Click to get your own widget

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Matt Ridley's Articles

  I have recently been going through the articles of Matt Ridley on his blog and I am impressed.

Here are some of the best or at least the ones that, as a libertarian technophile, I thought most important:

Alone in the Universe http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/very-well,-alone.aspx

Science is usually derived from technologic progress http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/technology-is-often-the-mother-of-science,-not-vice-versa.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/determined-to-be-different.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/global-outlook-rosy-europe's-outlook-grim.aspx

Ban of GM rice kills http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/gm-crops-don't-kill-kids-opposing-them-does.aspx

Reinventing the dodo/mammoth http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/reversing-extinction.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/why-nuclear-power-costs-so-much.aspx

Julian Simon and our good future http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/julian-simon-on-rational-optimism.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/keeping-an-open-mind-about-the-sun.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/the-probable-net-benefits-of-climate-change-till-2080.aspx

Panspermia http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/did-life-arrive-on-earth-as-microbes.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/obsidian-chronicles-ancient-trade.aspx

Getting rid of smallpox http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/sometimes-it-is-right-to-wipe-out-a-species.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/the-benefits-of-gm-crops.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/too-much-intellectual-property-smothers-innovation-(1).aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/why-can't-things-get-better-faster-(or-slower).aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/an-epidemic-of-absence.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/connecting-human-islands.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/did-your-ancestor-date-a-neanderthal.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/in-denial-about-denial.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/balance-of-nature.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/nuclear's-future.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/speaking-in-hands-before-tongues.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/the-precautionary-principle-does-not-take-into-account-the-deaths-caused-by-not-adopting-new-tecnology-the-deaths-caused.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/two-rival-kinds-of-plants-and-their-future.aspx

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/why-aliens-are-silent.aspx




















































 

Labels: , ,


Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The "World's Greatest Problems" Solved - Government's "longitude prize"

  This is the government's recent new "Longitude Prize" of £10 million to solve the world's greatest problems. Clearly it is neither a Longitude Prize nor an X-Prize, nor a serious attempt to solve real problems, but a bit of PR spinning by people who know nothing about any of them except that focus groups have said they are popular.

    A real X-Prize, of which the real Longitude prize was an example, is given for a very specific objective technical achievement. Anything else is just government patrimony.

    Still - that focus groups have said that X-Prizes are popular and that is an important and welcome development.

    I have added my solutions in italics:

"The vote takes place between 22 May and 25 June, and will be held by the BBC on its Horizon website and by text. You can also sign up to a newsletter to keep up to date on the latest news. The winner will be announced on 25 June and will become the focus of the £10 million prize fund.
The challenges are as follows:
  • flight: how can we fly without damaging the environment? By airplane - they release CO2 which is beneficial to crop growth without having any downside like the "contributes to catastrophic global warming" totalitarian lie
  • food: how can we ensure everyone has nutritious, sustainable food? Market freedom, Britain quitting the EU and letting us trade with 3rd world food producers; and building the OTEC powered floating islands whose by product is seafood in vast quantities.
  • antibiotics: how can we prevent the rise of resistance to antibiotics? Keep some sorts off the agricultural market and held in reserve.
  • paralysis: how can we restore movement to those with paralysis? Powered exo-skeltons like those used for the ceremonial first kick in the Brazilian World Cup.
  • water: how can we ensure everyone can have access to safe and clean water? Life straws and free markets. Lomberg has repeatedly pointed out that we could supply clean water to the world for a small fraction of the cost of fighting the "catastrophic warming" fraud, so I suppose getting rid of our corrupt, totalitarian Fascist political class pushing the fraud would be a major step.
  • dementia: how can we help people with dementia to live independently for longer? A better question - probably safer housing and interactive computer systems would work. I may come back to this.

The food and water issues are dealt with as parts 11 & 12 here.

Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, said:
This prize will challenge scientists to tackle one of today’s greatest scientific problems. What makes this prize so innovative however, is that the public will be given the power to decide which area of science and society will benefit from this funding.
This is everyone’s opportunity to play a part in what could be the next scientific milestone.

  Well I guess I have pretty much solved the "world's greatest problems" - is that worth £10 million or will it go to someone more respectful of the partasitic scum in power? 

Labels: , ,


Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Proven - Global Warming Caused By Government "Scientists" Faking the Figures - No News At Ten

   Much of the alleged warming trend has been proven a fraud caused by government pseudo-scientists faking their numbers.

   Which, in turn, means that all other figures from government or "environmental" sources are, at the very least, unproven and to may be assumed wrong unless there is sufficient supporting evidence.

Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres - NASA and NOAA - have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century "global warming".

The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments.

When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted - ie fabricated by computer models -  20th century 'global warming' suddenly looks much more dramatic.

This is especially noticeable on the US temperature records. Before 2000, it was generally accepted - even by climate activists like NASA's James Hansen - that the hottest decade in the US was the 1930s.

As Hansen himself said in a 1989 report:
In the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.
However, Hansen subsequently changed his tune when, sometime after 2000, the temperatures were adjusted to accord with the climate alarmists' fashionable "global warming" narrative. By cooling the record-breaking year of 1934, and promoting 1998 as the hottest year in US history, the scientists who made the adjustments were able suddenly to show 20th century temperatures shooting up - where before they looked either flat or declining.
 
But as Goddard notes, the Environmental Protection Agency's heatwave record makes a mockery of these adjustments. It quite clearly shows that the US heat waves of the 1930s were of an order of magnitude greater than anything experienced at any other time during the century - far more severe than those in the 1980s or 1990s which were no worse than those in the 1950s."
 
    Which makes Mike Haseler's $10,000 prize for anybody proving catastrophic anthropogenic global warming into an even safer bet than he thought. I commented:
 
"Your money is safe but its a good idea. With hundreds of billions spent (much more if we count foregone growth) there should be volumes of proof of it happening by now if it were not a fraud."
 
    At the very least, every politician, churnalist, broadcaster and pseudo-scientist who promoted this fraud owes us an unstinted public apology. By definition, every one who doesn't is a wholly corrupt thieving totalitarian Fascist parasite who can NEVER, under any circumstances, be trusted, without overwhelming supporting evidence, to be telling the truth on any other subject either.

Labels: , ,


Sunday, June 22, 2014

Why Dowsing Works

   Dowsing works. It has been practiced since the 15th C, with what clients say is success. There are thousands of reputable people who have no doubt it works. After WW2 the officer in charge of a British army base in Germany tried it when he couldn't get mains supply. The base is still using the well he found.
is that dowsing is a very
  Dowsing doesn't work. When tested dowsers have repeatedly done little better than average. That little is seen in a lot of ESP phenomena and is well worth attention but it is irrelevant to the level of success claimed. When the Amazing Randi, debunker of a range of ESP phenomena turned up with his $10,000 prize for successful dowser he was inundated with people who clearly genuinely wanted to be tested because they thought it would be easy (rather different from séance runners who don't want his attention) - they failed.

   So what is going on. This is my guess:

   There is water down there almost everywhere. Dig deep enough even in the Sahara and you will find aquifers. What is needed is the confidence to keep digging. If a successful dowser says there is definitely water people will dig till they find it, where otherwise they would do a few feet and give up.

    So it works in similar psychological way to the placebo effect. That is a very real effect.
=======================================
    So what lessons does this have for the rest of reality.

    That when people believe it can be done it can be (usually).

    And on the other hand "When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found". - Prof John McCarthy

    If Columbus hadn't believed he could sail across the Atlantic (because he though he thought the Earth was about 1/5th the size it is) he wouldn't have tried, or given up after a couple of weeks.

     If Kennedy hadn't nailed his credibility to getting to the Moon by 1970 they wouldn't have (his scientific advisors thought the timetable loony).

    In Heinlein's book Methuselah's Children humanity develops a way of ending aging because they know a group of conspirators have found out how and they only have to replicate the research. It works even though what they know is wrong.

    If we believe the ecofascists that nothing can ever be done until it has been done successfully, for decades, it won't be.

    If the political class say loudly enough that we need a tram system and are sufficiently committed to spend £1 billion on it we will get one (well half of one).

    If the political class say finding life on Mars for £2 million; cutting tunnels at the same cost as Norwegian ones; automated trains sooner than automated cars, can't be done then it can't even though they all easily and cheaply could if there was a will to succeed.
   
    If we say we can get rid of the parasite political class we can. But not if we say we can't.

   And lets have major X-Prizes for things we don't currently even have an idea how to do - FTL drive; anti-gravity; age reversal; teleportation (at above the level of atoms); life after death; a Scottish government willing to allow us cheap housing; telepathy; time travel; dowsing. What's the downside to encouragement?

Labels: , ,


Saturday, June 21, 2014

More On Modular Housing

   I have, on a number of occasions, written about how we could have inexpensive, comfortable, high tech housing any time, and anywhere if we were allowed.

   In particular I have written of container homes, built out of shipping containers (10' X 10' X 40') which are widely in use already. Here are some more pictures.




   These have the great advantage that they can be converted easily and thus cheaply and are already available.

   However the real necessity for off site modular housing is simply that it be road transportable to the site.

  So what can legally be road transported - a width of 10' (3m) of 60' (18m) and about 20' (6m) in height (though bridges limit the last).
            The book Why Construction Is So Backward by Woodhuysen et al contains a drawing of such a home. Being 20" tall means 2 floors. In fact I am sure it would be easy to do a fold up 3rd floor on top because it wouldn't be load bearing.

        18m X 3m by just 2 floors is a home of 108 m.

British families are living in some of the most cramped conditions in Europe with more than half of homes falling short of minimum modern space standards, new research has found.
 
The study found the UK has the smallest homes by floor space area of any European country with the average new build property covered just 76sq m compared with almost double that amount of 137sq m in Denmark.


More here

      3 floors would be 162 m or "module" means you can have 2 together, or as many more as you want.

      Incidentally with that much space, doubled to allow infrastructure and small gardens you get 9,260 per km, with 3 per family that is 28,000 per km. London is 8,382 km which would mean a population of 230 million. That is without multi-storey living like Keetwonen. That is not a population level I would ever aspire to but it does show that there is no sort of space limitation on this.
Keetwonen student apartments –
       One libertarian option is just to classify these as temporary structures, which they obviously are, and get all building regulators off them.

http://howtobuildashippingcontainerhome.blogspot.co.nz/

Labels: , ,


Wednesday, June 18, 2014

LPP Fusion Crowdfunding at £73,500 of £117,600

    I have lifted this bodily from Next Big Future. I achieving it - the possibility of getting a working fusion device - would be wonderful. Odds are it will take longer and cost more, as such things do but even if that were so any slight shortening of the period to till humanity has unlimited power is worthwhile. So I ask you to make a small investment as advised in the ######### section. I consider copying NBF as a better way to use my photons here than an original article I would write.

 
      Crowdfunding looks like a way those of us committed to human progress can bypass the parasitism of political pressure. I will have to look into it further but trying to get policitcal organisations, even the most sensible of them, to put even a tiny fraction  of the money they take "to fund things that can only be funded by government" has not, so far, been very successful.

LPP Fusion Crowdfunding at $125K of $200K target





Scientists at LPP Fusion, led by Chief Scientist Eric Lerner, are just one step away from technically proving out dense plasma focus fusion and you a few thousand other people can help for the final push. They are already 63% of the way to the $200,000 they needed for a few key experiments with 19 days to go in the crowdfunding effort.

Success would be better than doubling NASA's budget and 100,000 times cheaper than one year of double NASA budget

Lawrenceville Plasma Physics has thanked Nextbigfuture.com and                                    the Nextbigfuture community.

The Nextbigfuture community have been early contributors to this key energy project and we have helped to get the word out on social media.

A few thousand people can change the course of the future

If this project is successfully fully funded and then leads to a successful experiment, then Nextbigfuture and the Nextbigfuture community will have been a significant part of creating a better future for space technology and energy.

LPP needs about 4000 more people to donate on average about $25 each or fewer people with larger average donations.

The Battle of Thermopylae was fought between an alliance of Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas of Sparta, and the Persian Empire of Xerxes I over the course of three days, during the second Persian invasion of Greece. It changed the course of history. It is remembered for the 300 Spartans at the battle. However, it was a Greek force of 7000 men at the start. Later the bulk of the Greek army was dismissed and 300 Spartans, 700 Thespians, 400 Thebans and perhaps a few hundred others, most of whom were killed fought to the end. They died making history but you can help make the future for a few dollars.

Relatively Painless Money Saving Ideas to free up money to possibly change the world

You can rent two movies from Redbox instead of going to the theater and donate the savings.
######################################################################
Switch out of cable or satellite television and use Netflix and a HDTV antenna.

Use voice over internet phone services like OOMA or only use a mobile phone and no landline.

######################################################################

This is a nuclear fusion project where a bit of public funding will have a huge impact.
It is ten thousand times cheaper than the International Tokamak project. ITER costs billions and will still require decades and two more projects to possibly get to a commercial fusion reactor and those fusion reactors will be about fifteen story tall buildings the size of a football stadium.

This project could be proven for about $1-5 million with critical components and testing helped by another $127,000.

LPP needs to get their Tungsten electrode and then later switch to a berrylium electrode.
If successful with their research and then commercialization they will achieve commercial nuclear fusion at the cost of $400,000-1 million for a 5 megawatt generator that would produce power for about 0.3 cents per kwh instead of 6 cents per kwh for coal and natural gas. This can lead to commercial energy that is twenty times cheaper than natural gas or coal Last night coal mining killed another 238 274 people.

Energy that is twenty times cheaper will provide a massive pollution-free boost to the global economy. Instead of global 3% growth with not enough jobs it will mean 5+% growth for 60 years or more at least.

SuperCheap energy also means cheap clean water.

Go to this link to donate.

They have imaged the pinch which shows that much of the physics is as expected

Shot 9-09-10-02, 0.225 microsec before pinch

Right - Shot 9-15-10-07, magnified plasmoid at the pinch. We see the plasmoid on axis, which is about 150 microns across. The small dots are individual pixels, and do not represent actual fluctuations in intensity.



LPP’s mission is the development of a new environmentally safe, clean, cheap and unlimited energy source based on hydrogen-boron fusion and the dense plasma focus device, a combination we call Focus Fusion.

This work was initially funded by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is now backed by over forty private investors including the Abell Foundation of Baltimore. LPP’s patented technology and peer-reviewed science are guiding the design of this technology for this virtually unlimited source of clean energy that can be significantly cheaper than any other energy sources currently in use. Non-exclusive licenses to government agencies and manufacturing partners will aim to ensure rapid adoption of Focus Fusion generators as the primary source of electrical power worldwide.













Labels: , ,


Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Reading

British spaceport in 5 years (coastal region possibly in Scotland) I privately understand Lossiemouth is the Scottish option. Campbelltown airport is actually pretty advanced but the flightpath from the US to Glasgow airports crosses it.
--------------------------------------------------------
Scottish secession will result in between 20,000 and 40,000 jobs moving to England, providing "huge boost" to City of London, says Centre for Economics and Business Research
--------------------------------------------------------
Balloon windmills -  I'm not convinced but they have at least the possibility of working which is more than current windmills do.
--------------------------------------------------------
Jerry Pournelle - As of course I always have. Interplanetary colonization is not easy. When NASA studied self-replicating systems in Space in 1980 it was concluded that technology was not up to closing the loop: we could not build real self-replicating systems with the current technology. When the report was presented to the Administrator, I pointed out that we did have the technology to build one kind of self-replicating system: a Moon Colony. It would have a replication time of about 18 years. The Administrator asked “Why would anyone want to live on the Moon”, which sparked the L-5 Society study on lunar colonists that demonstrated there was no shortage of well educated adventurous couples who would undertake to go live on the Moon. But that was back in the days of great space enthusiasm.

The good thing about the Moon as a place to study problems of space colonization is that is is only a few days away for physical transportation, and only a few seconds away for communications. We don’t need great theorists on the Moon: we need craftsmen. The best heart surgeon in the world is available by high definition television; a skillful surgeon can do her work under the direction of the best.

Before we start trying to build self replicating colonies elsewhere we should learn to build them on the Moon – and they might well be both physically and economically successful.
As to getting to Mars, it has been decades since I ran the Human Factors Lab at Boeing and did serious professional study of such matters, but I have kept in touch, and I don’t believe we know how to get humans to Mars alive, much less maintain them there. I do know that if we have a Lunar Colony first, we’ll have a lot more confidence in Mars operations.
--------------------------------------------
From Steve Sailer, I've not seen it reported elsewhere - The Dutch leftist legal professional who murdered in cold blood Pym Fortuyn, the candidate for prime minister on an immigration restriction platform, is out of prison after only 12 years. The assassin is usually identified as an "animal rights activist" to imply he was some kind of fringe wacko, but his testimony at his trial put him squarely in the mainstream of elite opinion on immigration in seeing Fortuyn's desire to stop Muslim immigration as beyond the pale. Indeed, the initial response of European Establishment figures in May 2002 was largely that Fortuyn had it coming.
-------------------------------------------
Typical - Despite clear evidence that the pro-Kiev radicals set Odessa’s House of Trade Unions ablaze on Friday killing dozens, the mainstream media is being ambiguous about the causes of the tragedy.
On Friday, Ukraine’s eastern town of Odessa saw brutal street battles between pro-autonomy activists and nationalist radicals which left 46 people dead. The majority of the victims died in the Trade Unions House that was set on fire by pro-Kiev radicals.

Very carefully worded commentary on the tragedy in Odessa came from the mainstream Western media, as if they were trying to avoid assigning the blame to those who actually set the building on fire. Their coverage of the event was heavily reliant on statements from Kiev that blamed the violence on pro-autonomy activists, as well as witness accounts given by the nationalist Right Sector members.
-------------------------------------------
Spiked on why the propaganda war on UKIP failed - basically because it was OTT and obviously lies (however I cannot say it entirely failed - there are some people who actually believe that if the entire state owned media, state regulated broadcasters and state funded by advertising newspapers make smoke they can't be entirely lying about a fire.)
-------------------------------------------
Mike Haseler's list of Scottish blogs
-------------------------------------------
"Age Reversal is no longer science fiction" by blood replacement. Not sure they have the full answer but they do have something.
-------------------------------------------
DIY cruise missile
 

Labels: , ,


Monday, June 16, 2014

Big Engineering 68 Constitution On Computer

   In 2009 I wrote a Big Engineering article on offering a prize for an open source computer programme able to function as a judge on matters of international law - a relatively simple field because there isn't much of it.

   Big Engineering 40 World Peace By Prize

   With Moore's Law (computer capacity doubles every 18 months) it has now increased some million times since 1980 & 250 times since 1997 (now 10 million or 2,500 times). Time for something bigger. The golden aim of such computer science is something that can pass the Turing Test - be able to carry out a conversation indistinguishable from that of a human (& more technical way of saying a computer with human level intelligence). I will aim for something lower - or higher.

I propose a series of prizes should be put up for a process culminating in the establishment of an open source computer programme which could determine the legality of national actions under international law.


The prizes should start with something capable of rendering a simulated decision in a war game atmosphere which both sides agreed was satisfactory. Then a larger prize for something used in a real situation & ultimately for one
which
successfully acts as a judge on the International Court of Justice, or if that option is refused, is able, on its own to render judgement in a years worth of different cases with judgements not agreed by a worldwide panel, to be inferior to the ICJ rulings. It is obviously necessary that, though the copyright remains in the designer's hands, the programme be open source so that it can be checked & run by anybody who needs to be able to trust it.Also here 

Law is a very computer like system with either/or decisions, set rules, logic & great importance laid on previous examples. As such it would be much easier for a computer programme to impersonate a superior judge than an ordinary human being.

It is overstating to say this would provide peace on Earth but it would provide a framework for it. Conflict usually occurs when both sides have convinced themselves they are in the right. Even where it isn't it is usually important for bystanders to be able to make a decision on that order.
 
     I think this is possibly the most important of my proposals over the years (& I have a high opinion of the value of many).
 
      There is a common feeling that "Peace on Earth" is highly desirable.
 
      Most of our problems are, by a broad definition, political - caused by human argumentativeness. However the rest of the world has yet to agree.
 
     I was diffident about this because, at the time, not being a computer specialist, I didn't know how technologically practical it was.
 
     That changed when the Turing Test, mentioned above, was passed a few days ago:
 
    "Eugene Gustman like an ordinary 13-year-old boy – so third of the judges decided the event Turing Test in 2014, which was held on June 8. Gustman said that he loves hamburgers and candy, and his father works as a gynecologist. But in fact, such a person does not exist – in fact, a program developed by a team of computer engineers led by English Vladimir Veselov and uraintsa Eugene Demchenko.

The fact that a third of the judges believed in the reality of the boy – this is a very significant figure. Under the terms of the test, developed in 1950 by the legendary scientist Alan Turing, it can be considered for the program passed if at least 30 per cent of judges are confident in communicating with the person."

    Of course those who don't want to accept it say that 30% approval is to low a bar and so on, and they may have a point, but it doesn't matter. Moore's law is continuing and progress is going to continue.

    Ray Kurwzeil here call it a premature announcement; that he thinks the test somewhat fixed and he "has seen better". This is probably true however being a 13 year old boy, on all subjects, is clearly a much more complicated task than being a Supreme Court judge discussing only the subject of the logical processes of the law. Whether a true Turing test or not it is clearly enough for a judge programme.

   There can now be no reasonable dispute that that proposal is currently practical. And not much, that we can go further.

   Which is why I am now proposing that the same process be applied to interpretation of constitutions. The whole point of a constitution is to say what government can, cannot & possibly must do and government itself is obviously an unsuitable entity to interpret this. Which is why we have "separation of powers" and judges, nominally independent of government deciding - except that, being human appointees there can be no certainty of them being independent.

   But an open source computer programme has to be because it can be tested by anybody (well anybody who knows how)  and while many will dislike some decisions, because they will dislike the constitutional assumptions (republicans in Britain, gun opponents in the US) they will have to be consistent, whoever is making the case - that's what impartial justice means.

    We should design a programme to act as a Supreme Court for interpreting constitutional law. In turn new laws, or indeed a new Scottish constitutional settlement can be tested before it is enshrined. making laws mean what we want them to mean is most of constitutional law. With this programme that can be done quickly and easily. For example we have little idea how the redefinition of marriage will affect other laws, and currently we have no way of definitively knowing until after, perhaps decades after, passing it. 
 

Labels: , , ,


Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Big Engineering 67 Greening Western China

   Some years ago I did a number of articles about bringing water to deserts. In particular was this one on Greening of Central Asia. Taking the 650 cubic km a year from Lake Baikal and, instead of letting it flow into the Arctic Ocean, redirecting it through a series of tunnels along the Mongolian & Chinese borders into and across the central Asian republics to the Caspian Sea.

    That is a lot of water. More than 7 times the Nile's output.

    Something I have only fairly recently realised is that western China's water basin is largely unconnected to China's coastal region. Which means water in that area would, if there was enough of it, would ultimately flow west too.


This map shows ground levels fairly well. Lake Baikal at the top has both yellow and green coloured land beside it so must be almost exactly on the line between the 2. So tunnels or canals could carry water across any of the yellow areas.

       The distance from Baikal to the point on the Mongolian southern border where the highest ground is is 1,000 km. I'm not sure whether there is or isn't land above the Baikal level all the way or a few miles where an aqueduct would be required. From there the distance to the Tarim basin (the oblong at the west bordered by the Himalayas and a row of mountains on  the western end) is about 700 km.

        The Tarim basin is one of the driest areas in the world. Rain doesn't get in (or out) from the central Asia region because of those mountains. The river Tarim (the longest) and others are some of the few rivers in the world that never wander down to the sea. Instead they peter out in the Lop Nor salt marshes (sufficiently unattractive the Chinese once used them for their nuclear tests). This is what it looks like now:




  However, as the map shows, much of this land is at the green level, below the level of Baikal. A couple of year's flow from there (ie 1300 cubic km) would make a big difference. The major green zone there looks like about 50,000 square km but I don't think any of it would end up more that a few tens of meters deep. 650 cubic km would fill that to an average of 10m in 9 months but probably at least twice that as dry ground soaks up water.  Because of the mountains that stop moisture getting in, we could expect moisture to stay in the area and get a decent rainfall. After that the water can be drained into the green zone to its north and then, by tunnel through the mountains to the green zone above and then in turn back across the Chinese border to Russia and rejoining the line from Baikal to Kazakhstan which I previously wrote of.

    The absolutely enormous amount of water available means that while it might take 4 years longer for the water to reach the Caspian there is plenty to go round. This would not have been the case if the water had drained eastward towards the sea, but it doesn't.

   That means a total of  about 1,800 km of tunnels. At Norwegian costs of £4m per km it would be about £8bn but I suspect the tunnels would have to be wider, or even duplicated and the total would be several times that. Still pretty minor for such a great increase in the fertility of the worlds most populous and now richest state. Less, possibly much less, than running a railway to Bradford.

    Of course the real expense is buying the water from Russia. Russia and Mongolia would reasonably want quite well paid. China might feel they are now strong enough to grab it. On previous cases I have said that the way to deal with political issues on these Big Engineering articles is simply to ignore them and treat the question as purely what can be done in engineering terms. I'm going to do that again but lets be clear - it is a big issue.

UPDATE
I have this comment which is of importance:

Hi Neil - an impressive idea, though I find the numbers a bit daunting. 650 cubic kilometres per annum requires an AVERAGE flow of 20,610 cubic metres per second. Our river Tay is the largest in the UK by annual discharge and it's peak flow is about 1,965 cubic metres per second. A typical 8 metre internal diameter tunnel has a cross section area of about 50 square metres , so even if the water was flowing at a whopping 10 metres per second (36 km per hour)you would require 42 such tunnels.Remember also you wish to use gravity as much as possible and to cover the distances you are talking about the cross sectional area of the aquaduct has to increase greatly as the flow rate needs must be slow for such a distance from a limited drop in elevation. Without pumping of some sort you are not talking of a few tunnels, but a broad canal possibly 30 times the combined width and depth of the Tay at Perth
----------------------------------------------------
     That is an issue.

     We could double the diameter to quadruple cross section area but the wider it gets the weaker it is so we can go up to the size of the Norwegian ship tunnel but anything else is going to need expensive reinforcing. I think the flow would be considerably lower than 10 meters because the gradient over the entire distance is low.

      Even assuming major economies of scale that sounds like app £80 bn rather than £8 bn. Still that is inexpensive for more than a million square km. It would also mean that it would take more than a year or 2 to put it in place.

      It might well turn out, bearing in mind that the depth here is not to great, that it would be cheaper to cut down from the surface and create an artificial canal. The aqueduct might also be replaced by an above ground canal held there by dams. All a matter of the most cost effective way.

Labels: , ,


Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Visit To The World's Fair 2014

   Isaac Asimov wrote this in 1964. I did a look at a similar 1900 article once before.
My comments in italics:

By ISAAC ASIMOV

    The New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future.

 What is to come, through the fair's eyes at least, is wonderful. The direction in which man is traveling is viewed with buoyant hope, nowhere more so than at the General Electric pavilion. There the audience whirls through four scenes, each populated by cheerful, lifelike dummies that move and talk with a facility that, inside of a minute and a half, convinces you they are alive.  The scenes, set in or about 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960, show the advances of electrical appliances and the changes they are bringing to living. I enjoyed it hugely and only regretted that they had not carried the scenes into the future. What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50 years from now? What will the World's Fair of 2014 be like?  I don't know, but I can guess.  One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.  Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it. OK on this he's wrong but the Good Doctor had a phobia that is clearly being reflected
There is an underground house at the fair which is a sign of the future. if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the "scenery" by changes in lighting. Suburban houses underground, with easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common. At the New York World's Fair of 2014, General Motors' "Futurama" may well display vistas of underground cities complete with light- forced vegetable gardens. The surface, G.M. will argue, will be given over to large-scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted on actual human occupancy. ditto Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare "automeals," heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be "ordered" the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming. looking at any supermarket you will see how much of our earing is prepared meals, most of which only need a microwave (or futuristic microwave oven as it would have been called. Yet we still have kitchens, some of which look to posh to use.

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.) There are a number of robotic machines (ie not looking like robots, that can do vacuuming. We are, perhaps surprisingly in view of Moore's Law, a few behind in this.

 General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)  saw Tom Cruise in 3d last week. Not much queue. 6 sales booths.


The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotope batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer. Highlighted because the very idea of vacuum cleaners powered by nuclear "waste" is beyond the pale. As indeed is supplying over half our power by nuclear. But it shows what was expected and indeed what is technically feasible (not automatically desirable because longer electric cords is much easier) but feasible. Well demonstrates how backward we have been made by false Luddite scares.


And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014. (Even today, a small but genuine fusion explosion is demonstrated at frequent intervals in the G.E. exhibit at the 1964 fair.) Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less practical. An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth. We don't have fusion but it is still promised for ---- years. The cost of solar power cells is dropping fast and is headed to be competitive (though not competitive to the cheap nuclear power we could have,

The world of 50 years hence will have shrunk further. At the 1964 fair, the G.M. exhibit depicts, among other things, "road-building factories" in the tropics and, closer to home, crowded highways along which long buses move on special central lanes. There is every likelihood that highways at least in the more advanced sections of the world*will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air*a foot or two off the ground. Visitors to the 1964 fair can travel there in an "aquafoil," which lifts itself on four stilts and skims over the water with a minimum of friction. This is surely a stop-gap. By 2014 the four stilts will have been replaced by four jets of compressed air so that the vehicle will make no contact with either liquid or solid surfaces. Hovercraft have proven less cost effective than conventional vehicles. The cost of road building is now overwhelmingly that of the political/bureaucratic costs of being allowed to do it. This gives little incentive for innovation

Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice.  Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains"*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. I suspect one of the major attractions of the 2014 fair will be rides on small roboticized cars which will maneuver in crowds at the two-foot level, neatly and automatically avoiding each other. A few years early but only a few. Automated driving systems are being made and how long it takes for them to be available to all depends largely on politics

For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections. They will be raised above the traffic. Traffic will continue (on several levels in some places) only because all parking will be off-street and because at least 80 per cent of truck deliveries will be to certain fixed centers at the city's rim. Feasible but not done 

Compressed air tubes will carry goods and materials over local stretches, and the switching devices that will place specific shipments in specific destinations will be one of the city's marvels. Feasible but would require political organisation

Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica (shown in chill splendor as part of the '64 General Motors exhibit) All available. For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires*intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite. No Moon colonies, entirely because it has been prevented.

Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014. Engineers have long solved that one. Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way, in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest.  However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony. As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. In fact, one popular exhibit at the 2014 World's Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in which ballet performances will be seen. The cube will slowly revolve for viewing from all angles. We have the TVs, we have the occasional robot on Mars, we even have the robots sending TV pictures from Mars.

One can go on indefinitely in this happy extrapolation, but all is not rosy. As I stood in line waiting to get into the General Electric exhibit at the 1964 fair, I found myself staring at Equitable Life's grim sign blinking out the population of the United States, with the number (over 191,000,000) increasing by 1 every 11 seconds. During the interval which I spent inside the G.E. pavilion, the American population had increased by nearly 300 and the world's population by 6,000.  In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000. US pop about 310 million

Population pressure will force increasing penetration of desert and polar areas. Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves. Underwater housing will have its attractions to those who like water sports, and will undoubtedly encourage the more efficient exploitation of ocean resources, both food and mineral. General Motors shows, in its 1964 exhibit, the model of an underwater hotel of what might be called mouth-watering luxury. The 2014 World's Fair will have exhibits showing cities in the deep sea with bathyscaphe liners carrying men and supplies across and into the abyss. Population pressure has not been such a problem because the green revolution means we are producing more food using less land. In turn no underwater living - not even any seateading beyond the experimental level - though that is coming - when the politics is squared

Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be "farms" turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which "mock-turkey" and "pseudosteak" will be served. It won't be bad at all (if you can dig up those premium prices), but there will be considerable psychological resistance to such an innovation.  Although technology will still keep up with population through 2014, it will be only through a supreme effort and with but partial success. Not all the world's population will enjoy the gadgety world of the future to the full. A larger portion than today will be deprived and although they may be better off, materially, than today, they will be further behind when compared with the advanced portions of the world. They will have moved backward, relatively. Nope, everywhere except maybe North Korea is much better off (& for NK it is because of politics)

 Nor can technology continue to match population growth if that remains unchecked. Consider Manhattan of 1964, which has a population density of 80,000 per square mile at night and of over 100,000 per square mile during the working day. If the whole earth, including the Sahara, the Himalayan Mountain peaks, Greenland, Antarctica and every square mile of the ocean bottom, to the deepest abyss, were as packed as Manhattan at noon, surely you would agree that no way to support such a population (let alone make it comfortable) was conceivable. In fact, support would fail long before the World-Manhattan was reached.  Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!  There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of AD. 2014 will have agreed on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85. Fortunately we didn't have to agree on lowering the birth rate. People did it voluntarily and individually. Anywhere women get the choice birth rates are falling.

There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently.  One of the more serious exhibits at the 2014 World's Fair, accordingly, will be a series of lectures, movies and documentary material at the World Population Control Center (adults only; special showings for teen-agers).  The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process. It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance, however, but also the subject matter that will change. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary "Fortran" (from "formula translation"). Automation has gone further than that and computing much easier.

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!
No it hasn't. Though there is disagreement between those who think the government should be providing more jobs and those who think government should be cutting benefits to those who refuse jobs. Surprisingly the number of hours worked hasn't greatly diminished overall - indeed because more wives are working (in jobs less strenuous than housework  once was) the workforce is far larger.
--------------------------------
   It looks like the bad things generally haven't happened, the technical and even social problems foreseen have been far less than foreseen. And that government telling us what we can't do is a greater problem - indeed the main barrier on human progress.

Labels: , ,


Thursday, June 05, 2014

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Africa? - UKIP paper #3

   I disagreed with the estimable, but sometimes wrong, EU Referendum on the subject of illegal immigration from, mainly, Africa. Dr Richard North there said that deaths of boat people trying to enter Europe are a tragedy (true) and that several times as many must die trying to cross the Sahara (also true). The problem is that tragedy, as Greek tragedy constantly showed, was not avoided by good intentions.

   Allowing increased immigration would simply encourage more and do nothing to fix the problem. A problem for the entire human race is that demographic growth is fastest in failed states and cultures and exporting people exports failure to the more successful.

   So what can we do to make Africa less of a failure? We have poured trillions into it in "aid" without success and it has tended just to reinforce divisions and kleptocracy.

So here are   some ideas, mostly ones I have written on before, and mostly very inexpensive compared to our annual £12bn a year "aid" budget, now collected in 1 place:

1 - Quit the EU. Getting out would allow us to buy food, which Africa can produce. Outside the EU trade barriers we could buy cheap (by our standards) food from them at high (by their standards) prices. By encouraging market solutions this would, alone, almost certainly do far more than our entire "aid" budget now does.

2 - Use our international influence to support the greatly increased use of DDT. The DDT ban has killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined (app 1 1/2 million a year) - yet before the western campaign started deaths were down to 50,000 a year.

3 - Use our international influence to support Golden Rice. Genetically modified rice with extra protein, which ends the protein deficiency diseases that leave survivors intellectually stunted. The eco-fascists have been responsible for obscene suffering simply because of their Luddite opposition to science.

4 - Support construction of a massive geosynchronous satellite in orbit over Europe/Africa (2 others should follow) able to provide virtually unlimited telecommunications traffic. It is believed that a, probably the, major reason for economic growth in Africa is that mobile phones have allowed people to negotiate trade with each other.

5 - Once such a system exists it will be possible to create a computerised teaching system able to provide a basic but good (QandA) education in the remotest village.

6 - Use the satellite to photo record all land and make computerised records of land ownership. Poor or no title to land is one of the major factors preventing the raising of investment capital across the 3rd world.

7 - Keep a record of speech, pictures and video footage of crime, sent up by mobile phones. I don't expect this to end corruption and brutality quickly but it will provide pressure. Who would have thought starving Africans could have mobile video cameras but such is our modern world.

8 - Where there are guerrilla wars against moderately sensible governments provide drone aircraft to hunt them down.

9 - Use this same network as a banking system using a non-national virtual currency exchangable through mobiles. A prudent banker can make this inflation free simply by not inflating the quantity of money beyond demand (and still make a vast profit).

10 - I have said we should be building a factory mass producing small nuclear reactors. If maximum production exceeds demand we should give/auction excess ones to 3rd world countries. This has the advantage from our point of view that we are guaranteeing they will all sell, even if only at cost prices, rather than making the market entirely subject to political bans.

11 - Build Aquarius style floating islands powered by OTECs. One spin off is deep ocean water that can be used to grow protein rich algae which can, in turn, be supplied as a protein additive.

12 - Lifestraws - a way of cleaning water that the PC brigade hate. These, if mass produced in the hundreds of millions, would have very low marginal cost.

13 - Cut a tunnel under the Chad mountains and divert most of the water from the Congo's tributary, into Lake Chad and from there, through canals and other tunnels, across the Sahara creating lakes (2 virtually inland seas) along the way. My guess is it would be a century before it reached Tunisia but by then the Sahara would be revitalised by a century worth of water and as fertile as it was during the "catastrophic global warming" of 7,000 BC when we have cave paintings from the centre of the, now, desert, showing hippos.

14 - Open the Qattara Depression to seawater - make electricity and use much of it to refine Manganese and other minerals in sea water.

15 - Build a linear accelerator good space launcher from the top of Kilimanjaro (Bifrost here).

16 - A major programme of disease eradication. Africa is subject to a much greater disease reservoir than almost all the rest of the planet. Tackling them needs a continent wide programme. Matt Ridley  gives a number of examples here - for example:
There are 2,500 species of mosquito in the world and only one of them — Aedes aegypti — is responsible for carrying dengue fever, a disease that currently afflicts nearly 400 million people and rising.... Last month the Brazilian government gave an Oxford-based company called Oxitec a licence to release into the wild genetically engineered male A aegypti mosquitoes. They carry two extra genes that render their offspring incapable of breeding. Release enough of them in an area and the species all but dies out locally. The beauty of this scheme is that the rarer the species gets, the better the chance that the genetically engineered males you release will mate with any available females, so the technique becomes more effective, not less, as local extinction approaches
     There are a lot of diseases there. This plays to our strength of technological knowledge. It should not be allowed to play to our weakness - ecofascism. The "Greens" would certainly oppose curing disease that way but they, in turn, must be opposed.
--------------------------------------------
I would also, like the crime videoing programme, have a programme of recording all the languages, songs, dances, religions and perhaps most important, ballads of every tribe in Africa through the mobiles programme. The brothers Grimm did a little of that for Europe but we don't know how much we have lost, and in a few generations Africa will have suffered the same cultural loss.

I would also like DNA records (ie frozen blood) to the same extent. It may be 50 years before we know what it all means, but we will still have it then.
--------------------------------------------
     Most of these are relatively inexpensive (quitting the EU) or have spin off benefits (guaranteeing sale of small nuclear reactors/space craft). None of them involve more than the minimum direct interaction with local governments. Thus none of them rely on money we pay being passed on successfully. None of them have the obscenity of us telling locals that if they want us to provide power it will only be the most expensive and unreliable windmills, to satisfy political parasites and their friends back here, rather than attempting to maximise any benefit to "aid recipients".

     However, even if all this saves millions of lives and makes it far better for a billion, it won't make life in Africa as good as here so it won't stop attempts at economic immigration. The only thing that can do that is stopping it. Japan and South Korea have immigration rates of 0.00% so it can be done, but only if the will is there.

Labels: , ,


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

British Blogs.