May 2008
Indian Village Economies
Alia’s predicament is akin to most of residents in India’s half a million villages. Where poverty is secular and shows no sign of receding. Like Barigaon, most of India’s villages are entirely sustained by natural resources like land and forest. With 70 per cent of population depending on agriculture and around 400 million people on forests, environment controls the rural economy . It is the survival base on which life depends. And the relation between ecology and economy is so strong, and yet fragile, that even a small disturbance will lead to a human catastrophe like the impending starvation in Barigaon this year.
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/cover.asp?foldername=20020515&filename=anal&sid=1&sec_id=7
Genetic algorithms for making hardware do things (on FPGAs)
Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type.
It seems that evolution had not merely selected the best code for the task, it had also advocated those programs which took advantage of the electromagnetic quirks of that specific microchip environment. The five separate logic cells were clearly crucial to the chip’s operation, but they were interacting with the main circuitry through some unorthodox method– most likely via the subtle magnetic fields that are created when electrons flow through circuitry, an effect known as magnetic flux. There was also evidence that the circuit was not relying solely on the transistors’ absolute ON and OFF positions like a typical chip; it was capitalizing upon analogue shades of gray along with the digital black and white.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=870
Indiana Jones IV
It’s just fine. It’s no great meditation upon aging, but people have aged. It’s perhaps not the most inspired of the plots, but it’s not breathtakingly stupid…
in short, it works. You’ll enjoy yourself. Go see it.
Bothering Barnett Again
Hm. Let’s see, in the event of a global economic crash, whether India or China fare better.
The village is rooted in self-sufficiency and food security. The global economy, while efficient in some respects, is incredibly volatile and unstable. To grow dependent on something you cannot hope to control is not wisdom.
I think that the new technologies of decentralization are going to make India’s bet on the village seem like a very good idea, as the export-driven cities of China peak and fade into rapid obsolescence as urbanization run its course.
The Chinese market cannot sustain that much urbanization. The export markets are driven by unsustainable borrowing. Push will meet shove, and what then?
Half of the human race lives in villages. Given cell phones, and eventually lap tops, given cheap pumps to irrigate, and cheap solar for drinking water, power and light, given primary health care from traveling workers… I think the slums look like a much less good, and much less *stable* option. Particularly with gasoline at $130 and rising: living close to your food supply makes more and more sense.
The golden age of the village is ahead of us, not behind us.
http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2008/05/the_precious_village_holds_ind.html
He’s not an infrastructure guy or a technologist, so he’s following the wrong trends. It’s hard to see the metahistorical forces which create the village when you think in centuries, not millennia.
Barefoot College Geodesic Domes
http://www.barefootcollege.org/domes.htm
SODIS in Tanzania
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4786216.stm
good article!
http://www.msrc.sunysb.edu/news/Tanzania.html - more here.
well that’s damn clever
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
what’s nice is that you can trim off the end of the hash, to get a less and less precise hash, because it basically represents a quadtree in hash from.
Brilliantly simple, and well executed.
Christian Science Monitor on AFRICOM
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0516/p03s03-usmi.html?page=1
I’m still figuring out what I learned at the AFRICOM expo. I had brief discussions on STAR-TIDES with a lot of senior people, but placing infrastructure at the center of “winning the peace” is such a radical shift in perspective from the process-heavy approaches which have been at the core of the US govt. thinking on peacemaking for ever and a day.
When you get the tech right, problems go away and there are no processes to speak of. No complicated inter-agency shenanigans about deploying cell phones: the tech is right, it just happens.
I wish more people involved were engineers. Really, seriously, I wish people understood how much of the core situation is about gaps in science, engineering, and product development.
One way of seeing that is to look at strategy and tactics in a wider perspective:
* Science
* Technology
* Politics
* Strategy
* Tactics
The real leverage is science. But if the science marches forwards - and it has - and technology doesn’t come along, you wind up with unapplied science - gaps like the lack of a really good quality, reliable, home solar water pasteurization appliance. Not a solar cooker, a domestic water purification gadget.
If politics doesn’t keep pace with technology… well… that’s too common to even discuss. Look at the lack of a systematic US govt. push behind birth control research. Absurd, obscene medieval ideas about contraception propagated by the Vatican still hold sway over US tech policy in this key area. Just dumb. It’s not that religion has no place in politics: people gotta get their values somewhere, and for some, that will be religion. But that kind of stupid has no place in politics, particularly inside of such powerful organizations.
The strategic and tactical levels ride on the reality created at the other levels. But if a problem exists at the scientific level - let’s take malaria or famine - no amount of scrambling around on the other levels is going to make it right. The science is the key, the core to the whole thing.
The internet did more to protect global freedom of speech than just about anything else the US govt. has done. That’s really the lesson that AFRICOM should have embraced at a fundamental level: pay for the tech to make problems go away, rather than trying to implement political and strategic band-aids. Everything which doesn’t get down to the core is surface.
Scientific research is the ultimate, fundamental, global foreign policy initiative. Everything else is afterthought. Global transformation through targeted research is the foreign policy high-ground of the 21st century. It’s power you can actually use, unlike the obsolete piles of nuclear weapons and “strategic” bombers, tools for destroying enemy bureaucracies, useless against the new generation of bottom-up warfare.
Imagine if AFRICOM primarily saw itself as a vehicle for solving the problems that lead to wars and humanitarian disasters in Africa. It’s not unrealistic, the mandate is clearly given by US DOD Directive 3000.05. But it’s making this jump in the mindset: “solve the problem as far up the ladder as possible.”
In general, I think we’ll find science as foreign policy is the key to aligning the interests of the poorest 75% of the human race with whichever power gets to it first.
Good article on STAR-TIDES from last year
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=169&sid=1296495
Big earthquake management
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-quake22-2008may22,0,3753797.story
yep. it’s about like that.