Beats the pants off a conventional PC. This technology may move faster than we’ve previously expected.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Gas Can
How government wrecked it:
I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.
It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.
At some point, in ways large and small, people will revolt.
Nobody Knows How to Make A Pencil
We treat technological progress as though it were a natural process, and we speak of Moore’s law — computers’ processing power doubles every two years — as though it were one of the laws of thermodynamics. But it is not an inevitable, natural process. It is the outcome of a particular social order.
Which reminds me of the Heinlein quote:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Kevin’s new book
B00b-Plate Armor
Time to retire it. Let’s do it for the women.
“Like Touching Infinity”
Life aboard an Antarctic research ship.
I suspect that astronauts aboard the ISS have similar perspectives, and more spectacular views.
Self-Driving Cars
How soon will they come, and what are the liability issues?
These are sorts of things that will be a drag on flying cars as well.
Muskets
Sorry, gun grabbers, but it’s an historically ignorant argument.
That’s probably why Piers Morgan uses is.
And amusingly, as Cooke points out, the implications of this argument is that it would justify civilians having select-fire weapons, since that’s what the military has.
Organs And Tissues
From a 3-D printer. Also, printed meat, though that’s actually harder, surprisingly. Could be handy on a space ship, though.
Faster, please.
Oil And Gas
The new green energy:
…as profits from wind, solar, biofuels and other alternatives consistently fell short of expectations — and as the fossil fuel business boomed — things got complicated. Venture capitalists and other investment funds started stretching the definition of clean technology almost beyond recognition in an effort to make money while clinging to their environmental ideals.
Today, clean technology investment funds are not trying to replace the fossil fuel industry, they’re trying to help it by financing companies that can make mining and drilling less dirty. The people running these funds acknowledge the apparent hypocrisy, but defend a more liberal definition of clean technology.
“Oil and gas will be with us for a long time. If we can clean that up we will do the world a great service,” says Wal van Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix, a Vancouver, Canada-based venture capital firm founded in 2001.
Shat a shock, that profits “consistently fell short of expectations.” Perhaps, like the president and his campaign-donating cronies, they had unrealistic expectations. Or more likely for the latter, they just expected the taxpayer to make up the difference.
The Green EU
It took an economic disaster for them to reduce their carbon output:
But the data shows that even though EU economic weakness and US natural gas are responsible for significant drops in emissions in the developed world, developing countries, led by China, continue to drive the global total higher.
This underscores the disconnect between green policies and green results. The US hasn’t checked off many items on the green wish list for domestic legislation; Europe has. But it turns out that the introduction of the euro and the subsequent economic disaster had more to do with European emissions drops than Kyoto or the shambolic carbon-trading program.
The usual suspects are headed to Bonn next week for another forlorn attempt to carve out a meaningful global climate treaty. Meanwhile in the real world, the challenge is to find a way for developing countries to continue rapid growth without driving greenhouse gasses and other pollutants to potentially dangerous levels.
That’s assuming that the high levels of the “other” “pollutants” is more dangerous than slow economic growth, of course. And meanwhile, it turns out that the US has twice as much oil, and three times as much gas as we thought. And “peak oil” continues to recede into the future, to the tears of the Malthusians. Which are delicious.
[Update a while later]
Gazprom (and the Russian economy) are in trouble, too:
The US has begun exporting gas to Europe, and has also ramped up coal exports by more than 250 percent since 2005. The net result has been to knock Gazprom back on its heels. The WSJ reports that the negotiations with Bulgaria were heated, with Gazprom’s negotiators shouting in frustration on several occasions.
In public statements, however, the Russian company remains defiant (and perhaps in a state of denial) about the implications of the shale gas boom…
Well, that’s one tactic, I guess. Not one I’d recommend, though.