, when hearing the latest piece of doomongering, that so-and-so is a Luddite.
In the meantime, thank heavens for the invention of air conditioning.
|
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.
|
