Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

Dramatic Climate Change

It’s happening faster than anyone would have guessed — with average temperatures rising 15-20 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the results of the spike in temperature is unprecedented violent storm activity, unlike anything that has ever been witnessed in several centuries of observation.

And it’s all happening on Jupiter. The Hubble provides this gorgeous image, showing what are now the three red spots of Jupiter — each one a massive storm system.

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The original Great Red Spot is bigger than Earth, and may have been observed as early as the 17th or 18th century. The other two are recent arrivals. It’s interesting that, on Jupiter, intensified storm activity is correlated with an increase in average temperature. Here on earth, some experts have recently come to a rather different conclusion.

It’s also interesting that such climate change is even taking place on Jupiter and, as we have observed, elsewhere in the solar system. How can this be happening on planets where there are no SUVs, and where George W. Bush was never president?

It just doesn’t add up.

Reader's Choice Video 3

Queen Rania of Jordan has taken on the worthy cause of combating anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes. Here she gives here latest thoughts on the subject, including a personal shout-out to FastForward Radio chatroom regular Harvey Espatchelowe:

Looks like Harvey has made quite an impression on the Queen!

Got a video tip for us? Send it to Speculist1 – at – yahoo.com.

Reader’s Choice Video 3

Queen Rania of Jordan has taken on the worthy cause of combating anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes. Here she gives here latest thoughts on the subject, including a personal shout-out to FastForward Radio chatroom regular Harvey Espatchelowe:

Looks like Harvey has made quite an impression on the Queen!

Got a video tip for us? Send it to Speculist1 – at – yahoo.com.

Really Big Building or Self-Contained City?

Architect Eugene Tsui is walking the line between the two with his two-mile-high Ultima Tower concept.

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Blogger Mahesh Basantani comments:

We’ve seen a whole slew of gigantic, volcano shaped, city-in-a-building towers, each promising to be the largest building in the world. First it was the wacky X-Seed design for Tokyo, and then even Norman Foster got into the game with his proposal for the massive ‘Crystal Island’ development in Moscow. Well now, architect Eugene Tsui is taking the gigantic volcano tower concept to a whole new eco level, by taking design inspiration from the natural world. His new design for the Ultima Tower – a 2-mile high Mt Doom-esque structure – borrows design principles from trees and other living ystem to reduce its energy footprint. We are always intrigued by architecture that uses biomimicry – the borrowing of principles from nature’s designs – and Tsui’s concept for this towering, ultra-dense urban development has certainly captured our attention with its thought-provoking design.

The base of the tower is 7000 feet in diameter. Solar panels on the outside would provide a good deal of the the required energy for operation. Additional power would come from wind turbines. Plus, Tsui describes a method of generating energy based on temperature differential between the bottom and the top of the tower. (I’me familiar with the idea of generating power using the temperature differentialin water; I suppose air would work the same. But if there’s that much difference in temperature between the top and the bottom of this thing, either the top or the bottom — I’m guessing the top — would be pretty uncomfortable.) The 144 elevators would be powered by compressed air.

In addition to trees, one of the inspirations from the natural world for this design was an African termite mound:

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Tsui’s design calls for the tower to be surrounded by lakes on all side, which got me wondering — why not ocean? Could something like this be constructed out at sea, attached to a huge platform bolted to the sea floor? It would be like the ultimate oil rig. If so, I think a design like this would be a good endgame for the Seastedders — folks who want to, in their own words, “create permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas.”

Their concept photo looks a lot less ambitious than the Ultima Tower:

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On the other hand, it looks like it’s designed for — among other things — agriculture. That would probably be an important consideration when building a self-contained habitat out at sea. Ultima Tower would be a huge undertaking even on land. But I love the idea of having it sit out somewhere in the middle of the Pacific — an independent city-state. There’s something very appealing about that.

FastForward Radio

Sunday, May 18, 2008, FastForward Radio featured a distinguished panel discussing the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems.

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Our live listeners reported a serious sound problem during the show. Fortunately, the archived show sounds fine. Our apologies to those who tried to listen live. We hope you enjoy the show now.

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Or download the MP3 for this show or other archived shows at:

Listen to FastForward Radio... on Blog Talk Radio

Here’s the nanofactory video that was mentioned several times. It provides a good quick introduction to the idea of atomically precise manufacturing.

Human Progress

Via InstaPundit, check out this excerpt from the introduction to Chris Hedges’ new book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists. (The excerpt begins about a quarter of the way down the page.)

Hedges argues that the both secular and religious fundamentalists are a threat. Both groups have lost sight of the notion of sin — the idea that human nature is at its core limited, flawed, fallible. Once people forget about sin, once they believe in human moral progress, all manner of trouble ensues:

Yet the belief persists that science and reason will save us; it persists because it makes it possible to ignore or minimize these catastrophes. We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf. We prefer to think we are the culmination of a process, the result of centuries of human advancement, rather than creatures unable to escape from the irrevocable follies and blunders of human nature. The idea of inevitable progress allows us to place ourselves at the center of creation, to exalt ourselves. It translates our narrow self-interest into a universal good. But it is irresponsible. It permits us to avert our eyes from reality and trust in an absurdist faith.

“For every age,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.”

The belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels and divine intervention. Scientific methods, part of the process of changing the material world, are nearly useless in the nebulous world of politics, ideas, values and ethics. But the belief in collective moral progress is a seductive one. It is what has doomed populations in the past who have chased after impossible dreams, and it threatens to doom us again. It is, at its core, the enticing delusion that we can be more than human, that we can become gods.

The real problem, it seems to me, is not the belief that human moral progress is possible; the real problem is the idea that it’s inevitable. It’s not. And if, as we have suggested, humanity takes one step back for every two forward, even a fairly significant trend of moral progress would have to be marred by many horrible setbacks which, when added together, could make a strong case for a complete lack of moral progress or even for an observable trend of moral decay.

It’s easy, for example, to look back over the past century of human history and see one example after another of technological advancement being put in the service of human exploitation and destruction. The examples are many. They are appalling, and they are unavoidable.

Even so, they don’t tell the whole story. As we have noted before, research shows that human pre-history was significantly more violent than any period in recorded history — including the 20th century. A modern human living in the 20th century was less likely to die from violence at the hands of a fellow human being than a hunter-gatherer living 50,000 years ago. In fact, in order for the 20th century to reach the carnage level of the hunter-gatherer era, we would have had to see a total death toll from wars of about 2 billion.

I can’t find a good estimate of the total death toll of all wars in the 20th century, but let’s take the high-end estimate for all World War II deaths as listed in Wikipedia, 75 million, and let’s double that. And then, just for good measure, let’s double it again. So that gives us an estimate of 300 million total war-related deaths in the 20th century.That means that the technologically powered depravity of that century managed to achieve a death rate of only about 1/7th of what our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced.

What if we go back just a couple thousand years. What percentage of the world’s population lived in slavery at that time, or a condition we would find indistinguishable from slavery? Yes, it is horrifying to think that pockets of slavery and slave-like conditions still exist in our world today — but how many billion would have to be slaves today to match the percentages of the era of Julius Caesar?

How many women voted (anywhere, for anything) 300 years ago? All around the world, how many vote now?

How many environmental groups existed 150 years ago? How many exist now?

How many animals benefited from prosthetic technology 25 years ago? How many benefit now?

Technological development doesn’t make us better. It gives us more choices. And sometimes we choose to make things better with the increased capability we have been given. It’s not inevitable that we will make things better, but it does seem built-in for us to try. Hedges is right that we shouldn’t view ourselves as the culmination of a process of advancement. We aren’t the culmination; we’re just the latest step. Nor should we view human nature or the human condition as perfectible. Rather, we should see them for what we have demonstrated them to be time and time again throughout our history — vastly improvable.

As for that “enticing delusion” that we can become more than human, I think I have to hang on to that one for a while. Even the idea that we will become “gods” isn’t out of bounds, relatively speaking. I have at my fingertips capability that would make me seem vastly godlike to one of those hunter-gatherer ancestors we were just talking about. I believe that our descendants will surpass us even further than we have surpassed the hunter-gatherers. The thing to remember is that, when they reach that state, there will be nothing godlike about it.

Hedges is right to point out our limitations and the risks we face. But I think he is missing out on something important. The future is never the future. All you ever get is the present. The utopia we live in (relative to our ancestors) is not utopia at all, as we well know. And transcending what it means to be “human” does not make one a god or even put one into a transcendent state of humanity. Transcending limitations is the natural human state. To reject the human ability to advance may be the biggest delusion of them all.

Alternative Lines Through Time

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When Stephen asked me to do an update to Lines Through Time, I demurred. I want to check in on that one in 10-year increments. But I got to thinking about the reasoning I employed in laying out the meandering course of my life, and it occurred to me that I don’t (necessarily) agree with myself on this thing. That is to say, Phil 2008 disagrees with Phil 2003. Of course, once that sort of thing starts going on, look out. Anything can happen. I may do an update after all when Phil 2009 decides that Phil 2008 was overly fond of the decade as a measuring increment, or that he was just plain lazy.

Anyway, Phil 2003 tracks us through 20 years of decisions that led him to be sitting in his bedroom, looking out the window one fine autumn morning and wondering how he came to be sitting there. At each stage, he shows how a different decision or happenstance would have resulted in a completely different outcome. The problem with this approach is that each of these changes would have only changed the probability of one thing happening vs. another. Nothing is really excluded.

All of which is to say that Phil 1983 could have followed a very different course than the one outlined, and still ended up right where Phil 2003 picked up the narrative. Let’s see how that might work. Phil 2003 writes:

After I graduated from college in Kentucky in 1983, I decided to move to Denver to go to law school. Had I not decided to go to law school, I might not have moved to Denver.

This one starts out kind of mushy. I might not have moved to Denver, but then again I might have. I chose Denver in the Law School time line because I had always planned to the live here as an adult. Why would that have changed?

I dropped out of law school a couple of years before starting my master’s. If I had stayed in law school, I would never have started my master’s.

Well, this is just silly. My wife went to grad school after getting her law degree as did (I think) my co-blogger. One does not necessarily exclude the other.

Mike and I met in grad school in 1986. If either of us had decided not work on that particular degree at that particular time, we would have never met.

This one is harder to get around. Unless we met later on the job (which would not have been as likely if I went ahead with the law degree) it seems unlikely that I would have befriended Mike had I not been in that degree program at that time.

My friend Mike started working at U S WEST a few months before I did. If Mike had not taken a job at US WEST, I would never have learned about the job opening there and would not have applied for it.

Unless, of course, I learned about the job via other channels. Of course, had I finished law school I probably wouldn’t have been looking for tech writing jobs. Then again, I might have ended up working for U S WEST as a lawyer. A lot of folks did back in those days. In fact, years later I was going through orientation having been hired back at US WEST (once again by Mike) after returning from overseas, and lo and behold, joining the company the same day as I was my old study partner from law school.

On the other hand, I might have stayed in law school another year and then quit. Or I might have finished and then decided — as apparently quite a few law graduates do — that I had no interest in being a lawyer. There are a lot of possibilities, and none of them preclude my being hired on at US WEST. It’s kind of hard to imagine me finishing a law degree and then taking a $40K-a-year technical editing job, but then again…I’ve done lots crazier stuff than that. (Plus, 17 years ago that was more money than it sounds like now.)

I was hired on a technical editor at U S WEST Advanced Technologies in 1991. If I hadn’t taken the job with US WEST, I would not have been able to take over Cap’s project for him.

This one is true as far as it goes. I can’t see a company like US WEST putting me in charge of a project of any size if I wasn’t working for them in some capacity.

If I hadn’t become lead facilitator, I would never have recommended using tools from the quality management system for the Russian start-ups.

Says who? I would have been familiar with the tools even if I never became the lead facilitator. I might have come up with the idea anyhow.

If Cap hadn’t gotten sick (or if he had asked someone else to cover this project for him) I would never have taken that first trip to Moscow.

True, but so what? Maybe I would have taken a different trip to Moscow. See below.

If I hadn’t suggested [using the TQM tools as the basis for rolling out new ventures] I would not have made several trips to Russia in 1993 and 1994 helping to outline the business roll-out process.

Right. Or maybe I would have had some other, equally good or better idea that was also well-received. Just because that idea worked doesn’t mean it was the only possible solution. And it’s not like that outfit was exactly swimming in creative, out-of-the-box suggestions.

Or let’s try this one on for size. I finish my law degree with an emphasis in international law (which was an area of particular interest) and take a position with US WEST Overseas Operations. In the course of this job, I become aware of the problems they’re having with the roll-out of these joint venture companies. I put a proposal together for how to address the problem and pitch it to execs in charge — this is exactly what I did anyway. At this point, assuming they liked my idea, these divergent timelines would more or less meet back up.

Or at least they could.

If I hadn’t done so much work in Russia, I would never have been called down to Malaysia.

I’m not sure about this. A lot of people got sent down to Malaysia who had never been part of the Russia stuff. Malaysia was, in some ways, a bigger project. So my stroke of brilliance comes later, and the timelines meet up when I go to Malaysia.

If I hadn’t taken both contracts, I would never have met my girlfriend.

The point is that I needed to be in Malaysia, working where I was working, in early 1997 in order to meet her. There are a lot of ways that could have happened. Plus, I could have met her later and under different circumstances. Even if I hadn’t taken the second contract, she and I knew a lot of the same people.

If I hadn’t met her, I wouldn’t have tried to stay longer.

Well, probably not, but on the other hand — I liked Malaysia a lot. I might have stayed on anyway if the right opportunity presented itself.

If I had allowed the company to rotate me back in at the end of my contract, I would have taken a job in either Europe or California in 1997.

Those two offers were the most likely, but I might have tried hard to find something in Denver anyway. I might have settled on Denver so that my daughter (who I had custody of at the time) could be near her mother.

If I hadn’t moved back, she wouldn’t have been here visiting me.

There’s no arguing with that.

If she hadn’t come to see me, she never would have met her friend.

She met her friend by making cold calls to telecom companies until she had a few connections. She would have probably done that upon coming here to live even if she had never visited Denver before.

If it weren’t for the help of her friend, she probably wouldn’t have taken that particular job.

Unless, as with my US WEST job, she found it through different channels.

Commuting from where we were living in Boulder County was arduous for her, so we moved. If she hadn’t taken the job, we wouldn’t have moved there.

Of course, she could have taken a completely different job down in the south part of town, which would have put us in exactly the same position. Things could have worked out very differently indeed– with changes at every turn — and yet I still might have been looking out that same window on that same morning I wrote that blog entry.

Or one tiny thing might have changed back in 1983 and the whole story would be radically different.

Reader's Choice Video 2

Check out these modular robots. Reader Florian was impressed by their ability to reassemble when kicked apart.

Its not quite T2, but it’s a start. Harvey’s contribution this week only looks like it’s from another planet. But this is a journey through time, not space.

Reader’s Choice Video 2

Check out these modular robots. Reader Florian was impressed by their ability to reassemble when kicked apart.

Its not quite T2, but it’s a start. Harvey’s contribution this week only looks like it’s from another planet. But this is a journey through time, not space.

Ethanol: the Other Side

I was pleased to see (via InstaPundit) this favorable treatment of Robert Zubrin’s views on ethanol in Newsweek. I don’t think corn-based ethanol is a great way to go, especially with the heavy subsidies that seem to be required to make it happen, but at least we can have a little clarity on whether ethanol production is causing a food shortage.

It isn’t.

If we’re going to produce ethanol, there are much better ways to go than corn. Sugar beets would make more sense, as would organic waste. Or we might think about importing ethanol if we’re really serious about the stuff.



Probably a better fuel for humans than vehicles

The other day I heard a radio ad for a local auto dealer touting its leadership in providing flex fuel vehicles within the state of Colorado. That strikes me as progress. But I want to see pumps dispensing pure ethanol (from sources other than corn) and methanol. I would take both of those as significant signs of progress.

UPDATE: More on importing. This s about as political as I ever like to get. But even if, for whatever reason, you disagree about dropping the tariff on imported ethanol, at least here’s something more interesting to look at tan that tired corn photo, above.