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]
|
I just did a random link from the list on the left here such as I like to do from time to time, and I got to this blog, and to a link from it to this article. What is being described here sounds amazing, and although I did look to see if the date April 1st was involved, this seems to be for real. Someone thinks it’s for real, at any rate.
Someone called Appel is busy developing a process which turns rubbish into riches.
The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.
…
“The potential is unbelievable,” says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. “You’re not only cleaning up waste; you’re talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world.”
“This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step,” agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director.
I’m always impressed by the savvy and general informedness of the best Samizdata comments on technology issues. So, people, any comments on this stuff? Is this thing all that these guys are cracking it up to be? Or is it fatally flawed? Miracle or mug’s game? Genius or madness? Alchemy or insanity? Or maybe just somewhere in between, and boring? I’d love to know.
If it’s half as good as they’re saying, this looks like another wonder of capitalism to add to the collection. But then again, maybe this has all been gone into weeks ago, and proved idiotic.
If it does work, how long will it take for the environmental lobby to decide that they hate it? Because if this is a wonder of capitalism, they will hate it.
There is quite a procession of folks headed for Mars at the moment, according to this BBC report. Coming relatively soon after the awful Shuttle disaster, it is heartening to see some actual stirrings of decent activity in the space field at the moment.
Godspeed to them all.
Go out and buy a gas-guzzler, right now. Drive around burning tons of petrol and enjoy yourself in the process. Better still, invest your money in smokestack industries that belch fumes into the atmosphere. Not only is there a prospect of making a healthy profit but you will also be contributing to a better world:
The world has become a greener place in the past two decades as a result of climate change, according to a major study published today.
As the climate has warmed, the Earth has become more lush and rich with vegetation, notably in the Amazon rainforests, according to a study jointly funded by the US space agency Nasa and the US Department of Energy.
In the Amazon, plant growth was limited by sun-blocking cloud cover, but the skies have become less cloudy. In India, where a billion people depend on rain, the monsoon was more dependable in the 1990s than in the 1980s.
So it appears that we are not destroying the planet after all. Nor are we ethically obliged to abandon our consumer societies or turn our backs on technology and progress.
Of course, a few of us were saying this all along but, amidst the whistling of different tunes, it is nonetheless instructive to actually observe the process of the juggernaut of received wisdom performing a 180 degree turnabout.
I predict that, within a few years, the whole notion of ‘global warming’ and its attendant primitivism will become every bit as laughable and discredited as the ‘Canals on Mars’.
On Monday night I watched a Channel 4 TV documentary about the battle between Lockheed and Boeing for the contract to build the next US jet fighter. Winner takes all, and Lockheed won with this. It’s all completely new stuff to me, although I’m sure Dale Amon has been all over this for years.
At the end this show there was a tantalising reference to unmanned flight, in which, it just so happens, one of the companies that is doing best is … Boeing. Ever since I’ve been on the lookout for uses for this kind of aircraft, besides searching out and bombing enemies on a battlefield I mean. I’m sure Dale Amon has been all over that question as well, but to me, it’s a new one. What can you do with these gismos? War, yes, but what else?
(By the way, I take it there are people on the ground paying attention to these things when they’re in the air, and that they don’t genuinely and completely fly themselves. Tell me this is true.)
In the small hours of Wednesday morning I found myself watching another TV documentary, this time about how they’re using swarms of these unmanned planes to make better weather forecasts. And here’s something else which was apparently made possible by unmanned flight, this time in the form of a movie about birds.
Any other offers? There have to be lots of other brilliant things you can do with flying robots. One obvious application springs to mind, which is unmanned cargo planes full of stuff which, at a pinch, you can stand to lose.
And what about stuff you can’t afford to lose? How about “unmanned” passenger planes? After all, there are unmanned passenger trains now. We have them in London, on the Docklands Light Railway. So why not an unmanned 747? I can of course well imagine why not, but seriously, could that ever help at all?
Walt Disney will introduce self-destructing DVDs for ‘rent’ this August in a pilot project to crack a wider rental market. The discs, dubbed EZ-D, become unplayable after two days and do not have to be returned. They stop working after a change in colour renders them unreadable, starting off red, but when taken out of the package and exposed to oxygen, the coating turns black and makes it impenetrable by a DVD laser.
The technology is impervious to hackers as the mechanism which closes the viewing window is chemical and has nothing to do with computer technology. However, the disc can be copied within 48 hours, since it works like any other DVD during that window.
The only purpose behind this wasteful production of DVDs I can see (think of all the waste from the useless discs!) is Walt Disney having a go at the rental market in an attempt to recoup the return on films released on DVDs. Presumably licenses or other means used to control the rental market are not good enough for them.
For the customer the benefit is marginal, I no longer have to remember to ‘return’ the disc, whose only use thereafter will be as a tacky coffee mug mat. In fact, there will cease to be rental market as such, as there will only be two kinds of DVDs I can purchase. The expensive ones that last and the cheap ones that will play only for 48 hours. It is not clear whether they will be distributed by a similar network of ‘rental’ shops. It certainly makes economic sense to do so, since one of the benefits of renting a DVD or a video is the convenience of being able to do so close to one’s home and at any hour of the day.
I do not have sufficient detail to take a firm position on this one. My gut reaction is that any attempt to control markets by restricting either supply or demand eventually blows up in the face of companies whose delusions of market power got better of their business sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s this or nothing. Seriously, there’s been nothing here for nearly twenty four hours, so I’m going to write about Tesco moisturised and elasticated No Fuss 2 in 1 anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner, because it’s a subject I feel strongly about. (Sorry, I can find a link to the Tesco enterprise as a whole, but no direct link to any information about this particular product.)
For the last few decades I’ve always assumed that shampoo, by its nature, is something that can’t be entirely convenient. Does the lid hold the shampoo in tightly? If so, it will be a bother opening it, by unscrewing it or by otherwise gouging it open, and that means you’ll tend to keep it open, and that means that it loses its moisture and gets stuck at the bottom of the container, and you have to hold it upside down for about a minute, waiting for it to appear, or perhaps dilute it, which risks diluting it too much and turning it into an uncontrollable liquid rather than a semi-controllable sludge (no disrespect intended). Then, once it has appeared, I assumed it to be a law of nature that not all of it would end up in my hair, but that some of it would assemble itself just outside the hole in the container from which it had emerged, where it would dry out and perhaps block the hole. Which is why I probably should keep the container shut, by screwing it shut again, or by forcing the lid back on. (Remember, a lid that is easy to force short is a lid that can easily fall open again, and that defeats the purpose of the thing.) But that’s so much bother that I can seldom be bothered.
Actually, the procedure I eventually got around to using was to put the lid back on, but to keep the container upside down so that I didn’t have to wait for it to journey laboriously to the exit every time.
I hope this is making sense.
So, let’s take those two adjectives that I apply (for they do not appear on the container) to the latest Tesco shampoo (and conditioner) one at a time. Moisturised, and elasticated. → Continue reading: Tesco moisturised and elasticated No Fuss 2 in 1 anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner
Next time you run into a bunch of eco-loonies howling from the rooftops about the number of innocent Iraqi children killed by Anglo-American sanctions or the number of Africans whose lives are blighted by the alleged predations of globalisation, you might want to take some comfort from the realisation that what is really going on here is a massive exercise in guilt-displacement.
Green campaigns, you see, are not just a laughable manifestation of Western illiberal neurosis. They actually kill real people in the real world. There is no better illustration of this than their the long-standing (and shameful) war against DDT, an extremely useful chemical spray that has a proven track record in stopping the spread of malaria but which the greenies regard as a ‘toxin’ that must be eradicated in order to ‘improve’ the environment.
Using their customary formula of junk-science, scare-mongering, moral blackmail and religious fervour, the enviro-mentalists have managed to persuade Western governments to lean on the governments of developing countries to prohibit the use of this life-saving bit of technology.
This is neo-imperialism of the worst kind. Western greenies seem to regard the Third World as a sort of benevolent plantation where they can administer their muddle-headed, quasi-mystical, do-goodery to the poor, benighted fuzzy-wuzzys.
The results have been disastrous but the good news is that the ‘noble savages’ have had just about enough of this crap:
Kenya’s leading research center has come out in favor of using DDT to stem the toll of malaria in the country, reigniting a bitter debate between those who want to protect the environment and those who favor saving African children.
With the announcement, Kenya is poised to join a handful of other African countries, which are disregarding donor-nation admonitions that the chemical is an environmental disaster.
Proof (as if any more were actually needed) that one can afford to play along with these self-indulgent parlour games and humour the participants until such times as actual lives are on the line as a result. The Kenyans have rudely (and justly) reminded the world that they are critically vulnerable to the consequences of fashionable clap-trap in a way that over-stuffed and ridiculously coddled Western metropolitan elites are not.
“DDT is not the only weapon against malaria, but given its success in other parts of Africa, it would be of great benefit for malaria control in Kenya,” Richard Tren, director of Africa Fighting Malaria, in Johannesburg said yesterday. “Not using DDT, in effect, condemns Africans to die.”
Dr. Davy Koech, director of KMRI, said DDT is one of the most effective pesticides against the anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria. He said malaria in Kenya has reached epidemic proportions.
Every person engaged in this campaign of prohibition should hang their heads in shame and ignominy.
Cheap and effective, DDT was once considered a modern miracle for dealing with malaria and insect pests in agriculture. It was used during World War II, when entire cities were sprayed to control lice and typhus. DDT was used to eradicate malaria in the United States, but it was also used by the ton for agriculture, where it killed birds. DDT was named the culprit and vilified by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book “Silent Spring,” leading to its ban in the United States in 1972.
I wonder if that book has even been objectively scrutinised?
Zambia recently decided to reintroduce the chemical for malaria control, and Uganda announced that it would begin using DDT again.
“In Europe, they used DDT to kill anopheles mosquitos that cause malaria,” Ugandan Health Minister Jim Muhewezi told the Monitor newspaper in Kampala. “Why can’t we use DDT to kill the enemy in our own camp?”
Because, Mr.Muhewezei, some Westerners regard ideology as being more important than life itself.
I sincerely hope that this outbreak of common sense continues to spread. I also hope that this episode goes some way to persuade sensible people in the Third World that their lives will not improve until they dismiss the idiotic ravings of Western socialist cranks and start to embrace the enlightenment of technology, capitalism, progress and property rights.
And, if there is any justice in this world, Western enviro-mentalists will all be rounded up and prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
[My thanks to Chris Cooper for flagging up this issue on the Libertarian Alliance Forum]
This is the first posting in what may or may not turn into a series on the general theme of the historic impact of the ever changing and evolving technology of communication, thoughts provoked by the talk that Michael Jennings gave at my home on the evening of Friday April 25th.
One of my fondest memories is of an earlier talk given by Sean Gabb in this same ongoing last-friday-of-the-month series, about the impact of the printing press. He described this not in the usual way, by telling the story of the printing press itself, and how it spread, and what it caused, but by describing how things were done before printing existed. He described how documents were copied before there were any printing presses to copy them, the central point being that such documents only lasted so long and it was all that the copyists could do to keep existing texts in continued existence. In such a world it was very hard for knowledge to grow. On the contrary, the only thing it could really do was shrink, which does a lot to explain why the Golden Age in those days tended to be placed in the past, rather than in the future as we now tend to prefer.
But another way to look at the arrival of printing is to look at it not just as a means of data storage, but also as a means of data transmission.
Consider. With any means of communication there are basically two problems to solve. First, you have to concoct the message in the first place. Second, you have to transmit it. Now, look at printing from these two points of view. Clearly, it does wondrous things to the first process, but equally clearly, a little compression aside, it contributes almost nothing to the second. Getting a book from Antwerp to Rome still depends on the speed of a donkey, just as it always did.
This simple fact had huge consequences for the way that printing impacted upon the wider culture. → Continue reading: How printing caused nationalism
Last Friday evening Aussie blogger based in London Michael Jennings gave a talk at my place, on the subject of digital TV. What is it? Where’s it at? Where’s it going? That kind of thing. He combined knowing a lot about his subject with not talking at too great length to a degree that doesn’t always happen at these things, and I think all those present found it most informative and interesting. I certainly did.
For the benefit of those as ignorant of this subject as I was at 8pm on Friday evening, I summarise as best I can something of what I learned during the next hour and a half.
Around 1980, or so, governments around the world began switching to digital TV. They did this for a variety of reasons, but to a degree rare in such circumstances they all arrived at very similar technological destinations, which resulted in a new global system that involved only trivial incompatibilities. US TV corporations wanted an excuse to cling to their existing wavelengths. The British government was looking to economise on the use of existing bandwidths so that it could auction the vacated electronic real estate. In Japan they wanted to dominate the next generation of TV manufacturing. And so on. In practice it all meant the same thing. Digital TV. Which is where we now are. I now have a little box above my TV which cost £100, which has transformed a TV which emitted five channels in rather poor quality to a TV that emits something more like a dozen channels in better quality, including 24 hour news services from the BBC, from ITV and from Sky, just in time for the war.
How come digital TV means more channels? Compression. Digital data can be compressed. How does that work? Well, instead of transmitting thousands of very big numbers each referring to each bit of the picture being described, you can instead emit a string of numbers many of which take the form of things like “the same as the bit next to it” or “one more than the bit next to it” and this occupies much less space. The more computing power you apply to such processes, the more you can compress, and computing power, as we all know, is leaping ahead year by year. Once all the information arrives in our TV sets we can apply steadily increasing computing power to its storage and viewing and manipulation. TV has now become something that you need to upgrade, because it is going to get better year by year, and keep on getting better.
Threading its way in among this story is the related story of the rise of the DVD, to the point where it is about to dethrone the VHS tape as the standard for hiring movies from the Shop Around the Corner or buying them to have in your home. Apparently DVDs will in due couse jump to being an order of magnitude better, and I’m going to wish I’d not bought so many DVDs in their present primitive state. Oh goodie.
So, an informative evening, and no doubt I’ve missed out lots. As to what all this will mean for our culture, I’ll try to have a go at that in a later posting. Or maybe postings, because it is a complicated story.
UPDATE:
Email from Jennings:
“Around 1980, or so, governments around the world began switching to digital TV.”
Thanks for the nice comments. However, “1990” is more accurate. I suppose you could say that some of the HDTV efforts that ultimately led to digital TV started in 1980, but digital was not technically possible until a decade later and in 1980 nobody had any idea that “digital” is where we would end up. The first application that could be described as “digital TV” in any form is the Video CD, for which the technical standard was released in 1987. The first broadcast digital TV system of any form was the American DirecTV satellite system, which commenced broadcasts in 1993.
Yeah, 1990. I meant 1990.
Nice article in Wired on how playing video games is helping youngsters to think better, therby overcoming the obstacles put in their way by our dumbed-down education system. Hmm. Food for thought. Any, this screed by James Paul Gee perhaps suggests that homeschooling parents should ensure their children play certain types of game as a key element of the learning process. I must say I never thought that Doom or Grand Theft Auto as agents of learning, but the world is a strange place.
I liked this paragraph:
We don’t often think about videogames as relevant to education reform, but maybe we should. Game designers don’t often think of themselves as learning theorists. Maybe they should. Kids often say it doesn’t feel like learning when they’re gaming – they’re much too focused on playing. If kids were to say that about a science lesson, our country’s education problems would be solved.
In other words, all those kids out playing computer games are no cause for concern. They are our next Edisons, Feynmans and Bill Gateses.
The folk at the U.S. techie magazine Wired have been celebrating 10 years of existence. On the whole I have enjoyed reading that publication, notwithstanding its occasional teenage-like cockiness, obsession with fashion and suchlike. On the whole I regard their particular northern Californian brand of breezy optimism to be a tonic compared to a lot of doom and gloom stuff that comes our way. They are also consistent defenders of privacy and exude a pretty strong libertarian cultural vibe, though many of their authors could not be classed as out and out libertarians.
In the April edition, Wired got two authors, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall to write about the need for the U.S. government to launch a $100 billion venture on getting the country linked up to hydrogen power in order to wean Americans off their addiction to oil. A lot of reasons are given, many of them pretty obvious, such as reducing reliance on oil from the instable Middle East and reducing carbon dioxide emissions because of the so-called Greenhouse effect.
Their article contains a lot of impressive facts and figures as well as calls to embark on a hydrogen project with the same fervour that JFK asked Americans to put a man on the Moon. But that is my problem with this article, as it applies just as much to Britain as it does to the U.S.A. Surely, do we really want vast amounts of taxpayers’ money spent encouraging big energy firms to move into this technology, when that is bound to provide endless opportunities for pork-barrel politics, and the like? And while it was a magnificent achievement, putting men on the Moon came at a vast cost and the bloated bureacracy of NASA is surely a warning of what can happen with such projects, as Rand Simberg has pointed out many times before.
Ultimately, if the price of oil rises to a level which means sharp entrepreneurs think hydrogen-powered energy solutions make sense, it will happen. After all, the oil industry got started in the late 19th century without a vast government-led project. The best thing governments can do in this area is like pretty much everywhere else – GET OUT OF THE GODDAM WAY!
I’ve had half an eye on British TV all evening, and you might be quite surprised how gung-ho it has rather suddenly become. Finally, we are getting all the stuff about what a total bastard Saddam Hussain is, from fearsome looking guys with towels on their heads. On Newsnight they’re now discussing the nuances of the fighting that might happen, with an elderly military guy who sounds confident and expert and who I’ve never seen before. Funny how war seems to cause all manner of total strangers suddenly to pop up in TV studios.
All this makes me remember that there is just one more guess about this “war” that I want now to get on the samizdata record before events overtake me and leave me having to say: “I said that! Didn’t I say that?!” So now let me say it.
There’s been a lot of grumbling in the blogosphere, and from the likes of Mark Steyn and many others, about how absurdly delayed this “war” has been, and what a “rush to war” there hasn’t been.
The dominant explanation of this now is that Dumbo the Elephant alias George W. Bush has been standing like a greyhound in the slips (Henry V – please pardon the mixing of the animal metaphors) and that Tranzi Tony Blair has been restraining Dumbo with a lot of flummery about the UN, World Opinion, and other such foolishnesses not held in very high regard in our corner of the blogosphere.
But what if the reason the “war” has been so delayed is that it has taken a long time to get it ready? If I understand the Americans correctly they’ve been planning this war since 9/12. And one of the things they have been most concerned to achieve is low casualties, on both sides. And one of the most important ways they’ve been setting about how to get that result is by throwing technology at the problem. → Continue reading: What if the wait turns out to be worth it?
|
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.
|
