How to make everything right wrong again

No post for ages - work has been busy, not that anyone follows this so no worries there. Also I had nothing interesting to say and the last thing the internet needed was more drivel.
An interesting idea was given to me today after reading a bbc article about Northern Rock being split into a "good bank" and a "bad bank".
Now as I read this all the good/reliable mortgages and business will be packaged together and sold off to make some of the bailout money back. This is a good thing.
As for the bad bank then as I read this it will exist solely to hold onto the bad mortgages. Now it was pointed out to me that these mortgages will eventually come to the end of their term. The question is what happens next? Assuming that this bad bank doesn't issue new mortgages then the people facing this will have to go to the open market to look for a new deal. So the good profitable parts of the business will eventually dwindle and leave, leaving only mortgages that foreclose or people who are unable to go elsewhere.

With my cynical hat on this seems like a very efficient way to make sure that the taxpayer is left with all the bad debt and the free market only has the reliable debt. This may be a good thing for the financials of the banking iundustry, but it does undermine the concept that the banking industry would eventually pay back the bailouts.
Now I'm not that naive, but it does seem that those of us currently without mortgages are being charged for those who drew a straight line on growth curves; which is a little unfair, but hey we already have an idiot tax in the form of the national lottery so this feels like a "not being an idiot" tax. Ah! Smug self righteousness, better than any drug I know!

Mad Salt Lake Idea

I think this idea must be mad, because no-one seems to have done it yet; however I don't understand what the problem would be, so I explain it here to be deconstructed.

There exist in the world a large number of salt flats that are to my knowledge to all intents and purposes barren wastelands with no useful purpose to the ecology or humans. I propose to change that.
There is no shortage on this planet of seawater so we pump the seawater back to these salt flats and create new salt lakes. This would give nice shallow water, unfortunately it'd almost certainly be too salty for anything but the most hardy algae to live in. So what would creating a new dead sea give us.

• Increase precipitation
• Cooling effects of bodies of water on surrounding area
  
• You could use it as cooling water runoff area for power plants.
• Salt production

Not major benefits it might seem except that people are suggesting building boats spraying sea water to create more clouds to combat global warming. Also there's always talk about the lack of fresh water, so here's a way to increase it.

The only problems I can see with this would be the energy cost of pumping the water (which might effectively be free if the power plant cooling is available) and the potential corruption of the water table. If that was a problem though then presumably every time it rained on one of these locations you'd get irreversible salt water corruption of the water table.

Precognescence In sportsmen

This is an old thought of mine that I thought I'd share; it's a thought experiment so:

Suppose precognescence is real.
Suppose this talent is particularly useful in sports such as motorracing where knowing ahead of time for example exactly how much grip you have available would be an advantage. Similarly knowing that someone is going to try and overtake you by dodging to the left before they do it would be a huge advantage.
Now suppose that because the offspring of sportsmen/women are likely to interbreed and produce offspring likely to go into that sport themselves then you have set up perfect evolutionary conditions for enhancing this effect.

To summarise - if the ability to see into the future is possible, and this is a genetically carried feature, expect to see it in sportsmen.

Now the existence of this sort of this goes against what you would term my belief system (i.e. all currently observed scientific data) however that's never a reason to fully discount something so: how could we test for it?

Easy - change the penalty for jumping the start of a race. At the moment (taking F1 as an example) there is a random delay from all lights going on, to the lights going off and the race starting. If you are judged to have moved before all lights go off you are judged to have jumped the start. Change this so that no penalty is given if you are sufficiently close to the lights going out. If you have no precognescence, then jumping the start will then most of the time give you a penalty, however if you can truly anticipate when it is going to happen then it'll soon become clear which these drivers are.

I know what results I'd expect to see (i.e. that nothing really changes) but the universe could yet surprise us.

New Speed Limit?

According to this there's plans for a 50 limit on single carrageways.

Despite the fact that quoting the governments own statistics:

• A 40% reduction in the number of people killed or seriously injured (KSI) in road accidents;
• A 50% reduction in the number of children killed or seriously injured (children are defined as being those aged under 16);
• A 10% reduction in the slight casualty rate, expressed as the number of people slightly injured per 100 million vehicle kilometres

Compared with the 1994-98 average baseline, in 2007

• The number of people killed or seriously injured was under 31 thousand, 36 per cent below the baseline.
• The number of children killed or seriously injured was 55 per cent below the baseline.
• The slight casualty rate was 32 per cent below the baseline.
• In this period the traffic has risen by an estimated 16 per cent.

So things are in fact getting better.
We have to fight this! Time to get onto writetothem

Sparticus Invented the internet

Very busy at work so another post I wrote a long time ago and never got around to posting as a reply to someone who annoyed me...

Look I'm fed up with this "we invented the internet" attitude. Lots of countries had their own nationwide computer networks, some educational, some military; it just so happens that Arpanet became the successful one.
Does it mean it was the better network? Maybe, but if Arpanet had never existed, then any of the other networks in existence in any other country could have become dominant and we'd still be surfing the net, just the underlying protocol may have been based on some ISO/OSI model instead of the IP model (for example). or on anything else any of those prototype networks used.

Maybe people feel that the US is vital to the internet? Fine unplug yourselves and see who suffers more. I'll truly miss google, wikipedia, archive.org - but life will carry on, I'll still keep sending emails to all my friends, I'll still make VoIP calls to my parents and I'll still keep getting new versions of the latest Linux distros.

I see the fact that Arpanet/TCPIP "won" as no more of a validation of the technology than VHS over betamax. Please remember that most trunk traffic still travels over ATM, and that most broadband connections run as ATM too; the link to both my place of work and my home are both IP over ATM.
An old rule always applies that given two competing products the American one will normally win - the Transputer, IBM PC, VHS etc.
On that note I'm waiting for some American company to rediscover the Transputer in the next decade and 30 years later I'll be here still online with people saying that Americans invented parallel computing like they claim they invented computers. ENIAC may have been the 1st by some definition but it was neither the first electronic computing device (Colossus) or the first stored program computer(Manchester Mark 1). It's a half way house and computers evolved - you might as well try and find when a chicken first evolved.

Not that I'm complaining of course - I'm employed by an American company, but I still find it fascinating how these things pan out.

Embryo/Abortion Rant

I wrote this a while ago as a rant after an online discussion and i never got the chance to post it. So here it is:

A human embryo has the potential to become a human being. An embryo has no claim to humanity other than the DNA/other gubbins it contains. Change the DNA for another chunk of DNA and you no longer have a human.
So does the information in the DNA count as humanity? I hope not, if we have sequenced the DNA of a human, then each copy of this I delete puts me as a murderer.

You cannot make judgement based on something's potential. The obvious example is I have the potential to be a murderer, but you don't arrest me. Any woman is equipped to be a prostitute, but you don't send her to jail.

When the day comes that we can take a computer representation of a cell and hook it up to a machine which will spin a cell from that, then every computer in the world will have the potential to be a father/mother.

Is it intelligence then? I'd argue most dogs show more intelligence than a new born baby, so why do they have different rights? How about disabled adults who either mentally or physically can't perform functions we'd expect of a human.

No, there is no scientific answer to when a human becomes a human; you might as well ask where a rainbow starts.

Weaponising Space

I'm for it.

I say this first because everyone else seems to be against it, so let me first acknowledge what I believe are the problems with weaponising space and causing a new arms race.

Valid Problems

1. It'll be expensive
2. It may cause WWIII
3. Could be very bad for diplomacy/international reputation
4. It could divert attention away from more productive developments.
   

Erm that's about it that I can think of, granted the second problem is a big worry, but MAD has worked so far...

Invalid Problems

1. Ideas about keeping space as a pristine wilderness
2. Space should be only for research and peaceful use
   

Well first off anyone who thinks the first really just does not realise how big space is, nore the concept of light speed. There will always be more wilderness.
As for the second, that's a symptom of watching too much star trek; if the singularity ever occurs then maybe, just maybe we'll be rid of wars. Until that day man will always be at war with each other.

So what do I see as the advantages of weaponising space.

1. I believe that getting the military into space is probably the quickest way to get humanity into space.
2. Space development has been lacking recently mostly because the general population asks why spend money in space. Protecting yourself or conquering others would be a good reason to.
3. Compare the merits of being the first and the last to develop a military technology.

Let's take 1 first:
I think the most important thing for humanity as a species is survival. Second I think comes quality of life. getting humanity into space will achieve both of these; maybe not in the short term, but certainly in the long term.The military is well known for throwing all resources available at an endeavour and being somewhat careless about individual human lives for the greater cause. This may be what is needed to get early space technology working.
Hopefully 2 should be obvious.
As for point 3: From machine guns, to rifle factories to atomic weapons; wouldn't you want to be among the first to do this

A final point was that for the first few countries to do it, weaponising space might be expensive, but look at how lucrative the arms trade is to Britain, France, USA, Russia...