James Dyson (inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner) has created a waterfall that creates the illusion of water following an endless spiral uphill. BBC NEWS | UK | How does Dyson make water go uphill?
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Western economies are largely becoming service based economies, and irreversibly so, the US cannot compete globally in manufacturing and production, as witnessed by the huge subsidies to farming or steel manufacture. What if many of the services that rely on information technology are not economically viable in the long run? What if never ending cheapness created by the applicability of Moores Law and lack of scarcity in digital media conspire to create hyper-deflation? Kevin Werbach recently delivered “the notion that many media organizations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of
“Richard Dawkins perhaps provided the best visual for our link to chimps,” Fouts told Discovery News. “Imagine taking the hand of your grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the women would be holding the hand of a chimpanzee.” This is not what Dawkins said and is complete BS. rather like saying “Imagine a chimpanzee taking the hand of her grandmother, who was holding the hand of her grandmother and so on down the line. 155 miles out, one of the chimps would be holding the hand of a human”. Chimps and humans share a common ancestor, we are not decended from chimps any more than chimps are from us, but we share an ape ancestor. Discovery Channel :: Study: Chimps Belong In Human Genus
Although deflation strikes fear in the minds of governments (the principal economic stabilizing mechanism, interest rate adjustment, is no longer viable) and bankers (“because a zero rate would roil money market funds, which rely on a positive interest rate to cover their own operating costs”) it is ordinary people who would lose out most. Low interest rates on mortgages may have created a false euphoria where people believe they can afford house prices that would normally be out of their reach. Deflation could spell bad news for anyone with debt, such as a mortgage, as the value of the debt would increase over time. For the poor, who often rely on extortionate loans just to survive, let alone buy property, the effects could be crippling. In the early 19th century in Britain, social unrest brought on from the effects of deflation almost caused a revolution. Deflation Hints Feed Talk of…
Europemedia on a virtuoso Kevin Werbach performance: “The notion that many media organisations currently depend on their revenues through the assumption of ‘scarcity’ is as radical as it is true. As weblogs provide a rival to newspaper columnists, P2Ps topple record companies, open spectrum enables everyone to become a broadcaster and TiVo makes advertisers shudder.” Europemedia.net: News – TVMW Seminar: The Kevin Werbach experience
“Whereas Dr Wildman’s team find that chimps and humans are 99.4% similar, other researchers last year put the similarity at around 95%; the figure you get depends on precisely which genetic differences you look at.” DNA mechanisms for reproduction are not a blueprint but a recipe. This BBC article does not mention that the 95% figure for chimp vs. human comparison takes into account how the recipe is followed and therefore may make more sense. i.e. it does not merely look at the ingredients of the recipe, the DNA sequences, which have usually indicated more than 98% concordance. BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chimps genetically close to humans via Kottke
“Contrary to popular myth, Walt Disney did not choose to be frozen, though Dick Clair, a writer for “The Carol Burnett Show,” did.” MEME 5.01
In case anyone misinterprets the previous post defending Matt Ridley’s attack on those (such as Bill Joy) who see absolute dangers in innovation such as nanotechnology and concludes somehow that I am against environmentalist causes. 1. It is scientists who are arguing, backed up by solid evidence that we need to cut back pollution. 2. It is politicians, particularly those with religious beliefs that fly in the face of scientific evidence, that refuse to believe evidence for issues such as global warming. 3. Although industry is the product of a technological society and is the cause for most pollution: a. there is a difference between science and the abuse of its innovation; b. contrary to popular opinion, non-industrial societies can be environmentally damaging; c. some scientific innovations would seem to be a very plausible way to reduce the environmentally damaging effect of industrialized society (for example, information technology increases opportunities…
Matt Ridley very sensibly rebuffs the Bill Joy like hysteria in the latest doom mongering book, ‘The Final Century’: “Consider what would have happened, for instance, if we had somehow waved a magic wand and prevented the invention of agriculture. Evidence suggests that increasingly efficient hunter-gatherers would have continued their extinction of prey species – they had already devastated the fauna of Australia, the Americas and many islands – stopping only when the last tree in the last rain forest was felled. Rees admits in passing that “the most dramatic engines of current economic growth – miniaturisation and information technology – are environmentally benign”, but then fails to follow this thought.” Telegraph | Arts | Prophet or pessimist?
Like half of America I left the real world and re-entered the computer generated Matrix for a couple of hours of sensory overload this weekend. And perhaps San Francisco is fashionable again. How effortlessly the Prada wearing New Yorker types Trinity and Neo slipped into beads and hemp for their trip to Burning Man, sorry, Zion. I’m not really a science fiction fan, however, the Matrix reloaded did remind me of one of the most priceless moments on TV, ‘the hippy episode’ of Star Trek where Spock becomes sentimental and plays a Vulcan Harp with a flower behind his ear. The Matrix Reloaded (kottke.org)
It seems that Rube Goldberg is the American Heath Robinson, or is Heath Robinson the British Rube Goldberg? Either way, great commercial, shame about the car. Honda’s New Accord via Azeem Azhar
The Internet has revolutionized genealogy, however most people can only trace their family tree back to the beginning of the 19th century. The price of genetic tests is dropping exponentially and it is now possible to test markers on Y Chromosome (male lineage) and Mitochondrial (female lineage) DNA to show where you came from over a 100,000 year timescale for $200. What is so special about genetic genealogy is that it almost entirely dispels racist ideology. Although first identifiable humans appeared 2M years ago and spread throughout the world, all of us are descended from around 20,000 people who left Africa around 100,000 years ago. Although the Chinese government may insist that different races evolved from earlier hominids we are in fact all Africans. While in the UK I met with the maker of The Journey of Man a documentary which tracks the ultimate genealogical goal, the trail of humans…