Imagine the future

I’ve only just heard about the latest techno-wizardry likely to hit shops in the next couple of years but what I do know is I fucking want one. It seems kind of an inevitable development thinking about it, the first step to turning us all into cyborgs but in 10 years I can seriously see everyone wearing a pair of these damn things. So Google are cooking something up at their super secret X labs where they dream up all manner of shit from space elevators to real life terminators and they’ve come up with something called Project Glass – essentially  a pair of glasses with a heads up display that can instantly access the Internet for information, make phone calls, send texts, plan routes, act as an organiser and all manner of miscellanea - view the vid for an idea.

Although it seems these aren’t quite ready for rolling out onto the market just yet, the concept is there and just seeing the concept in action is enough to already sell a product to me that hasn’t even been invented yet. But one thing is certain – this is the future!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/09/google-project-glass-augmented-reality

Anonymous on the war path

Predictably Anonymous is dissatisfied with UK government plans to spy on every single one of its citizens, taking a step back from harassing the Chinese government to harass the UK government instead.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f3384904-8186-11e1-b39c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1rUAp0Klg

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/hackers-group-anonymous-crashes-home-784250

The media gets it right again…

Interesting…

This would be a world beater if politicians could ever be convinced to fund it.

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/skylon.html

Climate change denialists

You personally may believe that no evidence exists for it but just about every serious climatologist on the planet disagrees with you,

somehow you seem to think that taking a good proportion of the carbon that has been locked up in the earth's crust over the course of millions of years of geological time as coal, oil and natural gas

and then releasing it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide over the space of a couple of centuries

whilst at the same time deforesting vast areas of the planet which soak up this carbon dioxide locking up the carbon and releasing the oxygen back into the atmosphere,

will have absolutely no effect whatsoever?

The Future is Crazy

The new emerging technology on the minds of businessmen around the world is something that has been a long long time coming. In today's world however and necessity being the mother of invention it was inevitable that it would arrive on supermarket shelves before much longer.

So we're all getting annoyed by now with the impossible spider web of wires and power lines for gadgets and electrical devices that now pervasively intrudes our lives. Probably most people hadn't even really thought about it and just generally accept it as a given but when you really think about it, it is deeply annoying having to untangle a labyrinth of wires that have gotten hopelessly mangled together somehow. And somewhat predictably a solution now exists. If I was going to be technically correct about this I would have to say that a solution has existed since the dawn of electricity - Nikola Telsa (Legend) came up with it and it was a LOT more advanced 100 years ago than it is now. Unfortunately the crazy bastard never bothered to write down how he did it so it had to be reinvented 120 years later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Wireless electricity is the future. Without a doubt it has to be the future. I could point out the massive potential problems with this new invention such as the fact that 30% of the energy gets wasted when electricity is transported through the air - adding a massive energy burden to our already troublingly overburdened civilisation. Or the fact that electromagnetic radiation travelling through the air is likely to increase the amount of radiation a person is exposed to during their lifetime and consequently increase cancer rates accordingly. But you know what - fuck it, it's cool. And therefore we should definitely have this new toy. Just imagine a world where your phone charges itself and you don't have to plug things in for them to work. Imagine no more, it's here already.

The new technology works on the principle of near-field resonant magnetic induction. Basically two electromagnets resonate at the same frequency and power is transferred wirelessly from one to the other. Interestingly enough this is exactly how Tesla said it worked shortly before he was branded a lunatic and ostracised by the scientific community. The efficiently rates claimed - 98% of power is successfully transferred. How the proximity to the power source alters this ratio I'm unsure of for now. Some of the new technologies require the charging object to be right next to the inductive power source, some allow it to work at a distance although the efficiency is obviously further decreased the further away from the power source the inductive object is.

So what does it all mean? It means the future is going to look like Minority Report. See the video below demonstrating ecoupling technology combined with electroluminescent materials to know why.

Alternative Energy?

Limitless (2011)

Got chance to watch this decidedly average Sci-Fi film the other day. Thoughts? Well it's decent and I enjoyed it a lot more than Battle: Los Angeles. The premise is also pretty clever - that premise being about a man stumbling across a drug that makes him feel smart and invulnerable (er wait... don't all drugs make you feel like that?). But in the case of this drug - NZT it actually does give him these qualities and consequently he makes the transformation from lowly writer to stock market tycoon in less than a couple of weeks. Naturally though the story isn't a simple as that because this drug has some serious side effects - like complete amnesia, psychosis, oh and it kills you if you stop taking it - a couple of dilemmas that the protagonist faces during the course of this movie. Ultimately the man - Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) manages to overcome these obstacles and we are left with a movie that is arguably pro drugs and was quite possibly funded by the pharmaceutical industry looking to sell more nootropics such as Piracetam and Adderall. But NZT, hell if I had some I'd conquer the world and you pathetic minions would have to bow before me. Time to get in touch with my dealer. The second best film I’ve seen at the cinema this year. Stars Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, Tomas Arana and Anna Friel. 7.5/10.

Viva la Revolution?

Alternative Nuclear Energy

In my last article I expressed doubts over the viability of nuclear energy to provide a stop gap measure in securing us a future with safe energy. Maybe I was too hasty. Nuclear technology exists which does provide a viable and 'safe' alternative. I use the word safe cautiously here because make no mistake this shit will still melt your skin off and cause you to puke and shit yourself to death if you come in contact with it. But this is the case with nuclear energy anyway. The main difference with the alternative source of nuclear energy - Molten Salt Reactors is that they're unlikely to explode and ejaculate copious amounts of toxic shit into the atmosphere. And this would seem to be kind of an important advantage.

Molten Salt Reactors rely on a different principle to modern nuclear reactors in that the fuel's already molten so that in itself precludes the possibility of a meltdown. But they have another advantage - they don't have to use transuranic elements such as Uranium or Plutonium for fuel. MSRs can use Thorium as part of their fuel cycle and the advantage of using this is it doesn't spontaneously fission - it needs a catalyst. So when you switch the damn thing off you don't need to wait several months for it to actually be off, it's off. The fail-safe mechanism in these reactors is one that doesn't need to be controlled by humans. If the reactor gets too hot, a plug in the base of the core melts and the molten fuel leaves the containment vessel and drops into a holding area. Once the molten fuel is separated from the catalyst - fission ceases. Essentially the reactors save themselves. These reactors also operate at normal atmospheric pressure which eliminates the possibility of a pressure explosion such as at Chernobyl or very nearly at Fukushima.

Add to this other advantages such as the fact these reactors can be used to burn up long lived radioactive waste and in themselves produce dramatically less radioactive waste (between 10 - 10,000 times less). The fact that Thorium is cheaper and far more abundant than Uranium then it would really seem to be a no brainer to use these instead. Unfortunately the technology isn't quite ready for practical application. The reason this technology wasn't developed in the first place is because it didn't provide us with an easy way to kill several hundred million people in the space of a few hours which is obviously a capability which we as a species simply couldn't live without. Traditional reactor design led the way because as a by-product it enabled the development of nuclear weapons. Using a Thorium fuel cycle makes it difficult to develop nuclear weapons because as well as them not being produced in sufficient quantities, it's difficult to chemically separate the generated isotopes of Uranium. It's still possible of course but wouldn't be an economically sound way of building an atom bomb. There are also good technical reasons why U-233 has never been used in atom bombs. And Plutonium production – forget it.

So maybe if the nuclear industry really wants a renaissance, they should follow China’s lead in developing this technology. Perhaps people would be more amenable to having an energy source that doesn’t cause total pandemonium when it goes wrong. It won’t be astronomically expensive to develop either. Just a thought. 

The Death of a Nuclear Future?

We were once promised faithfully that it would never happen again yet for some reason, quarter of a century later here we are up the same creek without a paddle. What events do I refer to? Chernobyl of course and its new baby brother – Fukushima Dai-ichi.

The facts coming out of Japan have so far been scarce from the initial denial of any kind of meltdown to the gradual admission of a partial meltdown to the admission of a partial meltdown in three reactors, to the admission they have no ability to cool the fuel whatsoever. This much was already obvious long before they admitted it for several reasons - the detection of radiometric caesium and iodine in the atmosphere indicated that radioactive material had escaped the containment vessel. The explosions were also a dead give away - the presence of hydrogen alone indicated that the zirconium casing around the fuel rods had begun to melt because they had to be hot enough to strip oxygen atoms from the steam inside the reactor through dissociation. This is what caused the hydrogen build-up in the upper part of the reactor building leading to the subsequent explosions. Initially TEPCO chose to lie about these things, either that or worse – they didn’t have a clue. One thing is so far certain – we aren’t being told the whole story. And as with all nuclear accidents it will likely take an age before we finally know the truth.

The media have in recent days been criticized for showing ‘disproportionate coverage’ of the disaster unfolding at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Especially amidst the backdrop of a humanitarian tragedy that totally eclipses it in scale. I disagree with that consensus. People across the world have been deeply worried that this could be a repeat of Chernobyl and the world in general has been spooked by the very thought of the prospect. Indeed in recent days its ghost has come back to haunt us once more. The Chernobyl disaster was ultimately a hundred times worse than the recent Earthquake in Japan. It wasn’t just a disaster either, it was a nightmare. Let's be fair about this as well - nightmare isn't even a strong enough word to describe that event. For as long as the human race exists, people will continue to pay the price for that disaster and even after we’re long gone – nature will continue to pay that price in our absence. Even though Chernobyl can only be directly connected to the deaths of 31 people due to the initial criticality event, the consequences were catastrophic. Vast tracts of land across the Ukraine and Belarus were rendered uninhabitable. Hundreds of thousands of people had to be forcibly relocated. Cities across the Ukraine and Belarus were reduced to ghost towns. Radioactive fallout contaminated land across most of Europe and the northern hemisphere. But it continues to get worse. Of the 800,000 liquidators sent into to clean up the disaster, around 100,000 are now dead with another 100,000 permanently disabled. The fallout has been responsible for innumerable health problems in the affected populations and not just from cancers, from intestinal problems, circulation problems, respiratory problems, endocrine problems and autoimmune diseases. Many of the people suffering will ultimately die from exposure to the fallout, numbers now estimated to be over a million people since 1986. The economic cost of the disaster alone is in the realm of at least several hundred billion dollars. Then we have the the massive number of birth defects and stillborn children. The deep psychological scarring of its victims. The 200,000 women forced to have abortions. The farmland deemed unfit to grow produce. The mass slaughter of irradiated livestock. The pollution of the water table in affected areas. The list just goes on and on and on. The accident at Chernobyl didn’t just kill people, it destroyed their souls.

So 25 years later had we really learned anything. It turns out not. The entire world was gearing up for a nuclear renaissance, the horrors of Chernobyl having faded sufficiently from the public consciousness. With the threat of global warming, our dependence on middle-eastern oil imports, safe nuclear power was supposed to be our salvation and now the dream lies in ruins. Governments were convinced that nuclear energy was somehow now safer than it had been in that much simpler time only a generation ago. Then all of a sudden events in Japan threw a massive spanner into the works. Now granted it was on the part of the Japanese an act of extreme stupidity to not only build one of these reactors on seismically active ground but also near a stretch of coastline guaranteed to be hit by tsunamis. Their hubris and faith in technology has bitten them hard. But it was a faith shared by the rest of the world. We have been repeatedly assured by our governments over the years that it could never happen again, that reactor design in the west is much safer, that meltdowns cannot happen now. That is correct apparently, until they do. So now the pro-nuclear lobby has naturally got to change its tune a little and point out that in Britain we’re not on a fault line. That’s correct so therefore it’s safe, I mean it’s not like there are any other threats to our country that would see a nuclear reactor as being a good target now is it? Not like terrorism for instance.

One of the reasons this accident has the world on edge is because it is so reminiscent of Chernobyl. The parallels are obvious. Granted I doubt the radiological release from the plant will be anything close but the rest of it has the same modus operandi. The evacuations, the radiation warnings, the exclusion zone, the explosions, the fires, the panic, even the pictures of the damaged reactor buildings look the same. The initial surge in radiation was detected hundreds of miles away from the Fukushima site, similarly the first clue that the Soviet Union had a serious nuclear problem came from Sweden. After the Chernobyl accident, the Soviet authorities went into a state of denial. Currently the Japanese authorities are in a state of denial. Initially the Soviet government lied about the seriousness of the Chernobyl incident, the Japanese authorities are currently lying about the seriousness of the Fukushima incident. I think I may be doing the Japanese a disservice here though, they are dealing with the problem a hundred times better than the Soviet Union dealt with Chernobyl. The Japanese at least admitted they had a serious problem and began evacuating straight away unlike the Soviets who tried at first to make-believe that nothing was wrong. That’s not to pour scorn on the bravery of the Soviets who originally dealt with Chernobyl, each one of them tried to rectify the situation knowing with absolute certainty they were going to die. In the same vain and before the eyes of the world the faceless Fukushima 50 has been used to personify the disaster in Japan – giving us a real life fairy-tale to believe in as they embark on a suicide mission to fight their own nuclear nightmare against insurmountable odds. That sounds sickeningly pretentious but I like it, it’s poetic. These men took on the mission to cool the reactors knowing full well it could mean their lives and in doing so they have won the admiration of the world.

Ultimately the problem with nuclear energy is it's a lethally toxic technology. It wasn’t developed as a technology of peace, it was developed as a weapon of war that has since been adapted for peaceful purposes. In so doing so we created our own metaphorical Frankenstein and when this stuff goes wrong it goes very badly wrong – people will pay the price… forever. We’re kind of like children playing with fire and every now again we will get burnt. In order for us to fully utilise this technology we should really need to be assured that it's 100% safe but as the events at Fukushima illustrate, no matter how many safety measures, false assurances and propaganda we are given, there is no such thing. Pro-nuclear activists will nevertheless continue to insist this technology is safe. Let me give them a clue, it isn't and it never will be. The spin they’ve tried to put on this event has been interesting – spin like ‘things are under control’ and ‘the radiation is not a threat’. The problem I have here is do they seriously believe that anyone will ever believe that explosions and fires anywhere near the vicinity of a nuclear reactor is an acceptable state of affairs? The question as to whether this technology is safe has already been answered, it was answered at Windscale, it was answered at Three Mile Island, it was answered at Chernobyl and now it has been answered at Fukushima. But this isn’t the question that really needs to be asked is it? Because surely by now we know the answer. The question here isn't a question of whether we should use nuclear energy as it is a question of whether it's worth the price we could potentially pay. Without nuclear we can likely kiss goodbye to the electronic utopia we've built for ourselves because there simply isn’t another alternative. Our technological civilisation is built on a thirst for energy that can’t be quenched any other way. Renewable energy will never cover the void and oil as well as not lasting forever comes mainly from countries we simply cannot trust. The latter comes with massive environmental problems of its own. People could I suppose sacrifice the luxuries but no government on Earth is going to make that call and I can’t see the world turning back to candlelight somehow so regardless of the political fallout from Fukushima, nuclear is here to stay. As an added bonus we’ll get plenty of reassurance from governments that they’ve run numerous tests on our reactors and that nothing can possibly go wrong with them. Which is obviously quite comforting until you realise that man made disasters don’t occur because of what we thought of, they occur mainly because of what we didn’t think of. If we get away with one calamity every twenty years which seems to be the going rate, we may only be due two more before more practical power sources are developed. As to where and when those calamities strike we leave that to chance.

This incident has at the very least highlighted the desperate need for openness, honesty and transparency in the wake of a nuclear accident. The public need to know exactly where they stand so they can make informed decisions. This obviously can’t happen if a private company is trying to protect its own financial interests. Perhaps the IAEA will reach some sort of agreement about this in the coming months. If the nuclear beast is here to stay, we deserve the right to know when we’ve got to run away from it. My own preference would be this... invest heavily in nuclear fusion. No matter how expensive it is, ultimately it buys us an alternative. Convincing people that it’s safe is going to be tricky given how tarnished the word nuclear has become but sooner or later we really need to crack this problem because a safe sustainable future depends on it. For the size of the economic hit the world would have to take if we ever had to evacuate a city the size of Tokyo, this seems to me to be a more acceptable gamble. For the cost of one Chernobyl, we could have had a limitless clean environmentally friendly energy source. But alas it’s not like humans to exercise that kind of foresight.

The Rise of Anonymous

I was thinking about writing a legends article for this group because in many ways they are, however I reserved judgement this time because they don’t quite fit the bill. In fact they don’t really fit into any category because their motivations… aren’t individual ones. The only people who haven’t heard of this group by now probably have little understanding of the Internet and indeed the virtual world in general. So  for those readers I’ll try and introduce the idea of exactly who or what anonymous is.

Anonymous is arguably the world’s first ever superconsciousness, a gestalt entity comprised of hackers and cyber activists from around the world. The entity has no leadership, no evident direction  or intent but nevertheless acts with a high degree of unison when trying to achieve certain indescript goals. They are in a way an example of an anarchic, digitized global brain and act as a cohesive entity in much the same way a flock of birds acts as a cohesive entity. And this is interesting because they are an example of a true anarchy that actually works. The name “Anonymous” has since become used as a mass noun to describe the group. This name arose from the image posting boards of sites like 4chan and 7chan whereby every poster on those boards is not required to register and so posts under the moniker anonymous.

They have been described by the media in various ways – most notably as hackers on steroids and cyber terrorists treating the Internet as though it were a real life video game and their prowess is certainly powerful in this arena. Through their collective actions, the organisation has now become powerful enough to shake governments or at the very least be a major pain in the ass. For instance during the 2010 – 2011 Tunisian protests, Anonymous assisted the Tunisian people by delivering DDoS attacks against 8 Tunisian websites taking them offline. Anonymous then proceeded to attack Egyptian government websites during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The group is currently involved in on-going operations  in Libya and Iran and aims to prevent those countries from censoring information from the Internet as well as disrupting government misinformation. I pointed that the Internet was a crucial factor in my  earlier article about the Middle-East. Anonymous are an instrumental part of that factor. The group has also conducted other major operations against countries including Operation Titstorm in which they attacked the government of Australia over its proposed censorship of the Internet.

Anonymous are perhaps most well known for the now infamous project Chanology which saw them declare all out war against the Church of Scientology. The impetus for the project was supposedly the church issuing a copyright claim against a leaked video of Tom Cruise acting like a complete fucknut but more likely Anonymous were just beginning to recognise their potential and were looking for a quarry worthy of their mettle. Chanology saw the group identify with a purpose which has gone on to become the core tenet of their loose ideology – that of preventing Internet censorship, which they now seek to crush in all its forms. The initial salvos of Chanology began on January 21st 2008 and saw multiple DDoS attacks against Scientology websites, massive numbers of prank phone calls and black faxes. It wasn’t long before the activities of anonymous drew the attention of the fabled ‘wise beard man’ who is apparently the only person anonymous have ever listened to. He cautioned them against conducting illegal activities against the church and said they would be far more effective if they protested peacefully. Beginning in February 2008, members of anonymous protested in more than 93 cities world wide all wearing masks from the film V for Vendetta to protect their identities.

The goal of project Chanology

The first message from wise beard man

In recent months, the group has launched attacks against MasterCard, PayPal, Amazon and other organisations who supported the oppression of wikileaks as well as sought vengeance for the perceived set up of Julian Assange (legends article to come). Anonymous has been noted by some observers to be the successor to the wikileaks crown and if that happens, there’ll be pretty much fuck all anyone can do about it especially in light of their attacks against the bank of America and the computer security organisation HBGary Federal - the company favoured by the US government for keeping its information intelligence secure.  The Anonymous attack on HBGary Federal humiliated the company causing massive damage to its public image. Hacktivists working for Anonymous managed to steal a large amount of sensitive data from the company including thousands of emails and data stored on its servers. They also hijacked the company’s website and posted the message “You brought this upon yourself. Let us teach you a lesson you’ll never forget: Don’t mess with Anonymous”. The stolen data exposed company activities including a planned smear campaign against wikileaks and the data was later published on P2P networks effectively destroying their public reputation. The company has since failed to meet revenue projections and the parent company HBGary Inc has begun sales negotiations. Operation Leakspin similarly involved wikileaks and took a second look through intelligence data released on wikileaks for potentially overlooked cables / information and the further promotion of that material on the Internet.

Below: Messages from Anonymous

 

Is this group good or bad? I’m not entirely sure, some of their actions are good but some of the actions attributed to them whether through disinformation or because of the actions of some anonymous members are not. In this respect they would have be classified as a neutral force in the world, the collective unconsciousness of the people who comprise that group – a chaotic neutral force. In their wake they leave pandemonium and in general scare the shit out of anyone who ends up on the wrong side of them. It’s interesting but it seems now a virtual certainty that groups like this will soon begin to seriously influence the course of human history and that for me at least is a fascinating development. In the age of the Internet we probably should have seen something like this coming yet for some reason we just didn’t. The rise of anonymous was to some extent an unexpected side-effect of the information age although the enjoyably terrible film Hackers did to some extent predict something like this. And as for the future, well with digital native generation now reaching adulthood expect to see  a lot more weird shit like this going on in the future.

Below: Members of Anonymous protest