Making a series of announcements can offer an excuse to slip in one extra posting, this month... so....
Here's a special offer for Hugo Award voters (and everybody else)! Baen's UNIVERSE Magazine has now posted my new novella "Shoresteading" (now available on my website for open-free access to anybody who wants to read a rollicking, near future adventure story, set in a world of rising seas, big ideas and strange hopes!
I provided the very first editorial for the newly launched site of SIGMA - the “think tank of scientific science fiction authors.” SIgma formalizes what has long been a practice at many government agencies of consulting SF writers about our area of most intense interest -- the future and processes of change. The theme of my editorial is one I have discussed before... the increasing brittleness of our civilization - one in which we depend ever-more upon a paint-thin layer of skilled professionals to anticipate and protect us from all possible dangers. An approach that is fragile and deeply contrary to the American tradition. We need to remember our roots, as a civilization that has always depended, also, upon resiliency.
Rounding out a list of “David Brin announcements...”
Starship Sofa has produced -- on its audio magzine Aural Delights a spoken version of my story “Temptation.” The narration is by Julie Davis. A story by Geoff Ryman makes the lengthy experience worthwhile.
The second part of “Temptation” is also up (1hr 20min in to the show). Part 3 will appear soon. (The text of the story Temptation is also available on my website.)
==OTHER INTERESTING ITEMS==
Toys of tomorrow!
A fascinating epistemological analysis ‘The trouble with conspiracy theories’ by Edward Feser, addresses some of the matters I have raised before, e.g. the difficulty of recruiting - and maintaining loyalty from - skilled henchmen in any sort of large scale and ongoing/concealed betrayal of the proncipal belief systems that most of them were brought up in. Neither Fesr nor I deny the existence of small scale conspiracies. In fact, I believe he downplays conspiracies too much.
There are many logical holes in his neat refutation. For example, there are ways that a tight-knit “inner conspiracy” of a few fanatics could control much larger groups who did not consciously think of themselves as committing a betrayal. (Suppose, for example, just half a dozen blackmailed/suborned men held the highest offices in a nation; they could then appoint fools and delusionally partisan rationalizers into lower positions, who could then achieve high levels of damage without the ever becoming aware that they were doing so. The same effect can be achieved through clever use of prodigious amounts of cash.) Still, it is an interesting perspective.
San Diego Science Festival this year.
Speaking of which, see a lovely essay about how the “rightful place” of science is not only in making better tools for a better world, but in teaching by far the highest moral values.
The color red can make people’s work more accurate, and blue can make people more creative.
Google Earth now lets you zoom around Mars.
Note the following might be claimed as a predictive hit on my part... even though some aspects of the reportage itself strike me as, well, a bit fishy. Researchers in Great Britain and the United States have imaged the first high definition imprints that dolphin sounds make in water. The resulting "CymaGlyphs" are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin "picture word."
The CymaScope captures actual sound vibrations imprinted in the dolphin's natural environment -- water, revealing the intricate visual details of dolphin sounds for the first time. "There is strong evidence that dolphins are able to 'see' with sound, much like humans use ultrasound to see an unborn child in the mother's womb," said Florida based dolphin researcher Jack Kassewitz. "The CymaScope provides our first glimpse into what the dolphins might be 'seeing' with their sounds." The CymaScope will be used to image the sounds so that each CymaGlyph will represent a dolphin "picture word." The ultimate aim is to speak to dolphins with a basic vocabulary of dolphin sounds and to understand their responses."
There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic "snapshot" of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium, so the dolphin's primary method of communication may be picture based.
It sure SOUNDS like what I described many years ago.... (Alas, the link stopped working. As I expected, it may have been too good to be true.)
See the web site of my friend and fellow author T. Jackson King, who has posted a cool variety of stories and chapters.
See an incredibly alien place on Earth
“A major Indian-German geoengineering expedition set sail this week for the Scotia Sea, flouting a U.N. ban on ocean iron fertilization experiments in hopes of garnering data about whether the process actually does take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it in the deep ocean, a technique that may help reverse global warming.” There are so many variables. (1) I cannot believe that iron will do this all by itself. Indeed, we should start by replicating nature and doing ocean fertilization by stirring up mud from the ocean bottom... exactly as I depicted in EARTH. (2) One issue is iron-caused acidification. (3) Also, could this stimulate more “desert ocean” areas to be useful fisheries? By itself worth testing. (4) There are also regions e.g in the Gulf of Mexico, that are dying of Eutrophy or too MUCH fertilizer washing in from farms up the MIssissippi. In those cases, installing bubblers that inject air into the water might cause fisheries and CO2 absorption.”
China officially started construction of a Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the largest in the world, in a remote southwest region on Friday. Preparation and research for the project took some 14 years. The dish-like telescope, as large as 30 football fields, will stand in a region of typical Karst depressions in Guizhou Province when it's done in 2013. FAST's main spherical reflector will be composed of 4,600 panels. Its observation sensitivity will be 10 times more powerful than the 100-m aperture steerable radio telescope in Germany. Its overall capacity will be 10 times larger than what is now the world's largest (300 m) Arecibo radio telescope developed by the United States, according to Nan Rendong, the chief scientist of the project and an NAO researcher
Mike Gannis stumbled on this Wikipedia entry for a clever but terribly meanspirited British “reality” show.
As Stefan Jones pointed out: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory as via government, big business, formal education, church has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG." And now, they have finally put a lot of the WHOLE EARTH archives from 1968-1971 online. Have a look at this marvel. Why, it's like finding out that people were trying hard to invent the internet before there were personal computers! So far just a few of the articles are PDFs. But literally thousands of pages of the ginormous Whole Earth Catalogs and the various journals have been scanned in. Go flip through the first 20 or so pages of The Last Whole Earth Catalog; it's like finding a sub-index of the Encyclopedia Galactica.
I highly recommend looking at the site for Random Acts of Conditionless Kindness (RACK) offering ways to do little things that help a lot.
Bruce Willis’s film SURROGATES will appear in September. “Set in a futuristic world where humans live in isolation and interact through surrogate robots, a cop (Willis) is forced to leave his home for the first time in years in order to investigate the murders of others’ surrogates.” And yes, it does eat off the same plate as KILN PEOPLE... with also some resemblance to Asimov’s THE NAKED SUN. Ah well. I will forgive all if it turns out to be an actual original movie that’s smart and well done! In this era when most studio execs should be shot for cowardice and lack of imagination, that’d be really something.
Researchers Evaluate Climate Cooling Potential of Different Geoengineering Schemes.
*Existing activities that add phosphorous to the ocean may have greater long-term carbon sequestration potential than deliberately adding iron or nitrogen. COMMENT: Then farm fertilizer runoff may not be so bad? Theplume of algae that is "killing the Gulf of Mexico" comes to mind. Might such a site be the best place to seed iron, to try shifting the bloom from algae to plankton? Or would such a plume better reach its potential by bubbling in air, so that anoxic conditions reverse and algae-eaters can then swoop in, turning the region into both a new fishery and a carbon sink?
* On land, sequestering carbon in new forests and as bio-char (charcoal added back to the soil) have greater short-term cooling potential than ocean fertilization as well as benefits for soil fertility.
Interesting anti-cynicism from the Progressive Policy Institute:
In dollar terms, America's ties with poor nations span aid, charity, trade, and remittances. Government aid and private charity flows, at $22 billion and $9 billion, account for the least money but are essential in emergencies and can bolster public health, primary education, and other public services. Remittances are larger -- immigrants send at least $45 billion home from the United States each year raising family incomes in rural districts and urban slums. Imports from low-income countries, excluding energy and goods from China, totaled $405 billion (or $35 billion per month) in 2007. This is a much larger figure than those for aid, charity and remittances, but complements rather than replaces them by supporting tens of millions of middle-class and lower-middle class urban jobs and raising farm incomes, in poor countries.
A quick table on the U.S. role in poor-country finance, excluding energy and China, as of 2007, finds the United States buying about a quarter of poor-country exports; providing a fifth of foreign direct investment, foreign aid, and remittances; and accounting for nearly two-thirds of charitable donations.
The World Bank defines "absolute poverty" as life on $1.25 a day or less (in constant 1993 dollars) and has estimated poverty rates on this basis back to 1981. In that year, 52 percent of the world's people were very poor. By 1990, the figure was 42 percent. In 2005, the most recent year available, only 25 percent of the world's people were very poor. East Asia recorded the most progress, with the absolute-poverty rate falling from 78 percent in 1981, to 55 percent in 1990, and 16 percent in 2005. In one generation, then, Asian poverty fell from the near-universal experience of life to the sad exception. Drops elsewhere in the world have been slower but real: Since 1981, Latin America has cut absolute poverty from 13 percent to 8 percent; India and its neighbors from 60 percent to 40 percent; the Middle East from 8 percent to 4 percent; Africa from 54 percent to 51 percent. In eight low-to-middle income countries without oil -- Chile, Jamaica, Mexico, Uruguay, Egypt, Jordan, Thailand, and Malaysia -- the absolute-poverty rate has fallen below two percent. Conclusion: if poor countries have good education, financial, infrastructure, anti-corruption, and other policies; if they are free of wars and coups; and if rich countries help through aid, trade and easy remittance, poverty often falls quickly and permanently.
United States World Total
Goods imports* $405 billion ~$1.8 trillion
Service imports $71 billion ~$350 billion
Remittances** $45 billion $248 billion
investment $41 billion $215 billion
Foreign aid $22 billion $105 billion
Private charities $9 billion $15 billion
* Excluding oil, gas, fuel and Chinese goods. With energy and China trade, the figure was $1.1 trillion.
** $248 billion in total
The World Bank charts the decline of poverty, 1981-2005.
All right, that last excerpt was a bit long. But it's thought provoking and suggests there still may be hope.