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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Today I visited my mother, and maybe I got my enthusiasm for Isn’t Capitalism Great? stories from her, because like me she thinks that good news is important. And she told me of some very good news that was in last weekend’s Independent On Sunday. I made a copy of the cutting.
An Oxford physics professor is selling 10 million pairs of revolutionary new spectacles to Africa which enable the users to wear them for a lifetime without ever going to an optician.
The professor is a man called Joshua Silver, and the glasses he has devised are as remarkable an invention as I have ever heard about.
With normal glasses the lenses are made of solid glass. But Professor Silver’s lenses are filled with liquid (silicon oil), and you can alter the focus of these lenses by pumping liquid into or out of them so that they expand or contract. You fiddle about with them until they are just right for you. And if your eyesight changes, which for most people means your eyesight getting worse, you can alter them, just by twiddling a couple of knobs on the side of the glasses. You only ever need one pair of glasses in your entire life, and you never need visit an optician in your entire life.
None of this is now a particularly big deal in somewhere like London SW1 or New York City (although it quite soon may become important there as well), but in Africa, for millions upon millions who are now blurry-eyed losers, this is the chance to make visual sense of your world for the first time in your blighted life. Africa just doesn’t have opticians on every street corner the way rich countries do. Many Africans with bad eyesight never even learn to read, for this one reason. Educated people who used to have good eyesight but don’t any more now have to retire early. All that could now be about to end. → Continue reading: Adjustable spectacles from an Oxford physics professor – £6 a pair and they last a lifetime
Yesterday I saw an advert in the London Underground that I think said something interesting about the differences between different countries, namely the cost per minute of ringing them up.
The advert was for something called Alpha Telecom which is apparently some sort of internet something-or-other for ringing people up in foreign parts.
I can’t explain how that works, but I can give you the different prices for the different countries with which we Brits would appear to be in regular phone contact, because I jotted them down. The numbers don’t say which countries are the best. But perhaps they do say something about which countries work the best. It would seem that distance has nothing to do with anything here, which I guess because this is the Internet we’re talking about. The INternet murders distance. What seems to matter is degree of serenity or confusion at the destination of your call.
All measurements of differential national merit strike me as interesting. What does it cost to become a citizen legally? What does it cost to become a citizen illegally? (Do some countries pay you to join?) Who gets the most sporting medals? What are the different credit ratings of different national governments? What proportion of people are wearing shoes? Driving cars? Connected to the Internet? Can read and write? Who scores highest and lowest, in the opinion of some bunch of people in Washington DC who measure “freedom” in different countries, and which countries have changed their scores the most since last year or in recent years? When does each country’s “tax freedom day” arrive, ditto? And so on. Well, maybe this cost of phone calls thing is another such score, albeit a very crude one.
So here are the scores, in pence per minute I assume: Austria 4, Somewhere illegible (Canada I think) 4, France 4, Germany 4, Hong Kong 7, Ireland 4, New Zealand 4, Pakistan 20, Spain 4, Sweden 2, USA 3, Australia 4, India 20, South Africa 8, and: Internet 1.
So, if I’m right about what this all means, the most efficient country in the world is the Internet, followed by Sweden, followed by the USA, followed by all the brand-X Western democracies. I think that Sweden and Hong Kong are the most interesting scores, the former for being so low, the latter for being rather high. Ireland and Spain have reputations for incompetence that they would seem to be shedding fast. I also wonder if Hong Kong, and maybe also South Africa, have gone or are going up, and whether either India or Pakistan are coming down from their current twin peaks.
But maybe I’m quite wrong, and it means either nothing at all, or something very trivial. I’m sure our many techy readers will elucidate. If you do, gentlemen, could you include an explanation of what this system actually is and does, because I can’t make it out at all. Surely a telephone is a telephone, and the Internet is basically something you look at and type into and get email in and out of with a computer, with occasional videos and tunes as decoration. How can you phone the internet?
I am a fairly regular reader of New Scientist for its take on fast breaking technological news. The magazine does have a downside though. It is very… well… representative of UK “liberal” politics.
I have just finished an item in the 29-Nov-2002 issue, “I see a long life and a healthy one…” about entrepreneurial companies making genetic testing available to the consumer. One would think a science magazine would be praising them for taking cutting edge science and bringing it to the consumer in an affordable and appealing way while potentially creating many high paying jobs for scientists in the UK, generating yet another path for massive capital infusion into genetic and health research and adding to UK exports to top it off?
Naaah.
I’ll let these quotes from the article stand on their own:
British regulators were caught on the hop when Sciona’s tests first went on sale. No one had foreseen that consumers would suddenly be able to learn something about their genes without a doctor’s agreement, or even knowledge.
Another option would be to return control of genetic testing to the medical profession, banning companies from providing tests unless requested by a doctor. Companies say this is a step too far towards meidcal paternalism, and argue that people have the right to obtain genetic information about themselves. But [Helen] Wallace [of GeneWatch UK] disagrees: “We need to ensure proper consultation through GP’s to ensure that people understand the implications of taking a test,” she says
What could I possibly add?
Here’s another “wonder of capitalism story. Yes folks, Internet connections on passenger airplanes. As Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog, who piloted me to the story, puts it:
Look, no Ministers of Transport, no Euro-directives, no dirigisme. Isn’t greed good.
I suppose, what with Samizdata being in the gloomy mood it’s in just now, various among us will find ways to be depressed even about this. Either (a) it will offer terrorists new ways to hijack airplanes, blow them up or even fly them into famous landmarks, without even being on them. Or else (b) it will be annoying to have to sit next to a surfer or emailer, especially if he has a sound card. Like portable phones on trains all over again, in other words.
But I’m impressed. Patrick has now bestowed upon me automatic posting rights to Transport Blog, for when he isn’t in the mood. So maybe one day I’ll do a celebratory posting to TB from an airplane:
“Patrick and transportsmen everywhere, how are you my old mates? How’s things? Trains all late as usual, are they? Cars and buses and lorries all jammed up? Good, good. I’m now two and half minutes away from landing at Stanstead. I estimate I’m somewhere north of Watford. I’ve been delayed by strong cross winds but I’ll be at arrivals in thirty three minutes and expect to be back at base in one hour and forty seven and a quarter minutes, approximately, can’t be sure exactly. You may have to delay the meeting by three and a bit minutes, maybe four. Or so. I’m doing my final approach now. The flaps are coming out into flap mode. The wheels are now down. No, I tell a lie. Yes, here they come. Oops. Rather bumpy, my son, rather bumpy. But mustn’t grumble, know what I mean? Have to unplug now. See you at head office in one hour, forty two and eleven sixteenths minutes. Give or take. Gotta rush.”
Maybe not. Seriously, when I’m actually on that airplane I’ll have something better than that to say, and it will be good to keep up with the blogs. I think this is very good news.
One of the extra shake-it-out-and-chuck-it-out items with the latest Radio Times, which I nearly did chuck out but then decided to take a look at, is one of those catalogues full of slightly stupid software for £49 “reduced to £39 SAVE £10”. But one of these software packages looked really good. It was a virtual train set. “Build your own landscaped railway”, said the brochure. I went to the edream.co.uk website to investigate further, and it said, of this build-your-own landscape railway (if that doesn’t get you straight there, click on “Hornby Special Edition 2002” on the right of the main page):
Adults and children alike adore model railways but how many can afford the money and space for their own set? Well, you can! This new 2002 virtual train set costs less than £20 and lives in your PC so there’s no clutter and no tidying up. Operate legendary engines ancient and modern from The Flying Scotsman to Eurostar around sprawling track layouts to whistle blasts and the clackety-clack of rolling stock as you switch points and pull up at platforms and sidings.
→ Continue reading: Virtual trains in two dimensions (and in three?)
I reported on the Twente University server room fire last week. According to this item in the Debian News mail list it was arson:
“Debian Server burnt down. Wichert Akkerman reported that a fire started in the computing facilities of Twente University. According to the fire department, everything in the building and the entire building was burnt to the ground. The Debian server “satie” that served as security and non-US archive was hosted there. Two days later, the Security Team reported that the security service was successfully reinstalled on another server. The nm and qa hosts had their home on satie as well and were also reinstalled on klecker. It has finally been confirmed that the fire was a result of arson.”
One has to wonder about motive. It’s just not the done thing to go burning down a university computer centre.
This news in from my alma mater, CMU, on the NSF Million Books Project:
The NSF’s Information Technology Research Program has also awarded a $3 million, three-year grant to the Million Books Project to support digitization of core academic materials, technical reports, government documents and cultural treasures.
I made the prediction to friends in 1980 that by 2010 one would be able to sit on a beach in the South Pacific and access any reference work or data on Earth, whether it be 15th century bills of laiding from the Library of Lisbon or the contents of the Library of Congress.
I think we’re still on schedule.
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.
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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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