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Clif claims that China is already working on a similar project -- although I doubt this, and figure that it's just the Great Firewall's spider.

Google's prediction thing is pretty fascinating, but it's less about indirectly forecasting the future news than it is about analyzing specific datasets and calculating probable outcomes. Very domain-specific information. There should be a relevant link here: http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?p=797502#797502
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Man, just when I was starting to respect my state's senator (re: thorium reactors), he had to go and be friends with Joe fucking Lieberman, and one of the Rockefeller kids, and together they're working on a surreptitious bill rider to implement a government-controlled kill switch onto the internet. http://libertypulse.com/article/sneaky-senate-trying-to-slip-internet-kill-switch-past-us/

FYAD
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[psiga]

A Steve Aylett quote that I love: "the average legislator is driven by the desire to cool his molten ignorance into some lasting obstacle"
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[psiga]

This inappropriately(?) reminds me of an unrelated(?) quote:
"He wanted to go to a motel in the Bronx where I would defecate on him, but I told him I was uncomfortable going to the Bronx," testified the dominatrix, Gina Pane, 31
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[psiga]

I've been wondering lately why gay peeps don't start a religion of some sort which says that it's totally OK to be married, and then start playing the First Amendment card about things; all like "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" and such.
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I'd kinda love to spend hours commenting on the last few pages worth of neat shit, and add some neat shit of my own, but I'm really only here to press control-v:
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2222423
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"...And moreover, they let the Pentagon know what they were releasing. They gave them the files in code to them and asked them actually to identify people that they hoped to be redacted from those. Now, the Pentagon refused, meaning they prefer to bring charges into—both in court and in the press, of—endanger, rather than actually to protect these people, showing the usual amount of concern they have over other humans." -Daniel Ellsberg

Stay classy, shadow government/military industrial complex.
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[psiga]

Breaking things up with some positive news for a change:

20 year old frozen embryo was still viable, and we now have one more earthly mouth to feed: http://singularityhub.com/2010/10/14/embryo-frozen-for-20-years-is-now-a-bouncing-baby-boy/

More importantly, a compilation of various announcements, including human and animal trials of lab grown body parts, as well as the human trial of embryonic stem cell injection to treat spinal injury: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/10/friday-science-tissue-engineering-nanotechnology-and-muscle-aging.php

Dare I say progress.
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[psiga]

For those of you who have not heard him speak, his regional dialect / speech impediment is as gorgeous as his fashion sense.
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http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/regenerative-medicine-could-get.html

Human trials for using stem cells to make titties bigger: Already successful.
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[psiga]

In the specific case of China and US Bonds, I do think there's a difference: If a key player starts getting antsy, then that is economics; but if a key player is a government, which uses the antsiness as a threat to get some leverage in negotiations, then that is politics.

If the largest bond holder in the world starts to sell, then A) that's a lot of bonds; and 2) speculative traders who hold few alliances but look to fundamentals would turn crazy bearish. People making moves based on fundamentals would start to trigger the algorithms of people trading with technical indicators, and so they would turn bearish too. Eventually the stops of the set-it-and-forget-it crowd would be hit, and they'd get out... So we'd have a big ugly cascade, larger than the largest bond holder's initial position. And China gets to use that as a game piece for negotiating, since they are the largest bond holder.


Beyond bonds, I figure that when people speak of "the trade deficit" they are using it as a catch-all phrase to represent the sense of market imbalance in general. Whether it's China's growing position in non-renewable resources, America's weakened manufacturing base, the massive environmental and wage disparities between them, or whatever. It goes beyond who gets the dividends from their AAPL or GOOG. Which is not to say that the xenophobes have a perfectly clear picture of both parties' economic situations ... but considering economic language is designed to be about as obscuring as legalese, that is not surprising.


I'm just... you know me; I'm just thinking out loud here. Not responding to the commercial or any youtube comments about the commercial. I thought that this one girl whom you only see for a moment is pretty, though. http://i.imgur.com/FPyJP.jpg Does that count as valid commentary?
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Huh. Best Japanese android prototype so far.


I still get that uncanny valley feeling, but this may be the first time that I've felt it being the upside of the slope rather than the downside. What really gets me is how much it reminds me of Data from Star Trek. Brent Spiner was a fucking psychic, apparently.
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Sheeeeeit. And here I was just about to call James Randi re: proof of the supernatural.
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Game on? China quietly imposes embargo on rare earth exports to the US.

In the couple of articles that I've read about this, nobody mentioned exact figures. China is denying any wrongdoing, naturally, and US is rolling around on the ground like a footballer hoping to get the other guy a foul, naturally. I can't make a firm decision without firm numbers. Either way, let us hope for a swift introduction of newer and better materials.
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Meanwhile, in Washington's farewell address before stepping down from presidency:

20 I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.

21 This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.

22 The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.

23 Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.

24 It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.

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Jefferson was pretty hilarious sometimes, I just want to say. "The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man; but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal." [source]
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Your voice is valuable.
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For me, I'd like to see the voters monitoring an institution that is not polarizing them into party factions aimed at unrelated issues. If the people are policing the voting system, they should not be policing the voting system and abortion rights and gay marriage and tax breaks for the wealthy; it should be an issue unto itself that has nothing to do with any other issue.

In my view, the vote is less of a "last-ditch repository" and more of a keystone to civility.

It is not being treated as the keystone to civility. It is being used, indeed, "to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another."

We're nowhere near a solution to this situation. I see no end in sight. So I'm just wondering what an alternative could possibly look like.
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. . .

http://tickerforum.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2255000

Unidentified flying object. :\

Edit: HackerNews has decent discourse on it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1886631
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I used to try to keep up with so many of those blogs...
http://nextbigfuture.com/
http://thefutureofthings.com/
http://futurismic.com/
http://singularityhub.com/
As well as the keelynet blog that I linked however many pages ago, and http://www.fightaging.org/ for good measure.

Plus I'm thinking of adding http://www.technologyreview.com/ and http://www.sott.net/signs/list_by_category/14-Science%20&%20Technology?page=1

Understandably, with that many subscriptions they all just start piling up unread counts in my RSS reader. Between the junk science reports and the shit that won't hit shelves til 5 to 10 years from now, there's hardly anything actionable in them anyway.

THE GOOD NEWS: Even if America goes bankrupt, technological progress will still happen! I am not afraid!

THE BAD NEWS: Nobody seems to know what will happen when we are hit by one of those pesky solar storms that whack Earth every once in a while.
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http://vimeo.com/16542211 The guy who runs nextbigfuture did a mini TED talk. His public speaking skill is abysmal, he hath a lithp, and the first nine and a half minutes are basically argh. If you're willing to skip to the 9:25 mark (which, because it's vimeo, means you have to let the whole video load to that point first {dammit}), he starts covering the game changing technologies that he sees on the horizon. Nuclearizing cargo ships, converting gigantic power transmission lines to smaller superconducting lines, and so on.

Unrelated to that, some researchers have devised a new LCD filter which lets about 38% of light through it rather than the usual 8%. Nearly a 5x savings on the power draw for the backlight. Also supposedly easier to manufacture than existing filters, so I would not be surprised to see this on the market in a year or two.

I also want to talk about graphene, but can't wrap my brain around all of it right now. The discoverers recently received a well deserved Nobel prize for it. Some researchers have determined that controlling the tension of the graphene sheet will change its conductivity, which opens the door to some day have a computer processor which is made entirely of graphite. Also I'm hearing things about how electrons can move through graphene as waves, without collapsing into particles. I don't really understand it. But it breaks so many models at this point that researchers don't really understand it either. This article is fascinating and overwhelming: http://www.electroiq.com/index/display/semiconductors-article-display/331055/articles/solid-state-technology/volume-51/issue-6/features/nanotechnology/graphene-a-playground-for-physics.html
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What overwhelms me is stuff like "the presence of a minimum conductivity is itself unexpected behavior. The carrier density at the Dirac points approaches zero, so the conductivity should vanish as well, but it does not."

I thought people already figured out how to use it for switching. Lemme see... Yeah: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24482/

In some ways it's like how the invention of the laser was "a solution in search of a problem," but a whole bunch of uses and even new fields of study are being born from graphene extremely quickly. Suddenly we have this magical shit that makes electrons behave two dimensionally, breaks all sorts of models, demonstrates some kind of limited supermagnetism, allows wave functions to be altered and analyzed without having to collapse them into particles, and god knows what else.
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Wheee.



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It seems that big names like NASA et al don't really know what to say or think about it. It's a field that goes outside of what they were specifically put into service to do, and they don't want to overstep bounds by making claims that they aren't certain about. Problem is, the more they study the weird plasma storms flying around our solar system lately, the more their reports say "We've never seen anything like this. It completely defies our existing models."

I came across this site a while ago. A useful spook who has brought large amounts of data together. Take his own opinions with a grain of salt, but he has done unquestionably large amounts of footwork. http://sickscent.blogspot.com/p/heliosphere-topics.html

I don't know of a go-to article or anything, to recap everything that we know so far. Personally, I see this less as a ~legendary event, foretold by our ancestors~, and more of a holy shit, our whole society is dependent on technology that has no defense against a phenomenon that happens regularly enough that we should know better. Whether it happens in 2012 or 2023, or any other solar maximum, a storm will probably happen within our lifetimes.
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I would've given that bold letter warning either way, for what it's worth.

And considering the last couple of videos I posted were both serious and from youtube, I'm not really wanting to write off all youtubery as entertainment.

But don't worry 'bout it. Really.
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Can't see why it would be. Pity his updates are like ten minutes, though. It'd be good to get some nicely encapsulated and regionally tailored solar weather reports.


Edit: Clif's latest update says that the tipping point they've been forecasting is tomorrow, and "This tipping point is NOT like the 9/11 attacks. This is only my second experience with such in this work, but i am able to tell that this tipping point (expected at 6:50 am pacific coast time, tomorrow, on November 14th, 2010) is NOT like that event at all."

Which is a bit in conflict with what I heard earlier. I'm not sure what kind of "like" he refers to. What if this is not like it in theme but is like it in magnitude? Oh well, whatever.

He goes on to say that the release will happen over the next couple months, sixty-some days. I'm guessing it's something to do with deciding how we handle QE2 and/or the mortgage underwriting debacle, since those seem to be a linchpin in the US Dollar's volatility right now. But Clif isn't specific.


Edit the II:
Freeman, he talked about the forum with all the doomers!
"Yes, i did post on the GLP *(glupers...my label as i imagine they 'gulp' a lot as part of the emotional rush of their craving for DOOOOOOOMMMMM...) forum. Igor and i have some linguistic experiments on-going to determine what will be required in the way of processing to screen out our own impact on the language, if it is even possible at this stage. GLP is among our test bed sites. HPH and our shape reports have become so infamous that propagation and pollution of our data stream is a reality. We will be continuing the experiments over the next few weeks (assuming net is up, and there is some level of 'normality' out and about), and should have results in about a month. "
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The blog is a gold mine. I've read like 8 or 9 entries from it tonight, and will probably RSS it. Sankyuu.
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Well this is certainly interesting. Researchers discover that adding sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to algae at the right time will make it grow considerably faster than usual. http://www.montana.edu/cpa/news/nwview.php?article=9083

I'm confused by their numbers, though. At one point they say "half the time" then they say "two to three times the output" and then they say "twice the output in half the time." Twice the output in half the time means 4x gross output, though. So... I guess this means it's producing anywhere from two to four times as much output as we'd usually get.

Theoretically this will play nicely with all variations of algae growth, be they algal ponds, or bioreactors.


This is reminding me of something that now I can't find references to. I saw some garage inventor guys working on algae bioreactors, and they discovered that it was possible to stimulate growth with electricity rather than light. They promptly went stealth from that point, so to protect the discovery's patentability. I wonder when it will resurface.

Edit: I haven't found the garage guys, but did come across a fairly long, dense, and abstruse report from the NIH, which made a pretty little chart showing all of the various electromagnetic stimulation methods which could potentially be used on algae biofuel production: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2790121/figure/f6-ijms-10-04515

We're still a ways away from being able to say what works best. But progress, nonetheless.
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