Taylor Dinerman wrote a nice tribute to Robert Heinlein in today’s Wall Street Journal. He concludes:
In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief that “this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure. Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and his noble essential decency.”
Mr. Dinerman writes a weekly column for the Space Review.
Nice to see Taylor and Jeff Foust’s publication getting broader exposure.
An ironic note: The agricultural revolution that changed America was not entirely a result of efficient machines, chemicals, and new crop species. Much of it was due to the end of devoting millions of acres to pasturage and feed stuffs for millions of horses. My grandfather told me that when he was small half our farm was used to feed the horses that pulled the cultivators for the vineyard and orchard. But apparently here we go again-planting land for transportation. And we should expect everything from ice cream to beef to rise in price as a result.
Efforts to force-feed the U.S. corn ethanol industry are likely to trigger lots of forest clearing, but U.S forestland is of substantially poorer quality than its corn land. Our corn is grown on our best land, while our forests grow on our worst. Forest land is steeper, dryer, poorly drained, or somehow lacking
In Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “Midnight Sun” posed the conundrum (a riddle with a pun as the answer) whether the world would end in global warming or cooling. Robert Frost also pondered this riddle in his 1920 poem.
I think I have the answer: “Fire!”
The pun is that this is what you say to clear a crowded movie theater. Now that you have the punchline, you can get the setup in my column in The Space Review which is up.
It sounds great. There’s only one problem. It doesn’t work:
Despite apparently violating fundamental laws of physics, Steorn planned to demonstrate its machine to the public Wednesday at the Kinetica Museum gallery in London.
Steorn, however, ran into a minor problem — Orbo isn’t working.
Steorn posted a note on its Web site:
“We are experiencing some technical difficulties with the demo unit in London. Our initial assessment indicates that this is probably due to the intense heat from the camera lighting. We have commenced a technical assessment and will provide an update later today.”
Yes, of course. Camera lighting. I’m sure that’s it.
The robot’s biologically-inspired control software uses a functional model of “place cells”. These are neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that help real rats to map their environment. They fire when an animal is in a familiar location.
Alfredo Weitzenfeld, a roboticist at the ITAM technical institute in Mexico City, carried out the work by reprogramming an AIBO robot dog, made by Japanese firm Sony, with the rat-inspired control software.
When placed inside a maze, the robot learnt to navigate towards a “reward” in a remarkably similar way to real rodents, using landmarks to explore.
Randall Parker has a list of consequences when the cost of individual gene sequencing comes down (as it inevitably will). I found this one interesting:
Discovery of genetic variations that contribute to appearances such as genes for eye and hair color, complexion, hair texture, facial shape, and other attributes that contribute to visual desirability.
Physical desirability is a two-way street. We are bred to appear desirable, but we’re also bred to view desirable people as desirable. I wonder if some people might not figure out how to rearrange their genes to change what is desirable to them? That’s probably a much tougher problem, though.