Lifeboat Foundation

This week Reuters reported:

“As many as 2,000 people forcibly sterilized under a past North Carolina program should be compensated $50,000 each, a panel voted on Tuesday, the first time a state has moved to pay victims of a discredited human selection program.”

There approximately 2000 living victims of the eugenics experiment conducted between 1929 and 1974 in the State of North Carolina. The short report released at a late hour of the business day (3:26PM) in a non-graphic format only commanded ‘24’ tweets by the time that I wrote this article some 24 hour later. These are extremely small viewership numbers for the magnitude of this article.

Governor Beverly Perdue provided political backing for the aforementioned compensation derived by a five member task-force. While this information may just seem as common as Interpol discovering some Waffen SS General in his late 90’s, it is not. The political and legal implications of this executive decision are wide spread. It is not the normal protocol of any government to give legal and financial incentive to its constituencies to demand (and receive) any type of indemnification. A greater question for the NC-Governor and the task force is: Why? While I’d expect to see some District and possibly even the Supreme Court push back on this legislation, there is a real opportunity posed to the pseudo-democratic body that is the United States from a legal, socio-cultural, and technological standpoint. Of course there is a real threat posed from an economic standpoint. Every affected entity (individual or institution) seeking reparations for their abuse, from slavery to agriculture subsidies, has some new grounds for argument; and further, in the fashion of capitalistic we should assume that every ambitious attorney is paying attention.

Continue reading “Reparations Could Have a Future” »

We all are given one, totally private, at this very moment. This kind of thinking – causal thinking – got almost lost.

Inside the screen, everybody is active, forgetting the screen. This insight is more important than what I have to say inside our screens.

Nevertheless I feel like mentioning that I attended a beautiful talk today by a charming lady scientist who is a high-ranking member of CERN. I loved every word. In the public discussion afterwards, she was asked by a Tübingen citizen unknown to me about the black-hole danger. She expressed in two sentences that they are possible but would have been detected. She did not know about the 4 years old proof that the detectors cannot detect them and that Hawking radiation – which she mentioned as the reason for their detectability — does not exist according to the un-disproved Telemach theorem (now in print in an international math journal).

The most beautiful science, with a loving heart, can if consciously endowed with a blind spot – refused scientific dialog – not flourish. You cannot believe how beautiful the cathedral of the LHC is. Is a beggar allowed entry into one corner?

The TV screen is the real cathedral. Forgive me that I talked about less important things.

It was with great satisfaction that I watched a recent (Horizon?) documentary on the wildlife, wolf population and introduced endangerd species flourishing in the Chernobyl district in the abandonment of the area by mankind 25 years ago — with most not willing to hunt in the area for fear of contracting radiation poisoning. One wonders if this will be the template for the future, that eco-disaster areas will be abandoned to become our new wildlife sanctuaries. Or is it morally wrong to designate such areas as wildlife sanctuaries and wilfully expose the animal kindom to such levels of radiation?

After Fukushima the world was reawakened to the real danger of fault tollerance at nuclear power plants — but as a relatively clean technology is surely here to stay. Is there a need for a more inclusive debate on the location of such reactors to areas that are a) less likey to suffer natural disasters but b) also provide a suitable follow-on purpose in the event of area abandonment due to radiation. Opinions welcome.

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Journal for Innovation, Ethics, & Technology Management

ISSN: 2226-048X

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Journal for the Advancement of Education

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Continue reading “5 new African Journals on Technological Innovation” »

Steamships, locomotives, electricity; these marvels of the industrial age sparked the imagination of futurists such as Jules Verne. Perhaps no other writer or work inspired so many to reach the stars as did this Frenchman’s famous tale of space travel. Later developments in microbiology, chemistry, and astronomy would inspire H.G. Wells and the notable science fiction authors of the early 20th century.

The submarine, aircraft, the spaceship, time travel, nuclear weapons, and even stealth technology were all predicted in some form by science fiction writers many decades before they were realized. The writers were not simply making up such wonders from fanciful thought or childrens ryhmes. As science advanced in the mid 19th and early 20th century, the probable future developments this new knowledge would bring about were in some cases quite obvious. Though powered flight seems a recent miracle, it was long expected as hydrogen balloons and parachutes had been around for over a century and steam propulsion went through a long gestation before ships and trains were driven by the new engines. Solid rockets were ancient and even multiple stages to increase altitude had been in use by fireworks makers for a very long time before the space age.

Some predictions were seen to come about in ways far removed yet still connected to their fictional counterparts. The U.S. Navy flagged steam driven Nautilus swam the ocean blue under nuclear power not long before rockets took men to the moon. While Verne predicted an electric submarine, his notional Florida space gun never did take three men into space. However there was a Canadian weapons designer named Gerald Bull who met his end while trying to build such a gun for Saddam Hussien. The insane Invisible Man of Wells took the form of invisible aircraft playing a less than human role in the insane game of mutually assured destruction. And a true time machine was found easily enough in the mathematics of Einstein. Simply going fast enough through space will take a human being millions of years into the future. However, traveling back in time is still as much an impossibillity as the anti-gravity Cavorite from the First Men in the Moon. Wells missed on occasion but was not far off with his story of alien invaders defeated by germs- except we are the aliens invading the natural world’s ecosystem with our genetically modified creations and could very well soon meet our end as a result.

While Verne’s Captain Nemo made war on the death merchants of his world with a submarine ram, our own more modern anti-war device was found in the hydrogen bomb. So destructive an agent that no new world war has been possible since nuclear weapons were stockpiled in the second half of the last century. Neither Verne or Wells imagined the destructive power of a single missile submarine able to incinerate all the major cities of earth. The dozens of such superdreadnoughts even now cruising in the icy darkness of the deep ocean proves that truth is more often stranger than fiction. It may seem the golden age of predictive fiction has passed as exceptions to the laws of physics prove impossible despite advertisments to the contrary. Science fiction has given way to science fantasy and the suspension of disbelief possible in the last century has turned to disappointment and the distractions of whimsical technological fairy tales. “Beam me up” was simply a way to cut production costs for special effects and warp drive the only trick that would make a one hour episode work. Unobtainium and wishalloy, handwavium and technobabble- it has watered down what our future could be into childish wish fulfillment and escapism.

Continue reading “Verne, Wells, and the Obvious Future Part 1” »

If I can intervene on the polarized opinions posted by some individuals on Lifeboat regarding CERN and particle physics safety debate, wherein I was name dropped recently — the person in question, Mr Church, may find my email address on page one of the dissertation linked in my bio. Regarding the safety conference asked for by the Cologne Administrative Court cited by Prof Rossler, I would suggest that with its ample funds, The Lifeboat Foundation should host a public conference on the subject and invite CERN delegates, critics and journalists alike to attend. In the spirit of the Lifeboat Foundation, however, I would suggest that the focus of such conference should be on discussion of how particle physics can be used to solve problems in the future — and the matter of fringe concerns on MBH accretion rates and so on could be dealt with as a subtext. I think it would be a good opportunity to ‘clear the air’ and could be good for the profile not just of the Lifeboat Foundation, but for particle physics research in general. I would like to hear others thoughts on this, and how Lifeboat manages its funds for such events and conferences…

Wednesday on the Opinion Pages of the NY Times the renowned Vinton Cerf “father of the internet” published an article titles Internet Access Is Not A Human Right. It could be argued that the key word here is “access”, but before I address access again, I should start with the definition of the internet. I had this debate while at Michigan State in October of 2010 with the philosopher Andrew Feenberg. I’ll do my best not to be redundant while everything is still live via the links in this article.

Perhaps the internet requires much more definition, as the roots of the word can be confusing. Inter: situated within – Net: any network or reticulated system of filaments or the like. Its terminology is synonymous with the “web” or a web, which requires multiple linkages to points of initiation in order to exist well. If this is the internet that Feenberg is referring to then I’d think it accurate. However, the internet is not actually a web of ever connected points. Information destinations are not required.

The internet is analogous to space. Regardless of whether or not we access space, its potential exists – we can access or insert entities of sorts into the space regardless of, if another user were present to receive information of sorts from the distributed. Space is a dynamic system of expanding material potential as is the internet’s material potential. The potential of the internet expands as users (or rather, potential users) access to the internet expands – access could come in many forms including, user population(s) growth or by computing speed or by computing power… The internet, regardless of the constraints of the word, it cannot be identified as a specific technology.

Continue reading “The Internet is a Human Right, VINTON G. CERF is Mistaken” »

If a single specialist says “This is an emergency!,” the world MUST listen.

Except when another scientist says in a way that can be upheld by him: “I gave the following disproof.” No such scientist speaks up. The few who tried 4 years ago on the web gave up to defend their arguments against the counterproofs offered immediately, in order to keep their mouths shut in public ever since, also against the much simplified theorem offered two years ago.

Not stopping to check the proof that this is an emergency – but instead continuing the attempt at building undetectable-at-first micro black holes in their “black hole factory” for a year – as CERN did, is undefensible before history. All currently esteemed science journalists are violating their duty. The world’s media might lose their subscribers in the wake of this worst press scandal ever.

Why this strong language here? It is because the media withhold from you, the readers of the world, that not a singlespecialist colleague speaks up against the proofs presented (Telemach theorem, Gothic-R theorem). So every person learns that checking facts is no longer fashionable on this planet: Poor youth, the brightest of history, poor future, poor planet.

Continue reading “Listen: This Is an Emergency!” »

The Journal for Biological & Health Innovation is accepting papers for peer review now. This journal is specific to Africa and our thoughts, theory, research, practice could have a huge impact on the expeditious development of the rest of the world technologically.