March 30, 2006

Health: Ben Best and CR

Ben Best: Caloric Restriction With Adequate Nutrition (C.R.A.N.) - an Overview and My Practice of Caloric Restriction with Adequate Nutrition, two great, detailed essay's on Ben's experience with caloric restriction.

It's always nice to have really intelligent people proceed you and then take you through their hard earned experience. Ben believes that the starting point for a CR calculation should be your natural diet/weight before adopting an kind of CR diet - which in my case means something like 2000kcals/130lbs, even though I am 6'0" tall. His argument for basing the calculations there rather than at say 2700kcals/165lb (a typical 6'0" guy) is animal studies which show that "naturally skinny" rats don't benefit unless they to restrict. That's crappy! It would be much easier for me to restrict my diet if I was starting from 3000 calories, rather than 2000...

At any rate, interesting reading. I am certainly not ready yet to embark on any kind of CR program, but I have been watching my diet much more carefully lately and that alone has caused changes. Less pizza, pasta, bread and candy, and more veggies, salads and nuts/seeds. This pretty much automatically results in less calories consumed, although I am not any hungrier than usual. I don't have a bathroom scale, but judging by how my pants fit I think I've lost a few pounds, and must be back under 130lbs again.

March 30, 2006

Future Studies: Open Source Scenario Planning

WorldChanging: Open Source Scenario Planning, where Jamais Cascio reveals his plans to create some kind of "Open Source" version of scenario planning.

The fundamental difficultly of the concept is figuring out what the "code" that needs to be opened is - I agree with comment by Karl Schroeder that the brainstorming factors that Jamais proposes would be both difficult to capture and not terribly helpful in terms of using that material to power your own scenarios. It's easy to think of making a bullet point list of factors that an organization generates - but if you've ever read such a bullet point list you weren't a part of, you know that list is practically useless. You just lack the context and background to make any sense of most of the points...

Ultimately I think that the value of scenario planning is the knowledge and wider perspective that the participants gain because of their participation in the creation of scenarios. And to maximize that, the scenarios have to be very relevant to the organization at hand, and therefore dependent on factors that outsiders may not be familiar with.

Can this be reduced to some kind of "source code" that would work in an Open Source model? I don't know. Certainly the existing Open Source community does engender that kind of "experience knowledge" in it's community members, as they work on the explicit products of their projects (the code, the services the program provides, etc). So perhaps an Open Source model of scenario planning would just be the provision of a "development environment": a set of time-tested community/administration tools and best practices, with FAQs, Web2.0 software, helpful starting materials (like Jamais's "long lists of potential issues and events"), etc. Organizations interested in doing scenario planning could then roll-their-own using this Open Source infrastructure, rather than running to experts such as the GBN for facilitation.

March 30, 2006

Serious Games: Will Wright's Spore

Google Video: Spore Gameplay. I wrote last year about Spore, Will Wright's upcoming game. This video gives a lot more detail and shows that they have the basic framework already completed. Super exciting! I love how the game progresses outward in orders of magnitude as your creature gets more complex - what a brilliant way to encompass everything from PacMan to First Person Eaters to RPGs to RTS, to Civ style, etc... it may be the ultimate game. I sure hope there is a Mac version :-)

March 30, 2006

Health: Nursing Homes versus Cruise Ships

Rense.com: No Nursing Home For Me. Apparently it's cheaper to ride a cruise ship full time than to pay for some nursing homes... which would you rather do for your aging relatives? I suppose the extra cost for the nursing homes must be to deal with the frail - those last five years of life where even the slightest injury can be life-threatening. I think this is an interesting comparison for gaging the costs of an aging population...

March 30, 2006

Technology: Blogjects

Boing Boing: Manifesto for "blogjects" -- objects that blog, which got me excited because it's something I could actually build... imagine taking my CR-288 sensor and making it post concentration data to a blog on a periodic basis, that's a really cool tool that a process engineer could use to keep on top of their tool's status, adding process visibility.

March 29, 2006

Serious Games: Game-onomics

Wired 14.04: Geekonomics: "why abundance sucks, and other unexpected lessons of the game economy." Basically abundance sucks because it's boring. If everybody has a +5 Ginormous Sword of Leeching Death, it's not very interesting or valuable...

Which just goes to show that humans are mostly interested in comparative/positional advantage versus other people. That's what drives value and price in the developed economies, and it's what's been driving the innovation since the transition to an industrial economy. Virtually everything since has not been an essential need for humans, yet we continue to work 40+ hour weeks to get these new things: why? It's because humans like having "better" things that few other people have, even if the marginal benefit of those goods over much cheaper alternatives is vanishingly small. Any theory of economics or Utopia which fails to account for this basic aspect of human nature fails miserably in the real world - and, apparently, in virtual worlds as well :-).

March 29, 2006

Technology: Is Apple Getting Ready to Run Windows?

Engadget: Is Apple getting ready to run Windows?. Apparently Apple has signed on to be a member BAPco, "an industry group that does one thing and one thing only: create benchmarks for testing the performance of Windows-based PCs." Why would Apple need to be a member of such a group?

Only one possible reason springs to mind: they intend to run windows and/or windows applications on their Intel boxes! I predicted that such a move might occur in June of 2005, shortly after the transition to Intel was announced, and built a big set of scenarios around it. Lots of other people made similar predictions. But of course events have proceeded faster than was initially announced by Apple, and my date of 2008Q2 for the release of such a feature now looks hopelessly far in the future.

I'd give even money at this point that the windows emulation feature will be a big part of Leopard, i.e. 10.5, the next major release of OS-X, scheduled for release 2006Q4. With MS having just announced the delay of Vista until after the Christmas season, Apple has an awe-inspiring opportunity to dominate the Christmas gift giving season with both iPods and Macs. As a shareholder, I say bring it on!

March 28, 2006

Future Studies: Robotics and Global Scenarios

Several years ago I read the work of Marshall Brain, and enjoyed it greatly. Marshall is a very smart man, and he's got his finger on the pulse of a very important trend. You should go read his Robotic Nation and Manna essays. Go ahead, I'll wait. OK, so now you're edumacated, and I can explain both why I think he's right-in-general and where I think he's wrong. Plus, some scenarios for the global future.

To address Robotic Nation first, I think he's right that "robots", especially in his broader definition of that term, will displace millions of people from their current occupations. Those people will have to find new jobs, and Marshall is fearful that because of the vast number of such people, the nation may face an epidemic of unemployment.

But consider history. 150 years ago a large fraction of the population (50%+) worked on farms, planting, tending and harvesting food. A futurist at that point could have predicted that the steam engine would be adapted to farm work, and that many millions of such people would be displaced from farms as their work was automated. And, they would have been correct. But instead of going jobless, those people found new jobs in a huge variety of industries that hadn't even existed a few years before. In addition to all the jobs created in the designing, building, powering and supporting of the machinery itself, new industries like the auto industry and communications (telegraph, radio, TV, etc) came into being and employed millions. With the exception of the great depression (which was caused more by fiscal policy than anything else) the could-have-been-predicted mass unemployment never occurred.

In the 1970s, it became clear that the large American manufacturing industry, which was the big middle class employer, was being mechanized and off-shored. The 30% of the population which was thereby employed has faced rounds and rounds of layoffs, cutbacks, etc. Yet today, with as little as 10% of the population in manufacturing jobs, the unemployment rate stands *lower* than during the 70s. Why? Again, all sorts of new industries and professions such as personal computers, internet stuff, cell phones, etc all took up the slack - and this was in addition to the few jobs created to directly support the new industrial robots and off-shoring management.

And I think that the same story will play out this time around. Robots will take many service jobs, exactly as Marshall outlines. Those people will loose their jobs, and the jobs directly created to design, install and support those robots will be woefully insufficient to replace the jobs lost.

But, entirely new industries unrelated to that replacement will spring up. I think great places to look for that include space, nanotechnology, medical services, more internet stuff, and so on (insert your favorite new tech here). People will retrain and the economy will maintain it's low unemployment figures.

Up to this point my agreement and disagreement with Marshall are typical economist fare, and I don't think that you've been surprised. But here is where I make a sharp left turn...

Every round of these economic changes has resulted in a upward movement of human labor to more skilled jobs, requiring more intelligence and knowledge, requiring more people to perform at very high levels of personal achievement. To date that hasn't generally been a problem, because the vast bulk of people have been working considerably below the level that is, on average, achievable by humans. This is a partial explanation of the Flynn Effect - as people have been required by work to operate at a higher level, they rise to the occasion.

How long can that continue to be true? Is it possible that our economy will eventually require an average level of personal achievement which is above the average level available/achievable?

My suspicion is that this next round is NOT the round where that limit is reached. Most people in those service jobs are capable of more. It will be the round after that, so possibly starting 20 years from now. And of course these increasing requirements also mean that it will suck to be young and unskilled: there will soon be no entry level jobs which do not require massive amounts of education.

And the implications of running into that barrier are explained quite well in Manna - some growing class of people becomes unable to meaningfully contribute to the economy, in the sense that their labor does not provide a value sufficient to justify paying them a living wage. That class of people are the unlucky Gaussians, those who by chance have lower than average intelligence, more difficult childhoods, economically unsuitable personality traits, or what have you.

As I see it, at that point the society has basically four scenarios:

Scenario 1 is do nothing, let those people exist as an ever growing population of homeless poor, with high death rates. I'd like to think that everyone would avoid this solution, but given the current power of the neoconservatives, you can't be too sure!

Scenario 2 is the welfare state, where you support people with money but they lead wretched meaningless lives and via their numerous children create a long-term festering sore in civilization. I think this solution is nearly as bad as S1, in the long term. This is Marshall's Manna America. I think Marshall's $25,000 per year stipend in Robotic Freedom is also an S2 solution.

Scenario 3 is Marshall's Manna Australia Project, where you revolutionize the economy and hope that all classes can be creative and productive on at least some low level. I suspect that S3 would not work nearly as well as Marshall hopes - just based on personality alone I think that hoping for large chunks of the population to be "cultural creatives" is hopeless. Not everyone can be (or wants to be) artists, scientists, or engineers... but everyone does need to feel that they have some kind of meaningful employment. Humans have a need to contribute, and that drives poor people as much as trust fund kids... It's possible that I'm wrong and the Australia Project would be a satisfying paradise, but I certainly don't think it's as obviously a paradise as Marshall paints it to be. "Brave New World" (Aldous Huxley) is another S3 solution. A third S3 solution you can read about is the Huffie economy of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Huffie is just an explicit measure of popularity, and everyone who has gone through high school knows how dangerous that can be for those without certain types of talents. All of these S3 possibilities represent end-case scenarios for humans, were we essentially entertain ourselves to death - and those who don't entertain or fit in have to punished somehow (even pre-birth punishment, in the case of BNW). I don't think S3 is a bad scenario, especially for those who just want to live a happy life with friends, but I think that humanity is capable of more than that.

Scenario 4 is sustainable transhumanism. Let people modify themselves in order to meet the new challenges and opportunities. I'm not talking about little communications implants like in Manna (though that will happen as well), but rather things like genetic therapies, designer drugs, neural interfaces for rapid retraining, and eventually AI, IA and uploading, recursive intelligence improvements, godlike powers, etc. The same forces which drive the economic obsolescence of Gaussian humans will enable the transformation of those humans into more capable beings. The economic problem is allowing the poor people to participate in that uplift: and that's a classic capitalist problem. We just need a capital infrastructure which allows people to pay for their transcendence with the fruits of that investment - very similar to today's cheap student loans. The social problem is that everything becomes up-for-grabs: if human nature changes, all the rule books are out the window. From a human perspective the economy and the world become incomprehensible. The benefits are that the economy and technology continue to move upward, with ever more interesting and enjoyable careers, products, and lives for the participants. And, that we can acheive a sustainable civilization a lot faster in an S4 world...

As always, the real world will be some combination of the scenarios. In fact you can already see how S1 and S2 share our modern world. The emergence of S3 is already underway in places like Singapore, Sweden, or even San Jose. Lots of people in those places already have enough in the material world, and they now compete and work mostly for the social and intellectual benefits. Any dot com millionaire who still works is doing it just to be a member of the creative class - to earn Huffie, as it were. Meaningful, creative work is a human need for at least a small fraction of the population.

Are we on the verge of some S4? How much S4 might we need to escape from Marshall's jobless America? Could S4 be used to lift more people into S3, or will it primarily be used to further lift S3 individuals?

I believe that transhumanists have a responsibility to help the world see the benefits of S3 and S4 as the long-term goals: neither S1 nor S2 would be a happy long-term outcome for our civilization, yet those scenarios are precisely what "right wing" and "left wing" politics are all about. So my next essay, on sustainable transhumanism, will address in a lot more detail how I see S4 working, and how we might get other groups of people on board to make S4 a more likely future.

March 27, 2006

Personal: Favicon

Digital Crusader now has a favicon! What a cute little guy! I tried to get the head band strings into the icon as well, but 16x16 is just much too small for that kind of detail. I'm still quite pleased with that the logo can be reduced that small and still look good. Co-workers complimented me on the logo so today is a happy day :-)

Also, I have modified the monthly archive pages to have nice banner titles at the top, so that it's clear which month you're looking at.

March 27, 2006

Awesome Events: More Events

I discovered Laughing Squid, which is "art, culture and technology from San Francisco and beyond. They post many blogs about various events around the SF Bay Area and I mined a few months worth to find things I haven't seen before, or things I had forgotten about:

MakeZine.com: Maker Faire, April 22-23, 2006, San Mateo, California. $12.50/adult. I will probably go, because there will be lots of interesting people to talk to!

Creative Commons Salon, monthly on 2nd Wednesday's. Next one is: April 12, 2006, in SF, on how the internet is changing music.

SF Tech Sessions, Wednesday March 29, 2006, in downtown SF. Three speakers from local internet startups.

Now this one I've heard of before (even met some people who have been to them) but I had totally forgotten about it. DorkBot!. Apparently there hasn't been one since January 25th, 2006. But I'll keep an eye on the dorkbot blog, and maybe I'll go to the next one.

I love this new Awesome Events category already :-)

March 27, 2006

Future Studies: Idea Markets

New York Times: Let Everyone Have Ideas via slashdot. Describes a privately held business which has been using idea markets in order to drive innovation inside their company. Brilliant! Also of note in idea markets, the Foresight Exchange Prediction Market is linking to Consensus Point Inc. which is now selling and hosting idea futures market server software. I don't know what they are charging, but seeing the benefits that the NYT article describes, it would seem the best way would be to negotiate a (small; perhaps 1%?) share of revenue on any new business ideas that the market brings into being. I love idea markets and practically every good sci-fi book I've read recently has used them somehow.

March 27, 2006

Personal: Pledge Bank: Mprize300

PledgeBank: 'I will become a member of "The 300" at Mprize.org'. I created this pledge hoping to get others to join me in a significant contribution of money to a cause that I believe in. I will likely make the commitment regardless, but it would be extremely wonderful if my commitment could be multiplied 20x by getting others to join me!

If you've been thinking about it but are having a hard time parting with that much money, me too - let's join our efforts and really accomplish something! And if you've got a blog, please blog about this pledge -- according to the site, "Your pledge will not be publicised elsewhere on the site until a few people have signed it. So get out there and tell your friends and neighbours about your pledge." Let's get the ball rolling!

March 27, 2006

Sustainability: Bike Tubes

Velo-City, a neat proposal to elevate and streamline bike pathways as an alternative mode of transportation. I'd use 'em!

March 27, 2006

Personal: IE Transparent Background

So I looked at my new image in Internet Exploder and the transparency wasn't working, leaving a nasty white block around the new logo. Microsoft sucks! But then I found this handy hack which makes it work. Apparently there is a side effect on links inside the div, but for now I don't have any of those so I'm not worried about it. Thank you DaltonLP!

March 27, 2006

Technology: Windows Vista Delayed Again

Slashdot: Heads Roll As Microsoft Misses Vista Target. I wrote Trouble At Microsoft six months ago, and this most recent delay just proves that the trouble has not been fixed.

MS is dropping the ball on Vista. I expect that this delay will not be sufficient: my new expected date for Windows Vista is something like June 2007. That will make it by far the longest period between OS released in MS history... and I am concerned that it will be another "Windows ME", an operating system so bloated and crappy that many computer manufacturers keep using the previous version! In that case, of course, Windows XP came out about a year later and saved MS's butt in the consumer space - this time, they have nothing equivalent.

If I was BillG, and I knew then what I know now, I would have started a skunk-works project at the time of the Longhorn Reset, when it became clear that management was making very poor decisions about the Windows product line. That was about June of 2004. I would have told them to do something like this wired story where MS builds a windows compatibility layer on top of the linux kernel - a very similar project to Apple's OS-X. Using things like Wine it might not even take 2 years - but I think they would have been better off starting from complete scratch and using wine as the "compatibility" layer. So they could have had something decent right now, and something quality by the fall.

Perhaps MS has done this - a few hundred engineers would have been enough, and lord knows they could easily hide that many on their huge, sprawling campus.

At any rate, I am bumping the probability to MS ships a dud OS up by another 10%, to 20%. I think it's also interesting that the new ship date line up with the expected date for a new version of Apple's OS-X. Nobody knows what Apple is up yet (or at least I haven't seen anything) but given their past track record I expect some good things. MS will be lucky to match Tiger (10.4), so Apple's lead is consolidating at well over a year (2, if MS has to delay further as expected).

Finally, I expect that after MS ships Vista, they *will* start over. They have to jettison all that complexity, all that backwards-compatible cruft. They tried to do it this time by rewriting in .NET, but (as any idiot could have told you) managed code was not a suitable environment for coding an operating system in. This time around perhaps they will make a better decision: if Vista is bad enough, the fate of the company may rest of the quality of the initial decisions...

March 25, 2006

Personal: New Logo and Tag Line

Digital Crusader has a new look! Thanks to Alex Weldon for the image and concept - I could not have done it without him. The new phrase "questing for sustainable transhumanism" is begging for an explanatory essay, and I will produce one over the next week. Suffice it to say that I think there is a big hole in most transhumanist thinking regarding sustainability: we're in such a rush to welcome the glorious future that we haven't stopped to consider how long that future might last, or even how it will work in some cases... for now, my web searches show that I have a monopoly on the meaningful conjunction of those two terms.

March 25, 2006

Health: Odds of Dying

National Safety Council: Odds of Dying, a big table of the causes of death in the US in 2002. It makes for very interesting comparisons...

For instance, almost twice as many people (31,655) died from self-harm (suicide) as from assault (murder, 17,638). And, of course, both of those numbers pale beside accidents (traffic, 48,366; other, 58,376). And then, look how many people die because they can't breath: drowning, 3,447, other, 5,511! Exposure to noxious substances: 17,550, i.e. as many people die from chemicals (and drugs) as from murder! Ditto for falls: 16,257 (to think tripping is as dangerous as all those dudes with guns and knives!)

Comparing this to causes of death you can see that natural causes make those two pale, of course. At 872/100,000, that means that (300M*10*872=) 2.62M people died in 1996 from all causes.

The point of looking at such things is to figure out what risky behavior you might be engaging in, and fix it, so that your risk of death goes down. See this interesting image for a graph of causes of death as percentages of total deaths, versus age, for 1979. In your 20s and 30s, it's basically accidents. In the forties and fifties for women, cancer, for me, heart disease and cancer. Later, both heart disease and cancer.

Fascinating...

March 25, 2006

Sustainability: Flood Maps

Flood Maps via WorldChanging, it's a Google Maps hack which shows where the coastline will be with anywhere from a 1 to 14 meter rise in sea level. My house in San Jose is safe, apparently, but things like San Jose's airport don't fare so well! And of course there are lots of places that suffer devastating losses. The main question at this point is how much sea level rise we will actually see in the next hundred years - and I have a sinking suspicion that it may be tens of meters rather than the 2 or 3 that is commonly announced. All the news recently has been about the accelerating rate of melting...

March 24, 2006

Awesome Events: 2006 Upcoming Conferences

Every year there are a bunch of transhumanist conferences and other events of interest to technophiles of every stripe. This is the beginning of a list for this year. I will likely be attending several of these, especially the free ones near my place :-).

The Stanford Singularity Summit. May 13th, Memorial Auditorium, Stanford, California. Free to the public.

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies presents: Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights, May 26-28, Stanford University Law School, Stanford, California, $170 now or $200 at the door.

RoboGames: The World's Greatest Minds and Their Robots, June 16-18, Fort Mason Festival Pavilion, San Francisco, California. $20/day or $55 for the works.

The World Futures Society presents WorldFuture 2006: Creating Global Strategies for Humanity's Future, July 28-30, Toronto, Canada. $500 now, or $600 at the door. The website really sucks, see their PDF Brochure (24 pages) instead.

TransVision 2006 - Emerging Technologies of Human Enhancement, August 17-19: University of Helsinki, Finland, Europe. 145 Euros now, 170 at the door.

Wired NextFest, Sept 28-Oct 1, Javits/New York City, New York. $15 now, or $20 at the door.

X-Prize Cup 2006. October 16-22, but no other details at all.

Events still missing (they will likely be held this year but have not yet been announced):

RoboNexus 2006?
Extropy Institute: VP Summit III?
Foresight Nanotech Institute: 14th conference?
Accelerating Studies Foundation: Accelerating Change 2006?
DARPA Grand Challenge 2006?
Immortality Institute: Life Extension Conference 2006?

See also:
WTA: Upcoming Events
Santa Cruz Future Salon, April 2, 5:00 pm, Borders Books, 1200 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz, California. This month is on Stem Cells with Christopher Thomas Scott.

Enjoy :-)

March 22, 2006

Awesome Events: CyberSalon: New Media and Elitism

Future Salon : Berkeley Cybersalon: Elitism and High Quality Media. I was there and this post is my review and notes.

On the panel:

Joshua Greenbuam: industry analyst / trade columnist
Lisa Stone: traditional journalist and blogger
Steve Gillmor: unknown
Andrew Keen: moderator
John Markoff: newspaper reporter for the New York Times
Jory des Jardins: cofounder of blogher

~120 people in the audience.

Andrew Keen handed out copies of this essay: Web 2.0 Is Reminiscent Of Marx. I think the essay misses the developing technology side of the equation. Most citizen bloggers will produce crap - in this his criticism is correct, and the elitism of old media was needed. But, technology will continue to develop. Collaborative filtering, AI, recommendation technology, and mere social word-of-mouth will ensure that the good stuff rises to the top and gets the attention that it deserves. The New Media rises on the power of people and technology combined, and that will easily trump the power of the mere people behind main stream "elitist" media (MSM).

But more of my viewpoint later, for now let me transcribe some of my notes.

Opening Question: Is big media elite?

JG: yes, if elite is selected/elected/top drawer talent/expert knowledge/information/processes.
LS: search as the leveller for elite MSM vs. blogging (this is essentially my position)
SG: no distinction between blogging and newspapers - the two are converging.
JM: Old view from outside: power structure analysis, big media are elite. New view from inside MSM, feels beleaguered, has union job, doesn't feel he is elitist. Elite in terms of politics and economics, but maybe not in terms of information and knowledge? Feels there is no relation between everyone having a voice and participation in society and democracy (i.e. blogging is not democratizing the US!)
JdJ: not elitist, rather a creature of habit. Fact checking + copy editing = excellence. Blogging is about personal expression and MSM is catching up, e.g. fast company asked her to rewrite a blog post into a front page story, and didn't like a prior impersonal essay she submitted.

MSM crisis is economic, and that is a direct result of the new media / web 2.0, e.g. craigslist.

But there is a crisis of quality caused by old habit and professionalism - inability to pull in expert bloggers, instead rely on staff, etc: not as good or as passionate as amateur reporter in their own fields.

Do internet users care about the quality of information, since they get it for free?

Interesting economic point: SOURCES have *never* been paid. Are blogger sources or reporters? The internet is just an aggregator/intermediary/publisher; new sources can go direct.

Both MSM and new media are extremely diverse, talking in general about them is crazy.

Audience Comment (Dan): "What mechanisms do you have in place to get to a place where you can trust what you read?"

New media is not making a difference in political problems in this country - instead it's chaos. (several others respond "that's bullshit!")

SG: thinks that the revenues problem with MSM is because they are all making a mistake in not driving the new media tools and processes. (Eric adds: similar to the mistake the record labels/RIAA are making with digital music)

JdJ: narcissistic is also transformational/inspirational for the readers; so it's bad, it's just people finding a voice for the first time. (Eric adds: PostSecret is a great example of a narcissistic new media which is massively inspirational)

Question re getting women involved in new media: how do you enculture people so that they can experience themselves as experts? (people think: but what makes me worthy to blog/take up other people time/etc) It's a very real barrier to women starting a blog, but once you get them some exposure they like it and continue.

Foundation of human nature: finding value in sharing experience. This explains why there are so many blogs, irrespective of the value that readers get: writers feel that it is valuable just to share...

Jennifer, an audience member: blogosphere is about connecting not content; you know the bloggers, so you feel you can trust them.

Corporate media concentration is also perceived to have degraded the quality of the MSM content.

Someone has to make money to support journalism in a democracy (e.g. writing up town council meetings)

In the blogosphere people don't pretend to be neutral ("there is no view from nowhere") -> but they try to be fair, to be valued for their voice.

That ends my notes from the CyberSalon, here are a few more of my thoughts.

1) I came away feeling that a lot of really smart things had been said, but that nobody had really addressed the future of the new media. Tools to filter, promote and fund RSS feeds are rapidly evolving and changing, and five years from now new media will be an entirely different beast, while MSM will still be newspapers, magazines, TV and radio. In short New Media will develop it's equivalents of "editorial review" and "fact checking" and "reporter reputations", etc. and those things will make new media much more usable, trust-worthy, etc.

I agree that at the present time much of the blogosphere is either an empty echo chamber or a simple repeator for the articles that the MSM chooses to publish on the web (i.e. that the elitist model is still better right now in terms of generating content that is great), but I that is rapidly changing and there are already a fair number of new media organizations that are putting out very high quality stuff. Just check my recommended blogs section and see for yourself. Hardly a week goes by without me discovering another great new media source - and the diversity of them is enormous.

I can only hope that at least some of the best MSM organizations figure out new media and new media revenue models before the economics of this transition destroy them. I think Wired News, Salon, and New Scientist are hopeful candidates for that. As example of new media organizations who seem to have figured out revenue models, check out Engadget and Arstechnica.

March 20, 2006

Economics: The Intention Economy

Linux Journal: The Intention Economy by Doc Searls. An excellent essay about a buyer focused economy. I think it's a lot more interesting than all the talk about attention economies - attention is useful for academics, where ideas are the things being traded (hence memetic theory), but for markets the things which matters is money, and a much better proxy for that is intention to buy.

I think a great example of the beginning of the intention economy is online air tickets. That really is a market where customers state their intent to travel, and various companies compete & bid to fill the demand. And I don't think it's an accident that the airline industry is loosing money hand over fist - I think that's a consequence of a buyer centered market before industry has a grasp on what that will mean (although obviously there are lot of other causes of the problems in the airline industry).

The internet makes possible intention economies for lots of well defined goods, and I think that's the primary reason it's become the economic force that it is: customers love the new power. The first comment on the article, about car salesmen not wanting to switch to an intention-economy-style method of interaction, is bang on, and yet it wouldn't be hard to create a website which would do what he was asking for: return quotes on certain well defined performance specs, along with all the information that a consumer could possibly desire about each option.

I wonder if Google Base will end up being a big hub of the intention economy? At it's core the idea is very similar to search - you're just searching for quotes on a given product spec...

March 20, 2006

Sustainability: The Six-Stroke Engine

Damn Interesting: The Six-Stroke Engine, an idea to improve upon the century old four-stroke engine cycle used in practically all internal combustion engines. The basic idea is to add an extra compression and power cycle involving water. Compress regular air, add liquid water at TDC, the water vaporizes because of the engine temperature, driving a second power cycle and cooling the engine. Genius! But of course there are a few problems...

The first of which would be rust! Is it possible that new stainless steels allow this to be a non-issue? I bet engine life-time would be hugely reduced, because of metal fatigue caused by thermal cycling... but, this is a materials issue and materials has been making great progress in the last few decades... it's possible that now is the time for innovations such as this one. At any rate, I am not a materials scientist or engine builder, so I'm not really qualified to comment on the troubles in this area.

The second would be does it affect the combustion process of the regular power cycle? I believe that engine temperature is an important operating requirement for the efficiency of the engine and this would clearly makes the temperature hover low, perhaps as low as 100 degrees Celsius. Also even after the exhaust strokes water will remain - will that affect e.g. the emissions of the engine? The inventor claims that it might even clean the engine, leading to lower emissions, but that seems unlikely.

Third, he has yet to prove it actually increases engine power or efficiency. Thermodynamically it makes sense to me - he's essentially adding another power stroke to the engine, which should result in a net gain in efficiency (converting more of the thermal energy into work), but practically that stroke is going to be considerably weaker than the main power stroke. Over twelve strokes the work output is likely lower for the six-stroke than the four-stroke, but fuel consumption should also be lower (only 2/3), so the question will be the relative ratio. Even if its comes out at the same power and efficiency, the overall to-the-wheels performance might be better, since this new engine can eliminate a lot of fans and cooling equipment...

Anyway, it's one of the most interesting things I've read in a long time, and I am surprised that it hasn't occurred to anyone before (it certainly was never mentioned in my thermodynamics class...). Read more here, here, here, and from the links on the bottom of the original article.

March 20, 2006

Health: Selling the Promise of Youth

Business Week: Selling The Promise Of Youth. Their summary is good: "The anti-aging industry is offering a dizzying array of hormones and supplements. Business is booming. But some remedies are risky, and the benefits are unproven." It's a great piece of reporting,

My research shows that there are currently NO drugs, supplements, treatments, etc that have a *proven* anti-aging effect. There are great numbers of things (especially supplements) which have a claimed anti-aging effect, but in general what science has been done does not support those claims. But billions of dollars worth are still sold because people are desperate.

However, I do think it's possible that some supplements and treatments available today could cause a "rectangularization -- years of healthy living followed by a short, acute decline, as opposed to a slower, triangle-like descent toward the grave." In fact I think things like exercising and eating healthy foods cause rectangularization.

March 20, 2006

Awesome Events: Bruce Stirling at SXSW

SXSW06 BruceSterling.mp3, Bruce Sterling's talk at , the big interactive/video/music conference held annually in Austin. Stirling is such an iconoclast, and his speaking style is a little strange, but I always enjoying listening to him if only because you have no idea what he's going to say next. See the WorldChanging writeup of the talk for some info. If you're interested in SXSW, WC has a small writeup as well.

March 20, 2006

Awesome Events: Tomorrow's People

Fight Aging!: Tomorrow's People Event Underway, and there are RealAudio video recordings available for those of us not living in the UK.

The Longer? panel was quite excellent, worth watching for sure. There is a substantial diversity of opinion on the panel, even though all of them are life-extension advocates. The fact that anti-aging research can be promoted for such a wide variety of reasons is heartening and given how fast the media is latching unto this topic I expect that it will be only a few more years before we see some real progress in terms of getting these things funded at a national level (especially in the UK, probably not in the US).

The Stronger? panel however was disappointing and highly technical. The talk in the middle by Kevin Warwick was the best of the bunch but if you know much about Warwick's activities it's not that informative. Nice orange shirt though!

There are more videos here but I haven't yet watched any of them. Many of them look quite interesting, so over the next few days I will be checking them out (check back here for some more recommendations later).

March 20, 2006

Economics: Hotel Check-In Machines

Robotic Nation Evidence: Deployment of ATMs, talks about using kiosks to check-in at Hotels (basically converting your CC into a room key). Great idea, that would save a lot of time! I have been meaning to write a big long essay about Mr. Robotic Nation and his stuff for quite a long time. I think he's got the kernel of a correct idea, but that he's missing some important pieces that mean the future will be both better and worse than his predictions...

Look for that essay in the coming weeks.

March 20, 2006

Sustainability: The Planet is Melting

WattHead: The Planet is Melting. I don't normally link without saying much, but this WattHead post is a really great aggregation of information about climate change and it can stand all by itself :-)

March 15, 2006

Health: Anti-aging: The Fountain of Health

Technology Review: The Fountain of Health. Lately the big buzz in the anti-aging news has been about how delaying the aging process also delays all the major diseases associated with aging - CVD, diabetes, alzheimer's, cancer, etc. Thus an anti-aging solution isn't just a fountain of youth, it's also a fountain of health!

The amazing thing is that caloric restriction seems not only to increase life span (and thus delay these diseases) but to actually do more than that: you are fundamentally less at risk for these things even after adjusting your age-related risk for the anti-aging effects of CR.

There has been lots of interesting news in the field recently that has been piling up in my browser window, so here is a link-fest for your enjoyment:

The Scientist: The Longevity Dividend, where they talk about how a small investment in anti-aging research now would pay a dividend (via increased productivity in old age and increased length of working age) not just for this generation of humans but every generation thereafter. Lots of people complained about the "7 years" claim that the researchers are hoping to extend life by (that being far too conservative, after all), but what I think is astonishing is that a mere 7 years is enough to halve your risk of age-related disease at any given age over about 50. This shows how powerful even small amounts of life-extension can be.

Business Week: Biotech's Diet In A Bottle Could Extend Your Life which talks more briefly about the same stuff that the Technology Review article above covers. Business Week reaches a very different audience, so it's good to see this stuff getting out there.

EurekAlert: For the first time: Longevity modulated without disrupting life-sustaining function reports on progress towards making the insulin/IGF-1 pathway targetable by drugs for life-extension benefits without also triggering other side effects (such as messing up childhood growth, or more importantly the metabolic stuff...). Promising research indeed!

Technology Review: The SENS Challenge: Update. They've picked the judges for their biogerontology prize - the one which will attempt to show that SENS is "so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate", which I think is an impossible standard, but if you can argue successfully in favour of that it's got a $20,000 reward :-). It would be much easier to prove that SENS is technically incomplete or inaccurate in some way. It is just me or does the very presence of all these articles prove that SENS is "worthy of learned debate" irregardless of whether it's technically feasible as currently laid out? At any rate, they seem to agree that the contest isn't very technical, because the panel of judges they have appointed doesn't even have a biogerontologist! Still, it's a pretty impressive panel and I will be watching the contest to see if anything interesting develops.

March 14, 2006

Technology: PS3 Delayed

Slashdot: PlayStation 3 Delay Official - until November in Japan; who knows when in the US! Read on for my thoughts on the next generation consoles...

#1 observation: all Sony had to do was put out something competitive, on-time with backwards comnpatibility to PS2, and they would have owned this next generation console war just like they did the last. Even large blunders will only reduce their advantage, not eliminate it.

#2 observation: it appears that Sony has become too ambitious and are having some internal problems to boot. The Cell processor very complicated and requires special compilers that IBM is still in the process of creating - meaning that game programmers are left in the lurch right now. It's also power hungry, meaning they have the same sorts of problems that MS is having right now with cooling. The Blue-ray drive is expensive (new precision tech) and they are *still* debating the specs, meaning nothing is final yet. And finally, Sony is struggling to match MS's online service, because it's been an awesome hit. Yet Sony has no experience with that type of thing at all! All this has resulted in delays that will further hurt Sony's standing in the market.

#3 observation: meanwhile, Nintendo is calmly opting out of the speed race in favour of fancy controllers and inventive/creative games, plus cheaper prices. They are targetting a broader audience, and judging by the success of the DS and Nintendogs, it might actually work. If so Nintendo might "disrupt" the market and take an unexpectedly large fraction of the market this round, mostly by picking up customers that otherwise wouldn't be members of the market at all. Or, they might fail miserably and be a distant "also ran". There likely isn't a middle position - they are playing "go big or go home".

#4 observation: even with their supply problems, and their overheating issues, it seems that MS has done a good job with the XBOX 360. There are no killer games yet, but they will come. The online "Live" service has been met with rave reviews and is already driving adoption of the console. MS looks poised to take a larger share of the market this round.

Combining these observations, my prediction is that this console round will be much closer than the last one, with Nintendo, MS and Sony roughly spliting the market in thirds, at least in North America. In Japan Sony's lead is more substantial and therefore Sony will still own that market, with Nintendo in second and then MS a distant third. Nevertheless it's an interesting time to be a gamer, or even an investor :-)

March 12, 2006

Health: Regulation of the Healthcare Industry

CRON Diary: Making choices requires information, where Mary give an example of how the medical industry and practitioners business needs are not aligned with "evidence-based medicine", i.e. the needs of the patients. Via this example she highlights in a few hundred words the problems with an unregulated healthcare industry. Those who bemoan the existence of the FDA and the other national health-care oversight and regulatory agencies should explain how (and more importantly why) we would get this information from private industry.

One of the things that I learned from my study of the supplement industry and their products is that even with copious time and lots of intelligence, it is practically impossible for mere citizens to determine the benefits and risks of a given substance or treatment. e.g. I still have no idea if coenzyme Q-10 is beneficial or not, despite weeks of research, a one month trial, and a study of the science behind it all. I suspect that most people would lack the patience and the education that I have: if I can't decide, who could?

I've read the History of the FDA and this alternate telling of same, and the thing both of them make clear is that much of the regulation came about because of nasty events that propelled Congress to act in the face of public outrage. That typically makes for bad law.

That same site has a set of recommended reforms for the FDA, but in my opinion implementation of that list would result in chaos and unimaginable amounts of misinformation, unnecessary treatments, drugs and surgeries, etc. Even today, with the FDA on guard, there are numerous drugs and medical interventions which cost far more money than they are worth, in terms of benefits gained.

The problem is NOT safety, per say (although that's certainly a concern) but rather economy: if you let people do it, they will buy snake oil, because even highly intelligent people with all the information available can't make decisions with the whole picture in mind. They can only decide that they would rather do something rather than nothing: and all too often, that decision is a poor one, as shown by the post that I linked above. The doctors honestly believed that it was going to help, and they probably even had some evidence (or at least reasons) for that belief. They would have merrily performed tens of thousands of such operations per year and I bet most of their patients would have been happy! But the larger picture revealed by doing randomized studies to collect evidence showed that people were at best wasting money, and at worst risking their lives. Any proposed restructuring of the FDA needs to keep both a safety and an efficacy mandate in mind.

However, I can agree that there might be better ways to administer programs which deliver those safety and efficacy certifications, i.e. that "good governance" is called for in medical industry oversight. I point to almost every other developed country in the world as models of how this can be done - the American medical oversight system being by far the worst system I know of. I believe that drug and device approval can be made substantially faster, cheaper and safer with merely better focus, process and funding at the FDA. In fact such a renewed mandate could be a big help in controlling the spiraling costs of healthcare in the country - most of which is caused by excessive use of procedures and drugs which are NOT effective, or at least not effective enough to justify their large cost.

But to get to that point, the American public is going to have to be re-educated. While opponents of the FDA have trumped the vast gains in knowledge in the general public about nutrition and healthcare subjects in the last two decades, I know that most of that knowledge is superficial and often incorrect. It comes in large part from advertisements and packaging material which promotes the products irregardless of the actual benefits contained within: the entire herbal supplement industry is an example of this, but increasing foods are following the same logic. Without evidence any claim of benefit is as empty as the snake oil of the 19th century (even if it's not as deadly).

Another point is that healthcare, even if freed from governmental influences, is not and will never be a "free" market. People will willing spend all of their money seeking cures, because they "don't have a choice": to not spend the money is to accept the condition and the risk of it killing you. In short, illness is equivalent to holding a gun to peoples heads, and expecting that they will make good decisions about how to pursue healthcare in that case is expecting something that can never occur. Millions of American's already throw money away on supplements, acupuncture, chiropractic care, and off-label prescription drugs... sometimes they get something in return (although it's often hard to tell - I should know, I've tried some of those things), but mostly they get nothing. Yet they will continue to spend as long as they believe there is some hope, or they can convince themselves they are getting some benefit.

This article on Why is the American Health Care system so Expensive? demonstrates the problem in a nut shell: given the choice, people will spend an additional $16 on medical services for every $10 increase in their income! *Americans want their health care system to be expensive!* The private system in America is so expensive because people are irrational about healthcare and will spend regardless of the benefits received. The author seems unaware of the fact that Americans receive substantially poorer healthcare on average than most of the European countries he compares it to, as measured by the health of the population. This is because the private selection of healthcare results in sub-optimal choices: people spend money in the wrong places, like surgical interventions (expensive and often little benefit, but easy for people to choose), rather than in the right places, like vaccines and subsidized exercise facilities (cheap with large benefits, but people hate them!). AND, importantly, the healthcare providers in America have exactly the same incentives as their customers in terms of delivering expensive drugs and surgical interventions. This pathology is at the heart of the problem here and until it's addressed, no progress will be made on the problem.

The future of the medical system in America looks awesome: more and more money, lots of designer drugs, invasive procedures, expensive medical devices, etc. But the future health of the American population looks poor: increasing obesity, diabetes, CVD, passive lifestyles, expensive healthcare insurance, etc. These two facts are directly related, and until America realizes that throwing more money at the health industry only makes the problem worse, no progress will be made.

So, how to dig out of this death spiral? A good start would be a huge overhaul of the FDA. Streamline the approval processes to decrease the costs, yes, but more importantly introduce new requirements that make the new devices and drugs prove that they are *worth it* financially. Lowering the chance of a repeat heart attack by 1% at a cost of $5,000/year in Statin drugs is dumb when you can just tell the patients to walk 30 minutes a day and lower their risk by 30%! Require that doctors educate their patients on the benefits of exercise. Spend government money on prevention & research rather than on treatment and remediation.

March 9, 2006

Transhumanism: Deathist Nation

Sentient Developments: Deathist Nation, an essay which critiques the mainstream "bio-ethics" movement that is currently anti-"anti-aging", i.e. what transhumanist have taken to calling pro-death. The position is clearly illogical and untenable if the science and technology actually develop as I believe it will. But, we are rightly concerned both that they may impede the research and slow the results down, or more dangerously may prohibit the use of such technologies or even enforce what amounts to death penalties on people who could extend their lifespan by using such technologies. Here's hoping that the bio-Luddites don't maintain their current positions of power.

March 9, 2006

Health: Brain Exercise

Pete's Place: 7 Day Program To Get Smart! Basically change up your regular routines to stimulate your brain (the link gives examples for 7 days). By breaking patterns that you usually zombie through, you can make yourself more alert during times when it actually does matter! Or at least that's the theory: it's only been tested on 15 people so far, the bigger test with 100 people has yet to happen.

March 9, 2006

Technology: Nanotech Helps Energy Storage

WorldChanging: On the Horizon (03/03/06): Charge!, a collection of links about emerging technologies for energy storage. Basically, applications of nanotechnology to batteries and capacitors, resulting in surprisingly large increases in storage density (kWh/kg), storage capacity (kWh or sometimes mAh for small batteries) and discharge/recharge rates (max kW).

I find it surprising that merely modifying the coating on the electrodes in a battery can double the storage capacity - shouldn't that be related to the chemistry, not to the way that chemistry interacts with the electrical systems? i.e. sure, vastly accelerated charge/discharge cycles are a plausible consequence of nano-coated electronics, but storage capacity as well? Wow!

The big conclusion is that batteries and ultra-capacitors are going to get better rapidly as we enter the nano-era, and that means that electric vehicles and strong hybrids are an even more obvious winner over hydrogen cars.

March 8, 2006

Awesome Events: Events for March 2006

I've decided to bring back the Awesome Events category, and post both listings of future events (probably once a month) and my writeups of the events that I do attend. The former is a formalization of things I have been doing for friends anyway, while the latter should help me remember them better, and give me a hard copy to refer people back to if they want more information. I may also change the categories of some of the older posts which used to be in this category (before I removed it) back into it. The idea is to inspire myself to actually provide these services.

With that preamble out of the way, here is the event listing for March 2006:

• The Long Now Foundation, Friday, March 10, 02006. Kevin Kelly - "The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method." Doors open 7:00pm, talk at 7:30pm. Free, seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. The talk will take place at The Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. Free.

  The co-founding editor of "Wired" magazine and author of OUT OF CONTROL is working on a new book on "what technology wants." His research led to the first-ever history of scientific methodology. Starting from this long-term view of science's past transformation, he speculates on how the practice of science will change in the future.

• BERKELEY CYBERSALON: Bloggers: expertise and elitism. 5-7 p.m., Sunday, March 19, 2006 Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. $10/person.

  Bloggers and podcasters are suspicious of “elitist” big media and view the “democratizing” force of digital technology positively. In contrast, many traditional journalists regard most blogs, wikis and podcasts as amateurish and narcissistic. We wonder if expertise is,
  by definition, elitist. And we ask if expertise and elitism might indeed be necessary features of a high-quality media. A Cybersalon panel of experts – including NY Times technology reporter and author John Markoff, BlogHer cofounders and bloggers Jory des Jardins and Lisa Stone, and blogger/podcaster/digital reporter Steve Gillmor -- takes a critical look at the concepts of expertise and elitism in the dynamic Web 2.0 world.

• Future Salon: Global Guerrillas with John Robb. How is global warfare and security changing in a world of Accelerating Change. Friday March 31st, 6-7 networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP. From 7-9+ pm presentation and discussion. SAP Labs North America, Building D, Room Southern Cross, 3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94304. Free.

  The combination of the Abqaiq attack and this new attempted attack on a major power station in Jordan shows that al Qaeda has adopted infrastructure disruption as its preferred method of warfare.

For other events of possible interest, check out

SFGate.com: Bay Area Lectures for the next 30 days. Mostly art and culture.

WorkIt: Networking Events and Resources. Mostly highly technical training sessions.

SwissNex: Connecting the Dots. Discussions at the science/society interface.

Global Exchange: Mostly liberal activist gatherings.

March 4, 2006

Sustainability: LA Community Garden Eviction

sustainablog: Los Angeles Urban Farm Receive 3-Day Eviction Notice, because of a legal settlement that has transferred the rights on the property to a private owner. The owner intends to pave over the property and erect a warehouse for the use of WalMart - classic!

I have sent a letter to the Major:

Dear Mayor Villaraigosa,

I am writing in support of the campaign to save south central farm, a 14 acre community garden in your city. Please reconsider the eviction of families from this property - I understand that there are legal issues but surely they can be settled in a manner superior to paving over 13 acres of productive and community generating farmland!

I have a small plot (24'x24') at a community garden near my own apartment in San Jose, and I understand the agony that the members of the south central farm must be experiencing. Gardening is more than simply obtaining food from the ground - it represents a labor of love, an investment in place that is irreplaceable. That it also improves the sustainability of a city while reducing pollution, improving community bonds, and reducing poverty is incidental compared to the emotional loss that the hundreds of community gardeners will personally experience.

My words will join the flood of many others pleading for a change of heart - I can only hope that you have the will and power to accomplish what we desire. Reinstate the gardeners - people are more important than a legal squabble and I trust that a better solution can be found.

Sincerely,
Eric Boyd
(my address)
Green Thumb Community Garden plot holder

UPDATE: the address for the mayor, mayor@lacity.org, bounces (apparently "550 No such recipient"). I have tried to find an alternate address but there is nothing on the city website and several clever guesses also failed. I sent the email to postmaster@lacity.org along with a complaint, but it is unlikely anyone will ever read that... Bastards!

March 4, 2006

Technology: Man-Made Diamonds

C&EN: The Many Facets Of Man-Made Diamonds, another rescue from my old bookmarks. This story explains how Gemesis is creating large (>1 carat) yellow diamonds, but also gives excellent background on the industrial production (100 tons/year!) and use of diamonds. As the hardest and strongest (in compression) material we know of (almost!), the potential uses of large amounts of diamond are astonishing. Science fiction had a blast a decade ago writing about the diamond age, but it seems that has mostly passed. Yet a few more years and we may enter it!

When the article was published over a year ago, they were just *saying* that you could purchase them as gemstones. Today, you can buy them online at Joseph Schubach Jewelers! Still thousands of dollars per carat, of course, but I bet that has more do with perception than actual production costs (just like with real diamonds!). Given that it appears to be a clean room technology involving simple pressure containers and pure feed stocks, production of diamonds should have the same sort of exponential returns on scale and process engineering that semi-conductors are famous for, i.e. ten years from now you can purchase the same diamond for 1/10 of the cost, or spend the same and get a diamond 10x as big :-). How long can the price of diamonds be held far above their production costs, now that any old semi-conductor company could "host" a "diamond mine"?

March 4, 2006

Future Studies: Terrorism Futures

Wired News: The Case for Terrorism Futures, an old article that I dug up from my bookmarks. I have always been fascinated by Idea Futures, the idea that you can create a market in ideas and then use money to help predict the probability of something occurring.

This DARPA grant to develop an idea futures market for use in predicting situations of interest to the military was something I actually worked on - we created a proposal but then got hog-tied by our lack of America citizenship, and so never actually submitted the proposal. Given how it turned out maybe it was for the best!

Still, I expect that eventually Terrorism Futures will come of age. The main objection - that terrorists could profit from betting on a scenario which they then carry out - is exactly the POINT of the system. Intelligence officers already commit acts of that nature every time they pay an informant; this just cuts out the middleman. When a terrorist bets on a scenario, the odds of that scenario will go up - and that should be the signal to watch for the event to occur! The more they want to make on the bet, the more they will have to influence the price - and the bigger the "alert" becomes.

I am by no means a market fundamentalist, but I believe that sometimes markets are the right tool for the job.

March 4, 2006

Politics: What You Can't Say

Paul Graham: What You Can't Say, an essay about taboo in speech. Fascinating! I found this essay (and a number of things to come) in my old bookmarks, which I decided would be an interesting thing to mine for ideas... I am disappointed that Paul didn't continue on at the end to actually create a list of things you can't say - but I guess that's consistent with his view that you should keep your thoughts and words in different worlds. My list of some things you can't talk about:

anti-aging: growing old is horrible and we should work to prevent it

evolution: humans are apes and our minds & bodies betray that heritage all the time

transhumanism: our natural state is seeking to improve ourselves; we use technology to achieve this and will continue to do so

atheism: there are no gods, not even yours

religion: historically, the most divisive and nasty of the things people will kill each other for; in modern times, a great way to close your mind (faith)

sustainability: we are using and discarding resources much faster than this planet can support; a likely result is collapse of our global society and billions of human deaths

America: a country of vast inequality, ruled by money, distracted by fear, creating chaos in the world, and trending even more negative than that...

Now go ahead and flame me.

March 2, 2006

Sustainability: Personal Rapid Transit

WorldChanging: Personal Rapid Transit. I wrote about Personal Mass Transport about a year and a half ago, and said that I hoped it would take off. Now it seems there is a pilot project under development for Heathrow Airport (London).

The pilot project will be an 18 pod, 2 mile track system which apparently has only 2 terminals (a parking lot and Terminal One). So that's more like a go-cart system than PRT. But the article says that if it's successful, they may expand the system to link other lots and other terminals, and by 2012 the system could have 500 pods and 30 miles of track - still not city scale, but large enough to prove that city scale would work. 2012 is only 6 years from now, so this is certainly moving much faster than the 30+ years of stagnation to date...

The great thing about starting at an airport is that expansion into the city proper is an easy and logical thing. Heathrow airport is only 15 miles (west) from the heart of London. And surely London of all places is interested in a mass transit system which will get traffic off the streets :-). The airport system may be limited to 25MPH (and battery power!), however, so it's possible that the city system and the airport system would not be compatible. That would be an easy fix however with a transfer station... or you might even be able to design pods which can switch systems.

Also interesting to note is that the same company which runs Heathrow also runs a half a dozen other airports. BAA is privately held. They issued a press release about the PRT deal with Advanced Transport Systems back on the 20th of October, 2005. Apparently construction is not actually underway yet - instead ATS is using the initial partnership money (1.1M pounds) to "commercialise their prototype vehicles and develop software for BAA", i.e. to actually develop the idea to the point where it can be built. That's why it won't be open till 2008. BAA is getting an equity stake in ATS (25% for 7.5M pounds), which means they are serious about it!