Some thoughts on the potential of mind uploading. Conservatives (both “left” and “right”) will hate this.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
On Not Being A Dove
A long but fascinating essay from the late John Updike. I found this passage quite interesting:
The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of [the president] by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world. They were full of aesthetic disdain for their own defenders, the business-suited hirelings drearily pondering geopolitics and its bloody necessities down in Washington. The protesters were spitting on the cops who were trying to keep their property—the USA and its many amenities—intact. A common report in this riotous era was of slum-dwellers throwing rocks and bottles at the firemen come to put out fires; the peace marchers, the upper-middle-class housewives pushing baby carriages along in candlelit processions, seemed to me to be behaving identically, without the excuse of being slum-dwellers.
Emphasis mine.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. They weren’t anti-war — they were just on the other side.
Cui Bono?
I wonder how many of the procrastinators who haven’t done anything to prepare for the changeover from analog to digital television are Democrats? Is the government concerned that their sheeple won’t continue to get their ABC/NBC/CBS pro-big-government propaganda if they don’t delay the switch, and fund the boxes?
Time To Check My DNA
Is there a longevity gene? If true, this seems like good news. It shows that life extension is possible, and that it might even be achievable with genetic surgery.
Rough Night
So, after being up for about twenty-two hours, I got to bed about 11 Pacific. I got a call about quarter after one informing me that my luggage had arrived at LAX (no mention of where it had arrived from). I said, yes, please deliver it.
A while later, I got another call telling me that they were at the condo. I got the luggage (I thought) after a long and unnecessary dispute over the proper amount of the tip to the delivery guy, who (at the risk of seeming racist) seemed to be in both accent and appearance Middle Eastern. I ended up giving him more than I should have from cash that I hadn’t realized I had. Then (at least so I thought) back to bed.
About 2:40 AM, there was a knocking on the door downstairs. I thought “now what?” and ignored it, hoping that it was one of the other doors. But it persisted. I got up, and there was a guy claiming to be delivering my luggage. He said he would have just left it outside, but didn’t know if it was a good neighborhood for that.
He was right. He did have my luggage. The other delivery had apparently been an annoying dream. I took delivery (with no tip) and went back to bed, hoping that it had been real this time. In the morning, it turned out to have been.
And note, I really couldn’t have twattweeted this:
Lugj l8t to LA. Got urly morn call to delivr from LAX. Got nther call was here. Rgu bout tip. Was dream. Real dlvry l8tr. Finely got sleep LOL.
See, it’s just not the same.
Now What Is Google Doing?
An emailer points out that a search for “Rand Simberg” in Google results in a malware warning for every single site associated with my name. However, it’s hard to take it personally, because apparently it is doing it with all searches (at least the few that I tried). Google has apparently decided that every site on the Internet is dangerous to your computer. I wonder if they have a new algorithm that’s screwed up?
[Update a few minutes later]
Whatever it was, they seem to have fixed it. I still have tab open with the problem showing, though. I guess I should take a screenshot.
[Early evening update]
For anyone curious, I didn’t do a screengrab, but here’s a sourcegrab from a typical search result this morning. A screengrab would be redundant at this point, since I could easily fake one from the source if I wanted to take the trouble to hack the HTML. But I didn’t. It’s the real deal.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Heh. I hadn’t noticed this the first time I looked. The only site that it doesn’t think will harm your computer is google.com.
[Monday afternoon update]
Here’s the story on what happened with Google.
[Bumped]
Twitter For The Uninitiated
From Lileks. But “tweeted” for the past tense of “tweet” just doesn’t sound right. Wouldn’t “twat” be better?
Oh. Right.
Missing The Point At The Economist
I just want to pull my hair, of which I have little to spare, when I read editorials like this:
Luckily, technology means that man can explore both the moon and Mars more fully without going there himself. Robots are better and cheaper than they have ever been. They can work tirelessly for years, beaming back data and images, and returning samples to Earth. They can also be made sterile, which germ-infested humans, who risk spreading disease around the solar system, cannot.
Here we go again. Humans versus robots, it’s all about science and exploration. It is not all about science and/or exploration. The space program is about much more than that, but the popular mythology continues.
Humanity, some will argue, is driven by a yearning to boldly go to places far beyond its crowded corner of the universe. If so, private efforts will surely carry people into space (though whether they should be allowed to, given the risk of contaminating distant ecosystems, is worth considering). In the meantime, Mr Obama’s promise in his inauguration speech to “restore science to its rightful place” sounds like good news for the sort of curiosity-driven research that will allow us to find out whether those plumes of gas are signs of life.
Hey, anyone who reads this site know that I’m all for private efforts carrying people into space. They also know that I don’t think that anyone has a right to not “allow them to do so,” and that I place a higher value on humanity and expanding earthly life into the universe than on unknown “distant ecosystems.” What have “distant ecosystems” ever done for the solar system?
I also question the notion that Obama’s gratuitous digs at the Bush science policy had anything whatsoever to do with space policy. And of course, to imagine that they did, is part of the confused policy trap of thinking that space is synonymous with science.
A Three Wheeler
Aptera says they’ll be delivering their new electric car this year. I assume that the single rear wheel is to save weight, and eliminate any need for a differential (though that’s not really a problem with an electric, if it has separate motors on each wheel). Of course, it’s not like they’re the first to think of it.
The Bees
Sometime over the past few months or years, our house in California had become a haven for honeybees. They found a tiny hole in the flashing of the roof, and set up shop inside a wall, just below the ceiling of the living room. They managed to find a small crack inside, so once a day or so one would find its way into the house, which was obviously a problem for the tenants.
I got one ridiculous quote of nineteen hundred bucks (this included opening the wall, removing the bees, and restuccoing) to remove them, but I got separate quotes for bee removal and stucco replacement, which got the cost down to six hundred or so total. Anyway, the bees were removed today, and through the magic of the Internet and my tenant’s videocamera, you can watch.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, the video’s been taken down, at least temporarily. I think he wanted to reedit it. I’ll update if it gets uploaded again.
[Update about 8 PM Eastern]
OK, it’s back up and I’ve updated the links.