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do not rub eyes after having Texas barbeque.
I’ve read and enjoyed one of Ray Kurzweil’s books (this one). He is a futurist and often gets a lot of flak about how wild his predictions are. That’s how futurists make money I guess.
I think I am more likely to agree with some of his predictions than the next person though — a lot of his predictions are based on the model that technology creeps up on us very iteratively; one day you are dialing up to a BBS at 1400 baud, and and the next thing you know, a decade later 80% of your social time is on Instant Messenger.
Anyway I was just reading this interview with Kurzweil and thought that this quote was particularly amazing/funny/absurd:
I’m very confident that over the next decade we’ll largely eliminate the diseases that kill 95 percent of people today. We’ve identified a dozen or so aging processes, and we have strategies for reversing them all. I believe that within 10 years we’ll produce a mouse that doesn’t age, and we’ll translate that into human therapies within another five to 10 years after that.
95%? 10 years? Come on Ray. Don’t get me wrong, once a few key technologies really get rolling — nanotech, gene therapy, etc — then I think we are going to see some amazing advances. But as far as I can tell, those things will only begin to really get rolling in about 10 years.
On the other hand, Kurzweil spends all of his time researching this stuff so maybe he knows something I don’t. On the other hand, maybe he thinks about it so much that he has an exaggerated sense of how close the technology is to being scalable in a lab/commercial context.
Stopping disease, aging, and, ultimately, death, is something Kurzweil talks about a lot.
Do you think that someday there’ll be legal limits on how long people can live?
Not if I have anything to say about it. But there’s a very powerful “death-ist” need. People really have it deeply ingrained. Life is short. You can’t live forever. The only things that are certain are death and taxes. We have this whole so-called normal lifecycle; certain things happen at certain ages. We’ve rationalized death, which in my view is a profound tragedy and a tremendous loss of knowledge and expertise. And we have rationalized it as a good thing. I guess if there’s nothing you can do about it, the best thing you can do is rationalize it, but there will be things that we can do about it.
I have a book coming out in the fall, Fantastic Voyage. And in it I say that right now we have the means to slow down aging to such an extent that even baby boomers like myself can remain healthy and vital long enough for the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, at which point we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains.
You look like you’re in good shape.
Well, I take this very seriously. I’m very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests—memory and sensory acuity and response times—it had me at age 40. I’m 56.
What do you do to slow the aging process?
I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I’m really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it’s good to be natural. I don’t think it’s good because biological evolution is not on our side.
It’s in the interest of our species for people past child-rearing age not to stick around, at least in an era of scarcity, and our biological program hasn’t changed since we lived in an era of scarcity. We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, “Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow.” These are all programs that need to be changed. [snip]
Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines?
Well, ultimately, there’s going to be very little difference between a guy who’s 120 and a guy who’s 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we’ll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It’s not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we’ll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.
(NOTE: if you want your name in Elvish, don’t ask me, I don’t know how to do it! There’s an automated way to do it here. I have no idea how accurate it is.)
Here is my name in Tengwar Quenya Elvish, generated by Jason:
And an illustration of what is going on:
update: and here it is a more correct/fancy version (Jason’s skillz are improving by the hour!!):
(NOTE: if you want your name in Elvish, don’t ask me, I don’t know how to do it! There’s an automated way to do it here. I have no idea how accurate it is.)
Caught this in Reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, a blog of a brave man who is going to read through the entire Enclopedia Britanica and blog about what he learns and experiences:
[an excerpt from the EB that his blog post quoted]
Among Bacon’s papers a notebook has survived, the Commentarius Solututs (”Loose Commentary”), which is revealing. It is a jotting pad “like a Marchant’s wast booke where to enter all maner or remembrance of matter, fourme, business, study, towching my self, service, others, eyther sparsim or in schedules, without any manner of restraint.” This book reveals Bacon reminding himself to flatter a possible patron, to study the weaknesses of a rival, to set intelligent noblemen in the Tower to work on servicable experiments. It displays the multiplicity of his concerns: his income and debts, the King’s business, his own garden and plans for building, philosophical speculations, his health, including his symptoms and medications, and an admonition to learn to control his breathing and not to interrupt in conversation.
My buddy Brenn has made a couple cafepress shirt stores with his original artwork. Skeletons Can Dance and Bob the Battle Lizard.
Guardian Unlimited pulls no punches. Some excerpts:
It was JRR Tolkien who converted CS Lewis to Christianity during one long all-night walk that ended in dawn and revelation.
Disney is deliberately promoting this film to the religious - it has appointed Outreach, an evangelical publisher, to promote the Christian message behind the movie in British churches. The Christian radio station Premier is urging churches to hold services on the theme of The Gospel According to Narnia. Even the Methodists have written a special Narnia-themed service. And a Kent parish is giving away £10,000 worth of film tickets to single-parent families. (Are the children of single mothers in special need of the word?)
US born-agains are using the movie. The Mission America Coalition is “inviting church leaders around the country to consider the fantastic ministry opportunity presented by the release of this film”. The president’s brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is organising a scheme for every child in his state to read the book. Walden Media, co-producer of the movie, offers a “17-week Narnia Bible study for children”. The owner of Walden Media is both a big Republican donor and a donor to the Florida governor’s book promotion - a neat synergy of politics, religion and product placement. It has aroused protests from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which complains that “a governmental endorsement of the book’s religious message is in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution”.
…43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn’t say what Easter celebrated. Among the young - apart from those in faith schools - that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what “agony in the garden”, “deposition”, “transfiguration” or “ascension” mean.
This Christ-lion willingly lays down his life, submitting himself to be bound, thrashed and humiliated by the white witch, allowing his golden mane to be cut and himself to be slaughtered on the sacrificial stone table: it cracks in sympathetic agony and his body goes missing. …
But so far, so good. The story makes sense. The lion exchanging his life for Edmund’s is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of. Parfait knights and heroes in prisoner-of-war camps do it all the time. But what’s this? After a long, dark night of the soul and women’s weeping, the lion is suddenly alive again. Why? How?, my children used to ask. Well, it is hard to say why. It does not make any more sense in CS Lewis’s tale than in the gospels. Ah, Aslan explains, it is the “deep magic”, where pure sacrifice alone vanquishes death.
Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus’s holy head every day that you don’t eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told.
Tolkien hated Narnia: the two dons may have shared the same love of unquestioning feudal power, with worlds of obedient plebs and inferior folk eager to bend at the knee to any passing superior white persons - even children; both their fantasy worlds and their Christianity assumes that rigid hierarchy of power - lord of lords, king of kings, prince of peace to be worshipped and adored. But Tolkien disliked Lewis’s bully-pulpit.
Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion … He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman - he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia “one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read”.
Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.
Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and “make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life”. … Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children’s minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.
look at this shit:
- the navy trains dolphins to patrol and SHOOT POISON DARTS AT TERRORISTS. FURTHERMORE, these dolphins ESCAPED during huricane katrina. ARMED WITH THE DARTS. THIS IS REAL. link
- gillette came out with a FIVE BLADE RAZOR. think about that. not only are they all the way up to 5, but they actually SKIPPED 4. this is actually something that the onion specifically predicted. link
- that barbara bush quote about the people in the astrodome being “underpriviliged anyway”. i mean really, i could not be more pleased that katrina happened while barb was still alive, so that that quote could go down in history. link
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[actually from 2004, but it's too good to leave out]this quote, from a “senior bush advisor” (speaking to a journalist):
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We”re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you”re studying that reality ‚Äì judiciously, as you will ‚Äì we”ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’’s how things will sort out. We”re history’’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
- update: I had this one bookmarked but forgot to include it in my initial post:
A spokeswoman for the Family Research Council (FRC) says young women should have to deal with the consequences of a rapidly spreading sexually transmitted disease rather then rely on a new vaccine.
The FRC’s Bridget Maher said her group believes over-reliance on the vaccine for the human papilloma virus (HPV) could send the wrong message to young women. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” Maher told New Scientist. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”
what is wrong with 2005? the onion describes reality. the daily show is the only mainstream news source. politicians don’t even try to pretend that they aren’t living in an alternate, self-centered reality. and ideoologically driven groups assert that a solution to a problem should not be implemented because it makes a previous solution to the problem seem less important. YES, THAT IS THE POINT OF NEW, MORE EFFECIENT/COMPREHENSIVE SOLUTIONS. WE NO LONGER HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE DRAWBACKS OF THE OLD SOLUTIONS.
if anyone has any more “2005 is the onion becoming reality” examples, let me know.
