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Hi Friends
Here some pics from the meeting at Puebla Mexico last September 23
full album here:
http://s268.photobucket.com/albums/jj23 ... la%202012/
Greaser hat geschrieben:Thanks for posting, it seems that you guys enjoyed your get together!
I would have a question which I hope you can answer... On one of the pictures in the album I have seen a Rekord S 1900, unfortunately just its trunk lid and not its engine compartment. Do you know if these cars were also equipped with the same four cylinder cih-engine we all know from our European cars?
Kind regards,
opelmexico hat geschrieben:Hi Michael,
Yes you are right it has a 1900 opel engine, but that car was imported to Mexico from Europe it was not built in Mexico. Mexican opels have GM engines.
Best regards
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Fidel's Legacy Is Cemented
Some 20,000 Cuban medical professionals are working in Venezuela alone and the Commandante has told the United Nations that it is willing to send 4,000 doctors to Africa to fight the spread of HIV and Aids. More than 200 Cuban doctors are working in Zimbabwe while 2,000 others are still working in South Africa, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Zambia...
(A young Castro shown with Kwame Nkrumah examining blueprint for a United Africa).
While the US regime and other opponents of Cuban President Fidel Castro rub their hands with glee about his precarious health, many people in Africa recall the veteran Commandante's deep sense of service to the continent and the training of thousands of students in various scientific and medical fields over the years.
It is no secret that the mainstream international media is preparing to press the button on of "canned obituary" copies on this exceptional politician of great international authority who still enjoys the solid support of Zimbabweans and Africans at large for helping end colonialism and apartheid.
The death of Castro would be a great loss to Zimbabwe and Africa and many wish him speedy recovery and long life given the support the Commandante has made to the continent. Despite the oblique criticism Castro had endured in his 47-year-old rule, his greatest accomplishment is in the sciences where Zimbabwe and Africa have benefited in many ways.
Reading through the works of the Commandante, one finds Castro's great insight into the importance of science is shaping the future of developing countries.
"The future of our homeland," he said a year after the triumph of the Cuban revolution of 1959, "has to be necessarily a future of men of science, it has to be a future of men of thought, because that is precisely what we are planting, what we are mostly planting are opportunities for intelligence." This statement still resonates powerfully to Zimbabwe and Africa after more than four-and-half decades when Castro made the statements.
"One of the factors that make the great difference between the developed world and the developing world, a determining element of that huge difference, is science," he said in recent years reflecting on the role of science in human development. At the height of the Cuban revolution, there was a huge exodus of doctors and other skilled professionals to the US and other western countries at a time when most Cubans who were illiterate needed their services most.
Castro never mourned their departure but worked tirelessly to develop programs to raise literacy levels as well as develop intelligence. At the time, analysts say, one of the biggest steps taken in the formation of a scientific foundation in the country was the creation, by virtue of a Presidential Resolution signed by Fidel Castro on July 1, 1965 of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNIC).
This institution has churned out more than 20,000 specialists in a wide range of scientific fields since it was established 39 years ago. The opening of this institution led to the rapid expansion of Cuba in the field of science and other critical sectors which have gained respect internationally.
Today, Cuba boasts of well developed research institutions specializing in agricultural health, pharmaceutical chemistry, biomedicine, genetic engineering and biotechnology, informatics and human health sciences. Cuba now produces unique medical products like the meningococcal vaccine (VA-MENGOC-BC) which has saved thousands of children in Asia, Africa and Latin America from death.
"It is a true revolution within the concepts of scientific research and hundreds of thousands of people are participating in this, hundreds of thousands," Castro said explain his strategies to promote research throughout the country 'to set everyone to research, to experiment, to reason, to innovate."
"We have many good hospitals, excellent medical teams, with their laboratories, their equipment and what we are promoting is research in all hospitals," he said in a speech marking the 30th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba in the 1990s. His visions are evident and benefits to mankind all clear to see. Some 20,000 Cuban medical professionals are working in Venezuela alone and the Commandante has told the United Nations that it is willing to send 4,000 doctors to Africa to fight the spread of HIV and Aids. More than 200 Cuban doctors are working in Zimbabwe while 2,000 others are still working in South Africa, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mali, Zambia and other 21 African countries. Since 1980, Cuba has trained more than 3 000 science and mathematics teachers for Zimbabwe.
It is also working with Botswana, Kenya and Tanzania by supplying anti-retroviral drugs and conducting research on Aids vaccine. By the end of 2002, Cuba was providing anti-retrovirals to more than 30 000 patients in Africa, an outcome of Cuba's deliberate policies to advance through scientific development. Tens of thousands of African students have also studied in Cuba in various scientific disciplines.
Cuba has one of the best social systems with five times more doctors per citizen than rich countries like Britain and other western countries. "I am proud to be a friend of Fidel, a friend of the greatest man in living history," Argentine soccer legend Diego Maradona once said in 2001 after meeting Castro went he went to Cuba to receive treatment. This shows how recognized the Cuban health institutions are worldwide. Some 3,000 poor Americans go to Cuba to receive free treatment while thousands more visit Havana for other specialist treatment services.
Castro remains a true friend of Africa and whenever he speaks of efforts to develop Cuba he also thinks of other countries.
Tsiko is The Black Star News' Southern Africa correspondent based in Harare, Zimbabwe
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The Chaparral, Yearbook of the College of Industrial Arts, 1906
Description: Yearbook for the College of Industrial Arts in Denton, Texas, (now Texas Woman's University) includes photos of and information about the college, student body, faculty and organizations. The Daedalian represents the school's unique history and standing as a single-sex college established by the state of Texas for the education of women.
Date: 1906
Creator: College of Industrial Arts (Denton, Tex.)
Partner: Texas Woman's University


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"From idea to science" is a process, and as such, it's become a series here. We've discussed what I perceive to be the institutional boundary conditions that constrain my academic success, then followed that with a long exposition on the science that gets me out of bed in the morning. But now it's time to get specific. This is the part that I admittedly have difficulty with: turning ideas and desires into concrete plans. Or, at least making them into plans that are acceptable to people who provide money.
Today, let's take the general idea from last time and break it up into individual, graduate-student-sized projects. In one sense, this is easy—just come up with three sets of experiments. Unfortunately, they need to tie together intellectually. It isn't necessary that the students need to work together on everything, but, thematically, they should be sufficiently related. That way, the students can assist each other when problems arise.
Getting specific also means thinking about who I am going to ask for money and how much. The European Research Council is offering up to €2 million (about $2.59 million) over five years to a few clever and competent researchers fitting a certain profile. I need to be relatively young—you must have held your PhD for less than 12 years—and you should be looking to strengthen an existing research group. There are other criteria, but those are the two that give you the essence of what they are looking for: new researchers trying to get more independence. As for the money, it sounds like a lot, but, for what I want to do, it will provide for three PhD students over the entire period.
On the upside, that I can only run three PhD research projects offers an unexpected benefit: I need to think carefully about what I really want to do.
Learning the basics
I want to understand the vibrational motions of molecules at their most intimate level. To do this, what I envision doing is taking a molecule that has one unique bond—say a single oxygen atom stuck on a ring of carbon atoms. We use a laser to pump the hell out of the stretch vibrational mode of the bond between the ring and the oxygen. Because it is the only bond of that type, and all the other vibrational modes have quite different vibrational frequencies, I have a unique starting point in my experiment. I know exactly which vibration is oscillating.
Now, as the oxygen molecule bounces around, it will start transferring energy to other atoms in the carbon ring. When it collides with other molecules, it will also transfer energy. So, after a certain amount of time passes, I take a snap-shot of the excited vibrational modes. And, I do it in such a way that I can see not only which vibrational modes are excited, but also t whether they are oscillating in a fixed phase-relationship with the original excitation pulse.
All of this will depend strongly on the environment. So there are a huge number of experiments to do, each of which could tell us a little more about what the molecule is doing.
These same experiments, but with different model compounds, can be used to tell us what is going on when a molecule attaches to a surface. For instance, if an alcohol molecule attaches to the surface of certain metals, it will break up. Now, we can use this experimental scheme to understand that break-up in more detail, by exciting vibrational modes and looking at how they shift and vanish as the alcohol breaks up into new compounds. In a sense, we use the excitation of vibrational motion as a tag to track when and how the break up occurs. And that holds a great deal of importance in understanding how metal catalysts work.
It may be sad to think that the life of a grad student can be summed up in four paragraphs. But I am pretty confident that what I have described is actually more like eight years work instead of four. I'm not too concerned about that; with a good start, new students can follow the project as long as it remains interesting.
It is also the key project for the grant. Everything we learn from these experiments will be pumped into the following two.
Shoveling molecules about and making them do cartwheels
If the first project is about understanding, the second is about control. We want to use the vibrational motion of the molecules to our advantage. To do that, we need to be able to set a certain fraction of the population vibrating in a particular way. In fact, we want to be able to drive what are called "coherent population oscillations." This basically means that, for a laser pulse of a given intensity, I can be certain that every molecule within the focus is vibrating at a particular vibrational frequency, and all the vibrations are in phase with each other.
What makes this important is that population statistics underlie optical properties. For instance, if I can make a population that's evenly divided between two vibrational states, then I prevent the molecules from emitting certain colors of light. This is an important step for improving some imaging techniques. We can image using the vibrational frequencies that we excite with a laser as labels for particular chemicals. This provides high contrast images without introducing artificial contrast enhancers. If we can prevent the molecules from emitting certain colors of light, then we can improve the image contrast.
But, better yet, we can use this process to see smaller features. I can choose my laser beam shape so that it will create equalized populations in some places but not in others. And, as I increase the laser power, the size of the area where the populations are equal increases. If I set things up right, then the image is generated from the shrinking areas where the populations aren't equal. Essentially, as I turn the laser power up, I can see smaller and smaller features in an image. That will be one of the main goals of this project: imaging at high-resolution.
This isn't the only way of controlling population dynamics, either. It's possible to crank the laser intensity up so high that it keeps the molecules vibrating in phase. Once we get to that stage, the entire molecular population will cycle rhythmically between the two states. These coherent population oscillations, otherwise known as Rabi flops, are used throughout atomic physics, but doing flops with molecules is so much harder that it has never been popular.
The nice thing is that Rabi flops can also be used as a probe for molecular behavior: where is this molecule within the light field? Does its proximity to a surface shift its vibrational resonances, and how far? All of this will show up in the spectrum of the Rabi flops.
Now, you might expect that these Rabi flops will be very short-lived. But, in atomic physics and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (think MRI), a number of techniques have been developed to preserve the coherence required for Rabi flops. One aspect of this project will be trying to apply variations of these techniques to our molecular systems to preserve coherence and increase the precision with which we can perform spectroscopy. That will be... challenging. (In case you were wondering, "challenging" is a forbidden word in grants, because it is viewed as being synonymous with "impossible.")
Spectroscopy leads to molecules, which lead to reactions, which lead to chemistry
In the last project, I want to get into some basic chemistry. When it comes to physics, I am pretty confident of my stuff. I know where the difficulties are and I know where I am pushing boundaries. But, of chemistry, I am entirely ignorant. And I want to do some chemistry.
Previously, I described how we were going to excite the vibrational mode of an oxygen atom attached to a benzene ring then see what happened. Well, one might wonder: does the excitation of a particular vibrational mode help determine the outcome of a chemical reaction?
To explore this has been a bit difficult. The natural energy of that vibrational mode is such that we would not expect a single excited molecule in a beaker full of compound. In fact, if we were to heat the beaker, the compound would boil away before that mode would be excited in a single molecule—temperatures of about 3000K are required to get a small population with that mode excited. So, usually, no one really knows if the excitation of vibrational modes can affect the outcome of a chemical reaction.
But lasers give us a tool to create molecular populations in a highly excited vibrational state, and we can take snap shots of molecular states at a later time. So we can really get right into the dynamics of the reaction itself. This is separate from determining the statistics of a reaction like its rate or the energy released—those are a compilation of many factors. Here, we would just be looking at the reaction itself. We can tag a molecule by putting it in a vibrational state, and then look for reaction products in the vibrational spectrum. We can track both the appearance of new products, and where the vibrational energy goes as the products are produced. I think this would be very informative.
The difficulty is picking model reactions to study. Again, I'm no chemist and I'm not sure that my choices are good. I've decided, rather arbitrarily, to divide the world up a bit. There are reactions that normally just go in a single direction: two reactants form a single or pair of products. Then there are reactions that go forward and backwards: the reactants form products that then recombine to form the reactants. And there are reactions where the outcome is a pair of products, with the balance between the two determined by something like the temperature.
The job is to choose some good examples in the classes that I have created and study them. It should be possible to use vibrational modes to enhance, or suppress, the direction a reaction wants to go. So, in the first case, the reaction might be severely hindered by certain excitations and sped up by others. In the second case, the right excitation might prevent the back-reaction from occurring; in the last, we might be able to selectively choose which product dominates.
In the end, though, I want to apply this to something more relevant like catalysis. The end-point would be studies on catalytic activity when the reactants and/or products are vibrationally excited. Obvious examples include the reduction of carbon dioxide and water splitting. Although they appear simple, these are not easy reactions to understand. And, as I am rapidly learning, the catalysis community speaks an entirely different language. So even once we do the work, it will be difficult to communicate the results in a way that shows their relevance to the community that should be most interested in them.
In short, I need to very circumspect in describing this project and what I want to do with it.
Where's dessert?
So that is the three-course meal of science that I have in mind. I must admit that the last project worries me. The ideas are clearly expressed in the application, but I worry that I am simply going to walk into the trap of not knowing enough chemistry to make this one work. Luckily, I was able to convince a very good chemist to collaborate in this part of the project, so that will help. I also intend to keep the chemistry as simple as possible, mostly sticking to reactions that are well-known and easy to run. Even so, a chemist might well balk at giving me money to do this.
That's where the grant stands, but I have even more minds to convince. In the next and final installment, we'll take a look at how I justify the actual research to my bosses, my institute, and myself. Or, as I tend to think of it, it's the story of how to make a sphere look square.


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April 25, 2009 was our first annual "Carnival for a Cure" downtown Taylorsville. I would like to thank everyone who made this event a huge sucess. All proceeds made that day benefit the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
First I'd like to thank the carnival committee, especially Greg and Kathy Smith, Angela Beard, Diana and Brian Viergutz, Linda and Eric Fernandez, Martha Smith, Jennifer Goodlett, Gina and Joe McGinnis, Leanna Nation and Joyce Tindall.
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- AJ Matthews named Co-Player of the Week; Ibrahim Johnson Named Rookie of the Week -
New York, N.Y. - The Skyline Conference released the 13th Men's Basketball report for the 2011-12 season this afternoon, including Player of the Week, Rookie of the Week, Honor Roll and Conference statistics. Junior forward AJ Matthews (Brooklyn, N.Y.) was named Player of the Week for the 8th time this season, while freshman forward Ibrahim Johnson (New York, N.Y.) took Rookie of the Week honors.
Matthews had two more double-doubles (23 straight), but no shot has been bigger than his field goal with :08 left to lift the Rams to a 68-67 win at MSMC and give the Rams a 1st-round bye. Had 15 points and 11 rebounds in the game, after a dominating 24 point, 22 rebound effort vs. Maritime. He is currently the Div. III National leader in double-doubles and rebounds (16.0), 3rd in points (22.0) and blocks (4.0), and 5th in field goal percentage (62.8%).
Johnson continued his stellar rookie year by helping the Rams to two league wins. He had 15 points and 9 rebounds in big win over Mount Saint Mary, then had 10 points and 9 rebounds vs. Maritime, shooting 77% from the field.
To view the full Skyline report, click HERE.


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The Best Way For An Independent Filmmaker To Make Money?/
When I was in Sydney, Australia to lead a two day workshop on producing for Screen Australia, I was asked by Screen Hub journalist Andrew Einspruch what the best way for an indie filmmaker to make money these days. I replied:
I think the question should probably be something a little bit different, or they're going to get trapped along the way.
The answer to that question is finding the aggregated and underserved communities and addressing them directly with what they are starved for. That has kinda been the history of independent film, at least in the States. The clearly definable demographics. The rise of New Queer Cinema was not just a cultural phenomenon, but it was a wise business practice. It was a group of people with high discretionary income that were already gathered, that had ways to address them directly and engage them socially.
It works the same, essentially, for Tyler Perry. Middle class, church-going family black audience in America being underserved for years. And he had ways to reach them directly and was well rewarded for it.
Even movies as diverse as Fahrenheit 911 and Passion of the Christ – same sort of thing: underserved, pre-collected audiences with ways to address them directly.
And now, we can drill that down, like single liberal-leaning wooden boat enthusiasts living on the coast. You can reach those people. And if they've been underserved, and they gather, then providing them more of what they want or what they can't get hold of is good business practice – as long as you are basing your costs around what the size of that audience is. You need to factor all that in. That's how a filmmaker can make money.
But, I'm not sure that would be rewarding on a long term basis for the creative spirit. The good business practice in the long run is very similar to what is also most nourishing of that creative spirit. And that is asking of one's self, "How do I maintain a productive, prolific creative life? How do I make sure that I produce material on a regular basis?" And I think that is sound business practice, as well as being something that will become rewarding.
Not all of that content is going to be monetised. Most of it is going to be used to engage with audiences. By focussing on having an on-going conversation, we reward and transition audiences into different forms of engagement.
For example, the music business thought, at one time, that their business was on the pre-recorded product, and things like live shows were ways to drive greater sales of that product. Now they've turned that 180 degrees around, recognising that in a world of cultural abundance, and an excess of leisure time options, people crave the authentic and unique experience.
If we are able to provide content and engagement to a core audience that starts to identify with that relationship as part of their identity, the breadth and variety of those forms of engagement also come with a different level of pricing. We can create engagement that is also event-based, even if our main form of expression is linear and pre-recorded.
This is the first question in an interview that I did with Andrew Einspruch for ScreenHub. If you are a member of that organization you can read the whole thing here.
Screen Hub is "The daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals." Their web site for the link is http://www.screenhub.com.au.
Andrew Einspruch's indie Australian film company Wild Pure Heart Productions has created the feature film Finding Joy and the documentaries 2012: This Sacred Earth and 7 Days with 7 Dogs, and is currently working on the low budget feature The Farmer. Andrew can be found on Twitter as@einspruch and at andreweinspruch.com.


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Home >> Course Descriptions >> College of Education
Language Issues and Interventions for Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Three semester hours.
This course discusses the communication and language issues posed by individuals with Autism spectrum. This includes intervention strategies for individuals having the entire range of disabilities caused by Autism Spectrum Disorders including programs which are currently used to assist those individuals through the life span. Prerequisite: Graduate standing.
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The Oceans Are Coming Ashore
The Oceans are Coming Ashore
Wilson Vailoces stands knee deep in mud as he inspects his prized stand of red mangrove trees-trees that he planted himself over a decade ago on the tidal flats in front of his house. Vailoces lives just north of Bais Bay on the southeast coast of the Philippine island of Negros. His mangroves are intended to reduce erosion of his waterfront property, and to provide breeding, feeding, and nursery areas for a wealth of commercially valuable marine life, such as shrimp and milkfish. The going is tough and he lurches from side to side like a ship in a gale, grabbing the roots of his "trees on stilts" to steady himself.
A decade ago, the coast here was eroding, and valuable stocks of fish and shellfish had been depleted by over-fishing, which sometimes involved the use of explosives and poisons. "We had cut down all the mangroves and reduced most of our reefs to rubble by dynamite fishing," explains Vailoces, a self-educated small-scale fisher, who had to drop out of grade school to help his father pull a fitful living from the sea. Faced with the total collapse of his way of life, Vailoces decided he had to take the initiative to rebuild the region's resources if there was to be any future for his children. And the only way to do that, in his view, was to plant mangroves.
Vailoces began his mangrove rehabilitation project with help from the marine laboratory at nearby Silliman University in Dumaguete City. After his neighbors saw how well the mangroves worked as natural fish farms and shore stabilizers, they followed his lead. Lush mangrove forests now cover 100 hectares of coastal land in Bindoy Municipality. By the late 1990s, over 100,000 trees had been planted-one-tenth of them by Vailoces himself.
Vailoces didn't stop with mangroves. He also built and sank 1,000 artificial reefs made from bamboo, tires, or concrete. Designed as large pyramids, they provide excellent cover for a host of marine life. And he began working with local farmers, in an effort to convince them to use less harmful pesticides on their mangos and other fruit crops. He also turned his attention to the steep hills above the coast, where subsistence farmers eke a living from the highly unstable soils; Vailoces persuaded the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources to encourage the farmers to surround their fields with trees, which help stabilize the slopes. "Great damage had been done to coastal fisheries from landslides and siltation due to deforestation in the hills," he explains. "Coral reefs were buried and mangroves inundated. But we managed to turn that situation around."
Or so he thought. "Unfortunately, the mangroves have not continued their seaward march. They are expanding laterally up the coast, but not towards the sea," observes Vailoces, standing waist-deep in seawater. "We simply never anticipated the effects of sea level rise caused by global climate change. By now these red mangroves should have been moving out another 20 feet or so," he says, pointing seaward. "But they haven't been able to get a solid foothold because the waves are running in higher and with more force."
The subtle, inexorable rise in sea level has already had an effect on the Bindoy coast. "I can't tell you how much the sea level has risen here, but it is discernable," says Vailoces. Already, storm surges at high tide almost reach the floor boards of his house, which sits on short, half-meter pilings atop a small hill. Computer models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate that a 1-meter rise in sea level could occur by 2080. Well before then, it seems, the Vailoces family may have to abandon their land and livelihood, and flee inland. "We would be completely swamped here by a 1-meter rise," he laments. "Even a half-meter rise would cause serious erosion problems, despite the protection afforded by the mangroves, and storm surges would routinely waterlog us."
On the other side of the world, rising sea levels are eroding the beaches and wetlands of the Chesapeake Bay, the huge inlet along the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast that contains the largest body of brackish water in North America. Maryland, the state that contains most of the bay's shoreline, is now on the front lines of climate change. On the state's eastern shore, the 8,100-hectare Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge has lost close to one-third of its land area over the past three decades, and many once rich bottomland farms are now either waterlogged or too saline to sustain crops. Out in the bay, Maryland's Smith Island-actually a little archipelago 13 kilometers long and 6 kilometers wide-has lost about 490 hectares over the past century; land that was wooded a generation ago is now salt marsh.
More and more of Maryland's natural shoreline is disappearing behind a bulwark of revetments and bulkheads. According to the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the permits issued over the past 15 years for this type of construction now account for 500 kilometers of the state's coast. In 1996, a conference at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland brought together 140 scientists, property owners, and government officials who produced a blunt consensus statement: "The evidence that sea level has risen, is rising and will continue to rise along the coast of Maryland is so great that no informed person would suggest otherwise."
1 Billion at Risk
There is no comprehensive global assessment of the number of people who would be displaced by a 1-meter sea level rise, but it's thought that roughly 1 billion people live at sea level or just a few meters above it. Regional studies conducted by the IPCC suggest that the impacts will be devastating, especially in the tropics and warm temperate regions, where many coastlines are heavily settled. The most vulnerable areas are concentrated along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, the west coast of Africa, South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and the Maldives), all coastal states comprising Southeast Asia, and low-lying coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. These regions contain some of the poorest and most heavily populated countries in the world, with some of the highest fertility levels. Just over 2 billion people inhabit these places and up to half of them live on the equivalent of $2 a day or less. China and Southeast Asia include the most crowded coastlines in the world, with population densities averaging over 2,000 people per square kilometer. All of these regions are primed for profound social upheaval, as a quick survey will show.
Take Asia first. In land-short Bangladesh, a 1-meter rise would inundate 3 million hectares, displacing 15-20 million people. In neighboring India, 600,000 hectares would be submerged, and 7 million people would be driven from their homes. Indonesia would lose 3.4 million hectares-home to at least 2 million people. Vietnam would likely lose 2 million hectares in the Mekong Delta and another 500,000 hectares in the Red River Delta; roughly 10 million people would be displaced. Malaysia would lose up to 700,000 hectares, much of it devoted to export crops such as rubber, palm oil, and coconuts; as many as 1 million people would be driven inland. And in the Philippine archipelago, up to a quarter of the entire population-some 20 million people-could be affected, with 5-10 million displaced outright. Millions more would be forced out of their homes in Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, and Thailand.
On the low-lying islands and coral atolls in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, there are of course fewer people to displace, but the inundation would effectively remove many of these places from the map. Take the Maldives, an island nation of stunning coral atolls that drop off the south coast of India like tears. A 1-meter rise would swamp about 85 percent of the country's capital island, Malé, which harbors 60,000 people on just 600 hectares of land. Like many of the rest of the Maldives' 1,196 islands, Malé averages just one meter above sea level. Nearly all of the islands would be converted to sandbars and tiny spits by an extra meter of water, or they would sink beneath the waves completely. The country's entire population-some 300,000 people-would be forced to flee to India or Sri Lanka. "We would have no choice," Maldives President, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, told a British Commonwealth meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 1989. "For the Maldives would cease to exist as a nation." More than a decade later, Gayoom was still offering the same dismal assessment. In September 2000, he asked the 149 world leaders who had gathered in New York for the UN Millennium Summit, "when the UN meets to usher in yet another century, will the Maldives and other low-lying nations be represented here? My time at the podium is up, but I pray that of my country is not."
Other island nations would fare little better. Even an 80-centimeter rise would inundate 65 percent of the Marshall Islands and Kiribati in the South Pacific; presumably, most of their inhabitants would hope to find shelter in Pacific Rim countries such as Australia or New Zealand. A 1-meter rise would displace around 5 million people throughout the South Pacific. Some 300 Pacific atolls would disappear from the map. Many would become uninhabitable long before they went under, because salt intrusion would foul drinking water supplies and more frequent, more severe storms would batter them to pieces.
In West Africa, the countries along the Gulf of Guinea are facing a fate similar to Southeast Asia's. In Nigeria, for instance, up to 70 percent of the coast would be inundated by a 1-meter rise, affecting more than 2.7 million hectares and pushing some beaches 3 kilometers inland. Close to 4 million people would be displaced and part of the capital city of Lagos would be under water. Oil production in the Niger Delta and elsewhere would be impaired as well. This might seem like an appropriate form of economic loss, given the cause of the sea level rise, but it's likely to be painful for the Nigerian economy all the same: estimates based on current rates of pumping put the costs at $6 billion to $18 billion a year.
It's a similar picture elsewhere along the west African coast. Côte d'Ivoire, for example, would _lose 180,000 hectares of coastal land and several million people would be driven from their homes. Côte d'Ivoire's shoreline is already retreating inland and the rising seas would exacerbate this natural process, accelerating it to a rate of up to 7 meters per year. Both of the country's main coastal cities, Abidjan (the capital) and San Pedro, would be partly swamped and their port facilities damaged. To the north, in Senegal, a 1-meter rise would inundate close to 600,000 hectares and displace as many as 200,000 people, most of them south of the Cape Verde peninsula. Senegal's problems would be compounded by events in the Gambia, the tiny country that consists of little more than the flood plain of the Gambia River. On a map, the Gambia looks like a crooked finger pointing deep into Senegal, which surrounds it on all sides but the coast. The Gambia would only lose around 10,000 hectares, but unfortunately that includes all of Banjul, its capital city. The entire city is no more than a meter above sea level. Over 50,000 people from Banjul alone would have to be relocated, and since the Gambia already averages 300 people per square kilometer, many of them would presumably cross into Senegal.
On the south coast of the Mediterranean, Egypt would be the hardest hit by a 1-meter rise. At least 2 million hectares of the fertile Nile Delta would be lost to the advancing sea and another 10,000 hectares of productive crop land would be subject to erosion and salinization. Some 8-10 million people would be displaced, including nearly the entire population of Alexandria. Most of the inundated area would consist of prime agricultural land currently worth close to $1 billion, but this figure pales in comparison to the cost of losing Alexandria. The demise of this ancient city would cost the country over $32 billion in lost land, infrastructure, and tourist revenue. And of course, there's no way to put a price on the cultural damage.
When the Seas Invade Cities
As Alexandria's plight suggests, sea level rise is going to be an urban planner's nightmare. In many coastal cities, the problem is compounded by the fact that the land underneath them is sinking. Excessive groundwater pumping is the primary cause of this subsidence, but urban sprawl is a factor too, since buildings and pavement cause rainfall to run off instead of seeping back into the earth to recharge the groundwater. In addition to lowering the ground level, this overpumping makes the cities vulnerable to a kind of underground flooding: as the freshwater is pumped out of coastal aquifers, saltwater tends to seep in. Underground saltwater intrusion is a serious problem for Manila, Dhaka, Bangkok, and Jakarta. Obviously, continued sea level rise will tend to make the aquifers under these cities even saltier. Most of Manila's wells, for instance, might very well turn too saline to use at all if the sea level rises by a meter or so. That would force officials to spend billions of dollars that the Philippines doesn't have on desalination plants. The money would have to be borrowed from abroad, saddling the country with more foreign debt.
Since most of these cities are just a few meters above sea level, they would face another major expense in the need to beef up flood control systems. Manila's system is so antiquated that every year during the monsoon rains, scores of people drown in low-lying areas because the storm drains cannot handle the tremendous volume of water dumped on the city over the course of a few hours. "We are overwhelmed right now," shuddered one city water manager. "I can't even imagine what would happen if the sea rises by a meter. Hundreds would drown during the rainy season and we would be faced with massive capital investments in new, bigger pumping stations and storm drain systems."
Bangkok's problems are no less severe. Dozens of people living in swampy areas drown every year during the rainy season. Many more are made periodically homeless-most of them squatters occupying squalid, make-shift settlements along the Chao Phraya River and its tributaries, or along the city's many fetid, refuse-choked canals. Officials estimate that sea level rise will cost Bangkok an additional $20 million per year in pumping costs alone. The cost of relocating displaced communities has not been estimated, but is expected to be "astronomical."
In terms of the sheer number of people likely to be affected, Shanghai, China's largest city, may be in a class of misery all its own. A 1-meter rise would flood up to a third of this city of 17 million people, displacing as many as 6 million of them. Shanghai is currently attracting hordes of migrants from all over the Yangtze River Valley; that demographic current would be reversed, as immense waves of refugees flood out of the city.
The Americas
Sea level rise is an equal opportunity destroyer. It will affect low-lying coastal areas throughout the world, regardless of the level of development. Even though the Americas are for the most part better prepared to cope than the regions just surveyed, these nations also face profound dislocation.
In the United States, a study carried out by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) found that a half-meter sea level rise would inundate up to 1.9 million hectares of dry land along the eastern seaboard and Gulf Coast if no protection measures are taken. Up to 1.6 million hectares would be flooded if currently developed areas are protected. These figures do not cover the wetlands that would be affected, but a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that a 1-meter rise would inundate close to 3.6 million hectares, with the losses about equally divided between the wet and dry areas.
The FEMA study also found that a 90-centimeter rise would greatly increase the amount of the east coast floodplain that is vulnerable to storm damage-from 5.1 million to 7 million hectares. Over much of the floodplain, the frequency of storm damage would increase radically. A 1-meter rise, for example, would cause areas that are currently inundated only by the once-in-a-century "monster storm" to see such flooding every 15 years. The likely effect would be to push insurance costs beyond the reach of many or most people-depending, of course, on the extent of government subsidies. Overall, according to the EPA study, a 1-meter rise could cost the U.S. economy anywhere from $40 billion to $475 billion.
Similarly, an IPCC study of five east coast Latin American countries-Argentina, Belize, Guyana, Uruguay, and Venezuela-found that a 1-meter rise would inundate around 13.5 million hectares and affect upwards of 750,000 people, the majority of them living in poor fishing communities and squatter settlements. By far the worst effects would be felt by tiny Guyana. Out of a total population of 700,000, about 80 percent or 560,000 people would be affected; at least half would probably end up as environmental refugees.
A Natural and a Human Disaster
Biologically rich coastal wetlands, such as mangrove swamps, marshes, salt ponds, and intertidal areas are also endangered by sea level rise. According to studies carried out by the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain, 40-50 percent of the world's remaining coastal wetlands will be lost by 2080, due to a combination of drainage for agriculture, urban sprawl, and the effects of a 1-meter sea level rise. And this is the conservative estimate: it assumes that major conservation initiatives will offset some of the loss. In the no-remediation scenario, up to three-quarters of remaining coastal wetlands are lost.
The areas most apt to lose their coastal wetlands differ somewhat from those most at risk in human terms. The coastal wetlands most likely to suffer lie along the Atlantic coast of North and Central America, the U.S. Gulf Coast, and around the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas. These areas generally exhibit an appreciable slope once you move inland from the tidal range. There is little potential in such places for coastal wetlands to migrate inland-they would be trapped between the advancing waves and the high ground. In the United States, studies suggest that up to 43 percent of remaining coastal wetlands would be submerged, mostly along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Louisiana is already losing some 900 hectares of coastal wetlands each year to a combination of subsidence and sea level rise. Since nearly half of the world's coastal wetland has already been annihilated by development, the losses inflicted by sea level rise are likely to be far more disruptive than they might otherwise be. Many of these ecosystems will probably not be able to perpetuate themselves as residual fragments of what were once much larger wholes. Their characteristic species will begin to die out; the resulting landscape will be far less diverse and probably less stable.
These ecological tragedies will overlap with human tragedies as well, although the connection will be easier to see in some places than in others. Consider the Sunderbans, one of the most vulnerable coastal wetlands in Asia. The largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world, the Sunderbans carpets 100,000 hectares along the Bay of Bengal, partly in India and partly in Bangladesh. It is home to myriad wild creatures, including 315 species of birds; among the endangered species to be found here are the Rhesus macaque (a monkey), Irrawaddy dolphin, and Bengal tiger. A 1-meter sea level rise could well mean extinction for the local populations of many Sunderbans creatures. The Sunderbans tigers, for example, currently number around 350 and are an important reservoir of genetic wealth for their species. The rising waters would probably do away with their main prey animals and drive the tigers into heavily settled areas further inland, where it is unlikely that they would survive.
The Sunderbans is human habitat as well. At least half a million people are directly dependent on the forest-woodcutters, thatch harvesters, fishers, and collectors of honey and beeswax. In the event of substantial sea level rise, most of these people would share the tigers' fate: they would be forced farther inland and their forest economy would be badly crippled.
"We are, in essence, conducting a big geophysical experiment with the Earth's climate," says Sydney Levitus, an oceanographer at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "One of the possibilities is that [the Earth] could go into an abrupt climate shift." Thus far, there is little evidence that this possibility has captured the imaginations of many politicians or policymakers. "Unfortunately, as with most coastal management efforts," says Jens Sorensen, a coastal management expert at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, "most government agencies are doing nothing more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." The usual assumption seems to be that climate change proceeds by increment, so serious action can be deferred until later in the century. Real reform, in other words, is our children's problem.
No doubt, part of the reason for this complacency is that the climate computer models speak in terms of fractions of degrees-they sound incremental even when they are forecasting convulsive change. And indeed, the prospects of an abrupt shift, in one form or another, no longer seem that remote. For example, over the past three decades, the world's oceans have warmed by an average of 0.3 degrees Centigrade. But tropical waters in the northern hemisphere have been warming at the rate of 0.5 degrees Centigrade per decade, five times the global rate. "This may seem like a small number," says Levitus, "but in fact it represents a huge increase in the heat content of the world ocean." And of course, other parts of the earth's climate system may also be on the verge of rapid flux. This appears to be the case, for example, with the world's ice cover (see pages 5-7).
Nor is the climate system the only factor in play. Consider the increase in our own numbers. Today, about one-sixth of the global population lives within a few meters above sea level. (These, of course, are the 1 billion people most at risk from sea level rise.) According to mid-range U.N. projections, the global population is expected to grow from its current 6.1 billion to 8.9 billion by 2050. The U.N. also projects that a full third of these people may live in coastal regions subject to the effects of sea level rise. That's the equivalent of nearly half the current global population. Where are these people going to go? Our geophysical experiment, to use Levitus's term, could become an unprecedented social experiment as well. Unfortunately, this scenario differs in one crucial aspect from experiments in the ordinary sense of the word: we won't be able to start over if the results go awry.
But if 2050 still seems too remote to worry about, think again of the Vailoces family and their mangroves on the Negros coast. Vailoces doesn't need projections to see the urgency of the problem. He knows that climate change has arrived. "It is here and now for us," he says emphatically, gazing out to sea.
Don Hinrichsen is an award-winning writer and U.N. consultant. His latest book is Coastal Waters of the World: Trends, Threats and Strategies, published by Island Press in 1998.


text:
My talk at Skeptech is now available on youtube. I am not kind to Transhumanism.
My talk at Skeptech is now available on youtube. I am not kind to Transhumanism.
PZ Myers says
I've already got a Mormon Transhumanist doing that glassy-eyed mormon schtick at me on Twitter, so it could get bad.
Jadehawk says
mormon transhumanist?
why would a mormon want to upload themself into a computer? won't they get their planet quicker by just dying?
A what now? How the hell does that work?
consciousness razor says
You can't blame them. If they don't send you hate mail, the Singularity could easily punish them for not having done everything they can to make the Singularity exist sooner. If it's relatively nice, maybe they'll just get coal in their stockings.
leftwingfox says
Maybe they want to be a cylon?
John Morales says
The sound quality execrable. :|
PZ Myers says
Here: The Mormon Transhumanist Association. It's a real thing.
mildlymagnificent says
Hah. I just love any reminder at all of one of the world's great book titles.
Great Mambo Chicken And The Transhuman Condition was fun to read at the time. And any reminder since always brings a smile.
Jadehawk says
Here: The Mormon Transhumanist Association. It's a real thing.
huh. fascinating. But I guess you're right that transhumanism and the Mormon afterlife are oddly similar anyway.
So I guess maybe transhumanism is the Mormon version of Rapture: the afterlife, but without having to die first.
steve oberski says
So do transhumanist mormons still get their own planet and a stable full of wives ?
Marcus Ranum says
So do transhumanist mormons still get their own planet and a stable full of wives ?
Since it's all in virt, they just get spun up new instances of their current wives. I guess you can have as many as you want, that way.
Jadehawk says
So do transhumanist mormons still get their own planet and a stable full of wives ?
I'm a horrible person. The first thing I thought when seeing that comment was this:
*flees thread before the femistasi finds her and takes her feminist card away*
leftwingfox says
I hadn't heard about the "slicing the brain" bit before. Wow. It's brilliant!
I'll be right back. I'm going to douse my computer in acetone, fill it full of plaster, then slice it into micrometer thin wedges to examine it under an electron microscope. I'll be able to figure out the source code for windows in no time!
Improbable Joe, bearer of the Official SpokesGuitar says
I've been watching the Mormon Transhumanist thing on Twitter… high-larious!
Shplane, Spess Alium says
Two minutes in, so far I've been able to discern ~five words said.
Guess I'm waiting for a transcript.
mobius says
Here: The Mormon Transhumanist Association. It's a real thing.
From what little I know of Mormonism, this does make sense, though not in the "upload to a computer" way. I recall that part of the Mormon beliefs is that Mormons will ascend upon dying and become some sort of god themselves.
Akira MacKenzie says
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed that Transhumanism (or, at least its more "optimistic" versions) is becoming a sciencey-sounding religion-surrogate like $cientology, the Venus Project, or the Raelians. It comes complete with a prophet (Kurzwell), an afterlife (uploading and resleeving), and great revelationary event (the Singularity) and all built around faith; faitht hat science works the way they hope it will rather than how it actually works. It also comes with strident fanatics who will defend it to the end despite what evidence tells them.
There is only one Omega-Point and Kurzwell is its prophet.
pseudonymus says
Half my dominion to the person to deliver me sound unfettered. Why don't conferences prepare for this better, are these videos not big enough deals, is this the punishment I get for not attending? Cruel and unusual!
ck says
Since it's all in virt, they just get spun up new instances of their current wives. I guess you can have as many as you want, that way.
I suppose so. Just gotta convince her to fork.
Sorry. I couldn't resist.
More seriously, do these transhumanists not know anything about computers? I mean your average magnetic disk with have an unrecoverable read error every 10E14 bits read. Solid state drives increase that to one error per 10E16 bits. That translates to one error per 12.5 TB or 1250 TB worth of data read. If they're talking about reproducing a mind in software, then they really should know that software is not tolerant of bit errors. There is research being done on "self healing" software, but that technology isn't likely to be mature soon, and I'm not sure much research is being done with the premise that the software itself will become corrupt and need healing.
Also, producing software that supports life control systems is an extremely rigorous process, and can involve things like formal verification. For devices that have a very small number of inputs and a limited number of states, this can take a lot of time and effort. Just imagine what it would take for an artificial brain, unless your fine with the idea of 5% of the population just dropping dead for no good reason.
liokae says
So.. watched through the whole thing, and just to try and clarify: You don't have any disagreement with transhumanism *itself*, just with some of the specific ideas proposed by individuals? Because I couldn't spot anything in there against the philosophy itself, just (fully justified) takedowns of the misuse of "evolution" and the attempts to explain favored possible pathways with current technology.
PZ Myers says
Transhumanism is inevitable, with the only other alternative being extinction.
However, the technofetishist/libertarian version of transhumanism is bogus. It's also weirdly counterproductive for members of our species to be cheering on our replacement!
satanaugustine says
Any possibility of a transcript of your talk, PZ? I cannot make out the majority of what you're saying in the video. Is this an "official" recording of your talk or just one done by an audience member? The acoustics of wherever Skeptech was held are abominable.
PZ Myers says
The recording gear was at the back of the room, I had no audio mic for it, either — they were just picking up the sound with a remote mic. Sorry.
Also, no transcript. I had cursory notes for some of the slides, but otherwise, that's almost all just me winging it. Sorry again.
I'll probably give this talk somewhere else some other time, maybe we'll get a clearer recording then.
chigau (ouch) says
evolution is extinction
satanaugustine says
Thanks for the response, PZ!
chigau (ouch) says
So I googles "portable voice recorder" and this was first:
they have some waaay cool stuff.
danielbjorkman says
The best thing I can say for transhumanism is this – at least when people are drooling over the thought of living forever in a perfect android body, they're not just throwing their hands up and accepting the end of civilisation as inevitable. That, to me, is a step in the right direction.
But it'd be really nice if we could have some optimism for making a better world through improvement of social institutions and individual morals (both of which has happened in some very drastic ways before, after all, no matter how much short-sighted cynics claim it is completely impossible!) instead of expecting technology to save us.
dingojack says
Transhumanism? Trans-huu-man-is-im?!? Exterminate, exterminate, EXTERMINAAATE!!!
Dingo the Dalek. :)
michaelbusch says
Good stuff! And, iffy sound or not, thanks to the SkepTech organizers for archiving the talks!
[shares talk elsewhere]
Muz says
I kinda like Transhumanism I have to admit. The basis for it is quite cheerful. It's when people try to bring it about technologically it becomes fairly silly. As the talk essentially put forward, it's putting the cart before the horse.
Cory Doctorow is an interesting fellow on the subject. He arguably loves it too, since he's written a few bits of sci-fi along those lines, but he thinks its nonsense at the same time.
One thing he said on the notion of uploading your mind to the computer so you can live forever is, we don't even really know who 'you' is. There's a temporal and sensory component to your identity; inputs and constant flow of things from hormones and nerves of immense complexity. Even if you could take someone's brain and simulate it in software, it wouldn't be you anymore one second later. Are they going to simulate the entirety of experience or try to make this simulation 'live' in the world as you did? Are you going to have to "verify the integrity of the backup"? It's going to be different. No two complex turbulent systems react to small factors the same. They don't really say how this could work. Mostly it's a lot of hand-wavey appeals to Moore's law instead.
But still fun to think about from time to time, which I think is its only real use.
Robert B. says
See, this is why I was interested when I heard what your talk was about. I'm a transhumanist, and would dearly like to keep that house clean of bad science and political dipshittery. I'm still surprised that anyone thinks we could achieve any of the major goals of transhumanism without first going through a major overhaul of societal institutions and individual morals. If someone invented a death vaccine today, can you imagine the political clusterfuck as everyone tried to stop the "wrong people" (poor, brown, gay, foreign, etc.) from getting it?
Unfortunately, I don't have 56 minutes to spare just now. I'll try to watch the video tomorrow.
=8)-DX says
Mormons? I thought it was called Unitology. And the goal of transhumanism was to become one with the marker in the event called convergence?
richcon says
Thanks for posting that talk, I just finished watching it and very much enjoyed it.
Did the people getting their disembodied heads cryogenically frozen watch too much Futurama?
Mickey Mortimer says
While I agree some(most?) transhumanists have an unrealistic timeframe for when advances could occur, in part due to the ignorance of biology you pointed out, nothing you said really addresses the liklihood of these advances occuring say… hundreds or thousands of years from now. And not by natural evolution as you note is inevitable, but via technological and biological manipulation. But my main question is why you think it's so counterproductive to want to replace ourselves as a species. Do you really have any investment in whether the Earth's civilization is Homo sapiens a few thousand years from now instead of something partially created by us?
billyeager says
Gotta ask though, would someone be so kind and post the key issues against transhumansim, please?
Personally, I don't see what the big hoo-ha is about being 'human'. Being 'sentient', sure, that's a big deal, but for that sentience to be 'stuck' inside this incredibly flawed biological container, considerably less so.
Unless the argument against transhumanism is one based on the notion that we 'should' remain in these crappy bodies because our tenuous existence is what gives our lives that 'spark' that joie de vivre, I struggle to understand what rationale is employed in being 'unkind' to the topic.
Perhaps it's a Biologist thing.
haitied says
Really, has no one heard of a sub mix? assign mic to aux "x" and plug in recorder. . . . if there is a PA system there is a mixing board, if there is a mixing board there is an aux output, if there is an aux output we don't need to suffer with squealing barely discernible audio. /endrant
sawells says
@35 : short version, the idea of "uploading" yourself by some kind of brain scan is about as practical as flying to the moon by flapping your arms really hard. There are physical limitations which no amount of bicep exercises are going to overcome.
Being sympathetic or otherwise to the goal is completely irrelevant to the critique of the proposed method, and saying "you guys look really dumb flapping your arms like that" does not mean we disapprove of the idea of going to the moon.
jesse says
The only spot I thought you might be being a bit unkind to the trasnhumanists was with cryonics. You pointed out that certain bits of it do work — the rabbit experiments and sperm being two.
I was thinking that the problems you outlined (it was hard to hear, so forgive me if I missed it) aren't completely insoluble, at least in principle. That is, one could conceive of well-vitrified bodies coming back if there was a way to repair some of the inherent cell damage you talk about, post-revival. That isn't a technology I see being available anytime soon tho. And it leaves aside the whole problem of brains, which are much more delicate than kidneys and can't be transplanted. I don't know what the actual results of the kidney experiment were or if that makes any sense. Maybe try it with some individual nerve cells…
The experiments with fish sounded interesting. Does anyone (on the more serious science side) think suspended animation might be possible? (Where you are alive going in and coming out). Not without tweaking some of our own genes, perhaps. But a way to get humans to "sleep" for a while would be a really big help on long space missions. And you'd still age of course, if slowly. The most "realistic" depiction was by Stephen Baxter and he posited that the people involved had genes added from certain species of polar fish.
But other than that… yes, the transhumanist crowd a la Kurzweil bugs me because their techno-optimism — no bad thing in itself — starts sounding ridiculous pretty quickly. And there is an unfortunate right wing / libertarian streak. Kurzweil seems to have a real fear of death. I mean, I do too. But he seems to simply not understand that Moore's law, for instance, has real physical limits. Even quantum computing wouldn't necessarily offer a solution, unless you think that human brains are quantum systems. (I'm looking at you, Deepak Chopra).
glodson says
And then you spent the rest of the post showing why you should have watched it.
Ing:Intellectual Terrorist "Starting Tonight, People will Whine" says
I'm good with the ideas of improving humans and all. its the "and be free of our filthy flawed meat prisons" I hate.
alkisvonidas says
I've only watched the first 15 minutes of your talk so far, so I can't yet comment on the whole. But comparing cryonics to Pascal's Wager was extremely unfair (I don't mind you being unkind, that's a matter of style).
Pascal's Wager fails to account for the cost of belief: Truly following a dogma entails a great deal of devotion and obligations, closing your mind to many potentially intellectually fulfilling ideas and basing your morality on a premise that in all probability is bogus. In short, you will be squandering this one life.
Cryonics entails one cost only, the cost of being frozen, and having someone look after your, er, human popsicle. Whether or not this cost is forbidding is something you can decide fully rationally. For my part, I'm definitely not having my body cryogenically preserved, because a) I don't want to outlive my generation and b)I don't plan spending my life making the kind of money it would take to have myself frozen. But, I don't see why someone could not choose differently. Their body, their choice, right?
chigau (ouch) says
Ing #40
But then we will be free of Sin®.
halelujah halleluyah yay!
birgerjohansson says
Robert B.
"I'm a transhumanist, and would dearly like to keep that house clean of bad science and political dipshittery."
Can we come up with a good name for this? Grown-up transhumanism? Transhumanism 2.0? Transhumanism/r (for realism) ?
— — — — — — — — — — — —
Making brains robust enough to survive freezing and thawing out may almost certainly require human germline GM, introducing genes that has evolved in species like the Siberian newts.
WharGarbl says
I hadn't heard about the "slicing the brain" bit before. Wow. It's brilliant!
I'll be right back. I'm going to douse my computer in acetone, fill it full of plaster, then slice it into micrometer thin wedges to examine it under an electron microscope. I'll be able to figure out the source code for windows in no time!
We do something like that already. Maybe not the fill it with plaster part. That's one of the way to "debug" circuit boards.
You can also do it with CPU chips (or microprocessors). Cut and polish to expose the slice you want, and stick it in an electron microscope.
The following Youtube video shows a deconstruction of a microprocessor using SEM.
Obviously, you cannot use this to get the software code.
However, the slicing of brain studies can be useful in figuring out, at least, the hardware part of how brain work (and study mechanical defect that occurs in certain brain diseases). I'm not confident on the "brain-upload" part, but this kind of study could help pave way to better machine-brain interface.
Possible application could be better prosthetic (prosthetic eyes, limbs, etc).
Akira MacKenzie says
Transhumanism+, perhaps?
(Ducks and runs.)
ragarth says
Add me to the list of people who are sad they can't hear this talk.
Hopefully pertinent: I despise Kurzweil with a passion for turning Transhumanism into some kind of newfangled saft-brained religious thing. I'm a transhumanist, and I'm constantly having to specify 'no, not a Kurzweilian one…' because everyone assumes transhumanism == brain mush.
WharGarbl says
Transhumanism is sort of happening already.
Obviously, we already have technology that correct some of human-body's failings.
Glasses/surgery that correct imperfect vision.
Motorized wheel-chair to correct the problem of "not being able to walk".
Pacemaker to correct defective heart.
Automated insulin pumps to correct bad pancreas.
Portable dialysis machines to correct bad kidneys.
In addition, we already have technology that help enhance "human limitations".
Cellphones enhances your ability to communicate (you can certainly communicate further than you could by shouting).
Smartphone + Wifi/Cellular Net enhances your ability to acquire needed informations.
The much aligned Google Glass would enhance your ability to archive stuff (in short, a sort of secondary memory).
Of course, some of the more… idealistic idea seems a bit far-fetched (brain upload, immortality, etc). Some rudimentary "learning" AI that helps us process data (for example, the IBM Watson) may be possible in our lifetime.
Also obviously, all this enhancement raise several fairly visible issues.
1. Rich/Poor divide.
2. Privacy/Rights issues.
ragarth says
I tend to call myself a classical transhumanist. I believe that the core concepts of non-kurzweillian transhumanism will occur so long as we don't kill ourselves off, but many of them will not occur within our lifetime. Believing that mind uploading, designer genetics in adults, and effective immortality will come about in our lifetimes is as realistic as believing that we'll be colonizing another star system within our lifetimes.
That said, I do believe we'll be seeing indicators of transhumanism within our lifetime. Specifically in the realm of improving cybernetics, and tighter integration of communication and processing technology into our lives. We may even see the body mod culture push a few cosmetic ideals of transhumanism forward, but nothing ground breaking. These would all be conservative mind you: No cyborg soldiers that can crush cars like tin cans, more like better control mechanisms and more natural capacity in limb replacements, and coverings that look increasingly realistic.
bodach says
Finally, an answer to the question about the necklace I see all the time: "What's the 't' stand for?"
leftwingfox says
Obviously, you cannot use this to get the software code.
Which is the major point, but we also don't douse computers in acetone and plaster before slicing them; brains need to be chemically processed before they can be sliced, which is pretty devastating to a biochemical structure of networked receptors.
It's useful for understanding the larger structures, but PZ was pointing out that transhumanists believed this was a key development, not a distant first step. It's a far cry from understanding the "source code" of brain activity, let alone the active running state of a conscious individual.
nonzero says
Transhumanism isn't a new idea, it is as old as history. Both religious and secular utopian extrapolations of the future always had the same undercurrent of transcending the human condition. The difference is that modern transhumanists purport to base their ideas upon solid scientific grounds, but the reality is much more messy than they like to admit and the details are far from understood.
PZ is right in saying that either transhumanism in some form or extinction is inevitable. What I don't agree with is basing the extrapolation of the future evolution of humanity purely on biological natural selection. Cultural and technological evolution soon will supersede the slower biological changes to our genomes, and that is a very novel and unprecedented event in the history of life on earth.
What I wish the talk focused more on is the erroneous ideas of Kurzweil that all the dynamics of the brain can be compressed into the information of the genome, which as he put it, is smaller than Microsoft Word in bit length. This is really wrong, and PZ posted a response to this on his blog, just wish he would have talked about it in the presentation.
kemist, Dark Lord of the Sith says
Since it's all in virt, they just get spun up new instances of their current wives. I guess you can have as many as you want, that way.
Well, as long as you don't run out of RAM. At worst you can swap some on the HD, but you'll find those are kinda slow.
I mean your average magnetic disk with have an unrecoverable read error every 10E14 bits read. Solid state drives increase that to one error per 10E16 bits. That translates to one error per 12.5 TB or 1250 TB worth of data read. If they're talking about reproducing a mind in software, then they really should know that software is not tolerant of bit errors.
Meh. Just install the whole thing on a RAID array.
But seriously, I'd worry about read error after I'd figure out what a mind and a consciousness actually are and whether these can actually be transferred from an analog to a digital system and keep their attributes.
We may do all this work to find out that we can download and upload huge swathes of memory from brain to non-organic support, but aren't any closer to replicating consciousness.
WharGarbl says
I understand what you're saying.
Although one more nitpicking.
Which is the major point, but we also don't douse computers in acetone and plaster before slicing them; brains need to be chemically processed before they can be sliced, which is pretty devastating to a biochemical structure of networked receptors.
They don't douse computers in acetone and plaster, but they do have to coat the microprocessor in silver atoms for SEM.
JJ831 says
Somewhat OT, @CK @19
There is research being done on "self healing" software
RAID RAID RAID RAID. Not too mention that there is self-healing devices out there – FusionIO cards have a self healing ability on their NANDs (or so it is claimed) . VM snapshots, could images, all that jazz.
We've been dealing with bit errors for a long time and we know how to deal with it.
OK, so you might BSoD every now and then. Maybe you have to be spun up from the most recent image of 'you'.
JJ831 says
VM snapshots, could images, all that jazz.
Should read:
VM snapshots, cloud images, all that jazz.
Marcus Ranum says
You pointed out that certain bits of it do work — the rabbit experiments and sperm being two.
No, you missed the part where PZ explained that they don't actually work. Sperm work as a mass because of their highly redundant and parallel nature – it doesn't matter if half the frozen sperm are dead; you'll still get a pregnancy from one of the others, and it's OK because sperm don't work as a unit, they work as individual cells.
Now, take your brain and randomly freeze-explode half the neurons in it. Because your brain works as a unit the results are – not so good.
screechymonkey says
Finally, an answer to the question about the necklace I see all the time: "What's the 't' stand for?"
"I pity the fool who don't upload his consciousness!" — Mr. T(ranshumanism)
Sorry, the reference to necklaces made me do it.
Lincoln Cannon says
=8)-DX says
Finally, an answer to the question about the necklace I see all the time: "What's the 't' stand for?"
A "T" symbol is just a cross with the top knocked off and stands for "Our Ford". =P
im says
" And there is an unfortunate right wing / libertarian streak. "
It's worth noting that many of the libertarians in the transhumanist communities are much better than the normal ones, and tend to be aware of both costs and benefits rather than being self-serving or just blanking out on freedom, and may generally have a much healthier, less ideological, less narrow-minded view of politics in general than either PZ or most libertarians.
I used to think that singularitarians expected stuff to come WAY too soon. Now I just think moderately too soon. I'd say it's 50-50 that the world starts changing in the next 200 years that makes the Industrial Revolution look like the change from cassette tapes to CDs.
davehooke says
@im #60,
I'd say it's 50-50 that the world starts changing in the next 200 years that makes the Industrial Revolution look like the change from cassette tapes to CDs.
Just to be pedantic, that didn't quite happen. The vinyl record predates the cassette tape for music by over a hundred years.
John Morales says
davehooke, the wax cylinder predates the vinyl record by many decades, and the significance of CDs over cassette tapes (or vinyl or wax) is that the recording is digital and not analog.
Ichthyic says
Lincoln, I read your screed.
all i can do in response is roll my eyes and laugh.
you buggers are NUTZ.
davehooke says
John Morales,
In terms of wide use, yes. Again to be pedantic, the innovation of the CD is not digital recording though. Nor is it digital encoding.
Xanthë, chronic tuck says
Apologies for necrotising the thread to add this very late afterthought; I finally got around to watching this video during the last week (I somewhat loathe listening to stuff on YouTube and avoid it completely if there is a transcript available), and it spurred me to go on a bit of a rant on my own blog (I'll get the blogwhoring over and done with: my response is entitled, Transhumanist silliness), but I've a few comments to make specifically about the talk:
• The sound isn't unlistenable, and PZ is quite audible from the recording point at the back of the lecture theatre, provided you listen with headphones. Ambient playback on built-in speakers on computer or mobile devices simply isn't going to cut it.
• The talk is wickedly funny at times – the use of Pascal's wager in the section on cryonics was definitely my favourite gag, though I was laughing so much that I didn't pay quite enough attention when the display changed (to show the religious and extra-terrestrial versions of the same risk matrix), and almost missed that.
• Education in the year 2000, as imagined in Paris in the year 1900; well, yes. Predicting the future is a vexed subject!
• Obviously a better sound recording of this lecture would be preferable at some later point when you have an opportunity to talk on the same subject; but I'd prefer the pacing to be a little bit more even: I felt the criticisms of the later topics – the 2045 Initiative's Avatar Project, and the Singulitarianist witterings of Ray Kurzweil – suffered from being rushed, when the presentation of say, the cryonics section was relaxed, or slightly sprawled in comparison.
• Overall, I really liked it! Awesome talk, and a pity the running over time prevented a Q&A from the audience, which could have gone in interesting tangents given the subject matter.


text:
Adam Blauert
Blauert on Outdoors: Trails near San Joaquin River make for a fun hike
Three years ago, I visited the Bureau of Land Management's San Joaquin River Gorge Special Recreation Management Area and wrote a story about it.
Located near the small Fresno County community of Auberry, its most popular attraction is a bridge that spans the gorge, providing river views and a gateway for hikers, horseback riders, and mountain bikers to access the trails on the opposite side of the river. The short hike from the parking area to the bridge is something that just about anyone can do.
There are two trail options once you cross the bridge to the Madera County side of the river: The 6-mile Pa'san Ridge Loop and the 5-mile round-trip riverside Wuh-ki'o Trail. Pa'san Ridge was the more challenging of the two, with some slanted granite and low-growing branches that were difficult for our horses. We really enjoyed the trip, however, especially the outstanding wildflower displays, the bridge and the views.
On the first day of this year's spring break, I returned with a friend to explore a fourth trail. In addition to the Bridge Trail and the two trails on the Madera County side of the river, you can also start at the trailhead parking area and follow the 14-mile San Joaquin River Trail along the Fresno County side of the river westward to the South Finegold Recreation Area at Millerton Lake. This is the option we chose.
Like most trips, it sounded easier than it actually turned out to be. Although the website says that if you start at Auberry and follow the river as it descends to Millerton "the hike is mostly downhill," there are some very significant elevation gains as well. In fact, it feels like there is almost as much up as there is down. We had expected to save time cruising downhill with our mountain bikes, but the uphill climbs negated most of the gains. By the time we reached the parking area at Millerton, we were exhausted and sore.
The trip was well-worth it, however, and the biking was exciting. We saw a beautiful stretch of the river while encountering only one other person. The wildflowers were remarkable – the best I've seen this year. And it was an unforgettable day of challenging riding beneath the landmark summit of Table Mountain.
To enjoy the whole trail as we did, it's necessary to park cars at both ends of the trail. Don't do it unless you have a whole day, and unless you have experience mountain biking on rough single-track trails, plan on hiking instead. The trail includes steep and narrow sections with dangerous cliffs, sharp bends, rocks, gravel, sand, cows and a couple of fence gates that are hard to see until you almost run into them. It's possible to fish the river and Millerton Lake from the trail, but it would be easier in a year when the reservoir isn't so low from drought conditions.
Just before the bridge at Big Sandy Creek, you cross onto state park lands. Backpacking and hunting are allowed on BLM land, but not within the state park. The halfway point is Temperance Flat where a restroom is available and a boat-in campground operates when the lake level is higher. Temperance Flat has been suggested as a potential site for an additional dam on the San Joaquin River. There's a long uphill climb and then a short descent before you reach the parking location for your second vehicle at the end of Sky Harbor Road near Table Mountain Casino. There's a State Park day use area ($8/vehicle) or you can park outside the gate (which closes at sunset).
For an enjoyable hike that isn't nearly as strenuous, try the Bridge Trail. If you're up for more, continue your hike by trying part of the Pa'san Ridge Trail or the Wuh-ki'o Trail. Or you can simply hike the first section of the San Joaquin River Trail and turn around after you've seen the river (about 4 miles round trip). Although your first view of the river is cut by power lines, if you continue a bit farther you will find an uninterrupted vista. If you have the stamina, I'd recommend following the trail down to the level of the river before you return. There are some nice places to enjoy a picnic lunch near the water. Although the dry weather will be bringing our wildflower season to a close shortly, there's still time to enjoy the display if you go soon.
Spring is the best time to visit in order to enjoy the wildflowers. Fall and winter can also be good times, but summer is far too hot. Pack plenty of water – we used more than we expected. Watch out for poison oak and rattlesnakes, and check for ticks after you get off the trail.
The San Joaquin River was a route of travel used by the native peoples of California. Someday the Millerton to Auberry section of trail will be connected with other existing sections and additional sections will be reconstructed to form a 73-mile route stretching from Highway 99 all the way to the river's headwaters at Devils Postpile National Monument near Mammoth Lakes. To learn more about it, go to: www.sjrtc.org.
For more information about recreation at the San Joaquin River Gorge, check out the BLM's website at: www.blm.gov/ca/st/en/fo/bakersfield/Programs/Recreation_opportunities/SJRG_SRMA.html or call (559) 855-3492.
Day use fees are only $5 per car and campsites are $10 a night. Equestrian campsites with corrals are available for $25 a night. The visitor center, learning center and Indian village are open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily. To find the trailhead and recreation area, follow Highway 168 from Fresno to Prather and then turn left on Auberry Road. After passing through Auberry, turn left on Powerhouse Road, then left again on Smalley Road. The drive is just under an hour's time from Fresno.


text:
'If I win ... I will make a song with Paramore,' the rapper tells MTV News after learning of his five nominations.
B.o.B certainly had that "magic" this year. The rapper got five Grammy nominations for his various efforts with everyone from Bruno Mars to Eminem to Paramore's Hayley Williams. So, how does it feel to get all those nods?
"I feel like being nominated for a Grammy is something that's more about the music to me than anything else," he told MTV News after all the potential winners were announced. "It's great. It's just like a party. It's like being in the locker room after a football game that you won."
Read more here.