There is a one in 75 chance that an asteroid will hit Mars in January 2008.   That probability may go down after more observations.

It wasn’t discovered until November of this year.

I recognize and acknowledge that global warming is a problem.  But if you found out that an asteroid had a 1 in 75 chance of hitting the Earth, would your top concern be your carbon footprint?

Scientists do believe that they have ways to deflect asteroids w/missile strikes, if we have 15 years notice.  I observe with some dismay that 2 months is slightly less than 15 years.

In the span of 13 years, we’ve already seen a comet hit Jupiter, and now a “fly by” (most likely) on Mars.   NASA has a theoretical program to track 90% of asteroids, but, of course, that program isn’t being funded.

So here’s the current situation - we don’t know (and will probably never know) what all is out there, and, even if we did, we’d have few options to prevent a strike unless we have 15 years advance notice.

I recognize that most people concerned by global warming have nothing but the best of intentions when they advocate that we throttle down our growth and  industry in order to live in harmony with nature.   But as I’ve said before, the asteroid that hits the Earth won’t care how pastoral our countryside is.

I’ve read arguments that the Earth and her creatures would be “better off” if humanity never existed.  Really?  It is a certainty that, absent advanced technological intervention, an asteroid will eventually hit the Earth, and extinguish most of the species on the planet.  It is a certainty that at some time in the future that the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt, and kill most of the life on the North American continent.  It is a certainty that various large slabs of islands in the  Atlantic and Pacific oceans will collapse, and send massive tidal waves to obliterate much of the coast.   It is also a certainty that eventually, absent human efforts at preservation, every species on Earth will go extinct.  How exactly would this be better for the Earth?
If we are obligated to be the stewards of the Earth and her creatures, we are also the defenders of the Earth and her creatures.   We can defend the Earth most readily by increasing our technological advances, instead of throttling them back.  And we can defend the Earth’s creatures most readily by building an effective and sustainable space colonization program and taking the animals (or at least their DNA) with us.

One in Seventy-Five…  The clock is ticking.

A commenter on a blog I read said the old chestnut:  “for the 1,257th time, someone name something new and revolutionary that’s come out of open source. Th incentive that drives creativity isn’t there. Real artists see no virtue in being starving artists.”

So I thought I would compile a list of great software projects that were built in an open-source way - i.e. not for profit, and with source that was freely shared with others.

This is just a tentative list - I’m sure there are mistakes, and please feel free to correct in the comments.  Also, if you can think of other revolutionary software, please add it.

1. Rails - combining the various aspects of web development into a seamless package was certainly revolutionary (to me).  And it was open source from the beginning.  Don’t like Rails?  Django was built the same way.
2. emacs - certainly open source, and was the first text editor that I know of that incorporated a programming language as part of its core functionality.
3. Internet News - the servers and readers were all oen source - this was the first “Internet-scale” forum
4. DNS - created by a scientist, specced via RFC and deployed freely.
5. Wiki - the original WikiWikiWeb from Ward Cunningham wasn’t open source, but it was shared and available, and he (as far as I can tell) took no compensation for it
6. IRC - was it open source?
7. Sendmail - was it revolutionary?
8. Jabber?

I look forward to your suggestions.

I’m sitting in my car, using my wireless broadband on my wife’s computer, which has been flawlessly connected for the last 3 hours, while listening to my iPod Nano through the car stereo.

Fricken Sweet

Coding Sanity reviews Microsoft’s latest OS, and gives is a great report - a welcome improvement over Windows Vista.

I haven’t upraded my game machine to Vista. I think I’ll leapfrog it and install this great new OS. I suspect it will go very, very smoothly, like I wasn’t upgrading at all!

*Edit* - must have forgotten the link earlier.

So after providing technology to make storage simple, and make setting up computers trivial, Amazon adds a database system on top.

I wonder what happens when they run out of things to virtualize?

Who would have thought that reviews of a product on Amazon would be so amusing.

Must be that dry British pen humor, not the profanity-laced, scatalogical humor of us Yanks.

http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

Via Bryan Caplan, commentary from Tyler Cowen on anti-natalism:

Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence… David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one’s life make one’s life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence… The author then argues for the ‘anti-natal’ view—that it is always wrong to have children—and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a ‘pro-death’ view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct.   (jb’s emphasis)

Sorry..  Better for whom, or what?  How can the word “better” mean anything if there are no moral actors to judge?   Does he mean “better for the Earth?”  The Earth will eventually melt into a pile of slag.  Only intelligent life, acting as moral agents can possibly prevent that.  Does he mean “Better for animals?”  Again, every fluffy bunny, every species of dog, fish, cat,cow, or woodchuck will eventually go extinct, but for the intervention of intelligent life.

Or maybe his position is more extreme - all life is suffering, all life is pain, therefore, all life (in the universe) must be destroyed, so that the amount of suffering will be decreased.   Benetar takes suffering, and places it on a pedestal, as the one thing that must be avoided at all costs.

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t strike me as  either interesting or profound.  If I said “Tickling is the one thing in the universe that must be avoided at all costs”, I could easily follow that with demands that birds be made extinct, artificial feathers destroyed and everyone’s fingers cut off, so that we could all avoid the horror of being tickled.

And everyone would simply respond with, most charitably, an incredulous stare.    I suggest the same response for Mr. Benetar’s proposal.

Very funny for those of us with scars from the last tech bubble.

I haven’t watched the video yet, so I am not commenting on that until I get the chance to see it.

*Edit* I watched the video.  It’s priceless.

One of the benefits of living and working in DC is that I now know a lot more about the layout of our nation’s capital and the surrounding area. So, for example, in Live Free or Die Hard, when I see metro trains that say “MTA”, I know that they’re not Washington’s Metro, whose logo is a big M.

Also, when I see cars driving through various streets, and see very tall skyscrapers, I know that that particular scene is also not shot in DC. I couldn’t say that every scene in “DC” was faked, but most of them were, or at least looked fake, which is probably worse.

It was a fun movie, but the over-the-top-ness of the heroic survival was fairly ridiculous, even for a movie named “Die Hard”. Also, the plot was essentially a recycling of the plot of Die Hard With a Vengeance. Mac-guy Justin Long handled himself pretty well, all things considered.

You know how sometimes you forget to do something, and then you forget that you forgot, and then you feel bad that you forgot and it just seems awkward…

Well, I wrote this just before Thanksgiving. Since it’s still the holiday season, it’s still worth saying:

• I want to thank Pamela Slim, and J Timothy King for helping inspire me to try something new
• I want to thank Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok from Marginal Revolution for providing the economic justification to try something new
• I want to thank all the good people at the Sunlight Foundation for helping introduce me to non-profits, the inner workings of democracy and most of all, their interesting points of view.
• I want to thank my wife and kids for putting up with selling the house and moving and all the strange new things that come along with it.
• I want to thank all my wife’s friends for being incredibly helpful and supportive when she was trying to get the house ready.