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Uncertain futures


Saturday, October 30, 2004

Evolving humans had tiny 'Hobbit' cousins till very recently

Fossils of around eight very small human-like creatures have been found on the Indonesia island of Flores. Reports in Nature suggest they walked upright and had fire, tools and probably language. But even the adults were only the height of a three-year old child, and had a brain just a quarter the size of a modern human.

What's more, the individuals in the Flores cave lived recently - between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago. Others of the species may even have survived into historic times.

According to Peter Brown, who led the science team, the find's importance "is not in the evolutionary story of modern humans, but in how the broad group from which modern humans evolved may have adapted to different ecosystems. Prior to this finding it would not have been thought that a hominin with the brain size of H. floresiensis could make the type of tools associated with the skeleton, or even get to Flores at all."

The Australian quotes another member of the team who predicts more such finds will turn up on other islands in the area.

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

GM cat promises relief to allergy sufferers

But is it ethically correct? Nice story in The Scotsman about an attempt to breed a genetically-modified pet that won't make people sneeze.

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Iraq - could it get worse for the US?

This highly critical assessment by an anonymous Washington insider of how things are going in Iraq suggests it could.

Two possibilities in particular could make the US position even more difficult:

1. Iranian intervention
"Perceived oppression of Iraq's 60-percent Shiite majority could lead to massive and sustained Iranian intervention. Given the Coalition's tenuous supply lines between Kuwait and Baghdad, potential Iranian intervention could be roughly analogous to Chinese intervention in Korea in November 1950 (which resulted in the longest sustained retreat in U.S. military history)."

2. Worse from Abu Ghraib
"One more incident could make a barely tenable situation disastrous. Abu Ghraib and other prisons contained sections with incarcerated females and juveniles. Any hypothetical abuses from that quarter that might come to light would be even more explosive than what has gone before. So would any possible participation in these activities by Israeli nationals. Additional incidents would stimulate insurgent recruitment among 25 million Iraqis as well as recruitment of international terrorists within a pool of one billion Muslims."

Monday, May 24, 2004

Nuclear 'now only way to stop global warming'

James Lovelock, one of the most respected and scientifically credible figures in the green movement, has urged a rethink on nuclear power.

Writing in the Independent, he says that nuclear power is now the only practical way to stop global warming.

"Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear."

Lovelock is the original proponent of the Gaia hypothesis, first put forward in book form in 1979. This posits that the organisms of the Earth together form a self-regulating system that maintains conditions suitable for life. Although at first controversial and not taken seriously outside of green circles, over time the theory has gained scientific respectability and has proved highly productive in sparking scientific research.

Despite the near cessation of nuclear developments around the world, the nuclear lobby is still active - particularly in Britain where pro-nuclear figures have been active in attempts to block what some see as nuclear power's current main rival, wind power. Against this background it would be easy for nuclear power's opponents to portray the 84-year-old Lovelock as an unwitting dupe of the nuclear lobby.

But in fact Lovelock has been remarkably consistent over the years in his view that climate change is a much greater threat to our world than nuclear accident or even nuclear war.

For Lovelock it is all about putting the correct priorities on the various threats. Although an accident like Chernobyl might kill many people and other living things over a wide area, the global biosphere can cope with it and will recover back to something resembling its present state. By contrast, by changing the composition of the atmosphere humans are producing unpredictable and possibly very large global effects; although Lovelock is confident the biosphere can again adapt, there's no guarantee that the adaptation will provide a comfortable or even viable niche for humans.

Related links:

Independent: Greenland ice is melting
Extract from 'Gaia: a new look at life on Earth' (1979)
Guardian on who is behind UK opposition to wind farms
Slashdot discussion on Lovelock and nuclear power

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

Other good recent links

So much for the freelance economy
Wired muses pessimistically on the collapse of guru.com, an online marketplace where IT contractors and others were supposed to find people eager to outsource to them. Sees it as failure of 'e-lance' idea and restructuring of the firm rather than simply economic cycle.

State of content
This UK take on the same event puts it in the context of a current parliamentary enquiry into freelance conditions here, the IR35 tax changes etc.

IDC isn't too optimistic about the IT market, at least in the short term:
IT Spending Slowing Down in the Transport Sector, says IDC
Short-Term Contraction in IT Consulting Market, IDC Says

good Canadian site about neologisms

Meanwhile over in Utah...

Pepys reloaded

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, reposted day-by-day as if it were a weblog. It's currently at 2 June 1660, and 3 June should appear later today.

It's the 300 anniversary of Pepys' death this year.

In fact by my calculations the actual anniversary is tomorrow - he died on May 26th, but when we switched to the Gregorian calendar (in 1752) we dropped 11 days.

Water may stymie Arab-Israeli peace accord

Interesting background facts (and maps) from the independent US defence analyst Chuck Spinney. He thinks it's going to be very hard to have peace in the Middle East without dealing with the water issue, but at the moment the roadmap has little to say about it.

The problem is that Israel consumes more water than it can replenish within its pre-1967 borders. The West Bank and Golan are both crucial recharge areas, and Israel also uses water from Lebanon. Even if Israel had normal relations with its neighbours, water would still be a potential source of conflict.

Spinney suggests that Israel may ultimately have to rethink how it's using the water - over 50 percent goes on agriculture, but agriculture contributes no more than 3 percent of the country's GDP.

Most bloggers "are teenage girls"
The Register reports on a survey done in Poland. "Over 60 per cent of Polish blogs are written by women and a staggering three quarters are written by teenagers or younger."

A survey published by Pew Research back in April about how Americans used the Internet during the Iraq war supports the view that weblog readership is low, and that weblogs are mainly of interest to the under 30s.

Thursday, May 15, 2003

An ocean empty of fish?

Industrialised fishing has changed the world's oceans to such an extent that the sea can no longer be considered a natural system, according to a major 10-year-long study published in the science journal Nature. Stocks of the large predatory species have literally been decimated - only 10 per cent remain.

"We are in massive denial and continue to bicker over the last shrinking numbers of survivors, employing satellites and sensors to catch the last fish left," according to the study's lead author Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Canada. "We have to understand how close to extinction some of these populations really are. If present fishing levels persist, these great fish will go the way of the dinosaurs."

Co-author Boris Worm of Kiel University in Germany says "The impact we have had on ocean ecosystems has been vastly underestimated. It could bring about a complete re-organization of ocean ecosystems, with unknown global consequences."

Authors' press release
Plenty more fish in the sea? - Guardian
Great Fish Going the Way of the Dinosaurs - Environmental News Service
Few of world's large fish remain - Boston Globe

Sunday, March 02, 2003

Attack of the heavyweight hawks

Amazingly, you can predict a country's policy on Iraq from how fat its people are. The Bush administration draws its support, at least in the developed world, from the countries with the fattest populations.

If you look at this 2002 health report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, what's striking is how close the correlation is.

Starting at the left hand side of Chart 5 "Obesity in the adult population across OECD countries", the least fat members of the OECD club are, in order:


They are all also at the peacenik end of the spectrum on Iraq.

It's only when we get to medium-fat Spain that support for immediate war becomes a serious option. Then, as we move towards the developed world's most obese nations, the US and UK, the tone gets yet more hawkish.

This is clear from looking at the fat end of the OECD list, which is, in order:

Czech Republic
New Zealand
United Kingdom
United States

There are some exceptions that make the hawks/obesity correlation less than perfect. Canada and New Zealand only fit the pattern in general terms. Both sent troops to Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf War, but have reservations on this occasion.

Canada objects strongly to the US doctrine on regime change. It has said it won't send ground troops to Iraq, but may send other forces once the war is underway. New Zealand is likely to stay on the sidelines.

Nonetheless, the relationship is striking. The fatter its population the more ready a nation seems to be to commit troops to this war.

Background on OECD figures

Saturday, March 01, 2003

Iraq may have got rid of weapons already

The vast majority of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed soon after the Gulf War, according to a defector who has been publicly praised by Bush, Blair and Powell. What's more the Americans and British have known this since 1995, but have been keeping strangely silent about it.

These allegations have been made by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University lecturer who caused a furore recently by revealing that a UK government briefing paper on Iraq supposedly based on intelligence sources was plagiarised from an article written by a student.

The defector was General Hussein Kamel (also spelt Kamal), a son-in-law of President Saddam Hussein and former head of Iraq's secret weapons programme. He was killed when he returned to Baghdad in 1996.

Rangwala has got hold of the transcript of a debriefing of between Kamel and UN weapon inspectors in Jordan in August 1995. In it Kamal tells the inspectors what happened to Iraq's nerve gas and anthrax, and its nuclear and missile programmes.

Worldnet Daily plays this revelation up

as does The Scotsman

The Washington Post plays it down

as does The Guardian

And here's the transcript itself and Glen Ringwala's comments on it.

Friday, February 28, 2003

New warning on identity theft

Job site Monster.com has sent users an email warning them of the danger of identity theft. Apparently fraudsters have been luring people into revealing personal information by posting fake job adverts

The danger of identity theft has been thrown into sharp relief by the case of 72-year-old British holidaymaker Derek Bond, who has just returned to the UK after being released from a South African prison, where he was held for over two weeks on FBI orders.

The FBI is now saying that another man who they are holding in Las Vegas used the entirely innocent Mr Bond's identity to cover his tracks while engaged in a telemarketing scam.

FBI agent John Lewis told the BBC on Wednesday morning "There are two people in custody at this exact moment in different parts of the world for the same offence. One is the right guy, and one is the wrong guy ... Mr Bond is owed an apology." Audio clip

Lewis thinks it a clear case of identity theft. "It is very frequent. In a sense, it is out of control, and obviously in this case it has caused one person an awful lot of harm."

One other interesting aspect of the case is how the FBI finally got the right man. Agent Lewis says that he received an anonymous phone call on Tuesday afternoon. The extremely well-informed caller said "I think you've got the wrong man in South Africa", and gave the real name of the fraud suspect, the name he was now using, and the address where he could be found in the US.

By this time the case of the obviously-innocent Bond was being widely reported in the British press. Rather than let it continue to damage UK-US relations and the credibility of US intelligence at this crucial time, it seems likely that some other part of the intelligence community took matters into its own hands and solved the FBI's case.

Sunday, February 09, 2003

North Dakota found to be harboring nuclear missiles. reports the Onion

Friday, February 07, 2003

Russians win top spot in UK music chart

What with peace-mongering Germans refusing to go to war and sylphlike Russian females riding high in the pop charts, national stereotypes are taking something of a hammering at the moment. The pop babes are Tatu, a teen duo of apparently lesbian tendencies who have just taken the number one spot in the UK singles chart, ahead of acts such as Kelly Rowland from Destiny's Child and Fame Academy winner David Sneddon.

Tatu (called tATu in the US for copyright reasons) is a manufactured band in the modern tradition. Singers Lena (17) and Yulia (16) were selected by producer Ivan Shapovalov from 500 hopefuls at an open casting. Their real preferences about sex or anything else aren't easy to distinguish from the hype, but the teen lesbian angle is successfully generating plenty of publicity.

Official Russian management site
US record label (UMG/Geffen)
Better German site with more music (flash)
Good fan site

UPDATE: Russians still at top a month on

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

China and US military still committed to space

Following the loss of the shuttle Columbia last Saturday there's been a lot written about the future of manned space flight - and most of it has been pretty negative. Either they'll be a long delay before such flights resume, or the commentators question the need for sending humans aloft at all. The future of the International Space Station looks bleak, and a mission to Mars looks unlikely any time soon.

But almost all this coverage has focused on the US civilian agency NASA, with perhaps the Europeans and the Russians getting a mention. What's been overlooked is the strong interest the US military still has in space, and the rapidly developing Chinese space programme - which aims to put a man in space by the end of this year or early next.

Chinese motivation seems to be a mixture of military and political.

China's Space Ambitions Keep Western Experts Guessing

China's Space Program Driven by Military Ambitions

Is China developing an anti-satellite capability?

Meanwhile NASA's plans to develop Project Prometheus, the kind of nuclear propulsion system that would be required to effectively explore the planets, now looks very uncertain.

Space tourism also looks less likely in the aftermath of Columbia's disaster.

However, the shuttle has always flown some military missions. Indeed, all but one of the seven astronauts who died in Columbia held military rank. If the civil programme slows down the pressure will be on the military to take over control of those things that really matter to it.

UPDATE: Pentagon sees space as military high ground

Call to weaponize space

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