Webs’ Random Ideas

Found via Blog Around the Clock…

The Darwin Project is St. Ambrose’s way of celebrating the 200 anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday. They have some lectures scheduled as well some more artistic events. It all looks pretty interesting, but I will probably stick with the lectures.

So far I have already spaced on the first lecture which looked incredibly interesting. But I plan to mark down the rest and will write about them as I partake.

Hopefully the argument of dependency on foreign oil and using alternative energies can be laid to rest.

Not a bad idea really. Sure I would rather see a faster transistion to alternative energy, but we do not have the infrastructure to transistion over night. Nor are we currently spending enough money on research to advance technology.

But how exactly does the plan work?

The Pickens Plan is a bridge to the future — a blueprint to reduce foreign oil dependence by harnessing domestic energy alternatives, and buy us time to develop even greater new technologies.

Building new wind generation facilities and better utilizing our natural gas resources can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports in 10 years. But it will take leadership.

Seems like a good idea to me. Check out the site and see what you think.

I guess those two go hand in hand… anyways here is what I am talking bout:

So there are two issues here:

1) McCain wants to drill of the coast in part to help with energy independence, in fact he seems to be claiming that this will in fact help achieve this.

2) McCain is stating that inflating tires has no effect on how much gas Americans consume, and has no marginal gain in energy independence.

1) For this statement to be true drilling off-shore would have to have an effect on US oil supply. Well according to some people that know what they are talking about the change would be marginal. It would take 7-10 years to start getting oil from off-shore, and the amount coming in would be minimal and have no real effect. It’s simply pandering.

Even if some new technology were able to make the drilling go deeper and tap into previously unknown sources, the effect is still a marginal gain in the grand scheme of things as we are importing 10,000 more barrels a day then we are exporting. It’s going to take a lot to change this.

Unfortunately off-shore drilling has disasterous environmental effects and other solutions could have a more immediate effect. Such as using more alternative energies. Who cares how wasteful people are being their energy used comes from a renewable source? It just makes sense to me.

2) As for this point, well 1 simple link will do just fine. The funny thing is, I learned about the usefullness of inflating tires 10 years ago from drivers ed. And I heard the same thing repeated from multiple car “experts” (friends or local mechanics I trusted as a source of info). Only now has it become politicized.

Both candidates are pandering on energy that one is obvious and is why we need to question them. Don’t let your candidate get off easy, write them and prod them with questions.

I got an email a few days ago, won’t say from who, but it sparked my interest.

http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2008/07/science-today-easy-way-to-lie-to-public.html

I know that you guys are in the tank for science, but I found this exchange interesting, if mainly because Brenda Rosser and Bruce Webb are well known and quality.

Think on it for a second, does science help to lie to the public as an arm of the commercial interests? Particularly with greater and greater concentration and specificity of fields. I’m not saying that all scientists fall in this category, but sufficient that certain authority can be bestowed by attaching to the coattails of responsible science.

We need a greater concentration on ethics in science.

It’s a strawman. Just because some people misuse evidence and science speaks nothing to the rest.

Think on it for a second, does science help to lie to the public as an arm of the commercial interests?

No. Science is a way of discovering and analyzing. It’s a way to look at the world and not just see the beauty but explain how it all works and fits together. Science was never meant to be used for good or evil, that’s what people choose to use it for. As stated above it’s more of a way of explaining and analyzing.

We don’t just need ethics in science but all walks of life. I can think of other areas of life where no ethics has done some terrible damage.

A new documentary by scientist Randy Olsen. Go check out the trailer.

First click here, Expelled Exposed!

Then go here to learn how to help (it’s really easy)…

So Thurs Feb 14th I had the privilege to listen to Ray Kurzweil speak. The talk was incredibly interesting and insightful. I really enjoyed it and at the end of the whole event our College President remarked that his coffee would have two creams (he was joking about how long the whole event was, not about how boring Kurzweil is).

For me, the whole event was incredibly boring as we had faculty awards and other things I had trouble staying awake for. Being that I really wanted to listen to Kurzweil speak I was worried that I would be asleep by the time he came up. This was my first time ever listening to Kurzweil and I knew very little about him going into the speech, but once he started speaking I was very much awake.

I don’t want to try to remember everything from the speech and dump it into this post, instead I wish to focus on a couple key items (at least in my view) and maybe discuss them a little.

(more…)

There is a discussion going on at ***Dave’s blog about morality and technology. Originally the topic was about a study asking respondents about their opinions on nanotechnology; the study was written in Science Daily. From the article:

In a sample of 1,015 adult Americans, only 29.5 percent of respondents agreed that nanotechnology was morally acceptable.

To me this seems like a completely silly response. But even more so, it seems like an udder nonsensical question. Now I don’t know what question was asked for sure, I can’t find the original study, but I am assuming the question was along the lines of, “Do you find nanotechnology to be morally acceptable?” Which to me, and ***Dave, seems akin to asking, “Do you find metallurgy morally acceptable?” How can you get a true result from such a question?

I also found this odd from the article:

The moral qualms people of faith express about nanotechnology is not a question of ignorance of the technology, says Scheufele, explaining that survey respondents are well-informed about nanotechnology and its potential benefits.

“They still oppose it,” he says. “They are rejecting it based on religious beliefs. The issue isn’t about informing these people. They are informed.”

I’m not sure I buy that conclusion at all. People in general do not seem to have a full grasp of technology, what it is, where it’s going, etc. If they did, stem cells wouldn’t be an issue of morality and neither would nanotechnology. Below is a clip of a comment I left on ***Dave’s blog about this very subject:

If we stick to dictionary definitions of morality we are dealing with ethical decisions of right or wrong essentially, goodness based on a code of conduct, and/or human ethical decisions. Basically to be moral or immoral you or something has to make a conscious decision based on some kind of code.

So in the extreme case of cannibalism, for example, most people in the industrialized world would come to the conclusion that eating another person is immoral. Our codes of conduct or (un)written rules condone such action. In more remote places of the world it is acceptable and likely considered moral by their code or (un)written rules.

In the case of technology that goes into building a PMFRD machine, each piece of technology is an inanimate object. It cannot make a decision based on (un)written rules. Now maybe the machine on a whole could make such decisions with the right amount of AI. But the machine on a whole is not considered technology, rather a machine or AI robot. And different pieces of technology went into creating this machine. And furthermore, the machine was still programmed to make such decisions based on some kind of code. It still had a creator that decided how to give the robot the ability to make decisions.

You may need to go to the link above for the discussion on ***Dave’s blog for context, but basically technology can’t really be good or evil, people are based on pre-defined standards.

So what do you think? Is technology moral or immoral? Are people good or evil? Do people kill people or do PMFRD machines kill people?