Thoughts on the rest of the twenty-first century.
[Via Next Big Future]
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Nanostitching
Is this a key to much lighter aerospace structures? Lighter aircraft would be more fuel efficient, but it seems to me that the big payoff would be in mass fraction for launch vehicles and spacecraft.
Evolutionary Benefits
…of religion.
I don’t know whether or not I’ve blogged on this subject before, but it’s a common notion that while not everyone requires a supreme lawgiver to be good, most people perhaps do, and that a retributive religion promotes a better society. Similarly (and perhaps it’s a corollary, as pointed out in the link), while dying sucks for an individual, some view it as a good for society and the species, by getting the fogeys out of the way and making room for fresh blood and ideas. At least in the latter case, I think that the cure is worse than the disease, and I’d like to have the problems associated with indefinite lifespan, and look for solutions to them, than die without getting the chance to tackle them. Of course, one of those solutions is space migration.
I Hope He Freezes In The Dark
Timothy Noah is cheering what he hopes is the upcoming demise of the nuclear power industry, in the wake of Obama’s closing off the Yucca Mountain option. I was never a big fan of Yucca Mountain — I think it a ridiculously overpriced solution to an hysterical non-problem. But for the money that they planned to spend on it, we could have come up with a safe and reliable launch industry, by using it as a market for storage on the moon.
Cut-Rate Fuel Cells?
They may have come up with a way to replace platinum catalysts with doped carbon nanotubes.
Of course, this is bad news for potential space industrialists, because it will depress the market for platinum-group metals (PGM) long thought to be a potential source of extraterrestrial wealth in asteroids.
No Shockwave
No, this isn’t about the supersonic technology that I discuss from time to time. I’m referring to the fact that it doesn’t seem to be available for Linux. I’ve been using a Fedora workstation in lieu of my broken Windows box, and that seems to be the biggest deficiency. Many, many sites, including PJTV, are unviewable from Linux due to the fact that Adobe doesn’t seem to support it. There are claims that it can be ported via Crossover, or by using Wine, but I haven’t had time to try. This would seem to be a pretty big hole in the Linux desktop. How are the netbooks handling it?
Vista Problems?
I’m not really thrilled with the prospect of giving Microsoft any money (and I’ve been living without my Windows machine for over a month now), but XP is still available at Amazon, in both home and Pro editions. It may be the solution to getting my broken W2K machine back up.
Scientists, Engineers And Futurists
Some thoughts on the audacity of technological hope, from JoSH.
The Democrat War On Science
John Tierney has some useful thoughts on the politicization of science in the new administration:
Most researchers, Dr. Pielke writes, like to think of themselves in one of two roles: as a pure researcher who remains aloof from messy politics, or an impartial arbiter offering expert answers to politicians’ questions. Either way, they believe their research can point the way to correct public policies, and sometimes it does — when the science is clear and people’s values aren’t in conflict.
But climate change, like most political issues, isn’t so simple. While most scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is a threat, they’re not certain about its scale or its timing or its precise consequences (like the condition of California’s water supply in 2090). And while most members of the public want to avoid future harm from climate change, they have conflicting values about which sacrifices are worthwhile today.
A scientist can enter the fray by becoming an advocate for certain policies, like limits on carbon emissions or subsidies for wind power. That’s a perfectly legitimate role for scientists, as long as they acknowledge that they’re promoting their own agendas.
But too often, Dr. Pielke says, they pose as impartial experts pointing politicians to the only option that makes scientific sense. To bolster their case, they’re prone to exaggerate their expertise (like enumerating the catastrophes that would occur if their policies aren’t adopted), while denigrating their political opponents as “unqualified” or “unscientific.”
“Some scientists want to influence policy in a certain direction and still be able to claim to be above politics,” Dr. Pielke says. “So they engage in what I call ‘stealth issue advocacy’ by smuggling political arguments into putative scientific ones.”
My concern with Chu and Holdren is that they are Club of Rome types who seem to be anti-technology. I’m sure that they would say that they are in favor of “appropriate” technology (yet another leftist theft of an intellectual base, like “progressive”), but it amounts to having no faith in our descendants to come up with technological solutions to today’s burgeoning problems. That inability to account for technological improvement is at the heart of apocalyptic predictions like world-wide famine and California agriculture drying up from lack of water. It’s that same blindness (and ignorance of basic economics) that resulted in Holdren and Ehrlich losing their bet with Julian Simon
Not to say, of course, that famines and droughts can’t occur, but if they do, it will be a result of foolish (or evil) government policies, not an overabundance of carbon in the atmosphere.