January 2008
media
In the free world the media isn’t government run; the government is media run.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=426640&cid=22144770
Training birds of prey to find thermals for paragliders - Parahawking
In 2001 the owners of Sunrise Paragliding in Nepal, Rajesh Bomjan and Adam Hill, quite by chance met up with Scott Mason, a falconer from England. Realizing that birds of prey rely on thermals to assist them in gliding long distances, in much the same way as paragliders do, these three men decided to blend the modern techniques of paragliding with the ancient art of falconry – the result of this collaboration is parahawking.
The ambitious project of training birds of prey to fly with paragliders required an exchange of knowledge between the pilots and the falconer, with each one learning the other’s trade. Aviaries were constructed to house two kite chicks which had been rescued from a local farmer. Kites are birds of prey belonging to the same family (Accipitridae) as hawks, eagles, harriers and vultures. Kites are extremely agile and receptive to training. These two birds, Shadoko and Sappana, became the focus of the project for the following two years, with the ultimate goal of training them to detect thermals for paragliders.
Through patience and dedication, parahawking has been perfected by the trio and is now offered to trained paraglider pilots as an unrivalled adventure activity. Participants in a six day course learn the basics of training birds of prey, including the use of equipment. They move on to handling the birds in the correct way and receive instruction on how best to co-operate with the bird to enhance the paragliding experience. The first parahawking flight is tandem with one of the instructors. Participants are shown how the bird guides the paraglider pilot to the thermals and then retrieves an edible reward from the fist of the pilot.
http://www.nepal.com/blog/the-unique-experience-of-parahawking
Somalia - Functional Anarcho-capitalism?
The east African country of Somalia has been without a functioning central government since the overthrow of its aging ruler, General Mohamed Siad Barre, in 1991. Since the dictator fled, the country has been victim to a horrific clan-based conflict, and has become the archetype of a failed state.
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Yet, despite the chaos, and the lack of any central government, Somalia has one of the most efficient telephone systems in its region. It takes just three days for a landline to be installed, compared with waiting times of many years in neighbouring Kenya, where a stable democratic government has been in place for half a century.
http://www.ethicalcorp.com/content.asp?contentid=4994
Paypal - Libertarian Financial Infrastructure?
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund.
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TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: “Rod is one of our nation’s leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses.”
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So, Thiel’s politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes’ famous characterisation of life as “nasty, brutish and short”, and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: “For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe.”
Hm. I’m not quite sure what to think about that. What are the odds it’s true?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook?
Why Shatner is god
Watch. Learn from the master!
What is to America as Lead in the drinking water was to Rome?
The Divorce Pill?
Women generally prefer the smell of men whose MHC gene complements are different from theirs, setting the stage for the best biological match. But Wedekind’s T-shirt study revealed one notable exception to this rule: women on the birth-control pill. When the pill users among his subjects sniffed the array of pre-worn T-shirts, they preferred the scent of men whose MHC profiles were similar to theirs—the opposite of their pill-free counterparts.
This dramatic reversal of smell preferences may reflect the pill’s mechanism of action: It prevents the ovaries from releasing an egg, fooling the body into thinking it’s pregnant. And since pregnancy is such a vulnerable state, it seems to activate a preference for kin, who are genetically similar to us and likely to serve as protectors. “When pregnant rodent females are exposed to strange males, they can spontaneously abort,” Herz says. “The same may be true for human females.” What’s more, some women report a deficit in sex drive when they take the pill, a possible consequence of its pregnancy-mimicking function.
The tendency to favor mates with similar MHC genes could potentially hamper the durability of pill users’ relationships in the long term.
i.e. the pill is destroying an important evolutionary mate selection strategy which maintains the strength of the human immune system. Oops. We really need to upgrade birth control technology.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20071228-000001.xml&page=3
Larry Brilliant - “The Case For Informed Optimism”
Oh… you know it’s good. Watch it.
Permaculture in India
Bill Mollison, the founding father of the Permaculture movement, gives us a quick tour of one of his many projects. This time we’re in central India, a couple of hours north of Hyderabad — walking amongst mangoes, bananas and a wide variety of other fruit and vegetables. What’s special about it is this ‘food forest’ sits on what was, only a couple of years earlier, a dry, hard, barren wasteland.
http://www.celsias.com/2008/01/05/two-years-to-turn-rock-hard-land-into-food-forest/
What the word needs… A LiveCD with homedir-on-flash-drive
1> Boot from the DVD on any computer.
2> Plug in your flash drive.
3> Compute, including saving documents.
4> There’s your simple computing environment for, well, pretty much anywhere. For bonus points, make general software installable to the keychain drive.
Why doesn’t this exist?