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I think the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia were nicer. They actually developed their colonial areas.

Paul Collier has a different opinion on this. He might be wrong, but he at least RTFA. In fact, I suspect he read the entire fine literature, which requires a time frame known by the ancient unit of "year".

Paul Collier on the "bottom billion"
Collier on the Bottom Billion
Marshall Plan

America has arguably done as much to revitalize Western Europe and Japan in the aftermath of WWII as nation in history. Because they had to slow the Red Menace.

For the guy who thinks that the American empire is overextended like the Roman empire, one small difference is that ability to collect information about how the far flung empire is functioning.

Ancient Rome measured this in fortnights, modern America measures this in milliseconds. Roman conquerors had world maps skirted with sea monsters. American school children pan and zoom the world over at the resolution of habitable structures or backyard orchards. I don't see *any* grounds for useful comparison. America is a fickle beast of a strange new stripe. Historical antecedents merely confuse matters. I don't understand this thread at all.

Better than Collier is the Mesquita interview on EconTalk. He's a much darker pessimist, who doesn't think America does a lot in this world entirely out of the goodness of its heart.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships

He does concede that the American political system still runs on the production of public goods (aka policy), and not pure kleptocracy--yet--though IMO the system is increasingly straining in that direction.

I think I've posted this one before. The dark banking sector scares me, in combination with the technology and will.

Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks

That's fairly grim. This next fellow is perhaps too dour to be much use to anyone.
Bill Joy: What I'm worried about, what I'm excited about

But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things.

The problem is, he's probably right, and some of those "advantages" are going to look ugly by the standards of fraternal liberty.

I think the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia were nicer. They actually developed their colonial areas.

Paul Collier has a different opinion on this. He might be wrong, but he at least RTFA. In fact, I suspect he read the entire fine literature, which requires a time frame known by the ancient unit of "year".

Paul Collier on the "bottom billion"
Collier on the Bottom Billion
Marshall Plan

America has arguably done as much to revitalize Western Europe and Japan in the aftermath of WWII as nation in history. Because they had to slow the Red Menace.

For the guy who thinks that the American empire is overextended like the Roman empire, one small difference is that ability to collect information about how the far flung empire is functioning.

Ancient Rome measured this in fortnights, modern America measures this in milliseconds. Roman conquerors had world maps skirted with sea monsters. American school children pan and zoom the world over at the resolution of habitable structures or backyard orchards. I don't see *any* grounds for useful comparison. America is a fickle beast of a strange new stripe. Historical antecedents merely confuse matters. I don't understand this thread at all.

Better than Collier is the Mesquita interview on EconTalk. He's a much darker pessimist, who doesn't think America does a lot in this world entirely out of the goodness of its heart.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships

He does concede that the American political system still runs on the production of public goods (aka policy), and not pure kleptocracy--yet--though IMO the system is increasingly straining in that direction.

I think I've posted this one before. The dark banking sector scares me, in combination with the technology and will.

Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks

That's fairly grim. This next fellow is perhaps too dour to be much use to anyone.
Bill Joy: What I'm worried about, what I'm excited about

But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things.

The problem is, he's probably right, and some of those "advantages" are going to look ugly by the standards of fraternal liberty.

I think the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia were nicer. They actually developed their colonial areas.

Paul Collier has a different opinion on this. He might be wrong, but he at least RTFA. In fact, I suspect he read the entire fine literature, which requires a time frame known by the ancient unit of "year".

Paul Collier on the "bottom billion"
Collier on the Bottom Billion
Marshall Plan

America has arguably done as much to revitalize Western Europe and Japan in the aftermath of WWII as nation in history. Because they had to slow the Red Menace.

For the guy who thinks that the American empire is overextended like the Roman empire, one small difference is that ability to collect information about how the far flung empire is functioning.

Ancient Rome measured this in fortnights, modern America measures this in milliseconds. Roman conquerors had world maps skirted with sea monsters. American school children pan and zoom the world over at the resolution of habitable structures or backyard orchards. I don't see *any* grounds for useful comparison. America is a fickle beast of a strange new stripe. Historical antecedents merely confuse matters. I don't understand this thread at all.

Better than Collier is the Mesquita interview on EconTalk. He's a much darker pessimist, who doesn't think America does a lot in this world entirely out of the goodness of its heart.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships

He does concede that the American political system still runs on the production of public goods (aka policy), and not pure kleptocracy--yet--though IMO the system is increasingly straining in that direction.

I think I've posted this one before. The dark banking sector scares me, in combination with the technology and will.

Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks

That's fairly grim. This next fellow is perhaps too dour to be much use to anyone.
Bill Joy: What I'm worried about, what I'm excited about

But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things.

The problem is, he's probably right, and some of those "advantages" are going to look ugly by the standards of fraternal liberty.

Most newspapers haven't clued into something very important - things are changing. You'd think that an industry that is focused on staying current with events would have noticed this, but they are dinosaurs holding on to a bygone methodology (hello music industry). The key thing is this - news is out there, in abundance. People don't _need_ to buy _that_ newspaper to get the news - they can get it from 1001 different sources. What the news industry needs to do is make people _want_ to get it from their source rather than someone else's source.

ted.com has a great lecture by Jacek Utko about using design to save newspapers. Now, I'm biased since I'm a graphic designer so any story about graphic design having a major beneficial impact on a product is one that is going to interest me but the results of Jacek's work are impressive. He made his clients newspapers special - different. There was a reason for people to _want_ to buy them to get the news from that source rather than the other sources available. It took a major leap of faith and some radical change but that's what's happening, whether people want it or not - change is going to happen. You can either sit back and try to hold on to the days gone by and let change happen to you or you can step up and proactively make some changes on your own. I suspect those that do the former are doomed to vanish into obscurity.

Da*nit, I want to get on a Zeppelin in say Toronto and spend 2-3 days cruising leisurely (which a nice train style sleeper-cabin, restaurant and bar, free wi-fi of course) to Europe, ideally with service running on an a day that is modified in length in order to reduce jet lag once I get there. If travel were civilized spending more time doing it would be ok. Case in point: Life lessons from an ad man.

Portable devices are converging, and cellphones so far are the main target of that convergence. But they are evolving. Started looking just as a bit more than a (big) keypad, added display that grew over time to be all display in touchscreens, added fast cpus and plenty of memory, photo/video cameras, gps/accelerometers and other sensors, etc. In a short future could be seen more as portable internet devices than phones, and its shape and way to use could evolve even more.

How they will end if start adopting the features of i.e. SixthSense or other approachs to user interfaces? More than cellphones will be called Augmented Reality Devices?

I think every single member of society has a right to know the past criminal history of someone they're in any kind of relationship with. This is completely different from saying someone shouldn't be allowed to re-enter society, but the fact that may people have a hard time getting better than a minimum wage job after committing murder isn't something I feel bad about.

I think such a requirement is quite outrageous. But it does make me think of yet another application of the "project a tag cloud onto the person in front of you" feature seen in Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense (at around 7:00).

Actually, I've never paid for cable TV (got my own place in 1992 and just installed an antenna), so maybe I'm not their target demographic anyway.

Last night I watched a 35 minute lecture by Robert Sapolsky on YouTube the night before, a random TED talk. The night before that, hulu, and Netflix has been cheaper than premium cable forever. My parents-in-law gave up their TV in about 2001 and we gave them a cheap PC and Netflix subscription instead, they love it.

Yeah, cable service has been as dead to me for a long long time now.

Check out the bio-mimicry database: http://asknature.org/

Here's the really interesting TED talk where the founder introduces it, and describes some examples of nature's engineering at work: http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html

It's a camera, a computer, a cell phone and a projector all tied together and worn like something between a tie and a necklace. The user controls the thing via gestures. Here's a demo.

Interesting echo from FAQ which I read the other night. The original contains a lot of italic I'm not going to replicate.

An important fact about monotone's networking is that it deals in facts rather than operations. Networking simply informs the other party of some facts, and receives some facts from the other party. The netsync protocol determines which facts to send, based on an interactive analysis of "what is missing" on each end. No obligations, transactions, or commitments are made during networking. For all non-networking functions, monotone decides what to do by interpreting the facts it has on hand, rather than having specific conversations with other programs.

The closer one lives to the foundation, the stronger the argument for a fact-based architecture. DNS is about as foundational as one can get in internet security. Interesting, the architecture of monotone is highly cryptographic, and somewhat reminiscent of DNSSEC from the 40,000 foot view.

The people who don't see the problem with mixing fact and policy are likely the same people who don't regard it as a big problem that your credit card numbers is widely distributed in plain text: to every vendor you do business with, many of their employees, the trash collectors out back, and their governing union.

Why is it that some guy on the GPS thread complained that the police are free to criminalize driving under the age of 18 (to collect more revenue) and effectively act as their own judge, jury, and executioner (in the corrupt towns where this practice becomes established), but there is generally less complaint about VISA architecting themselves the same powers?

If the police collected a 2% slice of gasoline revenues and awarded bonus points for trips to Hawaii in any year where you keep your license clear and generally found other clever ways to rebate unpenalized drivers the 2% (with enough hidden strings attached it doesn't ultimately cost them much), would they be as loved as the VISA company? Just asking.

Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?

Turns out it depends on how you frame the question. If the question is: do you want the DNS system to become so badly abused it might as well have been designed by a bank, you might get one answer. If the question is: do you want DNS optimized so your porn streams with ten seconds less delay between clips, you probably get the other answer.

I vote for facts. That said, I will say one thing in defense of Akamai: one can construe CDN as a fact based system, if the factoids you are dealing in that "this IP address can deliver the content you want". Ideally, you already have a secure hash signature of the file you're seeking so it can't play too many games with the notion of "the file you want".

I don't see why DNS needs the facts to be so low level as "this is the same IP address everyone else gets for the same query". There could be a good reason, but Vixie's excellent article fell short of providing it.

Ideally, the CDN problem would have been solved with another layer of delegation: the content you are seeking can be obtained from a vast array of different places, here's an authoritative address for a highly overloaded server; if you're in a hurry go talk to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to find a location near you. Then the caching proxy can send a request with the header "I represent a client in the Pacific Northwest" rather than sending back to the client the name of the video store where client's attorney rents his own porn.

Michael Shermer, famous Skeptic, gave a TED speech on "why people believe strange things." He actually brought one of those detectors out on stage, and said that US public schools were buying it as a marijuana detector, and paying hundreds of dollars for it. Looking at the image in the article, it appears to be the same device.

Here is an interesting talk at TED.com on safe power outlets TED.com

but I have high hopes that a return to the rocket-centric designs of yesteryear will put us back in the forefront of space exploration.

With the current political climate, I wouldn't count on government to get us there. We've been idling for decades and really do need private sector involvement to start making solid progress again.

Even Intel's shiny new Nehalem architecture is not much more than an updating of the DEC Alpha (ditto for AMD but their designs, at least, have been based on it for 10 years).

I'm shocked at this claim. Back in the day, Byte Magazine used to dissect processor architectures in a way you rarely see any more, apart from anything written by Jon Stokes over at Ars. Realworldtech picked up the torch, and I followed it for a while; smart guys, but you need a large Kool-Aid division factor to hang there.

This problem of "true innovation" has dogged the computer industry since the introduction of Hype 1.0.

Kurweil's law is "no technology before its time". Why is it that the premature ejaculator so often gets the lion's share of the credit? You can't deny the innovation at Xerox. The Xerox Dorado from 1979, which I once used for an hour, is reputed to have contained 3000 discrete ECL chips and have a BOM cost pushing up into six figures. Retail price might have been in the $200k range if, say, all the moon rocks recovered by NASA had been made of solid gold, and the engineers were suitably rewarded. I was told my my friend, a coop student there at the time, that the rumour on estimated street price to sell the Dorado was "probably $250k". I thought that was high at the time, but I knew less then about cost multiples.

Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us

... acceleration of technology [is a] strong interest of mine, and a theme that I've developed for some 30 years. I realized that my technologies had to make sense when I finished the project. That invariably, the world was a different place when I would introduce a technology. And, I noticed that most inventions fail, not because the R&D department can't get it to work -- if you look at most business plans, they will actually succeed if given the opportunity to build what they say they're going to build, and 90 percent of those projects or more will fail, because the timing is wrong -- not all the enabling factors will be in place when they're needed.

When you run a giant fab, you need to consider your volume targets in choosing processor design goals. What made the Alpha kick ass was the incorporation of some ultra-expensive metalization. That's how you get fast 64-bit adder in early 1990s process technology: an entire layer devoted to fast carry propagation. Lacking OOO, you need short, deterministic instruction latencies above all else, unobtainium be damned. Works for NASA, Boeing, and Ferrari. This fabrication approach was a total non-starter for Intel volume production.

IIRC--and this is becoming dim--the Alpha was a four-issue core with a uniform instruction width and precious little OOO logic. What is it that Nahalem is reputed to have copied here? It's been known for 15 years now that x86 integer performance was able to directly compete with RISC designs given a large design team devoted to working around the instruction set wonkiness. Most of the problems with x86 were toll bridges, rather than permanent road blocks. On the floating point side, the blighted x86 stack architecture cost you a factor of two. But floating point defined the low-volume workstation market, where sports cars like the Alpha found fleeting glory. I actually think the Itanium better represented Intel's desire to take Alpha to the next level.

Apart from that, over the longer time frame, reality imposes convergent evolution. To my knowledge, Intel never once publicly stated that AMD's on-die memory controller was the wrong path to take. Intel usually said "not yet, we can do it cheaper for another spin without going there, and besides, our marketing department ate some bad mushrooms for a couple of years there, so our roadmap is a bit jumbled right now." Does AMD get credit for innovating on-die memory controllers or for facing up to despe

Marxism is more realistic.

Despite evidence?

Judged on ambition, rhetoric, and failure, the evidence that AI can't work is at least as compelling as the evidence that Marxism can't work.

I don't particular wish to see Marxism successfully debugged, and from time to time I wonder what kind of anti-nirvana AI might lead to. The killer-app for AI seems to be circumventing the "Are you human?" question, and it's heavily funded by the fastest growing sector of the global economy.

Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks

Likewise, the failures of Marxism 50 years ago have about as much present relevance as the failures of AI 50 years ago. The world has changed. Furthermore, the old binary world view has become increasingly less relevant.

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

Many different outcomes, which fail to line up nicely on either side of the gym according to gender and bench space.

At their most naive, a libertarian reasons "big government can't be right, so small government can't be wrong". The device here is to make size the defining factor. But it's not. There are tolerable large governments (Sweden and Singapore could be doing a lot worse) and execrable small governments.

Here is quite a different theory about why size matters in government.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships | Library of Economics and Liberty

The basic idea is that corruption in government is in an inverse relation with the size of the ruling coalition. If the coalition is diffuse enough, the honcho in chief must sway the coalition through the creation of public goods; if small enough, the coalition can be bought through private corruption.

My personal beef with libertarianism is the naive suspension of emergent behaviour: that personal liberty is some kind of magic stable equilibrium point. The usual argument is "except for all the rest" meaning everyone who thinks government is part of the solution spoiling the situation. Kind of like telling someone driving in Sao Paulo for the first time "you won't crash if you don't flinch". All those white and yellow lines are overrated. Who needs them?

How to Cross the Street in Rome

For all its counterintuitive sense, crossing the street like a Roman can be summed up in one sentence: Step off the curb with a confident stride and the traffic will stop. But for the amateur street crosser, wait for a native to cross and then follow. Watch as they step off the curb with what appears to be reckless but suave abandon and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, the traffic magically stops.

I read that as a pretty good summary for the libertarian model of how to reform government. I'd like better insight into the "magically stops" part. Something more sophisticated than "size matters". Perhaps something that takes into account Sapolsky as a leading authority on emergent behaviour.

Back to coalitions and public goods, open source is pretty much the definition of a public good. It's highly compatible with a subtle form of libertarianism not well suited for shouting about from roof tops. My sense of it is that the cohort of subtle libertarians is a pretty small voice in the weeds.

Marxism is more realistic.

Despite evidence?

Judged on ambition, rhetoric, and failure, the evidence that AI can't work is at least as compelling as the evidence that Marxism can't work.

I don't particular wish to see Marxism successfully debugged, and from time to time I wonder what kind of anti-nirvana AI might lead to. The killer-app for AI seems to be circumventing the "Are you human?" question, and it's heavily funded by the fastest growing sector of the global economy.

Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks

Likewise, the failures of Marxism 50 years ago have about as much present relevance as the failures of AI 50 years ago. The world has changed. Furthermore, the old binary world view has become increasingly less relevant.

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

Many different outcomes, which fail to line up nicely on either side of the gym according to gender and bench space.

At their most naive, a libertarian reasons "big government can't be right, so small government can't be wrong". The device here is to make size the defining factor. But it's not. There are tolerable large governments (Sweden and Singapore could be doing a lot worse) and execrable small governments.

Here is quite a different theory about why size matters in government.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships | Library of Economics and Liberty

The basic idea is that corruption in government is in an inverse relation with the size of the ruling coalition. If the coalition is diffuse enough, the honcho in chief must sway the coalition through the creation of public goods; if small enough, the coalition can be bought through private corruption.

My personal beef with libertarianism is the naive suspension of emergent behaviour: that personal liberty is some kind of magic stable equilibrium point. The usual argument is "except for all the rest" meaning everyone who thinks government is part of the solution spoiling the situation. Kind of like telling someone driving in Sao Paulo for the first time "you won't crash if you don't flinch". All those white and yellow lines are overrated. Who needs them?

How to Cross the Street in Rome

For all its counterintuitive sense, crossing the street like a Roman can be summed up in one sentence: Step off the curb with a confident stride and the traffic will stop. But for the amateur street crosser, wait for a native to cross and then follow. Watch as they step off the curb with what appears to be reckless but suave abandon and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, the traffic magically stops.

I read that as a pretty good summary for the libertarian model of how to reform government. I'd like better insight into the "magically stops" part. Something more sophisticated than "size matters". Perhaps something that takes into account Sapolsky as a leading authority on emergent behaviour.

Back to coalitions and public goods, open source is pretty much the definition of a public good. It's highly compatible with a subtle form of libertarianism not well suited for shouting about from roof tops. My sense of it is that the cohort of subtle libertarians is a pretty small voice in the weeds.

For better understanding on Dan Ariely's point, see this video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html

This technology is only a subset of the prosthetic arm - 'Luke' - developed by Dean Kamen's company. The prosthetic arm is controlled directly by the user's brain as well and allows a lot more complexity compared to the hand shown here. Also, Luke is being built as a modular system where you only use the parts of the arm that you need - if you don't need the upper arm, you can use just the hand and lower arm, and so forth.
More details below:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/05/dean-kamens-rob/
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamens-luke-arm-prosthesis-readies-for-clinical-trials/2
http://blog.ted.com/2008/02/dean_kamens_arm.php

PS: For those who can't place the name, Dean Kamen is the inventor of Segway, among other things.

Can we tie it into this somehow? http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

The reason Starcraft currently sucks with a track pad is because you're using a single-touch interface, and even if you aren't, Starcraft is limited to only recognise one point of mouse input. If the "pinch" (for zoom), "drag" (for pan and rotate) and other (eg, tilt camera, see this TED video (you can skip to the "flying across a map" section)) gestures were available, as well as the larger input surface as shown in the video, I think that this input would be easier than using a mouse!

As is also shown in the video, you still have a keyboard (look near the end), so shortcuts are still available. I wouldn't mind betting that most of those 300+ actions are performed via shortcut keys.

Personally, as an American citizen, I could give a rats fuck what the international community thinks about us.

That thinking (which isn't exclusive to americans) is exactly why the poorest billion in the world are no better off today than they were 50 years ago. The problem is that international politics is still busy more with national self-interest than with trying to make life better for everyone. The whole system is deeply and fundamentally broken.

Still, things are changing. Asia has made huge leaps the past 50 years, to where they're going to surpass the US and EU. The world is changing, and you would do well to notice it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_at_state.html

The sad thing is before his 1st term is over, we will be hardly distinguishable from most of the European countries in terms of economics and social and political policy.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I swear, the way some americans talk about socialist europe you'd think we were all sleeping on dirty concrete floors and living off water and bread.

But how many news agencies give people the chance to investigate for months these days?
For example, I enjoyed the reportage on "Why is Africa still poor" on BBC world. But yes, adding more information doesn't usually worsen the picture.

This ones are just the start. And you give some time to Microsoft creativity and they will do the multitouch equivalent of pressing start to end the session.

I saw a demonstration of this from MIT students. I'm pretty sure sony bought it, not developed.

Video
http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html

Site
http://www.witricity.com/

Done by a guy at TED this summer http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html

Already been done.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html

Thing is a lot of people don't know what they want or need.

See:
http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

So if you ask them what they want, they may often give you useless or even incorrect answers (watch for the part about coffee).

Similarly often when you ask people something - e.g. whether they want "targeted ads" or "XYZ", they may say "No" (or "yes"). But when you rephrase the question, or provide an example, they suddenly say "Oh, that's different". To make things worse many survey questions are pretty bad.

And media headlines are worse, after all the actual survey was: "Asked if online ad vendors should deliver targeted ads by tracking customers' behavior across multiple Web sites, 86 percent of the 1,000 respondents said no."

That's quite a big difference between wanting "targeted ads" and wanting "targeted ads by tracking your behaviour".

Just because a relative or friend asks me to buy or look up something for them online doesn't mean that I suddenly want ads for similar stuff on every webpage.

At least the google search page rarely serves up irrelevant ads when I'm searching for stuff.

Gever Tulley really impressed me in this talk at TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

Here's his blog on the Tinkering School: http://www.tinkeringschool.com/blog/

Take away all the immigrants (especially the highly skilled ones) and the UK economy will collapse. The technological centers of innovation in UK, e.g. Cambridge, will shrink or simply disappear without an influx of foreign workers. London will grind to a halt if you remove the foreign workers (they keep the place together, clean and in functioning order). Note that ex-Imperial colony immigrants have to jump through exactly the same hoops as other people to obtain the right to stay in the UK.
Imperialism might have ended 50 years ago, but the effect of imperialism will be felt for a long time to come, especially in Africa. All the artificial borders that the imperialist rule imposed on regions (notice all the straight artificial borders on the map in Africa), have to be corrected. Usually this comes in the form of civil war, Sudan being an excellent example of this. I refer you to Parag Khanna's TED talk. I'm not saying the UK should throw open its borders for ex-imperialist colony immigrants, but do realize that the effect of imperialism is still felt in regions of the world today.

you might find this interesting:

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

This guy shows time-lapse fotage of ice disappearing but there is also a nice graph of CO2 in there somewhere.

They do just that and they don't check if your qualified enough to issue such evidence. Peter Donnely gave an example in his TED Talk called "How stats fool juries". This projects result's will be no more relevant than the MIT's gaydar's but it has the backing of the FBI. You're going to have a hard time disproving it in court.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

You're wrong. I highly recommend that you watch this.

This is one of the more peculiar forms of populist ideology: I can't think of anything the average American understands less well than wealth.

Pareto distribution
New evidence for the power-law distribution of wealth

Getting rich in America obviously means adding another zero. Does it really need to be an exponential feedback relationship to get an enterprising American (or Brit) off the couch? A linear feedback relationship couldn't achieve the same purpose? Why not? How about a slightly smaller power-law coefficient? No chance?

At what magnitude does the power-law wealth coefficient cease to be about entrepreneurial motive, and instead become more about power elites? Anyone in America interested in funding a study to determine this? Hmmm, no one with enough money to fund this wants to know the answer.

Excess concentration of wealth hasn't been a complete disaster over the past 100 years. You can argue the merits: we have in fact enjoyed a spectacular rise in wealth pretty much all around, if you look at it through lenses with a logarithmic slant.

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

One can argue it has been a complete disaster, lately. When the elites bungle, we all pay. Kinda sucks as a system, actually.

If you go back 100 years, there were many untapped resources, it was a growth scenario. For the next 100 years we'll have to work very hard to relearn our current standard of living with respect to an increasingly finite resource base.

But oh no, even a sensible initiative--which is likely nothing but a good thing in terms of managing California's over stressed electrical grid--is going to put an imperceptible dent in our precious exponential wealth incentive coefficient. How will we ever live?

Photosynth was showcased in a mid 2007 TED talk. You can find it here.

It would be nice to have photosynths of monuments, art, or architecture that have been damaged or destroyed (e.g. the Buddhas dynamited in Afghanistan, the churches that collapsed in the 2009 Italy earthquake) from tourist photos that may be floating out in the interwebs.

For an interesting perspective on globalization of organized crime, see Misha Glenny's TED talk on the subject

At [Internode ISP's] Simon [Hackett]'s request, we're transplanting a post from WP Internode forum [to WP Broadband forum]:

From: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1280230
To: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1280474

(There's a Poll [on the first thread] on the Q of whether you feel that, an ISP [with] "too many" plan options
may deter you from choosing any of their plans, as Barry Schwartz suggests in his earlier TED talk.)

---

First, some background from an -earlier- post (in the above thread;
reply to the thread in which your comment(s) are most relavent):

In a TED talk, Barry Schwarz (author of "The Paradox of Choice") notes that:

- when there are "too many" alternatives to choose from,
- fewer people will make a choice

Cf: http://www.ted.com/talks/langâ/eng/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

(eg, where supermarket demonstrators showing many jams,
fewer people buy any of the demo'd jams (By contrast,
where just a handful of jams are demo'd, more people buy;

-or-

If [US] companies offer many mutual funds to employees;
employees miss out on employer mathing-comtributions,
of up to US$ 5,000.00, by not making a choice of fund.)

Extrapolating to WP Broadband Choice's tabbed-page with
Internode's many (too many?) plans, I wonder:

How many people give the 'node a miss, eg, due to the
"excess" number of Internode plans shown on offer there?

cf: http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/bc/isp-9/internode.htm

(My guess is that ISPs offer from several to many plans,
eg, to keep Aussies focussed on analysing plans for the
"best" deal for them, in part, so that they will have less
energy to -demand- cheap, unlimited plans, such as are
the norm, in many other countries in Australia's "class.")

--- Here comes the post, shifted from forum Internode:

--- (Although it was originally about Internode, feel free to
--- read this post with -your- choice of ISP, ie, in place of
--- "Internode" where it appears, & maybe let us know
--- which ISP you're thinking about in any replies. ;-)

[In WP's Internode forum] Simon Hackett [wrote]:

"[coming up with a new Internet plan] a lot of work and it has to fit in around some other major new project initiatives that are also in the pipeline"

With all due respect, Simon, I â" for one â" urge Aussie ISPs to redirect all the creative energy & programming/implementation time needed to dream up & implement YAPBP (Yet Another Pricy Broadband Plan) ...to find better ways to deliver what Aussie customers know is possible (since so many other countries' ISP provide it, while we drool in envy that they got it right, while AU continues to lag):

- cheap, fast, unlimited, unrestricted Internet ...not: you can use it for -this- (eg, watch TV -or- access -our- choice of files) purpose for free/cheap, but -that- (eg, research or remote medical imaging, etc.) usage is gonna cost you

For far too long, Aussie ISPs have hugged Telstra's "data allocation & penalty (pick one: huge 'excess' fee or get dial-up speed)" model.

Other Aussie ISPs are -starting- to help us to move to cheaper (if not cheap) unlimited plans, if only on an After Hours (during non-peak periods) basis.

Canberrans enjoy perhaps the -cheapest- AH-unlimited plans (speed "only" 2 Mb/Sec, eg, from their local ISPs that resell TransACT), paying from $20/mon for access to it all.

Why should such plans be reserved -only- for those living in Canberra (eg, pollies & C'th gov't officials & public servants)?

What is Internode missing that TransACT has got right?

In a sports-cent

Clinton perjured himself answering questions that would have been better left to judgement day. If the questioning had stuck to whether he compromised his presidential duty (more than a finger wagging), then I would take the perjury charge a lot more seriously. Most of the major institutions of America contain men at the top ruling their institutions while concealing their extra-marital activities or their Percocet habit.

If Alan Turing had been in a situation where no hard evidence had been found, would he have perjured himself to have lied about his orientation and activities? Does McCarthy automatically hold the trump card: guilt by evasion, no matter how inappropriate the question?

Doesn't this play into the whole outwardly irreproachable, inwardly corrupt meme, aka you get what you deserve?

Thomas Barnett draws a new map for peace

I really like this guy. He cracks me up. Mighty fond of his leviathan, but I can overlook that.

America has forgotten how to ask the right question. The right question for Bush V2 was "suppose you kick royal ass once you get there, then what?" That was a rather large fill-in-the-black to be left lying around for a rainy day. Win the peace? We would have had to spell that word out to the commander in chief of act now, think later.

It's sad that politics has devolved to mouse-traps in cookie jars. Ah, we never did that, the mouse traps were too expensive. A bit like Gimli's remark "It's a little tight across the chest." or "We dwarves are natural sprinters. Very dangerous over short distances." He's my favourite character for creative self-representation.

Warning: don't ever Google "Gimli chest" to word a quote correctly. I got a multiple dose of fanfic brain-sear from the Google summaries alone. I love what Turing accomplished, glad I don't have to read his late night fictional musings. Some things should not be recorded.

Deal with which structures? The structures in daily life? Or prison structures, like are found in most schools? What crime have children committed (besides being young) that they deserve to have to learn how to live inside a prison instead of learn to live inside a healthy family and healthy neighborhood?

From:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
"""
Ask any schoolchild why they don't like school and they'll tell you. "School is prison." They may not use those words, because they're too polite, or maybe they've already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can't be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, "School is prison."
Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.
Willingham surely knows that school is prison. He can't help but know it; everyone knows it. But here he writes a whole book entitled "Why Don't Students Like School," and not once does he suggest that just possibly they don't like school because they like freedom, and in school they are not free.
"""

How parents can best interact with their children is a complex topic, depending in part on the parent's temperment and the child's temperment. One resource:
http://www.motherstyles.com/
Another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles

I would agree that *some* unschoolers (especially "radical" ones with young children) tend too far to permissive parenting. But, that does not invalidate the general concept of "unschooling" as defined by John Holt decades ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
"""
Unschooling refers to a range of educational philosophies and practices centering around allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a conventional school. Exploration of activities is often led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
"""

Just look at this one essay on how harmful grading is:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/fdtd-g.htm

Or this on how pointless homework is:
http://www.thecaseagainsthomework.com/

Or this on how people are punished by "rewards" in school:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

Or this on how the secret to a happy life is in part how we think about time in a balanced way (schools are unbalanced in that sense):
http://www.thetimeparadox.com/
http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studi

I grew up on a farm and have killed and eaten many animals as a part of my daily life as a young man.

Around 20 years ago I stopped eating meat altogether after a fairly gruesome botched attempt at killing an animal. It left an indelible (inedible?) impression on me that I couldn't shake. My reasons for maintaining that vegetarianism however were manyfold.

1/ I've realised I simply don't need to eat meat to be healthy: I very rarely get sick and have am in very good physical condition.

2/ I found eating meat to be less metabolically efficient: I noticed an improvement in my sleep patterns and did not feel sluggish/tired after dinners.

3/ Eating meat is environmentally inefficient: Rather than cutting down trees to grow plants to grow grains to feed to cattle to form into meat, some of which will be eaten, just eat the plants directly. A huge portion of the world's C02 comes from cow 'emissions' meanwhile there is an increasingly lack of plant surface to transform this C02 back into oxygen.

4/ Meat now smells and (when accidentally eaten tastes) somehow rotten. It's just not something I would ever want to put in my mouth anymore than carpet or polystyrene. Meat is a dietary habit, cut with a kick of testosterone. You can get over it.

5/ Animal meat is absolutely murder, of course it is! It doesn't matter whether it's aware of it or not, whether it's feeling pain (almost all farm animals are utterly terrified just prior to death), it's murder to satisfy a dietary habit no matter which way you look at it.. When I was killing cows and pigs with a knife of a gun I was murdering them: killing them against their will.

6/ Eating meat is unncessary in my 21 century western dietary context: People started eating meat out of necessity in harsh conditions. Our bodies reflect that we haven't done it for long: unlike cats, sharks and dogs, we have never killed animals with our own hands and/or teeth. We've had to invent weapons to do so, the same weapons we used to kill other people. Just as I do not need to kill other people, expanding or defending territory, I don't need to eat animal parts to be a healthy human. And what of the mythic Food Chain? If you think paying people to prod cows, sheep and pigs into the back of a truck, drive them scared out of their minds for miles in their own shit, lead them into a large building with men in white overalls bearing stun guns and knives reflects anything as congenital as a 'food chain', you're out of your depth..)

7/ Meat from farms is, in general, far from a safe or remotely 'natural' product these days. In fact most meat from the U.S is banned here in Europe because it's so augmented with artificial hormones considered harmful to human bodies.

Ted talk: How to build a rain-forest

Joh, meet Bill Stone. Here's his bio.

Now, watch his talk at TED.

In that TED Talk he speaks of wanting to take a one way trip to the moon to mine hydrogen.

He sees a fueling station on the moon as being a launching pad to exploring space more fully.

Money quote:

The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency. If you try to do that for the moon you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there. But if you send a mining team there without the return propellant first. Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez? This is not like that, I'm much more like Scotty. I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it, so we're not going to burn it. But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done.

There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and twenty years. That's not true. In seven years we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit.

We're living in one of the most exciting times in history. We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space. The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to general exploration.

To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed. We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Louis and Clark expedition to Shackleton Crater to mine the moon for resources and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit.

Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing. I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED. I intend to lead that expedition.

Watch the talk and you may change your mind about whether qualified people are willing to take one way trips to space.

Joh, meet Bill Stone. Here's his bio.

Now, watch his talk at TED.

In that TED Talk he speaks of wanting to take a one way trip to the moon to mine hydrogen.

He sees a fueling station on the moon as being a launching pad to exploring space more fully.

Money quote:

The traditional approach to space exploration has been that you carry all the fuel you need to get everybody back in case of an emergency. If you try to do that for the moon you're going to burn a billion dollars in fuel alone sending a crew out there. But if you send a mining team there without the return propellant first. Did any of you guys hear the story of Cortez? This is not like that, I'm much more like Scotty. I like this equipment, you know, and I really value it, so we're not going to burn it. But, if you were truly bold you could get it there, manufacture it and it would be the most dramatic demonstration that you could do something worthwhile off this planet that has ever been done.

There's a myth that you can't do anything in space for less than a trillion dollars and twenty years. That's not true. In seven years we could pull off an industrial mission to Shackleton and demonstrate that you could provide commercial reality out of this in low-earth orbit.

We're living in one of the most exciting times in history. We're at a magical confluence where private wealth and imagination are driving the demand for access to space. The orbital refueling stations I've just described could create an entirely new industry and provide the final key for opening space to general exploration.

To bust the paradigm a radically different approach is needed. We can do it by jump-starting with an industrial Louis and Clark expedition to Shackleton Crater to mine the moon for resources and demonstrate they can form the basis for a profitable business on orbit.

Talk about space always seems to be hung on ambiguities of purpose and timing. I would like to close here by putting a stake in the sand at TED. I intend to lead that expedition.

Watch the talk and you may change your mind about whether qualified people are willing to take one way trips to space.

I guess they have zero visibility now! It's melting, it's melting... Yikes... we'll miss them. Surely the glass mirrors could be destroyed in seconds or days without there even being direct fire burning the buildings... it's warping... it's warping... beam the telescopes up scotty... it was a far better thing that they have done... opening our eyes to the universe... to infinity and beyond...

Maybe they'll need those adjustable glasses retrofitted after? http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/josh_silver_demos_adjustable_liquid_filled_eyeglasses.html

A sad song of sorrow for the mechanical eyes that have showed us so much. May you rest in pieces.

Bioinformatics is no actual work with chemicals or lab, it's almost 100% computers and stats. ...And a lot of file-conversion and a lot of making crappy web pages to show data in a pretty way to non-scientists and scientists. You program computers, but you also deal with 10 year old programs that can't handle the data size now, tons of Java or Perl and any problems there, etc.

Some people are programming along the lines of what you ask, however, there is even a fancy UI that you click and tell a machine what type of what-have-you pathway you want and *spoot* out comes a bacteria that does what you want.

Very close to being out and about in the world...the link below is a tad old, they've gotten further then what Venter said at the time.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/craig_venter_is_on_the_verge_of_creating_synthetic_life.html

Deadliness of a virus is usually a side effect of the way that it approaches spreading. see http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/paul_ewald_asks_can_we_domesticate_germs.html

Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?

That may work, but that will not satisfy many of those who are raising this issue. Because, to them, the garbage patch isn't the real problem, the real problem is the morality of our way of life.

I heard a radio show (http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/maritimenoon_20090811_18990.mp3 q@23:45 a@25:40) recently where a proposal to solve litter by having more garbage bins on public streets was dismissed in favour of the more sustainable solution of encouraging people not to eat chocolate bars in the first place.

See how Charles Moore bookends his talk about the garbage patch with criticism of the consumer culture to see how thinking on this issue runs along the same lines.

It turns out that the old carrot and stick isn't the best motivator for jobs that involve any level of cognitive processing. Check out Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation at Ted.com.

Add to my previous post masturbation and nocturnal emission: it turns out that a small amount of fresh sperm is more effective than a larger quantity of stale spumen.

And female orgasm: the cervix mashes down on a little pocket where semen pools.

And the bulbous bowhead of the male member: turns out to be good at removing stale/foreign semen from the vaginal tract.

I knew I had more material, but it was locked away in another file.

Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm