Free The Memes Archive
October 2007
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5:27pm Thursday October 25, 2007 (link)
I've decided to call my Big Stupid Project, "Sea of Memes", so I've renamed all the references to BSP. It also has its own domain name.
Interestingly, seaofmemes.com is already registered on GoDaddy. I have a "bid" in to
see if I can get it (the name with dashes was available.) It looks as if GoDaddy just
registers these domain names and parks them so it can "auction" them off for more money.
A nuisance!
3:25am Saturday October 20, 2007 (link)
After years of running without problems, I've finally contracted a virus on my
computer. For a month now, it has been displaying annoying popups despite my
best efforts to get rid of it. Two antivirus programs have also failed.
In honor of this nuisance, I've written a article on the problem. See Why can't they stop computer viruses?
Note that this isn't a rant, it's an explanation. It's written for a general
non-technical audience. It's a bit long, but I hope you'll enjoy it.
7:11pm Sunday October 14, 2007 (link)
Since my global warming pieces have run, I've had some email asking what I really think about
the issue. As I think I've made clear in the articles, I don't come down firmly on either side of
the debate. I think it's an interesting, very complex, scientific question.
As far as action goes however, I'd probably line up with Bjorn Lomborg. As far as I understand it, his main points are
- Warming hasn't gone as far as people think, won't get as bad as people like Al Gore imply, and won't be as
bad for humanity as many seem to believe.
- In a world where millions of children die every year of preventable causes, it seems bizarre to worry about
sea levels rising two feet a hundred years from now. Spend money on today's problems.
- The best way to handle Global Warming is not to try prevention, which is expensive and almost certainly won't work. The best way is to become richer, so that you are more able to cope with the consequences. If Bangladesh had 100 years of decent economic growth, it would be rich enough to build sea walls or take other measures to deal with flooding. If it stays poor because third world industrialization is discouraged, it will be hit much harder. Even if Bangladesh stays poor, a richer world would be more able to lend a helping hand. This sounds like a stretch, but consider earthquakes. The same magnitude quake does a lot more damage in third world countries than it does in the U.S., because of our stricter building codes. A richer country can take more precautions.
I actually take a slightly different view than Lomborg. Along with a lot of other techies, I think development of new technologies such as biotech and nanotech will change the rules completely. Along with new dangers, they will add amazing new capabilities. I expect the world to change out of recognition between now and 2100. For more, read The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I put Global Warming pretty far down my list of worries.
That doesn't mean I don't worry about it at all. I worry that it's become yet another divisive political issue. People use these issues to define themselves and the groups they belong to. After that, they refuse to look at any facts related to the issue (which just challenge their belief that they are "saving the world.") And they refuse to look at the consequences of their policies, since they think it's all in a good cause.
I also worry about the huge amounts of money people want to spend to combat global warming. Based on what I know of the science, these policies will probably be ineffective. It would be one thing if you could really reverse warming, but to spend trillions and accomplish nothing is just criminal waste. The world does have other serious problems!
Finally, the solar-cycle or ocean cycle people might actually be right that warming has already hit its peak and
we'll see cooling soon. After all, these are scientific questions and their theories fit the history of warming
better than the CO2 theory. If they are right, after a bitter fight, the CO2-based theory will be discredited.
Unfortunately, so will a lot of the science community! I don't think the public will make any distinctions between
politicians like Al Gore who've pushed this, and the actual scientists who have always been a bit more cautious.
Instead, the whole community will be the "boy who cried wolf" the next time an issue like this comes up. Since
I expect technological crises to be a dime a dozen over the next 100 years, this worries me!
5:00am Thursday October 11, 2007 (link)
I've written another global warming piece, which you can find
here. Here's the intro:
Back in August, 2007, there was a flurry of news items about how NASA had revised its temperature measurements and was now showing 1934 to be the hottest year on record, not 1998. The global warming story was one of steadily increasing temperatures, so this sounded very significant. A lot of the right wing blogs had a field day with it and made it sound like NASA couldn't get its math straight. James Hansen of NASA and other warming researchers replied that the revision was minor and didn't change the big picture at all.Curious about this, I followed a link in one of the articles to a page on the NASA site, which gave the actual numbers.
5:13pm Friday October 5, 2007 (link)
I'm reading a bunch of tributes to Sputnik and the milestone of 50 years of space exploration. Like a lot of the writers, I'm kind of disappointed with the progress made during my lifetime. Unlike those writers, I don't hope for a renewed manned space program.I was 11 when the Apollo astronauts walked on the moon, and I grew up on science fiction. You'd think I'd be wishing for easy trips to space, colonies on the Moon and Mars, etc. But looking at what's actually been done, I'm hoping for just the opposite.
The Apollo program, for all its brilliance, was a stunt. If we were going to do a manned space program, Apollo was the wrong way to go about it. It should have been done in stages, with each stage building a base for the next stage. Instead, it was a single shot, Earth to Moon with nothing in between. It should have been done with commercial benefits in mind, so that each stage paid for itself (the way satellite launches started an industry.) Instead, it was done to impress the world. If it had been commercial and staged, it would have been sustainable. As it was, after the novelty wore off, the program shut down, leaving next to nothing. Three space shuttles so creaky that everyone crosses their fingers whenever they launch. A space station that exists to give shuttles somewhere to go.
On the other hand, the robotic probes, from the deep space missions like Voyager that photographed the outer planets, to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars, have been fantastic successes. As computers get better, the robots will only get better. They already do things that humans cannot not do (like stay for hundreds of days on Mars), and will soon do many of the things that humans can do.
People used to argue that without men in space, there would be no emotional connection to the space program, and eventually, no support for it. The public needed to see the astronauts on TV, and imagine themselves stepping on the soil of the Moon or Mars.
But soon, we'll be able to do a lot better than that. Anyone on the web will be able to download a virtual reality of Mars and walk around in it. See the sun rise and set, walk the valleys and climb the mountains. Turn the clock back and see the landscape covered with water. A far more direct connection than TV! And the scientists (or the public) will be able to request more detail. Those requests will feed back to a fleet of robotic rovers covering the surface, or drifting through the atmosphere, or photographing the planet from space. One of them will take another picture or another core sample, and add to the database. The simulation will get richer, allowing more detail in the places we are interested in. Whether it's a better view down a valley, or a closer look at an interesting rock.
The whole of Planet Earth will explore Mars via our robotic eyes and hands, creating a
computer-mediated vision of the entire world. That strikes me as far more practical,
more productive and more interesting than having a few astronauts poke around the surface
for limited times.
3:40pm Wednesday October 3, 2007 (link)
For some reason, the History Channel has started to run science documentaries.
I had "The Universe" on last night while I was reading the news. It was the
usual concern about asteroids and comets hitting the Earth, and had astronaut
Russell Schweickart arguing for a large program of observation to map all the
Earth-crossing objects, and some kind of spacecraft to visit any problematic
asteroid and "do something" about it. A manned mission, of course... :-)
If you calculate the odds of a large object hitting the Earth, multiplied by the expected damage, you get something worth spending money on. So it would seem sensible to work on programs like this. However, if, like me, you expect a lot of technology improvements this century, the best thing to do is wait until the technology gets better.
To handle this problem now, you need a lot of ground and space-based telescopes, a manned mission to an asteroid, and some method for changing its course. To have any kind of reliability, this should probably be part of a larger effort in space. We are unlikely to get the first few right. And it's all very expensive.
On the other hand, if you had some kind of nanotechnology to work with, the picture looks very different. Your spacecraft is an assembly plant with software and some materials, not a fully-equipped mission. Your computer is much smarter and doesn't need a human presence. The system could use much better materials, and be smaller and lighter. Once it gets to its destination, it can take slow-but-efficient approaches, like covering the surface of the asteroid with steerable mirrors and using light pressure from the Sun to change its orbit.
Finding the asteroid has a similar tradeoff. You could build more Hubble-style telescopes, put in orbit with ground-based shuttles. Or, with some kind of self-replicating nanotech, put up a small seed plus materials and let it grow itself into a very large telescope.
This whole idea applies to other areas. There was an item a couple of years back about computer simulations that argued that for the largest simulations (ones taking years to run), the quickest way to solve them was to wait for computers to get better. In other words, doing the problem now on today's computers would take longer than waiting five years and doing the problem on future computers. And I don't mean that the future computers would just do it quicker (that's given), but that they would finish it more than five years quicker, making delay the quickest solution!
Many people have argued the same for global warming. That instead of straining our economies to cut back CO2 emisions, we should just wait for technology to get better. In 30 years, biotech or nanotech might offer a cheap way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in quantity, allowing us to bypass the whole problem of cutting emissions. Or, better batteries and solar cells could change the economics of energy production.
This all sounds like an elaborate excuse for doing nothing, but it's actually
an observation of what it's like to live on an accelerating curve of
technology improvement. If people in 1900 had wanted to calculate PI to
a million digits, they could have done it the hard way, by hand, at great
expense, with low reliability, and taken years at it. By
the 1950's, it could be done accurately and quickly with the first expensive computers.
By the end of the century, any kid with a home computer could do it.
12:25pm Tuesday October 2, 2007 (link)
People seem to think that we're going to just slog through in Iraq. Of course,
many people want us out of Iraq, but they still think that staying there is an
option. I'm not so sure.
Next year, the economy is going to be in the toilet. If on top of the subprime mess, the dollar is dropping, the financial situation is going to look really bleak. Also, remember that the boomers start retiring in 2011, and nothing has been done about Social Security or Medicare cost increases.
The administration will request another $100 billion for the wars (I'm reading $190 billion in the Washington Post.) Congress is going to be hearing people scream "I'm losing my house to foreclosure and you're spending money on this?!" The defense department is not going to get the full amount.
As soon as we cut back in Iraq, or make it clear that we want to leave someday soon, the Iraqis are going to stop cooperating. Why put yourself and your family at risk by working with the Americans if they aren't going to stay? But without that cooperation, we won't make any progress at all in Iraq. In fact, a lot of what has been done will fall apart quickly. If the U.S. is seen as leaving, the various factions will expect full out war and prepare accordingly.
It wouldn't take much of an incident to convince the American public that things really aren't going well there. That, combined with the financial pressure, and troop exhaustion, will make it very hard to keep up the current level of effort. But any withdrawal from previously secure areas of Iraq could cause an incident.
I think the whole war effort is on a much shakier footing than many believe. It
wouldn't take much for it to collapse. I don't look forward to the consequences
of that happening, but I think it's a real possibility.
3:19pm Monday October 1, 2007 (link)
I've written another piece for Charles Hugh Smith, about housing, called
It's not (just) a credit crunch.
Here's the intro:
I'm still reading plenty of articles in my news summaries that talk about housing and the credit crunch. These articles predict that the Fed will lower rates enough to make credit more available, and that this will help the housing market. From what I know of the situation, this is just plain wrong. So at the risk of restating the obvious, let's look at the numbers again.
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