Here’s a graph of Anti-HumanityEarth Hour’s effects in California.
It doesn’t really surprise me. Even if a lot of people dimmed lights, the amount of electricity used for lights in CA isn’t that huge a percentage of the total demand. For instance, one of the biggest drivers, particularly in the Bay Area, 24/7/365, is server farms, and no Virginia, even in the land of fruits and nuts, they’re not going to shut them down for a stupid political propaganda stunt.
[Update a few minutes later]
There are only two days left before the Conficker worm does whatever it’s going to do. Go check out your Windows system.
John Tierney has some thoughts on, and from Freeman Dyson, that seem appropriate to last night’s nonsense:
The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.
The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.
Like Tierney, I am firmly in Freeman’s camp.
…time to celebrate human achievement. Get those lights on at 8:30!
…and yet so far.
I’ve been slowly bringing my Fedora Core 9 box up to full utility, and had a major breakthrough today, in that I finally got flash/shockwave running in Firefox. The problem now? No sound.
When I go System/Preference/Hardware/Volume Control, I get the message: “No volume control GStreamer plugins and/or devices found.”
I’ve checked, and Gstreamer and Gstreamer-plugins-good are installed. I tried G*-plugins-bad and ugly, but they weren’t to be found in the repository (is this a 64-bit problem?). Anyway, anyone have any idea what the problem might be? Is there some command line to detect the sound card (it’s built into the board)?
Behold, the hotelicopter.
Did Natasha Richardson die of Canadacare?
But it’s so much more “efficient.”
One of my consulting clients is very Windows centric, and I thought it was going to be a problem when my Windows desktop died a few weeks ago. Though, actually, I could never access either their Sharepoint or Exchange servers even when it was up, because there was some software on it that was incompatible with Juniper, so the only way I could get in was with my Vista laptop. Well, just for the hell of it, I tried to access both sites today using Firefox in Fedora, and it seems to be fully functional, so it gets along better with my client’s server than my Windows 2000 machine did.
This is interesting on two levels: first, that the security system didn’t complain, and second, that Linux Firefox seems to play well with Microsoft sites. It’s come a long way, baby.
There’s a very interesting (and long) profile over at New York Times magazine:
Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”
Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
But he’s got a pretty good track record.
It put an end to funding nonsense like this:
A typical apartment has three or four rooms in the shapes of either a cylinder, a cube, or a sphere. Rooms surround a kitchen-living room combination with bumpy, undulating floors and floor-to-ceiling ladders and poles. Dozens of colors, from school-bus yellow to sky blue, cover the walls, ceilings and other surfaces.
At least one tenant says he feels a little younger already. Nobutaka Yamaoka, who moved in with his wife and two children about two years ago, says he has lost more than 20 pounds and no longer suffers from hay fever, though he isn’t sure whether it was cured by the loft.
There is no closet, and Mr. Yamaoka can’t buy furniture for the living room or kitchen because the floor is too uneven, but he relishes the lifestyle. “I feel a completely different kind of comfort here,” says the 43-year-old video director. His wife, however, complains that the apartment is too cold. Also, the window to the balcony is near the floor, and she keeps bumping her head against the frame when she crawls out to hang up laundry, he says. (“That’s one of the exercises,” says Ms. Gins.)
“A different kind of comfort.” Yes, I suppose that’s one way to put it. But there’s a fly in the ointment:
Some transhumanists dismiss the couple’s architectural solution.
You don’t say.
“Human life has enough challenges in terms of our work and daily lives that we don’t need to invent new physical challenges for our bodies,” says Ray Kurzweil, a leading transhumanist figure in the U.S.
Well, the good news is that Madoff’s (and their) loss is our gain.