Journey to the End of the Night (H.G. Wells edition)

OR TYPES OF FAILURES OF PREDICTIVE FRAMEWORKS

A project that I have long wanted very much to do is to write a history of the Future, especially, a history of the Future as seen in popular culture. Certainly a society’s view of its future tells what it values, and what it fears. If the positive outweigh the negatives, then we have futures such as is seen in Star Trek. When the negatives outweigh the positives, we have distopias, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, George Orwell’s 1984, the Mad Max movies, Brave New World, or works such as Philip Dick’s Blade Runner or The Lathe of Heaven. In each of these distopian visions though, society fails in different ways.

The failure modes are each different and therefore informative. Sometimes these distopias actually do seem to predict the future, or at least a little piece of it. It is telling that it is very easy to think of many distopian futures, but rather difficult to think of utopian ones. It is clear that we are more interested in our possible failures.

Rita, educating us all

Well, we can learn much from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and, as noted several times here, there exists a whole set of connexions between Sustainability and War processes, especially in the way that they will both drive Urbanism/Urban Form in the next century or so. (When I say War here, I am referring to 5GW, as described and discussed over at John Robb’s excellent website Global Guerrillas.)

So, looking at the New Orleans Principles, a set set of ten guidelines for Sustainable development formulated in response to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, I am not at all surprised to find:

8 • Provide for passive survivability
Homes, schools, public buildings, and neighborhoods should be designed and built or rebuilt to serve as livable refuges in the event of crisis or breakdown of energy, water, and sewer systems.

Journey to the End of the Night (Hugh Ferriss edition)

Hugh Ferriss‘ renderings, at their best, are some of the most evocative examples of American art of the previous century. His renderings were at once broadly and lastingly influential (just look at the set design of Batman or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for proof of this) However, for all their timelessness, they also captured the unique aesthetic spirit of an age. For all the influence he had, one would think everyone would know who Hugh Ferriss was.

The setting of his best renderings is night, but not just any night. It is a night where his buildings radiate light and life, and that’s because something is happening in them. Sometimes, the night is glamorous and his buildings are beacons of light. Other times, the night has become menacing and heavier, but the buildings still radiate light, and are shelters from that night. This often results in a very layered space, similar to Piranesi, in which bright objects in the distance are pushing dark objects in the foreground out towards the viewer.

CopyBot Resistance

Over at Ed Felton’s blog, Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten, observing the CopyBot phenomena in Second Life, asks the question Will It Copy? As interesting as that question is, is I am more interested in a special class of objects that, even if they would copy perfectly, will lose a good part of their value when they are copied.

For example, even if you could make a perfect copy of my suit, it wouldn’t be worth very much to you because it won’t fit you, or, even if it did fit you, it might not be appropriate for your line of work. This isn’t as trivial as it seems at first blink, because many items fall into this class. What’s interesting is that some of these items are already primarily digital in form, so they would be very easy to copy. Once you start to study why things are resistant to copying a whole new category of copybot resistant items can be seen, and those items all have some distinct commonalities.

Adam Smith saw it

INTRODUCTION AND BASIC THEORY

Starting off with the Adam Smith quote which concluded my prior post:

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

I want to outline the reasons why the foremost threat to human liberty in our day comes not from the colossal aggregation of power in the hands of big government, but from the processes which are part of the dis-integration of state power and the consequent rise of non-state entities as powerful autonomous agents.

SuSE is still spelt with a small u

This is my obligatory post on the Novell Microsoft patent covenant. I wasn’t going to comment on it, but there’s a tie-in with another issue I was about to post about, so here goes:

First, as a user of SuSE since October 1998 (version 5.3) I know their product well, and have great respect for the SuSE development team. They are a great bunch of coders, who have an attention to quality and a dedication that I don’t think anyone matches. So, I think Novell got a heck of a deal when they bought SuSE. That’s why I have Novell on my stock picks on my Predictions for the year 2007 post. The aesthetics of their distro was always a bit out ahead of the competition. I have been extremely happy with their YaST Set-up tool, which has been released under the GPL recently.

My ambivalence in trying to punish the SuSE distro itself for Novell’s actions is summed up best of all by Ladislav Bodnar over at Distrowatch:

While Novell continues to endure the wrath of the open source community, spare a thought for the developers of openSUSE. Since this highly popular distribution is still largely developed in Germany where the original SuSE Linux was born, it is quite likely that the deal caught its core developers by surprise just as much as it shocked the rest of the Linux world. So far, however, there is no indication of any drastic changes affecting the openSUSE distribution. The project has just released the second beta of openSUSE 10.2 and is on target for the December 7th final release.

If you make a decision to boycott Novell’s products, should that include the openSUSE distribution? Although it might seem acceptable as a way to punish Novell for its part in the controversial deal, please remember that by refusing to install and use openSUSE, you’ll be also punishing the project’s innocent developers who continue to produce what they believe is the best Linux distribution on the market and whose only crime is that they happen to be on Novell’s payroll. Unless they themselves call for boycotting the project or decide to walk away from it, DistroWatch would argue that it is OK to continue using the distribution and supporting the project as before. For more information about the impact of the unpopular deal on openSUSE, please read this web log post by Andreas Jaeger, the distribution’s release manager.

The rumours of Emmanuel Goldstein’s death have been Greatly Exaggerated.

Another post over at Global Guerillas, in which everyone dances around the truth, afraid to touch the real issues:

Free Time, that is (Battery) Free Time

Considering the very large category of things that almost everyone has and really doesn’t need, there’s one item that can be quite rewarding to eliminate: watch batteries. Although, certainly they are quite small, they are rather nasty in that: they are made with quite a few very toxic chemicals, and they are almost never disposed of in a way that isn’t harmful to the environment. (Note: throwing your watch batteries away with your regular house hold trash is not the way to get rid of them; take them to your recycling center, if it recycles batteries.) It is estimated that only about 2% of watch batteries are disposed of in accordance with all laws governing their disposal.

Science Friday’s coverage of Steven Johnson’s New Book

Interesting Science Friday show coming up. Great Book too, BTW.

One hundred fifty-some years ago, the London cholera epidemic changed how we fight infectious disease and gave birth to the field of epidemiology. Can the lessons learned from the epidemic help us with modern bioterrorism? Join Ira Flatow in this hour of Science Friday for a look back at the epidemic with author Steven Johnson. His new book ‘The Ghost Map’ looks at the work of pioneering epidemiologist John Snow and the medical detective work that helped stop London’s cholera outbreak.

On a related note, see my post over at Freedom to Tinker “Syndromic Surveillance: 21st Century Data Harvesting.” which discusses one of the components necessary for epidemiologists in the age of 5GW. Too bad, five years after 9/11, the USA still does not have a comprehensive Syndromic Surveillance System…

Note added December 3, 2006: Note that a podcast of the interview is available at the above link, from the Science Friday website.

The New Front Line: Climate Change

Another data point on the relationship between Sustainability and 5GW (fifth generation warfare) is presented below. First, an article from the Financial Times:

Climate change ‘could tip states into failure’
By Hugh Williamson in Berlin
Published: October 24 2006 03:00 | Last updated: October 24 2006 03:00
Global warming could endanger the political stability of entire nations, with a failing climate leading to more failed states, Margaret Beckett, the British foreign secretary, told the Financial Times on Monday.
Disputes over access to water and food resources were exacerbated by climate change, Ms Beckett said. “There are nations in a very delicate condition and [global warming] will tip some of them over into being failed states.”

Now, let’s hold that thought, and see what John Robb has to say about State Failure and why State Failure is relevant to the growth Global Guerrilla networks: