August 2007
Fake movie trailer thingie
Star Wars / Lord of the Rings mashup.
The first half is a bit…. ho hum.
Then… well…. OH MY GOD funny. You want to watch this. It’s three minutes. You’ll like.
All I’m saying is that it’s hard to beat Bruce Sterling
Physicist Chow links to exactly one article. It’s this one.
Just… read. Think. Enjoy. Then tell me that it’s not, actually, fairly probable.
PS: it’s the gender ratios bit that makes it science fiction. Everything else is futurism.
Hexayurts - if you want to use lumber
Drop me an email. There’s some stuff that might work ideally for your application.
Oops…
Mother Theresa had some issues.
Cluttering Barnett’s blog…
A long comment I should have made a blog post to begin with.
Tom, yes, I may well have missed your point, but I do think that it’s worth noting just how differently these things look.
In the 20th century, the West went completely insane, and the madness was contagious. First you have WW1, which was insane and obscene - trench warfare… my god, what *happened* to people that they were willing to do this to each other? Where was the sense of honor which had been so much of a part of war, at least in theory?
Then WW2… Just… more insanity. Then death camps and gulags, and the ever-present fear that the USA and USSR would **destroy the planet.**
I mean, did you ever think about how that period of time looked from the outside? To have to supposedly civilized West threatening to ruin the entire planet for all of the other human beings in their insane wars?
Something was **seriously wrong** with the west at a political level for about a century. So wrong that you were willing to destroy the planet for the rest of us over *how your societies divided up scarcity.*
I don’t mean to rant here, but this is really really important: the west is contaminated with the 20th century and the things that the cultures did and went through in that period. And this madness has proven to be contagious, at least in China. However you think the line of transmission goes from Marx to Mao, we can at least say “inspiration.”
I feel like this context is entirely missing from debates over globalization. The other thing that is missing is any serious appreciation of the environmental impact of economic growth, and the degree to which globalization rests upon the availability of cheap labor and international trade agreements which favor the industrialized nations over the rest.
Can [globalization] really work for everybody?
Right now, we have about 2 billion people in the “rich” niche, and four billion poor. We’ve already maxed out certain kinds of resource availability - oil, most notably, but also some of the rarer metals, and of course the questions of ecosystem carrying capacity not just for carbon, but for sulphur and other misc. air and other pollution.
4 billion more rich people? Doubling or tripling the number of available “jobs” - i.e. roles in the economic system other than “subsistence agriculturalist”?
Do I really believe this?
I’m not sure. Maybe.
Similar issues about the stability of capitalism - we’ve seen it crash once, during the Great Depression. Now we have another round of wobbles over sub-prime, which is just a tremor, but clearly indicates that The Big One is still a possibility. The global financial system is not absolutely stable.
So I guess what I’m reacting to here is the core assumption that the West has something which can be exported, and something which scales to a planetary level safely. I think I see problems in terms of environment, and in terms of the inherent stability of the global financial markets.
Are those resolvable? Maybe not until the west *learns* to stop placing immediate, short-term benefit over long term goals.
You still have nuclear arsenals capable of sterilizing the planet. How can we take your political thinking seriously when it generates this kind of insanity? The threat to destroy all life rather than lose a war? Who would even *think* such a thing?
This is what we mean when we say white people are crazy, and it’s contagious. You have a breakdown in fundamental rationality about a lot of basic things in the west, and I’m not sure that it’s progress.
I mean, I’m taking a somewhat exaggerated version of my actual position here - leaving out a lot of the counterbalancing points which are actually parts of my own argument here, just for the sake of sharp counterpoint - but this is the rational of the people who are knee-jerk anti-globalization a lot of times. It’s seldom put into words, but that basic feeling of “there’s something dangerous wrong with these people” is very strong and based on relatively recent behavior.
That’s kind of why I flared when you talked about exporting western political thought to India as “growing up.” It’s more like spreading a disease.
Again, I’m sorry if this is a rant, and I know that you like your blog to be a place of constructive and reasoned argument - if you like I’ll post this at home as a blog post, and you can comment there if you like, or we could take it to email.
Nepalese appropriate technology boom
It has gone almost unnoticed that Nepal’s infant mortality rate has been reduced by half since 1990. How did that happen? Not because a lot of state-of-the-art hospitals were built. Fewer babies die in Nepal these days mainly because of the spread of awareness about safe drinking water. The message went out through radio, and made an impact because of higher literacy levels and better vaccination coverage.
And they’re doing this across the board.
Brilliant demo
Deletes the least visually important bits from an image rather than scaling or cropping. Blade Runner.
OMG bad wind at Burning Man this year
WIND WARNING. . . Reposted from Arcana in LA Burners….
Greetings from the playa where I am happy and well and holded up in my car. I dont want this to deter anyone from coming, as it’s still a blast - but..batten down the hatches kids, cause the wind is the worst I’ve seen in the 12 years I have been coming here.
For those of you around when the big wind hit last year and took our camp down, that is the way it has been the bulk of the time - really that windy, mostly non stop. The airstream is shaking and rocking and my tent is tied to every rack and bumper and hitch the truck & airstream have, and I’m still unsure if it’s going to hold up (one pole already snapped). The whiteouts are lasting a long time, some well over 5 hours.
I hear it has been like this for weeks, dont know if it will continue through the event. but the green man is about nature, so be prepared for the force of nature to remind us how small we are! The good news is that it’s warm thus far, even in the middle of the night.
The garage tents around here seem to be holding up when they have no walls & are tied down every few feet - so if you feel like grabbing one from costco, that could work. I suggest that if you are debating between a tent or a van/suv, you pick the car. be sure to put everything in bins that have locking lids, and in ziplocks inside those. if your tent has any open netting areas that do not zip closed with a solid fabric, i suggest glue gunning a fabric onto them, closing them up permanently, before you come here (fabric on the outside of the tent, so it’s between the tent & the rainfly).you can always cut it off later. mine has a few open ones and theres a good 1/8 inch layer of dust inside, on top of the bed, the floors, everywhere. had to sleep with dust mask last night. too much to keep up with & too late to close them off.
the wind/dust is coming from the same direction as always so be sure to park your cars in a way that blocks it from anything you put up. and lots of bungees, ive been through 20 just for my tent. phil - great decision in sleeping in the rider truck. i think that is all to tell - just a whole lot of wind. will update you if it stops. am still having a total blast, the wind is part of the fun for sure, and look forward to seeing you’ll in a week! cma, please bring glue gun so i can seal up my tent.
PS - wind reminders -fully enclosed goggles for day & night (not only dark ones), things that light up so u can be seen, bungees, rope, 2 ft long reebar - more than you think you need, heavy lotion, lip stuff, babywipes, giant sheet or tarp or something to cover all the stuff in your tent (to stop dust from getting into your bed), and lots of soft towels - more than you think you need. xx
For god’s sake, use filament tape, that’s all I’m saying.
Interbegging at Y-Combinator
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44869
Hi. My name is Vinay Gupta, of the Hexayurt project, a FOSS-style organization aimed at radically improving the lot of refugees and the poor.
We’ve had some luck, recently, and we need help coping.
Here’s the technology - we call it “Disastr” - a simple approach to using the network to reinforce efforts to evacuate and rehouse American refugees in the event of a natural disaster like the potential Bay Quake, or events of a more man-made nature.
http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_Mass_Evacuation
We just won the Treehugger Participate! context, to go and showcase the shelter technology (the hexayurt itself) at Burning Man.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/participate_win.php
We also have an event in Washington DC, involving the DoD, the American Red Cross, and a variety of other groups, where we are hoping to present some of our work (the “Expedient Infrastructure for Transitory Populations” project.)
Here’s the issue: we’re unfunded. It’s been paid for mainly out of our own pockets, although we’ve had a little funding from the DoD for some parts of it. Now we have the classical problem of success: taking it the next step of the way takes funding, and funding we do not have. We’re flying all over the country to show this stuff to people.
The existing funding cycles are vastly too slow and unresponsive to help us. We travel light and move fast.
So here’s the question: can the “micro-cap” model, like Y-Combinator, work for venture philanthropy too?
Who’s willing to throw, say, $10,000 at this project, to see what we can do? Everything you see so far was done on less than $5k.
Vinay Gupta, hexayurt@gmail.com
If it can work for venture capital, why not for venture philanthropy?
Incredibly important and subtle point about gender and evolutionary biology
The punchline: looks like about 2/3rd of the ancestors of the current human race were female, because a lot of men died without ever reproducing.
Impacts for our understanding of our own genetic heritage? Huge.