Re: Mention of David Brin
On Jul 10, 2009, at 3:28 PM, Charlie Bell wrote: On 11/07/2009, at 1:25 AM, Dave Land wrote: On Jul 9, 2009, at 5:21 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 07:07 PM Thursday 7/9/2009, hkhenson wrote: snip (considerable) On the other hand, also coming into my screen today was a blog entry from The Oildrum, specifically ahttp://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485#more guest blog under the byline of Gail the Actuary in which an expert on space-based solar power explained how a new approach to the launch of vehicles may be able to cut the cost enough that space-based solar energy would become an answer, even the answer, to our future energy problems. Space-based solar arrays are one of those technologies that are always somewhere over the horizon, and some would say over the rainbow. If you take a few minutes to read this blog, and again the comments, you find the dissonance on full display. On the one hand you have a person saying that there may be an energy answer after fossil fuels. On the other hand you have lots of people not only saying it is not possible, but directly arguing that a human die-back is more desirable than cheap energy. And as I always ask folks who express similar ideas, how many of them volunteered to start it by being the first to go right now? I've never thought of this as a particularly effective response. Besides being too much of a personal attack, it is too easily deflected: Those who would make an argument like that (that a culling of the human species is an effective solution to one problem or another) clearly think of some human lives as having less value than others. They would almost certainly put themselves in the high value group. It is also a little to close to an I'm- rubber-you're-glue kind of school-yard argument technique. Better is to probe to see what populations they would like to see culled, how they would evaluate cases, and so forth. It gets at the same thought process without seeming to be a personal attack. And anyway - reducing populations by lowering breeding rates is just as effective, and as has been shown the world over, as populations become more affluent and better educated they breed later and less (often choosing to have none or one child). So the answer to the population crisis is development and education, not culling. Perfect -- and really more the point of my comment: why merely irritate them when your goal is to engage them in considering the ramifications of their idiotic statement? But yes: education does wonders to slow population growth. Dave ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Mention of David Brin
On Jul 11, 2009, at 8:56 AM, Dave Land wrote: On Jul 10, 2009, at 3:28 PM, Charlie Bell wrote: On 11/07/2009, at 1:25 AM, Dave Land wrote: On Jul 9, 2009, at 5:21 PM, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 07:07 PM Thursday 7/9/2009, hkhenson wrote: snip (considerable) On the other hand, also coming into my screen today was a blog entry from The Oildrum, specifically ahttp://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485#more guest blog under the byline of Gail the Actuary in which an expert on space-based solar power explained how a new approach to the launch of vehicles may be able to cut the cost enough that space-based solar energy would become an answer, even the answer, to our future energy problems. Space-based solar arrays are one of those technologies that are always somewhere over the horizon, and some would say over the rainbow. If you take a few minutes to read this blog, and again the comments, you find the dissonance on full display. On the one hand you have a person saying that there may be an energy answer after fossil fuels. On the other hand you have lots of people not only saying it is not possible, but directly arguing that a human die-back is more desirable than cheap energy. And as I always ask folks who express similar ideas, how many of them volunteered to start it by being the first to go right now? I've never thought of this as a particularly effective response. Besides being too much of a personal attack, it is too easily deflected: Those who would make an argument like that (that a culling of the human species is an effective solution to one problem or another) clearly think of some human lives as having less value than others. They would almost certainly put themselves in the high value group. It is also a little to close to an I'm- rubber-you're-glue kind of school-yard argument technique. Better is to probe to see what populations they would like to see culled, how they would evaluate cases, and so forth. It gets at the same thought process without seeming to be a personal attack. And anyway - reducing populations by lowering breeding rates is just as effective, and as has been shown the world over, as populations become more affluent and better educated they breed later and less (often choosing to have none or one child). So the answer to the population crisis is development and education, not culling. Perfect -- and really more the point of my comment: why merely irritate them when your goal is to engage them in considering the ramifications of their idiotic statement? But yes: education does wonders to slow population growth. I should have known: XKCD says it better than I ever could… http://xkcd.com/603/ Dave ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Population growth rate differentials and consequences
-Original Message- From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On Behalf Of Charlie Bell Sent: Friday, July 10, 2009 5:28 PM To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion Subject: Re: Mention of David Brin And anyway - reducing populations by lowering breeding rates is just as effective, and as has been shown the world over, as populations become more affluent and better educated they breed later and less (often choosing to have none or one child). So the answer to the population crisis is development and education, not culling. Isn't the population crisis sorta old hat? According to Wikipedia, the latest numbers (provided from the CIA) has the world fertility rate dropping from 2.8 in 2000 to 2.61 in 2008. For developed countries, the ZPG rate is 2.1, for countries with high mortality rates (e.g. much of sub-Sahara Africa), the ZPG fertility rate can approach 2.5. In fact the UN, IIRC, is forecasting world population to peak around 2050-2060, and then start dropping. This process will not be even. Europe is already near the tipping point, with the EU fertility rate at 1.5. Japan has passed the tipping point, with the death rate exceeding the birth rate by 21%. Russia is in free fall, with the death rate exceeding the birth rate by 50%, and the population falling 0.5%/year. The US is almost perfectly on the ZPG point. It accepts far more immigrants than anyone else, so it will continue to grow. China has a big demographic bulge that has to work its way through the population; but the under 20 set is relatively smaller than older age cohorts because of the 1 child policy (as well as having a strong male bias). India is approaching ZPG and, with present trends, should get there in 5-10 years. But, Mid-Eastern countries, such as Iraq and Iran, still have high fertility rates, and don't have corresponding low lifespans (like Africa) to balance them out). So, we will see a vastly different looking world in 2050, unless there are massive changes in social attitudes. For example, Russia will be mostly old women. Japan will be very old and shrinking fast. Europe will be smaller and fairly old. The US will be browner, but otherwise it's forecast to have similar demographics to today, with the main cause of the aging of the population will be advances in medicine. If one adds to that the fact that the 40+ crowd is not the usual source of trend setting and radical innovation (yes, I know that includes me), one will see a tendency for Europe and Japan to become backwaters, full of pensioners who will be overwhelming the working age population with their need of support. So, in essence, the countries that lead the drop in population will become unimportant on the world stage. As far as solving the environment vs. human poverty conflict problem, it's clear that the best chance we have is for wealthy countries to develop a breakthrough that allows an environmentally friendly, cheap source of energy. Right now, we are in a period where, compared to say 1920-1990, there is a dearth of fundamental breakthroughs. The hottest potential fields are nano-tech and synthetic biology. The latter is virtually red-taped out of existence in Europe, so the main hope for that is in the US. Billions are going into venture capital and IPO projects in this area, and there is potential for a real breakthrough (e.g. algae that produce fuel from CO2 and ocean water without being hothouse plants). But, without that, the EU and US can cut CO2 emissions 50% in the next 30 years, and it will only have a modest effect on the rate of increase of CO2 emissions. In short, those countries/regions that continue to be way below ZPG will find that their children and grandchildren will have little say in the future of the world, because they will have little impact. The few of them that will be around will be busy taking care of the old folks (e.g. folks like me :-) ). Dan M. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Drinking Water From Air Humidity
In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090605091856.htm ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: In despair for the state of SF
I'm sorry you read this turkey, but the KJA is a hack and has been for years... Damon. On Jul 4, 2009 4:19 AM, Warren Ockrassa war...@nightwares.com wrote: A week or so back I finished _Hidden Empire_, the first book in Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of Seven Suns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Seven_Suns I discovered this one late -- the series is out now in pulp, and I was unaware of it prior to that. I have some things I just need to vent. [spoilers -- ha, as if] What an unbelievable turd. While it's not unusual for a novelist to foreshadow, Anderson basically forecudgeled. His aliens are disinteresting in the extreme; the only marginally noteworthy society was the Green Priests and their symbiosis with their worldforest, and they were human. The obtuseness of his characters and societies is unforgivable. When you compress the core of a gas giant and turn it into a star, notice what appear to be diamondlike nodules shooting out from the new sun, and then see diamondlike ships attacking cloud-harvesters on other gas giants, you have to be a cretin of genuinely universal proportions to not understand what happened. Yet that's exactly what occurs: No one knows why the hydrogues are attacking cloud harvesters! The alien allies of Earth are anthropomorphic and capable of interbreeding with humans -- oh come on -- and have a history recitation that's millennia deep. Their leader even knows about the hydrogues, though it's a buried secret, yet he still manages somehow to be stunned and ignorant of their attacks, sources, reasoning, etc. Anderson has a husband/wife team of xenoarchaeologists who've uncovered both the wormhole tech used to create suns of gas giants, and teleportation tech used by a long-dead race called the Klikiss. Yup, just the two of them. Not a team, no student support, just a couple of kooks digging up fossil civilizations. And they reactivate a teleport panel using, essentially, camp-light batteries. Those must be some damn impressive batteries. One can only assume they're radically unlike the Li-ion cells in iPhones. And as for the cloud harvesters -- well, early in the narrative we have a captain of one of these things STEPPING OUTSIDE ONTO AN OBSERVATION DECK without breathing apparatus as his skymine sucks up free hydrogen. They even keep doves. Outside. In the atmosphere of the gas giant. While harvesting hydrogen. Almost every page contains a slap to the face of science and SF; it's not even fantasy. It's just a childish notion of magical settings placed for the convenience of plot and story, without any effort made to actually consider what's feasible and what is not. But what tweaked me most was the interview section at the end of the book, where Anderson says he wanted to write a saga that included everything he claims to love about SF. He mentions _Dune_ particularly -- no surprise since he worked with Brian Herbert on continuing Frank Herbert's exploration of that storyline. The only thing I can conclude is that Anderson never understood what Herbert accomplished with _Dune_, and more generally, he doesn't understand SF at all -- least of all what makes a good SF story. Any decent editor in the genre would have suggested two things to him: Rethink. Redact. If this is the state SF is sliding into, particularly in the wake of the _Trek_ and _Transformers_ noise-machines, what the hell do we have left? -- Warren Ockrassa | @waxis Blog | http://indigestible.nightwares.com/ Books | http://books.nightwares.com/ Web | http://www.nightwares.com/ ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: In despair for the state of SF
There is so much good science fiction - not to mention 'slipstream', 'New Weird', etc - out there (old and new) why waste your time reading the crap? DANNY 2009/7/5 Doug Pensinger brig...@zo.com xponent Matter Maru rob Or Anathem, eh? Doug ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com -- It is better to be Hated for what you are, than Loved for what you are not. (Andre Gide) ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Google Operating System
Alberto Monteiro wrote: Other than by breaking the M$ pay to play licensing paradigm and leveling the playing field for open source developers? Who says M$ won't have users pay to play M$-Linux? It's possible that the worse nightmare of the free-software sjihad/s community happens: M$ may embrace, extend and then extinguish Linux. I'm sure MS would love to do that, but the GPL licensing on Linux will make it very difficult to accomplish. To-date, no one who has been caught misappropriating Linux for a commercial product has successfully gotten past the GPL. --[Lance] -- GPG Fingerprint: 409B A409 A38D 92BF 15D9 6EEE 9A82 F2AC 69AC 07B9 CACert.org Assurer ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Population growth rate differentials and consequences
On 11 Jul 2009 at 13:59, Dan M wrote: The US is almost perfectly on the ZPG point. It accepts far more immigrants than anyone else, so it will continue to grow. China has a big demographic Um, quite apart from the issues with that being cracked down on for the sort of people you'd think they'd actually want in recent years (but let's not go into the H1-B fiasco), the UK is looking at 80 million (15 million more) people by 2050. Also, the European trends are based mostly on the analysis of the old EU countries, and not the countries the EU has more recently expanded to cover, which have younger and more fertile populations. AndrewC ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
RE: Population growth rate differentials and consequences
Behalf Of Andrew Crystall Also, the European trends are based mostly on the analysis of the old EU countries, and not the countries the EU has more recently expanded to cover, which have younger and more fertile populations. OK, let's look at the fertility rate for countries added since 2000 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_European_Union_enlargements#History_ of_European_Union_enlargements Bulgaria 1.48 Czech Republic 1.23 Estonia 1.42 Hungary 1.34 Latvia 1.29 Lithuania 1.22 Poland 1.27 Romania 1.38 Slovakia 1.34 Slovenia 1.27 I hope you notice that _all ten_ have fertility rates under 1.5. GB and France are the two main countries that are above the 1.5, with GB at 1.66, and France at 1.89. Dan M. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Mention of David Brin
At 11:00 AM 7/11/2009, Charles Bell wrote: And anyway - reducing populations by lowering breeding rates is just as effective, and as has been shown the world over, as populations become more affluent and better educated they breed later and less (often choosing to have none or one child). So the answer to the population crisis is development and education, not culling. The problem is the time constant to reduce the population by reduced breeding. It is going to be very hard to increase affluence in an energy crisis, it may even become impossible to feed the world population if the supply of energy largely fails. Various system dynamic models that don't include a large input of energy show the population falling from a peak of about 7 billion to one or two billion by the end of the century. No country on earth is immune to such a drop in population. The US for example might be blessed with only half the population starving, other places would get hit much harder. Keith Henson PS www.htyp.org/dtc for the details on an energy proposal. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Drinking Water From Air Humidity
On 16/06/2009, at 2:22 PM, net_democr...@yahoo.com wrote: In the seminal science fiction book 'Dune,' Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090605091856.htm There are several devices to do this, some of them actually on the market. One is a wind turbine arrangement that produces around 10 litres an hour (plenty for drinking purposes for several people!). http://www.waterunlimited.com.au/ is one, although their website seems to be in between designs right now. C. ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
Re: Drinking Water From Air Humidity
On Jul 11, 2009, at 7:03 PM, Charlie Bell wrote: There are several devices to do this, some of them actually on the market. One is a wind turbine arrangement that produces around 10 litres an hour (plenty for drinking purposes for several people!). Vaporators? My first job was programming binary load lifters. Very similar to your vaporators in most respects... -- Warren Ockrassa | @waxis Blog | http://indigestible.nightwares.com/ Books | http://books.nightwares.com/ Web | http://www.nightwares.com/ ___ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
