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Last login: 10 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA.; Likes 1,599 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 228 fans • Received 65 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

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The ScienceBlogs Book Club : Engineering Life: The Dog that Didnt Bark in the Ni…: Jun 9, 8:21am 1 review science
http://scienceblogs.com/bookclub/2008/06/engineering_life_the_dog_that.php; Breaking Boundaries via The Loom / Carl Zimmer, in the Scienceblogs book club by Carl Zimmer
Imagine that mad scientists defied nature and violated the barriers between species. They injected human DNA into non-human creatures, altering their genomes into chimeras--unnatural fusions of man and beast. The goal of the scientists was to enslave these creatures, to exploit their cellular machinery for human gain. The creatures began to produce human proteins, so many of them that they become sick, in some cases even dying. The scientists harvest the proteins, and then, breaching the sacred barrier between species yet again, people injected the unnatural molecules into their own bodies. This may sound like a futuristic nightmare, the kind that we will only experience if we neglect our moral compass and let science go berserk. But it is actually happening right now. Today millions of people with diabetes will inject themselves with insulin that was produced by E. coli. The fact that no one is disturbed by this state of affairs says a lot. Engineering Life: The Dog that Didn't Bark in the Night [Picture: "The Young Family," by Patrician Piccini (2002-3). Wikipedia via "The Loom"] The side-effects of Late-Modernity do not stop to surprise and one can't but wonder what is going to result out of all those side-effects. Since long I have the feeling that this bodes ill for the future of humanity. But who am I to downplay what some characterize as an immense potential for humanity? I don't observe Late-Modernity from the vintage point of the moralist but with the critical eye of the pragmatist. A pragmatist does not judge. He simply observes what is working and what is not. He tries to figure out the possible outcomes in the future of human endeavors in the present. And as a pragmatist observing the side-effects of modernity I often get overwhelmed with nausea. So what is it that I observe? The side-effects of modernity are displacing the narrow band where the interactions, between what the Chinese call "the ten thousand things", are balancing themselves out. But the placement of this narrow band, as we know it, was the fertile ground out of which human life emerged and developed to the present day. If this narrow band, where "the ten thousand things", are balancing themselves out, shifts away from what we know then what we know about human life simply disappears. This is deadly for humanity... but it changes nothing to the balance of the "whole in which we are such tiny particles". Whatever happens the whole remains permanently balanced.

StumbleUpon - Arachne929s web site reviews and blog: Jun 8, 6:20am 20 reviews stumblers
http://arachne929.stumbleupon.com/

StumbleUpon - Infojnkees web site reviews and blog: May 27, 2:04pm 74 reviews stumblers
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StumbleUpon - Dogstoyevskis web site reviews and blog: May 21, 5:39pm 4 reviews stumblers
http://dogstoyevski.stumbleupon.com/

StumbleUpon - lilly2112s web site reviews and blog: May 21, 5:32pm 174 reviews stumblers
http://lilly2112.stumbleupon.com/

Low-tech Magazine: Is ecotech the new asbestos?: May 21, 3:03pm 5 reviews science, sustainability, modernity
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/05/nanotechnolog-1.html; Is ecotech the new asbestos? in Low Tech Magazine by Kris De Decker
It's hard to keep track of the soon-to-be-implemented technological solutions that will solve our energy and environmental woes by means of nanotechnology - the science of manipulating individual atoms. ... Unfortunately, more and more research indicates that nanomaterials might become a severe health problem and an environmental nightmare. Is ecotech the new asbestos? in Low Tech Magazine Carbon nanotubes that look like asbestos, behave like asbestos in EurekAlert Image/Low Tech Magazine Observing the reality that modernity has unleashed upon humanity one can't but be stunned at the systemic impasse it has landed us in. What is even more stunning is to observe the religious like belief that has overtaken the rationality based community whose members are carried away by the absolute belief that science and technology are destined to solve all the problems unleashed by modernity forgetting that rationality and science and technology, as its functional instruments, have been driving modernity since its inception and are thus largely responsible for the numerous side-effects of modernity that we are confronted with today. With much fanfare, the last few years, nanotechnology has been erected on the pedestal of the ecological, of the sustainable, and its applications have been presented as the solution to the energy crunch, climate change, the food crisis and so on. And one sees the same mechanism at work with other new scientific approaches as genetics for example. The potential of new sciences and technologies are always presented as worldchanging, never is there a thought for non-intended consequences. The implementation of the technology eventually is followed later by such consequences as has been the case along the last century with CO2 and all kinds of poisons that have crept into our food chain and the materials used in the manufacturing of our toys, tools and instruments. The apologists of science and technology would want us to believe that these are founded in the absolute truth opened to us by rationality. But believing that rationality is the absolute in terms of access to the truth is a kind of fundamentalist belief in par with any religious fundamentalism. This kind of belief in rationality is simply making abstraction of history. How did rationality emerge? After merchants had been obeying the logic of capital for a few centuries that logic extended its influence among the academics. The understanding and application of the logic of capital was indeed conferring richness and power to the merchants. It was thus only logical that its influence would gradually be felt in the other fields helping thus displace religious belief as the ultimate access to the truth. This historic detour lets us understand that rationality is no more than the leading belief about truth that is gradually adopted by all societies entering modernity. In late-modernity we start to understand that the truth about reality is something unattainable to humanity. We are indeed such extremely tiny particles in the whole that encompasses us that the whole remains out of our field of vision and out of our field of understanding. Once we accept our limitation we start to understand that we are interconnected with all the other particles in the whole. We start to understand that we are in a bind with all particles around us. We start to understand that the harmony between ourselves and with all the particles around us is the condition of our reproduction as a species. That's when we start to understand that we have to reduce drastically the footprint of our species for humanity to survive in postmodernity.

The New York Times & Log In: May 19, 7:43am 1 review economics, globalization
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/opinion/19krugman.html?th&emc=th; Stranded in Suburbia in the NYT by PAUL KRUGMAN
I have seen the future, and it works. O.K., I know that these days you're supposed to see the future in China or India, not in the heart of "old Europe." If Europe's example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don't drive them too much. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin - but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars. And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia - utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas - it's starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea. ...if we're heading for a prolonged era of scarce, expensive oil, Americans will face increasingly strong incentives to start living like Europeans - maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives. Stranded in Suburbia It's all about the "cost of living" stupid! 1. Globalization is flattening incomes around the world: down in the West and up in the South. 2. Incomes were down in the West these last 2 decades for the majority of the citizens. Cheaper goods from China or other South countries at first mitigated the impact of real decreasing incomes. But the increasing incomes in the South are now passed along to Western consumers in the form of more expansive commodities. 3. Hard working bees in the South are saving high percentages of their incomes, their children are attracted to consumerism, and thus develops the middle-class in the South that, let's not forget this, represents roughly 85% of the world population. So its middle-class is weighing heavily on the world demand for commodities thus provoking a corresponding increase of the world demand for raw materials and energy. Result: the prices of oil and other energy sources and the prices of all raw materials are shooting up inexorably (meaning that there is no end in sight in their increase). Furthermore the demand for energy and raw materials is such that their availability is diminishing so do we hear about peak oil, peak phosphorous, peak this and peak that... From those 3 heavy trends in the world economy a fuzzy impression starts to take hold for us all: - Westerners will not be able to sustain their way of life a lot further and will have to make do with less consumerism... How will they take this? - Southerners will want to taste the Western way of life, that they saw so often splashed in their window on the world (TV), but those images in their minds will be no more than a mirage... How will they take this?

The New York Times & Log In: May 17, 11:50am 1 review globalization
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Gross-t.html; Cost of living in the NYT by DANIEL GROSS
The timing for Jeffrey D. Sachs's new book on how to avert global economic catastrophe couldn't be better, with food riots in Haiti, oil topping $120 a barrel and a gnawing sense that there's just less of everything - rice, fossil fuels, credit - to go around. Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of seemingly unstoppable developments like climate change and the explosive growth of China and India. Which is why Sachs's book - lucid, quietly urgent and relentlessly logical - resonates. Things are different today, he writes, because of four trends: human pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty and a political climate characterized by 'cynicism, defeatism and outdated institutions.' These pressures will increase as the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world. Cost of living ARTICLES ABOUT JEFFREY D. SACHS - Energy prices shoot to the stratosphere because many reasons but chief among those, these last few years, has been political uncertainty driving higher future prices. But peak oil threatens to be even more pressing that sees demand growing faster than the offer of oil products and this problem is going to amplify, for, without any serious alternative to oil coming to the market within the foreseeable future we will be left with always rising costs. - The production of food has been kidnapped along the last decades by agro-chemical corporations and as a consequence small farming has been decapitated leaving agriculture at the mercy of chemical fertilizers produced from oil and from rock phosphate. - In general all resources are under strain due to a huge increase in demand that, as writes Farid Zacharia, accrued due to the recent entry into modernity of the rest of the world. Unfortunately the simultaneous rise of the cost of living is paralleled by the side-effects of some short centuries of modernity in the West that are menacing the whole of humanity of possible extinction. Humans are thus confronted with the absolute necessity to change their ways of living and possibly to abandon all the values and ideas that supported modernity. But how will the countries of the South, that are in the process of entering modernity, respond to the need to curtail modernity?

StumbleUpon - advenas web site reviews and blog: May 17, 7:15am 128 reviews stumblers
http://advena.stumbleupon.com/

The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The Failure of Networked Systems: May 15, 5:51pm 1 review systems, complexity, collapse
http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/3377; The Failure of Networked Systems by aeldric in TOD Australia & New Zealand
Oil appears to be at or near peak capacity - exports are dropping. As for the food network - world grain reserves are at historic lows, and expected to drop a little more next year. And the environment? Climate change is clearly with us, indicating that the environment has already gone past its capacity. When looked at in these terms it appears that the network is already in decline. Each of these three parts of the network is at or past capacity. If a span of years is the natural time-frame for a crash in this system, then it seems quite plausible that we are watching a very broad-based crash of our energy systems - right now. Our actions in increasing the connections to the food and environment networks will not help, and may simply speed the crash. The Failure of Networked Systems Australia: What to do, what to do about our energy situation?
In the first article Aeldric argues that interconnected networks engender higher levels of complexity that eventually could lead to the collapse of the entire system. In the second article he turns his mind to defining some "thought-starters" of possible solutions adapted to the conditions of Australia. The comments on these 2 articles are fascinating and in an answer to one of those comments Aeldric states the obvious "Contrary to popular opinion, the job of a democratic leader is to be elected, not to take actions with a view to the long-term good of the people. Getting elected is about appearance, not substance." Urgent societal decisions need to be taken at the political level but if "getting elected is about appearance and not substance" then we logically are driven to the conclusion that democracy is not the right political system for solving crises that are threatening societal collapse. Political systems based on meritocracy would assuredly be far more efficient. But when faced with cascading crises threatening such a collapse of our societies it is a little late to start thinking about changing the decision making process. In such times we can only expect doing something with the system we have... and "So we march forward SimplyHoping...."

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