Red letter day

Starbucks in North Bay.

Headline of the day

From Human Rights Watch:

"New Campaign to Stop Killer Robots"

Life in the future, indeed.

Enjoying life in the future

Will McLean says it true: the real desert of Burning  Man has proved far preferable to the dystopian desert of Mad Max.

Desktop fusion -- almost routine

Over at Science News, there is a story about a 17-year-old who has achieved nuclear fusion on a desktop and -- maybe -- used it to create a beam of neutrons. Astonishing? Get this:

[Ben] Bartlett is not the first person to achieve fusion. He’s the 34th outside government and industry, he says. Neither is he the youngest. That record belongs to [Taylor] Wilson, who built his reactor at age 14. Would-be “fusioneers” — such as Mike Kovalchick of York, Pa., another competitor at the science fair — often start with plans posted online by the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium.

[Speechless]

Music for Easter from the future

Again from TED.com, again thanks to Ken Stange.

Martian war machines

At this link you will find a very scary piece of video, sent to me by my Czech friend, Filip Marek. Someone has mangled it, and the beginning is missing, but it appears to be a legitimate Channel 4 documentary out of Britain. And what is documented in this is pretty scary: the use of remote-controlled drone aircraft, whose controllers are enlisted personnel with basic computer skills based in Arizona, to attack people in the eastern hemisphere, whose countries the United States is not at war with. I have heard about this before, but this presentation is very hard hitting.

Let's just think about one point raised in the video, by implication: wouldn't any counterattacks against the Arizona base be considered by the US government to be terrorism? And in fact wouldn't terrorism be one of the few possible responses to robot attacks from the air? And then we are presented with the information that the recent Times Square bomber was inspired by a desire to get revenge for such airborne attacks...

In the end it may simply be a lack of fuel that may save us from a really terrifying kind of war.

This brings back to me one of the more terrifying visions of the future I have ever had. In the movie Apocalypse Now there is an amazing scene where the US helicopters fly into battle -- a battle that involves shooting people on the ground who may or may not be the enemy -- playing the Ride of the Valkeries on a really good sound system.


I realized then that the Martian war machines were no longer H. G. Wells' vision from a fantastic feature, but a reality. Mine wasn't really a vision of the future, of course, despite my words above. It was a vision of the past.

Now I've got another one to match.

Living in the future, Egyptian politics section

Steven A. Cook writing in Foreign Policy [thanks to Arabist.net]:

Perhaps more important was the return to Egypt in February of Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), after a 12-year absence. ...Foreign news outlets estimated that as many as one thousand Egyptians turned out to welcome him home at Cairo’s airport -- and to implore him to run for president in Egypt’s 2011 elections (a significant number given the government’s record of intimidation and violence).

...
He coyly told the Egyptian and foreign press that he would consider running if the Egyptian government enacted electoral and party reforms to ensure truly free and fair elections. At the same time, he formed a new political organization called the National Front for Change, which encompasses a broad swath of Egypt’s fractious but largely ineffective opposition movement.... The creation of the Front, along with his tantalizing public statements, only amplified the ElBaradei phenomenon. By late February, Egyptian bloggers and journalists were reporting that one thousand people were joining ElBaradei’s Facebook page every ten minutes. This story is surely apocryphal, but it is nonetheless worth noting that ElBaradei currently has 82,069 Facebook supporters, compared to [son and potential heir of the current president] Gamal Mubarak’s 6,583.

Image:ElBaradei's Facebook fan page.