The Rational Mind

The UK’s Tony Collins holds the Guinness World Record for the longest wait on a hospital trolley after spending 77 hours and 30 minutes stuck outside the toilets in the Princess Margaret Hospital, Swindon, UK, between February 24 and 27, 2001.

“I’d contracted a virus,” said Tony about his record-breaking experience, “and although I was taken in at 3 p.m. on the Saturday, it wasn’t until 8.30 p.m. on the Tuesday that I was found a bed in another ward, when an elderly patient was moved to make room for me.”

According to some sources, Windows Vista took 10,000 engineers 5 years to write, costing Microsoft about $10 billion dollars. That makes it one of the biggest engineering projects in history. Chances are very good that you’ll be using Vista on a daily basis within a few years. The development process was not without its setbacks and disappointments, but has there ever been a single project in history that has directly provided a value to so many people?

By the way, the buzz in the media is that Windows Vista is the last of its kind –the market is moving too fast to spend so many resources trying to get so many features out at once. Vista is partly a demonstration of that – it dropped a number of major features because they made the product too complex, and would have delayed the release. I wouldn’t count Microsoft out yet – but I’m sure there’s exciting times up ahead.

Let’s assume that “global warming” is the hoax that I think it is. What happens when, sometime around 2020, no evidence of global warming (as a historically unique trend) is found? The following scenarios are three plausible outcomes to the “global warming” crisis.

A) The Fraud Discredited
Politicians and the scientific community admit their error. Environmentalist regulations and environmental agencies are cut back or eliminated. The hundreds of think-tanks, non-profits, and lobbying agencies that survive on the profits from the environmentalist hysteria voluntarily disband.

B) A disaster narrowly averted
Continual improvements in solar power or another renewable technology make it more cost efficient than fossil-fuel based power. The market gradually changes until solar power is dominant.
Politicians proclaim victory, and praise the regulatory state and state-coerced green energy. They stress the need for continual vigilance as they look around for a new crisis to bankroll their campaigns.

C) A self-fulfilling prophecy
Faced with a lack of evidence for global warming, environmentalists focus instead on random climate variation and natural disasters under the banner of “climate change,” which can conveniently be blamed for heat waves, cold fronts, hurricanes, and even tsunamis. The draconian regulatory state gradually erodes the wealth producing capacity of industry, thus destroying the only tool man has to deal with nature’s fury. The EPA/ /DOJ wrecks the economy, FDA causes plagues, and the FCC makes sure the party line gets coverage. The Son of Kyoto shifts energy production and industry from relatively clean, developed nations to environmentally irresponsible developing ones. Innovations in energy production/consumption become prohibitively expensive to get past the regulatory state.
By 2020, nature is unpredictable as ever, but our ability to deal with it is crippled by the state. Politicians seize upon the global havoc they unleashed as proof of the need for further regulation.

Which outcome is most likely? Very likely, it will be a combination of all three. Which one is pre-eminent depends on your estimate of the world’s sanity.

Al Gore’s new movie on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” opens with scenes from Hurricane Katrina slamming into New Orleans. The former vice president says unequivocally that because of global warming, it is all but certain that future hurricanes will be more violent and destructive than those in the past.
…
With the official start of hurricane season days away, meteorologists are unanimous that the 2006 tropical storm season, which runs from June 1 through November, is likely to be a doozy.

(emp. mine)
Can you name a single hurricane from 2006? If not, don’t be too hard on yourself -it’s “the most tranquil season in a decade“.

As if you needed more proof that Russia has reverted to a dictatorship, the Brits have found conclusive evidence that yet another Putin critic has been assassinated by radiation.

Security sources said MI5 believes the Russian intelligence services assassinated Mr Litvinenko. Britain made a formal request to Moscow for help in the murder investigation. But Mr Putin left diplomats open-mouthed with claims that the former spy did not die ‘a violent death’.

At a dramatic press conference in London the Health Protection Agency (HPA) revealed that he had been killed by a ‘large dose’ of radioactive polonium 210, and not thallium as previously thought.

Only a speck of it would have been enough to prove fatal once it got into his system, probably by being slipped into his drink or on to food.

Whoever did this must have been expert in the dosage because giving him too much would have caused almost instant death while it took weeks for him to become gravely ill, giving the killer ample chance to escape.

Starbucks has a “The Way I See It” program that accepts submissions from customers and celebrities to be printed on their coffee cups. You can comment on the random thoughts you found on one of their cups, or submit your own. Most of the submissions are predictably boring. Wouldn’t it be great to see some really great ideas on a cup? Submit yours here.

According to market research firm iSuppli, the newly released PS3 game console costs Sony $241-$400 for each console sold. This is not the cost of the system – this is the net loss to the company after subtracting the price of each console from the cost of the components.

Game console makers like Sony and Microsoft take an initial loss for each system sold so they can provide the very best product to the customer. Of course they wouldn’t do this unless they believed that the initial loss would eventually yield a net profit. They make up for the loss in two ways. First, they take advantage of accelerating technology to get cheaper components. For example, while Microsoft initially took a $126 loss for each Xbox 360 sold, it now makes a $75 profit due to the cheaper cost of the components. It’s probable that some of the cost decrease comes from manufacturers who compete for the console maker’s business. Second, they take a cut of the price of every game sold for their system.

Think about the gamble such decisions involve. Microsoft bets on how many million systems will sell at a given performance level to determine whether it will recoup its costs. Hardware manufacturers bet on the success of a given console to decide where to direct their research. Game makers decide which platform deserves years of development time. Consumers, by comparison, face the least risk, but they must also decide which console will be successful and have the games they want. Success is far from guaranteed – consoles fail as often as they succeed, often taking their company down with them. Remember the Sega Dreamcast?

Do you have a sense yet for the excitement of markets? Such strategic decisions are made every day in every industry — to the extent that it is free. Why doesn’t Hollywood make movies about THIS, rather than yet another gang of thieves bickering with each other as they complete yet another caper?

There is an excellent three-hour interview with technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil available on C-SPAN. Watch now.

This rare three-hour long interview allowed him to discuss his ideas in depth and take calls from the public. The show profiles his many inventions (starting with a videotape of his 1965 appearance at age 17 on “I’ve Got A Secret” with Steve Allen).

It also covers his career, ideas, and recent books, “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology” and “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever.”

Richard Dawkins offers some advice for students of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, which has an exibit of dinosaur bones that are “3,000 years old.” Watch the video here. More on his site.

From the Daily Mail: a photo of North and South Korea with commentary from Donald Rumsfeld.

“It says it all. There’s the south, the same people as the north, the same resources north and south, and the big difference is in the south it’s a free political system and a free economic system.

“The people in the north are starving, their growth is stunted. It’s a shame, a tragedy.”

An aide added: “This oppressive regime is too busy trying to make war to make life comfortable for its people.”

Some people have asked me about the city in my blog’s header. It’s Hong Kong. I didn’t pick the image at random – the shining skyline represents one of the newly-created engines driving the world forward. My inner optimist wonders about the progress that economic freedom can bring, while my pessimist wonders at how far New York City has sunk in the mire of statism to lose that honor to Communist China. The trends are not evident to everyone yet – but will it be as clear as North and South Korea in 20 or 30 years?

Edit: there is a discussion on this post here.