Category Archives: Technology and Society

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.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Under Attack

9 Comments

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.

General Science, Technology and Society

A Potential Breakthrough?

4 Comments

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.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

Bring On The Meat Factories

7 Comments

Hey, I’m all in favor of factory-manufactured meat, if it can be made to taste as good as the naturally grown variety, but I’m not going to stop eating meat until it happens. My criteria are basically intelligence based, and the first animal I’d give up eating, if I were going to give up any,s would be pigs, but I still occasionally have pork. I don’t feel that badly about eating cattle–they just don’t seem that bright to me. And the question of whether or not they’re better off living a short life, and then being slaughtered, than never having existed at all is one that, as noted, is purely subjective and unresolvable in any ultimate sense. I know that I’ve seen some pretty happy looking cows on the hillsides overlooking the Pacific in northern California. I can think of worse lives.

By the way, Phil should be aware that marsupials are mammals. The distinction is placental versus non-placental mammals. And there are people (probably some of those “bitter,” out-of-work folks) in this country who eat possum, and armadillo.

General, Popular Culture, Technology and Society

I Know What He Means

5 Comments

Lileks:

The Piccadilly was knocked down for the Marriott Marquis, which is really one hell of a hotel. I stayed there for a week; loved the rooms and the hotel and the location, but I absolutely hated the glass elevators. Practically had to huff a bag of laughing gas to get on the things.

It’s a problem with Marriotts in general. The large atrium with the glass ‘vators seems to be a trademark. I hate them. They don’t seem to take into account the acrophobes among us.

Administrative, Technology and Society

Fedora Upgrade Woes

5 Comments

OK, so I followed Pete’s advice, and tried an upgrade from Core 7 to Core 8 via yum (yes, I know that Core 9 will be out shortly, but I figure it would probably be a mistake to go directly from 7 to 9, based on previous experience). Everything went fine until the end, when it failed with this message:

–> Processing Conflict: glibc-common conflicts glibc < 2.7 Error: No Package Matching glibc.i686 So, now what? [Evening update] OK, I ended up having to completely blow away glibc. Unsurprisingly, it broke my installation, with no obvious way to fix it. But it allowed me (finally) to do an ftp upgrade via a rescue CD. I'm now running FC8.