Posts filed under ‘Uncategorized’
Free Trash or self organizing city services
In Taipei you have to pay for trash bags. Bags are also expensive. It’s potentially possible that someone could make a profit from collecting 32 NT trash bags (the big ones), burning the trash and then reselling the bag. Hence, it could be possible to do away with city wide trash disposal simply by placing the cost of the service on the bag. If each bag was worth such and such an amount, slightly durable, and could be resold, this could create a market where folks would simply go around collecting trash, disposing of it, and reselling the bags for their profit. Of course some people would probably choose to burn or dispose of their trash themselves and also this might be a good incentive for cutting down on waste to begin with. You wouldn’t need to worry about people throwing out garbage in bags that are worthless, no one would want to pick up a shoddy disposable plastic bag because of it’s low resale value. Is it possible that this might be a better method for dealing with trash than the current system where the person throwing away their trash pays a remarkably small amount for a large amount of waste? While many cities employ similar methods as Taipei does (recylcing is free, normal trash costs money), this method has the advantage of being low cost (in theory it provides a city with trash disposal with no cost to the government) and hence perhaps something for the developing world.
technorati tags:sanitation, garbage, environment, cities, urban
Amnesia in pre-literate societies + Ignorant Invaders
The story is always familar to us in video games (especially Japanese ones). The civilization advances and then finds out that another civilization before it was more advanced. But how does this happen or has it happened? Imagine for a second if only 300 people in the world could make cars and they were to die tomorrow. Would we still be able to make cars? Eventually yes, as we developed the technologies again and extrapolated what we need from preserved specimens, but if we didn’t have writing and hence lost an immense oral tradition of knowledge or if the education gap was so high as to make transference of knowledge (not to mention the perspective and values of a more educated class) hard to do then it’s perfectly possible our society would fall apart. We are not so far from such a society at any moment, after all the number of information theory researchers in the world amounts to maybe 30 to 40k, but these people have left behind writing and we’re all close enough to them to be able to pick up where they left off, but my point being primitivism in a society can easily come after the class driving technological development has been killed off which does happen every once in awhile. If there was no writing and then all the quantum phyiscists died off, how long would it take for even educated folks to figure out the basics of quantum mechanics? We have now arrived at a context similar to that of a pre-literate tribe who has lost their elite to disease.
Let’s say that tomorrow aliens arrive on earth. Back on their home planet they have a naturally occuring energy source that provides them with the ability to fly through space at faster than light speeds. The aliens are not necessarily more advanced than us, they merely had the advantage of geography and context on their side to let them reach us first, but what if the aliens aren’t even advanced enough to know this, what if they lack the critical hindsight to see the wealth of intelligence before them? Then we not only have geographically advantaged invaders, but ignorant ones too and maybe they’ll kill off the mechanics? Now what are you going to do?
Maybe I should write science fiction?
Neural Stem Cell + Mad Cow Disease
Mad Cow Disaease is caused by a protein that pokes holes in the brain eventually driving the victim insane, neural stem cells (recently cultured by researchers at Fudon University) repair portions of the brain. Hence a neural stem cell treatment would repair damaged portons of the brain, but more interestingly the stem cells can also be used as biomarkers, hence we can literally regrow portions of the brain with biomarkers in them creating one large neuronal structure which could be tagged and studied as it works. If this would help anyone I don’t know, but the idea just occured to me and sounds fun (especially on mice). You could eventually have an entire brain tagged and studyable at one time.
technorati tags:neurology, hacks, biomarkers, neural
Singapore quickly
Never forget that the time difference between LAX and Singapore is well over a day as I did and hence missed my Dad who left LAX the 11th U.S. time but arrived in Singapore the 13th while I arrived the 11th Taipei time and left the 12th Singapore time. Ahhh the earth so fickle is your rotation. Anyway, Singapore is obviously more diverse than Hong Kong or Japan, while perhaps traces of localism have dissapeared from Japan and other former confucianists, Singapore is one of those countries that seems to have actively grabbed immigrations by the reins and is taking it in for profit. That said, it’s also the only country I’ve been too that specifically asked if you’d been to Africa or South America in the last 6 days implying that the party is reserved for north of the equator countries only and does further reinforce the disneyland with a death penalty concept used to disparage it. The city itself I spent 12 hours in mostly wondering around malls near city hall with a brief stop in the marina. Surprisingly they have light rail running all the way from the airport making them one of the few Asian metropolises to have actually decide their cabbies and bus lines don’t need the added value of thousands of tourists pouring in per day. Singapore is also notable for having tons of archectual value in a small space that’s both spacious, clean, and surprisingly tastifully decrorated. While Shanghai has a slightly naive feeling to it’s design with a well designed and clean inner city, it still seems to have been made to impress while Singapore seems to have been made to be functional and it’s design more elegant compared to China’s bling it’s more macintosh than ice cream shop chains in other words. Picked up Royston Tan’s Shorts and also walked through a huge pile of garbage in a tunnel proving that things have changed since William Gibson walked through what was probably his own oppression (and I might added Shonen Knife is nothing compared to the subversive humor and creativity of Tan’s films.) a few years back. Singapore did feel like some type of camp for the wealthy though, sitting in a coffee shop I watched a young woman diligently hash out equations from an economics text book which is, next to the bioinformatics babes of Taipei, perhaps is as sexy as nerdism can get in Asia, and on my way out I ended up caught behind a group of Indian entrepenuers who were talking with a British expat who was complaing about having to much work in Dubai and not being able to make it in time (a problem we probably all wish we had). All in all, Singapore is perhaps a flat world oasis, but it also has a remarkably different feel from the rest of Asia, While Seoul for instance stocks English language text books in prodigious numbers and Taipei has anything and everything design related or Shibuya-kui Singapore felt more worldly, it’s populos seems to understand that there’s more to like than just engineering or economics etc. It seems to be a genuine creative economy in which film buffs are just as likely to be bank rolling their obsessions through intellectual means as through I.T. or other well known fields. It’s a consultants type of town in which folks are figuring out the holes in industries rather than trying to compete with them. Regardless, I wanna go back and I also picked up Osamu Tezuka‘s Buddha comics in English which is amazing. p.s. Flickr’s Singapore tag for city hall is nice.
Bangkok hour 10
No train from new airport (but new airport is nice especially the liquer store behind customs so you can sip while you wait on your luggage). Bangkok has the same problem as middle America, it’s poverty is it’s main charm. Walking down the strip tonight two cab drivers asked me if I wanted a beet. Sat around talking to them for about 20 minutes when one of them suggest I go to a girl bar or a boy bar down the street. Head off down the street and folks take me by the arm and ask if I want to a girl show. Their tactics are slightly less forceful than Shanghai’s prostitutes (and here slightly more legit), but pretty much anyone will be asked. Sex on a motorbike is apparently cool. Was hit by a scooter when I first got here, think I hurt them more than me.
Tales of these regions (especially Cambodia) are well known (one teacher at my academy says a group of canadain dudes paid some prostitutes in cambodia to suck their cocks while they shot rocket launchers etc.) Bangkok in particular is in the midst of a clean up (trains and buses close early), but the city is still sleazy in an entertaining type of way. A man rummaging through garbage sold me a tortoise for 5 baht etc. What’s advertised as possible here is perhaps more mirage than actuality, but the city is permessive much more so than the other tigers that sorround it.
Story
If it happened to be at the Chancellor Dick’s ______ in Wyoma, Utah, that’s where he’d be. Towering over 7 feet tall in the maroon carpeting, dangling tide mendallions on the middle of the day, beer brimming, you could almost here his sound in words, a steady stumble of reel to reel as the men came in and out of theater, the threat of porn washing off their backs and this was only day 2 of the American foot race and already he could feel the stereotypes whistling away to the wind, the winner this year would be amputated, driven by revenge, and ultimately fraile, walking into last place with a smile on his back, knowing that the world’s problems would be solved by place and time and not the actions of men somewhere off in the woods screaming. Simplicity was not brutality anymore, it was a means of churning intelligence to the collective will of the small and simple, and his foot prints left simple statement of elegance in the wake of something so complicated, it could only be understood in simple black or white and maybe a dash of yella.
technorati tags:fictions
Imposition, Rail Guns and Nuclear Bombs, Other Stuff
One of the reasons why we’re here today, surfing the internet etc, was that education was imposed on people through out the world by various governments. Like it or not, you’re going to learn. Cutting down on ignorance or the possibility of feral children etc. While we associate the totaltarian with the holocaust and hence bad, it’s whole sale approach (and nigh marxist optimisim) can also be used to do something that can help society as a whole too. Hence is it discredited entirely for bad reasons or do we have the technologies (and know how) to convince people to better themselves with out having to require it? The totaltarian is rightly feared, but what it takes away (choice) is also what makes it’s anti-thesis weak too.
In terms of ethics lets look at the following: nuclear bombs are bad becuase they can kill millions in an instant, but the choice of killing millions is also what holds them up, you pause for a second, do I really want to eliminate everyone in this city etc? In essence nuclear bombs are hard to justify using because their results push at the upper limits of categories, the people in country X might be bad, but you would really really have to believe that everyone is alike and hence part of the bad people of country Y category to be able to justify nuking them (or perhaps just feel that some people really deserve to die and the others are accpetable casualities). On the other hand let’s say you have have a rail gun, it can kill anyone in the world at anytime painlessly (or perhaps incredibly painfully if you so choose). Now the rail gun is more contextual, it let’s you single out the individual in the mess that you want to do away with. Would this weapon be more likely to be used than a nuclear bomb? Yes, it would and the year on year total of killing would probably exceed those killed by nuclear weapons rather quickly. In essence, because nuclear weapons force the user to consider their actions over a greater diversity of people, they’re less likely to be used than weapons that can single out an individual. But how does this relate to the first paragraph, it’s quite simple.
Totalatarians have done a great deal of damage to the world, but a lot of it is through indirect means, Mao didn’t mean for the Chinese to starve, he just happened to have fucked up the country’s farms with bad planning, it was an honest mistake. Had he approached it from a free market angle, the risk of various different plans would have been spread over a greater area of innovators leading to some people messing up and others suceeding. But the real problem with Mao’s idea was that he wasn’t thinking contextually or individually, his policy killed millions. He was just the wrong guy, at the wrong moment, with the wrong line of thinking. It’s this means of killing that makes totaltarianism bad, but that doesn’t make it ethically wrong or a-moral it took deliberate genocide to do that, but the actual numer of people killed by autocratic genocide is probably less than those killed by individuals in free countries fighting over resources or ideas etc. While numbers do not necessarily make up the impetus of a good arguement, totaltarianism has it’s advantages in both allowing good ideas to be absolutely implemented along with bad, democracies have their disadvantages in letting individuals choose to pursue their own vices and also spreading accountability for choices to their government instead of the voter or tax payer, very rarely do people in a democracy take blame for voting in programs that fail etc. On the other hand every text book has the story of Mao and China’s starvations, hence future dictators should have learned that thinking on the wholesale non-contextual categorical method was a bad thing, while voters should have continued to vote bad policies in and not taken accountability for them. Of course while the later has happened, the former hasn’t happened. Why don’t Dictators learn?
technorati tags:stuff
A rule someone else probably already invented
An incentive in any plan whether economic, physcological, or just someone giving a dog a bone is dependent on what that incentive means to the reciever and their interpretation of it. Hence any plan that rests on the idea of incentives driving people to a certian goal or standard will invariably fail as the people partaking in it not only become desensitized to it, but all begin to redefine the reward in their own mind. We do not have standard selves or standard meaning and the differences between what incentives mean to each individual means that you can’t get a steady response especially the simplier the reward becomes. (I think people often respond to complex issues similarly and simplier ones do their frequency meet with more different strategies).
technorati tags:stuff
links for 2006-07-29
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from waxy I think MS graph of R&D spending.
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number when you search for childish sex on this Slovakian search engine. what’s better is it’s a link to a music review.
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the fictions tag at technorati is rather interesting and surprisingly rather French.
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“In other words, they’ve been hotter than Jessica Simpson and slower than, well, Jessica Simpson.” Who is Jessica Simpson? How do I miss this reference every time? oh yeah and chips, new intel chips.
links for 2006-07-28
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they make interactie art projects with platforming games. from regine wmmna
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from robot wisdom. hedge funds are bad.
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about nails it.
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is it just me or does this small scale nanofactory look like a gamecube? it’s amazing how design conscious the neuvo-economy is. 20 years ago this would have been a solid steel block.
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i like that it fills the entire screen and makes u scroll.
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“In fact, each of the top 10 selling cars and top 10 selling trucks (pickups, SUVs, and minivans) in the first half of 2006 is produced at facilities in the United States.7 Toyota Camry, Honda Accord, Chevy Impala (GM), Ford Taurus, Nissan Altima, Ford Ex
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Joe Nishizawa’s tokyo pictures.
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from robot wisdom. old idm-ish videos. includes dr. oc’s blue flowers.
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the classic.
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it’s a nice trick.
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title about sums it up.
