Thursday, November 27, 2014
Economics/Business ... Politics ... Society ... Technology ...
I’m going to discuss three “big thoughts” from three different thinkers, as to see if there’s a common thread in them (or at least a common question that lies at the heart of all of their concerns). We can start with this: on the surface level, they all relate to “the state of human civilization, and where its going”. As to how they might relate to today, the American celebration of Thanksgiving — I will leave that to the reader.
The first big thought is from a Teaching Company audio lecture course that I recently finished. The course is presented by Professor David Christian, and is called “Big History” (appropriately enough). At the end of Professor Christian’s sweeping review of the highlights from the 13.7 billion years of our Universe’s existence, he presents a dilemma regarding the future. A rather large one. And that dilemma is this: according to the U.N., the world’s human population is to peak around 9.2 billion in 2075, then slowly decline. If between now and the, all of those people were to adopt a modern western lifestyle, we would need around 3 or 4 Earths to provide sufficient resources to support such a global living standard. Unless something comes along that makes “the good life” a whole lot less energy and resource intensive, it seems quite clear that not everyone is going to get to enjoy the conveniences and comforts that most Americans take for granted. Perhaps less than half of the world will ever be able to achieve it.
Therefore, there will continue to be a division between the haves and the have nots. Probably an increasingly wide division, as the educational requirements of a high-tech world raise the bar for getting in on the good life. And that, according to Christian, is going to fuel » continue reading …
Friday, October 3, 2014
Current Affairs ... Technology ...
I got into some drama the other day with the head monk of my Zen sangha. The head monk, who in real life is a successful local attorney and family man, another aging Baby Boomer like myself, asked what I thought about the new IPhone 6 craze. I was in a touchy mood that day, and his otherwise well-intentioned and generally innocent question set me off into a diatribe about the evils of smartphones.
My barrister-monk inquisitor was really just trying to make some friendly small talk, since I have become known to the group as the “science guy” and I’m generally pretty good with PC-level computer applications (e.g. I run the zendo’s web site). My semi-monkish inquisitor has been using smartphones for many years now, and as with most of the professional-class in the industrialized world, the smartphone has become an integral part of both his work life and his personal life. Since I can also be considered part of that “class” (I think), his assuming that smartphones are also a big part of my life was not unreasonable. Given my general technical interests, why shouldn’t he have assumed that I was a big fan of Apple and was intrigued by all the wonderful and amazing stuff that it and its Android competitors are packing into those bright little square things that you carry around all the time, so close to your body.
So he was taken aback a bit by my actual response. I started rambling on about not becoming overly dependent upon technology, how life is more than staring at a screen and pushing buttons, and how a Zen student should » continue reading …
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Technology ...
I heard a story on Bloomberg radio the other day about how Boeing is updating the design of its old 737 airplane. In addition, some airline just bought a bunch of them, sight unseen. (The airline is the Irish low-cost carrier RyanAir, and the new plane design is called the 737 MAX 200, a plane that won’t be ready to fly until 2017. RyanAir committed to 100 of them, with an option for 100 more.)
Hmmm, I find that interesting, given that the 737 has been around for quite a while now. Other planes that flew along side the 737 are now gone. So, being a person who admires survivors, I did a bit of research on the 737. Turns out that the plane first flew in 1967, and started carrying passengers regularly in 1968. By now it’s the best selling commercial airplane; a little over 8,000 of them were built (with more to come, obviously).
Boeing was actually late to the party with the 737; it was intended to fill the niche for a smaller, intermediate-range jet flying from shorter runways in smaller cities, a market that had already been opened up by the Douglas DC-9 and British Aircraft BAC-111. Both of those planes » continue reading …
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Current Affairs ... Public Policy ... Technology ...
I’m going to weigh in with some comments on the Ferguson, MO situation and the difficult national issues that it touches upon. Before I offer my own thoughts, I would like to summarize a few articles by a few pundits who I feel offered some very cogent observations about the tragic events that have transpired over the past 2 weeks.
Charles Blow in the NY Times states that
discussion about issues in the black community too often revolves around a false choice: systemic racial bias or poor personal choices. In fact, these factors are interwoven like the fingers of clasped hands. People make choices within the context of their circumstances and those circumstances are affected — sometimes severely — by bias . . . These biases do material damage as well as help breed a sense of disenfranchisement and despair, which in turn can have a depressive effect on aspiration and motivation. This all feeds back on itself . . . If we want to truly address the root of the unrest in Ferguson, we have to ask ourselves how we can break this cycle.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar says that the ultimate problem is more a matter of bias and class presumptions against those living in poverty.
This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color » continue reading …
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Technology ... Web Site/Blog ... Zen ...
I’ve been away lately from this obscure little corner of the “world wide web”, so I thought I’d check in tonight with a quick thought or two. [Correction upon posting: it’s gonna be more than two, and they won’t be all that quick after all – so I will split this essay and post it in three bits].
I’ve been involved in two projects over the past two weeks that have demanded most of my spare time. First, I promised my Zen group that I would set up a discussion forum for their web site. So I installed the phpBB machine on the host, and then started learning how it works and how to customize it for our particular needs. Turns out that phpBB is not as easy and cut-and-dried as they advertise. There are plenty of options, plenty of different features, and plenty of different ways to do things with it. I was surprised by just how complex the phpBB system is; on the plus side, it has a lot of capacity and functionality; on the con side, that makes it hard to set up and manage if you disagree in any way with the basic settings and design features. And it turns out that I have a lot of disagreements, based on what I know about the people who will be moderating and using this forum.
You might want to ask, so why didn’t you just use Facebook as a place for discussion and interaction? Well . . . to be honest, I have my problems with “the Book”. I’m an aging Baby Boomer, and I’m not sure that I like the way that site is set up and how it works. With Facebook, you don’t get as many design options as » continue reading …
Current Affairs ... Technology ...
OK, so I just told you (Part I, above) about the PHPBB web site forum that I’ve been working on. The other “project” soaking up all of my time for the past 10 or 11 days was a damage control effort, following an unanticipated internet identity fraud incident.
Yes, it finally happened to me. I realize that internet identity fraud is rampant, but of course I never thought it would happen to me. I am a careful user of the net, I don’t give away sensitive personal and financial information casually, I keep my computer clean with with anti-virus and anti-malware scans, I’m using Windows 8.1, my passwords are pretty good . . . but sorry, it was finally my turn. Somehow, someone got onto my PayPal account and wired a fairly large sum of money to an e-mail address in Europe. At first I blamed the Heartbleed security vulnerability, as it was being exposed right about when I got hacked. But no, PayPal claims it was never vulnerable to Heartbleed.
To be honest, I may have gotten fooled into giving away my PayPal credentials during an eBay purchase. I made several eBay purchases in February and early March, all using PayPal (not many payment options these days on eBay, given that » continue reading …
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Food / Drink ... Technology ...
I haven’t been doing any deep thinking of late, just trying to survive a nasty winter season. But here are a few random, petty thoughts and observations that I wanted to share:
Why we call Chickens “chicken”
I was reading a recent article in Scientific American about chicken intelligence. Scientists are interested in animal intelligence, and some recent studies by Carolynn L. Smith indicate that the common chicken, which most people are familiar with as the white stuff inside their crispy KFC delights or sandwich spread or Sunday roast, isn’t as ‘bird-brained’ as we once thought. Despite their reputation as really stupid creatures, these ungamely game birds are showing some real thinking and problem solving abilities in scientific tests and observations (I had never been a fan of chickens myself, beyond what they could put on my dinner plate; nevertheless, as a vegetarian for the past 25 years, I’ve given them a break despite my low impression of them).
One thing that the SciAm authors note is that male chickens can be very wily in their use of vocalizations. Chickens don’t exactly use a symbolic language like we do, but they do have a variety of different noises (beyond the usual cluck-cluck and rooster crow) that mean something to other chickens. They have a peculiar noise » continue reading …
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Current Affairs ... Technology ...
I’m seeing a lot written these days about “Big Data”. I’m not fully versed with it yet, but the concept seems to be grounded in the fact that many people today (especially younger people) put a whole lot of info about themselves on the Internet via social network sites, and through buying stuff on-line, banking on-line, and doing business with government agencies. And there are even more data sources, especially the smartphone: it monitors your calls, figures out your location with GPS locators, and otherwise snitches on what you are doing to some central command, like it or not. Furthermore, businesses (and even government agencies, albeit slowly) do more and more of their business via on-line mechanisms, exposing themselves to data collection.
All of this has not gone unnoticed by the big communications companies and web site corporations (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.); they are compiling huge databases with extremely detailed info about the day to day doings of individuals and corporate entities. And it’s not like all of these databases with all kinds of private information about almost everyone get used only by the compiling company or agency; they put this info out there for sale, so that the info gets amalgamated into mega-databases.
Obviously, a lot of people get upset about erosion of privacy due to these big databases. But a lot of young people don’t seem » continue reading …
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Society ... Technology ...
In my last blog, I pondered the complaint of the Millennial generation, i.e. that they have been given a raw economic deal, especially compared to the opportunities to achieve the “American Dream” that my own Boomer generation was given. Instead of seeking some form of anti-youth conspiracy amidst our aging leaders (arguably in their quest to maintain Social Security and Medicare benefits for their peers, including myself), or suspecting an unhealthy sub-conscious mindset grounded in the jealousy and disappointment of an aging generation that once sang “hope I die before I grow old” and chanted “never trust anyone over 30”, I will next focus on what machines and technology are doing to the modern workplace . . . which is quite a lot. I will note that technology has been changing what workers do for over a century now, with mostly good results (e.g. increasing pay tied to growing worker productivity). But the pace of technology change seems to be accelerating and taking us into new territory, such that humans and their social systems are losing the ability to keep up. Are the Millennials the shock troops facing an ultimately contracting need for human skills and abilities in an increasingly automated production economy guided by artificially intelligent (computerized) managerial systems?
The human race overall is getting smarter and better with regard to finding improved techniques to build or create things from nature. The pace of progress seems to keep on accelerating. Entrepreneurs and politicians soon see the possibilities created by these new techniques, and put them to use for their own fortune and power. The biggest impact on the masses results from better and cheaper ways to do things that once required people to do. So, are we facing the nightmare of a world where machines eventually take over most everything, while most people (other than a handful of rich “masters” and a small contingent of their extremely intelligent lackeys who are able to keep up with accelerating machine intelligence) become un-needed, and are thus cast into desperate poverty with lives that are nasty, brutish and short?
This nightmare is not a new one, as many economists like to point out. Technology and change in the workplace has been going on for at least 300 years now in the west. A look at the economic history of America since the Civil War reveals many innovations that » continue reading …
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Current Affairs ... Society ... Technology ...
As a follow-up to my recent note on John McAfee and his book on the Hindu “yamas”, I read a bit more about the Belize murder case against him. The circumstances of that murder still seem fishy, and Mr. McAfee’s hypothetical role in it certainly does seem plausible. But McAfee seems to be off the hook now that he’s back in the States. Or is he?
There’s an interesting article on the Sci Am web site about new techniques for “lie detecting”. These techniques are based on “big data” studies of people’s behavior and language usage, not on “high tech” solutions such as sodium pentothol injections or wired lie detectors that monitor heart rates, brain wavelengths, skin tension, etc.
All you need now are some videos and e-mails of a suspected liar discussing things that relate to the “secret” that the person might be hiding. The big data studies show emerging trends and differences in what is said and how it is said between liars and truth-tellers.
Has anyone analyzed Mr. McAfee about the murder of his next door neighbor right after some of McAfee’s dogs were poisoned? In fact, someone has! A high-tech company called » continue reading …