Filed under: Climate Change, General Musings, Global Warming, Government, Health, Iraq, Politics, Press, Society
There’s a very good column by Eugene Robinson in Friday’s Washington Post, about the need for someone with some smarts in the Oval office. From the piece:
One thing that should be clear to anyone who’s been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher’s pet with perfect grades.
When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don’t see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.
And even better:
Actually, I want a president smart enough to know a good deal about science. He or she doesn’t have to be able to do the math, but I want a president who knows that the great theories underpinning our understanding of the universe — general relativity and quantum mechanics — have stood for nearly a century and proved stunningly accurate, even though they describe a world that is more shimmer than substance. I want him or her to know that there’s a lot we still don’t know.
I want the next president to be intellectually curious — and also intellectually honest. I want him or her to understand the details, not just the big picture. I won’t complain if the next president occasionally uses a word I have to look up.
I wasn’t the smartest kid in my high school. But I was pretty damn close. I certainly wasn’t the smartest kid at my college – Grinnell was full of people as smart or smarter than me. But I have never, ever understood the instinct that some people have that their president should be someone “they’d want to have a beer with”. I don’t want to have a beer with them. I want them to bust their ass working to fix the myriad problems we face, or at least to mitigate the impact of those problems while we work to solve them over the long term. Not just Iraq, or terrorism, but Peak Oil, global warming, health care, the threat of a pandemic, rebuilding New Orleans, rebuilding the National Guard, et cetera, et cetera. I want someone who is at least as smart as I am, who is at least as well educated, who has some real life experience beyond just getting elected to office, and who has shown that they are actually competent in managing something more important than some bloody sports team. After six years of the Worst. President. Evah. you’d think that this would be obvious, but it is telling that it takes a columnist for one of the largest and most important papers in the country to come right out and say it.
Sheesh.
Jim Downey
(Tip of the hat to Hank Fox for the link.)
Filed under: Carl Sagan, Climate Change, Global Warming, Government, James Burke, NASA, NPR, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin was interviewed yesterday morning by Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition. During that interview the following exchange took place, on the topic of global warming:
(Inskeep): Do you have any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with?
(Griffin): I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change. First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.
This morning’s program had a follow-up segment about how this conflicts with the general consensus in the scientific community, and other reports in the media point out that it is at odds with NASA’s own scientists. Even President Bush just came out with a plan to address climate change concerns in advance of a big global warming symposium being held in Germany next week.
The callousness of Griffin’s remarks is what has most people upset, I think. Because under most scenarios studied, significant global warming is going to lead to the death of millions of people. James Burke did a good series on how this will likely play out called After the Warming, and then of course there’s Al Gore’s book and movie An Inconvenient Truth. To have the NASA chief say that it would be arrogant of us to presume that this is “the best climate for all other human beings” seems assinine, at best.
I believe in global warming. I believe that it is likely a huge problem facing us. For the world of Communion of Dreams, set about 50 years hence, I had to deal with what I expect will be the reality of global warming. Since I wanted to deal with other issues, I decided that I needed a way to explain why the effects of global warming hadn’t yet created additional huge problems for humankind. My initial choice was to have an asteroid impact kick up a lot of dust into the stratosphere, and thereby slightly alter the albedo of Earth. When that additional disaster seemed to be too much for my initial readers, I changed it to having a man-made source: limited nuclear exchanges in Asia, creating a mild “nuclear winter” effect. Given that this term was partly a product of Carl Sagan’s scientific research, it seemed a fitting solution. (As I’ve mentioned previously, Sagan was part of my inspiration for Communion.)
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see whether Griffin survives this little climate change in his job situation, created by his own hot air.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Flu, General Musings, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Science Fiction, Society, Wired, Writing stuff
In this post from last week, I talked about the relevant issues confronting us with pandemic threats such as the bubonic plague. Well, as you may have heard over the last day or so, public health authorities have acted to impose quarantine restrictions on a man with a drug-resistant form of TB. He’s now being treated with antibiotics as the authorities try and back-track his recent trip to Europe and see who he may have exposed to this particularly nasty strain of the disease.
In my early thinking about the ‘fire-flu’ which forms the back-story of Communion, I was intending on it being a strain of influenza which had developed resistance to early anti-viral treatments. I thought I’d have a series of serious but not pandemic flu strains weaken the global economy, and then have a really nasty one hit that was drug resistant. But so few people understand about the problems presented by widespread and inappropriate antibiotic use, that I gave on on that mechanism, figuring that it would just take too much explanation. Going with the ‘weaponized’ form of flu gave me some additional plot devices to work with, as becomes clear when you read the book.
But that doesn’t mean that the threat isn’t real. In fact, the reaction of the public health authorities is telling, I think. They know that having a nasty, drug-resistant form of TB widely spread by someone this way is a very serious threat, and could easily present a huge problem, and turn back the public-health clock 100 years.
Charming.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, BoingBoing, Expert systems, General Musings, Government, Heinlein, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech
The tech of Communion of Dreams is based on a seamless connectivity of almost all electronic components – it is what enables the AI/expert systems such as Seth to move freely through the world on behalf of their clients, augmenting reality in such a way as to allow for much deeper insight and understanding of the world. I don’t say it explicitly in the book, but in part this level of connectivity is what allows for the actual development of true artificial intelligence (an homage to Heinlein’sThe Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
Via BoingBoing comes news that Tim Wu has an excellent piece up about the forthcoming auction of wireless spectrum, and how it presents the opportunity to encourage the kind of innovation necessary for the world of Communion to become possible. Wu, a leader in the promotion of net neutrality and broadband tech, understands that establishing common standards and then allowing inventors to attach their gadgets to wireless networks will be the critical infrastructure of the future. An excerpt:
The right to attach is a simple concept, and it has worked powerfully in other markets. For example, in the wired telephone world Carterfone rules are what made it possible to market answering machines, fax machines and the modems that sparked the Internet revolution.
Attachment rights can break open markets that might otherwise be controlled by dominant gatekeepers. Longshot companies like Ebay or YouTube might never have been born had they first needed the approval of a risk-averse company like AT&T. If you’ve invented a new toaster, you don’t have to get approval from the electric company. Consumers decide how good your product is, not some gatekeeper.
It’s an excellent position paper, all the better for being brief and to the point. Read it, share it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, General Musings, Government, Guns, Iraq, movies, NPR, Predictions, Press, RFID, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
A story this morning on Weekend Edition – Saturday about the military’s efforts to recover lost or captured soldiers in Iraq brought up the topic of “tagging” our people with some kind of tracking device. Retired Marine Lt. Col. Gary Anderson was somewhat critical of the current Pentagon leadership that such an application of technology hadn’t been put into more widespread use yet.
His reaction is understandable. The idea of tracking devices of one sort or another has been extremely popular in fiction (everything from spy novels to SF) for decades, and we now have a widespread tech which could be fairly easily adapted for such use: Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID for short. Combine this with the already extant use of battlefield electronics, it should be possible to increase the range of such passive devices without sacrificing size and concealability, allowing for hiding such tags in clothing or even within the body of the soldier. Certainly, this would seem to fit with the current mindset of the military, and would fill the gap until current military tech evolves to have an ‘information-integrated force’ such as I stipulate for Communion.
[Mild spoiler alert.]
In Communion, I apply the tech of the period to have the soldiers ‘wired’ with an array of information-sharing devices, analogous to the type of integrated ‘cyberware’ used by the general population. For military applications, though, the tech is more robust, a little more cutting edge, a bit further advanced in application, to the point of even having “smart guns” which would only function for those using the correct encryption key. This does play a minor part in the plot development at several junctures, and assumes that at all times anyone can be tracked fairly easily.
Anyway, the idea of tagging our people in that kind of war environement seems to be a no-brainer to me. Yeah, there are privacy issues to be concerned with for the use of such tagging in civilian life, but that is much less an issue for someone in the military. I expect we’ll see it implemented across the board in the near future…the first step into my predictions about in-body cyberware.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Predictions, Press, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
[Mild spoiler alert.]
Pandemic flu is at the heart of my novel Communion of Dreams. It is the ‘history’ of the novel, which has shaped the society of 2052 (the setting of the book). And it turns out to be the threat faced by the characters again in the latter third of the book. I won’t go into further detail, in case you haven’t read the book and would like to see how that all plays out.
When I first started formulating the novel, I immediately turned to the model of the 1918 flu pandemic to give me some idea of how I had to cope with the impacts that a renewed pandemic would have on our society. Since then, there have been additional pandemic scares crop up which have allowed me to see new aspects of this (and which, I am convinced, would make the book potentially a best seller, if it was allowed to escape the ‘sci-fi ghetto’). Why? Because pretty much everyone is slowly becoming convinced that we’re due for another pandemic, perhaps a really bad one.
And that fear has public-health officials nervous. Because they know that managing fear during a pandemic will be difficult. One example of this is the current research into whether conventional face masks would be effective or counter-productive in the event of a flu epidemic, and the recently announced guidelines from the CDC about who should wear masks, when.
While I worked in an abulatory surgical center during grad school, I had to wear a surgical mask at all times. You get used to it. And it does help control certain behaviours which can lead to the spread of disease (sneezing, absent-mindedly touching your nose or mouth, et cetera). But masks are not a panacea, and if used improperly or with a false sense of the protection they provide, could actually make matters worse on a societal scale.
It’ll be interesting, from an intellectual standpoint, to see how this plays out. Because I do expect a pandemic flu ‘event’ to happen within my lifetime. Not that I particularly want to actually have to experience it, mind. Mostly, I just hope that I have my book published before it hits, so people don’t think that I am just playing off of the fear and grief of recent history…
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, General Musings, Government, movies, Press, Science Fiction, Wired, Writing stuff
Wired has a great piece about how the CIA used a faux science fiction film project to smuggle out the six Americans who had hidden at the Canadian embassy during the 1980 hostage crisis in Tehran. Longish, but well worth the read.
I was finishing up my final semester at college when this happened, and remember well the news that the six had been smuggled out. To find out now that it was done using this kind of ruse is fascinating, and has had me reflecting on how real life is often much more absurd than most fiction. Surely, there’s a screenplay waiting be be written about this story.
And I think I’ll have to slip in some reference to either the supposed film (Argo), or the fake Hollywood production company (Studio Six) set up to pull off this rescue into one of my future books. It’d fit nicely with the prequel to Communion…hmm…
(Via BoingBoing.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Constitution, General Musings, Government, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Writing in today’s Guardian, Naomi Wolf has a fascinating and frightening piece about the current arc of fascism in America, in which she outlines the 10 common steps taken by those who wish to move an open/democratic society to a closed/fascist one. Go read it. If you’ve been paying attention to the country over the last decade, it’ll scare the hell out of you.
There are so many ways that a society such as ours can fall prey to totalitarianism, or just fall apart. Another major terrorist attack would probably do it. So would a pandemic, collapse of the oil markets (precipitated by anything from civil unrest in Saudi Arabia to war with Iran), global warming, et cetera et cetera. If you’ve read Communion, you know that I base the “history” of that book on the chaos caused by a flu pandemic. For reasons of my own, I use that particular device because it serves a purpose with the plot. But I could have almost as easily come up with another mechanism by which our society collapses.
Science fiction is all about making reasonable predictions about what may happen, and how people will then react to the situation.
Unfortunately with real life, there are so many unreasonable things that will happen, and we have to live with the results rather than just read about them.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, BoingBoing, Buzz Aldrin, General Musings, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
It’d be fun to include this little gem into any future revision of Communion. From an article in Aviation Week:
Space History Buffs Try to Save Sat Dish
A chance reading of a “for sale” advertisement in a weekly newspaper has launched a group of 30 space history buffs on a mission to save the 30-meter Jamesburg AT&T/Comsat satellite dish about an hour from Monterey, Calif.
The dish was built in 1968 to support the Apollo 11 moon landing a year later. Besides its commercial duties, it also played a role in capturing and distributing images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, says Pat Barthelow, an avionics technician from Sacramento who first noticed the ad in the Carmel (Calif.) Pine Cone and quickly put out the word.The weekend restorers worked over the past four months to get the dish running. The 10-story high dish is housed in a 20,000 square foot building, both of which are in excellent shape, Barthelow said.
[Mild spoiler] This would make for a perfect reference about ‘industrial archeology’ for Arthur Bailey to make at any of several junctures in the book. I love the notion that people are now starting to realize that the NASA era contains valuable historical artifacts that are outside our usual scope of consideration. Sure, someday there will be a dome covering the site of the Apollo 11 landing, where Niel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked. But places like the Jamesburg Earth Station are just as valuable from the perspective of understanding the tech behind our first ventures into space.
(Via BoingBoing.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Constitution, Depression, General Musings, Government, Guns, Iraq, RKBA, Society, Violence, Writing stuff
I’m adapting this from a comment I made during a discussion on UTI, now that I’ve had a chance to digest things a bit. It is a follow up to this post of last Tuesday.
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When a tragedy like this (well, any violence directed against innocents is a tragedy, really) occurs, people naturally want to look for ways to curtail the threat in the future. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.
In 1994 something like 800,000 Hutus were slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, and almost all of that was done with machetes. Almost 200 people were killed yesterday in Iraq, by someone using car bombs. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 with fertilizer and deisel fuel on this day a dozen years ago.
Guns do kill – something like 12,000 homicides and an additional 6,000 accidents/suicides each year here in the US. My father was one of those people in 1969, and my step-brother a little more than a decade ago. You never really get over that kind of personal tragedy, as I mention here.
But cars also kill. About 30,000 Americans a year, if memory serves. And about 18 months after my dad was killed, my mom was one of those people. But because it wasn’t an act of violence, it is somehow easier to accept that. Which is curious, because we do seem to accept that level of death in our country (and others) relatively easily.
People are violent. It is part of who we are. Now in the UK guns are almost completely outlawed – yet gun violence is once again becoming a problem in some areas. In an effort to control the results of violent behaviour, the UK is now increasingly becoming a nanny-state, outlawing the carrying of pointed knives, limiting their sale even for home use, forcing pubs to shift from glass bottles and drinking vessels to plastic ones because the others were being used to bash and cut others in pub brawls…you get the idea.
As I mention in that blog post cited above, I hate the facile arguments on both sides: that getting rid of all guns would solve the problem; and that if only someone with a legal CCW had been there they could have stopped Cho earlier. The best you can say is that it is possible that stricter gun control (even to extending to effective bans) *might* have stopped Cho from being able to murder so many so easily…or that someone legally armed on campus *might* have been able to stop Cho once he started shooting. No, there is a lot of slop there on both sides – no one knows the answer to ‘what if?’
For me it comes down to a couple of different deciding factors. We have over 200 million guns in this country, something like 80 million handguns. So, getting rid of them isn’t a practical answer for at least a generation. And prohibiting them will basically mean that you are telling criminals that they can count on law-abiding citzens being disarmed. Which means you either accept the increased power advantage of criminals, or you move towards an increasingly police-heavy state, with all of the implications that carries.
Further, the 2nd Amendment was put there for a reason: to control the worst instincts of wanna-be tyrants. The founders understood that humans being what we are, you needed to control the worst instincts of those who would rule rather than govern. They built checks & balances into the Constitution between the different branches of government – but knew that the real check and balance had to go further – had to go all the way down to the individual citizen. In preserving the right to keep and bear arms, they made sure that there was a final option available to curb dictatorship. Granted, my pistols and rifles will not stand up in a full-fledged firefight to modern military weapons – but that isn’t the point. You only have to look at Iraq to see the effectiveness of small arms and improvised explosives to see what a population can do in resisting a military force. That alone changes the calculus of anyone – foreign or domestic – who thinks that they would like to impose their will on the American public by arms.
Lastly, having the *option* of carrying a concealed weapon legally means that you have more possible courses of action open to you when things go south. No, I would not claim that I would have been able to draw my weapon and stop Cho before he killed anyone. That’s just macho posturing. But I carry a 9mm pistol – the same calibre weapon he used to kill most of the 32 he murdered. I *might* have had a chance, if everything had gone just right. Maybe only a small chance – but that would have been more of a chance than the poor bastards who didn’t have that option open to them had.
Yeah, there are no easy or simple answers. I am willing to consider possible solutions – but we have to consider the entire issue completely and make a rational decision, not one based on the immediate emotions following such a horror.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 