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Fictional Town "Eureka" To Become Real?
Zarath writes "The fictional town of Eureka (from the TV series by the same name) is going to potentially become a real life town as the University of Queensland, in Australia, plans to build a multibillion-dollar 'brain city' dedicated to science and research. The city, hoping to hold at least 10,000 people, is looking to attract 4,500 of the brightest scientists from around the world to live and work there. The city is planned to be built west of the city of Brisbane, in Queensland. While not funded by the Department of Defense (like the [city of the] TV series), the potential for such a community is very interesting and exciting."
...keep all of our best and brightest in one location. What could possibly go wrong?
One of the most interesting decisions in Soviet science was the establishment of Akademgorodok, an enclave outside Novosibirsk dedicated entirely to scientists (see e.g. Josephson's New Atlantis Revisited published by Princeton University Press). I don't understand why that wasn't more popular in Western countries. Maybe sciences move ahead when you give scientists peace, a sense of respect and dignity, and ability to manage their own work. Of course, generous funding is essential, lest it all go down the tubes.
Towns and cities are located and populated naturally. Towns are near a river or a port or an important crossroads. Or they grew up from nothing over the course of many decades. The people that live there settled there for natural reasons, usually related to jobs and opportunity.
Towns can be created artificially. Almost every attempt to do it is a failure though. Success usually takes HUGE amounts of money and some other factor to draw people to the location. This one claims to have the money, but they probably don't have enough. And it seems to lack any other incentive to draw folks there.
This sounds more like Research Triangle Park, Silicon Valley, CERN, or many other university backed commercial regions.
Call me when they have that invisible bridge thing working.
Speaking of nuclear weapons...
What happens if this "Brain City" becomes a military target for an anti-western nation, or any nation that might oppose scientific thought? All it would take is a single attack to wipe-out so much research and great thinkers.
Don't we try to avoid the single point of failure and prefer distributed networks for this reason?
Actually, they've found a very high rate of autism coming from the children in silicon valley. :(
Can all fish swim?
An amusing meme, but far from the truth. From a history of Los Alamos Lab :
One resident recalled that "the Hill dwellers were amateur everything: hikers, riders, photographers, ethnographers, mineralogists, musicians, and artists-craftsmen in all assorted fields. Saturday nights they partied and square danced. Sundays they fished or exploited their hobbies."
The parties were frequent and well attended. Resident Jean Bacher recalled that "Saturday nights, the mesa rocked... fenced in as we were, our social life was a pipeline through which we let off steam."
Some of the most brilliant minds of the last century seemed perfectly capable of having fun together and blowing off steam. Maybe this time there will be more LAN parties than square dances, but people will figure out how to get together.
Who said the US government's role was limited to the Internet? None of those companies would have gotten anywhere without some of the advances at Bell Labs, which was kept going by government contracts.
Your choice of terminology suggests that you're a libertarian nutjob. I wish you success in your return to the real world.
Two of the smartest people I have ever met married and began cranking out kids. They now have one of the biggest collection of marginal morons you have ever seen. Nice kids, yes. Well behaved kids, yes. But they don't have the sense God gave a herd of cows. All I can figure is that the parents IQ waves were 180 degrees out of phase. Either that, or they are putting on one helluva show when company is around.
Um, I think this proves that they did become much much smarter. The thing is smarter people seem very very stupid to every one else. The best that they can really hope for is to shut the heck and look well behaved/well mannered to everyone else. Let's hope that they aren't actual geniuses. They'd look like an insane asylum to "normal folks."
Of course, if they have over 3 kids running around, (no matter how well behaved) they'd also look like an insane asylum to childless folks.
Their are various definitions of smart as well. If you are meaning street smart, then the kids could be book smart and look like morons yet still be geniuses; they'd esp look stupid to the street smart crowd.
And just like Los Alamos, I fully expect this to have some serious problems finding people to come do the unskilled labor. When they do, it comes with some subtle social problems. There is no small degree of resentment among those who, unable to afford housing in Los Alamos, are forced to commute from less expensive surrounding areas. A community like this sounds good on paper, but in practice, it's complicated. If Los Alamos could uproot and relocate for no cost today to a less isolated area, I think it would be done in a heartbeat. It was only the initial secrecy that required it to be where it is and inertia that keeps it there.
Not a bad design, even if it is thirty years old. Distributed systems. Fault tolerant. Designed to be able to disperse and have the citizens stay connected through encrypted channels. Amazing social dynamics. I would certainly consider moving there if it existed.
That John Brunner was a pretty sharp guy.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Those "unrealistic" utopian colonies got a lot more done than people give them credit for. Specifically, the movement you link to created, among other things, the Amana corporation, founed by the residents of, you guessed, the Amana colonies. Who also, by the way, made kickass furniture and sold it in mass quantities. You know, like the Quakers? Maybe you've heard of them or of a few of the many products they invented and commercialized. Or, instead, maybe you're more a "free love" kinda elitist. In which case drop by your local Target or Nordstrom's and buy some Oneida flatware, a product of the Oneida communities.
I could go on and on. I've researched this a bit and given the primitive tech they were working with and the chowderheaded "social sciences" they had to do their best to unlearn, some of those colonies did quite well. And with the hundred plus years that have now been put into analysis and of creating more efficient setups like the hundred-plus ecovillages, most of which are thriving, we're far better positioned to try again.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
A.) You were promulgating a bit of disinformation that gets stronger every time it gets repeated in a public place.
/. is still one of the biggest fora on the web and I reserve the right to cut down the damage that you'll do rather than limiting myself to only what *you* consider accountable behavior.
B.) You were creating an implied equivalancy between two "equally ridiculous", "equally false" public statements. Which isn't so nice when one of those statements not only isn't equivalently false but was, in fact, used as a key part of a still ongoing and successful campaign to establish and maintain the larger and equally false supposed equivalency between the level of lying and overall fraud between Democrats and Republicans.
After years as a policy guy trying to change behavior through reason I came to the sad conclusion that behavior is, in fact, largely determined not by fact but by perception and that many of the most destructive false perceptions are those spread mostly under the cover of "I'm just joking", which is no different from the frat boy who hits one of the "nerds" in the face, knocking him down, and then claims that the nerd has no legitimate grounds to be angry, let alone fight back. After all, "I was just messing with you".
Sorry, I have no opinion of nor much interest in your intent; I post in response to expected consequences.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Benzene, Toluene, basically most of the stuff that's in gasoline, and MMT ... these are all more likely sources than vaccinations. People just get regular exposure to these chemicals, it's part of our car culture ...
Just look at that MMT molecule - it looks fucking badass! Hehe, wow - look at this, an easy Google search and the EPA hands this right to me:
"One recent California study reported that a modest increase in the incidence of autism was associated with the highest 25% of manganese air concentrations (65)." Source
(MMT has a manganese atom in the middle of it)
Oh yeah - It's probably also worth blaming whatever chemical clouds are making it over the Pacific.
Vaccines?? Come on ... let's look at the obvious sources of carcinogens and mutagens. I just think it's far more likely to be the fuel for industrial progress ... no matter how bad it is, we'll still end up using it in large amounts daily, and spreading the chemical love all around the world.
Stuff like this just adds more backing to my argument.
But yeah, vaccine soup does kind of worry me, just doesn't seem that likely to me. I honestly hope you're right, and it's the vaccines, because that's something we can get some control over ... where as this gasoline issue; we pretty much need a working, feasible nuclear fusion reactor now to solve that problem. (which could introduce a whole other set of issues...)
Actually I have an uncanny ability and aptitude for IQ tests. I've done several under proper conditions, as well as being assessed by a university psychology department. In many respects I'm an "idiot savant" for them, as I seem to really struggle with real world problem solving, yet get absurd results on the tests intuitively.
For me at least the scores from IQ tests measure my ability to do IQ tests, and seem to be very weakly correlated to any practical measure of intelligence.