AC wrote: "Exactly, the best excuse to refuse to honor treasuries while saving face is warfare and the Chinese know it. That's why they are investing in supersonic cruise missiles, generation 5 fighters, submarines, uavs, and anti-satelite warfare. If push comes to shove, they will need to neutralize our GPS, artillery, & air superiority. This is also why the US is working on SCRAM-jets & rail guns. You can bet we've spent most of the past 10 years surveying the ocean floor in the region so we can cut the fiber backbone & have an advantage with sonar. There will be nuclear subs parked off the coasts of both countries ready to launch a nuclear bombardment if the other side flinches. Glad I don't live in DC."
The concern about honoring treasuries is a non-issue, since as long as they are denominated in dollars the USA can just print the money. Still, "war is a racket", so you may well be right in the end, AC, but if so, it is too bad both the Chinese and the US Americans are both caught up in a deep irony. As I talk about here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?..."
The general truths about loss of freedom as a coder working for others brought some tears to my eyes, after having had to stop running our own company making educational software and work at IBM Research for a time (even if, as places go, that was a nice place to work). It's also easy to turn to junk food when you are under stress -- even as eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans, and getting adequate vitamin D is what keeps us healthier and more productive in the long term (along with stuff like omega-3s and iodine). Did you have any deeper comment in mind about food issues when you wrote that? It really seems like a lot of young programmers don't eat well.
And The Future Soon really gets at some truths about the transhumanist movement. I've sent that link to at least one. I'm not sure if you meant it specifically about transhumanism though?
I guess everyone probably asks you where you get your ideas for those two, or what sorts of things you may have meant, and sometimes art is intentionally ambiguous, so I'm not saying you may want to answer to those questions. I applaud your decision to make that stuff available for free, rather than create more artificial scarcity.
So, I guess my question is, did you have any thoughts when you made those and put them under a free license that someone would make great videos to go along with them? Do you have any comments on the videos?
Also, I'd love it if you did a song in relation to my sig line, which in it' full form is "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity." Feel free to do what you want with that idea if it goes under a free license.:-)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
And: http://evolution-of-religion.com/ "If religious beliefs and behaviors promoted survival and reproduction in our ancestral past, then they may have been favored by natural selection over human evolutionary history. This would mean that religious beliefs and behaviors are adaptive, and that religion evolved as a natural product of Darwinian selection. The "Evolution of Religion" project is dedicated to exploring this hypothesis using scientific methods from psychology and evolutionary biology."
"Yes, and that is a perfectly fine, perfectly legitimate interpretation of freedom -- the freedom to forfeit certain rights in exchange for software."
What is often unacknowledged is that the poster you are responding to only was forced to make that choice because our socioeconomic system is broken, and now is resting heavily on the idea of artificial scarcity...
"And die early from worrying about all that crap?"
How about have tons more energy and lots less health issues that otherwise might slow you down?:-)
But you're right that too much anxiety about food can be its own sets of healthy problems...
"I teach calculus and set theory fairly often."
I like to phrase it that way because different connections work for different people. I'm glad you've found something that works for you -- hopefully you have some time for contemplating integrals in the sunshine to get your vitamin D.:-)
A planet far away from a sun, perhaps wandering hundreds of millions of light years from a galactic core, may be less susceptible to things like supernovas or galactic superwaves. http://www.etheric.com/LaViolette/Predict.html " Galactic Core Explosions - prevailing concept (1980): At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although, in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years."
Our own solar system is far to the edge of a galaxy.
Ecosystems on such planets might be sustained by heat produced at the boundary of the planets nickel-iron core, or for gas giants, in moons circling the larger primary that are heated by tidal forces.
It would not suprise me to learn that most life only exists on those kind of remote planets. On Earth, there is much life on the distant ocean floor, and much variety, because it is such a relatively stable place. Those rogue planets might be wonderful stable homes for life in that sense.
Or perhaps you could eat a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans and get the right amount of vitamin D, and get enough of some other key nutrients like Omega-3s and iodine, and quite possibly put off both cancer and heart disease until you are in your second century?:-) Although other things matter in life too, friends, family, a good night's sleep, meaningful work, living in a health-promoting community, a connection to the infinite, and so on...
I applaud your caution, but I lost about 50 pounds following that sort of advice, and feel a lot better, and have kept it off easily. His book is probably the most scientifically based one out there... YMMV.
"Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss" http://books.google.com/books?id=CX8huSU0n8AC
Dr. Fuhrman's approach can cure most type 2 diabetes too, but I doubt you will believe that either::-)
"Dr. Fuhrman Cures Diabetes - But Drug Companies Object " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
Iodine especially is a potentially big issue because if you eliminate salt and dairy as he suggests, those are two major sources of iodine in the US diet, and you need to replace that with a multivitamin or eating seaweed or other things. If you were under his care, he would no doubt check for that, but for someone following his advice from a book (myself included) it is easy to mess up on iodine. I brought that to his attention through his forum but he was somewhat dismissive of it, sadly.
I also think Dr. Fuhrman could prioritize his approach a bit better, and also that there may be issues about metabolic types and individual biochemistry that may come into play. It's also not clear if salt is quite as bad as he says it is.
In general, I think he has done a great job, but no one knows everything about such a complex topic. And his active practice probably also limits his time for additional study. I also agree with you that financial conflicts (he sells branded food products, even though he gives some of the proceeds to nutritional research) muddy the water. But that is also a big issue in our society in general, and we need something like some mix of a gift economy or basic income or 3D printing and/or great central planning to move beyond it.
But overall, he's probably one of the best out there, after having read tons of stuff by different people in my own quest for health for myself and my family.
Dr. Andrew Weil has better holistic advice, but not quite so good nutrition advice. He is also more knowledgeable on herbal remedies: http://www.drweil.com/
We are in the midst of a revolution in nutritional knowledge and the connection to health, but sadly most people are in denial about it. And there are, as you say, so many vested interests and conflicts of interest that it is hard to know who to trust.
But as I quote here from Marcia Angell, the problem may be even worse in mainstream science:
As Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, overally coffee is bad for you because of the caffeine (and also maybe how it is produced if it is decaffinated and also based on what it may be mixed with, like milk products that can themselves contribute to cancer). The reason people are seeing these benefits is that most people in the Western world are suffering from vegetable deficiency disease, because humans are adapted to get the bulk of our calories from leafy greens, and we use the phytochemicals from living plants in all sorts of ways to defend against cancer and inflammation and repair broken cells and so on. So, the reason we see these positive results from coffee drinking tend to be because people otherwise don't eat enough beans of other sorts, as well as leafy greens and so on.
And:
"Should I drink coffee?" http://drfuhrman.com/faq/question.aspx?sid=16&qindex=0 "Although one cup of coffee per day is not likely to cause any significant health problems, it is clear that excessive consumption of caffeinated beverages is dangerous. Coffee is known to contribute to heart disease by raising blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and homocysteine.(1,2) Caffeine addicts with excessive consumption are also at higher risk of cardiac arrhythmias that could cause sudden death.(3)"
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization#Fall_of_civilizations "Joseph Tainter in "The Collapse of Complex Societies" suggested that there were diminishing returns to complexity, due to which, as states achieved a maximum permissible complexity, they would decline when further increases actually produced a negative return. Tainter suggested that Rome achieved this figure in the 2nd Century AD."
The suggestion is that civilizations tend to refuse to accept going down any path to a more sensible solution than collapse because every move towards better social health would be more painful than just business-as-usual. Of course, ideally, that is what political leadership (not political followership?) is for, to get people to make the hard choices and improve overall social health.
As long as there is a huge and growing rich/poor divide in this world, driven in part by increasing automation decreasing the value of most human labor, and we fail to do anything about that overall situation (like institute a basic income), our country will be at increasing risk for all sorts of different directions, of which cyber threats are only one set of issues. Here is a document prepared for President Kennedy and delivered to President Johnson in 1964, that is only more and more true in some ways:
"The Triple Revolution Memorandum: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights" http://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 measure -- 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.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not
More evidence: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
Albert Einstein on science and religion: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
With that said, we should be careful to distinguish the mindset the uses skills (engineers, doctors) from the mindset that explores new ideas (scientists at their best, of which there seem to be not too many, since the PhD process is designed to destroy independent inquiry as discussed in this book: http://disciplinedminds.com/ ).
Of course, a really good doctor or engineer may be interested in fundamental ideas too, like Charles Darwin who started out getting a medical education, so there is no clear boundary...
Also, it is very common that engineers tend to create thing using what they know and some trial and error. Scientists then try to systematize what the engineers know and have shown actually works (even if engineers can not explain why it works). Then engineers uses the systematization created by the scientists to push the boundaries even further... And then they find new things, and the scientists get interested again.
That may be about to happen in a big way of the Rossi/Focardi eCat cold fusion device turns out to be all that it is claimed? Maybe scientists will even eventually decide there is no such thing as "hot fusion" which is just a speculation and the sun really is mostly a ball of iron, and maybe most oil comes from hydrogen produced by the Earth's nickel hydrogen core?:-) Related:
Maybe it will also help avoid the fate for an unemployed humanity Marshall Brain wrote about in the first part of "Manna" or I talk about in this youtube video:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
An alternative David Brin-like transparent society suggestion to make data mining go both ways:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc. " http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
That said, I'm not against privacy laws... But I can wonder what the unintended consequences may be.
For example, is HIPAA really helping make medicine better? Example: http://crazymer1.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/hipaa-laws-unintended-consequences/ "Anyone whose loved one suffers from severe mental illness has most likely run smack dab into the HIPAA laws when they try to help their loved one. The way they stand right now, HIPAA Laws (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) are a hindrance rather than a help for the severely mentally ill population."
Sometimes trying to regulate into law what should be the product of a health life-affirming culture is not a great idea in the end. Our culture has lots of problems, including with respect for privacy, but it is not clear that laws are the best way to solve these problems.
A big part of these problems, for example, relate to economic uncertainty if you are seen in a bad light. With something like a "basic income", privacy issues at least in some areas might not be as important. So there may be other more fundamental ways to address some of these issues. related: http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
Another big issue is simply a broad imbalance of economic power, which might be addressed in part to a return to a 92% progressive tax rate, as the USA had a few decades ago in its boom years. Or, perhaps more corporate charter revocations when corporations do not put the public interest first, as used to be routine a century or two ago?
"Not true. Most are pathogenic infectious diseases and accidental injuries. Most in the west are chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. These both have links in genetics, and yes, even diet (in the case of heart disease)."
As Dr. Fuhrman says is the meticulously researched book "Eat to Live", which links to studies to back up what I wrote: http://books.google.com/books?id=CX8huSU0n8AC everyone has weak links "genetically". But, in most cases, how you eat and live your life determines whether those weak links are ever stressed and become a problem. Heart disease is a direct result of inflammation and fatty build up, which is directly related primarily to what we eat. Cancer is the failure of the body to police itself as the body is continually getting cancerous cells which it destroys if it is healthy, but it won't be able to do that if you eat junk that promotes cancer while crippling your immune system (and also lack vitamin D).
If you study this, you will see I am more or less right, and that 75% or more of things like infections, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are directly linked to poor nutrition. It is similar to organic gardening -- if your plants are stressed out from lack of nutrients (including micronutrients) in the soil, they are going to be more sickly and susceptible to disease.
So, you're just repeating "conventional wisdom" which is, in this case, wrong and deadly, sorry. I provided plenty of links to back up my statements, you are doing not much but repeating old and deadly misinformation. But if you want to see how heart disease is a symptom of vegetable deficiency disease, you could look at this: http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
Please, for your own sake, try to look into all this and move beyond the knee jerk reaction. People are making trillions of dollars a year off of ignorance and misinformation like you are reiterating. Another video:
"Nutrient Density is the Key to Good health " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGgeGHU1Bs
Anyway, so my post got modded "Troll". Not suprising as I put my point more strongly than usual. It's still overall right. But it shows a bit of what the real disease is... People do not want to hear the truth, and dismiss it as too outlandish. I used to do the same, and thought it strange to think there was any connection between what I at and how I felt.
Just to show how much you might want to learn on this, from a relatively conservative body (the evidence is stronger than they say, but even they admit to evidence):
"Vitamin D and Cancer Prevention: Strengths and Limits of the Evidence" http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/vitamin-D
But you just dismissed that without looking into it. The fact is, for every melanoma (skin cancer) dermatologists have prevented by telling people to stay out of the sun, they may have caused thirty others from vitamin D deficiency.
On the history of medicine, I cited the Flexner Report which was a big place US medicine took a wrong turn a century ago. Sure, the guy who suggested doctors should wash their hands was essentially beaten to death for it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
And the guy who wanted to run anti-smoking ads in 1927 was fired for it, and then per
As is a good night's sleep, friends, family, a connection to that which is beyond us, meaningful work, daily exercise walking and such, and that kind of stuff. And obviously avoid smoking, excessive alcohol, and obvious environmental toxins at work and play.
The focus on magic bullets is unfortunate. As is a focus on diagnosing things like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes that are mainly signs of vegetable deficiency disease and lack of vitamin D (and to a lesser extent those other issues). Most health rests on the basics. It's true that there are exotic genetic diseases and so on, but what causes the most chronic misery and early death in the industrialized words is these basic nutritional (and sunlight) problems.
Of course, there is not much profit in actually preventing or curing disease, so most of the money pours into diagnosing and treating what are really symptoms of nutritional and lifestyle disorders... It's been that way in part since the misguided Flexner Report: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
So, is this going to make an Android phone an important part of a lot of open source hardware projects (including RepRap perhaps)?
Note also: http://faircompanies.com/diy/view/make-your-own-open-source-android-smartphone/ "Flow DIY is an open source hardware platform so anyone can make a smartphone with the Android operating system and the exact capabilities one is looking for. Its components as well as the final creation by the user are open source, a first step toward the generalization of DIY devices. Interest is growing in personalizing not only software and web applications, but in everyday devices. A legion of DIYers are demanding tools to create increasingly more sophisticated devices...."
As I've said elsewhere, with the turnover rate of Smartphones, in two or three years, today's generation of smartphones will be free-as-in-discarded.:-) So, it can make sense to build stuff for them, especially since if they are free-as-in-discarded-beer then they can be free for kids to use for educational things (like instead of the OLPC XO-1). Reference: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
That's one reason I started working on Android software (and under a three-years-and-its-free-under-the-GPL model that I am still conflicted about). http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
Still, sadly my Google Developer Smartphone died several after I got it and I never got around to sending it in for replacement, so I guess there is an amount of old phones that will not be usable for similar reasons (but I doubt that will be the majority). Also, as people have pointed out, the Smartphone batteries tend to go, making them less useful as they age (although I guess you could hack in some alternative power if you were motivated).
Still, I'd suggest that if one is making an open manufacturing project that requires computing, integrating an Android Smartphone might be an interesting idea.
As I discuss here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f?hl=en "You may well be right in practice with email, but none-the-less I think this once again suggests the need for much better tools for communications than plain email. If we were using something like a social semantic desktop (or whatever) to create these open manufacturing systems, people could post whatever they wanted to a cloud of ideas and semantic tagging done by the community (including how hardware oriented some post was) would let items that Adrian was interested bubble up to some semantic-related queue he set up for himself, essentially as a form of topical moderation (but, where there was an infinite number of topics). At least, that's the hope.:-)..."
That was in the context of email, but much the same applies to almost any web setting.
We used a convention of an underscore and the units in our 1990s Garden Simulator (in Delphi Pascal), and it worked fairly well. So, like: maxTempForDay_degC
And this: http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/ http://dublinopinion.com/2011/05/06/an-appeal-from-teachers-and-researchers-of-economics/ "The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged.... Professors, lecturers and researchers have been entrusted by society with the task of serving the society through their search for a better understanding of reality. Only in this context does academic freedom have a real meaning...."
The question is, how repeatable is it for everyone to be in on something at the right time in the right place? How about instead building a world that works for everyone?
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!). So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
Slashdot Mirror
AC wrote: "Exactly, the best excuse to refuse to honor treasuries while saving face is warfare and the Chinese know it. That's why they are investing in supersonic cruise missiles, generation 5 fighters, submarines, uavs, and anti-satelite warfare. If push comes to shove, they will need to neutralize our GPS, artillery, & air superiority. This is also why the US is working on SCRAM-jets & rail guns. You can bet we've spent most of the past 10 years surveying the ocean floor in the region so we can cut the fiber backbone & have an advantage with sonar. There will be nuclear subs parked off the coasts of both countries ready to launch a nuclear bombardment if the other side flinches. Glad I don't live in DC."
The concern about honoring treasuries is a non-issue, since as long as they are denominated in dollars the USA can just print the money. Still, "war is a racket", so you may well be right in the end, AC, but if so, it is too bad both the Chinese and the US Americans are both caught up in a deep irony. As I talk about here: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
Which I heard as the soundtrack to these youtube videos:
"The Future Soon"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiDK_yBCw0
"Code Monkey"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Wy7gRGgeA
The general truths about loss of freedom as a coder working for others brought some tears to my eyes, after having had to stop running our own company making educational software and work at IBM Research for a time (even if, as places go, that was a nice place to work). It's also easy to turn to junk food when you are under stress -- even as eating a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans, and getting adequate vitamin D is what keeps us healthier and more productive in the long term (along with stuff like omega-3s and iodine). Did you have any deeper comment in mind about food issues when you wrote that? It really seems like a lot of young programmers don't eat well.
And The Future Soon really gets at some truths about the transhumanist movement. I've sent that link to at least one. I'm not sure if you meant it specifically about transhumanism though?
I guess everyone probably asks you where you get your ideas for those two, or what sorts of things you may have meant, and sometimes art is intentionally ambiguous, so I'm not saying you may want to answer to those questions. I applaud your decision to make that stuff available for free, rather than create more artificial scarcity.
So, I guess my question is, did you have any thoughts when you made those and put them under a free license that someone would make great videos to go along with them? Do you have any comments on the videos?
Also, I'd love it if you did a song in relation to my sig line, which in it' full form is "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity." Feel free to do what you want with that idea if it goes under a free license. :-)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
See also, on the revolution of religious thinking:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_42_38/ai_92805318/
And:
http://evolution-of-religion.com/
"If religious beliefs and behaviors promoted survival and reproduction in our ancestral past, then they may have been favored by natural selection over human evolutionary history. This would mean that religious beliefs and behaviors are adaptive, and that religion evolved as a natural product of Darwinian selection. The "Evolution of Religion" project is dedicated to exploring this hypothesis using scientific methods from psychology and evolutionary biology."
"Yes, and that is a perfectly fine, perfectly legitimate interpretation of freedom -- the freedom to forfeit certain rights in exchange for software."
What is often unacknowledged is that the poster you are responding to only was forced to make that choice because our socioeconomic system is broken, and now is resting heavily on the idea of artificial scarcity...
Alternatives:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://www.semanticdesktop.org/
My own limited attempts in that direction:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
"And die early from worrying about all that crap?"
How about have tons more energy and lots less health issues that otherwise might slow you down? :-)
But you're right that too much anxiety about food can be its own sets of healthy problems...
"I teach calculus and set theory fairly often."
I like to phrase it that way because different connections work for different people. I'm glad you've found something that works for you -- hopefully you have some time for contemplating integrals in the sunshine to get your vitamin D. :-)
Do people know what these puzzles are? Is there a chance this could be used as a botnet, or to break catchas and do spamming, or something like that?
"Yeah, go ahead and read Keynes. Then you too will know how to create a bubble economy and a currency that's worthless by design."
Other options than emphasizing artificial scarcity:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/OS:Economic_Transformation
http://knol.google.com/k/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
A planet far away from a sun, perhaps wandering hundreds of millions of light years from a galactic core, may be less susceptible to things like supernovas or galactic superwaves.
http://www.etheric.com/LaViolette/Predict.html
" Galactic Core Explosions - prevailing concept (1980): At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although, in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years."
Our own solar system is far to the edge of a galaxy.
Ecosystems on such planets might be sustained by heat produced at the boundary of the planets nickel-iron core, or for gas giants, in moons circling the larger primary that are heated by tidal forces.
It would not suprise me to learn that most life only exists on those kind of remote planets. On Earth, there is much life on the distant ocean floor, and much variety, because it is such a relatively stable place. Those rogue planets might be wonderful stable homes for life in that sense.
Or perhaps you could eat a lot of vegetables, fruits, and beans and get the right amount of vitamin D, and get enough of some other key nutrients like Omega-3s and iodine, and quite possibly put off both cancer and heart disease until you are in your second century? :-) Although other things matter in life too, friends, family, a good night's sleep, meaningful work, living in a health-promoting community, a connection to the infinite, and so on...
I applaud your caution, but I lost about 50 pounds following that sort of advice, and feel a lot better, and have kept it off easily. His book is probably the most scientifically based one out there... YMMV.
"Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss"
http://books.google.com/books?id=CX8huSU0n8AC
Getting a good blender and making green smoothies helped a lot too.
http://greensmoothierevolution.com/
Dr. Fuhrman's approach can cure most type 2 diabetes too, but I doubt you will believe that either: :-)
"Dr. Fuhrman Cures Diabetes - But Drug Companies Object "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
But that is more and more common knowledge, except among most doctors and CEOs of drug companies:
http://www.rawfor30days.com/index4.html
His approach can also reverse most heart disease... Although others can do that too, as well. Just Google on reverse heart disease.
Is Dr. Fuhrman's approach perfect? No, I think it could be improved in a couple of ways. For example, I think he is a bit low on Vitamin D and quite a bit low on iodine. Others on that:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
http://www.iodine4health.com/
Iodine especially is a potentially big issue because if you eliminate salt and dairy as he suggests, those are two major sources of iodine in the US diet, and you need to replace that with a multivitamin or eating seaweed or other things. If you were under his care, he would no doubt check for that, but for someone following his advice from a book (myself included) it is easy to mess up on iodine. I brought that to his attention through his forum but he was somewhat dismissive of it, sadly.
I also think Dr. Fuhrman could prioritize his approach a bit better, and also that there may be issues about metabolic types and individual biochemistry that may come into play. It's also not clear if salt is quite as bad as he says it is.
In general, I think he has done a great job, but no one knows everything about such a complex topic. And his active practice probably also limits his time for additional study. I also agree with you that financial conflicts (he sells branded food products, even though he gives some of the proceeds to nutritional research) muddy the water. But that is also a big issue in our society in general, and we need something like some mix of a gift economy or basic income or 3D printing and/or great central planning to move beyond it.
But overall, he's probably one of the best out there, after having read tons of stuff by different people in my own quest for health for myself and my family.
Dr. Andrew Weil has better holistic advice, but not quite so good nutrition advice. He is also more knowledgeable on herbal remedies:
http://www.drweil.com/
Dr. Mark Hyman probably has better overall advice about autism:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
We are in the midst of a revolution in nutritional knowledge and the connection to health, but sadly most people are in denial about it. And there are, as you say, so many vested interests and conflicts of interest that it is hard to know who to trust.
But as I quote here from Marcia Angell, the problem may be even worse in mainstream science:
As Dr. Joel Fuhrman says, overally coffee is bad for you because of the caffeine (and also maybe how it is produced if it is decaffinated and also based on what it may be mixed with, like milk products that can themselves contribute to cancer). The reason people are seeing these benefits is that most people in the Western world are suffering from vegetable deficiency disease, because humans are adapted to get the bulk of our calories from leafy greens, and we use the phytochemicals from living plants in all sorts of ways to defend against cancer and inflammation and repair broken cells and so on. So, the reason we see these positive results from coffee drinking tend to be because people otherwise don't eat enough beans of other sorts, as well as leafy greens and so on.
See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
And:
"Should I drink coffee?"
http://drfuhrman.com/faq/question.aspx?sid=16&qindex=0
"Although one cup of coffee per day is not likely to cause any significant health problems, it is clear that excessive consumption of caffeinated beverages is dangerous. Coffee is known to contribute to heart disease by raising blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and homocysteine.(1,2) Caffeine addicts with excessive consumption are also at higher risk of cardiac arrhythmias that could cause sudden death.(3)"
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization#Fall_of_civilizations
"Joseph Tainter in "The Collapse of Complex Societies" suggested that there were diminishing returns to complexity, due to which, as states achieved a maximum permissible complexity, they would decline when further increases actually produced a negative return. Tainter suggested that Rome achieved this figure in the 2nd Century AD."
The suggestion is that civilizations tend to refuse to accept going down any path to a more sensible solution than collapse because every move towards better social health would be more painful than just business-as-usual. Of course, ideally, that is what political leadership (not political followership?) is for, to get people to make the hard choices and improve overall social health.
More on social pyramids and economics:
"The Mythology of Wealth"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
As long as there is a huge and growing rich/poor divide in this world, driven in part by increasing automation decreasing the value of most human labor, and we fail to do anything about that overall situation (like institute a basic income), our country will be at increasing risk for all sorts of different directions, of which cyber threats are only one set of issues. Here is a document prepared for President Kennedy and delivered to President Johnson in 1964, that is only more and more true in some ways:
"The Triple Revolution Memorandum: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights"
http://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 measure -- 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.
The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis. The general economic approach argues that potential demand, which if filled would raise the number of jobs and provide incomes to those holding them, is underestimated. Most contemporary economic analysis states that all of the available labor force and industrial capacity is required to meet the needs of consumers and industry and to provide adequate public services: Schools, parks, roads, homes, decent cities, and clean water and air. It is further argued that demand could be increased, by a variety of standard techniques, to any desired extent by providing money and machines to improve the conditions of the billions of impoverished people elsewhere in the world, who need food and shelter, clothes and machinery and everything else the industrial nations take for granted.
There is no question that cybernation does increase the potential for the provision of funds to neglected public sectors. Nor is there any question that cybernation would make possible the abolition of poverty at home and abroad. But the industrial system does not
More evidence:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
Of course, science has become so corrupt in many ways, it has done itself in...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science
"Here are some related broad quotes on social problems in science, some of which relate to competition for funding. "
Albert Einstein on science and religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
With that said, we should be careful to distinguish the mindset the uses skills (engineers, doctors) from the mindset that explores new ideas (scientists at their best, of which there seem to be not too many, since the PhD process is designed to destroy independent inquiry as discussed in this book: http://disciplinedminds.com/ ).
Of course, a really good doctor or engineer may be interested in fundamental ideas too, like Charles Darwin who started out getting a medical education, so there is no clear boundary...
Also, it is very common that engineers tend to create thing using what they know and some trial and error. Scientists then try to systematize what the engineers know and have shown actually works (even if engineers can not explain why it works). Then engineers uses the systematization created by the scientists to push the boundaries even further... And then they find new things, and the scientists get interested again.
That may be about to happen in a big way of the Rossi/Focardi eCat cold fusion device turns out to be all that it is claimed? Maybe scientists will even eventually decide there is no such thing as "hot fusion" which is just a speculation and the sun really is mostly a ball of iron, and maybe most oil comes from hydrogen produced by the Earth's nickel hydrogen core? :-) Related:
Great news. :-)
Maybe it will also help avoid the fate for an unemployed humanity Marshall Brain wrote about in the first part of "Manna" or I talk about in this youtube video:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
To avoid more economic disaster, we need to transition to a gift economy and other socioeconomic models before robots can replace most people in most tasks as they are more and more doing... Example of the technology just coming out of robotics labs:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
...only outlaws will have your data? :-)
An alternative David Brin-like transparent society suggestion to make data mining go both ways:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc. "
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
That said, I'm not against privacy laws... But I can wonder what the unintended consequences may be.
For example, is HIPAA really helping make medicine better? Example:
http://crazymer1.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/hipaa-laws-unintended-consequences/
"Anyone whose loved one suffers from severe mental illness has most likely run smack dab into the HIPAA laws when they try to help their loved one. The way they stand right now, HIPAA Laws (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) are a hindrance rather than a help for the severely mentally ill population."
Sometimes trying to regulate into law what should be the product of a health life-affirming culture is not a great idea in the end. Our culture has lots of problems, including with respect for privacy, but it is not clear that laws are the best way to solve these problems.
A big part of these problems, for example, relate to economic uncertainty if you are seen in a bad light. With something like a "basic income", privacy issues at least in some areas might not be as important. So there may be other more fundamental ways to address some of these issues. related:
http://basicincome.iovialis.org/e00.html
Another big issue is simply a broad imbalance of economic power, which might be addressed in part to a return to a 92% progressive tax rate, as the USA had a few decades ago in its boom years. Or, perhaps more corporate charter revocations when corporations do not put the public interest first, as used to be routine a century or two ago?
More on 21st century enlightenment, from the RSA:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
"Not true. Most are pathogenic infectious diseases and accidental injuries. Most in the west are chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. These both have links in genetics, and yes, even diet (in the case of heart disease)."
As Dr. Fuhrman says is the meticulously researched book "Eat to Live", which links to studies to back up what I wrote:
http://books.google.com/books?id=CX8huSU0n8AC
everyone has weak links "genetically". But, in most cases, how you eat and live your life determines whether those weak links are ever stressed and become a problem. Heart disease is a direct result of inflammation and fatty build up, which is directly related primarily to what we eat. Cancer is the failure of the body to police itself as the body is continually getting cancerous cells which it destroys if it is healthy, but it won't be able to do that if you eat junk that promotes cancer while crippling your immune system (and also lack vitamin D).
If you study this, you will see I am more or less right, and that 75% or more of things like infections, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are directly linked to poor nutrition. It is similar to organic gardening -- if your plants are stressed out from lack of nutrients (including micronutrients) in the soil, they are going to be more sickly and susceptible to disease.
So, you're just repeating "conventional wisdom" which is, in this case, wrong and deadly, sorry. I provided plenty of links to back up my statements, you are doing not much but repeating old and deadly misinformation. But if you want to see how heart disease is a symptom of vegetable deficiency disease, you could look at this:
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
Please, for your own sake, try to look into all this and move beyond the knee jerk reaction. People are making trillions of dollars a year off of ignorance and misinformation like you are reiterating. Another video:
"Nutrient Density is the Key to Good health "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGgeGHU1Bs
And:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
Anyway, so my post got modded "Troll". Not suprising as I put my point more strongly than usual. It's still overall right. But it shows a bit of what the real disease is... People do not want to hear the truth, and dismiss it as too outlandish. I used to do the same, and thought it strange to think there was any connection between what I at and how I felt.
Just to show how much you might want to learn on this, from a relatively conservative body (the evidence is stronger than they say, but even they admit to evidence):
"Vitamin D and Cancer Prevention: Strengths and Limits of the Evidence"
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/vitamin-D
See also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
But you just dismissed that without looking into it. The fact is, for every melanoma (skin cancer) dermatologists have prevented by telling people to stay out of the sun, they may have caused thirty others from vitamin D deficiency.
On the history of medicine, I cited the Flexner Report which was a big place US medicine took a wrong turn a century ago. Sure, the guy who suggested doctors should wash their hands was essentially beaten to death for it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
And the guy who wanted to run anti-smoking ads in 1927 was fired for it, and then per
And get probably 75% of medical issues diagnosed and cured, as they are mostly nutritional deficiencies... :-)
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/
Sure, Omega-3s and Iodine are important too:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/oct/17/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime
http://www.iodine4health.com/
http://www.bluezones.com/
As is a good night's sleep, friends, family, a connection to that which is beyond us, meaningful work, daily exercise walking and such, and that kind of stuff. And obviously avoid smoking, excessive alcohol, and obvious environmental toxins at work and play.
The focus on magic bullets is unfortunate. As is a focus on diagnosing things like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes that are mainly signs of vegetable deficiency disease and lack of vitamin D (and to a lesser extent those other issues). Most health rests on the basics. It's true that there are exotic genetic diseases and so on, but what causes the most chronic misery and early death in the industrialized words is these basic nutritional (and sunlight) problems.
Still, for cheap testing, this may be the future through using a paper-with-chemicals test and a cell phone, and such tests could help detect nutritional deficiencies:
http://www.ted.com/talks/george_whitesides_a_lab_the_size_of_a_postage_stamp.html
Of course, there is not much profit in actually preventing or curing disease, so most of the money pours into diagnosing and treating what are really symptoms of nutritional and lifestyle disorders... It's been that way in part since the misguided Flexner Report:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
But yes, this is still a great initiative -- even if it misses the obvious. But there is so little that is obvious (as is said in the Skills of Xanadu): :-)
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51
And of course, in our widely dysfunctional and dying culture, where people mostly eat either long dead carrion (aged factory farmed meat) or ground up long-dead plants (flour and sugar), and much of our entire cultural socio-economic infrastructure is geared around getting everyone to embrace this death-eater cult, it is no metaphorical surprise that the result of being a death eater is that you die early... Related:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
Do you really need a "tricorder" to diagnose death-eater disease?
Just posted here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/8d32987e3767c868#
So, is this going to make an Android phone an important part of a lot of open source hardware projects (including RepRap perhaps)?
Note also: ..."
http://faircompanies.com/diy/view/make-your-own-open-source-android-smartphone/
"Flow DIY is an open source hardware platform so anyone can make a smartphone with the Android operating system and the exact capabilities one is looking for. Its components as well as the final creation by the user are open source, a first step toward the generalization of DIY devices. Interest is growing in personalizing not only software and web applications, but in everyday devices. A legion of DIYers are demanding tools to create increasingly more sophisticated devices.
As I've said elsewhere, with the turnover rate of Smartphones, in two or three years, today's generation of smartphones will be free-as-in-discarded. :-) So, it can make sense to build stuff for them, especially since if they are free-as-in-discarded-beer then they can be free for kids to use for educational things (like instead of the OLPC XO-1). Reference:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006250.html
That's one reason I started working on Android software (and under a three-years-and-its-free-under-the-GPL model that I am still conflicted
about).
http://www.artificialscarcity.com/
Still, sadly my Google Developer Smartphone died several after I got it and I never got around to sending it in for replacement, so I guess there is an amount of old phones that will not be usable for similar reasons (but I doubt that will be the majority). Also, as people have pointed out, the Smartphone batteries tend to go, making them less useful as they age (although I guess you could hack in some alternative power if you were motivated).
Still, I'd suggest that if one is making an open manufacturing project that requires computing, integrating an Android Smartphone might be an interesting idea.
As I discuss here: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/576771df555e729f?hl=en :-) ..."
"You may well be right in practice with email, but none-the-less I think this once again suggests the need for much better tools for communications than plain email. If we were using something like a social semantic desktop (or whatever) to create these open manufacturing systems, people could post whatever they wanted to a cloud of ideas and semantic tagging done by the community (including how hardware oriented some post was) would let items that Adrian was interested bubble up to some semantic-related queue he set up for himself, essentially as a form of topical moderation (but, where there was an infinite number of topics). At least, that's the hope.
That was in the context of email, but much the same applies to almost any web setting.
We used a convention of an underscore and the units in our 1990s Garden Simulator (in Delphi Pascal), and it worked fairly well. So, like: maxTempForDay_degC
Other examples of how we translated a USDA ARS model to something more understandable:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/help100/00000269.htm
ENO3 = NitrateMovedToFirstLayerFromSoilEvap_kgPha
M = numLayers
SEV* = evaporation_mm
C(NO3) = meanNitrateConcThisLayer_gPm3
I liked it too...
One can question the whole issue of graduate / business schools in other ways too:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
And this: ... Professors, lecturers and researchers have been entrusted by society with the task of serving the society through their search for a better understanding of reality. Only in this context does academic freedom have a real meaning. ..."
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
http://dublinopinion.com/2011/05/06/an-appeal-from-teachers-and-researchers-of-economics/
"The authors of this appeal are deeply concerned that more than three years since the outbreak of the financial and macroeconomic crisis that highlighted the pitfalls, limitations, dangers and responsibilities of main-stream thought in economics, finance and management, the quasi-monopolistic position of such thought within the academic world nevertheless remains largely unchallenged.
The question is, how repeatable is it for everyone to be in on something at the right time in the right place? How about instead building a world that works for everyone?
"RSA Animate - 21st century enlightenment "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
:-) Thanks. You might like this post by me too then:
"DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology"
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/64c7c2fb922a4bcf?hl=en
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"Roughly one-third of the energy content of a gallon of gasoline produced from California wells is input from natural gas. Less than 2/3's is net energy (probably a lot less!). So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"