There’s an interesting discussion over at Fighting Aging, on the efficacy of the current institutional and philosophical approaches to life extension:

I think I take the opposite side of the argument from Linksvayer above: in my opinion it matters greatly as to the banner you raise funding beneath. The problem we face today is not a lack of funding for medical research per se – rather, it is a culture disinterested in tackling aging head-on. It doesn’t matter how much money is flowing into the study of aging or treating age-related disease if the defeat of aging is not a primary, agreed-upon, widely supported goal. There has never been any trouble in raising funding for new methods of tackling specific age-related disease, but look at the rate of progress today in extending healthy life span in the old; it’s faster than zero, but if healthy life extension continues to be incidental and inefficient, we will all still age, suffer and die – and not significantly later than we would have done if medical science stood still. In this context here, I rate “not significantly” as a couple of decades – sounds good, but it is enormously worse than what is possible if we get our act together.

It doesn’t have to be that way, however – we have a chance to change things quickly enough to matter. The change we need to enact is at the level of infrastructure, understanding and intent. When the expected cost of development and commercialization of new technology runs into the hundreds of billions, it doesn’t happen by accident. At that scale, the only change and progress to come about is that enacted deliberately and with intent, in an atmosphere of sufficient support and understanding to make ongoing fundraising and collaboration possible.

In other words, if you’re not working on A, don’t expect to achieve A.

For someone my age, there could be a big (as in fatal) difference between ten years and twenty, though it’s obviously much more critical for those more advanced in age than me. “Spin-off” is often used as a (flawed) argument in favor of NASA spending. It’s not flawed just because many of the things claimed for it (teflon, Tang, microchips) are patently false, but because the argument can always be made that if one wants better microchips or breakfast beverages, efforts spent directly toward those ends will be more effective. I think that “Reason” is making the same argument here, and he’s right.

I wasn’t sure how to categorize this post. This kind of research, and breakthroughs, are going to require a combination of science (figuring out how stuff works) and technology (figuring out how to make it work better).

Richard Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary theorist, and popularizer of science, but over at the NYT Review of Books, H. Allen Orr isn’t very impressed with his recent screed against religion:

Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he’s actually more an amateur.

Jane Galt talks about the not-so Bright Daniel Dennett (who I think is brilliant in many ways, but certainly not this one). He really does seem clueless about human nature, and the need for belief systems.

In the course of searching for something else, I just ran across this old post, that I’d never seen before, in which I was astonished to read:

This brings me to Rand Simberg, a smart guy that is a big supporter of ID (that

Colby Cosh remembers Carl Sagan.:

He continued to expound the gospel even as improved modelling showed that the likely effect would be closer to “nuclear autumn.” But his fancies came to an end in 1991 when he warned Western governments that ignition of the Kuwaiti oil fields by Saddam Hussein would be certain to induce the equivalent of nuclear winter. When Saddam lit the match, it was only Sagan’s prestige that fell to below zero. In his 1996 book The Demon- Haunted World, he all but acknowledged that his own “baloney detector” had suffered interference from his personal politics. Yet contemporary iconographers now claim that Sagan’s hypothesis, though wrong, frightened Mikhail Gorbachev so badly that Sagan can be credited with playing a “role” in ending the Cold War. (If you believe what the Soviet generals have to say on the subject, Ronald Reagan’s investments in missile-defence research — which Sagan fought to the point of civil disobedience– were more persuasive.)

Iain Murray notes that, now that the Democrats control Congress, global warming isn’t as urgent an issue as the hysteria mongers have have been telling us it is.

Some climatologists are getting concerned that their scientific results have been hijacked by global warming evangelicals with an anti-growth agenda. It’s about time.

Better fire up your SUVs. We have to fight off the new global cooling trend.

This could be huge. I’d like to see it replicated as soon as possible. Some researchers may have come up with a cure for diabetes. And it’s an unconventional one, out of left field:

Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an “enormous” number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.

Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick — injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.

“Then we had the biggest shock of our lives,” Dr. Dosch said. Almost immediately, the islets began producing insulin normally “It was a shock ? really out of left field, because nothing in the literature was saying anything about this.”

The only problem I see is that this is worse than stem cells from a human sacrifice standpoint. How many people will a small band like the Hot Chili Peppers be able to cure? Just how much capsaicin can they produce, and how fast?

From Lileks:

The idea of people sitting at home in sweatpants watching a big TV while shoveling in the Haagen-Daz mortifies the social engineers; they can practically feel the planet wobble on its axis from the cumulative weight of so much freedom and prosperity.

The preferred model for a nice, controlled population is a dense city where your small apartment has a tiny fridge st0cked with bean curd molded into pleasant, food-like shapes. Trains take you to your job, which is either building trains, fixing trains, designing public service posters for trains, cleaning trains or writing software to operate trains. Once a week you’ll pull on your best taupe-hued hemp jumpsuit and take the train to the biweekly Culture Expo to hear something held up to enlightened ridicule (anything’s game, except Islam and Global Warming).

It may sound like hell itself, but at least it’s sustainable.

Makes me want to get in the SUV and head to McDonald’s. And I don’t even like McDonald’s.