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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I’d have written this article sooner, but I carry the weight of being a day job scientist and engineer, so I had to actually read the damn thing before I dared to stick my neck out. Gotta keep my street cred intact y’know.
My initial impression after reading the paper is positive. Science, along with Nature are among the most prestigious journals, so right off the bat you know it’s to be taken seriously. Secondly, I know of the technique they used (more later) so it’s not quite so out of the blue as the failed Pons/Fleischman technique.
I’m going to remain cautious until the replications start rolling in. I do not expect it will take many days before that occurs as the published experimental technique does not require any terribly specialized equipment(1). I imagine grad students around the world already are madly digging gear out of closets and throwing their own test beds together. They will want their lab among the first to say Aye or Nay. I would not be surprised to hear the first tentative reports within a few days.
I must admit it was a complete surprise. I’ve been in bull sessions about cold fusion over the last decade or so and cavitation has been one of the ideas that came up again and again. I remember standing around in a conference hallway in 1995 in a circle with 3 or 4 others while Dr. Robert Forward talked about it. As the years have rolled on I assumed people had tried the idea and it hadn’t worked.
I’m sure there will be a lot of hype if replications pour in. But here’s my reality check for you. A few excess neutrons coming out of a beaker is a very, very long way from an economical power generating plant. Even if it works, it could be decades or never before it amounts to anything.
I’ll be watching this one very closely.
(1) Well… I admit the neutron source might be a bit dicey to get hold of.
Some weeks ago Glenn Reynolds commented on an article in Nanotechnology Magazine. The author claims there is a nanobacteria so small it slips past our defenses. It creates Calcium deposits in virtually every organ of the body when it encysts itself for further protection. It reproduces very, very slowly due the inefficiency of its’ tiny molecular machinery, takes about 40 years to do noticeable damage… and is the cause of virtually all degenerative diseases. He claims it is cureable and his organization is running trials already, using FDA approved drugs in special prescriptions.
Glenn readily admitted passing judging on these claims was out of his area of expertise. Had it been a lesser claim, I’m just enough of a know-it-all to have judged it within mine. But given the earthshaking nature of what was on the table… I decided to hold back and wait for reinforcements. I really don’t like to make a complete fool of myself if I can help it. I am a firm believer that when something seems too good to be true… it probably is.
I contacted Christine Peterson and Eric Drexler at the Foresight Institute and ran it by them.
While Eric did not entirely dismiss it, he did point out a very troubling issue which would require explanation before one could take the paper seriously:
I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that the medicos have overlooked a class of small, unusual bacteria. Evidence for such things has been trickling out for a while now.
On the other hand, any nanobacterial researcher who claims to have found a bacterium only 20 nm in diameter has no idea what a bacterium is. (It helps to have room for both a ribosome and a cell membrane, and maybe even some DNA and enzymes just to round things out.)
I wouldn’t suggest you throw away your “remedies” just yet.
Like many who walk the cutting edge, I have friends in the cryonics field and have my little Alcor freezer dogtag hanging about my neck. Well, to be honest, it’s void at the moment as entrepreneuring in Belfast is a better way to end up in the poor house than the cryostat but that is another story. A lot of stories actually.
Needless to say, I found this bit of eurofascism both troubling and astounding:
“A French couple who were frozen when they died in the hope that medical advances would one day revive them are facing a thaw at the hands of local authorities,” the BBC reports. When Monique Martinot died in 1984, her husband, Raymond, put her on ice. Last week he died, and his son stuck him in the same fridge. “What has been done is outlawed in France,” a prosecutor tells the BBC. “In this country, bodies must either be cremated or buried.”
The BBC notes that “many European countries have legislation in place restricting the preservation of dead bodies in such a way.”
In my book the prosecutor will be guilty of a double, premeditated homicide if he goes through with this. Some of you are now thinking: “Huh? But they’re already dead!”
To paraphrase a former American president (and beat you with a dead cliche): it depends on what you mean by “dead”. Cryonics exists on the premise that so long as the brain and memories are intact, a technology will exist at some arbitrary time in the future capable of both undoing the cause of death and repairing the damage caused by freezing. I think most would agree there is at least a possibility of resuscitation.
What we have here are Schroedinger’s People, neither alive nor dead, suspended in a quantum world of chance. So our French prosecutor will be a quantum murderer if he opens the box. He will intentionally kill two people and extinguish their chance to once again walk a Riviera beach side by side.
Note: I was led to this story by the Opinion Journal e-mail news.
We’ve given this blog a “G for Guidance” rating, because it contains material which some libertarians might feel would be unsuitable for younger conservatives.
The blogger bash was great, great fun, but not, in my view, as significant to humanity as a whole as the magic mouthwash story concerning which I blogged on February 21st. (By the way, I omitted to include the link to the Ananova story.)
To recap a little. Tooth decay is caused not by sugar as such, but by bacteria which thrive on sugar and which are also responsible for tooth decay. The magic mouthwash replaces the tooth decaying bacteria with genetically engineered alternative bacteria who beat the crap out of original bacteria and steal all their sugar, but don’t cause tooth decay. They presumably just sit around discussing such things as bacterial nature and the essential sugarness of sugar. Like I said, amazing.
Now okay, I agree, when the historians write up the next thousand years, Samizdata as a whole will obviously loom far larger in their thoughts than the mere detail of exactly when, and exactly by whom, “tooth decay” was abolished. But humans now can surely be forgiven for not quite seeing the larger picture. People now are excited, even some of the Token Normal Women whom Our Great Leader had persuaded by some means or another to attend the Bash. Amazing, said one Normal Woman with whom I shared the magic mouthwash news, echoing my exact word in my first blog. And no less than two e-mails flooded in to OGL on the subject.
Andy Spring emailed thus:
“Something isn’t right here. If the new strain of Streptococcus mutans can take over an entire ecosystem, i.e., my mouth, from the old strain, then it’s all around genetically superior to the old strain. If that’s the case, why hasn’t some natural mutation of the old strain already made this evolutionary improvement? Is it just because the new strain is so genetically ‘distant’ from the old that it couldn’t have arisen from the usual sources of genetic variation (mutation, genetic drift, etc)?”
This is a strange email. Andy Spring (1) expresses doubts about the basic rightness of the universe, (2) asks the question that has caused him to have these doubts, but then (3) answers (2) with what I’m sure must the right answer. Where, Andy Spring, is point (4): “All right, relax everyone, the universe makes sense after all’?”
No matter. Andy Spring has advanced our understanding of the magic mouthwash, and I am grateful to him.
Gene 6-Pack takes the story a significant stage further by asking:
“Would the benevolent bacteria in the mouthwash also be spread by kissing?”
I instinctively feel that the answer to this question must be yes. Welcome to the world of Sexually Transmitted Cures (STCs).
The mouth will not be the only human orifice into which new and magically engineered fluids will be squirted in the years and decades to come. We need only factor in the greediness of state-monopoly doctors and of crypto-statist drug corporations lobbying for the perpetuation of their captive markets (nationalised monopoly not-free-any-more-at-the-point-of-use health “services”), and the general unhappiness of the medical profession about all their patients suddenly not being as ill as they might be, all of which we can confidently rely on, to see that the world is about to become a very different place.
Do you want some magic bugs, to cure whatever ailment ails you? You can either: go to a doctor, wait several months and part with several hundreds or even several thousands of pounds. Or: you can catch your cure from someone who has already acquired it, by obtaining the relevant bodily fluids from that person, perhaps parting with a far smaller sum of money to this person. The more sex you have and the more people you have sex with, and the more sex they had and the more people they had sex with, and so on, the less ill you will be.
The genetic engineers will unleash a General War of good new bugs against bad old bugs, fixing the odds in favour of the good bugs, who will destroy the old bugs and then either just sit about loafing and doing us no harm, or, even better, will buzz about inside us, doing good.
The contribution of non-medical persons to all this will be to create the globally unified fluid battlefield within which the bad old bugs will have no fluidically isolated human bodies in which to hide. An orgy of sexual abandonment in other words.
Parents will encourage their offspring to make-out and sleep around, early and often, if only so as not to interrupt their own wife-swapping parties.
“I don’t want to see you back home before midnight!”
“Remember not to use a condom!”
“From now on, you’re going to go out every night for a month, and with a different boy each night!”
“She seemed like a nice girl. So dump her and have a fling with that nymphomaniac in number 22.”
The ultimate super-bug -the Great White Whale of the genetically-engineered-bugger’s art – will be the all-purpose cure for everything: Acquired Immunity Sufficiency Syndrome, AISS.
At first there will be problems. Gays and Africans will find it much each to get AISS than the straight community, for reasons I’d rather not dwell on. For a few years, gays will be famously healthier than the rest of us – and apparently far more numerous, for the world will become heavily populated with men who are only passing as gay but are secretly straight. No self-respecting girl would dream of having sex with a man who’d never had sex with another man. But in due course, I feel sure, it will be possible to catch the latest version of AISS from a toilet seat.
I heard about it last weekend on the BBC TV news, and Perry, informed of the needle, was impressed. He searched the haystack, and found it for us.
A genetically modified mouthwash has been developed which could effectively eliminate tooth decay, scientists claim.
The mouth rinse contains a friendlier GM version of the bug that rots the teeth which does not produce enamel eroding acid.
When the solution is squirted into the mouth, the good bugs take over from the Streptococcus mutans bacteria and prevent them from returning.
According to the researchers, a single five-minute treatment costing less than £100 would last a lifetime.
Professor Jeffrey Hillman, from the University of Florida, said: “If this approach works as well as we hope, it has the potential to eliminate the majority of tooth decay.”
The new strain appears to stay permanently on the teeth, preventing other bugs from gaining a foothold. “It is genetically stable and should be safe for humans,” Professor Hillman added.
He hopes to start clinical trials this year, using a solution squirted on to the teeth of adult volunteers. The mouthwash would be most ideally suited to infants cutting their first teeth, he added.
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
Scott Rubush is far from impressed with all this technology and I, for one, am greatly relieved that, at long last, somebody has had the guts to speak the truth.
“technology does little to change the quality of life…”
Says Scott and…
“Hell, I live in the 21st century in one of the wealthiest cities on earth, and I still had to roll my arse out of bed this morning and go to work—at a computer terminal, no less”
How right he is. I, too, am deeply nostalgic for the days when I could rise from my rat-infested bed of straw in the middle of the night to milk a goat, bury a couple of my children and vainly try to dig a turnip out of the frozen soil with rudimentary hand-tools. Those were the days when we had real quality of life.
After all, what has technology ever done for us, eh?
Well, I suppose there’s the steam engine, the lathe, penicillin, vaccines and manned flight.
But, apart from those things, what has technology ever done for us, eh?
Okay, well, there’s electricity, the internal combustion engine, steel, oil fractionating, synthetic fabrics, rubber galvanisation, intensive farming and antibiotics.
But, all that aside, what has technology ever actually done for us, eh?
And I suppose there’s radio, radar, cine film, pasteurisation, central heating, the lightbulb, plastics, telecommunications, the laser, microwaves, invitro fertilisation, the integrated circuit, computers and, of course, the Internet.
So apart from steam engine, the lathe, penicillin, vaccines, manned flight, electricity, the internal combustion engine, steel, oil fractionating, synthetic fabrics, rubber galvanisation, intensive farming, antibiotics, radio, radar, cine film, pasteurisation, central heating, the lightbulb, plastics, telecommunications, the laser, microwaves, invitro fertilisation, the integrated circuit, computers and, of course, the Internet…WHAT HAS TECHNOLOGY EVER ACTUALLY DONE FOR US, EH??
Let me commend to you an admirable article by Dinesh D’Souza in the U.S. technology and investment publication Red Herring, on how technology helped abolish slavery and emancipate women, called Technology and Moral Progress:
Of course there are many people in the West who harbor deep anxieties about technology, even as they concede, and enjoy, its conveniences. The biggest concern is that technology will undermine cherished values like privacy, individuality, community, and human dignity. The critics say that technological progress does not produce moral progress.
We can’t just call these critics technophobes or Luddites. We have to meet their argument head on and show that technology doesn’t just make our lives easier; it also strengthens our core values. Thus, technological progress can generate moral progress.
D’Souza makes many valid points and Red Herring is well worth a regular read for those interested in what is going on in tech but who don’t want frivolity. The link to their site can be found in the sidebar.
On February 1st, XCor’s team of test pilots continued pushing the envelope of the world’s first general aviation rocket plane. Dick Rutan, also known for his non-stop around the world flight with co-pilot Jeanna Yeager, was at the controls.
The purpose of this test was an attempt to touch and go; however one engine failed to relight after touchdown so Rutan allowed the aircraft to roll to a stop.
Such problems are no big deal for EZRocket. The engineers will work on it, fix the problem, learn from it… and they could have flown again the next day if they had chosen. Test flights, from rolling EZRocket out of the hanger to rolling it back in again take about an hour.
With a small amount of investment, perhaps $10M or so, XCor could build a general aviation craft capable of several suborbital hops a day. They are also prepared to build flyable rocket powered reproductions of the Me163 and the Bell X1A using their now well proven engine.
So if any pilots out there have a yen for the unusual…
Do you have a science qualification? Are you tired of struggling to pay your bills and make ends meet? Are you sick of seeing the other guy making a good living while you constantly scrimp and save? Do you ever wonder what the secret is to making loads of money?
Well, wonder no longer. Just follow our easy 8-step guide below and you too can be a Successful Scientist
1. Fix your attentions to some aspect of modern life or a consumer product; preferably something technological, new-fangled and, therefore, little understood
2. Issue releases to the press expressing your concerns about possible links between the said product and vague, nebulous ‘health risks’. Don’t worry about rejection, the press will lap them up
3. Approach the manufacturers of the said product and threaten to kick up even more of a stink unless they play ball. Remind them of the damage their reputation can suffer if they appear to be unresponsive and heartless
4. Do the same thing to the appropriate government department
5. Advise all parties concerned that your fears will only be assuaged by more research
6. Advise all parties that this research cannot possibly be conducted without more resources
7. Set up your research facilities with the huge portion of taxpayers money that the government presents you with in order for you to shut up and go away
8. Repeat Steps 1 to 7 above until retirement
The European ‘Kommisariat’ is deeply concerned about Europe’s lack of progress in the field of biotechnology
Apparently, Europe is light years behind the USA in development and commercial application (snigger). The solution? A brand new ‘Policy Initiative’ (read ‘Five-Year Plan’) which will involve all of Europe’s biotech companies being made answerable to the suits in the European Commission for the ‘Great Leap Forward’ which is now required of them and the Commission, for its part, will ‘assist’ by means of various ‘initiatives and proposals as appropriate’
Having been ordered to compete with the USA one wonders what fate awaits European bio-engineers should they fail? Exile in Siberia? I wonder if the European Commissioners have stopped for even a second to ask themselves why companies in the USA are so far ahead? Probably not. The idea that central plans don’t work is unknown to the Eurocrats; the reality that innovation and enterprise are smothered by ‘initiatives and policies’ is offensive to them. It is as if the Soviet Union is still the blueprint for them (while being an object lesson for everybody else)
Anyway, the American biotech companies shouldn’t bother losing any sleep. If this is the way that their European counterparts are going to be forced to play their hand, then the existing gap will only grow wider
Whether fried bills raise eyebrows depends on how common they are. I would say the constituency for privacy in everyday monetary transactions is large enough to ensure that at least as high a percentage of fried bills is in circulation at that future date as the percentage of cocaine-positive US $20 bills today.
I’m sure we could come up with bulk fryers. Perhaps some enterprising liberty-conscious individuals of the future will find a way to casually blow the circuits in stacks of moneybags as they pass by the bank…
I have had a number of responses and suggestions (most of them polite) on how to deal with smart tagged money. Dale Amon even provided a recipe for dealing with the pesky things. While I’m sure it will work, that’s not the point.
On the money issue, I’m betting that once tagging becomes common place, non-emitting currency will be treated as counterfeit. At best not accepted, at worse generating a call to the authorities. Foil lined bags and wallets will probably be one answer. There will be others. My point was there will be a cost in time, effort and/or finances to achieve the anonymity we now enjoy gratis.
Taking the whole counter-measures idea one step further, I’m sure you will be able to cleanse yourself of smart tags on, in and about your person. When emiting is the norm, however, non-emitters will be regarded with suspicion. It will be seen as attempts to hide your identity. As a modern analogy, you can wear gloves and a full-face ski-mask into a mall, but don’t expect people to treat you normally.
Technology is a very double edged sword, and the ways it is applied are often vastly different from what the inventors intended. Witness Alfred Nobel and dynamite. He was a pacifist who saw the power of dynamite as a way to help cash poor, resource rich countries access the wealth trapped inside the earth. Within a few months of introduction to the world, it was applied to the military and the destructive effects of war increased exponentially. In a similiar vein, how many people involved in the discovery and production of smart tags do you think foresaw the use by the US Army of tags on bees to locate landmines?
The applications of smart tags will be limited only be our imaginations. Literally the stuff of dreams. The tricky part will be ensuring that the dreams in our heads don’t become nightmares in our waking lives.
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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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