Publicity and Such Saturday, May 19 2007
interviews 6:15 pm
My interview with RU Sirius has been made into a transcript and posted online, for your skimming pleasure. This was the first time I got to meet RU in the flesh, after having bought his 1992 book, Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, at a garage sale when I was 16. I think he is pretty cool and I like the way he is giving numerous transhumanists and intelligent futurists publicity nowadays.
In other news, Eliezer Yudkowsky was interviewed recently by Cameron Reilly, an Australian podcast mogul. He’s also interviewed other familiar people you may have heard of, like Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil, etc. You can find the links to those other interviews right there on the page. This is not the best podcast ever… if you’ve never listened or read anything of Eliezer’s before then I would recommend this video first.
May 19th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Ah, you gotta love the law of microbial infallibility. For people with a good chunk of free time and a good deal of organic waste, you can even use the bacterium Clostridium acetobutylicum to take pretty much any organic compound (cellulose, sugar, starch, and the like) and turn it into n-butanol, a gasoline analog. Just be sure the fermenting tank is air-tight and that you siphon off the butanol with a nonpolar compound such as vegetable oil or fuel oil.
May 19th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Oh, and on diamond mechanosynthesis, why couldn’t replicator could simply build a heat pump to get all the heat out of the synthesis chamber? Evolution already invented this to a limited degree in all endotherms.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
And on the question of the bees disappearing, there was an article about it a few weeks ago that I thoroughly took apart at http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=107132&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=28.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
On particle accelerators: Cosmic rays regularly impact our atmosphere with six orders of magnitude more power than the largest particle accelerator ever built, and they’ve been doing this for four billion years, and we’re not dead yet.
On cults: To be fair to everyone who denounces us, we have a lot of ideas (imminent radical changes to everyone’s lives, immortality, the power of recursive self-improvement) that nobody thinks about much, and historically people proposing a whole bunch of new ideas are probably crazy cultists. The key problem is that people don’t understand the mechanism for how all these things are supposed to come about, so they think we’re just more crazy people promising stuff with no mechanism as to how we’re going to get it.
On being a briefcase word: This seems to happen to many new words. Before the Singularity, it happened to nanotech, and it’s even happened to some philosophical ideas. People like to pick up words that sound big and fancy, and if they don’t know what they mean, they invent an altered meaning on the spot and then tell other people that’s what the word means. Since most people have average ideas, the new definitions that show up usually tend more toward the mainstream than the original conception.
On implants: As far as I am aware, removing an implant seems to be roughly on the same order of difficulty as implanting it in the first place. It’s physically possible in just about every case as long as you have modern technology and a competent surgeon.
May 20th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Re bees: The NYT had a useful longer piece about the problem:
Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons
(ca. 1 900 words)
May 25th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
“not the best podcast ever”… sheesh, tell me what you REALLY think.
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