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American lifestyle must change, says neuroscientist

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According to neuroscientist Peter Whybrow, head honcho of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA the concept of the American DreamTM is a “biological impossibility.” From the Wired article:

“We’ve been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want,” said Whybrow

…

Our built-in dopamine-reward system makes instant gratification highly desirable, and the future difficult to balance with the present. This worked fine on the savanna, said Whybrow, but not the suburbs: We gorge on fatty foods and use credit cards to buy luxuries we can’t actually afford. And then, overworked, underslept and overdrawn, we find ourselves anxious and depressed.

This seems to be related to the newly-emerging discipline of behavioural economics, as pioneered by Richard Thaler and others. Here is a good introduction to behavioural economics on Edge.org.

Behavioural economics seem to reflect the fact that economists are coming round to the intuitively obvious idea that human beings really are not super-intelligent, near-psychopathic, wholly self-interested beings like homo economicus.

[image from Orin Optiglot on flickr]

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Pedestrian power: prototype power-source footwear

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There’s nothing worse than being halfway through a long walk around the city only to have your MP3 player run out of juice[1]. Wouldn’t it be great if you could keep it charged up just by walking?

Japanese electronics company NTT Docomo evidently thinks so, as they’ve been showing off a prototype shoe that can generate 1.2 Watts of power through the motion of their wearer.

Docomo power source shoe prototype

Spiraltwist at grinding.be neatly sums up my feelings: “Concept is excellent, design needs to be refined.” That said, Docomo reckons the finished version will be on the market by 2010, by which time there’ll be plenty more pocket-sized gimcracks to plug it into… provided they have compatible plugs and sockets, natch. [image from linked DVICE article]

While we’re on the subject of wearable tech, Gizmodo has a round-up of geeksome gadgetry that means you can have your cyberpunk future rightfreakingnow… provided you don’t mind looking like a fool. I mean, trousers with a keyboard and speakers built in? Come on… [via Hack-a-Day]

[ 1 – OK, there are plainly plenty of things worse than this, but I thought I’d go for upbeat today; it’s a Tuesday, after all. ]

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Boffin reckons there could be 37, 964 advanced civilizations in the galaxy

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Here we have a new treatment of the Drake Equation in this paper: A Numerical Testbed for Hypotheses of Extraterrestrial Life and Intelligence. From the preamble:

This paper outlines a means for applying Monte Carlo Realisation techniques to investigate the parameter space of intelligent civilisations more rigorously, and to help assign errors to the resulting distributions of life and intelligence.

The Monte Carlo method, from what I can gather from Wikipedia, involves:

…a large and widely-used class of approaches. However, these approaches tend to follow a particular pattern:

  1. Define a domain of possible inputs.
  2. Generate inputs randomly from the domain, and perform a deterministic computation on them.
  3. Aggregate the results of the individual computations into the final result.

There’s a lot of complex maths in the paper, and author Duncan H. Forgan says that when it comes to biological parameters the figures are basically guesswork, given that there is only one known biosphere.

Forgan applies his methods to different theories concerning the likelihood of life, including Panspermia, the Rare Life Hypothesis (life is rare, but life is likely to become intelligent), and the Tortoise and Hare Hypothesis (we assume civilizations that develop rapidly are more likely to destroy themselves) with the following scores:

  • Rare life: 361 advanced civilizations
  • Tortoise and Hare: 31,573 advanced civilizations
  • Panspermia: 37, 964 advanced civilizations

Read the paper – if it demonstrates anything it is how much more there is to find out about our galaxy.

[via Slashdot][image from on flickr][image from Kevin on flickr]

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Antimatter in fiction

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An intriguing essay on the treatment and development of antimatter (or “contraterrene” matter) in science fiction from physicist William S. Higgins:

In 1940, Rojansky speculated that some objects in our solar system might consist of contraterrene matter. Certainly, some do not; fallen meteorites contain the same elements as terrestrial materials. If, however, a contraterrene object were orbiting the sun or passing through the solar system, it would be steadily bombarded by ordinary dust and gas. The resulting annihilation would gradually heat and erode its surface, causing volatile materials to escape and surrounding the object with a cloud of debris. In other words, it would look very much like a comet. Were some comets contraterrene?

…

This sparked John Campbell’s restless imagination. He imagined that space-going miners might pursue contraterrene asteroids as a rich source of energy, despite the deadly radiation risks in handling untouchable material. After author Robert Heinlein turned down the idea, Campbell offered it to veteran writer Jack Williamson. Williamson set to work.

His story, “Collision Orbit,” appeared in the July 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction under the pen name Will Stewart. In it, engineer Jim Drake struggles to exploit the energy of contraterrene asteroids by finding a way to manipulate them without touching them, using magnetic fields. (Read the logbook from this issue for more information.)

Ooh yes do check it out.

[via Boing Boing, as ever][image from Don Fulano on flickr]

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Open-source government – politics without the corruption?

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In an open letter explaining why he’s quitting the hedge fund business, Andrew Lahde makes an interesting comment regarding a way of changing the American governmental system with a view to making it less corrupt – model it on the Linux development process. [via SlashDot] [image by Tony the Misfit]

Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt. George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher. My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly. I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken.

I think most of us can agree on the latter point, but I’m not sure about Ladhe’s idea of making the rewards of government service more attractive at baseline… but if it actually resulted in people who genuinely wanted to make a difference to the world (rather than just their bank balances) taking the reins of government, it’d be no bad thing.

Of course, how much respect you have for the political philosophy of a just-cashed-out hedge fund manager who made a fortune from the sub-prime crisis probably depends on how close to meeting your own monthly budget you are right now…

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