On the bright side
October 15th, 2008 Filed Under news, politics
At least the 10% of my 401k that I lost today is not as much as the 10% I lost yesterday.
As a side note, it is interesting that the stock market performs better and with less volatility during Democratic presidencies:
Using the Dow Jones industrial average as the benchmark, Stock Trader’s Almanac shows a $10,000 investment compounded during Democratic presidencies since 1901 would be worth $279,705 after 48 years. The same $10,000 investment during 56 Republican years would have been worth just $78,699. If you adjust for inflation, the value of a $10,000 investment under Democratic presidents is $33,426.The inflation-adjusted value under Republican presidents is $26,145.
Stumble it!World Population
May 9th, 2008 Filed Under news, sustainability
Slashdot had a post noting that today the world population will surpass 6.666666666 billion people, right on track to hit 7 billion by 2012. Many people, including myself, think the world is radically overpopulated with humans, but I’m no longer worrying about it. It’s just how life goes: a new replicator (species) struggles to survive, and if it doesn’t go extinct, it becomes dominant and tries to convert all matter into copies of itself. Eventually, it suffers a massive population reduction, whether from a cataclysmic event, a new dominant predator, or by choking on its own waste. Then it has another chance to go extinct, but if all “goes well”, it settles into a comfortable equilibrium with the rest of the replicators, and the cycle repeats.
| Year | World Population |
|---|---|
| 1600s | 500 million |
| 1800s | 1 billion |
| 1930 | 2 billion |
| 1960 | 3 billion |
| 1975 | 4 billion |
| 1987 | 5 billion |
| 2000 | 6 billion |
| 2012 (predicted) | 7 billion |
A friend of mine, Joe Ardent, believes that the Singularity is nigh upon us, and with it comes the end of resource scarcity. I happen to believe that energy will be a limiting factor for some time to come–I don’t think we will manage to create a viable fusion or antimatter or other essentially “limitless” energy source in my lifetime. That’s not to say it won’t happen ever. The concept of the Singularity emerges naturally from exponential growth, and in time, I suppose all things are possible. But this is a battle of the exponents: just as our technological and production capabilities grow exponentially, so does our population and its consumption (and I’m not even taking into account the emergent problems that come with scaling all new technology).
So I bet this friend a year’s supply of energy (about 300 GJ, or 10kW-years) that before we achieve the Singularity–for the purposes of the bet, defined as a billion people having programmable nano-factories that can make unlimited copies of those same nano-factories–the world will see a huge population reduction, defined by the bet as a 15% population drop (the loss of 1 billion people from today’s world population).
That is a nearly unfathomable number of people–the entire world population in A.D. 1800–and the events that could cause such a massive loss of population are certainly not going to be pleasant. For comparison, the Black Plague killed 100 million people, reducing the world population by 25%.
But let’s put this in perspective: If something does happen in 2012 to knock a billion people off the earth’s roster, that would merely set the world’s population back to 6 billion, which we had just 12 years prior in 2000. Honestly, as a planet and a species, we would scarcely notice such a minor disturbance in the Force.
I of course hold out hope that our awakening superbeing becomes aware of its plight, and takes active steps to limit its population and reverse the last century’s hypergrowth. But this looks like it will take a very long time–the annual growth rate did peak (at 2.2%) in the ’60s, which is good news, but 40 years and 3.5 billion people later, we’re still headed the wrong direction (over 1% annual growth). More developed countries which already have a negative population growth (like Italy), are worried that their particular breed of human will be overrun by a swarm of another particular breed of human, and so they’re encouraging their breed to, well, breed. Which is not a real solution to any real problem.
Effective solutions, like encouraging widespread contraceptive use or offering impoverished parents a few bucks to get their children sterilized, are not widely pursued for so-called “moral” reasons. So it looks like, we humans are going to keep procreating ourselves into an ever-deeper hole, and regardless of technological progress will eventually suffer the same plight as every dominant lifeform before us. Ah well. We all know that it will be the poorest and ugliest who will die first, so assuming we don’t go completely extinct, our descendents will be richer and more beautiful than we are. Maybe they’ll be smarter too, but I’m not going to bet on it.
OLPC XO Laptop Review
December 30th, 2007 Filed Under awesome, featured, news, science
“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” — William Gibson
Today, December 31st 2007, is the last day of the Give-1-Get-1 (G1G1) campaign for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, where you donate $400 to the OLPC, and one child in Peru, Mongolia, Cambodia, or Nigeria gets an XO laptop, and you get one too. This is the only way right now for anyone reading this to get one at all, so until further notice today is the last day to get one of these laptops. Even developers on the project have to return theirs when they’re done. Many people, including myself, think that OLPC should continue the G1G1 campaign indefinitely: this is a great way to help make their project economically sustainable.
I donated on the first day, partly because I believe in their mission, but also because the machine itself is so neat and I wanted to play with it. My XO laptop arrived a week ago in one small box with only three parts inside: the laptop, the power cord, and the battery. I was looking forward to the hand-crank, but they canned it for an unspecified reason. A pull cord generator is due out “in developed markets by late summer 2008″.
I pulled it out and it looks like a green Speak n’ Spell, what with the handle. I spent, honestly, at least 5 minutes trying to figure out how to open it–it’s an alien puzzlebox. I put the battery in, opened the port covers, fiddled with every button and crevice I could find. Turns out those “port covers” are also latches for the screen, and also they function as wireless antennae. You can’t open the laptop without putting up the antennae. Very clever.
The keyboard is really tiny, just barely enough space for my fat American fingers to function. I pushed the button with the power symbol on it and it booted instantly with a full battery. I was annoyed by the touchpad constantly resetting the cursor to the sides, but a quick visit to the troubleshooting page showed me how to open the device, and at the bottom, that the touchpad issue is a known bug and I should try the four-fingered salute. I did, and the problem was solved.
It was a little difficult at first for a veteran computer user like myself, due to extra keys with new symbols, but I found my way around. I clicked on the Eye icon and there I was on the screen! I didn’t know it had a webcam, and I made a 10-second video lickety-split. I got on our wireless network (WEP), downloaded an mp3, and a few clicks later it was playing. I swear, I almost cried thinking about what some lucky Peruvian dirt farmer’s kid was going to get, compared to the monochrome textpunk 300 baud cassette beast I had.
Of course, knowing it runs Linux, I just had to get to a terminal and futz around. There’s actually a Terminal Activity, and it’s a standard shell; no root password either. I wanted to install one of my favorite games, NetHack, and my first try (’apt-get install nethack’) didn’t work; but it’s using components from Fedora Core 6, so my second try (’yum install nethack’) did. With these specs–a 400MHz processor, 256MB of RAM, 1GB of flash for hard disk (75% available out-of-the-box), webcam, wireless mesh networking, microphone and speakers–it’s literally, almost to the point of mockery, a hundred times more powerful than the computers I grew up with. And it’s a laptop, and it only consumes 2 watts of power.
After playing with it for day, I knew this laptop was made for a child, and even though I wanted to, I couldn’t let it collect dust on a shelf to show to friends once every few months. So I gave the laptop to my nephews, who are 6 and 10, and from the photos it looks like they’re going to get lots of good use out of it. I’ve been so lucky to have been born in the time and place that I was, and I’ve spent many hours in complete rapture surfing the Internet with free software running on cheap hardware. The future is indeed here; now let’s distribute it more evenly!
punk vs. cop
October 14th, 2007 Filed Under happening, news
Last night a Seattle police officer shot a 13-year-old kid on my front lawn. I was just falling asleep when I heard two loud reports (and I don’t remember hearing anything before or after). The kid was out tagging with a friend, police saw them, they ran, the police caught up to them at my house, told them to put their hands up, and the one kid reached into his pants for something stupid. The cop shot twice and hit him in the leg, which I’m sure hurt a lot, but will probably (hopefully) not be fatal or debilitating.
Moral of the story: if a cop tells you to put your hands up, you should not reach into your pants for ANY REASON. Not to ditch the evidence, not to pull out a cellphone, not to scratch your balls. If you don’t want to put your hands up, your other option is to run away. It’s not a great idea and it’ll probably come back to haunt you later, but at least it’s non-threatening and you probably won’t be shot at (though cops love to use “non-lethal” force on perps who try to run away. I learned that from Hill Street Blues).
Fungi use radioactivity for energy
May 22nd, 2007 Filed Under news, science
ScienceDaily reports that fungi can use melanin to eat ionising radiation as an energy source:
“Just as the pigment chlorophyll converts sunlight into chemical energy that allows green plants to live and grow, our research suggests that melanin can use a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum–ionizing radiation–to benefit the fungi containing it,” says Dr. Dadachova.
…
The researchers also carried out physico-chemical studies into melanin’s ability to capture radiation. By measuring the electron spin resonance signal after melanin was exposed to ionizing radiation, they showed that radiation interacts with melanin to alter its electron structure. This is an essential step for capturing radiation and converting it into a different form of energy to make food.
