On Geoengineering

Cartoonist Stephanie McMillian of the strip Code Green has a criticism of the effort that I and others have put into geoengineering the earth:
Well, I highly doubt that I'd see millions for geoengineering, or for that matter, turn a profit at all. As for mastery over the earth, I'd argue that we've had that since we managed to figure out fire. I do agree that reducing emissions in the first place is the most ideal solution, but there's a catch.
Specifically, reducing emissions would require an unprecedented amount of cooperation, which is unlikely to be forthcoming, given what people believe. I live in a region not only riddled with global warming denial, but the belief in abiotic oil -- the belief that oil doesn't come from the fossilized remains of things dead for eons, but instead is generated in the mantle and bubbles up, due to handwave handwave god handwave handwave.
Since these people do not believe that global warming is even happening, they are unwilling to make any changes to their lifestyle, energy use, or anything else, in order to resolve what they regard as a non-issue. I have tried to convince them, but they have largely been unwilling to listen. Psychology studies suggest that they are basically un-convincable as they have made this a tribalist issue, in which they have largely defined themselves as not the kind of person who believes. And as for the facts, the facts be damned. If chemistry and physics shows that this is happening, then by jingo, chemistry and physics must clearly be socialist plots.
Since they can't be convinced, the next step would be to try and organize to defeat them politically, which would also be insanely difficult, as they are a very entrenched interest group with the backing of at least 40% of the electorate. We couldn't force it without effectively having a brutal second American civil war, likely to pull in and destabilize other countries as well.
Video blogger Hank Green once lamented that the copyright solution that Youtube, the company that he must work with on a daily basis, does not use the best possible solution for the conflict between people wanting to upload videos that may contain additional copyrighted work (such as someone else's music in the soundtrack), but instead the most possible solution. Similarly, I think that geoengineering is, at this point, the most possible solution, as I do not require universal cooperation to make it happen. It does not challenge the deniers, who are unlikely to even notice.
However, one thing that emission efficiency that she advocates would give us is that it would enable us to geoengineer less. The more carbon we have to yank out of the atmosphere, the more extreme the measures that we will have to resort to in order to actually make it happen. The more trees you can plant, the less I have to feed the ocean. The more you can reduce your use of gas-burning cars, coal-derived electricity, and cement, the less I have to dim the atmosphere to protect against the most catastrophic effects. The more you can use organically farmed produce instead of factory farmed meat, the fewer artificial trees I will have to plant in the desert.
Ultimately, I'm interested in geoengineering to give us a better world than the one nature gave us. A world that has space for both the cities that help us get what we want and need, and the nature that we admire so much. And with practice, I'd like to use what we learn from doing this to turn Mars from a frozen dried rock into a lush world with many human cities, and Venus from a scorching hellish world into a new paradise. And someday when the sun dies, I'd like us to be able to move out into the universe, carrying with us the gifts of the earth, who will continue to live on in a new world, perhaps one not yet born.

Reactionless EM drive

Recently, a Chinese physicist claimed to have invented something that was previously only science fiction. I'm going to have to explain. Most of our motion is thanks to Newton's 3rd law, which states that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. In other words, to move forward, something else must be pushed backwards. When I walk, or drive, or take a train, my shoes or the vehicle are pushing the earth backward, to push me forward. The earth is pushed back a negligible amount. This is bad news for rocketry, as there is now a tyranny of fuel requirements. In order for the rocket to move, it must eject fuel. The fuel has weight. More weight means less thrust for any particular expenditure of fuel. The rocket must be super powerful to move both itself, and the fuel required to move it, which requires still more fuel (because the additional fuel has mass, causing additional inertia). So science fiction writers proposed the reactionless drive, in which no fuel is ejected. Instead, energy is inputted into the system, and somehow directly transferred into motion. This way any energy, such as solar power, nuclear power, or other systems that don't involve a constant stream of exhaust, could keep the rocket moving. The rocket would be much lighter, and thus easier to launch, maneuver, and power. The EM drive is, if the reporting about it is correct, exactly that reactionless drive. Microwaves are bounced around in a container, imparting their energy in the desired direction of motion. Microwaves have essentially zero mass, and can be produced by electrical activity. Since electricity can be generated by all kinds of systems, any of these systems can power the rocket. The drive as described now is not very efficient. Only 2% of the inputted energy becomes motion, the rest becomes heat, noise, and other wasted energy. This drive could not launch a rocket from the earth's surface, and would only really be useful for a rocket that is already in space. However, we can expect refinement of the device as time goes on. And someday, in the distant future, a spacecraft will launch, unfurl its solar panels, and use a reactionless drive like the EM drive to speed it on its way to a distant star. A laser system in solar orbit is tracking the system and providing a steady steam of power. The craft accelerates, going faster and faster until it is traveling at a large percentage of the speed of light. After years of accelerating, it then reverses the process, slowing down until it arrives at a planet, orbiting the distant star. It then deploys its payload. Perhaps this is a scientific probe, to bring data of this distant world to scientists on earth. Perhaps this is a colony constructor, bringing a human colony to a distant world. Perhaps it is something that I can't even conceive of yet. But whatever it is, it will be glorious.

Scale

I was recently fooling around with Wolfram Alpha, especially in regards to the whole feed the oceans thing I wanted to do. The following preposterous things were discovered:

• The cost would be about $100 million for the first run, then $50 million after that
• Getting the carbon levels down to the way they were when I was a child would triple the biosphere
• Reversing the carbon to pre-industrial levels would increase it to ten times

These numbers give me a headache. By tripling the biosphere, I mean that imagine every fish there is in the world. Now imagine three times as many. Three times as many seagulls. Three times as many whales. Three times as many squids. Three times as many sea cucumbers. And sooner or later, it works back to the land, and you have three times as many crows, and three times as many snakes, and three times as many owls, and mice, and cows.

Meanwhile for me, an unexpected expense that came up that amounted to my entire paycheck for a two-week period threw everything through a loop for a month.

The big numbers are discouraging, but the journey of a million miles begins with a single step. Even stopping things from getting worse makes it that much easier to get around to making things better.

A critical shortage

Recently we have run out of a critical supply. No, there's still enough oil for the moment, the electric grid is working fine, at least in my area of the world, and there's no shortage of food where distribution is not being deliberately sabotaged. We're short of IP addresses.
When the current familiar IP scheme that you're used to was invented in 1981, networked computers were kind of rare. It was though that the 4 billion addresses possible under the system could never possibly be used up, since networked computers were primarily owned by governments and major educational institutions. In the early days, addresses were handed out like candy, with groups getting a class A (everything starting with one particular number, like all addresses starting with 12".) all to themselves just because. In addition, the entire 127 block (from 127.0.0.1 to 127.255.255.255) were all allocated to "loopback" meaning "Don't actually use the network because it's right in this computer right here." You should only need one address for that.
Later, when more and more countries were going online, it became apparent that since there were 5 billion people in the world, who all wanted to go online, and only 4 billion possible addresses, that something would have to give. More justification had to be given to be assigned large blocks of addresses instead of small ones.
This was then made worse by devices, as well as individual people and servers, also wanting IP addresses for projects like an Internet-connected refrigerator. (The refrigerator can report its state to, say, the grocery store, so instead of you ordering milk, the refrigerator does it for you.)
By last year, justification had to be given to get any sort of IP address at all. Groups with large allocations were asked to give them back. This faired poorly -- generally the response was to come up with dumber and dumber schemes to "prove" why ownership of their entire allocation was "necessary." Some organizations did in fact give their blocks back, most notably Stanford University.
So next month, we run out completely. If you want to go online -- well, too bad, all slots are full. Now what?
Thankfully, this whole thing was seen well in advance, and a new specification, IPv6 was written in 1998. (version 5 was a beta that turned out to not be very useful.) IPv6 increased the address size by four times, which due to the way that computers stores numbers, exponentially increases the possible addresses. IPv6 has enough addresses to give every atom in the solar system, if not the visible universe, its own unique address. I won't say that running out is impossible -- I suppose that in the deep future we could develop some sort of teleportation and quantum entanglement technology that makes us have a galaxy-spanning empire of hexadecitellions of people, but it won't happen anytime soon unless we're REALLY stupid about how we allocate addresses.
To use IPv6, your operating system has to support it, your software has to support it, and your ISP has to support it. Generally the las step is the sticking point. My company offers browsing customers a hybrid stack, where you have an IPv6 address, but IPv4-only websites will see you as this one address that the ISP has reserved. That address is a node that understands both protocols, and can route between the two.
China is the most excited by this news, as when IPv4 was first written, most of China didn't have electricity, much less computers, and so they were allocated extremely few IP addresses. Since pretty much everyone in China wants to go online, they need to go IPv6, or it's just not going to happen.
Everyone should try to go to IPv6, but there are some transition costs, and I think we're going to have to struggle with it for quite a while, and the pain is higher because we waited so long.

Technology Sociology

Yesterday, during my work break, I learned of a cool thing, and a tragic thing. The cool thing is that a young father, wanting to share his love of the Zelda series of video games with his daughter, has been reading the text for her. As the daughter would prefer that her avatar in video games be female, he has been changing the references to the hero, Link, being a boy, to being a girl. To preserve this once she does learn to read, he hex edited the rom and re-burned it with the references all changed. Some awkwardness ensued, as all text had to remain the exact same length, lest all pointers thereafter become wrong, corrupting the entire ROM. Link is ambiguous looking enough so that this works out. At first, the comments that the father received were admiring, especially from young women who wished that they could have enjoyed media in this way. However, after the blog entry had been up for about a day, suddenly a storm of people came in infuriated that he altered the original game, feeling that he was somehow ruining it. A veritable torrent of rants, whines, and complaints that he was infringing Nintendo's copyright ensued. Perhaps these people were trolling, or perhaps they felt that any modification of their favorite thing detracted from it, even hypothetically, but it did make me wonder one thing about the world of technology. Is the world of video games and computers sexist? I do admit that there were only four people in my graduated class who were female...and none of them graduated as a computer scientist. All of them switched to math or other related majors. None of them really explained why, but when I look around, I suspect it's the culture. Computer science has been so male dominated for so long that a fraternity-esque "dudebro" culture that's as disconcerting for an average women as a knitting group consisting primarily of bitterly divorced mothers would be for an average man dominates the scene.

Some pundits posit that this doesn't really matter, but I think it does. Many of the most important pioneers in computer science have been women, such as the very first programmer ever, Ada Lovelace, or the inventor of higher level languages, Admiral Hopper. Other fields also had problems of a sexist culture, such as medicine, and they resolved it by treating sexist behavior as completely unacceptable. I see no reason why computer science can't do the same.

Holographic Universe

So I've seen in several places that a large group of scientists are talking to the press about the possibility that the entire universe may be some sort of hologram or simulation.   Amateur philosophers quickly run to their armchairs to talk about what this means, so I think I need to weigh in as well.
Holography comes from greek words meaning "whole image."  It's a way of recording something 3 dimensional on a 2d surface.   The typical holograms that we interact with day to day are made by shining a laser off the object to record onto film.   The film then develops a complicated photograph that, when that same laser is shined back on it, reproduces a ghostly 3d image of the original subject.
A similar idea floated in philosophy is that the universe is a simulation, or a dream.   These ideas are hardly new -- most Hindu sects were proposing this well over 3 thousand years ago.   Other religions like Buddhism and Christian Science also are very attached to the idea that the universe is a dream or in some other way not the true objective reality.
So, if the universe is some sort of hologram, what would it mean?

Well, for starters, what is it encoded on?   Could we change this encoding?   More importantly, could we change a small part of this encoding without screwing everything else up?  If so...free planets for everyone!

Suddenly huge amounts of physics would cease to be relevant, as we could screw around with the original medium to travel faster than light, reverse entropy, and other patent nonsense.

If not...well, it's an interesting idea, but with no practical implication to our lives, it's relegated to the realms of philosophy to be endlessly argued about by various bizarre factions.

On a similar note, if the universe was some sort of simulation, I think I'd use my programming knowledge to cheat like crazy:

struct wallet{
   *plasticrectangle creditcards[8];
   *paperrectangles money;
   *plasticrectangle id;
   *foldedpaper carinsurance;
}

money=1000000000000000;
}

Whereupon my wallet promptly explodes due to Pauli principle violations and I use the proceeds to buy a new wallet, house, car, and secret laboratories in Tahiti, Hawaii, the moon, and Mars.

This could also be used to teleport things and people:

struct location
{
float x;
float y;
float z;
}

home.location=self.location(x), self.location(y), self.location(z);

I could now arbitrarily teleport myself home:

self.location=home;

I guess what I'm trying to say is that these ideas are interesting, if a little impractical.

Curing AIDS

Since it first appeared in America in 1985, there has been an intensive amount of interest in a treatment of some sort of the Auto ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome, or AIDS.   Other countries may have been interested when first exposed as well.  And according to Slashdot, we may now have it.   Supposedly, 3 people have been completely cured of the disease, which was previously minimally treatable and guaranteed fatal.
This is still tentative and prone to additional testing, since case #1 apparently has some radical differences with cases #2 and 3, covered in the article.   The theory relies upon bone-marrow transfer immunity.   When you receive a bone-marrow transplant, you inherit with it the donors immune system capabilities, including all vaccinations.   In this case, one of the rare people who was completely immune to AIDS (for genetic reasons mostly) donated bone marrow to these two patients, who inherited the immunity. 
If this can be confirmed, this will mean a radical new hope for the world's suffering.  Still no cure for the common cold or herpes, though.

Pirate Drone

The Pirate Ba has had an ongoing arms race with the media companies that produce the content that they are distributing. The servers are seized by court order, and blocked at the ISP level. To get around this, a new, utterly insane plan has been brought to bear. The new plan is to build servers that operate in aerial drones, reaching the internet through radio link, and periodically alnding to change batteries and other maintenence. To take the drone offline, it wouldn't take a police action. It would require an air force. Due to the current state of international law, the air force would have to be the air force of the local nation (Sweden), or else it's an act of war. Should the authorities convince the Swedish air Force to attack the drones, the drones could quite easily fly to Finland while the planes are taking off. Should the Finnish Air Force then deploy, then the drones would fly to Russia, since Russia doesn't care about electronic piracy. Authorities would have to jam the radio link, which is harder than it sounds.

Netcycle

In Vietnam, rising wealth has lead to a major increase in motor vehicles as a means of transportation, and with the rise of motor vehicles has come a rash of street racers. The police dislike it, as the races run faster than many of the riders can control, often causing property damage and personal injury. The police's first motivation is to stop vehicles who participate in this type of activity, ASAP. In my country, the United States, a fast vehicle that refuses to pull over for the police is herded onto a road with no traffic, and a strip of spikes is laid on the road. As the vehicle approaches, the spikes are activated. The spikes puncture the tire in such a way that the vehicle comes to a halt. The spikes are then quickly retracted so that the chasing police car can run past it without this tire damage. The vehicle's driver is then forced to yield. Vietnam isn't wealthy enough to buy such machinery, nor industrialized enough to make it themselves, so they dipped into their historical engineering and decided to stop the bikes with fishing nets. Apparently, due to Vietnam's long history of fishing, the average Vietnamese person can throw a net very very precisely. This net, thrown into the motorcycle's motor, jams it in such a way that the motorcycle rolls to a controlled halt. Other methods had previously been rejected because the motorcycle lost control, which often resulted in the very crashes that the police were trying to avoid. It's cheap, simple, and effective.

Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo appears in the news a lot these days. He is the recipient of a Nobel peace prize, one that the Chinese government is hell-bent in preventing him from actually receiving. The Chinese government is really enraged about him, and to know why I'll have to explain more about his prize and how he got it.
In 1977, a group of Czech intellectuals irritated the then communist Czech government by producing a document called the Charter 77, which demanded human rights and democracy, and lambasted the Czech government for denying its promises in this regard. Though the Czech government lashed out, ultimately the demands outlined in Charter 77 were upheld after the fall of communism. Liu Xiaobo and a large number of other Chinese intellectuals were inspired by this document, and made a similar one called Charter 08 (as it was written in 2008).
This clearly annoyed the Chinese government, who not only was very irritated to be criticized like that, but also considers human rights to be a load of western bullshit that would derail Mao's vision of an equal society. Mr. Liu then went on to further annoy them:

(It would take) 300 years of colonialism. In 100 years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would require 300 years as a colony for it to be able to transform into how Hong Kong is today. I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough.

These kinds of views are generally seen as seditious, and I think if I expressed any similar beliefs (if I advocated that it would be a good thing if America were to be conquered by another country, say Germany or China), I think I would be loudly denounced as a treasonous bastard, though not arrested. The Chinese government, nationalistically insulted, arrested Mr. Liu on grounds of sedition.
The Chinese government was further enraged when Mr. Liu was awarded the Nobel peace prize for the work on Charter 08, and its inability to lobby the Norwegian Government to influence the decision. (Members of the selection committee are chosen by the Norwegian parliament, but the government has no further input on selection and certainly enjoys nothing remotely similar to veto power.)
So that's why he's imprisoned, why the Chinese government is mad at Norway, and why shit will fly for years to come from all this. I argue that human rights, "Ren Quan" in Chinese, is an important part of Sun Yat Sen's "Minquan," or "people's power."

More on Emulating the Brain

Timothy Blee has a lot more to say about Robin Hanson's thesis of simulated people. Namely, Mr. Blee asserts that it is not possible.
Brains work in a very different manner than silicon chips. Silicon chips have a central processor, that can store data on temporary storage, like RAM, or permanent storage like hard drives. It cycles very very quickly. I recently bought a 3.2 GhZ processor. It cycles 3.2 billion times per second.
Brains, however, are a massive network of neurons that signal each other They cycle slowly, only 30 times per second, and can connect to many other neurons at any given time, and are always reconfiguring each other.
Mr. Blee then points out that emulation works in computers works because we know how both the target and host computer operate, and by Dr. Turing's theorem can restructure the directives to match the host computer's operation. We at this point have only a fuzzy idea of how the bran works, and our theories on it are constantly being proven wrong.
I think that it's hypothetically possible to emulate the brain -- but it may require radically different hardware. A massive memristor mesh would be a closer approximation than the machine on your desk (or lap). The hardest part is that the brain literally rewires itself as you learn things, and so far no hardware we have ever built does that.
I thought of this because of Mr. Hanson's previous rants about emulated people, and thinking how an emulated version of me could be handy at work. While I'm stressing and frazzled, I could pass messages to him and he could help me. (Which would probably even be easy for him...the world would move quite slowly from his perspective.)

New Years

A new year is a new beginning or some such. I could talk about why January, why the new year represents a new beginning, but instead I think I'll have a public service announcement.
Many people traditionally celebrate the new year by firing a gun into the air. They think this is harmless, but the bullet forms a very high ballistic arc that often ends in someone else's house. People have been severely injured or killed because of this. So, as your local sherrif's or other law enforcement office will tell you, please don't fire guns into the air unless there's no one else around for miles. You can call them for more information.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

The Prisoner's Dilema is an intellectual game with implications in the real world of dealing with people who you may not be able to trust. It comes up commonly, and recently one such scenario actually did happen as a current event.
In the game, you and another person (a smalltime acquaintance of yours who you don't know very well), are accused of committing a crime. The police separate the two of you and ask each of you separately if the other person is guilty. You both have the choice of cooperating with each other and proclaiming the other's innocence, or tattling on the other person.
The results depends on what the police learn from this investigation. If neither of you talks, they'll probably be able to press a lesser charge on you both, and you'll both spend a week or two in jail, but you'll escape conviction . If both of you tattle, you'll both surely be convicted on this evidence, and you'll both spend 3 years in jail. And if one of you talks and the other doesn't, then the tattler escapes and the victim rots in prison for 5 long years. So....what will you tell them? The best possible result for you may be to play the other guy for a sucker, but the net benefit is for you both to cooperate.
Worse, the real life versions tend to be iterated, where you and the other guy show up over and over and over, and have the same choices every time. Reward vs. Punishment are on the line, and the other guy definitely remembers what you did the last time.
A university did a simulation of iterated prisoner's dilemma to see if there's a rational way to handle scenarios like this, and the results were surprising. Various programs were put in that used various strategies. There were programs that always cooperated. There were programs that always attacked. These tended to get eliminated pretty quickly when their bad choices caught up to them. One early winner was a strategy that they called "Tit for Tat." This program started out cooperating, and then always used the same strategy that the partner used last time. So if you cooperated with it, it cooperated with you. If you wronged it, it got revenge. But the ultimate winner was "Generous Tit for Tat," which sometimes declined to go for revenge, thus getting out of some vicious cycles.
I say this came up in the news due to the situation with Russia, America, and Nuclear Weapons. Russia would like to inspect US uranium mining and nuclear production, and limit both countries supplies of nuclear weapons. This is an iterative prisoner's dilemma, with the "cooperate" option being to let the other country's inspectors in and limiting the production of nuclear weapons, and the "defect" option being to eject the other country's inspectors and build more nuclear weapons to gain the other hand.
Previously, both of us have chosen "cooperate" with the SALT and START treaties. Shortly after SALT II was an arguable defection on both sides, when the Reagan administration refused to sign the treaty on the grounds that Russia violated it, and Russia responding with a large construction of additional nuclear weapons.
So then, America, we have a choice. Cooperate or Defect. And Russia is watching.

Learning By Doing Theory

There's little demand for inexperienced workers. Almost all companies want to hire workers with prior experience in their field, to minimize training expenses, and to start productive working immediately. This leads to the extreme environment I have been seeing for the past year where many companies won't even bother with a person who isn't already working in their field, and all companies demand prior experience. Those with little to none, like myself, where left with a catch-22 of requiring the experience to even get the experience required. This had to be frustrating for the companies too, who keep wondering why the figurative watering hole has been permanently dried up. (Like most professions, IT workers like me do not spring fully formed from Zeus's forehead!)
I think the entire system would benefit from workfare. People would be paid to do things, thereby getting the money to raise them out of poverty, but more importantly, they would have experience that would make them more attractive to hire in the first place. Companies would gleefully hire up the workforce bunch, who have prior experiences doing what they want and can be laboring productively starting immediately, and the training expenses have already been handled. The paying government would also benefit of progressively shrinking welfare rolls as the petitioners get snapped up into the workforce and the economy recovers.
However, for this to work, workfare would have to revolve around all sorts of industry's work, without stepping on that industry's toes by competing. We do need shovelers and road crews to fix our roads, but having done that doesn't benefit any industry. If the government did manufacturing, engineering projects, and IT, three industries with large demand for the foreseeable future, wouldn't companies that do manufacturing, engineering, and IT complain about the competition? (Yes, undoubtedly.) So the government would have people manufacture build and program systems....that would be thrown in a hole and forgotten. Not good for the morale of the workers, nor would the government really benefit from the results of that.
A better idea are institutions like NASA. NASA has a massive crew of engineers with numerous skills that almost any company would want to hire, but it focuses on something that companies can't yet do profitably for themselves -- space travel. (Space engineering is extremely expensive, and won't be profitable until we figure out some way to keep the expenses down.) So a workfare engineering facility would have to manufacture things that are useful to the government, but not profitable for private companies to make. Specialized tools for the CIA, perhaps. And government IT would have to focus on programming and maintaining computer systems that are somehow unprofitable for private contractor work. I can't think of any of these offhand, but I'm sure they exist and the NSA readily knows what these sorts of things would be.

Delaware Race

At the time that I wrote this, two people were vying to become Delaware's 2nd senator. The Democratic party were running Christopher Coons, the Republican party were running Christine O'Donnell. The previous holder of the position, Ted Kaufman, is not seeking another term.
In the debates, both were quite disappointing. Both candidates showed a remarkable ignorance towards the first amendment. Ms. O'Donnell asserted, as many fundamentalists believe, that the separation of church and state was externally imposed by court decision, and challenged anyone to show her that this principle is in fact in the constitution. Mr. Coons challenged her on this, but was then unable to mention any of the other protections of the first amendment. (Right to free speech, right to free press, right to redress the government, right to peaceable assembly.) Both have shown a shocking ignorance of the nation that they hope to regulate.
As for Ms. O'Donnell's assertion, she will be quite pleased to hear that the phrase "separation of church and state" does not appear literally in the constitution as such. However, the concept exists from the first amendment's statement that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that amendment, later wrote a letter describing his intention to have a "wall of separation between church and state," using those exact words.
Further connecting this, after the Barbary Wars, fought by the generation of Americans who founded the country, we signed the Treaty of Tripoli with the Barbary States. The treaty had 12 components, and in number 11, we assured them that we would not attack them for being Muslims:

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

"Mussulmen" and "Mahometan" being the 18th century way of describing Muslims. Essentially, we assert to being a secular nation that has no beef with Islam. I would further remind Ms. O'Donnell that treaties bear the same weight legally as the constitution itself.
The founders did seek to prevent what they saw as the abuse of religion at the time, in which the Church of England was quite embedded in the English government, and enforced its decrees with the force of the nation. They also felt that this diminished the honor of religion, especially when it became involved with the usual petty disputes that nations have to deal with. (Who owns the house on 1329 Main Street?) Someone always went away mad. To give the church government powers, in their minds, suggested that it was so weak that it would not survive on its own merits.
Since I wrote this, Delaware elected Coons instead of O'Donnell, by about a 16% margin.

Water Recycling, Historically

Human civilization uses a lot of water. We drink it directly, use it for cleaning, and pour tons of it on our plants for farming and gardening. It doesn't come from magic. We take it from nature. Various lakes and streams and rivers. (Though smaller sources like ponds tend to be a bad idea. The water gets stagnant and things start to grow in it.)
After we've used the water, it tends to be unappealing. If we washed things with it, it's now full of dirt and soap. It may contain sewage. In the old days, we'd just flush it straight back into the river. The river did tend to take it away where we never saw it again. We now know that all rivers eventually go to the ocean, and the ocean an only absorb so much before we get horrible blooms and such.
Since then, we've learned to chemically clean water. We add a material that sticks to the dirt and bacteria and soap and whatever other additives. We run it through sand and charcoal. We expose it to ultraviolet light to kill off what bacteria remains. The end result of this is cleaner than the water we got from the stream in the first place. And yet, it's been proven in Singapore and Australia, two places with a desperate shortage of water, that people are still grossed out by the idea of recycled water. (And yet all water is recycled. In nature, it's filtered by clay and such before flowing back to the river. The clay does a very good job, but it is quite limited in capacity. Put more than a certain amount of water through it and it just stops working at all.)
So if people won't touch this filtered water, the next best thing, and the thing that I'm 99% sure actually happens, is to return recycled water to nature. No more infected, polluted rivers. No more harmful algae blooms from detergent. And yet, this could be better.
Studies of river water with returned water show traces of pharmacology byproducts. The metabolic transformations of the pills people took, peed out, and survived the filtering process to return to the river. Sometimes they combine into hormone-like chemicals. News reports feminized frogs, where various pills combined to form a pseudo-estrogen, the frogs absorbed this and feminized.
I suppose the only way around this is to find a better purification system. The only way I could be totallly sure would be to electrically separate the hydrogen from oxygen, and then burning the hydrogen to recombine them. (and condense the resulting steam, of course.) This is not energy efficient.

A Computer for Sir Terry

Sir Terry Pratchett, Order of the British Empire, is a very prolific writer, most famous for his Discworld series of books. He is known for a major use of computers and the Internet, and yet has said in an interview that his favorite computer of all time was the first one he owned, the ZX Spectrum. That computer also proved insufficient for modern works, as the same interview reported that his novels exceed 10 MB by the time of their completion, and the ZX Spectrum had only 64k of memory and recorded to tapes, a slow and sequential process.
Hobby groups exist that recreate old computers, and if Sir Pratchett requested, I would ask one of them to make a portable computer with the features of the ZX Spectrum, like its rubber chiclet keyboard, and write software with a similar interface. We would need at least a word-processing program and an Internet browser. I would ask that it have at least 100MB of RAM, a framebuffer (with more RAM, the Spectrum supported a 256×192 color display, and I would want better than that), RF Video, and wireless network access. It will also need Z80 emulation if it isn't using a Z80 type processor (do they even make those anymore?), and NFS (Network File System, a means of storing files on a separate computer that it reaches with a network). The reason for these will become apparent in the next component.
I would then provide Mr. Pratchett's home with a wireless network, and an immense server with RAID 10. The RAID would be shared with NFS, and here is where the Spectrum clone's OS and programs would be stored. It would have room for terrabytes of data for Sir Pratchett to use, and would provide the Internet connection. The RAID setup would ensure both a metric insane supply of space, plus reliability in case of the loss of any of the drives. Ideally, the drives would be setup for hot swapping, to minimize issues for the end user.
One major obstacle I have this this is my unfamiliarity with the ZX Spectrum, which was not sold in the United States where I live. Pictures of it suggest that it was portable and battery-powered, broadcasting video to a television set. Articles describe it as receiving its programming from audio cassette, yet only some models have a visible tape player, leaving me wondering how the other models received programs. (burnt permanently to a ROM, perhaps?) The design would be much simpler if wired connections could be involved, since electrical power can be received via socket, wired Internet is faster and more reliable than wireless, as well as more difficult to snoop from the outside. And video to the television almost assuredly works better if we can send it by a wire, instead of having to broadcast it. I would want the device to resemble the Spectrum in physical size, and operate similarly to one only better, since it could view the Internet, which the average person couldn't in 1982, edit entire novels, and save to the massive server instead of a gazillion tape cassettes. I have literally no idea how the ZX's OS operated, and so can't help with the programming.
I would encourage the creators of the Spectrum clone to license the design with Sinclair Research Ltd, the company that invented the Spectrum, and sell it together. I could probably be convinced to buy one.
Sir Pratchett, however, would probably prefer that people donate towards Alzheimer's research, as he was diagnosed with the disease in 2007, and has noted with quite a lot of alarm that research into the cause and treatment of the disease has been somewhat lacking.

News Summary

NPR says that the best way to survive in a falling elevator is not to jump at the last second, as is popularly believed, (as you could not possibly jump fast enough), but you should instead lie on the floor, and try to wedge yourself between the two walls at the last second. You'd take a beating, but you'd live. After all, it's not the fall that kills you, so much as the sudden stop at the end. Hopefully my readers will never need to know this information, but better to have and not need, then to need and not have.
Discovery News reports what female friends of mine have said to me all along: If you're female, your own body hates you with the ferocity of a thousand suns. Estogen clusters in ovulating women make it hard for them to think straight, brain scanning studies of American women showed that they want to be thinner, sometimes thinner than is biologically possible for them. Confrontation with the idea that they might be fat, even if demonstrably false, sent part of their brains into existential crisis.
There was also reported to be a crisis in groundwater, in that at the rate it is being used faster than it can be replaced (by rain, underground water flow, etc). Complete depletion would result in a massive and disastrous desertification of the area. (I do not believe their claim that this is connected to sea level rise. Groundwater has always gone towards the sea since there was a sea to begin with. Groundwater didn't come about by magic, but by rain from evaporated seawater.)
They also report that before airplanes, there were still intercontinental exchanges of disease causing viruses and bacteria, carried by duststorm. Bacteria and viruses would travel with the dust, blown by the wind, until deposited on a new land, with new hosts to infect. The disease would arrive in a weakened state, having to survive both a dry wind storm and a large amount of UV radiation, which was only partially blocked by the supply of dust.
Fark leads me to a story by ABC news, which says that a mall in St. Louis, Missouri, banned groups of unaccompanied teenagers, to the immense annoyance of said teenagers. The mall also discovered that said teenagers were not their primary patrons: the policy made all store's profits go up, even the ones catering to teenagers. The large groups hanging out tended not to spend money, preferring instead to horse around and irritate others around them.
Tomorrow I return to the mad science.

Bread and Circuses

In the later part of the Roman Empire, the roman government spent fortunes providing bread and entertainment to the masses. This was not out of the goodness of their hearts. One enraged person can be ignored, but riotous masses have a way of ruining everything when they get past a certain amount of frustrated. Namely, they tend to take what they need to survive by force. And then set things on fire just to show how truly pissed off they are.
In fact, in the countries where communist revolutions succeeded, I've noticed three common factors:
1. A useless and insufferable aristocratic class
2. A large body of intellectuals
3. Starving and enraged peasant masses
The local communist party recruits its main body from the intellectuals, and makes promises to the peasants along the lines of bread, circuses, and employment, and blames everything on the aristocrats. Which they then have killed as a way of solving those problems. Allthough Karl Marx was still thousands of years in the future, as was his idea of communism, Rome was trying to prevent this sort of thinking, which wouldn't have ended well for the aristocrats. And worse for the emperor himself, who was usually at the forefront of helping out.
A good economist can draw a modern lesson from this, I'm sure. And probably something lest costly than free bread and stab shows.

Combating AIDS

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or "AIDS," is a disease that throws entire populations into panic. It's sexually transmitted, assuredly fatal, and rather miserable to have. I had to endure many public services about it in school, because it wigged people out so severely that the department of education felt compelled to step in to inform us that no, you cannot get it from toilet seats, or handshakes, or really anything that doesn't involve other people's bodily fluids going into you.
AIDS is caused by a retrovirus, HIV. (Human Immunodeficiency Virus.) I know people who deny this, but they have no evidence for that belief. Retroviruses are one of the hardest to fight, because of how they work. I had to go into a bit of biology to explain this.
Our cells are made of protein, which are controlled by our DNA. To operate DNA, it's copied into RNA, which arranges proteins into complex structures, and folds them into their final shape. Most viruses are RNA-only, because they exist to endlessly replicate themselves, and try to convert your cells into virus factories. Retroviruses, however, know how to convert their RNA back into DNA, and replace chunks of your cell's DNA with its DNA, so the next time you copy that cell, you copy that virus too. Even if you purge all the viruses out of your body, the virus can reemerge from that cell, which is the scary thing about retroviruses. However, they can also be used for good. Genetic therapies exist in which a benign retrovirus is modified to inject beneficial genes into yours, and then the virus malfunctions and "dies" afterwards. (Well, it's debatable if viruses count as "alive," as they are just chunks of RNA and protein, but it malfunctions such as to be nonfunctional.)
So, AIDS is quite prevalent in some parts of the world, and immensely terrifying even in places were infection is rare. And yet, no part of the world is totally free of infection. Is there any surprise that there's an immense demand for a cure?
We've made a lot of progress, but aren't there yet. HIV has proven quite polymorphic, responding to all attempts to fight it by rearranging itself until it is immune to what we throw at it. And yet this strength is also now its biggest weakness. One can literally mutate it to death. Unfortunately this doesn't help medically, because the virus tends to reemerge from older, more effective forms, stashed away in a random cell's DNA.
Another discovery is that a small percentage of the population is immune to bubonic plague, which ravaged Europe in the 1300s. These people are also immune to AIDS, for reasons that we don't readily understand. (This mutation assuredly developed from the plague, in which the non-immune population of Europe was devastated, leaving only those unexposed or immune to reproduce.) I see no possible connection: bubonic plague is caused by a bacteria, and AIDS by a virus. There must be some sort of third-party connection, in that some aspect of the bubonic plague immunity also makes it harder, or impossible, for HIV to gain a foothold. More research is required.
So if a person with AIDS asked me for a treatment, I think I would start with a bubonic plague innoculation, and extremely agressive genetic therapy. Along with the traditional anti-viral drugs like AZT. I would hope to reconfigure their genes until the existence of retroviruses in their body is impossible. This would also mean that any children they had would not resemble them in the slightest, but it's a small price to pay in the face of miserable death.
Also, AIDS does not kill you directly. It just destroys your immune system so that the first other disease to come along rages through your body unopposed until you die.