I haven't read this book, but I'd be shocked if it were better or more interesting than Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez - which vividly represented the same sort of organizational idea, but set inside a truly impressive narrative. Check out his talk at Long Now to get a taste.
While this is no surprise, I still think that we'll eventually have to transition to large-scale organic farming anyway. Present forms of industrial farming destroy topsoil and rely on fossil fuels which will get too expensive to be used for fertilizer. It might work for now, but hopefully we'll still be alive when present methods hit a wall. To stay alive, we'll simply have to transition to organic methods. What we need to do is to engineer crops that produce high yields even when they're farmed organically, which is to say, they should resist pests, fix lots of nitrogen from the atmosphere and yield products with a higher nutritional content. Organic farming is a method that makes sense to combine with a genetically engineered product, something I would much prefer to whatever it is that I'm buying in grocery stores now.
How is it different, exactly? They have a chain of command, uniforms, salutes, orders, gunships... Even their headquarters are in a fucking fort. The only difference I see is that they never show the slightest hint of being answerable to, or even checked by, a civilian authority, elected or not.
You must have not been watching the actual episodes, geek-pretender! It's pretty clear that the United Federation of Planets is basically a symbolic body about as potent as our UN. There have been many important diplomatic negotiations in many episodes and movies. Did you once see the president or any other democratically elected figure even participating in them, much less leading them? No, you didn't, because it was always admirals or some other higher-ups from the Navy/Starfleet. So while there may be a token civilian democracy in the Federation, it's really the military that exercises all the executive power. How could you miss that?
I don't really care that much if we get a man on Mars. That's bound to be an anticlimax anyway, as it turns out that Mars is pretty boring. I think that picturing awesome future science in terms of a mission to Mars shows a real lack of imagination. It's just a copy of something big we've done almost 50 years ago, except bigger. Instead, I want science to do big things that are *unlike* anything we've done before. For example, I want the world's most advanced AI to be something that educates students. And lo, it's Neal Stephenson himself who explores that idea more deeply and insightfully than I could have ever imagined. This is the kind of thing for which we need professional imagineers. Every moron can picture a mission to Mars, and think it's cool. But the real progress in technology will be not in the obvious stuff that every moron can imagine, like flying cars and faster trains. The true innovations will be brilliant things that we don't even realize we're missing! And insightful forward-looking authors like Stephenson or Bruce Sterling really might help us expand the range of what's worth aspiring to.
I totally agree, and I think the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" is the best piece of sci-fi inspiration that anyone could have. If I were to complain about our slowness of progress, I wouldn't blame science. I'd blame the entrenched interests of our civil authorities. One glaring mistake we know we make is in how we educate young people. Everyone who knows anything about this stuff understands just how much better we can do, and there's aren't even technological impediments holding us back. It's just that we can't get up off our asses and actually do it. That's the perfect situation in which a little inspiration might go a long way, and I certainly find the technology in "The Diamond Age" to be the most inspiring educational invention ever. Also, Stephenson has the wisdom to explore what it is that we really want from an education, and how the right use of technology could help us realize it.
Say what? Sending the Navy into space and administering an empire that's apparently not subject to any kind of civilian authority? There's a rigid military chain of command, people obey their superiors and the captain has to say "at ease" before you can so much as slouch. Seriously, is there even a civilian government that has any kind of check on the Navy/Starfleet? I know that there's a civilian United Federation of Planets, but in terms of real executive power, they're basically as impotent as the UN. As far as I can tell, all the high-level negotiations with Romulans, etc. were conducted by admirals, not prime ministers or presidents. Isn't this exactly what right-wingers like?
You're also forgetting Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009 - that's profits, not revenue. But not only did it DODGE ALL TAXES, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings. (source)
So please, if you want to rage about Solyndra and you don't first rage about this, it will be obvious to all that you're full of shit.
Solyndra was a government investment that didn't pan out. Given the number of such investements that our government makes, it's kind of impressive that Solyndra is the only one to really go wrong. For example, the government made money on its loan guarantees to carmakes, while also keeping them from drowning and firing everyone.
Yeah, but you forgot to mention that next to climate models, general relativity is a dead simple theory. These days, bright high school students can completely master it. The climate, on the other hand, is a gigantic non-linear system with feedback effects and uncertain inputs. One chronic mistake that smart physicists and engineers always make is that they underestimate the complexity of the climate. The old joke is that if you ask a physicist how best to milk a cow, he'll start his answer with "OK, let's assume a spherical cow homogenously filled with milk." The point is that if you do that kind of thing, you can't have too much confidence in your solution. (Physics is comparably simple, so there you can, but you can't import these heuristics to a messy subject like climate science.)
That's how physicists and engineers can become know-it-alls about things which are actually far more complicated than anything they're willing to appreciate.
Did anyone else wonder if there's someone among these named people who aren't being paid by some CO2-dumping company? If so then they're the real fool!
I don't think that's right. In Nova Scotia and in places like London, Ontario, people speak very strongly in that way and many of them don't know any French. I thought it had to do with the fact that so many of the original Canadians were Scots, and in Scotland they also say "a-BOOt" and "a-GAIN-st".
What you're describing is the difference between a giant, scary company with a good PR department, and one that has no idea how to sell their brand. I think it's that simple.
If they built a giant Enterprise, they'd probably have trekkie fans all over the world visting downtown vegas.
And moving to the city.
Yeah, just like fans of Paris started settling in Las Vegas when they built a fake Eiffel Tower, and fans of Egypt started moving there when they built a fake Pyramid of Giza. I'm glad you realize that the way to attract people to your city is to build a hotel/casino in the shape of some object they like. They just can't stay away! Their next brilliant architectural move will be a wedge-shaped hotel called "Pizza Tower" and it will look just like a gigantic slice of pizza. Because let's face it: Nobody can resist a slice of pizza! Keep it classy, Las Vegas!
Yes I do know about the fake Eiffel tower in Vegas. I also know about the fake Pyramid of Giza, the fake Statue of Liberty and the many other crimes of pastiche that have grown up in Las Vegas. This makes my point: Is there a single shred of dignity in any of these abominations? Is this the neighborhood where the Enterprise belongs?
So you're saying that we could once build an entire nuclear powerplant in 77 days and get it running within 9 hours... in an ice cave, in Greenland? If the people who did that could see us now, they'd insult our manhoods.
The normals wouldn't get it and the trekkies would complain about all the inauthenticity, saying things like: "The REAL Enterprise didn't have (disgusted face) BATHROOMS!" Then they would try see how much synthohol they could drink in the ten forward bar.
People often bring up the idea that a megastructure may become an eyesore over time. I can't think of an example where that's been true.
I have an example: Las Vegas. When those people sober up one morning, they'll look at their city and ask themselves: "What the fuck have we built here? Just how fucked up were we?" If your franchise goes Vegas, it does not grow in class or stature. There will never be an Eiffel Tower (or any other admired work of architecture) in Las Vegas. There will only be Trump towers. It's not a place where Piccard would have landed the Enterprise.
Apparently you aren't the first to have this idea. These guys filled a greenhouse with CO2, which was just waste from a nearby industrial plant. As a bonus, they heated the greenhouse with the waste heat from the plant. No surprise, vegetables grow really well in there! To me, that seems like a very efficient use of our "waste" and our land!
I had the same thought. Suppose one such device has an area of ten square meters that's exposed to the sun. How much hydrogen can it make on a given day compared to a ten square meter photovoltaic cell powering an electrolysis reaction? (The latter, with proper catalysts, is pretty close to 100% efficient.) Theoretically, if the container is perfectly insulated, every unit of incident solar energy gets trapped in it could be sunk into splitting H20. But there may be all kinds of side reactions and anyway, there is no perfect insulation.
Also, there's no reason why this reaction has to be solar powered. Why not cover the core of a nuclear reactor with a lot of zinc, and suspend it in water? Wouldn't that also be a good way to make hydrogen? Isn't this a lot like the way in which those hydrogen explosions happened in Fukushima (reaction between the coolant water and fuel rod cladding)? Couldn't we design a reactor that superheats zinc and water, and pipe off the O2 and H2?
So if these things are so damn efficient but also weak, would it make sense to move big structures with a whole giant slew of these thrusters? Or do they individually scale up? How much fuel would it take to move something of the mass of the ISS into Martian orbit? That would be traveling in style!
It sounds to me like the system is working: The students who are trying to game the computer with crap are given failing grades by a human grader. It might not be long before the easiest way to game the computer will be to learn the material and write a good essay. But as we're on our way there, we'll keep the human element in the equation and leave the computers in the role of the useful assistant.
Excellent comment! I agree, this would be an excellent tool for students. In fact, it should be written for them, not for the professor. As a professor, my assignment would be: Turn in something that the auto-grader marks as a B or better, and only then will I read it and give it a real grade. A system like that would save me a lot of frustration!
My students are pretty talented, but I can tell you: Even they would benefit from having a proofreader for the things they turn in to me. It looks like Pearson (I don't like that company, btw.) is trying to market this as an evaluation tool, which is not the best idea. It shouldn't be a tool of the professor, but a tool of the student, something like an improved spell checker, but more of an idea checker.
Machine semantic analysis has actually come quite a long way, and together with subject experts, maybe we are on the verge of being able to compose a program that could give useful feedback on an essay about - say - the history of heliocentrism or the Cogito argument by Descartes. I'd love to have my students mess with such a program until they compose an essay that satisfies it. (It should also auto-check for plagiarism.) Of course, the grade would be decided by me. The role of the program would be to prod the student to produce better work, and to give him or her useful suggestions for how to do so.
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I haven't read this book, but I'd be shocked if it were better or more interesting than Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez - which vividly represented the same sort of organizational idea, but set inside a truly impressive narrative. Check out his talk at Long Now to get a taste.
This is in the FAQ, almost exactly like you asked it.
I really like this idea!
While this is no surprise, I still think that we'll eventually have to transition to large-scale organic farming anyway. Present forms of industrial farming destroy topsoil and rely on fossil fuels which will get too expensive to be used for fertilizer. It might work for now, but hopefully we'll still be alive when present methods hit a wall. To stay alive, we'll simply have to transition to organic methods. What we need to do is to engineer crops that produce high yields even when they're farmed organically, which is to say, they should resist pests, fix lots of nitrogen from the atmosphere and yield products with a higher nutritional content. Organic farming is a method that makes sense to combine with a genetically engineered product, something I would much prefer to whatever it is that I'm buying in grocery stores now.
How is it different, exactly? They have a chain of command, uniforms, salutes, orders, gunships... Even their headquarters are in a fucking fort. The only difference I see is that they never show the slightest hint of being answerable to, or even checked by, a civilian authority, elected or not.
You must have not been watching the actual episodes, geek-pretender! It's pretty clear that the United Federation of Planets is basically a symbolic body about as potent as our UN. There have been many important diplomatic negotiations in many episodes and movies. Did you once see the president or any other democratically elected figure even participating in them, much less leading them? No, you didn't, because it was always admirals or some other higher-ups from the Navy/Starfleet. So while there may be a token civilian democracy in the Federation, it's really the military that exercises all the executive power. How could you miss that?
I don't really care that much if we get a man on Mars. That's bound to be an anticlimax anyway, as it turns out that Mars is pretty boring. I think that picturing awesome future science in terms of a mission to Mars shows a real lack of imagination. It's just a copy of something big we've done almost 50 years ago, except bigger. Instead, I want science to do big things that are *unlike* anything we've done before. For example, I want the world's most advanced AI to be something that educates students. And lo, it's Neal Stephenson himself who explores that idea more deeply and insightfully than I could have ever imagined. This is the kind of thing for which we need professional imagineers. Every moron can picture a mission to Mars, and think it's cool. But the real progress in technology will be not in the obvious stuff that every moron can imagine, like flying cars and faster trains. The true innovations will be brilliant things that we don't even realize we're missing! And insightful forward-looking authors like Stephenson or Bruce Sterling really might help us expand the range of what's worth aspiring to.
I totally agree, and I think the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" is the best piece of sci-fi inspiration that anyone could have. If I were to complain about our slowness of progress, I wouldn't blame science. I'd blame the entrenched interests of our civil authorities. One glaring mistake we know we make is in how we educate young people. Everyone who knows anything about this stuff understands just how much better we can do, and there's aren't even technological impediments holding us back. It's just that we can't get up off our asses and actually do it. That's the perfect situation in which a little inspiration might go a long way, and I certainly find the technology in "The Diamond Age" to be the most inspiring educational invention ever. Also, Stephenson has the wisdom to explore what it is that we really want from an education, and how the right use of technology could help us realize it.
Say what? Sending the Navy into space and administering an empire that's apparently not subject to any kind of civilian authority? There's a rigid military chain of command, people obey their superiors and the captain has to say "at ease" before you can so much as slouch. Seriously, is there even a civilian government that has any kind of check on the Navy/Starfleet? I know that there's a civilian United Federation of Planets, but in terms of real executive power, they're basically as impotent as the UN. As far as I can tell, all the high-level negotiations with Romulans, etc. were conducted by admirals, not prime ministers or presidents. Isn't this exactly what right-wingers like?
You're also forgetting Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009 - that's profits, not revenue. But not only did it DODGE ALL TAXES, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings. (source)
So please, if you want to rage about Solyndra and you don't first rage about this, it will be obvious to all that you're full of shit.
Solyndra was a government investment that didn't pan out. Given the number of such investements that our government makes, it's kind of impressive that Solyndra is the only one to really go wrong. For example, the government made money on its loan guarantees to carmakes, while also keeping them from drowning and firing everyone.
Yeah, but you forgot to mention that next to climate models, general relativity is a dead simple theory. These days, bright high school students can completely master it. The climate, on the other hand, is a gigantic non-linear system with feedback effects and uncertain inputs. One chronic mistake that smart physicists and engineers always make is that they underestimate the complexity of the climate. The old joke is that if you ask a physicist how best to milk a cow, he'll start his answer with "OK, let's assume a spherical cow homogenously filled with milk." The point is that if you do that kind of thing, you can't have too much confidence in your solution. (Physics is comparably simple, so there you can, but you can't import these heuristics to a messy subject like climate science.)
That's how physicists and engineers can become know-it-alls about things which are actually far more complicated than anything they're willing to appreciate.
Did anyone else wonder if there's someone among these named people who aren't being paid by some CO2-dumping company? If so then they're the real fool!
I don't think that's right. In Nova Scotia and in places like London, Ontario, people speak very strongly in that way and many of them don't know any French. I thought it had to do with the fact that so many of the original Canadians were Scots, and in Scotland they also say "a-BOOt" and "a-GAIN-st".
What you're describing is the difference between a giant, scary company with a good PR department, and one that has no idea how to sell their brand. I think it's that simple.
If they built a giant Enterprise, they'd probably have trekkie fans all over the world visting downtown vegas. And moving to the city.
Yeah, just like fans of Paris started settling in Las Vegas when they built a fake Eiffel Tower, and fans of Egypt started moving there when they built a fake Pyramid of Giza. I'm glad you realize that the way to attract people to your city is to build a hotel/casino in the shape of some object they like. They just can't stay away! Their next brilliant architectural move will be a wedge-shaped hotel called "Pizza Tower" and it will look just like a gigantic slice of pizza. Because let's face it: Nobody can resist a slice of pizza! Keep it classy, Las Vegas!
Yes I do know about the fake Eiffel tower in Vegas. I also know about the fake Pyramid of Giza, the fake Statue of Liberty and the many other crimes of pastiche that have grown up in Las Vegas. This makes my point: Is there a single shred of dignity in any of these abominations? Is this the neighborhood where the Enterprise belongs?
So you're saying that we could once build an entire nuclear powerplant in 77 days and get it running within 9 hours... in an ice cave, in Greenland? If the people who did that could see us now, they'd insult our manhoods.
The normals wouldn't get it and the trekkies would complain about all the inauthenticity, saying things like: "The REAL Enterprise didn't have (disgusted face) BATHROOMS!" Then they would try see how much synthohol they could drink in the ten forward bar.
People often bring up the idea that a megastructure may become an eyesore over time. I can't think of an example where that's been true.
I have an example: Las Vegas. When those people sober up one morning, they'll look at their city and ask themselves: "What the fuck have we built here? Just how fucked up were we?" If your franchise goes Vegas, it does not grow in class or stature. There will never be an Eiffel Tower (or any other admired work of architecture) in Las Vegas. There will only be Trump towers. It's not a place where Piccard would have landed the Enterprise.
Apparently you aren't the first to have this idea. These guys filled a greenhouse with CO2, which was just waste from a nearby industrial plant. As a bonus, they heated the greenhouse with the waste heat from the plant. No surprise, vegetables grow really well in there! To me, that seems like a very efficient use of our "waste" and our land!
I had the same thought. Suppose one such device has an area of ten square meters that's exposed to the sun. How much hydrogen can it make on a given day compared to a ten square meter photovoltaic cell powering an electrolysis reaction? (The latter, with proper catalysts, is pretty close to 100% efficient.) Theoretically, if the container is perfectly insulated, every unit of incident solar energy gets trapped in it could be sunk into splitting H20. But there may be all kinds of side reactions and anyway, there is no perfect insulation.
Also, there's no reason why this reaction has to be solar powered. Why not cover the core of a nuclear reactor with a lot of zinc, and suspend it in water? Wouldn't that also be a good way to make hydrogen? Isn't this a lot like the way in which those hydrogen explosions happened in Fukushima (reaction between the coolant water and fuel rod cladding)? Couldn't we design a reactor that superheats zinc and water, and pipe off the O2 and H2?
So if these things are so damn efficient but also weak, would it make sense to move big structures with a whole giant slew of these thrusters? Or do they individually scale up? How much fuel would it take to move something of the mass of the ISS into Martian orbit? That would be traveling in style!
It sounds to me like the system is working: The students who are trying to game the computer with crap are given failing grades by a human grader. It might not be long before the easiest way to game the computer will be to learn the material and write a good essay. But as we're on our way there, we'll keep the human element in the equation and leave the computers in the role of the useful assistant.
Excellent comment! I agree, this would be an excellent tool for students. In fact, it should be written for them, not for the professor. As a professor, my assignment would be: Turn in something that the auto-grader marks as a B or better, and only then will I read it and give it a real grade. A system like that would save me a lot of frustration!
My students are pretty talented, but I can tell you: Even they would benefit from having a proofreader for the things they turn in to me. It looks like Pearson (I don't like that company, btw.) is trying to market this as an evaluation tool, which is not the best idea. It shouldn't be a tool of the professor, but a tool of the student, something like an improved spell checker, but more of an idea checker.
Machine semantic analysis has actually come quite a long way, and together with subject experts, maybe we are on the verge of being able to compose a program that could give useful feedback on an essay about - say - the history of heliocentrism or the Cogito argument by Descartes. I'd love to have my students mess with such a program until they compose an essay that satisfies it. (It should also auto-check for plagiarism.) Of course, the grade would be decided by me. The role of the program would be to prod the student to produce better work, and to give him or her useful suggestions for how to do so.