A long but interesting article at The Economist. There are some lessons here for space settlements.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Abolishing Email?
That’s what a major IT company plans to do.
I’ve long thought that for intra-organization communications blogs are much better than email. I was very concerned a few years ago when I was consulting for a major aerospace corporation (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) how much technical work was going on in emails that were difficult to archive or search properly.
It Was Just A Matter Of Time
They’ve cloned a Stradivarius with a 3-D printer. I don’t think we’re that far from Star Trek replicators.
The economic and market effects of this technology will be far reaching. For instance, as Eric Drexler pointed out in the eighties, what happens when there is no way, other than a chain of custody, to tell the difference between the original Mona Lisa and an exact copy?
Do Kittens Really Rule The Internets?
Asking the important questions.
The science is settled.
More America 3.0 Analogies
From Jim Bennett’s Facebook page:
Iain Stuart Murray: Hopefully America 3.0 won’t have to be patched continually like version 2. And it should outperform Europe 5.7.1.2 and probably UKX.
James C. Bennett: Well, America 1.0 was based on a cleaned-up version of England 5.0, the highly successful 1688 release. 3.0 throws out the patches created for 2.0 that had gotten cumbersome and tries to play on the strengths of the original design. Since the original code was English, some of the design could well prove useful for a new UK release.
Iain Stuart Murray: let’s see – England 5.0 was replaced by UKI in 1707, thanks to a merger with another operating system. This proved so successful that it kept adding new features, although it lost some really attractive ones in 1776 when America 1.0 was spun off. UKII in 1801 might be thought of as the first in a series of bloatware expansions. UKIII was in 1858, and UKIV in 1877 following the complete acquisition of Indian call centers that had been outsourced. There were a series of updates between 1906 and 1914, and then several features were spun off until the completely radical revision of UKVII in 1948. That looked shiny when first released, but soon became the slowest system on the market, leading to the equally radical UKVIII in 1979. UKIX (1997) was based on UKVIII but required more and more admin permissions as time went on. There is hope that UKX (2010) will make it cleaner, but there’s been little evidence of that so far.
James C. Bennett: Unfortunately, the development partnership for UK X, formed at the last minute by adverse market circumstances, has resulted in the partner’s insistence on incorporating large chunks of code from Bonaparte V, which runs on an entirely different operating system. Since Bonaparte V itself is already displaying severe problems, this was a particularly problematic choice.
Heh.
The Long View
Putting current events into perspective:
Long after the time in which anyone can easily recall who was US president in 2011, or what party was in power, or which wars of declining empire were fought, and then long after anyone even cares about that ancient history, and later, long after the whole downward slope of the history of the US is but a footnote of interest to scholars of the transition from second to third millennium, and later still, long after anyone can even find out with any great reliability who was US president in 2011 … long after all these things are forgotten, the first half of the 21st century will still be clearly recalled as the dawn of the era in which aging was conquered.
It will also be remembered as the era in which we finally opened up the rest of the solar system to human endeavors after the false start of the mid-twentieth century.
Jeff Bezos
An interesting interview. It’s mostly about Amazon’s business model and plans, but Blue Origin does come up:
Levy: You have a separate company called Blue Origin that hopes to send customers into outer space. Why is that important to you?
Bezos: It is a serious effort. When I was 5 years old, I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. It made me passionate about science, physics, math, exploration.
Levy: Will you walk on the moon someday?
Bezos: Me? Are you saying would I if I could?
Levy: I bet you’d like to, but do you think you will?
Bezos: Boy. I’ve been asked to make tough predictions before. That one’s very tough. But that’s not what this is about. If I wanted to buy tourist trips to fly to the International Space Station and Soyuz and those things, there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s $35 million. I want to lower the cost of access to space.
Levy: How do you do that?
Bezos: I like to say, “Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.” For Amazon, that’s selection, speed of delivery, lower prices. Well, for Blue Origin it’s cost and safety. If you really want to make it so that anybody can go into space, you have to increase the safety and decrease the cost. That’s Blue Origin’s mission. I’m super passionate about it.
Levy: Do you feel that it’s a bit disconnected to start a space-exploration company in this economically grim time?
Bezos: No. We employ a lot of aerospace engineers. They have families, their kids go to college. We buy a lot of materials. Somebody made those materials, right?
I don’t even understand that last question, but note the use of the e-word. I wish we could get people to think about space in terms other than science and exploration.
[Late morning update]
This is sort of related. Lileks isn’t impressed with the Kindle Fire.
What’s Better Than Hybrids?
Diesels and light weight. We were seriously considering a VW TDR last spring, but ended up not getting anything.
What’s New With The Droid?
An extensive review of the Ice Cream Sandwich OS upgrade.
Has Second Life Failed?
Too soon to tell. Pooky Amsterdam mercilessly fisks a typical clueless story from the MSM.