Tag: Technology
Writing Update: Penny Royal II
Jawing
The Great Stagnation
This is why you see no technological singularity in The Departure – the parasitic state has killed innovation and invention. My only hope, in the real world, is that the financial collapse we are entering now will kill off some portion of the parasite infestation before the host dies. But even if that does happen, the host will still need time to recover its health, and the problem is that parasites grow faster than their hosts.
Ranting is Habit-Forming.
It’s been my custom in recent years to read ranty blogs in the morning that I was twittering, responding to and getting irate about. Ranting can become a habit, I’ve discovered (No shit!). It can also affect your health both mental and physical. Ranting becomes a fall-back, cringe moments become more frequent, you find yourself spending time putting together bitchy bile-filled responses to people who aren’t going to take any notice anyhow, and end up just feeding their bile too. It also tends to eat up your time and distract you from the things you should be concentrating on. So now I’m trying to break the habit.
Thinking About Buying a Smartphone.
Okay, I’m thinking about buying a decent smartphone but, before I waffle on about that, let me get something straight. All I have ever used is a simple mobile phone for making phone calls. The only reason I bothered with one was because in Crete we don’t have a phone line since with the few calls we make it’s hardly worth paying the line rental. It was also the case that doing so was pointless for Internet because, apparently, there was no broadband up in the mountains where we were. (It is possible that there is but OTE didn’t want you to know that, preferring to sell you a year’s dial-up Internet then sell you broadband on top of that. The phone company there is as corrupt as the rest of everything in Greece.)
Science Fiction Singularity
I had gone off Horizon programs because of how dumbed down they’ve been, how so often they were lacking in content – what content they had often being spread over an hour when, if you cut out all the pointless camera shots, they might have filled twenty minutes – and by the frequent righteous environmental preaching. However, I did record one called ‘Playing God’ (a title that put me off straight away), and enjoyed it immensely.
Stem Cell Success
Hitting the sack last night to read for a while I did not get to see the 10.00 o’clock news (probably a good idea) but I did hear some mention of a stem cells success. On Twitter this morning I picked up on a story about two people, who were losing their sight, being treated with embryonic stem cells. One of them, a 51-year old graphic artist who was ‘legally blind’ i.e. could read nothing on an eye-chart, and a 78-year old suffering from macular degeneration.
A week after having cells derived from a days-old embryo injected into her eye, the graphic artist could count fingers, and after one month she could read the top five letters on the eye chart. She can see more colour and contrast, has started using her computer, and for the first time in years can read her watch and thread a needle. The macular degeneration patient recently went to the mall for the first time in years.
There’s some about the possible dangers of using stem cells in the article, how they can differentiate into the wrong sort of cell. I read a story somewhere (which might be apocryphal) of someone being treated for Alzheimer’s and ending up with bone growing inside their brain. Then there are the moral issues. Being an atheist myself and more inclined to the idea that intelligence is more to be valued than species this is not an issue to me. And isn’t it also the case that adult stem cells can now be used and that ways are already being found to multiply them?
This from 2006:
Researchers of the Whitehead Institute have discovered a way to multiply an adult stem cell 30-fold, an expansion that offers tremendous promise for treatments such as bone marrow transplants and perhaps even gene therapy.
“A 30-fold increase is ten times higher than anyone’s achieved before,” says Lodish, senior author on the paper.
Perhaps any biologists here or those who have read up on the subject can elaborate?
Super Massive Black Hole Power Plant
I just love this kind of thinking…
The structures of the power plant basically revolve around the central SMBH in Keplerian motion to form “Dyson Shells.” In an advanced case of Type II, the central star is almost fully covered to form “Dyson Sphere”. Here we discuss the case of structures partly covered, or the Dyson Shell type, and call it a Dyson Sphere. Unlike a stellar environment, or Type II Dyson Sphere, there are complex structures like relativistic jets, accretion disk and accreting matters, rapidly rotating stars, etc., and hence it would be very difficult to construct a fully covered structure, like a system studied by Birch over a large gaseous planet (e.g., Jupiter). However, it is not easy to set numbers of power plants with similar distance orbiting around the central SMBH. Hence, it would be a possible solution to set the power plants on a solid framework, something like structures studied by Birch. Some areas should be kept uncovered to yield emanating jets and accreting flows.
Follow Friday, Apparently
So, I just passed 30,000 words on Penny Royal (having been slowed up over the last two days by feeling crap). The backstory I previously mentioned is now at about 29,000 words and looks likely to turn into a book by itself. What more can I say? Nothing. I don’t want come-backs of the, ‘But you said so-and-so was going to happen’ kind. Everything is up in the air at the moment and I’m just writing where the fancy takes me.