Many big things writ small
On the better to hit-and-run post than not post at all principle:
Bowie! I have a secret hope that 'Blackstar Dead Bowie' is not the last phase of reinvention but the latest. Although it would be a Dick Move of massive proportions to his many fans, among whom I am but a minor dabbler. The timing of the album release seems too neat to be coincidence. But of course that's also entirely consistent with the facts as we know them. Alas.
Problematic, yes. Also made the B word trendy. I like Evan Davis' theory that he caused the global financial crisis, not by inventing securitisation, but by making it trendy. Pretty good going for an autodidact with a single O-level in Art.
Future! Like many people [citation needed], since I was very young I have had secret protocol so I could authenticate messages from my future self, or from perfect clones, should that ever become possible. But it completely failed to take in to account the fact that brain-reading technology alarmingly plausible, whereas time travel is pretty convincingly impossible.
Politics! Jeremy Corbyn might surprise electorally in May. All the political establishment predictions about him (won't get on the ballot, won't win the leadership, will lead party to dismal result in Oldham byelection) have been spectacularly wrong. On the other hand, the polls of the general electorate (rather than the Labour party membership) certainly line up with the doomsayers. I've given up prognosticating on this one having been proven wrong. But I don't believe it's as certain doom as most mainstream commentators, who were just as wrong as I was.
Politics! What if Trump wins? Relatedly, the ability to influence humans (which seems to be only very vaguely related to the empirical state of the world) is more powerful than the ability to influence anything else (which is very strongly related to the empirical state of the world). This is essentially my long-standing view that people who make really good deals will always do better than people who make really good things, because the former will get a good deal from the latter. I'm pretty sure this is probably not a good thing.
Doom! Climate change is on us, right now. The floods are big in our minds at the moment here, but of course, this particular episode of exceptional weather can't be definitively attributed to it. Our ability to make good decisions about adaptation does not look promising: we have already wasted shedloads of money by failing to pour money in to flood defences, adaptation, and mitigation at a time when interest rates are exceptionally low. But floods in a remote corner of the NW of Europe are small beer for humanity. The big news is massive impacts on our food supply. This is much more precarious and complex a system than most people appreciate.
Eugenics! Germline genome editing is terrible, awful, massively risky, a moral minefield, and strongly linked to some very horrible stuff, and not just historically. But I think we are probably going to have to go there, now the tools are opening up (PGD, CRISPR and related functions). Not least for selection pressure reasons: now we can survive and thrive despite minor misfeatures in our DNA, much of the selection pressure against them is lifted. But also because we can alleviate much suffering.
Germs! If I were advising a young microbiologist or research clinician I would tell them to get in to human microbiota research. Everyone knows we have a growing problem (sorry) with the antibiotic window closing, but I have a hunch that we will look back on our current approaches to managing bacteria on and around our bodies with the horror that we now have for bloodletting and pre-anaesthetic surgery. There's circumstantial evidence for a surprising number of chronic and apparently unmanageable conditions being amenable to much better treatment.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/309701.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.
Bowie! I have a secret hope that 'Blackstar Dead Bowie' is not the last phase of reinvention but the latest. Although it would be a Dick Move of massive proportions to his many fans, among whom I am but a minor dabbler. The timing of the album release seems too neat to be coincidence. But of course that's also entirely consistent with the facts as we know them. Alas.
Problematic, yes. Also made the B word trendy. I like Evan Davis' theory that he caused the global financial crisis, not by inventing securitisation, but by making it trendy. Pretty good going for an autodidact with a single O-level in Art.
Future! Like many people [citation needed], since I was very young I have had secret protocol so I could authenticate messages from my future self, or from perfect clones, should that ever become possible. But it completely failed to take in to account the fact that brain-reading technology alarmingly plausible, whereas time travel is pretty convincingly impossible.
Politics! Jeremy Corbyn might surprise electorally in May. All the political establishment predictions about him (won't get on the ballot, won't win the leadership, will lead party to dismal result in Oldham byelection) have been spectacularly wrong. On the other hand, the polls of the general electorate (rather than the Labour party membership) certainly line up with the doomsayers. I've given up prognosticating on this one having been proven wrong. But I don't believe it's as certain doom as most mainstream commentators, who were just as wrong as I was.
Politics! What if Trump wins? Relatedly, the ability to influence humans (which seems to be only very vaguely related to the empirical state of the world) is more powerful than the ability to influence anything else (which is very strongly related to the empirical state of the world). This is essentially my long-standing view that people who make really good deals will always do better than people who make really good things, because the former will get a good deal from the latter. I'm pretty sure this is probably not a good thing.
Doom! Climate change is on us, right now. The floods are big in our minds at the moment here, but of course, this particular episode of exceptional weather can't be definitively attributed to it. Our ability to make good decisions about adaptation does not look promising: we have already wasted shedloads of money by failing to pour money in to flood defences, adaptation, and mitigation at a time when interest rates are exceptionally low. But floods in a remote corner of the NW of Europe are small beer for humanity. The big news is massive impacts on our food supply. This is much more precarious and complex a system than most people appreciate.
Eugenics! Germline genome editing is terrible, awful, massively risky, a moral minefield, and strongly linked to some very horrible stuff, and not just historically. But I think we are probably going to have to go there, now the tools are opening up (PGD, CRISPR and related functions). Not least for selection pressure reasons: now we can survive and thrive despite minor misfeatures in our DNA, much of the selection pressure against them is lifted. But also because we can alleviate much suffering.
Germs! If I were advising a young microbiologist or research clinician I would tell them to get in to human microbiota research. Everyone knows we have a growing problem (sorry) with the antibiotic window closing, but I have a hunch that we will look back on our current approaches to managing bacteria on and around our bodies with the horror that we now have for bloodletting and pre-anaesthetic surgery. There's circumstantial evidence for a surprising number of chronic and apparently unmanageable conditions being amenable to much better treatment.
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/309701.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.