Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Technology and Society

Testdisk: A Data Miracle Tool

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Some of you may recall that I was having drive problems the other day. I was getting the data off my old drive and moving it to a new one when it started issuing bad sector and impending drive failure warnings. As a result, I failed to get the hidden files in my home Linux directory (the most critical data loss was my much of my sent email for the last three years). It was looking pretty grim. ddrescue, which is supposed to be a very powerful data-recovery tool, couldn’t see anything, and attempting to look at it with fdisk to see if the drive was even there just resulted in an overflow error. I took it to a local data-recovery guy, and he put his diagnostics on it, and told me that it was having a delay after the first 30g (of a 2T drive), and that he couldn’t do anything with it (though I think that he understood Windows much better than he did ext4). I was almost resolved to simply mourning the loss, or sending it to a specialist, with the potential of spending many hundreds of dollars and only getting back individual randomly named files with no file structure. But I tried one more thing.

I ran the program most of yesterday (it took from mid-morning until late evening to go through all two terabytes), but when it was done, the logical volume was restored, and the drive looked like new (it’s even possible that it will boot, though I haven’t tried it, and don’t really have any reason to). But I can’t recommend it more highly.

And yes, I will be backing up religiously, with a cron job every night (possibly also to my remote server).

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

Limits To Growth

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The authors of the report were wrong about everything:

The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960s. Food supply has not collapsed (1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve). Malnourishment has dropped by more than half, from 35 percent of the world’s population to under 16 percent.

Nor are we choking on pollution. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.

In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost 3 million people – roughly one in 500 — died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.

Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking.

Because it gives them an excuse to run our lives for us.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I agree with Glenn: “Personally, I’ll be more impressed if we’re ever warned of a pending doom whose aversion won’t require giving a lot of power to bureaucrats, technocrats, and other hangers-on while being left poorer and more constrained ourselves. Because no matter what the crisis being propounded, the remedy always seems to be the same…”