http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-07-office-fit_x.htm "Sitting at their desks is about the last thing workers would do in Dr. James Levine's office of the future. Dr. James Levine keeps a 1 mph pace on his treadmill while checking his e-mail.at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Instead of being sedentary in front of their computers, they'd stand. But instead of standing still, they'd walk on a treadmill. And instead of meeting around a conference table, they'd talk business while walking laps on a track."
But just a standing desk with a tall stool to alternate with can work wonders for back pain and good posture. The walking is probably better on the knees though.
The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD. These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.
It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that: http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm
Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era": http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html "This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."
People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.
Another related essay:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton" http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html "And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."
First of all, school up to the PhD is a pyramid scheme (currently failing):
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (Vice Provost CalTech) http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html The end result is "disciplined minds" who will not step out of line politically: http://disciplined-minds.com/ Or journalistically: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm "By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story.... The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda."
The reason schooling exists in its current form is to teach these seven lessons:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm in order to prepare most people for a life of servitude to the military or factories (and to not be very thoughtful about consumption or politics either).
"The Prussian Connection" -- Gatto http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm And from:
"A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of." http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html "We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling."
Still, studies have shown that the only people who really get economic value out of an Ivy League degree or equivalent are those from lower middle class backgrounds. All other things being equal, for most other people it's not worth the money as an investment. See the book "Class" for some other details: http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253 Otherwise, consider:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" (1975) http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf "College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead."
And consider those years ahead following Moore's Law will include computers 10000X faster than what we have now for the same price in 20 or so years. http://www.transhumanis
I was impressed by the animation which included moving through a simulation of attracted particles. Did they use astronomy specific tools to make this which inter-operate with Flash/Shockwave or was it coded by hand? And does the animation actually simulate gravitational attraction or is it just replaying a set of movements precomputed by another software package?
I want to raise some of the deeper issues behind the problem of cyber-warfare (or even just most plain cyber-crime related to fraud). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwar
Most of the movie "War Games" is silly, but this statement from it is profound: "the only winning move is not to play". Or to generalize it, there are finite games and infinite games, and infinite games are about continuing to play, not about winning (see author James P. Carse on _Finite and Infinite Games_). http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-962221125884493114 Now that we are confronted with global warfare, whether nuclear, biological, or cybernetic, we need to rethink what games we want to play. As Albert Einstein said "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking." The same might be said about genetic engineering or the internet. We need to somehow transcend these arms races instead of try to win them.
It continually boggles my mind that people are willing to admit to problems of such extreme magnitude caused by "progress" so far -- like the threat of nuclear war, the threat of bioengineered plagues (or even just cluster bombs and land mines), the threat of economic collapse (speculation, derivatives, etc.), the threat of widespread pollution with unexpected consequences (e.g. endocrine disruptors from plastics), the threat of global climate change, the threat of universal fascism (by "liberals" or "conservatives":-), the threat (or opportunity) of an upcoming technological singularity, and so on including the threat of cyber-warfare or cyber-crime (essentially the technological face of the usual horsemen: war, plague, famine, leading to death), but then, when faced with these huge threats, the solutions proposed are timid, piecemeal, or regressive. Why not consider that big systemic problems (sometimes resulting from incremental quantitative changes over time adding up to vast qualitative changes) may require widespread transcendental changes (even if just a change of the heart or the prevalent mythology)?
=== the need for mutual security and a resilient civilian infrastructure ===
As long as the US defense strategy is based on strategic dominance of others
"Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance" http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289 and not mutual security for all, the US will not be secure, because it will be a threat to everyone by its own logic. Such a one-sided strategy will promote the development of the very ruinous arms races which have already cost trillions and left both the USA and the now-defunct USSR as losers of the cold war (the USA just taking a little longer to fall from the financial punches of the past few decades).
These issues were outlined in the book _Brittle Power_ in the 1980s, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power mainly in regard to the US energy infrastructure, but the ideas apply everywhere including manufacturing and likely the internet. Systems which balance meshwork and hierarchy http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm (and so are at least moderately decentralized, compared to hierarchical monopolies) will stand the greatest chance of survival. Unfortunately, the civilian systems which the General is charged with protecting are mainly not of that variety. The internet is more-so like this than almost any other system, but it still has its key weaknesses in practice (including widespread use of difficult-to-audit proprietary software like Microsoft Windows). That lack of resiliency is a product of the failure of decades of civilian governance in terms of
Almost all of the good stuff in Java and the JVM (from garbage collection through hotspot compiling) was developed first for Smalltalk, sometimes decades earlier.
Displays in our eyeglasses sounds pretty tame compared to Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil. http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0518.html?printable=1 "Vernor Vinge's Hugo-award-winning short science fiction story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" takes place in a near future in which everyone lives in a ubiquitous, wireless, networked world using wearable computers and contacts or glasses on which computer graphics are projected to create an augmented reality."
If magic glasses was "sci fi" I can imagine why Peter Norton left in disgust. Many people have a real difficulty understanding the nature of exponential growth in technological capacity. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change Or: http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."
It is quite true that forming a corporation you control may in various cases limit your personal losses from the results of the actions of others you employee (e.g. an employee does something wrong, so the only assets at risk are the corporations *and* the employee's for personal negligence, not yours). However, from discussing this issue myself with a non-profit lawyer, my understanding is that if *you* are the one writing the code, you remain personally liable for any problems it has even if you are totally working in good faith, like if you unknowingly infringe a software patent (good licenses can limit these liabilities somewhat). So I think this document is misleading in that it can be read to imply forming a corporation would protect the *author* of the code, when it really at best protects those who participate in the organization (board members) and who do not contribute code. For example, if you contribute problematical code to Apache, the Apache board may not be liable personally (even if Apache organization assets may be at risk), but you still are. So, in short, my understanding is that forming a corporation does not protect the individual contributors significantly from liability for their own personal actions, only from the actions of others (and even then, only when they are unaware of them or not directing them to various degrees). Perhaps they can address that issue in a future release; either indicating I am mis-informed or indicating that what I say is true. This is a very essentially point for individual developers to understand. It is one reason for liability insurance (and maybe the free software world could benefit by a good liability insurance system?) I think this is an important issue to get right, because otherwise it tempts free software developers (like myself) to spend a lot of time (and money) pursuing corporate forms which in the end may not provide much protection anyway for your personal efforts (compared to say, putting assets in the name of your spouse or having professional liability insurance). There may be other good reasons to form or join a non-profit though, but individual liability protection for the developer may not be one of them.
"If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that."
If everything else is free (or incredibly cheap), why does an author need a return on their time (most of the time)? See: http:///www.reprap.org (GPL'd 3D fabricator) "Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain M. Banks, 1987.
Do parents need a return for the time they spend with their children? Or, in this case their "mind children"?
In 1997, my wife and I gave away a garden simulator under the GPL (more than six person-years of work) http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ and got the whole free internet in return (including Slashdot). Seems like a good deal to me.:-)
The problem for Douglas Adams was that, as Ian Banks' quote might suggest, he was was *poor* (or felt he was poor, or felt at risk of being poor in the future), where poor essentially means you can't expect reasonable needs to be met without major effort. So Douglas Adams must have felt (perhaps quite correctly) that he needed the ration units to survive (or thrive) in a system oriented around rationing. When scarcity (for most things) comes to an end worldwide, as is happening, then there is not much need for rationing and ration units for most of the basics (energy, food, water, shelter, computing, health care, transportation, etc.) See also, from 1964(!): http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."
To see what such a world might look like in fiction (contrasted to our the recent ways), read James P. Hogan's novel, _Voyage from Yesteryear_. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear Of course, as in James P. Hogan's novel, getting there (post-scarcity ideology dominant) from here (scarcity ideology dominant) is going to be "interesting times". For a more dystopian take on this (if the wealth from cybernation is not shared roughly evenly), see:
"Manna" http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Yes, you're right of course. Terminator would have been a better example (but the Daleks are a lot more over the top). And in fact, worse, the Daleks raise the issue that human/machine symbiosis can lead to bad ends too.
I used to work on simulations of intelligent self-replicating robots until in the 1980s someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after I gave a talk and told me to "keep up the good work". To his credit, I don't know if he was praising me for saying how easy it was to make destructive machines (the first ones were even cannibals until I added a sense of "smell" for recognizing self and other) or my comments on how much harder it would be to make robots that cooperated with each other (or with people). I think that truth remains and shows in the comments here -- predatory Daleks are much easier to build than a collaborative R2D2. I left the field -- fearing the focus of the military funding was likely to be more on the Dalek side of things, and focused more on augmenting human capacities (whether gardening, storytelling, software development, or rethinking industrial infrastructure to be more sustainable and inherently more secure and abundant and peace-promoting). I can sometimes wonder myself if I should have kept working towards cooperative robots (the scene in Silent Running where the drones performed surgery together was always an inspiration), but ultimately transcending war (to peace? to something else?) is more likely to come from the ideas of people like (Mr.) Fred Rogers, Leon Shenandoah, Mahatma Gandhi, or James Carse.
"Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood: Family Communications" http://www.fci.org/
"To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah" http://www.amazon.com/Become-Human-Being-Tadodaho-Shenandoah/dp/1571743413
"Gandhi's Words" http://www.indiaspace.com/quotes.htm
"James P. Carse, Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game, SALT talk" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-962221125884493114
But developing Daleks continues. See Manuel De Landa's book:
"War in the Age of Intelligent Machines" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines "The next threshold point, or singularity, to be reached, according to de Landa, is the point where man and machine cease to oppose themselves, becoming one single war machine, and when that war machine itself is crossed by the machinic phylum -- this last condition might be compared to Deleuze's call for the desiring molecular machines to use the social machines, instead of being composed and manipulated in order to form a complex molar machines. The developments of artificial intelligence, which will sooner or later lead to the creation of "predatory machines", that is intelligent machines. Even if "the advent of [truly autonomous weapons] may be quite far in the future, the will to endow machines with predatory capabilities has been institutionalized in the [US] military" (p.128) warns de Landa. This disconnection of the war machines from the machinic phylum, of the military institution from the social formation, may result in erratic war machines that become nomads because of a lack of political control: if battles are not strategically ordered following political objectives, then even their victories become meaningless."
And see Manuel De Landa (indirectly) on why intelligent killbots will never work as intended for technical reasons. The implication of what he writes below, is, if an intelligent machine's mind (like a person's) is a mix of hierarchies and meshworks, and receives input from the outside, it will be as unpredictable (or more so) than a person. It might be a good *partner* to people (hopefully for benign tasks like self-driving cars
http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm "To speak of the "end" of work is to speak in the passive voice as if work is ending itself, and needs only a nudge from progressive policies to wind down without a fuss. But work is not a natural process like combustion or entropy which runs its course of itself. Work is a social practice reproduced by repeated, multitudinous personal choices. Not free choices usually -- "your money or your life" is, after all, a choice -- but nonetheless acts of human intention. It is (the interaction of many) acts of will which perpetuate work, and it is (the interaction of many) acts of will which will abolish it by a collective adventure speaking in the active voice. Work will end, if it does, because workers end it by choosing to do something else -- by living in a different way."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7c.htm "The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus.... At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen, where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command. The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations--to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people's schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history."
http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/ "A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html "Now, when I asked my audience why educated Americans supported the war, they couldn't figure it out. One thing I heard is that since working-class young men had to go to war, naturally they and their families opposed it. But research shows that when people expect to go to war-whatever educational level they are-they tend to support that war. Because of cognitive dissonance, people come to believe in what they have to do. So I pointed out that there are two social processes, both tied to school, that could help explain why educated people supported the war. One, educated Americans tend to be more successful and affluent, and thus have more allegiance to society. They have a strong incent
http://breakingranks.net/ "The purpose of this web site is to discuss the social cost of rankism and to develop a grassroots capacity to defend and protect dignity in everyday life. We hope you will join us in planning and building a world without rankism!"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
http://www.reprap.org/ "[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I used to hang out at the robot labs at CMU in the 1980s. What frightened me most about the whole thing of military robotics (as well as mind children) was a combination of arrogance and incompetence (not that I haven't been guilty of both at times myself), which in this area is likely as not to lead to robotic cockroaches that take over the earth (exterminating humankind incidentally) and which then all die off.:-)
If robots that kill autonomously is the answer, you're asking the wrong question.
Check out "Voluntary Simplicity": http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Voluntary+Simplicity Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_living "Simple living (or voluntary simplicity) is a lifestyle in which individuals consciously choose to minimize the 'more-is-better' pursuit of wealth and consumption. Adherents choose simple living for a variety of reasons, including spirituality, health, increase in 'quality time' for family and friends, stress reduction, conservation, social justice or anti-consumerism, while others choose to live more simply for reasons of personal taste or personal economy. Simple living as a concept is distinguished from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice. Although asceticism may resemble voluntary simplicity, proponents of simple living are not all ascetics. The term "downshifting" is often used to describe the act of moving from a lifestyle of greater consumption towards a lifestyle based on voluntary simplicity."
Frugality gives you a lot of options. And it isn't about paying the least you can for everything. It is about spending money on what you really need or want in proportion to your true needs and wants (as you consciously define them). For example, if free time to play and record music is important, then don't waste your time making money to rent a bigger apartment than you really need, or buy more gear than you really need, etc.. Frugal living is ultimately about priorities. Ultimately this may culminate in rethinking "work" itself: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "Twenty years ago [in 1965], Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine." http://www.reprap.org/
"Free" used to work in the past in America: http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty "The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
Let's hope "free" works again in the future, or we may get this: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm "In other words, Manna spread through the American corporate landscape like wildfire. And my dad was right. It was when all of these new Manna systems began talking to each other that things started to get uncomfortable."
That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities: http://www.poissonrouge.com/ If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading): http://www.starfall.com/
And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry" http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html or for younger kids stuff on energy: http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html
The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books): http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp
Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so). http://www.rokenbok.com/ The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.
The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See: http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.
Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average,:-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"?:-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.
Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory "The discovery of the Jones polynomial by Vaughan Jones in 1984, and subsequent contributions from Edward Witten, Maxim Kontsevich, and others, revealed deep connections between knot theory and mathematical methods in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. A plethora of knot invariants have been invented since then, utilizing sophisticated tools such as quantum groups and Floer homology. In the last 30 years, knot theory has also become a tool in applied mathematics. Chemists and biologists use knot theory to understand, for example, chirality of molecules and the actions of enzymes on DNA."
With the way electronics is disappearing into products, possibly almost nothing a child learns now about electronics from toys will be that useful in two decades.
Building with LEGO, making and untying knots, playing with sand and water, staring out the window and noticing a rainbow -- that's the route to genius, or at least solid engineering IMHO.
1. How a NASA-based educational MMO should be designed.
Think Big. NASA's MMO network should eventually have a worldwide support involving hundreds to thousands of NASA personnel who seed content into the system or supervise the system in various ways. It might entail tens of thousands of server nodes as well as extensively involve users machines for local processing. Naturally, some parts of the operation of the system might be outsourced, like to Amazon's or Sun's pay-as-you-go virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. NASA's MMO framework should be he definitive place worldwide to go for manufacturing knowledge -- like Wikipedia only about how to make things and simulate them and develop software to control all that. Yes, there are some sites like Marshall Brain's "How Stuff Works" but this will eclipse those by several orders of magnitude in terms of detail (and people like him would be good consultants on content if they were willing to contribute under free licenses).
The entire thing should be done under a free and open source license, including all content contributions. This may entail getting all non-NASA participants to contribute a signed document about their involvement with the project.
It should be done by NASA cooperating with the existing leaders in the open source and free software projects, like by looking at SourceForge or FSF projects (many projects already exist for physic modeling and MMORGs in a variety of ways). Hiring an existing commercial MMO group creates two conflicts -- one is that this project could detract from a current online offering, the other is that there will be a temptation not to release the details of simulation technologies (And so keep huge chunks of the software or content proprietary) or to provide older packages other than what is being commercially promoted. There is lots of knowledge in the free and open source world on how to do big systems and how to write simulation software.
Been thinking about this on and off for over ten years (including kicking around some ideas with with Al Globus in the past, not that that means he endorses anything here).
Knowledge should be stored in a RDF-like approach (similar to how our Pointrel data storage system works). http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/
Open software architectures should be used, like our PataPata project tried (similar to Squeak or Python, maybe on Java): http://sourceforge.net/projects/patapata
Overall architecture will be a hierarchy of simulated activities, structured across a loose meshwork of nodes. There will also be multiple levels of realism and detail.
It should be planned as incremental and evolutionary changes as hardware and software continue to improve -- in part from the use of this system itself for design and simulation.
2. How a NASA-based educational MMO should support both formal and informal education efforts.
Make a general learning tool usable by everyone; create safer filtered whitelisted subsets of it for use in classrooms. The use of an RDF-like approach helps support this kind of tagging and filtering across multiple data sources.
3. How a NASA-based educational MMO should connect to current and future NASA missions.
Add NASA data and knowledge to the system including detailed plans for NASA equipment. Participants will help desig
"PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. The PlantStudio software simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure. You can "grow" plants over their life cycles, producing lifelike images at any age. You can design, animate and breed a wide variety of plants. By using the "evolutionary arts" of variation and selection in the plant breeder, you can quickly and easily create whole families of unique plants for your 3D scenes."
It's about ten years old, but still useful.:-) [I'm one of the developers.]
While I'm not specifically disputing what you say, for a little context, Africa was (and to an extent, still is) the site of hundreds of years of brutal European colonialization (including by European and American slavers), which broke apart pre-existing family and tribal traditions in Africa. While in some ways not as bad as what happened in North America (where the indigenous population was mostly wiped out and displaced by various means), clearly there is historical reason for anger in Africa towards the West. See for example:
"Africans on Africa: Colonialism" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4653125.stm "Take corruption, the great scourge of Africa. For historians like Stephen Morrison, Director of the Africa Programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, this modern day curse has its clear roots in the colonial era. The colonial state was "inherently authoritarian", he told me. "If you held power, it allowed an ability to skim and award contracts and the like - it promoted a corrupt form of government in many places," he added. There have long been arguments about the pernicious effects on Africa of colonial rule. But it is a complex picture.... The post-colonial era was still in its first decade, but already all over the continent, things were falling apart - partially because, when Africa was split up between the great imperialist powers in the nineteenth century, the map of Africa was arbitrarily redrawn. Families and whole tribes had been split up into separate countries. Rival kingdoms, who had for centuries shared borders and warred with each other, suddenly found themselves redefined as one people. "
This post isn't meant to justify people being bad to each other, just to provide some context for understanding the emotional roots of it, in the interest of moving forward. As that article (Africans on Africa: Colonialism) continues: "All the same, nearly 50 years since the end of the colonial era, is it time perhaps for us to stop blaming the trauma of that encounter for all our problems? Who truly is to blame for this? To my mind, many of Africa's most profound problems stem from the way Africans look at themselves: all too often, Africa suffers from low self-esteem. All too often, Africans see themselves mirrored in the eyes of the west - of those rich former colonial powers who like to regard Africans only as victims. And, all too often, Africans become the distorted images reflected in these mirrors.... Clearly, Africa does need the world's help. But Africa's destiny can be changed for the better only by Africans themselves. To borrow Benjamin Franklin's words, we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. We must come together, not in a sentimental but ultimately pointless spirit of nationalist phrase-making, but to pull ourselves, together, out of this mess we're in."
In theory, government has other ways of raising funds than taxing and confiscation of physical property. Import and export duties, for example. Or renting the public airwaves. Or charging an annual fee for keeping copyrighted world out of the public domain (the rights holder can self-assess what the fee would be, and anyone who can pay, say, 100x that to the rights holder could buy it out into the public domain). Or charging admission to national parks. Or renting public land. Probably lots more ways as well.
Governments can do lots of things well. Though ultimately we need to move beyond an economy based on a scarcity-oriented world view to one with an abundance-oriented world view. http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html "Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
"The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's.... If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion [of PhDs] has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch.... The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists."
That's the deeper problem; read the entire linked article for more on it and some possible solutions.
Sorry, but unfortunately someone has decided to take our collective Universe down in a few minutes for system maintenance and an upgrade, so you won't get your chance. Of course, history will also be rewritten, and the new concept will be called a "Stargate".:-)
Just as a followup, as others have posted about online, I just bought a cheap I/O Magic SATA enclosure (at CompUSA's going out of business sale -- the end of an era for me, I wish the staff luck), and the old drive itself apparently works in the new enclosure. It took half an hour or more to pry the case apart (and some pinched fingers). These directions were helpful in the end (see the Nov 05, 2007 11:39 post), http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/24609792/m/783007917831 but the case is very scratched up in the process. I managed incorrectly to get a screwdriver between the metal enclosure and a plastic backing with the clips, which made everything harder until I realized that. Not that I would use the case again for anything anyway if it is what burned out. Anyway, I said I'd never trust the drive, but we'll see (maybe I'll find a good use for it where reliability is not an big issue). Hard to imagine twenty years ago talking about conservatively junking half a terabyte of storage.:-) Anyway, sounds like Seagate may still make good drives, but their FreeAgent Pro enclosures are problematical.
Thanks for all the replies suggesting encryption as a matter of course. I can see now that is an especially good idea if you ever intend to take advantage of hard drive warranties.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-06-07-office-fit_x.htm
"Sitting at their desks is about the last thing workers would do in Dr. James Levine's office of the future.
Dr. James Levine keeps a 1 mph pace on his treadmill while checking his e-mail.at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Instead of being sedentary in front of their computers, they'd stand. But instead of standing still, they'd walk on a treadmill. And instead of meeting around a conference table, they'd talk business while walking laps on a track."
But just a standing desk with a tall stool to alternate with can work wonders for back pain and good posture.
The walking is probably better on the knees though.
The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.
It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm
And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."
People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.
Another related essay:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."
Old school advice...
... The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda."
First of all, school up to the PhD is a pyramid scheme (currently failing):
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (Vice Provost CalTech)
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
The end result is "disciplined minds" who will not step out of line politically:
http://disciplined-minds.com/
Or journalistically:
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm
"By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story.
The reason schooling exists in its current form is to teach these seven lessons:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
in order to prepare most people for a life of servitude to the military or factories (and to not be very thoughtful about consumption or politics either).
"The Prussian Connection" -- Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
And from:
"A conversation with historian and author James Loewen. Sort of."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"We like to believe schooling is a good thing. But when it comes to understanding any problem with historical roots, we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand it. Students who have taken math courses are better at math. The same is true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. But in history, stupidity is the result of more, not less, schooling."
Still, studies have shown that the only people who really get economic value out of an Ivy League degree or equivalent are those from lower middle class backgrounds. All other things being equal, for most other people it's not worth the money as an investment. See the book "Class" for some other details:
http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
Otherwise, consider:
"College is a Waste of Time and Money" (1975)
http://www.grossmont.edu/bertdill/docs/CollegeWaste.pdf
"College, then, may be a good place for those few young people who are really drawn to academic work, who would rather read than eat, but it has become too expensive, in money, time, and intellectual effort to serve as a holding pen for large numbers of our young. We ought to make it possible for those reluctant, unhappy students to find alternative ways of growing up, and more realistic preparation for the years ahead."
And consider those years ahead following Moore's Law will include computers 10000X faster than what we have now for the same price in 20 or so years.
http://www.transhumanis
I was impressed by the animation which included moving through a simulation of attracted particles. Did they use astronomy specific tools to make this which inter-operate with Flash/Shockwave or was it coded by hand? And does the animation actually simulate gravitational attraction or is it just replaying a set of movements precomputed by another software package?
I want to raise some of the deeper issues behind the problem of cyber-warfare (or even just most plain cyber-crime related to fraud).
:-), the threat (or opportunity) of an upcoming technological singularity, and so on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwar
Most of the movie "War Games" is silly, but this statement from it is profound: "the only winning move is not to play". Or to generalize it, there are finite games and infinite games, and infinite games are about continuing to play, not about winning (see author James P. Carse on _Finite and Infinite Games_).
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-962221125884493114
Now that we are confronted with global warfare, whether nuclear, biological, or cybernetic, we need to rethink what games we want to play. As Albert Einstein said "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking." The same might be said about genetic engineering or the internet. We need to somehow transcend these arms races instead of try to win them.
It continually boggles my mind that people are willing to admit to problems of such extreme magnitude caused by "progress" so far -- like the threat of nuclear war, the threat of bioengineered plagues (or even just cluster bombs and land mines), the threat of economic collapse (speculation, derivatives, etc.), the threat of widespread pollution with unexpected consequences (e.g. endocrine disruptors from plastics), the threat of global climate change, the threat of universal fascism (by "liberals" or "conservatives"
including the threat of cyber-warfare or cyber-crime (essentially the technological face of the usual horsemen: war, plague, famine, leading to death), but then, when faced with these huge threats, the solutions proposed are timid, piecemeal, or regressive. Why not consider that big systemic problems (sometimes resulting from incremental quantitative changes over time adding up to vast qualitative changes) may require widespread transcendental changes (even if just a change of the heart or the prevalent mythology)?
=== the need for mutual security and a resilient civilian infrastructure ===
As long as the US defense strategy is based on strategic dominance of others
"Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance"
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289
and not mutual security for all, the US will not be secure, because it will be a threat to everyone by its own logic. Such a one-sided strategy will promote the development of the very ruinous arms races which have already cost trillions and left both the USA and the now-defunct USSR as losers of the cold war (the USA just taking a little longer to fall from the financial punches of the past few decades).
These issues were outlined in the book _Brittle Power_ in the 1980s,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
mainly in regard to the US energy infrastructure, but the ideas apply everywhere including manufacturing and likely the internet. Systems which balance meshwork and hierarchy
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
(and so are at least moderately decentralized, compared to hierarchical monopolies) will stand the greatest chance of survival. Unfortunately, the civilian systems which the General is charged with protecting are mainly not of that variety. The internet is more-so like this than almost any other system, but it still has its key weaknesses in practice (including widespread use of difficult-to-audit proprietary software like Microsoft Windows). That lack of resiliency is a product of the failure of decades of civilian governance in terms of
Almost all of the good stuff in Java and the JVM (from garbage collection through hotspot compiling) was developed first for Smalltalk, sometimes decades earlier.
Displays in our eyeglasses sounds pretty tame compared to Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0518.html?printable=1
"Vernor Vinge's Hugo-award-winning short science fiction story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" takes place in a near future in which everyone lives in a ubiquitous, wireless, networked world using wearable computers and contacts or glasses on which computer graphics are projected to create an augmented reality."
Hans Moravec was talking about "magic glasses" in the 1980s,
http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/reviews/erin.htm
and you can buy variants of them today
http://www.i-glassesstore.com/
(not quite heads-up, but it is not much of a stretch I've seen prototypes for those, likely even on Slashdot).
If magic glasses was "sci fi" I can imagine why Peter Norton left in disgust. Many people have a real difficulty understanding the nature of exponential growth in technological capacity. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change
Or:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."
It is quite true that forming a corporation you control may in various cases limit your personal losses from the results of the actions of others you employee (e.g. an employee does something wrong, so the only assets at risk are the corporations *and* the employee's for personal negligence, not yours). However, from discussing this issue myself with a non-profit lawyer, my understanding is that if *you* are the one writing the code, you remain personally liable for any problems it has even if you are totally working in good faith, like if you unknowingly infringe a software patent (good licenses can limit these liabilities somewhat). So I think this document is misleading in that it can be read to imply forming a corporation would protect the *author* of the code, when it really at best protects those who participate in the organization (board members) and who do not contribute code. For example, if you contribute problematical code to Apache, the Apache board may not be liable personally (even if Apache organization assets may be at risk), but you still are. So, in short, my understanding is that forming a corporation does not protect the individual contributors significantly from liability for their own personal actions, only from the actions of others (and even then, only when they are unaware of them or not directing them to various degrees). Perhaps they can address that issue in a future release; either indicating I am mis-informed or indicating that what I say is true. This is a very essentially point for individual developers to understand. It is one reason for liability insurance (and maybe the free software world could benefit by a good liability insurance system?) I think this is an important issue to get right, because otherwise it tempts free software developers (like myself) to spend a lot of time (and money) pursuing corporate forms which in the end may not provide much protection anyway for your personal efforts (compared to say, putting assets in the name of your spouse or having professional liability insurance). There may be other good reasons to form or join a non-profit though, but individual liability protection for the developer may not be one of them.
"If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that."
:-)
If everything else is free (or incredibly cheap), why does an author need a return on their time (most of the time)?
See: http:///www.reprap.org (GPL'd 3D fabricator) "Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain M. Banks, 1987.
Do parents need a return for the time they spend with their children? Or, in this case their "mind children"?
In 1997, my wife and I gave away a garden simulator under the GPL (more than six person-years of work)
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
and got the whole free internet in return (including Slashdot). Seems like a good deal to me.
The problem for Douglas Adams was that, as Ian Banks' quote might suggest, he was was *poor* (or felt he was poor, or felt at risk of being poor in the future), where poor essentially means you can't expect reasonable needs to be met without major effort. So Douglas Adams must have felt (perhaps quite correctly) that he needed the ration units to survive (or thrive) in a system oriented around rationing. When scarcity (for most things) comes to an end worldwide, as is happening, then there is not much need for rationing and ration units for most of the basics (energy, food, water, shelter, computing, health care, transportation, etc.) See also, from 1964(!):
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."
To see what such a world might look like in fiction (contrasted to our the recent ways), read James P. Hogan's novel, _Voyage from Yesteryear_.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
Of course, as in James P. Hogan's novel, getting there (post-scarcity ideology dominant) from here (scarcity ideology dominant) is going to be "interesting times". For a more dystopian take on this (if the wealth from cybernation is not shared roughly evenly), see:
"Manna"
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Yes, you're right of course. Terminator would have been a better example (but the Daleks are a lot more over the top). And in fact, worse, the Daleks raise the issue that human/machine symbiosis can lead to bad ends too.
I used to work on simulations of intelligent self-replicating robots until in the 1980s someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after I gave a talk and told me to "keep up the good work". To his credit, I don't know if he was praising me for saying how easy it was to make destructive machines (the first ones were even cannibals until I added a sense of "smell" for recognizing self and other) or my comments on how much harder it would be to make robots that cooperated with each other (or with people). I think that truth remains and shows in the comments here -- predatory Daleks are much easier to build than a collaborative R2D2. I left the field -- fearing the focus of the military funding was likely to be more on the Dalek side of things, and focused more on augmenting human capacities (whether gardening, storytelling, software development, or rethinking industrial infrastructure to be more sustainable and inherently more secure and abundant and peace-promoting). I can sometimes wonder myself if I should have kept working towards cooperative robots (the scene in Silent Running where the drones performed surgery together was always an inspiration), but ultimately transcending war (to peace? to something else?) is more likely to come from the ideas of people like (Mr.) Fred Rogers, Leon Shenandoah, Mahatma Gandhi, or James Carse.
"Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood: Family Communications"
http://www.fci.org/
"To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah"
http://www.amazon.com/Become-Human-Being-Tadodaho-Shenandoah/dp/1571743413
"Gandhi's Words"
http://www.indiaspace.com/quotes.htm
"James P. Carse, Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game, SALT talk"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-962221125884493114
But developing Daleks continues. See Manuel De Landa's book:
"War in the Age of Intelligent Machines"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines
"The next threshold point, or singularity, to be reached, according to de Landa, is the point where man and machine cease to oppose themselves, becoming one single war machine, and when that war machine itself is crossed by the machinic phylum -- this last condition might be compared to Deleuze's call for the desiring molecular machines to use the social machines, instead of being composed and manipulated in order to form a complex molar machines. The developments of artificial intelligence, which will sooner or later lead to the creation of "predatory machines", that is intelligent machines. Even if "the advent of [truly autonomous weapons] may be quite far in the future, the will to endow machines with predatory capabilities has been institutionalized in the [US] military" (p.128) warns de Landa. This disconnection of the war machines from the machinic phylum, of the military institution from the social formation, may result in erratic war machines that become nomads because of a lack of political control: if battles are not strategically ordered following political objectives, then even their victories become meaningless."
And see Manuel De Landa (indirectly) on why intelligent killbots will never work as intended for technical reasons. The implication of what he writes below, is, if an intelligent machine's mind (like a person's) is a mix of hierarchies and meshworks, and receives input from the outside, it will be as unpredictable (or more so) than a person. It might be a good *partner* to people (hopefully for benign tasks like self-driving cars
I should also add:
... At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen, where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command. The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations--to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people's schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history."
http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm
"To speak of the "end" of work is to speak in the passive voice as if work is ending itself, and needs only a nudge from progressive policies to wind down without a fuss. But work is not a natural process like combustion or entropy which runs its course of itself. Work is a social practice reproduced by repeated, multitudinous personal choices. Not free choices usually -- "your money or your life" is, after all, a choice -- but nonetheless acts of human intention. It is (the interaction of many) acts of will which perpetuate work, and it is (the interaction of many) acts of will which will abolish it by a collective adventure speaking in the active voice. Work will end, if it does, because workers end it by choosing to do something else -- by living in a different way."
also: "The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and
Negri" by George Caffentzis
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article1927.html
And the schooling system perpetuates the problem:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7c.htm
"The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus.
http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/
"A sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong."
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/18/loewen.html
"Now, when I asked my audience why educated Americans supported the war, they couldn't figure it out. One thing I heard is that since working-class young men had to go to war, naturally they and their families opposed it. But research shows that when people expect to go to war-whatever educational level they are-they tend to support that war. Because of cognitive dissonance, people come to believe in what they have to do. So I pointed out that there are two social processes, both tied to school, that could help explain why educated people supported the war. One, educated Americans tend to be more successful and affluent, and thus have more allegiance to society. They have a strong incent
http://breakingranks.net/
:-)
"The purpose of this web site is to discuss the social cost of rankism and to develop a grassroots capacity to defend and protect dignity in everyday life. We hope you will join us in planning and building a world without rankism!"
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
http://www.reprap.org/
"[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures--unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
I used to hang out at the robot labs at CMU in the 1980s. What frightened me most about the whole thing of military robotics (as well as mind children) was a combination of arrogance and incompetence (not that I haven't been guilty of both at times myself), which in this area is likely as not to lead to robotic cockroaches that take over the earth (exterminating humankind incidentally) and which then all die off.
If robots that kill autonomously is the answer, you're asking the wrong question.
Check out "Voluntary Simplicity":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Voluntary+Simplicity
Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_living
"Simple living (or voluntary simplicity) is a lifestyle in which individuals consciously choose to minimize the 'more-is-better' pursuit of wealth and consumption. Adherents choose simple living for a variety of reasons, including spirituality, health, increase in 'quality time' for family and friends, stress reduction, conservation, social justice or anti-consumerism, while others choose to live more simply for reasons of personal taste or personal economy. Simple living as a concept is distinguished from those living in forced poverty, as it is a voluntary lifestyle choice. Although asceticism may resemble voluntary simplicity, proponents of simple living are not all ascetics. The term "downshifting" is often used to describe the act of moving from a lifestyle of greater consumption towards a lifestyle based on voluntary simplicity."
Frugality gives you a lot of options. And it isn't about paying the least you can for everything. It is about spending money on what you really need or want in proportion to your true needs and wants (as you consciously define them). For example, if free time to play and record music is important, then don't waste your time making money to rent a bigger apartment than you really need, or buy more gear than you really need, etc.. Frugal living is ultimately about priorities. Ultimately this may culminate in rethinking "work" itself:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Twenty years ago [in 1965], Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
"Free" may be the only thing that "works" in the the long term, check out:
"Why work"
http://www.whywork.org/
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"A critique of a neo-futurist's vision of the decline of work" by Bob Black
http://www.t0.or.at/bobblack/futuwork.htm
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine."
http://www.reprap.org/
"The Triple Revolution" letter to the president sent in 1964
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"Free" used to work in the past in America:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."
Let's hope "free" works again in the future, or we may get this:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"In other words, Manna spread through the American corporate landscape like wildfire. And my dad was right. It was when all of these new Manna systems began talking to each other that things started to get uncomfortable."
A sci-fi novel about a clash of old and new ways of thinking:
_Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=29
That was a great site you mentioned with all sorts of fun activities:
:-) why dump him into the day-prison euphemistically called "school"? :-) "Schooling" has only a tangential relationship to "Educating" in practice.
http://www.poissonrouge.com/
If a younger kid is going to play video games, those are probably the best sorts of them. So too with the other one you mentioned (though it is more about reading):
http://www.starfall.com/
And certainly YouTube offers access to lots of interesting stuff for young kids (buildings being demolished, tornadoes, firetrucks, bagger 288, visualization of new ideas, etc.). Example:
"Take a seat concept: a library seat that follows you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dgaz6NIUFk
And for slightly older kids there is lots of educational video online like from the Annenberg CPB project like "The World of Chemistry"
http://www.learner.org/resources/series61.html
or for younger kids stuff on energy:
http://www.learner.org/resources/series160.html
The late Fred Rogers' "Family Communications" non-profit has lots of good resources too both for kids and parents (CDs, DVDs, web pages, and books):
http://www.fci.org/parenting.asp
Kids can also learn a lot from Rokenbok and other RC toys (even at age four or so).
http://www.rokenbok.com/
The benefits of RC over video games is that the physical RC vehicles can also be pushed around by hand or used with other toys. And a child's eye site continues to develop normally instead of being used at a common fixed distance to the screen.
But there remains a lot to be said for learning from the real world. See:
"Gever Tulley: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/202
"Nature deficit disorder"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_deficit_disorder
The Greeks suggests a good life involves "moderation in all things, including moderation". Or in other words, balance. Might kids grow healthiest at a certain pace? Perhaps too much of one thing (video games, broadcast tv) can mean too little of something else (health, creativity)? See:
http://www.openwaldorf.com/media.html
It's certainly a complex topic, but again, if kids are going to use video games, then the links you pointed to are fantastic ones, and much more likely to promote creativity than staring at less engaging and less interactive fare than advertisement and fear/sarcasm driven broadcast TV.
Also, now that you've gone and helped your kid get smarter than average,
See John Taylor Gatto:
"The Underground History of American Education":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
John Holt:
"Teach your own"
http://www.holtgws.com/
Unschooling:
http://www.unschooling.info/articles.htm
_Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Batteri
Check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theory
"The discovery of the Jones polynomial by Vaughan Jones in 1984, and subsequent contributions from Edward Witten, Maxim Kontsevich, and others, revealed deep connections between knot theory and mathematical methods in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. A plethora of knot invariants have been invented since then, utilizing sophisticated tools such as quantum groups and Floer homology. In the last 30 years, knot theory has also become a tool in applied mathematics. Chemists and biologists use knot theory to understand, for example, chirality of molecules and the actions of enzymes on DNA."
With the way electronics is disappearing into products, possibly almost nothing a child learns now about electronics from toys will be that useful in two decades.
Building with LEGO, making and untying knots, playing with sand and water, staring out the window and noticing a rainbow -- that's the route to genius, or at least solid engineering IMHO.
Maybe watching TV with a friend is better than watching it alone?
1. How a NASA-based educational MMO should be designed.
Think Big. NASA's MMO network should eventually have a worldwide support involving hundreds to thousands of NASA personnel who seed content into the system or supervise the system in various ways. It might entail tens of thousands of server nodes as well as extensively involve users machines for local processing. Naturally, some parts of the operation of the system might be outsourced, like to Amazon's or Sun's pay-as-you-go virtualized cloud computing infrastructures. NASA's MMO framework should be he definitive place worldwide to go for manufacturing knowledge -- like Wikipedia only about how to make things and simulate them and develop software to control all that. Yes, there are some sites like Marshall Brain's "How Stuff Works" but this will eclipse those by several orders of magnitude in terms of detail (and people like him would be good consultants on content if they were willing to contribute under free licenses).
The entire thing should be done under a free and open source license, including all content contributions. This may entail getting all non-NASA participants to contribute a signed document about their involvement with the project.
It should be done by NASA cooperating with the existing leaders in the open source and free software projects, like by looking at SourceForge or FSF projects (many projects already exist for physic modeling and MMORGs in a variety of ways). Hiring an existing commercial MMO group creates two conflicts -- one is that this project could detract from a current online offering, the other is that there will be a temptation not to release the details of simulation technologies (And so keep huge chunks of the software or content proprietary) or to provide older packages other than what is being commercially promoted. There is lots of knowledge in the free and open source world on how to do big systems and how to write simulation software.
Been thinking about this on and off for over ten years (including kicking around some ideas with with Al Globus in the past, not that that means he endorses anything here).
See NASA pre-proposal from about ten years ago: "Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge)
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
See SSI paper of about seven years ago: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to the Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
Knowledge should be stored in a RDF-like approach (similar to how our Pointrel data storage system works).
http://pointrel.sourceforge.net/
Open software architectures should be used, like our PataPata project tried (similar to Squeak or Python, maybe on Java):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/patapata
Overall architecture will be a hierarchy of simulated activities, structured across a loose meshwork of nodes. There will also be multiple levels of realism and detail.
It should be planned as incremental and evolutionary changes as hardware and software continue to improve -- in part from the use of this system itself for design and simulation.
2. How a NASA-based educational MMO should support both formal and informal education efforts.
Make a general learning tool usable by everyone; create safer filtered whitelisted subsets of it for use in classrooms. The use of an RDF-like approach helps support this kind of tagging and filtering across multiple data sources.
3. How a NASA-based educational MMO should connect to current and future NASA missions.
Add NASA data and knowledge to the system including detailed plans for NASA equipment. Participants will help desig
Check out the free PlantStudio software:
:-) [I'm one of the developers.]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/index.htm
Originally for Windows, but runs under WINE.
"PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. The PlantStudio software simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure. You can "grow" plants over their life cycles, producing lifelike images at any age. You can design, animate and breed a wide variety of plants. By using the "evolutionary arts" of variation and selection in the plant breeder, you can quickly and easily create whole families of unique plants for your 3D scenes."
It's about ten years old, but still useful.
While I'm not specifically disputing what you say, for a little context, Africa was (and to an extent, still is) the site of hundreds of years of brutal European colonialization (including by European and American slavers), which broke apart pre-existing family and tribal traditions in Africa. While in some ways not as bad as what happened in North America (where the indigenous population was mostly wiped out and displaced by various means), clearly there is historical reason for anger in Africa towards the West. See for example: ... The post-colonial era was still in its first decade, but already all over the continent, things were falling apart - partially because, when Africa was split up between the great imperialist powers in the nineteenth century, the map of Africa was arbitrarily redrawn. Families and whole tribes had been split up into separate countries. Rival kingdoms, who had for centuries shared borders and warred with each other, suddenly found themselves redefined as one people. "
... Clearly, Africa does need the world's help. But Africa's destiny can be changed for the better only by Africans themselves. To borrow Benjamin Franklin's words, we must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately. We must come together, not in a sentimental but ultimately pointless spirit of nationalist phrase-making, but to pull ourselves, together, out of this mess we're in."
"Africans on Africa: Colonialism"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4653125.stm
"Take corruption, the great scourge of Africa. For historians like Stephen Morrison, Director of the Africa Programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, this modern day curse has its clear roots in the colonial era. The colonial state was "inherently authoritarian", he told me. "If you held power, it allowed an ability to skim and award contracts and the like - it promoted a corrupt form of government in many places," he added. There have long been arguments about the pernicious effects on Africa of colonial rule. But it is a complex picture.
This post isn't meant to justify people being bad to each other, just to provide some context for understanding the emotional roots of it, in the interest of moving forward. As that article (Africans on Africa: Colonialism) continues:
"All the same, nearly 50 years since the end of the colonial era, is it time perhaps for us to stop blaming the trauma of that encounter for all our problems? Who truly is to blame for this? To my mind, many of Africa's most profound problems stem from the way Africans look at themselves: all too often, Africa suffers from low self-esteem. All too often, Africans see themselves mirrored in the eyes of the west - of those rich former colonial powers who like to regard Africans only as victims. And, all too often, Africans become the distorted images reflected in these mirrors.
In theory, government has other ways of raising funds than taxing and confiscation of physical property. Import and export duties, for example. Or renting the public airwaves. Or charging an annual fee for keeping copyrighted world out of the public domain (the rights holder can self-assess what the fee would be, and anyone who can pay, say, 100x that to the rights holder could buy it out into the public domain). Or charging admission to national parks. Or renting public land. Probably lots more ways as well.
Governments can do lots of things well. Though ultimately we need to move beyond an economy based on a scarcity-oriented world view to one with an abundance-oriented world view.
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."
From the vice-provost of CalTech, Dr. David Goodstein:
... If federal support for basic research were to be doubled (as many are calling for), the result would merely be to tack on a few more years of exponential expansion before we'd find ourselves in exactly the same situation again. Lederman has performed a valuable service in promoting public debate of an issue that has worried me for a long time (the remark he quoted is one I made in 1979), but the issue itself is really just a symptom of the larger fact that the era of exponential expansion [of PhDs] has come to an end. The End of the Frontier could just as well have been called The Big Crunch. ... The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists."
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's.
That's the deeper problem; read the entire linked article for more on it and some possible solutions.
Sorry, but unfortunately someone has decided to take our collective Universe down in a few minutes for system maintenance and an upgrade, so you won't get your chance. Of course, history will also be rewritten, and the new concept will be called a "Stargate". :-)
Just as a followup, as others have posted about online, I just bought a cheap I/O Magic SATA enclosure (at CompUSA's going out of business sale -- the end of an era for me, I wish the staff luck), and the old drive itself apparently works in the new enclosure. It took half an hour or more to pry the case apart (and some pinched fingers). These directions were helpful in the end (see the Nov 05, 2007 11:39 post), :-) Anyway, sounds like Seagate may still make good drives, but their FreeAgent Pro enclosures are problematical.
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/24609792/m/783007917831
but the case is very scratched up in the process. I managed incorrectly to get a screwdriver between the metal enclosure and a plastic backing with the clips, which made everything harder until I realized that. Not that I would use the case again for anything anyway if it is what burned out. Anyway, I said I'd never trust the drive, but we'll see (maybe I'll find a good use for it where reliability is not an big issue). Hard to imagine twenty years ago talking about conservatively junking half a terabyte of storage.
Thanks for all the replies suggesting encryption as a matter of course. I can see now that is an especially good idea if you ever intend to take advantage of hard drive warranties.