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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Hot off the Debian-Security mail list:
“It has been confirmed that the Twente University server rooms have now completely burned down. This means, (security,non-us,nm,qa}.debian.org and ftp.snt.utwente.nl are now lost. Rest in peace…
To translate and summarize http://www.webwereld.nl/nieuws/13242.phtml: “The fire started a little after 8AM CET. There are no casualties. The near Dutch-German internet exchange will take over some of the SURFnet activities. The network will probably be up again tomorrow, with help from HP. A new server room in another building was already being prepared anyway for use next month…”
And yes, also in the Netherlands it’s highly unusual that such a fire happens.
Regards, Pieter-Paul”
- Take a sheet of grey construction paper.
- Hold it over your head.
- Look up at it in a dark room.
That’s approximately what I can see from here. T’is a normal Irish night, so I’d also need slow wipers for my eyeballs.
I would just about see the glow from a dinosaur killer asteroid,.. if it passed directly overhead.
Or even if their isn’t, either we have free will, or we do not and are just deterministic biochemical meat puppets dancing to some unfathomable script… God playing with himself. If the latter is true, then what the hell, nothing, and I do mean nothing actually matters. Morality? Truth? Life? Death? Meaningless.
Even if you do not believe in God, the same questions are relevant. I would argue that we do indeed have free will (for an excellent discussion by an atheist on that, see sections of David Deutsch‘s remarkable Fabric of Reality). And if we have free will, the very notion of submitting to the slings and arrows of life when an arrow-proof shield can be fashioned with our own hands is surely unreasonable… and to forcibly require that a person do nothing when the means to build that shield exist is not just unreasonable but monstrous.
In the print edition of New Scientist, Tom Shakespeare, the co-author of Genetic Politics: From eugenics to genome advocates outlawing parents from using ‘sperm selection technology’ which can allow the sex of a child to be chosen. He sees this as a precursor to parents eventually selecting desired traits for unborn children:
On balance, then, I believe that sperm sorting will in the long run do more harm than good. And this seems doubly true of sex selection via pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Even if there is no “gene for” intelligence, sporting prowess or artistic talent, few scientists doubt that gene-chip technologies will one day provide considerable information about genetic variations. Letting parents choose embryos on the basis of sex now, for no good medical reason, will make it harder in the future to say no when they ask to choose embryos on the basis of other traits.
This thinking is actually quite close to that used by socialists who argue that ‘private’ education should not be allowed because it should not be up to mere parents to decide what is best for ‘their’ children. Not only can private individuals not be trusted to make such decisions (it should be left to ‘experts’), it is also unfair to others if those children are better educated. Similarly, if physically more capable disease resistant children can be ‘created’ by parents, this is somehow seen as ‘bad’ for everyone else. → Continue reading: If there is a God…
Want to buy a robot mini-dragon to watch out for fires and intruders? Got lots of money? Then what you need is a Banryu.
It looks like something from Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell. Very cool indeed.
I was just reading an article about the “space parasol” idea. That’s the concept of placing a sunshade at the Earth-Sun L1 point1 to intercept perhaps 2% of the solar flux before it reaches Earth. This would counter the projected temperature changes on Earth due to a green-house effect.
It struck me there is more to it than that. It is known the Solar Constant2 has risen slowly over the aeons of our star’s life and will continue to do so. At some point in our distant future we will have no choice but to either move our planet further outwards, abandon it for a new home or build sunshades. The evolution of the solar system gives us absolutely no choice in the matter. We will be forced to take complete control of the energy balance of Earth or else we and all other life will be on our way to extinction.
I’m confident our “greens” will by then have mutated into “browns” who will believe we should allow events to run their natural course from parched bare rock to parched bare rock.
Whether we take up the reigns of control now or our descendant species do so millions of years from now is not relevant to the purpose of this article however. Somewhere in the Universe there are civilizations which have faced the choice already. Some of them will have chosen to control the stellar flux on their home world.
We have two methods of detecting extrasolar planets currently. One is by the doppler effect caused by a stars’ dance about the changing center of gravity of its’ planetary system; the other is by watching the light curve for dips due to planets passing across their star’s disk from our perspective.
It is quite possible for us to see doppler effects without seeing eclipses. It happens if the plane of the alien solar system is tilted with respect to us such that planets never pass directly between us and their star. This is the most likely scenario.
But what if we were to see the opposite effect? What if we see a significant dip in the light curve at predictable intervals and yet do not see any doppler effect?
I’ll expand on this for those who have not said “Aha!” yet.
It should take a fairly significant sized body to make a dip we detect: almost certainly one with a disk size from which we would infer a substantial, Jupiter class, mass. Such an object would almost certainly cause alternating redward and blueward doppler shifts of the stars spectral lines as it orbits the star. If that is not the case, we have an anomaly. An object in orbit about its’ star which is large enough to block substantial light and yet is very low mass relative to its’ size should strike one as very odd.
It could be a parasol built by intelligent life.
1 = Lagrange points are where the gravity between two bodies creates a “balance” point such the pull from each tends to keep the object where it is. The Earth-Sun L1 point is on a line directly between and a couple million miles inwards. You can either read about it or calculate it yourself.
2 = The Solar Constant is the average total energy flux at Earth orbit, currently about 1.37 kw/m^2 flat on to the Sun. It is reasonably constant over a human lifetime but is not constant in the long term. The Sun was hotter in its’ earliest years until it stabilized somewhat cooler than it is now. It has slowly grown hotter and will continue to do so for billions of years to come. Life will be impacted long before our star leaves the Main Sequence in the far future. At that time it will expand to red gianthood and will become large enough to absorb or at best turn Earth into an orbiting cinder.
There is an interesting posting by David Farrer over at Freedomandwhisky, about the now quite familiar experience most of us have had of buying an incredibly cheap airline ticket. David talks of the Edinburgh to London route, because although Edinburgh and surrounding parts is the Freedom & Whisky target-rich commentary environment London is obviously the centre of the universe and he has to visit it from time to time to keep in touch, but of course it’s the same for everyone.
One of the reasons airplane tickets can be so cheap is that buying and selling them has got so much cheaper. You can now buy airplane tickets on the internet at a price that fluctuates from day to day – even hour to hour or minute by minute – according to the vagaries of supply and demand.
This is one of the most characteristic uses of computers in our time. A new business has not in any obvious sense been invented. What’s happened is that an old one – ticket touting – has been re-invigorated. And I think I’m right in saying that the same principle is now being applied to cinema tickets, and of course the package holiday trade has been doing this kind of thing for years.
This experience surely helps to spread libertarianism. Oh, I don’t mean that, as soon as you’ve booked your ticket for your last-minute emergency trip to Athens to get your mad uncle out of jail and been flabbergasted by how little you had to pay for it, you experience an uncontrollable desire then to log in to amazon.com and purchase the collected works of Murray Rothbard. What I do suggest is that several very important libertarian memes, about such things as the fact that prices are a totally subjective matter in no way dependent upon the history of how much it cost for the thing being sold to be made in the first place, and concerning the general desirability of free markets as the best way to coordinate complicated collective activities (such as a hundred or so more people all deciding to share the same plane trip to Athens – tomorrow morning at 6 am) surely are being popularised by these kinds of arrangements.
Note the word “collective” there. Collectivism not only messes with individual activity (because that’s its nature); it also can’t now do collective activity nearly as well as voluntarily co-ordinated individual choice-making.
The plane trip has already been decided upon by the airline, and they can’t now cancel it. The taking-off and landing slots, the crew, the maintenance and the petrol have all been committed to. Whether you are on the plane or not makes hardly any difference at all to the airline’s fixed costs. What does one less empty seat cost them? So if there’s a chance they could maybe fill the plane in a last minute rush by damn near giving away the seats, it makes sense for them to try to do just that. So, you get your bargain ticket.
An airline ticket futures market, you might say. My point is: computers are now turning everyone into Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko’s opinions are accordingly that much more likely to spread to everyone.
That’s not an original thought, but it is quite a thought.
I don’t recall any of those “wonders of capitalism” postings lately, so here’s one, scanned in from the November 2002 issue of Prospect (paper version so no link), referred to in an article about nanotechnology (“The Science of the Tiny”) by Michael Gross of Birkbeck College, London.
I’ve been hearing for years about how wonderful nanotechnology is just about to be. But where’s the stuff? Where are the nanotechnologically produced products that we can buy? In the shops? Says Gross:
… There is at least one that you can buy already. It is the self-cleaning window. It uses a combination of two clever molecular tricks. First, it contains a catalyst that uses the energy of light to oxidise common kinds of dirt, to convert them into smaller, more soluble molecules that wash away with rain water. At this point, the second trick comes in. Ordinary glass is fairly water-repellent (hydrophobic), which means that water does not cover it smoothly, but tends to form droplets. The surface of self-cleaning glass, however, is coated in molecules that attract water and encourage it to spread out. So, instead of sitting around as drops which leave drying spots when they evaporate, the rain will cover the surface evenly, dissolve what the photocatalyst made of the dirt, and run off. Simple. Yet it would not be possible without molecular design on the nanometre scale.
I don’t need it. Correction: I don’t want it. But I’m a big fan of skyscrapers, and skyscrapers are going to want this stuff by the square mile, and presumably they already do. I assume that technophiliac Samizdatistas like Dale Amon and Russell Whitaker have known of these magic window panes for years but this is the first time I’ve heard about them, and I’m impressed.
I seem to recall some mention here of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Yes, here, in the comments. All who seek a painless way of learning a little more about this truly great man, and also about a rather interesting British broadcaster whom not all Samizdata readers will know much about, should read this Patrick Crozier piece for Biased BBC, which proves that Biased BBC is not itself nearly so biased as you might expect it to be. (Once again the blogger archive system is a deranged mess which blanks out the very piece you are trying to get to. All must move from Blogger to Movable Type. All, I say, all. So go to the top and scroll down to Wed Oct 23.)
Patrick begins thus:
The BBC is a bit like the dying days of the Soviet Union. Most of it is crap but just occasionally it can put on a show that makes you temporarily forget its manifold inadequacies.
Last night was just such a night, with Jeremy Clarkson’s biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel playing the role of Olga Korbut.
You can usually count on Clarkson to be sarcastic and to throw in a few not-very-funny similes. But last night be dropped it. He played it straight. The effect was amazing – it was like watching a completely different person. In place of sarcasm was enthusiasm. In place of simile, passion.
Quite simply it was stupendous. Clarkson has never and will never do anything as good as this. For once subject and author (all part of the Great Britons series) came together for a moment of magic, transforming both. We will never look upon either of them the same again.
And I love this, towards the end of Patrick’s piece, about the end of Clarkson’s performance:
This is (approximately) how he ended: “I understand Princess Diana is up for this award. Now, I am sure she was a very nice lady but quite simply she wasn’t in Brunel’s league. John Lennon is another candidate. I am the eggman. I am the walrus. And then Shakespeare the man who has bored and confused generations of schoolchildren.”
“In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Puck dreams of a Girdle circling the Globe. Shakespeare dreamt it but Brunel with his bridges, tunnels, viaducts, railways and ships built it.”
As I recall it Puck said he’d put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and I don’t remember Brunel ever launching a satellite into earth orbit. But had he been around now he undoubtedly would have.
Jeremy Clarkson, for the benefit of all you Americans, is a somewhat facetious but otherwise very capable, confident and good-humoured writer and TV broadcaster, mostly on the subject of cars. Politically Clarkson is a P. J. O’Rourke party-on libbo-rightie – O’Rourke also got a lot of his first writing assignments doing cars did he not? – and is definitely one of us. He gets right up the noses of all those whose noses we here want got up, so it’s very good news that Patrick reckons he did so well.
All of this is in connection with a BBC search to find “the greatest Briton”, and you never know, Brunel might do quite well. Princess bloody Diana indeed.
On the recommendation of a friend, this afternoon I went to see the IMAX 3D movie Space Station. I expected to enjoy it but I did not think I would be astounded by it. 3D filming sure has come a long way!
The experience was made even better by the entirely suitable venue of the IMAX cinema, which is the superb Science Museum in Kensington. After seeing the show, I wandered around and looked at the exhibits.
If you want to see the glory of what Islamic culture can produce, go visit the Alhambra in Spain. But if you want to see and understand the glory of what secular western culture can produce, go to the Science Museum and see the making of the modern world. This place is more than just a museum, it is a temple to the western mind and what makes us what we are. It is gallery after gallery of astonishing achievements, dead ends and curiosities. If you would know what you are then understand where you came from.
This is your heritage.
This research from Finland rates very high on the neatness scale.
It looks like it is useable anywhere with reasonably still air, so I can well imagine adverts floating in the aisles of department stores.
It’s a great Christmas gift for all those budding young tent preachers you know. They’ll get that Holy Appearance vetting them Officially for that lucrative TV contract they’ve always wanted. If your friends are of a more Shakespearean inclination, just think of the possibilities for their next production of Macbeth or Hamlet!
Ah, the future. I love this era.
There’s a market for “date rape” drugs and now a market for “anti-date rape drug” devices. Drink Safe Technology is producing ‘smart coasters’ which sniff chemical interference with drinks.
“You can carry this in your purse, take your drink to the bathroom with you, test it out, and if it comes out positive, you know something’s wrong with that guy you were talking to,” said Janita Patrick, a San Jose State University student. “Keep walking and get away.”
Just for the hell of it, here is a story that most certainly has its origins in someone’s exceedingly boring job. I mean, typing “go to hell” into Google is almost as bad as ego-googling.
According to Computerworld, the No. 1 search result is Microsoft Corporation’s home page. When asked about the devilish search result, Google spokesman Nate Tyler said it’s an anomaly that Microsoft ranks ahead of even Hell.com, not to mention AOL and UNC. Unsurprisingly, a Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the results of the Google search; AOL didn’t return several telephone calls seeking comment. How on earth does a corporate spokesman deal with an enquiry like that?!
A reader of FlashGuru’s MX101 known as Atomgas says it’s not Google’s fault, but rather the result of all the Web site authors who have a bone to pick with Microsoft:
“It’s the they way Google works and what makes Google [the] best search engine ever,” Atomgas said. “The difference between Google and other search engines is exactly this: Google makes the priority of the found results by the number and target of found links. If many people have links ‘go to hell’ pointing at Microsoft, Google will think that this is the best match to show to you, so the result[s] just show the mood of many Web site authors, not Google’s opinion.”
Well, now we know why linking in blogosphere is such a big deal… 
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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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