Science

I Want to Be Like Norm

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This panel below is from a the web comic “Escape From Terra”.  It’s a pretty good hard science fiction story which examines how a libertarian/anarchist society might function in space. The centeral conflict revolves around those in space trying to keep their freedoms in the face of ever-present encroachment from the statist world-government of Earth (it’s modelled on the EU).

In the story, two pilots deliver a chunk of a comet to a self-made billionaire who is hiding out on his own little artificial habitat. The billionaire has to hide because he keeps creating disruptive technologies that empower ordinary people to live their lives independently of the state, and the government doesn’t like that — to the point it wants to see him dead.

In this panel, the billionaire explains his motivations:

[Click for full size]

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[Source]

Every geek in the world should strive to emulate the late Norman Borlaug. Geeks and business people have done more good for the world than all the politicians and wannabe-politicians combined.

In 1969, the people who changed the world for the better weren’t left-wing, pro-communist-victory “activists” but the engineers and scientists who landed men on the moon and fired up the first two nodes of the Internet. People who view “progress” in terms of politics first and foremost have done far more harm than good. Yet, as the comic points out, we know their names while the names of those who made our lives so much better are erased from common history .

People in the developed world (and increasingly the rest of the world as well) have lives of physical comfort, social equality and political freedom mostly because of the efforts of geeks like Borlaug who use knowledge and hard work to turn dirt and water into happiness.

When artists whip out posters of people like Borloug instead of the glorious leader du jour, we will know we have become a truly wise civilization.

Mini-Book Review — Cochran/Harpending — The 10,000 Year Explosion

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Cochran G. and Harpending, H., The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Perseus Books, NY, 2009.

In an earlier cb review of a book on the role of culture and education on American intelligence (Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It:, I mentioned a hypothesis by physicist and iconoclast scholar Gregory Cochran suggesting a genetic basis for Ashkenazi intelligence scores (slightly less than one standard deviation above the American population’s average). Nisbett noted that this slight difference in average IQ translated into massive differences in the distribution of individuals at the very highest IQ levels (140+).

Cochran, and anthropologist Henry Harpending, have now written a fuller discussion of their Ashkenazi hypothesis within the context of a much wider contrarian, and occasionally irreverent, book on the new discoveries in human genetics affecting our understanding of the evolution of modern humans. The authors explicitly reject the convential wisdom that human evolution largely stalled with the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens as the sole hominid species on the planet.

With new techniques for examining the human genome, it’s possible to give approximate dates on the major recent changes to human physiology triggered by migrations into new environments or the adoption of new economic lifestyles (such as pastoralism or agriculture). Key physiological adaptations such as lactose tolerance, resistance to diabetes or obesity, Vitamin D absorption through skin, malarial protections (subject to recessive genetic disease such as sickle-cell anemia), high-altitude occupation, and the aforementioned Ashkenazis’ IQ, now have associated dates and timetables … and new research promises to nail down the timing and nature of similar genetic changes amongst the world’s populations. The impact of such genetic changes, and associated vulnerabilities, on the human occupation of Europe, North America, and Africa/Asia for the last 50,000 years are the focus of this book.

In contrast to most authors in the biological and social sciences, Cochran and Harpending believe that significant and influential human evolution has occurred in the recent past and that the pace of such evolution continues and even accelerates as selective pressures on modern populations intensify. The larger population pools in turn make it more likely that valuable mutations can spread widely and relatively quickly … often in ways that are completely independent of the X and Y sex chromosomes first used to map human genetic history. For example, Cochran and Harpending suggest that there may well have been an exchange of advantageous genetic mutations (through “introgression”) from Neanderthals to Cro-Magnon/H. sapiens sapiens without any associated impact on the paternal or maternal lines of genetic material associated with our species.

By looking back into post-Neanderthal human prehistory with new genetic data, scholars can track the movement of humans out of Africa and into Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. They can also begin to hypothesize about the role that genetic change played in the relative reproductive success of Upper Paleolithic hunters, the first agricultural communities in Eurasia, and the Indo-Europeans who left their cultural and linguistic imprint on roughly 3 billion of the people in the world today.

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Cool Retrotech

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Here’s an interesting piece about the Apollo guidance computer, which played an important role in the moon-landing mission. The computer’s read-only memory, which stored the program and various constant data, was a “rope memory,” woven by women working at a factory near Boston. The pattern of the weave determined the “ones” and “zeros” of the permanantly-stored data. (via Isegoria)

Among the strange people who assert that the moon landing was a fake, one of the arguments used is that computers in 1969 lacked the computational capacity to guide such a mission. This ignores the fact that the guidance problem for intercontinental ballistic missiles is similar to that for space flight–do they also believe that the American and Soviet missile fleets were make-believe?

It is interesting, though, to compare the AGC with present-day computers. The AGC clock speed was about 2MHZ…around 500 to 1000 times slower than that of the computer on which you are probably reading this. The computer’s RAM was 2000 words, or 4000 bytes (that’s bytes, not kilobytes or megabytes) and the rope-memory ROM was 36KW, or 72KB.

And here’s a guy who built his own working replica of the AGC.

Quote of the Day

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When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.

Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science .

See also, Climate change: The sun and the oceans do not lie.

Hat tip: Michael Barone