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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • Low-tech Magazine: Sunbathing in the living room: oven...

    Rated Dec 05 2008 • 23 reviews • technology • lowtechmagazine.com

    Oven stoves and heat walls
    in Low Tech Magazine by kris de decker

    An oven stove is a very efficient and robust oven that radiates heat all day. In the US it was introduced only 20 years ago, but in Europe the technology is almost one thousand years old. Especially in Russia, Scandinavia and Central Europe the oven stove has a long and rich tradition.

    In the 18th century, several European governments financed research to improve the technology, as a way to overcome an acute shortage of firewood: ecotech before the term existed. However, its further development and distribution was thwarted by the arrival of coal, gas and oil. Oven stoves are large, heavy and slow, but they offer so many advantages that they \u2013 again - deserve to be subsidized by the government.

    Oven stoves and heat walls
    Green Techniques







    Relatively simple technologies that can be mastered and implemented by anyone. It not only procures a better internal environment it also allows you to be creative.




    26K views
    Low-tech Magazine: Sunbathing in the living room: oven stoves and heat walls

  • http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9817361-54.html?part=rss...

    Rated Nov 16 2007 • 2 reviews • science, technology, policy • news.com

    Carbon taxes, not technology, will cut emissions, says MIT professor
    via InnovationWatch, in Cnet by Michael Kanellos

    There's no reason to think that technology will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. over the next 50 years, according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but regulations and higher prices might.

    The technology versus taxes--it's the primary green tech debate of the day. Nearly everyone would like to see inventions emerge that can curb emissions and reduce dependence on fossil fuels in an economical fashion. Many, however, say it's not feasible, particularly in the near term. Count this study in that latter camp.

    Richard Eckaus, Ford International professor emeritus of economics, and Ian Sue Wing conducted a study on energy consumption and emissions in the U.S. from 1958 to 1996 and again from 1980 to 1996. The study also then projected forward and made predictions about what might happen from 2000 to 2050.

    Carbon taxes, not technology, will cut emissions, says MIT professor
    At the tipping point by UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki Moon

    It's not as if technology were not working. That's not the point. The point is that the market sorts things out over the long run and technology could thus be produced and made available when it's too late that means when the problems to solve have mutated into a fundamental shift that is no longer answerable.

    Let's talk examples.
    Following the 1st energy crisis of the seventies the EU and Japan initiated a taxation policy that would increase the cost of energy to such a point that everyone should think to reduce his consumption of it. The result of that policy distinguishes the EU and Japan from the US in many ways:
    * pressed by their consumers car companies in the EU and Japan researched more energy efficient engines and designs while the US surfed further on the wave of cheap energy. After more than 20 years of practicing such differentiated policies EU and Japanese car companies are dominating the world market while US car companies are struggling to survive...
    * Europe and Japan were using those high taxes on fuel to finance research and development of renewable energies. Today Western European countries and Japan are generating more and more of their electricity from non-fossil sources and their technologies are dominating the world market. Meanwhile the US has been boxed in higher dependency on fossil fuels produced by countries it politically opposes...

    In terms of climate change Europeans and Japanese are a lot better prepared today to answer the problem than the US. This in itself should be sufficient proof of the necessity of state intervention to orient the market in the desired direction and the presently felt urgency is only exacerbating that necessity.




    390 views
    http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9817361-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

  • The Archdruid Report: The Innovation Fallacy

    Rated Sep 13 2007 • 1 review • science, reality, technology • blogspot.com

    The Innovation Fallacy
    in The Archdruid report by John Michael Greer

    It took 500 million years to create our planet's stockpile of fossil fuels. Once they're gone, what's left is mostly diffuse sources such as sunlight and wind, and trying to concentrate these so they can power industrial society is like trying to make a river flow uphill.
    ...
    If energy resources are't available in sufficient quality and quantity, innovation can make a successful society but it won't make or maintain an industrial one. Itu2019s worth suggesting that the maximum possible level of economic development in a society is defined by the abundance and concentration of energy resources available to that society.
    ...
    For most of human history, the resource that has been in shortest supply has arguably been energy. For the last three hundred years, and especially for the last three-fourths of a century, that's been less true than ever before. Today, however, the highly concentrated and abundant energy resources stockpiled by the biosphere over the last half billion years or so are running low, and there are no other resources on or around Earth at the same level of concentration and abundance. Innovation is vital if weu2019re to deal with the consequences of that reality, but it can't make the laws of thermodynamics run backwards and give us an endless supply of concentrated energy just because we happen to want one.

    The Innovation Fallacy

    Technophiles push reality out of the sphere of their ideological rationalism. They just fail to see the big picture. In this article John Michael Greer gives an compelling refutation of technophiles' ideology of "the ever more".

    The principle of life relies on what its environment has to offer, in term of energy and resources, that can help it to reproduce itself and to expand. Evolutionary transformations in the principle of life appear as a species' adaptation to changes threatening the access to its habitual resources. Once a resource rarefies the specie has to find another one which eventually obliges it to mutate in order to adapt itself to whatever is available out there. But once all the resources the specie can possibly adopt are rarefying then that specie enters a spiral of collapse.

    It seems to me that humanity is entering such a spiral and technology is not going to extract us from our condition. There is just no way out the world population will decline drastically and such a decline shall not go without much suffering. Demographic projections table such a decline to start after 2050. Will humanity find an optimum equilibrium for the resources available to it? I think so. But this road of adaptation to our environmental realities could possibly disrupt the complexity of our advanced societies leaving our descendants to strive in a post-modern reality that could take possibly some pre-modern traits of simplicity.




    4 views
    The Archdruid Report: The Innovation Fallacy

  • Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans...

    Rated Sep 12 2007 • 2 reviews • evolution, science, reality, technology • reason.com

    Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?
    in Reason Online by Ronald Bailey

    By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?

    Computer scientist Stephen Omohundro argued that self-improving AIs would be ultra-rational economic agents, basically examples of homo economicus. Such AIs would exhibit four drives; efficiency, self-preservation, acquisition, and creativity. Regarding efficiency AIs optimizing their resource use would turn to nanotechnology and virtualization wherever possible. Self-preservation involves protecting its utility function from death which it would do by building in redundancy and embedding itself in mutually defensive social relations. The drive to acquire more resources means that AIs could be dangerously competitive with humans. If Omohundro is right, there are good reasons to doubt that an AI that is a relentless utility maximizer will be friendly to less than perfectly efficient humanity.

    Given these big concerns about how super smart AIs might treat humanity, should they be created at all? Famously, former Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy declared that they are too dangerous and that we should relinquish the drive to create them. Charles Harper, senior vice president of the Templeton Foundation, suggested there was a "dilemma of power." The dilemma is that "our science and technology create new forms of power but our cultures and civilizations do not easily create parallel capacities of stewardship required to utilize newly created technological powers for benevolent uses and to restrain them from malevolent uses."

    Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?

    I more and more often observe myself wondering if the collapse of our late modern systems (economic, financial, scientific, technologic and other), in finale, is not the best thing that could befall humanity.

    We are, like automatons, driving on a freeway leading to "we don't know where" and, as automatons, we are never questioning if this "we don't know where" is somewhere we really like or want to go. Its like our minds had been hijacked. By by what could they have been hijacked? I suggest that our minds have been hijacked by what drives our totalitarian modernity to be the most efficacious tyranny humanity has ever been the prisoner of. But what drives modernity? The only valid answer is the logic of capital or the rationality that the use of capital imposes to its holders. We are automatons driven by that rationality and it should thus not come as a surprise then that the automatons we build should be at our image.... self-improving AIs would be ultra-rational economic agents, basically examples of homo economicus. ...there are good reasons to doubt that an AI that is a relentless utility maximizer will be friendly to less than perfectly efficient humanity..




    88 views
    Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?: And other questions from the Singularity Summit - Reason Magazine

  • index.html

    Rated Aug 24 2007 • 5 reviews • books, worldviews, technology • vrinimi.org

    Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
    via adrianhon / Metafilter, in vrinimi.org

    Mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction visionary worthy of Arthur C Clarke's mantle, Vinge is most famous for popularising the idea of the singularity, where technology advances so quickly that humans cannot participate, but he's also credited with writing one of the first stories about cyberspace, True Names, back in 1981. More recently, he's been exploring how augmented reality and belief circles will change the way we live in his latest novel Rainbows End - which he put online, completely for free.

    Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge FREE EBook.
    singularity
    True Names by Vernor Vinge FREE EBook.
    augmented reality and belief circles
    Summary and notes on Rainbows Ends in Wikipedia

    Vinge focuses exclusively on the technological aspect of change. For sure everything comes fast nowadays but... other parameters could very well asphyxiate science and technology in the not so distant future.

    Vinge is nevertheless someone very creative and with a flair for where science is taking us. So singularity is mastered with augmented reality, at least, within the scope of the belief system of the individual.

    This idea of "belief circles" is certainly most interesting. It's kind of a tribalization of worldviews. But the description of them given by Vinge will without any doubt flounder due to the impact of all those determining factors that he does not take into account: side-effects of modernity, peak resources and an economic globalization that has been realized in a non globalized political system which inevitably concludes into destructive tensions.

    So in the end I remain convinced that we are assisting at the emergence of a worldwide worldview that shall take its shape as the outcome of the interactions between all the factors of change at work today.




    2,691 views
    index.html

  • Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

    Rated Aug 01 2007 • 1 review • science, energy, technology • atimes.com

    The great biofuel fraud
    in AsiaTimes by F William Engdahl

    Professor David Pimentel of Cornell University and other scientists claim that net energy output from bio-ethanol fuel is less than the fossil-fuel energy used to produce the ethanol. Measuring all energy inputs to produce ethanol, from production of nitrogen fertilizer to energy needed to clean the considerable waste from biofuel refineries, Pimintel's research showed a net energy loss of 22% for biofuel - they use more energy than they produce. That translates into little threat to oil demand and huge profit for clever oil giants that re-profile themselves as "green energy" producers.

    The great biofuel fraud

    The most shocking here is even not that bio-fuels will increase the total demand for fossil-fuels... the most shocking is to observe how easily the scientific community at the world's leading university centers is being "caged" and its future research dictated by capital.
    This is the most powerful illustration of science's dependence on capital that also annihilates its ideological claim at "pure rationality".

    " ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP are all into biofuels. This past May, BP announced the largest ever research-and-development grant to a university, $500 million to the University of California-Berkeley, to fund BP-dictated R&D into alternative energy, including biofuels. Stanford University's Global Climate and Energy Program got $100 million from ExxonMobil; University of California-Davis got $25 million from Chevron for its Bio-energy Research Group. Princeton University's Carbon Mitigation Initiative takes $15 million from BP. "




    161 views
    Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

  • Why izimi will obsolete file upload websites & OpenBusiness

    Rated May 18 2007 • 1 review • science, technology, change, society • openbusiness.cc

    Why izimi will obsolete file upload websites
    in Open Business by David Ingram

    Read on.
    Business guru and VC Francis McInerney, who describes himself as a u201cfuturist, strategist and realistu201d, has a similar view on all this:
    u201cBasically, Izimi obsoletes YouTube. This is a phenomenon I advised customers about over a decade ago when I demonstrated that when information costs fall far enough, strange things happenu2026 By disintermediating social networks like YouTube, Izimi precludes the strategy of Viacom of forcing social networks to pay for material that can no longer be copyrighted. Izimi software lets individuals syndicate whatever they want, from whomever they want, without using intermediaries like YouTube. This impels copyright owners to attack their customers, tens of millions at a time, or to create copyright-free business models.u201d northriver.com/blog/2007/03/07/izimi/ [northriver.com/blog/2007/03/07/izimi/] )
    What does all this mean? Well, the same forces operate in every business sector, and it goes like this: as the speed of business increases, driven by the availability of better and easier-to-use tools (generally technology) among those further down the supply chain, those who occupied the middle and upper tiers of the supply chain find themselves becoming marginalised, driven out, or at least forced to radically change their business models. Itu2019s tempting to think that this doesnu2019t apply to our sector, the media/information/technology sector, and so we need not consider it, but the truth is it does.

    Why izimi will obsolete file upload websites


    I'm not a tech geek but I understand that science and technology are not neutral. They contain a vision: the dream of the future in the head of their creators.

    Along much of the history of science the will of capital holders, who financed science and new technologies, fashioned the drive of technology in the direction they were expecting. Normal is it not. You have money and you want to invest it in something for the good reason that you want to reproduce it and eventually to see its mass grow further. So the investments made in science and technology were made with the idea to increase the mass of the invested capital. And it worked well for quite a long time.

    But along the way science and technology became so prevalent that almost everybody was given the education that would allow them to toil in the field of scientific knowledge or on its margins. And something totally unexpected started to emerge. Culture was beginning to interfere with the economic logic driven by capital. The heads of more and more scientists and technologists had been contaminated by a dream about a future, a vision about the creation of such a future, that was totally freed of the logic of capital, that was gradually starting to rely on a mix of ideas relating to the understanding of the extreme complexity of our reality and the implications of humanity's actions on that complexity.

    That's where technology started to diverge from the dream of capital holders and follow the cultural dream of a better tomorrow.




    68 views
    Why izimi will obsolete file upload websites & OpenBusiness

  • Process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy to run...

    Rated May 17 2007 • 1 review • technology, energy, market • scienceblog.com

    Process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy to run engines

    in ScienceBlog, a communique by Purdue University

    A Purdue University engineer has developed a method that uses an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water for running fuel cells or internal combustion engines, and the technique could be used to replace gasoline.

    The method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen - two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy, said Jerry Woodall, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue who invented the process.

    "The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you only produce as much as you need when you need it," said Woodall, who presented research findings detailing how the system works during a recent energy symposium at Purdue.

    The technology could be used to drive small internal combustion engines in various applications, including portable emergency generators, lawn mowers and chain saws. The process could, in theory, also be used to replace gasoline for cars and trucks, he said.

    Hydrogen is generated spontaneously when water is added to pellets of the alloy, which is made of aluminum and a metal called gallium. The researchers have shown how hydrogen is produced when water is added to a small tank containing the pellets. Hydrogen produced in such a system could be fed directly to an engine, such as those on lawn mowers.

    "When water is added to the pellets, the aluminum in the solid alloy reacts because it has a strong attraction to the oxygen in the water," Woodall said.

    This reaction splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in water, releasing hydrogen in the process.

    The gallium is critical to the process because it hinders the formation of a skin normally created on aluminum's surface after oxidation. This skin usually prevents oxygen from reacting with aluminum, acting as a barrier. Preventing the skin's formation allows the reaction to continue until all of the aluminum is used.

    Process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy to run engines



    This is one discovery I have been waiting for a long time and here it seems it is.

    Fuel cells have been tested for some 15-20 years in Europe and they work. But 2 major road-blocks impeached the fuel-cell technology to get access to a wide market: the storage of hydrogen in the vehicles' tanks and the supply of hydrogen along the road system.

    If what professor Woodall of Purdue says in this communique is verified than those 2 road-blocks would be taken away and fuel-cells could finally gain access to the commercial market... and this could also render obsolete the distributors of energy and empower the individual with a clean source of energy (This is still to be proved, for if I understood correctly, the reaction continues until all of the aluminum is used). So what about the residue?




    1 view
    Process generates hydrogen from aluminum alloy to run engines | Science Blog

  • KurzweilAI.net

    Rated May 15 2007 • 1 review • science, technology • kurzweilai.net

    Augmentation
    in KurzweiAIl.net

    The increase of capacity or addition of attributes to a thing or system. Can refer to the merging of technology with biological matter to increase human abilities of thought, perception, physical strength or other attributes.

    Augmentation


    This is a collection of links to articles referring to augmentation. One example that might interest you is Darpa's Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation. By the same token take this opportunity to experiment Kurzweil's artificial intelligence system and see if it helps you discover things you otherwise would not have deen...




    117 views
    KurzweilAI.net

  • George Monbiot: Road deaths are the worlds most...

    Rated May 14 2007 • 1 review • technology, society • guardian.co.uk

    A million road deaths every year? It's just the price of doing business
    in The Guardian by George Monbiot

    Death and injury on the roads is the world's most neglected public health issue. Almost as many people die in road accidents - 1.2 million a year - as are killed by malaria or tuberculosis. Around 50 million are injured. Some 85% of these accidents take place in developing countries. The poor get hurt much more often than the rich, as they walk or cycle or travel in overloaded buses. The highest death rate is among children walking on the roads.

    The annual economic cost to developing countries, in lost productivity alone, is $65-$100bn, roughly the same as the amount they receive in foreign aid. I caught a glimpse of the human cost when I was hospitalised in northern Kenya. Some of the men on the ward had bullet or axe wounds inflicted in tribal wars, others were dying of HIV/Aids, but over half had been smashed up in road accidents. They could not afford good painkillers, and sobbed and screamed through the night. It looked like a scene from the first world war.

    A million road deaths every year? It's just the price of doing business
    Rigged to Blow
    from Clusterfuck Nation by james howard kunstler


    When calculating the cost of rail transportation States are simply making an addition: the financial costs related to the investment in rail lines + the cost of their maintenance + the financial costs related to the investment in rail cars + the cost of their maintenance + the working costs of running the system.
    And States then tell us that the cost of rail transportation per kilometer/passenger is this much. But they don't explain us their calculations. Fact is nevertheless that they are using the total of that addition divided by the number of kilometers/passengers (or miles).
    What's wrong with that ?

    Well...
    The calculation of the cost per kilometer/passenger of road transportation only includes the financial costs relating to the investment in cars + the cost of their maintenance + the cost of running them.
    Do you see what I mean now ?

    The investment in the road infrastructure and its maintenance are never taken into account in the calculation of the cost of road transportation. And there is even worse, for, as George Monbiot writes "... many people die in road accidents - 1.2 million a year - ... Around 50 million are injured. " Contrast that with the rail transportation system that experiences only rare accidents.
    Those costs of the road transportation system are never integrated in the calculation of the cost per kilometer/person!!!

    How come that all those comparative studies between rail and road transportation are always so unjust and so radically biased in favor of the road transportation system?

    I like the way Kunstler describes the present state of affairs as "the car-crazy infrastructure for everyday life, and all the activities supporting it, that most Americans now living regard as the natural and normal medium for human existence, as salt water is the natural and normal medium for squid".

    Yes there is just no questioning any longer...




    97 views
    George Monbiot: Road deaths are the worlds most neglected public health issue | Comment is free | The Guardian