A Real Bird's Eye View

Technology marches on with fancy new airborne platforms for fancy camera shots...

How to be Successful by Being Consistently Wrong

Only the big industries can be consistently wrong and continue to be big and dominate their industry. Here is a post by Steve Blank on his blog that nails how the anti-Internet movie industry has made lots of money on technological innovation in the past and despite its current crusade against the Internet will most likely make a killing off the Internet:

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.

But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

The Movie Industry and Technology Progress
The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.

• 1920’s – the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can’t compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again.


• 1940’s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. “It’s all over,” complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today.


• 1950’s – broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn’t compete with paid.


• 1970’s – Video Cassette Recorders (VCR’s) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with “end of the world” hyperbole. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.


• 1998 – the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased.


• 2000 – Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR’s reignite interest in TV.


• 2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers.


• Today it’s the Internet that’s going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar?

Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology?

There is more. Go read the whole article.

What upsets me is that the luddites in the MPAA and RIAA and other big cartels are only too willing to destroy the Internet in their belief that it will make them more money. They are dead wrong. Worse, they are destroying one of the great advances of the past century all for a quick profit. Tragic.

Go read about SOPA. Follow up the leads that Steve Blank highlights in his article. This insane push to destroy the Internet needs to be stopped.

From Cold Fusion to Widom-Larsen

Here is a bit from an excellent post by Steven Krivit in his excellent blog NewEnergyTimes. This reviews the history of investigations and thinking about the unexpected energy production by the Fleischmann–Pons experiment to the latest thinking centred on Widom-Larsen theory. Here is the history as understood by Krivit and presented at Mitre Corp (an R&D outfit for the US government):

The first phase is 1989-1993. The initial problem is that nuclear experts had never known of any kind of nuclear energy that did not produce commensurate levels of dangerous radioactive emissions. Few people at this time were aware of weak interactions, let alone the possibility that weak interactions could lead to high reaction rates. So, for most scientists, the claimed results were inexplicable according to what they knew at the time.

Nuclear physicists couldn't conceive of a way that deuterons could penetrate or overcome the Coulomb barrier at room temperature. Some people, like Hagelstein, tried to come up with explanations for this, but they all relied on imaginary physics.

From the experimental side, the field suffered early on from "experimenter's regress," which is explained by author Harry Collins: "When the normal criterion - successful outcome - is not available, scientists disagree about which experiments are competently done."

When the field emerged in 1989, there was a lot of initial opposition. Many people in science academia responded to it unprofessionally and with outright hostility. Some of these opponents lacked the courage to consider something so radically new and potentially disruptive; some lacked imagination. On a psychological level, it threatened their fundamental understanding of physics. On a practical level, it threatened their stature and funding. It threatened to make their textbooks and coursework obsolete. There were also some other opponents who were researchers who attempted to replicate the initial claim but failed and then may have felt embarrassed and frustrated and then became angry.

The second phase is 1993-2004. During this period, the field was largely neglected by mainstream science and mainstream media. To a great degree, although the researchers would certainly have liked to receive more financial support, I think they were happy to be left alone. However, significant misinformation which occurred from the onset of the field was never corrected in the broader public awareness [during this time]. But that started changing as of [the publication of] Charles Beaudette's Excess Heat & Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed in 2000 and Steven B. Krivit and Nadine Winocur's The Rebirth of Cold Fusion in 2004. These books began to help correct some of the historical record.

The third phase starts in 2005, when Widom and Larsen came out with their theory, and has continued to the present. During this phase, the field has been experiencing bitter factionalism between two groups. One group is people who maintain their belief in "cold fusion" or, if not [in name], at least the idea of deuterons somehow overcoming the Coulomb barrier. Sometimes, they seem to have loyalty only to the name of "cold fusion." [Often, many of these proponents defend either the concept or the term "cold fusion," much like adherents to a religion defend their right to their beliefs.]

The other group of people, whom you don't hear much about, recognizes low-energy nuclear reactions as real, but they don't presume or assert that it’s a fusion mechanism.

Here is a presentation from SPAWR that gives a more technical view of developments in LENR:



Follow developments of LENR at Steven Krivits NewEnergyTimes blog.

A Glimpse into the Future

Here is a talk by Cory Doctorow on the future of computers given the impulse by corporations to control "rights" that require them to tie down their "customers" in thousands of ways to ensure maximum profit:



Skip the first 2 minutes of intros to get into the Doctorow talk.

A full transcription of the talk can be found here.

Cory offers up lots of thoughtful points. This video is well worth your time.

My Kind of App

Here's a great app to get your mind off your troubles and cares...



Yep... life has a way of biting back!

Anti-Science is Alive and Well

People prefer to "believe". They don't like slow and painful study and rational thinking, calculation, experimentation, theory building aka "science". That requires 20 years of education and only really dedicated and really smart people can access the edges of science these days. That sidelines the masses and they don't like that one bit.

So people believe in magic. They believe in "spirit" and "soul" and the "power of positive thinking". They believe in "holistic medicine". They have their religions.

I worked in a high tech company and was appalled to discover that even people with PhDs in science believed in such madness as "homeopathy". These were smart people, well educated people who had worked hard to understand technology and science and yet they gave in to magical thinking.

Here's what magical thinking will "achieve". From Yahoo! News:

Five share $340,000 in holistic healer case that left woman a quadriplegic

The Canadian Press – Fri, 11 Nov, 2011

RICHMOND, B.C. - Five B.C. residents, including a woman nearly killed by arsenic poisoning and left a quadriplegic, are sharing more than $340,000 as a result of a settlement involving a self-proclaimed holistic healer.

Money from the settlement came from property seized from the defendant and sold under the B.C. government's civil forfeiture legislation.

The government says the defendant, Selena Tsui, was not charged in the case after the Crown concluded there was no substantial likelihood of conviction on any criminal charges.

The government says between 2000 and 2004, Tsui told at least a dozen people she was qualified to diagnose and treat diseases, including mental conditions, when in fact she had no formal training.

One of her clients, identified only as E.L., began taking a concoction she believed contained mushrooms and herbs, but had extreme arsenic levels, and she suffered respiratory and renal failure, cardiac arrest and paralysis.

She was taken to hospital, put on life support and given a five per cent chance of survival, but her life was eventually saved.

The real world is complicated. It isn't a simple morality story. It isn't something that "a good heart" and a "strong will" can conquer. It requires hard work, sophisticated technology, advanced math, and a long education in a specialist area of science. But people love quacks with no training yet who have an "aura" about them, or can "channel spirits", or have a commanding presence and claim a direct line to "God".

Right now, Europe and the United States are in the hands of quacks. Serious economists know that austerity budgets only prolong a depression. A Keynesian approach is needed. But Obama and the European leaders would rather call in the witch doctor to shake bones over the economy and prattle some debt reduction "confidence building" mumbo jumbo rather than rely on the math, the models, and the sophisticated economic theories (the ones prior to the Chicago school and "freshwater" economists turned into lunatics and ran economics off the rails).

It is tragic living in a world where some plague is raging and the scientists and the doctors have the technology to manipulate DNA to create a vaccine to cure it, but the "authorities" (political, religious, civic, etc.) all cry out for "prayer" and "abstinence" and "a submission to God's will" or some "alternative medicine" rather than to science to cure the plague.

We live in a dark time. Carl Sagan wrote a book in 1995 before he died in which he worried about this modern anti-science trend. The book was called The Demon-Haunted World. We live in that magical thinking, irrational, and anti-science world. Millions die every year because of this stupidity. That is what people who want "quick solutions" have created by preferring magical thinking to the difficult path of rationalism and science. Tragic.

Walk Like a Man, Fast as You Can

I'm amazed at the progress in robotics. It is solid. The day when robots take over the manual aspects of life is getting much closer.



What is less clear to me is the day when the robots will take over the intellectual aspects of life. Dedicated "smart" software is impressive, but I haven't seen any general purpose intelligence worth beans. Progress on this side of technology is much, much slower.

But the robots are coming, the robots are coming!

Peeking into the Future

Here is an interesting film on the effects of the digital age and networking are having on shaping the future. I like this. This is optimistic about the future. We need more of this...

The Future Has Arrived

Here's a bit from the BBC with a wonderful story about new technology:

Scientists have succeeded in forming a "feedback loop" between a computer and a common yeast to precisely control the switching on and off of specific genes.

The computer controlled flashes of light to start and stop this gene expression, "learning" how to reach and maintain a set value.

The groundbreaking approach could find use in future efforts to control biological processes, such as the production of biofuel from microbes.

It appears in Nature Biotechnology.

The approach is a comparatively simple means to take control of fantastically complex biochemical processes to achieve a desired result.

"The neat thing about this is that there are many people who have tried to do things like this by, for example, coding in the cell itself a synthetic circuit, putting genes and mechanisms in the cell," said senior author John Lygeros, of the Automatic Control Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

"That's had limited success up to now."

...

"It's quite difficult to engineer synthetic circuits that do something robustly in the cell, and the hope is that by augmenting this with external signals, you can get them to behave better," he said.

"That for example may have applications in biofuel production, or antibiotic production, where they use genetically engineered organisms to increase the yields of reactions."

Go read the whole article to get all the details.

This is a big step into "the future". I can foresee all kinds of new production and processing done using biological techniques. Chemists must be licking their chops with visions of gearing up to produce all kinds of hard-to-make molecules.

This is a huge step into the nano world with a wonderful new control technique. This isn't the grey goo doomsday scare story that the anti-technologists love to trot out. This is a technique that gives very precise control at human scale to nano processing.

Technological Optimism

I'm a big fan of technology. I buy into the Julian Simon view that any "limits to growth" are wrong-headed because it ignores the fact that the ultimate resource is human ingenuity.

Here are some bits out of Paul Krugman's latest NY Times op-ed looking at the upcoming future for solar energy:

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

...

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

Krugman is making the point that the upcoming 2012 elections are going to be important for many reasons. A big one is that they will decide whether the political right gets to continue blocking technological advance in the energy area. The sad fact is that China is quickly becoming a leader in this area (along with Germany) and the US, which used to lead the world, will soon be a "has been" and utterly negligible. All thanks to the Neanderthal thinking of the Republican party that favours the rich and corruption over the American people and a better future.

Looking at Day 1 of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

Here is an excellent account of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It is one article in a whole issue of IEEE's November 2011 Spectrum issue. Spectrum is the journal of electrical engineers:

24 Hours at Fukushima

A blow-by-blow account of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl

By Eliza Strickland / November 2011

Sometimes it takes a disaster before we humans really figure out how to design something. In fact, sometimes it takes more than one.

Millions of people had to die on highways, for example, before governments forced auto companies to get serious about safety in the 1980s. But with nuclear power, learning by disaster has never really been an option. Or so it seemed, until officials found themselves grappling with the world's third major accident at a nuclear plant. On 11 March, a tidal wave set in motion a sequence of events that led to meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station, 250 kilometers northeast of Tokyo.

Unlike the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, the chain of failures that led to disaster at Fukushima was caused by an extreme event. It was precisely the kind of occurrence that nuclear-plant designers strive to anticipate in their blueprints and emergency-response officials try to envision in their plans. The struggle to control the stricken plant, with its remarkable heroism, improvisational genius, and heartbreaking failure, will keep the experts busy for years to come. And in the end the calamity will undoubtedly improve nuclear plant design.

True, the antinuclear forces will find plenty in the Fukushima saga to bolster their arguments. The interlocked and cascading chain of mishaps seems to be a textbook validation of the "normal accidents" hypothesis developed by Charles Perrow after Three Mile Island. Perrow, a Yale University sociologist, identified the nuclear power plant as the canonical tightly coupled system, in which the occasional catastrophic failure is inevitable.

On the other hand, close study of the disaster's first 24 hours, before the cascade of failures carried reactor 1 beyond any hope of salvation, reveals clear inflection points where minor differences would have prevented events from spiraling out of control. Some of these are astonishingly simple: If the emergency generators had been installed on upper floors rather than in basements, for example, the disaster would have stopped before it began. And if workers had been able to vent gases in reactor 1 sooner, the rest of the plant's destruction might well have been averted.

The world's three major nuclear accidents had very different causes, but they have one important thing in common: In each case, the company or government agency in charge withheld critical information from the public. And in the absence of information, the panicked public began to associate all nuclear power with horror and radiation nightmares.

Go read the whole article. It is well worth your time. The rest of the article goes through the 24 hour timeline detailing the complications and mis-steps that led to the disaster.

We've learned a great deal about the Fukushima accident in the past seven months. But the nuclear industry's trial-and-error learning process is a dreadful thing: The rare catastrophes advance the science of nuclear power but also destroy lives and render entire towns uninhabitable. Three Mile Island left the public terrified of nuclear power; Chernobyl scattered fallout across vast swaths of Eastern Europe and is estimated to have caused thousands of cancer deaths. So far, the cost of Fukushima is a dozen dead towns ringing the broken power station, more than 80 000 refugees, and a traumatized Japan. We will learn even more as TEPCO releases more details of what went wrong in the first days of the accident. But as we go forward, we will also live with the knowledge that some future catastrophe will have yet more lessons to teach us.

The foot-dragging and refusal to share information or access outside experts by TEPCO is criminal. Every engineer I know was always willing to share information. It is a tough career and you want to learn through others experiences. But management puts up walls to protect "intellectual property" or, in the case of TEPCO, to hide facts from the prying eyes of the wider world.

One of the hats I wore was "software safety engineer" and my experience was that it was difficult to get management to pay more than lip service to safety. Worse, the analysis to uncover failure modes was not a popular activity for engineers who got paid for producing designs. I also worked as a performance engineer and I ran into similar problems getting engineers to take the analysis for performance seriously. But I found they were more amenable to performance because it was more concrete. I built models and that was something that was tangible. Safety analysis produced paper but it didn't come across as "real". I'm not saying that engineers were hostile to the analysis. Some were interested, but most were indifferent. They just saw it as another hoop they had to jump through to get their job done. There are excellent books on safety but, just like human-centred design, these books aren't on the bookshelves of most engineers.

The Robots are Coming, the Robots are Coming!

And on bicycles no less...



Maybe this "takeover" by the robots won't be so bad. This robo-guy is a midget on a bike. He isn't the hulking threat that Klaatu was in The Day the Earth Stood Still. And this isn't the gray goo that threatens to swallow us up and they populate the earth with their slimy descendants.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the day that I can sit down and have a friendly chat with a robot that not only makes a good companion but will help tuck me in bed at night and make sure I have three square meals a day. I'm an optimist with the fear of a little pessimism because I know some idiot will steal the warm and fuzzy robo-future and replace it with hulking RoboCop look-alikes who will beat me with a baton if I have an independent thought. The evil have a way of stealing sweetness and light and replacing it with power, dominance, fear, and pain. They prefer the future in shades of black. Oh... and with them on top.

Peak Oil has Peaked

Here is an interview of Daniel Yergin author of "The Quest: Energy Security and the Remaking of the Modern World"

In 1991 Yergin published "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power". He is an expert in oil. I trust his views and not the doom-and-gloom crowd who sell "peak oil". Sure oil is a finite resource, but it will last a lot longer than any of the fanatics who want to close down industry and go back to a romantic image of 1820s pastoralism realize. Read the book:

Update from the Front in the On-Going Computer War

Two years ago the US/Israel opened that latest offensive in the War of the Worlds that may be the Götterdämmerung of our civilization. They released the Stuxnet virus to degrade the Iranian attempt to build nuclear weapons.

In the interim, China has used viruses and worms sneak into computers around the war probably in preparation for opening a new front in the Computer Wars.

Now there is a mysterious outbreak of a virus in the US's drone fleet. It isn't clear who has unleashed this new attack and what the intentions of the probe may be.

We are in the fog of war and in the opening stages of WWIII.

From Wired magazine:

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.

“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”

Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.

Go read the whole article.

Most wars are fought with the bottom 90% of the population in a fog. We will be victims of this new war. We will have our economies wrecked, lives lost, and most of us won't even know there are battles going on, who is involved, and what kinds of devastation are being inflicted. We are like the serfs of the Middle Ages. Our feudal lords (the top 1% who control the government and military) are fielding armies that scourge the land and we know nothing about it until the armed columns descend upon our tiny village and put us all to the sword.

Death & Physics

I enjoy Jenifer Ouillette's Cocktail Physics blog. Here is a bit out of piece she has written on Robert Wilson:

... nobody forgot that the work they were doing at Los Alamos was both vital to national defense, and highly dangerous due to the radioactive substances involved. Wilson recalled his own brush with death while assisting a physicist in the Critical Assemblies Group with another experiment to determine when criticality was reached as one stacked a series of enriched uranium hydride cubes. He was surprised, and a bit dismayed, to find that the group didn't rely on the usual elaborate safety devices commonly used at cyclotron facilities at the time. Instead, the physicist arrived with a simple set-up involving a wooden table, a single neutron counter to monitor criticality, and a whole bunch of cubes of enriched uranium hydride.

Wilson watched, rapt, as the physicist started stacking uranium cubes, and then noticed with alarm that the neutron counter wasn't, well, counting. Upon inspection, he discovered that the voltage supply was burnt out. When the counter was turned back on, it lit up immediately, to Wilson's horror. "A few more cubes and the stack would have exceeded criticality and could well have become lethal," he recalled. Furious, Wilson chewed out the physicist, his division leader, and even raged about it to Oppenheimer himself, but he had to leave for Trinity the very next day, so he let the incident drop. Had he stayed and pursued the matter, Wilson believed, "I might have saved the lives of two people. To this day, the incident is on my conscience."

Those two people were Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. and Louis Slotin, both of whom died of radiation sickness after accidents that occurred while conducting critical experiments with a plutonium core -- known as "tickling the dragon."

More on Louis Slotin from Wikipedia:

On May 21, 1946, with seven other colleagues watching, Slotin performed an experiment that involved the creation of one of the first steps of a fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around a plutonium core. The experiment used the same 6.2-kilogram (13.7 lb) plutonium core that had irradiated Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., later called the "Demon core" for its role in the two accidents. Slotin grasped the upper beryllium hemisphere with his left hand through a thumb hole at the top while he maintained the separation of the half-spheres using the blade of a screwdriver with his right hand, having removed the shims normally used. Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.

At 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a "prompt critical" reaction and a burst of hard radiation. At the time, the scientists in the room observed the "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave". In addition, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand. Slotin instinctively jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere and dropping it to the floor, ending the reaction. However, he had already been exposed to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation. Slotin's radiation dose was about four times the lethal dose, equivalent to the amount that he would have been exposed to by being 1500 m (4800 ft) away from the detonation of an atomic bomb.

As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. Slotin's colleagues rushed him to the hospital, but irreversible damage had already been done. His parents were informed of their son's inevitable death and a number of volunteers donated blood for transfusions, but the efforts proved futile. Louis Slotin died nine days later on May 30, in the presence of his parents. He was buried in Winnipeg on June 2, 1946.

At first, the incident was classified and not made known even within the laboratory; Robert Oppenheimer and other colleagues later reported severe emotional distress at having to carry on with normal work and social activities while they secretly knew that their colleague lay dying.

The core involved was subject to a number of experiments shortly after the end of the war and was used in the ABLE detonation, during the Crossroads series of nuclear weapon testing. Slotin's experiment was set to be the last conducted before the core's detonation and was intended to be the final demonstration of its ability to go critical.

The accident ended all hands-on critical assembly work at Los Alamos. Future criticality testing of fissile cores was done with special remotely controlled machines, such as the "Godiva" series, with the operator located a safe distance away in case of accidents.

One of the jobs I had was software safety for the detrous manipulator being built for the Space Station. It was hard to get the engineers to think hard about "what could go wrong". We are all optimists by nature. We love to extrapolate the upside. It is really hard, however, to think about failure modes, the "what if" when things go wrong. It helps if you've had previous experience to guide you. But the problem with new technology is that it is "new". We all love to see the wonderful new possibilities of the new, but few like to muck around with the grim downside. Worse, when people do consider what can go wrong, they tend to overshoot and come up with real gloom-and-doom scenarios (e.g. gray goo or the singularity) rather than the more mundane cascade of of unlikely faults that have hidden connections that lead you into a major disaster.

An Insight into Steve Jobs

Here is Steve Jobs talking about his life at a Stanford graduation ceremony in 2005:



Steve Jobs was an interesting character.

Personally, I find the bit at 11:50 into this video to be the most interesting. His claim that "death is very likely the single best invention of life" is a little hard to take since I'm now nearing that age where the Grim Reaper is hanging around my door... waiting... I fully understand the "it clears out the old to make way for the new" but I'm a little resentful that I've lived my life backwards. When I was young and knew nothing I threw away my life. Now that I'm old and "wise" I don't have the future possibilities that are worthy of that wisdom. Oh well...

I remember trying to convince the principal of the high school in which I was teaching math to buy one of the original Apple personal computers in 1978 to give the kids on some "hands on" math experience with programming and algorithms. But the principal thought an electronic scoreboard for the basketball team was more important than a computer. So I quit teaching. I had learned a "lesson" in life: educational institutions are not really about "education".

Peak Oil

For the doomsday crowd that follows regular predictions of gloom-and-doom, the "peak oil" story has been a good one.

The typical "picture of doom" is something like this from Wikipedia:

Click to Enlarge
That picture is pretty convincing. We are on the slide to perdition. Only a bleak and hopeless future awaits us...

But wait a second. Here is a more recent graph from an article in the Houston Chronicle:

Click to Enlarge
The article goes on to report a "new peak" in production:

North America appears headed for an oil renaissance, with crude production expected to hit an all-time high by 2016, given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week.

U.S. oil production in areas including West Texas' Permian Basin, South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, and North Dakota's Bakken shale will record a rise of a little over 2 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects.

Canadian crude production is expected to grow by 971,000 barrels per day during the same period, with much of the oil headed for the U.S.

Combined, the U.S. and Canadian oil output will top 11.5 million barrels per day, which is even more than their combined peak in 1972.

Goldman Sachs has estimated the U.S. could move from being the No. 3 oil producer behind Saudi Arabia and Russia to the No. 1 spot by 2017.

It's a reversal of the steady downward production trend that started after 1971, when U.S. oil production peaked around 9.5 million barrels per day.

I know this is a shock and disappointment to the end-of-days crowd. But this is an old story. If you followed the Club of Rome with its best seller in the early 1970s, the book "Limits to Growth" you've seen this tale before. It is so convincing. The end is nigh! Repent!

But human ingenuity keeps foiling that tale of gloom and despair. It is so seductive to believe that there is no hope and we must give up our sinful "modern ways" and go back to our pastoral past when we were disease ravaged and lived an average of 34 years. But those pesky scientists and technologists keep ruining out return to a "golden age" by creating new techniques or helping us conserve or producing a new substitute. This story is older than civilization. But the siren call of "repent! the end is nigh!" keeps winning because it appeals to our dark side that expects us to be punished for "having it too good".

The Club of Rome pessimists are still in business and no doubt still selling their siren song of "the end is nigh!". But you are better off reading "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon. Unlike the Club of Rome, Simon has been right more than wrong. But unlike the Club of Rome, Simon is ignored by the press. It is so much easier to sell papers with the story of doom-and-gloom. Nobody wants to hear that we will "muddle through" or that we can count on "human ingenuity". We want morality plays. We want punishment for sinful ways, the excesses of the past. Nobody wants dull fact, reasoned judgement, and a scientific attitude. It doesn't sell.

Oil and Technology Opening the Door to Energy Self-Sufficiency for the US

Here is a bit from a press release by the American Chemical Society:

New technology that combines production of electricity with capture of carbon dioxide could make billions of barrels of oil shale — now regarded as off-limits because of the huge amounts of carbon dioxide released in its production — available as an energy source. That’s the topic of the latest episode in the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) award-winning “Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions” podcast series.

Adam Brandt, Ph.D., notes in the podcast that almost 3 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in the world’s deposits of oil-shale, a dark-colored rock laden with petroleum-like material. Brandt and colleague Hiren Mulchandani are at Stanford University.

The United States has by far the world’s largest deposits in the Green River Formation, which covers parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The domestic oil shale resource could provide 1.2 trillion to 1.8 trillion barrels. But concerns over the large amounts of greenhouse gases — mainly carbon dioxide — released by current methods prevent many companies from trying to extract oil from shale.

Brandt’s answer is EPICC — a self-fueled method that generates electricity, as well as the heat needed to produce that electricity from shale. The report, which appears in ACS’ journal Energy & Fuels, describes how EPICC could generate large amounts of electricity without releasing into the atmosphere carbon dioxide from burning the shale. That carbon would be captured and stored underground as part of the production process.

The new podcast is available without charge at iTunes and from www.acs.org/globalchallenges.

The gloom & doom crowd is going to be seriously disappointed. It reminds me of those in the 15th century gnashing their teeth about the disappearance of old oak forest just as Britain was rising to be the world's sea power. Or those doom & gloomsters who have been rushing about for the last 50 years warning about "peak oil". It is always very popular to linearly extrapolate from the past and discover doom awaits us. But their requires a steadfast ignorance about human ingenuity and technological change. The doom & gloom crowd always ignore "the ultimate resource" as they weave their tales of resource shortages and the doom that awaits us.

Privacy and Facebook

Here is a bit from an article in the NY Times where the journalist interviews Cory Doctorow about companies gathering large amounts of data about us:

The privacy bargain we make with tech companies usually involves giving up some personal data in return for a free service, as with Facebook or many mobile applications.

Doctorow argues it’s hard for people to assign a value to personal data. When the full consequences of giving up that data are still unknown, how do you determine whether the privacy bargain is a fair one?

“It’s hard to get worked up about things where the failure and the deed are separated by a long way,” said Doctorow. “It’s the same reason that people start smoking.”

He insists data-driven companies such as Facebook actively exploit users to solicit as much data as possible. “Facebook trains you to undervalue your privacy. These companies are choca with social scientists now and those people have read their Skinner (an American behaviorist), have read their Adler (founder of the school of the school of individual psychology) and they understand intermittent reinforcement.” In exchange for posting status updates, photos and other information, Facebook users are intermittently rewarded with attention from people they care about. This mechanism can have addictive qualities similar to gambling.

...

Tech companies often do not offer clear or easy privacy choices to users. Facebook constantly changes its privacy settings to push the default towards more public data, and its Byzantine custom privacy settings are bewildering for a new user. “Complexifying a proposition is usually there to stop you from finding out whether the deal is good,” comments Doctorow.

With mobile applications, the choice is often between giving the application all the data it requests or not installing at all.

...

One of the reasons that we undervalue out personal data seems to be that the threat is not visceral and concrete. “In technology we often have this core problem of taking a fairly abstract social harm and rendering it concrete,” concludes Doctorow. “I think science fiction is rubbish at predicting the future, but it can create narratives that become part of our discourse. Imagine it’s 1947 and Orwell hasn’t written 1984 yet, and you’re trying to explain to someone why you don’t want to be electronically surveiled.”

In other words, we are like those naive animals that don't understand that cars kill and wander out on the road at night only to be flattened one day as our past comes back to bite us in the ass.

My complaint about the tech companies is that they require you to contractually sign off of a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo which is (a) long and boring, (b) mostly unintelligible, and (c) puts liabilities on you while ensuring that the service provider has no liabilities. That clause (c) is the real killer because under the legal system it is effect "forever". You could have just given away rights to your first born and not know it. That kind of legal system is insane.

Internet Service and US Infrastructure

Government makes a difference. The political right in the US argues that government should be shrunk to fit in a bathtub where it can be strangled. But government provides the rules and the infrastructure for a civilized society. Thanks to the Republicans, the US standard of living is falling fast.

Here is the state of Internet service in the US. From a post by CommonDreams.org:

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the U.S. has sunk to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds, just behind Romania.

Why? Because our nation's regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers.

In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant FCC to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress.

Under the Bush administration, the FCC tossed out competitive broadband safeguards such as open-access requirements, which opened lines to other providers. In 2002 the agency declared that high-speed cable Internet access would no longer be considered a telecommunications service that opened the network to competitors, but rather an “information service” that did not. Following a 2005 court decision, the FCC also reclassified broadband delivered by the phone companies as an “information service.”

These were radical policy shifts that went against the long-held assumption that open communications in competitive markets were essential to economic growth and innovation.

Sadly, the right has whipped up propaganda that has taken a large proportion of the mind share in the US. In amongst the "hooray!" screams for Rick Perry's record of executions, there is a constant drum of propaganda for tax cuts and loosened regulations to "let the job creators" grow the economy. Funny. They've been unleashed for 30 years and the state of the US economy is now worse than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. So much for "job creators", a slick nickname for "fat cats sucking the life blood out of the economy".