Filed under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Google, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech
I, and just about every other SF writer out there who has written about the near-term future (let’s say the next 50 years), have to some degree based our future on a so-called “hydrogen economy,” wherein hydrogen fuel has replaced fossil fuel for most of our energy needs. I don’t make a big deal of it in Communion of Dreams, but that was my basic assumption, and there are references in the text which show this.
Well, the future just got a little closer.
CHICAGO (AFP) – US researchers have developed a method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material, potentially providing an abundant source of this clean-burning fuel, according to a study released Monday.
The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water.
Numerous public transportation systems are moving toward hydrogen-powered engines as an alternative to gasoline, but most hydrogen today is generated from nonrenewable fossil fuels such as natural gas.
There’s been a lot of hype about hydrogen – a quick Google search of “hydrogen fuel” will kick up about 1.4 million hits. A lot of the predictions made about the use of hydrogen have been overly optimistic, since there are real technical problems still to overcome for it to be put into widespread use. But this is a big step forward – news which should make everyone concerned about global warming or climate change or just ‘peak oil’ happy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Constitution, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Government, NYT, Politics, Predictions, Press, Society, Terrorism
Over the weekend, news came out of yet another “Trust us, we’re the government” debacle, this time in the form of the principal deputy director of national intelligence saying that Americans have to give up on the idea that they have any expectation of privacy. Rather, he said, we should simply trust the government to properly safeguard the communications and financial information that they gather about us. No, I am not making this up. From the NYT:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, told attendees of the Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s symposium in Dallas.
* * *
“Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity,” he said, according to a transcript [pdf]. “But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.”
The future, Mr. Kerr says, is seen in MySpace and other online troves of volunteered information, and also in the the millions of commercial transactions made on the web or on the phone every day. If online merchants can be trusted, he asks, then why not federal employees, who face five years in jail and a $100,000 fine for misusing data from surveillance?
Or, from the Washington Post:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Kerr said. “I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.”
This mindset, that allowing the government to just vacuum up all of our personal information, to monitor our email and phone communications, or whatever else they are doing but don’t want to tell is, is somehow equivalent to my posting information on this blog or giving some company my credit card number when I want to buy something, is fucking absurd. First off, there is a fundamental difference between what I willingly reveal to someone in either a personal or commercial exchange, and having my information taken without my knowledge or agreement. To say otherwise is to say that just because my phone number is listed in the phone directory, everyone who has the ability to do so is free to listen in on my phone conversations.
Even worse, it shows how we are viewed by this individual, and our government: as their subjects, without rights or expectations of being in control of our lives.
And the notion that we can just trust governmental employees with our private information is patently ridiculous. First off, saying that we should because we already trust commercial businesses with our private information is completely specious – how many times in the last year have you heard of this or that company’s database having been hacked and credit card, personal, and financial information having been stolen? This alone is a good reason to not allow further concentration of our private data to be gathered in one place. Secondly, think of the many instances when hard drives with delicate information have been lost by government employees in the State Department, at the Department of Veterans Affairs, or even at Los Alamos National Laboratory – and those are just the things which have actually made it into the news. Third, and last (for now), anyone who has had any experience with any government agency can attest to just how screwed up such a large bureaucracy can be, in dealing with even the simplest information.
I recently went round and round with the IRS over some forms which they thought I had to file. I didn’t, and established that to the satisfaction of the office which contacted me. Yet for six months I was still being contacted by another office in charge with collecting the necessary fees and fines – three times I had to send a copy of the letter from the initial office which cleared me of the matter, before they finally, and almost grudgingly, admitted that I owed them no money (for not filing the documents I didn’t need to file). These are not the same people I want to trust to handle even *more* information about me.
Allowing the government to take this position – that the default should be that they can just take whatever information about us they want, so long as they promise not to misuse it – is to abandon any illusions that we are in any way, shape, or form a free people. It would turn the entire equation of the Constitution on its head, saying that the government is sovereign and we its subjects. That such a thing is even proposed by a government employee is extremely revealing, and should cause no little amount of concern.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Government, NPR, NYT, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
. . . the one I have in Communion of Dreams about a military EM jamming device which shuts down all communications in a given area is actually pretty lame. This sort of thing has been a staple of Science Fiction just about forever, and in fact real radio jamming equipment has been used since the early days of radio. I remember back in the ’70s reading about something called an ‘Odien Coil’ which could be used to blanket all radio and television broadcasts for up to about a half-mile. For Communion, I just set a few different parameters for the device, and gave it the ability to disrupt all the electro-magnetic spectrum used to carry the data of a ubiquitous computing/augmented reality society, then allowed it to play an important role in the plot.
So, while my prediction in this regard is, as I said, pretty lame, I still got a bit of amusement out of the recent NYT coverage of cell phone jamming devices. It was mentioned again this morning on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, and that reminded me that I wanted to say something about it here, because while the tech is actually fairly old, how it is applied in a society becoming increasingly dependent on instantaneous cell phone communication is nonetheless newsworthy and insightful. From Matt Richtell’s NYT article:
The technology is not new, but overseas exporters of jammers say demand is rising and they are sending hundreds of them a month into the United States — prompting scrutiny from federal regulators and new concern last week from the cellphone industry. The buyers include owners of cafes and hair salons, hoteliers, public speakers, theater operators, bus drivers and, increasingly, commuters on public transportation.
The development is creating a battle for control of the airspace within earshot. And the damage is collateral. Insensitive talkers impose their racket on the defenseless, while jammers punish not just the offender, but also more discreet chatterers.
“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”
Bingo. We’re still in the early phase of this kind of communications tech. As I stipulate in Communion, one way such technology could evolve is to become even more personal, literally implanted into our bodies, making it completely unnecessary to speak above a whisper in order to conduct a call clearly. If this were to happen, it would solve the problem of idiots needing to chatter away loudly on their phones, and perhaps societal pressures would counteract the current situation. And if it wasn’t just a matter of politeness bringing about such a change, perhaps the application of jamming technology will push us in that direction.
One can hope, anyway.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, General Musings, Health, Hospice, Predictions, Sleep
Last Friday I dropped a note to the Library Director I’ve mentioned in this post about this big project, basically asking why I had yet to see payment for my work when I’d been told I should see it as early as 10/19. I got the following reply right away:
Thanks so much for letting us know. We turned in the invoice and will go tracing the situation. Again I apologize for this delay. You should not have to ask these things. We are in a transition period with a “temporary” agency helping us out in our business office until we can hire some staff. I’ll ask Mr. R to also help us with this situation and we will write you probably next week with any details.
*Sigh* Beginnings are fragile times, as we learn to dance with someone new. Is this delay a portent of things to come – will I always have to hassle them to pay their bills on time? Or is it just a fluke, an unfortunate glitch which means nothing? I replied this morning:
Thank you – any help you can provide to expedite payment will be greatly appreciated. I’m somewhat distracted by our hospice care-giving for my mother-in-law at this time and don’t have the attention to spare trying to track such things down.
So we’ll see. And I mention this because it does sort of sum-up how I am feeling now, as we enter into the closing weeks of my MIL’s life: distracted, tired. Yes, we’re now getting more sleep, and that helps a great deal – but still, the emotional stress has cranked up along with the demands of routine care giving, as I have tried to outline in all my posts related to this. I do have work to do, as does my wife, and then there is the routine of just getting through the needs of ‘normal’ life. But to a certain extent such concerns fall by the wayside as we turn more of our focus to giving my MIL a good death, as comfortable and pain-free as possible – all the while trying our best to pace ourselves, since we have no way of knowing exactly how much further this marathon has to go.
Jim Downey
*** Update, 10:00AM November 5 ***
Got word back from the client:
Good news. The check was sent out Friday (November 2), so you should receive it within a day or so. As suspected, the turbulence in our business office is to blame for the delay. We apologize again.
So, provided nothing gets ‘lost in the mail’, looks like we’re off to a decent start. With institutional clients, I usually expect them to take upwards of a month to process payment, and this client would not be tardy.
Fingers crossed.
Jim D.
Filed under: Flu, General Musings, Global Warming, Habanero, Migraine, movies, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Umberto Eco, when asked why he wrote The Name of the Rose, famously replied: “I wanted to poison a monk.”
I can sympathize.
There are times when I’m a little grumpy, or have just had a little too much exposure to my fellow monkeys, when I’d like to kill a few people myself. In fact, catch me when I’m feeling more than a bit honest, and I’ll admit that part of the backstory of Communion of Dreams is because I think that the world really would be better off with about 2/3 of the population gone, as traumatic and painful as that might be. No, I am not advocating it – I can just see the benefit of some pandemic flu or plague, in terms of the carrying capacity of the planet.
And of course I see plenty of ways in which we’re well on the road to having this happen, as I write about here upon occasion. Take your pick: war, terrorism, global warming, disease, or even just eating ourselves to death. I just came from the store, where I needed to get some frozen raspberries for a habanero jelly recipe I want to make. There in my neighborhood supermarket were 120 feet of freezers carrying various ice creams and other dessert treats. One aisle over was 60 feet of frozen pizzas. I looked and looked for frozen fruits, and found one narrow little rack, about half the width of one 10′ wide freezer unit, containing a small selection of fruits. Think there’s something wrong there?
*Gah.*
OK, I am a little grumpy. I’m in a cycle of migraines, it seems, having had two in the last week. Still living with the echoes of the one yesterday. But still, sometimes I feel very pessimistic about our future . . . and take a certain perverse pleasure in it.
Well, this is the 200th post. Woo-hoo. I’ll be a little more upbeat later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, DARPA, Expert systems, Failure, Government, Guns, movies, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Wired
You think you get frustrated when your computer acts up? How do you think the guys who were on the receiving end of 500 rounds of 35mm explosive anti-aircraft fire feel? From Wired’s Danger Room blog:
We’re not used to thinking of them this way. But many advanced military weapons are essentially robotic — picking targets out automatically, slewing into position, and waiting only for a human to pull the trigger. Most of the time. Once in a while, though, these machines start firing mysteriously on their own. The South African National Defence Force “is probing whether a software glitch led to an antiaircraft cannon malfunction that killed nine soldiers and seriously injured 14 others during a shooting exercise on Friday.”
Wasn’t something like this part of the paleo-future Skynet from the Terminator? You think maybe we should pass along to the boys at DARPA the suggestion that they should watch that movie as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, General Musings, Hospice, Predictions, Psychic abilities
It was a half hour before lunch yesterday. I checked in on my MIL, who was sitting in the front room, reading. Doing this regularly helps her feel less anxious, gives her a chance to ask questions or if she needs something, since she doesn’t always remember that she can just call for me.
“How’re you doing?”
“I’d like to get up and look out that window.”
This is unusual. “Um, why?”
“Because I want to see what’s so interesting out there.”
“???”
“There was a man here a few minutes ago, and he was looking out that window at something.”
No, there wasn’t – we’d been alone since my wife left for her office 90 minutes earlier. “A man?”
“Yes. There was a man there, looking out. He seemed to be very interested in something.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
I was on-call last night. It’s a lot easier to do this now that it’s only a couple times a week. My MIL had been restless early on, so I went to check on her about 11:00.
“You OK?”
“Yes. But I need to get up.”
“Do you need to use the toilet?”
“No. I need to make room for the other people.”
“???”
“All the people who are here. I need to let them use the room.”
“No, it’s OK – this is your room, and they’re happy to let you sleep here.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
At 5:30 this morning, she was stirring. I went downstairs to see what was going on. My MIL was over at the edge of her bed, against the rails, trying to reach the lamp on her bedside table (which we keep out of range of her reach on purpose).
“Whatcha doing?”
“Trying to turn on that light.”
“Why?”
“Well, so I can see the other people.”
“???”
“The ones who are here for dinner. I want to go to dinner with them.”
“It’s 5:30 in the morning.” There’s a bright digital clock on the table, but she usually forgets to look at the indicator for AM/PM.
“Then why are the people here for dinner?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll go ask them. But you can go back to sleep, and we’ll be sure to get you up when it is time for breakfast at 8 o’clock.”
“OK.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
It was a little after 7:00, I was just sitting down with my second cup of coffee and catching up on the news online. I heard my MIL stirring again, went to investigate.
“Do you need something?”
“I’m trying to see if I can get my head through these bars.” She means the bed rails.
“That’s not a good idea. You could get hurt.” She won’t be able to, anyway, but still it’s not a good idea for her to be trying it.
“Oh. OK. Well, I called my family in Boonville, and the oldest boy is going to come and get me.” I think she’s thinking of my wife’s cousin Bob, who died earlier this year.
“Well, I’ll be sure to come wake you when he gets here. But you can go back to sleep until then.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Makes you wonder.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Failure, General Musings, Government, ISS, NASA, NYT, Predictions, Science, Space, tech
Here’s a prediction: more people are going to die in space.
Not exactly newsworthy, is it? When you engage in the sort of dangerous enterprise like spacetravel (or even just getting there), the learning curve is steep and marked with blood. I can’t see any other way around it – as carefully designed and tested as every component is, there are still going to be failures, and some of those failures are going to mean that good men and women die. I know it. You know it. The astronauts certainly know it.
But just as today’s cars and aircraft are *thousands* of times safer than early cars and airplanes were, so will spacecraft become safer through use and experimentation. Via today’s NYT, the opening paragraphs of this article by James Oberg seems to understand how this learning process works:
4 October 2007—Aboard the International Space Station, the three Russian computers that control the station’s orientation have been happily humming away now for several weeks. And that’s proof that the crisis in June that crippled the ISS and bloodied the U.S.-Russian partnership that supports it, has been solved.
But the technological—and diplomatic—lessons of that crisis need to be fully understood and appreciated. Because if the failure had occurred on the way to Mars, say, it probably would have been fatal, and it will likely be the same international partnership that builds the hardware for a future Mars mission.
The critical computer systems, it turned out, had been designed, built, and operated incorrectly—and the failure was inevitable. Only being so relatively close to Earth, in range of resupply and support missions, saved the spacecraft from catastrophe.
Oberg gives a nice, complete explanation of what happened and how it was overcome. But the concluding paragraph may come as a bit of a surprise:
It is dismaying that after decades of experience with manned space stations, Russian space engineers still couldn’t keep unwanted condensation at bay. But what’s worse is that they designed circuitry that would allow one spot of corrosion to fell a supposedly triply redundant control computer complex. Another cause for dismay is that when trouble did develop, the Russians’ first instinct was to blame their American partners. Such deficiencies need to be worked out in the years ahead, on the space station, before both the technology and the diplomacy can be thought reliable enough for far-ranging missions that replacement shipments wouldn’t be able to reach.
Why is he so harsh? Because, as his wiki entry explains:
During the 1990s, he was involved in NASA studies of the Soviet space program, with particular emphasis on safety aspects; these had often been covered up or downplayed, and with the advent of the ISS and the Shuttle-Mir programs, NASA was keen to study them as much as possible.
Ah. Got it – he’s professionally aggravated that the Russians *haven’t* been willing to learn the lessons of their mistakes. Because until you ‘fess up to the mistakes you make, you can’t learn from them . . . and more people will die, needlessly.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Architecture, Flu, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
Couple of items of interest from the news.
First, researchers have figured out a way to produce what I called “plasteel” in Communion of Dreams, and used as the basis for a lot of the architecture of the future. From PhysOrg.com:
New plastic strong as steel, transparent.
By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that’s as strong as steel but lighter and transparent.
It’s made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue.
Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it “plastic steel,” but the new material isn’t quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft.
Ah, I love to see my predictions actually coming true. (Not that I knew exactly how this would be achieved, but it was clear that materials science will reap a huge benefit from nanotech advancements.)
Now for the bad news:
Bird flu virus mutating into human-unfriendly form.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The H5N1 bird flu virus has mutated to infect people more easily, although it still has not transformed into a pandemic strain, researchers said on Thursday.
The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” said Kawaoka, who led the study. “The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus,” Kawaoka said.
This is unbelievably bad news. The thing which has kept H5N1 from becoming a real threat is that it is difficult for it to move from one human to another – almost all the deaths attributable to the virus so far have come in animal to human transfers. Part of this is due to the fact that the virus just doesn’t find us all that good a place to set up shop. But once it does, it will only be a matter of time before you start to see human-to-human transfers. And then it’ll be “hello, pandemic!” And depending on how virulent that strain is, it may or may not precipitate the sort of global catastrophe I envision as the basis for Communion.
That’s one prediction I’d really love to have completely wrong.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Failure, Flu, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Politics, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Terrorism
[This post contains spoiler information about Communion of Dreams.]
Twin news items to make you nervous:
Well, it makes me nervous, anyway. First we have a report on how with the increased accreditation of so-called high security labs has seen an increased incident rate for those labs. In the last 4 years, more than 100 incidents involving very dangerous biologic materials have occurred. From the first news article:
The mishaps include workers bitten or scratched by infected animals, skin cuts, needle sticks and more, according to a review by The Associated Press of confidential reports submitted to federal regulators. They describe accidents involving anthrax, bird flu virus, monkeypox and plague-causing bacteria at 44 labs in 24 states. More than two-dozen incidents were still under investigation.
The number of accidents has risen steadily. Through August, the most recent period covered in the reports obtained by the AP, labs reported 36 accidents and lost shipments during 2007 — nearly double the number reported during all of 2004.
And the second one involves cattle ranchers who are concerned about the DHS plans for a new animal disease research lab, and how the proximity of such a lab near livestock operations poses a threat. (Disclosure note: my hometown of Columbia was recently removed from a list of potential sites, in part thanks to efforts of friends of mine who opposed such a facility being placed here.) The threat is not theoretical – it is little known in this country, but recent outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain have been tied to a similar research lab in that country. Yet this is what we hear from the government:
“No matter where we put it it’s going to be safe and secure,” said James Johnson, Homeland Security‘s director of national labs and the program manager for the planned lab.
I’m sure it will be, Jim. Just like all those other high-security labs around the country.
See, the problem is that people being people, mistakes happen. Under the best of conditions. And when you’re messing around with really dangerous shit, the potential harm of an error goes way up. And that is only being concerned with mistakes.
[Spoiler alert.]
Because what happens when some one or group decides to exploit the system in place to redirect something really nasty for their own purposes? This is what I use as the source of the original ‘Fire Flu’ for Communion, though that isn’t revealed until late in the book. Impossible? Oh? Remember the 2001 Anthrax attacks which killed five people and shut down the Senate’s postal facility? That whole episode is still unsolved.
I don’t know about you, but when the same people who let New Orleans die tell me that I should trust them to secure biologic agents which have the potential to wipe out our (overly concentrated) livestock, cause widespread crop failure, or even start a pandemic plague of some variety, I shudder.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 