http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html "A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "
See also the "Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964, which I quote here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "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 potent
"Nothing sharpens your mind as much as having to discuss/cooperate/compete with other very bright minds"
Thus we have Slashdot; I have learned so much from it over the past twelve or so years.:-)
BTW, Alfie Kohn on "Competition versus Excellence": http://www.alfiekohn.org/miscellaneous/cve.htm "In a comprehensive review of 245 classroom studies that found a significant achievement difference between cooperative and competitive environments, David Johnson and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota reported that 87 percent of the time the advantage went to the cooperative approach. That result concerns bottom-line learning and doesn't even include the enhanced ability to get along with other people. In visiting classrooms where cooperative learning is used, I like to ask students to describe the experience in their own words. One ten-year-old boy thought a moment and replied, "It's like you have four brains." By contrast, a competitor's single brain often shuts off when given no reason to learn except to triumph over his or her classmates."
With laser launch systems, we would all have Cheap Access to Space. And then we could develop self-replicating space habitats to make lots of new land and collects lots of solar energy for use in space. So, we could then support quadrillions of people in style in the solar system.
Instead, it sounds like most of the money is going to make technology to do ourselves in fighting over land and oil.
This is just another example of the dangerous deep ironies of people steeped in 19th century "security" strategy holding 21st century technology in their hands: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
The article makes a lot of sense. Here is a twist on it. Iodine helps the body get rid of heavy metals. Overworked soils can become depleted of iodine. Maybe it happened to the Romans too? Although the USA stupidly made it worse starting in the 1960s by reducing the use of iodine in bread, which may have made the leaded gasoline issue worse: http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james37.htm "Forty years ago the food industry decided to remove iodine from baked goods and replace the iodine with bromine. Iodine and bromine appear similar to the thyroid gland and bromine easily binds to the thyroid gland's receptors for iodine. Bromine, however, is of no value to the thyroid gland unlike iodine and it inhibits the activity of iodine in the thyroid gland. Bromine also can cause impaired thinking and memory, drowsiness, dizziness and irritability. This substitution of bromine for iodine has resulted in nearly universal deficiency of iodine in the American populace. Iodine therapy helps the body eliminate fluoride, bromine, *lead*, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum and mercury. Could this substitution of bromine for iodine have been carried out to increase diseases and thus create more need for pharmaceutical drugs?" [My emphasis]
http://solarroadways.com/intro.shtml "Suppose we made a section of road out of this material and housed solar cells to collect energy, which could pay for the cost of the panel, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. What if we added LEDs to "paint" the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface (like the defrosting wire in the rear window of our cars) to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates? The ideas and possibilities just continued to roll in and the Solar Roadway project was born.
In 2009, we received a contract from the Federal Highway Administration to build the first ever Solar Road Panel prototype. During the course of its construction, we learned many lessons and discovered new and better ways to approach this project. These methods and discoveries are discussed throughout this website. Please enjoy and send us any questions that you may have....
The Solar Roadway is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels that collect energy to be used by our homes and businesses. Our ultimate goal is to be able to store excess energy in or alongside the Solar Roadways. This renewable energy replaces the need for the current fossil fuels used for the generation of electricity. This, in turn, cuts greenhouse gases literally in half....
Each individual panel consists of three basic layers:
Road Surface Layer - translucent and high-strength, it is rough enough to provide great traction, yet still passes sunlight through to the solar collector cells embedded within, along with LEDs and a heating element. It is capable of handling today's heaviest loads under the worst of conditions. Weatherproof, it protects the electronics layer beneath it.
Electronics Layer - Contains a microprocessor board with support circuitry for sensing loads on the surface and controlling a heating element. No more snow/ice removal and no more school/business closings due to inclement weather. The on-board microprocessor controls lighting, communications, monitoring, etc. With a communications device every 12 feet, the Solar Roadway is an intelligent highway system.
Base Plate Layer - While the electronics layer collects energy from the sun, it is the base plate layer that distributes power (collected from the electronics layer) and data signals (phone, TV, internet, etc.) "downline" to all homes and businesses connected to the Solar Roadway. Weatherproof, it protects the electronics layer above it....
When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the intelligent Solar Roadway is formed. These panels replace current driveways, parking lots, and all road systems, be they interstate highways, state routes, downtown streets, residential streets, or even plain dirt or gravel country roads. Panels can also be used in amusement parks, raceways, bike paths, parking garage rooftops, remote military locations, etc. Any home or business connected to the Solar Roadway (via a Solar Road Panel driveway or parking lot) receives the power and data signals that the Solar Roadway provides. The Solar Roadway becomes an intelligent, self-healing, decentralized (secure) power grid. "
So, I can believe blue morning and red evening would help as mentioned in the article, but I would expect that the participants are getting vitamin d deficient too, because the RDAs are generally several times too low (at least in the USA, not sure about Russia). See also: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
Phytonutrients act in part as dailyanti-cancer chemotherapy for your cells, and are vital building blocks like for the pigments in your eyes, and are essential for the immune system to work well, and on and on. When you eat a lot of meat, which generally has a lot of fat these days, or eat a lot of other animal products, you crowd essential phytonutrients out of your diet. Still, it is true that animal products can concentrate other vital nutrients, like iodine, that may otherwise be hard to come by in vegetables grown on depleted soils (unless you eat sea vegetables with a lot of iodine).
That said, perhaps this in vitro meat can be engineered to have a large amount of phytonutrients as well as things like omega-3s (also originally from plants ingested by animals)?
But we don't need many animal products of any sort to be healthy or happy, as above. But we do need to learn a lot about nutrition. Starch-focused vegan diets, for example, tend to be very unhealthy, compared to vegetable-focused vegan diets.
And another innovation in this area would include producing oranges without the tree, or orange juice without the orange, perhaps in indoor farms (with LED lights maybe powered by hot or cold fusion energy someday).
Even for in vitro meat, in vitro meat broth might be easier, an idea I can thank Bryan Bishop for suggesting.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/ "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air...."
Or also: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "
For ways beyond that, see my online book: "Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease" http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
Maybe from vitamin D deficiency, not enough exercise, not enough mind-body interaction -- as well as the fact that one can "prove" any crazy thing by logic in the absence of experimental validation?
It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.
Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.
The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation. http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer: http://remineralize.org/
And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).
The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s
Princeton: "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model". I presented an analogical story about why simpler thinking could be better for survival because it allowed faster reaction times. I developed some of those ideas into a couple of conference presentations and made a couple related simulations of self-replicating robots in the late 1980s.
Then I wrote an (unpublished) essay about it in a PhD grad program at SUNY Stony Brook in Ecology and Evolution around the early 1990s, outlining why Hydras did not have brains, focusing there more on the actual cost to the organism to have a big brain. Not much traction there then. I had another cool idea there about the normal distribution as an ideal search function for an arbitrary discontinuous problem space.
My wife (who I met in E&E grad school around then) did her graduate thesis work on why foraging theory was wrong because sometimes organisms that made "dumb" decisions would do better than ones that all made "Smarter" decisions that set them in competition with each other. Just today we were discussion this, and I was thinking that for social species, it would make sense for individuals to move to a food source with a probability related to its relative size, so that the population could forage optimally. That might explain aspects of human behavior where people seem to make "dumb" decisions, perhaps also reflected in behavior of troops of bonobos or chimps. I might predict that solitary foragers might do less of that? Probably some PhD or even Nobel Prize in that for someone else.:-)
Glad to see this kind of research is going mainstream a couple decades later. Back then, especially as I was motivated in this direction by thinking about robotics and AI, such ideas were very far out of the mainstream. They were not rejected so much as mainly ignored or not understood. Plus, I wanted to build what I thought would be a next stage in human (co-)evolution -- the self-replicating space habitat, and that took things way too far...
I thought about those ideas in part from reading people like Victor Serebriakoff and his book "Brain", Gregory Bateson and "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", Norbert Weiner on Cybernetics and "The Human Use of Human Beings", and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan also underlay some bunch of that. And then at my advisor's suggestion because I was looking into this area, "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg (possibly a pre-release copy?) and "Man, Robot and Society: Models and Speculations" by Masanao Toda talking about "The Fungus Eater" robot thought experiment. This was before "Evolutionary Psychology" became a field of its own eventually.
It is possible that these time, material, heat, and energy costs of computation may define limits that prevents many of the scenarios people outline for various flavors of computational "Singularity". Like everything, intelligence can have diminishing returns depending on the level and the context -- although it might also have threshold where exceeding some level may change the nature of the survival game entirely too.
Although environment has a lot to do with intelligence, too. And there are ways that today has the most interesting environment in some ways, even if unhealthy diets and lifestyles are probably greatly diminishing intelligence a lot too these days.
I think asteroid capture is a cool idea. However, it just brings closer the day where a single patient-but-psychopathic physics major with a laptop and a solar-sail-propelled spacecraft could slightly deflect a bigger asteroid and destroy all life on the planet. My guess for that is around 2050 (such a laptop would be more powerful than all of Google today), if humanity still exists the -- although it might take hundreds of years for a cheap spacecraft to do that. Although we'll probably reach the point where the average biochemistry major could wipe out the human race with an engineered plague first (2030?) -- which is a good reason to develop self-replicating space, underwater, and antarctic habitats first, and this project is a step towards that, and so probably worth the risk.
No one ever talked about the human genome project as like giving copies of the keys to your house away to every random stranger on the planet. But humanity has been protected through genetic security by obscurity, and that obscurity is rapidly being dispelled through all the best of intentions... (even though simply eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans, and getting enough vitamin D, iodine, and omega-3s will accomplish much but not all of the promises of genetic medicine). And that's not even talking about the threats of systems designed directly by the military as weapons of mass destruction or mass confusion...
So, we need to rethink our approach to security, emphasizing mutual security and intrinsic security, like I talk about at that essay. I can only hope the US or global defense establishment stops investing mainly in preparing to face 20th century threats and starts thinking about effectively preparing to deal with emerging 21st century threats. F-22 Raptors are just more "security theater" when major 21st existential threats are things like plagues, asteroids, nanobots, killer robots, deadly financial dogmas, and bureaucracies out of control.
But hey, I lost out on getting a PhD at Princeton in the 1980s on this stuff in part because in the 1980s I would not go along with the game there of justifying optimally picking on nickels before an existential steamroller (even though I missed out on understanding the power of networks): http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
I can hope the same sort of social force and group think behind those financial threats that finally emerged in 2008 won't apply entirely to contemplating these existential threats still to come. We all need some security. The issue is how we go about getting it non-ironically.
The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.
There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).
See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im
Elaborating on my previous posts, as I wrote about in a term paper project for a 1980s college undergraduate course run by Prof. Steve Slaby, called "The Technological Imperative of the Arms Race", technology is an amplifier -- the question is, what sorts of things do we want to amplify?
The book "Descartes' Error" makes the point that we can't "reason" without emotions. This seems obvious to me now, but back in college it did not seem so in a philosophical sense. Modern psychology can show us how our emotions drive our reasoning process (even as reasoning can provide feedback that may affect our emotions and again our reasoning etc.). And our emotions are generally first determined by our values (including psycho-physiologically values, like perhaps a instinctive reaction to a snake or a bad smell). And those values in turn are generally determined by our personal biology, our family upbringing, our friends and neighbors, our personal history, and our culture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
Albert Einstein talks about aspects of that in an essay at this link where he says that science can perhaps tell us something about what seems to be, but science can never tell us what should be. And our thoughts on what should be are the basis of our actions (including how we direct our thoughts). The essay: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
I was thinking as I read the New Yorker article (around the part I stopped at), that these scientists, or at least the scientific enterprise in general, had other choices than to make the next weapon or the next defense for a theoretical attack. They could have focused on using science to make the world work better for everyone (or at least most people) and thus reduce conflicts, like Bucky Fuller did with his focus on "Livingry". They also could have researched the social and organizational issues behind war and other conflicts, like Morton Deutsch did or Alfie Kohn did. Thus this essay by me mentioning such people:
Also on this theme: "The World Was Probably Already Destroyed" http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/ "Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation.... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion...."
I have for a time made a little niche creating a little ripple with my sig on the irory of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as well as related writings. That is a little ripple that may only be meaningful as a "trimtab" when surveillance AIs newly emerging into sentience decades from now process it from all the other stuff being archived these days.:-) Perhaps even after the human race is physically long gone from our follies as above?:-( Recent example: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/12/06/0055206/army-tests-autonomous-black-hawk-helicopter
Would I like to do more such as with various other projects I've tried that have not gone very far in reality (educational simulations, self-replicating space habitats, design libraries, social-semantic desktops, etc.). Sure, but at least I can do something even if it is small. Our path out of any technological singularity may have a lot to do with our path going into one. Every little effort may make a difference. So, as I see it, with every email I send and slashdot post I make, I'm potentially programming the values of computers that won't exist for decades.:-) Well, or statistically as above, I guess I'm most likely perhaps programming an infinite chain of future simulated versions of the same computers that are already simulating me? What an admittedly odd way to spend so much time...:-)
Although, that is not that different from the plant growth algorithm my wife and I developed in our PlantStudio software, which grows structures through successive iterations on a numerical seed. And it is in keeping with someone else's point on the interrelation between the universe coming into being and our own personal growth. And of course everyone is doing that kind of programming too with every Slashdot post or twitter or text message; I'm just more aware of the possibility perhaps. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor
So, in that sense, are we creating our own future "God" at some moral and physical temperature? Which is a different argument from saying we are "God" or that we see "God" in our own image. And even different from this ultra-short sci-fi story (only as big as the previous paragraph): ""Is there a God?" sci-fi short story âoeAnswerâ by Fredric Brown" http://obront.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/is-there-a-god-sci-fi-short-story/
I wish I could remember the author or title of a journal article my (sadly late, just found out recently) advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, had laying around about 1984, which talked about mind as an infinite tower of effectively simulations. I'm sure that theme may also pop up in some religions, especially Eastern ones. Perhaps it indeed is simulated turtles all the way down?:-)
Maybe because the Great Programmer wanted us to be able to use buffer overruns to invoke the debugger and thus do magic? http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&cid=33042664 http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=33043184 "I've thought about writing a sci-fi novel based around three interacting groups (taking off on Arthur C. Clark's ideas of any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic): * Those who have expanded human consciousness in a transhumanist technical nanotech/biotech direction and can do magical-looking things like with nanotech (like when nanites rebuilt the Red Dwarf). * Those who have found this debugger link or just a bug and can affect reality in magical seeming ways (so, like Harry Potter or Earthsea, where words an incantations and symbolic movements and symbolic devices like wands are combined to create patterns that invoke complex programs written in arcane symbols, such as from "lumos" causing light to all sorts of complex spells invoked in complex ways -- maybe with a high degree of secrecy involved in who makes these things and who is told about them). * Those who have just expanded humanity in a brute-force sort of way throughout the solar system and beyond through self-replicating space habitats duplicating themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, and maybe also have recently learned to tap zero-point energy and so create energy and matter in empty space (so, they can duplicate things out of thin vacuum as it were). I have no idea where that would go. But those are the major sorts of "magic" things I can imagine in our future, and all are hard-sci-fi "plausible". Would the mystery of consciousness be an underlying theme?"
Or perhaps there are deeper aesthetic issues involved that we have only just begun to be aware of?:-) http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34980884 "Still, ultimately, you may be right as far as there always being some issue to be in conflict about, and how on a cosmic scale, groups may well disagree fundamentally about things like enclosing stars. I'm also reminded of the Red Dwarf theme of David Lister's cat's descendants fighting over what color hats they should be wearing.:-) So, I'll go you one further -- are people going to fight over what color-temperature their local Dyson sphere should be tuned to?:-) Or even the color-temperature of the universe? Would you like a naturally balmy 2.725 K background temperature in the universe, or is that excessively wasteful and just an unasthetic looking color, and 2.724 K would be better?:-) Or maybe a slightly warmer 2.726 K would be worth it for making a peppier cosmos?"
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
"A basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. It is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries in three important ways:
* it is being paid to individuals rather than households;
* it is paid irrespective of any income from other sources;
* it is paid without requiring the performance of any work or the willingness to accept a job if offered.
Liberty and equality, efficiency and community, common ownership of the Earth and equal sharing in the benefits of technical progress, the flexibility of the labour market and the dignity of the poor, the fight against inhumane working conditions, against the desertification of the countryside and against interregional inequalities, the viability of cooperatives and the promotion of adult education, autonomy from bosses, husbands and bureaucrats, have all been invoked in its favour.
But it is the inability to tackle unemployment with conventional means that has led in the last decade or so to the idea being taken seriously throughout Europe by a growing number of scholars and organizations. Social policy and economic policy can no longer be conceived separately, and basic income is increasingly viewed as the only viable way of reconciling two of their respective central objectives: poverty relief and full employment.
There is a wide variety of proposals around. They differ according to the amounts involved, the source of funding, the nature and size of the reductions in other transfers, and along many other dimensions. As far as short-term proposals are concerned, however, the current discussion is focusing increasingly on so-called partial basic income schemes which would not be full substitutes for present guaranteed income schemes but would provide a low - and slowly increasing - basis to which other incomes, including the remaining social security benefits and means-tested guaranteed income supplements, could be added.
Many prominent European social scientists have now come out in favour of basic income - among them two Nobel laureates in economics. In a few countries some major politicians, including from parties in government, are also beginning to stick their necks out in support of it. At the same time, the relevant literature - on the economic, ethical, political and legal aspects - is gradually expanding and those promoting the idea, or just interested in it, in various European countries and across the world have started organizing into an active network. "
See also the "Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964, which I quote here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"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 potent
"Nothing sharpens your mind as much as having to discuss/cooperate/compete with other very bright minds"
Thus we have Slashdot; I have learned so much from it over the past twelve or so years. :-)
BTW, Alfie Kohn on "Competition versus Excellence":
http://www.alfiekohn.org/miscellaneous/cve.htm
"In a comprehensive review of 245 classroom studies that found a significant achievement difference between cooperative and competitive environments, David Johnson and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota reported that 87 percent of the time the advantage went to the cooperative approach. That result concerns bottom-line learning and doesn't even include the enhanced ability to get along with other people. In visiting classrooms where cooperative learning is used, I like to ask students to describe the experience in their own words. One ten-year-old boy thought a moment and replied, "It's like you have four brains." By contrast, a competitor's single brain often shuts off when given no reason to learn except to triumph over his or her classmates."
http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/
The same may be starting in medicine and (re)realizing how important nutrition is:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Informative summary, thanks 0x7e!
Some other economic and political aspects as well:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3365133&cid=42539793
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
http://blog.vitamindcouncil.org/2011/12/07/the-difference-between-a-prophet-and-a-madman/
Adequate iodine may help prevent infections, too:
http://www.jmbblog.com/2009/11/iodine-the-forgotten-weapon-against-influenza-viruses/
So may eating a lot more vegetables:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html
Any chance you made ofther changes in your diet and/or lifestyle about the same time?
If about fifty percent of medical staff avoid flu shots, what does that mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
With laser launch systems, we would all have Cheap Access to Space. And then we could develop self-replicating space habitats to make lots of new land and collects lots of solar energy for use in space. So, we could then support quadrillions of people in style in the solar system.
Instead, it sounds like most of the money is going to make technology to do ourselves in fighting over land and oil.
This is just another example of the dangerous deep ironies of people steeped in 19th century "security" strategy holding 21st century technology in their hands:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
The article makes a lot of sense. Here is a twist on it. Iodine helps the body get rid of heavy metals. Overworked soils can become depleted of iodine. Maybe it happened to the Romans too? Although the USA stupidly made it worse starting in the 1960s by reducing the use of iodine in bread, which may have made the leaded gasoline issue worse:
http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james37.htm
"Forty years ago the food industry decided to remove iodine from baked goods and replace the iodine with bromine. Iodine and bromine appear similar to the thyroid gland and bromine easily binds to the thyroid gland's receptors for iodine. Bromine, however, is of no value to the thyroid gland unlike iodine and it inhibits the activity of iodine in the thyroid gland. Bromine also can cause impaired thinking and memory, drowsiness, dizziness and irritability. This substitution of bromine for iodine has resulted in nearly universal deficiency of iodine in the American populace. Iodine therapy helps the body eliminate fluoride, bromine, *lead*, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum and mercury. Could this substitution of bromine for iodine have been carried out to increase diseases and thus create more need for pharmaceutical drugs?" [My emphasis]
Seaweed can be a good source of iodine, BTW.
http://solarroadways.com/intro.shtml ... ...
"Suppose we made a section of road out of this material and housed solar cells to collect energy, which could pay for the cost of the panel, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. What if we added LEDs to "paint" the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface (like the defrosting wire in the rear window of our cars) to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates? The ideas and possibilities just continued to roll in and the Solar Roadway project was born.
In 2009, we received a contract from the Federal Highway Administration to build the first ever Solar Road Panel prototype. During the course of its construction, we learned many lessons and discovered new and better ways to approach this project. These methods and discoveries are discussed throughout this website. Please enjoy and send us any questions that you may have.
The Solar Roadway is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels that collect energy to be used by our homes and businesses. Our ultimate goal is to be able to store excess energy in or alongside the Solar Roadways. This renewable energy replaces the need for the current fossil fuels used for the generation of electricity. This, in turn, cuts greenhouse gases literally in half....
Each individual panel consists of three basic layers:
Road Surface Layer - translucent and high-strength, it is rough enough to provide great traction, yet still passes sunlight through to the solar collector cells embedded within, along with LEDs and a heating element. It is capable of handling today's heaviest loads under the worst of conditions. Weatherproof, it protects the electronics layer beneath it.
Electronics Layer - Contains a microprocessor board with support circuitry for sensing loads on the surface and controlling a heating element. No more snow/ice removal and no more school/business closings due to inclement weather. The on-board microprocessor controls lighting, communications, monitoring, etc. With a communications device every 12 feet, the Solar Roadway is an intelligent highway system.
Base Plate Layer - While the electronics layer collects energy from the sun, it is the base plate layer that distributes power (collected from the electronics layer) and data signals (phone, TV, internet, etc.) "downline" to all homes and businesses connected to the Solar Roadway. Weatherproof, it protects the electronics layer above it.
When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the intelligent Solar Roadway is formed. These panels replace current driveways, parking lots, and all road systems, be they interstate highways, state routes, downtown streets, residential streets, or even plain dirt or gravel country roads. Panels can also be used in amusement parks, raceways, bike paths, parking garage rooftops, remote military locations, etc. Any home or business connected to the Solar Roadway (via a Solar Road Panel driveway or parking lot) receives the power and data signals that the Solar Roadway provides. The Solar Roadway becomes an intelligent, self-healing, decentralized (secure) power grid. "
Example: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/research-reveals-link-between-low-vitamin-d-and-military-suicide/
"Research published this past week is the first to report that low vitamin D levels are associated with an increased risk for suicide in US military personnel."
Seasonal Affective Disorder is well known to be correlated with low sunlight levels:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/mental-health-and-learning-disorders/depression/
So, I can believe blue morning and red evening would help as mentioned in the article, but I would expect that the participants are getting vitamin d deficient too, because the RDAs are generally several times too low (at least in the USA, not sure about Russia). See also: http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
... which meat of any sort does not have: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
Phytonutrients act in part as dailyanti-cancer chemotherapy for your cells, and are vital building blocks like for the pigments in your eyes, and are essential for the immune system to work well, and on and on. When you eat a lot of meat, which generally has a lot of fat these days, or eat a lot of other animal products, you crowd essential phytonutrients out of your diet. Still, it is true that animal products can concentrate other vital nutrients, like iodine, that may otherwise be hard to come by in vegetables grown on depleted soils (unless you eat sea vegetables with a lot of iodine).
Here is how to recalibrate your taste buds for healthy eating:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
That said, perhaps this in vitro meat can be engineered to have a large amount of phytonutrients as well as things like omega-3s (also originally from plants ingested by animals)?
But we don't need many animal products of any sort to be healthy or happy, as above. But we do need to learn a lot about nutrition. Starch-focused vegan diets, for example, tend to be very unhealthy, compared to vegetable-focused vegan diets.
But at least in vitro meat would be an improvement over the current situation:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/links.html
And another innovation in this area would include producing oranges without the tree, or orange juice without the orange, perhaps in indoor farms (with LED lights maybe powered by hot or cold fusion energy someday).
Even for in vitro meat, in vitro meat broth might be easier, an idea I can thank Bryan Bishop for suggesting.
Sounds fascinating, thanks! http://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640
http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/ ..."
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off. Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air.
Or also:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias. "
For ways beyond that, see my online book:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
Or this book by Jeff Schmidt:
http://www.disciplinedminds.com/
Maybe from vitamin D deficiency, not enough exercise, not enough mind-body interaction -- as well as the fact that one can "prove" any crazy thing by logic in the absence of experimental validation?
On the general topic see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
It's true that people take up space and use up resources. But they also create spaces worth being in and produce resources. Also, the more people we have, the more innovation we have. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
Most of the USA's land and about half its water goes to livestock agriculture. The livestock runoff then pollutes most of the other half. See:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.ravediet.com/
While a small amount of clean organic naturally-fed unprocessed meat (especially fish before mercury and dioxin polluted them) may be healthy in a diet, the quantities and types of animal product most US Americans are eating are part of why US health is so poor.
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
On Earth, we could reduce water consumption by growing vegetables indoors. But in any case, we can always condense fresh water out of the air or distill it from the oceans if we have cheap energy, which we will get soon from cheap solar panels (and maybe cheap hot or cold fusion soon). The more people, the sooner we will get those innovation breakthroughs.
Since the Solar System could support quadrillions of people living in style in space habitats, even if one was to argue the Earth was overpopulated, even limited agricultural land is no reason to limit human population growth any time soon, even if one might suggest an aesthetic limit on the Earth perhaps, like putting an occupancy limit on a restaurant in a city.
The repentant anti-GMO activist is wrong on the need for GMOs, because GMOs (even if safe) are solving the wrong problem. To begin with, people starve or are malnourished for economic reasons that could be solved with a global "basic income". The market does not hear the needs of people without money, so the simplest solution to malnutrition is to give people money so the market will listen to their needs. Yes, this requires some level of social consensus leading to enforced redistribution of resources. Frances Moore Lappe and others explains why less people does not mean less starvation.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/food-theres-lots-it
http://windward.hawaii.edu/facstaff/dagrossa-p/articles/WhyCantPeopleFeedThemselves.pdf
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Although a semi-rebuttal to Lappe that ignores distribution issues:
http://www.hoodrivernews.com/news/2002/sep/18/lappe-response-think-locally-starve-globally/
Agricultural robotics (including for the home gardener) and solar panels are going to change the face of agriculture over the next twenty years to produce lots of food for all, if we want that future:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We do not need GMO crops to feed the planet. What we need is to do things like grind up rocks to make cheap organic fertilizer:
http://remineralize.org/
And then we need a space program. And we need to be better stewards of the oceans (rather than overfish because our economic systems are broken in that sense).
The current focus on plant breeding, whether GMO or conventional, has produced monocultures of crops that are dependent on s
Princeton: "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model". I presented an analogical story about why simpler thinking could be better for survival because it allowed faster reaction times. I developed some of those ideas into a couple of conference presentations and made a couple related simulations of self-replicating robots in the late 1980s.
Then I wrote an (unpublished) essay about it in a PhD grad program at SUNY Stony Brook in Ecology and Evolution around the early 1990s, outlining why Hydras did not have brains, focusing there more on the actual cost to the organism to have a big brain. Not much traction there then. I had another cool idea there about the normal distribution as an ideal search function for an arbitrary discontinuous problem space.
My wife (who I met in E&E grad school around then) did her graduate thesis work on why foraging theory was wrong because sometimes organisms that made "dumb" decisions would do better than ones that all made "Smarter" decisions that set them in competition with each other. Just today we were discussion this, and I was thinking that for social species, it would make sense for individuals to move to a food source with a probability related to its relative size, so that the population could forage optimally. That might explain aspects of human behavior where people seem to make "dumb" decisions, perhaps also reflected in behavior of troops of bonobos or chimps. I might predict that solitary foragers might do less of that? Probably some PhD or even Nobel Prize in that for someone else. :-)
Glad to see this kind of research is going mainstream a couple decades later. Back then, especially as I was motivated in this direction by thinking about robotics and AI, such ideas were very far out of the mainstream. They were not rejected so much as mainly ignored or not understood. Plus, I wanted to build what I thought would be a next stage in human (co-)evolution -- the self-replicating space habitat, and that took things way too far...
I thought about those ideas in part from reading people like Victor Serebriakoff and his book "Brain", Gregory Bateson and "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", Norbert Weiner on Cybernetics and "The Human Use of Human Beings", and "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan also underlay some bunch of that. And then at my advisor's suggestion because I was looking into this area, "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg (possibly a pre-release copy?) and "Man, Robot and Society: Models and Speculations" by Masanao Toda talking about "The Fungus Eater" robot thought experiment. This was before "Evolutionary Psychology" became a field of its own eventually.
It is possible that these time, material, heat, and energy costs of computation may define limits that prevents many of the scenarios people outline for various flavors of computational "Singularity". Like everything, intelligence can have diminishing returns depending on the level and the context -- although it might also have threshold where exceeding some level may change the nature of the survival game entirely too.
Other articles on Slashdot have talked about how individual human intelligence peaked thousands of years ago:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/11/13/191217/study-claims-human-intelligence-peaked-two-to-six-millennia-ago
Although environment has a lot to do with intelligence, too. And there are ways that today has the most interesting environment in some ways, even if unhealthy diets and lifestyles are probably greatly diminishing intelligence a lot too these days.
flyaway vs. program cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor
Nonetheless, I'd much rather that money went to the space program than the war "racket": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
For this reason: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
I think asteroid capture is a cool idea. However, it just brings closer the day where a single patient-but-psychopathic physics major with a laptop and a solar-sail-propelled spacecraft could slightly deflect a bigger asteroid and destroy all life on the planet. My guess for that is around 2050 (such a laptop would be more powerful than all of Google today), if humanity still exists the -- although it might take hundreds of years for a cheap spacecraft to do that. Although we'll probably reach the point where the average biochemistry major could wipe out the human race with an engineered plague first (2030?) -- which is a good reason to develop self-replicating space, underwater, and antarctic habitats first, and this project is a step towards that, and so probably worth the risk.
No one ever talked about the human genome project as like giving copies of the keys to your house away to every random stranger on the planet. But humanity has been protected through genetic security by obscurity, and that obscurity is rapidly being dispelled through all the best of intentions... (even though simply eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans, and getting enough vitamin D, iodine, and omega-3s will accomplish much but not all of the promises of genetic medicine). And that's not even talking about the threats of systems designed directly by the military as weapons of mass destruction or mass confusion...
So, we need to rethink our approach to security, emphasizing mutual security and intrinsic security, like I talk about at that essay. I can only hope the US or global defense establishment stops investing mainly in preparing to face 20th century threats and starts thinking about effectively preparing to deal with emerging 21st century threats. F-22 Raptors are just more "security theater" when major 21st existential threats are things like plagues, asteroids, nanobots, killer robots, deadly financial dogmas, and bureaucracies out of control.
But hey, I lost out on getting a PhD at Princeton in the 1980s on this stuff in part because in the 1980s I would not go along with the game there of justifying optimally picking on nickels before an existential steamroller (even though I missed out on understanding the power of networks):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
I can hope the same sort of social force and group think behind those financial threats that finally emerged in 2008 won't apply entirely to contemplating these existential threats still to come. We all need some security. The issue is how we go about getting it non-ironically.
Could boys perhaps be more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
One of the reasons we homeschool/unschool is that school especially these days push intense academics on all kids way too early, and boys especially suffer for that. Echoing your point, at least one study I've heard of shows that the focus on early academics is depriving children of the early experiences they need in nature and with water and sandboxes that kids need to later have an intuition about scientific and engineering things (so that they know what the symbols for mass, force, volume, rates of change, and so on actually physically represent).
http://www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us/services/recreation/gb/gb-playessentials.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
http://susanlemons.wordpress.com/category/early-academics/
And then the schools push parents to drug the non-compliant children...
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
Almost any school is filled with large numbers of well-meaning good-hearted hard-working adults who really care about children. The problem is they and the children are trapped in "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
Here is a psychologist saying the only reason affluent kids do better on math is that their parents teach it to them since most schools are terrible at teaching it:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
The iPad has a lot of math-learning games for it that your son might like. We just got several for our kid. Here is one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion-math-wings/id508228412?mt=8
See also:
http://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-apps
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
http://www.squidoo.com/ipad-for-autism
The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.
There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).
Just watch out from becoming even more vitamin D deficient by being even more inside using fascinating computing gadgets. A focus on early academics instead of outdoor play also harms kids in that sense. My speculation about that:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005083.html
See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im
The biggest thing about this article is it shows how quickly something taught in science textbooks for decades like the notion of "absolute zero" is slowly realized to be, if not 100% false, then at least a gross oversimplification. We may someday say the same about things like LENR (Cold Fusion) or even deep issues like consciousness and spirituality (Charles Tart's work, for example). Examples:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://pesn.com/2013/01/03/9602259_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_January3/
http://web.archive.org/web/20090308132014/http://suppressedscience.net/physics.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
Elaborating on my previous posts, as I wrote about in a term paper project for a 1980s college undergraduate course run by Prof. Steve Slaby, called "The Technological Imperative of the Arms Race", technology is an amplifier -- the question is, what sorts of things do we want to amplify?
The book "Descartes' Error" makes the point that we can't "reason" without emotions. This seems obvious to me now, but back in college it did not seem so in a philosophical sense. Modern psychology can show us how our emotions drive our reasoning process (even as reasoning can provide feedback that may affect our emotions and again our reasoning etc.). And our emotions are generally first determined by our values (including psycho-physiologically values, like perhaps a instinctive reaction to a snake or a bad smell). And those values in turn are generally determined by our personal biology, our family upbringing, our friends and neighbors, our personal history, and our culture.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error
Albert Einstein talks about aspects of that in an essay at this link where he says that science can perhaps tell us something about what seems to be, but science can never tell us what should be. And our thoughts on what should be are the basis of our actions (including how we direct our thoughts). The essay:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
I haven't finished reading it yet, but there is a recent New Yorker article (still available as full text) about a scientist and his feelings about the ethics about his past research on weapons of mass confusion derived from nerve gas:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all
One discussion of it here:
http://incunabula.org/2012/12/the-doctor-behind-the-armys-psychedelic-manhattan-project-has-some-regrets-weed-isnt-one-of-them/
I was thinking as I read the New Yorker article (around the part I stopped at), that these scientists, or at least the scientific enterprise in general, had other choices than to make the next weapon or the next defense for a theoretical attack. They could have focused on using science to make the world work better for everyone (or at least most people) and thus reduce conflicts, like Bucky Fuller did with his focus on "Livingry". They also could have researched the social and organizational issues behind war and other conflicts, like Morton Deutsch did or Alfie Kohn did. Thus this essay by me mentioning such people:
Also on this theme: "The World Was Probably Already Destroyed" ... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion. ..."
http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/
"Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation.
I have for a time made a little niche creating a little ripple with my sig on the irory of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as well as related writings. That is a little ripple that may only be meaningful as a "trimtab" when surveillance AIs newly emerging into sentience decades from now process it from all the other stuff being archived these days. :-) Perhaps even after the human race is physically long gone from our follies as above? :-( Recent example:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/12/06/0055206/army-tests-autonomous-black-hawk-helicopter
Would I like to do more such as with various other projects I've tried that have not gone very far in reality (educational simulations, self-replicating space habitats, design libraries, social-semantic desktops, etc.). Sure, but at least I can do something even if it is small. Our path out of any technological singularity may have a lot to do with our path going into one. Every little effort may make a difference. So, as I see it, with every email I send and slashdot post I make, I'm potentially programming the values of computers that won't exist for decades. :-) Well, or statistically as above, I guess I'm most likely perhaps programming an infinite chain of future simulated versions of the same computers that are already simulating me? What an admittedly odd way to spend so much time... :-)
Although, that is not that different from the plant growth algorithm my wife and I developed in our PlantStudio software, which grows structures through successive iterations on a numerical seed. And it is in keeping with someone else's point on the interrelation between the universe coming into being and our own personal growth. And of course everyone is doing that kind of programming too with every Slashdot post or twitter or text message; I'm just more aware of the possibility perhaps. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor
So, in that sense, are we creating our own future "God" at some moral and physical temperature? Which is a different argument from saying we are "God" or that we see "God" in our own image. And even different from this ultra-short sci-fi story (only as big as the previous paragraph):
""Is there a God?" sci-fi short story âoeAnswerâ by Fredric Brown"
http://obront.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/is-there-a-god-sci-fi-short-story/
I wish I could remember the author or title of a journal article my (sadly late, just found out recently) advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, had laying around about 1984, which talked about mind as an infinite tower of effectively simulations. I'm sure that theme may also pop up in some religions, especially Eastern ones. Perhaps it indeed is simulated turtles all the way down? :-)
Anyway, at least we can try to see an upsid
And on the moral aspects of simulation: http://users.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/rants/simulation_errors.html
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6200005.stm
http://www.aspcr.com/newcss_rights.html
Smiles. :-) BTW the placebo effect is getting stronger as we continue into the singularity: http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all
Anyway, I guess I maybe only be wrong the first time I wrote about the this topic. :-) https://www.google.com/search?q=ancestor+simulation
Or a couple links higher (it was an article on the Fermi paradox): http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=33037634
A better link to that entire subthread: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=33039522
Maybe because the Great Programmer wanted us to be able to use buffer overruns to invoke the debugger and thus do magic?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&cid=33042664
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1733076&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=33043184
"I've thought about writing a sci-fi novel based around three interacting groups (taking off on Arthur C. Clark's ideas of any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic):
* Those who have expanded human consciousness in a transhumanist technical nanotech/biotech direction and can do magical-looking things like with nanotech (like when nanites rebuilt the Red Dwarf).
* Those who have found this debugger link or just a bug and can affect reality in magical seeming ways (so, like Harry Potter or Earthsea, where words an incantations and symbolic movements and symbolic devices like wands are combined to create patterns that invoke complex programs written in arcane symbols, such as from "lumos" causing light to all sorts of complex spells invoked in complex ways -- maybe with a high degree of secrecy involved in who makes these things and who is told about them).
* Those who have just expanded humanity in a brute-force sort of way throughout the solar system and beyond through self-replicating space habitats duplicating themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore, and maybe also have recently learned to tap zero-point energy and so create energy and matter in empty space (so, they can duplicate things out of thin vacuum as it were).
I have no idea where that would go. But those are the major sorts of "magic" things I can imagine in our future, and all are hard-sci-fi "plausible". Would the mystery of consciousness be an underlying theme?"
Or perhaps there are deeper aesthetic issues involved that we have only just begun to be aware of? :-) :-) So, I'll go you one further -- are people going to fight over what color-temperature their local Dyson sphere should be tuned to? :-) Or even the color-temperature of the universe? Would you like a naturally balmy 2.725 K background temperature in the universe, or is that excessively wasteful and just an unasthetic looking color, and 2.724 K would be better? :-) Or maybe a slightly warmer 2.726 K would be worth it for making a peppier cosmos?"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34980884
"Still, ultimately, you may be right as far as there always being some issue to be in conflict about, and how on a cosmic scale, groups may well disagree fundamentally about things like enclosing stars. I'm also reminded of the Red Dwarf theme of David Lister's cat's descendants fighting over what color hats they should be wearing.
... I've been involved with: http://oscomak.net/
http://www.openvirgle.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
Maybe some ideas there might be useful in growing your efforts.