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Manned Space Exploration Is Bullshit
Posted in Tech
on April 21st, 2012 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Science Fiction,
Science,
Energy,
Space
What made me think about this was seeing Elon Musk interviewed on the Colbert Report the other week. He said that he wanted to get into "important problems", as he said later, "One was the Internet, one was clean energy, and one was space," to quote Wikipedia, which is just about a direct quote of his comments on the show. Musk is the CEO of SpaceX, a private space exploration company, as well as Tesla Motors, makers of what is considered the world's first modern, commercially viable electric car. He made his fortune from PayPal. So he succeeded in having a foot in all three camps, but in choosing space exploration as the next place to focus his energy, I feel like he chose a vanity project over doing something really important. Space exploration is just not important to the future of humanity, and manned space exploration is just a gigantic waste.
Pharmaceutical Quality System Software Design
Posted in Tech
on March 3rd, 2012 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
jQuery,
AJAX,
Web Design,
Django
I don't know much, or anything, about how software for pharmaceutical quality systems is designed, so this is a speculative article about how I think it might be done, and I may not come up with any good answers about how they do it after defining the requirements. So this is just for the mental exercise. By "quality systems," I mean computer systems that replace paper documents in a traditional quality system. So, for example, out of spec investigation reports, inspection reports, nonconformance, deviations and so on. LIMS systems expand this to include absolutely all raw data. All modern computerized quality systems evolved from paper-based systems from before the computer era, and in my view the place to start is to examine the specifications and capabilities of the paper system and see how it can be replicated in a computer-based system. I'm imagining this as if I wanted to get into this business, how would I make the product, although that's not something I seriously intend.
The Limits of Climate Disaster
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on February 27th, 2012 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball,
Science,
Energy,
Climate Change
The record will show that I am certainly not a climate change denier. However, I think that many scenarios of global warming make unwarranted assumptions about the rate of increase of green house gas levels in the atmosphere and hence don't paint a realistic picture of the future. A prime example of this genre, but by no means exceptional, is Under a Green Sky by Peter D.Ward, which I've just finished reading for the second time. I don't have any problem with the greenhouse extinction theory he describes, which is brilliant and convincing, but I have a problem with the way he extrapolates it into the future.
A Relevant Program for the Left
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on February 21st, 2012 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Politics,
Energy
The Left has not been really relevant in a long time. The Left has been completely routed since the fall of Communism, impotent and pushed into niches on the edges of society with no popular appeal. Contrasted with a potent and virile (if increasingly vile and loathsome) Right, the Right's accusations of milquetoast centrist politicians like Obama having an "extreme Left" agenda is bitterly amusing. The closest things we have seen to a resurgence of the Left as a political force with mainstream political relevance has been anti-globalization protests, which have drawn mostly disgust from the broader public who are uncomprehending and indifferent to the movement's beliefs and goals. In fact, even these resurgences are plagued by a perception and/or reality that they are united by nothing more than a common spirit and have no coherent ideology or program. However, I can think of at least one coherent and plausible program from a mainstream perspective that could be proposed based on an analysis of the anti-globalization Left.
Natural Is Not Good
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on October 31st, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Gay Stuff,
Science,
Politics
There is a series of articles I want to write on a variety of topics, if I ever get around to it, and they all sort of need this article as a basic underpinning. Rather than make the argument over and over, I would like to make it in one place and refer back to it. This point has been made by many other people many times before, but it seems to run very much counter to many popular ideologies, so it bears repeating: just because something is natural, doesn't make it good. A lot of natural things are bad, even evil. And a lot of unnatural things are good. Goodness itself is somewhat unnatural. Basing your ideology on arguments about what is natural and what isn't with the underlying subtext that natural is good is only setting yourself up for a fall as our knowledge about nature evolves.
"Ethical Oil" by Ezra Levant
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on September 4th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Reviews,
Politics,
Energy
This weekend I read the book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands by Ezra Levant. I have complicated feelings about Ezra Levant, and I was certainly of two minds about buying this book. On one hand, it's an interesting topic. On the other hand, it's Ezra Levant, someone who I view as trying to inject the Canadian body politic with the same poison that's killing the United States an inch at a time à la Fox News, and that's not something I want to support financially. In Levant's favour, when it comes to the civil liberties and journalistic freedoms which make public dissent possible, Ezra is not just a cynical ideologue playing for his team first, last and only; he is the real deal, willing to stick up for anyone's rights, even people he doesn't agree with. What clinches it for me was the fact that he was the only person with a media outlet (when he ran the Western Standard magazine) who had the sheer balls to publish the Danish "Mohammed Cartoons." Furthermore, he was hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission as a consequence of doing so, winding up out of pocket something like a hundred grand to defend himself, and succeeded in staring them down. It is ultimately in honour of that swinging pair and that single, decisive act to defend freedom of speech in Canada from religious oppression that I threw a few bucks his way, and now a few links, too, via giving my impressions of his book.
Cultural Change Is Slowing Down
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on July 30th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball,
Science Fiction
Earlier, I blogged on my predictions for technological progress, with an angle on the implications for science fiction writing. My basic thesis is that writers in most times are guilty of extrapolating the notion of progress from their own time. Pre-nineteenth-century authors would generally extrapolate technological progress flatly, or shallowly, if it occurred to them to anticipate it at all. Nineteenth and early twentieth century authors perceived the rapid rate of progress in their time but extrapolated it linearly, tending to undershoot many aspects of the actual progress which occurred. And mid-twentieth-century to twenty-first century authors have tended to extrapolate the apparently exponential progress of our own time and overshoot our actual progress (i.e., "Where is my flying car?"). I was lately struck by the impression that the same thing seems to have happened with the way cultural change is depicted and anticipated.
Synthetic Fuels
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on May 8th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball,
Energy
Human survival at our present population level absolutely requires vast reserves of energy, to produce and transport food for our immense population if for no other reason. Particularly if we want to maintain anything like a comfortable and pleasant lifestyle for significant numbers of people, affordable and plentiful energy is a must. While there is a lunatic fringe in geology which proposes that oil is being continuously generated in the earth by microorganisms and essentially limitless, and others who favour an abiogenic origin of petroleum and much higher reserves available than conventional geology predicts, the safe money is on the hypothesis that fossil fuels are a finite resource, and that further, in the case of conventional oil, we are actually at or near a peak in production. Hence, curiosity about what, if anything, humanity will do when fossil fuels become scarce enough that running our civilization on them is prohibitively expensive leads one to the consideration of synthetic fuels.
Jumpy Web Pages and AJAX
Posted in Tech
on April 28th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
AJAX,
Web Design
Go to www.cbc.ca/news - one of the things you will notice is that after the page loads, AJAX elements are continuously loading which causes bits of the page to jump around. This can result in you clicking on a link you didn't intend as the page jumps around under your cursor if you are not content to wait for all the AJAX to load, and in attempts to scroll the page being very choppy and unpleasant. I'm only using CBC as an example - a lot of AJAX heavy pages do this. I submit that this is an example of bad use of AJAX and bad design overall, as it irritates the user and makes a worse user experience. Proposed rule: When using AJAX to load content into a web page, reserve room for that content in the page's CSS and do not allow it to shove bits of the page around as it loads unless you have a damn good reason to.
Bring on the Coalition
Posted in Personal Miscellany
on April 20th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Politics
In the current Canadian election, the Conservatives have been using the word "coalition" as a scare word, and the opposition have been obligingly playing along by ducking for cover and disavowing any intention of forming a coalition. Well, let's take the scare off.