Posts by boothamshaw 18 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
Okay. It's 7.00am, and my driverless car arrives from the depot to drive me to work. Due to an oversight, cleaning did not happen and the part digested kebab helpfully left there by a 3am clubber is still on the seat. And the floor, and the door. Oh, and a used condom... Meatware will always be a factor.
I can never work out how you would "know" if a system became self-aware anyway, unless it told you it was, and even then it might have been mistaken about itself. Naturally intelligent systems, like hamsters, fish or Belgians are made of nothing but matter, with a great deal of information flowing between various bits thereof. There's probably no extra ingredient that an AI system would be forever denied access to, so I can't really see why a non-biological intelligence couldn't come into existence eventually. However, unless it "thought" in a manner highly similar to the way we do, perhaps we might never recognise each other as fellow sentients.
Why graphite? What's wrong with charcoal? Pretty stable, can be buried, might even be used as fuel later. This is better than my other idea, which involves building big rafts of logs from conifer plantations, adding windsails and steering them quietly up to greenland to beach for a couple of hundred years. There is a carbon cost in the actual logging operation I admit, but that's where my third plan comes in, which is a sort of "job creation" scheme for large numbers of currently underused manual labourers...
I'm a biology teacher, but about ten years back I wound up doing a couple of years teaching AS and A2 ICT, because I was well, a bit geeky and had my own memory stick (70MB I think).
It was the most sterile, pointless and bafflingly arbitrary educational experience I’ve ever had (and I had to introduce “key skills” to my school, so I know what I’m on about). I found myself recounting the exciting role played by Winchester discs in modern back-up regimes, and getting the students to make bullet-point lists of things they could say about ergonomic office furniture. I’m happy to say we’ve ditched the whole thing now. Maybe it is important to teach programming, maybe not. It would have to be more engaging than the tripe I was required to serve up. Based on my own experiences, home plumbing, wiring your own mains electrics, how to use a chainsaw and how to replace rotten bits of window-frame would have been far more life-enhancing.
One situation cannot be more unique than another, unless one is unique (an absolute state) and the other is not. Comparative statements of uniqueness are inexcusable. To be "a little unique" is to have slipped gracefully into a new category of rarity more commonly decribed as "unusual", "rare" or perhaps "out of the ordinary", if mood dictates.
"man"? are you absolutely certain your correspondant was a male?
Irregardless isn't really a word. Possibly you meant regardless.
Could of? Could OF? You mean could HAVE in all probability.
Your deployment of the semi-colon was a little ill-advised, and a mere comma would have been more acceptable, albeit less racey.
Finally, though no less importantly, "they could of cared less" is an Americanism. It is therefore also a truism, as our cousins tend to shy away from constructions that invite contradiction. Of course people have the capacity to care less about a particular issue. it doesn't mean that they will, merely that they might. To say that somebody "couldn't have cared less" is the sort of hyperbole that makes command of a language as expressive as English such a joy.
Oh wait a minute - I'm a grammar nazi. Oh the shame.
I have absolutely no idea how many scientists start off because they got switched on by SF - I certainly did, and sure, only a tiny fraction of that crazy optimistic nonsense got into the textbooks. (Orbital phone relays anyone?) However, I don't read this column to hear about grown-up realism. I want to see the edges of what might be possible, just maybe, one day. Or maybe not.
It's not really all that bad in a lot of the developing world. Sure, watch Bob Geldorf's holiday videos, and it looks like hell on Earth. Those people are in need of far more than electricity, and no amount of wind farming is going to address their problems. For a lot of places though, the reduced standard of living implied by lower power consumption in no way reduces the human capacity for being happy, fulfilled and productive. I am not at all convinced that we need everyone to come up to Californian standards of consumption in order to be content.
This boundary setting article is really useful, because it puts a clear limit on what can ever expect from wind power. That's helpful. Now we do the same for any other power sources we can think of and start to think about options. One of these has to be snatching the sweeties away from the Europeans and Americans before they gobble up the lot.
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