State of Fear has very silly politics and terrible science.
Do you really think it realistic that huge, powerful, and rich environmental organisations would perform evil acts that only employees of sensible and socially responsible oil companies can save us from? Is it reasonable or realistic that environmental scientists, who in the real world are willing to forgo lucrative careers to take low-paid academic positions because they love and care about researching the natural world, would cause massive destruction of the natural world to score political points?
In the real world, who has the most money for public relations and the most political capital? The ex-chief executive officer of the giant energy corporation Halliburtons is the vice president of the USA for goodness sake. Could the head of Greenpeace ever hope to reach such an influential and powerful position?
All the local environmental fund raising events I've been involved with have been in conjuction with people that have very little financial resources but care deeply about recycling, local environment issues, etc. Very different from Crichton's own protagonist, who zips about the world in a Gulfstream Jet.
I did some research a couple of years ago in co-evolving the neural network controllers and the morphology of robots that are mostly built from lego. They used customised controllers instead of the MindStorm ones. A population were first evolved in simulation over few hundred generations and then physically constructed.
For those that are interested in this sort of thing, the paper was published in ALife IX and is online.
Yes, that's right. No model of the physical world is 'correct', although some may be more so than others.
Building robots or complex physical things whose attributes were evolved in a physics simulation such that their behaviour is more or less the same (the 'reality-transfer' problem) is difficult and an active area of research in evolutionary robotics.
There is a large difference in evolved behaviour between physical things and models of those same things. GAs using physics simulators are very good at exploiting inaccuracies and subtle features of the simulation, making the transfer between the simulation to reality very difficult without the use of specialised techniques such as Minimal Simulations and Incremental Evolution.
This means you have to be skeptical with experiments performed just in simulation without testing the same model in reality.
The story is by Arthur C. Clarke and is in Venture to the Moon that's collected in the book The Other Side of the Sky.
Explorers on the moon set up an experiment to shoot sodium up into the thin lunar atmosphere so it would glow and be visible from Earth. But somebody sneakily swaps the nozzle used so it fires the sodium up in the shape of words - of a certain sugar based fizzy drink - and hence creates the largest advert ever seen!
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Do you really think it realistic that huge, powerful, and rich environmental organisations would perform evil acts that only employees of sensible and socially responsible oil companies can save us from? Is it reasonable or realistic that environmental scientists, who in the real world are willing to forgo lucrative careers to take low-paid academic positions because they love and care about researching the natural world, would cause massive destruction of the natural world to score political points?
In the real world, who has the most money for public relations and the most political capital? The ex-chief executive officer of the giant energy corporation Halliburtons is the vice president of the USA for goodness sake. Could the head of Greenpeace ever hope to reach such an influential and powerful position?
All the local environmental fund raising events I've been involved with have been in conjuction with people that have very little financial resources but care deeply about recycling, local environment issues, etc. Very different from Crichton's own protagonist, who zips about the world in a Gulfstream Jet.
For those that are interested in this sort of thing, the paper was published in ALife IX and is online.
Building robots or complex physical things whose attributes were evolved in a physics simulation such that their behaviour is more or less the same (the 'reality-transfer' problem) is difficult and an active area of research in evolutionary robotics.
This means you have to be skeptical with experiments performed just in simulation without testing the same model in reality.
The story is by Arthur C. Clarke and is in Venture to the Moon that's collected in the book The Other Side of the Sky. Explorers on the moon set up an experiment to shoot sodium up into the thin lunar atmosphere so it would glow and be visible from Earth. But somebody sneakily swaps the nozzle used so it fires the sodium up in the shape of words - of a certain sugar based fizzy drink - and hence creates the largest advert ever seen!