Congratulations to Sarah Hoyt, who has won this year’s Prometheus . Here’s the press release.
Here’s a list of previous winners. I’m struck by how few of them I’ve read. Perhaps I should rectify that.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
If We Are In A Computer Simulation
Some questions.
Is The Space Age Over?
The Economist seems to think so. More thoughts later.
[Friday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has a good comment over at their web site:
The author uses the cheap-shot pejorative “Space Cadet” to demean those in favor of space travel. So I will use “Earth Child” to characterize the author’s parochial one planet view.
Go read all, as he takes Earth Child to task. A lot of the other comments there are also pretty critical and disdainful.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
More comments over at NASA Watch.
Rolling Back The Clock?
I’ve always thought that progeria was sort of an existence proof that the aging process is a lot more amenable to external intervention than many want to believe. After all, if it can be accelerated on such a grand scale, why not be able to slow, or even reverse it? Yes, I know that some people think it’s a violation of the Third Law, but I don’t buy it. We do cellular repair perfectly well for years before it starts to decline, and if the repair mechanisms can be made to work again, there is no law of thermodynamics that says we can reduce the entropy again.
So this is a very exciting development, with profound societal implications if it pans out:
The drug rapamycin has been found to reverse the effects of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a fatal genetic disease that resembles rapid aging, in cells taken from patients with the disease. Rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection of transplanted organs, has already been shown to extend life span in healthy mice. Researchers hope the findings will provide new insight into treating progeria as well as other age-related diseases.
As Glenn says, faster, please.
The Natural Gas Fiasco
…at the New York Times:
Natural gas just might be the energy solution environmentalists say they want, but actually can’t stand because nothing would put them out of business faster. Forbes blogger Chris Helman words it perfectly:
We would have thought that the Times would be in favor of plentiful, low-cost natural gas. It burns a lot cleaner than coal, and with nuclear off the table for now, gas is poised to fuel U.S. economic growth for more than a generation to come. I can only guess that the problem, as the Times sees it, is that as long as we have all that cheap gas, there’s precious little need for solar panels, windmills and other cornerstones of their much-heralded but slow evolving green jobs revolution.
Forbes, on the other hand, thinks it’s pretty awesome that thanks to drilling ingenuity the U.S. has proven to have one of the world’s biggest and cheapest hoards of clean-burning gas. Now that’s a story.
This may be a solution to some of the idiocy in California as well, given out high electric rates due partly to NIMBY reluctance to build generating capacity and the insane carbon law they passed. We’re currently paying fifteen cents a kilowatt-hour in SoCal (more for amounts exceeding baseline). I can buy a generator like this one (or smaller), and produce the same power for about a quarter of that at current gas prices (and they’re likely to continue to go down). But I imagine if I were to do that, the carbon nazis would come after me. Also, I’m not sure if they’re designed for steady use, but I think that if you could come up with one that was fairly quiet and could run 24/7, it will become pretty attractive to a lot of people around here.
Fedora Sound Problem
For the first time evah, I finally got the Nvidia drivers installed on my machine (I had been using nouveau), and the video is great. Problem is, I’ve lost sound in videos. It’s not an intrinsic sound problem — I can still hear system sounds, and the audio in Second Life (which is the reason I finally broke down and fought with the system to get the video drivers installed) is fine. But when I play Youtube, silence. Anyone have any ideas?
[Update a while later]
It’s not just Youtube — videos in general don’t work (e.g., PJTV).
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, continuing to narrow it down. It’s a Firefox problem. Things are fine in Opera (which I assume means that it’s not an underlying Flash problem).
[Update a few minutes later]
Never mind. I shut down and restarted Firefox, and all seems to be well now…
Capture The Moment
Are we about to see a revolution in photography? If it works, I would expect prices to plummet eventually.
DNA Synthesis Costs
…are dropping rapidly.
Spam
…hits the Kindle. It seems to me that this is the key:
Daffron of Logical Expressions said Amazon should charge for uploads to the Kindle publishing system because that would remove a lot of the financial incentive for spammers.
“This is why email spam has become such a problem — it costs nothing,” she said. “If people can put out 12 versions of a single book under different titles and authors, and at different prices, even if they sell just one or two books, they can make money. They win and the loser is Amazon.”
It would require a redesign of the Internet to eliminate free email, but it seems like Amazon could control this. Maybe they will soon.
Former Astronaut Bernard Harris
An interesting interview. He’s being a little too politically correct here, though:
…in the 21st century we need teachers who teach math and science to have expertise in math and science. So there needs to be an upgrade there, and refocus on how much we value those teachers. As you know, in this country, we don’t pay our teachers all that well. We need to rethink that.
The problem isn’t that we don’t pay teachers well, at least on average. The problem is that we don’t pay the valuable ones enough, and we pay the worthless ones far too much, thanks to the unions. We need to be able to adequately compensate the teachers who have actual useful knowledge to impart, and get rid of the ones who don’t. This would all start by eliminating the worthless, or to be more accurate, negative-value, “education” major.