From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 09:38:13 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 11:38:13 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: The most common line of thinking goes something like this: "You know, the Universe is soooo big, even the Galaxy is sooo big, that there MUST be intelligent life out there!" Well, as has been said here before, it's not THAT big. The assumption that the "Universe is big enough" - is a bad one. Still this assumption is widespread. It's a common idea. In the infinite space, with the infinite number of stars and with the infinite light speed, this "axiom of the masses" - would hold. But with the finite light speed or any other finite number - this reasoning can be easily wrong. Say, that there was a quadrillion of civilizations just like ours in the Universe. That still doesn't guarantee another civilization with a book named Rare Earth with the approximately the same plot. The probability p of an advanced civilization per star can easily be smaller than 1/N - where N is the number of stars in the Universe. The majority just forget this obvious fact. They just assume that p is bigger than 1/N or rather p is MUCH bigger than 1/N. Looks like it isn't! www.protokol2020.wordpress.com On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 10:05 PM, TwentFirstCentury Matters < matters21stcentury at yahoo.com> wrote: > "### Absolutely. Plus, we have to remember that our information about > the far reaches of the universe is very outdated. It takes time for > light cones to intersect... not seeing signs of expansions in galaxies > farther than 0.7 billion > > years is to be expected. This means we don't have to be the firstborn > in the whole universe, only the firstborn in a much smaller sphere, to > explain the still-empty skies." > > > Rafal, > would you surmise the farther away beings might be, the more unlike > humans they would be? > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Sep 1 14:44:49 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 07:44:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Tomaz Kristan Subject: Re: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? >.The most common line of thinking goes something like this:"You know, the Universe is soooo big, even the Galaxy is sooo big, that there MUST be intelligent life out there!".Well, as has been said here before, it's not THAT big...Looks like it isn't! We must recognize that as mind boggling as the thought may be, it is a possible explanation for the silent sky: we really are the first ones here. If true, this generates a line of thought even more astonishing. If we are the first tech enabled species in the galaxy, then this whole thing is ours, all of it, but there is a catch. We need to hurry. Reasoning: we model intelligence as an ever upward climb towards more and better, but it is not necessarily so. Humanity is accumulating knowledge at a high rate, but our collective intelligence may or may not increase in the long run. I can easily imagine mechanisms which would cause average intelligence to decrease. We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that last phrase is very important. I know we have these IQ tests and performance is going up. But we may be fooling ourselves. We tend to wait around for nano-santa to show up, but he may not. Robust nanotech might happen and not kill us, but it is speculative. We have a number of technologies we conceive, as a class could be called PS^2B^2, for Pie in the Sky in the Sweet By and By. But if we really ponder, we have a technology I call P^2DN^2 for Potatoes on the Plate in the Dirty Now and Now. An example of the latter would be the primitive MBrain nodes I sketched in a post a few days ago. If we look carefully, we could conceive of an MBrain that could be conceivably constructed using all technology that is either current or is on the immediately foreseeable horizon, using technologies understood and mastered already. This is important in the possible outcome of a gradually declining ability of humanity, which is one possible future (not the one I consider most likely, but a possibility.) We could conceive of an MBrain which would start tugging the sun towards another star, which is a necessary prerequisite to some earth-based life form colonizing the galaxy. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 15:51:11 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 16:51:11 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 3:44 PM, spike wrote: > We must recognize that as mind boggling as the thought may be, it is a > possible explanation for the silent sky: we really are the first ones here. > If true, this generates a line of thought even more astonishing. If we are > the first tech enabled species in the galaxy, then this whole thing is ours, > all of it, but there is a catch. We need to hurry. Reasoning: we model > intelligence as an ever upward climb towards more and better, but it is not > necessarily so. Humanity is accumulating knowledge at a high rate, but our > collective intelligence may or may not increase in the long run. I can > easily imagine mechanisms which would cause average intelligence to > decrease. > > We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average > intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that last > phrase is very important. I know we have these IQ tests and performance is > going up. But we may be fooling ourselves. > > We tend to wait around for nano-santa to show up, but he may not. Robust > nanotech might happen and not kill us, but it is speculative. We have a > number of technologies we conceive, as a class could be called PS^2B^2, for > Pie in the Sky in the Sweet By and By. But if we really ponder, we have a > technology I call P^2DN^2 for Potatoes on the Plate in the Dirty Now and > Now. An example of the latter would be the primitive MBrain nodes I > sketched in a post a few days ago. > > That is another alternative to the fate of intelligent civilizations. 1) They might keep going upwards and decide to do something else than spam the galaxy. 2) They might get control of their pleasure centres and exit to nirvana. 3) Intelligence might peak and then dwindle away as it ceased to be an evolutionary factor. Your suggestion 3) has support in that people are delegating more intelligence to their devices nowadays than ever before. One article commented that we used to casually remember dozens of phone numbers, but we have lost that ability as our phones do the remembering. We used to do mental arithmetic to add up bills, calculate percentages, etc., but not now. We used to read maps and plan journeys, but now we just key into the GPS system. And so on.... People think spending hours updating their status and reading and commenting on their friend's status is a significant activity. Actually, in some ways it might be. I note that Obama thinks that because hundreds of terrorists have tweeted and posted Youtube videos claiming the Assad military gassed civilians, that constitutes real evidence. Can a few thousand 'likes' really start a war? What a strange world we live in. BillK From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 16:02:18 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 18:02:18 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> Message-ID: spike, I agree with what you have just said. It very well could be, that small lizards are just waiting for us mammals to die out. Then they will continue as they used to, back in good old times before the KT event. It's possible that they will never become very intelligent, they will just die out sometimes later, when the Earth will become a lifeless planet (again). Until then, they will exercise the New Jurassic. It's a small opportunity window for us now. Before the dark will fall again. On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 4:44 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Tomaz Kristan > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?**** > > ** ** > > >?The most common line of thinking goes something like this:"You know, > the Universe is soooo big, even the Galaxy is sooo big, that there MUST be > intelligent life out there!"?Well, as has been said here before, it's not > THAT big...Looks like it isn't!**** > > ** ** > > We must recognize that as mind boggling as the thought may be, it is a > possible explanation for the silent sky: we really are the first ones > here. If true, this generates a line of thought even more astonishing. If > we are the first tech enabled species in the galaxy, then this whole thing > is ours, all of it, but there is a catch. We need to hurry. Reasoning: we > model intelligence as an ever upward climb towards more and better, but it > is not necessarily so. Humanity is accumulating knowledge at a high rate, > but our collective intelligence may or may not increase in the long run. I > can easily imagine mechanisms which would cause average intelligence to > decrease.**** > > We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average > intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that last > phrase is very important. I know we have these IQ tests and performance is > going up. But we may be fooling ourselves.**** > > We tend to wait around for nano-santa to show up, but he may not. Robust > nanotech might happen and not kill us, but it is speculative. We have a > number of technologies we conceive, as a class could be called PS^2B^2, for > Pie in the Sky in the Sweet By and By. But if we really ponder, we have a > technology I call P^2DN^2 for Potatoes on the Plate in the Dirty Now and > Now. An example of the latter would be the primitive MBrain nodes I > sketched in a post a few days ago.**** > > If we look carefully, we could conceive of an MBrain that could be > conceivably constructed using all technology that is either current or is > on the immediately foreseeable horizon, using technologies understood and > mastered already. This is important in the possible outcome of a gradually > declining ability of humanity, which is one possible future (not the one I > consider most likely, but a possibility.) We could conceive of an MBrain > which would start tugging the sun towards another star, which is a > necessary prerequisite to some earth-based life form colonizing the galaxy. > **** > > spike**** > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 16:09:18 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 18:09:18 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> Message-ID: BillK, > 2) They might get control of their pleasure centres and exit to nirvana. Their nirvana might end soon. Either by our (or somebody else) intervention, either by a GRB nearby. Even if you are in a nirvana, you must take care of your neighborhood if you want your nirvana to last. Your neighborhood is the Universe. On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 5:51 PM, BillK wrote: > On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 3:44 PM, spike wrote: > > We must recognize that as mind boggling as the thought may be, it is a > > possible explanation for the silent sky: we really are the first ones > here. > > If true, this generates a line of thought even more astonishing. If we > are > > the first tech enabled species in the galaxy, then this whole thing is > ours, > > all of it, but there is a catch. We need to hurry. Reasoning: we model > > intelligence as an ever upward climb towards more and better, but it is > not > > necessarily so. Humanity is accumulating knowledge at a high rate, but > our > > collective intelligence may or may not increase in the long run. I can > > easily imagine mechanisms which would cause average intelligence to > > decrease. > > > > We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average > > intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that > last > > phrase is very important. I know we have these IQ tests and performance > is > > going up. But we may be fooling ourselves. > > > > We tend to wait around for nano-santa to show up, but he may not. Robust > > nanotech might happen and not kill us, but it is speculative. We have a > > number of technologies we conceive, as a class could be called PS^2B^2, > for > > Pie in the Sky in the Sweet By and By. But if we really ponder, we have > a > > technology I call P^2DN^2 for Potatoes on the Plate in the Dirty Now and > > Now. An example of the latter would be the primitive MBrain nodes I > > sketched in a post a few days ago. > > > > > > That is another alternative to the fate of intelligent civilizations. > > 1) They might keep going upwards and decide to do something else than > spam the galaxy. > > 2) They might get control of their pleasure centres and exit to nirvana. > > 3) Intelligence might peak and then dwindle away as it ceased to be an > evolutionary factor. > > Your suggestion 3) has support in that people are delegating more > intelligence to their devices nowadays than ever before. One article > commented that we used to casually remember dozens of phone numbers, > but we have lost that ability as our phones do the remembering. We > used to do mental arithmetic to add up bills, calculate percentages, > etc., but not now. We used to read maps and plan journeys, but now we > just key into the GPS system. And so on.... > > People think spending hours updating their status and reading and > commenting on their friend's status is a significant activity. > > Actually, in some ways it might be. I note that Obama thinks that > because hundreds of terrorists have tweeted and posted Youtube videos > claiming the Assad military gassed civilians, that constitutes real > evidence. > Can a few thousand 'likes' really start a war? What a strange world we > live in. > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 17:46:59 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 10:46:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 7:44 AM, spike wrote: > We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average > intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that last > phrase is very important. I know we have these IQ tests and performance is > going up. But we may be fooling ourselves. > No offense, spike, but making conclusions based on that is a fallacy just like assuming that there must be other civilizations out there just because there are so many stars. Sure, we may be. Or we may not be. The hard, non-anecdotal evidence - the IQ tests and performance, as you mention - suggests we are not. Therefore the most likely conclusion is that we are not. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 18:04:06 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 19:04:06 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 6:46 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > No offense, spike, but making conclusions based on that is a fallacy just > like assuming that there must be other civilizations out there just because > there are so many stars. > > Sure, we may be. Or we may not be. The hard, non-anecdotal evidence - the > IQ tests and performance, as you mention - suggests we are not. Therefore > the most likely conclusion is that we are not. > > As you probably know (and what I think Spike was referring to) there is a lot of dispute about the IQ test results. Are IQ results rising just because people are getting used to them and treating them as a problem-solving game? Using the same abilities they have honed over years of playing computer games? And what about all the abilities not measured by IQ tests? What points in this direction is that the results on performance tests are not increasing (and even falling). Without calculators students struggle with maths problems. Computers do spelling and grammar checking. The internet answers questions and holds knowledge. Relying on their their own brain leaves most students failing miserably at anything that requires stored knowledge. They might have a high IQ, but what do they actually *know*? BillK From spike66 at att.net Sun Sep 1 18:29:57 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 11:29:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] tweets starting a war, was: RE: Silence in the sky-but why? Message-ID: <017f01cea741$43496780$c9dc3680$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK ... >...Actually, in some ways it might be. I note that Obama thinks that because hundreds of terrorists have tweeted and posted Youtube videos claiming the Assad military gassed civilians, that constitutes real evidence. Can a few thousand 'likes' really start a war? What a strange world we live in...BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, I will post more on the rest of your commentary later, after I have had some time to ponder, but I wish to comment on this last bit. Many, probably most Americans are desperately hoping the congress will just say no to intervention in Syria. Doing nothing is a terrible option, the second worst, with the worst being anything else we could do there. According to our lamestream press, Obama is asking putting the question to congress, but intends to treat it as advice rather than orders, reserving the power by executive precedent (Kennedy, Nixon et.al.) to act unilaterally. I am vaguely predicting the following outcome, perhaps with unfounded optimism: the congress will say no, Obama will decide to not go against their orders, reasoning that if he claims extraordinary powers, he should at least do something that would help his party politically rather than harm his party. spike From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 22:23:46 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 16:23:46 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D1614.20503@aleph.se> <20130828084308.GX29404@leitl.org> <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 11:43 PM, spike wrote: > At some point somewhere in time, some intelligent life form was the very > first. > Clearly, this must be the case. The obvious question is whether we are the very first. > We can set aside for now the argument that this first wise guy is us, and > agree that somewhere and somewhen in the observable universe, someone was > first. > Tautology, even if it is us. > If we assume, quite reasonably, that this first intelligent tech-enabled > species wanted to colonize the universe or at least the galaxy it > inhabited, I proposed years ago a design for an MBrain node, that looks > like this: > I don't follow the design especially, but the concept yes. > The reason I wanted to start with the assumption of the first intelligent > species is that that particular species would definitely see a radio silent > sky, and all the signals it sent out would go forever into cold dark dead > space. So if that species wanted to spread, it would need to move actual > matter, atoms and molecules, rather than instructions on how to build > copies of itself. So, these nodes would need to go. > > There is a good reason to think interstellar space could have diffuse > hydrogen clouds that would be mission-enders if you encounter one, even at > .001c. Your spacecraft would ablate away. But if you took your entire > star along, then the radiation from that star would dissipate the hydrogen, > as our star does now.**** > > Approximate dimensions about 120 mm diameter, so it is about the size of > our DVDs for those of you who are old enough to remember those, and with > three LCD regions for maintaining a desired attitude towards the first > smart star, I showed that a sufficiently large swarm of these things could > move a star anywhere you wanted to go. > But how many millions of years would it take to get it moving at a reasonable speed? Have you done those calculations Spike? I'm sure it depends on how many devices you make and how large they are and so forth... but assuming you take half the mass of the asteroid belt and build these things out of it... what kind of acceleration would you get? The other thing is how would you agree which direction to go? I'm guessing humanity would want to move to the outside of the galaxy where the metalicity is higher (more gold, seems like a good reason to go somewhere... LOL) but seriously, how would you figure out the right direction to go? Ok, you might be able to compute a good direction with regards to the imminent collision with the Andromeda Galaxy... :-) > **** > > My realization today is that with an MBrain moving a star, it could go to > a binary where both stars in the binary are on the main sequence. For main > sequence stars, the luminosity increases as 2^3.5 times the mass. So > doubling the mass would increase the luminosity by a factor of about 10, > and this would increase the available acceleration by 10. So the trick is > to move the home star to the nearest star and collide them, assuming their > combined mass is below the limit so that the combined stars would not go > supernova, then speed off at an acceleration of 10 times as many nanometers > per second squared, or if you don?t mind the oddball unit, several tens of > meters per square year. > If staring at your navel is indeed where such civilizations actually go, then moving the star about would use a lot of matter that could otherwise be used to create more navels... so that eventuality is still an interesting answer to the Fermi Paradox. > **** > > Oy vey, I realized that this whole post is babbling, and assumes everyone > who reads this far was in on the discussing going back at least ten years. > **** > > I need to go back and write some introduction to moving stars with > MBrains. Does everyone here know what I mean by that? You reflect some > fraction of the star?s radiant energy in one direction, and since momentum > is conserved, the whole star and planet system goes the opposite direction > the MBrain aims the light. Today?s realization: you combine stars to make > them faster. The first smart species would eventually invent an MBrain and > start rocketing away to the nearest star. Wouldn?t it? > Astronomer dudes... would there be any way of detecting a star moving in such an unnatural way? Would this be of SETI interest? Any efforts along those lines? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Sep 1 22:33:30 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 1 Sep 2013 16:33:30 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike spoke: I can easily imagine mechanisms which would cause average intelligence to > decrease. > You need look no further than Washington DC to see a prime example of such a mechanism. > **** > > We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average > intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that last > phrase is very important. > It's not the average intelligence that is important, but the intelligence of the least average person in the smart direction. One Einstein makes up for a million below average proles in some important ways. > I know we have these IQ tests and performance is going up. But we may be > fooling ourselves. > As long as the long tail keeps reaching towards intelligence, I think we are all good. So long as the dumb proles don't vote themselves too many feeding troughs. > **** > > We could conceive of an MBrain which would start tugging the sun towards > another star, which is a necessary prerequisite to some earth-based life > form colonizing the galaxy. > Why is that a necessary prerequisite? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 2 11:17:15 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 13:17:15 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D1614.20503@aleph.se> <20130828084308.GX29404@leitl.org> <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130902111715.GG29404@leitl.org> On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 04:23:46PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > But how many millions of years would it take to get it moving at a > reasonable speed? Have you done those calculations Spike? I'm sure it > depends on how many devices you make and how large they are and so forth... > but assuming you take half the mass of the asteroid belt and build these > things out of it... what kind of acceleration would you get? You're competing against relativistic craft ~kg to ~ton range, capable of 1-10 g acceleration. > The other thing is how would you agree which direction to go? I'm guessing > humanity would want to move to the outside of the galaxy where the Humanity that chose to become solid state or begat solid state will go everywhere it pleases. > metalicity is higher (more gold, seems like a good reason to go To astronomers, anything heavier than hydrogen or helium is a metal. I don't see why you need metals in the chemical sense for, other than transition metals, in traces. > somewhere... LOL) but seriously, how would you figure out the right > direction to go? Ok, you might be able to compute a good direction with > regards to the imminent collision with the Andromeda Galaxy... :-) From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 2 14:48:46 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 07:48:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130902111715.GG29404@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D1614.20503@aleph.se> <20130828084308.GX29404@leitl.org> <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> <20130902111715.GG29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <03b401cea7eb$874f5700$95ee0500$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Subject: Re: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 04:23:46PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > But how many millions of years would it take to get it moving at a > reasonable speed? Have you done those calculations Spike? I have done the calcs on it, takes 20 million years to get to the nearest star from here, doesn't ever get up to a reasonable speed for interstellar travel. The speed once it reaches the nearest star is about 200-ish meters per second, about the speed of a Booeing 737. The real magic is that you can deflect off of the nearest star gravitationally, and pick up some of its orbital velocity around the center of the galaxy. This is a good idea, since with this scheme you can't actually stop at the target star; you just go zooming on past. But it isn't really like flying over Salt Lake City on your way to Denver, for you leave behind some MBrain nodes at the target star, so they use the metal that is there and start a new MBrain. > but assuming you take half the mass of the asteroid belt and build > these things out of it... what kind of acceleration would you get? Kelly The sample calcs I did require about 20% of the asteroid belt and max acceleration is in the pico-G range as I recall, which is why I used the units meters per square year rather than an alternative picometers per square second. This whole notion isn't for the impatient types, who insist on rushing around in the lifetime of a particular species. >...You're competing against relativistic craft ~kg to ~ton range, capable of 1-10 g acceleration... Eugen That depends on what your definition of "compete" is. The other fast species can do their thing, while the MBrain goes about its business on a different time scale. > The other thing is how would you agree which direction to go? ... Kelly What you mean you? You and I wouldn't need to agree. The MBrain makes that decision without consulting humanity, and does what it collectively decides to do. If your question is how does an MBrain decide things and can you have competing MBrains around the same star, my answer is I don't know and I don't know. But MBrains are smart, so I would trust them to do the right thing. >I'm guessing humanity would want to move to the outside of the galaxy...Kelly Perhaps. Metal is very valuable in this scheme, but the outboard guys can carry metals inboard with them. The MBrain as photon rocket notion carries all the planets and everything else in there along for the ride. >...Humanity that chose to become solid state or begat solid state will go everywhere it pleases... Eugen Ja, if that becomes reality, this other scheme is likely a nonstarter. But humans to solid state is pie in the sky tech, whereas we have everything, or durn near almost everything we need right now to build an MBrain. MBrain tech is now potatoes on the plate technology. If humanity suffers a peak collective intelligence and starts declining (I can think of several mechanisms that could cause that) then we may never achieve human intelligence to solid state, and if not, we may never get out of the cradle. But if we create the means of converting the asteroid belt to an MBrain, then we start along the 20 million year journey to the next star, then the next intelligent life form will see a star coming at a couple hundred meters per second, realize there are wonderful opportunities, etc. Kelly more directly to your question, it could be that the original MBrain merely gets programmed to head off to the nearest star, with the MBrains never having anything like intelligence. The nodes just do what they do, like 6E26 chess computers, never developing intelligence or ever wanting to. > ...but seriously, how would you figure out the right > direction to go? Ok, you might be able to compute a good direction > with regards to the imminent collision with the Andromeda Galaxy... > :-) Kelly_______________________________________________ OK Kelly and other MBrain fans, here's your assignment: propose a direction to start. Considerations: as I noted before, the luminosity of a star on the main sequence scales as the 3.5 power of the mass, so if you double the mass of a star, its luminosity goes up by about 11 but its mass doubles, so the acceleration available with an MBrain goes up by five and some change. With that information, we want a star which we can combine with ours and still be on the main sequence, for causing a supernova could spoil an MBrain's whole eon. I haven't worked out the details on whether colliding two stars would cause a nova (note difference between nova and supernova.) I suspect any star collision would cause a nova, but that is not a show stopper I wouldn't think. There is another thing I thought of. Just as it might be possible to combine two stars, it might be possible to collide two stars in such a way as to create a smaller star. If for instance you have a 1 solar mass star colliding with another 1 solar mass star, you might be able to arrange the collision to create a 1.8 solar mass star and a 0.2, the smaller one going zinging off with enormous velocity. Why would you do that? We only have a few billion years before main sequence stars start to go red giant, and even less than a paltry billion years for the bigger stars. But if you take a star on the main sequence and remove some of the mass, its lifetime is extended enormously. The resulting star becomes more difficult to steer, because the luminosity available for the MBrain to deflect is lowered by a factor of about 280 and the mass is lowered by a factor of 5, so the available acceleration is lower by a factor of about 56, but the star's lifetime is extended by a factor of about 25. So with that technique we are partially freed from that tight deadline only a few billion years away and approaching rapidly. MBrain star steering is not for impatient types who expect everything to happen in this particular geological age. It helps to look at things from the perspective of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. All these eons, the greenstone watched these life forms pop out of the sea, swarm all over the place, run around in circles, accomplish nothing from the perspective of moving off to the nearest star and joining the others, or if there are no others, then becoming the others. spike From bbenzai at yahoo.com Mon Sep 2 15:08:27 2013 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 08:08:27 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1378134507.76823.YahooMailNeo@web165006.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Kelly Anderson dun wrote: > As long as the long tail keeps reaching towards intelligence, I think we > are all good. I don't think so, because: > So long as the dumb proles don't vote themselves too many > feeding troughs. you're assuming the dumb proles are intelligent enough to realise this would be a bad idea. Ben Zaiboc From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 2 15:33:35 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 16:33:35 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <1378134507.76823.YahooMailNeo@web165006.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1378134507.76823.YahooMailNeo@web165006.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 4:08 PM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > Kelly Anderson wrote: >> As long as the long tail keeps reaching towards intelligence, I think we >> are all good. >> So long as the dumb proles don't vote themselves too many >> feeding troughs. > > you're assuming the dumb proles are intelligent enough to realise this would be a bad idea. > > It's not the dumb factor in play. Look at Detroit. It's every group trying to maximise their own benefit. The difficulty is that in a complex interlinked society just about any group can put a gun to the city's head. Eventually the money to pay all the forced benefits runs out. BillK From giulio at gmail.com Mon Sep 2 16:35:19 2013 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 18:35:19 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> Message-ID: An alien artifact the size of a dust speck, crewed by 42,000 alien uploads implemented in nano-circuitry, landed on my nose five minutes ago. It is now writing a virus to replace junk DNA with a message. A few seconds ago, a wormhole opened in my freezer between the meat and the cottage cheese. It is now shooting photons at the eggs, and you wouldn't believe the message encoded in the polarization. It is really wow. No? Perhaps yes. Let's keep looking, and widen the search. On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 11:18 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-08-27 15:32, spike wrote: >> >> Of all the observed scientific anomalies that I know of, the misnamed >> Fermi paradox is absolutely the most vexing. The more we study that >> question, the more clear it is that there is something fundamentally wrong >> with our models of everything we think we know about intelligence, >> evolution, space travel, everything. > > > Yes. You can guess why it is a favourite around the FHI office. It annoys us > too. > > >> This view of the evolution of intelligence as a temporary random >> excursion from the boring mean, a spike rather than an S curve to a new and >> higher plateau, goes against everything I have always believed and hoped >> for, but it is the only way I have been able to explain Fermi's paradox. >> This realization is in some ways worse than when my own fundamentalist >> religious notions crumbled to dust beneath my feet. I do hope someone can >> talk me out of this grim conclusion. > > > Well, we might be lucky and life is amazingly unlikely. A more worrying > possibility is strong convergence: all civs somehow become quiet and do not > litter the universe; as I have argued this is deeply problematic - why are > there no defectors? The possibility of the earliest big expanders just > setting up some rules implementing this, with police nanoprobes in every > system, is downright paranoid but seems much more consistent - and might > actually be pretty benign, if a tad too close to a religious view (God as a > script set by ancient aliens running on a distributed police replicator > system...) The simulation argument might be the really nice one: we are > living inside the posthumans' simulation, and they just left out aliens. > > When being simulated or subject to alien police devices are the nice > options, then things are weird. > > > > -- > Dr Anders Sandberg > Future of Humanity Institute > Oxford Martin School > Oxford University > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 2 16:49:22 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 18:49:22 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> Message-ID: <20130902164922.GT29404@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 02, 2013 at 06:35:19PM +0200, Giulio Prisco wrote: > An alien artifact the size of a dust speck, crewed by 42,000 alien You need at least cm^3 for a human equivalent. Dust motes are possible, but quite stupid. > uploads implemented in nano-circuitry, landed on my nose five minutes You can cloak macroscale artifacts quite easily, especially if you've infiltrated CNS of people, causing selective agnosia. > ago. It is now writing a virus to replace junk DNA with a message. > > A few seconds ago, a wormhole opened in my freezer between the meat Even if wormholes were easy nevermind feasible, and smart cultures were common as dirt, statistically, not all of them would vanish without trace. Even a single hillbilly would be detectable halfway across the universe. Yet it isn't. > and the cottage cheese. It is now shooting photons at the eggs, and > you wouldn't believe the message encoded in the polarization. It is > really wow. > > No? Perhaps yes. Let's keep looking, and widen the search. Anything in numbers will have a giant metabolism. Aliens don't run on unicorn farts. From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Mon Sep 2 17:00:43 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 19:00:43 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <03b401cea7eb$874f5700$95ee0500$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D1614.20503@aleph.se> <20130828084308.GX29404@leitl.org> <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> <20130902111715.GG29404@leitl.org> <03b401cea7eb$874f5700$95ee0500$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 4:48 PM, spike wrote: > > I haven't worked out the details on whether colliding two stars would cause > a nova (note difference between nova and supernova.) I suspect any star > collision would cause a nova, but that is not a show stopper I wouldn't > think. Have you heard of "blue stragglers" ? Star merging may occur naturally in sufficiently dense environments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_straggler Alfio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Mon Sep 2 17:35:26 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 19:35:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 7:27 PM, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > > If the odds of intelligent, tool-using life with the potential for space > > travel arising around a star, in a given five billion years of the star's > > lifespan, is somewhere around one trillionth (readily justifiable when > you > > multiply together all the factors it would need to overcome, even before > the > > species gains the capacity to wipe itself out), then we would indeed > expect > > there to be exactly one intelligent species by now - and here we are. > Not > > counting anything we create, we could expect on the order of another ten > > billion years before another species like us came along. > > > > > > Gadzooks! You mean we are the only intelligent life in the galaxy! > > Now that's really frightening. > Do you know how the discovery of the first extrasolar planet went? It's an interesting tale [editorial note: I am writing this based on an interview on a printed astronomy magazine many years ago, so details like the star's name and the astronomer affiliations might be wrong. And I am unable to find references to it on any web page. But the gist of the story should hold anyway] During the 1990s, a team of Californian astronomers was collecting Doppler data of hundreds of stars. The idea was that, should a planet orbit the star, the planet's gravity will induce a small sinusoidal motion of the star that can be detected by ground telescopes. The astronomers did some preliminary calculation, and discovered that a small Earth-sized planet would be way too small to induce a detectable movement. Because of the limited sensitivity of their instruments, only a gas giant like Jupiter could move the star about with enough force to be seen. And Jupiter-sized planet have orbits many years long (obvious, no? like the ones in our solar system) because their orbit need to be nice and wide in order to intersect a lot of gas and collect all of it to reach their size (again obvious, no?). So this was a long-term project. Collect data, store it, and have a look at it a dozen years later when something resembling an orbit could be seen. In 1994, another group of Swiss astronomers was looking at star called 51 Pegasi. This star was included in the Californian catalogue, but the data had not been analyzed yet (they would have to wait some more years, anyway). After only some days of observation, it became obvious that the star was moving back and forth exactly as if a planet was orbiting it. And it was so clear, because it was a Jupiter-sized planet with an orbital period of just four days! After some months of disbelieving their own eyes, they published the discovery of the first extrasolar planet on Nature. Upon hearing the news, the Californians rushed to their computer, dusted off the storage disks, and in about 30 minutes they found the same planet in their data. Alas, they arrived too late. They had a consolation prize, for they were following not just one star, but about a hundred. They found two or three short-period Jupiters just by looking, and again two or three more with some additional effort. But they missed chance to be the first because of their preconceptions of how a solar system should be made. In the following years, all sorts of oddball systems have been found: some have multiple Jupiters close to the star, others have high-eccentricity orbits that periodically sweep a system clean of small debris like an Earth-sized planet, etc. It is true that selection effects still make it very difficult to detect whether a star hosts a planet similar to our own, but we know at least that our solar system, with all the planets in almost-round orbits and nicely grouped by size, cannot be taken as a typical example. Alfio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 2 18:07:21 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 19:07:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > In the following years, all sorts of oddball systems have been found: some > have multiple Jupiters close to the star, others have high-eccentricity > orbits that periodically sweep a system clean of small debris like an > Earth-sized planet, etc. It is true that selection effects still make it > very difficult to detect whether a star hosts a planet similar to our own, > but we know at least that our solar system, with all the planets in > almost-round orbits and nicely grouped by size, cannot be taken as a typical > example. > > Initially extrasolar planets found were all giant planets because they were easier to detect. But the Kepler mission now has thousands of candidates. Quote: In 2013, estimates of the number of Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way ranged from at least 17 billion to at least 144 billion. ----------------- BillK From gsantostasi at gmail.com Mon Sep 2 18:08:09 2013 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 13:08:09 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> Message-ID: Spike, Just relax, we are the first ones. Life is relatively abundant, intelligent life much less so. Everything is fine, even if it would be cool to have galactic friends to talk to. But this could be good news too because it shows how important human beings are. We have great responsability to seed the universe with intelligence and creativity. Giovanni On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 8:32 AM, spike wrote: > > Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? > > Anders tackles the Fermi paradox. > > > > >...'We still don't know what the answer is, but we know it's more radical > than previously expected.' > > ------------ > > > Of all the observed scientific anomalies that I know of, the misnamed Fermi > paradox is absolutely the most vexing. The more we study that question, > the > more clear it is that there is something fundamentally wrong with our > models > of everything we think we know about intelligence, evolution, space travel, > everything. If our current understanding of these things is anywhere close > to correct, there has been plenty of time for intelligence to evolve and > colonize everywhere in the visible universe, and the signals between > civilizations should be easily detectible. > > After pondering all the possibilities, I am forced to conclude that > apparently intelligence is inherently self-destructive or self-limiting, > and > that our current level of intelligence on this planet is anomalously high. > It goes against everything I dream for and envision for the future of > humanity: that the collective intelligence on this planet a century from > now > will me more like what it was a century ago, and a millennium from now more > like what it was a million years past, more like what it was for the 99.99 > percent of the time since life existed. In that view, intelligence is > temporary always and everywhere. > > This view of the evolution of intelligence as a temporary random excursion > from the boring mean, a spike rather than an S curve to a new and higher > plateau, goes against everything I have always believed and hoped for, but > it is the only way I have been able to explain Fermi's paradox. This > realization is in some ways worse than when my own fundamentalist religious > notions crumbled to dust beneath my feet. I do hope someone can talk me > out of this grim conclusion. > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 2 18:01:26 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 11:01:26 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D1614.20503@aleph.se> <20130828084308.GX29404@leitl.org> <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> <20130902111715.GG29404@leitl.org> <03b401cea7eb$874f5700$95ee0500$@att.net> Message-ID: <043d01cea806$7219b2c0$564d1840$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Alfio Puglisi Sent: Monday, September 02, 2013 10:01 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 4:48 PM, spike wrote: I haven't worked out the details on whether colliding two stars would cause a nova (note difference between nova and supernova.) I suspect any star collision would cause a nova, but that is not a show stopper I wouldn't think. Have you heard of "blue stragglers" ? Star merging may occur naturally in sufficiently dense environments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_straggler Alfio Cool thanks Alfio. I did some BOTECs on this notion and found something yesterday which they vaguely hint at in your article, the fast spin. I was trying to determine if the induced close encounter between two stars would transfer mass from the smaller to the larger under all circumstances. Turns out it's the other way around under most circumstances as far as I can tell, but what I was doing is figuring out if we could use angular momentum to do what I suggested yesterday, create a smaller mass star while keeping our modest forward speed, which took 20 million years to accumulate. There is one other question I still have no insights on how to calculate. If we induce a very close encounter between stars, transfer some mass from the more massive star, we really get the less massive star spinning wildly. That would (I think) cause that star to stay on the main sequence longer, since its pressure gradient would be decreased: the center of that star is at lower pressures than it would be if its sidereal motion is zero. I will post later on that if I manage to model this successufully and solve the equations, no guarantee. Some of you hipsters, do feel free to scoop me on that. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 2 18:26:16 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 11:26:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <047201cea809$e9f877b0$bde96710$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Alfio Puglisi >. >.Do you know how the discovery of the first extrasolar planet went? It's an interesting tale >.[editorial note: I am writing this based on an interview on a printed astronomy magazine many years ago, so details like the star's name and the astronomer affiliations might be wrong. And I am unable to find references to it on any web page. But the gist of the story should hold anyway] >.During the 1990s, a team of Californian astronomers was collecting Doppler data of hundreds of stars. The idea was that, should a planet orbit the star, the planet's gravity will induce a small sinusoidal .Alfio Alfio, this was indeed a cool story, and I recall the article. If we are talking about the same one, it was in about spring of 2000, and was mostly about Marcy and Butler's team. Oh my that was a time to be living, if one is into this sort of thing (I am bigtime) the 1990s when they started hauling in the discoveries of that which most of us felt certain had to be there somewhere. After that, the space guys started talking about the spacecraft which would later become Kepler, the mission which BALL AEROSPACE would SCREW UP for us and RUIN our fun, curse those lousy bastards but I digress, and oh my that was a time to be alive, was it not? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Mon Sep 2 20:10:12 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 22:10:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 8:07 PM, BillK wrote: > On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > > > In the following years, all sorts of oddball systems have been found: > some > > have multiple Jupiters close to the star, others have high-eccentricity > > orbits that periodically sweep a system clean of small debris like an > > Earth-sized planet, etc. It is true that selection effects still make it > > very difficult to detect whether a star hosts a planet similar to our > own, > > but we know at least that our solar system, with all the planets in > > almost-round orbits and nicely grouped by size, cannot be taken as a > typical > > example. > > > > > > Initially extrasolar planets found were all giant planets because they > were easier to detect. > But the Kepler mission now has thousands of candidates. > > Quote: > In 2013, estimates of the number of Earth-sized planets in the Milky > Way ranged from at least 17 billion to at least 144 billion. > Oh yes, but what kind of stars are hosting those planets, and at what distance? Turns out that most of those stars are M-type, way cooler than our sun, and to be habitable, the planed must be so close to the star that it will be probably tidally-locked to present always the same face to the red star. A very, very different environment from our one. In all, only about 10% or less of Kepler's candidates could be considered potentially habitable planets, even discouting the tidal lock. All this still suffers from selection effects, because: 1) close planets on small stars are easier to find, even with Kepler 2) our idea of what an habitable planet is could well be biased by our sample of one For added fun, have a look at this gallery: http://physics.sfsu.edu/~skane/hzgallery/gallery.html What I find interesting is the eccentricity: a lot of the extrasolar planets have very high eccentricity, some even resemblng cometary orbits! Look at how many of the orbits are off-center with respect to their star! If you click on the green circles, representing the habitable zone, you'll see that even most of the potentially habitable planets have orbits that are far from circular. Again selection effects count here, because a high eccentricity orbit is easier to find, but not by a lot. This time it seems a real feature of planets, that our solar system is sorely missing. Probably to our advantage, it must be said... Alfio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 3 00:00:00 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 2 Sep 2013 17:00:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Fred Pohl, R.I.P. In-Reply-To: <20130902183550.29125917z2mu67di@webmail2.webhero.com> References: <20130902183550.29125917z2mu67di@webmail2.webhero.com> Message-ID: <013601cea838$89a96ca0$9cfc45e0$@att.net> Fred Pohl has died, damn. {8-[ I don't know if he was signed up. I am forwarding this for Robert Kennedy: -----Original Message----- From: Robert G Kennedy III, PE [mailto:robot at ultimax.com] Sent: Monday, September 02, 2013 4:36 PM To: spike66 at att.net Subject: Fred Pohl, R.I.P. No doubt was a formative influence of many on this listserve. Last of the "Golden Age" authors, I believe. Dammit. http://io9.com/rip-frederik-pohl-the-man-who-transformed-science-fict-124140 5614 At least I had the honor of having dinner with him at the Heinlein Centennial in 2007. Didn't get that with RAH himself. Robert -- Robert G Kennedy III, PE www.ultimax.com From lubkin at unreasonable.com Tue Sep 3 00:48:42 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 20:48:42 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Fred Pohl, R.I.P. In-Reply-To: <013601cea838$89a96ca0$9cfc45e0$@att.net> References: <20130902183550.29125917z2mu67di@webmail2.webhero.com> <013601cea838$89a96ca0$9cfc45e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <201309030106.r8316Sc9019563@yee.zia.io> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: 7c5dafb.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 165601 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 3 16:50:18 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 09:50:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma: was: RE: tweets starting a war... Message-ID: <01df01cea8c5$acb52760$061f7620$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] Subject: tweets starting a war, was: RE: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK ... >...Actually, in some ways it might be. I note that Obama thinks that because hundreds of terrorists have tweeted and posted Youtube videos claiming the Assad military gassed civilians, that constitutes real evidence. Can a few thousand 'likes' really start a war? What a strange world we live in...BillK _______________________________________________ The way this is all playing out, it appears the guy with the most and the best guns is stuck with the moral responsibility to enforce international law. Should the guy with the most and the best guns be stuck with the moral responsibility to enforce international law? Since I have your ethical engines warming up, I have been presented with another moral dilemma by 23andMe, this one much more complicated than the one I posed a few weeks ago. As you recall, that one was where a young lady who did not know her father showed up on my cousins list. She contacted me for help. I pondered for a while, then punted that one in a way: I explained to her how to use online resources to do what she wanted, find information available to the public, etc. Then I promptly stepped out of the loop, but in a sense I outed my own second cousin, with unknown consequences. I do confess I would not be pleased with that second cousin had he done that to me, however I would not be pleased with myself in that case for having sired a pup and then hidden from her for her entire life, so he and I would both be annoyed at me. Now I have a bigger problem, which will need to wait until this afternoon, gotta run. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Sep 3 17:42:10 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 13:42:10 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Inappropriate For Children Message-ID: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwMyjKQ725E -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Sep 3 19:49:01 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2013 12:49:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma: was: RE: tweets starting a war... In-Reply-To: <01df01cea8c5$acb52760$061f7620$@att.net> References: <01df01cea8c5$acb52760$061f7620$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sep 3, 2013 10:05 AM, "spike" wrote: > The way this is all playing out, it appears the guy with the most and the > best guns is stuck with the moral responsibility to enforce international > law. Should the guy with the most and the best guns be stuck with the moral > responsibility to enforce international law? Who defines international law? Often the guy with the most and the best guns. So yeah, that guy is also charged - usually by that same guy - with enforcing it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Wed Sep 4 12:23:29 2013 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 05:23:29 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <01df01cea8c5$acb52760$061f7620$@att.net> References: <01df01cea8c5$acb52760$061f7620$@att.net> Message-ID: <1378297409.86325.YahooMailNeo@web121203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> BillK wrote: > I note that Obama thinks that?because hundreds of terrorists have tweeted and posted Youtube videos?claiming the Assad military gassed civilians, that constitutes real evidence.? Can a few thousand 'likes' really start a war? What a strange?world we live in...< According to the official unclassified document (believe it or don't believe it) the US has satellite imagery of the rockets launched from regime-controlled territory into the rebel-controlled territories affected by the chemicals on the morning of the attack. We also have an intercepted telephone call of a Syrian commander in which he implicates Syrian forces and expresses concern that UN inspectors might find the evidence. So, it really is not all about YouTube videos, though we have at least 100 videos too. Brit, French, and German intelligence report similar evidence, including an intercepted phone call in which Hezbollah expressed surprise at Assad's "mistake". Here is the official US Assessment: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/USG-assessment-on-Syria.pdf Gordon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 4 12:46:06 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 14:46:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <1378297409.86325.YahooMailNeo@web121203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <01df01cea8c5$acb52760$061f7620$@att.net> <1378297409.86325.YahooMailNeo@web121203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20130904124606.GU29404@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 05:23:29AM -0700, Gordon wrote: > Brit, French, and German intelligence report similar evidence, including an intercepted phone call in which Hezbollah expressed surprise at Assad's "mistake". It's not that we've caught these sources lying before, right? P.S. Ignore the three-headed dog, don't forget Snowden, Manning and Assange > Here is the official US Assessment: > http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/USG-assessment-on-Syria.pdf From spike66 at att.net Wed Sep 4 14:35:04 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 07:35:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Deep field flythrough In-Reply-To: <522735A1.3090403@philosophy.ox.ac.uk> References: <522735A1.3090403@philosophy.ox.ac.uk> Message-ID: <010401cea97b$f382f300$da88d900$@att.net> Anders posted this to me. Way cool, ja? If one is posting on the topic of intelligence in the cosmos, do view this 59 second video for a bit of perspective. spike -----Original Message----- From: Anders Sandberg [mailto:anders.sandberg at philosophy.ox.ac.uk] Subject: Deep field flythrough Just thought you might want to see this: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130827.html (Still on the list, but due to a mail client folder mess-up I cannot get the list emails; I am working on it) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Sep 4 17:40:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 10:40:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma Message-ID: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] >...Since I have your ethical engines warming up, I have been presented with another moral dilemma by 23andMe, this one much more complicated than the one I posed a few weeks ago...Now I have a bigger problem, which will need to wait until this afternoon, gotta run... spike Ethical dilemma posed by 23andMe A few weeks ago a distant cousin contacted me trying to determine our most recent common ancestor, something which is not at all remarkable except that this relative is black. She viewed Alex Haley's Roots miniseries as a teenager in the 1970s, and became interested in genealogy, started doing her own, specifically searching for former slaves, but came up empty handed. Half of her ancestors were fairly recent immigrants from Africa, so they were out, and the others who came earlier settled in New York and Massachusetts, where they didn't have slavery, so it was looking like none of the candidate 32 GGGgrandparents would be former slaves but she had some candidates for whom she didn't have enough information to conclude with confidence than none of their ancestors were former slaves. She noted that at family reunions, her cousins just assumed, as she had as a teen, that her ancestors had been slaves in America, but had to later conclude that there were few, if any in that category. She chose to not disabuse her cousins of these notions. Many years went by, then 23andMe showed up. She discovered she had some European genes and went back to work on the family research. She knew she had one GGGgrandfather who was thought to be a malatto, white enough to talk his way into the Union army in 1863. She thought he is where at least some of the European genes were coming from, and perhaps he or his parents had been sired by a white slave owner etc, but she didn't have that information, didn't know his parents names. She had his name and family tradition of his Union army service. That name didn't help us in finding our common ancestor, because that name didn't show up anywhere in my family tree and none of the names in my family tree showed up in hers. So no clues there. The other half of the story is less pleasant. Back about 1989 and 1990, I was doing genealogy the old fashioned way. I had a death certificate of my GGgrandmother, which listed the maiden name of her mother. I searched on that and found a matching name, but it was from another state, Georgia. This was the only reference I could find to that name, but I couldn't prove they were the same person and had no explanation for why this mother and this baby would have showed up in another state with no apparent family members nearby. I read the story anyway, in one of the paper books in the Sutro library. I will draw the curtain of mercy upon the details, but the outline is as follows: the family I found which I had no direct evidence were my relatives, had a nice farm in Georgia, but General Sherman's army came through in November of 1864, brutalized the family murdering at least two of them, destroyed the farm, wrecked and burned their farming tools, took their stored food leaving them to starve that winter, slew their animals, but one of the teenage daughters managed to survive being gang raped. She became pregnant. According to the story in this book, she was urged to give up her Yankee baby for adoption to a local black family, but refused, and ended up leaving the area. At the time, I recall wondering how the hell the locals figured that baby would be better off being adopted by a black family in postwar Georgia than being raised by a single mother. It wasn't the baby's fault she was sired by Union troops, but in any case, I moved on, for I didn't even know if there was any relation there, until a number of circumstances arose recently, such as my discovery of cousins on 23andMe from an area who traced their ancestry back to this GGgrandmother with this name which matched the single teen G^3grandmother from Georgia who had been taken by force by General Sherman's men on their murderous march to the sea. These cousins in another state did not have in their family tradition anything about the circumstances of their ancestor's birth, in fact they had nothing. This black cousin gave me the name of her mulatto ancestor, from which I was able to find civil war service records, which verified that he was part of Sherman's army in a division which was in the place where the Georgia farm was attacked approximately nine months before my GGgrandmother was born. The evidence is compelling: my own G^3grandfather was a Union soldier and a rapist. That explains my 1/64th subSaharan African ancestry. The evidence, if not conclusive, is at least compelling as all hell. So now, my ethics hipster friends, what do I do now? Do I tell my black cousin? Or do I go to my grave with that information? Or do I give the name of my G^3grandmother and let her discover this shameful history on her own? spike From sparge at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 19:24:37 2013 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 15:24:37 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Life or death Message-ID: A singer/songwriter/guitar player I follow on Twitter posted the following tweet: ---- Jason Isbell @JasonIsbell 3 Sep There aren't really any "life or death" situations. More like "death now, or death later" situations. ---- Which is pretty good, but it didn't take me too long to come up with the decision to pursue cryonic preservation as one that could *potentially* really be "life or death". -Dave From atymes at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 19:44:08 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 12:44:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sep 4, 2013 10:55 AM, "spike" wrote: > So now, my ethics hipster friends, what do I do now? > > Do I tell my black cousin? I fail to see the downside of this course of action. Given what you have said, it would do her no harm, and it is information she has been searching for. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Sep 4 20:27:56 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 13:27:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 12:44 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma On Sep 4, 2013 10:55 AM, "spike" wrote: > So now, my ethics hipster friends, what do I do now? > >>. Do I tell my black cousin? spike >.I fail to see the downside of this course of action. This whole revelation is one very rare example in my own life of a piece of information I would unknow if we had the option to unknow some piece of information we know. If anyone here knows how to unknow something, do clue me. There are mercifully rare examples of information which is harmful to the individual. This might be one of them. >. Given what you have said, it would do her no harm. Is that my call to make? Is there any introduction or opt-out exit ramp I should offer? Is that analogous to how 23andMe carefully introduces clients to their markers on two particular diseases before revealing them, offering the option to not unlock those two files? Note on that: I opened both, don't have the indicators, my cousin opened both and has markers for one of the two really bad diseases, my bride opted to open neither file. >. and it is information she has been searching for. It is that, and this is the reason why I am seriously considering telling what I know. I can estimate the upside of telling more easily than I can estimate the downside. Thanks Adrian. Other opinions please? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 21:31:10 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 15:31:10 -0600 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 2:27 PM, spike wrote: > >? and it is information she has been searching for? > > It is that, and this is the reason why I am seriously considering telling > what I know. I can estimate the upside of telling more easily than I can > estimate the downside.**** > > Thanks Adrian.**** > > Other opinions please? > I would put the chances that ALL of us are descended from some rapist somewhere at nearly 100%. Just because you know the name of one of your rapist g^3parents, doesn't make you a worse person. Tell the girl. She's interested and wants to know. The real ethical dilemma is whether to track down the other white descendants of this white northern soldier and tell them? They aren't asking. Should you force it down their throats the way he forced his down hers? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 21:44:20 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 15:44:20 -0600 Subject: [ExI] FW: Deep field flythrough In-Reply-To: <010401cea97b$f382f300$da88d900$@att.net> References: <522735A1.3090403@philosophy.ox.ac.uk> <010401cea97b$f382f300$da88d900$@att.net> Message-ID: And you could take 12,913,982 more pictures/videos just like this one and not see the same galaxy twice. -Kelly On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:35 AM, spike wrote: > Anders posted this to me. Way cool, ja? If one is posting on the topic > of intelligence in the cosmos, do view this 59 second video for a bit of > perspective. spike**** > > ** ** > > -----Original Message----- > From: Anders Sandberg [mailto:anders.sandberg at philosophy.ox.ac.uk] > Subject: Deep field flythrough > > ** ** > > Just thought you might want to see this:**** > > ** ** > > http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130827.html**** > > ** ** > > (Still on the list, but due to a mail client folder mess-up I cannot get > the list emails; I am working on it)**** > > ** ** > > --**** > > Dr Anders Sandberg**** > > Future of Humanity Institute**** > > Oxford Martin School**** > > Oxford University**** > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 21:53:31 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 15:53:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <20130904124606.GU29404@leitl.org> References: <01df01cea8c5$acb52760$061f7620$@att.net> <1378297409.86325.YahooMailNeo@web121203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <20130904124606.GU29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 6:46 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 05:23:29AM -0700, Gordon wrote: > > > Brit, French, and German intelligence report similar evidence, including > an intercepted phone call in which Hezbollah expressed surprise at Assad's > "mistake". > > It's not that we've caught these sources lying before, right? > > P.S. Ignore the three-headed dog, don't forget Snowden, Manning and Assange > > > Here is the official US Assessment: > > > http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/USG-assessment-on-Syria.pdf > You have to admit that it would be an intelligence coup of the highest degree if the rebels actually did this and framed Assad successfully. Like the Russians say, what did Assad have to gain by doing this? He was winning by all accounts, and now he may soon be handed a whoop ass by a major world power. So is Assad that stupid, or are the rebels that smart? And if the rebels are that smart, are Obama and the CIA that dumb? Well, the CIA has been fooled before *cough* Iraq *cough*... The similarity is interesting because the Obama white house is leaning on the CIA in a heavy way for "actionable evidence" in exactly the same way the Bush white house did. Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it, but only a decade later!?! It boggles the mind. The fallout for this will be great if Obama pierces the human shields Assad has now put in place around all of his goodies. Not to mention the spanking Israel stands to face. Obama was an idiot to put that "red line" statement out there. Hide behind John Kerry, you wimp! -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Sep 4 21:57:30 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 14:57:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson . >.Tell the girl. She's interested and wants to know. Thanks Kelly, I am vaguely inclined to agree. >.The real ethical dilemma is whether to track down the other white descendants of this white northern soldier and tell them? They aren't asking. Should you force it down their throats the way he forced his down hers? -Kelly That one's easy Kelly: No. If they aint askin' I aint tellin. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 22:17:01 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 18:17:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:40 PM, spike wrote: > Do I tell my black cousin? > > Or do I go to my grave with that information? > > Or do I give the name of my G^3grandmother and let her discover this > shameful history on her own? > I don't think history has any particular morality. What is your current policy on sharing knowledge? You did say that you wish you could unknow this information, but since we'll assume willful destruction of information is antithetical to life- (and identity) preservation, you are unable to do so. I think this is an interesting question. We have record-retention policies that certain documents must be available upon request for a minimum amount of time but we don't really much experience with records that must NOT be available after a duration of access. Yes, we're starting to wise-up about getting rid of evidence before it is requested, maybe that sets some precedence. In this case though, you've recovered information from the past. Is there some value to the present? Is it your responsibility to protect the future from whatever harm may come from sharing this knowledge? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 23:01:05 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 17:01:05 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Inappropriate For Children In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: IMHO, this is the worst of all his videos. He has some really good ones though. -Kelly On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 11:42 AM, John Clark wrote: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwMyjKQ725E > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 4 23:02:29 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 17:02:29 -0600 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:57 PM, spike wrote: > *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > > *?***** > > ** ** > > >?Tell the girl. She's interested and wants to know?**** > > ** ** > > Thanks Kelly, I am vaguely inclined to agree.**** > > ** ** > > >?The real ethical dilemma is whether to track down the other white > descendants of this white northern soldier and tell them? They aren't > asking. Should you force it down their throats the way he forced his down > hers? -Kelly**** > > ** ** > > That one?s easy Kelly: No. If they aint askin? I aint tellin. > Aww, but Spike... He forced himself on her... What about that old ethic of an eye for an eye? Don't they deserve it... ;-) -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Sep 4 23:21:23 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 16:21:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <017b01cea9c5$79566680$6c033380$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Subject: Re: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 1:40 PM, spike wrote: Do I tell my black cousin? Or do I go to my grave with that information? Or do I give the name of my G^3grandmother and let her discover this shameful history on her own? >.I think this is an interesting question.In this case though, you've recovered information from the past. Is there some value to the present? Is it your responsibility to protect the future from whatever harm may come from sharing this knowledge? Mike Mike this is a case where exactly one person other than me would be interested in knowing it. Kelly and Adrian may have clued me sufficiently. Currently unless someone talks me out of it, I am inclined to gently suggest a possible explanation to my cousin without going into gory details about the behavior of the Union troops, and give her the name of one of my ancestors who is likely common to all those white cousins she found. I see no compulsion to write about it in the family book. It will be interesting to see what she does with the info if she does just a little digging. Will she tell her cousins they probably have no former slaves in their past? Will she tell them to review their high school history texts in the chapter called "Sherman's March to the Sea" or google on it? I will likely pass along the info, but I can see plenty of downside to it. I have no control over that info once it gets free. Ja I know information wants to be free. But once it is, that information is free to kick anyone's ass it wants. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 5 00:14:51 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 17:14:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> Message-ID: <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Subject: Re: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 3:57 PM, spike wrote: That one's easy Kelly: No. If they aint askin' I aint tellin. spike >.Aww, but Spike... He forced himself on her... What about that old ethic of an eye for an eye? Don't they deserve it... ;-) -Kelly Who is they, Kelly? My fourth cousin didn't do anything wrong. Neither did I. Rather I haven't yet. But it feels like anything I do here is at least partly wrong. I have a thought experiment for you Kelly and others who are reading this thread. This exercise has a point. Take a list of characteristics you consider important to being a good person in your view, put them in order of importance if you wish, any number of characteristics, and personalize them, your top values rather than what you have been taught are the right values. What makes a good successful person in your view? Perhaps you chose honesty, fairness, intelligence, diligence, kindness, generosity. You can likely envision a person who you know who is all that. OK now, estimate your position on that scale as a percentile as compared to every person in the world. My guess is that you estimated your position in the top half of every one of those scales. Repeat for all people in your nation. Speculate you still did well in all categories, and if you repeat for everyone in your neighborhood, you likely still did well. In all three cases, if you averaged your percentile in all those categories, you likely scored in the 70s or perhaps even the 80s. OK now, repeat the above experiment will a group composed of all your direct ancestors. Hmmmm, my ancestors. Imagine them gathered in a fantasy or thought experiment where all of your ancestors are the age you are now, gathered in one spot. That would be a hell of a party, would it not? If you imagined the above thought experiment compared against this crowd, your own genetic donors, are you more honest, smarter, fairer, more diligent, etc than they? If you are like me, you probably put yourself about average on many if not most of those scales, and possibly below average, so if you average your scores on all your scales compared to your own ancestors, you might be only around 50th percentile average. Anyone else get that result? Look at that a different way. That thought experiment, if it turned out the same as it did for me, is equivalent to saying your own ancestors were better than average people. We tend to think highly of our own ancestors. If so, is it not upsetting to learn that one of our own was an evil bastard? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pjmanney at gmail.com Thu Sep 5 01:23:33 2013 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 18:23:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:14 PM, spike wrote: > Look at that a different way. That thought experiment, if it turned out the same as it did for me, is equivalent to saying your own ancestors were better than average people. We tend to think highly of our own ancestors. > > If so, is it not upsetting to learn that one of our own was an evil bastard? I'm fascinated that someone can't imagine their ancestors as complete assholes/psychos/sociopaths. Everyone has nasty ancestors. Everyone. From an evolutionary bio standpoint (calling Keith!), we're all the product of rapists and pillagers. If you were Australian, Spike, you'd brag about how badass your transported ancestors were. It's a mark of distinction if your GGGGdad was a serial killer as opposed to a lowly and all to common thief. The worse the crime, the greater the pride... ;-) Hell, both my grandfathers were SOBs. Dad's dad abandoned his two small boys to their psychotic, drug addicted mother because he couldn't be bothered and happily never saw them again until they tracked him down 28 years later. Mom's dad was a life-of-the-party alcoholic who charmed the pants off of everyone and never said a truthful thing in his life and was the ruin of everyone he sunk his claws into. That doesn't make me less of a successful and happy person, with a great family life. In fact, it's a testament to the malleability of the human spirit that my parents came from such damaged beginnings and succeeded on their own terms, together. They celebrated their 50th anniversary this April. Why would you -- or anyone -- care about the bad deeds of someone from so long ago, just because you share the tiniest bit of genetic material? I just don't get it... PJ From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 5 02:06:50 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 22:06:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <017b01cea9c5$79566680$6c033380$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <017b01cea9c5$79566680$6c033380$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 7:21 PM, spike wrote: > Mike this is a case where exactly one person other than me would be > interested in knowing it. Kelly and Adrian may have clued me > sufficiently. Currently unless someone talks me out of it, I am inclined > to gently suggest a possible explanation to my cousin without going into > gory details about the behavior of the Union troops, and give her the name > of one of my ancestors who is likely common to all those white cousins she > found. > > ** ** > > I see no compulsion to write about it in the family book.**** > > ** ** > > It will be interesting to see what she does with the info if she does just > a little digging. Will she tell her cousins they probably have no former > slaves in their past? Will she tell them to review their high school > history texts in the chapter called ?Sherman?s March to the Sea? or google > on it?**** > > ** ** > > I will likely pass along the info, but I can see plenty of downside to > it. I have no control over that info once it gets free. Ja I know > information wants to be free. But once it is, that information is free to > kick anyone?s ass it wants. **** > > > That's why I asked about your policy (principle) on the matter. Whether it's one person on one billion people, does it change how you feel about "information freedom" ? I didn't post it earlier, but I still have a mental picture of Prometheus deciding if he grants humanity fire for all the good that it does when used responsibly or keep us from the pain of being burned? fire is an analogy for knowledge. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pizerdavid at rocketmail.com Wed Sep 4 20:22:14 2013 From: pizerdavid at rocketmail.com (David Pizer) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 13:22:14 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Can we become immortal? Message-ID: <1378326134.15260.YahooMailNeo@web161802.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Defense of "Immortalism." I *want* to live forever using scientific methods if they become available.? ??There are many others who now are willing to make that claim too.?? When we talk about science reversing aging, and/or creating other possible ways to survive from death, (cloning, Transhumanism, uploading, & others), we are sometimes admonished by our fellow "Extreme Life" advocates not to use the "I" word, (Immortality).? ?They say it will be impossible to become immortal because they claim that even if science can create an un-aging body, (or other suitable containers), for YOU and/or I to live in, (in the future), it will still be impossible to be immortal (to live forever) for several various reasons.?? I will discuss their reasons below and give my reasons why they may be wrong and it just MIGHT BE POSSIBLE TO BECOME SCIENTIFICALLY IMMORTAL in the future. 1.? Some claim the universe will someday quit expanding and gravity will begin to pull the universe back into a single point where all matter and energy will be compressed into a space smaller than the head of a pin,? (called The Big Crunch), and that it will be impossible for anything to survive in that situation. 2.? Or, they claim the universe will keep expanding, (due to dark energy?), pushing the planets and stars so far apart? that the temperature drops to close to the temperature of absolute zero, everything is turned into black holes or tiny particles, and nothing can live in this situation called "The Big Chill." 3.? But there is another possible fate for our universe, called "The Goldilocks Universe." ?In this more probable situation the expansion rate of the universe gradually slows down to where expansion forces and gravity offset each other just right, and our universe goes on forever.? What a beautiful concept - An Immortal Universe filled with? Immortal People. Afterthought:? In my many years on this planet discussing cryonics and other options for scientific immortality, I have found that many opponents claim they know of reasons why cryonics or immortality, or very extreme life extension, won't work.? But they really have other reasons to make these negative claims where they either don't want Scientific Immortality to work, ?or they don't want us to talk in public about these great advancements working while the extreme life extension movement, (or Immortality movement), is so small compared to the tradition religions with their exclusive, hopeful methods of immortality.?? They (perhaps correctly ? I don't know) don't want scientific immortality prospects to accidentally appear to compete with traditional religious philosophy for immortality while our movement is so small and vulnerable.?? I say that this is a valid concern because we have seen historically how brutal one traditional religious group can treat different (usually smaller) religious groups when the more powerful group feels the smaller group's existence is creating growing competition for the minds of the masses. I don't see why Scientific Immortalists have to say that they think their options might lead to scientific immortality, AND THEN ADD that they also think that people who hope for traditional religious immortality are wrong or stupid.???? Personally, I hope both groups are right.?? Live and let live. Freedom for everyone to pursue their own paths as long as they don't harm others on their own personal venture. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 5 03:30:17 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 20:30:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Deep field flythrough In-Reply-To: References: <522735A1.3090403@philosophy.ox.ac.uk> <010401cea97b$f382f300$da88d900$@att.net> Message-ID: <019401cea9e8$3eeb2df0$bcc189d0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2013 2:44 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] FW: Deep field flythrough >.And you could take 12,913,982 more pictures/videos just like this one and not see the same galaxy twice. -Kelly It's astonishing, is it not? If ever I am tempted to accept that humanity is the first intelligent species, I gaze at a few of these deep sky images and I always come away saying, no there is just nooooo daaaaamn waaaay out of alllll thoooose staaaars, life hasn't previously figured out a way to become intelligent, somewhere and somewhen in all that space in all that time. Just no way! If you look at those NASA deep sky images, one of the few examples of government money which really returns something of real value, do keep reminding yourself that this is a tiny patch of sky, and that there are millions of other possible deep sky photos that could be made, even if most of them have stars in the foreground. I will accept that intelligent life is exceedingly rare, with an average of perhaps one civilization per galaxy or even one per super cluster, but there are plenty of both in this big old universe, plenty. We still haven't discovered the right answer to Fermi's anomaly, but do not let us get discouraged. The answer is out there somewhere; we will figure it out eventually. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Sep 5 04:19:28 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 21:19:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: Deep field flythrough In-Reply-To: <019401cea9e8$3eeb2df0$bcc189d0$@att.net> References: <522735A1.3090403@philosophy.ox.ac.uk> <010401cea97b$f382f300$da88d900$@att.net> <019401cea9e8$3eeb2df0$bcc189d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:30 PM, spike wrote: > It?s astonishing, is it not? If ever I am tempted to accept that humanity > is the first intelligent species, I gaze at a few of these deep sky images > and I always come away saying, no there is just nooooo daaaaamn waaaay out > of alllll thoooose staaaars, life hasn?t previously figured out a way to > become intelligent, somewhere and somewhen in all that space in all that > time. Just no way! > And I then look at the population statistics of Earth, all those billions of people...and then look at Earth, non-nighttime view, zoomed out enough that I can see an entire hemisphere at once. What sign of intelligent life? And yet it's there, if - and only if - you zoom in enough, or look at it at the right time (night, when the lights are broadcasting, assuming you can see in the same wavelengths humans do). I also look at the hopes and dreams of a common casino loser, certain that the odds must favor him this time! ...but they never do, even if they are mostly statistical odds and some people do honestly win from time to time. And I also remember that someone has to be first. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 5 04:18:34 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2013 21:18:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> Message-ID: <01b101cea9ee$fd5c5380$f814fa80$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of PJ Manney Subject: Re: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 5:14 PM, spike wrote: >>... Look at that a different way. That thought experiment, if it turned out the same as it did for me, is equivalent to saying your own ancestors were better than average people. We tend to think highly of our own ancestors. > >>... If so, is it not upsetting to learn that one of our own was an evil bastard? >...I'm fascinated that someone can't imagine their ancestors as complete assholes/psychos/sociopaths. Everyone has nasty ancestors. Everyone. From an evolutionary bio standpoint (calling Keith!), we're all the product of rapists and pillagers... Hmmm, thanks PJ, this is all excellent food for thought. As is my custom, this entire episode has sent me into deep introspection, and has resulted in some useful insights. >...If you were Australian, Spike, you'd brag about how badass your transported ancestors were. It's a mark of distinction if your GGGGdad was a serial killer as opposed to a lowly and all to common thief. The worse the crime, the greater the pride... ;-) I don't get Australia in that way. I recognize what you are saying is true, but it just doesn't work for me. >...Hell, both my grandfathers were SOBs...That doesn't make me less of a successful and happy person, with a great family life... PJ I am truly proud of you and I am proud to have you as a friend. I admire those who overcome adversity and succeed in spite of disadvantageous circumstances. >... In fact, it's a testament to the malleability of the human spirit that my parents came from such damaged beginnings and succeeded on their own terms, together. They celebrated their 50th anniversary this April... Excellent! Best wishes to them. >...Why would you -- or anyone -- care about the bad deeds of someone from so long ago, just because you share the tiniest bit of genetic material? I just don't get it... PJ _______________________________________________ It might be related to my thought experiment regarding collecting your ancestors and rating yourself against them in all the characteristics you care about. Both my grandfathers were outstanding men, for whom I have the greatest admiration. They had their faults of course, but I would consider myself successful if I could be like either of them, if I could be half the man as either of these excellent men. Many men catch themselves doing some mannerism their fathers did, at which time we realize we have become our own father. That never happened to me, but I sometimes catch myself doing some quirky mannerism of both my grandfathers. An example, I recall when I was a boy seeing my grandfather take up a habit of eating breakfast cereal for supper. I thought it so strange. Now, about a third of the time I eat breakfast cereal for supper. No particular reason, it is just what sounds good to me. I never became my father, but I am gradually becoming my grandfathers. Or at least I want to. But I digress. In the particular case in question, my fourth cousin wanted to find a former slave ancestor. The union soldier was her last great hope, or nearly last. We haven't ruled out that one of his parents may have been a slave, but there are no known records of who they are. So if I tell, as I probably will, then it not only reveals that this guy was a rapist and possibly a murderer, but it also casts doubt on his slave past. There's another aspect to all this, a risk. I have become online friends with this cousin, as people do who correspond with a common goal (we both would like to be descended from a freed slave.) If I tell what I know gently, suggesting he may have fathered a child while in the service, leaving out the part about the raping and murdering, there is a risk she could carelessly post something like "Oh yes, young soldiers being what they are, he might have associated with some sleazy camp-following harlot." Of course then I would be highly annoyed and either tell her the rest of the sordid story, or just not post back at all. My telling her only part of the story carries a risk, and my telling the rest of the story carries a risk as well: it could strain a friendship to the breaking point. Had it been the other way around, and she was descended from the victim, I would not feel welcome, and probably would not tell. As it is, we are both descended from the rapist, but only I am descended from the victim. Of course I am going to be sympathetic with my own G^3grandmother, who went thru brutal hell, having her family and home destroyed, her body violated, childhood stolen, left struggling to survive while pregnant through a desperate winter with little food, then rejection by her own community for choosing to keep her own baby. That young lady is a fighter and winner, and yes, more than yes, damn right I am proud of her. I am proud of being her great^3 grandson, I am inspired by her tragic yet triumphant story. Yes I am ashamed of the man that raped her, even though he too is my direct ancestor, and had he not done that shameful act of violence, I wouldn't be here. Oy vey, it's definitely a weird mixture of emotions. PJ thanks for your insights. spike From pharos at gmail.com Thu Sep 5 07:58:39 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 08:58:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 1:14 AM, spike wrote: > If so, is it not upsetting to learn that one of our own was an evil bastard? > > "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". We cannot apply modern standards of behaviour to the past. Even the 1960s-70s was very different from today. Far less centuries ago. We are here now because our ancestors did what was necessary to survive, even in the most brutal savage circumstances. The choice you face is non-existence because your ancestors didn't manage to survive. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 5 10:11:04 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 12:11:04 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Invitation to join an online conversation this Saturday or Sunday Message-ID: <20130905101104.GQ29404@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from chriscorte01 at yahoo.com ----- Date: 04 Sep 2013 23:03:32 -0700 From: chriscorte01 at yahoo.com To: New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com Subject: [New_Cryonet] Invitation to join an online conversation this Saturday or Sunday X-Mailer: Yahoo Groups Message Poster Reply-To: New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com Anyone interested in cryonics and transhumanism is invited to join in an online discussion this Saturday at 9:00 A.M. (hosted by Dennis) or Sunday at 11:30 A.M. PST (hosted by me).? Our previous conversations have been lively, entertaining and have covered a wide range of topics. These chats are a great way to meet like-minded people, make personal connections and help us build a stronger cryonics community. We now have a Meetup page[1]http://www.meetup.com/Transhumanism-and-Cryonics-Online-Conversation-Group/?. If you would like to join us, just send an email to?kekik2336 at .... On Sunday at 11:30 you'll receive an email from Google+ inviting you to join the Hangout. Just click the link and join in the conversation. You'll need to sign up for a Google+ account to access the Hangout. No one will mind if you use a pseudonym and the software allows you to mask your identity on the video. Of course, your privacy will be respected. No part of our discussion will be reproduced, broadcast or recorded. __._,_.___ Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional [2]Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required) Change settings via email: [3]Switch delivery to Daily Digest | [4]Switch to Fully Featured [5]Visit Your Group | [6]Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | [7]Unsubscribe __,_._,___ References Visible links 1. http://www.meetup.com/Transhumanism-and-Cryonics-Online-Conversation-Group/ 2. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/New_Cryonet/join;_ylc=X3oDMTJnaWI5dHZkBF9TAzk3NDc2NTkwBGdycElkAzczODg0MTUxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNzU0MTY1MARzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNzdG5ncwRzdGltZQMxMzc4MzYxMDEz 3. mailto:New_Cryonet-digest at yahoogroups.com?subject=Email Delivery: Digest 4. mailto:New_Cryonet-fullfeatured at yahoogroups.com?subject=Change Delivery Format: Fully Featured 5. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/New_Cryonet;_ylc=X3oDMTJlM2VsaWpwBF9TAzk3NDc2NTkwBGdycElkAzczODg0MTUxBGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNzU0MTY1MARzZWMDZnRyBHNsawNocGYEc3RpbWUDMTM3ODM2MTAxMw-- 6. http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/terms/ 7. mailto:New_Cryonet-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com?subject=Unsubscribe ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 5 13:16:35 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 15:16:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Spy Files: New WikiLeaks docs expose secretive, unruly surveillance industry Message-ID: <20130905131635.GL29404@leitl.org> http://rt.com/news/wikileaks-spy-files-release-402/ Spy Files: New WikiLeaks docs expose secretive, unruly surveillance industry Published time: September 04, 2013 16:06 Edited time: September 05, 2013 10:00 Get short URL Screenshot from a leaked documentScreenshot from a leaked document Tags Central Asia, Information Technology, Intelligence, Internet, Middle East, WikiLeaks The growing surveillance industry complex is providing governments with increasingly sophisticated spying software to track and control their citizens, the latest documents obtained by the pro-transparency group, WikiLeaks reveal. A trove of documents, outlining the activities of dozens of companies operating in the ever-expanding electronic snooping industry, were made available by the pro-transparency group on Wednesday. ?Lawful interception?, mass monitoring, network recording, signals and communication intelligence, and tactical interception devices were among the services and products provided by a litany of Western based firms, as outlined in hundreds of pages of documents covering trade brochures, internal memos, and invoices. "WikiLeaks' Spy Files #3 is part of our ongoing commitment to shining a light on the secretive mass surveillance industry. This publication doubles the WikiLeaks Spy Files database,? the accompanying press release cites Julian Assange. ?The WikiLeaks Spy Files form a valuable resource for journalists and citizens alike, detailing and explaining how secretive state intelligence agencies are merging with the corporate world in their bid to harvest all human electronic communication." One 2011 document showed how companies such as UK-based Gamma Group, German-based Desoma and Swiss-based Dreamlab are working in concert to ?create Telecommunications Intelligence Systems for different telecommunications networks to fulfill the customers? needs? regarding ?massive data interception and retention.? In March, Gamma International, which is a subsidiary of Gamma group, made Reporters Without Borders 'Corporate Enemies of the Internet' list for 2013, which singled out five ?digital mercenaries? who sell their surveillance technology to authoritarian regimes. The firm?s FinFisher Suite (which includes Trojans to infect PCs, mobile phones, other consumer electronics and servers, as well as technical consulting), is considered to be one of the most sophisticated in the world. During the search of an Egyptian intelligence agency office in 2011, human rights activists found a contract proposal from Gamma International to sell FinFisher to Egypt. Bill Marczak, a computer science doctoral candidate at the University of California, helped investigate the use of FinFisher spyware against activists and journalists in Bahrain in 2012, as well as in other states. ?We don?t have any sort of contracts, so that we could see financial dealings between companies and these governments. The only indications that we have as to where the spyware has been used are based on the research. In cases that we?ve seen the spyware has been targeted against activists and journalists in a particular country. We?ve been scanning the internet looking for this technology. So we found, as I said, spywares in Bahrain. We saw it being targeted against Bahraini journalists and activists last year. We?ve also found servers for the spyware in a number of other countries, such as Turkmenistan, Qatar, Ethiopia,? Marczak told RT. RT was the only Russian broadcaster that collaborated with WikiLeaks in this investigation, which also brought into the spotlight other companies including Cobham, Amees, Digital Barriers, ETL group, UTIMACO, Telesoft Technologies and Trovicor. Trovicor, incidentally, also features among Reporters Without Borders ?digital mercenaries.? The firm, whose monitoring centers are capable of intercepting phone calls, text messages, voice over IP calls (like Skype) and Internet traffic, has also been accused by of helping Bahrain imprison and torture activists and journalists. Screenshot from a leaked documentScreenshot from a leaked document While a smoking gun in the form of government contracts or invoices was not forthcoming, internal documents discovered by WikiLeaks do confirm that the firm?s dealings with autocratic states. In a December 2010 correspondence between Nicolas Mayencourt, the CEO of Dreamlab Technologies AG, and Thomas Fischer from Gamma Group?s Germany-based branch Gamma International GmbH, a ?quotation concerning the Monitoring system for iproxy (infection proxy)-project? is provided for an unspecified end customer in Oman. One concern involved keeping the client [Oman] aware of any changes made to the proxy [intermediary] server infected with their software for the sake of culling information from select targets. ?During the integration tests in Oman in September 2010 the end customer figured out that not all of the components of the iproxy infrastructure are under their full control. It is, for example possible that changes of the Oman-network may occur without their knowledge. Thus, it might occur that ISPs [Internet service providers] may modify some of the current configuration. Therefore, the question arose whether it is possible to identify such a modification in the network setup by monitoring the whole iproxy infrastructure. >From this point of view, a request for an efficient and user-friendly monitoring of the iproxy infrastructure including all components of the systems was derived. This requirement is discussed and a proposal for solution is described in this offer.? The infection process as was conducted on-site in Oman in 2010 can be conducted in two different variants, as described in a separate document, ?System Manual Project O?, prepared for the Gulf client. The first is described as a binary infection, whereby binaries (non-text computer files) are infected after being downloaded by the configured target. ?In order to do this, the software analyzes the data streams on the NDPs [network data processors] at both of the Internet exchanges (IX). As soon as a matching type of binary is downloaded, the infection mechanism is initiated, then it attaches loader and payload (trojan) to the binary.? Screenshot from a leaked documentScreenshot from a leaked document The second method is described as update infection, which ?works by sending counterfeit server responses to predefined applications (for example iTunes, Winamp, OpenOffice and SimpleLite), when they are searching for updates.? Data can be captured both through traditional public switch telephone networks (PSTN), mobile providers and internet protocol suites across a range of devices. The user?s information, including his or her IP address, user name, [cell] phone number, the date time and identity of the person being communicated with, and the method or protocol (mail, WWW, Skype, chat, voice, fax, and SMS) are all up for grabs. Upon being captured, the data is stored in a ?Data Warehouse? and ?retrieved on command.? Quotations for the project, enumerated in Swiss francs (CHF), are broken down in multiple categories: Monitoring and alarming 83,355.00 Services provided by Dreamlab 34,400.00 Training 5,400.00 Annual solution maintenance 24,000.00 Redundant monitoring implementation 57,955.00 Services provided by Dreamlab for redundancy 5,760.00 Annual solution maintenance for redundant system 12,000.00 Note: 1 CHF = 1.06720 USD Although such software does have legitimate applications for law enforcement, it can easily be used to stifle civil society, as Marczak argues was the case in Bahrain. Apart from journalists and activists, he noted that in the Malaysia and Ethiopia, members of the political opposition were apparently being targeted as well. One piece of FinFisher spyware discovered, for example, contained details relating to the upcoming Malaysian elections. ?You couldn?t say exactly who was targeted against, but the use of election-related content suggests politically motivated targeting. We also found a sample of this spyware that appeared to be targeted at activists in Ethiopia. The spyware contained a picture of Ethiopian opposition leaders that was displayed when the user opened it. By opening the picture the user copied the spyware,? he said. From pjmanney at gmail.com Thu Sep 5 15:29:56 2013 From: pjmanney at gmail.com (PJ Manney) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 08:29:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 12:58 AM, BillK wrote: > "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". > > We cannot apply modern standards of behaviour to the past. Even the > 1960s-70s was very different from today. Far less centuries ago. > > We are here now because our ancestors did what was necessary to > survive, even in the most brutal savage circumstances. The choice you > face is non-existence because your ancestors didn't manage to survive. Excellent point. In the case of my family, abandonment could even be considered a social norm at the time. While my paternal grandfather was still an SOB (I have lots of outside confirmation on this point), he was only one of many men who abandoned their families in the 1930s. I do not believe his abandonment was due to financial issues as much as personal issues, but the level of family abandonment during the Great Depression was staggering. They called it "Poor Man's Divorce." My maternal grandfather financially abandoned my mother's family around the same time, although he hung around to get what he could from them. None of this was unusual at the time. Just like rape is horrifyingly "normal" in times of war. Which is, again, why I'm so surprised at Spike's response. Tell your cousin. You won't be telling her anything unusual from a genealogical perspective. Maybe you should watch this show and see how even these people have rapists, murderers, abandoners, etc. in their families: http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/who-do-you-think-you-are Even more interesting: like all families, these celebrities have been told family stories of how wonderful their ancestors are, only to find out the truth is something else entirely. :-) PJ From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 5 16:46:34 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 09:46:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> Message-ID: <037f01ceaa57$7c8a7b10$759f7130$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of PJ Manney >... Tell your cousin... Ja, that is what I did. Read on please. >... You won't be telling her anything unusual from a genealogical perspective... There is that, but this kind of information does tend to put one into an emotional tailspin. If one is not ready for what you might find, genealogy can be a rough sport. I saw that ~1/64 subSaharan African DNA and had imagined some open-minded sporty lass from generations past having a go at the local football hero back in the early 1800s or perhaps some other cheerfully libertine explanation, so naturally this was all a big disappointment. Furthermore, the man who stepped up and married this shattered refugee in 1867 and adopted her baby was a fine man from an excellent family. Now I learn that he and all his line are not genetically related, so it is like losing a G^3grandfather and all his forefathers, damn. Likewise, my half fourth cousin just had a branch of her tree lopped off. She had imagined whoever sired these cousins from North Carolina was her ancestor. Now she has learned to the contrary, their ancestors before 1865 are not genetically related to her, even though she and they show up as distant cousins now, since we all descended from the Union soldier. We are brothers from another mother. Sigh. Regarding the reason why I decided to tell, this is one of the cases where the golden rule might contradict the notion of being faithful to history. Seldom seen is this: contradicting values. It happens. I didn't go into the gory details, but my half fourth cousin is a smart lady, she will figure it out if she really wants to know. But to do so, she will need to take some action herself: I gave her what she needs to know, but didn't put it in her face. As in the case a few weeks ago when I was contacted by the illegitimate daughter of a second cousin, I showed her the grave site but did not dig up the corpse. The moral guidance for this comes from 23andMe: they have a ton of information in there, but you must take deliberate action to get to it. They do not have a pop-up screen which tells if you have the markers for Alzheimers for instance. You must go take deliberate action to get to that. Finding that info will require a few verbs on her part. I rather prefer inquiring minds do not want to know, but neither will I stand by and let her continue to search in vain for information I hold. So I told. Even though it is too late to untell what I told, if anyone has moral guidance to offer, do feel free, thanks. I suspect this will not be the last time I face this kind of question. I thought of closing out my 23andMe account but decided to not do that. >...None of this was unusual at the time. Just like rape is horrifyingly "normal" in times of war. Which is, again, why I'm so surprised at Spike's response... PJ Hmmm, ja, but I am still choking on that. General Lee did not allow his men to behave in this shameful way. When they were caught raping the locals in their campaigns in the north, there was bloody hell to pay. General Sherman's orders, on the other hand, offered no guidelines to prevent this sort of thing on his murderous rampage to the sea in 1864. I curse his goddam memory while simultaneously acknowledging my existence was the result. Ja, it is a weird mixture of emotions. spike From pharos at gmail.com Thu Sep 5 18:17:01 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 19:17:01 +0100 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <037f01ceaa57$7c8a7b10$759f7130$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> <037f01ceaa57$7c8a7b10$759f7130$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 5:46 PM, spike wrote: > Hmmm, ja, but I am still choking on that. General Lee did not allow his men > to behave in this shameful way. When they were caught raping the locals in > their campaigns in the north, there was bloody hell to pay. General > Sherman's orders, on the other hand, offered no guidelines to prevent this > sort of thing on his murderous rampage to the sea in 1864. I curse his > goddam memory while simultaneously acknowledging my existence was the > result. Ja, it is a weird mixture of emotions. > > If it helps you could make a case that your ancestor saved her life. Given the circumstances of the 'scorched earth' destroy everything campaign, it would have been very easy for the infantry squad to kill the girl to destroy the evidence of the crime. One more death among thousands would not have been noticed. Perhaps your ancestor made great efforts to save her life. (Is there a film script in here somewhere?). BillK From atymes at gmail.com Thu Sep 5 18:30:03 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 11:30:03 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <037f01ceaa57$7c8a7b10$759f7130$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> <037f01ceaa57$7c8a7b10$759f7130$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sep 5, 2013 10:00 AM, "spike" wrote: > Now I learn that he and all his line are not genetically > related, so it is like losing a G^3grandfather and all his forefathers, > damn. So what? It is your memes, not really your genes, that you personally should care about. At least until and unless you gain the practical (not just theoretical) ability to edit your genes as easily. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Thu Sep 5 21:23:29 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 15:23:29 -0600 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> Message-ID: Very interesting. My Great Great Great Grandfather Thomas Hill Allsop, married my Great Great Great Grandmother, after converting to the Mormon Church, on his way to Salt Lake City from England. At the time, she had left an abusive husband in England, and had a toddler girl from that bad husband, which of course became Thomas Hill's step child in SLC, Utah. She was my Great Great grandmother. For you thinkers out there, you're probably wondering: Wait, then how is Thomas Hill your Great Great Great grandfather?? We'll he married this step child, when she was in hear teens as a polygamous second wife with her mother, and I descended from that! So what is ethically worse, that or rape? Yes, Genealogy and all history is oh so much fun. I can't wait till we can achieve the ability to resurrect these poor souls and work to make true justice - between them, and us, paying them back for being our creators. Brent Allsop On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 9:29 AM, PJ Manney wrote: > On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 12:58 AM, BillK wrote: > > "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". > > > > We cannot apply modern standards of behaviour to the past. Even the > > 1960s-70s was very different from today. Far less centuries ago. > > > > We are here now because our ancestors did what was necessary to > > survive, even in the most brutal savage circumstances. The choice you > > face is non-existence because your ancestors didn't manage to survive. > > Excellent point. In the case of my family, abandonment could even be > considered a social norm at the time. While my paternal grandfather > was still an SOB (I have lots of outside confirmation on this point), > he was only one of many men who abandoned their families in the 1930s. > I do not believe his abandonment was due to financial issues as much > as personal issues, but the level of family abandonment during the > Great Depression was staggering. They called it "Poor Man's Divorce." > My maternal grandfather financially abandoned my mother's family > around the same time, although he hung around to get what he could > from them. > > None of this was unusual at the time. Just like rape is horrifyingly > "normal" in times of war. Which is, again, why I'm so surprised at > Spike's response. > > Tell your cousin. You won't be telling her anything unusual from a > genealogical perspective. Maybe you should watch this show and see > how even these people have rapists, murderers, abandoners, etc. in > their families: http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/who-do-you-think-you-are > Even more interesting: like all families, these celebrities have been > told family stories of how wonderful their ancestors are, only to find > out the truth is something else entirely. :-) > > PJ > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Sep 6 00:46:43 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 17:46:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> <00d801cea9ad$3e011de0$ba0359a0$@att.net> <00c901cea9b9$c16049c0$4420dd40$@att.net> <006901cea9cc$f13b2210$d3b16630$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sep 5, 2013 2:24 PM, "Brent Allsop" wrote: > My Great Great Great Grandfather Thomas Hill Allsop, married my Great Great Great Grandmother, after converting to the Mormon Church, on his way to Salt Lake City from England. At the time, she had left an abusive husband in England, and had a toddler girl from that bad husband, which of course became Thomas Hill's step child in SLC, Utah. She was my Great Great grandmother. > > For you thinkers out there, you're probably wondering: Wait, then how is Thomas Hill your Great Great Great grandfather?? We'll he married this step child, when she was in hear teens as a polygamous second wife with her mother, and I descended from that! Isn't the problem (though explained) how he's your GG grandfather, not your GGG grandfather? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Sep 6 05:11:35 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 01:11:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 4:05 PM, TwentFirstCentury Matters wrote: > "### Absolutely. Plus, we have to remember that our information about > the far reaches of the universe is very outdated. It takes time for > light cones to intersect... not seeing signs of expansions in galaxies > farther than 0.7 billion > years is to be expected. This means we don't have to be the firstborn > in the whole universe, only the firstborn in a much smaller sphere, to > explain the still-empty skies." > > > Rafal, > would you surmise the farther away beings might be, the more unlike humans > they would be? ### No, I don't think that is the case, the basic physics does not seem to change at the visible universe scale, at least not in an easily detectable way, so the resulting intelligences should be similar as well. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Sep 6 05:40:34 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 01:40:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Steve Van Sickle's presentation at SENS6 Message-ID: Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending Steve Van Sickle's presentation at SENS6, reporting his results with cryonic preservation of kidneys. Steve developed a technique for persufflation of organs perfused with cryoprotectants using cold helium. He was able to cool pig kidneys to liquid nitrogen temperature, achieving total vitrification while *avoiding* fractures! I was absolutely floored by his work, easily the most important presentation at SENS6 so far. Steve also described calculations for hyperbaric persufflation, which might allow vitrifying a human body in *a few minutes*! Needless to say, if this work pans out, it would dramatically change the world of cryonics. There used to be three obstacles preventing reversible cryonic suspension - fractures, cryoprotectant toxicity, and rewarming issues (crystalization). Steve solved the fractures issue and with the dramatically shorted cooling and even more dramatically shorter thawing times there might be enough of a reduction in cryoprotectant toxicity and rewarming injury that reversible suspension might be within reach (give or take 10 million dollars worth of development work). The presentation video should be available on the SENS site at some point, check it out. Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 6 08:54:23 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 10:54:23 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [cryptography] regarding the NSA crypto "breakthrough" Message-ID: <20130906085423.GW29404@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from coderman ----- Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2013 10:47:10 -0700 From: coderman To: Cypherpunks list , cpunks , Discussion of cryptography and related Subject: [cryptography] regarding the NSA crypto "breakthrough" of all the no such agency disclosures, this one fuels the most wild speculation. """ James Bamford, a veteran chronicler of the NSA, describes the agency as having made "an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users". That sounds a lot like saying that the the spooks have managed to break at least some of the cryptographic codes that protect everything from secure e-mail to e-commerce. """ however, the crypto breakthrough discussed is more mundane: deployment of deep packet inspection with SSL/TLS capabilities.[0] this represents three significant efforts: 1. upgrading physical infrastructure (DPI systems at this scale use ASICs for processing, not software which can be upgraded on demand.) 2. secret partnerships with service providers to obtain server SSL/TLS secret keys. 3. key distribution to provision the DPI classifiers/sniffers with requisite secret keys when updated by service providers. hence, a "crypto breakthrough" providing unprecedented actionable visibility into previously opaque streams, with such inspection occurring at the edges rather than the mothership (where all encrypted data is sent, decryptable or not...) these efforts are compartmented, with few aware of how these different pieces fit together, thus fueling speculation about the nature of this break. from a technician point of view, you would notice the new ability to see inside SSL traffic, but may not understand how it was done. (e.g. with keys handed over in secret agreement for "reasonable compensation" and national security, rather than a basement full of quantum computers breaking web server keys...) class break in discrete log? quantum code crackers? you've been watching too much Sneakers![1] ;) 0. "SSL: Intercepted today, decrypted tomorrow" , should read "SSL: Intercepted and decrypted in real-time, almost everywhere" http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/25/ssl-intercepted-today-decrypted-tomorrow.html less than a third of a percent of SSL/TLS web traffic uses forward secrecy! 1. "Sneakers" still the best hacker film to date... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography at randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 6 09:29:12 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 11:29:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How to remain secure against NSA surveillance Message-ID: <20130906092912.GE29404@leitl.org> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance How to remain secure against NSA surveillance The NSA has huge capabilities ? and if it wants in to your computer, it's in. With that in mind, here are five ways to stay safe Bruce Schneier theguardian.com, Thursday 5 September 2013 20.06 BST A patron works on his laptop during the Tech Crunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, California, September 11. 'Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. That's how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA.' Photograph: Beck Diefenbach/Reuters Now that we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on the internet, including today's disclosures of the NSA's deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems, we can finally start to figure out how to protect ourselves. For the past two weeks, I have been working with the Guardian on NSA stories, and have read hundreds of top-secret NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. I wasn't part of today's story ? it was in process well before I showed up ? but everything I read confirms what the Guardian is reporting. At this point, I feel I can provide some advice for keeping secure against such an adversary. The primary way the NSA eavesdrops on internet communications is in the network. That's where their capabilities best scale. They have invested in enormous programs to automatically collect and analyze network traffic. Anything that requires them to attack individual endpoint computers is significantly more costly and risky for them, and they will do those things carefully and sparingly. Leveraging its secret agreements with telecommunications companies ? all the US and UK ones, and many other "partners" around the world ? the NSA gets access to the communications trunks that move internet traffic. In cases where it doesn't have that sort of friendly access, it does its best to surreptitiously monitor communications channels: tapping undersea cables, intercepting satellite communications, and so on. That's an enormous amount of data, and the NSA has equivalently enormous capabilities to quickly sift through it all, looking for interesting traffic. "Interesting" can be defined in many ways: by the source, the destination, the content, the individuals involved, and so on. This data is funneled into the vast NSA system for future analysis. The NSA collects much more metadata about internet traffic: who is talking to whom, when, how much, and by what mode of communication. Metadata is a lot easier to store and analyze than content. It can be extremely personal to the individual, and is enormously valuable intelligence. The Systems Intelligence Directorate is in charge of data collection, and the resources it devotes to this is staggering. I read status report after status report about these programs, discussing capabilities, operational details, planned upgrades, and so on. Each individual problem ? recovering electronic signals from fiber, keeping up with the terabyte streams as they go by, filtering out the interesting stuff ? has its own group dedicated to solving it. Its reach is global. The NSA also attacks network devices directly: routers, switches, firewalls, etc. Most of these devices have surveillance capabilities already built in; the trick is to surreptitiously turn them on. This is an especially fruitful avenue of attack; routers are updated less frequently, tend not to have security software installed on them, and are generally ignored as a vulnerability. The NSA also devotes considerable resources to attacking endpoint computers. This kind of thing is done by its TAO ? Tailored Access Operations ? group. TAO has a menu of exploits it can serve up against your computer ? whether you're running Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, or something else ? and a variety of tricks to get them on to your computer. Your anti-virus software won't detect them, and you'd have trouble finding them even if you knew where to look. These are hacker tools designed by hackers with an essentially unlimited budget. What I took away from reading the Snowden documents was that if the NSA wants in to your computer, it's in. Period. The NSA deals with any encrypted data it encounters more by subverting the underlying cryptography than by leveraging any secret mathematical breakthroughs. First, there's a lot of bad cryptography out there. If it finds an internet connection protected by MS-CHAP, for example, that's easy to break and recover the key. It exploits poorly chosen user passwords, using the same dictionary attacks hackers use in the unclassified world. As was revealed today, the NSA also works with security product vendors to ensure that commercial encryption products are broken in secret ways that only it knows about. We know this has happened historically: CryptoAG and Lotus Notes are the most public examples, and there is evidence of a back door in Windows. A few people have told me some recent stories about their experiences, and I plan to write about them soon. Basically, the NSA asks companies to subtly change their products in undetectable ways: making the random number generator less random, leaking the key somehow, adding a common exponent to a public-key exchange protocol, and so on. If the back door is discovered, it's explained away as a mistake. And as we now know, the NSA has enjoyed enormous success from this program. TAO also hacks into computers to recover long-term keys. So if you're running a VPN that uses a complex shared secret to protect your data and the NSA decides it cares, it might try to steal that secret. This kind of thing is only done against high-value targets. How do you communicate securely against such an adversary? Snowden said it in an online Q&A soon after he made his first document public: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on." I believe this is true, despite today's revelations and tantalizing hints of "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities" made by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence in another top-secret document. Those capabilities involve deliberately weakening the cryptography. Snowden's follow-on sentence is equally important: "Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it." Endpoint means the software you're using, the computer you're using it on, and the local network you're using it in. If the NSA can modify the encryption algorithm or drop a Trojan on your computer, all the cryptography in the world doesn't matter at all. If you want to remain secure against the NSA, you need to do your best to ensure that the encryption can operate unimpeded. With all this in mind, I have five pieces of advice: 1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are. 2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it's true that the NSA targets encrypted connections ? and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols ? you're much better protected than if you communicate in the clear. 3) Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA ? so it probably isn't. If you have something really important, use an air gap. Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it's pretty good. 4) Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It's prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means. 5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. For example, it's harder for the NSA to backdoor TLS than BitLocker, because any vendor's TLS has to be compatible with every other vendor's TLS, while BitLocker only has to be compatible with itself, giving the NSA a lot more freedom to make changes. And because BitLocker is proprietary, it's far less likely those changes will be discovered. Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography. Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can. Since I started working with Snowden's documents, I have been using GPG, Silent Circle, Tails, OTR, TrueCrypt, BleachBit, and a few other things I'm not going to write about. There's an undocumented encryption feature in my Password Safe program from the command line); I've been using that as well. I understand that most of this is impossible for the typical internet user. Even I don't use all these tools for most everything I am working on. And I'm still primarily on Windows, unfortunately. Linux would be safer. The NSA has turned the fabric of the internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible. Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That's how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 6 14:05:15 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 16:05:15 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? Message-ID: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> http://ecoapocalypse.blogspot.nl/2013/09/why-do-political-and-economic-leaders.html Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? Posted on February 10, 2012 by energyskeptic Since there?s nothing that can be done about climate change, because there?s no scalable alternative to fossil fuels, I?ve always wondered why politicians and other leaders, who clearly know better, feel compelled to deny it. I think it?s for exactly the same reasons you don?t hear them talking about preparing for Peak Oil. 1) Our leaders have known since the 1970s energy crises that there?s no comparable alternative energy ready to replace fossil fuels. To extend the oil age as long as possible, the USA went the military path rather than a ?Manhattan Project? of research and building up grid infrastructure, railroads, sustainable agriculture, increasing home and car fuel efficiency, and other obvious actions. Instead, we?ve spent trillions of dollars on defense and the military to keep the oil flowing, the Straits of Hormuz open, and invade oil-producing countries. Being so much further than Europe, China, and Russia from the Middle East, where there?s not only the most remaining oil, but the easiest oil to get out at the lowest cost ($20-22 OPEC vs $60-80 rest-of-world per barrel), is a huge disadvantage. I think the military route was chosen in the 70s to maintain our access to Middle East oil and prevent challenges from other nations. Plus everyone benefits by our policing the world and keeping the lid on a world war over energy resources, perhaps that?s why central banks keep lending us money. Van Jones once said ?People say that I am hard core about some of this stuff because I have been to Davos, and I?ve sat with Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Tony Blair, and Nancy Pelosi. I?ve sat with all these people who we think are in charge, and they don?t know what to do. Take that in: they don?t know what to do! You think you?re scared? You think you?re terrified? They have the Pentagon?s intelligence, they have every major corporation?s input; Shell Oil that has done this survey and study around the peak oil problem. You think we?ve got to get on the Internet and say, ?Peak oil!? because the system doesn?t know about it? They know, and they don?t know what to do. And they are terrified that if they do anything they?ll loose their positions. So they keep juggling chickens and chainsaws and hope it works out just like most of us everyday at work.? (Van Jones) 2) If the public were convinced climate change were real and demanded alternative energy, it would become clear pretty quickly that we didn?t have any alternatives. Already Californians are seeing public television shows and newspaper articles about why it?s so difficult to build enough wind, solar, and so on to meet the mandated 33% renewable energy sources by 2020. For example, last night I saw a PBS program on the obstacles to wind power in Marin county, on the other side of the Golden Gate bridge. Difficulties cited were lack of storage for electricity, NIMBYism, opposition from the Audubon society over bird kills, wind blows at night when least needed, the grid needs expansion, and most wind is not near enough to the grid to be connected to it. But there was no mention of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) or the scale of how many windmills you?d need to have. So you could be left with the impression that these problems with wind could be overcome. I don?t see any signs of the general public losing optimism yet. I gave my ?Peak Soil? talk to a group recently of very educated people, and to my great surprise realized they weren?t worried until my talk, partly because so they weren?t aware of the Hirsch 2005 ?liquid fuels? crisis concept, nor the scale of what fossil fuels do for us. I felt really bad, I?ve never spoken to a group before that wasn?t aware of the problem. I wished I were a counselor as well. The only thing I could think of to console them was to say that running out of fossil fuels was a good thing ? we will soon be forced by geological shortages and consequent political unrest to stop burning so much fossil fuel, which means better odds we and many other species won?t be driven extinct from climate change. 3) As the German military peak oil study stated, when investors realize Peak Oil is upon us, stock markets world-wide will crash (if they haven?t meanwhile from massive, unreformed financial corruption), as it will be obvious that growth is no longer possible and investors will never get their money back. 4) As Richard Heinberg has pointed out, there?s a national survival interest in being the ?Last Man (nation) Standing?. So leaders want to keep things going smoothly as long as possible. And everyone is hoping the crash is ?not on my watch? ? who wants to take the blame? 5) It would be political suicide to bring up the real problem of Peak Oil and have no solution to offer besides consuming less. Kjell Aleklett, professor of Professor of Physics at Uppsala University in Sweden, points out that one of the failures of democracy is that ?It is very difficult for any politician to admit that something is wrong, and that we might need to do something about it. If they were to do this, another politician would come along and say, ?There?s no problem; vote for me and we can carry on as we are?.? The ?solution? of both parties is Endless Growth, or ?Shop Until You Drop? and ?Drill, Baby, Drill? to get out of the current economic and energy crises. Capitalism ends when growth is no longer possible, all that our leaders can do is try to keep the gain going as long as possible, and not end while they?re in office. Since golden parachutes and astronomical pay regardless of performance typifies most corporations, there?s less at stake for CEO?s and other economic ?leaders?. There?s also the risk of creating a panic and social disorder if the situation were made utterly clear ? that the carrying capacity of the United States is somewhere between 100 million (Pimentel) and 250 million (Smil) without fossil fuels, like the Onion?s parody ?Scientists: One-Third Of The Human Race Has To Die For Civilization To Be Sustainable, So How Do We Want To Do This?? There?s no solution to peak oil, except to consume less in all areas of life, which is not acceptable to political leaders or corporations, who depend on growth for their survival. Meanwhile, too many problems are getting out of hand on a daily basis at local, state, and national levels. All that matters to politicians is the next election. So who?s going to work on a future problem with no solution? Jimmy Carter is perceived as having lost partly due to asking Americans to sacrifice for the future (i.e. put on a sweater). I first became aware of the intersection of politics and peak oil at the Denver 2005 Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference. Denver Mayor Hickenlooper, now governor of Colorado, pointed out that one of his predecessors lost the mayoral election because he didn?t keep the snow plows running after a heavy snow storm. He worried about how he?d keep snow plows, garbage collection, and a host of other city services running as energy declined. A Boulder city council member at this conference told us he had hundreds of issues and constituents to deal with on a daily basis, no way did he have time to spend on an issue beyond the next election. Finally, Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, head of the peak oil caucus in the House of Representatives, told us that there was no solution, and he was angry that we?d blown 25 years even though the government knew peak was coming. His plan was to relentlessly reduce our energy demand by 5% per year, to stay under the depletion rate of declining oil. But he didn?t believe in efficiency as a solution, which doesn?t work due to Jevons paradox. The only solution that would mitigate suffering is to mandate that women bear only one child. Fat chance of that ever happening when even birth control is controversial, and Catholics are outraged that all health care plans are now required to cover the cost of birth control pills. Congressman Bartlett, in a small group discussion after his talk, told us that population was the main problem, but that he and other politicians didn?t dare mention it. He said that exponential growth would undo any reduction in demand we could make, and gave this example: if we have 250 years left of reserves in coal, and we turn to coal to replace oil, increasing our use by 2% a year ? a very modest rate of growth considering what a huge amount is needed to replace oil ? then the reserve would only last 85 years. If we liquefy it, then it would only last 50 years, because it takes a lot of energy to do that. Bartlett was speaking about 250 years of coal reserves back in 2005. Now we know that the global energy from coal may have peaked last year, in 2011 (Patzek) or will soon in 2015 (Zittel). Other estimates range as far as 2029 to 2043. Heinberg and Fridley say that ?we believe that it is unlikely that world energy supplies can continue to meet projected demand beyond 2020.? (Heinberg). 6) Political (and religious) leaders gain votes, wealth, and power by telling people what they want to hear. Several politicians have told me privately that people like to hear good news and that politicians who bring bad news don?t get re-elected. ?Don?t worry, be happy? is a vote getter. Carrying capacity, exponential growth, die-off, extinction, population control ? these are not ideas that get leaders elected. 7) Everyone who understands the situation is hoping The Scientists Will Come up With Something. Including the Scientists. And even many of the science-educated don?t have a clue ? natural resources, ecology, and energy was not their field of study. I didn?t want to ruin anyone?s vacation on a rafting trip down the Tatshenshini-Alsek in 2003, but the last day of the trip I explained the situation to an astronomer, and he said in great shock, ?But there has to be an alternative to oil!? It had never occurred to him that solar, wind, geothermal, and so on couldn?t replace oil. Scientists would like to win a Nobel prize and need funding. But researchers in energy resources know what?s at stake with climate change and peak oil and are as scared as the rest of us. U.C.Berkeley scientists are also aware of the negative environmental impacts of biofuels, and have chosen to concentrate on a politically feasible strategy of emphasizing lack of water to prevent large programs in this from being funded (Fingerman). They?re also working hard to prevent coal fired power plants from supplying electricity to California by recommending natural gas replacement plants instead, as well as expanding the grid, taxing carbon, energy efficiency, nuclear power, geothermal, wind, and so on ? see http://rael.berkeley.edu/projects for what else some of UCB?s RAEL program is up to. Until a miracle happens, scientists and some enlightened policy makers are trying to extend the age of oil, reduce greenhouse gases, and so on. But with the downside of Hubbert?s curve so close, and the financial system liable to crash again soon given the debt and lack of reforms, I don?t know how long anyone can stretch things out. (8) The 1% can?t justify their wealth or the current economic system once the pie stops expanding and starts to shrink. The financial crisis will be a handy way to explain why people are getting poorer on the down side of peak oil too, delaying panic perhaps. Other evidence that politicians know how serious the situation is, but aren?t saying anything, are Congressman Roscoe Bartlett?s youtube videos (Urban Danger). He?s the Chairman of the peak oil caucus in the House of Representatives, and he?s saying ?get out of dodge? to those in the know. He?s educated all of the representatives in the House, but he says that peak oil ?won?t be on their front burner until there?s an oil shock?. 9) Less than one percent of our elected leaders have degrees in science. They don?t have a clue ? they studied law, maybe economics, but know very little about ecology. The vast majority of political and economic leaders don?t have a clue. And they?ve had no time to understand energy, environment, evolution, EROI, or any other relevant information after college to hear or read and acquire a ?big picture view? of (systems) ecology, population, environment, natural resources, biodiversity / bioinvasion, water, topsoil and fishery depletion, and all the other factors that will be magnified when oil, the master resource that?s been helping us cope with these and many other problems, declines. 10) Since peak oil began in 2005 (we?re on the plateau with decline coming in 1-4 years), there?s less urgency to do something about climate change for many leaders, because they assume, or hope, that the remaining fossil fuels won?t trigger a runaway greenhouse. Climate change is a more distant problem than Peak Oil. And again, like peak oil, nothing can be done about it. There?s are no carbon free alternative liquid fuels, let alone a liquid fuel we can burn in our existing combustion engines, which were designed to only use gasoline. There?s no time left to rebuild a completely new fleet of vehicles based on electricity, the electric grid infrastructure and electricity generation from windmills, solar, nuclear, etc., are too oil dependent to outlast oil. Batteries are too heavy to ever be used by trucks or other large vehicles, and require a revolutionary breakthrough to power electric cars. 11) I think that those who deny climate change, despite knowing it is real, are thinking like chess players several moves ahead. They hope that by denying climate change an awareness of peak oil is less likely to occur, and I?m guessing their motivation is to keep our oil-based nation going as long as possible by preventing a stock market crash, panic, social disorder, and so on. 12) Politicians and corporate leaders probably didn?t get as far as they did without being (techno) optimists, and perhaps really believe the Scientists Will Come Up With Something. I fear that scientists are going to take a lot of the blame as things head South, even though there?s nothing they can do to change the laws of physics and thermodynamics. Chris Nelder says that ?We trust narratives that fit our emotions, associations and experiences, rather than actively assessing the evidence. This is why the peak-oil story gained currency in the press in 2008, when prices for oil and gasoline shot up ? it fitted in with our experiences. When prices fell, the story faded. Similarly, extreme weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes capture the public?s attention in a way that decades of warnings about global warming have failed to do?. (Nelder) 13) Kurt Cobb, in his blog Resource Insights, writes this about why oil company executives are keeping quiet: ??their companies may soon find it impossible to replace all their oil reserves. Oil companies strive to replace at least 100% of what they produce so that their reserves don?t fall. If investors come to believe that a failure to replace reserves will be ongoing year after year, they will mark down oil company share prices significantly. In fact, it?s already happened, and it?s likely to happen with more frequency as more companies struggle to reach 100 percent replacement. Such share price declines would, of course, make a lot of oil executives significantly poorer as the value of their stock and stock options plummet. Essentially, oil companies would be recognized as self-liquidating businesses. All of this the oil industry wants you to ignore as it undertakes yet another public relations campaign to convince the world that supplies will only grow from here. Naturally, with prices near $100 a barrel, the public needs reassurance. The campaign is designed to lull both the public and policymakers into a somnolent surrender to a business-as-usual future that will leave us unprepared for the momentous challenges ahead. Oil is the central commodity of the modern age. As of 2011 it provided one-third of the world?s energy and the basis for countless petrochemicals necessary to the functioning of modern society. Oil?s role in transportation remains critical; 80 percent of the world?s road, rail, air and sea transportation fuel is derived from petroleum, and in the United States the number is 93 percent. Good substitutes for oil in transportation are still hard to come by?. (Cobb) 14) There?s plenty of misinformation out there, plenty of rosy, cornucopian ?we?ve got plenty of oil? projections from all kinds of experts. Why wouldn?t you believe them? If I hadn?t joined peak oil forums, it?s unlikely I would have ever stumbled on the information to counter the Wall Street economic view of the world (see my book list and energy topics) 15) Tariel Morrigan, in ?Peak Energy, Climate Change, and the Collapse of Global Civilization? puts the problem this way: ?Announcing peak oil may be akin to shouting ?Fire!? in a crowded theater, except that the burning theater has no exits?. Morrigan says a government announcing peak oil threatens the economy, not only risking a market crash, but the panic that would follow would cause social and political unrest. What a conundrum ? not warning people isn?t fair, but warning people will make the economic crash come sooner and doesn?t help to make a transition (it would have made a difference in the 70s, but it?s too late now). In addition, announcing peak oil will make many lose confidence in their government because they?ll feel they were deceived, that the government failed to protect them, or was incompetent, corrupt, and colluded with private interests (especially oil companies and the institutions involved with the wide-scale economic fraud and recklessness). 16) A story must be positive or a problem must have a solution to be picked up by the media as an ongoing theme. This is even more true for getting a book published. Although this book appears to be quite doomer: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, it has a ?happy? solution ? we?ll just migrate to the Moon and Mars! The only method of propulsion we have to escape the planet is fossil fuels, and they don?t come anywhere near to getting us to the speed of light necessary to get to the closest star. Nor will a space elevator do that ? even if it could be built, it?s absolutely ridiculous to think we could survive on the Moon or Mars. Biosphere II was a failure, and that was right here on Earth. The idea of abandoning Earth is absurd, sad ? pure science-fiction. But you can?t get a book published about how we face extinction if you don?t offer some hope. Conclusion We need government plans or strategies at all levels to let the air out of the tires of civilization as slowly as possible to prevent panic and sudden discontinuities. Given history, I can?t imagine the 1% giving up their wealth (especially land, 85% of which is concentrated among 3% of owners). I?m sure they?re hoping the current system maintains its legitimacy as long as possible, even as the vast majority of us sink into 3rd world poverty beyond what we can imagine, and then are too poor and hungry to do anything but find our next meal. Until there are oil shocks and governments at all levels are forced to ?do something?, it?s up to those of us aware of what?s going on to gain skills that will be useful in the future, work to build community locally, and live more simply. Towns or regions that already have or know how to implement a local currency fast will be able to cope better with discontinuities in oil supplies and financial crashes than areas that don?t. The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with Heinberg?s 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting high taxes and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than one child so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as possible. Hirsch recommended preparing for peak 20 years ahead of time, and we didn?t do that. So many of the essential preparations need to be at a local, state, and federal level, they can?t be done at an individual level. Denial and inaction now are likely to lead to millions of unnecessary deaths in the future. Actions such as upgrading infrastructure essential to life, like water delivery and treatment systems (up to 100 years old in much of America and rusting apart), sewage treatment, bridges, and so on. After peak, oil will be scarce and devoted to growing and delivering food, with the remaining energy trickling down to other essential services ? probably not enough to build new infrastructure, or even maintain what we have. I wish it were possible for scientists and other leaders to explain what?s going on to the public, but I think scientists know it wouldn?t do any good given American?s low scientific literacy, and leaders see the vast majority of the public as big blubbering spoiled babies, like the spaceship characters on floating chairs in Wall-E, who expect, no demand, happy Hollywood endings. Posted by sean hufford at 4:02 AM From atymes at gmail.com Fri Sep 6 15:53:00 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 08:53:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 7:05 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Since there?s nothing that can be done about climate change, because > there?s > no scalable alternative to fossil fuels Starting the article with a claim, and repeating it constantly throughout the article, doesn't make it true. But there was no mention of Energy Returned on Energy Invested > (EROEI) or the scale of how many windmills you?d need to have. So you > could > be left with the impression that these problems with wind could be > overcome. > According to the study Wikipedia cites, wind's EROEI is 18 - a net positive. Sure, you couldn't solve all the world's energy problems with just wind power; solving them is going to require a combination of solutions, so arguing against each component in turn because it can't do 100% is the opposite of helpful. > The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with > Heinberg?s > 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting high taxes > and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than one child > so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as possible. > So is this a world problem or a US problem? "Limiting immigration" doesn't affect the world so much, but "carrying capacity" only makes sense in the context of the entire world (because food can be imported, on a sustainable basis, to any given nation). That drivel has no place on a transhumanist list, other than to see the nature of the ignorance and attitudes we're still fighting against. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 6 16:17:03 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 18:17:03 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 08:53:00AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Starting the article with a claim, and repeating it constantly throughout > the article, doesn't make it true. The Nile is not just a river in Egypt. > According to the study Wikipedia cites, wind's EROEI is 18 - a net We're missing a TW/year substitution rate, and alternative energy sources (too little, too late) don't produce hydrocarbon gases and liquids. > positive. Sure, you couldn't solve all the world's energy problems with > just wind power; solving them is going to require a combination of The point is that we've missed the boat, and we're in for a world of hurt. The sooner everyone agrees the less pain there will be. > solutions, so arguing against each component in turn because it can't do > 100% is the opposite of helpful. In order to begin solving a problem you must first realize that you have a problem. > > > The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with > > Heinberg?s > > 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting high taxes > > and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than one child > > so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as possible. > > > > So is this a world problem or a US problem? "Limiting immigration" doesn't It is a world problem. But as a subsistence farmer your life already sucks, and it will only suck a little more. > affect the world so much, but "carrying capacity" only makes sense in the > context of the entire world (because food can be imported, on a sustainable > basis, to any given nation). Billions of people can barely afford their next meal. Quadruple the food prices. What happens? > That drivel has no place on a transhumanist list, other than to see the > nature of the ignorance and attitudes we're still fighting against. You're not solving the problem. You're being a part of the problem. From atymes at gmail.com Fri Sep 6 16:42:16 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 09:42:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 9:17 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 08:53:00AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > Starting the article with a claim, and repeating it constantly throughout > > the article, doesn't make it true. > > The Nile is not just a river in Egypt. > Yep. And the fingers-in-ears denial here is that there are ways technology can solve this problem. They're hard to do, though. It's so much easier to just declare that we're all screwed and everybody else is going to have to suck it up. > > According to the study Wikipedia cites, wind's EROEI is 18 - a net > > We're missing a TW/year substitution rate, and alternative energy > sources (too little, too late) don't produce hydrocarbon gases and > liquids. > Like I said in the very next sentence, wind can't do all the world's energy problems - but the way to get that TW/year substitution rate is to assemble it from a variety of sources, and not damn every single one (like wind) just because it won't do it all itself. As to hydrocarbons, they can be manufactured given enough energy. The problem is thus having enough energy. > > solutions, so arguing against each component in turn because it can't do > > 100% is the opposite of helpful. > > In order to begin solving a problem you must first realize that you > have a problem. > Being addicted to disasterbation is a problem, yes. It often compels people to not only not help solve bigger problems, but to actively get in the way of those who are because they're convinced that all efforts to do good must inevitably, tragically do more harm than good. > > > The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with > > > Heinberg?s > > > 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting high > taxes > > > and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than one > child > > > so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as possible. > > > > > > > So is this a world problem or a US problem? "Limiting immigration" > doesn't > > It is a world problem. Then what's that note about limiting immigration doing there? That's inapplicable in the context of the world. > You're not solving the problem. You're being a part of the problem. > That you sincerely believe this is the problem with disasterbation: rather than try to fix the root problem, you think it better to attack people because they are trying to fix the root problem. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 6 22:06:07 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 00:06:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 09:42:16AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Yep. And the fingers-in-ears denial here is that there are ways technology > can solve this problem. They're hard to do, though. It's so much easier Technology can solve the problem -- if it's deployed on time, and budget. We're all out of time, and budget. I'm afraid now this is going to hurt quite a bit. > to just declare that we're all screwed and everybody else is going to have > to suck it up. Ever so subtly and unflaggingly, I try to get people to realize that the boat has sailed, and we *now* must jump into the cold water, so that we still have a chance to reach it. The longer we falter, the more people are going to drown. > > > > According to the study Wikipedia cites, wind's EROEI is 18 - a net > > > > We're missing a TW/year substitution rate, and alternative energy > > sources (too little, too late) don't produce hydrocarbon gases and > > liquids. > > > > Like I said in the very next sentence, wind can't do all the world's energy I never said a single thing about wind. It's about all renewable, total. > problems - but the way to get that TW/year substitution rate is to assemble > it from a variety of sources, and not damn every single one (like wind) > just because it won't do it all itself. It doesn't matter what you choose, because we're running two orders of magnitude short, and the energy debt is cumulative. And as I've been saying you, the total curve is not an exponential above nontrivial saturation levels. Sometimes I hate being right, again. > As to hydrocarbons, they can be manufactured given enough energy. The We're missing two orders of magnitude of that goddamn energy, and I'm not counting infrastructure work. Look at chemical engineering. Look at your average synfuel plant, the budget, the construction, and realize that We're Having Problems. That we're also having senior moments, collectively, is not exactly helping. > problem is thus having enough energy. No, the problem is not "just" about having energy. Necessary, but insufficient. > > > > solutions, so arguing against each component in turn because it can't do > > > 100% is the opposite of helpful. > > > > In order to begin solving a problem you must first realize that you > > have a problem. > > > > Being addicted to disasterbation is a problem, yes. It often compels Assume I'm wrong, and you're right. Now assume the opposite. See the asymmetry in outcomes? Does that give you pause? Three decades ago the cost would have been negligible. Now it is no no longer negligible, but that is also not the fault of people that served you a plan on a silver platter, which you chose to ridicule and then ignore. Whoops. Now it seems it's time of the blame game. Yes, I admit it. 9/11 was all my doing. I killed Kennedy, too. > people to not only not help solve bigger problems, but to actively get in > the way of those who are because they're convinced that all efforts to do > good must inevitably, tragically do more harm than good. I don't know who you're talking about, but if you look back at a quarter of century of my posting history, you'll notice that I have been optimistic, but also capable of learning. If the outcome doesn't match predictions, I readjust the outlook. Same applies to unjustly much-maligned Limits to Growth. The original report assumed adaptive change. Only the more recent versions factored the Paths Not Taken In. Are we smarter than yeast? It doesn't seem that we are. If you don't like the message, don't shoot the messenger. Many of us can still make it, but no longer all of us. That Troy fell wasn't exactly Cassandra's fault. > > > > > The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with > > > > Heinberg?s > > > > 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting high > > taxes > > > > and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than one > > child > > > > so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as possible. > > > > > > > > > > So is this a world problem or a US problem? "Limiting immigration" > > doesn't > > > > It is a world problem. > > > Then what's that note about limiting immigration doing there? That's > inapplicable in the context of the world. I don't know what you're talking about, but it's impossible to fabricate solutions if everything is coming crashing down around you. That assumes that you're at all trying, if you're just fiddling while Rome burns, the footnotes don't matter. > > > You're not solving the problem. You're being a part of the problem. > > > > That you sincerely believe this is the problem with disasterbation: rather > than try to fix the root problem, you think it better to attack people > because they are trying to fix the root problem. What exactly are you doing to solve the root problem? And why I'm wasting my breath, still giving a shit? Perhaps I do not learn, after all. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Sep 6 23:02:13 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 17:02:13 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <03b401cea7eb$874f5700$95ee0500$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D1614.20503@aleph.se> <20130828084308.GX29404@leitl.org> <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> <20130902111715.GG29404@leitl.org> <03b401cea7eb$874f5700$95ee0500$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 8:48 AM, spike wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 04:23:46PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > But how many millions of years would it take to get it moving at a > > reasonable speed? Have you done those calculations Spike? > > I have done the calcs on it, takes 20 million years to get to the nearest > star from here, doesn't ever get up to a reasonable speed for interstellar > travel. The speed once it reaches the nearest star is about 200-ish meters > per second, about the speed of a Booeing 737. The real magic is that you > can deflect off of the nearest star gravitationally, and pick up some of > its > orbital velocity around the center of the galaxy. This is a good idea, > since with this scheme you can't actually stop at the target star; you just > go zooming on past. But it isn't really like flying over Salt Lake City on > your way to Denver, for you leave behind some MBrain nodes at the target > star, so they use the metal that is there and start a new MBrain. > It would seem that over a VERY long time period, one could detect this kind of spreading of MBrains in the astronomic data. If a star changes direction or acceleration, that is certainly observable, but you would have to watch over a very very long period of time, unless you could predict what the pattern would be. Would they head off away from each other? In the direction with the least likely future MBrains? Who knows? But the direction of highest degree of long term reproduction would be a fairly good guess. > > but assuming you take half the mass of the asteroid belt and build > > these things out of it... what kind of acceleration would you get? Kelly > > The sample calcs I did require about 20% of the asteroid belt and max > acceleration is in the pico-G range as I recall, which is why I used the > units meters per square year rather than an alternative picometers per > square second. This whole notion isn't for the impatient types, who insist > on rushing around in the lifetime of a particular species. > LOL. No, this is clearly a scheme for the patient. The problem is whether, in all that time, someone would come up with a "better" use for all that matter. > >...You're competing against relativistic craft ~kg to ~ton range, capable > of 1-10 g acceleration... Eugen > > That depends on what your definition of "compete" is. The other fast > species can do their thing, while the MBrain goes about its business on a > different time scale. > > > The other thing is how would you agree which direction to go? ... Kelly > > What you mean you? You and I wouldn't need to agree. The MBrain makes > that > decision without consulting humanity, and does what it collectively decides > to do. If your question is how does an MBrain decide things and can you > have competing MBrains around the same star, my answer is I don't know and > I > don't know. But MBrains are smart, so I would trust them to do the right > thing. > I'm guessing they would want to optimize for long term spreading of their MBrainness, but who knows, I'm certainly not that smart. > >I'm guessing humanity would want to move to the outside of the > galaxy...Kelly > > Perhaps. Metal is very valuable in this scheme, but the outboard guys can > carry metals inboard with them. The MBrain as photon rocket notion carries > all the planets and everything else in there along for the ride. > Yup. I get it. > >...Humanity that chose to become solid state or begat solid state will go > everywhere it pleases... Eugen > > Ja, if that becomes reality, this other scheme is likely a nonstarter. But > humans to solid state is pie in the sky tech, whereas we have everything, > or > durn near almost everything we need right now to build an MBrain. MBrain > tech is now potatoes on the plate technology. If humanity suffers a peak > collective intelligence and starts declining (I can think of several > mechanisms that could cause that) then we may never achieve human > intelligence to solid state, and if not, we may never get out of the > cradle. > But if we create the means of converting the asteroid belt to an MBrain, > then we start along the 20 million year journey to the next star, then the > next intelligent life form will see a star coming at a couple hundred > meters > per second, realize there are wonderful opportunities, etc. > > Kelly more directly to your question, it could be that the original MBrain > merely gets programmed to head off to the nearest star, with the MBrains > never having anything like intelligence. The nodes just do what they do, > like 6E26 chess computers, never developing intelligence or ever wanting > to. > > > ...but seriously, how would you figure out the right > > direction to go? Ok, you might be able to compute a good direction > > with regards to the imminent collision with the Andromeda Galaxy... > > :-) > Kelly_______________________________________________ > > > OK Kelly and other MBrain fans, here's your assignment: propose a direction > to start. > > Considerations: as I noted before, the luminosity of a star on the main > sequence scales as the 3.5 power of the mass, so if you double the mass of > a > star, its luminosity goes up by about 11 but its mass doubles, so the > acceleration available with an MBrain goes up by five and some change. > With > that information, we want a star which we can combine with ours and still > be > on the main sequence, for causing a supernova could spoil an MBrain's whole > eon. > > I haven't worked out the details on whether colliding two stars would cause > a nova (note difference between nova and supernova.) I suspect any star > collision would cause a nova, but that is not a show stopper I wouldn't > think. > > There is another thing I thought of. Just as it might be possible to > combine two stars, it might be possible to collide two stars in such a way > as to create a smaller star. If for instance you have a 1 solar mass star > colliding with another 1 solar mass star, you might be able to arrange the > collision to create a 1.8 solar mass star and a 0.2, the smaller one going > zinging off with enormous velocity. Why would you do that? We only have a > few billion years before main sequence stars start to go red giant, and > even > less than a paltry billion years for the bigger stars. But if you take a > star on the main sequence and remove some of the mass, its lifetime is > extended enormously. The resulting star becomes more difficult to steer, > because the luminosity available for the MBrain to deflect is lowered by a > factor of about 280 and the mass is lowered by a factor of 5, so the > available acceleration is lower by a factor of about 56, but the star's > lifetime is extended by a factor of about 25. So with that technique we > are > partially freed from that tight deadline only a few billion years away and > approaching rapidly. > > MBrain star steering is not for impatient types who expect everything to > happen in this particular geological age. It helps to look at things from > the perspective of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt. All these eons, the > greenstone watched these life forms pop out of the sea, swarm all over the > place, run around in circles, accomplish nothing from the perspective of > moving off to the nearest star and joining the others, or if there are no > others, then becoming the others. > The other thing to consider is whether there would be any advantages to be gained in creating a binary star system somewhere along the line. A binary system might have some interesting advantages over a single star system. More mass without going supernova being just the start of the potential list. Pick up stars that have a good long life ahead of them, leaving behind stars that might be going supernova in the next billion years or so. Picture running (albeit very slowly) away from an impending (in a billion years) supernova... pretty interesting idea. Maybe the earth won't be swallowed by our expanding sun when the time comes... maybe... -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Sep 7 13:07:21 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 15:07:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 01:11:35AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### No, I don't think that is the case, the basic physics does not > seem to change at the visible universe scale, at least not in an > easily detectable way, so the resulting intelligences should be > similar as well. There are two issues with these assumption: the pioneer organisms are specialists, so the expanding wave front is different than the volume behind, which will have succession colonization waves, and then settle into a high-diversity equilibrium. Regardless of origin, in a mature system the diversity is sufficiently high that any random sampling will result in very dissimiliar organisms, though there will be convergent evolution for specific niches (the most important one being the pioneer niche). From pharos at gmail.com Sat Sep 7 14:09:39 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 15:09:39 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 2:07 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > There are two issues with these assumption: the pioneer > organisms are specialists, so the expanding wave front > is different than the volume behind, which will have > succession colonization waves, and then settle into > a high-diversity equilibrium. > > As you know, I am not keen on the idea of expanding wave fronts colonizing the galaxy. :) My main reason is (agreeing with Fermi) that considering galactic time scales we should have been colonized already. We don't see this happening in any other galaxy either, even nearby galaxies within a few million light years distance. The argument usually goes along the lines of - crossing time (at one tenth the speed of light) of 300 years, add a recuperation time of say ~ 700 years, each step in the expanding wavefront takes ~ 1000 years, therefore to cross the entire galaxy would take a few million years. Even less if you assume the wave front doesn't stop for the ~700 years recuperation time. I have found another objection to the wave front theory as well, quoting from - Are Intelligent Aliens a Threat to Humanity? Diseases (Viruses, Bacteria) From Space. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., Centre for Astrobiology, Cardiff University, UK . Quote: With the numerical values chosen in this example, our space colonisers would need to have biological generation time (mean life-span) considerably in excess of ours. Otherwise, we have to posit that the potential predator embarks on a space voyage that benefits not its own generation but several generations into the future. No example exists on Earth where this model applies, either naturally in the living world, or in a sociological context. -------------- This paper suggests that galactic colonization is more likely along panspermia lines. i.e distributing DNA by microbes and viruses, leaving them to develop wherever they find a suitable environment. This would be undetectable by us, but could produce life growing throughout the galaxy. BillK From spike66 at att.net Sat Sep 7 14:57:43 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 07:57:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D1614.20503@aleph.se> <20130828084308.GX29404@leitl.org> <011e01cea47a$a4172a30$ec457e90$@att.net> <20130902111715.GG29404@leitl.org> <03b401cea7eb$874f5700$95ee0500$@att.net> Message-ID: <051501ceabda$9c0b2780$d4217680$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson >. >.The other thing to consider is whether there would be any advantages to be gained in creating a binary star system somewhere along the line. A binary system might have some interesting advantages over a single star system. More mass without going supernova being just the start of the potential list. Pick up stars that have a good long life ahead of them, leaving behind stars that might be going supernova in the next billion years or so. Picture running (albeit very slowly) away from an impending (in a billion years) supernova... pretty interesting idea. Maybe the earth won't be swallowed by our expanding sun when the time comes... maybe... -Kelly Kelly your questions have spurred me to restart my efforts to finish that MBrain book Robert Bradbury and I were working on several years ago. This discussion has spawned a few new ideas. Regarding our sun going red giant, we have time to haul the thing out to the next star, drop off our favorite planet and some of the MBrain nodes, then hurl the sun elsewhere, such that when it goes red at the end of Main Street, there are few if any sentient beings to suffer. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Sat Sep 7 15:58:16 2013 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 08:58:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin - Mt.Gox Message-ID: <1378569496.68574.YahooMailNeo@web121202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Concerned about the financial health of Mt. Gox, (the largest Bitcoin exchange), I transferred out what coins I had there. News surfaced in recent weeks that the US seizure of Mt. Gox funds was no small affair. Not only was its Dwolla account seized, but so too was its US Wells Fargo bank account. The total funds seized amounted to about $5 million, including $50,000 of the CEO's personal funds. While all this was happening, Mt. Gox was telling customers about the Dwolla seizure, but not about the Wells Fargo seizure, and it was not divulging the dollar amounts. They put a hold on withdrawals of USD which they attributed to supposed technical difficulties as they established new financial relationships. The hold was later lifted, but I've seen numerous reports that USD withdrawals are still delayed as much as four weeks or more.?I appears to me that Mt. Gox is experiencing undisclosed financial problems, and that they have been less than honest about it with their customers.? The liquidity issues at Mt. Gox would also explain the wide spread between the market price there and other exchanges like Coinbase. The Mt. Gox BTC price is about 10% higher. It looks like an arbitrage opportunity, but the discrepancy is probably explained by the fact that US sellers at Gox cannot get ready access to their USD.? What do you think, Mirco? (or anyone) Gordon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Sat Sep 7 16:03:52 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 18:03:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?windows-1252?q?Silence_in_the_sky=97but_why=3F?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <522B4E68.70808@libero.it> Il 26/08/2013 14:46, BillK ha scritto: > Anders tackles the Fermi paradox. > > Quote: > Dr Sandberg concludes: 'Our key point is that if any civilisation > anywhere in the past had wanted to expand, they would have been able > to reach an enormous portion of the universe. That makes the Fermi > question tougher ? by a factor of billions. If intelligent life is > rare, it needs to be much rarer than just one civilisation per galaxy. > If advanced civilisations all refrain from colonising, this trend must > be so strong that not a single one across billions of galaxies and > billions of years chose to do it. And so on. > 'We still don't know what the answer is, but we know it's more radical > than previously expected.' Maybe, just maybe, civilizations reach a point where they "transcend" what we are able to detect and move to another level altogether. If we were cavemen, we would look for advanced civilizations in caves. But if the advanced civilization moved to seasteading or cloud cities, they would have problems to detect them. The same is probably true with advanced space civilizations: if they are able to manipulate gravity, build mega scale habitats, move faster than light, etc. they could have hardly any interest in coming down to a gravity pit like a Earth-like planet. If intelligent life move to artificial support, they would have no need to live on a habitable planet. We evolved out in the savanna of East Africa, but expanded out at every chance available and even today the savanna of East Africa is very scarcely populated. Mirco From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Sep 7 16:31:13 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 12:31:13 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > In order to begin solving a problem you must first realize that you have > a problem. > Yes, and looking at the figures for natural gas production in the USA it sure doesn't look like running out of fossil fuels is going to be much of a problem in the immediate future: http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9070us2m.htm The huge expansion of domestic oil and gas production in the USA has created about 1.2 million jobs and increase disposable income by almost $2000 per household per year. And new technology, that is to say fracking, has INCREASED the usable gas reserves by 58% over what it was in 1997! Of course environmentalists are very unhappy about all this, but then they never saw a large scale power source they didn't hate. And by the way, in the current New Scientist magazine it says that there is twice as much energy in methane hydrate than all the world's oil and coal and natural gas and oil shale and tar sands combined. It also calls this unused resource the cleanest fossil fuel in the world. > The Nile is not just a river in Egypt. > Speaking of the Nile, Ethiopia is building a new dam on the Nile, it is expected to be completed by 2017 and will produce 6000 Megawatts of greenhouse gas free energy that the environmentalists say they are so worried about. The Aswan High Dam has been producing 2100 Megawatts since 1970 and just a few days ago Uganda anounced they were going to build a 600 Megawatt damn. Of course environmentalists are very unhappy about all this, but then they never saw a large scale power source they didn't hate. > > alternative energy sources (too little, too late) don't produce > hydrocarbon gases > Alternative energy also tends not to produce usable amounts of energy either, and often for the same reason. Very very small demonstration projects are OK but as soon as anybody tries to ramp it up to usable levels environmentalists put a stop to it; solar cells take up too much land, geothermal causes earthquakes, wind turbines are noisy, disrupt wind patterns and kill birds. And I know from first hand experience that the mere mention of the word "nuclear" causes some to explode in mindless apoplectic rage. Environmentalists would have no problem with attaching one generator to one hummingbird, but if anybody wanted to actually make a real dent in the problem and found a way to connect 10^15 hummingbirds to a huge turbine environmentalists would scream bloody murder and organize protest demonstrations in the streets. > > The point is that we've missed the boat, and we're in for a world of > hurt. > And what a poor morality play it will be if that turns out to be untrue. The unholy must be punished for their profligate lifestyle, like people in China insisting on 3 meals a day and indoor plumbing. > > Billions of people can barely afford their next meal. Quadruple the food > prices. What happens? > What happens when food gets expensive? People starve. And what causes food to become expensive? Self righteous environmentalists, who claim to have taken the high ground on all moral issues, diverting resources away from food production and toward bio fuels. > You're not solving the problem. You're being a part of the problem. > Eugen, another part of solving a problem is making sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. Even if the current temperature of the earth is the perfect temperature to maximize human happiness, would reducing the increase by a fraction of a degree be worth millions dying from energy starvation? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From m2darwin at aol.com Sat Sep 7 05:12:51 2013 From: m2darwin at aol.com (m2darwin at aol.com) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 01:12:51 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [ExI] Subject: [New_Cryonet] Fw: [cryo] Fwd: Steve Van Sickle's presentation a Message-ID: <6ef66.7fe3b433.3f5c0fd3@aol.com> -----Original Message----- From: Alejandro Dubrovsky Sent: Friday, September 6, 2013 9:53 AM To: cryo at postbiota.org Subject: [cryo] Fwd: [ExI] Steve Van Sickle's presentation at SENS6 -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [ExI] Steve Van Sickle's presentation at SENS6 Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 01:40:34 -0400 From: Rafal Smigrodzki Reply-To: rafal at smigrodzki.org, ExI chat list To: ExI chat list Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending Steve Van Sickle's presentation at SENS6, reporting his results with cryonic preservation of kidneys. Steve developed a technique for persufflation of organs perfused with cryoprotectants using cold helium. He was able to cool pig kidneys to liquid nitrogen temperature, achieving total vitrification while *avoiding* fractures! I was absolutely floored by his work, easily the most important presentation at SENS6 so far. Steve also described calculations for hyperbaric persufflation, which might allow vitrifying a human body in *a few minutes*! There's only one small problem (at least for me) with this "remarkable breakthrough", or more particularly, with the crediting of it. When Steve Van Sickle was President of Alcor, and Tanya Jones was in charge of acute patient care, I engaged in an extended and frustrating series of emails with Van Sickle, copied to Tanya and to Alcor Director Dr. Brian Wowk. The subject of this correspondence was my urging Alcor to switch to using gas perfusion following cryoprotective perfusion of patients, in order to achieve both more uniform cooling, as well as much faster cooling and very possibly the reduction or elimination of fracturing injury in patients. The reasons I suggested this were not merely theoretical. When I was working as a researcher for Manrise Corporation (Fred and Linda Chamberlain) in the mid-1970s I had conducted gas perfusion experiments on rabbit kidneys and heads following the work of Schimmel, et al. with gas perfusion of rat kidneys; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5872343 , that of of Hamilton and Lehr with gas peerfusion of canine small bowel http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4702169 and of the work of Guttmann, et al., using hedlium perfusion in canine kidneys: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1259562 and http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=661256 . This work demonstrated that uniform cooling rates on the order of 2-3 deg C min were achievable and, as I noted in my correspondence with van Sickle at that time, there was no evidence of fracturing, even in kidneys loaded with 25% w/v cryoprotectant. I would also point out my extensive discussion of the idea of gas perfusion in cryonics in this post on Cryonet during the "cooling fluids debate" that took place there on 12/17/92: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=1465 I pointed out that this technique was far easier to implement than was perflurochemical (PFC) perfusion and that it had the advantage of having already been proven out from a practical standpoint not only by my work in the mid-1970s, but by work done by Pegg, et al., in the in 1978; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/001122407890086X . What's more, experiments conducted in recent years using oxygen persufflation of hypothermically (non-frozen) stored organs had demonstrated that putative problems with gas emboli, or endothelial cell dehydration, were, in fact NOT problems and that organs perfused with gas could be transplanted with the long term support and survival of the animals being a uniform outcome: 1: Srinivasan PK, Yagi S, Doorschodt B, Nagai K, Afify M, Uemoto S, Tolba R. Impact of venous systemic oxygen persufflation supplemented with nitric oxide gas on cold-stored, warm ischemia-damaged experimental liver grafts. Liver Transpl. 2012 Feb;18(2):219-25. doi: 10.1002/lt.22442. PubMed PMID: 21987402. 2: Minor T, Akbar S, Tolba R, Dombrowski F. Cold preservation of fatty liver grafts: prevention of functional and ultrastructural impairments by venous oxygen persufflation. J Hepatol. 2000 Jan;32(1):105-11. PubMed PMID: 10673074. 3: Stegemann J, Hirner A, Rauen U, Minor T. Gaseous oxygen persufflation or oxygenated machine perfusion with Custodiol-N for long-term preservation of ischemic rat livers? Cryobiology. 2009 Feb;58(1):45-51. doi: 10.1016/j.cryobiol.2008.10.127. Epub 2008 Oct 17. PubMed PMID: 18977213. 4: Minor T, Olschewski P, Tolba RH, Akbar S, Koc?lkov? M, Dombrowski F. Liver preservation with HTK: salutary effect of hypothermic aerobiosis by either gaseous oxygen or machine perfusion. Clin Transplant. 2002 Jun;16(3):206-11. PubMed PMID: 12010145. 5: Lauschke H, Olschewski P, Tolba R, Schulz S, Minor T. Oxygenated machine perfusion mitigates surface antigen expression and improves preservation of predamaged donor livers. Cryobiology. 2003 Feb;46(1):53-60. PubMed PMID: 12623028. 6: Gong J, Lao XJ, Zhang SJ, Chen S. Protective effects of L-arginine against ischemia-reperfusion injury in non-heart beating rat liver graft. Hepatobiliary Pancreat Dis Int. 2008 Oct;7(5):481-4. PubMed PMID: 18842493. 7: Nagai K, Yagi S, Afify M, Bleilevens C, Uemoto S, Tolba RH. Impact of venous-systemic oxygen persufflation with nitric oxide gas on steatotic grafts after partial orthotopic liver transplantation in rats. Transplantation. 2013 Jan 15;95(1):78-84. doi: 10.1097/TP.0b013e318277e2d1. PubMed PMID: 23263502. 8: Minor T, Isselhard W, Klauke H. Reduction in nonparenchymal cell injury and vascular endothelial dysfunction after cold preservation of the liver by gaseous oxygen. Transpl Int. 1996;9 Suppl 1:S425-8. PubMed PMID: 8959878. 9: Saad S, Minor T, Nagelschmidt M, Fu ZX, K?tting I, Paul A, Troidl H, Isselhard W. [Revitalizing donor livers after cardiovascular arrest with venous oxygen persufflation]. Langenbecks Arch Chir Suppl Kongressbd. 1998;115(Suppl I):705-8. German. PubMed PMID: 14518345. 10: Tolba RH, Schildberg FA, Schnurr C, Glatzel U, Decker D, Minor T. Reduced liver apoptosis after venous systemic oxygen persufflation in non-heart-beating donors. J Invest Surg. 2006 Jul-Aug;19(4):219-27. PubMed PMID: 16835136. 11: Sun HW, Shen F, Zhou YM. Influence of perfusion by gaseous oxygen persufflation on rat donor liver. Hepatobiliary Pancreat Dis Int. 2006 May;5(2):195-8. PubMed PMID: 16698574. Van Sickle's response was, essentially, to argue that gas perfusion simply could not compete with the exchange capability of a liquid - even a liquid with relatively poor heat carrying capacity, such as a perflurochemical (PFC), or a mixture of PFCs. These remarks were presumably made on the basis of a patent by Brian Wowk and demonstrating the utility of PFC for improving heat exchange during cooling of organs and whole animals. My efforts to point out to Steve that this technique was severely limited because: * Because of the increasing viscosity, and ultimately the solidification of the PFCs at temperatures right around the critical glass transition point for M-22, the ability to remove heat from the patient is lost at precisely the point during cooling when it was most needed. * Perfusion of PFCs was incredibly uneven in the tissues due to a short circuiting effect that occurred when very low viscosity PFC first opened a channel of flow between the arterial and venous circulations. These "first opened" channels effectively "stole" much of the flow from the capillary beds. * The PFC proved virtually impossible to remove, proved obstructive to subsequent perfusion and precluded any access to the circulation at storage temperatures. * PFC perfusion was logistically very difficult and there were many problems with cryoprotective perfusate continuing to stream out of the animals' circulatory systems requiring extensive filtration and multiple trap placement in the PFC perfusion circuit (on both the venous and the arterial side). Perfusion circuit of a dog undergoing subzero PFC perfusion cooling to ~ -70 deg C in 1995: Prototype PFC perfusion cooling and re-warming machine developed at 21CM circa 1996: And lastly, that pumping PFC through Silastic (silicone rubber) tubing caus ed the build-up of dangerous electrostatic charges which, on two occasions, resulted in fires in the operating room and the destruction of the costly centrifugal pumps being used to pump the PFC. One fire had to be extinguished with a CO2 fire extinguished and it caused nearly $2,500 worth of damage - not to mention ruining the experiment! These problems were never definitively solved... Still, I could not get through to Van Sickle and I did not receive any response from Tanya Jones regarding this matter. Shortly after Peter Thiel funded Van Sickle and Jones' Argo Biomedical in February, 2012, I received an email (anonymous) informing me that the technology Argos was developing was being kept "top secret" in large measure to avoid a response from me, like this one. I was informed that the basis for Argos' research venture was the communications from me to Van Sickle and Jones in the mid-2000s. This prompted me to place a call to Dr. Greg Fahy and to ask him if he knew what Argos' research platform was? His response was that he had agreed to keep the matter confidential and that he intended to honor that agreement. The idea of using helium (or other) gas perfusion to increase both the rate and the homogeneity of cooling in organs is not a new one and it did not originate with me. While I can fairly take credit for being the first to propose this for use in cryonics, and to be the first to actually apply the technique to isolated heads, I have always been careful to credit the researchers who originated and first validated the utility of this idea. To those who would say that this idea is both obvious and compelling for application in cryonics, I would point to the correspondence reproduced below, wherein as recently as 2008, I am arguing for adoption of this approach - to no avail. Reaching the minimum concentration of cryoprotectants needed to achieve vitrification (CNV) uniformly in human cryonics patients is very difficult due to peri- and post-cardiac arrest ischemia. The result is that substantial freezing occurs in areas of the brain that are not quite at CNV. The obvious way to solve this problem is to eliminate ischemia. But, alas, this is not now possible. However CNV is a function of not just the CPA concentration, but also of the cooling rate. Currently, Alcor is limited to a cooling rate of ~ -3 deg C per hour for brain and this means that the CNV must be very high - well over 60% (v/v). If that cooling rate could be increased to even 0.5 deg C/min, the CNV would be lower and more of the brain in ischemic patients would thus likely undergone vitrification, as opposed to freezing. This is what I argued be done for Alcor patients many years ago. I subsequently repeated this argument to people at CI in 2007-8 - again to no avail. In closing I would like to quote Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke on 15 February 1676: "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants." For the context of this quote see: http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/OTHE00101 Generally, (but sadly, not always) it is in the character of innovators and academics to generously acknowledge the intellectual lineage of their work. Indeed, one of the reasons that Newton is, to this day, so much more beloved and respected than Robert Hooke, is because he had both the wisdom and the personal integrity to acknowledge that his efforts, Herculean though they were, were possible only because he himself had stood upon the shoulders of giants. Mike Darwin ____________________________________ From: M2darwin To: REDACTED CC: wowk at 21CM.com, gfahy at 21CM.com, aschwin.de.wolf at gmail.com, chana.de.wolf at gmail.com, m2darwin at googlemail.com BCC: danila.medvedev at gmail.com Sent: 10/4/2008 4:29:55 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time Subj: Cold Gas Perfusion Hello All, After much effort I retrieved my 1970s photocopy of Pegg's paper wherein he fails to reduplicate Guttman's work. The useful thing about this paper and the Schimmel paper on ultra cold gas perfusion of dog and rat kidneys is that they show what kind of cooling rates are possible and what the range of gas flows through dog kidneys was in Pegg's hands (i.e., a credible, solid researcher whose work is reproducible). Schimmel http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5872343: Pegg I've attached both papers plus a bit of history from Greg circa 1978 when he was very hot to trot for cold gas cooling . I've also extracted and relabeled the cooling curve graph from the Pegg paper. The principal problem with Pegg's paper is that the kidneys were in a cold air bath; in fact her had to wrap them in a rubber glove to SLOW the rate of cooling of the cortex. Schimmel et al., cooled their kidneys in an insulated container with the only source of cooling being the intra-arterial helium they used. Helium flow rates through dog kidneys were 750 ml/min = or - 140 ml/min and cooling rate to -80 deg C using gas chilled to -90 deg C was 2.8 deg C/min! This is in close agreement with Schimmel et al's data also copied below. I've marked up the Pegg data showing very conservative estimates for cooling and they come out where Pegg said they do: it is important to realize that the OVERALL rate of cooling is probably much slower than would be the case with a kidney or a patient loaded with a vitrifiable mixture because: 1) There is a huge 'loss' of efficiency in cooling rate in kidneys that freeze because the latent heat of fusion must be dissipated. This is not a problem in systems to be vitrified. 2) The delta decay is enormous in Pegg's study because he held his cold gas temperature to no lower than around -80 deg C and kept his delta of gas to organ at around -40 to -50 deg C for the first part of the procedure (less later on). If the delta T were TWICE this from the start the cooling rate would be a lot faster. In fact his peak rates were in the range of 4.5 deg C min according to the text in his paper. 3) He used helium which as he notes is particularly bad at heat transfer. To what extent this made up by better flow (he reports helium literally pouring out of the uninjured surface of the kidney!!!!! is unknown. However, if nitrogen is as much better you guys say, then cooling rates of ~3 deg C/min should be easily achievable for the kidney and presumably for the brain in patients without bad vascular obstruction. If you eliminate the problem Pegg had with the superficial cortex cooling faster than the deep cortex and medulla by insulating the patient/organ from the cold bath gas then you would see a virtual abolition of any significant difference between surface and core cooling - presumably eliminating viscoeslastic injury. 4) Finally, unlike the case with PFCs the vasculature will be open so that nanomachines or worst case, fixatives, can be introduced later at subzero temperatures. It will also be far cheaper than using PFCs if N2 works OK. Mike Darwin -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: clip_image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 26199 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: clip_image004.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 17631 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: clip_image006.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 21838 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: clip_image008.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 51973 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: clip_image009.gif Type: image/gif Size: 73 bytes Desc: not available URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Sep 7 17:03:55 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 10:03:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 3:06 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Ever so subtly and unflaggingly, I try to get people to realize that > the boat has sailed, and we *now* must jump into the cold water, so that > we still have a chance to reach it. The longer we falter, the more > people are going to drown. Actually, there's no boat; you're just telling people to drown. Like John said, how dare those billions of people in eastern China and northern India demand three meals a day - by your logic, they should go back to the standard of living they had previously been on. > Assume I'm wrong, and you're right. Now assume the opposite. > See the asymmetry in outcomes? Does that give you pause? > Nope. That's like Pascal's Wager: "If God exists, then to believe in Him (and not sin) is to gain infinite, while to disbelieve (and commit sin) is to lose infinite. If God does not exist, then to disbelieve (sin) is to gain a little, while to believe (not sin) is to lose a little. Therefore you should believe in God." This ignores the probabilities of both sides, and all possibilities other than the two being proposed. It's a logical fallacy. The probability of you being right about this, given the evidence, is about the same as the probability of the most utopian of visions that say there will "soon" (say, before 2030 - or 2040, being generous) be TW available for < $0.0001/MW with no carbon output. You never put a date on it, so when civilization fails to collapse, you can keep saying it's about to. But summing up the chances of you being right, up until (the Singularity/you go into cryo/etc.), the odds come out about the same. This is a well known problem with predicting collapse. Logically, you can keep claiming it's about to, and so long as you never give an exact date you're never "wrong" so reason can't dislodge your conviction. Emotionally, it feels SO GOOD to absolve yourself of all responsibility and insist everyone else is screwing themselves over - this is addictive just like tobacco and alcohol. So you keep doing it...and yet, despite your prophecies, civilization keeps trucking along. If it just harmed you, that would be one thing, but this harms other people. Occasionally you convince people not to build a new power plant, or some other measure that would actually address the pain. You feel that your convictions are supported as people continue to suffer, believing that the fix would surely have been short-lived. You turn a blind eye to cases where people build these "short-lived" fixes and peoples' lives improve: just because those fixes haven't collapsed yet, doesn't mean they won't tomorrow, or the day after that - no matter if they were built yesterday or 50 years ago. > > > > The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with > > > > > Heinberg?s > > > > > 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting > high > > > taxes > > > > > and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than > one > > > child > > > > > so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as > possible. > > > > > > > > > > > > > So is this a world problem or a US problem? "Limiting immigration" > > > doesn't > > > > > > It is a world problem. > > > > Then what's that note about limiting immigration doing there? That's > > inapplicable in the context of the world. > > I don't know what you're talking about, but it's impossible to fabricate > solutions if everything is coming crashing down around you. That assumes > that you're at all trying, if you're just fiddling while Rome burns, the > footnotes don't matter. > Civilization hasn't collapsed yet. Whatever the ominous signs and portents, the majority of the world's people are not starving and rioting at this second. Argue all you like about how that will and must happen, but any future - no matter how supposedly inevitable - is distinct from the present. Besides, you missed the question. If it's a world problem, then how does "limiting immigration" help? Where do people "immigrate" to the world from? (This isn't births: the author addressed that separately.) My point is that this is evidence the original author was, at best, confused. > What exactly are you doing to solve the root problem? > Working on ways to reduce the cost of getting things into orbit, so that space-basd solar becomes a lot more practical. For that matter, space-based anything: EROEI becomes less of a factor if you only measure initial energy from Earth vs. eventual returns to Earth, with the system acquiring more energy in space and using that exclusively to bootstrap its capabilities. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjv2006 at gmail.com Sat Sep 7 17:14:48 2013 From: sjv2006 at gmail.com (Stephen Van Sickle) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 10:14:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Steve Van Sickle's presentation at SENS6 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks for the kind comments, Rafal. Just to be clear, my results are still very preliminary. Furthermore, any extrapolation beyond swine kidneys is purely speculative and wildly premature. Steve Van Sickle On Sep 6, 2013 6:42 AM, "Rafal Smigrodzki" wrote: > Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending Steve Van Sickle's > presentation at SENS6, reporting his results with cryonic preservation > of kidneys. Steve developed a technique for persufflation of organs > perfused with cryoprotectants using cold helium. He was able to cool > pig kidneys to liquid nitrogen temperature, achieving total > vitrification while *avoiding* fractures! I was absolutely floored by > his work, easily the most important presentation at SENS6 so far. > Steve also described calculations for hyperbaric persufflation, which > might allow vitrifying a human body in *a few minutes*! > > Needless to say, if this work pans out, it would dramatically change > the world of cryonics. There used to be three obstacles preventing > reversible cryonic suspension - fractures, cryoprotectant toxicity, > and rewarming issues (crystalization). Steve solved the fractures > issue and with the dramatically shorted cooling and even more > dramatically shorter thawing times there might be enough of a > reduction in cryoprotectant toxicity and rewarming injury that > reversible suspension might be within reach (give or take 10 million > dollars worth of development work). > > The presentation video should be available on the SENS site at some > point, check it out. > > Rafal > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Sep 7 17:20:21 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 19:20:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130907172021.GM29404@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 03:09:39PM +0100, BillK wrote: > As you know, I am not keen on the idea of expanding wave fronts > colonizing the galaxy. :) I agree that this is not something what I would do. But what we want is not relevant across time and space. Life will always find a way. In a sense a sterile universe wastes a lot of resources. Consider the Moon. Perfect waste of atoms and joules, and lovers be damned. > My main reason is (agreeing with Fermi) that considering galactic time > scales we should have been colonized already. We don't see this If we were colonized, you would not be able to read this message. There are far more ways of being dead than being alive, yet you're observing yourself being alive. Probabilities mean nothing here, as long as no external samples are available. > happening in any other galaxy either, even nearby galaxies within a > few million light years distance. Try three orders of magnitude more. > The argument usually goes along the lines of - > crossing time (at one tenth the speed of light) of 300 years, add a Once begun, expansion will ultimatively turn relativistic. This means that probability of encountering subrelativistic expansion is nil. They get hopelessly left behind across time and across space. Your observation is heavily biased towards very expansive observers. You will never encounter any other kind, the chances are less than finding a needle in a haystack. > recuperation time of say ~ 700 years, each step in the expanding Exponential processes ramp up quickly. A single stellar system can become fertile almost immediately, and will autamplify by many orders of magnitude. Not only neighbor systems will be targeted. Solid state can cross intergalactic voids. Time is not important. > wavefront takes ~ 1000 years, therefore to cross the entire galaxy > would take a few million years. Even less if you assume the wave front Way less. > doesn't stop for the ~700 years recuperation time. > > I have found another objection to the wave front theory as well, quoting from - > Are Intelligent Aliens a Threat to Humanity? Diseases (Viruses, > Bacteria) From Space. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Ph.D., Centre for > Astrobiology, Cardiff University, UK . > Quote: > With the numerical values chosen in this example, our space colonisers > would need to have biological generation time (mean life-span) No biology will be part of expansion. It's all small-scale solid state. > considerably in excess of ours. Otherwise, we have to posit that the > potential predator embarks on a space voyage that benefits not its own Pioneers are not predators. They just restructure everything that no other life can emerge, and preexpansive life will be likely snuffed out due to their metabolism. > generation but several generations into the future. No example exists > on Earth where this model applies, either naturally in the living Au contraire, species succession in volcanic island colonization is a very good model, and happens all the time. > world, or in a sociological context. > -------------- > > This paper suggests that galactic colonization is more likely along The paper is bunk. > panspermia lines. i.e distributing DNA by microbes and viruses, There is no demonstrated interstellar panspermia transfer mechanism. Intrasystem yes, intersystem, no. > leaving them to develop wherever they find a suitable environment. > This would be undetectable by us, but could produce life growing > throughout the galaxy. I'm not very interested in primitive life. Especially, since it's undetectable. So let's rather look for our car keys under the streetlight. From eugen at leitl.org Sat Sep 7 18:30:59 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 20:30:59 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Silence_in_the_sky=E2=80=94but_why=3F?= In-Reply-To: <522B4E68.70808@libero.it> References: <522B4E68.70808@libero.it> Message-ID: <20130907183059.GY29404@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 06:03:52PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Maybe, just maybe, civilizations reach a point where they "transcend" > what we are able to detect and move to another level altogether. Tracelessly, and every single time out of a trillion? Just a single retarded civilization will be detectable. > If we were cavemen, we would look for advanced civilizations in caves. > But if the advanced civilization moved to seasteading or cloud cities, > they would have problems to detect them. They must be terribly low in numbers, though, as a mere Avogadro number of human equivalents will consume the complete solar output, and most of materials in this solar system. > The same is probably true with advanced space civilizations: > if they are able to manipulate gravity, build mega scale habitats, move > faster than light, etc. they could have hardly any interest in coming > down to a gravity pit like a Earth-like planet. Nobody talks about coming down. We're still able to see the stars. > If intelligent life move to artificial support, they would have no need > to live on a habitable planet. We evolved out in the savanna of East Nobody is talking about planets. We're wondering why not every stellar system is a FIR blackbody. > Africa, but expanded out at every chance available and even today the > savanna of East Africa is very scarcely populated. They rechristened Holocene into Anthropocene for a reason. We're a force of nature, already. From eugen at leitl.org Sat Sep 7 18:52:24 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 20:52:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 10:03:55AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > Actually, there's no boat; you're just telling people to drown. Like John Actually, you're literally Hitler. You gassed the Jews. Personally. > said, how dare those billions of people in eastern China and northern India > demand three meals a day - by your logic, they should go back to the > standard of living they had previously been on. > > > > Assume I'm wrong, and you're right. Now assume the opposite. > > See the asymmetry in outcomes? Does that give you pause? > > > > Nope. That's like Pascal's Wager: "If God exists, then to believe in Him > (and not sin) is to gain infinite, while to disbelieve (and commit sin) is > to lose infinite. If God does not exist, then to disbelieve (sin) is to > gain a little, while to believe (not sin) is to lose a little. Therefore > you should believe in God." This ignores the probabilities of both sides, > and all possibilities other than the two being proposed. It's a logical > fallacy. > > The probability of you being right about this, given the evidence, is about > the same as the probability of the most utopian of visions that say there > will "soon" (say, before 2030 - or 2040, being generous) be TW available > for < $0.0001/MW with no carbon output. > > You never put a date on it, so when civilization fails to collapse, you can > keep saying it's about to. But summing up the chances of you being right, > up until (the Singularity/you go into cryo/etc.), the odds come out about > the same. > > This is a well known problem with predicting collapse. Logically, you can > keep claiming it's about to, and so long as you never give an exact date > you're never "wrong" so reason can't dislodge your conviction. > Emotionally, it feels SO GOOD to absolve yourself of all responsibility and > insist everyone else is screwing themselves over - this is addictive just > like tobacco and alcohol. So you keep doing it...and yet, despite your > prophecies, civilization keeps trucking along. > > If it just harmed you, that would be one thing, but this harms other > people. Occasionally you convince people not to build a new power plant, > or some other measure that would actually address the pain. You feel that > your convictions are supported as people continue to suffer, believing that > the fix would surely have been short-lived. You turn a blind eye to cases > where people build these "short-lived" fixes and peoples' lives improve: > just because those fixes haven't collapsed yet, doesn't mean they won't > tomorrow, or the day after that - no matter if they were built yesterday or > 50 years ago. > > > > > > The best possible solution is de-industrialization, starting with > > > > > > Heinberg?s > > > > > > 50 million farmers, while also limiting immigration, instituting > > high > > > > taxes > > > > > > and other disincentives to encourage people to not have more than > > one > > > > child > > > > > > so we can get under the maximum carrying capacity as soon as > > possible. > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > So is this a world problem or a US problem? "Limiting immigration" > > > > doesn't > > > > > > > > It is a world problem. > > > > > > Then what's that note about limiting immigration doing there? That's > > > inapplicable in the context of the world. > > > > I don't know what you're talking about, but it's impossible to fabricate > > solutions if everything is coming crashing down around you. That assumes > > that you're at all trying, if you're just fiddling while Rome burns, the > > footnotes don't matter. > > > > Civilization hasn't collapsed yet. Whatever the ominous signs and > portents, the majority of the world's people are not starving and rioting > at this second. Argue all you like about how that will and must happen, > but any future - no matter how supposedly inevitable - is distinct from the > present. > > Besides, you missed the question. If it's a world problem, then how does > "limiting immigration" help? Where do people "immigrate" to the world > from? (This isn't births: the author addressed that separately.) My point > is that this is evidence the original author was, at best, confused. > > > > What exactly are you doing to solve the root problem? > > > > Working on ways to reduce the cost of getting things into orbit, so that > space-basd solar becomes a lot more practical. For that matter, > space-based anything: EROEI becomes less of a factor if you only measure > initial energy from Earth vs. eventual returns to Earth, with the system > acquiring more energy in space and using that exclusively to bootstrap its > capabilities. > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Sep 7 19:37:45 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 12:37:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Actually, there's no boat; you're just telling people to drown. Like > John > > Actually, you're literally Hitler. You gassed the Jews. Personally. > Huh. I've never before seen such a clear application of Godwin's Law. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Sep 7 20:10:17 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 22:10:17 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change? In-Reply-To: References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130907201017.GI29404@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 12:37:45PM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > Actually, there's no boat; you're just telling people to drown. Like > > John > > > > Actually, you're literally Hitler. You gassed the Jews. Personally. > > > > Huh. I've never before seen such a clear application of Godwin's Law. I'm glad you're able to take a hint. From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Sat Sep 7 20:27:52 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 14:27:52 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> Why is it that people are so willing to put so much time, effort and pain on possibly critically important things like this, when there are better ways to go about this and get something done. Sure, there could be some existential threat out there, but if there is is this the best way to go about it? Sure, there may be lots of people that through much rational effort, determine that something like 'peak oil', 'global warming', or whatever is critically morally important to everyone. But there are also other rational camps out there into which people have also put much effort. Camps just infinitely stating their beliefs in half baked non rigorous ways like this, descending into this kind of rhetoric, just hurts everyone, and makes it impossible to even talk about such potentially very important to all moral things. Might I propose a far better way than wasting so much effort on this, forcing each camp to hate the other, making it impossible to communicate in this way? We also once had terrible talks like this, and completely failed to communicate about 'qualia'. Does anyone remember those great days? How many times did one camp accuse another camp of being 'hittler', or worse, a 'religious fanatic'....? But of course, those days where everyone wasted so much time and effort, making comunication ever more impossible, are long gone, since everyone just 'canonized' their views: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88 Now people no longer need to ask questons like "why to "political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil", or why do scientists always deny there are spiritual qualities or 'qualia'. Everyone can finally respect everyone again, value diversity, and better understand the other point of view, without thinking they are Hitler, Anti Christ, or the destroyer of the world. And everyone's understanding of the real issues and all leading consensus camps, has been amplified, hugely!! We are making real progress, not just making everyone hate each other. If there really is an expert consensus around something like 'peak oil', then start building an expert consensus on just that, and stating, in a unified voice, exactly why you, and all the experts (hopefully experts that the other camp trusts) agree. And do it in a forum where all who disagree with you can also state, concisely and quantitatively, why they can't accept that 'peak oil' is a problem. Are you interested, at all, in that? Good luck truly communicating to those that need to understand, if you're not. Then, maybe we can really communicate, and hopefully thereby avoid the end of the world. I know canonizer.com is a bit hard to understand, and takes a bit of work - but it certainly takes far less time, effort, and pain that is always put into complete waste of time, making it ever harder to communicate, infinite yes no yes not discussions like this. Or maybe help make Canonizer.com a bit easier to use, no one person can do it all alone. Just canonizer your view, and from then on all you need to do is kindly say: "I'm in that expert consensus camp - is there an equally expert consensus camp emerging around what you believe". And there by really communicate, and maybe really save the world, with no fuss, no muss. Upwards, Brent Allsop On 9/7/2013 1:37 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Eugen Leitl > wrote: > > > Actually, there's no boat; you're just telling people to drown. > Like John > > Actually, you're literally Hitler. You gassed the Jews. Personally. > > > Huh. I've never before seen such a clear application of Godwin's Law. > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sat Sep 7 21:00:54 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 23:00:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 02:27:52PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > Why is it that people are so willing to put so much time, effort and > pain on possibly critically important things like this, when there > are better ways to go about this and get something done. Sure, there > could be some existential threat out there, but if there is is this > the best way to go about it? A number of people are seeing a crtical problem ahead, yet the majority doesn't. In order to solve the problem it however requires the action of the majority. This thing is way too big for people, or municipalities. This is nation-state, nay, planet-scale. Therein lies the problem. We are yeast. Don't hate on http://ecoapocalypse.blogspot.nl/2013/09/why-do-political-and-economic-leaders.html so much. Try some suspension of disbelief, and as a working hypothesis assume it's modelling many aspects that are true. What is the best way to go about it? It seems that we've ran out of options but at personal and small community level due to the reasons outlined above. Even knowing that doesn't help much, since most of us are locked in a precarious configuration it will hurt to change short-term. Yet by acting too late we will not be able to effect that transition. It seems the best strategy now is to act ruthless, bold and selfish, and make your exit while you still can. The exit must involve building a mutually supportive rural community. This is an alien concept to many. Here my fortune cookie ends. In case yours says something else, let's compare notes (please no discussions about how it's all unreal; because: nazis wear nice leather uniforms). From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Sat Sep 7 21:53:45 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 15:53:45 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> Hi Eugen, On 9/7/2013 3:00 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 02:27:52PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > >> Why is it that people are so willing to put so much time, effort and >> pain on possibly critically important things like this, when there >> are better ways to go about this and get something done. Sure, there >> could be some existential threat out there, but if there is is this >> the best way to go about it? > A number of people are seeing a crtical problem ahead, yet the majority > doesn't. In order to solve the problem it however requires the action of > the majority. This thing is way too big for people, or municipalities. > This is nation-state, nay, planet-scale. Exactly! And there could be some more terrible existential threat that only a few people are now just starting to see. In fact I feel like one of these. But I'm not giving up on anyone. I'm working to communicate concisely and quantitatively, to build expert consensus amongst experts everyone will trust, and I believe we can do something to save the world and all of us. > Therein lies the problem. We are yeast. Oh puuleese. Yeast can't communicate, at least like we can. And there are ways to comunicate much more effectively than like this. If there truly is a terrible risk, the most effect way to communicate such is to start building an expert consensus arround it in an open survey way, where you can also survey for why others can't yet accept what you are saying, if there are any, and have a concice and quantitative reference to that to work with. Currently, you are just working from your frame of reference, having no clue why I so hate what you are saying, or what might convince me. It also would help to find a set of experts that I trust, and start to build a consensus amongst them. That would definitely convince me, and I bet most every rational person. Once people understand, I and I believe anyone would go to the end of the world to save it, or any loved one. > Don't hate on > http://ecoapocalypse.blogspot.nl/2013/09/why-do-political-and-economic-leaders.html > so much. Try some suspension of disbelief, and as a working > hypothesis assume it's modelling many aspects that are true. To bad you have no clue as to why I so desperately truly 'hate' these kinds of points of view, and why I feel they are leading to the unnecessary eternal damnation of so many of my loved ones, indeed possibly most everyone alive today. Maybe if you had half an idea, you could finally find a way to communicate to all of us that feel as I do, then I could help you? > What is the best way to go about it? It seems that we've ran > out of options but at personal and small community level due > to the reasons outlined above. Oh yee of little and mistaken (thinking we are all nothing more than yeast...) faith. > Even knowing that doesn't help much, since most of us are locked > in a precarious configuration it will hurt to change short-term. > Yet by acting too late we will not be able to effect that transition. Once we can communicate, concisely and quantitatively, in an expert consensus way, it will amplify the moral wisdom of us all, and enable all of us to do whatever is required. Co-operation only requires definitive expert consensus. Sure, yeast can't achieve that yet, but we most certainly can. You can't expect everyone to be experts in the infinite number of existential end of the world threats an infinite number of individuals are going on about infinitely. All we need to do is to measure for which of them have the most expert consensus, and enable all these experts to comunicate in a definitive and concise, nobody can deny way, and rigorously measure for how fast this consensus is growing. And if it isn't growing in certain cercles, finding out why, concicely and quantitativedly, and surveying for what might work better, from their frame of reference. Why would the world not follow that, on a dime, giving any and all required, if you could do that? > It seems the best strategy now is to act ruthless, bold and selfish, As in kill people? Take away their free agency? Excommunicate nonbelievers? Give up on people? Force everyone to work on what you think is the most pressing existential threat, rather than what others think is a far more serious and pressing? > and make your exit while you still can. The exit must involve building > a mutually supportive rural community. This is an alien concept to > many. Exit? What will any of that do? So, yes, you hate, or are giving up on the rest of us? You'd leave us behind? > Here my fortune cookie ends. Yup, definitely giving up. > In case yours says something else, > let's compare notes What are you saying here? It sounds like you are almost asking people to try to communicate, concisely and quantitatively? > (please no discussions about how it's all > unreal; because: nazis wear nice leather uniforms). > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From lloydmillerus at yahoo.com Sun Sep 8 00:43:50 2013 From: lloydmillerus at yahoo.com (Lloyd Miller) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 20:43:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <041a01ceac2c$7d1e7690$775b63b0$@yahoo.com> Peak Oil and Climate Change is OPEC propaganda to keep the price of oil up. -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2013 5:01 PM To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org Subject: Re: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 02:27:52PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > Why is it that people are so willing to put so much time, effort and > pain on possibly critically important things like this, when there are > better ways to go about this and get something done. Sure, there could > be some existential threat out there, but if there is is this the best > way to go about it? A number of people are seeing a crtical problem ahead, yet the majority doesn't. In order to solve the problem it however requires the action of the majority. This thing is way too big for people, or municipalities. This is nation-state, nay, planet-scale. Therein lies the problem. We are yeast. Don't hate on http://ecoapocalypse.blogspot.nl/2013/09/why-do-political-and-economic-leade rs.html so much. Try some suspension of disbelief, and as a working hypothesis assume it's modelling many aspects that are true. What is the best way to go about it? It seems that we've ran out of options but at personal and small community level due to the reasons outlined above. Even knowing that doesn't help much, since most of us are locked in a precarious configuration it will hurt to change short-term. Yet by acting too late we will not be able to effect that transition. It seems the best strategy now is to act ruthless, bold and selfish, and make your exit while you still can. The exit must involve building a mutually supportive rural community. This is an alien concept to many. Here my fortune cookie ends. In case yours says something else, let's compare notes (please no discussions about how it's all unreal; because: nazis wear nice leather uniforms). _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike66 at att.net Sun Sep 8 01:15:00 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 18:15:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <041a01ceac2c$7d1e7690$775b63b0$@yahoo.com> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <041a01ceac2c$7d1e7690$775b63b0$@yahoo.com> Message-ID: <06e301ceac30$d72d21f0$858765d0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lloyd Miller >...A number of people are seeing a crtical problem ahead, yet the majority doesn't. In order to solve the problem it however requires the action of the majority. This thing is way too big for people, or municipalities. This is nation-state, nay, planet-scale... Lloyd America's finest news source has the answers: http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientists-look-onethird-of-the-human-race- has-to,27166/ spike From ALONZOTG at verizon.net Sun Sep 8 02:12:23 2013 From: ALONZOTG at verizon.net (Alan Grimes) Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 22:12:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] good movie; wish I could obtain a copy Message-ID: <522BDD07.2070805@verizon.net> Unfortunately the only extant copy of this movie is a VHS capture taken from live TV 13 years ago split into 8 parts for youtube distribution. The copy blows donkies but it's a great movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3gJC1XeqwU -- NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE Powers are not rights. From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Sun Sep 8 03:52:24 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 21:52:24 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <06e301ceac30$d72d21f0$858765d0$@att.net> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <041a01ceac2c$7d1e7690$775b63b0$@yahoo.com> <06e301ceac30$d72d21f0$858765d0$@att.net> Message-ID: <522BF478.5080505@canonizer.com> Oh thanks spike! That is great! And it so funny to see the naive, twisted, mistaken arguments/assumptions like cutting the people by 1/3 will triple the amount of oil each one of us has. I'd believe that it was more accurate that cutting humanity, at all, would decrease the amount of oil the rest of us have. In other words, the more people there are, the more you can mass produce oil wells and the more people there are to search for them, the more you can discover things like fraking, and the more it makes energy cheaper for everyone. Kill any one of us, and it makes oil that much more expensive, making ever more of our loved ones fail to make it to eternal heaven, thereby suffering eternal damnation. Now that is by far more significant than any other "it's the end of the world", rant, if you ask me. But, I could be wrong, so if any kind of true consensus could be really shown to exist [hint: I don't believe the global warmers claiming there is a 'consensus' that global warming is a problem - I want real quantitative numbers about concise things, otherwise it's all just fear mongering, and no better than this one girl I met last month that claims the Gods drew pictures of themselves on Mars (which you can see in Nasa photographs, at least if you really squint, and have here help you see them), and if we don't listen to her and them, they're going to destroy us all!! dun dun dun..!! And all the other people that have been predicting the end of the world for centuries. Brent On 9/7/2013 7:15 PM, spike wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org > [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Lloyd Miller > >> ...A number of people are seeing a crtical problem ahead, yet the majority > doesn't. In order to solve the problem it however requires the action of the > majority. This thing is way too big for people, or municipalities. > This is nation-state, nay, planet-scale... Lloyd > > America's finest news source has the answers: > > http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientists-look-onethird-of-the-human-race- > has-to,27166/ > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From mlatorra at gmail.com Sun Sep 8 04:24:47 2013 From: mlatorra at gmail.com (Michael LaTorra) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 22:24:47 -0600 Subject: [ExI] good movie; wish I could obtain a copy In-Reply-To: <522BDD07.2070805@verizon.net> References: <522BDD07.2070805@verizon.net> Message-ID: Title? Does the movie have a title? I don't click on blind links. On Sep 7, 2013 9:14 PM, "Alan Grimes" wrote: > Unfortunately the only extant copy of this movie is a VHS capture taken > from live TV 13 years ago split into 8 parts for youtube distribution. > > The copy blows donkies but it's a great movie: > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?**v=S3gJC1XeqwU > > -- > NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE > > Powers are not rights. > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ALONZOTG at verizon.net Sun Sep 8 03:59:39 2013 From: ALONZOTG at verizon.net (Alan Grimes) Date: Sat, 07 Sep 2013 23:59:39 -0400 Subject: [ExI] EUGENE!!!!! Message-ID: <522BF62B.9010505@verizon.net> You are really being counter-productive this week, Eugene. While we are in violent agreement about poly-ticks and, to some extent, about the state of our society, your continual repetition of the "All life is DOOOMED" crap is not helping the cause of transhumanism and I mean to call you out on that. We need people to work towards transhumanism. People need something to look forward to once the singularity arrives. When you tell them that there will be nothing but seating jungle-ecology of nanites people like everyone will look at it and ask "What good is that?" What value could that possibly have? And they would be absolutely right. You are turning them off, Eugene. You are telling them that transhumanism is irredeemably evil, Eugene. I don't give a flying fuck whether the expansion front is inevitable. The present state of the universe seems to speak volumes about that. I care whether it will be created by human hands, Eugene. I care whether my efforts towards a better future for myself will be perverted into committing atrocity on a universal scale, Eugene. I actually want a better future FOR MYSELF, Eugene. A copy is not good enough. It has to be me. It has to be in a body that is compatible with my aesthetic tastes. I will accept no compromises except those dictated by the laws of physics, Eugene. I will accept no vision, for myself, other than my own, Eugene. You are getting in my way, Eugene. You are dissuading people from contributing positively, Eugene. Jeezus doGdammed mudderfugging christ, Eugene, have you, in the last five years, even uttered a scenario where this wildly diverse jungle-ecosystem of species of evolving nanites could even be survivable to even a human upload???? What will be the price, Eugene? What will remain, Eugene? Every fucking day I fantasize about flying a million ton starship out to the edge of the universe for fame, fortune, glory, and most of all, adventure. Am I supposed to be happy that you, Eugene, advocate allowing a future to take place where there is nothing but the nanotech equivalent of bacterium snuffing out every star, and devouring every planet? Your fatalism is driving me nuts, Eugene. It's long past time that you re-thought your life, Eugene. It's time for you to decide exactly what you WANT, Eugene. It is time for you to decide what GOOD future you want for yourself, Eugene. And it's time for you, Eugene, to get to work getting there instead of telling us how doomed we are once the nanites take over. =| -- NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE Powers are not rights. From atymes at gmail.com Sun Sep 8 06:29:56 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 23:29:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] good movie; wish I could obtain a copy In-Reply-To: References: <522BDD07.2070805@verizon.net> Message-ID: "Max Knight: Ultra Spy". Other than Alan's comment, the reviews I'm finding on it are pretty negative. On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 9:24 PM, Michael LaTorra wrote: > Title? Does the movie have a title? I don't click on blind links. > On Sep 7, 2013 9:14 PM, "Alan Grimes" wrote: > >> Unfortunately the only extant copy of this movie is a VHS capture taken >> from live TV 13 years ago split into 8 parts for youtube distribution. >> >> The copy blows donkies but it's a great movie: >> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?**v=S3gJC1XeqwU >> >> -- >> NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE >> >> Powers are not rights. >> >> ______________________________**_________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ALONZOTG at verizon.net Sun Sep 8 07:00:58 2013 From: ALONZOTG at verizon.net (Alan Grimes) Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 03:00:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] good movie; wish I could obtain a copy In-Reply-To: References: <522BDD07.2070805@verizon.net> Message-ID: <522C20AA.5010707@verizon.net> Adrian Tymes wrote: > "Max Knight: Ultra Spy". Other than Alan's comment, the reviews I'm > finding on it are pretty negative. Heh. The reviewers don't know crap. I just re-watched it tonight, it' rocks. I mean it has such awesome lines... When discussing the uploading chip and how it isn't set up for downloading max is like "Brains check in but they don't check out. Why would anyone want to do that?" AWESOME!!! THE MOVIE ROCKS!!! =P FIVE STARS!!! =P -- NOTICE: NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS, SEE ABOVE Powers are not rights. From eugen at leitl.org Sun Sep 8 11:19:52 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 13:19:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] EUGENE!!!!! In-Reply-To: <522BF62B.9010505@verizon.net> References: <522BF62B.9010505@verizon.net> Message-ID: <20130908111952.GP29404@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 11:59:39PM -0400, Alan Grimes wrote: > You are really being counter-productive this week, Eugene. Always happy to be of service. > While we are in violent agreement about poly-ticks and, to some > extent, about the state of our society, your continual repetition of > the "All life is DOOOMED" crap is not helping the cause of > transhumanism and I mean to call you out on that. > > We need people to work towards transhumanism. Our future as a technological species is in jeopardy. We first must arrest the ongoing regression before progress has a chance to resume. Right now we're doing a terrible job of it. The core issue is that surplus energy is adaptively transformed into fertility increase. A radical approach would be engineering a sterility plague. I doubt somebody crazy and capable enough is around on time, so that's not going to happen. Luckily, urbanization driven by landflight increases apparent density, setting back feedback mechanisms, and high fertility is a liability in cities. > People need something to look forward to once the singularity arrives. > > When you tell them that there will be nothing but seating > jungle-ecology of nanites people like everyone will look at it and Not nanites. Postbiomass will have a much higher complexity spread, and also scale. Individuum size may well follow a power law. So you've got a metric buttload of tiny critters, but also whoppers the size of a large mountain. > ask "What good is that?" What value could that possibly have? And Humanity is a tiny subset of life. Life doesn't give a shit about what a single species thinks. Humanity as is is work in progress, and not going to stick around in any recognizable way either way. > they would be absolutely right. > > You are turning them off, Eugene. That's possible. If you ever need really awful PR, give me a call. > > You are telling them that transhumanism is irredeemably evil, Eugene. It is important to distinguish between what my own values are, and what Darwin wants. I do not agree with Darwin. I will not spam the universe with out of control hardware. I will help others to figure out how to not do that. So that's our job as transhumanists. First figure out how to unfuck this planet, and then let's think about how to not generate an irrecallable wave of pioneers. This boils down to a transition from out-of-control to a considerable degree of control. I'm not sure the solution is not going to become worse than the apparent problem. > I don't give a flying fuck whether the expansion front is > inevitable. The present state of the universe seems to speak volumes What we see gives us very little information. > about that. I care whether it will be created by human hands, > Eugene. I care whether my efforts towards a better future for myself > will be perverted into committing atrocity on a universal scale, > Eugene. I agree. > I actually want a better future FOR MYSELF, Eugene. I also agree. > A copy is not good enough. > > It has to be me. > > It has to be in a body that is compatible with my aesthetic tastes. It's a hard problem, especially given that we're no longer in 1970s anymore. A trajectory-pinching bottleneck is approaching (2050-2080s) that might well become a population bottleneck. If you care about people at all, at however abstract level, we should try to minimize the number of people that are going to die. > I will accept no compromises except those dictated by the laws of > physics, Eugene. > > I will accept no vision, for myself, other than my own, Eugene. > > You are getting in my way, Eugene. This is incorrect. A number of people, me included, are trying make things better for many people, including you. You're aware of a small part of it, actually. Unfortunately, I can't talk about it in any more detail yet. > You are dissuading people from contributing positively, Eugene. This scuttlebutt here has shrunk down to a very small crowd. What we talk about here doesn't make a difference. It's just a social place to hang out. Don't take it all too seriously. It's not worth it. > Jeezus doGdammed mudderfugging christ, Eugene, have you, in the last > five years, even uttered a scenario where this wildly diverse > jungle-ecosystem of species of evolving nanites could even be > survivable to even a human upload???? Of course. If you're the nucleation point, you're golden. Expansion starts at periphery, is initially slow and directed outwards. The core is doing what it always has been doing, only more so. > What will be the price, Eugene? What will remain, Eugene? > > Every fucking day I fantasize about flying a million ton starship A megaton is a bit excessive. Think small, leave the drive at home, and then, Oh, the Places You'll Go! > out to the edge of the universe for fame, fortune, glory, and most > of all, adventure. Am I supposed to be happy that you, Eugene, > advocate allowing a future to take place where there is nothing but I'm not advocating or allowing anything. I'm telling you what the system naturally wants to do. You seem to be confusing that with what I want to do. Nope, pegged me wrong. > the nanotech equivalent of bacterium snuffing out every star, and > devouring every planet? > > Your fatalism is driving me nuts, Eugene. > > It's long past time that you re-thought your life, Eugene. Never stopped doing that. > > It's time for you to decide exactly what you WANT, Eugene. > > It is time for you to decide what GOOD future you want for yourself, Eugene. > > And it's time for you, Eugene, to get to work getting there instead > of telling us how doomed we are once the nanites take over. Which reminds me, there is a lit review to do, and I'm procrastinating. > =| -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 8 11:53:49 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 12:53:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] EUGENE!!!!! In-Reply-To: <522BF62B.9010505@verizon.net> References: <522BF62B.9010505@verizon.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Alan Grimes wrote: > Your fatalism is driving me nuts, Eugene. > > Don't worry too much Alan. German philosophers have a tradition of the misery of existence, tragedy and suffering. I think it has a lot to do with the winter climate. ;) BillK From steinberg.will at gmail.com Sun Sep 8 15:53:35 2013 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 11:53:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] EUGENE!!!!! In-Reply-To: References: <522BF62B.9010505@verizon.net> Message-ID: Very progressive post, Alan! Transhumanism isn't supposed to be a cure for fear of death but that seems to be the way many people, primarily males, engage with it. It's a Gaian trick to encourage you to develop technology! Evolution never stopped! We're all probably going to die. But hey, God is real and the afterlife might be too! Why not help out the future generations in any case? If you spend your whole life trying to preserve your individual physical consciousness, you're not going to be very happy in the case that it doesn't work out. Eggs in one basket! On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 7:53 AM, BillK wrote: > On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 4:59 AM, Alan Grimes wrote: > > > Your fatalism is driving me nuts, Eugene. > > > > > > > Don't worry too much Alan. > German philosophers have a tradition of the misery of existence, > tragedy and suffering. > > I think it has a lot to do with the winter climate. ;) > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Sep 8 16:52:27 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 09:52:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] EUGENE!!!!! In-Reply-To: References: <522BF62B.9010505@verizon.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 8:53 AM, Will Steinberg wrote: > We're all probably going to die. But hey, God is real and the afterlife > might be too! Why not help out the future generations in any case? If you > spend your whole life trying to preserve your individual physical > consciousness, you're not going to be very happy in the case that it > doesn't work out. > > Eggs in one basket! > Eh. One can undertake actions that both lower the possibility of personal death (or at least, raise the possibility of post-cryonic resurrection) and make things better for future generations, at the same time. (Indeed, most things that make life better for future generations arguably increase the chance of P.-C. R.: if you do have to go cryo, which type of world is more likely to revive you - a crapsack post-apocalypse world, or a utopia you helped create but did not survive to enjoy?) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Sun Sep 8 17:51:22 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 19:51:22 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin - Mt.Gox In-Reply-To: <1378569496.68574.YahooMailNeo@web121202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1378569496.68574.YahooMailNeo@web121202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <522CB91A.8030202@libero.it> Il 07/09/2013 17:58, Gordon ha scritto: > Concerned about the financial health of Mt. Gox, (the largest Bitcoin > exchange), I transferred out what coins I had there. News surfaced in > recent weeks that the US seizure of Mt. Gox funds was no small affair. > Not only was its Dwolla account seized, but so too was its US Wells > Fargo bank account. The total funds seized amounted to about $5 million, > including $50,000 of the CEO's personal funds. > > While all this was happening, Mt. Gox was telling customers about the > Dwolla seizure, but not about the Wells Fargo seizure, and it was not > divulging the dollar amounts. They put a hold on withdrawals of USD > which they attributed to supposed technical difficulties as they > established new financial relationships. The hold was later lifted, but > I've seen numerous reports that USD withdrawals are still delayed as > much as four weeks or more. I appears to me that Mt. Gox is experiencing > undisclosed financial problems, and that they have been less than honest > about it with their customers. > > The liquidity issues at Mt. Gox would also explain the wide spread > between the market price there and other exchanges like Coinbase. The > Mt. Gox BTC price is about 10% higher. It looks like an arbitrage > opportunity, but the discrepancy is probably explained by the fact that > US sellers at Gox cannot get ready access to their USD. > > What do you think, Mirco? (or anyone) Apparently, the Bitstamp MtGox gap was reduced in the last few days. My opinion about MtGox is a bit more complex: Albeit the seizures of Dwolla e WF accounts were serious they do not put the solvency of MtGox in danger. They had a lot of fee in the past and now to cover the losses. MtGox have limits imposed by their bank to the number of international wires they can do for free (something like 12/day), so they had to put up a rotating queue and currently people there have a slot available every three weeks. So, if people do a withdrawal it is satisfied in few days, the second wait its free slot (21 days), the third the free slot after it (other 21 days). So a lot of people doing multiple transactions have a lot of problems (and the customer support tell them to cancel them and consolidate them is a single transaction) The problem with ? is a bit different because their bank(s) in Europe put a limit in money transmitted (and not the number of wires) so they are able to put together a lot of smaller transactions until the limit is reached. Anyway, if people is in a hurry to get their fiat money, my understanding is MtGox allow them to request a expedited withdrawal that is manually processed by their bank and cost 5% of the sum transmitted. This explain the reason for a long time the differential between MtGox and Bitstamp was around 10%. People could arbitrage only if the difference was a lot over 5%. When AurumExchange worked the differential was no more than 5% because the cost to move fiat from Gox to Stamp was 1-2-3% and the currency were credited in minutes (at worst hours). They had reserves at both exchanges and raised the cost of the transfer as their reserves depleted. My opinion is we are seeing the effects of the balkanization of the international banking system (not a lot of trust available between banks) and currency controls. Even sending US$ to Gox is a problem. MagicalTux (Karpeles) stated their bank credit to their account the money send immediately, but make it available to them with a large delay (more than a week, IIRC), they had a lot of transactions sending money to them reversed after days or weeks (and this often result in a loss as they credited immediately the credit to the customer account) and even transaction they sent to customers were reversed or hold for weeks without any reason apart fear of money laundering (a lot of bank managers are in permanent "CYA Mode ON" because of KYC and AML laws). A lot of the US legislation is making dealing in US$ and with US residents absolutely insane for banks and other financial institutions. So banks in Europe are refusing their services to US citizens and their spouses and so on. Before or later they will ask for the same legislations against US banks (it would be interesting if US banks were forced by German of Italy laws to give data about their Italian and German customers and their spouses in US or risk seizures and jail for their management if they do not comply). So I'm optimist with Bitcoin just because I see the previous system collapsing. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Sun Sep 8 18:11:12 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 20:11:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?windows-1252?q?Silence_in_the_sky=97but_why=3F?= In-Reply-To: <20130907183059.GY29404@leitl.org> References: <522B4E68.70808@libero.it> <20130907183059.GY29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <522CBDC0.5090506@libero.it> Il 07/09/2013 20:30, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 06:03:52PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> Maybe, just maybe, civilizations reach a point where they "transcend" >> what we are able to detect and move to another level altogether. > Tracelessly, and every single time out of a trillion? Just a single > retarded civilization will be detectable. You could be right, but the time from undetectable because too primitive to undetectable because too advanced could be very short. If we are in this short time period we would be unable to detect them. They could be undetectable by us now but maybe not one hundred years from now, or ten. >> If we were cavemen, we would look for advanced civilizations in caves. >> But if the advanced civilization moved to seasteading or cloud cities, >> they would have problems to detect them. > They must be terribly low in numbers, though, as a mere Avogadro > number of human equivalents will consume the complete solar output, > and most of materials in this solar system. How much wood would be needed to heat and cook 500 M Europeans and power all their industries? A lot more than exist in Europe and around the world. We just moved to something else and keep woods for wildlife. >> The same is probably true with advanced space civilizations: >> if they are able to manipulate gravity, build mega scale habitats, move >> faster than light, etc. they could have hardly any interest in coming >> down to a gravity pit like a Earth-like planet. > Nobody talks about coming down. We're still able to see the stars. If we discover some different way to obtain energy that is cheaper than building Dyson Spheres why should we build Dyson Spheres? > Nobody is talking about planets. We're wondering why not every stellar > system is a FIR blackbody. Because there is no need for them to be transformed in one to be useful. >> Africa, but expanded out at every chance available and even today the >> savanna of East Africa is very scarcely populated. > They rechristened Holocene into Anthropocene for a reason. We're a force > of nature, already. They called the Middle Ages the Dark Ages but it didn't made it true. Mirco From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Mon Sep 9 01:38:59 2013 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 21:38:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online Message-ID: >On June 6, 2011, the head of the IPCC said the world was "5 minutes to >midnight" to stop runaway global warming. He apparently said the >exact same thing 9 days ago in Geneva on September 2nd, 2013, >'despite' new and quickly changing data, and controversy, since 2011. >On September 27, 2013, the next annual IPCC report will be issued to t >the media. If the Mail Online report is even partially accurate about the >massive and unexpected amount freezing now happening in the Arctic >is true, will this criminal organization finally be disbanded, and >hopefully, many long prison sentences issued to those who have >caused so much global economic harm? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html @KevinGHaskell -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From matters21stcentury at yahoo.com Mon Sep 9 02:55:02 2013 From: matters21stcentury at yahoo.com (TwentFirstCentury Matters) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2013 19:55:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?b?77u/U2lsZW5jZSBpbiB0aGUgc2t54oCUYnV0IHdoeT8=?= In-Reply-To: <522CBDC0.5090506@libero.it> References: <522B4E68.70808@libero.it> <20130907183059.GY29404@leitl.org> <522CBDC0.5090506@libero.it> Message-ID: <1378695302.52228.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> What do you visualise when you think of extraterrestrials? Immediately I think of a Portuguese Man Of War type colonial,?in reaction to the automatic presumption by so many that an ET would be Earthlike. ? At any rate, bilateral symmetry is not what first comes to mind-- appears too pat IMO. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 9 06:46:21 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 07:46:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 2:38 AM, Kevin G Haskell wrote: >>On September 27, 2013, the next annual IPCC report will be issued to t >>the media. If the Mail Online report is even partially accurate about the >> >massive and unexpected amount freezing now happening in the Arctic >is >> true, will this criminal organization finally be disbanded, and >hopefully, >> many long prison sentences issued to those who have >caused so much global >> economic harm? > > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html > > The UK Daily Mail is a sensationalist right wing rag mainly concerned with blaming all UK troubles on immigrants and claiming just about anything we eat either causes cancer or cures cancer (sometimes both). Climate changes fluctuate from year to year. One year's figures must be seen as part of a long-term trend. See: August 2013 ice extent was 2.38 million square kilometers (919,000 square miles) above the record low August extent in 2012. The monthly trend is ?10.6% per decade relative to the 1981 to 2010 average. BillK From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Sep 9 11:26:51 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 13:26:51 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> Il 09/09/2013 08:46, BillK ha scritto: > Climate changes fluctuate from year to year. One year's figures must > be seen as part of a long-term trend. But these figures are homogenized, pasteurized and corrected in any way suit the people publishing them? But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? Long term on what time scale? Mirco From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 9 11:56:13 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 13:56:13 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> References: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> Message-ID: <20130909115613.GM10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 01:26:51PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 09/09/2013 08:46, BillK ha scritto: > > > Climate changes fluctuate from year to year. One year's figures must > > be seen as part of a long-term trend. > > But these figures are homogenized, pasteurized and corrected in any way > suit the people publishing them? > > But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? > > Long term on what time scale? Read the fine peer-reviewed publications. From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 9 12:26:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 05:26:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 2:38 AM, Kevin G Haskell wrote: ... >> ...http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice -caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html > >...The UK Daily Mail is a sensationalist right wing rag mainly concerned with blaming all UK troubles on immigrants and claiming just about anything we eat either causes cancer or cures cancer (sometimes both)... BillK _______________________________________________ But BillK, anything we eat does both cause cancer and cure cancer. A tumor is living tissue, and in that sense is made of the material we devour, but in many if not most cases, the body's immune system recognizes cancer cells and destroys them. The immune system is provided both energy and raw materials by our viands. Conclusion: cancer is both caused by and cured by what we eat, in a sense. The real tragedy regarding global warming is that it creates a distraction from a very real and much more immediate and dire problem, the decline in low cost energy. We have technological solutions, but they are all expensive, they all have environmental costs, we will hate all of them, all of them together will be utilized, but will make energy still more expensive than it is now, when oil spewed from the ground. We will still need to put most of them in place and hope for the best. Compared to those kinds of problems and the timeframe in which we face them, I would ask us to compare with the seriousness and urgency of global warming. To me, global warming is too much like worrying about a rising fever while the house is on fire. spike From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Sep 9 12:52:51 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:52:51 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good Message-ID: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> How Electricity Became a Luxury Good http://abcnews.go.com/International/electricity-luxury-good/story?id=20158621#! Apparently Germany is starting the road to become a hunter-gatherer society. But surely they will be happy to hunt and gather and die at 35 like ?tzi. > Altmaier and others are on a mission to help people save money on > their electricity bills, because they're about to receive some bad > news. The government predicts that the renewable energy surcharge > added to every consumer's electricity bill will increase from 5.3 > cents today to between 6.2 and 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour -- a > 20-percent price hike. > > German consumers already pay the highest electricity prices in > Europe. But because the government is failing to get the costs of > its new energy policy under control, rising prices are already on > the horizon. Electricity is becoming a luxury good in Germany, and > one of the country's most important future-oriented projects is > acutely at risk. Altmaier is on a mission to help save other people money because they are the cause of the additional costs but do not bear any bad effect from their choices. > Former Environment Minister J?rgen Tritten of the Green Party once > claimed that switching Germany to renewable energy wasn't going to > cost citizens more than one scoop of ice cream. Today his successor > Altmaier admits consumers are paying enough to "eat everything on the > ice cream menu." Surely Environment Minister J?rgen Tritten didn't pay any consequence for being wrong with someone else money. Mirco From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 9 13:08:38 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 15:08:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> Message-ID: <20130909130838.GP10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 02:52:51PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > How Electricity Became a Luxury Good > > http://abcnews.go.com/International/electricity-luxury-good/story?id=20158621#! You're citing bullshit. Teflon Angie & Mimimi Roesler are against renewables. Always have been. Wholesale electricity prices have *fallen*. Hefty price increases to end users are artifical, as we're facing national votes in a couple weeks. > Apparently Germany is starting the road to become a hunter-gatherer > society. But surely they will be happy to hunt and gather and die at 35 > like ?tzi. Why, why has exi-chat regressed into a slimy pool, full of reactionary trolls? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 9 13:26:11 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 06:26:11 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> Message-ID: <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato ... > Former Environment Minister J?rgen Tritten of the Green Party once > claimed that switching Germany to renewable energy wasn't going to > cost citizens more than one scoop of ice cream... Mirco Notice he didn't offer a time unit along with that scoop of ice cream. Will the cost be less than one scoop of ice cream per day? Or a scoop per minute? Per second? Per kilowatt hour? We see this in the form of radio commercials which assure us the stock market will DOUBLE! Sure, they are always right, but in what time frame? A year? A decade? A century? They never say what time they predict this doubling, and without that, the prediction is as meaningless as comparing the cost of green energy to a scoop of ice cream. Green energy will be expensive, it will not be green, but we will employ it anyway, because we will gradually run out of alternatives, and yes we need energy, lots of it. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, can you find anything in the previous sentence which you would dispute? spike From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Sep 9 13:47:52 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 15:47:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130909130838.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <20130909130838.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <522DD188.4020504@libero.it> Il 09/09/2013 15:08, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 02:52:51PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> How Electricity Became a Luxury Good >> http://abcnews.go.com/International/electricity-luxury-good/story?id=20158621#! > You're citing bullshit. Do you say I'm trying to bullshit a bullshitter? >> "It is only gradually becoming apparent how the renewable energy >> subsidies redistribute money from the poor to the more affluent, >> like when someone living in small rental apartment subsidizes a >> homeowner's roof-mounted solar panels through his electricity bill. >> The SPD, which sees itself as the party of the working class, long >> ignored this regressive aspect of the system. The Greens, the party >> of higher earners, continue to do so." The point is "They see themselves as" instead "they are the party of" > Teflon Angie & Mimimi Roesler are against renewables. Always have > been. Wholesale electricity prices have *fallen*. Do you pay your electricity at wholesale prices or at end user prices? > Hefty price increases to end users are artificial, as we're facing > national votes in a couple weeks. Sure, it is a conspiracy of the evvvvilll capitalists (if you want, but it is not recommended, you can add Jews, masons, rettilians, Nibiru between evil and capitalists). >> Apparently Germany is starting the road to become a >> hunter-gatherer society. But surely they will be happy to hunt and >> gather and die at 35 like ?tzi. > Why, why has exi-chat regressed into a slimy pool, full of > reactionary trolls? What is reactionary for some is progressive for others. In my opinion, forcing people to live in dark homes, without electricity and heating, without the ability to store food or cook is reactionary. But surely the reactionaries will expose the luminous and progressive future of their policies and how these short term problems they never endure (or will solve) are absolutely not important (for them). Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Sep 9 14:01:50 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 16:01:50 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> Message-ID: <522DD4CE.4000900@libero.it> Il 09/09/2013 15:26, spike ha scritto: > Green energy will be expensive, it will not be green, but we will employ it > anyway, because we will gradually run out of alternatives, and yes we need > energy, lots of it. > Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, can you find anything > in the previous sentence which you would dispute? Yes. If green energy will not be green, anything could be green energy. If green energy is what the government decide, they will change the meaning of green any time the want or need. I'm not sure green energies could be alternatives if we want keep the current technological level or increase it. Some are just a long term waste of energy compared to current technologies. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Sep 9 14:03:06 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 16:03:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130909130838.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <20130909130838.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <522DD51A.5010705@libero.it> Il 09/09/2013 15:08, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > Why, why has exi-chat regressed into a slimy pool, full of > reactionary trolls? Trolls love you anyway: http://tinyurl.com/ohuqzpc Mirco From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 9 14:28:49 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 15:28:49 +0100 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 2:26 PM, spike wrote: > Green energy will be expensive, it will not be green, but we will employ it > anyway, because we will gradually run out of alternatives, and yes we need > energy, lots of it. > > Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, can you find anything > in the previous sentence which you would dispute? > > As an aside, last year I obtained a sensor system that displays the house electricity usage. The sensor clips around the electric cable by the meter and sends the data to the display. You can immediately see the effect of switching on the kettle, as the display leaps up by 2000 watts. This has been useful in pointing out which devices use the most electricity. It also enabled a hunt to find all the things still using electricity after I thought everything was switched off. Switching lights off and changing to energy efficient light bulbs. Some devices, like TVs, still draw current while switched off, and these need to be switched off at the mains plug. The current used is small, but as it was on all the time, the yearly total was quite expensive. I am now down to running at about 60 watts consumption, for the laptop, modem, wifi and electric clock. Winter will be much more, of course! I recommend everybody to get one of these meters. They're fun! BillK From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 9 14:36:35 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 16:36:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <522BF478.5080505@canonizer.com> References: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <041a01ceac2c$7d1e7690$775b63b0$@yahoo.com> <06e301ceac30$d72d21f0$858765d0$@att.net> <522BF478.5080505@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <20130909143635.GV10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 09:52:24PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > Oh thanks spike! That is great! I never find Onion funny. Satire shouldn't be too close to reality. > And it so funny to see the naive, twisted, mistaken > arguments/assumptions like cutting the people by 1/3 will triple the > amount of oil each one of us has. I'd believe that it was more The fundamental logic that surplus energy is adaptively negated by increases in fertility does hold. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2013/09/the-real-population-problem/#more-1414 > accurate that cutting humanity, at all, would decrease the amount of > oil the rest of us have. In other words, the more people there are, > the more you can mass produce oil wells and the more people there You don't understand. The return of effort is going down. If you're losing on every sale, you can't make up for it in volume. > are to search for them, the more you can discover things like > fraking, and the more it makes energy cheaper for everyone. Kill Fracking is 40 years old. It is very expensive, you have to be really desperate to do it, especially on a large scale. You might have missed that very recently tight oil and gas is showing a diminishing return not just on net energy, but on volume, per unit of effort. This is sooner than antipated, and implies the end game is upon us. > any one of us, and it makes oil that much more expensive, making You seem to be confusing quality with quantity. Few people are actually in the solution set. Most are in the precipitate. > ever more of our loved ones fail to make it to eternal heaven, > thereby suffering eternal damnation. Now that is by far more There is no heaven -- yet. We're currently jeopardizing our ability to build it. (It wouldn't be eternal, and it would be actually heaven, but let's not engage in angelic dance metrology). > significant than any other "it's the end of the world", rant, if you The human history is full of cultures that crashed. We're currently repeating many of the patterns, but on a global scale. Many of you don't see a personal impact, since you're in privileged locations, and do not spend much time looking elsewhere. You should. Things are rotten in state of Denmark. > ask me. > > But, I could be wrong, so if any kind of true consensus could be > really shown to exist [hint: I don't believe the global warmers > claiming there is a 'consensus' that global warming is a problem - I Having trouble with the scientic process? It happens to the best of us. > want real quantitative numbers about concise things, otherwise it's > all just fear mongering, and no better than this one girl I met last > month that claims the Gods drew pictures of themselves on Mars If you need numbers, hit the primary peer-reviewed literature. > (which you can see in Nasa photographs, at least if you really > squint, and have here help you see them), and if we don't listen to > her and them, they're going to destroy us all!! dun dun dun..!! > And all the other people that have been predicting the end of the > world for centuries. Thank you for your opinions. If you want us to actually listen, author publications that make it past peer review. That's the bar now. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 9 14:43:04 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 16:43:04 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <522DD188.4020504@libero.it> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <20130909130838.GP10405@leitl.org> <522DD188.4020504@libero.it> Message-ID: <20130909144304.GY10405@leitl.org> Sorry, Mirco, no further point in talking to you. In fact, I think another hiatus from ExI is in order. So much bullshit, so little time. On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 03:47:52PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 09/09/2013 15:08, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > > On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 02:52:51PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > >> How Electricity Became a Luxury Good > > >> http://abcnews.go.com/International/electricity-luxury-good/story?id=20158621#! > > > You're citing bullshit. > > Do you say I'm trying to bullshit a bullshitter? > > >> "It is only gradually becoming apparent how the renewable energy > >> subsidies redistribute money from the poor to the more affluent, > >> like when someone living in small rental apartment subsidizes a > >> homeowner's roof-mounted solar panels through his electricity bill. > >> The SPD, which sees itself as the party of the working class, long > >> ignored this regressive aspect of the system. The Greens, the party > >> of higher earners, continue to do so." > > The point is "They see themselves as" instead "they are the party of" > > > Teflon Angie & Mimimi Roesler are against renewables. Always have > > been. Wholesale electricity prices have *fallen*. > > Do you pay your electricity at wholesale prices or at end user prices? > > > Hefty price increases to end users are artificial, as we're facing > > national votes in a couple weeks. > > Sure, it is a conspiracy of the evvvvilll capitalists (if you want, but > it is not recommended, you can add Jews, masons, rettilians, Nibiru > between evil and capitalists). > > >> Apparently Germany is starting the road to become a > >> hunter-gatherer society. But surely they will be happy to hunt and > >> gather and die at 35 like ?tzi. > > > Why, why has exi-chat regressed into a slimy pool, full of > > reactionary trolls? > > What is reactionary for some is progressive for others. > > In my opinion, forcing people to live in dark homes, without electricity > and heating, without the ability to store food or cook is reactionary. > > But surely the reactionaries will expose the luminous and progressive > future of their policies and how these short term problems they never > endure (or will solve) are absolutely not important (for them). > > Mirco > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 9 15:00:42 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 17:00:42 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130909150042.GZ10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 03:28:49PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Some devices, like TVs, still draw current while switched off, and > these need to be switched off at the mains plug. The current used is > small, but as it was on all the time, the yearly total was quite > expensive. 5 W 24/7/365 sets you back around 10 EUR/year. > I am now down to running at about 60 watts consumption, for the You could consider going insular PV DC route, battery-backed. > laptop, modem, wifi and electric clock. Winter will be much more, of > course! There is no point wasting a high-quality energy source to produce low-quality (heat). At the very least, use electricity to drive a heat pump, using ground or water thermal differential to air. I heat with locally sourced, air-dried seasoned hardwood, but that's not an option for everybody -- I did already mention the thing about selfishness, and making an exit, I believe. > I recommend everybody to get one of these meters. They're fun! From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Sep 9 15:23:04 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 11:23:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <20130909143635.GV10405@leitl.org> References: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <041a01ceac2c$7d1e7690$775b63b0$@yahoo.com> <06e301ceac30$d72d21f0$858765d0$@att.net> <522BF478.5080505@canonizer.com> <20130909143635.GV10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > I never find Onion funny. > Then there is something seriously wrong with you. Have you tried lithium? > Fracking is 40 years old. And fracking has improved during every one of those 40 years, especially in the last 5. > It is very expensive, Fracking is so expensive that companies do it because they enjoy losing money. Fracking is so very expensive that it caused natural gas prices in the USA to FALL from over $8 per million British Thermal Units in 2008 to about $4 today. > you have to be really desperate to do it Not as desperate as countries that have to heavily subsidize uneconomical ways to produce energy before anyone would be crazy enough to do it, like wind and solar and the most damaging and immoral of all, bio fuel. > Why, why has exi-chat regressed into a slimy pool, full of reactionary > trolls? > When did you turn into somebody who refuses to let facts change their belief about what is true? > I think another hiatus from ExI is in order > COWARD! John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 9 15:38:09 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 17:38:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> References: <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <20130909153809.GA10405@leitl.org> On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 03:53:45PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > >Therein lies the problem. We are yeast. > > Oh puuleese. Yeast can't communicate, at least like we can. And Transmitting information without purpose is useless. See http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts and http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends > there are ways to comunicate much more effectively than like this. > If there truly is a terrible risk, the most effect way to > communicate such is to start building an expert consensus arround it There is an expert consensus. But most people can't tell who's an expert, unless they're experts themselves. In fact, most people don't bother with experts, and are authority-driven. Therein lies a part of our problem. > in an open survey way, where you can also survey for why others > can't yet accept what you are saying, if there are any, and have a > concice and quantitative reference to that to work with. Currently, > you are just working from your frame of reference, having no clue > why I so hate what you are saying, or what might convince me. It I know why you hate what I'm saying. You think I'm the party who's putting everything in jeopardy. Unfortunately, it's exactly the other way round. Wrong goals kill. > also would help to find a set of experts that I trust, and start to > build a consensus amongst them. That would definitely convince me, This is not how reality works. > and I bet most every rational person. Once people understand, I and Rational people who think that the world works in a rational way are irrational. > I believe anyone would go to the end of the world to save it, or any > loved one. Not confirmed by empirical observation. Twerking lolcats get in the way. > To bad you have no clue as to why I so desperately truly 'hate' I might be stupid, but I'm not that stupid. I can model you ok. In fact I know that I'm wasting your and my time with this exchange. > these kinds of points of view, and why I feel they are leading to > the unnecessary eternal damnation of so many of my loved ones, > indeed possibly most everyone alive today. Maybe if you had half an > idea, you could finally find a way to communicate to all of us that > feel as I do, then I could help you? > > >What is the best way to go about it? It seems that we've ran > >out of options but at personal and small community level due > >to the reasons outlined above. > > Oh yee of little and mistaken (thinking we are all nothing more than > yeast...) faith. The empirical evidence does not support your interpretation. > >Even knowing that doesn't help much, since most of us are locked > >in a precarious configuration it will hurt to change short-term. > >Yet by acting too late we will not be able to effect that transition. > > Once we can communicate, concisely and quantitatively, in an expert I used to communicate concisely and quantitatively. However, I soon found it's a complete waste of everybody's time, so I'm now mostly doing my best impersonation of Statler and Waldorf from the peanut gallery. Pffffffrt. > consensus way, it will amplify the moral wisdom of us all, and > enable all of us to do whatever is required. Co-operation only > requires definitive expert consensus. Sure, yeast can't achieve No, you're completely wrong. > that yet, but we most certainly can. You can't expect everyone to > be experts in the infinite number of existential end of the world > threats an infinite number of individuals are going on about The question is one of prioritiziation in face of limited resources. Most people are terrible at that. > infinitely. All we need to do is to measure for which of them have > the most expert consensus, and enable all these experts to > comunicate in a definitive and concise, nobody can deny way, and > rigorously measure for how fast this consensus is growing. And if > it isn't growing in certain cercles, finding out why, concicely and > quantitativedly, and surveying for what might work better, from Have you never ever wondered why your pet project, or LessWrong never went anywhere? > their frame of reference. Why would the world not follow that, on a > dime, giving any and all required, if you could do that? > > >It seems the best strategy now is to act ruthless, bold and selfish, > As in kill people? Take away their free agency? Excommunicate No, no. It's about building islands of resilience, which can somewhat resist creeping regression around them. Unfortunately, it requires a lot of resources to do so effectively. > nonbelievers? Give up on people? Force everyone to work on what you Give up on the majority, absolutely. Heading for the rescue boats beats rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. > think is the most pressing existential threat, rather than what Forcing? Me, and which army? > others think is a far more serious and pressing? What is your set of pressing problems, listed in their priorities? Top five would be enough. > >and make your exit while you still can. The exit must involve building > >a mutually supportive rural community. This is an alien concept to > >many. > > Exit? What will any of that do? So, yes, you hate, or are giving It will last a little bit longer against the rising tidal wave of shit. Hate? Another perfect waste of time, I'm afraid. > up on the rest of us? You'd leave us behind? I've given on this community to accomplish significant goals a long time ago. I still value it as a social circle, though I've been taking vacations in the past when the aggravation got too serious. > > >Here my fortune cookie ends. > > Yup, definitely giving up. Insufficient information. > >In case yours says something else, > >let's compare notes > What are you saying here? It sounds like you are almost asking > people to try to communicate, concisely and quantitatively? Surprise me. > > >(please no discussions about how it's all > >unreal; because: nazis wear nice leather uniforms). From painlord2k at libero.it Mon Sep 9 18:50:44 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 20:50:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> References: <20130906140514.GH29404@leitl.org> <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <522E1884.8060104@libero.it> Il 07/09/2013 23:00, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 02:27:52PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > >> Why is it that people are so willing to put so much time, effort and >> pain on possibly critically important things like this, when there >> are better ways to go about this and get something done. Sure, there >> could be some existential threat out there, but if there is is this >> the best way to go about it? > > A number of people are seeing a crtical problem ahead, yet the majority > doesn't. In order to solve the problem it however requires the action of > the majority. This thing is way too big for people, or municipalities. > This is nation-state, nay, planet-scale. This is Reabsorption Theology repackaged. http://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/the-communist-religionist/ > It seems the best strategy now is to act ruthless, bold and selfish, > and make your exit while you still can. The exit must involve building > a mutually supportive rural community. This is an alien concept to > many. Indeed it is what the Hutterites did and do. The current lot do it without violence, but the first lot used to pillage others with different opinions. > Here my fortune cookie ends. In case yours says something else, > let's compare notes (please no discussions about how it's all > unreal; because: nazis wear nice leather uniforms). Nazism, also, is another form of Reabsorption Theology Repackaged in Leather). They just decided to kill all individuals and groups that stand against or were not worth to be reabsorped (Jews, Gypsy, mentally disabled, and so on). Mirco From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 9 20:16:42 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 13:16:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> Message-ID: <020601cead99$808abaa0$81a02fe0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: Re: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 2:26 PM, spike wrote: >>... Green energy will be expensive, it will not be green, but we will > employ it anyway, because we will gradually run out of alternatives, > and yes we need energy, lots of it. spike >...As an aside, last year I obtained a sensor system that displays the house electricity usage >...I am now down to running at about 60 watts consumption, for the laptop, modem, wifi and electric clock. Winter will be much more, of course! BillK _______________________________________________ Ja, I would argue that even after you have switched to LED lighting an added insulation to the attic, conservation is still the low hanging fruit for most people. It won't kill us to conserve. It won't yet anyway. I do recognize the arguments of those who say humanity is hopeless, but I disagree. We might find solutions to get us to a realistic future in which it is meaningful to worry about longer term stuff like global warming. But one thing I would like everyone to realize is that there is likely to be no magic new technology, nothing likely to replace oil. Energy conversion tech has been studied long enough and hard enough that the evidence is compelling: what we know now is pretty much what we will have in our lifetimes. We know what we need to do. We need to do it. spike From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 9 20:32:30 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 22:32:30 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <020601cead99$808abaa0$81a02fe0$@att.net> References: <522DC4A3.4040004@libero.it> <000f01cead60$273fc780$75bf5680$@att.net> <020601cead99$808abaa0$81a02fe0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130909203230.GP10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 01:16:42PM -0700, spike wrote: > Ja, I would argue that even after you have switched to LED lighting an added > insulation to the attic, conservation is still the low hanging fruit for > most people. It won't kill us to conserve. It won't yet anyway. I do There is a cost factor. Poor people live expensively. They can't afford something that costs short-term but provides savings long-term. There will be more poor people in the future than in the present. Poor people have less options. Including the option to escape the poverty trap. > recognize the arguments of those who say humanity is hopeless, but I Humanity is objectively dooming itself by failing to act on time. Ignorance and apathy kill. There is a chance at personal and small community scale. These are not hopeless. > disagree. We might find solutions to get us to a realistic future in which > it is meaningful to worry about longer term stuff like global warming. Through our actions we can still decide how many people are going to die. We no longer have a future without dead bodies however. We did it to ourselves. > But one thing I would like everyone to realize is that there is likely to be > no magic new technology, nothing likely to replace oil. Energy conversion The technology is already out there, and most of it has been for 40 years or longer. What we need is deployment, deployment, deployment. Failure to do so will cost additional lives. Every year matters. > tech has been studied long enough and hard enough that the evidence is > compelling: what we know now is pretty much what we will have in our > lifetimes. We know what we need to do. We need to do it. +100 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Mon Sep 9 20:32:47 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 22:32:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: References: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <041a01ceac2c$7d1e7690$775b63b0$@yahoo.com> <06e301ceac30$d72d21f0$858765d0$@att.net> <522BF478.5080505@canonizer.com> <20130909143635.GV10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 5:23 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > > >> > > Why, why has exi-chat regressed into a slimy pool, full of reactionary >> trolls? >> > > When did you turn into somebody who refuses to let facts change their > belief about what is true? > > > I think another hiatus from ExI is in order >> > > COWARD! > I do wonder too whether the benefits of lurking around here to read the occasional interesting post outweight the tiredness of having to sift through all the BS. In not even 24 hours we have 1) someone barely containing his excitement suggesting prison terms because the Arctic is not melting as fast as he was daydreaming, but only faster than any model has predicted 2) someone else giggling on how Europe's biggest economy will soon have to scramble for food, apparently because of a couple of solar panels he doesn't like and 3) various people going "la la la can't hear you" whenever the words "expensive" and "oil" are uttered at less than three paragraph's worth of distance. That's depressing. Worse, it's boring. That must be as close as a capital sin you can get around here. I can't get how any car-loving techie shouldn't be just drooling thinking of a Tesla Model S. I can't get how anyone with a sense for order of magnitudes is not awed at the thought of a cubic km of ice undergoing a phase transition and slowly liquefying with fractal features probably going below optical microscope resolutions, and then thinking that hundreds of billion of tonnes of the stuff (already out of my paltry imagination faculties) are undergoing the process and still are but a microscopic fraction of the total - while sipping a drink full of ice cubes. I can't get how anyone who has seen a coal plant can't scream "civilization!" in front of a magical piece of silicon which produces electricity with no moving parts just holding it high up. I can't get how having more energy sources available than one can count, all technologically ready and within a few cents in cost from each other, can't awe anyone who has tried to pedal on a bicycle with a generator bulb. LEDs can shine red and white without heating up - cold light, get that! SpaceX goes to the space station and wants to build a horizontal flavour of the experience in California. We can describe biological nanomachines like the influenza virus atom-by-atom and be overwhelmed a second later by the realization that we are still clueless on how a couple dozens of aminoacids fold together without even thinking. Instead, one gets a lot of posts "the government this" and "the environmentalists that". Cheer up, people! We should just spend our whole day with our mouth wide open, struck with Stendhal's syndrome upon seeing a cat, a machine honed by millions of years of evolution to be a perfect hunter of no less sophisticated small creatures. Maybe we are getting old. Alfio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Sep 9 20:54:59 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 16:54:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox Message-ID: Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg wrote: > There are about 2. 5* 10^ 11 stars in the Milky Way and about 5*10^22 > stars in the visible universe. Planetary systems appear to be relatively > common > Those are some big numbers, but I think biology may be able to come up with numbers that are just as big as those that astronomy can and perhaps even bigger. > Assuming the mediocrity principle [...] > That is quite an assumption! The average cubic meter in the universe contains just one hydrogen atom and about 5 times that amount of mass in the form of Dark Matter, whatever the hell that is. So the Earth environment is very very very unusual. > Even if a very small fraction such worlds developed intelligence, e.g. > 10^-9 it would imply hundreds of intelligent species in the Milky Way. > But where did you come up with that 10^-9 figure? Why isn?t the probability of evolving intelligent life in a given solar system 10^-30? I don?t think astronomy has a monopoly on big numbers. > the Earth is certainly not among the earliest terrestrial planets. > I don?t believe we know that to be the case, it could be that there are no terrestrial planets significantly older than Earth's 4.5 billion years. And if it had taken just 800 million years longer for intelligent beings to evolve on the Earth humanity would have discovered fire just about the time when life of any sort would no longer be possible because the sun would be starting to get off the main sequence. > Indeed it has been indeed it has been estimated that of the stars that > could have planets with complex life on them in the Milky Way, 75% of them > are older than our sun > But we don?t know if any of those very old stars, such as those found in globular clusters, have planets. We do know that today those very old stars contain very little metal and when they were first formed long ago they had even less. By ?metals? astrophysicists mean every element except hydrogen helium and lithium, and you can?t make life with just that, or even make planets except for gas giants. > if the alien civilisations wished to remain undetectable, > It is very hard for me to believe that a super mega advanced civilization would think we were even worth the bother of hiding from. > it would be relatively easy for them to do so. We are unlikely to notice > a single Dyson sphere in a distant galaxy. > I think we could probably detect a Dyson sphere with its distinctive infrared signature if it were within several thousand light years of us, and we could see a galaxy of Dyson spheres if there were one anywhere in the observable universe. But we see nothing. > it was possible for humans to launch the colonisation of the entire > universe on scales of time and energy that are cosmically insigni cant > only requiring about two replication stages to reach every star we could > ever reach, with a rapid launch phase. If human civilisation could achieve > this, then it is highly likely that any star-spanning alien civilisation > would be capable of doing so as well. > And that is the key mystery right there, why doesn?t the universe look engineered? I can think of 4 explanations: 1) Nonexistence. Maybe we?re the first, after all somebody has to be. 2) Extinction. Could every single civilization really engage in a war so brutal that it didn?t leave any survivors at all? During the cold war that possibility seemed somewhat more likely to me than it does now. 3) Unknown physical laws that prevent intelligence from performing large scale engineering. I can?t say anything about stuff that?s unknown except that at least so far there is no hint of anything like that. 4) Stagnation. ET may exist but he?s a couch potato. If you had complete control of your emotional control panel you might not want to do anything but sit and experience pleasure. I do see hints that this might be the case in the increased difficulty humanity has had in dealing with drugs. I think numbers1 and 4 are the most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox. John K Clark > it could be that there exist some fundamental limitation to what can be automated, whether macroscopic objects can be accelerated to high speed, reliably sent over long distances, or function over very long periods of time, making interstellar or intergalactic colonization impossible -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Tue Sep 10 00:21:58 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 18:21:58 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <20130909153809.GA10405@leitl.org> References: <20130906161702.GX29404@leitl.org> <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> <20130909153809.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <522E6626.6070203@canonizer.com> Hi Eugene, You indicated knowing who the experts is the problem. But at Canonizer.com it isn't. At Canonizer.com anyone can pick any experts they trust, by selecting the Canonizer algorithm on the side bar. So far, the most popular 'expert' algorithms are peer ranking ones, where peers rank each other. And, again, when you're attempting to communicate to anyone, or any group, you work from their chosen experts, whatever that is. You also asked: Have you never ever wondered why your pet project, or LessWrong never went anywhere? Well, it's not wikipedia, YET. But if you could see what it is becoming from where I'm sitting, you'd laugh at this. Remember, if you want to communicate successfully, you just need to work from your targets perspective. I admit there isn't enough evidence to prove to you it's capabilities, but it's making progress in that direction, and my prediction is that it will eventually convince you. As I indicated earlier, at the very minimum it has stopped the hateful conversations, like this one, where everyone repeated their POV, infinitely, on consciousness, and everyone eventually started acusing the others as Hitler, and so on. Now, everyone that participates very much enjoys the conversation is their understand is light years ahead of what it was when we were all stuck with infinite YES!! NO!! YES!.. Instead of infinitely repeating your position, you just say your' in camp http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/36 and everyone knows exactly what you believe, how many experts agree, and how many don't, along with concise and quantitative descriptions of why. Nobody ever needs to give up, as your camp, and everyone that agrees, is collaboratively continued to be developed. If anyone berings any new ideas, or new scientific evidence to the table, it get's canonized, and most importantly of all, you get a rigorous measure of just how good the information by know how many new people it convinces. If you want to know what the state of the art of the conversation is, you can see a nice concise and quantitative summary of what all 50 participators (including several world class experts like Chalmers, Lehar...) believe - real time. (Note: some have abandoned their now falsified camps, due to real experimental data.) Good luck finding anything like that, in all the work you and everyone has put into this conversation, or in anything like Less Wrong. You asked what my top priorities are. See my canonized list: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/120/8 What do you mean when you said: "I used to communicate concisely and quantitatively."? Finally, you s aid: "I know why you hate what I'm saying. You think I'm the party who's putting everything in jeopardy. Unfortunately, it's exactly the other way round. Wrong goals kill." I completely agree with this, and the facts of the matter of much of what you say. It's all about quantity and priorities. I completely agree that you could have something critically important to us all. Most everything you are saying is just driving me away from agreeing with you. Especially when you say things like there is a consensus. IF that were true, you should be able to start to canonize things, and such evidence would start to show up. In fact, can you point to any expert I might recognize. that supports this assertion? Seems to me there is far less evidence of any expert support for "peek oil" than for "global warming", and I very much doubt their claims of 'expert consensus'. Brent Allsop On 9/9/2013 9:38 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 03:53:45PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > >>> Therein lies the problem. We are yeast. >> Oh puuleese. Yeast can't communicate, at least like we can. And > Transmitting information without purpose is useless. > See http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts and > http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends > >> there are ways to comunicate much more effectively than like this. >> If there truly is a terrible risk, the most effect way to >> communicate such is to start building an expert consensus arround it > There is an expert consensus. But most people can't tell who's > an expert, unless they're experts themselves. In fact, most > people don't bother with experts, and are authority-driven. > Therein lies a part of our problem. > >> in an open survey way, where you can also survey for why others >> can't yet accept what you are saying, if there are any, and have a >> concice and quantitative reference to that to work with. Currently, >> you are just working from your frame of reference, having no clue >> why I so hate what you are saying, or what might convince me. It > I know why you hate what I'm saying. You think I'm the party who's > putting everything in jeopardy. Unfortunately, it's exactly the > other way round. Wrong goals kill. > >> also would help to find a set of experts that I trust, and start to >> build a consensus amongst them. That would definitely convince me, > This is not how reality works. > >> and I bet most every rational person. Once people understand, I and > Rational people who think that the world works in a rational way are irrational. > >> I believe anyone would go to the end of the world to save it, or any >> loved one. > Not confirmed by empirical observation. Twerking lolcats get in the way. > >> To bad you have no clue as to why I so desperately truly 'hate' > I might be stupid, but I'm not that stupid. I can model you ok. > In fact I know that I'm wasting your and my time with this exchange. > >> these kinds of points of view, and why I feel they are leading to >> the unnecessary eternal damnation of so many of my loved ones, >> indeed possibly most everyone alive today. Maybe if you had half an >> idea, you could finally find a way to communicate to all of us that >> feel as I do, then I could help you? >> >>> What is the best way to go about it? It seems that we've ran >>> out of options but at personal and small community level due >>> to the reasons outlined above. >> Oh yee of little and mistaken (thinking we are all nothing more than >> yeast...) faith. > The empirical evidence does not support your interpretation. > >>> Even knowing that doesn't help much, since most of us are locked >>> in a precarious configuration it will hurt to change short-term. >>> Yet by acting too late we will not be able to effect that transition. >> Once we can communicate, concisely and quantitatively, in an expert > I used to communicate concisely and quantitatively. However, > I soon found it's a complete waste of everybody's time, so > I'm now mostly doing my best impersonation of Statler and Waldorf > from the peanut gallery. Pffffffrt. > >> consensus way, it will amplify the moral wisdom of us all, and >> enable all of us to do whatever is required. Co-operation only >> requires definitive expert consensus. Sure, yeast can't achieve > No, you're completely wrong. > >> that yet, but we most certainly can. You can't expect everyone to >> be experts in the infinite number of existential end of the world >> threats an infinite number of individuals are going on about > The question is one of prioritiziation in face of limited resources. > Most people are terrible at that. > >> infinitely. All we need to do is to measure for which of them have >> the most expert consensus, and enable all these experts to >> comunicate in a definitive and concise, nobody can deny way, and >> rigorously measure for how fast this consensus is growing. And if >> it isn't growing in certain cercles, finding out why, concicely and >> quantitativedly, and surveying for what might work better, from > Have you never ever wondered why your pet project, or LessWrong never > went anywhere? > >> their frame of reference. Why would the world not follow that, on a >> dime, giving any and all required, if you could do that? >> >>> It seems the best strategy now is to act ruthless, bold and selfish, >> As in kill people? Take away their free agency? Excommunicate > No, no. It's about building islands of resilience, which can > somewhat resist creeping regression around them. Unfortunately, > it requires a lot of resources to do so effectively. > >> nonbelievers? Give up on people? Force everyone to work on what you > Give up on the majority, absolutely. Heading for the rescue boats > beats rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. > >> think is the most pressing existential threat, rather than what > Forcing? Me, and which army? > >> others think is a far more serious and pressing? > What is your set of pressing problems, listed in their > priorities? Top five would be enough. > >>> and make your exit while you still can. The exit must involve building >>> a mutually supportive rural community. This is an alien concept to >>> many. >> Exit? What will any of that do? So, yes, you hate, or are giving > It will last a little bit longer against the rising tidal wave > of shit. Hate? Another perfect waste of time, I'm afraid. > >> up on the rest of us? You'd leave us behind? > I've given on this community to accomplish significant goals > a long time ago. I still value it as a social circle, though > I've been taking vacations in the past when the aggravation got > too serious. > >>> Here my fortune cookie ends. >> Yup, definitely giving up. > Insufficient information. > >>> In case yours says something else, >>> let's compare notes >> What are you saying here? It sounds like you are almost asking >> people to try to communicate, concisely and quantitatively? > Surprise me. > >>> (please no discussions about how it's all >>> unreal; because: nazis wear nice leather uniforms). > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 01:41:57 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 18:41:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good Message-ID: From: "spike" > But one thing I would like everyone to realize is that there is likely to be no magic new technology, nothing likely to replace oil. Of all the people on this list, I expected you to know better. >From a paper I am about to put up on The Energy Collective: Economic Analysis of GEO Laser Propulsion It is not hard to get the cost for 5kg/kW power satellites down in this range if the cost of lifting parts to GEO can be brought down to $100/kg or less. Solar power on earth ties up material in the range of 500 kg/kW(average). Power plants built in space, where they get full time sunlight and are not subject to wind and gravity, allows a hundred to one materials reduction to 5 kg/kW and an energy payback time of less than two months. Given a 20-year lifetime for the power satellites, the EROEI would be around 120, good as the best days of oil. However, the cost of transporting even a greatly reduced mass to space is a big problem. One hundred dollars per kg is a hundred to one cost reduction compared to the current cost of around $10,000 per kg paid to put communication satellites in GEO. A two-orders-of-magnitude reduction in transport cost seems to be possible, but not using chemical energy (other than the first step where a Skylon type vehicle burns hydrogen with air for about 1/4 of the velocity to orbit). Beyond Skylon's air-breathing phase (above 25 km and Mach 5.5), it takes a 3 GW laser located in GEO to accelerate the vehicle for the last 6 km/s to orbit. I think you reviewed the long version for the JBIS. Keith From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 06:58:34 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 08:58:34 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130910065834.GV10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 06:41:57PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > From: "spike" > > > But one thing I would like everyone to realize is that there is likely to be > no magic new technology, nothing likely to replace oil. > > Of all the people on this list, I expected you to know better. > > From a paper I am about to put up on The Energy Collective: > > Economic Analysis of GEO Laser Propulsion > > It is not hard to get the cost for 5kg/kW power satellites down in Photovoltaics and wireless energy transmission go back almost two centuries. Satellite technology half a century. Laser propulsion, well, we don't have working laser propulsion. The bootstrap to scale will take money and time. We don't have money and time. Notice that terrestrial photovoltaics is already cost-effective. Further trend due to scaling alone is reliable, and indicates a very bright future. But the deployed global volume is falling a factor of 100 short. Let's assume that 3 GUSD gives you 1 GW effective. The spending on wars to secure oil supply alone gives you a TW effective. So the money is there, or would have been. It's a question of priorities. Incidentally, it is a lot cheaper to put up solar panels on my roof, for for the municipality to tile up a field with panels. And there's enough space to put up a flock of sheep there, or just leave it as a meadow. So given a chance to blow a few TUSD on bootstrap of something that is uncertain, you can just let individuals and small groups spend fine-grained (as small as a couple 100 USD) funds, with ability to add to an existing system incrementally. Which of these two realities has a better chance of happening? Don't get me wrong SPS are just great, but we need to make sure we get a chance of building them, somewhere after 2050 or 2080, given that we make it there with no more than a limp. > this range if the cost of lifting parts to GEO can be brought down to > $100/kg or less. Solar power on earth ties up material in the range > of 500 kg/kW(average). Power plants built in space, where they get > full time sunlight and are not subject to wind and gravity, allows a > hundred to one materials reduction to 5 kg/kW and an energy payback > time of less than two months. Given a 20-year lifetime for the power > satellites, the EROEI would be around 120, good as the best days of > oil. However, the cost of transporting even a greatly reduced mass to > space is a big problem. One hundred dollars per kg is a hundred to one > cost reduction compared to the current cost of around $10,000 per kg > paid to put communication satellites in GEO. > > A two-orders-of-magnitude reduction in transport cost seems to be > possible, but not using chemical energy (other than the first step > where a Skylon type vehicle burns hydrogen with air for about 1/4 of > the velocity to orbit). > > Beyond Skylon's air-breathing phase (above 25 km and Mach 5.5), it > takes a 3 GW laser located in GEO to accelerate the vehicle for the > last 6 km/s to orbit. > > I think you reviewed the long version for the JBIS. > > Keith > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From rahmans at me.com Tue Sep 10 08:46:09 2013 From: rahmans at me.com (Omar Rahman) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 10:46:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 06:26:11 -0700 From: "spike" >> >> ... On Behalf Of Mirco Romanato > ... >> Former Environment Minister J?rgen Tritten of the Green Party once >> claimed that switching Germany to renewable energy wasn't going to >> cost citizens more than one scoop of ice cream... Mirco > > ... > Green energy will be expensive, it will not be green, but we will employ it > anyway, because we will gradually run out of alternatives, and yes we need > energy, lots of it. > > Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, can you find anything > in the previous sentence which you would dispute? > > spike This is such a sensible statement that I am dumfounded, it's like finding an ice sculpture in the middle of a forest fire. (Or flame war!) Energy production will be become more expensive in the short term in the only currency that matters; energy invested. Food prices will go up if the transition is not managed gracefully. People will react as they always have to food prices going up. But, in the long run, switching to renewables for our day to day living makes a lot of sense, no more drilling through thousands of meters of rock, no more fighting wars to control the ground where the fossil fuels are; the energy comes to you. The oil industry began on land where the oil was literally seeping out of the ground and ever since then the EROEI has been going up. If we factor in the costs of the wars to maintain control of various oil patches the cost of oil is really quite high. I've written more but I'll try to match Spike's bravery: regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, can you find anything in my previous sentences which you would dispute? Omar -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 08:52:34 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 20:52:34 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 08:54:59 +1200, John Clark wrote: > I think we could probably detect a Dyson sphere with its distinctive > infrared signature if it were within several thousand light years of us, > and we could see a galaxy of Dyson spheres if there were one anywhere in > the observable universe. But we see nothing. I wonder how water tight the idea is - that Dyson spheres would emit infrared radiation? Maybe dark matter is Dyson spheres whose inhabitants have figured out perfect or near perfect complete thermal management, and to whom any form of leakage is woefully irresponsible wastage. Maybe it's a natural evolution that shortly after technologically advanced species develop immortality they conclude that sitting around waiting for their sun/s to die off or explode is a really bad idea, especially if they have the technical means to extend its life span through the complete recycling of its emitted radiation. From protokol2020 at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 09:06:22 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 11:06:22 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > they conclude that sitting around waiting for their sun/s to die off or explode is a really bad idea, especially if they have the technical means to extend its life span through the complete recycling of its emitted radiation. Instead of just recycling their initial star's energy, wouldn't they want to recycle all around? This self limitation is very unlikely. Even much less for "all those millions civs everywhere". The Rare Earth is the only sane explanation for our apparent solitude. On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:52 AM, Andrew Mckee wrote: > On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 08:54:59 +1200, John Clark > wrote: > > > I think we could probably detect a Dyson sphere with its distinctive >> infrared signature if it were within several thousand light years of us, >> and we could see a galaxy of Dyson spheres if there were one anywhere in >> the observable universe. But we see nothing. >> > > I wonder how water tight the idea is - that Dyson spheres would emit > infrared radiation? > > Maybe dark matter is Dyson spheres whose inhabitants have figured out > perfect or near perfect complete thermal management, and to whom any form > of leakage is woefully irresponsible wastage. > > Maybe it's a natural evolution that shortly after technologically advanced > species develop immortality they conclude that sitting around waiting for > their sun/s to die off or explode is a really bad idea, especially if they > have the technical means to extend its life span through the complete > recycling of its emitted radiation. > > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 09:42:40 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 11:42:40 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <522E6626.6070203@canonizer.com> References: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> <20130909153809.GA10405@leitl.org> <522E6626.6070203@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <20130910094240.GE10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 06:21:58PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > You indicated knowing who the experts is the problem. But at > Canonizer.com it isn't. At Canonizer.com anyone can pick any I have some bad news for you: the world is a big place, rife with established structures and processes, and it won't be beating down a path to your door unless your better mousetrap is of truly exceptional quality. I don't have a diplomatic way of saying that your invention sucks. It might be fixable, but it's not my job of figuring out how. > experts they trust, by selecting the Canonizer algorithm on the side > bar. So far, the most popular 'expert' algorithms are peer ranking > ones, where peers rank each other. And, again, when you're > attempting to communicate to anyone, or any group, you work from > their chosen experts, whatever that is. The whole premise is broken. > You also asked: > > Have you never ever wondered why your pet project, or LessWrong never > went anywhere? > > > Well, it's not wikipedia, YET. But if you could see what it is > becoming from where I'm sitting, you'd laugh at this. Remember, if > you want to communicate successfully, you just need to work from > your targets perspective. I admit there isn't enough evidence to > prove to you it's capabilities, but it's making progress in that I've looked. There's very little there, and what is is of appalling quality. It already starts of poor quality of the seed content. > direction, and my prediction is that it will eventually convince > you. As I indicated earlier, at the very minimum it has stopped the > hateful conversations, like this one, where everyone repeated their You don't know what a hateful conversation really is. I'm blunt and abrasive, but I'm not hateful. > POV, infinitely, on consciousness, and everyone eventually started > acusing the others as Hitler, and so on. Whoosh. > Now, everyone that participates very much enjoys the conversation is > their understand is light years ahead of what it was when we were > all stuck with infinite YES!! NO!! YES!.. Instead of infinitely > repeating your position, you just say your' in camp > http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/36 and everyone knows exactly what No. You publish in peer reviewed journals and go to conferences. Statements of belief are useless. Online arguments are largely useless. > you believe, how many experts agree, and how many don't, along with > concise and quantitative descriptions of why. Nobody ever needs to > give up, as your camp, and everyone that agrees, is collaboratively > continued to be developed. If anyone berings any new ideas, or new Look at the TOD track record. It has changed many people's lives. > scientific evidence to the table, it get's canonized, and most > importantly of all, you get a rigorous measure of just how good the > information by know how many new people it convinces. If you want Your metric is entirely broken. Numbers don't indicate consensus. > to know what the state of the art of the conversation is, you can > see a nice concise and quantitative summary of what all 50 > participators (including several world class experts like Chalmers, > Lehar...) believe - real time. (Note: some have abandoned their now You see, there's the problem: they're experts in an area that has no relevance. It speaks volumes that canonizer's focus is on philosophy. > falsified camps, due to real experimental data.) Good luck > finding anything like that, in all the work you and everyone has put > into this conversation, or in anything like Less Wrong. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of this conversation. > > You asked what my top priorities are. See my canonized list: > > http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/120/8 "Public enemy number one is, was, and ever shall be germs, that is virus and bacterial pathogens; this is no joke because we may be heading back into a world without antibiotics." "Public enemy number two is ocean acidification - the current unremitting trend of decrease in pH of the world's oceans due to the oceans absorbing about 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide that humans have been putting into the atmosphere. It is possible that the decreasing pH of the ocean will kill off all corals by the year 2050 - less than 40 years from now. It is also possible that the change from the ocean's normal slightly alkaline state to slightly acidic may kill off all significant surviving stocks of wild sea fish by 2100. That would mean no more fish and chips .... ever!" "Public enemy number three is global warming. By now a very well publicised change in average mid day temperature and also possibly an increased maximum temperature, which is probably due at least in significant part to the additional CO2 we have been putting into the atmosphere." "Public enemy number four is bureaucracy. You may be tempted to laugh at this idea but, after 25 years working at an Australian Government agency, I have no doubt that bureaucratic method is not adequate to the task of steering us humans out of the environmental disaster we have aimed ourselves toward. Big business also, I believe, is not up to the task either due once again to the bureaucratic nature of large corporate entities, and also to their propensity to assess the world and human values in terms of money profit only." I'll just let that stand uncommented. > What do you mean when you said: "I used to communicate concisely and > quantitatively."? I did that when I thought it would make a difference. I'm both stupid *and* stubborn, so sue me. > Finally, you s aid: > > "I know why you hate what I'm saying. You think I'm the party who's > putting everything in jeopardy. Unfortunately, it's exactly the > other way round. Wrong goals kill." > > > I completely agree with this, and the facts of the matter of much of > what you say. It's all about quantity and priorities. I > completely agree that you could have something critically important If you need me to tell you're what is critically important then you've demonstrated an epic chain of failures. Further prognosis likely isn't good. As your attorney, I recommend to go offline and try heavy immersion in primary literature. Maybe pick up a few online courses, and do a stint in a well-mentored lab. > to us all. Most everything you are saying is just driving me away > from agreeing with you. Especially when you say things like there If I had many people agree with me I'd knew I'd be dead wrong, and need to radically change the whole approach. > is a consensus. IF that were true, you should be able to start to > canonize things, and such evidence would start to show up. In fact, > can you point to any expert I might recognize. that supports this How would you, a non-expert, tell an expert from a kook? > assertion? Seems to me there is far less evidence of any expert > support for "peek oil" than for "global warming", and I very much If you're actively running away from the evidence, I can't help you. > doubt their claims of 'expert consensus'. Here's news: you don't matter. This list doesn't matter. Even if a large fraction of the population would be doing the right thing it will only postpone the reckoning a little. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 10:13:37 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 11:13:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > Instead of just recycling their initial star's energy, wouldn't they want to > recycle all around? > This self limitation is very unlikely. Even much less for "all those > millions civs everywhere". > > The Rare Earth is the only sane explanation for our apparent solitude. > > The Rare Earth hypothesis is not just one theory. It is a complicated system with many alternatives. (And many critics, of course). One option is that civilisations might be plentiful, but spread so far apart that contact between civs is very unlikely. (The universe is really, REALLY big). Another time-dependent option is that we are at the right age in the universe for intelligence to have developed. And intelligent life is just starting to appear throughout the universe, all at almost the same time - within a few million years of each other. I find the hard-line 'Rare Earth' option rather unbelievable. That everything must be exactly the same as our Earth for life to appear seems extreme circular reasoning. BillK From protokol2020 at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 10:26:33 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 12:26:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > I find the hard-line 'Rare Earth' option rather unbelievable I don't. Consider only one thing. Earth has been closer to Sun and rotated more rapidly when the Sun was fainter. Then it slowed down and went out toward the Jupiter. All just as fast as is necessary to maintain liquid water. Chances for a random planet to do this are minuscule. Several such coincidence were needed. On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:13 PM, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > Instead of just recycling their initial star's energy, wouldn't they > want to > > recycle all around? > > This self limitation is very unlikely. Even much less for "all those > > millions civs everywhere". > > > > The Rare Earth is the only sane explanation for our apparent solitude. > > > > > > The Rare Earth hypothesis is not just one theory. It is a complicated > system with many alternatives. > (And many critics, of course). > > > > One option is that civilisations might be plentiful, but spread so far > apart that contact between civs is very unlikely. (The universe is > really, REALLY big). > > Another time-dependent option is that we are at the right age in the > universe for intelligence to have developed. And intelligent life is > just starting to appear throughout the universe, all at almost the > same time - within a few million years of each other. > > I find the hard-line 'Rare Earth' option rather unbelievable. That > everything must be exactly the same as our Earth for life to appear > seems extreme circular reasoning. > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 11:18:24 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 12:18:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > I don't. Consider only one thing. Earth has been closer to Sun and rotated > more rapidly when the Sun was fainter. Then it slowed down and went out > toward the Jupiter. All just as fast as is necessary to maintain liquid > water. > > Chances for a random planet to do this are minuscule. > Several such coincidence were needed. > Agreed, but the onus is on you to prove that all these coincidences are necessary (not just sufficient) to create intelligent life. It is possible that life can appear under many different circumstances and in many different places. There is no requirement for all life to be exactly the same as on Earth. Even definitions like 'habitable zone' imply habitable for life like us. Which may be presumptuous. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 11:30:23 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:30:23 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:18:24PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Agreed, but the onus is on you to prove that all these coincidences > are necessary (not just sufficient) to create intelligent life. It is Proof is simple enough. How's your astrophysics and chemistry? > possible that life can appear under many different circumstances and The variability is low, as few areas of the PSE are potentially fertile. > in many different places. There is no requirement for all life to be > exactly the same as on Earth. Do you have a problem with the habitability zone? Do you think life could emerge in solid state or gas phase? > Even definitions like 'habitable zone' imply habitable for life like > us. Which may be presumptuous. It's not, because people who define these terms know how chemistry works, and have a very good idea what it takes to boot up self-replicating molecular systems. People who know little think that everything is possible. As they learn how much of possibilities have been mapped, they tend to prune a lot of possibilities. From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 11:34:04 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:34:04 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130910113404.GN10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 08:52:34PM +1200, Andrew Mckee wrote: > I wonder how water tight the idea is - that Dyson spheres would emit > infrared radiation? Completely. I recommend a basic course on thermodynamics. > Maybe dark matter is Dyson spheres whose inhabitants have figured Dyson spheres refers to circumstellar gravitationally bound assemblies. Dark matter is something else. Even if it was suitable for computation (doesn't look that way), and it would be possible to bootstrap transition from visible to dark, life never abandons one niche entirely. So, probabilistically and evolutionary the hypothesis doesn't hold. > out perfect or near perfect complete thermal management, and to whom > any form of leakage is woefully irresponsible wastage. That themodynamics thing isn't optional. > Maybe it's a natural evolution that shortly after technologically > advanced species develop immortality they conclude that sitting > around waiting for their sun/s to die off or explode is a really bad > idea, especially if they have the technical means to extend its life > span through the complete recycling of its emitted radiation. Sure, they transition to being powered by invisible pink unicorn farts. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 11:37:09 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:37:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Rocks live in the Moon. Clouds live on Jupiter, sand storms live on Earth and Mars. Clouds live on Venus. As do rocks. This we know by the signals we've got from them. We don't get any signal from an interstellar civilization activity. As if there were none. The conquering of the Universe would be a satisfying signal for me. Anything else is not a sufficiently credible signal. On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:18 PM, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > I don't. Consider only one thing. Earth has been closer to Sun and > rotated > > more rapidly when the Sun was fainter. Then it slowed down and went out > > toward the Jupiter. All just as fast as is necessary to maintain liquid > > water. > > > > Chances for a random planet to do this are minuscule. > > Several such coincidence were needed. > > > > > Agreed, but the onus is on you to prove that all these coincidences > are necessary (not just sufficient) to create intelligent life. It is > possible that life can appear under many different circumstances and > in many different places. There is no requirement for all life to be > exactly the same as on Earth. > > Even definitions like 'habitable zone' imply habitable for life like > us. Which may be presumptuous. > > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 11:41:21 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 12:41:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > It's not, because people who define these terms know how > chemistry works, and have a very good idea what it takes > to boot up self-replicating molecular systems. > > People who know little think that everything is possible. > As they learn how much of possibilities have been mapped, > they tend to prune a lot of possibilities. > We don't know everything - yet. Quote: New research has revealed that chemical reactions previously thought to be 'impossible' in space actually occur 'with vigour,' a discovery that could ultimately change our understanding of how alcohols are formed and destroyed in space - and which could also mean that places like Saturn's moon Titan, once considered too cold for life to form, may have a shortcut for biochemical reactions. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 11:42:30 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:42:30 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> Message-ID: <20130910114230.GO10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:46:09AM +0200, Omar Rahman wrote: > This is such a sensible statement that I am dumfounded, it's like finding an ice sculpture in the middle of a forest fire. (Or flame war!) I'm surprised at your surprise. This is the entire premise of the whole conversation. I'm having a duh! moment. > Energy production will be become more expensive in the short term in the only currency that matters; energy invested. EROEI and ROI are both relevant. Payback time is also relevant, as long-lived system require an initial energy investment, which is more expensive in an energy-poor environment, aka the energy cliff. Which is why buying PV made from dirty cheap coal today is at all justified. > Food prices will go up if the transition is not managed gracefully. Have you looked at the history of food prices plotted versus energy prices, and the drivers of Arab Spring? Biofuels and HANPP ring a bell? > People will react as they always have to food prices going up. People *have* already reacted to each past food price spike. > But, in the long run, switching to renewables for our day to day living > makes a lot of sense, no more drilling through thousands of meters of > rock, no more fighting wars to control the ground where the fossil > fuels are; the energy comes to you. You're entirely too reasonable for your own good. > The oil industry began on land where the oil was literally seeping > out of the ground and ever since then the EROEI has been going up. > If we factor in the costs of the wars to maintain control of various > oil patches the cost of oil is really quite high. > > I've written more but I'll try to match Spike's bravery: regardless "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." > of where you are on the political spectrum, can you find anything > in my previous sentences which you would dispute? From protokol2020 at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 11:45:52 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:45:52 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: > may have a shortcut for biochemical reactions May have shortcuts for simplifying enough complex molecules as well. On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 1:41 PM, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > It's not, because people who define these terms know how > > chemistry works, and have a very good idea what it takes > > to boot up self-replicating molecular systems. > > > > People who know little think that everything is possible. > > As they learn how much of possibilities have been mapped, > > they tend to prune a lot of possibilities. > > > > We don't know everything - yet. > > > Quote: > New research has revealed that chemical reactions previously thought > to be 'impossible' in space actually occur 'with vigour,' a discovery > that could ultimately change our understanding of how alcohols are > formed and destroyed in space - and which could also mean that places > like Saturn's moon Titan, once considered too cold for life to form, > may have a shortcut for biochemical reactions. > > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 11:54:58 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:54:58 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130910115458.GP10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:41:21PM +0100, BillK wrote: > We don't know everything - yet. We know pretty much everything *relevant* about prebiotic chemistry necessary for emergence of life. > Phys.org is a terrible site. It is always a good idea to hit the original papers, they at all bother to cite those. > Quote: > New research has revealed that chemical reactions previously thought > to be 'impossible' in space actually occur 'with vigour,' a discovery The abstract alone says no such thing. Abstract Understanding the abundances of molecules in dense interstellar clouds requires knowledge of the rates of gas-phase reactions between uncharged species. However, because of the low temperatures within these clouds, reactions with an activation barrier were considered too slow to play an important role. Here we show that, despite the presence of a barrier, the rate coefficient for the reaction between the hydroxyl radical (OH) and methanol?one of the most abundant organic molecules in space?is almost two orders of magnitude larger at 63 K than previously measured at ?200 K. We also observe the formation of the methoxy radical product, which was recently detected in space. These results are interpreted by the formation of a hydrogen-bonded complex that is sufficiently long-lived to undergo quantum-mechanical tunnelling to form products. We postulate that this tunnelling mechanism for the oxidation of organic molecules by OH is widespread in low-temperature interstellar environments. Now that sound a little less exciting, doesn't it? > that could ultimately change our understanding of how alcohols are > formed and destroyed in space - and which could also mean that places > like Saturn's moon Titan, once considered too cold for life to form, Thought by whom? Liquid water and water/ammonia are pretty common all over the solar system. > may have a shortcut for biochemical reactions. These are not biochemical reaction. This is prebiotic astrochemistry. Necessary, but not sufficient. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 11:56:09 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:56:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130910115609.GQ10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 01:45:52PM +0200, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > may have a shortcut for biochemical reactions > > May have shortcuts for simplifying enough complex molecules as well. That's what high temperature and ionizing radiation is there for. One hand giveth, another taketh away. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Tue Sep 10 12:12:43 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 06:12:43 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin - Mt.Gox In-Reply-To: <522CB91A.8030202@libero.it> References: <1378569496.68574.YahooMailNeo@web121202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <522CB91A.8030202@libero.it> Message-ID: <522F0CBB.8040504@canonizer.com> Hi Gordon and MIcro, Thanks for this great question, Gordon. I had the same questions and concerns. And thanks for the great answer, Micro... So another question I have is why is coinbase.com so much cheaper, both on the by and sell side, than even Bitstamp? And, where do you guys buy your Bitcoins, where do you hold them, where do you sell them, and what do you use to buy things via Bitcoin with? And what are the historical answers for these questions (when and from whom did you change and why?) Brent Allsop On 9/8/2013 11:51 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 07/09/2013 17:58, Gordon ha scritto: >> Concerned about the financial health of Mt. Gox, (the largest Bitcoin >> exchange), I transferred out what coins I had there. News surfaced in >> recent weeks that the US seizure of Mt. Gox funds was no small affair. >> Not only was its Dwolla account seized, but so too was its US Wells >> Fargo bank account. The total funds seized amounted to about $5 million, >> including $50,000 of the CEO's personal funds. >> >> While all this was happening, Mt. Gox was telling customers about the >> Dwolla seizure, but not about the Wells Fargo seizure, and it was not >> divulging the dollar amounts. They put a hold on withdrawals of USD >> which they attributed to supposed technical difficulties as they >> established new financial relationships. The hold was later lifted, but >> I've seen numerous reports that USD withdrawals are still delayed as >> much as four weeks or more. I appears to me that Mt. Gox is experiencing >> undisclosed financial problems, and that they have been less than honest >> about it with their customers. >> >> The liquidity issues at Mt. Gox would also explain the wide spread >> between the market price there and other exchanges like Coinbase. The >> Mt. Gox BTC price is about 10% higher. It looks like an arbitrage >> opportunity, but the discrepancy is probably explained by the fact that >> US sellers at Gox cannot get ready access to their USD. >> >> What do you think, Mirco? (or anyone) > Apparently, the Bitstamp MtGox gap was reduced in the last few days. > > My opinion about MtGox is a bit more complex: > > Albeit the seizures of Dwolla e WF accounts were serious they do not put > the solvency of MtGox in danger. They had a lot of fee in the past and > now to cover the losses. > > MtGox have limits imposed by their bank to the number of international > wires they can do for free (something like 12/day), so they had to put > up a rotating queue and currently people there have a slot available > every three weeks. So, if people do a withdrawal it is satisfied in few > days, the second wait its free slot (21 days), the third the free slot > after it (other 21 days). So a lot of people doing multiple transactions > have a lot of problems (and the customer support tell them to cancel > them and consolidate them is a single transaction) > > The problem with ? is a bit different because their bank(s) in Europe > put a limit in money transmitted (and not the number of wires) so they > are able to put together a lot of smaller transactions until the limit > is reached. > > Anyway, if people is in a hurry to get their fiat money, my > understanding is MtGox allow them to request a expedited withdrawal that > is manually processed by their bank and cost 5% of the sum transmitted. > > This explain the reason for a long time the differential between MtGox > and Bitstamp was around 10%. People could arbitrage only if the > difference was a lot over 5%. > > When AurumExchange worked the differential was no more than 5% because > the cost to move fiat from Gox to Stamp was 1-2-3% and the currency were > credited in minutes (at worst hours). They had reserves at both > exchanges and raised the cost of the transfer as their reserves depleted. > > My opinion is we are seeing the effects of the balkanization of the > international banking system (not a lot of trust available between > banks) and currency controls. Even sending US$ to Gox is a problem. > MagicalTux (Karpeles) stated their bank credit to their account the > money send immediately, but make it available to them with a large > delay (more than a week, IIRC), they had a lot of transactions sending > money to them reversed after days or weeks (and this often result in a > loss as they credited immediately the credit to the customer account) > and even transaction they sent to customers were reversed or hold for > weeks without any reason apart fear of money laundering (a lot of bank > managers are in permanent "CYA Mode ON" because of KYC and AML laws). > > A lot of the US legislation is making dealing in US$ and with US > residents absolutely insane for banks and other financial institutions. > So banks in Europe are refusing their services to US citizens and their > spouses and so on. Before or later they will ask for the same > legislations against US banks (it would be interesting if US banks were > forced by German of Italy laws to give data about their Italian and > German customers and their spouses in US or risk seizures and jail for > their management if they do not comply). > > So I'm optimist with Bitcoin just because I see the previous system > collapsing. > > Mirco > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > From pharos at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 12:47:57 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:47:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <20130910115458.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> <20130910115458.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 12:41:21PM +0100, BillK wrote: >> Quote: >> New research has revealed that chemical reactions previously thought >> to be 'impossible' in space actually occur 'with vigour,' a discovery > > The abstract alone says no such thing. > > Perhaps you should read more than just the abstract then? > > >> that could ultimately change our understanding of how alcohols are >> formed and destroyed in space - and which could also mean that places >> like Saturn's moon Titan, once considered too cold for life to form, > > Thought by whom? Liquid water and water/ammonia are pretty > common all over the solar system. > Eugen, you seem to have developed a recent tendency to automatically rubbish anything which contradicts your current worldview. How about trying for a bit more consideration that maybe, just maybe, somebody may, just possibly, have something a bit different? Here are quotes from one of the authors of the paper, from the New Scientist: Quote: The team also found that the reaction occurred 50 times faster via quantum tunnelling than if it occurred normally at room temperature by hurdling the energy barrier. Empty space is much colder than 63 kelvin, but dust clouds near stars can reach this temperature, adds Heard. "We're showing there is organic chemistry in space of the type of reactions where it was assumed these just wouldn't happen," says Heard. -------- Let's hope you don't claim the authors have misunderstood their own paper. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 13:12:13 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 15:12:13 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> <20130910115458.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130910131212.GS10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 01:47:57PM +0100, BillK wrote: > > The abstract alone says no such thing. > > Perhaps you should read more than just the abstract then? Did you just quote an article from a rubbish site to a trained chemist who happens to be interested in the origin of life and your comeback is that I'm misinterpreting the abstract you didn't read, and I should do your work for you, for free? It's an interesting idea. > > > > > >> that could ultimately change our understanding of how alcohols are > >> formed and destroyed in space - and which could also mean that places > >> like Saturn's moon Titan, once considered too cold for life to form, > > > > Thought by whom? Liquid water and water/ammonia are pretty > > common all over the solar system. > > > > Eugen, you seem to have developed a recent tendency to automatically > rubbish anything which contradicts your current worldview. How about No, I'm being more selective. You think you can afford to believe anything as if there was no cost attached. Nope. Keep your mind open but not enough that your brain falls out is not just an aphorism. You give me a mechanism how you think order is preserved in gas phase or plasma, or how matter transport happens in solid state, and then we talk. Is that sufficiently specific? > trying for a bit more consideration that maybe, just maybe, somebody > may, just possibly, have something a bit different? > > Here are quotes from one of the authors of the paper, from the New Scientist: New Scientist is not a peer reviewed primary publication. You might think I'm being difficult for no reason, but I'm really aren't. Get it straight from the horse's mouth, and don't bother with interpreters that will only garble the message. > Quote: > The team also found that the reaction occurred 50 times faster via > quantum tunnelling than if it occurred normally at room temperature by > hurdling the energy barrier. Empty space is much colder than 63 > kelvin, but dust clouds near stars can reach this temperature, adds > Heard. Yes, so what? > "We're showing there is organic chemistry in space of the type of > reactions where it was assumed these just wouldn't happen," says Yes, so what? > Heard. > -------- > > Let's hope you don't claim the authors have misunderstood their own paper. The authors sure didn't. You did. Hint: the article has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of life. We already know that prebiotic chemistry was clement enough at least in one instance. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 13:28:24 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 14:28:24 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <20130910131212.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> <20130910115458.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130910131212.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > The authors sure didn't. You did. Hint: the article has nothing > whatsoever to do with the origin of life. We already know that > prebiotic chemistry was clement enough at least in one instance. > > Yes, it does. Organic molecules are a necessary precursor to life. Complex organic molecules have already been detected in dust clouds and this paper shows how organic chemistry flourishes in cold dust clouds in space. To date nobody - not even you - knows how life is created, but we do know that organic chemistry comes first and we now also know that organic chemistry is not limited to 'habitable zones'. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 10 13:40:35 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 15:40:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <20130910113023.GL10405@leitl.org> <20130910115458.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130910131212.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130910134035.GU10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 02:28:24PM +0100, BillK wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > The authors sure didn't. You did. Hint: the article has nothing > > whatsoever to do with the origin of life. We already know that > > prebiotic chemistry was clement enough at least in one instance. > > > > > > Yes, it does. Organic molecules are a necessary precursor to life. > Complex organic molecules have already been detected in dust clouds > and this paper shows how organic chemistry flourishes in cold dust > clouds in space. Many papers have done that. So what? > To date nobody - not even you - knows how life is created, but we do This is correct. We might or might know more when we send probes outside of the inner solar system. There's plenty of juicy stuff out there. > know that organic chemistry comes first and we now also know that > organic chemistry is not limited to 'habitable zones'. That insight is at least a century old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis It's a surprisingly good article, for Wikipedia. Gives you a nice overview. From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 10 14:14:19 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 07:14:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> Message-ID: <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Omar Rahman . ... >.Green energy will be expensive, it will not be green, but we will employ it anyway, because we will gradually run out of alternatives, and yes we need energy, lots of it. spike >.The oil industry began on land where the oil was literally seeping out of the ground and ever since then the EROEI has been going up. If we factor in the costs of the wars to maintain control of various oil patches the cost of oil is really quite high. >.I've written more but I'll try to match Spike's bravery: regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, can you find anything in my previous sentences which you would dispute? Omar Actually, perhaps you intended to say EROEI has been going down steadily, but we know what you meant. Regarding Keith's notion of SBSP, that would be great if we can make it happen. The Chinese might do it. We have demonstrated control of lasers to shoot down drones: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/09/video-new-navy- laser-can-shoot-down-drones-is-headed-for-the-persian-gulf/ Note that the laser was aboard a ship, so it had to deal with the control problem of holding the laser on a target with more precision than required for laser propulsion, and simultaneously deal with a rolling ship. The power is not a show stopper, since we can replicate a laser like the one in the video arbitrarily many times. So we have the control algorithms and the power. The question to me is whether mankind will go ahead and do it. Getting the power to the ground is a problem, but we know how to do it. Again the question is: Will we? There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 14:35:00 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 10:35:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 Andrew Mckee wrote: >> I think we could probably detect a Dyson sphere with its distinctive >> infrared signature if it were within several thousand light years of us, >> and we could see a galaxy of Dyson spheres if there were one anywhere in >> the observable universe. But we see nothing. >> > > > I wonder how water tight the idea is - that Dyson spheres would emit > infrared radiation? > If the first law of thermodynamics is correct then the amount of energy emitted from a Dyson sphere into space would be equal to the amount of electromagnetic energy the naked star would have emitted if the sphere were not there. And if the second law of thermodynamics is correct then the frequency of those emitted electromagnetic waves will be shifted downward from visible light and ultraviolet into the infrared, or perhaps even more into microwaves. Incidentally if there were one of our laws of physics that I think even a civilization a billion years more advanced than ours would find just as true as we do it would be the second law of thermodynamics. The first law, the conservation of energy, is just a empirical observation, we've never seen it violated and use induction to conclude that we never will. But the second law is not like that, the second law is based on logic. In every one of Everett's Many Worlds where 2+2 is still equal to 4 the second law holds true. > Maybe dark matter is Dyson spheres whose inhabitants have figured out > perfect or near perfect complete thermal management We know very little about Dark Matter but one thing we do know is that it doesn't interact with electromagnetic waves, that's why it's so hard to detect. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 14:57:30 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 10:57:30 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 7:18 AM, BillK wrote: > Even definitions like 'habitable zone' imply habitable for life like us. > Which may be presumptuous. > You can maybe yourself to death with pointless maybes. Maybe life elsewhere is made of klogknee particles that scientists on Earth haven't discovered. But what we can say for sure right now is that there is zero evidence that chemistry can produce anything even close to being called "intelligent" unless liquid water is involved, and that can only happen in the habitable zone. And even if life elsewhere is made up of mysterious klogknee particles I still don't understand why they are such poor engineers. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gts_2000 at yahoo.com Tue Sep 10 15:18:20 2013 From: gts_2000 at yahoo.com (Gordon) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 08:18:20 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin - Mt.Gox In-Reply-To: <522F0CBB.8040504@canonizer.com> References: <1378569496.68574.YahooMailNeo@web121202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <522CB91A.8030202@libero.it> <522F0CBB.8040504@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <1378826300.50652.YahooMailNeo@web121205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Brent Allsop wrote: >And, where do you guys buy your Bitcoins, where do you hold them My first three purchases were at Mt. Gox. Since then I've made a couple of more at Coinbase. I store them now in my local wallet. Mirco: > Albeit the seizures of Dwolla e WF accounts were serious they do not put > the solvency of MtGox in danger.? Do we know this for a fact? Has Mt. Gox released any information about its finances? I haven't seen any. > Anyway, if people is in a hurry to get their fiat money, my > understanding is MtGox allow them to request a expedited withdrawal that > is manually processed by their bank and cost 5% of the sum transmitted. A 5% cost to get access to one's own USD in a timely fashion seems exorbitant to me. My experience with Coinbase has been much better, and I'm not even fully verified there. > So I'm optimist with Bitcoin just because I see the previous system > collapsing. I'm optimistic, too, but staying away from Mt. Gox for now. Here is an interesting article about Mt. Gox, its problems, and the spread vs other exchanges: How Bitcoin Spreads [at Mt. Gox] Violate a Fundamental Economic Law http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml Gordon -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Tue Sep 10 20:15:12 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 22:15:12 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?b?77u/U2lsZW5jZSBpbiB0aGUgc2t54oCUYnV0IHdoeT8=?= In-Reply-To: <1378695302.52228.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <522B4E68.70808@libero.it> <20130907183059.GY29404@leitl.org> <522CBDC0.5090506@libero.it> <1378695302.52228.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <522F7DD0.8040804@libero.it> Il 09/09/2013 04:55, TwentFirstCentury Matters ha scritto: > What do you visualise when you think of extraterrestrials? Immediately I > think of a Portuguese Man Of War > type colonial, in reaction to the automatic presumption by so many that > an ET would be Earthlike. > > At any rate, bilateral symmetry is not what first comes to mind-- > appears too pat IMO. If we think rationally about it we should suppose any traveler from another star will be technologically advanced enough to have no need of our resources. Why mine a planet when you can mine a asteroid field? If they are able to come here, they surely have some sources of energy vastly superior to ours. Then, if resources are not a concern, the reasons to travel is to find some new home and curiosity. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Tue Sep 10 20:17:15 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 22:17:15 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> Message-ID: <522F7E4B.6090209@libero.it> Il 10/09/2013 16:14, spike ha scritto: > There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late. Too late for who? It rarely is too late for everyone. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Tue Sep 10 20:40:38 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 22:40:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Bitcoin - Mt.Gox In-Reply-To: <1378826300.50652.YahooMailNeo@web121205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1378569496.68574.YahooMailNeo@web121202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <522CB91A.8030202@libero.it> <522F0CBB.8040504@canonizer.com> <1378826300.50652.YahooMailNeo@web121205.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <522F83C6.6090601@libero.it> Il 10/09/2013 17:18, Gordon ha scritto: > Mirco: > >> Albeit the seizures of Dwolla e WF accounts were serious they do not put >> the solvency of MtGox in danger. > > Do we know this for a fact? Has Mt. Gox released any information about > its finances? I haven't seen any. This is my interpretation of the fact. I do not know for sure, but MtGox have obtained at least 20K BTC just around the april (1% of the total number of BTC exchanged go in fees). And this is just for USD. Add ? and likes. >> Anyway, if people is in a hurry to get their fiat money, my >> understanding is MtGox allow them to request a expedited withdrawal that >> is manually processed by their bank and cost 5% of the sum transmitted. > A 5% cost to get access to one's own USD in a timely fashion seems > exorbitant to me. My experience with Coinbase has been much better, and > I'm not even fully verified there. They say this is what their bank ask. It is not their fee. It is, probably, used by big whales (at least six figures) to arbitrage. >> So I'm optimist with Bitcoin just because I see the previous system >> collapsing. > > I'm optimistic, too, but staying away from Mt. Gox for now. Here is an > interesting article about Mt. Gox, its problems, and the spread vs other > exchanges: > How Bitcoin Spreads [at Mt. Gox] Violate a Fundamental Economic Law > http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml The "law" they talk about could be true if there was no friction in the USD movement and transfers. But there is a lot of frictions to move USD to and from MTGox after the Feds seized the Dwolla's account, Liberty Reserve was shut down and OKPay stopped accepting cash from MtGox for private customers. Mirco From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Sep 10 22:00:07 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 16:00:07 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, spike wrote: > There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late. > Yes Spike, please do define too late. In Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, we have more fossil fuel BTUs than Saudi Arabia, though it does exist in hard to mine and transform rock shale form. There are significant deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of Earth.[3] Yes, solar power will be a major source of energy in the future when it becomes economically competitive for MORE applications than it is economically competitive for now. Wind will continue to be developed until the eco-terrorist-lawyers find a way to use the endangered species act to stop it for chopping up some kinds of birds that can't seem to learn to fly around turbines. There are huge amounts of oil sands in Canada. There is still a significant amount of liquid oil trapped in shale in North Dakota and similar formations elsewhere (though perhaps not as large). The North Dakota story is illustrative of what I think will happen in the future with other sources of energy. 1) It wasn't tapped until improvements in technology (methods of fracking) made it economical. 2) So-called "environmentalists" are up in arms about it. 3) Politicians do what's necessary to get reelected with respect to finally getting at it. 4) It's slightly more expensive than the previous best source of energy. When the time comes that energy is a real problem, so that the doomsday that is perceived by some is clear to all, the politicians will solve two problems at once. They will reduce the US debt (or increase spending) by selling parts of Utah/Colorado/Wyoming under government control and they will do this over the objections of the howling environmentalist community because the majority of citizens will call for it. End of problem. Gives more time for solar, space solar, and all other pet ideas to have more time to compete. Probably getting things into space will get cheaper. One thing I know for sure is that putting solar on each individual roof is the road to ruin because there is so much additional controlling hardware required for each small installation. Turning a local field into a solar collector has economies of scale that make it better. Yes, I understand EROI and all that jargon. I don't need another lecture from Eugen about it. And yes, there is the chance that Earth IS Easter Island and that we won't figure it out before we're all screwed. But I remain hopeful with all the hydrocarbons lying about. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 10 23:02:01 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 16:02:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> Message-ID: <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2013 3:00 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, spike wrote: There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late. >Yes Spike, please do define too late. >In Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, we have more fossil fuel BTUs than Saudi Arabia, though it does exist in hard to mine and transform rock shale form. Ja, all of these, but I was looking at the long term in the event that there is some fundamental reason why a singularity is impossible. For the record, I think a singularity is both possible and inevitable, but there is value in mapping out a future in which it is not, or a future in which the singularity takes longer than we thought, analogous in a way to nuclear fusion power. We have coal and we have oil enough for now and the next decade or two, but then what? The notion of a poverty trap is real. I have some distant cousins who are trapped in that now: they live way the hell out in a holler in West Virginia, and have only a vague notion of what a computer does. I can't even communicate with them: I have no intentions of writing on paper and sending stuff with stamps on it. I did that with their grandparents, will not do it now. That represents a group of people genetically similar to me, who are in a poverty trap. They do not use the internet; they are on the other side of a chasm which I cannot or will not span. We can imagine scenarios where humanity gets caught in a poverty trap, or a memetic trap similar to what grips much of the middle east today. The collective dedication to Mormonism in those places traps both the believer and unbeliever alike, slowing progress and causing retrogression. If we don't get something sustainable long term off the ground, I can easily envision most of humanity being far more concerned with their next meal than advancing science. Regarding oil shale, oil sands, fracking, sure we can do all that, but what I am looking at is a long term solution in the event that the singularity doesn't happen. These other things will work for our lifetimes perhaps, but what then? Also note that oil has made us comfortable and conservative. We don't want to change things when they work so well. But China and India are coming, and they read the internet too. They want to live like we do. Imagine that. What happens to our oil reserves then? Our coal reserves? As an exercise Kelly, map out a future with optimistic models of current energy resources, and anticipating the technological rise of China and India. Where does it lead? Use top level estimates of greenhouse warming, just using top level first order approximations, and include increased radiation of heat with Boltzmann's law. Where does it go? What happens if a billion Chinese people and another billion Indians want to drive SUVs? Then a billion more middle easterners get tired of being poor? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 07:02:54 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 19:02:54 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 21:06:22 +1200, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > Instead of just recycling their initial star's energy, wouldn't they want > to recycle all around? I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you're asking, recycle all around what exactly? > This self limitation is very unlikely. Even much less for "all those > millions civs everywhere". Errr, maybe so, but who on earth can know what goes on in the minds of alien civilizations? From protokol2020 at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 07:11:55 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 09:11:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you're asking, recycle all around what exactly? Nearby stars, nearby galaxies, nearby gas clouds ... > but who on earth can know what goes on in the minds of alien civilizations? You can. You are saying they just stay put. On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 9:02 AM, Andrew Mckee wrote: > On Tue, 10 Sep 2013 21:06:22 +1200, Tomaz Kristan > wrote: > > > Instead of just recycling their initial star's energy, wouldn't they want >> to recycle all around? >> > > I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you're asking, recycle all around what > exactly? > > > This self limitation is very unlikely. Even much less for "all those >> millions civs everywhere". >> > > Errr, maybe so, but who on earth can know what goes on in the minds of > alien civilizations? > > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 07:16:42 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 09:16:42 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <522F7E4B.6090209@libero.it> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <522F7E4B.6090209@libero.it> Message-ID: <20130911071641.GH10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:17:15PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 10/09/2013 16:14, spike ha scritto: > > > There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late. > > Too late for who? > It rarely is too late for everyone. Empty words, as usual. In a highly connected complex system prone to cascading failure there's no containment of local degradation. For the moment, our near-term future is determined by the decline function of total net energy. Ecosystem carrying capacity decline is the next determinant. Long-term, war. From andymck35 at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 08:38:47 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 20:38:47 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Sep 2013 19:11:55 +1200, Tomaz Kristan wrote: >> I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what you're asking, recycle all around what > exactly? > > Nearby stars, nearby galaxies, nearby gas clouds ... >> but who on earth can know what goes on in the minds of alien > civilizations? > > You can. You are saying they just stay put. Ummm, not really. In fact I'm pretty sure I made no mention regarding anyone traveling around or not. I was trying to suggest that there may be classes of Dyson spheres that are not detectable to us because the inhabitants are so technologically advanced they have discovered the technical means to recycle or translate what we would consider low grade- low utility emissions back into some form of useful energy. Yes I know what I'm suggesting is scientific heresy, and I should be burnt on a thermodynamically correct bonfire. But I'm just sayin, that we the human race, haven't been practicing science and engineering for very long even by human standards. Maybe the universe is full of highly advanced alien civilizations that have been refining their scientific understanding for millions of years and they know things that we currently do not. That seems like a fair assumption to me, given that we have been after all discussing some of the universe's puzzles for which we have no really conclusive answers. And if Eugen doesn't like my suggestion, well tough, I'm pretty sure what I'm suggesting is already on the 101 solutions to the Fermi paradox list already anyway, and there's nothing he can say to have it taken off. Nah, Nah Nah Nah, Nah! ;-) From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 09:07:49 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:07:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130911090749.GQ10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 08:38:47PM +1200, Andrew Mckee wrote: > Ummm, not really. In fact I'm pretty sure I made no mention > regarding anyone traveling around or not. Yes, you did. Metabolism on a stellar population is very detectable. Any implication of undetectability implies no growth and no travel. > I was trying to suggest that there may be classes of Dyson spheres > that are not detectable to us because the inhabitants are so > technologically advanced they have discovered the technical means to > recycle or translate what we would consider low grade- low utility > emissions back into some form of useful energy. Sure, if you believe in magic. > Yes I know what I'm suggesting is scientific heresy, and I should be > burnt on a thermodynamically correct bonfire. You're suggesting a great deal more: an infinity of possibilities, so everything is possible. Magic. There's a vast body of literature about it, it's called fantasy and science fiction. > But I'm just sayin, that we the human race, haven't been practicing > science and engineering for very long even by human standards. Maybe > the universe is full of highly advanced alien civilizations that > have been refining their scientific understanding for millions of > years and they know things that we currently do not. You're extremely self-limiting and terribly inconsistent. Why stop here? The sky is no longer the limit. Nyan-cat propulsion and buttered toast/cat antigravity, improbability drive, machine elves from hyperspace, and so on, you can enumerating them until the stars burn out. So you can sure do that, but I've got something else to do. > That seems like a fair assumption to me, given that we have been It's not a fair assumption. It is a self denial of service, would you be borderline self-consistent. > after all discussing some of the universe's puzzles for which we > have no really conclusive answers. There is a perfectly boring explanation for Fermi's paradoxon: it isn't. > And if Eugen doesn't like my suggestion, well tough, I'm pretty sure > what I'm suggesting is already on the 101 solutions to the Fermi > paradox list already anyway, and there's nothing he can say to have > it taken off. Nah, Nah Nah Nah, Nah! ;-) Your suggestion is roughly 50 kYears old. Probably, even a lot older. It's fun, but it doesn't get shit done. Do you want shit done, or do you want to goof off until a coronary insult drops you in the parking lot? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 09:18:47 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:18:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130911091847.GR10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 04:00:07PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Yes, I understand EROI and all that jargon. I don't need another lecture No, you don't. Because you haven't looked at the data, and the data are telling you that what you think is true isn't. I'm not saying that you, because you will not look at the data, and if you will, you will choose to selectively interprete it in a way that supports your position: we don't need to do anything. I'm saying that for the archives, in case somebody else comes along, and as another data point for the digital archeologists. > from Eugen about it. And yes, there is the chance that Earth IS Easter You do, but you've shown that you're knowledge-repellent. No point in wasting my breath. > Island and that we won't figure it out before we're all screwed. But I > remain hopeful with all the hydrocarbons lying about. The turkeys will remain hopeful until the very day of Thanksgiving. Gobble-gobble. From andymck35 at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 09:38:08 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 21:38:08 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, 11 Sep 2013 02:35:00 +1200, John Clark wrote: > If the first law of thermodynamics is correct then the amount of energy > emitted from a Dyson sphere into space would be equal to the amount of > electromagnetic energy the naked star would have emitted if the sphere > were > not there. And if the second law of thermodynamics is correct then the > frequency of those emitted electromagnetic waves will be shifted downward > from visible light and ultraviolet into the infrared, or perhaps even > more > into microwaves. > > Incidentally if there were one of our laws of physics that I think even a > civilization a billion years more advanced than ours would find just as > true as we do it would be the second law of thermodynamics. The first > law, > the conservation of energy, is just a empirical observation, we've never > seen it violated and use induction to conclude that we never will. But > the > second law is not like that, the second law is based on logic. In every > one > of Everett's Many Worlds where 2+2 is still equal to 4 the second law > holds > true. I'm sure you're right, so far as we know. I just wonder if some really advanced civilizations might discover a wrinkle or two that enables them to develop technologies that to us, seem to violate our known scientific laws. >> Maybe dark matter is Dyson spheres whose inhabitants have figured out >> perfect or near perfect complete thermal management > We know very little about Dark Matter but one thing we do know is that it > doesn't interact with electromagnetic waves, that's why it's so hard to > detect. Not to gleefully jump from the frying pan into the fire... But I'd reply that some would say Dark Matter and Dark Energy are really hard to detect because they are just huge fictional fudge factors added to prop up a seriously broken gravitational universe model that bore absolutely no resemblance to what the observable universe is actually doing. Well, others may say that, I on the other hand, couldn't possibly comment. :-) From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 09:45:14 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:45:14 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130911094514.GS10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 09:38:08PM +1200, Andrew Mckee wrote: > I'm sure you're right, so far as we know. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. In fact, thermodynamics is based on information, and all the deep theories are trending to information-based descriptions of reality. > I just wonder if some really advanced civilizations might discover a > wrinkle or two that enables them to develop technologies that to > us, seem to violate our known scientific laws. Cultures are diverse, and spatially spread. Out of a large population a traceless transition with perfect recall of expanding species has a probability indistinguishable from zero. > Not to gleefully jump from the frying pan into the fire... > > But I'd reply that some would say Dark Matter and Dark Energy are > really hard to detect because they are just huge fictional fudge > factors added to prop up a seriously broken gravitational universe > model that bore absolutely no resemblance to what the observable > universe is actually doing. This is the opposite of falsifyability. The machine elves from hyperspace want to have a stern word with you. > Well, others may say that, I on the other hand, couldn't possibly > comment. :-) You know what, go a top physics guy, and try that trick. If he's polite, he'll show you the door. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 10:34:50 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 06:34:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 01:11:35AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > >> ### No, I don't think that is the case, the basic physics does not >> seem to change at the visible universe scale, at least not in an >> easily detectable way, so the resulting intelligences should be >> similar as well. > > There are two issues with these assumption: the pioneer > organisms are specialists, so the expanding wave front > is different than the volume behind, which will have > succession colonization waves, and then settle into > a high-diversity equilibrium. > > Regardless of origin, in a mature system the diversity > is sufficiently high that any random sampling will result > in very dissimiliar organisms, though there will be > convergent evolution for specific niches (the most > important one being the pioneer niche). ### It all depends on what you mean by "similar". I meant that in a very weak way, implying only having only some basic evolved adaptations to survival in a given niche, although many details are likely to be different. Similar niches frequently produce very similar adaptations (fish, dolphins, ichthyosaurs, squid) in diverse animals. I agree with you the intelligences in a single niche to be as similar and as diverse as the above creatures, although given diverse niches there will be also more fundamental diversity of intelligences. Rafal From pharos at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 11:15:50 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:15:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> References: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? > Long term on what time scale? > > Just published on the BBC - Esa's Cryosat mission observes continuing Arctic winter ice decline The volume of sea ice in the Arctic hit a new low this past winter, according to observations from the European Space Agency's (Esa) Cryosat mission. In its three years of full operations, Cryosat has witnessed a continuing shrinkage of winter ice volume. It underlines, say scientists, the long-term decline of the floes. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 11:15:36 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 13:15:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130911111536.GX10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 06:34:50AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### It all depends on what you mean by "similar". I meant that in a If you sample spatial variation in a mature postecosystem from a given point of origin versus one with a different point of origin. The variability should not differ. Mature systems lose founder effect information over time. The only information about the point of origin might exist in personal memories of very long-lived species. > very weak way, implying only having only some basic evolved > adaptations to survival in a given niche, although many details are > likely to be different. Similar niches frequently produce very similar > adaptations (fish, dolphins, ichthyosaurs, squid) in diverse animals. Yes, precisely. > I agree with you the intelligences in a single niche to be as similar > and as diverse as the above creatures, although given diverse niches > there will be also more fundamental diversity of intelligences. I'm arguing that due to radiation the bulk of the postecosystem will be nonsentient, despite of founders having been. There is e.g. a strong selection pressure for pioneer organisms to lose sentience. As such they have behaviour, but no ethics to constrain it. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 12:07:27 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:07:27 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 04:02:01PM -0700, spike wrote: > Ja, all of these, but I was looking at the long term in the event that there > is some fundamental reason why a singularity is impossible. For the record, > I think a singularity is both possible and inevitable, but there is value in > mapping out a future in which it is not, or a future in which the > singularity takes longer than we thought, analogous in a way to nuclear > fusion power. We have coal and we have oil enough for now and the next > decade or two, but then what? No, we've already not having "enough" since roughly 2004. What we have is a bumpy plateau (decline, in terms of net energy) despite increasing effort, and according increase of price. The pain point varies across the globe, but is roughly in 100-115 USD/barrel (today's value) range. This is what is causing demand destruction. Lack of fuel liquids causes a shift to somewhat more available fuel solids, and increasingly lower-grade fuel solids, accelerating advent of peak total fossil, roughly 2020 (the exact time doesn't matter, as it's a regime, not a point of inflection). We've been running in energy hunger mode. It is steadily getting worse. Energy hunger compromises our ability to alleviate energy hunger. The degree of compromise is not linear and likely not smooth, and hence surprising to many. The symptoms of trouble are widespread, but clouded by cooked figures and nonobvious in their causality to naive observers. There is little incentive in highlight these causal links by those parts of the establishment that are aware and care (their own future is not in jeopardy, due to cushioning). > The notion of a poverty trap is real. I have some distant cousins who are It is difficult to explain people the poverty trap who have not experienced it personally pretty much for the same reason why the energy cliff is not obvious. > trapped in that now: they live way the hell out in a holler in West > Virginia, and have only a vague notion of what a computer does. I can't > even communicate with them: I have no intentions of writing on paper and > sending stuff with stamps on it. I did that with their grandparents, will > not do it now. That represents a group of people genetically similar to me, > who are in a poverty trap. They do not use the internet; they are on the > other side of a chasm which I cannot or will not span. > > > > We can imagine scenarios where humanity gets caught in a poverty trap, or a Don't look right now, but that giant sucking sound you hear... yes, it is what you think it is. > memetic trap similar to what grips much of the middle east today. The > collective dedication to Mormonism in those places traps both the believer > and unbeliever alike, slowing progress and causing retrogression. If we > don't get something sustainable long term off the ground, I can easily > envision most of humanity being far more concerned with their next meal than > advancing science. If you look at the failed and failing states, there you see much of humanity's future, or, rather, lack thereof. > > > Regarding oil shale, oil sands, fracking, sure we can do all that, but what > I am looking at is a long term solution in the event that the singularity > doesn't happen. These other things will work for our lifetimes perhaps, but Any progress is a function of available free energy. Historically, there have been no deviations. > what then? Also note that oil has made us comfortable and conservative. We > don't want to change things when they work so well. But China and India are > coming, and they read the internet too. They want to live like we do. > Imagine that. What happens to our oil reserves then? Our coal reserves? > > > > As an exercise Kelly, map out a future with optimistic models of current > energy resources, and anticipating the technological rise of China and The optimistic energy resource projections do not have a good track record, even looking back a decade. The apparent pessimists turned out realists, after all. > India. Where does it lead? Use top level estimates of greenhouse warming, > just using top level first order approximations, and include increased > radiation of heat with Boltzmann's law. Where does it go? What happens if > a billion Chinese people and another billion Indians want to drive SUVs? Ain't gonna happen. In fact, these SUVs you see are going to get a lot more rare. If you grew up with affordable air flight, well, you know the drill. So batten down the hatches. The storm is coming, and it's the Big One. > Then a billion more middle easterners get tired of being poor? Their real problem is that their future is going to get a lot crappier than their already sucky present. When you can't feed your family, people get desperate. Desperate people have nukes, too. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 12:32:35 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:32:35 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: <523062E3.9010705@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 01:02, spike ha scritto: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, spike > wrote: > There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late. >>Yes Spike, please do define too late. >>In Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, we have more fossil fuel BTUs than Saudi > Arabia, though it does exist in hard to mine and transform rock shale form? > Ja, all of these, but I was looking at the long term in the event that > there is some fundamental reason why a singularity is impossible. For > the record, I think a singularity is both possible and inevitable, but > there is value in mapping out a future in which it is not, or a future > in which the singularity takes longer than we thought, analogous in a > way to nuclear fusion power. We have coal and we have oil enough for > now and the next decade or two, but then what? We build nuclear power plants like hell; we should build them now but there is not enough pressure to do so. Chineses and Indians are doing so, Poles are doing so (and sell electricity to green Germans). Westerns have this phobia for everything nuclear (or everything where you need to dirty your hands). There are few exceptions. It will not last much longer, IMHO, because the comfort of the welfare state is going away a lot faster then people think. In my line of work, I can see how many psychotic patients. It is not strange to see them improve a lot of their psychotic symptoms when they have some serious physical problem (for example a broken leg or need some serious surgery). The sirens of Climate Change, green living and so on, will not be hear when the stomaches of the people will growl empty and they will tremble and shriver because of the cold during the winter. > The notion of a poverty trap is real. But the door is open > I have some distant cousins who > are trapped in that now: they live way the hell out in a holler in West > Virginia, and have only a vague notion of what a computer does. I can?t > even communicate with them: I have no intentions of writing on paper and > sending stuff with stamps on it. I did that with their grandparents, > will not do it now. That represents a group of people genetically > similar to me, who are in a poverty trap. They do not use the internet; > they are on the other side of a chasm which I cannot or will not span. There is no cellphone line there? No landline? No way to communicate without using a pony or a pigeon carrier? It happened before in some town in Italy (and other places of Europe). The town were depopulated as the younger generations escaped the trap to greener pastures. If they live there, maybe they are comfortable enough to stay there. If it happen like in Italy at the end of XIX century and the start of the XX, entire towns emigrated to the Americas (north and south) then Australia and other places of Europe, because there was not enough to eat and no future there. > We can imagine scenarios where humanity gets caught in a poverty trap, > or a memetic trap similar to what grips much of the middle east today. > The collective dedication to Mormonism in those places traps both the > believer and unbeliever alike, slowing progress and causing > retrogression. If we don?t get something sustainable long term off the > ground, I can easily envision most of humanity being far more concerned > with their next meal than advancing science. My reading of the problem is a lot different from yours. at the start of XX century mormonism there was on the wane, but it was supported by external forces (like the US) to keep oil available. And they supported the most backward regime available, placed in the most inhospitable place of all. No one ever conquered the place because, frankly, it is not worth the times and costs. As the revenues from oil will wane, the demographic explosion there will reverse itself. Already their women's fertility is falling like a rock and it is not very difficult to imagine their fertility will fall under replacement when oil will not be enough to subside their food, health care and retirements. Egypt is on a lifeline now and Saudi Arabia will be in the future. They are full of depreciating USD, food prices are skyrocketing (thank you Uncle helicopter Ben). Saudis are unable to produce anything, they have a 25% (at least) of their population formed by foreign laborers that will leave if they are not paid enough and have no love for Saudis. It is easy to stay retrograde and poor when someone is subsiding your lifestyle and prevent you from going from poor to starving. Then, when starving happen, people start to question everything and have little patience with everyone. It is then that revolutions happen and thing radically change forever. > Regarding oil shale, oil sands, fracking, sure we can do all that, but > what I am looking at is a long term solution in the event that the > singularity doesn?t happen. These other things will work for our > lifetimes perhaps, but what then? Also note that oil has made us > comfortable and conservative. Welfare made us comfortable and conservatives. > We don?t want to change things when they > work so well. But China and India are coming, and they read the > internet too. No poverty trap for them? Were they poor? So, maybe, it is not the poverty the problem but what keep you poor. > They want to live like we do. Imagine that. What > happens to our oil reserves then? Our coal reserves? Their prices go up and the US start to export more stuff and import less stuff. The US, also, will start to reduce wastes. Maybe the US also will start to build and make stuff to be exported. And the US people start to pay for what they consume instead of giving out a lot of green paper. > As an exercise Kelly, map out a future with optimistic models of current > energy resources, and anticipating the technological rise of China and > India. Where does it lead? Use top level estimates of greenhouse > warming, just using top level first order approximations, and include > increased radiation of heat with Boltzmann?s law. Where does it go? > What happens if a billion Chinese people and another billion Indians > want to drive SUVs? The US government give out food stamps like the Egyptian government subside breads and propane gas. What happen when the US government will run out of money (or the money they print will be worth nothing) to the people on food stamps? A lot will need to find a real job instead of surfing and chasing girls. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u775F1vKT8M There is so much waste in the system everywhere (in the US, in Europe, in Japan, and so on) that as they will be forced to put cut it, the economy will literally fly. > Then a billion more middle easterners get tired of being poor? They will start learning something useful and working for producing something useful to others so they can commerce. Mirco From pharos at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 14:07:32 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 15:07:32 +0100 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:07 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > No, we've already not having "enough" since roughly 2004. > What we have is a bumpy plateau (decline, in terms of net > energy) despite increasing effort, and according increase > of price. The pain point varies across the globe, but is > roughly in 100-115 USD/barrel (today's value) range. This is what > is causing demand destruction. Lack of fuel liquids causes > a shift to somewhat more available fuel solids, and increasingly > lower-grade fuel solids, accelerating advent of peak total > fossil, roughly 2020 (the exact time doesn't matter, as > it's a regime, not a point of inflection). > > We've been running in energy hunger mode. It is steadily > getting worse. Energy hunger compromises our ability to > alleviate energy hunger. The degree of compromise is not > linear and likely not smooth, and hence surprising to > many. > > The International Energy Outlook 2013 has recently been published by the U.S. Department of Energy. They forecast a fairly steady increase in worldwide energy consumption of oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear and renewables AND carbon dioxide emissions up to 2040. They have allowed for increased prices to cause a slowdown in the rate of increase of oil use and the increased prices also making harder to get resources viable. The full report is here: A review (criticism?) of the report is here: Quote from the review - If the experts at the U.S. Department of Energy are right, the startling ?new? fuels of 2040 will be oil, coal, and natural gas -- and we will find ourselves on a baking, painfully uncomfortable planet. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 14:42:14 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 15:42:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Space based solar power satellites Message-ID: Next Big Future has a report on Keith Henson's latest paper on SBS systems. One new idea is using Skylon type transport to get material into space using an air-breathing engine phase followed by GEO based propulsion lasers. Quote: Keith Henson has a new paper on Space based solar power satellites. It is called Rays of Hope: Propulsion lasers to get parts up, Microwaves to get energy down and the effect of large-scale deployment of power satellites on CO2. BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 15:23:07 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:23:07 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 5:38 AM, Andrew Mckee wrote: > I'm sure you're right, so far as we know. I just wonder if some really > advanced civilizations might discover a wrinkle or two that enables them to > develop technologies that to us, seem to violate our known scientific laws. > You can "maybe" yourself to death but it never gets you anywhere. Maybe ET is made of klogknee particles that Earth scientists know nothing about; and maybe it's a unknown law of physics that engineers made of those mysterious klogknee particles must be crappy at their job and that's why the universe doesn't look like it was engineered. Well maybe, but probably not. >> We know very little about Dark Matter but one thing we do know is that >> it doesn't interact with electromagnetic waves, that's why it's so hard to >> detect. >> > > > Not to gleefully jump from the frying pan into the fire... But I'd reply > that some would say Dark Matter and Dark Energy are really hard to detect > because they are just huge fictional fudge factors added to prop up a > seriously broken gravitational universe model For years people have tried to modify the law of gravitation so that it is consistent with what we see with our telescopes but it just doesn't work. If you observe the Bullet Cluster what you see is 2 clusters colliding and the regular matter that we can see staying in the center just as we'd expect regular matter to do and the Dark Matter (detected by gravitational lensing) remained spread out just as you'd expect Dark Matter to do. There is no way modifying gravity can explain that. And in addition, if you tinker with gravity so that galaxies like our own Milky Way hold together and behave as they should then galactic clusters like the Local group don't behave as we see them do. And if you tinker with gravity in another way so that galactic clusters behave as they do in our telescopes then individual galaxies don't. But if you invoke Dark Matter then everything comes out fine. As for Dark Energy, it's even more mysterious than Dark Matter. The best guess, and it's only a guess, of what it is does indeed involve a modification of Gravity. When you solve partial differential equations such as those in General Relativity you end up with a function and a constant term; Einstein first thought that the constant term, called the Cosmological Constant, was nonzero, but then he changed his mind and said it was zero and calling it nonzero was the greatest blunder of his life. Today many are starting to think that Einstein may have been right the first time around, among other things it can explain why the universe changed from deceleration to acceleration just 5 billion years ago, long after the Big Bang. Einstein was such a winner that his blunders are more interesting than most people's triumphs. And if you do the math you find that the amount of Dark Energy needed to accelerate the observed Normal Matter and it's five times more common brother Dark Matter by the amount we observe it to me accelerating, it turns out that the universe has precisely the amount of mass-energy needed to produce a flat universe; observations made just a few years ago showed that the universe is indeed flat, or at least isn't curved much, over a distance of 13.8 billion light years if the universe curves at all it is less than one part in 100,000. I think that's unlikely to be a coincidence John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 15:22:15 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:22:15 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130911071641.GH10405@leitl.org> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <522F7E4B.6090209@libero.it> <20130911071641.GH10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <52308AA7.6050502@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 09:16, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 10:17:15PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> Il 10/09/2013 16:14, spike ha scritto: >> >>> There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late. >> >> Too late for who? >> It rarely is too late for everyone. > > Empty words, as usual. In a highly connected complex > system prone to cascading failure there's no containment > of local degradation. For the moment, our near-term > future is determined by the decline function of total > net energy. Ecosystem carrying capacity decline is > the next determinant. Long-term, war. In war there is who is right and who is left, sometimes the definitions overlap. In the same way, an interconnected complex system can overcome failure if it have adaptive nodes able to adapt to the changing conditions. For example, years ago, in a discussion with the Gnutella Developers of applications like Bearshare, Limewire and Gnutella-GTK (and others) they stated the network was able, when it divided in two half without connections, to reconnect and reorganize. More nodes were there, faster the two half would reconnect without any external help. Freenet was studied and it was able to reorganize and continue to work even if the attacker was able to kill 90% of the nodes (and was able to choose the nodes to kill). The economy is the same type of network, with a lot of redundancy, a lot of adaptive ability and power. The only problem is the government take a toll so large they are killing it and preventing it from adapting. But, less the economy output, less the government power to block it. Predators go extinct more often than their prey. It is too late for people that is unable or prevented from adapting to the changing conditions, it is not too late for the others. Others are already adapting. Time will tell if they choose the right strategy to adapt. Mirco From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 15:25:34 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:25:34 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130911152534.GH10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 03:07:32PM +0100, BillK wrote: > The International Energy Outlook 2013 has recently been published by I recommend you research how official predictions have fared over reasonably short periods. Hint: save your printer's paper, or download volume. It's not worth it. > the U.S. Department of Energy. > They forecast a fairly steady increase in worldwide energy consumption > of oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear and They can forecast all that what they want, volume by 2040 will be down, and net energy will be way down. That's easy to predict, because it's our present. > renewables AND carbon dioxide Renewables will be way up, but incapable to fill the demand gap. Infrastructure transition will need even more energy, so you have to prioritize. There will be rationing. > emissions up to 2040. > > They have allowed for increased prices to cause a slowdown in the rate Such Sherlocks. Forecasting what's been going on for years. > of increase of oil use and the increased prices also making harder to > get resources viable. So despite demand destruction and dropping net energy due to EROEI and rising effort bancrupting companies they project the volume will be way up? Fed men speaking with forked tongue, from both sides of the mouth. > The full report is here: > > > A review (criticism?) of the report is here: > > > Quote from the review - > If the experts at the U.S. Department of Energy are right, the That's a very large if. > startling ?new? fuels of 2040 will be oil, coal, and natural gas -- > and we will find ourselves on a baking, painfully uncomfortable > planet. That's a given. But about half of all fuel will remain the ground, as it's not recoverable. So starvation slightly ahead of the heat stroke. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 15:28:04 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:28:04 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Space based solar power satellites In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130911152804.GI10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 03:42:14PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Next Big Future has a report on Keith Henson's latest paper on SBS > systems. One new idea is using Skylon type transport to get material > into space using an air-breathing engine phase followed by GEO based > propulsion lasers. > > > > Quote: > Keith Henson has a new paper on Space based solar power satellites. It > is called Rays of Hope: Propulsion lasers to get parts up, Microwaves > to get energy down and the effect of large-scale deployment of power > satellites on CO2. Spread the news. The more circulation it has, the more chances this has to get funded. From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 15:45:07 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:45:07 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> References: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 09/09/2013 08:46, BillK ha scritto: > > > Climate changes fluctuate from year to year. One year's figures must > > be seen as part of a long-term trend. > > But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? > > Long term on what time scale? > Long term since the 1970s, when reliable measures from satellites started. This is the trend for August: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2000/09/Figure31.png Alfio > Mirco > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 16:03:51 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:03:51 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 4:07 PM, BillK wrote: > > > The International Energy Outlook 2013 has recently been published by > the U.S. Department of Energy. > They forecast a fairly steady increase in worldwide energy consumption > of oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear and renewables AND carbon dioxide > emissions up to 2040. > > They have allowed for increased prices to cause a slowdown in the rate > of increase of oil use and the increased prices also making harder to > get resources viable. > > The full report is here: > > The EIA has an history of optimistic projections, followed by a reduction later. This graph from theoildrum, which uses EIA official data, is telling: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6556 Note how they predict each year a takeoff in oil production, which regularly fails to materialize and they have to shift their curve into the future. I don't have data after 2010, it would be interesting to see if it went the same Alfio > > > BillK > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 16:06:33 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:06:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > The North Dakota story is illustrative of what I think will happen in the > future with other sources of energy. > 1) It wasn't tapped until improvements in technology (methods of fracking) > made it economical. > Shouldn't that be "until the price of oil rose enough to make it economical" ? The main change in today's world is that oil is 5x-10x more expensive than before. Alfio > > > -Kelly > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 16:12:21 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:12:21 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130911161221.GL10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 06:03:51PM +0200, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > The EIA has an history of optimistic projections, followed by a reduction > later. This graph from theoildrum, which uses EIA official data, is telling: > > http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6556 Thanks for caring enough to pull up that graph. To anyone who's interested in such data and more, TOD will be soon in archival mode, but the articles will remain accessible. There will be a list of successor site listed, if not already available in the blogroll. > Note how they predict each year a takeoff in oil production, which > regularly fails to materialize and they have to shift their curve into the > future. I don't have data after 2010, it would be interesting to see if it > went the same -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 16:15:50 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:15:50 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130911161550.GM10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 06:06:33PM +0200, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > > > > > The North Dakota story is illustrative of what I think will happen in the > > future with other sources of energy. > > 1) It wasn't tapped until improvements in technology (methods of fracking) > > made it economical. > > > > Shouldn't that be "until the price of oil rose enough to make it > economical" ? The main change in today's world is that oil is 5x-10x more > expensive than before. Did someone just say 'Bakken'? http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9748 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9954 http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10102 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 16:43:56 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 10:43:56 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 6:26 AM, spike wrote: > To me, global warming is too much like worrying about a rising fever while > the house is on fire. > I've never heard it said better Spike. I would have to note that the cure for the rising fever as prescribed by the local alternative holistic healer will cost more than ten houses. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 17:01:37 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 19:01:37 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 10:43:56AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 6:26 AM, spike wrote: > > > To me, global warming is too much like worrying about a rising fever while > > the house is on fire. > > > > I've never heard it said better Spike. I would have to note that the cure > for the rising fever as prescribed by the local alternative holistic healer > will cost more than ten houses. You're still not getting it. There is no cure. Desperate people will burn everything they can. The falling EROEI *accelerates* the use of tight resources, because the net energy is falling per unit of effort, so you have to increase the effort, as long as the financials and thermodynamics allow it. Only then you stop. (Unless population drops very suddenly, which is an even worse outcome). The course of global warming is graven in stone. Not a damn thing can be done about it at this point, especially now that we have multiple feedback mechanisms kicking in. People should not spend synapseseconds on preventing the CO2 release, but how to mitigate the impact of increased CO2, which is not just about climate. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 17:23:58 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:23:58 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 10:43:56AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 6:26 AM, spike wrote: > > > > > To me, global warming is too much like worrying about a rising fever > while > > > the house is on fire. > > > > > > > I've never heard it said better Spike. I would have to note that the cure > > for the rising fever as prescribed by the local alternative holistic > healer > > will cost more than ten houses. > > You're still not getting it. I thought you were taking a break. > There is no cure. That's why I said "local alternative holistic healer". > Desperate people > will burn everything they can. Obviously. I've seen deforested Haiti from the air. > The falling EROEI *accelerates* > the use of tight resources, because the net energy is falling > per unit of effort, so you have to increase the effort, as > long as the financials and thermodynamics allow it. Only > then you stop. (Unless population drops very suddenly, > which is an even worse outcome). > I'm not interested in doom and gloom. I'm interested in solutions. Your solution matrix seems to rule out most of the most practical energy sources. I'm for solar, but it only has limited practical applications at present. > The course of global warming is graven in stone. Not a damn > thing can be done about it at this point, especially now that > we have multiple feedback mechanisms kicking in. > Then let's please stop talking about it. > People should not spend synapseseconds on preventing the > CO2 release, but how to mitigate the impact of increased > CO2, which is not just about climate. > I like building buildings out of CO2. Stuff like this: http://bit.ly/15SAPjg Seems like a reasonably good idea in principle, even if this particular solution has problems to be worked out. Concrete is a large contributor to atmospheric CO2, I'm sure you knew that. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 17:48:16 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:48:16 -0600 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 5:02 PM, spike wrote: > > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [ > mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] > *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > *Sent:* Tuesday, September 10, 2013 3:00 PM > *To:* ExI chat list > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good**** > > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, spike wrote: > > ** > > There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late.* > *** > > ** ** > > >Yes Spike, please do define too late.**** > > ** ** > > >In Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, we have more fossil fuel BTUs than Saudi > Arabia, though it does exist in hard to mine and transform rock shale form > ?**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > Ja, all of these, but I was looking at the long term in the event that > there is some fundamental reason why a singularity is impossible. For the > record, I think a singularity is both possible and inevitable, but there is > value in mapping out a future in which it is not, or a future in which the > singularity takes longer than we thought, analogous in a way to nuclear > fusion power. We have coal and we have oil enough for now and the next > decade or two, but then what? > We have sufficient coal in the US for the next 400 years. I realized I neglected to add that to the list. Now, if we needed to start using coal gasification, it would probably reduce that number (and greatly increase CO2 emissions). If we got electric cars working, which seems like a good bet now that they are beginning to make significant battery breakthroughs finally, then the number goes back up. > **** > > The notion of a poverty trap is real. I have some distant cousins who are > trapped in that now: they live way the hell out in a holler in West > Virginia, and have only a vague notion of what a computer does. I can?t > even communicate with them: I have no intentions of writing on paper and > sending stuff with stamps on it. I did that with their grandparents, will > not do it now. That represents a group of people genetically similar to > me, who are in a poverty trap. They do not use the internet; they are on > the other side of a chasm which I cannot or will not span. > Some days I feel like I'm in a similar poverty trap created by the government's mistreatment of me... but I'm not going to let them win. > We can imagine scenarios where humanity gets caught in a poverty trap, or > a memetic trap similar to what grips much of the middle east today. The > collective dedication to Mormonism in those places traps both the believer > and unbeliever alike, slowing progress and causing retrogression. If we > don?t get something sustainable long term off the ground, I can easily > envision most of humanity being far more concerned with their next meal > than advancing science. > I don't know that we've ever had a future that looked long term sustainable, but science gives me hope that we'll figure it out. The Easter Island folks didn't have science, but then again, they didn't have Mormonism to deal with either. > Regarding oil shale, oil sands, fracking, sure we can do all that, but > what I am looking at is a long term solution in the event that the > singularity doesn?t happen. > If the Singularity doesn't happen before we run out of the resources we already know about, I'll be taking a dirt nap before it's a problem. Is that self centered? Perhaps. But every generation has its own stuff to deal with, which includes the garbage the last generation left for them. Cold war anyone? Jimmy Carter/Iran anyone? > These other things will work for our lifetimes perhaps, but what then? > Well, then hopefully science will have moved forward. That's a long time to get laser based launch capabilities working, for example. > Also note that oil has made us comfortable and conservative. We don?t > want to change things when they work so well. But China and India are > coming, and they read the internet too. They want to live like we do. > Imagine that. What happens to our oil reserves then? Our coal reserves? > They may go away faster. But China has a command economy, and most of the people who hate our lovely capitalist system should take hope that China may come up with good answers. I think capitalism is more likely to come up with the best answer myself, but it's good to have your bets covered. > As an exercise Kelly, map out a future with optimistic models of current > energy resources, and anticipating the technological rise of China and > India. Where does it lead? Use top level estimates of greenhouse warming, > just using top level first order approximations, and include increased > radiation of heat with Boltzmann?s law. Where does it go? What happens if > a billion Chinese people and another billion Indians want to drive SUVs? > Then a billion more middle easterners get tired of being poor? > Look, I get where you're going. But I'm a trends guy. I like Kurzweil and I like Hans Rosling even more. Both of them are optimistic, and I tend to be as well. Now, I'm not pollyanna optimistic. Yes it could take some time. Yes, a lot of people could die. Yes, there could be resource wars. But China will claim the moon in the mid 2020s, and there's a lot of room for communists up there. ;-) -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 17:53:14 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 11:53:14 -0600 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130911091847.GR10405@leitl.org> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <20130911091847.GR10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 04:00:07PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > Yes, I understand EROI and all that jargon. I don't need another lecture > > No, you don't. Because you haven't looked at the data, and the > data are telling you that what you think is true isn't. > I've wasted a lot of time chasing down stuff on the oil drum that you've sent me after. So don't tell me I haven't spent time with your data. Just because I interpret the overall data differently than you do doesn't mean I'm wrong or ignorant. I would point out that Amory Lovins disagrees with you, and he is smarter and more educated about energy than both of us morons put together times ten. http://bit.ly/1aqTXZZ Eat that digital archeologists. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 18:00:38 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 20:00:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> Message-ID: <5230AFC6.8090502@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 18:06, Alfio Puglisi ha scritto: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Kelly Anderson > wrote: > > > > The North Dakota story is illustrative of what I think will happen > in the future with other sources of energy. > 1) It wasn't tapped until improvements in technology (methods of > fracking) made it economical. > > > Shouldn't that be "until the price of oil rose enough to make it > economical" ? The main change in today's world is that oil is 5x-10x > more expensive than before. Not in term of gold. http://www.macrotrends.net/1380/gold-to-oil-ratio-historical-chart But I suppose you are talking about prices set in toilet paper with (usually dead) politicians printed on. Mirco From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 18:02:01 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:02:01 -0600 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 6:07 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 04:02:01PM -0700, spike wrote: > > Don't look right now, but that giant sucking sound you hear... yes, it > is what you think it is. > Yes, it's the sound of me being dragged into this discussion AGAIN. > Any progress is a function of available free energy. Historically, > there have been no deviations. > Free energy? There never has been any energy source that was free. You have to go out into the forest and chop down a tree. > The optimistic energy resource projections do not have a good track > record, even looking back a decade. The apparent pessimists turned > out realists, after all. > That may be the case, but we're still doing OK. There won't be any real changes until people experience the REAL cost of gasoline AT THE PUMP. Getting rid of oil subsidies and paying the full cost at the pump is the only realistic solution. It would get the capitalistic system engaged, whereas now the capitalistic system is being undercut by meddling in Washington to get votes and power. Pay for Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria with a gasoline tax, and then see how fast alternatives are developed. It's more a matter of economics and government stupidity than EROI. > Ain't gonna happen. In fact, these SUVs you see are going to get a lot > more rare. If you grew up with affordable air flight, well, you know > the drill. So batten down the hatches. The storm is coming, and it's > the Big One. > The leading winds of the coming storm will be felt (if it is coming) as higher prices. Once we experience those, people will start building shelters. Will the shelters hold everyone? They rarely do. But there will be survivors of the storm. There always have been. > > Then a billion more middle easterners get tired of being poor? > > Their real problem is that their future is going to get a lot crappier > than their already sucky present. When you can't feed your family, > people get desperate. Desperate people have nukes, too. > You aren't desperate when you hope for the return of the madi. They'll be on their prayer rugs at the beach when the tsunami comes in, and I say good riddance to that memeplex. Now you've gotten me all wound up again... just as I was getting complacent in my day. Grumph! -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 18:08:08 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 20:08:08 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> Message-ID: <5230B188.4050003@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 18:06, Alfio Puglisi ha scritto: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Kelly Anderson > wrote: > > > > The North Dakota story is illustrative of what I think will happen > in the future with other sources of energy. > 1) It wasn't tapped until improvements in technology (methods of > fracking) made it economical. > > > Shouldn't that be "until the price of oil rose enough to make it > economical" ? The main change in today's world is that oil is 5x-10x > more expensive than before. The main change in today's world is the fact the government have printed 5-10 times the paper money (and credits) they had before. In this way they have redistributed an HUGE part of wealth from common people (usually middle class) to themselves and their allies and cronies. Then we have a lot of chatting about how things are worser now than then and how fuel is too costly, it will not last enough, and so on. Wake up!!! There is a hole in you tank and the government is siphoning you wealth away. Before you worry about peak oil or others long term problems, try to stop the government from steal you blind and without shoes. Then you can worry about the winter coming. Mirco From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 18:09:29 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 20:09:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <5230AFC6.8090502@libero.it> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <5230AFC6.8090502@libero.it> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 8:00 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 11/09/2013 18:06, Alfio Puglisi ha scritto: > > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Kelly Anderson > > wrote: > > > > > > > > The North Dakota story is illustrative of what I think will happen > > in the future with other sources of energy. > > 1) It wasn't tapped until improvements in technology (methods of > > fracking) made it economical. > > > > > > Shouldn't that be "until the price of oil rose enough to make it > > economical" ? The main change in today's world is that oil is 5x-10x > > more expensive than before. > > Not in term of gold. > > http://www.macrotrends.net/1380/gold-to-oil-ratio-historical-chart > > But I suppose you are talking about prices set in toilet paper with > (usually dead) politicians printed on. > > Mirco No, it's in terms of the average worker's salary. Or maybe you are paid in fixed-weight gold for your work? Alfio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 18:17:03 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 20:17:03 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Forced Exposure: Groklaw closes down In-Reply-To: References: <20130821124557.GJ29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5230B39F.8090704@libero.it> Il 21/08/2013 17:44, Adrian Tymes ha scritto: > On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 5:45 AM, Eugen Leitl > wrote: > My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's > possible. > Some part of my mind can't help but wonder if this isn't the true > objective of all this surveillance, or at least a significant part thereof. There is the example of Silk Road: Groklaw could be reborn inside the Tor network, without links to "real people". Or inside Freenet. And they could receive support using Bitcoin. Law enforcers are not able to shut down SR (and competitors) after years. I suppose they will have problems to shut down a lot of more websites if they move inside the darknet. Essentially, more people they drive inside the darknet, more difficult become tracing them, because traffic increase. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 18:53:20 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 20:53:20 +0200 Subject: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <5230AFC6.8090502@libero.it> Message-ID: <5230BC20.3060305@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 20:09, Alfio Puglisi ha scritto: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 8:00 PM, Mirco Romanato > wrote: > Not in term of gold. > > http://www.macrotrends.net/1380/gold-to-oil-ratio-historical-chart > > But I suppose you are talking about prices set in toilet paper with > (usually dead) politicians printed on. > No, it's in terms of the average worker's salary. Or maybe you are paid > in fixed-weight gold for your work? These measures are not trivial. If you measure the change of prices during the time, you suppose the quantity of the currency is the same, because the quantity of currency in circulation have a direct effect on the value of the currency unit. If the quantity of currency and credit change, you must have a way to compensate for this or you comparisons are bogus. Gold is useful because it is never consumed, just exchange, and its total supply increase very slowly (1%/year or so). So, it is a pretty stable unit of measure (even if it is a very manipulated market). Mirco From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 11 19:37:00 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 21:37:00 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 11:23:58AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > You're still not getting it. > > I thought you were taking a break. Hey, beats virtualizing braindead hosts. > > The falling EROEI *accelerates* > > the use of tight resources, because the net energy is falling > > per unit of effort, so you have to increase the effort, as > > long as the financials and thermodynamics allow it. Only > > then you stop. (Unless population drops very suddenly, > > which is an even worse outcome). > > > > I'm not interested in doom and gloom. I'm interested in solutions. Your I'm very interested in solutions. But they start with people accepting that there is a problem. Even on this list, the ostrichs are in the vast majority. Out there, the situation is a lot worse. Most of the 7 billion have no clue at all. Solutions are useless if people are not ready to accept them as such. We're not nearly there yet, here. > solution matrix seems to rule out most of the most practical energy > sources. I'm for solar, but it only has limited practical applications at > present. I disagree very much. For most people on this list PV is is a very affordable way to shave off the bulk of your electricity bill, or to allow you to live off-grid, which vastly enhances your exit options. Bootstrap is a process that profits from economies of scale. Why is solar so expensive in the sunny US versus the low-flux Germany? Because it takes a decade to build the market. Don't waste another decade. You can't afford the price. > > The course of global warming is graven in stone. Not a damn > > thing can be done about it at this point, especially now that > > we have multiple feedback mechanisms kicking in. > > > > Then let's please stop talking about it. I certainly haven't started with it. I had to react to a yet another red herring, that the CO2 emission problem is solvable. No, it isn't. Not anymore. You made this pie, it tastes terrible, but you have no eat it all up now. No other options. We done screwed up, we pays the price. > > People should not spend synapseseconds on preventing the > > CO2 release, but how to mitigate the impact of increased > > CO2, which is not just about climate. > > > > I like building buildings out of CO2. Stuff like this: > http://bit.ly/15SAPjg > Seems like a reasonably good idea in principle, even if this particular > solution has problems to be worked out. Concrete is a large contributor to > atmospheric CO2, I'm sure you knew that. I would be looking into geopolymers, and in just low-embedded-energy structures in general. You have to crunch the numbers whether a steel frame house with glass foam/carbon insulation is going to ROI over a cob construction, or some advanced low-tech things I've seen on a certain subreddit. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 21:26:08 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:26:08 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130911111536.GX10405@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> <20130911111536.GX10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 7:15 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > If you sample spatial variation in a mature postecosystem from > a given point of origin versus one with a different point of > origin. The variability should not differ. Mature systems > lose founder effect information over time. The only information > about the point of origin might exist in personal memories > of very long-lived species. ### Absolutely. Which is why I am really excited about us being possibly extremely close to a point-of-origin, a trivial spatiotemporal distance bridgeable with cryonics and a stable currency. Today I saw a former girlfriend, the woman I loved passionately some decades ago. The sunlight of her smile warmed my cold heart a bit. She thought she would not choose suspension even if she could afford it. It saddened me, yet, with a bit of luck, an echo of her being could be remembered for a long time. Poetic, no? ---------- > I'm arguing that due to radiation the bulk of the postecosystem > will be nonsentient, despite of founders having been. There is > e.g. a strong selection pressure for pioneer organisms to lose > sentience. As such they have behaviour, but no ethics to > constrain it. ### Yes. Are you familiar with any books by Karl Schroeder? He describes many variations of this scenario, set in various post-expansion locales. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 21:39:11 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:39:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: But China > will claim the moon in the mid 2020s, and there's a lot of room for > communists up there. ;-) ### No, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress! :) And just like you, I don't believe in the doom of mankind, definitely not from lack of energy. The only real danger for Human 1.0 is Human 2.0, and this does not fill me with dread. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 21:54:25 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:54:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > You're still not getting it. There is no cure. ### Coal. Oil. Gas. Photovoltaic. Wind. Thorium. Uranium. Other weird not yet invented shit. All are cures, lasting for between 50 and 500,000,000 years at current usage levels. Isn't this, like, an open-and-shut case? --------------------- > > The course of global warming is graven in stone. Not a damn > thing can be done about it at this point, especially now that > we have multiple feedback mechanisms kicking in. ### Seriously, you believe in this story? Global warming? Even the eco-nuts don't say "global warming" anymore, now it's "climate change". The first half of this century will be remembered as the Great Greening, not due to ecofreaks overrunning the planet but due to improved plant growth from carbon dioxide fertilization. Rafal From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 21:55:10 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:55:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% Message-ID: From: Eugen Leitl snip > The course of global warming is graven in stone. Not a damn thing can be done about it at this point, especially now that we have multiple feedback mechanisms kicking in. That's probably correct, but perhaps not certain. It looks like a really aggressive power satellite project could keep the CO2 short of the 450 ppm level. As a side effect of that effort, we might be able to put sunshades in L1. Of course we still have to worry about the friendly AIs eating our brains. (Assuming they have not done it already and we are simulations.) Keith From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 22:15:09 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 00:15:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> Message-ID: <5230EB6D.9000504@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 13:15, BillK ha scritto: > On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 12:26 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? >> Long term on what time scale? >> >> > > Just published on the BBC - > > Esa's Cryosat mission observes continuing Arctic winter ice decline > Are you kidding me? Quoting the BBC is like quoting Goebbel's radio programs about Jews. TwentyEightGate tell you nothing? http://omnologos.com/twentyeightgate-the-story-so-far/ They are all in in support of Climate Change. > The volume of sea ice in the Arctic hit a new low this past winter, > according to observations from the European Space Agency's (Esa) > Cryosat mission. > In its three years of full operations, Cryosat has witnessed a > continuing shrinkage of winter ice volume. Three years over what? 3 hundred? Pleeese! > It underlines, say scientists, the long-term decline of the floes. It underline the decline of scientific standard in favor of political grants. Many scientists know the side their bread slice is buttered. Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 22:22:46 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 00:22:46 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> Message-ID: <5230ED36.5070009@libero.it> Il 09/09/2013 14:26, spike ha scritto: > To me, global warming is too much like worrying about a rising fever while > the house is on fire. Mainly because the heat you feel is not fever at all, it is the effect of being in a burning house too much near the fire. As you put the fire out, the "fever" will disappear (it could be return later as an after effect of the burnings, but not because you got the flu or the plague). Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Sep 11 22:54:38 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 00:54:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> Message-ID: <5230F4AE.5090900@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 17:45, Alfio Puglisi ha scritto: > > On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 1:26 PM, Mirco Romanato > wrote: > > Il 09/09/2013 08:46, BillK ha scritto: > > > Climate changes fluctuate from year to year. One year's figures must > > be seen as part of a long-term trend. > > But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? > > Long term on what time scale? > > > Long term since the 1970s, when reliable measures from satellites > started. This is the trend for August: > > http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2000/09/Figure31.png I remember in the '70s when people told me about the forthcoming Glaciation. The climate was a lot warmer during the Roman empire and after 1.000, when people grow grapes to make wine in England (and now it is too cold to do so). Call me when the Queen and the Prince of Wales start producing wine from their lands. Mirco From spike66 at att.net Wed Sep 11 22:54:50 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 15:54:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <04f801ceaf41$ec57b8b0$c5072a10$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki ### Seriously, you believe in this story? Global warming? Even the eco-nuts don't say "global warming" anymore, now it's "climate change"...Rafal _______________________________________________ For the record, the first Atlantic hurricane of the season started today, Humberto. 2013 ties the record in the satellite age (since 1960) for the lastest first hurricane of the season. I think we just missed it, with 2013 coming in second place behind 2002 for the latest first hurricane of the season, but I don't know that for sure. In 2002, the first hurricane also came on 11 September, but I think it started later in the day than Humberto, which started early in the day. We might still be in the running for the record for the latest second hurricane of the season, since Gabrielle is weakening and is looking less likely to develop into a hurricane. Of course it could be argued that fewer and later hurricanes are a climate change. Floridians will get that, because we always depended on Atlantic hurricanes to bring in a lot of rain and replenish the ground water supplies. There are no mountains in Florida, so all the water comes from the ground. If there is no hurricanes, usually there is a drought. So in most of Florida, mild hurricanes are a good thing. One of the factors keeping humanity stuck to the ground is our news agencies make more money on bad news than good news. They can find some loser in any scenario, including climate staying the same. Those who live in a lousy climate place lose out in any global climate stays the same scenario. spike From lloydmillerus at yahoo.com Thu Sep 12 00:28:14 2013 From: lloydmillerus at yahoo.com (Lloyd Miller) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 20:28:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <04f801ceaf41$ec57b8b0$c5072a10$@att.net> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <04f801ceaf41$ec57b8b0$c5072a10$@att.net> Message-ID: <001501ceaf4f$07842120$168c6360$@yahoo.com> ### Seriously, you believe in this story? Global warming? Even the eco-nuts don't say "global warming" anymore, now it's "climate change"...Rafal Call it what it is genocidal environmentalist propaganda. From naturalborncyborg at gmail.com Wed Sep 11 00:18:06 2013 From: naturalborncyborg at gmail.com (Bill Burris) Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 18:18:06 -0600 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: China has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 32 under construction, and many more planed for the near future. I am investing in uranium and thorium mining companies. http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/why-a-uranium-renaissance-looks-inevitable http://energy-myths.caseyresearch.com/ Bill On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 5:02 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [ > mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] > *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > *Sent:* Tuesday, September 10, 2013 3:00 PM > *To:* ExI chat list > > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] How Electricity Became a Luxury Good**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, spike wrote:**** > > There is a good possibility we will not start on it until it is too late.* > *** > > ** ** > > >Yes Spike, please do define too late.**** > > ** ** > > >In Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, we have more fossil fuel BTUs than Saudi > Arabia, though it does exist in hard to mine and transform rock shale form > ?**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > Ja, all of these, but I was looking at the long term in the event that > there is some fundamental reason why a singularity is impossible. For the > record, I think a singularity is both possible and inevitable, but there is > value in mapping out a future in which it is not, or a future in which the > singularity takes longer than we thought, analogous in a way to nuclear > fusion power. We have coal and we have oil enough for now and the next > decade or two, but then what?**** > > ** ** > > The notion of a poverty trap is real. I have some distant cousins who are > trapped in that now: they live way the hell out in a holler in West > Virginia, and have only a vague notion of what a computer does. I can?t > even communicate with them: I have no intentions of writing on paper and > sending stuff with stamps on it. I did that with their grandparents, will > not do it now. That represents a group of people genetically similar to > me, who are in a poverty trap. They do not use the internet; they are on > the other side of a chasm which I cannot or will not span.**** > > ** ** > > We can imagine scenarios where humanity gets caught in a poverty trap, or > a memetic trap similar to what grips much of the middle east today. The > collective dedication to Mormonism in those places traps both the believer > and unbeliever alike, slowing progress and causing retrogression. If we > don?t get something sustainable long term off the ground, I can easily > envision most of humanity being far more concerned with their next meal > than advancing science.**** > > ** ** > > Regarding oil shale, oil sands, fracking, sure we can do all that, but > what I am looking at is a long term solution in the event that the > singularity doesn?t happen. These other things will work for our lifetimes > perhaps, but what then? Also note that oil has made us comfortable and > conservative. We don?t want to change things when they work so well. But > China and India are coming, and they read the internet too. They want to > live like we do. Imagine that. What happens to our oil reserves then? > Our coal reserves?**** > > ** ** > > As an exercise Kelly, map out a future with optimistic models of current > energy resources, and anticipating the technological rise of China and > India. Where does it lead? Use top level estimates of greenhouse warming, > just using top level first order approximations, and include increased > radiation of heat with Boltzmann?s law. Where does it go? What happens if > a billion Chinese people and another billion Indians want to drive SUVs? > Then a billion more middle easterners get tired of being poor?**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > ** ** > > **** > > ** ** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From matters21stcentury at yahoo.com Thu Sep 12 00:33:34 2013 From: matters21stcentury at yahoo.com (TwentFirstCentury Matters) Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:33:34 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> <20130911111536.GX10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <1378946014.35605.YahooMailNeo@web163404.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Am being extreme in rejecting conceivable quasi-anthropic ETs, but want to think on the possibilities. If you've read the following?sort of speculation too often, an apology is due to you in advance: ? Symmetry wouldn't necessarily be present. Perhaps locomotion wouldn't be with our familiar modes of locomotion but rather with gas thrust and say flagellan motion. ETs might be unappetising (merely to touch on this) to us, they?could perhaps internally recycle their own wastes; ETs?may be hideous albeit intelligent. Plus, wonder if a type of ET could be colonial rather than individual?some may?imagine (an intelligent version of Portuguese Man o' War comes to mind immediately). ? The majority of those I talk to on this?appear to?think-- if they think about it-- that if they were to land on a planet somewhere v. distant, they'd meet Jean Luc Picard or Luke Skywalker.. such is what I react to. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Sep 12 09:57:09 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 11:57:09 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: <52318FF5.9000301@libero.it> Il 11/09/2013 02:18, Bill Burris ha scritto: > China has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 32 under construction, > and many more planed for the near future. > > I am investing in uranium and thorium mining companies. > > http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/why-a-uranium-renaissance-looks-inevitable > http://energy-myths.caseyresearch.com/ Not a lot of patience, in China, with NO-TAV types. If you do not know what NO-TAV is, is a political lobby protesting against the building of a High speed train track in Italy (connecting France). The protests have reverted to act of terrorism like threats to people (workers, hotel owners, etc.), sabotages of machinery and clash often with the police there to protect the building site. Many businesses, now, are giving up. And obviously, the judiciary so eager to work overtime to try Berlusconi have no time or will to expedite the trials of the people arrested (and released immediately after). In fact, many, IMHO, will never be judged anyway before the statutes of limitations kick in, evidences be damned. This is the reason Berlusconi will be relevant even if they put him in jail (or home arrest). My bet is many of these business will end in the hand of organized crime and, after, not a threat will be done against them. Not ones without repercussions for the threatening party, anyway. Mirco P.S. Sorry for the rant. From andymck35 at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 10:39:12 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 22:39:12 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Sep 2013 03:23:07 +1200, John Clark wrote: > You can "maybe" yourself to death but it never gets you anywhere. Maybe > ET Well, correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't one of the principles of the scientific method is that no matter how cherished any given law may be, we should always maintain a tiny sliver of doubt that it is absolutely perfectly true now and for all time? So maybe, the body of knowledge we humans have teased into hard won existence is all really good, accurate and decidedly useful, but just maybe its a little to soon to be popping the champagne corks and declaring everything we know is all their is to know and should now be elevated to the status of gospel truth. So maybe asking "maybe" is sometimes a very good thing to do, isn't that after all how science advanced our body of knowledge from some decidedly incorrect beliefs? Or do I have to invoke the the scientific consensus of the day regarding the impossibility of heavier than air flight, shortly before the Wright brothers built an airplane and flew it around the sky. > For years people have tried to modify the law of gravitation so that it > is > consistent with what we see with our telescopes but it just doesn't work. > If you observe the Bullet Cluster what you see is 2 clusters colliding > and > the regular matter that we can see staying in the center just as we'd > expect regular matter to do and the Dark Matter (detected by > gravitational > lensing) remained spread out just as you'd expect Dark Matter to do. > There > is no way modifying gravity can explain that. > > And in addition, if you tinker with gravity so that galaxies like our own > Milky Way hold together and behave as they should then galactic clusters > like the Local group don't behave as we see them do. And if you tinker > with > gravity in another way so that galactic clusters behave as they do in our > telescopes then individual galaxies don't. But if you invoke Dark Matter > then everything comes out fine. Yes and I see a post not long back that a couple of detection experiments might have just detected some evidence for dark matter, this of course might well be negated by another more sensitive detector that spotted precisely nothing. So maybe the newer even more sensitive detectors and experiments might soon make that breakthrough discovery that finally gives some much needed physical evidence to the whole concept. In the meantime however, putting tongue in cheek and poking fun at dark matter is fair game I think. So those of us so inclined should do so now, very soon we might well be losing the privilege. > term; Einstein first thought that the constant term, called the > Cosmological Constant, was nonzero, but then he changed his mind and > said > it was zero and calling it nonzero was the greatest blunder of his life. > Today many are starting to think that Einstein may have been right the > first time around, among other things it can explain why the universe > changed from deceleration to acceleration just 5 billion years ago, long > after the Big Bang. Einstein was such a winner that his blunders are more > interesting than most people's triumphs. Thanks for the recap, and that's kinda sorta the point I was originally trying to make. If a towering genius like Einstein can make a slight 'blunder' and be humble enough to admit it, can we be so certain that every other law that has been invented is perfectly true and correct now and for all time?. I choose to maintain a tiny sliver of doubt that this is absolutely certainly true. And of course simultaneously hold the realization that I might very well be wrong. :-) From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 12 10:42:06 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> <20130911111536.GX10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130912104206.GG10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 05:26:08PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### Absolutely. Which is why I am really excited about us being > possibly extremely close to a point-of-origin, a trivial > spatiotemporal distance bridgeable with cryonics and a stable > currency. Yes, if we don't drop the ball some of us alive today might became one of those who remember how life was pre-exodus. > Today I saw a former girlfriend, the woman I loved passionately some > decades ago. The sunlight of her smile warmed my cold heart a bit. She > thought she would not choose suspension even if she could afford it. > It saddened me, yet, with a bit of luck, an echo of her being could be > remembered for a long time. Poetic, no? Far too many people reject cryopreservation almost reflexively. E.g. my wife has absolutely no interest whatsoever. > > I'm arguing that due to radiation the bulk of the postecosystem > > will be nonsentient, despite of founders having been. There is > > e.g. a strong selection pressure for pioneer organisms to lose > > sentience. As such they have behaviour, but no ethics to > > constrain it. > > ### Yes. Are you familiar with any books by Karl Schroeder? He > describes many variations of this scenario, set in various > post-expansion locales. I wasn't aware. I've only read Ventus. Do you have specific recommendations? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 10:58:32 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:58:32 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: > Well, correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't one of the principles of the scientific method is that no matter how cherished any given law may be, we should always maintain a tiny sliver of doubt that it is absolutely perfectly true now and for all time? Sure. However much, much greater doubts is required when your line of thinking comes in. On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Mckee wrote: > On Thu, 12 Sep 2013 03:23:07 +1200, John Clark > wrote: > > > You can "maybe" yourself to death but it never gets you anywhere. Maybe ET >> > > Well, correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't one of the principles of the > scientific method is that no matter how cherished any given law may be, we > should always maintain a tiny sliver of doubt that it is absolutely > perfectly true now and for all time? > > So maybe, the body of knowledge we humans have teased into hard won > existence is all really good, accurate and decidedly useful, but just maybe > its a little to soon to be popping the champagne corks and declaring > everything we know is all their is to know and should now be elevated to > the status of gospel truth. > > So maybe asking "maybe" is sometimes a very good thing to do, isn't that > after all how science advanced our body of knowledge from some decidedly > incorrect beliefs? > > Or do I have to invoke the the scientific consensus of the day regarding > the impossibility of heavier than air flight, shortly before the Wright > brothers built an airplane and flew it around the sky. > > > > For years people have tried to modify the law of gravitation so that it is >> consistent with what we see with our telescopes but it just doesn't work. >> If you observe the Bullet Cluster what you see is 2 clusters colliding and >> the regular matter that we can see staying in the center just as we'd >> expect regular matter to do and the Dark Matter (detected by gravitational >> lensing) remained spread out just as you'd expect Dark Matter to do. There >> is no way modifying gravity can explain that. >> >> And in addition, if you tinker with gravity so that galaxies like our own >> Milky Way hold together and behave as they should then galactic clusters >> like the Local group don't behave as we see them do. And if you tinker >> with >> gravity in another way so that galactic clusters behave as they do in our >> telescopes then individual galaxies don't. But if you invoke Dark Matter >> then everything comes out fine. >> > > Yes and I see a post not long back that a couple of detection experiments > might have just detected some evidence for dark matter, this of course > might well be negated by another more sensitive detector that spotted > precisely nothing. > > So maybe the newer even more sensitive detectors and experiments might > soon make that breakthrough discovery that finally gives some much needed > physical evidence to the whole concept. > > In the meantime however, putting tongue in cheek and poking fun at dark > matter is fair game I think. > So those of us so inclined should do so now, very soon we might well be > losing the privilege. > > > term; Einstein first thought that the constant term, called the >> Cosmological Constant, was nonzero, but then he changed his mind and said >> it was zero and calling it nonzero was the greatest blunder of his life. >> Today many are starting to think that Einstein may have been right the >> first time around, among other things it can explain why the universe >> changed from deceleration to acceleration just 5 billion years ago, long >> after the Big Bang. Einstein was such a winner that his blunders are more >> interesting than most people's triumphs. >> > > Thanks for the recap, and that's kinda sorta the point I was originally > trying to make. > If a towering genius like Einstein can make a slight 'blunder' and be > humble enough to admit it, can we be so certain that every other law that > has been invented is perfectly true and correct now and for all time?. > > I choose to maintain a tiny sliver of doubt that this is absolutely > certainly true. > And of course simultaneously hold the realization that I might very well > be wrong. :-) > > > > ______________________________**_________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 11:09:16 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 07:09:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130912104206.GG10405@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> <20130911111536.GX10405@leitl.org> <20130912104206.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:42 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 05:26:08PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >> ### Yes. Are you familiar with any books by Karl Schroeder? He >> describes many variations of this scenario, set in various >> post-expansion locales. > > I wasn't aware. I've only read Ventus. Do you have specific recommendations? I liked Lady of Mazes, and I read some of the Virga series. In Virga, humans are pestered by lawsuits from oaks, and generally live in the cracks of the legal system, compared to mice inhabiting but not owning a house. Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 12 13:21:43 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 15:21:43 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130912132143.GM10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 05:39:11PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > And just like you, I don't believe in the doom of mankind, definitely As a species, humankind if very difficult to kill. But as a technological species with sufficient population to avoid regression to some unknown halting point our future is far from being clear. > not from lack of energy. The only real danger for Human 1.0 is Human > 2.0, and this does not fill me with dread. How you ever noticed how far the regression in capabilities goes in failing states? E.g. consider 7 nm node on Intel's roadmap. What is the supply chain for that, what is the market so that you ROI, and where do you get the investments? Consider access to space, consider supercomputing, consider nanotechnology. None of the failed and failing states engage in any of that to any relevant degree. What are you going to do if your patients can't afford you? If you cut back, can you continue providing your patients with levels of care you're comfortable with? If the revenue stream drops that you're bankrupt, and you can't find work in your area of work, nor any other area, for that matter? These will appear as outlandish scenarios for most people on this list, but they're a daily reality to many. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 14:21:34 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:21:34 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Andrew Mckee wrote: >>You can "maybe" yourself to death but it never gets you anywhere. Maybe >> ET >> > > > Well, correct me if I'm mistaken, but isn't one of the principles of the > scientific method is that no matter how cherished any given law may be, we > should always maintain a tiny sliver of doubt Yes absolutely, but you should never forget what it is, a TINY sliver of doubt. > So maybe asking "maybe" is sometimes a very good thing to do, And maybe there comes a point when asking "maybe" stops being very productive . Maybe there comes a point when asking "maybe" becomes just a bit silly and maybe your time could be better spent investigating other things. Part of the art of being a good scientist is having a hunch about what deserves further investigation and what does not, > > do I have to invoke the the scientific consensus of the day regarding > the impossibility of heavier than air flight That was an engineering question not a scientific one. >I see a post not long back that a couple of detection experiments might > have just detected some evidence for dark matter, > There is no "might have" about it, they have detested EVIDENCE for dark matter; but of course in physics, or in any other science, you never find PROOF, you only get that in pure mathematics. > this of course might well be negated by another more sensitive detector > that spotted precisely nothing. > Maybe. And maybe a yet more sensitive detector will find it again, and maybe a even more sensitive detector will see precisely nothing once more, and maybe a [...] As I said, once you get into a infinite loop you can "maybe" yourself to death. > So maybe the newer even more sensitive detectors and experiments might > soon make that breakthrough discovery Maybe. But then again maybe not. You can't sit on the fence forever, eventually you've got to make a stand. Maybe future generations will see you as a visionary for taking that stand, maybe they will see you as a fool, and maybe they will see you as somebody who did the best he could with the evidence he had. Nothing is certain in life. Maybe. > In the meantime however, putting tongue in cheek and poking fun at dark > matter is fair game I think. > So those of us so inclined should do so now, very soon we might well be > losing the privilege. I see no proof or even evidence that is happening, people still have a right to make a fool of themselves. Denying the existence of Dark Energy and Dark Matter hasn't yet reached the level of foolishness as denying that the world is round, but it's getting there. Maybe. . > > If a towering genius like Einstein can make a slight 'blunder' and be > humble enough to admit it, can we be so certain that every other law that > has been invented is perfectly true and correct now and for all time?. > We know that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity CAN NOT be even approximately true and correct all the time because at the singularity in the center of a Black Hole it produces nonsense results, and because it is mathematically inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics. We need a quantum theory of gravity to supersede relativity just as Einstein superseded Newton, but we don't have such a theory yet; string theory wants to become that theory but so far it is not. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 14:31:55 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:31:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Modes of failure Re: FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > How you ever noticed how far the regression in capabilities > goes in failing states? E.g. consider 7 nm node on Intel's > roadmap. What is the supply chain for that, what is the > market so that you ROI, and where do you get the investments? > Consider access to space, consider supercomputing, consider > nanotechnology. None of the failed and failing states engage > in any of that to any relevant degree. > > What are you going to do if your patients can't afford you? > If you cut back, can you continue providing your patients > with levels of care you're comfortable with? If the revenue > stream drops that you're bankrupt, and you can't find work > in your area of work, nor any other area, for that matter? > > These will appear as outlandish scenarios for most people > on this list, but they're a daily reality to many. ### You are making good points and I do not discount the possibility that technological progress could be stopped or reversed due to state failures - the only thing I disagree with is that I don't see energy supply as a limiting issue. Sure, major failures are likely to coincide with massive reductions in energy availability - but the direction of causation, IMO, would run from social issues to technology failures, not the reverse. We do have a handle on the technologies of energy generation but we are much less effective at social management (interpersonal power, political power, division of resources, time preferences, financial management). Rome did not fall because of military failure, it fell because of too much bread and circuses (which eventually, after hundreds of years of decay, lead to military failure). The US and Europe will not fall because we run out of energy but, here I agree with you, we could fall, for other reasons. It would be a useful discussion to analyze the modes of failure by degree of likelihood. Useful data points: Europe during and after WWII - no state failures despite insane levels of physical damage to resources. What if somebody killed the top 10% of population by IQ (as happened in Poland)? Still, no major state failure. Did a modern state ever fail utterly (i.e. disappeared and was replaced by hordes of disorganized savages, not just annexed by another modern state)? I can't think of an example. Sure, there is a first time for everything but the absence of failures despite damage levels far exceeding anything happening nowadays does put some constraints on the likelihood of such failures. Rafal From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 12 14:33:51 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:33:51 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130912143351.GQ10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 05:54:25PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > You're still not getting it. There is no cure. > > ### Coal. Oil. Gas. Photovoltaic. Wind. Thorium. Uranium. Other weird Oil and gas are past peak. Total fossil and nonbreeder fissible peak is expected roughly 2020 -- the exact time is not important, since we're already in an energy hunger situation, while the population is growing, and the population of high-resource consumption subpopulation is also growing, within the constraints of the total available energy envelope. Negawatts by way of efficiency is negligible, so your only option is austerity -- rationing, and limiting blood perfusion to the critical core, leaving periphery anemic and cold while the patient continues exsanguinating at a runaway rate. Renewables are not making a difference -- we need about 1 TW/year effective substition rate, or 1000 new nuclear reactors/year equivalent for the next 40 years. We're deploying a factor of 100 too little, and the processes are not exponential past a nonegligible (5-10%) substitution rate. The real problem is that surplus energy results in adaptive increase of numbers of potential consumers, while we've been in serious and accelerating overshoot for last three decades, cruising on inertia, building up ecological debt. The pressure within the pressure cooker is building. The safety valve is stuck. This thing is going to blow. (Sorry for the metaphor overload. Some people get that better than numbers and trends). > not yet invented shit. All are cures, lasting for between 50 and Not yet invented shit is irrelevant, since invention-to-deployment in sufficient numbers is 30+ years. Despite widespread belief that innovation happens quicker now empirically it's untrue. Infrastructure work takes 30-40 years, assuming the invention is already ready for deployment. There was a pretty good thing going in 1970s, but everybody aborted Carter's plans but Germany. Germany is not doing nearly enough, especially lately due to political meddling. Some small countries are doing a lot more than Germany, but these are special cases. > 500,000,000 years at current usage levels. Isn't this, like, an > open-and-shut case? Many believe that, which is why we're in this situation. This is one of the ubiquitous antipatterns described in the collapse literature. Fire isn't real until it's burning you. Once on fire, rational thought completely shuts down and counterproductive behavior starts. Being poor makes you measurably more stupid, as most of your energy goes towards obtaining basic necessities. > > The course of global warming is graven in stone. Not a damn > > thing can be done about it at this point, especially now that > > we have multiple feedback mechanisms kicking in. > > ### Seriously, you believe in this story? Global warming? Even the Seriously, I believe that not a damn thing is going to change about the CO2 emission curve. It's going to go up as long as there are fossil carbon sources in the ground which can be extracted at sufficient profit and sufficient net energy. It might grow even faster if some buffering stops due to saturation. > eco-nuts don't say "global warming" anymore, now it's "climate > change". I'm not going to argue about the finer points or errors in the current climate models. I'm talking about the CO2 emissions, and the detected outgassing of methane hydrate clathrates in the permafrost and shelf, and loss of ice, reduction of ice thickness and reduction of polar albedo due to loss of reflective ice. All these mechanisms are happening, and all of them are positive-feedback. > The first half of this century will be remembered as the Great > Greening, not due to ecofreaks overrunning the planet but due to > improved plant growth from carbon dioxide fertilization. Ecosystem is not binding CO2 in any relevant numbers, at least sustainably. Ocean acidification is not preventable. Oceans will become marginal sources of food. Total food production is already stalling due to multiple factors. The bad old times of mass famines and starvation across poor areas of the world are coming back with a vengeance. Long-term, war. India/Pakistan/China triangle looks likely, but it doesn't mean it's going to start there. Africa and parts of Asia will be first, but it will be localized due to lack of long-distance WoMD, unless we've got multiple powers present in the area into conflict about access to fertile land and mineral resources. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 12 14:50:38 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:50:38 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Modes of failure Re: FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130912145038.GT10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:31:55AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### You are making good points and I do not discount the possibility > that technological progress could be stopped or reversed due to state > failures - the only thing I disagree with is that I don't see energy > supply as a limiting issue. Sure, major failures are likely to Historically, availability of cheap energy was always closely correlated with GNP (however biased the metric) growth. No known cases of decoupling have been known, so far. > coincide with massive reductions in energy availability - but the > direction of causation, IMO, would run from social issues to > technology failures, not the reverse. We do have a handle on the > technologies of energy generation but we are much less effective at > social management (interpersonal power, political power, division of > resources, time preferences, financial management). Rome did not fall > because of military failure, it fell because of too much bread and Actually, one of the reasons was insufficient bread. > circuses (which eventually, after hundreds of years of decay, lead to > military failure). The US and Europe will not fall because we run out Europe is one sick puppy, and most of North America is not any better shape. China is not doing at all well, if you read between the lines. > of energy but, here I agree with you, we could fall, for other > reasons. > > It would be a useful discussion to analyze the modes of failure by > degree of likelihood. Useful data points: Europe during and after WWII That would be a good investment. A very good area of inquiry is analysing modes of degradation to identify key points, and reengineer the structures towards more resilience so that instead of a contagious, unmanaged collapse cascade stages the now more resilient system rolls back into defined states, becoming close to antifragile. This would not have been necessary, had we acted on time (1970s/1980s). Now a managed collapse appears a prerequsite for a sustainable recovery. At this stage, further growth is postponed until we can tap extraterrestrial resources. We've run out of everything down here, due to our numbers, and our increased resource use per capita. > - no state failures despite insane levels of physical damage to > resources. What if somebody killed the top 10% of population by IQ (as > happened in Poland)? Still, no major state failure. Did a modern state Rebound from war was possible because energy and other resources were available. UK never really recovered. Poland just raided the retirement pension funds. Germany is a low-wage country relying on exports, and will collapse if the exports stop coming. > ever fail utterly (i.e. disappeared and was replaced by hordes of > disorganized savages, not just annexed by another modern state)? I The Eastern block never recovered. Southern Europe never recovered. UK never recovered (as a thought experiment, remove The City which is largely ficticious, since running on financial fumes, and run the numbers on what is left -- oops). > can't think of an example. Sure, there is a first time for everything > but the absence of failures despite damage levels far exceeding > anything happening nowadays does put some constraints on the > likelihood of such failures. We don't know the likelihood. There was never a global civilization, until now. All previous local cultures collapsed, and never recovered on meaningful time scales. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Sep 12 20:19:45 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 22:19:45 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Modes of failure Re: FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130912145038.GT10405@leitl.org> References: <20130912145038.GT10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <523221E1.4050306@libero.it> Il 12/09/2013 16:50, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:31:55AM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > >> ### You are making good points and I do not discount the possibility >> that technological progress could be stopped or reversed due to state >> failures - the only thing I disagree with is that I don't see energy >> supply as a limiting issue. Sure, major failures are likely to > Historically, availability of cheap energy was always closely > correlated with GNP (however biased the metric) growth. No > known cases of decoupling have been known, so far. But cheap energy is necessary but not sufficient. You must have the right socio-political structure (rule of laws, freedom, etc.) to allow exploitation of the available resources. >> coincide with massive reductions in energy availability - but the >> direction of causation, IMO, would run from social issues to >> technology failures, not the reverse. We do have a handle on the >> technologies of energy generation but we are much less effective at >> social management (interpersonal power, political power, division of >> resources, time preferences, financial management). Rome did not fall >> because of military failure, it fell because of too much bread and > Actually, one of the reasons was insufficient bread. Actually, the main reason was too high taxes and government controls. This stifled productions. People fled outside the borders of the empire and welcome the barbarous, because they taxed the people a lot less than the empire. Bread were insufficient because the peasants have no gain in working hard to grow more grain. And come a time when barbarous invaded the empire, took control of it and then, when they were weak, no one had any reason to restore the imperial dominion. >> circuses (which eventually, after hundreds of years of decay, lead to >> military failure). The US and Europe will not fall because we run out > Europe is one sick puppy, and most of North America is not > any better shape. China is not doing at all well, if you > read between the lines. I bet the Black Death time was a bit worse than this (1/3 or 1/2 population of Europe died in few years). But it was a time of changes and improvements. Necessity is the mother of Invention. > That would be a good investment. A very good area of inquiry is > analysing modes of degradation to identify key points, and reengineer > the structures towards more resilience so that instead of a > contagious, unmanaged collapse cascade stages the now more resilient > system rolls back into defined states, becoming close to antifragile. The problems of the system are nearly completely internals. The system have some group in power that have detached themselves from the consequences of their actions and they are growing at the expenses of the rest of the people. Political and financial groups feed from the economy at the expenses of productive people. The main antifragile strategy is to return the power to the market. Return the power to the people working and producing what is request and paid freely. For this, competition must be established and imposed in more field as possible. >From competitive currencies, to competitive infrastructures, to competitive governments. > This would not have been necessary, had we acted on time (1970s/1980s). > Now a managed collapse appears a prerequsite for a sustainable > recovery. At this stage, further growth is postponed until we > can tap extraterrestrial resources. We've run out of everything > down here, due to our numbers, and our increased resource use > per capita. The problem of central management is the same all the time. The central managers run the system at their advantage, not their subjects advantage. They can not run the system at the advantage of the ruled because they lack the informations needed and the ability tio process the informations in time before it is obsolete. Wal-Mart bringing supplies to its stores days before the FEMA was able to arrive is an example and distributing packs of emergency stuff to the people in need is the classical example of free enterprise making circle around government programs. >> - no state failures despite insane levels of physical damage to >> resources. What if somebody killed the top 10% of population by IQ (as >> happened in Poland)? Still, no major state failure. Did a modern state > Rebound from war was possible because energy and other resources > were available. UK never really recovered. Poland just raided the > retirement pension funds. Germany is a low-wage country relying > on exports, and will collapse if the exports stop coming. Maybe, just maybe, the insane level of public debts (Germany not excluded) have something to do with it? Government debt is the promise to tax the residents in the future to pay for current expenses. It is not strange people try everything the can to avoid it, sometimes at the cost of leaving the place. Anyway, the retirement funds of the poles (for some poles) never where there. They were just an accounting trick. So the government, simply, wrote off some debts and renegade some promises. >> ever fail utterly (i.e. disappeared and was replaced by hordes of >> disorganized savages, not just annexed by another modern state)? I > The Eastern block never recovered. Southern Europe never > recovered. UK never recovered (as a thought experiment, remove > The City which is largely ficticious, since running on financial > fumes, and run the numbers on what is left -- oops). They never recovered their status as global power, but their standard of living and technological level increased. What is interesting to me, for example, is the standard of living and the technology standard. If some kingdom or republic disappear and something else replace them, is not a big problem. >> can't think of an example. Sure, there is a first time for everything >> but the absence of failures despite damage levels far exceeding >> anything happening nowadays does put some constraints on the >> likelihood of such failures. > We don't know the likelihood. There was never a global civilization, > until now. All previous local cultures collapsed, and never recovered > on meaningful time scales. If a global civilization collapse, local civilizations will grow. When the Roman Empire collapsed many reign replaced it. And live went on, and technology continued to improve, commerce continued (until the Mormons invaded the North Africa and Spain). Natural selection never stop. Mirco From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 22:48:01 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:48:01 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 11:23:58AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > I'm not interested in doom and gloom. I'm interested in solutions. Your > > I'm very interested in solutions. But they start with people accepting > that there is a problem. Even on this list, the ostrichs are in the > vast majority. Out there, the situation is a lot worse. Most > of the 7 billion have no clue at all. > I reject this. You can develop a better car without saying "All current cars are doomed to fail by 2021" Even if they are (since they aren't autonomous). > Solutions are useless if people are not ready to accept > them as such. We're not nearly there yet, here. > On this list, I think everyone is open to new ideas about where to get more energy from. And you don't need to be a doom and gloom person to acknowledge that more energy and cheaper energy are OBVIOUSLY good things. > > solution matrix seems to rule out most of the most practical energy > > sources. I'm for solar, but it only has limited practical applications at > > present. > > I disagree very much. For most people on this list PV is > is a very affordable way to shave off the bulk of your > electricity bill, or to allow you to live off-grid, which > vastly enhances your exit options. Bootstrap is a process > that profits from economies of scale. Why is solar so > expensive in the sunny US versus the low-flux Germany? > Because it takes a decade to build the market. > Don't waste another decade. You can't afford the price. > I had solar on my own roof. It was an utter failure. I was lucky not to have killed myself knocking the snow off. When the $3000 batteries failed after only 4 years of use, the system was rendered useless. There was so much electronics overhead that the cost of the panels was less than 50% of the cost of the overall system. I had much more luck with my gasoline generators. Granted, you are probably talking about using the grid as your battery, and that's fine until the grid fails. There are plenty of gloom and doom grid people out there, you might get along with them Eugen. > > > People should not spend synapseseconds on preventing the > > > CO2 release, but how to mitigate the impact of increased > > > CO2, which is not just about climate. > > > > > > > I like building buildings out of CO2. Stuff like this: > > http://bit.ly/15SAPjg > > Seems like a reasonably good idea in principle, even if this particular > > solution has problems to be worked out. Concrete is a large contributor > to > > atmospheric CO2, I'm sure you knew that. > > I would be looking into geopolymers, and in just low-embedded-energy > structures in general. You have to crunch the numbers whether a steel > frame house with glass foam/carbon insulation is going to ROI over a > cob construction, or some advanced low-tech things I've seen on a > certain subreddit. > I think it's a reasonable area of research to figure out how to use atmospheric CO2 to build walls and stuff. I'll leave it at that. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 22:56:34 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:56:34 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <20130912143351.GQ10405@leitl.org> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130912143351.GQ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Oceans will become marginal sources of food. Total food > production is already stalling due to multiple factors. > The bad old times of mass famines and starvation across > poor areas of the world are coming back with a vengeance. > Could you please argue with "facts" that are not able to be refuted with 30 seconds and Google? http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/ Yes, there may be local areas currently having drought problems, but it's drought time somewhere nearly ALL THE TIME. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 23:06:09 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:06:09 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 3:06 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > The Rare Earth is the only sane explanation for our apparent solitude. > I don't know if this is a supportable assertion. It is certainly a top contender in explanations, but the only "sane" one... not by a long shot. Space is REALLY big. It seems hard to see intelligence from REALLY far off. I mean how close would you have to be to be able to detect our intelligence. Seriously, let's turn this around. Within how many light years could an intelligent race detect our intelligence? How would they do it? Would someone outside that light cone just assume there was no intelligence in our direction? Is it not similarly likely that we would miss intelligence out there for the same reasons? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 23:17:29 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:17:29 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: <20130911094514.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <20130911094514.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 3:45 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 09:38:08PM +1200, Andrew Mckee wrote: > > > I'm sure you're right, so far as we know. > > It's not just a good idea, it's the law. In fact, > thermodynamics is based on information, and all the deep > theories are trending to information-based descriptions > of reality. It seems unlikely to me that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is escapable over the long term. So I tend to agree with Eugen here. (It is not a mathematical impossibility that I agree with Eugen). I do think we have far more evidence (though perhaps not a huge amount) for a growing tumor somewhere in Eugen's brain than we do for extra terrestrial intelligence, or even extra terrestrial life. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 23:31:38 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:31:38 -0600 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <523062E3.9010705@libero.it> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <523062E3.9010705@libero.it> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 6:32 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 11/09/2013 01:02, spike ha scritto: > > > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, spike > > wrote: > Egypt is on a lifeline now and Saudi Arabia will be in the future. They > are full of depreciating USD, food prices are skyrocketing (thank you > Uncle helicopter Ben). Saudis are unable to produce anything, they have > a 25% (at least) of their population formed by foreign laborers that > will leave if they are not paid enough and have no love for Saudis. > > It is easy to stay retrograde and poor when someone is subsiding your > lifestyle and prevent you from going from poor to starving. Then, when > starving happen, people start to question everything and have little > patience with everyone. It is then that revolutions happen and thing > radically change forever. > I've heard interesting comparisons between Spain and Portugal and their squandering of New World gold profits and Saudi Arabia and their oil wealth... The take home point of these is that it is unlikely that Saudi Arabia will have any political power in a hundred years. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 23:36:00 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:36:00 -0600 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130911161221.GL10405@leitl.org> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> <20130911161221.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 06:03:51PM +0200, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > > > The EIA has an history of optimistic projections, followed by a reduction > > later. This graph from theoildrum, which uses EIA official data, is > telling: > > > > http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6556 > > Thanks for caring enough to pull up that graph. To anyone who's > interested in such data and more, TOD will be soon in archival mode, > but the articles will remain accessible. There will be a list of > successor site listed, if not already available in the blogroll. Does the oil drum going out of business mean anything to you Eugen? Does capitalism picking it as a loser mean ANYTHING? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 12 23:33:41 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 16:33:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <00c001ceb010$84a6c3d0$8df44b70$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson >. >.I think it's a reasonable area of research to figure out how to use atmospheric CO2 to build walls and stuff. I'll leave it at that. -Kelly No research needed. This is what we have been doing for centuries, and still do now if you have a wooden house, as I do. The carbon to make wood comes from the atmospheric CO2. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Thu Sep 12 23:52:13 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 17:52:13 -0600 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Kelly Anderson > wrote: > > But China > > will claim the moon in the mid 2020s, and there's a lot of room for > > communists up there. ;-) > > ### No, the Moon is a Harsh Mistress! :) > > And just like you, I don't believe in the doom of mankind, definitely > not from lack of energy. The only real danger for Human 1.0 is Human > 2.0, and this does not fill me with dread. > Perhaps you would like to take my money for the charity of your choice then. http://longbets.org/624/ I am with you. Human 2.0, and 3.0 and 4.0...etc. is certainly our biggest existential threat. After all, once you are obsolete technology, how often do you get booted up. Anyone want to buy my NeXT cube? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Fri Sep 13 00:08:41 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 18:08:41 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <00c001ceb010$84a6c3d0$8df44b70$@att.net> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> <00c001ceb010$84a6c3d0$8df44b70$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 5:33 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > *>?***** > > ** ** > > >?I think it's a reasonable area of research to figure out how to use > atmospheric CO2 to build walls and stuff. I'll leave it at that. ?Kelly** > ** > > ** > > No research needed. This is what we have been doing for centuries, and > still do now if you have a wooden house, as I do. The carbon to make wood > comes from the atmospheric CO2. > When your house gets destroyed, and the wood degrades, unless it is buried and becomes coal or something the CO2 will be released back into the atmosphere. If you turn it into something like concrete, that will take a lot longer. Besides, you can get greens to pay three times the amount of money for something like that than wood. ;-) -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Fri Sep 13 00:09:40 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 02:09:40 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: <20130911094514.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: Kelly Anderson: > Space is REALLY big. It is, yes. But the space required for intelligent life might be equally big. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 13 05:30:49 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 07:30:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130913053049.GW10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 02:55:10PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > That's probably correct, but perhaps not certain. It looks like a > really aggressive power satellite project could keep the CO2 short of > the 450 ppm level. Any air (flue gas initially) scrubbing will be competing with burning fossils (apropos burning fossils, Denmark outlawed fossil burners in new home heating). Don't see CO2 levels slowing down before 2080, nevermind reversing. By that time methane and water will dominate the greenhouse effect. > As a side effect of that effort, we might be able to put sunshades in L1. Any massive SPS constellation in LEO will automatically cause shading all by itself. > Of course we still have to worry about the friendly AIs eating our brains. Sounds suspiciously like zombies. > (Assuming they have not done it already and we are simulations.) Then, we are golden, and have to do nothing! You Could Be Immortal Already! -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Sep 13 06:53:02 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 07:53:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 11:48 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I had solar on my own roof. It was an utter failure. I was lucky not to have > killed myself knocking the snow off. When the $3000 batteries failed after > only 4 years of use, the system was rendered useless. There was so much > electronics overhead that the cost of the panels was less than 50% of the > cost of the overall system. > > I had much more luck with my gasoline generators. > > Granted, you are probably talking about using the grid as your battery, and > that's fine until the grid fails. There are plenty of gloom and doom grid > people out there, you might get along with them Eugen. > > In this case you are arguing on the basis of a statistical sample of one. Because your solar system had problems, that doesn't make solar power a bad idea. Solar power seems to be spreading rapidly in the US, using the grid as backup when needed. (If the grid fails, you will have bigger problems than boiling a kettle for coffee). :) See: Quote: Solar panels are the next granite countertops: an amenity for new homes that?s becoming a standard option for buyers in U.S. markets. At least six of 10 largest U.S. homebuilders led by KB Home include the photovoltaic devices in new construction, according to supplier SunPower Corp. (SPWR) Two California towns are mandating installations, and demand for the systems that generate electricity at home will jump 56 percent nationwide this year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. ?In the next six months, homebuilders in California and the expensive-energy states will be going solar as a standard, and just incorporating it into the cost of the house like any other feature,? Jim Petersen, chief executive officer of the PetersenDean Inc., the largest closely held U.S. roofing and solar contractor, said in an interview. ------------------ BillK From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 13 10:10:05 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 12:10:05 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130913101005.GY10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 04:48:01PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 11:23:58AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I'm not interested in doom and gloom. I'm interested in solutions. Your > > > > I'm very interested in solutions. But they start with people accepting > > that there is a problem. Even on this list, the ostrichs are in the > > vast majority. Out there, the situation is a lot worse. Most > > of the 7 billion have no clue at all. > > > > I reject this. You can develop a better car without saying "All current > cars are doomed to fail by 2021" Even if they are (since they aren't > autonomous). Do you understand the impact of surplus energy being adaptively absorbed by increased fertility and resource-using behavior in context of an ecosystem in deep overshoot? You can't invent a better car if the workshop is coming crashing down. > > > Solutions are useless if people are not ready to accept > > them as such. We're not nearly there yet, here. > > > > On this list, I think everyone is open to new ideas about where to get more Used to be that way, now this list has gotten only slightly more open-minded than your average environment. > energy from. And you don't need to be a doom and gloom person to > acknowledge that more energy and cheaper energy are OBVIOUSLY good things. I would like to point out that there won't be more and cheaper energy on this planet for the coming decades. This is seriously handicapping our ability to develop short-term solutions to a fundamental problem, see above. > > > > solution matrix seems to rule out most of the most practical energy > > > sources. I'm for solar, but it only has limited practical applications at > > > present. > > > > I disagree very much. For most people on this list PV is > > is a very affordable way to shave off the bulk of your > > electricity bill, or to allow you to live off-grid, which > > vastly enhances your exit options. Bootstrap is a process > > that profits from economies of scale. Why is solar so > > expensive in the sunny US versus the low-flux Germany? > > Because it takes a decade to build the market. > > Don't waste another decade. You can't afford the price. > > > > I had solar on my own roof. It was an utter failure. I was lucky not to Just because it didn't work out for you it doesn't mean it doesn't work for anybody else. In fact, 23 GW effective peak send a quite loud message to anyone willing to hear it. http://cleantechnica.com/2013/07/07/breaking-germany-sets-solar-power-record-again-23-9-gw/ "Germany?s peak electricity demand at midday is about 60 GW, so at 1:45pm or so, solar power was providing about 40% of the country?s electricity demand. Impressive. Approximately 1.3?1.4 million solar power systems were involved in creating that massive electricity output, our German solar expert Thomas tells me. And about 8.5 million people live in buildings where solar power systems are used to produce electricity or heat." > have killed myself knocking the snow off. When the $3000 batteries failed Nobody is doing that here, and almost nobody uses batteries. > after only 4 years of use, the system was rendered useless. There was so If you're using batteries, make sure you've got the right chargers, and the right battery type (e.g. FeNi and not Pb). > much electronics overhead that the cost of the panels was less than 50% of > the cost of the overall system. Yes, solar inverter price curve needs to improve. I'm not going to use inverters, but go low-voltage insular DC. > I had much more luck with my gasoline generators. > > Granted, you are probably talking about using the grid as your battery, and > that's fine until the grid fails. There are plenty of gloom and doom grid No, that's doing okay as long as there's enough insolation. You're only down if the grid is down, *and* the sun is down. > people out there, you might get along with them Eugen. I don't know what grid people are, but in most developing countries the grid is unreliable, and in e.g. US the grid is becoming too unreliable for many operations. At the very least I'd like to be able to run the gas burner if the grid is down, and also power a mission-crtical core of services. > > I would be looking into geopolymers, and in just low-embedded-energy > > structures in general. You have to crunch the numbers whether a steel > > frame house with glass foam/carbon insulation is going to ROI over a > > cob construction, or some advanced low-tech things I've seen on a > > certain subreddit. > > > > I think it's a reasonable area of research to figure out how to use > atmospheric CO2 to build walls and stuff. I'll leave it at that. Yes, many people build with wood. I dislike wood for fire safety reasons. In terms of atmospheric CO2 fixation, I'd look into biochar for sequestering and synfuels scrubbed from flue gas and atmospheric CO2. Geopolymers instead of Portland cement for concrete give you a lot more bang for the buck. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 13 10:44:44 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 12:44:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130912143351.GQ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130913104444.GB10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 04:56:34PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > > Oceans will become marginal sources of food. Total food > > production is already stalling due to multiple factors. > > The bad old times of mass famines and starvation across > > poor areas of the world are coming back with a vengeance. > > > > Could you please argue with "facts" that are not able to be refuted with 30 You're having reading comprehension issues. Hint: Google is a poor future trend extrapolator. It doesn't give you a nice plot of Earth ecosystem's carrying capacity. If you rely on the past and the current present to be a good predictor of the future, and there is a different regime ahead, you will only get surprises of the bad kind. Poor planning and short-term thinking is what got us into this tight spot in the first place. > seconds and Google? > http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/ > > Yes, there may be local areas currently having drought problems, but it's > drought time somewhere nearly ALL THE TIME. See, all is dandy, then. We don't have to do anything. The future will be better than the past. Any famines will be acts of God. Nobody could have anticipated them, couldn't they? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 13 11:35:08 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 13:35:08 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130913113508.GC10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 05:06:09PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 3:06 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > > The Rare Earth is the only sane explanation for our apparent solitude. > > > > I don't know if this is a supportable assertion. It is certainly a top You've got that exactly backwards. The only conservative explanation to 'where's everybody?' is that we're the first ones on the block. We're in nobody's smart light cone. Arguments from probability do not apply for self-measurements of any kind (including Simulation Argument), so but for the first three coefficients of Drake's equation which can be derived from observation, the other parameters are currently unknown. We *might* get a second data point for the fourth parameters just from finding causally independant source of life in this stellar system, but chances for that are not very good. Why this is so hard to grasp I don't know. > contender in explanations, but the only "sane" one... not by a long shot. > > Space is REALLY big. It seems hard to see intelligence from REALLY far off. No, it would be quite easy to see. Except, observation window before subexpansive observer and expansive observer for relativistic expansion is so short probability is nil. Everywhere the wave passes subexpansive observers are extinguished, or have no chance to develop. Applying anthropic principle, above means what we're seeing is exactly what we should be seeing for expansive (all the other ones are undetectable) relativistic (all expansive observers will become relativistic) observers. Why this is so hard to grasp I don't know. > I mean how close would you have to be to be able to detect our intelligence. We're undetectable, because we're not expansive. If we don't become expansive we'll become extinct rather soon. Nonexpansive cultures not just invisible, they're also doomed. Why this is so hard to grasp I don't know. > Seriously, let's turn this around. Within how many light years could an > intelligent race detect our intelligence? How would they do it? Would Don't flatter yourself. We're not intelligent, because we're not a space-faring culture. Pioneers are only as intelligent as much as it's useful to map the resource base upon arrival, before starting to feed and self-replicate. > someone outside that light cone just assume there was no intelligence in Nothing is observable outside of its light cone, by definition. This is why you don't see the "smart" (they really aren't anymore, but long time ago and long space away, they used to be) expansive guys coming, until they go right through your front door with a bulldozer. Remember why Vergeltungswaffe was so spooky? You didn't hear them coming, them being supersonic. Relativistic craft is the same way, only you don't *see* them coming until they're almost here. > our direction? Is it not similarly likely that we would miss intelligence > out there for the same reasons? No. Because you can see the stars, and in fact because you're at all around to read this message. That's the best evidence that Fermi's apparent paradoxon wasn't. Why this is so hard to grasp I don't know. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 13 11:42:27 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 13:42:27 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> <20130911161221.GL10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130913114227.GD10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 05:36:00PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Does the oil drum going out of business mean anything to you Eugen? Does TOD was a business? In a sense it was, it lost the fight in the blog attention economy. Most of key content contributors moved on to greener pastures several years ago, so quality content flow eventually stopped. This sucks, because now we have to collect that information from multiple sites. I personally will be falling off the bus, because I don't have the resources for that. If a single stop shop successor emerges, I'll see you there. > capitalism picking it as a loser mean ANYTHING? Yes, it means that you're even more demented than I thought. I doubt I can ever build a bridge over a reality gap that large. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 13 15:15:54 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 17:15:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130913151554.GP10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 06:18:06PM -0600, Bill Burris wrote: > China has 17 nuclear power reactors in operation, 32 under construction, China is desperate, but even so the construction has stalled. > and many more planed for the near future. > > I am investing in uranium and thorium mining companies. Your funeral. Peak nonbreeder fissible is 2020, and there are no safe, affordable breeders. There are niche users, like producing process heat e.g. for tar sands in Canada. But large-scale energy production in the inner solar system, never. That ship has sailed. Now the renewables are eating new nuclear for breakfast. > http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/why-a-uranium-renaissance-looks-inevitable > http://energy-myths.caseyresearch.com/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Sep 13 15:20:03 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 11:20:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <20130913101005.GY10405@leitl.org> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> <20130913101005.GY10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: >I would like to point out that there won't be more and cheaper energy on > this planet for the coming decades. That is most certainly true if environmentalists have anything to say about it! >> I had solar on my own roof. It was an utter failure. >> > > > Just because it didn't work out for you it doesn't mean it doesn't work > for anybody else. In fact, 23 GW effective peak send a quite loud message > to anyone willing to hear it. > > > http://cleantechnica.com/2013/07/07/breaking-germany-sets-solar-power-record-again-23-9-gw/ > The loud message this sends is that governments can get people to build anything no matter how ridiculous if the bribe to do so is big enough. Germany has the highest electricity prices in Europe, partially because they're shutting down their nuclear plants but mostly because 50% of the average consumer's electric bill goes into subsidizing solar energy. So far the German consumer has been forced to subsidize the solar cell industry to the tune of 100 billion euros (128 billion dollars). So what did they get out of those 128 billions dollars worth of solar cells? They reduced the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere enough that by the end of this century they will have delayed global warming by about 23 hours. Even the Germans are starting to get fed up with this nonsense and say they will pull the plug on solar subsidies by 2018. If so then, unless there are major technological breakthroughs, you can expect the solar industry to crash in 2018. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Fri Sep 13 17:31:26 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 19:31:26 +0200 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130913114227.GD10405@leitl.org> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130911120727.GA10405@leitl.org> <20130911161221.GL10405@leitl.org> <20130913114227.GD10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <52334BEE.2050308@libero.it> Il 13/09/2013 13:42, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 05:36:00PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> Does the oil drum going out of business mean anything to you Eugen? Does > > TOD was a business? In a sense it was, it lost the fight in > the blog attention economy. Most of key content contributors moved > on to greener pastures several years ago, so quality content > flow eventually stopped. There is a quality content contributor of TOD now working as astrologer in San Francisco, IIRC. Probably astrology pay better than Eco-catastrophism. Probably because it is a personalized service. > This sucks, because now we have to collect that information > from multiple sites. I personally will be falling off the > bus, because I don't have the resources for that. If a single > stop shop successor emerges, I'll see you there. I strongly doubt it. People have not enough time to worry about little gremlins when they are not able to work enough to pay the heating bills. >> capitalism picking it as a loser mean ANYTHING? > Yes, it means that you're even more demented than I thought. Capitalism is wrong when its choices do not conform with Eugene ideas. > I doubt I can ever build a bridge over a reality gap > that large. So will you stay in Wonderland forever? or was Oz? maybe Neverland? Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Fri Sep 13 17:58:54 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 19:58:54 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5233525E.5030003@libero.it> Il 13/09/2013 08:53, BillK ha scritto: > See: > > Quote: > Solar panels are the next granite countertops: an amenity for new > homes that?s becoming a standard option for buyers in U.S. markets. > At least six of 10 largest U.S. homebuilders led by KB Home include > the photovoltaic devices in new construction, according to supplier > SunPower Corp. (SPWR) Two California towns are mandating > installations, and demand for the systems that generate electricity at > home will jump 56 percent nationwide this year, according to the Solar > Energy Industries Association. Are there California towns mandating granite countertops? > ?In the next six months, homebuilders in California and the > expensive-energy states will be going solar as a standard, and just > incorporating it into the cost of the house like any other feature,? > Jim Petersen, chief executive officer of the PetersenDean Inc., the > largest closely held U.S. roofing and solar contractor, said in an > interview. Mandated wastes? Or just a way to keep low income minorities outside the town? It remember me the custom of New Guineans to slaughter pigs for festivals to show how much wealthy they are (becoming less wealthy but also less desirable as targets of a raid). Mirco From pharos at gmail.com Fri Sep 13 21:00:40 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:00:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Why Global Warming Will Be Far Worse, Far Sooner, Than Forecasts Predict Message-ID: David Brin, in his blog, points to an article showing that the IPCC (already hated by the global warming deniers) has a history of being far, far too conservative in their warming forecasts, Quote: The IPCC process virtually assures that all the research used in the report will be several years old. Since it only uses peer reviewed work and a consensus process, it has a long lead-time and a least common denominator data set. .......... But that?s only part of the reason the IPCC reports have been out-of-date-on-date-of?issue: for the most part, they still ignore the effects of positive feedbacks on warming. In short, empirical evidence suggests today?s worst-case scenarios are tomorrow?s most-likely outcomes. The same is true when we do ex-ante analysis of modeling done in the early stages of climate research. Today?s reality goes well beyond even the most dire past predictions. .......... Bottom line: The future we?re fashioning is completely incompatible with the civilization we?ve built, and the IPCC slow-walks, understates and outright ignores much of the science that screams at us to do something about it. ---------- BillK From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Sep 13 20:55:05 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 22:55:05 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] yet another ethical dilemma In-Reply-To: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> References: <006601cea995$de0abcf0$9a2036d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, 4 Sep 2013, spike wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: spike [mailto:spike66 at att.net] > > >...Since I have your ethical engines warming up, I have been presented with > another moral dilemma by 23andMe, this one much more complicated than the > one I posed a few weeks ago...Now I have a bigger problem, which will need > to wait until this afternoon, gotta run... spike > > > Ethical dilemma posed by 23andMe > > A few weeks ago a distant cousin contacted me trying to determine our most > recent common ancestor, something which is not at all remarkable except that > this relative is black. She viewed Alex Haley's Roots miniseries as a > teenager in the 1970s, and became interested in genealogy, started doing her [...] > So now, my ethics hipster friends, what do I do now? > > Do I tell my black cousin? > > Or do I go to my grave with that information? > > Or do I give the name of my G^3grandmother and let her discover this > shameful history on her own? > > spike I arrive late to the party, with all consequences, heh (my advice is going to miss your actions, most probably). I subscribe to too many lists, maybe I should trim it a little, later. Anyway, what a story. Some real meat from real life. I didn't enjoyed it but I appreciate it a lot. One missing piece of it are dates of death of victim family/neighbours - perhaps could be retrieved from local parish? This would tell more about the circumstances of ancestor's beginning. I mean, date comparison. Because right now you have some pieces and realistic expectation for matching picture is what you described above. However, I'd still try to find some more pieces if possible. Maybe there is more to the story? And if not, then there would be more evidence for realistic one. As of telling her - short version is "probably, yes". But it should be told in personal talk, I guess. Long version - it's probably not a secret I am not the biggest humanity fan on the planet. We have some great moments, which are dissolved and averaged in a sea of self delusions, ordinary lies and hypocrisy (and statistics). Notice how I use the word "we" - just in case someone thinks I am some kind of wannabe politician [1]. So the truth is much welcomed and rarely given (oh, but this is even longer story about how bipedals are brought up and programmed and taught to like the sweeteners - and I don't think I will be ready to give anything meaningful anytime soon about this). The truth is not supposed to be nice, it is only supposed to refer facts as they have been found. And people should be able to face the facts, which is optimistic version. If the sums of pros and cons feel about the same, tell her. Do not tell her if you think the cons weight much more. Despite what I think about truth, I accept idea of no strict binary rules and so there are situations when truth is better buried down for ever. The truth is good but it is not the whole and only good. This is up to you. Write pros and cons on a sheet of paper, carry it with you for some days, then when you decide, tear the sheet *and* burn it. You could also try some kind of non-decision, like writing the story and sending her a sealed envelope with "only for the brave and curious" or something on it. Well, this third choice is not my ideal at all. [1] There are days, when I am quite happy we are not going to spread among the stars and bring our lies with us. Talk about darkening! The mass of printed BS would do the job excellently. So not darkening of the stars is extremely positive finding for me. Way to go, species, whoever you are. So if I ever became a politician, I'd do my best to unpromote space exploration beyound Solar System. Observation yes, flights no, signaling... rather not. Well, what could we show to aliens - pyramids? How many people paid for building them? How many profited? Yet we build them all the time. Yes, I know, offtopic. And besides, politicians lie so I would find a reason to not keep the promise. And then rationalize it in my memoirs. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 03:04:40 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 23:04:40 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Why Global Warming Will Be Far Worse, Far Sooner, Than Forecasts Predict In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 BillK wrote: > empirical evidence suggests today?s worst-case scenarios are tomorrow?s > most-likely outcomes. The same is true when we do ex-ante analysis of > modeling done in the early stages of climate research. > To give you a idea of the quality of long range forecasts, in late May climate researchers predicted we would have a very active hurricane season that was way above average, but instead it's the slowest hurricane season in over 40 years. If they can't make good 4 month predictions what are we supposed to think when they start talking about the year 2100? > Bottom line: The future we?re fashioning is completely incompatible with > the civilization we?ve built, Bullshit. If it gets a little warmer and the sea gets a little higher we will adapt just as the human race always has, I mean it's not like this is the first time the climate has changed on us. And back then we didn't have advanced technology to help us. And even if global warming brings on disaster all the solutions proposed by those oh so moral environmentalists would cause far greater disasters. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 04:08:57 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 21:08:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Limiting CO2 was Global cooling Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 02:55:10PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > That's probably correct, but perhaps not certain. It looks like a > really aggressive power satellite project could keep the CO2 short of > the 450 ppm level. Any air (flue gas initially) scrubbing will be competing with burning fossils (apropos burning fossils, Denmark outlawed fossil burners in new home heating). Don't see CO2 levels slowing down before 2080, nevermind reversing. By that time methane and water will dominate the greenhouse effect. I make the claim that if started soon, i.e., in the next few years and pushed hard, the peak CO2 level will happen 22 years later according to the spreadsheet model. So if it started by 2015, then the CO2 would start coming down by 2037. I don't mind you disagreeing with me, but I would appreciate an analysis of what I have wrong with the model. (The question of it never being done is a different problem.) > As a side effect of that effort, we might be able to put sunshades in L1. Any massive SPS constellation in LEO will automatically cause shading all by itself. Actually, no. Think about the geometry. The earth GEO and the sun only line up for a couple of weeks around the equinoxes. Keith > Of course we still have to worry about the friendly AIs eating our brains. Sounds suspiciously like zombies. > (Assuming they have not done it already and we are simulations.) Then, we are golden, and have to do nothing! You Could Be Immortal Already! From msd001 at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 05:59:32 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 01:59:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Why Global Warming Will Be Far Worse, Far Sooner, Than Forecasts Predict In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 11:04 PM, John Clark wrote: > Bullshit. If it gets a little warmer and the sea gets a little higher we > will adapt just as the human race always has, I mean it's not like this is > the first time the climate has changed on us. And back then we didn't have > advanced technology to help us. And even if global warming brings on > disaster all the solutions proposed by those oh so moral environmentalists > would cause far greater disasters. > Buy that cheap tundra while it's still frozen and in a few years it'll be valuable farmland. (a few years is relative) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 08:42:23 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 20:42:23 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 02:21:34 +1200, John Clark wrote: >> > do I have to invoke the the scientific consensus of the day regarding >> the impossibility of heavier than air flight > > > That was an engineering question not a scientific one. Odd could have sworn the story I read mentioned scientists opinion, oh well, maybe the story has become the stuff of urban legend, and every one retells it slightly differently. > I see no proof or even evidence that is happening, people still have a > right to make a fool of themselves. Denying the existence of Dark Energy > and Dark Matter hasn't yet reached the level of foolishness as denying > that > the world is round, but it's getting there. Maybe. So, no love lost on the hybrid gravity-plasma physics guys and girls then? And in a touch of irony perhaps, I caught the NASA announcement on the news the other day that Voyager is now in interstellar space, and they know this because it's instruments detected the presence of a heavy plasma, go figure. And please feel free to skip the crucifixion if that sounds incorrect, this is the same news station that gleefully parrots the BBCs counter-factually wrong AGW propaganda, I don't trust them to correctly report the color of the sky on a clear day. > We know that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity CAN NOT be even > approximately true and correct all the time because at the singularity in > the center of a Black Hole it produces nonsense results, and because it > is > mathematically inconsistent with Quantum Mechanics. Well since you mentioned it, couldn't our hypothetical super advanced alien friends be dumping all their excess IR radiation into a Black Hole? Granted they would have to have a really really good reason to want to do so, but who knows maybe the great interstellar purple people eater is attracted to big dark warm balls in space. From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 17:54:16 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 13:54:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130913151554.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <65642861-8E31-49ED-AC78-EDEB54FF03BD@me.com> <04fc01ceae30$0b3578c0$21a06a40$@att.net> <098801ceae77$ba4294f0$2ec7bed0$@rainier66.com> <09c701ceae79$c2fb0670$48f11350$@att.net> <20130913151554.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > Peak nonbreeder fissible is 2020, That's only 7 years away, did you reach that conclusion because in 2013 uranium is the CHEAPEST it's been since 2006, 7 years ago? I'm not entirely sure that's the correct way to make good predictions. By the way, although it was all the rage not long ago, lately I haven't heard much about peak oil by 2020; is that because in 2012 the USA saw the largest yearly increase in oil production since oil drilling started in 1859? > and there are no safe, affordable breeders. > Thorium breeders are inherently safe, or at least vastly safer than any uranium reactor, breeder or non-breeder. Living next to a thorium power plant would be much more pleasant than living next to a coal powered plant too. And at current rates of consumption we will run out of thorium in the Earth's crust about the same time we run out of solar energy because the sun itself will have run out of fuel. So thorium reactors have just as much right to call themselves "renewable" as solar cells do. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 18:00:16 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 14:00:16 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Why Global Warming Will Be Far Worse, Far Sooner, Than Forecasts Predict In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 5:00 PM, BillK wrote: > David Brin, in his blog, points to an article showing that the IPCC > (already hated by the global warming deniers) has a history of being > far, far too conservative in their warming forecasts, > > > > Quote: > The IPCC process virtually assures that all the research used in the > report will be several years old. Since it only uses peer reviewed > work and a consensus process, it has a long lead-time and a least > common denominator data set. ### The IPCC uses buddy reviewed work, not actual peer review. Just read the Climategate emails, showing collusion to exclude scientists from publishing, to suppress dissenting opinions. This is not how science works, this was pure politics. Also, the IPCC projections have been crudely wrong and grossly exaggerating the signal from even the cherry-picked research they quoted. Brin is laughably off. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 18:29:03 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 14:29:03 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Modes of failure Re: FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: <20130912145038.GT10405@leitl.org> References: <20130912145038.GT10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Historically, availability of cheap energy was always closely > correlated with GNP (however biased the metric) growth. No > known cases of decoupling have been known, so far. ### Yeah, but what is the direction of causation - running out of sources of cheap energy leading to loss of GNP, or rather losing productive capacity due to e.g. barbarians at the gate, who broke the windmills and killed the lumberjacks, leading to, among other things, lower availability of energy. I am pretty sure that usually, and certainly in modern times, the latter was the rule. --------- > > Actually, one of the reasons was insufficient bread. ### Because barbarians slaughtered the peasants, because the corrupt state did not maintain military supremacy. ----------------- A very good area of inquiry is > analysing modes of degradation to identify key points, and reengineer > the structures towards more resilience so that instead of a > contagious, unmanaged collapse cascade stages the now more resilient > system rolls back into defined states, becoming close to antifragile. ### Indeed! And Nassim Taleb is my hero, too. ----------- > > This would not have been necessary, had we acted on time (1970s/1980s). > Now a managed collapse appears a prerequsite for a sustainable > recovery. At this stage, further growth is postponed until we > can tap extraterrestrial resources. We've run out of everything > down here, due to our numbers, and our increased resource use > per capita. ### I don't agree. Native populations in all areas crucial to further technological growth (Europe, North America, China, Japan) are either collapsing (voluntarily) or barely holding. There are more resources than we can use, especially when it comes to energy sources. -------------------- > >> - no state failures despite insane levels of physical damage to >> resources. What if somebody killed the top 10% of population by IQ (as >> happened in Poland)? Still, no major state failure. Did a modern state > > Rebound from war was possible because energy and other resources > were available. UK never really recovered. ### Really? They never managed to discover the structure of DNA? Built the Sinclair? The Concorde? They closed many coal mines in Silesia recently, because there is just too much coal on the market. ---------------- Poland just raided the > retirement pension funds. Germany is a low-wage country relying > on exports, and will collapse if the exports stop coming. ### Low-wage??? --------------- > >> ever fail utterly (i.e. disappeared and was replaced by hordes of >> disorganized savages, not just annexed by another modern state)? I > > The Eastern block never recovered. Southern Europe never > recovered. UK never recovered (as a thought experiment, remove > The City which is largely ficticious, since running on financial > fumes, and run the numbers on what is left -- oops). ### I think Eastern Europe recovered very well. Measured by per capita living space, per capita income in real money, life expectancy, scientific output, you name it, all states in Europe are vastly ahead compared to the time at the end of the war, and still vastly ahead of their pre-war status. -------------- > >> can't think of an example. Sure, there is a first time for everything >> but the absence of failures despite damage levels far exceeding >> anything happening nowadays does put some constraints on the >> likelihood of such failures. > > We don't know the likelihood. There was never a global civilization, > until now. All previous local cultures collapsed, and never recovered > on meaningful time scales. ### We do know a lot. The world was very globalized before WWI, and there was no global collapse despite horrendous losses in the key industrial/scientific engine of the world, Europe, which recovered well, was smashed again in WW II, and then recovered again. Wirtschaftswunder, anybody? Rafal From pharos at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 18:40:09 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 19:40:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Why Global Warming Will Be Far Worse, Far Sooner, Than Forecasts Predict In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > Also, the IPCC projections have been crudely wrong and grossly > exaggerating the signal from even the cherry-picked research they > quoted. Brin is laughably off. > > Makes you wonder how bad it has to get before the global warming deniers start to hesitate. Rolling Stone magazine has a published a new series of articles. Global Warming Is Very Real Scientists are fighting deniers with irrefutable proof the planet is headed for catastrophe Fact-Checking the Global Warming Deniers Beware of these oft-repeated talking points. None of them are true Global Warming's Denier Elite President Obama has vowed to take action to fight global warming. Meet the polluters, politicians and propagandists who?ve vowed to stop him ---------------- BillK From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 19:01:05 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:01:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <20130912143351.GQ10405@leitl.org> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130912143351.GQ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: -- we need about > 1 TW/year effective substition rate, or 1000 new nuclear > reactors/year equivalent for the next 40 years. We're > deploying a factor of 100 too little, ### Because there is not enough thorium? Or because the problem is not so dire as to make bureaucrats worry and people question them (rather than blather about "going green")? If there is a real problem, sitting cold in the dark, a lot of bobos and yuppies will lose their green religion and get their priorities straight, pretty fast. ---------------- > > The real problem is that surplus energy results in adaptive > increase of numbers of potential consumers, while we've been > in serious and accelerating overshoot for last three decades, > cruising on inertia, building up ecological debt. The pressure > within the pressure cooker is building. The safety valve is stuck. > This thing is going to blow. ### Malthus was right on the money most of the time, but it looks like now we are still in a non-Malthusian mode of growth. This may end, if enough stupids evolve to breed on the dole, outstripping the ability of productive humans to feed them. For now however, population growth is a non-issue in all scientifically important areas (JENC - Japan, Europe, North America, China). ----------------------- > >> 500,000,000 years at current usage levels. Isn't this, like, an >> open-and-shut case? > > Many believe that, which is why we're in this situation. ### So you think that e.g. recoverable sources of thorium are not sufficient to power us for tens of thousands of years? Show me your math. ------------------ > This is one of the ubiquitous antipatterns described in the > collapse literature. Fire isn't real until it's burning you. > Once on fire, rational thought completely shuts down and > counterproductive behavior starts. Being poor makes you > measurably more stupid, as most of your energy goes towards > obtaining basic necessities. > ### Yeah, but this is what I am talking about - collapse due to irrational behavior, not due to energy shortages. Aren't we actually talking about roughly the same thing? ---------------- I'm talking > about the CO2 emissions, and the detected outgassing of > methane hydrate clathrates in the permafrost and shelf, > and loss of ice, reduction of ice thickness and reduction > of polar albedo due to loss of reflective ice. All these > mechanisms are happening, and all of them are positive-feedback. ### If there was much more positive feedback left in the system, an apocalyptic global warming would happen every few million years. A bit more CO2 does not change the system substantially, since the greenhouse effect from CO2 is already mostly saturated, and even tripling the concentration would hardly make a difference. ------------------------ > > Ecosystem is not binding CO2 in any relevant numbers, at > least sustainably. Ocean acidification is not preventable. > > Oceans will become marginal sources of food. ### No, ocean acidity varies from place to place, and from time to time, so even if there was a minor shift in pH it would just shift the ecological niches, not sterilize the whole lot. ----------------------- Total food > production is already stalling due to multiple factors. > The bad old times of mass famines and starvation across > poor areas of the world are coming back with a vengeance. ### Collapse in poor areas does not significantly affect the survival of the industrial civilization. Just in case you wonder, I am not inhuman. Perhaps I am just incautious enough to articulate an ugly truth we all know. Rafal From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 19:11:02 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:11:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <5233525E.5030003@libero.it> References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> <5233525E.5030003@libero.it> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > >> ?In the next six months, homebuilders in California and the >> expensive-energy states will be going solar as a standard, and just >> incorporating it into the cost of the house like any other feature,? >> Jim Petersen, chief executive officer of the PetersenDean Inc., the >> largest closely held U.S. roofing and solar contractor, said in an >> interview. > > Mandated wastes? > Or just a way to keep low income minorities outside the town? ### Mirco, you hit the nail on the head - whenever you see a bureaucrat or a crony capitalist spouting green propaganda, there is some mean, nasty reason behind it. Keeping the wrong people out of town is one of them. Making a quick buck off the backs of the defenseless homeowners is another. Rafal From spike66 at att.net Sat Sep 14 19:04:10 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 12:04:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Why Global Warming Will Be Far Worse, Far Sooner, Than Forecasts Predict In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <012001ceb17d$324c1b80$96e45280$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 7:00 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >>... Also, the IPCC projections have been crudely wrong and grossly > exaggerating the signal from even the cherry-picked research they > quoted. Brin is laughably off... >...Makes you wonder how bad it has to get before the global warming deniers start to hesitate...BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, this is one of those fields of science which has been and is being ever more mired in a morass of political corruption, which is obscuring the signal. The notion of global action to counter climate change is championed by the current US administration, which is showing itself to be perhaps the very most corrupt and incompetent in American history, with the IRS scandal growing by the day. >From a purely scientific point of view, it is very clear that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising. It is very clear that carbon dioxide does transmit high frequency EM radiation and trap lower frequencies. From the well-known spectrum of the sun and the spectrum reflected by the earth's surface, it is a fairly easy top level calculation if we settle for single digit precision, to see that increasing carbon dioxide will increase global atmospheric temperatures, even after we take into account Boltzmann's equation. All this is really just college sophomore level physics, beyond reasonable refutation. The oddball fluctuations, such as this year's mysteriously absent Atlantic hurricanes, are just noise, obscuring the long term signal. Even then, missing hurricanes would not have obscured the signal as much, had not the global warming scientists insisted that global warming would necessarily mean more and bigger hurricanes (we don't know that.) But it seems in every case the paths to reversing the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are self-defeating. Germany has invested heavily in ground based solar. That country has plenty of money but is otherwise inherently ill-suited for that technology: not enough sun, not enough clear sky, not enough ground area. The nations best suited for ground based solar, such as the Saharan Desert nations, have plenty of sun, plenty of ground, plenty of clear skies, few environmentalists, but not enough money. The USA has money and plenty of sunny desert, but we also have a powerful environmental lobby to stop our blanketing the desert southwest with ground based solar. The best solution that I can think of is if American, Russian and German venture capitalists offer to buy most of Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco and Libya, then blanket that vast unoccupied land with ground based solar, the power from which is used to do biomass to liquid fuels, which will be worth a fortune. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 19:22:41 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:22:41 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Eternity in six hours: intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 7:06 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > Space is REALLY big. It seems hard to see intelligence from REALLY far > off. > It depends on how intelligent it is and how long it's been around, we're not very intelligent and haven't been here for long. > I mean how close would you have to be to be able to detect our > intelligence. > You'd have to be pretty close to detect our intelligence, but we've only been making computers for about 70 years and the universe is 13.8 billion years old. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Sep 14 19:24:15 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 15:24:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Why Global Warming Will Be Far Worse, Far Sooner, Than Forecasts Predict In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 2:40 PM, BillK wrote: > Makes you wonder how bad it has to get before the global warming > deniers start to hesitate. > > > > Rolling Stone magazine has a published a new series of articles. > > > Global Warming Is Very Real > Scientists are fighting deniers with irrefutable proof the planet is > headed for catastrophe > > > Fact-Checking the Global Warming Deniers > Beware of these oft-repeated talking points. None of them are true > > > Global Warming's Denier Elite > President Obama has vowed to take action to fight global warming. Meet > the polluters, politicians and propagandists who?ve vowed to stop him ### Nazi propaganda was getting more and more shrill close to the end. The AGW story is distinctly 20th century now. You are listening to the epigones. Try http://www.climatedepot.com/ as an antidote. Rafal PS. Don't invoke Godwin's law. You wrote "denier" first. From spike66 at att.net Sat Sep 14 21:10:55 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 14:10:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: References: <000901cead57$d42704d0$7c750e70$@att.net> <20130911170137.GO10405@leitl.org> <20130911193700.GS10405@leitl.org> <5233525E.5030003@libero.it> Message-ID: <016901ceb18e$e781a9f0$b684fdd0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Subject: Re: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > >>... ?In the next six months, homebuilders in California and the >> ...expensive-energy states will be going solar as a standard... >>... Or just a way to keep low income minorities outside the town? No. Excluding low income people has nothing to do with race. The race hustlers have sold that concept with appalling success. I can assure you, everywhere I have ever lived, racial minorities are welcome, so long as they have and make a ton of money. Poor people are welcome nowhere, utterly regardless of their race. >...### Mirco, you hit the nail on the head - whenever you see a bureaucrat or a crony capitalist spouting green propaganda, there is some mean, nasty reason behind it. Keeping the wrong people out of town is one of them. Making a quick buck off the backs of the defenseless homeowners is another. Rafal _______________________________________________ As a possibly unrelated aside, consider the case of a local neighborhood that was built in the late 1970s, when energy-conservation subsidies were plentiful. Then, as now, rooftop solar water heating makes more sense than rooftop solar power generation, even if natural gas is available, so the local builder put up those water heaters on all the houses in an enormous tract shack development and collected the available subsidies for doing so. Granted the Silicon Valley is in many ways an oddball special case, where the land the house sits on is far and away more valuable than the structure. In that case, rooftop solar and water heating makes perfect sense, however... Rooftop solar requires a heated water storage tank, which must be indoors, or at least inside the garage. Reasoning: we use hot water in the morning, when we shower. The hot water usage at any other time is negligible compared to that surge in hot water use. To take advantage of solar water heating, a tank is needed to store the water heated during the day, to feed the gas water heater in the morning. This tank takes up a lot of garage space, and since indoor space is very expensive, most of the homeowners removed the storage tank as soon as they moved into the new house, decommissioning those expensive rooftop solar water heaters. I have a friend who lives in that neighborhood. He has asked a number of neighbors, and has found not one who still has rooftop solar water heating, even though it is still to this day the low hanging fruit as far as energy use of rooftop space. Again citing the oddball case of the Silicon Valley, anyone who lives down here and can afford the outrageous crazy high real estate prices or rent will never notice a few dollars worth of savings on the utility bills. Back to Rafal's original point, the mean, nasty motive of keeping minorities out of certain neighborhoods. I do disagree. If people have and make a lot of money, they are automatically good neighbors full stop. They can be any color, black, white, green, purple or chartreuse, no problem, we will not even notice or care. If you have money, you are welcome here and everywhere. No money, not welcome anywhere. As a parting shot, we in the Silicon Valley are seeing more and more cases where the neighbor isn't even human, it is money. Chinese businessmen are storing wealth outside China, which is technically still communist. A good way to do that is to buy a home in California, specifically Silicon Valley where a lot of money can be stored in the form of a piece of ground with any flimsy excuse for a house sitting on it. I can show you examples of local homes which have been purchased, curtains installed, the lawn meticulously maintained by the local illegal Mexican population, a car sitting in the driveway, but no one has lived in the home since it was purchased, which may have been years ago. No one lives there, but anyone can look up the owner, clearly a Chinese person who has never been seen. Neighborhoods around here are gradually getting more sparsely populated as the Chinese quietly buy up local real estate. Their money is most welcome here, for they pay local taxes without running up any bills for municipal services. If the Chinese commies decide to crack down on capitalism, the homeowner will likely flee to here, and will be welcomed with open arms. spike From painlord2k at libero.it Sat Sep 14 21:25:56 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 23:25:56 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Modes of failure Re: FW: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good In-Reply-To: References: <20130912145038.GT10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5234D464.6070601@libero.it> Il 14/09/2013 20:29, Rafal Smigrodzki ha scritto: > On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > --------- >> >> Actually, one of the reasons was insufficient bread. > > ### Because barbarians slaughtered the peasants, because the corrupt > state did not maintain military supremacy. > ----------------- Actually the corrupt state taxed the peasants so much the run out to live with the barbarians, then the barbarians had a lot of bread and the empire a lot less. >> This would not have been necessary, had we acted on time (1970s/1980s). >> Now a managed collapse appears a prerequsite for a sustainable >> recovery. At this stage, further growth is postponed until we >> can tap extraterrestrial resources. We've run out of everything >> down here, due to our numbers, and our increased resource use >> per capita. > ### I don't agree. Native populations in all areas crucial to further > technological growth (Europe, North America, China, Japan) are either > collapsing (voluntarily) or barely holding. There are more resources > than we can use, especially when it comes to energy sources. > Poland just raided the >> retirement pension funds. Germany is a low-wage country relying >> on exports, and will collapse if the exports stop coming. > > ### Low-wage??? > --------------- This is entirely on the eye of the beholder. They are paid low wages compared with their productivity, but high wages compared to what, for example, earn Italians with the same job and the same productivity in Italy (because in Italy the government take half of the check). > ### I think Eastern Europe recovered very well. Measured by per capita > living space, per capita income in real money, life expectancy, > scientific output, you name it, all states in Europe are vastly ahead > compared to the time at the end of the war, and still vastly ahead of > their pre-war status. > -------------- In fact, in the last few years, a lot of Romanians have packed and returned in Romania. Unfortunately, they were the most productive workers. The low life instead prefer to stay in Western Europe, because in their home country they have no qualms to throw them in jail and beat the crap out of them when they are caught robbing, killing or stealing and no welfare for them, if they have no honest job. > ### We do know a lot. The world was very globalized before WWI, and > there was no global collapse despite horrendous losses in the key > industrial/scientific engine of the world, Europe, which recovered > well, was smashed again in WW II, and then recovered again. > Wirtschaftswunder, anybody? Mirco From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 15 17:40:54 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 18:40:54 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Dismantling the surveillance state Message-ID: Bruce Schneier has a piece on redesigning the internet, Also published in The Guardian newspaper. Quotes: Government and industry have betrayed the Internet, and us. By subverting the Internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations. Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? To the engineers, I say this: we built the Internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it. ---------------- BillK From rtomek at ceti.pl Sun Sep 15 18:17:17 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 20:17:17 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: <20130910094240.GE10405@leitl.org> References: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> <20130909153809.GA10405@leitl.org> <522E6626.6070203@canonizer.com> <20130910094240.GE10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, 10 Sep 2013, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 06:21:58PM -0600, Brent Allsop wrote: > > > You indicated knowing who the experts is the problem. But at > > Canonizer.com it isn't. At Canonizer.com anyone can pick any It's really easy to know experts, they tend to advertise themselves. But I'd like to know who pays them, this would've been a valuable information. There were experts and scientists working in Tobacco Institute, who proved with plenty of experimental data that smoking and cancer were unrelated. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute ] This pitiful (AFAIK) act ended 40 years later not because there was some kind of public call but more likely because health care could no longer be provided on required level, and the gov (acting on behalf of interested parties... erm.. voters I mean) stepped in. Just MHO, as usually. Sooo... So much about experts. They belong to the hand that feeds them. [...] > You don't know what a hateful conversation really is. > I'm blunt and abrasive, but I'm not hateful. Whoa, Eugen. The more I know you, the more I like you. [...] > I did that when I thought it would make a difference. I'm both > stupid *and* stubborn, so sue me. The only bad thing I find about you is that you're not a woman. [...] > If I had many people agree with me I'd knew I'd be dead wrong, > and need to radically change the whole approach. Alternatively, that you lived on a planet inhabited by non-humans. Non homo sapiens sapiens. Too much or not enough sapiens, and see where we are, knee deep in television. [...] > > doubt their claims of 'expert consensus'. > > Here's news: you don't matter. This list doesn't matter. > Even if a large fraction of the population would be doing the > right thing it will only postpone the reckoning a little. > There might be a solution, even now. Just grab this puny civilisation with iron fist and impose changes to its ways. Unfortunately, it seems iron fists have ugly, ugly side effects. And they tend to be implemented by morons who think they understand it (and they end up washing blood from ugly side of the fist so it looks nicer) and by those who claim that "one milion/bilion bodies, not a big dealion". This, of course, assuming we are going to the cliff. We may, indeed. OTOH, the peak/global memes are great advertisers, just like y2k was. So what we, or at least I, have access to is advertisements. I'm not sure if it's possible to get sense out of them, even with few tons of logic. Heck, this email is advertisement, too. Whatever I sell, don't buy. I mean, really, when I tell to not buy, then don't. Now, go and buy :-). Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 16 01:01:51 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 18:01:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Dismantling the surveillance state In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004101ceb278$54e55b60$feb01220$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK >...To the engineers, I say this: we built the Internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it. BillK ---------------- _______________________________________________ Agree. How? spike From kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com Mon Sep 16 05:41:56 2013 From: kgh1kgh2 at gmail.com (Kevin G Haskell) Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 01:41:56 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Leaked- IPCC's upcoming 5th assessment:THIS IS THE END! (...of AGW Alarmism) Message-ID: > I bring good tidings. >Not sure who's heard about the leaks from the IPCC from their upcoming climate assesment on Sept 27th, but they are apparently sharply toning down their AGW alarmist predictions, if not outright ending them. >If so, we will have to end with the scare-mongering, negativity, and profiteering, right? >To paraphrase General Douglas MacArthur: "Old AGW alarmists never die, they (should) just fade away." (Or at least their dire need to make it a 'serious' issue worth discussing.) :) >Kevin http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324549004579067532485712464 @KevinGHaskell -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Sep 16 05:53:15 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 22:53:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: References: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> <20130909153809.GA10405@leitl.org> <522E6626.6070203@canonizer.com> <20130910094240.GE10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > There might be a solution, even now. Just grab this puny civilisation with > iron fist and impose changes to its ways. Unfortunately, it seems iron > fists have ugly, ugly side effects. And they tend to be implemented by > morons who think they understand it (and they end up washing blood from > ugly side of the fist so it looks nicer) and by those who claim that "one > milion/bilion bodies, not a big dealion". > One problem with that is: how can you make sure you are not one of said morons? ...and then, how can you make sure while still maintaining power? Many of the ways to check seem to involve exposing yourself to attacks from people who are really good at seizing power but awful at responsibly using it. This is not an easy problem. If it was, it would've been solved already. It is true that many who attain power never think to ask themselves this - but some do. Enough of them do, combined with the naturally high visibility of national leaders, that any simple but reliable solution would have made itself evident already. I've thought of a few ways to approach a solution, but first I'd like to make sure I've stated the problem well enough that it's clearly understood. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Mon Sep 16 14:37:24 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 10:37:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Geek parents Message-ID: <201309161534.r8GFXi2e017955@yee.zia.io> I'm trying to decide if this is cool or insane. But it is familiar: When I was a newborn, my physicist mother measured the accuracy of her implementation of the applyDiaper algorithm with a ruler. Which I know because her non-geek relatives have been telling that story ever since. -- David. From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Sep 17 00:20:12 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 02:20:12 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] How to make progress (was Re: Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?) In-Reply-To: References: <20130906220607.GD29404@leitl.org> <20130907185223.GC29404@leitl.org> <522B8C48.7070703@canonizer.com> <20130907210054.GK29404@leitl.org> <522BA069.6070107@canonizer.com> <20130909153809.GA10405@leitl.org> <522E6626.6070203@canonizer.com> <20130910094240.GE10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, 15 Sep 2013, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > There might be a solution, even now. Just grab this puny civilisation > > with iron fist and impose changes to its ways. Unfortunately, it seems > > iron fists have ugly, ugly side effects. And they tend to be > > implemented by morons who think they understand it (and they end up > > washing blood from ugly side of the fist so it looks nicer) and by > > those who claim that "one milion/bilion bodies, not a big dealion". > > > > One problem with that is: how can you make sure you are not one of said > morons? This is easy to answer - I am THE moron. One of the two mentioned above. Or both, or some uncategorized kind, depending on circumstances. At least, I assume so based on some empirical data. Thanks to some well-timed chain of events, I have been isolated from decision making. Which is why my dreams, especially those about creating swamps by soaking soil with boold, are going to stay in my head, never to be materialized, just like is the case with the rest of the people. > ...and then, how can you make sure while still maintaining power? Many > of the ways to check seem to involve exposing yourself to attacks from > people who are really good at seizing power but awful at responsibly > using it. > > This is not an easy problem. If it was, it would've been solved > already. It is true that many who attain power never think to ask > themselves this - but some do. Enough of them do, combined with the > naturally high visibility of national leaders, that any simple but > reliable solution would have made itself evident already. > > I've thought of a few ways to approach a solution, but first I'd like to > make sure I've stated the problem well enough that it's clearly > understood. The question I'd like to ask is not about finding the right people. I assume there is no such breed. So, how to get the wrong people and lock them in such system, that will produce good even if they fail to be good, which is to be expected sooner or later (rather, sooner). Why such question? Well, because millenia of putting "right people" in the "right places" have not got us very far. Two steps forward, one step backward, and then suddenly discover we are marching inside a threadmill. It would have been a sign of madness to repeat this and expect different outcomes. I'd also like to answer this question, but for a while I am stuck. I guess I am too stupid or too lazy or too distracted... Emocracy somehow delivers, although see above, compare madness-voting relation. It is possible that building such a thing from humans alone is not doable. It is possible we could do it if we had time to develop some cybernetic solution, but 1) previous such attempts went bonk AFAIK 2) we have unprecized amount of time, ranging from a decade to a century. It is thus impossible to bet on a future because one has to assume that data we base our bets on has been manipulated (because, why not). For me, building iron fist from humans (homo s.s.) is pure fantasy. In a grim setup, I'd expect it to be used by a nomen-omen fistful of players to improve their life expectancy and nothing else. But you know what, it is possible to do at least small things. I will send another email in a newyorkean minute. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Sep 17 00:44:58 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 02:44:58 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts Message-ID: (It's about special food used for treatment accute malnutrition. According to UNICEF, there are millions - 6.9 in 2011 - preventable children death each year. Fortunately, the number dropped 50% from 12 mln in 1990. Preventable means, lack of vaccine which cost less than about 0.1 green alone or less than 1 green with portable fridge for transporting more of it, longer distance. For more details, see "UNICEF Annual Report 2012", http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_69639.html . I have quite a few of my own problems, probably bigger than most of readers, but I have just bought a month, maybe two worth of this Plumpy. It's easy, they welcome any money at unicef.org - or, go find your regional office's website. So, I am sure you can easily beat me at this stunt, or forward this to your innumerable buddies, challenging them in my name - TR) [ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/plumpynut-the-lifesaver-that-costs-well-peanuts-8783650.html ] (... links deleted ...) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts A nut paste used as a home-grown weapon in Africa's struggle against acute child malnutrition goes global [92]Sarah Morrison Author Biography [93][Morrison.jpg] Sarah Morrison Sarah Morrison is a general reporter at The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. [94]More articles from this journalist [95]Follow Sarah Morrison Sunday 25 August 2013 [96]Print Your friend's email address ____________________ Your email address ____________________ Send Reset Note: We do not store your email address(es) but your IP address will be logged to prevent abuse of this feature. Please read our [97]Legal Terms & Policies [98]A [99]A [100]A [101]Email [v234-Kenyav1.jpg] [102][v234-Kenyav1.jpg] Related articles * [103]Almost a billion go hungry worldwide * [104]Peanuts no more as crop price soars * [105]Malnutrition costing the world trillions a year, says UN report * [106]Dr John Sentamu: World leaders need to show more ambition in tackling hunger * [107]Islamists hit famine relief Suggested Topics * [108]Nuts And Seeds * [109]Minerals * [110]Cooking Fats * [111]Energy * [112]Malnutrition * [113]Food * [114]Sugar * [115]Vitamins It was dubbed the wonder product that "may just be the most important advance ever" when it comes to battling acute child hunger. Now the life-saving peanut paste, first trialled during a famine in Niger eight years ago, is reaching two million of the world's most severely malnourished children a year. The beauty of Plumpy'Nut, which was once said to be as important as the discovery of penicillin, is in its simplicity. The high-energy peanut-based paste, invented by a crusading French paediatrician, includes skimmed milk powder, sugar, vegetable fat and vitamins and minerals. It does not need clean water to swallow; it does not need to be cooked or refrigerated, and it stays fresh after opening. It can also be given to any child in the most advanced stage of malnutrition, anywhere, by anyone. Experts say the paste has "radically" changed the care of severely malnourished children in developing countries. Importantly, it has allowed them to be treated in their homes, rather than in hospitals, and it has "drastically" reduced their mortality rates. Now, with increased supply in the developing world, experts suggest that Plumpy'Nut, alongside generic versions of the product, could become Africa's "home-grown" cure for severe acute malnutrition. It could even, they add, be used to prevent it. This is no small feat: malnutrition is a major killer of children under five, accounting for around one million deaths annually, but affecting an estimated 20 million children worldwide. Unicef, the world's biggest buyer of high-energy peanut paste, bought enough last year to feed two million children, a 15-fold increase over the past eight years, and the highest amount on record. Nearly half of that came from African suppliers. For Jan Komrska, a contracts specialist at Unicef's nutrition unit, reaching the two-million-children-a-year mark was a "milestone". He added that the actual figure is likely to be even higher, as Unicef and other NGOs account only for 80 per cent of total sales. "It's the highest number of children we have ever reached and we want to keep it at that level," he told the IoS. He added that Unicef had been working to "motivate manufacturers to open sites in Africa", so that the product can be produced in the countries where it is used. There was just one supplier producing the paste in 2005; now, there are 19 Unicef-approved producers in countries with some of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world - including Sudan, Haiti, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, India and Niger. Six of the factories in Africa are franchises of the French company Nutriset, producing Plumpy'Nut, while five produce generic versions. Three were approved in 2012 alone. Things have changed radically since 2005, when the Plumpy'Nut paste was marketed by Nutriset. It was first given to around 60,000 children with severe acute malnutrition during the famine in Niger. Ninety per cent recovered completely. Within two years, the World Health Organisation gave the product its seal of approval. During the famine in the Horn of Africa two years ago, around 240,000 children were fed Plumpy'Nut. Now, the product is patented in 38 countries across the world. And despite patent battles - two American NGOs unsuccessfully fought for the right to overturn the company's patent in 2010, arguing that it hindered them from making a similar and cheaper paste - the supply is increasing. Nutriset set up a franchise and now works with producers in 11 countries in Africa, Asia and America. Just over 40 per cent of its product now comes from abroad. And while the company argues that its patent supports local production and "protect[s] them from major competitors", generic pastes have also been made in countries such as India and South Africa. Ismael Barmou, 32, is the deputy executive director of the only Plumpy'Nut factory in Niger, which opened three years ago. It is estimated that this year, the factory, which employs more than 90 people, will produce enough paste to treat 300,000 cases of severe acute malnutrition. Mr Barmou said that having a locally made product is essential to combating malnutrition. "If you import peanut paste to Niger, it takes about three months to reach us. We look at the projections of what is needed for children, and we work to that," he said. "This peanut paste is incredible. It can turn the balance from a negative curve to the kid being back almost to normal; that is amazing." For Meera Shekar, the World Bank's lead health specialist for Africa, the paste could very well be a "home-grown solution" to severe acute malnutrition, so long as local ownership and production increases and the advantages of economies of scale are seized. It currently costs around $50 (?30) to treat a child for up to two months. If the price is lowered, Ms Shekar believes it could be used as a "preventative" as well as a cure. [116]More in Africa ? Independent Comment Please enable JavaScript to view the [117]comments powered by Disqus. [118]blog comments powered by Disqus Top stories Armed police prepare to enter the Washington Navy Yard as they respond to a shooting in Washington [119]US Navy massacre: At least 12 shot dead by gunmen at Washington military site (... links deleted ...) References 92. http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/sarah-morrison 93. http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/sarah-morrison 94. http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/sarah-morrison 95. http://www.twitter.com/S_R_Morrison 96. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/plumpynut-the-lifesaver-that-costs-well-peanuts-8783650.html 97. http://www.independent.co.uk/service/legal-terms-amp-policies-759573.html 98. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/plumpynut-the-lifesaver-that-costs-well-peanuts-8783650.html 99. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/plumpynut-the-lifesaver-that-costs-well-peanuts-8783650.html 100. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/plumpynut-the-lifesaver-that-costs-well-peanuts-8783650.html 101. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/plumpynut-the-lifesaver-that-costs-well-peanuts-8783650.html 102. http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8783733.ece/ALTERNATES/w460/v234-Kenyav1.jpg 103. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/almost-a-billion-go-hungry-worldwide-8007759.html 104. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/peanuts-no-more-as-crop-price-soars-6282964.html 105. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/malnutrition-costing-the-world-trillions-a-year-says-un-report-8644674.html 106. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dr-john-sentamu-world-leaders-need-to-show-more-ambition-in-tackling-hunger-7763950.html 107. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/islamists-hit-famine-relief-6264628.html 108. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/NutsAndSeeds 109. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Minerals 110. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/CookingFats 111. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Energy 112. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Malnutrition 113. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Food 114. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Sugar 115. http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Vitamins 116. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/ 117. http://disqus.com/?ref_noscript 118. http://disqus.com/ From mbb386 at main.nc.us Tue Sep 17 00:38:41 2013 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 20:38:41 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Geek parents In-Reply-To: <201309161534.r8GFXi2e017955@yee.zia.io> References: <201309161534.r8GFXi2e017955@yee.zia.io> Message-ID: <1fb59ef5a3294bff90ccebf9b2ab21da.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> > > We think it is hilarious. About the time they think they have a schedule the child will go through a growth spurt, all will change, settle into a new routine, and then suddenly shift once more. At least that's how it was for us. Night times remained a challenge for everyone, and the mom complained bitterly that naptimes were all too short. The dilemma of "work while the child sleeps" or "sleep while the child sleeps" was never solved to anyone's satisfaction. However, both kids are now independent adults! Success! :) Regards, MB From sparge at gmail.com Tue Sep 17 13:15:57 2013 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 09:15:57 -0400 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 8:44 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > (It's about special food used for treatment accute malnutrition. According > to UNICEF, there are millions - 6.9 in 2011 - preventable children death > each year. Fortunately, the number dropped 50% from 12 mln in 1990. > Preventable means, lack of vaccine which cost less than about 0.1 green > alone or less than 1 green with portable fridge for transporting more of > it, longer distance. For more details, see "UNICEF Annual Report 2012", > http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_69639.html . I have quite a few > of my own problems, probably bigger than most of readers, but I have just > bought a month, maybe two worth of this Plumpy. It's easy, they welcome > any money at unicef.org - or, go find your regional office's website. So, > I am sure you can easily beat me at this stunt, or forward this to your > innumerable buddies, challenging them in my name - TR) >From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05Plumpy-t.html?_r=2&hp& "Plumpy?nut is also a brand name, however, the registered trademark of Nutriset, a private French company that first manufactured and marketed the paste. It was not the intention of Plumpy?nut?s inventor, a crusading pediatrician named Andr? Briend, to create an industry around Plumpy?nut. Briend, his friends say, was always personally indifferent to money. (Also, apparently, to publicity ? he declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.) One element of genius in Briend?s recipe was precisely its easy replicability: it could be made by poor people, for poor people, to the benefit of patients and farmers alike. Most of the world?s peanuts are grown in developing countries, where allergies to them are relatively uncommon, and the rest of the concoction is simple to prepare. On a visit to Malawi, Briend whipped up a batch in a blender to prove that Plumpy?nut could be made just about anywhere. Others, however, quickly realized that the miracle product had more than just moral value. Nutriset has aggressively protected its intellectual property, and the bulk of Plumpy?nut production continues to take place at Nutriset facilities in France. (Unicef, the world?s primary buyer, purchases 90 percent of its supply from that factory, according to a 2009 report prepared for the agency.) Internationally, there has been a vituperative debate over who should control the means of production, with India going so far as to impose sharp restrictions on Plumpy?nut, calling it an unproven colonialist import. Elsewhere, local producers are simply ignoring the patent. In Haiti, two manufacturers are making products similar to Plumpy?nut independently of Nutriset: one is Partners in Health, the charity co-founded by the prominent global-health activist Paul Farmer. Partners in Health harvests peanuts from a 30-acre farm or buys them from a cooperative of 200 smallholders. It?s planning to build a larger factory, but for now the nuts are taken to the main hospital in Cange, where women sort them in straw baskets, roast them over an outside gas burner, run them through a hand grinder and mix all the ingredients into a paste that is poured into reusable plastic canisters. Peanuts in Haiti and throughout the developing world have a high incidence of aflatoxin, a fungus that can sicken children, especially fragile ones. But Partners in Health says the product, which it calls Nourimanba, is safe." It's unfortunate that a product like this is burdened with a (probably overly broad) patent. It's basically fortified peanut butter, which isn't really a new idea. It's also unfortunate that the patent owner "has aggressively protected its intellectual property". It certainly makes people less likely to donate to Unicef. -Dave From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Sep 17 15:32:42 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 11:32:42 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A important step toward a topological quantum computer Message-ID: A topological insulator is a substance that is a insulator in its interior but a conductor on its surface. In the current issue of Nature Eryin Wang announced that he has found a topological insulator that not only conducts but superconducts, and at high (liquid nitrogen) temperatures! The reason this is important is that this is the perfect place to look for the holy grail of quantum computer research, non-abelian anyons. Computer designers love anyons because these quasi-particles would be far far less susceptible to quantum decoherence than regular particles. If anyons are found a large scale practical quantum computer can't be far behind, and that will change the world. http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2013/09/16/fault-tolerant-quantum-computing/ John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 17 15:50:19 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 08:50:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] A important step toward a topological quantum computer In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <010f01ceb3bd$9cd5ef20$d681cd60$@att.net> On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: [ExI] A important step toward a topological quantum computer >.A topological insulator is a substance that is a insulator in its interior but a conductor on its surface. If anyons are found a large scale practical quantum computer can't be far behind, and that will change the world. http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2013/09/16/fault-tolerant-quantum- computing/ John K Clark Is this a great time to be alive, or what? {8-] spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Tue Sep 17 16:16:17 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 10:16:17 -0600 Subject: [ExI] A important step toward a topological quantum computer In-Reply-To: <010f01ceb3bd$9cd5ef20$d681cd60$@att.net> References: <010f01ceb3bd$9cd5ef20$d681cd60$@att.net> Message-ID: Yea, far better than any of the previous billion years. But complete hellish,drudgery, shit compared to what things will be like in 25 years. Brent Allsop On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 9:50 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > ** ** > > * * > > *On Behalf Of *John Clark > *Subject:* [ExI] A important step toward a topological quantum computer*** > * > > ** ** > > >?A topological insulator is a substance that is a insulator in its > interior but a conductor on its surface? If anyons are found a large > scale practical quantum computer can't be far behind, and that will change > the world. > > > http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2013/09/16/fault-tolerant-quantum-computing/ > **** > > John K Clark**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > Is this a great time to be alive, or what?**** > > ** ** > > {8-]**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Tue Sep 17 19:51:53 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 21:51:53 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, 17 Sep 2013, Dave Sill wrote: > On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 8:44 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > > (It's about special food used for treatment accute malnutrition. According > > to UNICEF, there are millions - 6.9 in 2011 - preventable children death > > each year. Fortunately, the number dropped 50% from 12 mln in 1990. > > Preventable means, lack of vaccine which cost less than about 0.1 green > > alone or less than 1 green with portable fridge for transporting more of > > it, longer distance. For more details, see "UNICEF Annual Report 2012", > > http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_69639.html . I have quite a few > > of my own problems, probably bigger than most of readers, but I have just > > bought a month, maybe two worth of this Plumpy. It's easy, they welcome > > any money at unicef.org - or, go find your regional office's website. So, > > I am sure you can easily beat me at this stunt, or forward this to your > > innumerable buddies, challenging them in my name - TR) > > >From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05Plumpy-t.html?_r=2&hp& > [...] > It's unfortunate that a product like this is burdened with a (probably > overly broad) patent. It's basically fortified peanut butter, which > isn't really a new idea. It's also unfortunate that the patent owner > "has aggressively protected its intellectual property". It certainly > makes people less likely to donate to Unicef. > > -Dave OK, this is somehow valid objection. I considered it briefly, yesterday, but then decided to donate and marked the goal as "UNICEF decides", there were few examples of what could be purchased by what kind of money - like this and this much water purification tablets, first aid kits and the like. I choose few first aid kits which roughly translate to about 6 weeks of one child's life on Plumpy or to about 1000 polio vaccines. I hope the money will be spent wisely because they don't hang on hook in a toilet here. If the guys decide to feed hunger victim with patented life saving product, so be it. If they decide to finance making of generic equivalent of the said product, when they have such an option, so be it and to hell with patents. Or if they want, then why not vaccinate a thousand children or give a village year's worth load of water purifiers. If you were swimming in the open seas, would you want to be thrown a generic safety raft or just a raft? From certain point of view, and in certain situations, patent issues are... interesting. But they are not important. I bet you wouldn't want to wait until there was possibility to 3d print opensourced raft, using only renewables and ecologically grown materials, then transport them to you with help of likewise 3dp/os solar powered plane. Of course I realize this is not going to stop anything, actually those money of mine were small, eh, peanuts given scale of things. A year or two from now I'll read about preventable deaths again, but this time it would be diffent because I would know I helped. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From sparge at gmail.com Tue Sep 17 20:35:00 2013 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 16:35:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > If you were swimming in the open seas, would you want to be thrown a > generic safety raft or just a raft? I would accept whatever is offered, of course. The patent issue really only comes into play when the raft is purchased. If the rescue service is soliciting donations to buy rafts, donors may well care whether the rafts are produced by for-profit ventures or by non-profits. It could be that rafts produced by the for-profit makers are a better value, but donors may still balk at the idea of a portion of their donation going toward the CEO's Porsche payment. If Plumpy'nut were produced by an entity that *didn't* enforce intellectual property rights on others who want to produce similar products (locally and more cheaply) then more starving people could be saved at less cost. That kind of pisses me off and makes me not want to support them. -Dave From dan_ust at yahoo.com Wed Sep 18 00:10:35 2013 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 17:10:35 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] A important step toward a topological quantum computer In-Reply-To: <010f01ceb3bd$9cd5ef20$d681cd60$@att.net> References: <010f01ceb3bd$9cd5ef20$d681cd60$@att.net> Message-ID: <1379463035.94934.YahooMailNeo@web126203.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Tuesday, September 17, 2013 8:50 AM spike wrote: > On Behalf Of John Clark > >>?A topological insulator is a substance that is a insulator in its interior but a conductor on its surface? >> If anyons are found a large scale practical quantum computer can't be far behind, and that will change the world. >> http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2013/09/16/fault-tolerant-quantum-computing/ > > Is this a great time to be alive, or what? > > {8-] Indeed, but we all want to be alive not just now but to see what comes next and after that -- and, hopefully, to be not just spectators but participants. Regards, Dan ?See my latest Kindle-published story "Succession": http://www.amazon.com/Succession-ebook/dp/B00F02DLNG (Also available in other Kindle stores -- UK, Germany, India, etc.) From dan_ust at yahoo.com Wed Sep 18 00:21:02 2013 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 17:21:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1379463662.501.YahooMailNeo@web126201.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Just allow open immigration and free trade in food and most of this problem -- hunger -- will go away, IMO. Or it will become so miniscule that a few donations, even to people with patents on peanut snacks, will deal with what remains. ? Regards, Dan ?See my latest Kindle story at: http://www.amazon.com/Succession-ebook/dp/B00F02DLNG/ And see my other Kindle story at: http://www.amazon.com/Residue-ebook/dp/B00BS3T0RM/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Sep 18 02:48:53 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 22:48:53 -0400 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Dan wrote: > Just allow open immigration and free trade in food and most of this problem > -- hunger -- will go away, IMO. Or it will become so miniscule that a few > donations, even to people with patents on peanut snacks, will deal with what > remains. ### I am quite mystified by this comment. Free trade in food may somewhat alleviate hunger among the poor. Historically, persistent, endemic hunger was typical of governed Malthusian societies, such as imperial China, and modern locations where hunger persists fit this description. Improved access to food from external sources could plausibly reduce the death toll from hunger, although it might result in compensatory increases in violence due to increased population densities. However, I cannot imagine how open immigration (I am assuming, open immigration to the industrialized world) could mitigate hunger. Those who are rich enough to emigrate do not suffer hunger. Since Malthusian societies can generate immense numbers of new humans in a short period of time, any reductions in pressure on agricultural resources achieved by emigration would almost immediately be canceled by population growth. So, again, how is immigration supposed to end hunger? Rafal From bbenzai at yahoo.com Wed Sep 18 13:57:32 2013 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 06:57:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1379512652.86675.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Dave Sill > On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: >> >> If you were swimming in the open seas, would you want to be thrown a >> generic safety raft or just a raft? > > I would accept whatever is offered, of course. The patent issue really > only comes into play when the raft is purchased. If the rescue service > is soliciting donations to buy rafts, donors may well care whether the > rafts are produced by for-profit ventures or by non-profits. It could > be that rafts produced by the for-profit makers are a better value, > but donors may still balk at the idea of a portion of their donation > going toward the CEO's Porsche payment. > > If Plumpy'nut were produced by an entity that *didn't* enforce > intellectual property rights on others who want to produce similar > products (locally and more cheaply) then more starving people could be > saved at less cost. That kind of pisses me off and makes me not want > to support them. Exactly.? The point is not 'what do you prefer?' but 'what is it possible to get?' Patents on things like this are not immoral because they reduce people's choices, but because they kill.? It's not "Which kind of life-raft would you prefer?", it's "can you afford this life-raft, which is the only one available?".? "What's that you say?? You (or whoever else is paying for the rescue) can only afford a generic one?? Well, I'm not allowing them, so die". There's no getting round the fact that if you hold a patent on a life-saving technology, and enforce that patent to prevent it being available for cheaper, people will die because of your decision. Ben Zaiboc From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 18 17:17:20 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 19:17:20 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Zero Reserve - A distributed Bitcoin exchange Message-ID: <20130918171720.GD10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Eugen Leitl ----- Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 19:08:22 +0200 From: Eugen Leitl To: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net Subject: Zero Reserve - A distributed Bitcoin exchange User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Zero Reserve - A distributed Bitcoin exchange tl;dr: Proposal and prototype for a distributed exchange not requiring a banking gateway. Implemented as a plugin for Retroshare. Licensed under the LGPL. The Achilles heel of Bitcoin is the exchanges. Centralized as they are, they can be shut down by a number of means, by a number of players. Should that happen, price discovery of Bitcoin will not work any more. To address that, we offer a distributed exchange without the need of the banking system. Some intro and marketing blurb is here: https://github.com/zeroreserve/ZeroReserve/wiki A tech paper is here: https://mega.co.nz/#!vZ80yQJS!ccrCBREYZrOPr8oK7C9StVGuDmYENNYwrFiPXZVQldM And the code is here: https://github.com/zeroreserve/ZeroReserve In short, ZR uses the Ripple idea of Ryan Fugger to get money in and out of the exchange. ZR has nothing to do whatsoever with ripple.com, however. As such, there is no need for XRP. There is no pre-mining, no company, just code. Now the caveat: This is prototype software. Anything may or may not work. Security is only what the underlying Retroshare provides. The distributed order book works, but is still insecure. Currencies are therefore only defunct or fantasy currencies such as German Papermark(1923). Nothing you do has any effect on the blockchain. The next steps are: - hook up to the blockchain (using Amir Taaki?s excellent libbitcoin) - providing basic wallet functionality - provide authentication for anything beyond F2F. I see no reason why it wouldn?t work on OSX, but ZR was never built on it. It does build and run on Linux and Windows, though. Once you are on Retroshare and have some friends, you should be able to use this link to get and subscribe to the Zero Reserve Forum: retroshare://forum?name=ZeroReserve&id=b87d0a5577ced312d88a0ee8176e24a1 One of my RS identities: -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: OpenPGP:SDK v0.9 xsBNBFIrLBYBCADVYF9kvYYv+IOwlgHFcsdTIMAd7gIEbSaSLRWwFXZwTlxK8CGD x3kxSmUQXUl1hfm091CGBh5Xe+0O6RUdXYE6NuBTGzvIH8OHBjhCOb4cswIUAPnK rdX0O0U/tR5Jx9pQjfY5hbC6tDt/l4AtKcfi/7xUzpRkNibuEieky4aN6L4rAijO EBrEllkVKTOeoF/OQhz+nlQdt557RSt/NAIYnfMM+qekBDL+2I3Gsr5xk/7Rf2fI dIw2sQHrvetHZawypNuvZ/J7+t05FmtKShS4XObR3qcqd1pviTKJrrVoJJgI5PnZ +nEnzbtBsOwX1Y+FXCm4D8QN5vUpZN2zlznfABEBAAHNN0V1Z2VuIExlaXRsIChH ZW5lcmF0ZWQgYnkgUmV0cm9TaGFyZSkgPGV1Z2VuQGxlaXRsLm9yZz7CwF8EEwEC ABMFAlIrLBYJEJ9ljeAE3+qzAhkBAAD1sggAtJRoahysNczoTBlxeckAgtzUJlkL tcD5N+38NN2U+ivfaK67kF8mMZFiVyjcOrYmvtWesC50n2lRT6Vo1nkm8blfHzun rZ8j64KxAdiuM9XCT7JK1OMdk9VuFYvvEoFGGHCoZ402w4Jav/KgNY3G8obslv/Y peHdsYBdP5+6fM0qEhVbzahWDO95fYmB83X+KGfnf1bPrLy7gXDDphxxziBnMk7G nVNgBwFR8ohmJFlLxJHh8g1XjRFYicoQmKAm7X8E1V6Mw61AQXGV7gWOsqLu075c tCkzuTj2hE1li92oqcuyVmQEf5Bf/bBX9IUvkuAKFDrr7XqUqkyXKwow+w== =wccP -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Sep 18 19:50:31 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 15:50:31 -0400 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: <1379512652.86675.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1379512652.86675.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > > There's no getting round the fact that if you hold a patent on a > life-saving technology, and enforce that patent to prevent it being > available for cheaper, people will die because of your decision. > > How about using the patent to block for-profit business but not waiving that option when non-profit and humanitarian/aid providers distribute the product ? Is that immoral? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Sep 19 00:11:57 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 17:11:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: <1379512652.86675.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Sep 18, 2013 12:51 PM, "Mike Dougherty" wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: >> There's no getting round the fact that if you hold a patent on a life-saving technology, and enforce that patent to prevent it being available for cheaper, people will die because of your decision. > > How about using the patent to block for-profit business but not waiving that option when non-profit and humanitarian/aid providers distribute the product ? Is that immoral? Some for profit companies save lives while profiting. Also, in some cases a for-profit business may be the only option (say, because they have invested their profits in distribution networks). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From chriscorte01 at yahoo.com Thu Sep 19 05:56:28 2013 From: chriscorte01 at yahoo.com (chriscorte01 at yahoo.com) Date: 18 Sep 2013 22:56:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Invitation to join an online conversation this Saturday or Sunday Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mrjones2020 at gmail.com Thu Sep 19 12:48:32 2013 From: mrjones2020 at gmail.com (J.R. Jones) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 08:48:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Google Backs Venture to Research Aging... Message-ID: http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-331379/ Have you guys seen this? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Sep 19 13:26:29 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 15:26:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Google Backs Venture to Research Aging... In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <523AFB85.4090601@libero.it> Il 19/09/2013 14:48, J.R. Jones ha scritto: > http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-331379/ > > Have you guys seen this? Yes. There are too many IT (in the extended sense) billionaires and they are not stupid. They know they have a real chance to avoid or postponing death and aging if they use their wealth wisely. Things you do not find in politicians. Mirco From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Sep 19 13:55:36 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 09:55:36 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Glass could be key to banking organs Message-ID: The following article was in the September 14 2013 issue of New Scientist magazine and may be of some interest to fans of cryonics: ============= TRANSFORMING donated organs into a glassy state and putting them on ice could enable many more people to have transplants. When a person dies, doctors often have mere hours ? or in the case of kidneys, just over a day ? to find a recipient before the organ degrades. "This precludes any chance of banking organs and makes every transplant an emergency procedure, often in the dead of night... when patients aren't ready," says Stephen van Sickle of Arigos Biomedical in Mountain View, California. Nearly 1 in 5 donor kidneys is discarded in the US each year, because a suitable recipient or clinic cannot be found in time. But what if these organs could be frozen? Standard freezing creates damaging ice crystals. An alternative is vitrification. This process is often used to store human eggs or embryos for years and involves infusing the tissue with an antifreeze-like liquid and rapidly cooling it to create a glassy state. Doing this with large organs such as hearts and kidneys is harder, as more antifreeze can be toxic and the glassy organ can crack. To tackle this problem, van Sickle combined vitrification with persufflation, in which blood is replaced with a gas ? helium in this case. The organ cools more quickly, less antifreeze is needed and pockets of tissue are separated by gas, protecting against shattering. So far, van Sickle, who outlined his work at the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence meeting in Cambridge, UK, has frozen pig kidneys. CT scans revealed a lot less fracturing than with vitrification alone. The next stages to rewarm the organs to see if they remain viable. Greg Fahy of Californian firm 21st Century Medicine has vitrified, rewarmed and transplanted smaller rabbit kidneys. The new approach is "potentially valuable", he says. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mrjones2020 at gmail.com Thu Sep 19 14:51:25 2013 From: mrjones2020 at gmail.com (J.R. Jones) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 10:51:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Google Backs Venture to Research Aging... In-Reply-To: <523AFB85.4090601@libero.it> References: <523AFB85.4090601@libero.it> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Things you do not find in politicians. Perhaps because the Political arena is dominated by Lawyers. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Sep 19 18:00:27 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 20:00:27 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <20130909115613.GM10405@leitl.org> References: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> <20130909115613.GM10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <523B3BBB.1010507@libero.it> Il 09/09/2013 13:56, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 01:26:51PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: >> Il 09/09/2013 08:46, BillK ha scritto: >> >>> Climate changes fluctuate from year to year. One year's figures must >>> be seen as part of a long-term trend. >> >> But these figures are homogenized, pasteurized and corrected in any way >> suit the people publishing them? >> >> But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? >> >> Long term on what time scale? > > Read the fine peer-reviewed publications. http://astuteblogger.blogspot.it/2013/09/i-demand-al-gore-and-ipcc-return-their.html Interesting picture from the facebook page of Bjorn Lomborg "Connie Hedegaard, EU climate commissioner, tells us that even if climate science was wrong, EU policy on climate change is right. Really? I bet the 300,000 households in Germany who lost their power last year because they couldn't pay the bills, and the millions of energy poor in the UK disagree about Heedegaard's price hikes. I bet the 2.6 billion people still living in energy poverty would disagree with her notion that "we have to realise that in the world of the 21st century for us to have the cheapest possible energy is not the answer." Surprising interview with Heedegaard in Telegraph, and with some of my comments, like: "EU climate policies will cost ?174 billion annually by 2020, the EU commissioner seems to suggest wasting ?174 billion is no problem."" https://www.facebook.com/bjornlomborg/posts/10151953287563968 Mirco From painlord2k at libero.it Thu Sep 19 18:05:22 2013 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 20:05:22 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Google Backs Venture to Research Aging... In-Reply-To: References: <523AFB85.4090601@libero.it> Message-ID: <523B3CE2.80204@libero.it> Il 19/09/2013 16:51, J.R. Jones ha scritto: > > On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Mirco Romanato > wrote: > Things you do not find in politicians. > Perhaps because the Political arena is dominated by Lawyers. Not only what you say: the selection process reward crooks. Mirco From mrjones2020 at gmail.com Thu Sep 19 19:42:11 2013 From: mrjones2020 at gmail.com (J.R. Jones) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 15:42:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Google Backs Venture to Research Aging... In-Reply-To: <523B3CE2.80204@libero.it> References: <523AFB85.4090601@libero.it> <523B3CE2.80204@libero.it> Message-ID: On Sep 19, 2013 2:19 PM, "Mirco Romanato" wrote: > > Il 19/09/2013 16:51, J.R. Jones ha scritto: > > > > On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Mirco Romanato > > wrote: > > > Things you do not find in politicians. > > > Perhaps because the Political arena is dominated by Lawyers. > > Not only what you say: > the selection process reward crooks. > > Mirco A redesign of governance is long overdue. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Thu Sep 19 23:08:16 2013 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:08:16 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: <1379512652.86675.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <1379632096.46136.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> ?Mike Dougherty ?Wednesday, September 18, 2013 12:50 PM >> There's no getting round the fact that if you hold a patent on a life-saving >> technology, and enforce that patent to prevent it being available for cheaper, >> people will die because of your decision. > > How about using the patent to block for-profit business but not waiving that > option when non-profit and humanitarian/aid providers distribute the product ? > Is that immoral? I think the problem here is with considering this doing X will cause a person to die view. I'm not going to side with causing people to die, but understand that many actions one might take might cause someone to die -- even mundane. For instance, not donating all your wealth above the level of just keeping yourself alive might, by this standard, cause someone to die. There's someone out there -- probably many people -- who might have lived another day had the wealth you used for other things -- whether saving for your retirement, enjoying a meal above subsistence, paying for Internet access, paying to live above the lowest level of housing (i.e., in many nicer climes, not living in an alley or under the open sky), and so forth-- been spent on helping them. But I don't think it's immoral as such to spend money on yourself or on things other than helping other people to live. (This doesn't mean there's no moral concerns for the well-being of others. I just don't think it overrides all other moral concerns.) And there's a separation, I think, between what moral concerns can be enforce and what ones can't be enforced. For instance, a contractual obligation freely chosen (which should be redundant, of course) can be enforced (within limits, presuming the contracting parties have rights to what's involved, etc.). There is a moral claim there that where force can be used to compel the parties involved, depending on the details of the contract. But other moral concerns can't be enforced in many cases. To take a non-controversial (I hope) example, think of honesty. In many cases, this can't be enforced, such as, for instance, someone being honest about their feelings or their beliefs. We don't, I hope, think that if someone lies in general that they can be compelled to confess the truth. (Of course, when a lie is used to defraud someone, that's another matter, but I'm talking about the general case.) Aside from this, there's also the problem of whether patents themselves are morally defensible -- and not because people might lose their lives over patents. (In the same, it's immoral to do many unjust things -- even if the unjust thing doesn't kill anyone. For instance, it's immoral for me to steal your toothbrush -- even if I only do this once. I presume here that it's justly your toothbrush, you don't owe me anything of comparable or greater value (or haven't wronged me in any way to justify me taking it), stealing your toothbrush once is only going to set you back a small amount and not kill you. But it's still immoral to do this.) If patents aren't defensible, then this kind of answers the question above in a very different way... But let's leave that aside for the moment. I was going to suggest merely putting whatever life saving technology you invent into the public domain, avoiding patenting all together. Then it's up to whomever wants to to manufacturer whatever technology is there. I'm not a legal eagle, but I believe if it's in the public it can't be patented. Isn't this correct? (I'm also not sure how this varies from nation to nation.) Regards, Dan ?See my latest Kindle science fiction story, "Succession," at: http://www.amazon.com/Succession-ebook/dp/B00F02DLNG/ ?And see my other Kindle science fiction story, "Residue," at: http://www.amazon.com/Residue-ebook/dp/B00BS3T0RM/ From dan_ust at yahoo.com Thu Sep 19 23:22:49 2013 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:22:49 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] Google Backs Venture to Research Aging... In-Reply-To: References: <523AFB85.4090601@libero.it> <523B3CE2.80204@libero.it> Message-ID: <1379632969.32882.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> On Thursday, September 19, 2013 12:42 PM J.R. Jones wrote: >>>> Things you do not find in politicians. >>> >>> Perhaps because the Political arena is dominated by Lawyers. >> >> Not only what you say: >> the selection process reward crooks.> > A redesign of governance is long overdue. I think the core problem is there's no _exit_ option -- or no such option that's broadly available. Sure, if you're very wealthy or willing to flee a given area, then you have some exit option -- a very high cost one that few can afford or even will use.* But the rest of the people don't have any practical option to opt out. (Surely, people can band together or even revolt, but imagine if that were the main option available in other aspects of life, such as what products are available at a supermarket. How often would these change? Only once a critical mass of people demanded change in a sort of episodic fashion perhaps once or twice a generation. Heck, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation because we'd still be waiting for that critical mass with computers and the Internet.:) Also,I think it's not the type of people in politics or even their selection process. It's that it's a monopoly based on theft and force. I don't know how otherwise bright and reasonable people would expect a basically criminal organization to produce just outcomes as a matter of routine. The surprise is rather that governments everywhere aren't even more voracious and arbitrary. Regards, Dan ?See my latest Kindle science fiction story, "Succession," at: http://www.amazon.com/Succession-ebook/dp/B00F02DLNG/ ?and see my other Kindle science fiction story, "Residue," at: http://www.amazon.com/Residue-ebook/dp/B00BS3T0RM/ ? * And one might add, there are some pretty high barriers even in the States to using this option. Plus, it almost invariably means, for those who don't want to become permanent travelers or live on the lamb, being hassled by some other government. This isn't like, say, eating out at a restaurant. I might choose to not eat out at all and the restaurant owners don't band together to stop me. (No praise to them or any business. I think if they could force me to dine out, many of them would love this. It's just that we happen to live in a culture that, thankfully, hasn't yet discovered and embraced this means of restauranteurs enriching themselves. Not so with government and other mandatory policies.) From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Sep 20 02:52:24 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 22:52:24 -0400 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: <1379632096.46136.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <1379512652.86675.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <1379632096.46136.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 7:08 PM, Dan wrote: > Mike Dougherty Wednesday, September 18, 2013 12:50 PM > > How about using the patent to block for-profit business but not waiving > that > > option when non-profit and humanitarian/aid providers distribute the > product ? > > Is that immoral? > > But let's leave that aside for the moment. I was going to suggest merely > putting whatever life saving technology you invent into the public domain, > avoiding patenting all together. Then it's up to whomever wants to to > manufacturer whatever technology is there. I'm not a legal eagle, but I > believe if it's in the public it can't be patented. Isn't this correct? > (I'm also not sure how this varies from nation to nation.) > > I was thinking along the lines of using your patent right to prevent others from making derivative works employing your otherwise public/non-patented idea. This may be generalized too much to be applied to the Plumpy'Nut example. I'm also not a patent lawyer. I figure it's like my right to kick neighborhood kids' lemonade stand off my front lawn because I don't want them running their business in front of my house but allowing those same kids to play games on the same lawn. My "right" to private property is selectively invoked at will. I asked if it was immoral because I wasn't sure it's "fair" to use selective enforcement rather than adhering to an unyielding principle that's 100% one way or the other. fwiw - It would be refreshing to have kids running a lemonade stand on my lawn, and not just because of the cool citrus beverage :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Fri Sep 20 05:26:34 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 22:26:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Google Backs Venture to Research Aging... In-Reply-To: <1379632969.32882.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <523AFB85.4090601@libero.it> <523B3CE2.80204@libero.it> <1379632969.32882.YahooMailNeo@web126202.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Dan wrote: > I think the core problem is there's no _exit_ option -- or no such option > that's broadly available. Never has been, the way you put it. Even when there was frontier to immigrate to, going there meant leaving behind civilized comforts and society, giving up most reasonable possibility of becoming rich. Even today, it is entirely possible to exit one's life, go into hiding, and eke out a meager living somewhere where no one will find you, but you have excluded such options. It's that it's a monopoly based on theft and force. What other kind of monopolies are there, in the end? A monopoly based on law is ultimately based on force - or it is a monopoly that does not exist in truth. One based on possession is arguably based on theft: if you have something and I don't, and I am prevented from taking it, the possibility of having it has been stolen from me. > I don't know how otherwise bright and reasonable people would expect a > basically criminal organization to produce just outcomes as a matter of > routine. Well, for one, they - not you - are the ones who get to define what is "criminal", so they naturally tend to be not so criminal. > The surprise is rather that governments everywhere aren't even more > voracious and arbitrary. > Some governments have learned that excess in that regard means those in power will often soon be removed. Instead, they turn the decay rate down enough that it is not significant during any one person's time in power. Radically increased longevity, especially to most people instead of just some elites, would be a direct threat to this model. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 20 09:51:10 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 11:51:10 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Global cooling: Arctic ice caps grows by 60% against global warming predictions | Mail Online In-Reply-To: <523B3BBB.1010507@libero.it> References: <522DB07B.30905@libero.it> <20130909115613.GM10405@leitl.org> <523B3BBB.1010507@libero.it> Message-ID: <20130920095110.GR10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 08:00:27PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > Il 09/09/2013 13:56, Eugen Leitl ha scritto: > > On Mon, Sep 09, 2013 at 01:26:51PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote: > >> Il 09/09/2013 08:46, BillK ha scritto: > >> > >>> Climate changes fluctuate from year to year. One year's figures must > >>> be seen as part of a long-term trend. > >> > >> But these figures are homogenized, pasteurized and corrected in any way > >> suit the people publishing them? > >> > >> But the long term trend exist or is a conjecture? > >> > >> Long term on what time scale? > > > > Read the fine peer-reviewed publications. > > http://astuteblogger.blogspot.it/2013/09/i-demand-al-gore-and-ipcc-return-their.html Not a peer-reviewed publication. > Interesting picture from the facebook page of Bjorn Lomborg > > "Connie Hedegaard, EU climate commissioner, tells us that even if > climate science was wrong, EU policy on climate change is right. > > Really? > > I bet the 300,000 households in Germany who lost their power last year > because they couldn't pay the bills, and the millions of energy poor in > the UK disagree about Heedegaard's price hikes. > > I bet the 2.6 billion people still living in energy poverty would > disagree with her notion that "we have to realise that in the world of > the 21st century for us to have the cheapest possible energy is not the > answer." > > Surprising interview with Heedegaard in Telegraph, and with some of my > comments, like: "EU climate policies will cost ?174 billion annually by > 2020, the EU commissioner seems to suggest wasting ?174 billion is no > problem."" > > https://www.facebook.com/bjornlomborg/posts/10151953287563968 Not a peer-reviewed publication. BZZZZT. Try again. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 20 10:49:06 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:49:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now Message-ID: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/09/manned_space_exploration_cyborgs_and_finding_the_next_earth.html To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now Why we should hit pause on manned space exploration. By Srikanth Saripalli|Posted Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013, at 8:08 AM NASA's Mars rover Curiosity's self-portrait combines dozens of exposures during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars, Feb. 3, 2013. The rover is positioned at a patch of flat outcrop called "John Klein," which was selected as the site for the first rock-drilling activities by Curiosity. Future space explorers should be somewhere between human astronauts and robots like NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS We?ve been to the moon and just about everywhere on Earth. So what?s left to discover? In September, Future Tense is publishing a series of articles in response to the question, ?Is exploration dead?? Read more about modern-day exploration of the sea, space, land, and more unexpected areas. On Aug. 20, NASA?s administrator formally welcomed the newest candidates of the astronaut corps and released a space exploration roadmap that includes robotic and human missions to destinations that include near-Earth asteroids, the moon, and Mars. But given the success (both scientific and in the popular imagination) of Curiosity on Mars, we have to wonder: Is human space exploration really necessary? Can?t we just send robots for exploration and let them do the dangerous work? Most of the arguments in favor of manned space exploration boil down to the following: a) We need to explore space using people since keeping the entire human race on a single piece of rock is a bad strategy, and even if we send robots first, people would have to make the journey eventually; and b) humans can explore much better than robots. Both these arguments are very near-sighted?in large part because they assume that robots aren?t going to get any better. They also fail to recognize that technology may radically change humans in the next century or so. The first claim is based on the assumption that placing all our bets on Earth is a bad strategy. That is probably true. But there are already folks who are willing to be vitrified so that they can be immortal by transplanting their brain into a fresh (robotic) body. The Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov hopes to do by 2035 or 2045. Cryonics, or the science of preserving human beings, has been endorsed by numerous scientists. This is fringe science, to be sure. But even if one does not believe that we will have fully robotic bodies in the next 20 or 30 years, it is not far-fetched to think that at least some of us might be a combination of robotic and human systems?yes, cyborgs?in 100 years or so. Researchers like professor Kevin Warwick of the United Kingdom have been working on such brain-computer interfaces for the past decade. Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity Is Near predicts that human beings will soon ?transcend biology? and traverse the universe as immortal cyborgs. This has far-reaching implications for space travel: One can imagine cyborgs (with human consciousness) that are able to explore inhabitable planets such as Venus and Jupiter or can travel for centuries to the furthest galaxies. Given that the future of our bodies is uncertain, it makes more sense to send robots with intelligence to other planets and galaxies. Nature has built us a certain way?we are best-suited for our planet "Earth." Future space explorers will quickly realize that the human body is not the perfect machine for these environments. We will also want to explore other planets such as Venus and maybe even think about living on those planets. Rather than make those planets habitable, does it not make sense to purposefully evolve ourselves such that we are habitable in those worlds? The second argument in favor of manned space exploration?that human eyes can be more thorough?is based on the past robotic and human missions to the moon. Several articles in popular press have argued that humans on the moon have produced far more scientific data than the robots on Mars. While this is true, the robots that have been used till now are not at all "autonomous" or "intelligent" in any sense. They are complex machines that are controlled carefully from Earth; each instruction and move made by these rovers on Mars is first tested carefully and then uploaded. These are no different from the industrial welding machines of automobile plants or the drones used in Afghanistan. Indeed, we are very far from having autonomous robots on planetary missions, but such machines are being built in university labs every day. Robot Magellans (with scientific skills to boot) could be here long before colonists take off for Mars. A third argument that is rarely discussed, but that everyone agrees on, is that human exploration of space provides a valuable public relations opportunity. Contrary to popular belief, there never has been a groundswell of popular support from the general public for the space program. Even during the Apollo era, more people were against the space program than for it. Getting robots into space costs a lot less than humans and is safer ?so we can keep the space program going without creating budgetary battles. So what will the future space exploration robots look like? They will look nothing like the rovers that are on Mars today. While NASA is interested in sending big missions with large robots to accomplish tasks, I believe future robots will be smaller, ?distributed,? and much cheaper. To understand this, let us look at the current computing environment: We have moved from supercomputers to using distributed computing; from large monolithic data warehouses to saving data in the cloud; from using laptops to tablets and our smartphones. The future of space exploration is going to be the same?we will transition from large, heavy robots and satellites to ?nanosats? and small, networked robots. We will use hundreds or thousands of cheap, small "sensor networks" that can be deployed on planetary bodies. These will form a self-organizing network that can quickly explore areas of interest and also organize themselves into larger machines that can mine metals or develop new vehicles for future exploration. Astronauts may be able to capture the imagination better now than a personality-less robot. But for humanity?s long-term goals of exploration, science and eventual survival, the ?evolving? robot may be the better bet. This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 20 12:33:33 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:33:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Cryonics: the people hoping to give death a cold shoulder Message-ID: <20130920123333.GK10405@leitl.org> http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/sep/20/cryonics-death-insurance-policies Cryonics: the people hoping to give death a cold shoulder Insurance policies will now pay to preserve your dead body with the aim of reviving it in the future Rupert Jones The Guardian, Friday 20 September 2013 10.44 BST Young man, eyes closed, in cryogenics chamber The minimum fee for cryonic preservation is about ?17,500. Photograph: John Lamb/Getty Images Would you be alarmed at the prospect of waking up in the future and finding Simon Cowell lying next to you? Paying to be deep frozen when you die in the hope you will be brought back to life in the future is the stuff of a thousand science fiction stories, films and TV shows. However, it's not just a few eccentric American millionaires and celebrities keen to cheat death who are putting their faith in cryonics, the process whereby a body (or in some cases just a head) is suspended in liquid nitrogen to preserve it indefinitely, the aim being that ? perhaps several decades from now ? technology will be available to revive the individual and restore them to good health. Scores of Brits have also signed up for what the movement has dubbed "a second chance at life", including Victoria Stevens, a 38-year-old mother of two living in North Yorkshire, and Paul Crowley, a 42-year-old computer programmer from south London. They are both members of the US-based Cryonics Institute, which has more than 100 people in "cryonic suspension" at its facility in Michigan. TV mogul Cowell is reportedly an advocate of the controversial technology. In 2009 he was said to have told dinner guests that he had "decided to freeze myself when I die". And in June this year, the Sunday Times reported that three Oxford University academics had signed up with either the Cryonics Institute or its rival, the Arizona-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation. Simon Cowell is reported to have signed up for cryonic preservation. Photograph: Rex Features If you want to join them in taking a ride in this so-called "ambulance to the future" but you haven't got Cowell's millions, there are financial advisers who can arrange special life insurance policies that will pay for you to make this trip into the unknown. The cost of cryonics varies hugely, with a bewildering range of tariffs, fees and add-ons. The Cryonics Institute's minimum fee for cryopreservation is $28,000 (?17,500) ? there are other costs on top of this, notably paying for someone to arrive at the scene when you are dying or dead to prepare your body and ship it to America. Alcor, meanwhile, requires people to guarantee a minimum level of funding for its service, which is currently $80,000 (?50,000) for "neurocryopreservation" (the head only) and $200,000 (?125,000) for the whole body. A Russian company called KrioRus, meanwhile, offers a service starting at $12,000 (?7,500), though admits that as it is based in Moscow its services to foreign clients "are more complicated and expensive". The most common way of paying is via life insurance, which spreads the cost over many years. "Many people probably think cryonics is just for the wealthy, but with life insurance it is affordable for people on a modest income, especially if they start the policy when they are young," says Stevens, from Whitby, who is studying for a natural sciences degree. Victoria Stevens, a 38-year-old mother of two living in North Yorkshire, is interested in cryonics Victoria Stevens: 'death seems like an awful waste' So why did she decide to get involved with cryonics? "I really enjoy being alive," she replies. "I think the prospect of death ? it just seems like an awful waste after people spend their lives learning and progressing. I'd like to live longer and see more and experience more. We are happy to prolong our lives with heart transplants and so on ? it's just one step on from that." She says there were a "range of reactions" when she told friends and family: some were surprised, though many were supportive. "It's not for everybody," she says, adding: "It is a gamble; it's not a certainty that this will work." She estimates there are about 70-80 UK members of the Cryonics Institute. Stevens took out a ?100,000 insurance policy from insurer PruProtect to fund the process, for which she pays about ?36 a month ? the premium increases each year in line with inflation. She says it seemed prudent to buy more than the absolute minimum amount of cover because you can probably add another ?20,000 or so, on top of the Cryonics Institute's minimum fee, for "standby assistance" ? the people who deal with the body the moment someone is legally dead ? and the cost of transportation over to the US. Like many Brits involved in the process, Stevens is also a member of Cryonics UK, an organisation which describes itself as "Britain's volunteer standby assistance team", with its own ambulance and specialist equipment. The aim is that when you are dying, the Cryonics UK team arrive at the scene and, as soon as you are legally dead, take custody of your body, cooling it down and administering various fluids before ensuring it is shipped to the cryonics storage company. Its not clear what happens if the next of kin object to this happening. Fellow Briton Paul Crowley, also a member of Cryonics UK, says that his aim is simply either "to not die" or enjoy a vastly longer lifespan. He pays ?33 a month for a Prudential insurance policy that provides ?60,000 of cover. Both Crowley and Stevens used Devon-based Unusual Risks Mortgage & Insurance Services, a firm of financial advisers specialising in products for people with medical conditions and "unusual circumstances" that has become the go-to UK organisation for those looking to fund cryonics. Some of these people had tried other firms but "nobody had taken them very seriously", says Chris Morgan, lead financial adviser at the firm, which now has about 20 cryonics clients, gained through word of mouth. Most people opt for between ?60,000 and ?100,000 of cover and, because they are planning for an amount they will need at some unknown point in the future, when prices for cryonics services may be higher, they need to think about inflation-proofing, Morgan says. He generally recommends "whole of life" cover, which is designed to provide a guaranteed payout on death. The insurance has to be written in a certain way because there needs to be a mechanism in place so the cryonics provider knows it is definitely going to get its money, Morgan says. It is best to use an insurer that provides an "absolute trust" document, where the beneficiary ? the cryonics company ? is named, and this cannot be changed, he adds. "They need to be absolutely certain they are going to be paid for the services they are providing." While the likes of Cowell (allegedly) continue to be a cheerleader for cryonics ? he reportedly told GQ magazine in 2011 that he was going ahead with it, on the grounds that "if it's possible, and I think it will be, why not have a second crack? Does that sound crazy?" ? many others take the view that it's a scam or rip-off. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Sleeper. Photograph: BFI Woody Allen's comedy Sleeper, where the nerdy owner of a health food shop is cryogenically frozen and defrosted in 2173, probably didn't help those who want the technology to be taken seriously. Cryonics sceptics include the American science writer Michael Shermer, who wrote a few years ago that cryonics "is too much like religion: it promises everything, delivers nothing (but hope) and is based almost entirely on faith in the future ? it dwells in that fuzzy region of claims that have yet to pass any tests but have some basis, however remote, in reality. It is not impossible for cryonics to succeed; it is just exceptionally unlikely". For those who are interested or tempted, Cryonics UK is holding a "roadshow event" on 28-29 September at Rowland Brothers funeral directors in Whitehorse Road, Croydon. To find out more go to cryonics-uk.com/roadshow.html. ? Tomorrow's Guardian Money section is a "cost of dying" special, covering everything from probate and writing a will to dying intestate and inheritance tax -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com Fri Sep 20 12:54:24 2013 From: avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com (The Avantguardian) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 05:54:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now In-Reply-To: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> References: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <1379681664.86285.YahooMailNeo@web160504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> >________________________________ > From: Eugen Leitl >To: tt at postbiota.org; astro at postbiota.org; ExI chat list >Sent: Friday, September 20, 2013 3:49 AM >Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now >?? > > >http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/09/manned_space_exploration_cyborgs_and_finding_the_next_earth.html > >To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now > >Why we should hit pause on manned space exploration. > >By Srikanth Saripalli|Posted Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013, at 8:08 AM > >NASA's Mars rover Curiosity's self-portrait combines dozens of exposures >during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars, Feb. 3, >2013. The rover is positioned at a patch of flat outcrop called "John Klein," >which was selected as the site for the first rock-drilling activities by >Curiosity. > >Future space explorers should be somewhere between human astronauts and >robots like NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. Unless routine missions in LEO count as "exploration", manned space exploration has already been on pause for over 30 years. But it turns out robots won't be going anywhere anytime soon either because we are running out of Pu-238. And guess who won't let us make more? ? http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/09/plutonium-238-problem/ ? Excerpt------------- ? NASA?s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration ? By Dave Mosher?09.19.13 ? In 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft left Earth on a five-year mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Thirty-six years later, the car-size probe is still exploring, still sending its findings home. It has now put more than 19 billion kilometers between itself and the sun. Last week NASA announced that Voyager 1 had become the first man-made object to reach interstellar space. The distance this craft has covered is almost incomprehensible. It?s so far away that it takes more than 17 hours for its signals to reach Earth. Along the way, Voyager 1 gave scientists their first close-up looks at Saturn, took the first images of Jupiter?s rings, discovered many of the moons circling those planets and revealed that Jupiter?s moon Io has active volcanoes. Now the spacecraft is discovering what the edge of the solar system is like, piercing the heliosheath where the last vestiges of the sun?s influence are felt and traversing the heliopause where cosmic currents overcome the solar wind. Voyager 1 is expected to keep working until 2025 when it will finally run out of power. None of this would be possible without the spacecraft?s three batteries filled with plutonium-238. In fact, Most of what humanity knows about the outer planets came back to Earth on plutonium power. Cassini?s ongoing exploration of Saturn, Galileo?s trip to Jupiter, Curiosity?s exploration of the surface of Mars, and the 2015 flyby of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft are all fueled by the stuff. The characteristics of this metal?s radioactive decay make it a super-fuel. More importantly, there is no other viable option. Solar power is too weak, chemical batteries don?t last, nuclear fission systems are too heavy. So, we depend on plutonium-238, a fuel largely acquired as by-product of making nuclear weapons. But there?s a problem: We?ve almost run out. ?We?ve got enough to last to the end of this decade. That?s it,? said Steve Johnson, a nuclear chemist at Idaho National Laboratory. And it?s not just the U.S. reserves that are in jeopardy. The entire planet?s stores are nearly depleted. The country?s scientific stockpile has dwindled to around 36 pounds. To put that in perspective, the battery that powers NASA?s Curiosity rover, which is currently studying the surface of Mars, contains roughly 10 pounds of plutonium, and what?s left has already been spoken for and then some. The implications for space exploration are dire: No more plutonium-238 means not exploring perhaps 99 percent of the solar system. In effect, much of NASA?s $1.5 billion-a-year (and shrinking) planetary science program is running out of time. The nuclear crisis is so bad that affected researchers know it simply as ?The Problem.? ? ------------- ? Stuart LaForge ? ?Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.- Frank Herbert From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 20 13:34:23 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 15:34:23 +0200 Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now In-Reply-To: <1379681664.86285.YahooMailNeo@web160504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> <1379681664.86285.YahooMailNeo@web160504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20130920133423.GM10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 05:54:24AM -0700, The Avantguardian wrote: > Unless routine missions in LEO count as "exploration", manned space > exploration has already been on pause for over 30 years. But it turns out > robots won't be going anywhere anytime soon either because we are running out > of Pu-238. And guess who won't let us make more? Sounds great, except it ain't true. Photovoltaics works well beyond Mars orbit, and for everything else there's plain good nuclear reactors. Critical mass of U-235 or Pu-239 is very small, and they have way higher power densities than puny RTGs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor For larger installations, you can use MSRs. Notice that you need redox/hydrothermal geology for fissible ore formation, so chances are good you won't find suitable ores outside of Earth. We shouldn't waste these resources. We might need them very badly in future. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Sep 20 13:57:10 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:57:10 +0100 Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now In-Reply-To: <20130920133423.GM10405@leitl.org> References: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> <1379681664.86285.YahooMailNeo@web160504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20130920133423.GM10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Sounds great, except it ain't true. Photovoltaics works well beyond > Mars orbit, and for everything else there's plain good nuclear > reactors. Critical mass of U-235 or Pu-239 is very small, and > they have way higher power densities than puny RTGs. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor > > For larger installations, you can use MSRs. Notice that > you need redox/hydrothermal geology for fissible ore formation, > so chances are good you won't find > suitable ores outside of Earth. We shouldn't waste these > resources. We might need them very badly in future. > NASA have researched alternatives to Pu-238 and rejected them. I understand there is much opposition to launching nuclear reactors, ;) and scientists have worried about radiation damage to instruments. (Heavy shielding not allowed in rocket launches). And I don't think TOPAZ actually exists nowadays. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 20 14:05:02 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:05:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now In-Reply-To: References: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> <1379681664.86285.YahooMailNeo@web160504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20130920133423.GM10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130920140502.GO10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 02:57:10PM +0100, BillK wrote: > NASA have researched alternatives to Pu-238 and rejected them. If you want it the RTG way, and you run into supply bottleneck, then perhaps it's wise to diversify your options. > I understand there is much opposition to launching nuclear reactors, > ;) and scientists have worried about radiation damage to instruments. > (Heavy shielding not allowed in rocket launches). The Russians flew several of these in LEO. In general, a long boom and a little shielding goes a long way. > And I don't think TOPAZ actually exists nowadays. I have little doubt that the Russians will unmothball the program for a little money. However, if you want to develop the inner solar system, up to Mars, then PV is perfectly adequate. Even for propulsion, InP on capton gives you 3 kW/kg. Half that at Mars. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Sep 20 14:09:16 2013 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:09:16 +0200 Subject: [ExI] My last interview in Italian on Transhumanism, by Roberto Guerra Message-ID: Transumanesimo e Futurismo della Volont?: intervista a Stefano Vaj Redazione ? 18 settembre 2013 ? Lascia un commento - Post to Facebook 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 42 - Post to Twitter 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 - Add to LinkedIn - Post to Google+ - Add to Google Bookmarks - Post to StumbleUpon - Send via Shareaholic Mail - Print with PrintFriendly - Send via Gmail - Add to Oknotizie *D- Il transumanesimo: La nuova futurologia scientifica? *Una cosa che ? stata un Leitmotif dei miei interventi sull?argomento negli ultimi anni ? che il transumanesimo o transumanismo ? (o dovrebbe essere) una *futurologia della volont?*, non una futurologia ?meteorologica?. Qualcosa che non ci dice cosa *sar?*, anche se non si esime dal ridicolizzare gli scetticismi passati e presenti sulle potenzialit? della tecnoscienza, ma cosa *potrebbe essere se lo vorremo*. L?idea che sviluppi mirabolanti siano destinati a prodursi ?*no matter what*?, come sembrano suggerire Kurzweil ed altri autori, non solo ? profondamente demobilizzatrice, riducendo il transumanismo organizzato ad un gruppo di cheerleaders o ad un circolo del t? intento ad applaudire progressi inevitabili ed automatici, ma ? contraddetta da ci? che molti considerano un significativo decremento se non del ritmo dei progressi tecnoscientifici, quanto meno della loro *accelerazione*, che l?era incandescente che va grosso modo dal 1870 al 1970, e di cui siamo tuttora largamente debitori anche per gli sviluppi pi? recenti, ci aveva abituato a dare per scontata. Per cui, il transumanismo a mio avviso ?, e deve essere, essenzialmente una futurologia che ci inviti ad un ritorno sul promontorio dei secoli, secondo la formula marinettiana. *D- Umanesimo, postumanesimo o addirittura un antiumanesimo?* La vera questione ? il superamento dell?*umanismo*, cui ? ad esempio dedicato un intero numero della rivista teorica dell?Associazione Italiana Transumanisti, *Divenire. Rassegna di studi interdisciplinari sulla tecnica e il postumano*, con contributi di Riccardo Campa, Luciano Pellicani, Roberto Marchesini, Aldo Schiavone, Mario Pireddu, Salvatore Rampone, Max More, R?mi Sussan, Roberto Guerra, Emmanuele Pilia, Ugo Spezza, Francesco Boco e il sottoscritto. Perch? naturalmente, come tra l?altro discuto nell?intervista che mi ? stata fatta da Adriano Scianca nel volume *Dove va la biopolitica?* la cui traduzione in inglese ? accessibile online qui, alla base di una trasformazione postumana non pu? che esserci una *cultura postumanista*. E del resto i legami intrinseci tra transumanismo, sovrumanismo (nel senso di Nietzsche, Heidegger e Marinetti) e postumanismo, sono perfettamente chiari agli avversari ?umanisti? di tutte queste cose, da Kass a Fukuyama, da D?Agostino a Habermas a McKibben, pi? di quanto non lo siano a molti transumanisti. Vero ? che a un po? di confusione sull?argomento contribuisce l?atteggiamento di sufficienza o diffidenza che una certa parte della cultura postumanista (vedi ad esempio *Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition * di Keith Ansell-Pearson o *The Paradox of the Posthuman: Science Fiction/Techno-Horror Films and Visual Media * di Julie Clarke) ha nei confronti del ?transumanismo organizzato? a causa esattamente dei residui escatologici, manichei, specisti, universalisti, in una parola ?umanisti?, che ? legittimo riscontrare in talune sue componenti, ma che ? certo abusivo generalizzare, come io stesso e tutti gli altri neofuturisti italiani siamo qui a testimoniare. Un?altra complicazione ? il fatto che in inglese esiste un?unica parola, * humanism*, che fa originariamente riferimento all?Umanesimo dell?Italia del XIV e XV secolo, da Pico della Mirandola a Giordano Bruno, in cui sarebbe davvero difficile non riscontrare il germe stesso della riscoperta ?pagana? dell?etica della conoscenza e del superamento di s? da cui prende le mosse il transumanismo stesso, e per estensione all?opposizione contemporanea al fondamentalismo monoteista; ma al tempo stesso appunto all?umanismo, cio? a quella negazione (squisitamente antitransumanista) di tutto ci?, cui si oppongono Marchesini, Faye, Sloterdijk, Christen, More, etc., sull?onda della *Lettera sull?umanismo * di Heidegger e dell?idea prettamente nietzschana che ?l?uomo ? qualcosa che deve essere superato?. In questo senso, una vecchia versione della Dichiarazione Transumanista conteneva un ambiguo riferimento allo *humanism* (per altro rimosso nell?ultima revisione della medesima); ma anche qui all?improbabile interpretazione del transumanismo come un ?umanismo? si contrapponeva l?idea che la frase relativa significasse semplicemente che ?tutto quello che di buono poteva esserci nell?umanesimo ? oggi ricompreso nel transumanesimo?. Tesi avvalorata dal fatto che il responsabile della relativa inclusione, cio? Davide Pearce, ? certamente ?anti-umanista? se non altro nel senso di un radicale antispecismo. Personalmente, pur considerandomi anch?io antispecista, non condivido molto le posizioni ?animaliste? di Pearce, che per me sono solo una forma di ?umani(tar)ismo allargato?; ma non c?? dubbio che io e Pearce siamo entrambi ugualmente lontani dall?idea che tutti e solo gli appartenenti al genere umano avrebbero qualcosa che li renderebbero incommensurabilmente e definitivamente diversi dal resto del mondo naturale ed artificiale in cui siamo immersi, magari ad ?immagine e somiglianza? di qualche ente trascendente anche se non hanno oltrepassato lo stadio di embrione o sono nati anencefali. Sulla decostruzione dell?Umanit? come avatar secolarizzato della Cristianit? ho del resto gi? avuto occasione occasione di scrivere nel saggio *Intelligenze artificiose* . *D- E l?anima, un residuo dell?evoluzione*? L?anima, di una persona come di un popolo, non ? altro nella mia prospettiva che ?ci? che siamo?, che ci? che *siamo chiamati a diventare*.* *Cio?, ci? che ci rende *differenti*, e che la tecnoscienza ci consente potenzialmente oggi, come discuto in *Biopolitica. Il nuovo paradigma*, di sublimare ed autodeterminare in una misura inedita rispetto alle generazioni che ci hanno preceduto, attraverso un salto quantico che trova come precedenti unicamente la rivoluzione neolitica se non l?ominazione stessa. Non c?? dubbio d?altronde che l?anima ? un costrutto culturale ed evolutivo. Non ? un?essenza che esista originariamente in qualche iperuranio o mondo noumenico prima e al di l? della percezione in divenire che altri ne possano avere. Come lo ?spirito? e la ?psiche? rimandano etimologicamente al ?soffio?, al respiro, che consentono di distinguere un corpo vivente da un cadavere, cos? l??anima? ? ci? che rende ?animato? il corpo stesso, o i suoi avatar, o quanto meno la sua traccia storica, non il pallido fantasma che nella metafisica monoteista sopravviverebbe contraddittoriamente alla morte dell?entit? coinvolt?. Per cui, il transumanismo fa propria una visione ?evolutiva? della concezione indoeuropea dell?immortalit? dell?anima come immortalit? *storica*, attraverso l?ampliamento biologico e non della nostra persistenza nel mondo, non come immortalit? ultraterrena. *D- Arte transumanista anche? * La saldatura tra sovrumanismo come superamento mentale del retaggio umanista e la tecnoscienza come possibilit? di un suo superamento pratico avviene non a caso con il futurismo, che come ben illlustra *Divenire III * sta direttamente o indirettamente alla base dell?intero transumanismo, e che nasce non come un movimento di ingegneri, scienziati e filosofi (anche se come dimostra Riccardo Campa in *Trattato di filosofia futurista * ? facile ricostruirne anche scolasticamente la Weltanschauung), ma di *poeti ed artisti*. Ma se il transumanismo nella tradizione di *Mafarka il futurista * o dell?Order of Cosmic Engineers potrebbe essere considerato come ?arte applicata a se stessi e all?universo?, nel senso pi? quotidiano del termine esiste un vivace fermento di artisti, correnti e critici espressamente ispirati a tematiche transumaniste. Al riguardo vedasi quella che ? una vera e propria icona vivente della sua componente americana come Natasha Vita-More , chairman diHumanity Plus ; ma anche espressioni italiane come Roby Guerra, il mio attuale intervistatore, o Giancarla Parisi , alias Carla Rhapsody, il cui recente vernissage a Milano ? stato intitolato ?Transhuman Woman?. Per non contare gli artisti neofuturisti, come Graziano Cecchini, che io considero automaticamente transumanisti nell?ideologia se non nell?onomastica. *D- Transumanesimo e politica?* La ?politica politicante? italiana oggi ? semplicemente il teatrino del potere coloniale e mondialista che governa attualmente le nostre terre, le cui chiassose bagarre malamente nascondono una comune adesione a valori passatisti, universalisti, umanisti, che tradiscono un anelito ad una ?fine della storia?, secondo l?espressione di Fukuyama, che sancisca il definitivo avvento di un *Brave New World* huxleyano e globalizzato in cui tutto ? sacrificato alla stabilit?, alla stagnazione ed alla maledizione biblica contro ogni tentazione faustiana, secondo il modello profeticamente schizzato da Guillaume Faye sin dai primi anni ottanta in *ll sistema per uccidere i popoli .* Eppure, una cosa che transumanisti e neoLudditi o antitransumanisti radicali (?laici? o religiosi che siano) hanno in comune, ? l?identificazione della scelta tra un possibile futuro postumano o il suo rifiuto come *la questione politica fondamentale della nostra epoca*, rispetto a cui le crociate su temi come il sistema elettorale o il colore con cui verniciare i tombini appalesano tutta la propria inessenzialit?. In questo, i cattolici, oggi sparsi su (e infiltrati in) tutto l?arco ?politico? italiano, ma nondimeno *uniti sull?essenziale*, penso possano essere un modello interessante anche per coloro che implicitamente o esplicitamente si riconoscono al contrario in valori transumanisti. Ci? pur tenendo presente che i valori monoteisti, sebbene per lo pi? in forma secolarizzata, sono ancora largamente dominanti nella nostra societ?, mentre i valori postumanisti e transumanisti restano strettamente minoritari e patrimonio al meglio di sparute ?lites, cos? che il terreno oggi fondamentale ? un?azione *culturale*, prima che politica, mirante a cambiare quella che sono le mentalit? tuttora correnti. *D- E l?inquietante Singolarit? ? l?Intelligenza Artificiale senziente (dotata di Coscienza?) cosiddetta prevista da Kurzweil e altri*? Dal mio canto ho fatto di tutto per liquidare (ad esempio nel gi? citato saggio *Intelligenze artificiose *) le accezioni escatologiche di una possibile singolarit? tecnologica nel nostro futuro che sia interpretabile come parusia, come*rapture* provocata dall?Avvento di Esseri Superiori Infinitamente Buoni, Saggi e Razionali dediti a riscattarci da questa Valle di Lacrime; riducendo piuttosto il concetto stesso di singolarit? storica al senso originale della metafora; che come per le singolarit? cosmologiche non predice in realt? quantit? infinite, probabilit? superiori ad uno, e altri risultati insensati da interpretare in un qualche senso misticheggiante, ma fa semplicemente riferimento a mutamenti di natura sufficientemente radicali da superare le capacit? dei nostri strumenti predittivi e teorici attuali (?umani?). E naturalmente, nel caso della singolarit? tecnologica, fa riferimento alla volont?, *transumanista* in senso proprio, di volere che una tale frattura, un tale *Zeit-Umbruch*, effettivamente si produca. In questo, non ? difficile al contrario individuare nella visione della Singolarit? propria ad esempio a Ray Kurzweil, e nel paragone costante tra la capacit? di elaborazione di un computer o dell?insieme dei computer connessi dalla Rete e la mente umana o la capacit? aggregata delle menti umane, un?ipoteca antropomorfica e antropocentrica che rappresenta il pendant futurologico del residuo umanismo, provvidenzialismo e universalismo a livello valoriale dell?autore. E vicersa, naturalmente, merita di essere demistificato il pendant distopico della Rivolta delle Macchine, che ? facile decostruire come una versione secolarizzata del mito giudeocristiano del Golem, che continua a rispuntare, magari paludato sotto le vesti pi? aggiornate del Principio di Precauzione, anche negli ambienti pi? impensabili, e secondo cui l?incremento progressivo delle capacit? di elaborazione dei sistemi di cui ci valiamo porter? automaticamente alla nascita di AGI non solo Turing-qualified ma etologicamente antropomorfe e darwiniane in ogni senso, e tale ?bootstrap? tecnologico unito ad una indefinita flessibilit? architetturale comporter? un?accelerazione progressiva nel succedersi di iterazioni successive sempre pi? progredite (macchine che progettano macchine che progettano macchine sempre pi? evolute, sempre pi? velocemente), con il risultato che le stesse compiranno una ?rivoluzione?, prendendo il ?controllo?, ed eventualmente soppiantando il ?genere umano? con modalit? pi? o meno violente. Rispetto a queste narrative pi? o meno allucinatorie, mi sono permesso di notare che: - un fenomeno o una macchina non hanno bisogno di essere sistemi n? intelligenti (nel senso di esibire particolari capacit? di elaborare informazioni) n? di natura darwiniana (nel senso di ?denotato da una tendenza selettivamente determinata a comportamenti funzionali ad una autoperpetuazione e crescita competitiva?) per essere pericolosi; - un sistema darwiniano per essere illimitatamente pericoloso non ha bisogno di essere particolarmente intelligente (il virus dell?AIDS o le ipotetiche nanomacchine fuori controllo di Bill Joy rappresentando due dei tanti esempi possibili) - un elaboratore di informazioni pu? essere illimitatamente intelligente e illimitatamente pericoloso, senza essere affatto darwiniano, e perci? senza esibire alcun processo ?mentale? o motivazione propria, del tipo attribuito in questo contesto alle ipotetiche ?AGI ostili?, e ci? a seguito di un funzionamento per qualsiasi ragione indesiderabile del sistema stesso (ad esempio in dipendenza delle motivazioni fornitegli dalle sue ?periferiche umane?, o di sviluppi semplicemente ?deterministici?, ma imprevisti, dettati dalla sua programmazione, per non parlare dei bachi che questa possa contenere. In ogni modo, non esistono in effetti elementi che consentono di dimostrare ad esempio che un cavallo sia a priori un sistema intrinsecamente pi? pericoloso di un motociclista di una banda di teppisti stile *Road Warrior*, e ci? solo per la maggiore autonomia ?psicomorfa? del cavallo rispetto ad una motocicletta. Resta poi naturalmente da vedere pericoloso *per chi*. Al di fuori delle astrazioni universaliste o delle favole del secolo scorso, uomini, animali domestici, d?i e macchine non lottano in quanto tali tra di loro, non pi? di quanto facciano l?insieme delle femmine del regno animale contro il genere maschile, o ipotetiche classi sociali che attraversino ?oggettivamente? l?intero spettro delle societ? umane. Lavorano piuttosto * insieme* nel combattere avversari collettivi di composizione essenzialmente analoga e nel mantenersi simbioticamente o parassitariamente in essere. Non a caso, con buona pace di Hume, Bentham o Stuart Mill, molti di noi nutrono un gatto, o accudiscono piante da giardino, o celebrano riti, o dipingono quadri, o adornano avatar in Second Life, con risorse che potrebbero facilmente salvare la vita di qualche cospecifico all?altro capo del mondo, e non si sentono particolarmente a disagio nel farlo. Certo, recentemente alcuni esseri umani hanno avuto il discutibile pri- vilegio di essere tra le prime vittime di armi con una discreta componente robotica, a cominciare dai droni che iniziano gradualmente a rimpiazzare gli aerei tradizionali nella funzione di attacco al suolo. Ma, guarda caso, si tratta di attacchi la cui componente ?motivazionale? resta del tutto estranea alle armi stesse, e in cui l?intelligenza crescente dell?arma gioca un ruolo unicamente in rapporto alla sua *efficacia*, secondo parametri non differenti ad esempio dalla potenza esplosiva in chilotoni o megatoni che una delle parti in un (potenziale) conflitto possa recapitare sugli obbiettivi nemici. Il che ripropone il tema della sostanziale equivalenza, agli effetti pratici, tra il sistema rappresentato l?uomo alla tastiera di un componente che incorpori certe potenzialit? ed autonomie attraverso dispositivi digitali, con una delega elaborativa e creativa in ipotesi crescente, e del sistema che invece implementi la componente ?umana? su un altro supporto. Potenzialmente ?pericoloso? anch?esso, non c?? dubbio, in particolare per chi si trova dall?altra parte del mirino, ma *n? pi? n? meno della sua pi? prosaica ed attuale alternativa*. INFO *http://www.biopolitica.it **http://www.biopolitix.com http://www.divenire.org/autore.asp?id=3* ** -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Sep 20 14:42:59 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 07:42:59 -0700 Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now In-Reply-To: <20130920140502.GO10405@leitl.org> References: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> <1379681664.86285.YahooMailNeo@web160504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20130920133423.GM10405@leitl.org> <20130920140502.GO10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <01a401ceb60f$b43b6880$1cb23980$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl >...However, if you want to develop the inner solar system, up to Mars, then PV is perfectly adequate. Even for propulsion, InP on capton gives you 3 kW/kg. Half that at Mars. The fact that space based power is now getting a lot of mention in the mainstream press leads me to think we are at an important crossroads: http://www.foxnews.com/topics/space/space-solar-power.htm Even those of us who are hardcore space enthusiasts realize that space flight needs to be geared toward returning rewards that are real to others besides astronomy fans. We space-heads have been showered with priceless gifts from space for our entire lives. We are now facing challenges that do not need humans out there. Understatement, we face challenges that would be hindered by having to support humans out there. We need to design and build robots which can build space based solar power stations, and start sending that power down forthwith. We don't need humans in space anymore; we haven't needed them out there for a long time. We need energy down here, and we have needed it for a long time. Is not this perfectly clear? We have a really cool, achievable and difficult enough to be interesting engineering challenge with perfectly obvious benefits to humanity for the long term. What's not to like about that? We need robots which build space based solar power stations, ideally out of indigenous materials, and we need it by yesterday. spike From atymes at gmail.com Fri Sep 20 15:53:37 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 08:53:37 -0700 Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now In-Reply-To: <01a401ceb60f$b43b6880$1cb23980$@att.net> References: <20130920104906.GV10405@leitl.org> <1379681664.86285.YahooMailNeo@web160504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> <20130920133423.GM10405@leitl.org> <20130920140502.GO10405@leitl.org> <01a401ceb60f$b43b6880$1cb23980$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 7:42 AM, spike wrote: > Even those of us who are hardcore space enthusiasts realize that space > flight needs to be geared toward returning rewards that are real to others > besides astronomy fans. And once there is a place among that where humans outperform robots, then humans will have a place in space. My hunch is that this will be in maintenance and repair: when the teleoperation systems break down, such that even sending a repair robot isn't viable. This requires complex enough machinery to be in place first, though, and right now it isn't. There's a long way to go before humans and robots, rather than just robots, will be economically justified. An analogy may be made to the orks of the Warhammer 40K universe, for those familiar with that. First come the plants, then the small animals. Only once an ecosystem is built up do the orks arise. By analogy, we don't even have the plants in place yet. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stefano.vaj at gmail.com Fri Sep 20 17:14:53 2013 From: stefano.vaj at gmail.com (Stefano Vaj) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:14:53 +0200 Subject: [ExI] My last interview in Italian on Transhumanism, by Roberto Guerra In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hey, last only in the sense of "latest"! Hopefully. :-) -- Stefano Vaj -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Sep 20 20:05:28 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 21:05:28 +0100 Subject: [ExI] DNA Double Take Message-ID: Scientists are discovering that ? to a surprising degree ? we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it?s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Chimerism, as such conditions came to be known, seemed for many years to be a rarity. But ?it can be commoner than we realized,? said Dr. Linda Randolph, a pediatrician at Children?s Hospital in Los Angeles who is an author of a review of chimerism published in The American Journal of Medical Genetics in July. Last year, for example, forensic scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division described how a saliva sample and a sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn?t match. Bone marrow transplants can also confound forensic scientists. Researchers at Innsbruck Medical University in Austria took cheek swabs from 77 people who had received transplants up to nine years earlier. In 74 percent of the samples, they found a mix of genomes ? both their own and those from the marrow donors, the scientists reported this year. The transplanted stem cells hadn?t just replaced blood cells, but had also become cells lining the cheek. ------------ So, if people can be mixtures of DNA, how do we know which DNA is the hereditary one? And, if different organs can have different DNA, what does that say about susceptibility to disease? BillK From spike66 at att.net Fri Sep 20 23:35:53 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 16:35:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] DNA Double Take In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00eb01ceb65a$267ab190$737014b0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK ... >...Last year, for example, forensic scientists at the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division described how a saliva sample and a sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn't match. ------------ BillK _______________________________________________ Oy vey, so now I need to redo 23andMe but instead of spit, send a sperm sample. {8-[ Ummm, OK, kewalllllll... {8^] spike From kaseylinanderson at gmail.com Sat Sep 21 08:41:35 2013 From: kaseylinanderson at gmail.com (Kasey Anderson) Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 02:41:35 -0600 Subject: [ExI] DNA Double Take In-Reply-To: <00eb01ceb65a$267ab190$737014b0$@att.net> References: <00eb01ceb65a$267ab190$737014b0$@att.net> Message-ID: Hm, very interesting article. I think that a lot of scientists are finding that things happen in the body which are really quite counter-intuitive. We simplify things down to cute little cartoons of cells communicating through endocrine, autocrine, and paracrine systems, but if you look at a rudimentary diagram of what they think a cell might look like, with the approximate distances and densities of cell components, you realize that cells just aren't that simple. I've been helping write a review paper for my lab on the most pertinent research about endothelial cells in catheters, AV grafts, and fistulas, and one of the interesting things I've read about is that they think some of the cells that are responding to the foreign materials in grafts are actually coming from the *bone marrow.* Apparently stem cells circulate from the bone marrow around the body, and some of them are generated in response to/are attracted to the wound site. Anyway, at least that's my understanding of it. The Nature article that talks about it is here: http://www.nature.com/stemcells/2007/0712/071220/full/stemcells.2007.131.html and it is actually quite concise and interesting. As to your question of how we can tell which DNA is the hereditary DNA, I would have to play the devil's advocate and ask, why does it matter? After all, we've already been able to clone animals (albeit with a fairly low rate of success and them having functionally 'older' cells because of shortened telomeres) and been able to use in vitro fertilization to fertilize eggs outside the body. I'd say that if we can essentially copy life, our understanding of which DNA is the "hereditary material" is probably fairly well-defined. Actually, come to think about it, if we were able to reproduce whatever conditions a human mother has inside her body during pregnancy, there's really no reason, in my mind, to think that we couldn't build some sort of large-scale bioreactor that could grow an entire baby without even the help of a surrogate mother. Can you imagine the potential implications of watching a baby grow up outside of a human womb? Just for ethical reasons alone, I think it'd be a while before it was allowed even if it were possible, simply for ethical reasons related to the psychology of the infant if nothing else. Would a baby growing outside of its mother have the potential to even become socially well-adjusted? We know that stimulus is incredibly important to the development of the human brain (look up the Ganzfeld Experiment and the story of Genie, the 'feral child' who grew up for 13 years locked in a room, usually strapped to a toilet, if you need proof), so you'd definitely have to wonder just what psychological effects growing up in a human womb actually has on us. (The fact that we tend to sleep in the fetal position would probably be one). At the same time, it'd be pretty damn convenient not to have to be a balloon for 9 months in order to have a child, and maybe just have some hormonal changes that cause breasts to enlarge and produce milk. Anyway, haha, I got *way* off-topic, but those are sort of my (really long thoughts) on the subject. ;) On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 5:35 PM, spike wrote: > >... On Behalf Of BillK > ... > > >...Last year, for example, forensic scientists at the Washington State > Patrol Crime Laboratory Division described how a saliva sample and a sperm > sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn't match. > > ------------ > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > > Oy vey, so now I need to redo 23andMe but instead of spit, send a sperm > sample. > > {8-[ > > Ummm, OK, kewalllllll... > > {8^] > > spike > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Sep 21 12:45:00 2013 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 05:45:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1379767500.41623.YahooMailNeo@web165002.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> > From: Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sep 18, 2013 12:51 PM, "Mike Dougherty" > wrote: >> >> On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Ben Zaiboc > wrote: >>> There's no getting round the fact that if you hold a patent on a > life-saving technology, and enforce that patent to prevent it being > available for cheaper, people will die because of your decision. >> >> How about using the patent to block for-profit business but not waiving > that option when non-profit and humanitarian/aid providers distribute the > product ?? Is that immoral? > > Some for profit companies save lives while profiting. Of course, and I'm /definitely not/ saying that nobody should make a profit from saving lives.? That should be obvious.? What I'm saying is that it's immoral to make a profit /at the cost of lives/.? Mike's example is focusing on the wrong thing.? The point is not whether you make a profit, but whether you're killing people by withholding a service or product, or by preventing others from providing it.? I won't insult anyone's intelligence by going into the "so why don't you forego the profit and provide it for free?" pseudo-argument.? Although I suppose someone is bound to raise the idea that if a company is allowed to exclusively profit, they could potentially then save more lives all on their own.? Theoretically possible, but I seriously doubt it would pan out in real life. Ben Zaiboc From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Sep 21 13:12:42 2013 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben Zaiboc) Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 06:12:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1379769162.83315.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Dan wrote: > I think the problem here is with considering this doing X will cause a person to > die view. That's over-generalising what I was saying.? It's not "doing X", it's a specific kind of action, where there is something with the direct purpose or effect of saving lives, that is deliberately prevented from being made available as widely as it could, because that wouldn't be as profitable for someone.? Maybe, in some convoluted way, I could save a life if I lived in a ditch, but that's a quite different thing to holding a patent on a life-saving drug, and using it to actively prevent an organisation in India from manufacturing and deploying a version of that drug because I wouldn't profit from it. Ben Zaiboc From atymes at gmail.com Sat Sep 21 15:12:29 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 08:12:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] DNA Double Take In-Reply-To: References: <00eb01ceb65a$267ab190$737014b0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 1:41 AM, Kasey Anderson wrote: > Actually, come to think about it, if we were able to reproduce whatever > conditions a human mother has inside her body during pregnancy, there's > really no reason, in my mind, to think that we couldn't build some sort of > large-scale bioreactor that could grow an entire baby without even the help > of a surrogate mother. Can you imagine the potential implications of > watching a baby grow up outside of a human womb? > Yes, and so can many others. There's been quite a bit of research into the topic. A good starting point is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kaseylinanderson at gmail.com Sat Sep 21 17:42:44 2013 From: kaseylinanderson at gmail.com (Kasey Anderson) Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 11:42:44 -0600 Subject: [ExI] DNA Double Take In-Reply-To: References: <00eb01ceb65a$267ab190$737014b0$@att.net> Message-ID: Ah, very cool. I didn't realize there was already research into the topic, although it makes sense, haha. :) On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 1:41 AM, Kasey Anderson < > kaseylinanderson at gmail.com> wrote: > >> Actually, come to think about it, if we were able to reproduce whatever >> conditions a human mother has inside her body during pregnancy, there's >> really no reason, in my mind, to think that we couldn't build some sort of >> large-scale bioreactor that could grow an entire baby without even the help >> of a surrogate mother. Can you imagine the potential implications of >> watching a baby grow up outside of a human womb? >> > > Yes, and so can many others. There's been quite a bit of research into > the topic. A good starting point is > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus . > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sun Sep 22 01:36:49 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2013 18:36:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] To Boldly Go Nowhere, for Now Message-ID: From: "spike" snip > We need to design and build robots which can build space based solar power > stations, and start sending that power down forthwith. And suppose it turns out much harder to build such robots than we now think. Does that mean we can't have power satellites? My analysis is that the cost of people is low in the context of building power satellites, around 1/3 of a percent of the materials flow to GEO. Further everything shipped to GEO, even the digested remains of the ham sandwiches, is useful for building power satellites. If nothing else, it can be use as gravity gradient ballast to keep the power satellite pointed toward the earth. Keith From spike66 at att.net Sun Sep 22 12:09:56 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 05:09:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> >>...the NASA deep space images show galaxies, jillions of them, disappearing in the unimaginably vast distance, any direction we gaze... Subject: Re: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 6:46 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > No offense, spike, but making conclusions based on that is a fallacy > just like assuming that there must be other civilizations out there > just because there are so many stars. I had another thought on this, which may not be in our ever-expanding catalog of possible explanations for the silence of the cosmos. We have mention before that we need to master the use of iron and the other heavy elements, nearly all the elements on the chart for that matter, before advanced technology is even possible. It is possible that some planets, otherwise inhabitable, would be too short of metals, or that they could be inaccessible, as in the case of an ocean planet with no dry land. Advanced life forms might also need some supply of abundant fossil fuel or some access to practically unlimited quantities of concentrated energy, as in our case with coal. This notion then suggests that our current attempt at a singularity is a one-shot event. If we fail this time, this millennium, then the supply of easily-attainable energy is gone forever. If we burn up the coal beds and the oil in the next few hundred years and fail to develop something renewable and sustainable, it is too easy to envision human populations dwindling back down to the actual steady-state carrying capacity of the planet for our size mammal, perhaps a billion souls, but without the ability to develop or even maintain current technology. Then we would be unable to advance beyond what I have envisioned as an AD1000-ish level of technology for lack of easily-available energy. Even at current intelligence levels, humankind would be stuck at that level of technology indefinitely, with no clear path forward. So this current surge towards a singularity may be a one-shot deal, do it now or do it not, forever. spike From atymes at gmail.com Sun Sep 22 15:19:05 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 08:19:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 5:09 AM, spike wrote: > Advanced life forms might also need some supply of abundant fossil fuel or > some access to practically unlimited quantities of concentrated energy, as > in our case with coal. This notion then suggests that our current attempt > at a singularity is a one-shot event. If we fail this time, this > millennium, then the supply of easily-attainable energy is gone forever. Not necessarily singularity, but at least our chance of moving on to more advanced power sources - be it space-based solar, fusion, or whatever. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Sep 22 16:08:36 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 18:08:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 05:09:56AM -0700, spike wrote: > Advanced life forms might also need some supply of abundant fossil fuel or > some access to practically unlimited quantities of concentrated energy, as > in our case with coal. This notion then suggests that our current attempt > at a singularity is a one-shot event. If we fail this time, this > millennium, then the supply of easily-attainable energy is gone forever. If You've nailed another core aspect of the problem which should be blindingly obvious -- but for some strange reason isn't. Net free energy constraints the growth of a culture. Many failed civilizations literally burned through their forests in order to produce quicklime and charcoal and wood for construction, and then crashed. It takes energy to get energy. Wood is easy, peat still reasonably easy, coal hard and harder, as you you deplete shallow resources and have to go deeper. You need to be quite advanced in order to tap undersea resources, or even unconventional gases and liquids. As EROEI drops we eventually arrive at the energy cliff. Most of society's efforts are at this point needed to just obtain enough energy so that that society can stay where it is. There are no spare resources left. Every nonessential activity grinds to a halt. And then it gets worse. The fatal nature of the energy cliff is that it robs you of your ability to homeostate, resulting a regression runaway which is a yet another nasty positive-feedback process: the less E you can invest into the EROEI, the less total return. As soon as you lose your footing, and fall down the energy cliff you've lost the last bit of control you had. You're effectively in freefall. > we burn up the coal beds and the oil in the next few hundred years and fail In terms of oil volume, flat plateau (net energy decline) has been with us since roughly 2004. Total peak fossil and fissible is 2020, or thereabouts. The energy cliff begins at 8:1. I think we're already there, or nearly there. Our time has ran out. We've robbed outselves of all alternative choices which were available to us in the past. All the Roads Not Taken are in our past. I hope you like the road in front of you. > to develop something renewable and sustainable, it is too easy to envision > human populations dwindling back down to the actual steady-state carrying > capacity of the planet for our size mammal, perhaps a billion souls, but Considerably less. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html > without the ability to develop or even maintain current technology. Then we We already been unable to maintain our current technology for several decades. The regression is not uniform, and sufficiently slow so that it can be ignored by many. > would be unable to advance beyond what I have envisioned as an AD1000-ish > level of technology for lack of easily-available energy. Even at current We have no idea what technology level is sustainable if we have allowed us to run out of energy. > intelligence levels, humankind would be stuck at that level of technology > indefinitely, with no clear path forward. > > So this current surge towards a singularity may be a one-shot deal, do it > now or do it not, forever. Our launch window is closing. Whether we still can make it -- we should be able to see soon enough (~2050). -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sun Sep 22 16:35:47 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 18:35:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: Eugen Leitl: > It takes energy to get energy. Wood is easy, peat still reasonably easy, coal hard and harder, as you you deplete shallow resources and have to go deeper. You need to be quite advanced in order to tap undersea resources, or even unconventional gases and liquids. Isn't wind and solar always there? At least as I understand you posts about this matter? On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 05:09:56AM -0700, spike wrote: > > > Advanced life forms might also need some supply of abundant fossil fuel > or > > some access to practically unlimited quantities of concentrated energy, > as > > in our case with coal. This notion then suggests that our current > attempt > > at a singularity is a one-shot event. If we fail this time, this > > millennium, then the supply of easily-attainable energy is gone forever. > If > > You've nailed another core aspect of the problem which should be blindingly > obvious -- but for some strange reason isn't. > > Net free energy constraints the growth of a culture. Many failed > civilizations literally burned through their forests in order to produce > quicklime and charcoal and wood for construction, and then crashed. > > It takes energy to get energy. Wood is easy, peat still reasonably easy, > coal hard and harder, as you you deplete shallow resources and have to > go deeper. You need to be quite advanced in order to tap undersea > resources, or even unconventional gases and liquids. > > As EROEI drops we eventually arrive at the energy cliff. Most of society's > efforts are at this point needed to just obtain enough energy so that > that society can stay where it is. There are no spare resources left. > Every nonessential activity grinds to a halt. > > And then it gets worse. The fatal nature of the energy cliff is that > it robs you of your ability to homeostate, resulting a regression runaway > which is a yet another nasty positive-feedback process: the less E you can > invest into the EROEI, the less total return. As soon as you lose > your footing, and fall down the energy cliff you've lost the last > bit of control you had. You're effectively in freefall. > > > we burn up the coal beds and the oil in the next few hundred years and > fail > > In terms of oil volume, flat plateau (net energy decline) has been with > us since roughly 2004. Total peak fossil and fissible is 2020, > or thereabouts. The energy cliff begins at 8:1. I think we're > already there, or nearly there. Our time has ran out. We've > robbed outselves of all alternative choices which were available > to us in the past. All the Roads Not Taken are in our past. > I hope you like the road in front of you. > > > to develop something renewable and sustainable, it is too easy to > envision > > human populations dwindling back down to the actual steady-state carrying > > capacity of the planet for our size mammal, perhaps a billion souls, but > > Considerably less. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html > > > without the ability to develop or even maintain current technology. > Then we > > We already been unable to maintain our current technology for several > decades. The regression is not uniform, and sufficiently slow so that > it can be ignored by many. > > > would be unable to advance beyond what I have envisioned as an AD1000-ish > > level of technology for lack of easily-available energy. Even at current > > We have no idea what technology level is sustainable if we have allowed > us to run out of energy. > > > intelligence levels, humankind would be stuck at that level of technology > > indefinitely, with no clear path forward. > > > > So this current surge towards a singularity may be a one-shot deal, do it > > now or do it not, forever. > > Our launch window is closing. Whether we still can make it -- we should > be able to see soon enough (~2050). > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Sep 22 17:12:32 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 10:12:32 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > Isn't wind and solar always there? They are, and if civilization can be shifted to those as a primary source, then much of this problem goes away. Especially with space-based solar, where the limits of what can be harvested with Earth's surface area become a nonissue. (There might be limits as to how much wind it is practical to tap.) Of course, those are nonportable forms of energy, but if oil runs out, fuel manufactured from this energy will likely be the cheapest fuel around. Although, technically even solar is a "limited" resource: the total output of the Sun is finite and measured, and in billions of years the Sun's fuel supply will run low. But exchanging a problem that needs to be solved within the next several decades, for pretty much the same problem but it needs to be solved before several billion years pass, will suffice for now. On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > We already been unable to maintain our current technology for several > decades. The regression is not uniform, and sufficiently slow so that > it can be ignored by many. > New power plants are being constructed all the time, and have been for several decades. Coal plants going back to 1921 are still in operation. Human population has increased, and average energy used per person around the world has gone up. These are not consistent with a claim that we have been unable to maintain our current technology during this span of time. Granted, an increasing number of power plants are being retired - as was originally planned when they were first built. The intention was that they would be replaced with new capacity at that time, and that is now happening. There may be a case to be made about lack of readily accessible fuel, but technology itself keeps on advancing so long as there is fuel. As you note, historical collapsed civilizations did not collapse until after they ran out of fuel - not while they were running out. However close we may be to running out, the lights are still on right now, so there is yet time to break through. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sun Sep 22 17:10:36 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 10:10:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] bohemian rhapsody in physics Message-ID: <023f01ceb7b6$a86ab760$f9402620$@att.net> Oh man, is this crazy cool or what? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjbtsX7twc Now THIS kid has talent. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brent.allsop at canonizer.com Sun Sep 22 19:31:15 2013 From: brent.allsop at canonizer.com (Brent Allsop) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 13:31:15 -0600 Subject: [ExI] bohemian rhapsody in physics In-Reply-To: <023f01ceb7b6$a86ab760$f9402620$@att.net> References: <023f01ceb7b6$a86ab760$f9402620$@att.net> Message-ID: <523F4583.20404@canonizer.com> Wow, that was great! Thanks Spike. I just wish I understood more of all that "unified string theory" physics. In the theoretical field of science of the mind, any theory of everything must include qualitative properties like Redness and Greenness. The emerging expert consensus theories talk about Duality, as in "Macro material property DUALISM" and all the "Dualism" parent camps (see: http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/36 ). So when I see all the talk about "DUALITY" (starting soon after 5:00 in this Bohemian Gravity video), I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the Duality we talk about in theories of science of the mind field. Can any of you theoretical physicists help me out with this? It's probably just a completely unrelated type of predicted Duality, right? OH well, can't blame me for hoping. But as the great theoretical scientist of the mind Steven Lehar predicts, and as it says in this video (3:45) it is all waves, which are both quantum and qualitative properties, that vibrate and become Particles, right? Brent Allsop On 9/22/2013 11:10 AM, spike wrote: > > Oh man, is this crazy cool or what? > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjbtsX7twc > > Now THIS kid has talent. > > spike > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From protokol2020 at gmail.com Sun Sep 22 19:50:06 2013 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 21:50:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] bohemian rhapsody in physics In-Reply-To: <523F4583.20404@canonizer.com> References: <023f01ceb7b6$a86ab760$f9402620$@att.net> <523F4583.20404@canonizer.com> Message-ID: > So when I see all the talk about "DUALITY" (starting soon after 5:00 in this Bohemian Gravity video), I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the Duality we talk about in theories of science of the mind field. No, I don't think so. I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with that. On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 9:31 PM, Brent Allsop wrote: > > > Wow, that was great! Thanks Spike. > > I just wish I understood more of all that "unified string theory" physics. > > In the theoretical field of science of the mind, any theory of everything > must include qualitative properties like Redness and Greenness. The > emerging expert consensus theories talk about Duality, as in "Macro > material property DUALISM" and all the "Dualism" parent camps (see: > http://canonizer.com/topic.asp/88/36 ). > > So when I see all the talk about "DUALITY" (starting soon after 5:00 in > this Bohemian Gravity video), I'm wondering if it has anything to do with > the Duality we talk about in theories of science of the mind field. > > Can any of you theoretical physicists help me out with this? It's > probably just a completely unrelated type of predicted Duality, right? OH > well, can't blame me for hoping. > > But as the great theoretical scientist of the mind Steven Lehar predicts, > and as it says in this video (3:45) it is all waves, which are both quantum > and qualitative properties, that vibrate and become Particles, right? > > Brent Allsop > > > > > On 9/22/2013 11:10 AM, spike wrote: > > ** ** > > Oh man, is this crazy cool or what?**** > > ** ** > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rjbtsX7twc**** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > Now THIS kid has talent.**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing listextropy-chat at lists.extropy.orghttp://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Sun Sep 22 20:50:01 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 22:50:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 06:35:47PM +0200, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > Isn't wind and solar always there? At least as I understand you posts about > this matter? The energy flux is sure there, but you need to invest energy in order to be able to tap that flux. The only useful wind (with wortwhile EROEI) are large >1 MW installations, nevermind grid upgrades and storage buffers necessary to make use of a large fraction of wind. PV is sure smaller-grain, but if everybody suddenly decides to buy a few measly 100 Wp overnight you'll hit instant production limits, nevermind at >30 year life time you need to pay the EI part of EROEI *now*. No overdraft granted at the energy bank. At 3 TWp/year, and EROEI over many years that's a lot of energy you no longer have once past energy cliff. Do not ask for credit, you've been given ample credit already. There's not much more where that came from. Renewable deployment rate runs short a factor of 100, and that deployment gap is cumulative. The longer you wait, the more it's going to hurt. The energy supply gap means one thing: austerity. Demand destruction. Cutting back consumption not because it's a worthwhile thing, but because you no longer can afford it. Death by a million of papercuts. The more or less reliable results for today's local national votes are just in, and the majority emphatically does not want the Energiewende, having ousted the neoliberals (FDP) but having issued a vote of confidence for Merkel (CDU/CSU), which are staunchly anti-renewable. In case you were wondering whether we really are yeast: yes, we are. We can't deny it. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sun Sep 22 21:32:56 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 14:32:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Renewable deployment rate runs short a factor of 100, and that > deployment gap is cumulative. The longer you wait, the more > it's going to hurt. Thus the need for space-based solar, or something else that can massively boost this deployment rate. > The energy supply gap means one thing: austerity. > Demand destruction. Cutting back consumption not because it's > a worthwhile thing, but because you no longer can afford it. > Death by a million of papercuts. > The amount of energy you spend trying to get others to spend less energy, is greater than the amount of energy you've gotten people to save. Logically, if this is your measure of what's worthy, then you should stop spending any energy. > In case you were wondering whether we really are yeast: > yes, we are. We can't deny it. > You can't. We can. And when the world has failed to collapse, some of us will be there continuing to make sure it doesn't, rather than waste our time with disasterbation. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 01:01:15 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 21:01:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] bohemian rhapsody in physics In-Reply-To: References: <023f01ceb7b6$a86ab760$f9402620$@att.net> <523F4583.20404@canonizer.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 3:50 PM, Tomaz Kristan wrote: > > So when I see all the talk about "DUALITY" (starting soon after 5:00 in > this Bohemian Gravity video), I'm wondering if it has anything to do with > the Duality we talk about in theories of science of the mind field. > > No, I don't think so. I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with that. > > I think it's duality like up and down, left and right, positive and negative. If you're going into complex phenomenon like yin and yang, superego and id, mind and body, etc you're at a very different level of abstraction... well above the threshold of emergence. (whatever that means, eh?) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Mon Sep 23 03:12:54 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 05:12:54 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, 22 Sep 2013, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > without the ability to develop or even maintain current technology. > > Then we > > We already been unable to maintain our current technology for several > decades. The regression is not uniform, and sufficiently slow so that > it can be ignored by many. I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this (example[s] would help) but I am willing to believe it, to some extent at least. > > would be unable to advance beyond what I have envisioned as an AD1000-ish > > level of technology for lack of easily-available energy. Even at current > > We have no idea what technology level is sustainable if we have allowed > us to run out of energy. Most probably, some mix of 17 and 18 century (in high tech level places), with occasional inclusion of hand-make electronics. For the record, internet is not supportable at all. Mostly, because it may be hard/impossible to recreate even 60-ties level of computing. A lot of current production processes is automation - the hardware may last, say, 20-30 years if properly maintained, but some failures and parts cannibalising are inevitable. Once education fails, maintainance fails too. Actually, I'd speculate this is already happening, with manuals from A to Z followed by expendable staff, which otherwise does not have an idea what goes on under the hood and have hard time thinking outside the book. Since we are talking a lot about energy shortages and such, it is perhaps worth noting that to educate an engineer from the grounds up it requires about 15+ years in relatively stable environment. Okay, maybe it's possible to do this in 10 years if children are educated with program designed for this one purpose. No engineers, no industrial production. Not enough food -> brain development issues -> retarded engineers. I'm afraid any kind of survival plan that does not include sustaining/recreation of engineering is in fact a plan to slowly ride into dark ages and then even darker. There was a time in Europe, from what I have heard, when people knew Greek and had access to ancient math treatises but simply could not make anything out of it. Without certain type of education, math above certain level starts to sound like pure gobbledygooke. In light of this, surviving whatever catastrophe may await us seems relatively easy. Exercises for the impatient: 1. Create your own USB host from handful of parts: usb host connector (I am always a bit lost, whats its name, female A?), few wires, programmable microcontroller like 8051 or msp430 (I assume you have versions which can be interfaced with the said wires). This includes writing your own USB stack in assembler. I tried to locate such project but google failed on me. Thus, it's possible to have tons of USB based gizmos and nothing to connect them to. 2. Create CPU that does not suck (i.e. can support at least LISP 1.5 on it) from whatever parts that are not a cpu themselves. FPGA and similar stuff is not allowed. 36-bit words are very much welcome, but enough 8-bit words should do, too. Just not less than ten kilo of them. Because LISP has some requirements and so do nontrivial programs, even in Forth. This is doable but my impression is, only handful of people can and maybe few handfuls could, given enough time and books. The more time and no missing links in books, the better the results of course - in ten years frame, maybe even five, who knows, a moron like me could do, too. 3. Try to program Arduino with punched cards. This means, create a reader and maybe a puncher, too. Use as many Arduinos as needed. Of course you need to devise some card production process, too. Done? Now build a sorter. Congrats, you are now somewhere in 1850-1940 period, computing wise. It can be sustained provided enough supply of Arduinos and whatever other parts are needed. 4. Make a kilobit of your own core memory. Plug it to Arduino. Or whatever you please. Repeat 36 times to have one kiloword of core. Repeat last sentence 1024 times if you'd like to sport one megaword in your shiny new supercomputer. A chassis will have to be made of reinforced concrete and it'll look very much like a building, but a megaword is worth it. 5. Build your own alfanumeric printer, connect it to CPU and some core mem (a 36-bit kiloword may do), add card reader and run a program printing logarithmic tables. You have made it to the 1950-ties. Have a big drink. Or a bottle. When you wake up and headache is gone, try to build a hard drive. However: 6. Can you make an electric battery delivering certain voltage without looking up in google? Can you do so without multimeter? BTW, can you build analog multimeter? Can you build a transistor? Integrated circuit? Speaking of logarithms - can you build a log scale or Napier bones, or hand compute logarithms on paper with Taylor series? Out of your head? I assume all of the above can be done (even though I cannot any of the above), but it is not going to be easy without google and with eventual removal of all tech made after certain date. Doing whatever sophisticated production without a way of building computing hardware from a scratch - no, I don't think so. Some of it can be done with analog regulators, which have to be built, too. If "PID controller" rings any bells in a head, then maybe. There will be some junk but its quality will degrade quickly, I'm afraid. Besides, there will be plenty of mp3 players, digital cameras and cellphones, but not so much ARM capable compilers. PC requires huge voltages and amperages. Laptops - yeah, maybe, with car adapter. Unfortunately, military tech can no longer be trusted for rock solidness, after they introduced Windows to their systems (long ago) and started replacing Ada with C++ (not so long ago, AFAIK). Mainframes could be best bet but they may require unusual power options (like, three phase - I really don't know, do they?). Then again, how many laptops have compiler installed? And the number of people who can enter hex in command prompt from their memory is limited and it's not sure any of them will make it to times when their services are needed. It may be easier to find just a still working Commodore-64 with its builtin BASIC. So this junk is going to be very much useless outside the context of current civilisation. Most probably it'll be used for jewelry making, to create ritual bonding with better, golden times. This can be called disasterbation. Sure, why not. However, opposite thinking can be as well called triumpherbation, unless it can be logically proven that the global fail is avoidable [1] and massive life loss is not going to happen. Just in case, I'm not lamenting anything. I'm only trying to assess certain paths. [1] If using word "thorium", explain how to build enough plants [2] every year - those cannot be 3d printed. Even more important, I'd like to see one thorium plant in operation, delivering to the grid, this year. Last time I checked, there was none but maybe I missed something. Experiments being ran 30 years from now and shut down 20 years ago do not count. If using "solar space" please explain effects of solar flares and magnetic storms on such orbital station, including rare but possible Carrington-like events. When diminishing threats, include Fukushima keyword. I assume wind and ground solar are not available in enough quantity and/or can't be made fast enough to change anything [3]. But, again, I would like to be wrong, so surprise me, anybody. But I'd like to read about existing, available right now. Not some lab experimental startupmental. Hydrogen based tech? Nobody here mentions it, is it really so bonked? I heard this could be used for almost drop in replacing of oil fuels (I understand, difficulty is on par with converting normal car to gas). Of course it requires plenty of H. [2] BTW, even existing plants may be in trouble, even if otherwise in fine condition, once there is no more folks capable of, say, PDP-11 programming. Because there is some number of such old computers still used in nuke plants or in NASA and, well, despite all the progress and what not, spares have to be hunted on ebay and people have to be unmothballed from retirement. AFAIK. [3] Ground solar and wind are great option for individuals and not too big groups, IMHO. Maybe for some small countries, too - in a good place. As of countrywide solar+grid - I would be delighted to see this, really. I am still educating myself about this so, nothing interesting to say. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 23 04:01:17 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 21:01:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <05a101ceb811$8e86b230$ab941690$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Tomasz Rola Subject: Re: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? On Sun, 22 Sep 2013, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >>... without the ability to develop or even maintain current technology... spike > >>... We already been unable to maintain our current technology for several > decades. The regression is not uniform, and sufficiently slow so that > it can be ignored by many. >...I'm not sure what exactly you mean by this (example[s] would help) but I am willing to believe it, to some extent at least...Tomasz Rola --_______________________________________________ This is a difficult question, because some of what we call lost technology is just older technology being replaced by newer or more efficient technology. Examples: if we recreated the very best farm from 1500, then grabbed a dozen modern people and put them there, they would be near starvation before they realized those filthy beasts in the barn were food. The strange looking implements all around them are the 500 year ago version of our microwave. Good chance they would eventually figure out how to butcher the beasts, but you can be sure they would need to get hungry first. This example has a point: we have lost some technologies that were so common 500 years ago those ancients would be astonished at our helplessness. It takes a lot less knowledge to feed ourselves today than it did back then. In my own field of aerospace engineering, I have witnessed what looks to me like a definite retrograde technology. Aerodynamics using closed form equations: complicated as all hell. Now it is done entirely by finite element code. Controls engineering, oh how very laborious to learn it and to use it, the old 12 step program, develop a root locus plot, Nichols chart, Bode diagram, Nyquist procedure, zero the poles in the right half plane, start again, yakkity yak and bla bla, oh the sweat on the brow. None of this is done now, or rather it is not done that way. You just throw it in Matlab and Simulink, and the computer does the work. Young engineers don't need to learn how to do classical controls, and you can't afford to train them in those techniques anyway. So is classical controls an example of a lost technology? Not really, it is an example of a technology that has been coded into software. Now we don't need to know how it is done, any more than we need to know how to extract square roots by hand (yes I remember how to do that, no it is not necessary anymore.) If that is happening in the areas I know, is not this happening in every other field? spike From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 23 06:21:01 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 08:21:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The True Raw Material Footprint of Nations Message-ID: <20130923062101.GS10405@leitl.org> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130902162709.htm The True Raw Material Footprint of Nations Sep. 2, 2013 ? The amount of raw materials needed to sustain the economies of developed countries is significantly greater than presently used indicators suggest, a new Australian study has revealed. Using a new modelling tool and more comprehensive indicators, researchers were able to map the flow of raw materials across the world economy with unprecedented accuracy to determine the true "material footprint" of 186 countries over a two-decade period (from 1990 to 2008). The study, involving researchers from the University of New South Wales, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that the decoupling of natural resources from economic growth has been exaggerated. The results confirm that pressures on raw materials do not necessarily decline as affluence grows and demonstrates the need for policy-makers to consider new accounting methods that more accurately track resource consumption. "Humanity is using raw materials at a level never seen before with far-reaching environmental impacts on biodiversity, land use, climate and water," says lead author Tommy Wiedmann, Associate Professor of Sustainability Research at the UNSW School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "By relying on current indicators, governments are not able to see the true extent of resource consumption." "Now more than ever, developed countries are relying on international trade to acquire their natural resources, but our research shows this dependence far exceeds the actual physical quantity of traded goods," says Wiedmann, who worked at CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences when the research was undertaken. In 2008, the total amount of raw materials extracted globally was 70 billion metric tons -- 10 billion tons of which were physically traded. However, the results show that three times as many resources (41% or 29 billion tons) were used just to enable the processing and export of these materials. The researchers say that because these resources never leave their country of origin, they are not adequately captured by current reporting methods. They have used a new indicator they call the "material footprint" to more accurately account for these 'lost' resources and have developed tools that could assist policy-makers in future. Economy-wide accounting metrics (such as Domestic Material Consumption or DMC) currently used by certain governments and intergovernmental organisations, including the OECD, the European Union and the UN Environment Programme, only account for the volume of raw materials extracted and used domestically, and the volume physically traded. These indicators suggest resource-use in wealthy nations has increased at a slower rate than economic growth -- something known as relative decoupling -- and that other countries have actually seen their consumption decrease over the last 20 years -- something known as absolute decoupling. (See figures). Decoupling of raw material usage from economic growth is considered one of the major goals en route to achieving sustainable development and a low-carbon economy. But the study authors say when their "material footprint" indicators are factored in these achievements in decoupling are smaller than reported and often non-existent. The study relates to the following resources: metal ores, biomass, fossil fuels and construction minerals. Selected country findings: In 2008 China had by far the largest material footprint (MF) in absolute values (16.3 billion tons), twice as large as that of the US and four times that of Japan and India. Sixty per cent of China's MF consists of construction minerals, reflecting its rapid industrialisation and urbanisation over the last 20 years. Australia had the highest material footprint per capita (about 35 tons per person), but because it is a prolific exporter of resources, it appears to have a relative decoupling. Other developed economies (USA, Japan, UK) show similar levels at around 25 tons per person. Lower material standard of living and lower average level of consumption in many developing countries is reflected in a footprint below 15 tons per person, with India at the lower end at 3.7 tons per person. In absolute values, the US is by far the largest importer of primary resources embodied in trade and China the largest exporter. The largest per-capita exporters of embodied primary materials -- in particular metal ores -- are Australia and Chile. All industrialised nations show the same typical picture over time: as GDP grew over the last two decades there appeared to be a relative decoupling of resource use as indicated by DMC (even absolute decoupling for the UK). However, when measured by the material footprint indicator, resource use has grown in parallel to GDP with no signs of decoupling. This is true for the USA, UK, Japan, EU27 and OECD. South Africa was the only country shown to have an absolute decoupling using the MF indicator. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 07:14:31 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 01:14:31 -0600 Subject: [ExI] The True Raw Material Footprint of Nations In-Reply-To: <20130923062101.GS10405@leitl.org> References: <20130923062101.GS10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > South Africa was the only country shown to have an absolute decoupling > using > the MF indicator. > And yet, it is one of the largest producers of CO2 emissions in the world. You just can't win. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 07:19:51 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 01:19:51 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130907172021.GM29404@leitl.org> References: <06cb01cea329$e33856f0$a9a904d0$@att.net> <521D179C.4080901@aleph.se> <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <20130907130721.GJ29404@leitl.org> <20130907172021.GM29404@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sat, Sep 7, 2013 at 11:20 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 03:09:39PM +0100, BillK wrote: > > There is no demonstrated interstellar panspermia transfer mechanism. > Intrasystem yes, intersystem, no. > Seems like a star going supernovae somewhere in the neighborhood of a solar system with microbiotic life could produce a pretty good splash that could spew microbes all over the damn place. Wouldn't have to be their own star if that produces too big a bang for the microbes liking. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 07:27:30 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 01:27:30 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 3:32 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > The amount of energy you spend trying to get others to spend less energy, >> is greater than the amount of energy you've gotten people to save. >> Logically, if this is your measure of what's worthy, then you should stop >> spending any energy. > > OOh... Ouch. How much energy does one of these emails expend anyway? > You can't. We can. And when the world has failed to collapse, some of us >> will be there continuing to make sure it doesn't, rather than waste our >> time with disasterbation. > > I'm with you. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 07:31:08 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 01:31:08 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch.html -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 23 08:07:57 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:07:57 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130923080756.GZ10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 01:27:30AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > OOh... Ouch. How much energy does one of these emails expend anyway? It depends. 4G is pretty terrible at energy efficiency. On the other hand, lighting up a fiber costs very little. Modern routers can operate on embedded-like memory footprints, while core routers are dire beasts. The Internet could use a large helping of decentralism. If you're building rural communities, make sure you invest into fiber ducts or at least wireless meshes. Having a broadband connection is not just about circuses, it allows you to remain a part of global community, and share solutions. > > > You can't. We can. And when the world has failed to collapse, some of us > >> will be there continuing to make sure it doesn't, rather than waste our > >> time with disasterbation. No idea who wrote that, but WHY DO YOU THINK I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP? Desasterbation, my hairy arse. You nattering nabobs of positivity have gotten us into this shithole in the first place, remember? So shut your trap and eat that pie. It tastes terrible, but you've made it yourself. Eat it up. Eat it all up until you barf. > > > > > I'm with you. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 08:21:49 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 01:21:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130923080756.GZ10405@leitl.org> References: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130923080756.GZ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:07 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > WHY DO YOU THINK I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP? > Because it is an emotional release, that feels good enough to addict. That's the mental image "disasterbation" is supposed to convey. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 23 08:42:10 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:42:10 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130923080756.GZ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130923084210.GG10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 01:21:49AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:07 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > WHY DO YOU THINK I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP? > > > > Because it is an emotional release, that feels good enough to addict. I'm trying to spread the "good news" to make people stand up from their comfy chair, and do something about it. The ideal response should look somewhat like http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10230 > That's the mental image "disasterbation" is supposed to convey. Here is some more high-quality desasterbation: http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.de/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 09:32:17 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:32:17 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Nattering nabobs Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 9:07 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > No idea who wrote that, but WHY DO YOU THINK I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP? > Desasterbation, my hairy arse. You nattering nabobs of positivity have > gotten us into this shithole in the first place, remember? So shut your > trap and eat that pie. It tastes terrible, but you've made it yourself. > Eat it up. Eat it all up until you barf. > I think it is more correct to claim that it was the consumer society that got us into this shithole. The drive to consume more and more every year as a status symbol and linking nations GDP and progress to the idea of greater consumption is what got us into our present dire straits. The nattering nabobs are only saying 'Carry on as normal, don't worry' and resisting the need for change until it is forced upon them. By which time it will be too late to avoid much nastiness. The striking phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" was written by speechwriter William Safire for Republican Vice president Spiro Agnew in 1970. The phrase was aimed at the 'liberal' media who opposed the Vietnam war. This began the Republican policy of framing opponents as anti-American and unpatriotic. And it was successful in greatly weakening media critics, who now had to appear defensive and claim they were not 'unpatriotic'. BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 15:14:56 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 11:14:56 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > In terms of oil volume, flat plateau (net energy decline) has been with > us since roughly 2004. > In 2011 the USA exported more gasoline and diesel than it imported for the first time since 1949, and in 2012 the USA saw the largest yearly increase in oil production since oil drilling started in 1859. > Total peak fossil and fissible is 2020, > Natural gas production has increased dramatically just since 2007 and is now the highest it has ever been by far. And we will run out of thorium about the same time the sun runs out of hydrogen. > The only useful wind (with wortwhile EROEI) are large 1 MW installations, Such wind installations are very useful, to tax lawyers. A engineer would never recommend building such a thing, but a lawyer would. > if everybody suddenly decides to buy a few measly 100 Wp overnight [...] > If it became that popular then environmentalists would organize protest marches and sing songs against wind power because it disrupts the movement of global air patterns, kills birds, and is ugly and noisy. Environmentalists never met a large scale energy source they didn't hate so wind power, or anything else for that matter, is OK only if it remains tiny, uneconomic and impractical and doesn't come anywhere close to actually solving the problem. > Renewable deployment rate runs short a factor of 100, Because environmentalists refuse to even consider renewable energy sources like thorium reactors. > Our time has ran out. We've robbed outselves of all alternative choices > which were available > to us in the past. > Well if its too late and nothing can be done then continuing to blab about it is utterly pointless. Let us enjoy the little time we have left before the environmentalists get what they want and we all freeze to death in the dark. > WHY DO YOU THINK I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP? > I have no answer to that. John K Clark > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dan_ust at yahoo.com Mon Sep 23 15:50:27 2013 From: dan_ust at yahoo.com (Dan Ust) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 08:50:27 -0700 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: <1379769162.83315.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> References: <1379769162.83315.YahooMailNeo@web165005.mail.bf1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > On Sep 21, 2013, at 6:12 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote: > > Dan wrote: > > >> I think the problem here is with considering this doing X will cause a person to >> die view. > > > That's over-generalising what I was saying. It's not "doing X", it's a specific kind of action, where there is something with the direct purpose or effect of saving lives, that is deliberately prevented from being made available as widely as it could, because that wouldn't be as profitable for someone. Maybe, in some convoluted way, I could save a life if I lived in a ditch, but that's a quite different thing to holding a patent on a life-saving drug, and using it to actively prevent an organisation in India from manufacturing and deploying a version of that drug because I wouldn't profit from it. It is different, but where's the line drawn? Let's move away from the extreme example. What about the guy who's going to buy a latte before work. He could forego that pleasure and donate the money to some cause that would better someone else's life, possibly even saving their life, say, with an inexpensive vaccination that's the same price as his donation. (Similar to an example by the late Philippa Foot that I can't recall at the moment.) Is he a moral monster for deciding on bettering his own life with the latte? Then there's the issue of even if it is morally wrong for him to choose the latte, can we compel him to make the morally right choice. In other words, is it just and right for us to force him to do the right thing? And there are countless other examples where this can apply and apply in a more immediate fashion. What about a top heart surgeon that charges anything above her minimal costs of just getting by for surgery? All else being equal, isn't she condemning some of potential patients to death -- the ones who can't afford her and so have to go to a lesser heart surgeon with a higher chance if dying? That said, the main problem with patents for me is justifying them at all, regardless of whether they cause someone to choose more money over saving lives. (That doesn't mean, of course, that I'd choose more money over saving lives. (I'd love to be in a position of having loads of money to save lots of lives.:) I'm more asking about using that as the sole criterion here and also about the related issue of justice concerns.) Regards, Dan Through Monday PST, my three Kindle stories will be free: http://t.co/ML10V8umOZ http://t.co/VovjUEMuNG http://t.co/O4JSEV6C4F From atymes at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 16:08:51 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 09:08:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130923084210.GG10405@leitl.org> References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130923080756.GZ10405@leitl.org> <20130923084210.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:42 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 01:21:49AM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:07 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > WHY DO YOU THINK I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP? > > > > Because it is an emotional release, that feels good enough to addict. > > I'm trying to spread the "good news" to make people stand up from > their comfy chair, and do something about it. > > The ideal response should look somewhat like > http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10230 > Insisting that everyone who's doing something about it is wasting their time, and that doom is inevitable, won't get people to do that. Quite the opposite. > > That's the mental image "disasterbation" is supposed to convey. > > Here is some more high-quality desasterbation: > http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.de/ > No, that seems to simply miss the point that the more expensive technology is creating a disproportionately greater output, thus justifying the cost per machine. It is specifically not saying that everyone is doomed regardless of anything we do so we might as well stop trying. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Mon Sep 23 16:37:43 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 18:37:43 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, 23 Sep 2013, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > [...] > > Renewable deployment rate runs short a factor of 100, > > > Because environmentalists refuse to even consider renewable energy sources > like thorium reactors. Is it so? I have just checked a little. I am not convinced thorium can be deployed wide scale in the coming five years. I am not going to bet on ten years either. From what I understood, thorium _is not_ a drop-in replacement to be used in current plants. Moreover, there are quite a few problems not yet fully researched or solved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor#Difficulties On the said page, there is also a list of currently running initiatives. The only one that seems to have anything grid capable is one Japanese-multinational consortium running a 100MW plant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuji_MSR However, website of the consorium, http://www.ithems.jp/e_index.html times out in my location, for whatever reason - be it cut fiber or bad dns or whatnot. And I don't know if they deliver anything to the grid in a day to day operation or just experiment once a month. The closest date for some results seems to be somewhere around 2030: "Generation IV reactors (Gen IV) are a set of theoretical nuclear reactor designs currently being researched. Most of these designs are generally not expected to be available for commercial construction before 2030. Current reactors in operation around the world are generally considered second- or third-generation systems, with most of the first-generation systems having been retired some time ago. Generation V reactors refer to reactors that may be possible but are not yet considered feasible, and are not actively being developed." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor It is great there are so many enthusiasts of thorium. But twenty years is long time and then it's going to take some to deploy. I will have to wait and see how it resolves because I tend to rely on facts and possibilities are facts not. For me, thorium is just a possibility. It is not something I'd bet all my eggs on. BTW, thorium abundance is problematic to me, too. I have read it is only 3-4 times more abundant than uranium. However, if we don't build any thorium plant at all, then sure it will last longer than hydrogen in the Sun. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 16:53:12 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:53:12 -0600 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Dave Sill wrote: > On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > > If you were swimming in the open seas, would you want to be thrown a > > generic safety raft or just a raft? > > I would accept whatever is offered, of course. The patent issue really > only comes into play when the raft is purchased. If the rescue service > is soliciting donations to buy rafts, donors may well care whether the > rafts are produced by for-profit ventures or by non-profits. It could > be that rafts produced by the for-profit makers are a better value, > but donors may still balk at the idea of a portion of their donation > going toward the CEO's Porsche payment. > This talk changed my opinion about that. I suggest you take a few minutes and see if it doesn't change yours too. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html > If Plumpy'nut were produced by an entity that *didn't* enforce > intellectual property rights on others who want to produce similar > products (locally and more cheaply) then more starving people could be > saved at less cost. That kind of pisses me off and makes me not want > to support them. I don't think this is factually correct. The patent could be used to enforce local production of the paste, which would provide local jobs, as stated in the article. If Monsanto moved in, the local production would be overwhelmed by cheaper goods, and the local jobs would evaporate. I don't think it is as simple as you say here. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at alice.it Mon Sep 23 18:35:22 2013 From: scerir at alice.it (scerir) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 20:35:22 +0200 Subject: [ExI] bohemian rhapsody in physics In-Reply-To: <523F4583.20404@canonizer.com> References: <023f01ceb7b6$a86ab760$f9402620$@att.net> <523F4583.20404@canonizer.com> Message-ID: <0CEE7DE2F53E470D87A654CAE8631145@PCserafino> From: "Brent Allsop" > Can any of you theoretical physicists help me out with this? It's > probably just a completely unrelated type of predicted Duality, right? Yes, http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.6073 > But as the great theoretical scientist of the mind Steven Lehar > predicts, and as it says in this video (3:45) it is all waves, which are > both quantum and qualitative properties, that vibrate and become > Particles, right? "Everything in the future is a wave, everything in the past is a particle." --Lawrence Bragg From sparge at gmail.com Mon Sep 23 20:35:08 2013 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:35:08 -0400 Subject: [ExI] (The Independent 2013-08) Plumpy'Nut: The lifesaver that costs... well, peanuts In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Dave Sill wrote: >> >> On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: >> > >> > If you were swimming in the open seas, would you want to be thrown a >> > generic safety raft or just a raft? >> >> I would accept whatever is offered, of course. The patent issue really >> only comes into play when the raft is purchased. If the rescue service >> is soliciting donations to buy rafts, donors may well care whether the >> rafts are produced by for-profit ventures or by non-profits. It could >> be that rafts produced by the for-profit makers are a better value, >> but donors may still balk at the idea of a portion of their donation >> going toward the CEO's Porsche payment. > > This talk changed my opinion about that. I suggest you take a few minutes > and see if it doesn't change yours too. > > http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html Not really. I'm not hung up on the overhead factor of charities that I donate to. But charity CEOs making commercially-competitive salaries is going to be a hard sell for lots of would-be donors. I'm not wealthy, and when I donate, I want my donation to go someone who needs it, not someone who feels they deserve it. >> If Plumpy'nut were produced by an entity that *didn't* enforce >> intellectual property rights on others who want to produce similar >> products (locally and more cheaply) then more starving people could be >> saved at less cost. That kind of pisses me off and makes me not want >> to support them. > > I don't think this is factually correct. What fact did I state that you disagree with? > The patent could be used to enforce > local production of the paste, which would provide local jobs, as stated in > the article. If Monsanto moved in, the local production would be overwhelmed > by cheaper goods, and the local jobs would evaporate. I don't think it is as > simple as you say here. I'm sorry, I can't follow what you're saying. If Nutriset didn't enforce the Plumpy'nut patent, locals could produce a fortified peanut butter more cheaply. How would Monsanto "moving in" affect that? -Dave From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 24 09:03:56 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 11:03:56 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Belgacom Hack (EN translation) Message-ID: <20130924090356.GB10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from coderman ----- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 19:46:35 -0700 From: coderman To: cpunks Subject: Belgacom Hack (EN translation) http://cryptome.org/2013/09/belgacom-hack-en.htm / http://blog.cyberwar.nl/2013/09/belgacom-on-brink-of-catastrophe.html """ On the brink of catastrophe (2013-09-21) Ping. It's Friday the 13th. Around 11 o'clock in the morning, the IT consultants that Belgacom employs at its largest customers in the private and public sector receive a message. The message doesn't say much, except for an urgent request to cancel all appointments of that forenoon. An "emergency conference call" will take place instead. The news that is brought in that call makes the IT consultants gasp for breath. A piece of malicious software has been found on the network of BICS, a daughter company of Belgacom. It is hard to grasp even for well-informed insiders. The BICS network is so wide and deep that it is promptly clear to everybody that this is not just a Belgian problem. This problem is at least of European proportions. Because whoever controls BICS, controls the communication of a large part of the world. "This could have been larger than 9/11", says one source who closely followed the case. Without a grain of irony. The pressure on the teams of the Dutch digital defender Fox-IT, that started cleaning up together with an army of Belgacom employees last weekend, was enormous. It was their second attempt, various sources confirm. A first attempt to remove the villainous software from the infected computers at Belgacom in the last weekend of August was cancelled. "At the time, not all conditions were met required to remove everything at once", it was said. Some computers turned out to run the alternative operating system Linux, known of the penguin logo, not Windows. "The risk was too big that we could not remove everything at once. In that case you should not touch it. Or the adversary will know that the virus has been found", states someone politically involved. Strict conditions The investigation of the hacking started on July 19th, when Belgacom went to court. During their work, investigators at the intelligence services, police and justice were very wary of a leak about the entire operation. In early September they informed the Belgian cabinet on strict conditions: the list of attendees of that meeting was kept closely. If a politician would have wanted to reveal the news before the malware was dealt with, the investigators would press charges for breach of confidentiality of the investigation. "We could not risk everything going wrong due to someone talking", it is said. Belgacom was not infected with some common viruses, but with very professional malware that costed lots of money to develop. "We had to re-invent ourselves to do this", an investigator said. "In other investigations there is a fixed idea of where you're going, but in in this case it was continuously starting over because it was so difficult to get a grasp of the malware". Gradually it became clear that the hackers are not only interested in the communications in the Middle-East, where BICS holds a solid position via South-African minority shareholder MTN. "They have been looking around and took what they could", state sources involved in the investigation. They are clear about one thing: the attack originated from the United States. "We determine that by the signature of the malware, but especially by where the trails lead. They partially run through the UK. We think the US is the main destination. And the past weeks at the US Embassy, you notice some embarrassment when you request exchange of information." Yesterday, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported that the UK intelligence service GCHQ (Government Communications Headquartes) are responsible for the attacks. It based that claim on slides disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The news that GCHQ is behind the Belgacom attack is a surprise to at least the services working on the affair. The malware could do anything The malware at Belgacom actually consists of a complex system of complementary viruses. They are all connected. If a problem is imminent or if they are detected, they can signal each other. "It is somewhat like a human virus, which also mutates continuously", states someone involved who monitors the situation for his service. "For example, one part is responsible for searching and storing information, while another part is continuously looks for pathways to the internet to transfer information. Other pieces of code are responsible for circumventing firewalls, or carry out surveillance. If someone detects the hacking or attempts to remove a part of it, the virus that is acting as a guard promptly signals the other parts. Because you don't know what the malware is capable of, everything can go horribly wrong at the last step." The cost of the entire detection and cleaning operation is correspondingly high. Fox-IT, the Dutch cyber security/defence company that is commissioned by Belgacom to first make inventory of the problems and then solve them, is a familiar name. "For the first two weeks they estimated the costs to be one million euro", states a well-placed source. And then adds that the entire operation lasted ten weeks. Moreover, Fox-IT did not expect that, at a certain point, it had to allocate all of its employees to this case. A price tag of over five million euro, then? "It won't be far off." But what was so terrifying about this cyber attack? And why the panic that something would go wrong? Telephone data about conversations with countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria that disappear, how could that have such an impact? They are 'just' stolen phone data, right? The involved expert sitting opposite us, looks dead serious. There is drama in his voice, but considering the contents of what he says, that is not unjustified. "This was highly performing malware and it was present in the nerve centre of communications. Anything that a highly privileged network operator of Belgacom could do, this system could do as well. I don't have to make a drawing of it? It had all the keys, all the passwords and full control. We must dare to classify this as a big crisis. This could have been a catastrophe. And people don't seem to realize." Sensitive customers Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to make that drawing. BICS calls itself a "wholesale carrier". Two words, four syllables, but behind it is a network that spans the entire globe and the beating heart of which is located in our capital, Brussels. BICS provides the hardware infrastructure that carries internet traffic, phone conversations, text messages and mobile data of telecom companies and government institutions. And the more sensitive the customer, the more likely he is the end up at BICS. The daughter company of Belgacom markets itself with the argument that they never ever look at what travels over its cables. "We provide the cables for you, and you just send whatever you want over them", is what it basically boils down to. A glance at the list of BICS' customers makes one dizzy. The financial transport center Swift, Electrabel, bpost, Belgocontrol, they are all connected to BICS. The NATO in Evere, the European Commission and Parliament, SHAPE, the Supreme Headquerters Allied Powers Europe, in Bergen; BICS, BICS, BICS. Even the headquarters of the NATO Allied Air Command, in Ramstein, Germany, from where the 2011 air attacks on Libya where coordinated, depends on BICS. Among the military, it is pointed out that military communications has an extra layer of security; but that pointing-out happens with a degree of humility that is very unusual to the military. "Every organisation, not just the government, must now begin to wonder whether it is dependent of one single provider, of one single network. And specially how well it is secured itself", states someone who was at the front row of the affair. "Belgacom, that is critical infrastructure. How can Belgium keep running without it? Those are the questions that we must ask now. Because the organisation responsible for the attack has in fact the capability to completely disrupt Belgacom and BICS." A different source confirms, reluctantly, the doom scenarios: "You can't think of it. It would be larger than 9/11. The planes would pretty much fall out of the sky." As a figure of speech? "Hm, yeah." Lifeline A governmental source points out the consequences of even a limited disruption of phone communications and internet. "If a crisis occurs, what is the first thing a human does? Grasp their phone. Imagine that that lifeline is lost. Not just for you, but also for the emergency services, hospital, the fire department...? And for the police? At first glance it isn't, because they use the Astrid network [a Belgian national radio communications network intended for emergency services]. But that network only works apart from BICS for local communications. For interregional communications it is just as dependent on BICS as the rest. Hence, it is no coincidence that police chief Catherine De Bolle started looking for a backup for the communications system of the federal police on that Friday the 13th, just before the big cleaning operation would have started. How long would it take before Belgacom was up and running again after a destructive cyber attack, is unclear. "But it is clear that we are not prepared to counter this type of attacks right now", states a high-ranking source. "That awareness must finally start to grow. I am very apprehensive for the feeling of relief that I already observe in some people. 'Ah well, that has been nicely dealt with. It's over.' It's not, mind you. Whoever doesn't realise, this week, that it is urgent, will never get it. Playing things down now is dangerous." After De Standaard brought the news of large-scale hacking at Belgacom, it turned out that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the cabinet of the prime minister had been hacked. "And this is merely the top of the iceberg", states a source who was involved in the problems at Belgacom. Because telecom is one thing, but there are many other critical sectors that are the fundament of a country. Transportation, for example. Trains, trams, busses, highways, airplanes, everything involves computer networks and everywhere one should be cautious for cyber attacks. The energy supply is another critical fundament. And last but not least: the banking sector of a country. Luxembourg has already contacted the Belgian cyberservices [?] to obtain more information about the malware that hit Belgacom. Awareness Besides budgets and well-paid IT personnel, the remedy against the growing cyberthreat will be found in improved awareness. "Belgium wants to invest in knowledge and innovation, but if one sector is vulnerable to espionage, it is that one. Just as many computers of the global diplomatic network of Foreign Affairs have post-its one them with the passwords, many small companies are slacking in their security", a cyber specialist states. "And if you dare ask whether their Chinese interns are thoroughly screened, they look at you as if you're from another planet." Whether the gravity of the situation is apparent to everyone, is doubtful. In official communications, Belgacom states that it currently has no evidence of impact on its customers or their data. Understandly, the company does not want to trigger hysteria, but it sounds like down-playing nonetheless. "What should we write then?", states spokesman Jan Margot in his response. "The infection was at dozens of computers in our own system. They have been cleaned together with the entire network." BICS too doesn't say much about it. "There are no indications of an impact on the telecomnetwork of BICS", it states in a press release. "A number of our IT systems are integrated in the infrastructure of Belgacom and are affected in that way, but that remained outside the network that carries customer traffic." "That's all put rather euphemistically", according to the investigators involved. "But you cannot accuse them of lying. A lot of thought went into every comma of the communication." Joke Did Belgium become the joke of de European mainland as a result of the compromise of Belgacom? Intelligence services are continuously in contact with each other and exchange information. For the image of our country, the past week has been anything but stellar, but it is emphasised nonetheless that in such contacts it is often also about personal relations between people. "Moreover, all countries have problems and everyone tries to rise above them." What about ethics? Isn't it schizophrenic that our country, Belgium, receives information about threats that the US or others have stolen from us? "That is the eternal paradox", a recipient of such information states. Diplomatically it is the hardest. But if you receive information about a serious threat such as terrorism, you cannot ignore it. Then you have different things on your mind. """ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 24 10:37:06 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:37:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Slow Winter Message-ID: <20130924103706.GM10405@leitl.org> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf According to my dad, flying in airplanes used to be fun. You could smoke on the plane, and smoking was actually good for you. Everybody was attractive, and there were no fees for anything, and there was so much legroom that you could orient your body parts in arbitrary and profane directions without bothering anyone, and you could eat caviar and manatee steak as you were showered with piles of money that were personally distributed by JFK and The Beach Boys. Times were good, assuming that you were a white man in the advertising business, WHICH MY FATHER WAS NOT SO PERHAPS I SHOULD ASK HIM SOME FOLLOW-UP QUESTIONS BUT I DIGRESS. The point is that flying in airplanes used to be fun, but now it resembles a dystopian bin-packing problem in which humans, carry-on luggage, and five dollar peanut bags compete for real estate while crying children materialize from the ether and make obscure demands in unintelligible, Wookie-like languages while you fantasize about who you won?t be helping when the oxygen masks descend. I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed. Your friend would say, ?I wish that we could predict branches more accurately,? and you?d think, ?maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a simple saturating counter,? and you?d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would never work, but then you?d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would wake up the next morning and read their newspapers and the headlines would say OUR WORLD HAS BEEN SET ON FIRE. You?d give your buddy a high-five and go celebrate at the bar, and then you?d think, ?I wonder if we can make branch predictors even more accurate,? and the next day you?d start XOR?ing the branch?s PC address with a shift register containing the branch?s recent branching history, because in those days, you could XOR anything with anything and get something useful, and you test the new branch predictor, and now you?re up to 96% accuracy, and the branches call you on the phone and say OK, WE GET IT, YOU DO NOT LIKE BRANCHES, but the phone call goes to your voicemail because you?re too busy driving the speed boats and wearing the monocles that you purchased after your promotion at work. You go to work hung-over, and you realize that, during a drunken conference call, you told your boss that your processor has 32 registers when it only has 8, but then you realize THAT YOU CAN TOTALLY LIE ABOUT THE NUMBER OF PHYSICAL REGISTERS, and you invent a crazy hardware mapping scheme from virtual registers to physical ones, and at this point, you start seducing the spouses of the compiler team, because it?s pretty clear that compilers are a thing of the past, and the next generation of processors will run English-level pseudocode directly. Of course, pride precedes the fall, and at some point, you realize that to implement aggressive out-of-order execution, you need to fit more transistors into the same die size, but then a material science guy pops out of a birthday cake and says YEAH WE CAN DO THAT, and by now, you?re touring with Aerosmith and throwing Matisse paintings from hotel room windows, because when you order two Matisse paintings from room service and you get three, that equation is going to be balanced. It all goes so well, and the party keeps getting better. When you retire in 2003, your face is wrinkled from all of the smiles, and even though you?ve been sued by several pedestrians who suddenly acquired rare paintings as hats, you go out on top, the master of your domain. You look at your son John, who just joined Intel, and you rest well at night, knowing that he can look forward to a pliant universe and an easy life. Unfortunately for John, the branches made a pact with Satan and quantum mechanics during a midnight screening of ?Weekend at Bernie?s II.? In exchange for their last remaining bits of entropy, the branches cast evil spells on future generations of processors. Those evil spells had names like ?scaling induced voltage leaks? and ?increasing levels of waste heat? and ?Pauly Shore, who is only loosely connected to computer architecture, but who will continue to produce a new movie every three years until he sublimates into an empty bag of Cheetos and a pair of those running shoes that have individual toes and that make you look like you received a foot transplant from a Hobbit, Sasquatch, or an infertile Hobbit/Sasquatch hybrid.? Once again, I digress. The point is that the branches, those vanquished foes from long ago, would have the last laugh. When John went to work in 2003, he had an indomitable spirit and a love for danger, reminding people of a less attractive Ernest Hemingway or an equivalently attractive Winston Churchill. As a child in 1977, John had met Gordon Moore; Gordon had pulled a quarter from behind John?s ear and then proclaimed that he would pull twice as many quarters from John?s ear every 18 months. Moore, of course, was an incorrigible liar and tormentor of youths, and he never pulled another quarter from John?s ear again, having immediately fled the scene while yelling that Hong Kong will always be a British territory, and nobody will ever pay $8 for a Mocha Frappuccino, and a variety of other things that seemed like universal laws to people at the time, but were actually just arbitrary nouns and adjectives that Moore had scrawled on a napkin earlier that morning. Regardless, John was changed forever, and when he grew up and became a hardware architect, he poured all of his genius into making transistors smaller and more efficient. For a while, John?s efforts were rewarded with ever-faster CPUs, but at a certain point, the transistors became so small that they started to misbehave. They randomly switched states; they leaked voltage; they fell prey to the seductive whims of cosmic rays that, unlike the cosmic rays in comic books, did not turn you into a superhero, but instead made your transistors unreliable and shiftless, like a surly teenager who is told to clean his room and who will occasionally just spray his bed with Lysol and declare victory. As the transistors became increasingly unpredictable, the foundations of John?s world began to crumble. So, John did what any reasonable person would do: he cloaked himself in a wall of denial and acted like nothing had happened. ?Making processors faster is increasingly difficult,? John thought, ?but maybe people won?t notice if I give them more processors.? This, of course, was a variant of the notorious Zubotov Gambit, named after the Soviet-era car manufacturer who abandoned its attempts to make its cars not explode, and instead offered customers two Zubotovs for the price of one, under the assumption that having two occasionally combustible items will distract you from the fact that both items are still occasionally combustible. John quietly began to harness a similar strategy, telling his marketing team to deemphasize their processors? speed, and emphasize their level of parallelism. At first, John?s processors flew off the shelves. Indeed, who wouldn?t want an octavo-core machine with 73 virtual hyper-threads per physical processor? Alan Greenspan?s loose core policy and weak parallelism regulation were declared a resounding success, and John sipped on champagne as he watched the money roll in. However, a bubble is born so that a bubble can pop, and this one was no different. John?s massive parallelism strategy assumed that lay people use their computers to simulate hurricanes, decode monkey genomes, and otherwise multiply vast, unfathomably dimensioned matrices in a desperate attempt to unlock eigenvectors whose desolate grandeur could only be imagined by Edgar Allen Poe. Of course, lay people do not actually spend their time trying to invert massive hash values while rendering nine copies of the Avatar planet in 1080p. Lay people use their computers for precisely ten things, none of which involve massive computational parallelism, and seven of which involve procuring a vast menagerie of pornographic data and then curating that data using a variety of fairly obvious management techniques, like the creation of a folder called ?Work Stuff,? which contains an inner folder called ?More Work Stuff,? where ?More Work Stuff? contains a series of ostensible documentaries that describe the economic interactions between people who don?t have enough money to pay for pizza and people who aren?t too bothered by that fact. Thus, when John said ?imagine a world in which you?re constantly executing millions of parallel tasks,? it was equivalent to saying ?imagine a world that you do not and will never live in.? Indeed, a world in which you?re constantly simulating nuclear explosions while rendering massive 3-D environments is a world that?s been taken over by members of a high school A.V. club. The members of a high school A.V. club lack the chops to establish a global dictatorship, if only because doing such a thing would require them to reduce their visits to Renaissance festivals, and those turkey legs need help to be consumed in the style of a 15th century Italian aristocrat. John was terrified by the collapse of the parallelism bubble, and he quickly discarded his plans for a 743-core processor that was dubbed The Hydra of Destiny and whose abstract Platonic ideal was briefly the third-best chess player in Gary, Indiana. Clutching a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a shotgun in the other, John scoured the research literature for ideas that might save his dreams of infinite scaling. He discovered several papers that described software-assisted hardware recovery. The basic idea was simple: if hardware suffers more transient failures as it gets smaller, why not allow software to detect erroneous computations and re-execute them? This idea seemed promising until John realized THAT IT WAS THE WORST IDEA EVER. Modern software barely works when the hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROPERTY VALUES IN TOKYO. It?s better to stop scaling your transistors and avoid playing with monsters in the first place, instead of devising an elaborate series of monster checksand-balances and then hoping that the monsters don?t do what monsters are always going to do because if they didn?t do those things, they?d be called dandelions or puppy hugs. At this point, John was living under a bridge and wearing a bird?s nest as a hat. Despite his tragic sartorial collaborations with the avian world, John still believed that somehow, some way, he could continue to make his transistors smaller. Perhaps the processor could run multiple copies of each program, comparing the results to detect errors? Perhaps a new video codec could tolerate persistently hateful levels of hardware error? All of these techniques could be implemented. However, John slowly realized that these solutions were just things that he could do, and inventing ?a thing that you could do? is a low bar for human achievement. If I were walking past your house and I saw that it was on fire, I could try to put out the fire by finding a dingo and then teaching it how to speak Spanish. That?s certainly a thing that I could do. However, when you arrived at your erstwhile house and found a pile of heirloom ashes, me, and a dingo with a chewed-up Rosetta Stone box, you would be less than pleased, despite my protestations that negative scientific results are useful and I had just proven that Spanishilliterate dingoes cannot extinguish fires using mind power. It was at this moment, when John had hit the bottom, that he discovered religion. John began to attend The Church of the Impending Power Catastrophe. He sat in the pew and he heard the cautionary tales, and he was afraid. John learned about the new hyperthreaded processor from AMD that ran so hot that it burned a hole to the center of the earth, yelled ?I?ve come to rejoin my people!?, discovered that magma people are extremely bigoted against processor people, and then created the Processor Liberation Front to wage a decades-long, hilariously futile War to Burn the Intrinsically OK-With-Being-Burnt Magma People. John learned about the rumored Intel Septium chip, a chip whose prototype had been turned on exactly once, and which had leaked so much voltage that it had transformed into a young Linda Blair and demanded an exorcism before it embarked on a series of poor career moves that culminated in an inevitable spokesperson role for PETA. The future was bleak, and John knew that he had to fight it. So, John repented his addiction to scaling, and he rededicated his life to reducing the power consumption of CPUs. It was a hard path, and a lonely path, but John could find no other way. Formerly the life of the party, John now resembled the scraggly, one-eyed wizard in a fantasy novel who constantly warns the protagonist about the variety of things that can lead to monocular bescragglement. At team meetings, whenever someone proposed a new hardware feature, John would yell ?THE MAGMA PEOPLE ARE WAITING FOR OUR MISTAKES.? He would then throw a coffee cup at the speaker and say that adding new hardware features would require each processor to be connected to a dedicated coal plant in West Virginia. John?s coworkers eventually understood his wisdom, and their need to wear coffeeresistant indoor ponchos lessened with time. Every evening, after John left work, he went to the bus stop and distributed power literature to strangers, telling them to abandon transistor scaling and save their souls. Standing next to John, another man wore a sandwich board that said that the Federal Reserve was using fluorinated water to hide the fact that we never landed on the moon. The sandwich board required no transistors at all. It made John smile. When John comes home for the holidays, you?re glad that he?s back, but you miss the old twinkle in his eye. Your thoughts wander to your own glory days thirty years ago, when Aerosmith mistook young John for a large Xanax tablet and tried to trade him for a surface-to-air missile that could be used against anti-classic rock regimes. Oh, how you laughed! The subsequent visit by Child Protection Services was less amusing, but that was the way that hardware architects lived: working hard, partying hard, and occasionally waking up in Tijuana to discover that your left kidney is missing and your toddler has been shipped to a Columbian arms smuggler. It was crazy, but you wouldn?t change a thing. Your generation had lived so many dreams, and slain so many foes. Today, if a person uses a desktop or laptop, she is justifiably angry if she discovers that her machine is doing a non-trivial amount of work. If her hard disk is active for more than a second per hour, or if her CPU utilization goes above 4%, she either has a computer virus, or she made the disastrous decision to run a Java program. Either way, it?s not your fault: you brought the fire down from Olympus, and the mortals do with it what they will. But now, all the easy giants were dead, and John was left to fight the ghosts that Schr?dinger had left behind. ?John,? you say as you pour some eggnog, ?did I ever tell you how I implemented an out-of-order pipeline with David Hasselhoff and Hulk Hogan?s moustache colorist?? You are suddenly aware that you left your poncho in the other room. James Mickens is a researcher in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft?s Redmond lab. His current research focuses on web applications, with an emphasis on the design of JavaScript frameworks that allow developers to diagnose and fix bugs in widely deployed web applications. James also works on fast, scalable storage systems for datacenters. James received his PhD in computer science from the university of Michigan, and a bachelor?s degree in computer science from georgia Tech. mickens at microsoft.com From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 24 12:14:48 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:14:48 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [tt] NYT: Dinner Is Printed Message-ID: <20130924121448.GQ10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Frank Forman ----- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:59:35 +0000 (GMT) From: Frank Forman To: Transhuman Tech Subject: [tt] NYT: Dinner Is Printed Dinner Is Printed http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/dinner-is-printed.html By A. J. JACOBS THE hype over 3-D printing intensifies by the day. Will it save the world? Will it bring on the apocalypse, with millions manufacturing their own AK-47s? Or is it all an absurd hubbub about a machine that spits out chintzy plastic trinkets? I decided to investigate. My plan: I would immerse myself in the world of 3-D printing. I would live for a week using nothing but 3-D-printed objects-- toothbrushes, furniture, bicycles, vitamin pills--in order to judge the technology's potential and pitfalls. I approached Hod Lipson, a Cornell engineering professor and one of the nation's top 3-D printing experts, with my idea. He thought it sounded like a great project. It would cost me a mere $50,000 or so. Unless I was going to 3-D print counterfeit Faberg? eggs for the black market, I'd need a Plan B. Which is how I settled on the idea of creating a 3-D-printed meal. I'd make 3-D-printed plates, forks, place mats, napkin rings, candlesticks--and, of course, 3-D-printed food. Yes, cuisine can be 3-D printed, too. And, in fact, Mr. Lipson thinks food might be this technology's killer app. (More on that later.) I wanted to serve the meal to my wife as the ultimate high-tech romantic dinner date. A friend suggested that, to finish the evening off, we hire a Manhattan-based company that scans and makes 3-D replicas of your private parts. That's where I drew the line. As it turned out, the dinner was perhaps the most labor-intensive meal in history. But it did give me a taste of the future, in both its utopian and dystopian aspects. Jeffrey Lipton helping to prepare the evening’s dinner on a 3-D printer. In case you don't subscribe to Wired, a 3-D printer is sort of like a hot-glue gun attached to a robotic arm. But instead of squeezing out glue, the tube extrudes plastic. The shape is your choice. Using special software, you can design any object on your computer--say, a coffee mug with two handles-- then load the file into the 3-D printer. You wait a couple of hours as the printer nozzle shuttles back and forth, oozing out melted plastic layer by layer until--voil?--your ambidextrous mug. Other types of printers work with metal, biological tissue, ceramics and food. To its boosters, the 3-D printer is a revolution in the making. It will democratize manufacturing. Just as the Internet turned us all into couchbound Gutenbergs with the ability to publish to millions of readers with a single click, 3-D printers will turn us all into Henry Fords, Ralph Laurens and Daniel Bouluds. In the future, if you want a new pair of boots for that night's party, just load in a nylon cartridge, choose a design, punch a button and slip them on. OF course, the revolution isn't here yet, at least not for home users. According to an industry consultant, Terry Wohlers of Wohlers Associates, only about 68,000 consumer printers have been sold. Most home users are hobbyists, and the geek factor remains high. The biggest chunk of the fast-growing $2.2 billion 3-D printing economy is industrial. Food printing is so far a minor phenomenon, confined mostly to science fairs, universities and a handful of chocolate devotees. And, I hoped, me. But before I became a chef of the future, I'd need to make the plates and utensils. I bought a Cube 3-D printer, perhaps the sleekest of the home gadgets. It looks like a sewing machine mated with a MacBook. It's not cheap: $1,299, plus $49 dollars for each cartridge of plastic. I downloaded design software to my laptop and diagramed a fork. I clicked a button, and 20 minutes later, my "fork" emerged from my printer. It was a lopsided hunk of neon-green plastic with four sharp points at the end. It resembled something a chimp might use to extract termites. My next half-dozen tries weren't much better. I printed a cup that leaked, an ice-cube tray that refused to release its cubes, and a spoon that unintentionally called to mind one of Salvador Dal?'s melted clocks. My wife, Julie, called my new cutlery drawer "the island of misfit utensils." In my defense, 3-D printing is surprisingly hard--a fact its advocates don't dwell upon. So much can go wrong: The nozzle clogs, the machine overheats, the print pad tilts. In fact, Web sites like the blog Epic3DPrintingFail are devoted to photos of projects gone hilariously awry--including one box that looks as if it were the brainchild of a drunk Frank Gehry. It's also mind-numbingly slow. A teacup takes about four hours to print, accompanied by nonstop whirring. When I tried to design and print a replacement die for my son's Monopoly game, it was a daylong project. My son helpfully pointed out that Amazon has one-click ordering. That said, I did improve with practice. I was particularly proud of my wineglass, with its tapered cone. I became obsessed with the design software, spending hours squashing spheres and hollowing out cylinders. I downloaded some of the hundreds of free, publicly shared designs (though my wife nixed the Tetris-themed earrings). I found myself almost giddy after every successful print: Yes, I created this napkin ring! I can make anything. I am a god and bright blue plastic is my universe! The power can lead to narcissism. You think Americans in the Facebook era take excessive photos of ourselves? Get ready for selfie statues. At a 3-D printer store in NoHo run by Makerbot, you can get 3-D scans of your head (four cameras simultaneously snap photos of you from different angles). I got one of my 7-year-old son and printed a fist-size orange plastic bust of him. At home, we converted his head into a salt shaker for the dinner by poking a hole in the top of his plastic skull and adding some Morton's. If my table setting was going to look at all respectable, I'd need to call in the pros. I asked Mr. Lipson if I could hire him and his team to help. What a difference a Ph.D. makes. They sent back blueprints for the cutlery--a fork and spoon made of lacy, spiraling steel. I told the engineers that my wife likes Italy, so they sent Italian-themed designs. A wineglass inspired by a Roman column, with Corinthian flourishes. A candleholder influenced by Venetian gondola poles, adorned with Julie's favorite flower, the peony. I showed the images to my wife. She paused. "You might have gone a little over the top with the Italian theme," she said. "I think we have different agendas here. You want personalized designs that could only happen with 3-D printing. I want stuff we will actually use more than once." Mr. Lipson printed most of my dinnerware at a New York-based company called Shapeways, which has fancy, cutting-edge 3-D printers that work with metal and ceramics. Again, it's not cheap. The cost for my fork, for instance? $50. I couldn't afford a 3-D-printed dinner tuxedo, but Mr. Lipson offered to design a tie. "It'll be a bit like chain mail," he said. "I wouldn't want to blow my nose on it. But it will work." A few weeks later, the tie arrived: a long swath made entirely of white interlocking rings of nylon. I had trouble adjusting the tie, so I wore it loose and low, like a young banker after a few too many vodka tonics. At last, meal day arrived. The Cube can print only plastic, not food, so I had called in my tech team. At noon, Jeffrey I. Lipton--a 25-year-old Cornell Ph.D. candidate in engineering--arrived and unloaded boxes of equipment. Out came an air compressor, plastic tubes and bottles of xanthan gum, a food thickener. Our kitchen table was overtaken by a large 3-D printer that had been used for various other experiments--like printing artificial buttocks muscle for medical training. "Don't worry," Mr. Lipton said. "It's been cleaned." Mr. Lipson believes that the 3-D printer could be the most powerful kitchen tool ever created. You will have unlimited control over your meal's shape, consistency, flavor and color. Just think of what it means for parents, he said: "What boy wouldn't want to eat a Lamborghini, even if it's made of broccoli?" The most ardent supporters of 3-D-printed food have big ideas. NASA gave $125,000 to a Texas company to study 3-D-printed cuisine for astronauts. The benefit is, they could design a wide assortment of meals from shelf-stable ingredients. There's talk of embedding medicines in meals. In his book "Fabricated," Mr. Lipson dreams of digitally driven dinners, where the printer uses your body's up-to-the-minute data to create the perfect lasagna for your nutritional needs, with, say, extra protein or vitamin A. Junk-food makers hope 3-D printing will allow them to patent a new way to combine salt, sugar and fat. Animal-rights activists hope printers will squeeze out pork chops made from the lab-grown stem cells of pigs. And idealists believe that the technology will help solve world hunger. The hope? We can more efficiently ship powdered food to developing countries, where it can be printed into a variety of meals. A group of Dutch researchers is working on inexpensive bases made from algae and insect protein. When Mr. Lipson's engineers were experimenting with printing food in 2009, they created artificial snacks made from gelatin and flavoring. The resulting food cubes--infused with banana and vanilla--were sampled by undergraduate volunteers. They were not a hit. "It was met with universal condemnation," says Mr. Lipton. "It was very 'Soylent Green.' " Instead, the lab now squishes whole foods down into a paste that can be used as the printer's ink. The menu for my dinner took weeks to figure out, balancing my wife's tastes and the lab's scientific constraints. "It needs to be something processed," said Mr. Lipson. "Like quiche or meatloaf. It can't be a salad or steak." A 3-D printed pizza in the shape of Italy, complete with the Apennine Mountain range in the middle. Our final picks? Pizza, an eggplant dish, corn pasta and panna cotta. Our pizza will be in the shape of Italy, a topographically correct replica of the country, complete with the Apennine Mountain range in the middle. Mr. Lipton punched some codes into his laptop (e.g., 20 psi for air pressure), and the pizza dough began squirting out of a long tube. The tomato sauce--which was thickened with xanthan gum to achieve the right viscosity--proved more challenging. "These oregano flakes are killing me," Mr. Lipton said with a sigh, fiddling with the dial on the air compressor. The flakes were clogging up the tube's nozzle, leading to what one onlooker called a Vesuvian eruption of red sauce in Northern Italy. After extruding the cheese, the pizza was ready for heating. Future 3-D printers will most likely use lasers to zap the food. Mr. Lipton used a more traditional method: our oven. Twenty minutes later, we had a pizza shaped like Italy, or at least Italy and its surrounding coastal waters (the dough rose with the heat, expanding the borders). My wife and I put our slices on our 3-D-printed plates, cut a piece with our 3-D-printed forks. We clinked our 3-D-printed wineglasses and listened to some Sinatra playing (very faintly) on a plastic and rubber 3-D-printed speaker. WE each took a bite. We raised our eyebrows. It tasted like the 22nd century. Actually, it tasted like a slightly chewier version of non-3-D-printed pizza. I wasn't magically transported to the holo-deck of the Starship Enterprise, but it was good eating. In my wife's opinion, almost as good as Patsy's, which is high praise. "We actually found that creating totally new taste sensations alarms people," Mr. Lipson told me. "Humans are quite phobic that way. So we try to stick to tastes people are somewhat used to." Continuing with the carb-heavy theme, we next printed out corn-based noodles in the shape of our initials. They emerged from the nozzle in little squiggles, looking like a plateful of tiny beige Slinkies. They tasted like a more delicate version of angel-hair pasta. Our side dish was a 3-D Frankenfood: a paste made of squash and eggplant and printed in the shape of a gear (a design that seemed appropriately mechanical). The idea was to show the potential for 3-D printing to combine any vegetables--or meats or fruits or nuts --into a single object. We would create a new hybrid: the eggsquash, or the squant. Unfortunately, our eggsquash's texture was too gummy to enjoy, so my wife and I left half on the plate. The tie, the dishes and the cutlery were all created with a 3-D printer. The dessert was panna cotta. The plan was to have a secret 3-D-printed message hidden inside. If cut in half, the dessert was supposed to reveal the letters "NYC" in blue cream. (The lab had done a similar trick with a "C" buried inside a cookie.) Mr. Lipton dyed some of the panna cotta blue, but it never made it out of the tube. "This isn't going to work," Mr. Lipton said, after searching his gear. To inject the secret letters, we needed a second compressor hose, which Mr. Lipton had left at the Cornell lab. Instead, we had (once again) food in the shape of our initials. It was creamy and light, though the monogrammed letters made us feel uncomfortably Trump-like. Thanks to the technical snafus, the meal finished late--or at least late by parents-of-young-kids standards. Mr. Lipton packed up his gear around 11 p.m. After spending weeks with 3-D printing, I have no doubt it will change the world in ways we can hardly imagine. Much of the change will be behind the scenes, unobserved by consumers. Engineers foresee a lightweight largely 3-D-printed airplane that could cut fuel costs significantly. That savings will (fingers crossed) be passed along to travelers. As Mr. Lipton says, we are in for a "silent revolution." But will there also be a revolution in our homes and kitchens? Will 3-D printers transform our lives like the PC and Mac did? That remains to be seen. It will be a battle between two forces: one, our love for ego-gratifying stuff tailored to our every whim. And two, our built-in laziness. Will we make the effort to print out a hexagonal ostrich burger with cucumber swirls (and then clean the printer) when we can just get a Quarter Pounder at the drive-through on the way home? I'm a techno-optimist, so I hope so. In the meantime, I'd judge this the strangest and most memorable meal of my life, and that includes a dinner party that featured vegan cow entrails. A.J. Jacobs is an editor at large at Esquire magazine and the author of "Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection." _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt at postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 24 13:18:55 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 15:18:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?How_a_Crypto_=E2=80=98Backdoor=E2=80=99_Pitted_th?= =?utf-8?q?e_Tech_World_Against_the_NSA?= Message-ID: <20130924131855.GT10405@leitl.org> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/all/ How a Crypto ?Backdoor? Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA BY KIM ZETTER09.24.136:30 AM Illustration: alengo/Getty Images In August 2007, a young programmer in Microsoft?s Windows security group stood up to give a five-minute turbo talk at the annual Crypto conference in Santa Barbara. It was a Tuesday evening, part of the conference?s traditional rump session, when a hodge-podge of short talks are presented outside of the conference?s main lineup. To draw attendees away from the wine and beer that competed for their attention at that hour, presenters sometimes tried to sex up their talks with provocative titles like ?Does Bob Go to Prison?? or ?How to Steal Cars ? A Practical Attack on KeeLoq? or ?The Only Rump Session Talk With Pamela Anderson.? Dan Shumow and his Microsoft colleague Niels Ferguson titled theirs, provocatively, ?On the Possibility of a Back Door in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Ec Prng.? It was a title only a crypto geek would love or get. The talk was only nine slides long (.pdf). But those nine slides were potentially dynamite. They laid out a case showing that a new encryption standard, given a stamp of approval by the U.S. government, possessed a glaring weakness that made an algorithm in it susceptible to cracking. But the weakness they described wasn?t just an average vulnerability, it had the kind of properties one would want if one were intentionally inserting a backdoor to make the algorithm susceptible to cracking by design. For such a dramatic presentation ? by mathematicians? standards ? the reaction to it was surprisingly muted. ?I think folks thought, ?Well that?s interesting,? and, ?Wow, it looks like maybe there was a flaw in the design,?? says a senior Microsoft manager who was at the talk. ?But there wasn?t a huge reaction.? Six years later, that?s all changed. Early this month the New York Times drew a connection between their talk and memos leaked by Edward Snowden, classified Top Secret, that apparently confirms that the weakness in the standard and so-called Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm was indeed a backdoor. The Times story implies that the backdoor was intentionally put there by the NSA as part of a $250-million, decade-long covert operation by the agency to weaken and undermine the integrity of a number of encryption systems used by millions of people around the world. The Times story has kindled a firestorm over the integrity of the byzantine process that produces security standards. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which approved Dual_EC_DRBG and the standard, is now facing a crisis of confidence, having been forced to re-open the standard for public discussion, while security and crypto firms scramble to unravel how deeply the suspect algorithm infiltrated their code, if at all. On Thursday, corporate giant RSA Security publicly renounced Dual_EC_DRBG, while also conceding that its commercial suite of cryptographic libraries had been using the bad algorithm as its default algorithm for years. But beneath the flames, a surprising uncertainty is still smoldering over whether Dual_EC_DRBG really is backdoored. The Times, crypto experts note, hasn?t released the memos that purport to prove the existence of a backdoor, and the paper?s direct quotes from the classified documents don?t mention any backdoor in the algorithm or efforts by the NSA to weaken it or the standard. They only discuss efforts to push the standard through committees for approval. Jon Callas, the CTO of Silent Circle, whose company offers encrypted phone communication, delivered a different rump session talk at the Crypto conference in 2007 and saw the presentation by Shumow. He says he wasn?t alarmed by it at the time and still has doubts that what was exposed was actually a backdoor, in part because the algorithm is so badly done. ?If [NSA] spent $250 million weakening the standard and this is the best that they could do, then we have nothing to fear from them,? he says. ?Because this was really ham-fisted. When you put on your conspiratorial hat about what the NSA would be doing, you would expect something more devious, Machiavellian ? and this thing is just laughably bad. This is Boris and Natasha sort of stuff.? Indeed, the Microsoft presenters themselves ? who declined to comment for this article ? didn?t press the backdoor theory in their talk. They didn?t mention NSA at all, and went out of their way to avoid accusing NIST of anything. ?WE ARE NOT SAYING: NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG,? read the last slide of their deck. The Microsoft manager who spoke with WIRED on condition of anonymity thinks the provocative title of the 2007 presentation overstates the issue with the algorithm and is being misinterpreted ? that perhaps reporters at the Times read something in a classified document showing that the NSA worked on the algorithm and pushed it through the standards process, and quickly took it as proof that the title of the 2007 talk had been right to call the weakness in the standard and algorithm a backdoor. But Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research, says that regardless of the lack of evidence in the Times story, he discounts the ?bad cryptography? explanation for the weakness, in favor of the backdoor one. ?Bad cryptography happens through laziness and ignorance,? he says. ?But in this case, a great deal of effort went into creating this and choosing a structure that happens to be amenable to attack. ?What?s mathematically creative [with this algorithm] is that when you look at it, you can?t even prove whether there is a backdoor or not, which is very bizarre in cryptography,? he says. ?Usually the presence of a backdoor is something you can prove is there, because you can see it and exploit it?. In my entire career in cryptography, I?ve never seen a vulnerability like this.? National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: Wikipedia It?s not the first time the NSA has been accused of installing backdoors. Crypto trapdoors, real and imagined, have been part of NSA lore for decades. In some ways the current controversy echoes the long-ago debate over the first U.S. Data Encryption Standard in the 1970s. The NSA was widely suspected of weakening DES to make it more crackable by the agency by tinkering with a table of numeric constants called an S-Box and shortening the algorithm?s key length. In 1994, though, the NSA was exonerated when it turned out that the agency had actually changed the S-Box numbers to harden DES against a code-breaking technique that had been known only within NSA at the time. In 1995, another case came up that seemed to confirm suspicions about the NSA. The Baltimore Sun reported that year that the NSA had inserted a backdoor into cryptographic machines made by the respected Swiss company Crypto AG, apparently substantiating longstanding rumors to that effect. Then in 1999, Microsoft inadvertently kicked off another controversy when it leaked its internal name for a cryptographic signing key built into Windows NT. The key was called _NSAKEY, spawning speculation that Microsoft had secretly given the agency the power to write and sign its own updates to Windows NT?s crypto engine. Microsoft said this was incorrect, that the key was an internal Microsoft key only and that it was called ?_NSAKEY? because the NSA was the technical reviewing authority for U.S. export controls. The key was part of Microsoft?s compliance with U.S. export laws. Suspicions about the NSA and backdoors were lingering in 2006 when Shumow and Ferguson began looking at Dual_EC_DRBG after NIST approved it for inclusion in a standard (.pdf). The standard discussed four federally sanctioned random number generators approved for use in encrypting government classified and unclassified-but-sensitive communication. Each of the four algorithms was based on a different cryptographic design family. One was based on hash functions, one on so-called HMAC (hash-based message authentication code), one on block ciphers and the fourth one was based on elliptic curves. The NSA had been pushing elliptic curve cryptography for a number of years, and it publicly championed the last one ? Dual_EC_DRBG ? to be included in the standard. Elliptic curve algorithms are based on slightly different mathematics than the more common RSA algorithm, and the NSA believes they?re the future of cryptography, asserting that elliptic curve algorithms are smaller, faster and offer better security. But as Shumow and Ferguson examined the properties of the elliptic curve random number generator in the standard, to determine how to incorporate it into the Windows operating system, a couple of strange things stood out. First, the random number generator was very slow ? two to three orders of magnitude slower than another algorithm in the standard. Second, it didn?t seem to be very secure. ?There was a property [in it] that seemed to make the prediction-resistance of the algorithm not what you would necessarily want it to be,? the Microsoft manager says. In non-geek speak, there was a weakness that made the random number generator not so random. Good random number generation is at the core of encryption, and a weak RNG can undo the entire encryption system. Random number generators play a role in creating cryptographic keys, in opening secure communications between users and web sites and in resetting passwords for email accounts. Without assured randomness, an attacker can predict what the system will generate and undermine the algorithm. Shumow and Ferguson found that the obstacles to predicting what the random number generator would generate was low. It wasn?t a catastrophic problem, but it seemed strange for a security system being promulgated by the government. Then they noticed something else. The standard for implementing the algorithm included a list of constants ? static numbers ? that were used in the elliptic curve on which the random number generator was based. Whoever generated the constants, which served as a kind of public key for the algorithm, could have generated a second set of numbers at the same time ? a private key. Anyone possessing that second set of numbers would have what?s known in the cryptography community as ?trapdoor information? ? that is, they would be able to essentially unlock the encryption algorithm by predicting what the random number generator generated. And, Shumow and Ferguson realized, they could predict this after seeing as few as 32 bytes of output from the generator. With a very small sample, they could crack the entire encryption system used to secure the output. ?Even if no one knows the secret numbers, the fact that the backdoor is present makes Dual_EC_DRBG very fragile,? cryptographer Bruce Schneier wrote at the time, in a piece for WIRED. ?If someone were to solve just one instance of the algorithm?s elliptic-curve problem, he would effectively have the keys to the kingdom. He could then use it for whatever nefarious purpose he wanted. Or he could publish his result, and render every implementation of the random-number generator completely insecure.? No one knew who had produced the constants, but it was assumed that because the NSA had pushed the algorithm into the standard, the agency had generated the numbers. The spy agency might also, then, have generated a secret key. Schneier called it ?scary stuff indeed,? but he also said at the time that it made no sense as a backdoor, since it was so obvious to anyone who looked at the algorithm and standard that there was this flaw in it. As a result, developers of web sites and software applications wouldn?t use it to help secure their products and systems, he said. But in fact, many developers did use it. The U.S. government has enormous purchasing power, and vendors soon were forced to implement the suspect standard as a condition of selling their products to federal agencies under so-called FIPS certification requirements. Microsoft added support for the standard, including the elliptic curve random-number generator, in a Vista update in February 2008, though it did not make the problematic generator the default algorithm. Asked why Microsoft supported the algorithm when two of its own employees had shown it to be weakened, a second Microsoft senior manager who spoke with WIRED said that while the weakness in the algorithm and standard was ?weird? it ?wasn?t a smoking gun.? It was more of an ?odd property.? Microsoft decided to include the algorithm in its operating system because a major customer was asking for it, because it had been sanctioned by NIST, and because it wasn?t going to be enabled as the default algorithm in the system, thus having no impact on other customers. ?In fact it is nearly impossible for any user to implement or to get this particular random number generator instantiating on their machines without going into the guts of the machine and reconfiguring it,? he says. Other major companies, like Cisco and RSA, added it as well. NIST in fact provides a lengthy list of companies that have included it in their libraries, though the list doesn?t say which companies made it the default algorithm in their library or which products have been developed that invoke the algorithm. A Cisco spokesman told WIRED that the algorithm was implemented in its standard crypto library around mid-2012, a library that is used in more than 120 product lines, but the algorithm is not the default, and the default algorithm cannot be changed by users. The company is currently completing an internal audit of all of its products that leverage the NIST standard. RSA, however, made the algorithm the default in its BShare toolkit for Java and C developers until this week when it told WIRED that it was changing the default following the renewed controversy over it. The company sent an advisory to developer customers ?strongly? urging them to change the default to one of a number of other random number generator algorithms RSA supports. RSA also changed the default on its own end in BSafe and in an RSA key management system. The company is currently doing an internal review of all of its products to see where the algorithm gets invoked in order to change those. RSA actually added the algorithm to its libraries in 2004 or 2005, before NIST approved it for the standard in 2006 and before the government made it a requirement for FIPS certification, says Sam Curry, the company?s chief technology officer. The company then made it the default algorithm in BSafe and in its key management system after the algorithm was added to the standard. Curry said that elliptic curve algorithms were all the rage at the time and RSA chose it as the default because it provided certain advantages over the other random number generators, including what he says was better security. ?Cryptography is a changing field. Some algorithms go up and some come down and we make the best decisions we can in any point in time,? he says.?A lot of the hash-based algorithms were getting struck down by some weaknesses in how they chose numbers and in fact what kind of sample set they chose for initial seeding. From our perspective it looked like elliptic curve would be immune to those things.? Curry says the fact that the algorithm is slower actually provides it with better security in at least one respect. ?The length of time that you have to gather samples will determine the strength of your random number generation. So the fact that it?s slower sometimes gives it a wider sample set to do initial seeding,? he says. ?Precisely because it takes a little longer, it actually winds up giving you more randomness in your initial seeding, and that can be an advantage.? Despite the renewed controversy over the algorithm and standard, Microsoft managers say they still don?t think the weaknesses constitute an intentional backdoor. Callas agrees. He thinks it is simply bad cryptography that was included in the standard to round-out the selection so that there would be at least one elliptic curve algorithm in the standard. But one advantage to having the algorithm supported in products like Vista ? and which may be the reason the NSA pushed it into the standard ? is that even if it?s not the default algorithm for encryption on a system, as long as it?s an option on the system, an intruder, like the NSA, can get into the system and change the registry to make it the default algorithm used for encryption, thereby theoretically making it easy for the NSA to undermine the encryption and spy on users of the machine. Schneier says this is a much more efficient and stealth way of undermining the encryption than simply installing a keystroke logger or other Trojan malware that could be detected. ?A Trojan is really, really big. You can?t say that was a mistake. It?s a massive piece of code collecting keystrokes,? he said. ?But changing a bit-one to a bit-two [in the registry to change the default random number generator on the machine] is probably going to be undetected. It is a low conspiracy, highly deniable way of getting a backdoor. So there?s a benefit to getting it into the library and into the product.? To date, the only confirmation that the algorithm has a backdoor comes in the Times story, based on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, which the Times and two other media outlets saw. ?[I]nternal memos leaked by a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, suggest that the NSA generated one of the random number generators used in a 2006 NIST standard ? called the Dual EC DRBG standard ? which contains a back door for the NSA,? the Times wrote. An editorial published by the Times this weekend re-asserted the claim: ?Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a ?back door? into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.? But all of the quotes that the Times published from the memos refer to the NSA getting the standard passed by an international standards body; they do not say the NSA intentionally weakened the algorithm and standard, though the Times implies that this is what the memos mean by tying them to the 2007 presentation by Shumow and Ferguson. NIST has denied any knowledge of a backdoor and has also denied that the NSA authored its standard. The institute has, however, re-opened the standard for public comment as a result of the controversy and ?strongly? urged against using the algorithm in question until the matter could be resolved. The public comments period will close Nov. 6. Even without more explicit confirmation that the weaknesses in the algorithm and standard constitute a backdoor, Kocher and Schneier believe they do. ?It is extraordinarily bad cryptography,? says Kocher. ?If you look at the NSA?s role in creating standards [over the years] and its general cryptographic sophistication, none of it makes sense if there isn?t a backdoor in this.? Schneier agrees and says the NSA has done too many other things for him to think, when he sees government-mandated crypto that?s weak, that it?s just by accident. ?If we were living in a kinder world, that would be a plausible explanation,? he says. ?But we?re living in a very malicious world, it turns out.? He adds that the uncertainty around the algorithm and standard is the worst part of the whole matter. ?This is the worst problem that the NSA has done,? Schneier says. ?They have so undermined the fundamental trust in the internet, that we don?t know what to trust. We have to suspect everything. We?re never sure. That?s the greatest damage.? -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 15:09:30 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 09:09:30 -0600 Subject: [ExI] People Zoo Message-ID: This is a pretty amazing video. I especially liked the end where the robot promised to keep the guy in his "people zoo" because he likes him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ySljCcnq4o -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alfio.puglisi at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 15:25:02 2013 From: alfio.puglisi at gmail.com (Alfio Puglisi) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 17:25:02 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Energy markets Message-ID: An interesting article about European energy markets, written by a banker who finances them: "The Economic and Political Consequences of the Last 10 Years of Renewable Energy Development" http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10227 Quote: "...The wholesale market as it was designed 20 years ago (de facto based on gas-fired plants of various efficiency targeted at different points of the merit order curve setting up the marginal price) is irreversibly broken. The system is now dominated by plants with very low marginal cost of production (but high upfront investment), which means that spot prices are systematically too low for everybody - you can't invest in plants with high upfront investments (like nukes), and you can't invest in plants with high marginal running costs (gas-fired plants) unless you are betting on persistently low gas prices into the future." Alfio -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 24 16:24:44 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:24:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [NSG-d] Interesting new way to calculate high-energy particle interactions Message-ID: <20130924162443.GW10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Andy Hendrickson ----- Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 11:17:32 -0400 From: Andy Hendrickson To: nsg-d at marshome.org Subject: [NSG-d] Interesting new way to calculate high-energy particle interactions User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130801 Thunderbird/17.0.8 Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group - open discussion FYI. https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ Andy -- Andy Hendrickson andy at carpe-codex.com Sr. Software Engineer Carpe Codex! (Seize the Code!) =========================================================== chown -R us ~your/*base* The Vampire NetStat _______________________________________ Nanotechnology Study Group NSG-d open discussion group http://www.marshome.org/mailman/listinfo/nsg-d Send replies (no attachments) to: NSG-d___no-spam at marshome.org Questions for list admin: NSG-d-owner___no-spam at marshome.org Archive: http://MarsHome.org/mailman/private/NSG-d Unsubscribe: NSG-d-unsubscribe at marshome.org Password or Options or Unsubscribe: http://MarsHome.org/mailman/options/NSG-d Hosted by CyberTeams.com and Mars Foundation(tm), http://MarsHome.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 17:04:01 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:04:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [NSG-d] Interesting new way to calculate high-energy particle interactions In-Reply-To: <20130924162443.GW10405@leitl.org> References: <20130924162443.GW10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > FYI. > > > https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ > > Andy > No commentary? :( -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 17:40:41 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:40:41 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 Tomasz Rola wrote: >> environmentalists refuse to even consider renewable energy sources like >> thorium reactors. >> > > > Is it so? Yes that is so. > I have just checked a little. I am not convinced thorium can be deployed > wide scale in the coming five years. So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming five years. > I am not going to bet on ten years either. So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming ten years either. > The closest date for some results seems to be somewhere around 2030: > 17 years is more than good enough. > > From what I understood, thorium _is not_ a drop-in replacement to be > used in current plants. True. > Moreover, there are quite a few problems not yet fully researched or > solved: > Sure there are still technological problems to be solved, but they are trivial compared with the problems of making wind power abundant and economical, and super trivial compared with making even an experimental fusion reactor that just produces a little more energy that it needs for operation. And yet over the last 30 years tens of billions of dollars have been spent on fusion research but virtually nothing on Thorium research. > For me, thorium is just a possibility. It is not something I'd bet all > my eggs on. > But wind power and solar power and, god help us, bio-fuel, is something to bet all your eggs on? > BTW, thorium abundance is problematic to me, too. I have read it is only > 3-4 times more abundant than uranium. Uranium is not a particularly rare element and Thorium is much more common than Uranium, in fact it's almost twice as common as Tin. And Thorium is easier to extract from its ore than Uranium. At best a (non-breeder) Uranium reactor only uses .7% of its fuel (and usually less than that) because it can only get energy from the rare U235 isotope; but natural Thorium has only one isotope and a Thorium reactor can use 100% of it. It would only take 2000 tons of Thorium to equal the energy in 6 billion tons of coal that the world uses each year. There is 120 TRILLION tons of Thorium in the earth's crust and if the world needs 10 times as much energy as we get from just coal then we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion years. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 24 17:44:33 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 10:44:33 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go Message-ID: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> We knew this was going to happen eventually. A local company did this. The timing is interesting, since the fast food workers are threatening to strike unless their wages are raised way above minimum. Check it outwardly: http://momentummachines.com/#team spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 24 18:18:36 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:18:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Energy markets In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130924181836.GX10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 05:25:02PM +0200, Alfio Puglisi wrote: > Quote: > "...The wholesale market as it was designed 20 years ago (de facto based on > gas-fired plants of various efficiency targeted at different points of the > merit order curve setting up the marginal price) is irreversibly broken. > The system is now dominated by plants with very low marginal cost of > production (but high upfront investment), which means that spot prices are > systematically too low for everybody - you can't invest in plants with high > upfront investments (like nukes), and you can't invest in plants with high > marginal running costs (gas-fired plants) unless you are betting on > persistently low gas prices into the future." Yes. We need a ban on new coal and subsidies for natural gas peak plants, which are not cost effective due to low duty factor. Also, no more favoring off-shore wind for onshore. From eugen at leitl.org Tue Sep 24 18:19:42 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:19:42 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [NSG-d] Interesting new way to calculate high-energy particle interactions In-Reply-To: References: <20130924162443.GW10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130924181942.GY10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 01:04:01PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > FYI. > > > > > > https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ > > > > Andy > > > > No commentary? :( None I can share publicly :( From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 20:06:25 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:06:25 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 11:44 AM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > We knew this was going to happen eventually. A local company did this. > The timing is interesting, since the fast food workers are threatening to > strike unless their wages are raised way above minimum. Check it outwardly: > **** > > ** ** > > http://momentummachines.com/#team > I'll be sending them my resume... :-) This could be huge. The richest guy in the state of Utah made a lot of his money selling the styrofoam plastic shell McDonald's used for years. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 20:15:20 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:15:20 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 9:14 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > If it became that popular then environmentalists would organize protest > marches and sing songs against wind power because it disrupts the movement > of global air patterns, kills birds, and is ugly and noisy. > Environmentalists never met a large scale energy source they didn't hate so > wind power, or anything else for that matter, is OK only if it remains > tiny, uneconomic and impractical and doesn't come anywhere close to > actually solving the problem. > The root of this is that most "environmentalists" are simply anti-capitalists or anti-humanists who dress up in something a little more palatable to the masses. Who hates a polar bear? Nobody. Who wants to sit their ass out on the ice next to the bear? Nobody. Who wants everybody else to sit their ass out on the ice next to the bear? The environmentalists. > > Renewable deployment rate runs short a factor of 100, > > > Because environmentalists refuse to even consider renewable energy sources > like thorium reactors. > I recently spoke with a group of retired engineers who used to work for the Idaho National Laboratory. They indicated that they had once built and detonated a thorium based nuclear weapon, which I thought was interesting. Most of the thorium advocates claim it is safer in terms of nuclear weapons proliferation. Perhaps it is really difficult to make a bomb out of thorium, but apparently, it is possible. > Well if its too late and nothing can be done then continuing to blab about > it is utterly pointless. Let us enjoy the little time we have left before > the environmentalists get what they want and we all freeze to death in the > dark. > > > WHY DO YOU THINK I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP? >> > > I have no answer to that. > Because Eugen's wind is a renewable energy source? ;-) -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 19:48:29 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:48:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> Message-ID: The real test is in getting restaurants to buy these machines (or launching their own actual restaurant, as seems to be the plan here) and use them to serve customers profitably. There's more to a restaurant than just cooking; this machine must integrate with the rest, or find a way to operate on its own (perhaps vending machine style). The theoretical capability is already there. This is about implementing in practice. Good that someone is trying, though! On Sep 24, 2013 11:00 AM, "spike" wrote: > ** ** > > We knew this was going to happen eventually. A local company did this. > The timing is interesting, since the fast food workers are threatening to > strike unless their wages are raised way above minimum. Check it outwardly: > **** > > ** ** > > http://momentummachines.com/#team**** > > ** ** > > spike**** > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 20:30:40 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 21:30:40 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 8:48 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > The real test is in getting restaurants to buy these machines (or launching > their own actual restaurant, as seems to be the plan here) and use them to > serve customers profitably. There's more to a restaurant than just cooking; > this machine must integrate with the rest, or find a way to operate on its > own (perhaps vending machine style). > > The theoretical capability is already there. This is about implementing in > practice. Good that someone is trying, though! > Some Sushi restaurants are already operating with robot sushi chefs. So robot chefs seem to be accepted by customers. BillK From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 24 20:26:21 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:26:21 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> Message-ID: <0b8101ceb964$559b6ac0$00d24040$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 1:06 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 11:44 AM, spike wrote: We knew this was going to happen eventually. A local company did this. The timing is interesting, since the fast food workers are threatening to strike unless their wages are raised way above minimum. Check it outwardly: http://momentummachines.com/#team >.I'll be sending them my resume... :-) This could be huge. The richest guy in the state of Utah made a lot of his money selling the styrofoam plastic shell McDonald's used for years. -Kelly Kelly if they hire you, I will be the head of the welcome-to-the-neighborhood-Kelly committee. >.This could be huge. That's what I was thinking too Kelly. If a local fast food place could set up a lights-out kitchen, I would go out of my way to eat there. It has nothing to do with busting unions or any kind of labor warrior capitalist anything, but rather just that it seems so cool to me. I suppose I could argue it has the potential to be so much cleaner with no proles working back there, but even that isn't really it. I just like the notion of robots making my lunch. I am addicted to tech. I briefly worked in a fast food place in my misspent youth, and watched (I worked the register, never did work the kitchen.) It occurred to me way back in the 1970s that the process could be automated, long before I knew a damn thing about controls engineering. In retrospect, I am surprised it has taken this long. This robot would solve so many problems. In a fast food restaurant even on a hopping evening, there are lulls, where you have about four cooks standing around in back doing nothing, at least one person always on the till doing nothing, sometimes a separate cleaning guy maybe doing a piddling nothing in a spotless dining room, and at least one shift manager in his office, doing nothing. This can go on for ten or fifteen minutes, with not one customer walking thru the door. Experiment: go to a fast food restaurant some evening away from peak hours, watch and calculate, or at least estimate, knowing the cost of a worker is a minimum of about 22, 23-ish bucks an hour for the lowest tier, managers about 40-ish. Count the number of happy meals going across the counter. Estimate that cost per hour, then figure the capital cost of a robot with one guy watching and maintaining, make him a 60 dollar an hour guy if you want, a low-end technician level. Compare. They could sell those burgers 20 percent below McDonalds. I will eat them, even if they just match the competitors. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 24 20:33:19 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:33:19 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> Message-ID: <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go >.The real test is in getting restaurants to buy these machines. Adrian The theoretical capability is already there. This is about implementing in practice. Good that someone is trying, though! >>.http://momentummachines.com/#team spike _______________________________________________ NO! If it pencils out, they will buy. We will invest in it even. The real test, the real make-or-break, is if they figure out a way to allow the customer to watch the burgers being made, so they get the whole gee-whiz geek appeal factor. Adrian, they would suck in guys like us and our friends around here like nobody's business! We aren't the only geeks around who would pay as much or even pay more to watch a machine do stuff for us, and now that I am on that, imagine a robo-waitress, now wouldn't that be cool? Has to be humanoid, and sexy. We would buy the hell outta that place. I would even leave her a tip. It's a race! Venture capitalists, ready set GO! spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 24 22:44:52 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 15:44:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> Message-ID: <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> On Behalf Of spike Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go >>.The real test is in getting restaurants to buy these machines. Adrian _______________________________________________ >.If it pencils out, they will buy. We will invest in it even. The real test, the real make-or-break, is if they figure out a way to allow the customer to watch the burgers being made, so they get the whole gee-whiz geek appeal factor.spike Oh MAN there is money just itching to be made here, money screaming out to us to be made by us. If we could rig up some kind of long bar where customers could sit in stools along either side with glass between them and the robo-flipper, maybe rig up something that allows you to order with a keyboard or voice recognition, some kind of thing that washes the thing after every few burgers, all to where a prole can watch it all happen as his burger is being made, oh MY! Challenge for you, me lads. Go and see some of the goofy business models that have been tried, that worked in spite of being clearly flawed, such as In-n-Out, where they tried to intentionally understaff the kitchen under the theory that there would be a pile of customers standing around (they are pretty decent burgers) which makes others see and think that they must be really good, so they join the herd. Problem, if fast food isn't fast, that doesn't automatically make it healthy. It doesn't work indefinitely either, because time is money. Compare with Chik-Fil-A, great food, a little on the spendy side, chicken fried in light peanut oil. Set up for handling absurd crowds at lunchtime quickly. Problem, the whole appeal to the religious right by closing on Sunday, hmmm. Around the Silicon Valley, closing any public-trade business on Sunday is almost retail malpractice. Burger King: good food, traditional fast food, needs some kind of snazzy makeover, some kind of novelty of some kind. McDonalds, traditional, familiar, good food, ultrathin profit margins, a little boring perhaps. They make most of their actual corporate money in land speculation: plunk down a restaurant in a promising location and wait for land values to rise while occupying it with a steady if small money maker, and don't worry about getting rich on the burgers and fries, you won't. I can imagine the first guy to show up in this environment with a burger machine will make piles of money so high it will make your butt hurt just to look at it. Key: make the robo-burgers to where we can watch it being made and noooobody visibly working anything, runs 24/7 and isn't it so easy to imagine, HEY HOMELESS GUY, come on over here, I'll buy you a burger just to watch this marvelous thing run. The novelty factor will slay the competition! I would drop a few hundred bucks for a share in that venture. Wouldn't you? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Sep 24 23:14:45 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 16:14:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> Message-ID: <0c6e01ceb97b$dbd071f0$937155d0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 3:45 PM To: 'ExI chat list' Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go On Behalf Of spike Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go >>.The real test is in getting restaurants to buy these machines. Adrian _______________________________________________ >.If it pencils out, they will buy. We will invest in it even. The real test, the real make-or-break, is if they figure out a way to allow the customer to watch the burgers being made.spike OK creative thinkers, here's a game for you: think of fun snappy ways to advertise robo-burgers. I have an idea: have about four guys about 30 yrs old, eating robo-burgers, as a Prius drives by. Next scene, the same guys with stage makeup aging them all about 50 years, sitting there reminiscing about their first robo-burger back in '13, as kids go by on Back-to-the-Future style levitating boards. One of the now-old guys says "Rufus, these burgers are as good as they always was back in '13, but I just don't know about this here latest gadgetry." A mechanical arm comes out of the table with a roboburger and crams it in his face. Then another arm with a shake comes up and pours it over his head. A pause as the shake drips down. A French fry shoots up at him from the table. Another guys says "They shoulda just kept like it was back in them good old days." {8^D spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Tue Sep 24 23:55:52 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 19:55:52 -0400 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0c6e01ceb97b$dbd071f0$937155d0$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <0c6e01ceb97b$dbd071f0$937155d0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 7:14 PM, spike wrote: > OK creative thinkers, here?s a game for you: think of fun snappy ways to > advertise robo-burgers. I have an idea: have about four guys about 30 yrs > old, eating robo-burgers, as a Prius drives by. Next scene, the same guys > with stage makeup aging them all about 50 years, sitting there reminiscing > about their first robo-burger back in ?13, as kids go by on > Back-to-the-Future style levitating boards. > > One of the now-old guys says ?Rufus, these burgers are as good as they > always was back in ?13, but I just don?t know about this here latest > gadgetry.? A mechanical arm comes out of the table with a roboburger and > crams it in his face. Then another arm with a shake comes up and pours it > over his head. A pause as the shake drips down. A French fry shoots up at > him from the table. Another guys says ?They shoulda just kept like it was > back in them good old days?? > > Show the line at a typical fast food place near a corporate center during lunchtime. Everyone knows you get 40 minutes waiting in a queue to get food you spend 10 minutes consuming. Then show a walk-up & no-wait roboburger dispensed with a click on a smartphone app. The stupid ones can stand in their line watching the smart one take advantage of the better way. After the first line-jumper, roll up a truck with more roboburgermakers to keep everyone happy. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 01:02:23 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:02:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sep 24, 2013 4:00 PM, "spike" wrote: > The novelty factor will slay the competition! I would drop a few hundred bucks for a share in that venture. Wouldn?t you? Novelty factors wear off, often much quicker than people would like. How are you going to keep it profitable afterward? As to letting people watch: just make one face of the thing glass, like a vending machine. That might in fact be a good model to emulate: no frills, but no need for them. Just cheap hot eats. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Sep 25 01:45:41 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:45:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] generational difference on snowdn Message-ID: <0df101ceb990$f2044b80$d60ce280$@att.net> Does this surprise anyone here? "Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden "did a good thing" in leaking the news of the National Security Agency's surveillance program." http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-stone/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scoles at grg.org Wed Sep 25 04:30:06 2013 From: scoles at grg.org (L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D.) Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 21:30:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [GRG] Olshansky vs. Vaupel Debate Message-ID: <2A.24.11231.4D662425@cdptpa-omtalb.mail.rr.com> To Members and Friends of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group: Olshansky vs. Vaupel debate. I am clearly on Jay's side... -- Steve Coles >"Disagreements on the Current Trajectory of Life Expectancy" > > Here is another article in a popular science > series > on the history of human longevity and related topics. >This looks at a mainstream disagreement in aging research, among >researchers who do not see >radical >life extension > as a near-term possibility: > > One of the most fascinating debates in life science these days > is between S. Jay > Olshansky and > James > Vaupel of the Max Planck Institute for > Demographic Research in Rostock, GERMANY. They disagree > fundamentally about whether and how average life expectancy will > increase in the future, and they've been arguing about it for 20 > years. Olshansky, a lovely guy, takes what at first sounds like the > pessimistic view. He says the public health measures that raised > life expectancy so dramatically from the late 1800's to today have > done about as much as they can. We now have a much older > population, dying of age-related diseases, and any improvements in > treatment will add only incrementally to average life expectancy, > and with vanishing returns. > > On the other side of the ring is Vaupel, who > say > s that people are living longer and healthier lives all the time > and there is no necessary end in sight. His message is cheerier, > but he takes the debate very seriously; he won't attend conferences > where Olshansky is present. His charts are heartening; he takes the > records of the longest-lived people in the longest-lived countries > for each year and shows that average (maximum?) lifespan has been > zooming up linearly from 1800 to today. One wants to mentally > project the regression line into the foreseeable future. > > Olshansky says the only way to make major improvements in life > expectancy is to find new ways to prevent and treat the diseases of > aging. And the most efficient way to do that is to delay the > process of aging itself. That's something that some people already > do - somehow. Olshansky says, "The study of the genetics of > long-lived people, I think, is going to be the breakthrough > technology." Scientists can now easily extend lifespan in flies, > worms, and mice, and there's a lot of exciting research on genetic > pathways in humans that might slow down the aging process and > presumably protect us from the age-related diseases that kill most > people today. "The secret to longer lives is contained in our own > genomes," Olshansky says. > > However, Olshansky favors a mainstream high-level research > strategy that could > be > largely futile: a slow, expensive process of building treatments to > alter human metabolism to look more like that of long-lived people, > or to replicate the effects of Calorie Restriction (CR). It will > produce a great deal of knowledge, but is unlikely to have much or > an effect on lifespan; this is an approach that may slow aging > slightly, not create rejuvenation, and not directly address > the > root causes of aging. If we want to see real progress in human > lifespan in our lifetimes, decades or more of healthy life added, > even for those already old, then we have to look toward serious > investment in biogerontology and synthetic biology. > >URL: >http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/maximu L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D., Co-Founder Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group URL: http://www.grg.org E-mail: scoles at grg.org E-mail: scoles at ucla.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE or for ADMINISTRATIVE REQUESTS send an E-mail to jadams at grg.org or scoles at grg.org, or call (949) 922-9786 USA. *** Do NOT send an UNSUBSCRIBE message to the entire list. *** GRG mailing list GRG at lists.ucla.edu http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grg From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 25 10:23:49 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:23:49 +0200 Subject: [ExI] generational difference on snowdn In-Reply-To: <0df101ceb990$f2044b80$d60ce280$@att.net> References: <0df101ceb990$f2044b80$d60ce280$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130925102348.GR10405@leitl.org> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 06:45:41PM -0700, spike wrote: > Does this surprise anyone here? In a world that gave a Nobel Peace prize to Root, Wilson, Burgeois, Kissinger, Begin and Arafat, not really. From pharos at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 12:11:57 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 13:11:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [GRG] Olshansky vs. Vaupel Debate In-Reply-To: <2A.24.11231.4D662425@cdptpa-omtalb.mail.rr.com> References: <2A.24.11231.4D662425@cdptpa-omtalb.mail.rr.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 5:30 AM, L. Stephen Coles, M.D., Ph.D. wrote: > Olshansky says the only way to make major improvements in life > expectancy is to find new ways to prevent and treat the diseases of aging. > And the most efficient way to do that is to delay the process of aging > itself. That's something that some people already do - somehow. Olshansky > says, "The study of the genetics of long-lived people, I think, is going to > be the breakthrough technology." Scientists can now easily extend lifespan > in flies, worms, and mice, and there's a lot of exciting research on genetic > pathways in humans that might slow down the aging process and presumably > protect us from the age-related diseases that kill most people today. "The > secret to longer lives is contained in our own genomes," Olshansky says. > > If you make the huge medical advance of curing cancer completely, you only add about 2.5 years to the population average life expectancy. This is because cancer is mostly a disease of old age, and old people are going to die of something else within a few years anyway. To extend life expectancy significantly you have to cure EVERY disease. Especially those that affect all age groups. Now that is a really big step. BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 16:27:30 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:27:30 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I recently spoke with a group of retired engineers who used to work for > theIdaho National Laboratory. They indicated that they had once built and > detonated a thorium based nuclear weapon, which I thought was interesting. > Most of the thorium advocates claim it is safer in terms of nuclear weapons > proliferation. Perhaps it is really difficult to make a bomb out of > thorium, but apparently, it is possible. > Nobody can make a bomb out of Thorium but you can turn Thorium into Uranium 233 and you can make a bomb out of that, but as far as I know it has only been attempted twice. in 1955 the USA set off a plutonium-U233 composite bomb, it was expected to produce 33 kilotons but only managed 22; and in 1998 India tried it but it was a complete flop, it produced a miniscule explosion of only 200 tons. Today no nation has U233 bombs in their stockpile and there is a reason for that. The critical mass for U233 is 16 kilograms, that is slightly smaller than the critical mass for U235, but for P239 its only 4.4 kilograms. And U233, if it were obtained from a Thorium reactor like a LFTR, would be a nightmare to work with because about 1% of it would be contaminated with U232; in one second your unexploded fission core would produce more gamma rays than a plutonium core would in 26 hours. All those gamma rays would play hell with the bomb's electronics and decompose its chemical explosive, not to mention causing a bit of bother to the poor terrorists rushing around to finish building the damn thing before they dropped dead. And forget about trying to hide this behemoth, all those gamma rays are like a huge neon sign saying "NUCLEAR BOMB HERE". Existing Uranium reactors have produced about 1600 tons of Plutonium, there is no way to avoid them making the crap and regular reactors don't burn it up so it just accumulates. A LFTR produces U233 from Thorium but it burns 100% of it up, it has to or the reactor won't operate, and it makes virtually no Plutonium. The U233 is completely burned up inside the reactor where its hard to steal, and if it is stolen the theft is obvious because the reactor stops. A Uranium reactor produces lots of neutrons but a LFTR makes less of them, so it needs all the U233 that it makes to keep the chain reaction going, if you try stealing some the reactor will simply stop operating making the theft obvious. And in existing Uranium reactors used fuel rods are shipped to reprocessing plants to extract the Plutonium. In one case the potential bomb making material needs to be shipped across the country, with a LFTR it never leaves the reactor building. So you can make a bomb out of U233 but its hard as hell, so with thousands of tons of easy to use Plutonium already produced and more made every day in conventional reactors, not to mention thousands of poorly guarded fully functional bombs in the former USSR, why would any self respecting terrorist bother with U233, especially when it's so hard to steal from a LFTR? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Wed Sep 25 19:13:42 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 21:13:42 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Tue, 24 Sep 2013, John Clark wrote: > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 Tomasz Rola wrote: > [...] > > > I am not going to bet on ten years either. > > > So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming ten years either. The thing that worries me is that for the coming 10 or 20 years civilisation's back is barely covered. At least this is impression I get from processing tons of news over years and extracting thin layer that remains on the bottom. I'd say it is much more complicated than availability of oil/gas/coal or anything. Perhaps only one more bankster affaire stands between today and chaos. This is why I feel so uneasy whenever I read uberoptimists who claim that this or that will soon deliver us all from the darkness. The "soon" is not going to happen soon, AFAIK. > > The closest date for some results seems to be somewhere around 2030: > > > > 17 years is more than good enough. If we manage to keep going in good enough shape all this time and some more to build all required plants and infrastructure to support them. This is plan for decades and decades make me worry. [...] > > Moreover, there are quite a few problems not yet fully researched or > > solved: > > > > Sure there are still technological problems to be solved, but they are > trivial compared with the problems of making wind power abundant and > economical, and super trivial compared with making even an experimental > fusion reactor that just produces a little more energy that it needs for > operation. And yet over the last 30 years tens of billions of dollars have > been spent on fusion research but virtually nothing on Thorium research. Perhaps it is worth noticing that technical problems are not the most important even if they are the most difficult, perhaps. I wonder if there is anything that would make next 30 years any different wrt money spent on thorium? There seems to be plenty of politics in it. I would be far from blaiming greens for all the wrong, unless people like Bush Jr, he-Clinton and consortes are green, too. If you consider all politicians and other decision makers (Koch brothers, Gates family etc) to be green, than our understandings of the word is very different from each other. > > For me, thorium is just a possibility. It is not something I'd bet all > > my eggs on. > > > > But wind power and solar power and, god help us, bio-fuel, is something to > bet all your eggs on? Well, no. I wouldn't mind if every city and town possessed thorium plant, solar & wind farm and geostationary solar power plus as much coal plant as needed. The problem I see (and I once or twice wrote about it here, with some calculations about solar) is that none of this option alone is going to do the job, and there are issues (most of those are about ability to mine enough ore, build enough infrastructure, manufacture the manufacturing plants and so on). Besides, it seems like too many people count on "free market wisdom" to arrange things in such a way that all ends well. The problem with this is, I dont think there is such thing as "free market" and "wisdom" is disputable, too. There may be also, let's call it "silicon valley bias" with people soaked deeply in those stories, about guys who deliver few Perl scripts overnight, next year they IPO and two years later they buy an island and whatnot. If energy could be done in software (especially in Perl, PHP or Java), we would have had it by now. I could agree if someone said we have enough time only to make one solution, the one that is 1) drop in 2) solves about 70-90% of energy needs. 3) could be done in ten years, from grounds up to delivery on mass scale (more than doubling each year after going to market). Thorium, wind, ground solar are out of the equation. Biofuels and hydro do not scale up. I may disagree with you (or whoever else I see ok to disagree with) on something but this not necessarily means I belong to those who too disagree with you. Perhaps I disagree because I have my own brain, rather than want to be part of some group? > > BTW, thorium abundance is problematic to me, too. I have read it is only > > 3-4 times more abundant than uranium. > > Uranium is not a particularly rare element and Thorium is much more common > than Uranium, in fact it's almost twice as common as Tin. And Thorium is > easier to extract from its ore than Uranium. At best a (non-breeder) > Uranium reactor only uses .7% of its fuel (and usually less than that) > because it can only get energy from the rare U235 isotope; but natural > Thorium has only one isotope and a Thorium reactor can use 100% of it. > > It would only take 2000 tons of Thorium to equal the energy in 6 billion > tons of coal that the world uses each year. There is 120 TRILLION tons of > Thorium in the earth's crust and if the world needs 10 times as much energy > as we get from just coal then we will run out of Thorium in the crust of > this planet in 6 billion years. 3/4 of the crust is below water, thus a bit harder to get to. The rest is ok to mine, but the deeper the mining, the harder again. I could easily believe we can power ourselves on Th for the next 600 years but 6E9 sounds many orders of magnitude too optimistic. I'd like to make my own calculations if brain and time suffice. Not today, however. Do you have any link to where this claim of yours is somehow explained? Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 25 20:28:29 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 22:28:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130925202829.GC10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 09:13:42PM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming ten years either. > > The thing that worries me is that for the coming 10 or 20 years > civilisation's back is barely covered. At least this is impression I get > from processing tons of news over years and extracting thin layer that > remains on the bottom. I see you're still talking to John. Save your breath, it's perfectly useless. In case his debating style is not supplying you enough hints: he's doing it on purpose. Do not feed the troll. > I'd say it is much more complicated than availability of oil/gas/coal or > anything. Perhaps only one more bankster affaire stands between today and > chaos. From atymes at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 20:30:56 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 13:30:56 -0700 Subject: [ExI] generational difference on snowdn In-Reply-To: <0df101ceb990$f2044b80$d60ce280$@att.net> References: <0df101ceb990$f2044b80$d60ce280$@att.net> Message-ID: In the article, I note that those who were drummed out of an organization for telling the truth about evil, were because they threatened the organization's ability to operate. In other words, they failed to make the case as to why doing evil was not in the organization's interests. Yes, sometimes one has to carefully explain why evil is bad. It is not always obvious. (For example, the US soldier in Iraq could have pointed out how the commander's orders were eroding trust by Iraqi citizens, and going against the spirit and letter of their overall mission orders as given to the commander. Though, being nonconfrontational at first - sometimes hard to do when faced with new evidence of evil - can help too.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Wed Sep 25 20:48:23 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 22:48:23 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130925202829.GC10405@leitl.org> References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130925202829.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 09:13:42PM +0200, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > > So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming ten years either. > > > > The thing that worries me is that for the coming 10 or 20 years > > civilisation's back is barely covered. At least this is impression I get > > from processing tons of news over years and extracting thin layer that > > remains on the bottom. > > I see you're still talking to John. Save your breath, it's perfectly > useless. In case his debating style is not supplying you enough > hints: he's doing it on purpose. > > Do not feed the troll. Heh. Even if he is one, talking to him is still better than talking to oneself when one needs to gather one's minds and form some kind of cohesive mindset. However, one debugging method is to discuss a problem with rubber duck :-) . Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 20:53:43 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 14:53:43 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0b8101ceb964$559b6ac0$00d24040$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8101ceb964$559b6ac0$00d24040$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 2:26 PM, spike wrote: > ** ** > > *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto: > extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Kelly Anderson > *Sent:* Tuesday, September 24, 2013 1:06 PM > *To:* ExI chat list > *Subject:* Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go**** > > ** ** > > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 11:44 AM, spike wrote:**** > > **** > > We knew this was going to happen eventually. A local company did this. > The timing is interesting, since the fast food workers are threatening to > strike unless their wages are raised way above minimum. Check it outwardly: > **** > > **** > > http://momentummachines.com/#team**** > > ** ** > > >?I'll be sending them my resume... :-) This could be huge. The richest > guy in the state of Utah made a lot of his money selling the styrofoam > plastic shell McDonald's used for years.**** > > ** ** > > -Kelly **** > > ** ** > > ** ** > > Kelly if they hire you, I will be the head of the > welcome-to-the-neighborhood-Kelly committee. > I would not be able to relocate sadly, but it might make dropping by for the occasional visit more of a possibility. :-) > >?This could be huge.**** > > ** ** > > That?s what I was thinking too Kelly. If a local fast food place could > set up a lights-out kitchen, I would go out of my way to eat there. > Their design doesn't quite get there, as someone still apparently has to load the tomato tube, etc. > It has nothing to do with busting unions or any kind of labor warrior > capitalist anything, but rather just that it seems so cool to me. > It is cool, which is why you would want it transparent and visible to the public. Even McDonalds has turned their kitchens sideways so that you can look back there. In the old days, you couldn't see the kitchen... which always made me a little nervous. > I suppose I could argue it has the potential to be so much cleaner with no > proles working back there, but even that isn?t really it. I just like the > notion of robots making my lunch. I am addicted to tech. > Yes. Cleanliness is actually my biggest concern about this approach. Little bits of food would undoubtedly get spread around, and cleaning all the little bits inside seems like it could be quite a daily chore. **** > > I briefly worked in a fast food place in my misspent youth, and watched (I > worked the register, never did work the kitchen.) It occurred to me way > back in the 1970s that the process could be automated, long before I knew a > damn thing about controls engineering. In retrospect, I am surprised it > has taken this long. This robot would solve so many problems. > The front could be semi-automated much faster than the kitchen. I'm actually surprised that they haven't turned the cash registers around on the front desk in McDonalds they way they have at Home Depot, Walmart and some supermarkets around here. > In a fast food restaurant even on a hopping evening, there are lulls, > where you have about four cooks standing around in back doing nothing, at > least one person always on the till doing nothing, sometimes a separate > cleaning guy maybe doing a piddling nothing in a spotless dining room, and > at least one shift manager in his office, doing nothing. This can go on > for ten or fifteen minutes, with not one customer walking thru the door. > Yes, I'm sure that happens all the time. Not sure what robotics has to do with that statistical distribution though. > Experiment: go to a fast food restaurant some evening away from peak > hours, watch and calculate, or at least estimate, knowing the cost of a > worker is a minimum of about 22, 23-ish bucks an hour for the lowest tier, > managers about 40-ish. Count the number of happy meals going across the > counter. Estimate that cost per hour, then figure the capital cost of a > robot with one guy watching and maintaining, make him a 60 dollar an hour > guy if you want, a low-end technician level. Compare. They could sell > those burgers 20 percent below McDonalds. I will eat them, even if they > just match the competitors. > The capital cost of robotics depreciates over the whole time too, so I'm not sure this is a strong argument for automation. I will predict that if the Dumbocrats in Washington ever get the strength to implement the $15/hour minimum wage they have been talking about lately, I predict you'll see a lot more of this kind of stuff out there. The selling point was that you could use higher quality ingredients and match the price of McDonalds. That would bring me in. Currently, I have to go to Carl's Junior and spend over $5 to get the kind of quality I appreciate. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 25 20:54:58 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 22:54:58 +0200 Subject: [ExI] generational difference on snowdn In-Reply-To: References: <0df101ceb990$f2044b80$d60ce280$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130925205458.GF10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 01:30:56PM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > (For example, the US soldier in Iraq could have pointed out how the You don't just wake up as camp guard in Treblinka. This is malice aforethought. > commander's orders were eroding trust by Iraqi citizens, and going against > the spirit and letter of their overall mission orders as given to the > commander. Though, being nonconfrontational at first - sometimes hard to > do when faced with new evidence of evil - can help too.) You know, they evaded draft by going to Canada, during Vietnam. Today's mercenaries do not have even that excuse. From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 20:57:37 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 14:57:37 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 4:44 PM, spike wrote: > McDonalds, traditional, familiar, good food, ultrathin profit margins, a > little boring perhaps. They make most of their actual corporate money in > land speculation: plunk down a restaurant in a promising location and wait > for land values to rise while occupying it with a steady if small money > maker, and don?t worry about getting rich on the burgers and fries, you > won?t. > > I can imagine the first guy to show up in this environment with a burger > machine will make piles of money so high it will make your butt hurt just > to look at it. > McDonald's business model doesn't seem to be about good food to me. It seems to be about appealing to children, who drag their parents kicking and screaming into the joint. > **** > > Key: make the robo-burgers to where we can watch it being made and > noooobody visibly working anything, runs 24/7 and isn?t it so easy to > imagine, HEY HOMELESS GUY, come on over here, I?ll buy you a burger just to > watch this marvelous thing run. > So this joint would be about the geek in the family dragging everyone else in... only to enjoy a really good burger at the end of the day. It really is brilliant. Kickstarter anyone? :-) -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Wed Sep 25 21:00:33 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 23:00:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 02:57:37PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > McDonald's business model doesn't seem to be about good food to me. It > seems to be about appealing to children, who drag their parents kicking and > screaming into the joint. The Golden Arches are less about burgers than then are about real estate. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 21:03:49 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:03:49 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 02:57:37PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > McDonald's business model doesn't seem to be about good food to me. It > > seems to be about appealing to children, who drag their parents kicking > and > > screaming into the joint. > > The Golden Arches are less about burgers than then are about real estate. > Location location location. We have a storage company here in town that has a model like that. They put storage units in places where they think Walmart or someone will want to build a store in 15 years. They make more money on the real estate increasing in value than in storing people's junk. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 21:37:46 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 22:37:46 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130925202829.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Heh. Even if he is one, talking to him is still better than talking to > oneself when one needs to gather one's minds and form some kind of > cohesive mindset. However, one debugging method is to discuss a problem > with rubber duck :-) . > > If you want to organise your thoughts (and have the spare time) try writing lengthy replies to every post that interests you, but remember not to inflict it all on the list. I research and write much more than I actually post to Exi. (Is that sighs of relief I hear?) :) I read my screeds to the dog and the cat, The dog believes every word I write and nods in agreement. The cat is a much sterner critic. Often showing me his stern in contempt. BillK From rtomek at ceti.pl Wed Sep 25 22:37:04 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 00:37:04 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130925202829.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, 25 Sep 2013, BillK wrote: > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > Heh. Even if he is one, talking to him is still better than talking to > > oneself when one needs to gather one's minds and form some kind of > > cohesive mindset. However, one debugging method is to discuss a problem > > with rubber duck :-) . > > > > > > If you want to organise your thoughts (and have the spare time) try > writing lengthy replies to every post that interests you, but remember > not to inflict it all on the list. I research and write much more than > I actually post to Exi. > (Is that sighs of relief I hear?) :) > > I read my screeds to the dog and the cat, The dog believes every word > I write and nods in agreement. > The cat is a much sterner critic. Often showing me his stern in contempt. Well, my dog's name then is org-mode and it lives in emacs. So I need a cat in emacs, too. That will be hard, but the advice is cool. Thanks. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From anders at aleph.se Wed Sep 25 23:08:01 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 01:08:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [NSG-d] Interesting new way to calculate high-energy particle interactions In-Reply-To: <20130924181942.GY10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <1465747130-17701@secure.ericade.net> Eugen Leitl , 24/9/2013 8:23 PM: On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 01:04:01PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: ? > No commentary? ?:( None I can share publicly :(? Ah, need-to-know physics. ?Only particles involved in an interaction are allowed to know how it works. The rest of the world will only see probabilities - and Heisenberg rarely approves of FOIA requests for observables for "national incommensurability reasons". Even when you get observables the wavefunction is always redacted.? >From what I got of the talk about the finding it sounds like a fairly solid research project, but so does string theory (which has better music videos, so far). Would be cool if Feynman diagrams ended up obsolete.? -- Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 00:55:39 2013 From: possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com (John Grigg) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 17:55:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: Spike wrote: >Key: make the robo-burgers to where we can watch it being made and noooobody visibly working anything, runs >24/7 and isn?t it so easy to imagine, HEY HOMELESS GUY, come on over here, I?ll buy you a burger just to >watch this marvelous thing run. And then, when A.I. replaces many many jobs in the American economy, even engineering jobs, then you Spike, get to be the homeless guy! lol Well, except that you are working/retired, have a wife who also is an engineer, and I'm sure you have your money carefully invested. But the younger generations of white collar workers may not be so fortunate... Spike, be grateful for the many things the universe blessed you with, because many people do not get the brain power, health, loving family, or good birth year, that you received. The nameless homeless guy you mention, was probably not nearly as blessed, despite whatever bad decisions he may have made in his life. And as for everyone saying, "Kickstarter!!!" "Let's get rich!!!" I suspect the big corporations/franchises are not going to need your money as they automate themselves. And I bet venture capitalists have already poured tons of money into robotics companies with the goal of automating fast food restaurants. But it's nice to dream.... John On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 2:03 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 3:00 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 02:57:37PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >> > McDonald's business model doesn't seem to be about good food to me. It >> > seems to be about appealing to children, who drag their parents kicking >> and >> > screaming into the joint. >> >> The Golden Arches are less about burgers than then are about real estate. >> > > Location location location. We have a storage company here in town that > has a model like that. They put storage units in places where they think > Walmart or someone will want to build a store in 15 years. They make more > money on the real estate increasing in value than in storing people's junk. > > -Kelly > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 26 01:37:39 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 18:37:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Grigg Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 5:56 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go Spike wrote: >>.Key: make the robo-burgers to where we can watch it being made and noooobody visibly working anything, runs >24/7 and isn't it so easy to imagine, HEY HOMELESS GUY, come on over here, I'll buy you a burger just to >watch this marvelous thing run. >.And then, when A.I. replaces many many jobs in the American economy, even engineering jobs, then you Spike, get to be the homeless guy! lol Well, except that you are working/retired, have a wife who also is an engineer, and I'm sure you have your money carefully invested. But the younger generations of white collar workers may not be so fortunate... I do hear ya Johnny. It was insensitive of me to suggest making a commercial about a homeless guy getting robo-burgers. Good advertising is edgy stuff. The ad guys consider it a success if they offend about 5% of the audience. You can imagine playing the above ad on an outlet such as (what's that music video thing that you young guys watch?) MTV. That station is viewed by a crowd that is hard to offend. I think I went off on a tangent: advertising rather than your point: robo-burger will eliminate low-end jobs. Here's the scoop John: my job was eliminated by technology as well, and it was my own fault. I invested years into learning a bunch of controls techniques that were perfectly suited for software. Matlab and Simulink can do everything I did and a lot more, it never gets tired, it doesn't ask for raises. Shelly's job has a half-life I would now estimate in months at best, for all the same reasons. Our fault: we should have foreseen that our specialized knowledge could be automated. It was. >.Spike, be grateful for the many things the universe blessed you with, because many people do not get the brain power, health, loving family, or good birth year, that you received. The nameless homeless guy you mention, was probably not nearly as blessed, despite whatever bad decisions he may have made in his life. I do hear you, my youthful companion. >.And as for everyone saying, "Kickstarter!!!" "Let's get rich!!!" I suspect the big corporations/franchises are not going to need your money as they automate themselves. And I bet venture capitalists have already poured tons of money into robotics companies with the goal of automating fast food restaurants. Ja, that automated restaurant thing is still cool though. I will eat there, even if some big evil corporation is making a buttload of money while the human former-burger flippers are turned out of one of the lowest-end jobs our technologically advanced society can imagine. I don't have the answers to that. My own memories of working in one of those places is of unbroken misery, and I had the best job in the place. As soon as I got a chance to do beekeeping, I jumped on that like a ton of linemen on a loose football and never looked back. I did roofing in Florida in the summertime; even that job was better than fast food, oy vey. >.But it's nice to dream.... John Ja by all means. I have the notion that most factories will be automated soon, and if so, I have a notion that we may get a lights-out PV factory. Then I can imagine plenty of young people will be employed installing solar panels on American rooftops. We can argue energy all we want, but rooftops everywhere are there, and they can accept solar panels. Even if it isn't the cheapest energy, it is energy. We are a species that needs to work. We want to work. So let's work at that. Why not? Even if we want to argue there is plenty of oil/coal/natural gas/thorium/pick your favorite, there is little downside to getting humanity going on building rooftop solar everywhere while we wait for the other stuff. We want to work, and that's a task. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 26 02:48:43 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 19:48:43 -0700 Subject: [ExI] volunteers needed Message-ID: <014d01ceba62$ea9ef390$bfdcdab0$@att.net> The US government is currently in a struggle between those who want the fed to spend way beyond its means fighting those who want the fed to spend still more beyond that point. Unless a resolution is found, there is a possibility Washington DC will shut down on 1 October. Until the government can get back to its usual tasks, can we get some American volunteers to spy on each other? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Thu Sep 26 06:46:01 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 07:46:01 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> Message-ID: <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> I don't know if this has already mentioned in this thread, but my colleagues Carl Frey and Mike Osborne has done a pretty intriguing study of what jobs are at risk from AI: http://theconversation.com/machines-on-the-march-threaten-almost-half-of-modern-jobs-18485 http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/future-employment-how-susceptible-are-jobs-computerisation-oms-working-paper-dr-carl-benedikt-frey-m They have a list at the end. Don't aim at the high probability occupations for a career. On 2013-09-26 02:37, spike wrote: > > I think I went off on a tangent: advertising rather than your point: > robo-burger will eliminate low-end jobs. Here's the scoop John: my job > was eliminated by technology as well, and it was my own fault. I > invested years into learning a bunch of controls techniques that were > perfectly suited for software. Matlab and Simulink can do everything > I did and a lot more, it never gets tired, it doesn't ask for raises. > Shelly's job has a half-life I would now estimate in months at best, > for all the same reasons. Our fault: we should have foreseen that our > specialized knowledge could be automated. It was. > That is the problem for a lot of the jobs on the list in the paper - they rely on a specific skill, rather than general creative intelligence, dexterity or some other broader, hard to automate thing. Everything that could be done by an algorithm will be done by an algorithm, so one better find the part of the job that is non-algorithmic and leverage it. My data mining skills will be irrelevant soon, but hopefully not my ability to put the results into a delectable theoretical package or do weird cross-links between disciplines. > Ja, that automated restaurant thing is still cool though. I will eat > there, even if some big evil corporation is making a buttload of money > while the human former-burger flippers are turned out of one of the > lowest-end jobs our technologically advanced society can imagine. I > don't have the answers to that. My own memories of working in one of > those places is of unbroken misery, and I had the best job in the > place. As soon as I got a chance to do beekeeping, I jumped on that > like a ton of linemen on a loose football and never looked back. I > did roofing in Florida in the summertime; even that job was better > than fast food, oy vey. > There are many jobs that we almost have a moral duty to eliminate. > We are a species that needs to work. We want to work. So let's work > at that. Why not? Even if we want to argue there is plenty of > oil/coal/natural gas/thorium/pick your favorite, there is little > downside to getting humanity going on building rooftop solar > everywhere while we wait for the other stuff. We want to work, and > that's a task. > It is also a meaningful task, which is important. As Dostoyevsky said, "In order to destroy a man there is nothing more terrible than to give him meaningless work". Now off to work! (in this case, explaining my work to suits in order to make a sponsor look good. I see it as cultural anthropology of the business world) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From alito at organicrobot.com Thu Sep 26 09:12:58 2013 From: alito at organicrobot.com (Alejandro Dubrovsky) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 19:12:58 +1000 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8101ceb964$559b6ac0$00d24040$@att.net> Message-ID: <5243FA9A.5080205@organicrobot.com> On 26/09/13 06:53, Kelly Anderson wrote: > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 2:26 PM, spike > The front could be semi-automated much faster than the kitchen. I'm > actually surprised that they haven't turned the cash registers around on > the front desk in McDonalds they way they have at Home Depot, Walmart > and some supermarkets around here. > > One of my local McDonalds tried it for a while, but the experiment didn't last long and the machines got taken out. The interface seems surprisingly hard to get right. Too many products, too many ingredients that people can and do individually take out or add. Everyone skipped the machines and long-queued at the human-operated registers (I did too, even though I am a strictly machine-only queuer at the supermarket). I suspect that they'll have to go with either a short-list of classic options only, or very good speech recognition. From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 26 13:01:55 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 15:01:55 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Carbon nanotube computer Message-ID: <20130926130155.GW10405@leitl.org> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7468/full/nature12502.html Carbon nanotube computer Max M. Shulaker, Gage Hills, Nishant Patil, Hai Wei, Hong-Yu Chen, H.-S. Philip Wong & Subhasish Mitra Nature 501, 526?530 (26 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12502 Received 12 May 2013 Accepted 24 July 2013 Published online 25 September 2013 The miniaturization of electronic devices has been the principal driving force behind the semiconductor industry, and has brought about major improvements in computational power and energy efficiency. Although advances with silicon-based electronics continue to be made, alternative technologies are being explored. Digital circuits based on transistors fabricated from carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have the potential to outperform silicon by improving the energy?delay product, a metric of energy efficiency, by more than an order of magnitude. Hence, CNTs are an exciting complement to existing semiconductor technologies1, 2. Owing to substantial fundamental imperfections inherent in CNTs, however, only very basic circuit blocks have been demonstrated. Here we show how these imperfections can be overcome, and demonstrate the first computer built entirely using CNT-based transistors. The CNT computer runs an operating system that is capable of multitasking: as a demonstration, we perform counting and integer-sorting simultaneously. In addition, we implement 20 different instructions from the commercial MIPS instruction set to demonstrate the generality of our CNT computer. This experimental demonstration is the most complex carbon-based electronic system yet realized. It is a considerable advance because CNTs are prominent among a variety of emerging technologies that are being considered for the next generation of highly energy-efficient electronic systems3, 4. Subject terms: Electronic devices Electrical and electronic engineering At a glance Figures First | 1-3 of 8 | Last View all figures left SUBNEG and program implementation. Figure 1 Schematic of CNT computer. Figure 2 Characterization of CNFET subcomponents. Figure 3 CNT computer results. Figure 4 Fabrication flow for the CNT computer. Extended Data Fig. 1 Multibit arithmetic unit. Extended Data Fig. 2 Internal versus external connections of CNT computer. Extended Data Fig. 3 PMOS-only logic schematics. Extended Data Fig. 4 right Main Main? Methods? References? Acknowledgements? Author information? Extended data figures and tables? Comments CNTs are hollow, cylindrical nanostructures composed of a single sheet of carbon atoms, and have exceptional electrical, physical and thermal properties5, 6, 7. They can be used to fabricate CNT field-effect transistors (CNFETs), which are promising candidate building blocks for the next generation of highly energy-efficient electronics1, 2, 8: CNFET-based digital systems are predicted to be able to outperform silicon-based complementary metal?oxide?semiconductor (CMOS) technologies by more than an order of magnitude in terms of energy?delay product, a measure of energy efficiency2, 3, 4. Since the initial discovery of CNTs, there have been several major milestones for CNT technologies9: CNFETs, basic circuit elements (logic gates), a five-stage ring oscillator fabricated along a single CNT, a percolation-transport-based decoder, stand-alone circuit elements such as half-adder sum generators and D-latches, and a capacitive sensor interface circuit10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Yet there remains a serious gap between these circuit demonstrations for this emerging technology and the first computers built using silicon transistors, such as the Intel 4004 and the VAX-11 (1970s). These silicon-based computers were fundamentally different from the above-mentioned CNFET-based circuits in several key ways: they ran stored programs, they were programmable (meaning that they could execute a variety of computational tasks through proper sequencing of instructions without modifying the underlying hardware17) and they implemented synchronous digital systems incorporating combinational logic circuits interfaced with sequential elements such as latches and flip-flops18. It is well known that substantial imperfections inherent in CNT technology are the main obstacles to the demonstration of robust and complex CNFET circuits19. These include mis-positioned and metallic CNTs. Mis-positioned CNTs create stray conducting paths leading to incorrect logic functionality, whereas metallic CNTs have little or no bandgap, resulting in high leakage currents and incorrect logic functionality20. The imperfection-immune design methodology, which combines circuit design techniques with CNT processing solutions, overcomes these problems20, 21. It enables us to demonstrate, for the first time, a complete CNT computer, realized entirely using CNFETs. Similar to the first silicon-based computers, our CNT computer, which is a synchronous digital system built entirely from CNFETs, runs stored programs and is programmable. Our CNT computer runs a basic operating system that performs multitasking, meaning that it can execute multiple programs concurrently (in an interleaved fashion). We demonstrate our CNT computer by concurrently executing a counting program and an integer-sorting program (coordinated by a basic multitasking operating system), and also by executing 20 different instructions from the commercial MIPS instruction set22. The CNT computer is a one-instruction-set computer, implementing the SUBNEG (subtract and branch if negative) instruction, inspired by early work in ref. 23. We implement the SUBNEG instruction because it is Turing complete and thus can be used to re-encode and perform any arbitrary instruction from any instruction-set architecture, albeit at the expense of execution time and memory space24, 25. The SUBNEG instruction is composed of three operands: two data addresses and a third partial next instruction address (the CNT computer itself completes the next instruction address, allowing for branching to different instruction addresses). The SUBNEG instruction subtracts the value of the data stored in the first data address from the value of the data stored in the second data address, and writes the result at the location of the second data address. The next instruction address is calculated to be one of two possible branch locations, depending on whether the result of the subtraction is negative. The partial next instruction address given by the present SUBNEG instruction omits the least significant bit. The least significant bit is calculated by the CNT computer, on the basis of whether the result of the SUBNEG subtraction was negative. This bit, concatenated with the partial next instruction address given in the SUBNEG instruction, makes up the entire next instruction address. A diagram showing the SUBNEG implementation is shown in Fig. 1a. Figure 1: SUBNEG and program implementation. SUBNEG and program implementation. a, Flowchart showing the implementation of the SUBNEG instruction. b, Sample program on CNT computer. Each row of the chart is a full SUBNEG instruction. It is composed of two data addresses and a partial next instruction address. The (omitted) least significant bit (LSB) of the next instruction address is calculated by the arithmetic unit of the CNT computer, and the most significant bit (MSB) of the next instruction address indicates the running program, either a counter or bubble-sort algorithm in this instance. Full size image (258 KB) Download PowerPoint slide (681 KB) Figures index Next As our operating system, we implement non-pre-emptive multitasking, whereby each program performs a self-interrupt and voluntarily gives control to another task26. To perform this context switch, the instruction memory is structured in blocks, and each block contains a different program. To perform the self-interrupt, the running program stores a next instruction address belonging to a different program block; thus, the other program begins execution at this time. During the context switch, the CNT computer updates a process ID bit in memory, which indicates the program running at present. An example of the operating system running two different programs concurrently is shown in Fig. 1b. The circuitry of the CNT computer is entirely composed of CNFETs, and the instruction and data memories are implemented off-chip, following the von Neumann architecture and the convention of most computers today. The off-chip memories perform no operation other than performing a single read or a single write in a clock cycle. The address, data (for write), and read and write enable signals are provided by the CNT computer; the values, once read, are stored in D-latches in the CNT computer, built entirely using CNFETs. A full schematic of the CNT computer is shown in Fig. 2a. The CNT computer performs four tasks. Figure 2: Schematic of CNT computer. Schematic of CNT computer. a, Schematic of the entire CNT computer, composed of the four subunits: instruction fetch, data fetch, arithmetic operation and write-back. All components apart from the memory are implemented entirely using CNFETs. CLK1?CLK3, Clock1?Clock3; D, D-latch input; Q, D-latch output; G, D-latch clock; RD_en, read enable (instruction memory); WR_en, write enable (instruction memory); RD_A_en, read enable address A (data memory); RD_B_en, read enable address B (data memory); Data_in, data for data memory write. b, Timing diagram of the CNT computer. The lines show the waveforms corresponding to each signal; of particular note are the transitions of the lower five signals with respect to the clock signals. Full size image (207 KB) Download PowerPoint slide (532 KB) Previous Figures index Next (1) Instruction fetch: this task supplies instruction memory with the address to read. On the first clock (Clock1), the SUBNEG instruction is read from the instruction memory and saved in a bank of ten D-latches. The SUBNEG instruction contains the partial next instruction address (as explained above), and the addresses of the two single-bit data values to operate on (represented as [A] and [B], both of which comprise three bits). (2) Data fetch: this task supplies the data memory with the addresses given by the SUBNEG instruction to read. On Clock1, the first data address ([A]) is read and the value is saved in a D-latch. On the second clock (Clock2), the second data address ([B]) is read and the value is saved in another D-latch. (3) Arithmetic operation: this task performs the computation (subtraction and comparison with zero) on the two data values supplied by the data-fetch unit. (4) Write-back: this task writes back the result of the SUBNEG (B???A) in the data memory at the address of the second data address. On the third clock (Clock3), the result from the arithmetic-operation unit is saved in two D-latches. Simultaneously, Clock3 enables the write-back to the data memory. D-latches from the instruction-fetch unit supply the data address, and the D-latch from the write-back stage supplies the value to be written. A timing diagram depicting the above description and using three non-overlapping clocks is shown in Fig. 2b. The CNFET computer is composed of 178 CNFETs, with each CNFET comprising ~10?200 CNTs, depending on relative sizing of the widths of the CNFETs. Figure 3 shows transistor-level schematics of the subcomponents, D-latches and the arithmetic unit. We use logic circuits that use only p-type transistors, because our CNFETs are p-type without modifications. Consequently, relative sizing of the widths of pull-up and pull-down CNFETs is crucial; the ratio of all pull-up CNFET widths to pull-down CNFET widths in our design is either 20:1 or 10:1 (Methods). There is a maximum of seven stages of cascaded logic in the computer, demonstrating our ability to cascade combinational logic stages, which is a necessity in realizing large digital systems. Figure 3: Characterization of CNFET subcomponents. Characterization of CNFET subcomponents. a, Top: Final 4-inch wafer after all fabrication. Middle: scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of a CNFET, showing source, drain and CNTs extending into the channel region. Bottom, Measured characterization (current?voltage) curves of a typical CNFET. The yellow highlighted region of the ID?VDS curve shows the biasing region that the CNFET operates in for the CNT computer. b, Top: transistor-level schematic of arithmetic unit. Numbers are width of transistors (in micrometres). Middle: SEM of an arithmetic unit. Bottom: measured outputs from 40 different arithmetic units, all overlaid. c, Top: transistor-level schematic of D-latches. Numbers are width of transistors (in micrometres). Middle: SEM of a bank of 4 D-latches. Bottom: measured outputs from 200 different D-latches, all overlaid. Full size image (342 KB) Download PowerPoint slide (1,166 KB) Previous Figures index Next The CNT-specific fabrication process is based on the process described in refs 21, 23, 27, and is described in detail in Methods. Importantly, the fabrication process is completely silicon-CMOS compatible owing to its low thermal budget (125??C). We use standard cells for our subsystems, designed following the imperfection-immune methodology, which renders our circuits immune to both mis-positioned and metallic CNTs. Because this method ensures that the immunity to CNT imperfections is encapsulated entirely within standard cells, the fabrication is completely insensitive to the exact positioning of CNTs on the wafer and there is no per-unit customization, rendering our processing and design VLSI (very large-scale integration) compatible. The entire CNT computer is fabricated completely within a die on a single wafer. Each die contains five CNT computers, and each wafer contains 197 dies. There is no customization of any sort after circuit fabrication: all of the CNFETs and interconnects are predetermined during design, and there is no post-fabrication selection, configuration or fine-tuning of functional CNFETs. Just like any von Neumann computer, off-chip interconnects are used for connections to external memories. Our CNT-specific fabrication process and imperfection-immune design enables high yield and robust devices; waveforms of 240 subsystems (40 arithmetic logic units and 200 D-latches) from across a wafer are shown in Fig. 3. The yield of the subsystems, such as D-latches, typically ranges from 80% to 90%. The primary causes of yield loss?particles resulting in broken lithography patterns, adhesion issues with metal lift-off and variations in machine etch rates?are consequences of the limitations of performing all fabrication steps in-house in an academic fabrication facility. A SEM image of a fabricated CNT computer is shown in Fig. 4a. To demonstrate the working CNT computer, we perform multitasking with our basic operating system, concurrently running a counter program and an integer-sorting program (performing the bubble-sort algorithm). Although CNFET circuits promise improved speed2, 4, 8, our computer runs at 1?kHz. This is not due to the limitations of the CNT technology or our design methodology, but instead is caused by capacitive loading introduced by the measurement setup, the 1-?m minimum lithographic feature size possible in our academic fabrication facility, and CNT density and contact resistance (Methods). The measured and expected outputs from the CNT computer (Fig. 4b) show correct operation. To demonstrate the flexibility and ability of the SUBNEG computer to implement any arbitrary instruction, we additionally perform 20 MIPS instructions (Fig. 4c) on the CNT computer. Although the CNT computer operates on single-bit data values, this is not a fundamental limitation, because any multibit computation can be performed with a single-bit computer through serial computation23. Additionally, having shown the ability to cascade logic, fabricating a larger multibit CNT computer is not a fundamental obstacle, but rather affects only yield; as a demonstration, we show a two-bit arithmetic logic unit (composed of 96 CNFETs with a maximum of 15 stages of cascaded logic) in Extended Data Fig. 2 (see also Methods). Figure 4: CNT computer results. CNT computer results. a, SEM of an entire CNT computer. b, Measured and expected output waveforms for a CNT computer, running the program shown in Fig. 1b. The exact match in logic value of the measured and expected output shows correct operation. As shown by the MSB (denoted [4]) of the next instruction address, the computer is switching between performing counting and sorting (bubble-sort algorithm). The running results of the counting and sorting are shown in the rows beneath the MSB of the next instruction address. c, A list of the 20 MIPS instructions tested on the CNT computer. Full size image (604 KB) Download PowerPoint slide (1,394 KB) Previous Figures index We have reported a CNT computer fabricated entirely from CNFETs, and have demonstrated its ability to run programs, to run a basic operating system that performs multitasking, and to execute MIPS instructions. To achieve this we used the imperfection-immune design methodology and developed robust and repeatable CNT-specific design and processing. This demonstration confirms that CNFET-based circuits are a feasible and plausible emerging technology. Methods Main? Methods? References? Acknowledgements? Author information? Extended data figures and tables? Comments The fabrication process is depicted in Extended Data Fig. 1. CNT growth and transfer The CNTs are grown by chemical-vapour deposition with methane at 865??C. The growth substrate is an annealed quartz substrate, with parallel catalyst stripes of iron lithographically patterned on the wafer. Quartz is used to achieve 99.5% alignment of the CNTs, which align along the crystalline boundary owing to a minimized Lennard?Jones potential in this orientation14. After growth, the quartz wafer with CNTs is coated with 150?nm gold, and a thermal release tape is applied on top of the gold. When this tape is peeled from the wafer, it peels off the gold with embedded CNTs from the quartz wafer. The tape is then applied onto the target wafer and heated to 125??C, at which point the thermal release tape loses adhesion and is removed from the wafer, leaving the gold with embedded CNTs on the target wafer. The surface of the wafer undergoes oxygen and argon plasma etching to remove any residue from the tape, followed by a selective wet etch to remove the gold, leaving exposed, highly aligned CNTs on the wafer14. Local back gate Before transfer, the target wafer is first prepared, starting with a silicon wafer with 110?nm thermal oxide growth. To form the local back gate28 and bottom layer of wires, a two-layer resist stack is lithographically patterned on the surface. Following development of the pattern, the wafer goes through a quick oxygen plasma de-scum, followed by an anisotropic O2/SF6 plasma etch. After the plasma etch, a quick HF dip is used to smooth the surface and remove any side-wall deposition from the plasma etching. Next, an adhesion layer of Ti followed by Pt is evaporated, filling the trenches etched in the previous step. The bilayer of resist is dissolved away, lifting off the extra metal and leaving the metal in the trenches. An argon sputter etch follows, and, owing to the difference in etch rate between the Pt and SiO2, the surface of the wafer is smoothed until the offset between the local back gate height and the wafer is less than a nanometre. Initial transistor fabrication We use ~24?nm Al2O3 as our high-k back-gate dielectric. This is deposited through atomic-layer deposition on the wafer described above, covering the local back gates and bottom-level wires. Before CNT transfer, the deposited surface undergoes an oxygen plasma etch to clean the surface of any contaminants and a forming gas anneal, followed by the CNT transfer process described above. Immediately following transfer is source?drain definition of the individual transistors. A bilayer of resist is patterned and developed, and a bilayer of 20?nm Pd and 20?nm Pt is deposited for both the source and drains. This is followed by a traditional lift-off process. In addition to the source and drain, a second layer of metal wiring is patterned and deposited. This second layer of metal wiring is permanent through the rest of the process. After the metal deposition, mis-positioned and unneeded CNTs are removed by covering the active area of the transistors with photoresist and etching away the unprotected CNTs with oxygen plasma. The layout of the active area of the transistors follows the mis-positioned CNT immune design20, 21, and guarantees that no mis-positioned CNTs can cause incorrect logic function. This renders the circuit immune to mis-positioned CNTs. Contacts to the bottom-layer wires and local back gates are lithographically defined and etched with an Ar/CL2/BCL3 plasma etch, followed by HF dip, with the embedded metal acting as a natural etch stop. Metallic CNT removal To ensure high Ion/Ioff ratios and correct logic functionality, it is necessary to remove >99.99% of the metallic CNTs from the circuit, while leaving the semiconducting CNTs predominantly intact. This is achieved through electrical breakdown, which biases the gate of the transistor to turn the semiconducting CNTs off, and pulses a large current through the metallic CNTs, causing joule self-heating until the metallic CNTs oxidize and are removed, thus no longer conducting current29. Rather than performing breakdown on the individual transistors, we employ VLSI-compatible metallic CNT removal30 (VMR). VMR allows electrical breakdown to be performed on the chip scale. To do so, we lithographically define and pattern a gold layer through the lift-off processes described above. The gold is patterned to short every gate, source and drain together. This effectively forms a single large CNFET, composed of all of the single CNFETs connected in parallel. The shorted structures make use of the power rails and clock distribution networks to minimize area overhead. We then perform electrical breakdown on the entire structure once, enabling quick and efficient breakdown of hundreds of transistors and thousands of CNTs simultaneously (though this is not a fundamental limitation of the size of a VMR structure). After electrical breakdown, the gold layer is removed. The third and final metal layer of Pt with an adhesion layer of Ti is deposited and lifted off, forming the final circuit layout configuration. Test set-up As shown in Fig. 4a, the CNT computer has four rows of probe pads, each containing 39 pads. A custom probe card is used to probe all of the pads simultaneously, although many of the pads are unused (and are simply present to ensure that the probe tips from the probe card always land on metal). Through the probe card, the pads are either connected to a supply voltage (VDD, GND, VBIAS) or to the inputs or outputs of the computer (the address outputs and input values to and from the off-chip memories). All other connections are made on-chip, as shown in Extended Data Fig. 3. A National Instrument DAQ (data acquisition hardware, #9264) is used to interface with the probe card and read and write the inputs and, respectively, outputs to the CNT computer, and Agilent oscilloscopes (#2014A) are additionally used to record the analogue traces of the outputs of the CNT computer (Fig. 4b). Biasing The biasing scheme for the circuits is shown in Fig. 3, with VDD = 3?V and VBIAS = ?5?V. There is no individual tuning of biasing voltages for individual transistors. Scaled supply voltages can be achieved by scaling the transistor channel lengths from 1??m at present (due to the limitations of academic fabrication capabilities) to smaller channel lengths1. Speed The probe pads and probe card with connecting wires used to connect to the CNT computer add additional capacitive loading to the circuit, limiting the frequency of operation to 1?kHz. However, this is not a fundamental limitation, because commercial chips are packaged and connected to memory and external devices without the use of probe cards, greatly reducing parasitic capacitances. The speed is also limited by the fact that the CNFET gate length is ~1??m, set by the minimum lithographic feature that can be patterned in our academic clean-room; in field-effect transistors, on-current increases as the gate length decreases1. Lithographic overlay accuracy of ~200?nm further increases parasitic capacitances resulting in reduced speed. Moreover, the CNT density in this work is ~5 CNTs per micrometre, whereas the target CNT density for increased current drive is 100?200 CNTs per micrometre8. Several published approaches show promising methods of achieving this target CNT density27. CNT contact resistance must also be improved for high-performance circuits, and is another source of variation between devices. PMOS-only logic Logic circuits which use only p-type transistors are known as PMOS-only logic. The design of PMOS-only logic, which is well documented in the literature, is shown in Extended Data Fig. 4. Extended Data Fig. 4a depicts a PMOS-only inverter, whereas Extended Data Fig. 4b depicts a PMOS-only NAND gate. As is apparent from comparison of the two circuits, the pull-down network is always a single p-type transistor, whose gate is biased to remain on continuously. The pull-up network follows the design of typical CMOS circuits. The p-type transistors in the pull-up network create a conducting path from the output to VDD when the output should be logic?1. When the output should be logic?0, the pull-up network is designed to no longer have a conducting path to VDD, and, thus, the single p-type transistor in the pull-down network pulls the output to logic?0. The relative sizing of the pull-up network and pull-down network is critical, because the pull-down network is always biased on. Thus, when the pull-up network should pull the output to logic?1, the pull-down network will still be attempting to pull the output to logic?0. Thus, in our design, the transistors in the pull-up networks are always sized with a width of 10?20 times the pull-down transistor width. Exact transistor sizing is shown in Fig. 3. Multibit arithmetic unit Additionally, having shown the ability to cascade logic, fabricating a larger multibit CNT computer is not a fundamental obstacle, but rather only affects yield; as a demonstration, we show a two-bit arithmetic unit (composed of 96 CNFETs with a maximum of 15 stages of cascaded logic). The two-bit arithmetic unit is shown in Extended Data Fig. 2. The output waveform tests for all possible inputs, and shows correct operation. Additionally, we show that the circuits regenerate the signal between stages, a necessity for cascading digital logic, by highlighting the noise in the ?borrow out? output. Even with noise somewhere within the arithmetic unit (which can have multiple causes: a stage with low swing, electrical noise on the inputs, mobile charges in an oxide and so on), owing to the gain of each stage the final output levels (logic?0 and logic?1) always stay either below or above the threshold for logic?0 or logic?1, respectively (as shown by the horizontal black dotted line). References Main? Methods? References? Acknowledgements? Author information? Extended data figures and tables? Comments Franklin, A. D. et al. Sub-10 nm carbon nanotube transistor. Nano Lett. 12, 758?762 (2012) CASPubMedArticle Show context Wei, L., Frank, D., Chang, L. & Wong, H.-S. P. in Proc. 2009 IEEE Intl Electron Devices Meeting 917?920 (IEEE, 2009) Show context Chang, L. in Short Course IEEE Intl Electron Devices Meeting (IEEE, 2012) Show context Nikonov, D. & Young, I. in Proc. 2012 IEEE Intl Electron Devices Meeting 24?25 (IEEE, 2012) Show context Javey, A., Guo, J., Wang, Q., Lundstrom, M. & Dai, H. Ballistic carbon nanotube transistors. Nature 424, 654?657 (2003) CASISIPubMedArticle Show context Javey, A., Wang, Q., Kim, W. & Dai, H. in 2003 Intl Electron Devices Meeting Tech. Digest 31?32 (IEEE, 2003) Show context Appenzeller, J. Carbon nanotubes for high-performance electronics?progress and prospect. Proc. IEEE 96, 201?211 (2008) CASArticle Show context Deng, J. et al. in Proc. 2007 IEEE Intl Solid State Circuits Conf. 70?78 (IEEE, 2007) Show context Iijima, S. Helical microtubules of graphitic carbon. Nature 354, 56?58 (1991) CASISIArticle Show context Martel, R. A. ., Schmidt, T., Shea, H. R., Hertel, T. & Avouris, P. Single-and multi-wall carbon nanotube field-effect transistors. Appl. Phys. Lett. 73, 2447 (1998) CASISIArticle Show context Tans, S. J., Verschueren, A. R. & Dekker, C. Room-temperature transistor based on a single carbon nanotube. Nature 393, 49?52 (1998) CASISIArticle Show context Chen, Z. et al. An integrated logic circuit assembled on a single carbon nanotube. Science 311, 1735 (2006) CASISIPubMedArticle Show context Cao, Q. et al. Medium-scale carbon nanotube thin-film integrated circuits on flexible plastic substrates. Nature 454, 495?500 (2008) CASISIPubMedArticle Show context Patil, N., Lin, A., Myers, E. R., Wong, H.-S. P. & Mitra, S. in Proc. Symp. VLSI Tech. 205?206. (2008) Show context Patil, N. et al. Scalable carbon nanotube computational and storage circuits immune to metallic and mis-positioned carbon nanotubes. IEEE Trans. NanoTechnol. 10, 744?750 (2011) Article Show context Shulaker, M. et al. in Proc. 2013 IEEE Intl Solid State Circuits Conf. 112?113 (IEEE, 2013) Show context von Neumann, J. First draft of a report on the EDVAC. Ann. Hist. Comput. 15, 27?75 (1993) Article Show context McCluskey, E. J. Logic Design Principles with Emphasis on Testable Semicustom Circuits (Prentice-Hall, 1986) Show context Cao, Q. et al. Arrays of single-walled carbon nanotubes with full surface coverage for high-performance electronics. Nature Nanotechnol. 8, 180?186 (2013) CASArticle Show context Zhang, J. et al. Robust digital VLSI using carbon nanotubes. IEEE Trans. CAD 31, 453?471 (2012) Show context Patil, N. Design and Fabrication of Imperfection-Immune Carbon Nanotube Digital VLSI Circuits. PhD thesis, Stanford Univ. (2010) Show context Patterson, D. A. & Hennessy, J. L. Computer Architecture (Kaufmann, 1990) Show context Lin, A. Carbon Nanotube Synthesis, Device Fabrication, and Circuit Design for Digital Logic Applications. PhD thesis, Stanford Univ. (2010) Show context Herken, R., ed. The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey (Springer, 1995) Show context N?rnberg, P., Uffe, W. & Hicks, D. A grand unified theory for structural computing. Metainformatics 3002, 1?16 (2004) Show context Jeffay, K., Donald, S. F. & Martel, C. U. in Proc. Real-Time Systems Symposium 129?139 (IEEE, 1991) Show context Shulaker, M. et al. Linear increases in carbon nanotube density through multiple transfer technique. Nano Lett. 11, 1881?1886 (2011) CASPubMedArticle Show context Bachtold, A., Hadley, P., Nakanishi, T. & Dekker, C. Logic circuits with carbon nanotube transistors. Science 294, 1317?1320 (2001) CASISIPubMedArticle Show context Collins, P. G., Arnold, M. S. & Avouris, P. Engineering carbon nanotubes and nanotube circuits using electrical breakdown. Science 292, 706?709 (2001) CASISIPubMedArticle Show context Patil, N. et al. in Proc. 2009 IEEE Intl Electron Devices Meeting 573?576 (IEEE, 2009) Show context Download references Acknowledgements Main? Methods? References? Acknowledgements? Author information? Extended data figures and tables? Comments We acknowledge the support of the NSF (CISE) (CNS-1059020, CCF-0726791, CCF-0702343, CCF-0643319), FCRP C2S2, FCRP FENA, STARNet SONIC and the Stanford Graduate Fellowship and the Hertz Foundation Fellowship (M.M.S.). We also acknowledge Z. Bao, A. Lin, H. (D.) Lin, M. Rosenblum, and J. Zhang for their advice and collaborations. Author information Main? Methods? References? Acknowledgements? Author information? Extended data figures and tables? Comments Affiliations Stanford University, Gates Building, Room 331, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford, California 94305, USA Max M. Shulaker Stanford University, Gates Building, Room 358, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford, California 94305, USA Gage Hills SK Hynix Memory Solutions, 3103 North First Street, San Jose, California 95134, USA Nishant Patil Stanford University, Gates Building, Room 239, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford, California 94305, USA Hai Wei Stanford University, Paul G. Allen Building, Room B113X, 420 Via Ortega, Stanford, California 94305, USA Hong-Yu Chen Stanford University, Paul G. Allen Building, Room 312X, 420 Via Ortega, Stanford, California 94305, USA H.-S. Philip Wong Stanford University, Gates Building, Room 334, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford, California 94305, USA Subhasish Mitra Contributions M.M.S. led and was involved in all aspects of the project, did all of the fabrication and layout designs, and contributed to the design and testing. G.H. wrote the SUBNEG and testing programs, and contributed to the design and testing. N.P. contributed to the design, and N.P., H.W. and H.-Y.C. contributed to developing fabrication processes. H.-S.P.W. and S.M. were in charge and advised on all parts of the project. Competing financial interests The authors declare no competing financial interests. Corresponding author Correspondence to: Max M. Shulaker Extended data figures and tables Main? Methods? References? Acknowledgements? Author information? Extended data figures and tables? Comments Extended Data Figures Extended Data Figure 1: Fabrication flow for the CNT computer. (338 KB) Steps 1?4 prepare the final substrate for circuit fabrication. Steps 5?8 transfer the CNTs from the quartz wafer (where highly aligned CNTs are grown) to the final SiO2 substrate. Steps 9?11 continue final device fabrication on the final substrate. Extended Data Figure 2: Multibit arithmetic unit. (386 KB) a, Schematic of a two-bit arithmetic unit, comprising six individual arithmetic logic units (ALU) as shown in Fig. 3b. b, Measured and expected output waveforms testing all possible input combinations of the two-bit arithmetic unit, showing correct operation. Extended Data Figure 3: Internal versus external connections of CNT computer. (283 KB) a, Schematic of the CNT computer, showing that all connections are fabricated on-chip and that only signals reading or writing to or from an external memory are connected off-chip. b, SEM of the CNT computer, showing which connections are made to and from the CNT computer from the probe pads. The SEM is colour-coded to match the coloured wires in a. Extended Data Figure 4: PMOS-only logic schematics. (71 KB) a, Schematic of PMOS-only inverter. b, Schematic of PMOS-only NAND gate. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 13:56:12 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 09:56:12 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A Working Carbon Nanotube Computer Message-ID: The New York Times Published: September 25, 2013 By JOHN MARKOFF PALO ALTO, Calif. ? A group of Stanford researchers has moved a step closer to answering the question of what happens when silicon, the standard material in today?s microelectronic circuits, reaches its fundamental limits for use in increasingly small transistors. In a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the researchers reported that they had successfully built a working computer ? albeit an extremely simple one ? entirely from transistors fashioned from carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes, which are cylinder-shaped molecules, have long held the promise of allowing smaller, faster and lower-powered computing, though they have proved difficult to work with. The Stanford Robust Systems Group, however, has made significant progress in the last 18 months, advancing from building individual carbon nanotube transistors to simple electronic circuits made by interconnecting the transistors, and this week to a complete computer made from an ensemble of just 142 low-power transistors. While Stanford?s prototype computer is assembled from transistors that are gargantuan by industry standards ? one micron vs. 22 nanometers ? it is what computer scientists refer to as a ?Turing complete? machine, meaning that it is capable of performing any computation, given enough time. ?It can run two programs concurrently, a counting program and a sorting program,? said H. S. Philip Wong, a Stanford University electrical engineer, and one of the leaders of the group. ?We?ve spent a tremendous amount of time on this; in fact we?ve spent two generations of students on this.? The computer is based on a subset of 20 of the instructions used by the commercial MIPS microprocessor, which itself was designed by a group of Stanford researchers led by Stanford?s current president, John Hennessy, during the 1980s. ?I think this is a really nice piece of work,? said Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences at I.B.M.?s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. ?It?s a rudimentary demonstration that carbon nanotubes can be used to build a universal computer, or a Turing-complete machine. This is not the most efficient computer, but that wasn?t the point. It?s one of the first steps.? Because the factory processes that underlie the modern semiconductor industry require such painstaking precision, any new technology that the industry might use must be perfected more than three years before it can be considered for use in commercial production. Carbon nanotubes have continued to excite the material science field because of their proliferating array of allotropes ? different forms of the material ? all with potential. Dr. Guha complimented the Stanford group for maintaining its focus on a single engineering advance. Currently, semiconductor industry leaders can make integrated silicon circuits with a feature size of 22 nanometers, roughly 4,000 of which could be spread across the width of a human hair. With the arrival of a new generation of smaller transistors roughly every two years, the industry generally believes that silicon will be scaled down to a limit of 5-nanometer transistors sometime after 2020. The constant shrinking of transistor size over the last half-century has been important because it has significantly lowered the cost of computing, making it possible to build ever more powerful computers that are faster and cheaper, and consume less power with each generation. While Intel has been generally circumspect about what material technology it plans to turn to when silicon ceases to ?scale? down to smaller transistor sizes, I.B.M. has been more vocal and optimistic about the potential for carbon nanotubes. The company has recently succeeded in creating an inverter, a basic logic element used in electronic circuits, using two different types of carbon nanotube transistors, and plans to demonstrate the device at a technical meeting at the end of the year. The researchers said that their advance was not a scientific breakthrough, but it was a significant demonstration of the ability to work with a material other than silicon with great precision. They also stressed that their research project was entirely compatible with industry-standard manufacturing processes based on silicon. This suggests that in the future it will be possible to build hybrid chips using carbon nanotubes at particular locations, and thus extend the life of silicon in computing. The researchers said they were proud of their tiny prototype. ?This is a general computer and we can do anything with it,? said Max Shulaker, a Stanford graduate student who is a leading member of the research group. ?We could in principle run 64-bit Windows, but it would take millions of years.? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 14:05:39 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 10:05:39 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130923080756.GZ10405@leitl.org> References: <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130923080756.GZ10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 4:07 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: I BOTHER WRITING THIS CRAP ### I admit it can get a bit bothersome, for its repetitiveness. Rafal From lubkin at unreasonable.com Thu Sep 26 13:21:33 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 09:21:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Photonic molecules Message-ID: <201309261434.r8QEYV1g016365@yee.zia.io> >Working with colleagues at the Harvard-MIT >Center for Ultracold Atoms, a group led by >Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin and >MIT Professor of Physics Vladan Vuletic have >managed to coax photons into binding together to >form molecules ? a state of matter that, until >recently, had been purely theoretical. Everyone's reporting off the same press release. This version at least omits the stock photo of a light saber. Lukin's group's earlier papers are at ; Vladin's group's are at . I don't think I'm related to Lukin. It's not inconceivable; I'm just starting to explore what became of the Lubkins who stayed in Russia. (Yes, he's missing the B, but I have relatives who dropped the K.) -- David. From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 16:34:40 2013 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 19:34:40 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Day Appeal - October 1 Message-ID: *Dear friends,* *Just a few days remain until the first International Longevity Day ? October 1* http://www.longevityday.org/ to be celebrated by longevity researchers and advocates from around the world, during the UN International Day of Older Persons http://www.un.org/en/events/olderpersonsday/ On that day, we have an excellent opportunity to link in the public mind the issue of AGING with the issue of ANTI-AGING and PRO-LONGEVITY research that is probably the only means to truly address and ameliorate the problem of aging. People in more than 20 countries are organizing events on that day! *There is still time to organize more events in support of longevity and longevity research on that day*: Invite a few friends to meet and discuss recent advances in the field; write and publish a dedicated article or post (preferably in your national language); contact local media and politicians to try to raise their interest in the subject. There is still time before October 1 and there will be time to do so after that day, but we need to act. We can celebrate the Longevity Day ? all year round! An additional way of promotion is: *S**upport our petition to celebrate the International Longevity Day during the International Day of Older Persons.* This can be done in several ways: 1) Sign the online petition and spread it among your friends and on social media. https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Celebrating_International_Longevity_Day_during_the_International_Day_of_Older_Persons/ The petition is also featured on the newly established Longevity Intelligence Communications (LIC) site dedicated to promoting petitions related to longevity https://lonintelcomms.tumblr.com 2) Participate in the physical signing and mailing of the petition (to be sent to International Organizations, Governmental Offices, Associations of the Elderly, Scientific Societies, etc.) As a first option, the petition will be sent to the UN (the authors of the ?International Day of Older Persons?). If you are interested in doing so, please contact the address below for details. 3) Attached please find a template of a flyer containing a short version of the petition. You can modify it as you see fit: change the text, affiliation, country, logo, slogan, links, etc. ? as long as the spirit of support for Longevity and Longevity Research is maintained. Or print it out as it is and distribute it among friends, at your school, health club, etc. Engage people in the topic. Or upload it and spread it online. Please consider spreading this message. With some minimal effort we can create a series of highly influential and positive events, promoting the advancement of Healthy Longevity for All through Support of Scientific Research directed toward that goal! I also use this opportunity to draw your attention to an additional project that takes place at this time: *The crowd-funding effort to support life-span extension experiments in mice*. The support of this and other studies aimed to find effective means for healthy life extension will bring us closer to our goal. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/i-am-a-little-mouse-and-i-want-to-live-longer For details, please contact: Ilia Stambler Coordinator International Longevity Alliance ilia.stambler at gmail.com http://longevityalliance.org/ Please also see. http://www.longevityday.org/ -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Euro-transhumanists" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to euro-transhumanists+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: International Longevity Day Flyer - Template.doc Type: application/msword Size: 589312 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: LONGEVITY DAY FLYER.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 341033 bytes Desc: not available URL: From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Wed Sep 25 16:48:24 2013 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 19:48:24 +0300 Subject: [ExI] Longevity Day Appeal - October 1 Message-ID: *Dear friends,* *Just a few days remain until the first International Longevity Day ? October 1* http://www.longevityday.org/ to be celebrated by longevity researchers and advocates from around the world, during the UN International Day of Older Persons http://www.un.org/en/events/olderpersonsday/ On that day, we have an excellent opportunity to link in the public mind the issue of AGING with the issue of ANTI-AGING and PRO-LONGEVITY research that is probably the only means to truly address and ameliorate the problem of aging. People in more than 20 countries are organizing events on that day! *There is still time to organize more events in support of longevity and longevity research on that day*: Invite a few friends to meet and discuss recent advances in the field; write and publish a dedicated article or post (preferably in your national language); contact local media and politicians to try to raise their interest in the subject. There is still time before October 1 and there will be time to do so after that day, but we need to act. We can celebrate the Longevity Day ? all year round! An additional way of promotion is: *S**upport our petition to celebrate the International Longevity Day during the International Day of Older Persons.* This can be done in several ways: 1) Sign the online petition and spread it among your friends and on social media. https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Celebrating_International_Longevity_Day_during_the_International_Day_of_Older_Persons/ The petition is also featured on the newly established Longevity Intelligence Communications (LIC) site dedicated to promoting petitions related to longevity https://lonintelcomms.tumblr.com 2) Participate in the physical signing and mailing of the petition (to be sent to International Organizations, Governmental Offices, Associations of the Elderly, Scientific Societies, etc.) As a first option, the petition will be sent to the UN (the authors of the ?International Day of Older Persons?). If you are interested in doing so, please contact the address below for details. 3) Attached please find a template of a flyer containing a short version of the petition. You can modify it as you see fit: change the text, affiliation, country, logo, slogan, links, etc. ? as long as the spirit of support for Longevity and Longevity Research is maintained. Or print it out as it is and distribute it among friends, at your school, health club, etc. Engage people in the topic. Or upload it and spread it online. Please consider spreading this message. With some minimal effort we can create a series of highly influential and positive events, promoting the advancement of Healthy Longevity for All through Support of Scientific Research directed toward that goal! I also use this opportunity to draw your attention to an additional project that takes place at this time: *The crowd-funding effort to support life-span extension experiments in mice*. The support of this and other studies aimed to find effective means for healthy life extension will bring us closer to our goal. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/i-am-a-little-mouse-and-i-want-to-live-longer For details, please contact: Ilia Stambler Coordinator International Longevity Alliance ilia.stambler at gmail.com http://longevityalliance.org/ Please also see http://www.longevityday.org/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: LONGEVITY DAY FLYER.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 341033 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: International Longevity Day Flyer - Template.doc Type: application/msword Size: 589312 bytes Desc: not available URL: From bookemdanomurderone at yahoo.com Thu Sep 26 05:14:22 2013 From: bookemdanomurderone at yahoo.com (Bookemdano Murderone) Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 22:14:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] volunteers needed In-Reply-To: <014d01ceba62$ea9ef390$bfdcdab0$@att.net> References: <014d01ceba62$ea9ef390$bfdcdab0$@att.net> Message-ID: <1380172462.83175.YahooMailNeo@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> "Until the government can get back to its usual tasks, can we get some American volunteers to spy on each other? ?spike" ? You can always count on me to do sneaky things, Spike. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 26 14:47:38 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 07:47:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] volunteers needed In-Reply-To: <1380172462.83175.YahooMailNeo@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> References: <014d01ceba62$ea9ef390$bfdcdab0$@att.net> <1380172462.83175.YahooMailNeo@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <03d801cebac7$598268a0$0c8739e0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Bookemdano Murderone Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2013 10:14 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] volunteers needed >>."Until the government can get back to its usual tasks, can we get some American volunteers to spy on each other? spike" >.You can always count on me to do sneaky things, Spike. In the spirit of budget cuts, the department of secrecy has been furloughed. So until the government gets back on its feet, sneaky things must be done completely overtly. The mutual spying by volunteers must be done by the familiar PE-coach-inspired two fingers pointing at his eyes and then turning toward the hapless watched person, universally understood as his saying "I am watching you." All volunteer spies are requested to make the two-fingered gesture to each other until further notice. We will let you know when we can all resume the usual process of doing our sneaky things covertly. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 15:08:44 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 11:08:44 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming ten years either. >> > > >The thing that worries me is that for the coming 10 or 20 years > civilisation's back is barely covered. At least this is impression I get > You get that impression because you've been listening to Eugen Leitl too much. Eugen has said some intelligent things over the years but lately when it comes to energy issues he,..., well it would be impolite to say he's full of shit so lets just say he has an excess of fecal material. For example, he says we will start to run out of Uranium by 2020, but today Uranium prices are the lowest they've been in almost 8 years. I found a chart for the last 5 years: [image: 5 Year Uranium Price Chart - Uranium Price Per Pound] And so I would like to make a bet with Eugen Leitl and see if he is willing to put his money where his mouth is. If before January 1 2020 there is widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages (and not due to temper tantrums from environmentalists) then, assuming I'm still alive, I will send Eugen Leitl $1000; if there are not widespread reactor shutdowns because of Uranium shortages before January 1 2020 then, assuming he's still alive, Eugen Leitl only needs to send me $100. So do we have a bet? Come on Eugen, I'm giving you 10 to 1 odds, and you might get your $1000 next week if there are Uranium shortages next week, but there is no way I can get my lousy $100 before 2020. And think of all the cans of baked beans you can buy with $1000 that you will undoubtedly need for your underground redoubt when civilization collapses shortly after 2020. > If you consider all politicians and other decision makers (Koch > brothers, Gates family etc) to be green, than our > understandings of the word is very different from each other. > Bill Gates has probably saved more lives that any other individual in history, but he is not green thank goodness. The Koch brothers are not green either but they are utter morons nevertheless, there is more than one way to be dumb. >> we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion >> years. >> > > > 3/4 of the crust is below water, thus a bit harder to get to > So we will run out of Thorium in 1.5 billion years. The Earth will become uninhabitable in just 800 million years when the sun starts to run out of hydrogen and starts to get off the main sequence. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 26 15:11:20 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 17:11:20 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Photonic molecules In-Reply-To: <201309261434.r8QEYV1g016365@yee.zia.io> References: <201309261434.r8QEYV1g016365@yee.zia.io> Message-ID: <20130926151120.GA10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 09:21:33AM -0400, David Lubkin wrote: > I don't think I'm related to Lukin. It's not inconceivable; I'm just > starting to explore what became of the Lubkins who stayed in Russia. > (Yes, he's missing the B, but I have relatives who dropped the K.) Interesting etymology: http://www.ufolog.ru/names/order/%D0%9B%D1%8E%D0%B1%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BD From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 15:18:45 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 11:18:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130925202829.GC10405@leitl.org> References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130925202829.GC10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > I see you're still talking to John. Save your breath, it's perfectly > useless. In case his debating style is not supplying you enough hints: he's > doing it on purpose. > Yes, I'm purposely trying not to be stupid. You might want to try it sometime. > Do not feed the troll. > Troll? I've been on this list longer than you have Eugen, and I've never run away from it because somebody beat me in a debate! And the Extropian list was not started by people whining that everything is hopeless because of resource shortages. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From eugen at leitl.org Thu Sep 26 15:27:47 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 17:27:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Dead immortalists in 1978 Omni magazine article Message-ID: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> ----- Forwarded message from Mark Plus ----- Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 08:13:28 -0700 (PDT) From: Mark Plus To: New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com Subject: [New_Cryonet] Dead immortalists in 1978 Omni magazine article X-Mailer: YahooMailWebService/0.8.160.587 Reply-To: New_Cryonet at yahoogroups.com The recent announcement of the bankruptcy of the late Bob Guccione's Penthouse magazine business caused me to look up one of Guccione's other publishing ventures, Omni magazine, which came out from the late 1970's through the early 1990's.? I found, extracted and uploaded to Scribd this article, from Omni, October 1978: "Some of Us May Never Die," by Kathleen Stein http://www.scribd.com/doc/171164687/Some-of-Us-May-Never-Die-by-Kathleen-Stein Ironically several people referenced in this article have died by now, including the article's author, Kathleen Stein; the writers Robert Anton Wilson and F.M. Esfandiary; and the scientists Paul Segall, Bernard Strehler and Roy Walford. The self-confidence of these deceased people in the 1970's that they would "become immortal," or at least live for several centuries, by arbitrary dates which have already come and gone, strikes me as remarkably sad. Yet I see many of today's "transhumanists" falling into the same delusional way of thinking, only they've just added another 30-40 years to the previous range of dates. Apparently few people understand the point that we can only determine if a life extension breakthrough has happened retrospectively, after a whole lot of people have survived well past 120 years in good physical and cognitive shape. That rules out having any such knowledge in this century because every year between now and 2100 falls within current life expectancies.? At least Segall and Esfandiary both made it into cryo, and the article's first paragraph also recounts the neuropreservation of Robert Anton Wilson's daughter Luna Wilson. Including this article, I've found three public references to Luna's cryopreservation, yet TransTime has become strangely unresponsive about this fact, and it bothers me that Luna could fall into oblivion, along with a lot of other cryonauts, without an effort to maintain their social visibility while they wait for possible revival.? At least people can go into cryopreservation, despite all the difficulties and uncertainties involved. Cryonics has a better track record so far than predictions that you'll have radical life extension served to you in a pill(!) just by surviving to some arbitrary year. ? Mark Plus Secretary, Society for Venturism . . . how wearisom Eternity so spent in worship paid To whom we hate. Let us not then pursue By force impossible, by leave obtain'd? Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek Our own good from our selves, and from our own Live to our selves, though in this vast recess, Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easie yoke Of servile Pomp. Our greatness will appeer Then most conspicuous, when great things of small, Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse We can create, and in what place so e're? Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain Through labour and indurance. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 26 16:47:23 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 09:47:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> Message-ID: <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> >.Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] roboburgers to go I don't know if this has already mentioned in this thread, but my colleagues Carl Frey and Mike Osborne has done a pretty intriguing study of what jobs are at risk from AI: http://theconversation.com/machines-on-the-march-threaten-almost-half-of-mod ern-jobs-18485 http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/future-employment-how-susceptible-are-jobs-co mputerisation-oms-working-paper-dr-carl-benedikt-frey-m They have a list at the end. Don't aim at the high probability occupations for a career. . Thanks Anders. I have seen this coming for at least 20 years. In 1993, I was working with a couple of senior aerodynamics guys at Lockheed, hoping to steer my career that way. The three of us were writing a study on the flight path of aero-shrouds for THAAD missile, using closed form equations. We hired a couple of young guys to set up a NASTRAN model, which they did, starting after we started and finishing before we finished. Together they cost the company less than I did alone, since they were contractors. They got better answers, with more actual information than we equation-jockeys were providing, tighter tolerances, fun graphics, everything, and they knew nothing about air, nothing about all the cool science in shock wave mechanics, nothing. They didn't have engineering degrees, they didn't study science or calculus, they didn't understand or care why the shrouds flew the way they did. But after they ran a million sims they knew how the shrouds flew, better than we did, we being the math guys with all the brains. After that project I decided against becoming an aero-guru. Good choice; the aero group is nearly disbanded now, twenty five guys down to six today. There are many jobs that we almost have a moral duty to eliminate. -- Dr Anders Sandberg I couldn't have said it better Anders. But we are eliminating good jobs along with the lousy ones. I struggle to find things to teach my own seven yr old son, since I want him to learn relevant skills. All around me I see things that can easily be automated, and once they are, there is just no point in learning the theory behind the software, any more than we really need to understand shock wave mechanics of a tumbling aero-shroud or how to extract square roots by hand (I STILL know how to do that fun but useless skill.) I am open to suggestion from anyone here on teaching my mathematically talented 7 yr old. He is performing actual algebra and geometry in the second grade, no fooling. His entire top row on his Khan Academy board is dark blue, 134 skills mastered and nearly a hundred more level 1s and 2s. I have him doing Blender and Excel macros. Question please, what does a father teach a son today, assuming access to the collective wisdom of years represented by this group? Anders, Kelly, Eugen, Keith, anyone else especially fathers, what do we do now, coach? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 17:34:43 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:34:43 -0400 Subject: [ExI] volunteers needed In-Reply-To: <03d801cebac7$598268a0$0c8739e0$@att.net> References: <014d01ceba62$ea9ef390$bfdcdab0$@att.net> <1380172462.83175.YahooMailNeo@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <03d801cebac7$598268a0$0c8739e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:47 AM, spike wrote: > > > In the spirit of budget cuts, the department of secrecy has been > furloughed. So until the government gets back on its feet, sneaky things > must be done completely overtly. The mutual spying by volunteers must be > done by the familiar PE-coach-inspired two fingers pointing at his eyes and > then turning toward the hapless watched person, universally understood as > his saying ?I am watching you.? All volunteer spies are requested to make > the two-fingered gesture to each other until further notice. We will let > you know when we can all resume the usual process of doing our sneaky > things covertly.**** > > ** > Your mindcrimes have been logged. [they will be datamined when government resumes - please stand by] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 17:42:49 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:42:49 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:08 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 Tomasz Rola wrote: > >> >> we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion >>> years. >>> >> >> > > 3/4 of the crust is below water, thus a bit harder to get to >> > > So we will run out of Thorium in 1.5 billion years. The Earth will become > uninhabitable in just 800 million years when the sun starts to run out of > hydrogen and starts to get off the main sequence. > I would hope that in 800 million years we'd have thought of a way to reboot the sun if/when necessary. "Did you turn it off and turn it on again?" Though that program might take 100 millions to start, so you know... we have some time to do some feasibility studies and half a billion years to fight about whether or not it's a good idea or if anyone will mind a few bird-strikes. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 17:46:40 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:46:40 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Dead immortalists in 1978 Omni magazine article In-Reply-To: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> References: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > At least people can go into cryopreservation, despite all the difficulties > and uncertainties involved. Cryonics has a better track record so far than > predictions that you'll have radical life extension served to you in a > pill(!) just by surviving to some arbitrary year. > > I'm curious how you measure a "track record" when the race hasn't really even started. (I'd suggest it's more like the milling-about around the starting line before the event) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 17:54:50 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 10:54:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Dead immortalists in 1978 Omni magazine article In-Reply-To: References: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> At least people can go into cryopreservation, despite all the >> difficulties and uncertainties involved. Cryonics has a better track record >> so far than predictions that you'll have radical life extension served to >> you in a pill(!) just by surviving to some arbitrary year. >> > > I'm curious how you measure a "track record" when the race hasn't really > even started. > (I'd suggest it's more like the milling-about around the starting line > before the event) > Predictions of personal immortality have been around for millennia - and they were just as certain as we are now. (Granted, we know some of what they were doing wrong.) The event for the human race in general started long ago; we've only recently shown up. For each of us personally, the event started the moment we were born, and continues as long as we maintain it - in whatever form. Cryonics, at least, merely suspends the personal event rather than provably permanently ending it (to the degree that such is provable in this reality, ignoring immeasurable souls and the like). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 18:01:01 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:01:01 -0400 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 12:47 PM, spike wrote: > > > I am open to suggestion from anyone here on teaching my mathematically > talented 7 yr old. He is performing actual algebra and geometry in the > second grade, no fooling. His entire top row on his Khan Academy board is > dark blue, 134 skills mastered and nearly a hundred more level 1s and 2s. > I have him doing Blender and Excel macros. **** > > ** ** > > Question please, what does a father teach a son today, assuming access to > the collective wisdom of years represented by this group?**** > > ** ** > > Anders, Kelly, Eugen, Keith, anyone else especially fathers, what do we do > now, coach?**** > > > until (and unless) humans radically depart from our nature in the next 10 years (doubtful) I'd say those skills you could give your son are the social skills classically at odds with the math nerd stereotype of which you are indubitably proud. If he is capable of overcoming the schism of boys vs girls in school (to the point of making (and keeping) genuine friendships with people because of who they are / how they think) then he'll have those skills about 20 years ahead of his peers. I guess if you must frame the "problem" using maths, you could teach him statistics and try to develop some behavior modeling of the usual Meyers-Briggs personality types. [I know your interests in certain 'models' - I'm confident he'll grow to appreciate the same.] I'm confident the awareness/understanding of group/team dynamics will be very useful regardless of (or because of) future stressors on those groups. Ok, you got me. I have no idea how to really teach that. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 18:04:22 2013 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:04:22 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Dead immortalists in 1978 Omni magazine article In-Reply-To: References: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:46 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > >> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: >> >>> At least people can go into cryopreservation, despite all the >>> difficulties and uncertainties involved. Cryonics has a better track record >>> so far than predictions that you'll have radical life extension served to >>> you in a pill(!) just by surviving to some arbitrary year. >>> >> >> I'm curious how you measure a "track record" when the race hasn't really >> even started. >> (I'd suggest it's more like the milling-about around the starting line >> before the event) >> > > Predictions of personal immortality have been around for millennia - and > they were just as certain as we are now. (Granted, we know some of what > they were doing wrong.) The event for the human race in general started > long ago; we've only recently shown up. For each of us personally, the > event started the moment we were born, and continues as long as we maintain > it - in whatever form. Cryonics, at least, merely suspends the personal > event rather than provably permanently ending it (to the degree that such > is provable in this reality, ignoring immeasurable souls and the like). > What a cogent reply to my off-hand snarcasm. +1 & "like" :) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Sep 26 18:46:23 2013 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 11:46:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> Message-ID: <42F431CC-DF1A-44F2-8A00-588C684D4657@taramayastales.com> Have him come play with my 7 year old. Mine is quite social, but his math could use some improvement. They'd both benefit. :) On Sep 26, 2013, at 11:01 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 12:47 PM, spike wrote: > > > I am open to suggestion from anyone here on teaching my mathematically talented 7 yr old. He is performing actual algebra and geometry in the second grade, no fooling. His entire top row on his Khan Academy board is dark blue, 134 skills mastered and nearly a hundred more level 1s and 2s. I have him doing Blender and Excel macros. > > > > Question please, what does a father teach a son today, assuming access to the collective wisdom of years represented by this group? > > > > Anders, Kelly, Eugen, Keith, anyone else especially fathers, what do we do now, coach? > > > > > until (and unless) humans radically depart from our nature in the next 10 years (doubtful) I'd say those skills you could give your son are the social skills classically at odds with the math nerd stereotype of which you are indubitably proud. > > If he is capable of overcoming the schism of boys vs girls in school (to the point of making (and keeping) genuine friendships with people because of who they are / how they think) then he'll have those skills about 20 years ahead of his peers. > > I guess if you must frame the "problem" using maths, you could teach him statistics and try to develop some behavior modeling of the usual Meyers-Briggs personality types. [I know your interests in certain 'models' - I'm confident he'll grow to appreciate the same.] I'm confident the awareness/understanding of group/team dynamics will be very useful regardless of (or because of) future stressors on those groups. > > Ok, you got me. I have no idea how to really teach that. > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rtomek at ceti.pl Thu Sep 26 19:16:58 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 21:16:58 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Sep 2013, John Clark wrote: > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > [J. Clark]: > > > So what? We don't need to deploy it in the coming ten years either. > >> > > > > >The thing that worries me is that for the coming 10 or 20 years > > civilisation's back is barely covered. At least this is impression I get > > > > You get that impression because you've been listening to Eugen Leitl too > much. Eugen has said some intelligent things over the years but lately > when it comes to energy issues he,..., well it would be impolite to say > he's full of shit so lets just say he has an excess of fecal material. He may get too emotional sometimes, at least for my taste [1]. Maybe this means something good about his intentions? As of some of you guys making fun of his worries, there are moments when your optimism level resembles me of certain figures from Monty Python shows (if there is no such show, it sure should be). Just MHO. As of news, I read quite some of them. I have even read some news long before I subscribed here (yes, there were news then, too). Sometimes I disagree with Eugen and but sometimes I think what he says is worth closer look. That's all. [...] > >> we will run out of Thorium in the crust of this planet in 6 billion > >> years. > >> > > > > > > 3/4 of the crust is below water, thus a bit harder to get to > > > > So we will run out of Thorium in 1.5 billion years. The Earth will become > uninhabitable in just 800 million years when the sun starts to run out of > hydrogen and starts to get off the main sequence. Maybe. I don't think it will make sense to pulverize every cubic meter of rock just to have a gram or few of Th. Doesn't look economical. So I still do not buy your assertion with so many zeros on the wrong end. Since U is only slightly (3-4 times) less omnipresent in the crust, you should say now "we will run out of U in 400 million years, so we don't need Th at all". Why then you get so emotional about Th? We have 1/4 of the crust to mine for U. Leave the hapless greens and start building nuke plants :-). [1] I don't think humanity cares much about its future and any problem so far has been successfully solved, stealing first, then killing and as a last resort, cannibalism. So not much to fret about really - seems like anything aimed higher than those solutions is not going to get significant traction. This of course has some good sides, like our silence will be inspirational for some better brained species, because for us it obviously is not, we just keep asking, never dare to formulate answer, heh. Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Sep 26 20:07:29 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 16:07:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > Since U is only slightly (3-4 times) less omnipresent in the crust, you > should say now "we will run out of U in 400 million years, so we don't need > Th at all". All of today's reactors use only the rare U235 isotope, and that is only one part in140 of mined Uranium; Thorium has only one isotope and Thorium reactors can use 100% of it. But even so we are nowhere near to running out of Uranium or Thorium, but there are other advantages to Thorium. To burn the remaining 99.3% of Uranium, the U238, you'd have to use a exotic fast neutron breeder reactor. Thorium reactors use slow neutrons and so are inherently more stable because you have much more time to react if something goes wrong. Also breeders produce massive amounts of Plutonium which is a bad thing if you're worried about people making bombs. Thorium reactors produce an insignificant amount of Plutonium. Thorium reactors do produce Uranium 233 and theoretically you could make a bomb out of that, but it would be contaminated with Uranium 232 which is a powerful gamma ray emitter which would make it suicidal to work with unless extraordinary precautions were taken, and even then the unexploded bomb would be so radioactive it would give away its location if you tried to hide it, destroy its electronic firing circuits and degrade its chemical explosives. For these reasons even after almost 70 years nobody has a Uranium 233 bomb in its stockpile. A Thorium reactor only produces about 1% as much waste as a conventional reactor and the stuff it does make is not as nasty, after about 5 years 87% of it would be safe and the remaining 13% in 300 years; a conventional reactor would take 100,000 years. A Thorium reactor has an inherent safety feature, the fuel is in liquid form (Thorium dissolved in un-corrosive molten Fluoride salts) so if for whatever reason things get too hot the liquid expands and so the fuel gets less dense and the reaction slows down. There is yet another fail safe device. At the bottom of the reactor is something called a "freeze plug", fans blow on it to freeze it solid, if things get too hot the plug melts and the liquid drains out into a holding tank and the reaction stops; also if all electronic controls die due to a loss of electrical power the fans will stop the plug will melt and the reaction will stop. Thorium reactors work at much higher temperatures than conventional reactors so you have better energy efficiency; in fact they are so hot the waste heat could be used to desalinate sea water or generate hydrogen fuel from water. Although the liquid Fluoride salt is very hot it is not under pressure so that makes the plumbing of the thing much easier, and even if you did get a leak it would not be the utter disaster it would be in a conventional reactor; that is also why the containment building in common light water reactors need to be so much larger than the reactor itself. With Thorium nothing is under pressure and there is no danger of a disastrous phase change so the expensive containment building can be made much more compact. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From lubkin at unreasonable.com Thu Sep 26 20:22:04 2013 From: lubkin at unreasonable.com (David Lubkin) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 16:22:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Photonic molecules In-Reply-To: <20130926151120.GA10405@leitl.org> References: <201309261434.r8QEYV1g016365@yee.zia.io> <20130926151120.GA10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <201309262022.r8QKMBhv005778@yee.zia.io> Eugen wrote: >Interesting etymology: >http://www.ufolog.ru/names/order/%D0%9B%D1%8E%D0%B1%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BD Thank you. I hadn't seen that. There are a couple of other theories on the etymology. The most likely seems to be that my great-great-grandfather Joshua, a rabbi and the first Lubkin, moved 250 km from Lyubavichi to Gomel. Or his father or an ancestor made the move, i.e., Joshua was one of the "Lubavitcher kinder." I have finally begun a family web site to collate what everyone knows, remembers, and inherited. So I may have a better answer in a year or two. -- David. From anders at aleph.se Thu Sep 26 20:30:47 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 21:30:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] what to teach In-Reply-To: <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <04c901cebad8$13a6bdc0$3af43940$@att.net> Message-ID: <52449977.3040301@aleph.se> On 2013-09-26 17:47, spike wrote: > > I struggle to find things to teach my own seven yr old son, since I > want him to learn relevant skills. All around me I see things that > can easily be automated, and once they are, there is just no point in > learning the theory behind the software, any more than we really need > to understand shock wave mechanics of a tumbling aero-shroud or how to > extract square roots by hand (I STILL know how to do that fun but > useless skill.) > Hmm, thinking about Carl and Michael's paper, the skills to look for are creative intelligence (both the fine arts and originality - coming up with unusual ideas, creative or strategic ways of solving problems) and social intelligence (social perceptiveness, negotiation, persuasion, assisting others). Math is both good training in manipulating formal abstract systems and a generic tool for a lot of domains. I usually like to point at statistics being extra useful for sharpening reasoning skills and being able to deal with data. Similarly, knowing economics seems to be generally useful. Philosophy might be a good tool-sharpener (especially argumentation and logic, but never underestimate the power of realizing you can think of things like thinking or thinginess), plus learning to think about values can be pretty good for choosing one's own path. Same thing for psychology. Specific skills: learning to program, render graphics and make stuff is useful - the languages and methods will change, but the self-confidence and the awareness that the world can be changed to suit ones preferences rather than the opposite, that is a good knowledge. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Sep 26 20:38:12 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:38:12 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <074e01cebaf8$5235db00$f6a19100$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Tomasz Rola >...As of some of you guys making fun of his worries, there are moments when your optimism level resembles me of certain figures from Monty Python shows ... Regards, Tomasz Rola Indeed. Black Knight Syndrome isn't restricted to ExI, although we have more than our share of it. As always, all I ask is that those of you who are capable of making math models, even single digit BOTECs, do it. This is important for an upcoming discussion I had hoped to have here regarding Germany and its current attitude towards solar power. Even single digit BOTECs can deeply influence one's outlook. spike From anders at aleph.se Thu Sep 26 21:02:58 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 22:02:58 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Dead immortalists in 1978 Omni magazine article In-Reply-To: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> References: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5244A102.9090202@aleph.se> On 2013-09-26 16:27, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Ironically several people referenced in this article have died by now, including the article's author, Kathleen Stein; the writers Robert Anton Wilson and F.M. Esfandiary; and the scientists Paul Segall, Bernard Strehler and Roy Walford. The self-confidence of these deceased people in the 1970's that they would "become immortal," or at least live for several centuries, by arbitrary dates which have already come and gone, strikes me as remarkably sad. Yet I see many of today's "transhumanists" falling into the same delusional way of thinking, only they've just added another 30-40 years to the previous range of dates. I assume you have seen Stuart Armstrong and Kaj Sotala's excellent paper about why AI predictions are lousy? http://intelligence.org/files/PredictingAI.pdf Their analysis of why there are no experts on the future of AI seems applicable here too: too little feedback, no good background theory, people do not decompose their theories and scenarios into chunks that can be analysed and criticised meaningfully, and so on. (This is also why I respect Aubrey - he has at least tried to decompose his theory.) In fact, it makes me interested in making a copycat paper looking at life extension claims in the same way - anybody know a convenient database of them? -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From rtomek at ceti.pl Fri Sep 27 00:09:49 2013 From: rtomek at ceti.pl (Tomasz Rola) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:09:49 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, 26 Sep 2013, John Clark wrote: > On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Tomasz Rola wrote: > > > Since U is only slightly (3-4 times) less omnipresent in the crust, > > you should say now "we will run out of U in 400 million years, so we > > don't need Th at all". > > > All of today's reactors use only the rare U235 isotope, and that is only > one part in140 of mined Uranium; Thorium has only one isotope and Thorium > reactors can use 100% of it. But even so we are nowhere near to running out > of Uranium or Thorium, but there are other advantages to Thorium. [...] > Although the liquid Fluoride salt is very hot it is not under pressure so > that makes the plumbing of the thing much easier, and even if you did get a > leak it would not be the utter disaster it would be in a conventional > reactor; that is also why the containment building in common light water > reactors need to be so much larger than the reactor itself. With Thorium > nothing is under pressure and there is no danger of a disastrous phase > change so the expensive containment building can be made much more compact. OK, those arguments sound quite well. I guess I have also read some of it somewhere else too, so I can accept thorium as much better choice. However, it is only as good as we will collectively be 20-30 years from now (research + time to market). If I had certainty about civ lasting this long or better, twice as long, I could have good sleep while crowd of competent scientists and engineers - supported by competent decision makers - worked on whatever problem stood in way of worldwide Th adoption. I still think we may power ourselves with Th for about 1000 years or similar order of magnitude, rather than billion(s). If you don't want to discuss it, so be it. Anyway, your emails read much better when you don't write about greens :-). Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com ** From andymck35 at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 02:16:05 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 14:16:05 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <074e01cebaf8$5235db00$f6a19100$@att.net> References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <074e01cebaf8$5235db00$f6a19100$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 08:38:12 +1200, spike wrote: > Indeed. Black Knight Syndrome isn't restricted to ExI, although we have > more than our share of it. As always, all I ask is that those of you who > are capable of making math models, even single digit BOTECs, do it. And dare I ask what the math hating people on this list should be doing? Biting our tongues?, because although we can appreciate sound reasoning, good ideas and the odd convincing argument, if we cannot 'do the math' we have no right to hold or express an opinion? Not that I disparage those with the skills to make good use of all those wonderful mathematical formulas out there, I just wonder if you're getting a little one sided here, in what is after all a transhumanist mailing list, not an engineering working group crunching the numbers a get a woman on mars. :-) From andymck35 at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 02:23:48 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 14:23:48 +1200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 08:07:29 +1200, John Clark wrote: > All of today's reactors use only the rare U235 isotope, and that is only > one part in140 of mined Uranium; Thorium has only one isotope and Thorium > reactors can use 100% of it. But even so we are nowhere near to running > out > of Uranium or Thorium, but there are other advantages to Thorium. > .... > .... > Thorium reactors work at much higher temperatures than conventional > reactors so you have better energy efficiency; in fact they are so hot > the > waste heat could be used to desalinate sea water or generate hydrogen > fuel > from water. > > Although the liquid Fluoride salt is very hot it is not under pressure so > that makes the plumbing of the thing much easier, and even if you did > get a > leak it would not be the utter disaster it would be in a conventional > reactor; that is also why the containment building in common light water > reactors need to be so much larger than the reactor itself. With Thorium > nothing is under pressure and there is no danger of a disastrous phase > change so the expensive containment building can be made much more > compact. Sounds like there's a lot to like about them. So why isn't anybody building thorium fueled power station(s)? From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 02:46:41 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 19:46:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go Message-ID: > Question please, what does a father teach a son today, assuming access to the collective wisdom of years represented by this group? > > Anders, Kelly, Eugen, Keith, anyone else especially fathers, what do we do now, coach? Was thinking about this very topic recently and have no idea. Virtually everything I know, particularly mechanical skills, is obsolete. Who needs to rebuild a carburetor? Set the points in a distributor? Replace the vertical amplifier in a TV with magnetic deflection? It's almost as bad as chipping rocks to get a sharp edge (which I can also do). Long list of skills that are utterly out of date. When I was about 7 I remember watching my father rebuild a fuel pump for a late 1949s vintage car. Those skills were useful, though I don't think I ever rebuilt a fuel pump myself. I am hard pressed to think of a skill I could pass on to someone of that age. Sorry. Keith From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 05:57:47 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 07:57:47 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 02:23:48PM +1200, Andrew Mckee wrote: > Sounds like there's a lot to like about them. So it seems. > So why isn't anybody building thorium fueled power station(s)? Because alternative fuelcycle MSR breeders are an unsolved problem. Nobody knows if they can be made to work eventually, but even if, we already know they would come too late to make a difference. From pharos at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 07:58:41 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 08:58:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 3:46 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > Virtually everything I know, particularly mechanical skills, is > obsolete. Who needs to rebuild a carburetor? Set the points in a > distributor? Replace the vertical amplifier in a TV with magnetic > deflection? > I am hard pressed to > think of a skill I could pass on to someone of that age. > Perhaps that's why the US has 50 million living on food stamps. They have developed a society that doesn't need to employ their people. And Europe is in much the same condition. This leads to the much discussed 'end of work' situation. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 08:53:44 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 09:53:44 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Climate Change - Follow the money Message-ID: What is the first industry affected by climate change? The Insurance industry. And they are reacting to protect their bottom line. Quotes: When it comes to the calculating the likelihood of catastrophic weather, one group has an obvious and immediate financial stake in the game: the insurance industry. And in recent years, the industry researchers who attempt to determine the annual odds of catastrophic weather-related disasters?including floods and wind storms?say they?re seeing something new. ?Our business depends on us being neutral. We simply try to make the best possible assessment of risk today, with no vested interest,? says Robert Muir-Wood, the chief scientist of Risk Management Solutions (RMS), a company that creates software models to allow insurance companies to calculate risk. ?In the past, when making these assessments, we looked to history. But in fact, we?ve now realized that that?s no longer a safe assumption?we can see, with certain phenomena in certain parts of the world, that the activity today is not simply the average of history.? This pronounced shift can be seen in extreme rainfall events, heat waves and wind storms. The underlying reason, he says, is climate change, driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions. Muir-Wood?s company is responsible for figuring out just how much more risk the world?s insurance companies face as a result of climate change when homeowners buy policies to protect their property. RMS isn?t alone. In June, the Geneva Association, an insurance industry research group, released a report (PDF) outlining evidence of climate change and describing the new challenges insurance companies will face as it progresses. ?In the non-stationary environment caused by ocean warming, traditional approaches, which are solely based on analyzing historical data, increasingly fail to estimate today?s hazard probabilities,? it stated. ?A paradigm shift from historic to predictive risk assessment methods is necessary.? ----------- What they are saying is that the climate has changed. Their historical graphs don't apply any more, and it is costing them real money. Now, that's somebody talking who has a stake in the game. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 09:00:36 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:00:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130927090036.GL10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 01:42:49PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > > So we will run out of Thorium in 1.5 billion years. The Earth will become > > uninhabitable in just 800 million years when the sun starts to run out of > > hydrogen and starts to get off the main sequence. > > > > I would hope that in 800 million years we'd have thought of a way to reboot > the sun if/when necessary. When somebody is feeding you numbers, always ask where they got these. First question: does it work in practice? Second question, as this is a source of energy, what amount of reserves have worthwhile EROEI? What is the model for future energy demand growth? > "Did you turn it off and turn it on again?" > > Though that program might take 100 millions to start, so you know... we > have some time to do some feasibility studies and half a billion years to > fight about whether or not it's a good idea or if anyone will mind a few > bird-strikes. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 09:50:18 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:50:18 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [New_Cryonet] Dead immortalists in 1978 Omni magazine article In-Reply-To: References: <20130926152747.GD10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130927095018.GO10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 01:46:40PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > > > At least people can go into cryopreservation, despite all the difficulties > > and uncertainties involved. Cryonics has a better track record so far than > > predictions that you'll have radical life extension served to you in a > > pill(!) just by surviving to some arbitrary year. > > > > > I'm curious how you measure a "track record" when the race hasn't really > even started. Are you feeling lucky? I don't. http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/05/30/going-going-gone/index.html > (I'd suggest it's more like the milling-about around the starting line > before the event) The shot has been fired half a century ago. The body count rises every second. We've lost several on this very list already. You could be next. What are you doing about it? From anders at aleph.se Fri Sep 27 09:50:59 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 10:50:59 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Climate Change - Follow the money In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <52455503.601@aleph.se> On 2013-09-27 09:53, BillK wrote: > What is the first industry affected by climate change? > The Insurance industry. And they are reacting to protect their bottom line. I can attest to that. Yesterday I was at a meeting of some of the major reinsurance players: we were looking at emerging risk. Climate change is one of the top three issues on their radar, so obvious that its inclusion did not even merit much discussion. Of course, from an insurance perspective the important risks are those you lose money from if you do not pay attention, not necessarily the biggest ones. To them emerging risks are risks that do not stay the same, which typically spells trouble. This is why longevity was actually a risk in the discussion: everybody around the table liked it personally, but if the model of how much life extension we get is wrong, then money will be lost. Climate is nasty because of its uncertainty: estimating how it changes risks is very hard, and it affects lots of domains. Worse, it might introduce correlations we do not expect, the bane of insurance. Happy to say that some transhumanist topics are on their radar. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 10:22:24 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 12:22:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130927102224.GV10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 07:46:41PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: > > Question please, what does a father teach a son today, assuming access to the collective wisdom of years represented by this group? > > > > Anders, Kelly, Eugen, Keith, anyone else especially fathers, what do we do now, coach? I don't see my kid much, unfortunately, so options are naturally limited. I see no point in pushing kids nevermind turning play into chores, so the best you can do is to encourage some activities. So far I don't see anything off-scale what would warrant focused attention. > Was thinking about this very topic recently and have no idea. > Virtually everything I know, particularly mechanical skills, is Some mechanical skills are hard to automate. Working automation assumes supply of cheap energy, materials and capital. Some of us expect a prolonged period where such are scarce, and so need to plan in for absence of some of what we take for granted today. > obsolete. Who needs to rebuild a carburetor? Set the points in a > distributor? Replace the vertical amplifier in a TV with magnetic > deflection? We have a big problem: too much magic. Magic is really neat, but it takes huge supply chains, and turns into an unfixable brick if the fairy dust supply stops. Regression in capabilities might require use of technology many have completely forgotten ever existed. We will need more fixer-uppers and more engineers which are not just glorified trained monkeys. E.g. what I see in IT these days is utterly appalling. > It's almost as bad as chipping rocks to get a sharp edge (which I can also do). Let's hope you won't need to teach these skills. > Long list of skills that are utterly out of date. You can never quite know in advance. > When I was about 7 I remember watching my father rebuild a fuel pump > for a late 1949s vintage car. Those skills were useful, though I > don't think I ever rebuilt a fuel pump myself. I am hard pressed to > think of a skill I could pass on to someone of that age. Kids like to disassemble things, and taking things apart is even instutionalized in kindergartens. The problem is finding things to take apart which is rewarding. Magic is rarely that way. Few pick take to abstraction like fishes to water, you need physical layer activities to prime the process, and provide reference points. From mbb386 at main.nc.us Fri Sep 27 10:59:47 2013 From: mbb386 at main.nc.us (MB) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 06:59:47 -0400 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <20130927102224.GV10405@leitl.org> References: <20130927102224.GV10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <868bbe9510612cdbd36f7a0b1ec150b5.squirrel@www.main.nc.us> IMHO Eugen is right on the money! Magic will fail us if push comes to shove. Someone has to maintain the magic machines. Somebody must create the makers. Yes, to taking apart things - and putting them back together. It trains the mind in how to think about "stuff". My nephew took apart our (mechanical) kitchen timer when it didn't work right any longer. All those little pieces, and what they needed was oiling! He put it back together and it worked. Try mechanical clocks, watches, things like that. Find an older computer (one you're using as a door stop) and take it to pieces. If you're like me you have a (several?) box of parts and it would be easy enough to make something turn on and run - not like new ones, but working at command line. There is *nothing* wrong with knowing things like that. There's always repairing furniture - regluing legs on chairs and such. Learning how brakes work on cars. My son now teaches a class in brakes at the local community college, in their automotive tech division. He *is* a mechanic - there's lots of stuff that needs to be done on site, not all can be fixed in China. And it is *not* all computerized. Nothing is wrong with learning how a carburetor goes together, and it's easy to find pieces and parts for old engines. Please don't discount learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Reading and writing. This year where I live the state has decided that the children really should learn to read and write cursive - not knowing was a handicap! Duh! I presume the children know how to deal with money (loose change), but the other day in the store I watched a (local) woman struggle to pay for her purchase. She could manage to count out the $6 but the 37 or so cents was utterly beyond her. What she was buying required ID and she showed her driver license. It just made me sick to watch, and the clerk had to count out the change for her. :( Gee whiz. Regards, MB From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 11:45:10 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:45:10 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <074e01cebaf8$5235db00$f6a19100$@att.net> References: <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <074e01cebaf8$5235db00$f6a19100$@att.net> Message-ID: <20130927114510.GH10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 01:38:12PM -0700, spike wrote: > Indeed. Black Knight Syndrome isn't restricted to ExI, although we have > more than our share of it. As always, all I ask is that those of you who > are capable of making math models, even single digit BOTECs, do it. This is > important for an upcoming discussion I had hoped to have here regarding > Germany and its current attitude towards solar power. Even single digit Regardless how current coalition maneuvring plans will come out, the Energiewende -- which was a fig leaf in the first place -- will be blown away in short order. We need to start looking elsewhere. E.g. http://www.renewablesinternational.net/denmark-bans-fossil-fired-heaters/150/537/62090/ Denmark partly bans fossil-fired heaters The Danes continue to lead the way in the switch to a 100 percent renewable supply of energy. This year, they have banned the installation of heating systems fired with oil or natural gas in new buildings, and the clock is ticking for some existing systems as well. In February, Austrian blogger Cornelia Daniel posted some news about Denmark and wondered why the German-language press had not yet reported on it. Roughly 6 weeks before her post, a ban on the installation of heating systems fired with oil or natural gas took effect in Denmark for new buildings. What's more, starting in 2016 the installation of oil-fired heating systems will also be banned in existing buildings if there is a local supply of district heat or natural gas. As she points out, all of this information has been available since March 2012 ? and it's even in English (PDF). As I pointed out last fall, Denmark has much more ambitious goals than Germany (100 percent renewables in the old energy sectors by 2050, compared to a mere 80 percent in Germany ? and that only for electricity), but we continue to focus on the Denmark's big neighbor as though Germany were attempting to do something radical. In reality, the Germans have their work cut out for them just catching up with the Danes. In Denmark, the long-term goal for the heat sector includes the use of excess renewable power to generate heat from electrical systems (heat can be stored more easily than power) along with power-to-gas (P2G) and cogeneration fired with biomass. (Craig Morris) Some untended consequences: pipe infrastructure is great for delivery and natural gas infrastructure already allows you to buffer across seasonal variations. Natural gas infrastructure at the edge is compatible with 5-15% hydrogen, which makes methane even more suitable for micro co-gen with ICEs and doesn't hurt fuel cells. Considering the potential for wind, Denmark should look into wind gas (hydrogen and synmethane) and *improve* methane infrastructure. Kill coal and oil, but methane is a gateway drug to a hydrogen/synfuel economy. > BOTECs can deeply influence one's outlook. I wish people would just take the time to read and digest what is easily available online. There's enough empirical data out there. No need to guess. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 11:48:34 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:48:34 +0200 Subject: [ExI] [NSG-d] Interesting new way to calculate high-energy particle interactions In-Reply-To: <1465747130-17701@secure.ericade.net> References: <20130924181942.GY10405@leitl.org> <1465747130-17701@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: <20130927114834.GI10405@leitl.org> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 01:08:01AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Eugen Leitl , 24/9/2013 8:23 PM: > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 01:04:01PM -0400, Mike Dougherty wrote: > ? > > No commentary? ?:( > > None I can share publicly :(? > Ah, need-to-know physics. ? Well, I could tell you. But alone the logistics of having to kill you all would be prohibitive. From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 14:32:20 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 16:32:20 +0200 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <20130927143220.GS10405@leitl.org> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 05:55:39PM -0700, John Grigg wrote: > And then, when A.I. replaces many many jobs in the American economy, even > engineering jobs, then you Spike, get to be the homeless guy! lol Well, > except that you are working/retired, have a wife who also is an engineer, > and I'm sure you have your money carefully invested. But the younger That investment thing... it no longer works the way it used to. The assumption is based on sustained exponential growth, and we no longer have that. Nothing is immune from being raided, whether government pension or private retirement plan, bank account, or even physical metal or real estate ( http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauszinssteuer ) are just sitting ducks for confiscation. You have to diversify across many asset classes (many not ordinarily considered as investment, aka security by obscurity and stealth) and across geographic locations. Even if you're aware of that, most are insufficient tall to ride that ride. Post GenXers are pretty much completely screwed, especially if they're residing in failing states -- of which there will be a great deal more shortly. While the finance and economic problems are exacerbated by poor management (to put it euphemistically), the underlying driver that humanity has expanded their numbers and their rate of resource consumption per person beyond the limits of what this planet can take. Sounds familiar? Yeah, broken record, I know. Just as economic debt produces a crisis eventually, so does ecological debt (overshoot). They're somewhat related -- the economic outlook right now look a lot brighter if you'd pay 30-40 USD/barrel. > generations of white collar workers may not be > so fortunate... > > > Spike, be grateful for the many things the universe blessed you with, > because many people do not get the brain power, health, loving family, or > good birth year, that you received. The nameless homeless guy you mention, > was probably not nearly as blessed, despite whatever bad decisions he may > have made in his life. > > > And as for everyone saying, "Kickstarter!!!" "Let's get rich!!!" I > suspect the big corporations/franchises are not going to need your money as > they automate themselves. And I bet venture capitalists have already > poured tons of money into robotics companies with the goal of automating > fast food restaurants. I don't know the real costs for fast food meat, but I doubt you can really afford it, if you had to pay it. So fast food meat does not have a very bright future. Even so, fast food is not really the cheapest option to get your (borderline edible) calories. Cooking might no long stay a lost art, particularly if you have a lot of time but no money. > But it's nice to dream.... -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 836 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: From eugen at leitl.org Fri Sep 27 14:56:33 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 16:56:33 +0200 Subject: [ExI] =?utf-8?q?Who_owns_the_moon=3F_=E2=80=98Space_lawyers?= =?utf-8?q?=E2=80=99_increasingly_needed_for_legal_issues_beyond_Earth?= =?utf-8?b?4oCZcyBhdG1vc3BoZXJl?= Message-ID: <20130927145633.GA10405@leitl.org> http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/26/who-owns-the-moon-space-lawyers-increasingly-needed-for-legal-issues-beyond-earths-atmosphere/ Who owns the moon? ?Space lawyers? increasingly needed for legal issues beyond Earth?s atmosphere Edward Helmore, The Telegraph | 26/09/13 10:40 AM ET More from The Telegraph In this Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013 photo, a full moon is seen in Hong Kong. AP Photo/Kin CheungIn this Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013 photo, a full moon is seen in Hong Kong. In October 2018, a 1,600ft-wide asteroid named Bennu will pass Earth, close enough for Nasa to land a spacecraft on it. Five years later, the craft will return to Earth carrying rock samples that could tell us exactly how planets are formed. But the mission, dubbed OSIRIS-REx, has another purpose: to lay the groundwork for the development of an asteroid-mining industry. Nasa has competition, though. Last year, a group of private investors (among them Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt) formed a company called Planetary Resources, with the intention of mining asteroids for valuable minerals. But before Nasa, or anybody else, starts mining on Bennu, the Moon, or any other celestial body, a few questions need to be answered. Does anyone actually have the right to profit from space rocks? And if something should go wrong up there, far from Earth-bound laws, who is responsible? This is where ?space lawyers? come in. Space is still the new frontier, and like any frontier it?s a potentially lawless environment. But since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 there?s been an ongoing effort to draft treaties, establish jurisdiction and evolve a body of space law. As the private sector ? particularly Richard Branson?s Virgin Galactic ? looks toward commercial activity in space, from tourism to exploration, the ensuing legal minefield will be tough to navigate. And if there?s one person who knows what they?re talking about in this rapidly expanding area of law, it?s likely to be Joanne Gabrynowicz, professor of space law at the University of Mississippi, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Space Law (?a journal devoted to space law and the legal problems arising out of human activities in outer space?) and official observer for the International Institute of Space Law to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Legal Subcommittee. On any given week, Gabrynowicz can be found far from home. Last week, it was Virginia, a centre for the growing privatised space sector in the United States; this week it?s Beijing for the 64th International Astronautical Congress. More than 20 years ago, Gabrynowicz left a legal career in Manhattan to teach space law at the University of North Dakota. She?s now the leading expert in a field that?s expanding as the number of countries and private firms looking for new ways to utilise the vast wilderness of space grows. But what of the legal aspects of space mining? Apollo astronauts gathering a few moon rocks (842lb of lunar material, to be exact) is one thing, but space mining is another. ?A signatory to the Outer Space Treaty cannot by law appropriate territory and Nasa is a national entity of a nation that is a signatory to the treaty,? explains Gabrynowicz. ?So the question becomes, what is that asteroid? Is it a territory or something else, a scientific specimen?? A private firm such as Planetary Resources or Deep Space Industries (which plans to mine space rock for trinkets) is not directly bound by the Outer Space Treaty. But that simply poses more questions. Since property rights in space are untested, what happens if two companies go after the same asteroid? Is it first come, first served? And what about liability if a lassoed asteroid crashes into Earth? Who is going to be in charge of health and safety? ?It?s going to be a very long time before these hypothetical questions become real, concrete issues,? admits the professor. ?We?re going to have to look at other bodies of law and see how they connect.? Other questions, though, are much closer to becoming concrete. What to do about the problem of space junk, aka orbital debris? Or even legal disputes between astronauts on board the international space station? China and India are planning to become major players in a field dominated by Russia and the U.S. for the past 50 years. In the private sector, the field is crowded. There?s Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal, creator of the Tesla electric sports car and now, the rocket developer SpaceX; Microsoft?s Paul Allen is building a space cargo delivery system called Stratolaunch Systems (slogan: ?any orbit, anytime?); Branson, whose space tourism rocket-plane is backed by Allen and recently passed a crucial test; U.S. real estate mogul Robert Bigelow, who has ploughed more than $200-million into a scheme to mass-produce commercial space station modules; and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has bought 165,000 acres of west Texas to build a launch and test facility for his space company Blue Origin. All of which creates plenty of work for lawyers like Gabrynowicz. The University of Mississippi, which recently expanded its space law department, is not the only place of learning to spot an opportunity; in 2010, The University of Sunderland began a first-year module on law and the legal system beyond Earth?s atmosphere. Without a sensible legal framework, space law can get bizarre. Last year, a Quebec man named Sylvio Langvein walked into a courthouse in Canada and filed a suit declaring himself owner of the planets in our solar system, four of Jupiter?s moons, and the interplanetary space between. The judge dismissed Langvein?s claim, calling it an abuse of the Canadian legal system. Over the years, people have tried to sell plots on the Moon, register the planets in our solar system as their personal archipelago and so on. In 1980, Dennis Hope of San Francisco registered the Moon at the county office, gave himself the title of ?The Head Cheese? and sent the U.S., U.S.S.R. and the UN a $55,000 bill for littering. AP Photo/Reed SaxonSpaceShipTwo, suspended at center beneath its twin-fuselage mother ship, is seen at a Virgin Galactic hangar at Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, Calif., Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2013. In 2006, Virgiliu Pop, a law researcher at the Romanian Space Agency, published Unreal Estate: The Men Who Sold the Moon, a book he described as ?a serious analysis of a trivial subject.? ?Every now and then, someone thinks no one has claimed the Moon before, and then rushes to claim it,? Pop told Wired magazine. ?Humankind has a short collective memory, so the claimant is able to create some buzz before the story dies out ? to be followed by a similar story, years later.? The colonization of space is not short of volunteers. Mars One, a Dutch foundation with the rather ambitious aim of establishing a permanent human settlement on the red planet, recently received more than 200,000 applications for the one-way trip. Permanent settlements in space suggest questions of jurisdiction. What happens if, on a long missions, a child is born? ?Citizenship of a child in space will be based on the law of the parents? own nation and the law that governs the place of the child?s birth,? says Gabrynowicz. Or if a crime is committed? ?Under the International Space Station Intergovernmental Agreement, each state is granted jurisdiction over their respective nationals. But if the state of the accused party refuses to concur in granting jurisdiction to the aggrieved state, then the aggrieved state can assert jurisdiction.? Meanwhile, any large-scale aggression in space would presuppose the collapse of the Outer Space Treaty. Since space is, as Gabrynowicz puts it, ?a global commons governed by international law,? then international criminal law also applies. Under those circumstances, crimes like genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and so forth would fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. AP Photo/Paul SakumaElon Musk, whose SpaceX supplies commercial transport crafts for NASA, has said that he wants to die on Mars. And what about casual crime? In an article titled ?Jurisdiction in Outer Space: Challenges of Private Individuals in Space? in the winter 2007 issue of the Journal of Space Law, P-J Blount argued that of the various places a mugging might take place, the most likely would be on the Moon. ?It is the most likely place where two humans might meet each other,? Blount wrote. ?If a person from state X were to mug a person from state Y on the moon, it is feasible that no state could assert jurisdiction. The crime certainly occurs outside the territory of any state ?? One issue came to light earlier this year when the state of New Mexico came close to losing Virgin Galactic and its custom-built, Norman Foster-designed Spaceport 150. The state legislature dragged its feet on granting indemnity to the plane?s manufacturer and parts suppliers in the event of a mishap. Without it, the makers of each and every screw and rivet would have been held responsible if the worst happened. But with other states vying for commercial space business, the issue was settled. That said, it?s still not clear when Virgin Galactic will take off. The last announced date, 2014, now seems premature; Branson?s spacecraft has yet to be certified by U.S. authorities, and passengers will have to read through a thick binder of legal documents and sign off on pages of waivers before they?ll be allowed anywhere near the vehicle. With degrees in history, literature and law, Gabrynowicz brings formidable learning to her chosen field. ?I?m always interested to see how things were done in the past to imagine how they might be done in the future,? she says. In particular, she was interested in how the British legal system had migrated to the US. This led her to think, what happens if humans go to the Moon or to Mars? What kind of legal system will they take with them? Aaron Lynett/National PostNASA vigorously prosecutes people it feels have obtained moon rocks improperly. As it turns out, space law has little in common with maritime law and even less with, say, agreements over the exploitation of Antarctica, in which nations secured the continent?s neutrality by agreeing to suspend claims on it. Instead, space law traces its philosophical underpinnings to the Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of astronautical theory Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and to Sputnik, the catalyst for drawing up a treaty. ?Sputnik scared the bejeebers out of the world,? Gabrynowicz explains. The satellite was a benign experiment. It was the rocket that mattered ? it could just as easily have been carrying a nuclear weapon. ?It forced the U.S. and the Soviets to look over the abyss and they saw both would be able to fight a nuclear war in or from space.? So the U.S. went to the UN to propose a treaty ? the Outer Space Treaty ? that functions as a constitution for space and explicitly prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in space. To differentiate from the Soviets, Eisenhower was adamant that the U.S. space program would be a civil program. He looked to Tsiolkovsky, hero to both Sergei Korolev, father of the Soviet space program, and Wernher von Braun, father of the German and U.S. programmes, for inspiration. ?Tsiolkovsky said space is a human activity, not a national activity,? says Gabrynowicz. ?So we go into space as part of humankind.? AP Photo/Ted S. WarrenPeter Diamandis, co-chairman of Planetary Resources, an astroid mining company based in Bellevue, Wash., talks to reporters Wednesday, May 29, 2013, in Seattle about his company's plans for the world's first crowd funded space telescope. And that, in short, is why astronauts are considered envoys of mankind and why at blast-off the announcer says the mission is ?for all mankind.? Since space law was originally drawn up for state civilian or military actors, not the private sector, it?s largely untested. Space disputes have tended to be settled at a diplomatic level, not in the public realm (though the U.S. government has vigorously prosecuted anyone thought to have improperly obtained moon rocks). That could change, however, as more space junk begins to litter the skies. As much as 1,400 tons of man-made material has come plummeting down so far, including a Soviet nuclear-powered satellite that crashed in northern Canada in 1978, but to date, the only death related to objects falling from space was that of a Cuban cow in the early Sixties. OFF/AFP/Getty ImagesThe Outer Space Treaty was signed after Sputnik was launched. More troubling is the amount of junk floating around in orbit. While satellites or anything blasted aloft must be registered according to the UN charter, much space debris is now unidentifiable flotsam and jetsam. A complete, broken satellite is one thing ? it?s the responsibility of the entity that registered it ? but once an object is broken up into pieces, it?s hard, if not impossible, to tell who the pieces belong to. ?The engineers are saying that if you can identify the big pieces and collect them before they break up, that will help the debris problem more than trying to clear it up,? explains Gabrynowicz. So space junk collection might present a viable business model for an eco-minded, billionaire entrepreneur? That idea has been talked about, says the professor, before adding that, inevitably, ?There are considerable diplomatic and legal constraints.? The Sunday Telegraph From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 15:42:58 2013 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 08:42:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Teaching kids was roboburgers to go Message-ID: > From: Eugen Leitl > > On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 07:46:41PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote: >> Was thinking about this very topic recently and have no idea. >> Virtually everything I know, particularly mechanical skills, is >> obsolete. Who needs to rebuild a carburetor? Set the points in a >> distributor? Replace the vertical amplifier in a TV with magnetic >> deflection? > Some mechanical skills are hard to automate. Working automation > assumes supply of cheap energy, materials and capital. Some of us > expect a prolonged period where such are scarce, and so need to plan in > for absence of some of what we take for granted today. Once things start rolling downhill in that direction on a scale large enough to cause problems, you are very likely to see things go like Syria. The main problem will be the food supply failing because it is totally dependent on the energy supply. I don't know how far things will fall back, long way would be my guess. > We have a big problem: too much magic. Magic is really neat, but > it takes huge supply chains, and turns into an unfixable brick > if the fairy dust supply stops. Regression in capabilities might > require use of technology many have completely forgotten ever > existed. We will need more fixer-uppers and more engineers which > are not just glorified trained monkeys. E.g. what I see in > IT these days is utterly appalling. >> It's almost as bad as chipping rocks to get a sharp edge (which I can also do). > > Let's hope you won't need to teach these skills. Agreed. There are a lot of files around. I have also ground a really nice knife out of a file, but then there are a lot of knives around too. Big fall in the population and there should be knives around that keep people from needing sharp rocks for hundreds to thousands of years. >> Long list of skills that are utterly out of date. > > You can never quite know in advance. Robert Heinlein was a major influence in my life. There is a list of skills in _Time Enough for Love_ "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." I can, and have, done most of those. Those I have not, such as "plan an invasion" just have not come up in my life. I have, however, done every single step in making bread. For a few years I made virtually all the bread the family ate. (It was a sink for the excess eggs from the chickens and ducks.) >> When I was about 7 I remember watching my father rebuild a fuel pump >> for a late 1949s vintage car. Those skills were useful, though I >> don't think I ever rebuilt a fuel pump myself. I am hard pressed to >> think of a skill I could pass on to someone of that age. > > Kids like to disassemble things, and taking things apart is even > instutionalized in kindergartens. The problem is finding things to > take apart which is rewarding. As a kid I was known for doing this. The late and very much lamented Hugh Daniel used to provide such opportunities frequently. He was exceptionally good with kids and ran "take it apart" sessions frequently at science fiction conventions. A favorite for many years was disk drives. > Magic is rarely that way. > Few pick take to abstraction like fishes to water, you need physical > layer activities to prime the process, and provide reference points. Exactly. What is a kid going to learn taking apart a solid state drive? Keith From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 21:18:33 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 17:18:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130927114510.GH10405@leitl.org> References: <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <074e01cebaf8$5235db00$f6a19100$@att.net> <20130927114510.GH10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 7:45 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > Denmark partly bans fossil-fired heaters ### Outbreaks of madness of the crowds seem to occur with maddening regularity. Rafal From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Sep 28 03:40:15 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 23:40:15 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 10:23 PM, Andrew Mckee wrote: > Sounds like there's a lot to like about them. So why isn't anybody > building thorium fueled power station(s)? Even experimental Thorium reactors don't exist today, but they did 40 years ago, the idea wasn't pursued because they aren't much good for making Plutonium for bombs, and because they already had reactors that worked pretty well in submarines and the Navy didn't want to confuse the issue and dilute resources with something radically new. And because, for reasons that have nothing to do with science but everything to do with politics and environmental hysteria, no technology is more resistant to change than nuclear technology. So instead of rethinking it when in the 1950's they decided to make huge power plants they just scaled up the small reactors that worked well in submarines and in making plutonium for bombs to humongous size. But machines often don't scale well and things that operate beautifully at one size don't at another. The end result is not pretty because almost nobody has done any research into Thorium in over 30 years and we're stuck with clunky very badly designed reactors that use the wrong damn fuel. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sat Sep 28 05:43:37 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 06:43:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Teaching kids was roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <52466C89.1010703@aleph.se> On 2013-09-27 16:42, Keith Henson wrote: > Robert Heinlein was a major influence in my life. There is a list of > skills in _Time Enough for Love_ "A human being should be able to > change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design > a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a > bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act > alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a > computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. > Specialization is for insects." I can, and have, done most of those. > Those I have not, such as "plan an invasion" just have not come up in > my life. I have, however, done every single step in making bread. For > a few years I made virtually all the bread the family ate. (It was a > sink for the excess eggs from the chickens and ducks.) That quote is one of the main inspirations for me to study nearly everything. Still not even close to doing all of that, but it is early days. Actually planning on having a long and eventful life leads to some interesting considerations. One is that you will likely find yourself in situations for which you are not trained, yet will need to adapt quickly - having a broad knowledge base and enough fluid intelligence (or some substitute, like chutzpah) is essential. You will outlive people, institutions and nations - make sure you are not devastated by that. Even if events like world wars or 1917 flu-style pandemics have a return time of once per century, you have a decent chance of experiencing them. There are going to be long tail events on both the plus and minus side, and being able to catch the plus events when they happen is important - they rarely come around again, whether they are a photo opportunity or a financial windfall. You will also miss plenty of opportunities and not have the time to ingest all relevant information, but it is better than the alternative (too few opportunities and little relevant stuff). Not figuring out what you want (and why) means that you are less likely to get it. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Sep 28 15:18:33 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 11:18:33 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Accelerator on a Chip: How It Works Message-ID: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Sep 28 15:19:55 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 11:19:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Accelerator on a Chip: How It Works Message-ID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V89qvy8whxY -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 06:01:04 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:01:04 -0600 Subject: [ExI] generational difference on snowdn In-Reply-To: <20130925205458.GF10405@leitl.org> References: <0df101ceb990$f2044b80$d60ce280$@att.net> <20130925205458.GF10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 01:30:56PM -0700, Adrian Tymes wrote: > > > (For example, the US soldier in Iraq could have pointed out how the > > You don't just wake up as camp guard in Treblinka. This is malice > aforethought. > Actually, you don't plan to be evil. It just happens because other people have an influence on you. Maybe there is actual evil in someone like Hitler or Goebels, but the minions don't wake up and plan to be evil. http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html Moral Mazes gives a glimpse as to how this sort of thing happens in the corporate world. Robert Jackall gives us a view to evil which is more approachable by the folks who think all the evil in the world is in corporations. http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Mazes-World-Corporate-Managers/dp/0199729883 But, I see evil as something banal. Something that happens easily. It happens in government, corporations, armies, religions everywhere that people gather... but to be really truly evil usually requires a larger organization. If a billion people believe the way you do, it makes it easier to strap on the vest and blow up a wedding. > > commander's orders were eroding trust by Iraqi citizens, and going > against > > the spirit and letter of their overall mission orders as given to the > > commander. Though, being nonconfrontational at first - sometimes hard to > > do when faced with new evidence of evil - can help too.) > > You know, they evaded draft by going to Canada, during Vietnam. > Today's mercenaries do not have even that excuse. > Most kids who signed up for the Armed Forces in the United States did it because they honestly believed that America's way of life is threatened by what's going on in the world. Blame that on the mass media (another large organization full of evil) if you will. In my mind, the answer lies in local accountability, which is only able to be achieved by small groups where more people know each other and are not so afraid to speak out. A whistle blower that outs a small organization doesn't face the same kind of danger as one who outs a large organization. There just isn't the same kind of force impelling one to "get with the program" when the program is just a few dozen or a hundred people. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 07:40:20 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 01:40:20 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Teaching kids was roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <52466C89.1010703@aleph.se> References: <52466C89.1010703@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 11:43 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > On 2013-09-27 16:42, Keith Henson wrote: > >> Robert Heinlein was a major influence in my life. There is a list of >> skills in _Time Enough for Love_ "A human being should be able to change a >> diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, >> write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the >> dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, >> analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, >> fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." I can, >> and have, done most of those. Those I have not, such as "plan an invasion" >> just have not come up in my life. I have, however, done every single step >> in making bread. For a few years I made virtually all the bread the family >> ate. (It was a sink for the excess eggs from the chickens and ducks.) >> > > That quote is one of the main inspirations for me to study nearly > everything. Still not even close to doing all of that, but it is early days. > One of my favorite books of all time. Everyone on this list should take the time to read it if they can. > Actually planning on having a long and eventful life leads to some > interesting considerations. One is that you will likely find yourself in > situations for which you are not trained, yet will need to adapt quickly - > having a broad knowledge base and enough fluid intelligence (or some > substitute, like chutzpah) is essential. You will outlive people, > institutions and nations - make sure you are not devastated by that. Even > if events like world wars or 1917 flu-style pandemics have a return time of > once per century, you have a decent chance of experiencing them. There are > going to be long tail events on both the plus and minus side, and being > able to catch the plus events when they happen is important - they rarely > come around again, whether they are a photo opportunity or a financial > windfall. You will also miss plenty of opportunities and not have the time > to ingest all relevant information, but it is better than the alternative > (too few opportunities and little relevant stuff). Not figuring out what > you want (and why) means that you are less likely to get it. I take a few hours a day to sip gently from the fire hose of knowledge. Keeping broad is really difficult. I appreciate what this list does in keeping me abreast of so many things. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 07:45:09 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 01:45:09 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130828083826.GW29404@leitl.org> <1377979525.56356.YahooMailNeo@web163401.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <007501cea721$cff3bde0$6fdb39a0$@att.net> <00f601ceb78c$a83bd140$f8b373c0$@att.net> <20130922160836.GK10405@leitl.org> <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:27 AM, John Clark wrote: > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > > > I recently spoke with a group of retired engineers who used to work for >> theIdaho National Laboratory. They indicated that they had once built and >> detonated a thorium based nuclear weapon, which I thought was interesting. >> Most of the thorium advocates claim it is safer in terms of nuclear weapons >> proliferation. Perhaps it is really difficult to make a bomb out of >> thorium, but apparently, it is possible. >> > > Nobody can make a bomb out of Thorium but you can turn Thorium into > Uranium 233 and you can make a bomb out of that, but as far as I know it > has only been attempted twice. in 1955 the USA set off a plutonium-U233 > composite bomb, it was expected to produce 33 kilotons but only managed 22; > and in 1998 India tried it but it was a complete flop, it produced a > miniscule explosion of only 200 tons. > > Today no nation has U233 bombs in their stockpile and there is a reason > for that. The critical mass for U233 is 16 kilograms, that is slightly > smaller than the critical mass for U235, but for P239 its only 4.4 > kilograms. And U233, if it were obtained from a Thorium reactor like a > LFTR, would be a nightmare to work with because about 1% of it would be > contaminated with U232; in one second your unexploded fission core would > produce more gamma rays than a plutonium core would in 26 hours. All those > gamma rays would play hell with the bomb's electronics and decompose its > chemical explosive, not to mention causing a bit of bother to the poor > terrorists rushing around to finish building the damn thing before they > dropped dead. And forget about trying to hide this behemoth, all those > gamma rays are like a huge neon sign saying "NUCLEAR BOMB HERE". > > Existing Uranium reactors have produced about 1600 tons of Plutonium, > there is no way to avoid them making the crap and regular reactors don't > burn it up so it just accumulates. A LFTR produces U233 from Thorium but it > burns 100% of it up, it has to or the reactor won't operate, and it makes > virtually no Plutonium. The U233 is completely burned up inside the reactor > where its hard to steal, and if it is stolen the theft is obvious because > the reactor stops. A Uranium reactor produces lots of neutrons but a LFTR > makes less of them, so it needs all the U233 that it makes > to keep the chain reaction going, if you try stealing some the reactor > will simply stop operating making the theft obvious. > > And in existing Uranium reactors used fuel rods are shipped to > reprocessing plants to extract the Plutonium. In one case the potential > bomb making material needs to be shipped across the country, with a LFTR it > never leaves the reactor building. > > So you can make a bomb out of U233 but its hard as hell, so with thousands > of tons of easy to use Plutonium already produced and more made every day > in conventional reactors, not to mention thousands of poorly guarded fully > functional bombs in the former USSR, why would any self respecting > terrorist bother with U233, especially when it's so hard to steal from a > LFTR? > > Thanks for taking the time to make that so clear John. I really appreciate it. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 09:02:08 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 03:02:08 -0600 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> Message-ID: > > > There are many jobs that we almost have a moral duty to eliminate. > > > I love you Anders! Can I have your baby? Or at least add this to my quotes list? -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Sep 29 09:16:09 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:16:09 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> Message-ID: <5247EFD9.7090808@aleph.se> On 2013-09-29 10:02, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> >> There are many jobs that we almost have a moral duty to eliminate. >> > > > I love you Anders! Can I have your baby? Or at least add this to my > quotes list? Sure! (in the case of the baby, you might want to debug its genome slightly :-) -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kryonica at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 09:21:34 2013 From: kryonica at gmail.com (Cryonica) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:21:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <5247EFD9.7090808@aleph.se> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <5247EFD9.7090808@aleph.se> Message-ID: Lol! On 29 Sep 2013, at 10:16, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Sure! (in the case of the baby, you might want to debug its genome slightly :-) Cryonica kryonica at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Sun Sep 29 09:26:57 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:26:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Accelerator on a Chip: How It Works In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5247F261.5020505@aleph.se> On 2013-09-28 16:19, John Clark wrote: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V89qvy8whxY Original paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0464 Neat. So if one can accelerate electrons to 50 GeV in 100 feet, that means a one meter chip would presumably get you 500 MeV(linear increase in energy by length). The paper merely claims 25 MeV/m, but 25 MeV is still a pretty penetrating beam. I don't think this design lends itself to firing a lot of electrons as a particle beam weapon (efficiency of energy transfer from the laser into the electrons will still be low; you could just fire the laser at the target), but as they say, this is a good electron source for free-electron X-ray lasers. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 09:51:23 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:51:23 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: >> >> There are many jobs that we almost have a moral duty to eliminate. >> > > I love you Anders! Can I have your baby? Or at least add this to my quotes > list? > Remember that Anders is a philosopher. So try asking him 'What eez thees moral duty zat you speak off?' Considering that different races, cultures, have different moral duties. Most inquisitions, wars. pogroms, etc were driven by so-called 'moral duties'. And, of course, the people employed in nasty jobs might object strongly to being told that their job has been eliminated. The transhuman enhancement of morality is a dangerous concept. One man's morality is another man's oppression. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 11:31:10 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 12:31:10 +0100 Subject: [ExI] In Fragmented Forests, Rapid Mammal Extinctions Message-ID: Conservation biologists have long known that fragmenting wilderness can put species at risk of extinction. Over two decades, Dr. Gibson and his colleagues have tracked the diversity of mammals on the islands. In Friday?s issue of the journal Science, they report that the extinctions have turned out to be distressingly fast. After the Khlong Saeng river was dammed, David Woodruff of the University of California at San Diego recognized that the islands in the reservoir would be good places to study how quickly nature calls in that debt. The islands were all formed at the same time, they were all isolated by water and they were surrounded by a vast forest preserve that was still brimming with biological diversity. Between 1992 and 1994, Woodruff?s team visited a dozen islands, setting a 150-yard line of traps on each one. Each day for a week they visited the traps, tagged any mammals they found and released the animals. The researchers also set the same traps in the forests surrounding the reservoir. Just five years after the dam was built, they could see a difference. Several species were more rare on the islands than on the mainland. Dr. Gibson returned to the same 12 islands in 2012 and repeated the survey. He started on a 25-acre island. The first survey had found seven species of mammals. Dr. Gibson spent a week checking traps on the island and found only a single species: the Malayan field rat. This was a startling find for two reasons. One was the drastic crash in diversity. The other was that the Malayan field rat wasn?t on the islands when they first formed. Malayan field rats thrive around villages and farms and other disturbed habitats. The rats Dr. Gibson trapped must have come from the surrounding rain forests, where they still remain scarce. When they swam to the islands, they found fragmented forests that they could dominate. ?I thought, ?Wow, what if this trend holds?'? said Dr. Gibson. ?And it did.? On most of the islands, all the native species were gone, replaced by the rats. Only on a few islands did some species still cling to existence. Dr. Gibson surveyed an additional four islands and found they also had just one or two species, suggesting that all the islands were suffering massive extinctions in about 20 years. ------------ This report reminded me of Easter Island. Rat bones are the most prolific bones excavated on Easter Island. The settlers were eating the rats as one of their food sources. So if the rats were eating everything else, there was probably little food left for the humans either. BillK From anders at aleph.se Sun Sep 29 11:58:34 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 12:58:34 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> Message-ID: <524815EA.9060408@aleph.se> On 2013-09-29 10:51, BillK wrote: > On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote: >>> There are many jobs that we almost have a moral duty to eliminate. >>> >> I love you Anders! Can I have your baby? Or at least add this to my quotes >> list? >> > Remember that Anders is a philosopher. > > So try asking him 'What eez thees moral duty zat you speak off?' Oh noes! You found my weak spot! Metaethics! Argh!!! :-) > Considering that different races, cultures, have different moral duties. > Most inquisitions, wars. pogroms, etc were driven by so-called 'moral duties'. Seriously, that is just moral relativism... and a bunch of facts. Sure, people have different views on what we really ought to do. But that doesn't relativize moral truth any more than the fact that people have had different views on the shape of the earth changes what shape it really is. There could be a One True Moral System that we may or may not have found. The deep question is of course if the OTMS exists, how it exists, and if we can know it. In practice, however, moral systems do have sensible and actionable ideas that should be followed, especially when several agree with each other. > And, of course, the people employed in nasty jobs might object > strongly to being told that their job has been eliminated. Should we introduce a cheap shipwrecking robot that would prevent Pakistani children from making a living in the industry, yet save their health? It is nontrivial, sure. But what about medical robots that make medical care cheaper? Some doctors and nurses will be forced to do different jobs, but healthcare will become cheaper and easier to provide to poor people. Now, the occupation doctor is not so bad that it ought not exist. It is just consequentially a good thing if it could be done with a gadget. There are other jobs (fluffers, sewage workers, guano or sulphur collectors, CTS decon or porta potty cleaners) where I think a very strong case can be made in nearly every moral system that it would be good for the workers if that work did not exist. I have no doubt there are some people doing horrible things who actually love their jobs. But if those are rare in the occupation, you have a good reason to suspect that the occupation ought to go. > The transhuman enhancement of morality is a dangerous concept. One > man's morality is another man's oppression. Only if you try to impose your morality on others. See the work on the ethics of moral enhancement we have done in Oxford: there are plenty of things that might be doable that would make people better able to act morally without prescribing what morality to believe in. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From pharos at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 13:05:57 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 14:05:57 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: <524815EA.9060408@aleph.se> References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <524815EA.9060408@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > Seriously, that is just moral relativism... and a bunch of facts. > > Sure, people have different views on what we really ought to do. But that > doesn't relativize moral truth any more than the fact that people have had > different views on the shape of the earth changes what shape it really is. > There could be a One True Moral System that we may or may not have found. > The deep question is of course if the OTMS exists, how it exists, and if we > can know it. In practice, however, moral systems do have sensible and > actionable ideas that should be followed, especially when several agree with > each other. > > JUST moral relativism???? Races, nations, with different morality systems tend to disagree quite violently. Quote: The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown". The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end. The Big-Endians gained favour in Blefuscu. > I have no doubt there are some people doing horrible things who actually > love their jobs. But if those are rare in the occupation, you have a good > reason to suspect that the occupation ought to go. > > One of the non-obvious points to outsiders criticizing nasty jobs is that there are often hidden benefits that those thus employed are careful not to mention. Strangely you will often find much competition, closed shops, even waiting lists, for jobs that we superior beings deem horrible. And it is not always due to extreme poverty. > > Only if you try to impose your morality on others. See the work on the > ethics of moral enhancement we have done in Oxford: there are plenty of > things that might be doable that would make people better able to act > morally without prescribing what morality to believe in. > > Well I can't speak for the god-like beings that stride the hallowed halls of Oxford :) , but for most people, once they see the light and manage to obtain a rule book, they take great delight in trying to persuade other people to use the same rule book. By force, if necessary, as it is for their own good (obviously!). BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Sep 29 15:45:50 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 11:45:50 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Accelerator on a Chip: How It Works In-Reply-To: <5247F261.5020505@aleph.se> References: <5247F261.5020505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 5:26 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V89qvy8whxY >> > >> Original paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0464 >> > > > So if one can accelerate electrons to 50 GeV in 100 feet, that means a > one meter chip would presumably get you 500 MeV(linear increase in energy > by length). The paper merely claims 25 MeV/m, but 25 MeV is still a pretty > penetrating beam. > They make a rather interesting comment on that subject: "After writing of the manuscript we became aware of a recently proposed innovative scheme combining plasma based acceleration with the periodic field reversal at grating structures, which may lead to scalable accelerators with a sustained acceleration gradient up to TeV/m " That paper is at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.6516v1.pdf And in that paper they say: "In our simulations, we show that a sustained acceleration rate of 2.3 TeV/m is feasible with the plasma structures." > I don't think this design lends itself to firing a lot of electrons I would think you could have an array of accelerator channels spaced exactly one wavelength apart in the vertical direction. > as a particle beam weapon (efficiency of energy transfer from the laser > into the electrons will still be low; you could just fire the laser at the > target) I agree, I don't think electron beams would make much of a weapon, but who knows, weapon makers can be ingenious. > but as they say, this is a good electron source for free-electron X-ray > lasers. > And cheap practical X-ray lasers could have profound implications for microchip manufacturing, and phase contrast X-ray imaging, and yes perhaps weapons. John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From andymck35 at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 01:08:43 2013 From: andymck35 at gmail.com (Andrew Mckee) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:08:43 +1300 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, 27 Sep 2013 17:57:47 +1200, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Because alternative fuelcycle MSR breeders are an unsolved problem. > Nobody knows if they can be made to work eventually, So more research and development is needed to figure out if they are feasible, isn't that pretty much par for the course of every new piece of complex technology humans have invented? > but even if, > we already know they would come too late to make a difference. Too late, how so?, surely everything arrives into existence right after some clever person(s) gets off their ass and decides to make something useful, exactly when is of more interest to historians I would think. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 02:06:29 2013 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 22:06:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Accelerator on a Chip: How It Works In-Reply-To: References: <5247F261.5020505@aleph.se> Message-ID: On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 11:45 AM, John Clark wrote: scalable > accelerators with a sustained acceleration gradient up to TeV/m " ### Planck energy is 1.22x 10e16 TeV. So, a mere ~ 1.4 light-year long LINAC of this type could poke holes all the way down to the one true reality (in its 10e500 incarnations). When I grow up, I'll build this toy. Rafal From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 13:29:34 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 07:29:34 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? Message-ID: I just found an August 2013 New York Times article entitled How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class http://nyti.ms/1aEjj5X I believe that incomes almost always follow a power curve, with a few people making a lot of money, and a lot of people making a little bit of money. The best one can hope for is that the curve isn't too "corner hugging" and that there is a robust middle class. That seems like pretty simple economics to me. The question that this article brings up is whether technological progress itself dooms the middle class to types of jobs that are either highly creative and highly profitable, or to types of jobs that are service oriented, and low paying. I am curious if you agree or disagree with the premise of the article, if so why, and whether other forces might be at play beyond technological improvements that make "the rich richer, the poor poorer", which is another way of saying that the curve above is too "corner hugging". -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 13:36:21 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:36:21 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Open source programs to get more kids to code Message-ID: This article reviews sites that encourage kids to play and learn to code at the same time. Sample quote: Next up was Alice meant for kids ages 8 and up. This site uses a story telling type of learning to program. For some reason boys don?t seem to like Alice very much (they?re not really sure why since the kids can use aliens and spaceships in their stories). Using Alice you can drag and drop objects in to your scene/story and when you do it pops up windows where you enter properties for the items. Once you have your scene set up you can edit the code by clicking on the object (your alien for example), but the edit screen is not your standard 'code' view, instead it?s friendly to kids by giving them pull down menus of actions. Greenfoot is meant for slightly older kids (12+), but works similarly to Alice. The code editor in this shows you the Java with a bit of color coding (unlike the other tools that showed code in easy to use bubbles). Greenfoot is actually just a visual interface on top of BlueJ. and so on.......................... BillK From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 30 14:02:23 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:02:23 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I believe that incomes almost always follow a power curve, with a few Depends on the country. It's not a natural law. > people making a lot of money, and a lot of people making a little bit of > money. The best one can hope for is that the curve isn't too "corner > hugging" and that there is a robust middle class. That seems like pretty > simple economics to me. The only simple thing about economics is that it's an academical fairy-tale. When many grown men believe into fairy tales, bad things happen. > The question that this article brings up is whether technological progress > itself dooms the middle class to types of jobs that are either highly > creative and highly profitable, or to types of jobs that are service Engineering is highly creative and should be highly profitable, but it isn't. The job numbers aren't that terrible, but the quality loss is awful. Nobody wants to advertise this, as doing so would be political suicide. > oriented, and low paying. > > I am curious if you agree or disagree with the premise of the article, if I think it's a terrible blog. > so why, and whether other forces might be at play beyond technological > improvements that make "the rich richer, the poor poorer", which is another > way of saying that the curve above is too "corner hugging". There are two major factors mentioned: loss of cheap plentiful energy (by adaptive increase in numbers of consumers and also consumption per individual), and soon scarcity in other material supply, and globalization. Loss of special snowflake status is hard to take. No doubt there are several other factors I'm missing. From pharos at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 14:18:22 2013 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 15:18:22 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote: > I just found an August 2013 New York Times article entitled > How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class > http://nyti.ms/1aEjj5X > > The question that this article brings up is whether technological progress > itself dooms the middle class to types of jobs that are either highly > creative and highly profitable, or to types of jobs that are service > oriented, and low paying. > > This article strikes me as very similar to the article referenced by Anders earlier. Computers are going to be taking over a lot more jobs as their intelligence increases. BillK From eugen at leitl.org Mon Sep 30 14:25:44 2013 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:25:44 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20130930142544.GZ10405@leitl.org> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 03:18:22PM +0100, BillK wrote: > Computers are going to be taking over a lot more jobs as their > intelligence increases. Moore is slowing down (3 years doubling instead of 18 months by end of this year, according to AMD), and anything not involving networked bit-twiddling will need continuing supply of cheap energy and materials, some of them scarce. It would be interesting to see how e.g. agribots fare against a lower-tech solution, in a depleted world. From spike66 at att.net Mon Sep 30 16:29:23 2013 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 09:29:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] watch yourself: volunteers needed Message-ID: <015801cebdfa$399a24c0$acce6e40$@att.net> Forwarded from Eugen's list: Laura Poitras was featured on the cover of the NYT Magazine, which article I sent to this list. Now she has an NYT byline, which is as respectable as you can get. N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citi zens.html By JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS WASHINGTON--Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials. Well, today is the day in which the dysfunctional family we know as the US government tries to come to some agreement to halt a shutdown. The game theory we have learned from watching this slow motion train wreck was worth the tuition by itself. The majority party which holds one house of congress and the presidency, is arguing that a shutdown is the fault of the minority party, since the minority party knows if it doesn't do exactly as the majority party demands, it does not have the votes to pass any modification of the majority party's plans. Since the minority party knows it doesn't have the votes, even if its own party is in perfect unison, then any attempt at negotiating is pointless and merely constitutes a costly delay, which results in a government shutdown. Therefore any attempt at negotiation makes the shutdown the fault of the minority party. This attitude effectively destroys any notions of balance of power. Followed to its logical conclusion, whichever major party holds at least two of the three seats of power has absolute dictatorial authority. Slight complication: the minority party holds the lower house (the representatives) which determines the national budget. They are not ready to admit their existence is a mere formality. Conclusion: a government shutdown is inevitable. If the government shutdown proceeds tomorrow, we need volunteers to spy on themselves. In order to keep vital government services during the shutdown, I implore each of you, especially you dangerous types, to collect data on yourselves and send it to some central location for submission to the US government once it gets back on track, assuming it does. If you are doing anything fishy with your taxes, please audit yourselves, until the time sufficient government resources are again available, but this last one is probably covered. We definitely need volunteers to spy on themselves and each other however. I will start setting the example by noting the contents of this post. Recognizing that I wrote it, I will become suspicious of myself as possibly being some kind of snarky subversive. If l watch me will you watch you? If so, can we report each other to ourselves in this forum? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 18:47:55 2013 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:47:55 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> References: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: >> So why isn't anybody building thorium fueled power station(s)? >> > > > Because alternative fuelcycle MSR breeders are an unsolved problem. > And figuring out how to solve all our energy problems with the wind or bio fuel or solar is a solved problem?? Despite a very promising beginning virtually no money has been spent on Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) research in almost 45 years, much less Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (LFTR) that I'm talking about. You will never solve a problem if you don't even try. > Nobody knows if they can be made to work eventually, And we do know we can make wind or bio fuel or solar work eventually?? > but even if, we already know they would come too late to make a > difference. > If it's all hopeless then what's the point of blabbing about it? Let us enjoy the little time we have left! And I still haven't heard if you've accepted my bet about the shortage of uranium, remember $1000 can buy a lot of cans of beans that will come in handy after the apocalypse. > First question: does it work in practice? > Well, it worked in 1969 at oak Ridge, and although there has been virtually no research on thorium reactors since then I imagine such things would still work. > Second question, as this is a source of energy, what amount of reserves > have worthwhile EROEI? As president of IHAS I happen to know that "EROEI" stands for Energy Return On Energy Invested, but I have to ask myself why would anybody use such a obscure acronym? Is it because he expects all his readers to already know what it means? I don't think so, I think it's an attempt to blind his potential critics with bafflegab. By the way, "IHAS" stands for "I Hate Acronyms Society". John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Mon Sep 30 20:17:16 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:17:16 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Middle Class Doomed? In-Reply-To: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> References: <20130930140223.GY10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: <5249DC4C.3000903@aleph.se> On 2013-09-30 15:02, Eugen Leitl wrote: > On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote: > >> I believe that incomes almost always follow a power curve, with a few > Depends on the country. It's not a natural law. Whether it is a natural law is a good question, actually. It is not just that power-law tails are found in all industrialised economies, but they seem to follow robustly from a lot of models too (e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/condmat/0002374 ). One can of course quibble about whether it is really power law, lognormal or stretched exponential: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.0212 - but the effect is the same. Different countries have different exponents, so clearly the shape can be affected. But I suspect the overall wealth condensation effect is just due to the skew distribution of human ability and the winner-take-all properties of human attention: give everybody an equal amount of wealth, and very soon they will have given some of it to a few superstars who produce something everybody wants. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From anders at aleph.se Mon Sep 30 20:43:26 2013 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:43:26 +0100 Subject: [ExI] roboburgers to go In-Reply-To: References: <0a1801ceb94d$bc6a3360$353e9a20$@att.net> <0b8c01ceb965$4e85f380$eb91da80$@att.net> <0c4801ceb977$af578b80$0e06a280$@att.net> <20130925210033.GG10405@leitl.org> <00f101ceba58$fd16eeb0$f744cc10$@att.net> <5243D829.4030307@aleph.se> <524815EA.9060408@aleph.se> Message-ID: <5249E26E.20509@aleph.se> On 2013-09-29 14:05, BillK wrote: > On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote: >> Seriously, that is just moral relativism... and a bunch of facts. >> >> Sure, people have different views on what we really ought to do. But that >> doesn't relativize moral truth any more than the fact that people have had >> different views on the shape of the earth changes what shape it really is. >> There could be a One True Moral System that we may or may not have found. >> The deep question is of course if the OTMS exists, how it exists, and if we >> can know it. In practice, however, moral systems do have sensible and >> actionable ideas that should be followed, especially when several agree with >> each other. > JUST moral relativism???? > Races, nations, with different morality systems tend to disagree quite > violently. So? People have had violent disagreements about nearly any domain - religion, ownership, kinship, wealth, you name it. Does that mean that these domains are all empty of meaning? There is fundamental disagreements about how to unify relativity and quantum field theory. Is that evidence that there is no truth to the matter? Or just that we have not found the right approach? > >> I have no doubt there are some people doing horrible things who actually >> love their jobs. But if those are rare in the occupation, you have a good >> reason to suspect that the occupation ought to go. > One of the non-obvious points to outsiders criticizing nasty jobs is > that there are often hidden benefits that those thus employed are > careful not to mention. Strangely you will often find much > competition, closed shops, even waiting lists, for jobs that we > superior beings deem horrible. And it is not always due to extreme > poverty. Sure. But do you really think it was a bad thing for whipping boys, thralls, elevator operators, galley slaves, typists, icemen cup-bearers, mudlarks, and knocker-uppers to have their occupations become obsolete? > >> Only if you try to impose your morality on others. See the work on the >> ethics of moral enhancement we have done in Oxford: there are plenty of >> things that might be doable that would make people better able to act >> morally without prescribing what morality to believe in. > Well I can't speak for the god-like beings that stride the hallowed > halls of Oxford :) , but for most people, once they see the light and > manage to obtain a rule book, they take great delight in trying to > persuade other people to use the same rule book. By force, if > necessary, as it is for their own good (obviously!). Which is why ethicists disdain ethics review boards. The fact that people try to enforce Good Behavior stupidly does not mean good behaviour is a bad thing. -- Dr Anders Sandberg Future of Humanity Institute Oxford Martin School Oxford University From atymes at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 22:12:51 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 15:12:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Sep 30, 2013 11:49 AM, "John Clark" wrote: > On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: >> > Second question, as this is a source of energy, what amount of reserves have worthwhile EROEI? > > > As president of IHAS I happen to know that "EROEI" stands for Energy Return On Energy Invested, but I have to ask myself why would anybody use such a obscure acronym? Is it because he expects all his readers to already know what it means? I don't think so, I think it's an attempt to blind his potential critics with bafflegab. By the way, "IHAS" stands for "I Hate Acronyms Society". To be fair, we've been using "EROEI" quite a bit on this list, so it's fair to assume by now that most readers here are familiar with it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 22:29:52 2013 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 15:29:52 -0700 Subject: [ExI] watch yourself: volunteers needed In-Reply-To: <015801cebdfa$399a24c0$acce6e40$@att.net> References: <015801cebdfa$399a24c0$acce6e40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sep 30, 2013 9:44 AM, "spike" wrote: > any attempt at negotiating is pointless The hype and extremism you add here make your statement false. There is some room for negotiation on some points. You just said there is none, period. Now, the issue at hand where there is no room is on a matter that had been decided. The minority party insists on revisiting the decision, and is holding up lots of not directly related business (funding for most of the rest of the government), causing a lot of collateral damage, in the hopes of getting its way on this issue. But this is distinct from there being no room for negotiation at all, on anything - including specifically all those other points of business. There is also the matter of why it is the minority party - and the interests of Americans who are not, or at best are poorly, represented by either of those two parties. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 23:54:05 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:54:05 -0600 Subject: [ExI] watch yourself: volunteers needed In-Reply-To: <015801cebdfa$399a24c0$acce6e40$@att.net> References: <015801cebdfa$399a24c0$acce6e40$@att.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 10:29 AM, spike wrote: > I will start setting the example by noting the contents of this post. > Recognizing that I wrote it, I will become suspicious of myself as possibly > being some kind of snarky subversive. If l watch me will you watch you? > If so, can we report each other to ourselves in this forum? > OOooooohhhh, ooohhhh, ooohhh, can I be a snarky subversive semi-anarchist too!!!! PPPuuuuuuleeeeeaaaazzzeee? I love government shutdowns. I hope this one lasts a few months... but I fear that once the fun of saying, "See, they made us do it" is over, the minority party will fold like a house of cards, when they should stand up like a house of representatives... but I digress. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kellycoinguy at gmail.com Mon Sep 30 23:59:07 2013 From: kellycoinguy at gmail.com (Kelly Anderson) Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:59:07 -0600 Subject: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why? In-Reply-To: References: <20130922205001.GP10405@leitl.org> <20130927055747.GI10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 12:47 PM, John Clark wrote: > On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 Eugen Leitl wrote: > If it's all hopeless then what's the point of blabbing about it? Let us > enjoy the little time we have left! And I still haven't heard if you've > accepted my bet about the shortage of uranium, remember $1000 can buy a lot > of cans of beans that will come in handy after the apocalypse. > Perhaps if you bet $1000 worth of gold at today's prices, or $1000 worth of today's Bitcoin you'll get a bite... :-) Since everything is going to hell, $1000 may only buy ONE can of beans after the apocalypse. -Kelly -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bookemdanomurderone at yahoo.com Fri Sep 27 03:50:02 2013 From: bookemdanomurderone at yahoo.com (Bookemdano Murderone) Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:50:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [ExI] volunteers needed In-Reply-To: References: <014d01ceba62$ea9ef390$bfdcdab0$@att.net> <1380172462.83175.YahooMailNeo@web125406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> <03d801cebac7$598268a0$0c8739e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <1380253803.29485.YahooMailNeo@web125402.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> Bradley Manning will probably get sentenced to 35 yrs in the brig. I know 2nd degree murderers who have gotten less than 35 yrs. 35 yrs means Manning wont be eligible for parole (if he even gets time reduced) for at least a quarter century. Chomsky might be correct that this is a "national security State", though "Paranoid State" might be a better designation. ? The people who run this world are pigheads. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From noonslists at gmail.com Fri Sep 27 11:54:39 2013 From: noonslists at gmail.com (Noon Silk) Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 21:54:39 +1000 Subject: [ExI] [NSG-d] Interesting new way to calculate high-energy particle interactions In-Reply-To: References: <20130924162443.GW10405@leitl.org> Message-ID: > No commentary? :( http://susy2013.ictp.it/video/05_Friday/2013_08_30_Arkani-Hamed_4-3.html On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 3:04 AM, Mike Dougherty wrote: > On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:24 PM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> FYI. >> >> >> https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ >> >> Andy >> > > No commentary? :( > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- Noon Silk Fancy a quantum lunch? https://sites.google.com/site/quantumlunch/ "Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy ? the joy of being this signature." -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: