Rob Bailey has an interview with Peter Thiel. I agree with him that “transhumanist” is a misleading word, and it’s not useful to use it until there’s agreement on what is human. Unlike people like Asimov (and Kass) I don’t believe that we lose our humanity when we live indefinitely long.
I would have been interested to hear his thoughts on space.
Better (and longer) living through molecular assembly:
“I think the most profound – I use this word repeatedly – transformative potential that this technology has is to basically democratize modern medicine.”
In other words, nanotech has the potential to instantly diagnose and treat disease.
As Chris Peterson says, “bring it on.”
…I don’t use Microsoft Server software.
Why would anyone use Microsoft on their server? I can understand the desktop, for naive users, who also use the crap at home, but on a server?
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]
[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.
…of geeks.
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.
Is it time to give up on finding a vaccine for AIDS?
If the animal model is useless, that’s going to make it very hard to test new ones. The only ethical way to do it would be to work with people who engage in risky behavior, and that’s going to be very problematic in terms of getting credible results.
Some @n@l orifice is sending out spam using my long-time email address as the return address. So I get all the bounces. Typically, it’s about a thousand emails, in addition to the usual spam, and this is the third time this week (which makes me wonder how many of them don’t bounce, and actually get through). And I can’t filter it, because I have to know if email bounces, in case someone I was actually trying to send email to bounced.
But when these attacks happen, I have to just delete it all, because life is too short to go through them on the off chance that one in a thousand will actually be a legitimate bounced email.
I know Clark’s law (no, not Clarke’s Laws). The one that says that any sufficiently advanced amount of cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice, but it’s hard for me to believe that this is not intentional. I don’t know if my having to deal with all of this extraneous unfilterable email is the intent, or it’s just a side effect of the desire to make me look like a purveyor of p3nis enlargement devices and drugs.
Anyway, if I seem unusually testy, you know why.
A new class of high-temperature superconductors:
According to Steven Kivelson, a theoretical physicist at Stanford, “[there exist] enough similarities that it’s a good working hypothesis that they’re parts of the same thing.” However, not everyone hopes the mechanism is the same. Philip Anderson, a Nobel Laureate and theoretical physicist at Princeton, says that an entirely new mechanism of superconductivity would be far more important than if they mimicked the current understanding of superconductivity. “If it’s really a new mechanism, God knows where it will go,” says Anderson.
Let’s hope.
[Via Geek Press]
