Category Archives: Blog

Blog

UK General Election 2010: live lessons in political horse-trade plotting

I’m a little nusy again today, so in lieu of posting anything more substantial, I’ll suggest that those of you who aren’t already might want to keep half an eye on the post-election wrangling here in the UK, for many reasons. First and foremost, the result was unexpected, and unusual in that it sees the UK dealing with the sort of horse-trading on policy that many European governments (and, I believe, Canada) have to go through almost every time they hold a election.

But there’s more: the turn-out is way up, echoing the recent US elections; the markets are jittery, because the economic stability of the UK is on the line; serious procedural cock-ups have portrayed the electoral process to be at best flawed, at worst broken; and finally, no one really knows what’s going to happen, which is a weird place for a traditionally two-party nation to find itself in.

And finally, it’s your chance for a masterclass in spin, razorblade diplomacy and hidden double-bluff messages in public announcements. Great fuel for writers, and (I imagine) pretty fascinating for anyone with an interest in the actual mechanics of political process. I’ll leave your choice of news source down to your personal preference, but with the suggestion that trying a channel you don’t usually plug into will bring a whole new meta-level of lessons about politics into the frame… 🙂

Blog

Doom du jour: volcanic eschatology

Icelandic volcano with touristsNo points for knowing why it’s such a hot button topic*, but everybody’s talking about volcanoes these days. And it’s gloomy stuff, too; it’s been known for a while that the massive but (currently) dormant volcano under Yellowstone National park in the US could decide to pop off at any time (although apparently the meme about that eruption being “overdue” is unfounded), and now it transpires that Mount Fuji in Japan may well be shuffling its feet and clearing its throat in preparation to burst into song. [image by Hello, I am Bruce]

So, just in case the more immediate issues in the news aren’t depressing you enough, here’s Wired UK‘s survival expert Andy Hamilton explaining what would happen if Yellowstone was to go off:

Those within the vicinity will be incinerated as temperatures from the lava flow can reach up to 500 degrees, meaning all surrounding cities will be utterly destroyed. If you somehow managed to survive the fast flowing lava, the thick ash cloud that would rain down would choke you to death. All the states surrounding Wyoming would certainly perish very quickly. The UK and the rest of Earth would not escape. We would all be affected, wherever we were. Global temperatures would plummet by at least 21 degrees. This could last for many years, meaning that all plant life will slowly die off. We will have no vegetables; animals — our meat — will have no food, so humankind would likely starve.

Sheesh – how’s that for existential risk? I think I’m going to head to the local shop, max out my cards on tinned goods and strong alcohol (and maybe a crossbow), and then nail the door shut from inside before settling down to watch The Road on perpetual loop…

[ * I love the way that photoset is titled “Iceland’s Disruptive Volcano”, like it’s some recalcitrant child at the back of the classroom. Send it home with a stiff note to its parents, I say. ]

Blog

Solar cells printed on paper

Chalk up another point for MIT, bounteous font of great boffinry – their latest offering to the world is a solar cell you can print out onto paper. However, I wouldn’t get too excited about it:

… the new solar cells are created by coating paper with organic semiconductor material using a process similar to an inkjet printer.

The MIT researchers used carbon-based dyes to “print” the cells, which are about 1.5 to 2 percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. That falls well short of the more than 40 percent efficiency record for a multi-junction solar cell, or even the recent 19 percent efficiency record for silicon ink-based solar cells. But Vladimir Bulovic, director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Research Center, told CNET any material could be used to print onto the paper solar cells if it was deposited at room temperature.

It will still be some time before solar cells can be installed with a staple gun, however, as the paper variety are still in the research phase and are years from being commercialized.

Drill, baby, drill?

Blog

Zombiesat!

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The undead really are everywhere at the moment – even up in orbit. Zombiesat is the delightful (and, one assumes, largely unofficial) term for the state of defunct communications satellite Galaxy 15, which has recently stopped responding to control commands, and is now shambling toward the orbits of other (still-functional, and presumably expensive) comsats…

… though probably not in search of brains. Even so, if you can’t get a sort of flippant but fun Charlie-Stross-meets-Ben-Bova story out of this one, you’re probably not trying.

Blog

The transhuman victory is assured!

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Well, possibly not – but Michael Anissimov has a post provocatively titled “Transhumanism Has Already Won”, which argues that most of the central tenets of the movement (if such a fractious meme can fairly be called a movement at all) are already accepted – and in some cases actively desired – by a large portion of the world’s population:

Billions of people around the world would love to upgrade their bodies, extend their youth, and amplify their powers of perception, thought, and action with the assistance of safe and tested technologies. The urge to be something more, to go beyond, is the norm rather than the exception.

[…]

The mainstream has embraced transhumanism. A movie about using a brain-computer interface to become what is essentially a transhuman being, Avatar, is the highest-grossing box office hit of all time, pulling in $2.7 billion. This movie was made with hard-core science fiction enthusiasts in mind. About them, James Cameron said, “If I can just get ‘em in the damn theater, the film will act on them in the way it’s supposed to, in terms of taking them on an amazing journey and giving them this rich emotional experience.” A solid SL2 film, becoming the world’s #1 film of all time? It would be hard for the world to give transhumanism a firmer endorsement than that.

I’m not sure how solid an argument the success of an h+-themed movie is in this context, to be honest – though I’ll concede that entertainment media are powerful vectors for new ideas to enter mainstream discourse, even if their portrayal is essentially superficial.

But there’s more, which sees Anissimov explicitly repudiating the elitist devil-take-the-hindmost attitude that tends to be assumed (sometimes erroneously) as the transhumanist default:

When people write an article about a problem, it’s usually because they have a ready-made answer they want to sell you. But sometimes the universe just gives us a problem and it has no special obligation to give us an answer. Transhumanity is like that. Whatever answer we come up with may be a little messy, but we have to come up with something, because otherwise the future will play out according to considerations besides global security and harmony. Power asymmetry is not an optional part of the future — it is a mandatory one. There will be entities way more powerful than human. Where will they be born? How will they be made? These questions are not entirely hypothetical — the seeds of their creation are among us now. We have to decide how we want to give birth to the next influx of intelligent species on Earth. The birth of transhumanity will mean the death of humanity, if we are not careful.

Will it be possible for us to keep a sufficiently watchful eye on the privileged and powerful in order to stop them leaving us in the wake of their ascension? Difficult or not (and assuming transhumanism isn’t an unattainable omega point after all, which is another debate entirely), it’s got to be a better option than trying to ban or legislate around the problem.