Category Archives: Technology and Society

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society, Weird

Extreme Misanthropy

18 Comments

AIAA announced a couple weeks ago at IAC that they are renaming their annual Space Forum “Ascend.”

Having gotten that announcement out of the way with the plug for AIAA (which graced me with a media pass to the conference, on top of my delegate badge), this cannot go without comment. As I was ascending (see what I did there?) the escalator to the plenary this morning, someone was handing out a flyer called “ASCEND TODAY.” In it, it had two op-eds.

The first was titled “The Argument For Riding Out Humanity Here At Home And Nowhere Else,” by “B. Line.”

Chances are it’s one of those survival tools ingrained into our genes — the notion that “humanity” as well as other species are conscious, sentient beings, aware of their own mortality and filled with the same emotions, desires, regrets, and consciences as though they were an individual.

It’s what leads us to feel sad at the notion of something becoming extinct as if the thing possessed a collective soul that would experience immense angst or anguish if it disappeared from the planet.

The reality is unless there’s a cataclysmic event, the end of humanity of any other species typically would mean nothing more than a gradual tapering of populations until there was none left. “We” wouldn’t be missed. But again, it’s not “we.” Or “us.” “We,” after all, are not part of a larger collective consciousness. Just as “we” don’t really win when our favorite sports tea does. “We” had nothing to do with it.

But while the end of humanity would not in reality cause any actual sadness — as human-caused global warming is proving every passing day — humanity’s presence is causing real pain and real harm to living, breathing sentient creatures. Our presence is slowly (quickly in geologic terms) making the earth uninhabitable.

This is why, personally, I don’t think we should attempt to perpetuate humanity beyond our own failed experiment here at home. Humanity has caused so much damage to our planet and the life that inhabits it, there’s little justification to inflict or scourge anywhere else in the universe.

I may have missed transcribing the first paragraph. I was going to fisk this, but haven’t had time, but I thought I’d at least toss it out as chum for commenters.

Business, Economics, Law, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Rolling Blackouts In CA

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No, they’re not a climate-change story. It’s about rampant insanity and corruption of rent-seeking “green”-energy firms.

And this seems like cheating: Texas lures California businesses with promises of electricity.

What did socialists use to light their homes before candles? Electricity.

[Late-morning update]

California is approaching Puerto Rico territory.

Speaking of which…

[Thursday-morning update]

California is “winning” its way into the Stone Age.

And is the state becoming pre-modern?

Apparently. Pat Brown has to be rolling in his grave at what his idiot son has wrought.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Model Land

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Judith Curry, on a new paper concerning how to escape from it:

Naïvely, we might hope that by making incremental improvements to the “realism” of a model (more accurate representations, greater details of processes, finer spatial or temporal resolution, etc.) we would also see incremental improvement in the outputs. Regarding the realism of short-term trajectories, this may well be true. It is not expected to be true in terms of probability forecasts. The nonlinear compound effects of any given small tweak to the model structure are so great that calibration becomes a very computationally-intensive task and the marginal performance benefits of additional subroutines or processes may be zero or even negative. In plainer terms, adding detail to the model can make it less accurate, less useful. [Emphasis added]

Computer models can be useful in some circumstances, but they are not science.

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Computer Problems

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Yesterday, while installing a new router, my ethernet connection quit working. This morning, when I plugged the cable back in to troubleshoot, the computer died, and won’t reboot. This is a recent new motherboard. Not even sure how to start troubleshooting.

[Update a few minutes later]

I unplugged the cord from the power supply, plugged it back in, and the machine came back to life. Still no eth0, though.

[Update late morning]

OK, this is making me nuts. I went out to Office Depot, who didn’t stock any PCI-E ethernet cards, but they had a USB wireless dongle for thirteen bucks. I bring it home, plug it into the back of the machine, and the machine dies again. And this time, I don’t seem able to resurrect it.

An exact replacement for the mobo would be $150. But I’m not sure if I want another one.

[Update a while later]

OK, apparently when I was futzing around on the back panel, I was killing the switch on the power supply.

So I’ve plugged in the USB dongle, but the OS isn’t seeing it.

[Afternoon update]

OK, the OS is seeing the dongle, but it won’t connect to my wireless network. It attempts, then drops it.

In better news, I now seem to have a wired connection. The bad news is that I have no DNS. I can only ping by IP, not by domain name.

[Update a while later]

OK, I think I found the problem. Apparently my ExpressVPN account has expired, and it had written its nameserver into /etc/resolv.conf. I changed it to the router IP, and now it’s working (though I’m still getting a question mark on the network connection).