Category Archives: Technology and Society

Technology and Society

A New Strap-On Design

15 Comments

No, not that kind of strap on. Get your minds out of the sewer.

A strap-on helicopter:

Tiny rockets at the tips of the helicopter’s rotor blades take the place of a tail rotor, a component which couldn’t be safely attached to a human body. According to the company, the Libelula would be the lightest helicopter in the world, so light that it could be strapped to a person’s body with a carbon fiber corset.

“The best [part] of this technology is that [these] kinds of helicopters don’t need a tail rotor because they don’t have any torque, so with a simple vane they can turn – being the simplest form of an helicopter and the easiest and safer to fly,” the company says on its Web site.

So, first question is: how do they prevent the pilot/passenger from rotating with the blades (there’s bound to be non-zero friction in the bearing)? Seems like you’d get kinda dizzy, and it would be hard to steer.

There would also seem to be safety issues for bystanders–that thing could easily decapitate someone.

Technology and Society

The Man Who Grew A Finger

12 Comments

I suspect that this is just the beginning of getting to the point at which we’ll be able to regenerate whole limbs.

Interestingly, Patricia had a very similar injury a few years ago when we were diving in the Dominican Republic. She had it stitched up in Santo Domingo, and the nail is there now, but the finger is just a little shorter, and still a little numb at the end. This would have been a much better solution.

Anyway, bring it on.

Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Green Fascism

13 Comments

There’s an interesting post over at New Scientist on the new eugenicists. What’s even more interesting, though, are the numerous comments, which repeat many of the myths about population growth and control, and feasibility of mitigating it through space technology, including space (to use the politically incorrect word) colonization.

I don’t really have time to critique in any detail, other than to note that anyone who makes feasibility arguments on the latter subject by referring to Shuttle costs is completely clueless. Sadly though, years ago, Carl Sagan did exactly that.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Fascists Of The Corn

3 Comments

David Freddoso is still angry about our insane and, in my opinion, criminal ethanol and sugar policies:

The problem is that our sugar industry has even better lobbyists than big ethanol. They enjoy price supports, which we pay for both through the Treasury and in the supermarket. The price of our sugar is usually twice that of the world market. The sugar growers love it — even if they cannot sell all of their sugar, they have a guaranteed government buyer at an inflated price. The corn growers love it too, because high U.S. sugar prices push our food industries to use high-fructose corn syrup (ever seen that on a product label?) as an alternative sweetener — yet another artificial support for the world price of corn.

Not to mention wreaking havoc on the Everglades. Price-supported sugar cane is using up a lot of the water that both south Floridian humans and animals need, and they do this with the same political clout that they use to get the subsidies and tariffs, for an industry that is not all that big in terms of the economy.

Even if we want ethanol, we can’t solve the problem by importing sugar, because there are tariffs in place. We can’t import the ethanol itself because there’s a high tariff against that, too. Wherever you turn, there’s no way out — Americans don’t enjoy economic freedom, we live in a managed economy.

It makes me especially proud of my country when I see Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) call foreign delegates’ concerns over a potential doubling of world hunger “a joke…”

Let’s call these people out for what they are–Republicans and Democrats alike–fascists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

[Update a few minutes later]

Biofool.

[Update early evening]

Oh, wonderful:

Key House and Senate farm bill negotiators reached agreement today on the main elements of the farm bill…[T]he five-year bill would raise the target prices and loan rates for northern crops beginning in 2010, raise the sugar loan rate three-quarters of a cent and include a sugar-to-ethanol program.

Oh, that’s just great. We have a program that makes us overpay for sugar, and now we’re going to start a new program to subsidize the ethanol we create from it — because without the subsidy, the inflated sugar price we’ve created will make the ethanol unprofitable.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, they always find a way.

Economics, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

A Policy Disaster

5 Comments

Deroy Murdock writes on the ethanol scam, and its global effects on food and fuel prices.

[Update a few minutes later]

If this pans out, ethanol will make a lot more sense, won’t be competing with food, and won’t require any subsidies:

Along with cellulose, the cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. secrete glucose and sucrose. These simple sugars are the major sources used to produce ethanol.

“The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels,” says Nobles, a research associate in the Section of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Brown and Nobles say their cyanobacteria can be grown in production facilities on non-agricultural lands using salty water unsuitable for human consumption or crops.

Bring it on.

[Evening update]

David Freddoso has an appropriately outraged follow-up to the Murdock piece:

Our government’s negligence and perhaps even malicious misdirection of societal resources toward a worthless, unwanted product — ethanol — will cause millions of people to go hungry tonight.

The way things are going, this could become the worst chapter yet in the sad, ruinous history of our bipartisan agricultural welfare programs. For those who write in and protest that free-market capitalism is an uncompassionate, un-Christian economic system, I submit that you are currently witnessing the alternative.

Indeed. End the tariffs, end the subsidies. Let the market work.