I still remember the tingly feeling the first time I cloned a piece of DNA. From the moment the tiny drop of ligase fell in the tube to the moment I isolated DNA from a white colony in a sea of blue bacteria, looked at the gel, and knew for certain that I’d constructed a new plasmid, I was hooked. This probably sounds incredibly geeky, but I even bought my own copies of Old and Primrose’s Principles of Gene Manipulation and Maniatis’s Molecular Cloning, and read them, cover to cover, after work on warm summer nights. Hearing that enthusiastic amateurs are trying to build bacterial sensors in their kitchens rekindled that sense of excitement. I had to know more.
In the early 21st century Small Science, which had been eclipsed by government funded or industrial Big Science staged a partial resurgence after a long decline from the middle of the 20th century. The quotation above is an excerpt from article on DIY or do-it-yourself biology. Extending the open-source philosophy of the software industry, genetic engineering efforts are moving into amateur labs, linked together by shared databases and process flows. The influence of computer science in other areas is evident as well. The author of the quote above, Sandra Porter, wrote:
Talking with Jonathan Cline, DIYbio project manager and real-life electrical engineer in San Francisco, gave me some insights into the DIYbio philosophy. I learned that the group, as a whole, is very into the notion of building things cheaply and reducing costs, sharing information and tools, and finding ways for hobbyists to run experiments and contribute data back to a public database. Cline’s dream scenario would be to have standardized biological parts with predictable behaviors so that the parts could be combined and the cell would behave as programmed in an expected way. He described an example of putting computational logic into a cell with a memory circuit. The circuit would have multiple promoters, two genes for different shades of green fluorescent protein, and an amplifier that would create a feedback loop. Bacteria would turn green in response to a stimulus and after some period of time they would switch to producing the other color of GFP and become red.
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The amateurs have their own Wiki, called OpenNetWare. And they are taking on aging. The SENS Foundation is using the new techniques to “solve parts of the aging question”. Although there is probably a lot of hype and projection in this burgeoning field, there is also a sense of possibility. HPlusmagazine describes the intellectual core of the effort — and it’s dependence on open source philosophy.
DIYbio software has been around for a long time. Folding@home, which came out of Professor vinjay Pande‘s group at Stanford Chemistry Department in 2000, is designed to perform computationally intensive simulations of protein folding and other molecular dynamics. FAH, as it‘s known, is now considered the most powerful distributed computing cluster in the world. Open source software for bioinformatics, computational neuroscience, and computational biology is plentiful and continues to grow. On their own time, students, professors, entrepreneurs, and curious amateurs contribute to open source work that captures their interests. BioPerl and BioPython have hundreds of contributors and tens of thousands of users. Programs like GENESIS and NEURON have been downloaded by computational neuroscientists for over twenty years.
The software part is easy. The FOSS/OSS machine is well established, and has been successful for a long time. As the shift to open source software continues, computational biology will become even more accessible, and even more powerful. (Red Hat has recently asked the US Supreme Court to bar all software patents, submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the “Bilski case.” See Resources.) …
One unpleasant way to discover the power of new technologies is to have a malevolent organization beat civil society to the punch. The next big terrorist threat may come in the form of a biological attack. Recently, a government bipartisan commission “chaired by former Senators Bob Graham, a Democrat from Florida, and Jim Talent, a Missouri Republican, [gave] the new administration the grade of “F” for failing to take key steps the commission outlined just over a year ago in its initial report.”
Specifically, the commission concludes that the Obama administration, like the three administrations before it, has failed to pay consistent and urgent attention to increasing the nation’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to a germ attack that would inflict massive casualties on the nation.
The commission repeated its warning that unless nations acted decisively and urgently, it was more likely than not that a WMD will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013, and that the terrorists’ weapon of choice would be biological, rather than nuclear.
The Next 9/11 may not involve airplanes at all. Perhaps the thing to watch isn’t flight schools but courses in biology. Of course it is unlikely that such a threat would be developed with DIY bio methods which relies on open information exchanges. But the potential for Small Science has returned and with it the prospect of a substantial menace from a network of basement labs. And you can never tell whether the authorities will see a threat coming even if it is out in the open. One common failing of the giant intelligence apparatus is that it often fails to connect the dots even when the dots exist in abundance.
Maybe we are moving away from the gigantism which characterized the postwar years. Recent intellectual effort has partially moved away from the huge institutions. Big media, the academy and to some extent even Big Science are being challenged at least in some areas by the new productive paradigm of networked collaborators. Without wishing to overstate its advantages, perhaps the most enduring lesson of the last ten years is that Western societies have too many people locked up in giant, sterile bureaucracies and too self-motivated but networked entrepreneurs. At a time when many “advanced” welfare societies are investing in ever larger and eyeless monoliths, other societies, unhampered by this legacy are gaining ground simply by refusing these constraints.
Economic crises often contain a “message” about the current state of a civilization. After World War 2, the conventional wisdom was that things had to be made bigger and regulated ever more. Perhaps that era is over. When the last UAW dinosaur and SEIU shop closes down it may be a sad moment for its members. But it may also mark the day when millions of people are thrown into the real workforce, which with some luck will have the liberty and capital to absorb them, and they can get a productive job.
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Your last phrase bothers me, “… and they can get a productive job.” I interpret the DIY’ers as making their own productive jobs. A paradigm shift.
Terrorists using the poor mans atom bomb … Well I’ll tell ya what pilgrim if they get caught zero and eric well they’ll go apoplectic, charge then with organ invasion and try them at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach providing only an SPF 15 and denying then pool priledges. Oh the humanity !
What scares me is that publishing DIY biology technology balances the asymmetry between us and cave dwelling Al Qeada. Instead of jumping on a flight with explosives in his pants, the next university trained, crazy son of a rich could just work on his science project in the basement and figure out how to create better aerosols or some other horror.
When the US govt still had an offensive biologic program in the 60s, they modeled an anthrax attack using a weaponized (easily aerosolized) non infectious bacillus species. All it took was an outboard motor boat, a sprayer and the right weather (inversion layer= fog rolling into San Francisco) and the spread of this fake anthrax made it all the way to the east bay with killing concentrations.
So while you’re enjoying Wikipedia to look up the real incident behind the movie Valkyrie, John Doe Terrorist is on wikipedia trying to figure out how to kill more of us. Besides the govt, who is working on how to stop John Doe Terrorist? When/if a home lab creates a horror and kills lots of people, would you actually trust the govt to save you? Napolitano would say that the system worked because she was able to send condolence letters to the family members of all the dead people.
No I don’t think DIY’ers or any particular group of people have a monopoly on productivity. But my guess — and it is only a conjecture — is that the engine of creation has moved partially out of the big shop and into distributed locales. Internally outsourced as it were, not to China or India, but down the block.
So I think some of the challenges current structures are facing are really the result of competitive pressures. Early on in the War on Terror, I realized that much could be done by letting private individuals do certain things — monitor Arabic broadcasts for example, or start blogs in Anbar province, or much other stuff — under a broad policy guidance. Much of the information issues around terrorism I think consisted of generating information and keeping information close to the subsidiary level. You didn’t want things in one humongous colossal agency where it was locked under six levels of security.
So that got me to thinking that to some extent (and I don’t want to overstate the case) the age of individual initiative is back. Now is the time to be bold and imaginative. One of the reasons I am so dismayed at the Age of Obama is that it really hearkens back to the age of the aristocracy and the elite, with beautiful people and gatekeepers and badged authorities marching across a stage in gorgeous robes. And the thing is, many of these people would be far more productive if you could liberate them from this gilded tower. They are also more vulnerable than they imagine. They’ve grown up thinking they are safe because they always have been. But the times are changing. And we need to change with them somewhat.
FOG
The fog creeps in on little cat feet.
It sit on silent haunches,
Looking over harbor and city,
And then moves on.
Carl Sandburg
UPDATED
The fog creeps in on little cat feet weaponized plague in it’s teeth
It sits on silent haunches,then springs bring our death
Looking over harbor and city,no more Irish coffee at the Buena Vista, a pity
And then moves on to die in a gutter in that beautiful city.
Sylvia: You may have misread that last sentence. I believe Wretch was referring to the SEIU workers.
A couple of comments:
1) Most everyone at all familiar with Eisenhower’s farewell address knows of his warning about the “military/industrial complex,” but not the one about the arrival, growth, and potential perils of Big Science feeding at the federal and corporate trough.
2) We must be prepared for the possibility of a crackdown on home labs out of misdirected hysteria that would conflate these research efforts with those of terrorists and others with malignant intent. There already was one case somewhere in the U.S. where a hobbyist was forced to shut down his basement chem lab by the authorities without probable cause. Remember that the specter of “Security Theater” looms over us all, whether in the form of proliferating security cameras or continued intrusions at airport security checkpoints, subways, trainstations, etc., all driven by different variants of the ‘PC’ social policy virus.
In basement labs throughout the world
Test tubes and Bunsen burners
Are boiling stuff both mixed and swirled
By fast and slower learners
There’s nothing here at least at first
But failure does not daunt them
They do not see for which they thirst
May come one day to haunt them
Who knows what evil substance lurks
In Petri dishes hidden
In basements or in attic works
Just waiting to be bidden
To spread disease and red raw death
To those quite unsuspecting
That drawing in with every breath
In trachea collecting
Are spores and horrid looking germs
Just grinning as they kill us
Let’s leave this stuff to bigger firms
Where Medicare can bill us
MTL: All it took was an outboard motor boat, a sprayer and the right weather (inversion layer= fog rolling into San Francisco) and the spread of this fake anthrax made it all the way to the east bay with killing concentrations.
That will make Nahncee’s tail wag faster, she was saying she’d like to see a megaterror attack hit Berkeley next time. I objected to that on the same grounds I object to Habu saying nuke all the Muslims (my shared humanity), and also because my uncle and his wife live in Pinole and my brother’s mother-in-law and father-in-law live close to Berkeley.
And speaking of DIY’s they still haven’t caught the guy responsible for Amerithrax, which hit just before and just after 9-11. He’s probably home grown, and doesn’t have the benefit of a network of tribal mountain sanctuaries he can move around in, yet we’re no closer getting him than OBL.
Hobbyists doing DNA splicing and recombinations?!? Creating new life forms in their mom’s basement. Why do I think that this has a lot more downside than upside? First thing that jumped into my brain was The Twelve Monkeys. Watch it and be very afraid. At least the premise of the movie (not the time travel stuff, but the “For the good of the planet” motivation of the bad guy) should give anyone that thinks this is a good idea pause.
” Big media, the academy and to some extent even
Big Science are being challenged at least in some
areas by the new productive paradigm of networked
collaborators.”
According to:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/01/darknet-economies.html
“desktop manufacturing is on the cusp of becoming
as mainstream, inexpensive, and easy to use as
personal computers (with similar effect).”
So it looks like big manufacturing may soon be
added to your list of big institutions being
challenged.
Societies will have to learn to live with the fact that individuals have been empowered by technology and communications. The only long term way to counter malevolent forces is to hope they are checkmated by equally powerful and enabled good guys. One risk is that because the state is differentially obeyed by good guys and bad guys that poorly considered state responses may shut down good guy initiatives while the bad guys ignore the laws.
Often the response of the state to bad guy threats is to punish the good guys. If al-Qaeda invents an underwear bomb that means everybody has got to strip down to his BVDs. It makes sense in some universe, but is absurd from another point of view.
A better approach might be to restrict the general population only when there is a compelling public policy reason to do so, but to enable them otherewise because a lot of societies protection is going to come from that enhanced capability. We’ve talked a lot in these threads about “free energy” and “design margin”. It should be public policy to build a society with a lot of design margin, a lot of free energy.
The idea that it is desirable for us all to live on the edge of the energy envelope, with just enough of everything, with restrictions everywhere strikes me as a prescription for creating an extremely vulnerable, fragile and fascist world that can blown over by any wolf willing to huff and puff hard enough.
But the potential for Small Science has returned and with it the prospect of a substantial menace from a network of basement labs.
DIY chemistry has been around for a long time, if you consider moonshine stills and meth cooking. According to the Denver Post, the DEA even held a show-and-tell class at a nearby college in 2007 to show the locals how easy it is to make meth:
Cooking methamphetamine takes only a few hours and requires simple household ingredients, like striker plates from matchbooks, the guts of lithium batteries, drain cleaner.
“It’s pretty gross,” said Matt Leland, who works in career services at the University of Northern Colorado and who recently helped cook the drug in a lab. “If someone was truly interested in manufacturing meth, it would not be that hard.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration invited Leland and other citizens – such as software engineers, a teacher, a pastor and a school principal – to make methamphetamine last week in a lab at Metropolitan State College of Denver.
“At first, I thought, ‘Man, I cannot believe they showed us how to do it.’ But you can find the recipe on the Internet,” Leland said. “It just goes to show anybody who really wants to do it probably could.”
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_6003018
I was there yesterday.
I was at the dentist. I needed two crowns put in.
He ground the teeth down to stumps.
Then he put a camera hooked up to one computer in my mouth and took pictures of the stumps.
The pictures ended up on one computer. He outlined them with a mouse and then clicked a menu to select from a list of default teeth. One appeared on top of the stump picture.
He then customized it to fit my mouth and pressed a button.
The information was sent to a “printer” across the room.
It printed me a new tooth. The process was repeated with the second tooth.
I now have two of the fabricated teeth in my mouth. They are great.
I asked him if he could print me a new liver. He said “next year.”
;>)
These fabricators are the future.
I am sure we will all have them throughout our homes soon.
http://www.gizmag.com/3d-bio-printer/13609/
I was there yesterday.
I was at the dentist. I needed two crowns put in.
He ground the teeth down to stumps.
Then he put a camera hooked up to one computer in my mouth and took pictures of the stumps.
The pictures ended up on one computer. He outlined them with a mouse and then clicked a menu to select from a list of default teeth. One appeared on top of the stump picture.
He then customized it to fit my mouth and pressed a button.
The information was sent to a “printer” across the room.
It printed me a new tooth. The process was repeated with the second tooth.
I now have two of the fabricated teeth in my mouth. They are great.
I asked him if he could print me a new liver. He said “next year.”
;>)
These fabricators are the future.
I am sure we will all have them throughout our homes soon.
http://www.gizmag.com/3d-bio-printer/13609/
“When al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
called off a planned chemical attack on New
York’s subway system in 2003, he offered a
chilling explanation: The plot to unleash poison
gas on New Yorkers was being dropped
for “something better,” Zawahiri said in a
message intercepted by U.S. eavesdroppers.
The meaning of Zawahiri’s cryptic threat remains
unclear more than six years later, but a new
report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its
goal of attacking the United States with a
chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.”
Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35072269/ns/us_news-washington_post
I wonder what the “something better” was?
One of the issues in our specific society (right here in River City, so to speak) is lack of rigourous scientific truth in daily pronouncements by the MSM, liberals, the left, etc. However, when you have people, everyday people, performing lab work, scientific experimentation using open source (read peer reviewed) methodologies in their garages and basements, suddenly the BS is being exposed as BS. I think this will be the greatest impact of Open Source Science. The more people understand math and science and the implications thereof, the less power the CRU’s and IPCC charalatans have.
“I wonder what the “something better” was?”
nationalized health care. (rimshot)
Maybe we are moving away from the gigantism which characterized the postwar years.
Twas ever thus, the bureaucracy from Roman times on turns into dinosaurs and fossilizes.
Bruce Sterling, science-fiction writer, when he first started writing columns for Wired ten years ago or so, wrote a column to that effect, that he didn’t really fear the CIA or any other large organization was exercising conspiracies against progress, since they would always lose anyway.
The American economy from day one has promoted entrepreneurship better than any other. It’s under some pressure today, but still fairly strong. “Too big to fail” is a sign of that pressure, government mandates on small-ish businesses is another. Of course government mandates on BIG businesses just accelerates their failures, or their transformation into money-holes.
As to the threat or promise of DIY biology, well, I dunno. The biosphere has been evolving for several billion years, and it’s far more robust – WE are for more robust – than many give us credit for. Could a really horrible disease be cooked up in the lab? Maybe, but it’s still hard to beat mother nature. Ten, fifteen years ago there was a fad for biotech fiction in some of the mags, and some of it was super-creepy. In reality, our level of understanding of DNA and cellular processes still rates about a 3 on a scale of 100, and isn’t progressing all that fast.
And, the technical expertise of the jihadis has never been high, and I don’t see it getting better anytime soon. I doubt if DIY biology is going to be *easy* anytime in the next hundred years. And just consider the opportunity for “workplace accidents” when they try do to it in a cave somewhere, and the goat knocks over the test tubes.
6/Don. What I didn’t do was include the rest of my comment — sorry! Weary and blurry today, fell asleep and didn’t edit in time. I was attempting to write about the mental/attitudinal change that is occurring as huge numbers of people are laid off and they realize that being bright or even simply willing to work is not sufficient. One can’t just go out and “get a job” anymore; competition for the remaining open slots is fierce.
I’ve watched mill towns lose the single employer and I’ve read blogs written by ex-GM workers who had grown up assuming they’d follow in Dad and Grandpa’s footsteps. I wait impatiently for that spark when they figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. That shift to accepting that we are on our own and need to set our own places at the table (and maybe build the table, too) is percolating through our society. W’s Age of Individual Initiative.
I have a friend going through “outplacement training” right now. Boy is THAT a thriving field. What really worries me, though, is what on earth will all those government workers DO if/when they are downsized? What will the outplacement training agencies teach them, how to do outplacement training??? Unemployment benefits are not perpetual. Going on the dole is or will be a non-starter since the funds to support non-workers don’t exist.
Even though there is the known potential for evil doings in home labs, I am heartened by the increase in DIY labs. The internet does make it much easier to supplement existing knowledge, acquire supplies, make contacts, and convert a hobby into a small business. For instance, “artisan soap” is huge right now, but there is a limited market and buying lye is an over-regulated ordeal courtesy of the meth makers. My guess is that making meth or anthrax pays better, plus there isn’t the pesky tithe to the IRS (just to Satan later…). You do have to move often since making nasty things tends to taint the local water table, but small labs are portable. I haven’t seen a meth lab, but I’ve seen the damage a meth lab did to a rural watershed and I’d rather have moonshiners in the neighborhood. Yet another heavily regulated field!
T/8; search [ Tylenol suicide anthrax ]
The crowdsourcing of biological tools is not a development I welcome.
For one thing, I read Ken Alibek’s “Biohazard”, about the Russian bioweapons program. That was Big Science for the most part, most folks aren’t going to have four-story reactors for producing industrial batches of anthrax for weaponization. The Small Science he described was much more disturbing.
One researcher spliced the gene for myelin (the fat layer that allows efficient neural transmission) into Legionella pneumophila, a common bacteria that often lives in air conditioners and was the cause of Legionnaire’s disease back in 1976. They infected some rabbits, who got the legionella pneumonia they expected, and survived it (as most people who get the disease will). The kicker is that the infection sensitized the rabbits’ immune systems to myelin, and six weeks later the rabbits had the symptoms of multiple sclerosis — an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own myelin. Bingo — airborne MS.
This kind of thing bothers me. Legionella isn’t hard to find, and the gene for myelin can’t be hard to look up. One plasmid and we have a plague that brings back the bad old days of polio, only worse.
The likelihood of someone deliberately making a batch of nasty is far greater, IMO, than the likelihood of a garage bioresearcher finding anything particularly interesting.
What really worries me, though, is what on earth will all those government workers DO if/when they are downsized?
Sylvia, for some of us government workers, we’ll just have to take our skills to the private sector. I am a web designer, and also do animation and illustration. There are also engineers, scientists, mechanics, and even scholars on the federal payroll. They can transfer to the private sector.
My guess is that making meth or anthrax pays better, plus there isn’t the pesky tithe to the IRS (just to Satan later…). You do have to move often since making nasty things tends to taint the local water table, but small labs are portable.
And I recently read just how portable (it may have been at Instapundit). A meth-maker on the run can make his product in a half-gallon jug or large plastic soda bottle — no need even for the in situ mini-still anymore! He can be homeless!
Just the same, I concur with Wretchard on the need to be positive about the overall trend of decentralization of scientific research and labs, including down to the ‘basement lab’ level. While I appreciate the concerns expressed by many posters on the subject’s potential hazards, we should be more alive and excited about the prospects of greater freedoms. That more freedom can bring more risk and unintended consequences just goes with the territory, and requires a free people to be more agile, robust, and less fearful.
In WWII people were required to turn in their shortwave radio receivers. Amateur radio communications were not allowed except for government-sponsored exercises designed to support civil defense. Private aviation was not allowed within a hundred miles of the coasts.
These restrictions were not required in Germany, Italy, and Japan – because people there largely did not own the required apparatus. The fact that we had lots of “amateurs” in the USA doing technical things was a problem, requiring some wartime restrictions, but was also an immense advantage. The industries that supported all those hobbyists were very useful to the war effort, and the expertise of the individuals was invaluable. I even recall one British writer saying that Americans never even realized how important it was that almost every one of us could drive a car. and given the nature of the cars of that time, everyone was to some degree a mechanic.
I think it was Jerry Pournelle that pointed out in the early 80’s that the personal computer revolution meant that the USSR was doomed. Compare a nation where typewiters have to be registered and where they toss you in jail for 20 years for owning a mimeograph machine with one in which people can own as powerful a PC as they wish to pay for. Who will bury who?
We are in a continuous race to handle our own competency. An analogy told to me by a teacher in high school came from his experiences as a boy in Texas. Sometimes they would encounter a rattlesnake, and they found that if they grabbed the snake by the tail and spun him around in a vertical circle, the snake was harmless. The problem was how to stop spinning the snake once you have started.
The fact that we had lots of “amateurs” in the USA doing technical things was a problem, requiring some wartime restrictions, but was also an immense advantage.
RWE:
Also a lot of amateur flyers who in turn joined the Civil Air Patrol. A number of small CAP planes even sank U-Boats with strapped-on depth charges.
I have a friend going through “outplacement training” right now. Boy is THAT a thriving field. What really worries me, though, is what on earth will all those government workers DO if/when they are downsized? What will the outplacement training agencies teach them, how to do outplacement training??? Unemployment benefits are not perpetual. Going on the dole is or will be a non-starter since the funds to support non-workers don’t exist.
It’s a tremendous challenge, and there’s no magic bullet. But it seems self-evident that we’re going to have to create an environment in which people can find niches, fill them and make a living at them. It will probably not be enough to pick up the slack. But it’s better than doing nothing the only way jobs are going to be found is if they are created. Society has to make it a lot easier to create small businesses. To some extent, necessity is going to drive that process just as budget constraints in government are de facto going to diminish the regulatory burden.
I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever does it will be pretty substantial upheaval lasting half a generation maybe. But on the bright side, maybe we are on the cusp of great new things.
#21–Darren
Very interesting. Perhaps that’s the key to understanding the Fermi Paradox. Before any civilization can attain the level of interstellar travel, the technology must grow to the level that one psychotic can destroy that civilization by products grown in its own garage lab. And in accordance with the one True Guiding Principle, that being Murphy’s Law, it must and will happen. Interesting …
i saw this on insty. might be of interest
In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits
link
Mongo your #20, it wasn’t Bruce Ivins, Amerithrax was weaponized. An article came out just yesterday on this:
Silicon was used in the 1960s to weaponize anthrax, turning it into a lethal aerosol, according to author Edward Jay Epstein, who offered a fresh look at the anthrax attacks in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. The anthrax used in the attacks contained silicon, while Ivins’ flask contained none.
Moreover, Epstein found that Ivins did not have the means to attach silicon to anthrax spores, which requires highly specialized equipment not present at the Fort Detrick facility.
So far the Muslims have done a fine job of re-interpreting the technology and social innovations we’ve spoon fed them in the last 60 years in special Muslim ways…
Cell phones become bomb detonators..
Air planes become bombs…
Our rights to freely assemble have translated into opportunities to plot our downfall in mosques across our land…
Laws protecting people from transgress have become opportunities to transgress and threaten ruination…
Rights to practice religion without hindrance have become a license to install ten thousand enemy recruiting and indoctrination centers on our soil to wage insurrection…
Television has become a vehicle to spread al Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, Jumaat al Fuqura, Islamic Jihad, and Jihad Islamiya propaganda…
The internet has become a wonderful recruiting and communications tool for global terrorism…
Oil technologies and the trillions in infidel wealth have become vehicles to fund the global spread of Islam (aka global terrorism…)
Food technologies, and Western medicine have only served to birth an exploding Muslim population, which the Muslims then export to every corner of the globe to wage Jihad to spread more Islam…
Why wouldn’t the miracles of DNA science also be perverted and subverted to serve the genocidal purposes of Islamic Jihad too?
Tell me again why we admit tens of thousands of verminous Muslims to our colleges and universities annually? We KNOW they’ll turn every gift we give them into bombs and misery and weapons to destroy us in the end. Why do we do it??? Did anybody think this out?
Don Rodrigo #24:
Yes, I thought about that. A friend of mine owned the only remaining former CAP airplane that actually got a sub, a 1936 Fairchild 24R. The USAF Museum called him up and said they had to have it in the early 90’s and he gave it to them.
This is a very dangerous time, and the very real threats from the marxists who control the levers of power in Washington have created a dark cloud in our general outlook. Hence, our first impulse on encountering something new is to see it as a potential threat. I see that on this thread.
What is being described as small science is, in my view, no more than an extension of public literacy in the public arena. Literacy can be a threat – it provides the means for lies, distortions and downright dangerous ideas to spread in the general population – but on balance our society sees literacy as purely a net good.
I checked out a few items at the link and they appear to me to contain the kind of information that would be most interesting to individuals with very different mindsets than AQ would or could recruit – students or those pursuing a serious hobby.
Mary Shelly’s mindless monster created by biological science gone wrong has been a popular inspiration for horror stories, but in the real world many such monsters have been created by indoctrination and not a single one by biology.
Bottom line: In my view, small bioscience as described in the link is a step in the extension of literacy in the public sphere. Its on the path trod by Einstein dabbling in physics as a hobby in his spare time, and by Gates and Allen writing basic for the Altair.
re: jobs for the willing.
My sense is every time the government lets its employees know that there might not be a job for them tomorrow, the most able up and leave and do magic. And not just improvements in productivity but inventiveness and passion. To say nothing of moving from an economic below-the-line burden on society to an above-the-line wealth creator. I’ve never been able to figure out why individuals are thought of as costs to our society (and, say, a litter of piglets are not). In my over-simplified view the only time they are a cost for a society is when they are paid for or taken care of by our taxes.
To say nothing of the truism that supply can create demand (in the absence of regulation suppressing the market). e.g. we have unemployed teenagers looking for part time work, if only for the experience. Some would work for nothing. But we prohibit it (we being special interests and the well-intentioned but ignorant do-good-ers who always deny culpability for their actions.. ‘cept for a few like Sen. Moynihan who took responsibility for the left and the “Great Society” destroying the black family).
Such a pity. A real tragedy – that which we do to ourselves wittingly.
Morton: Tell me again why we admit tens of thousands of verminous Muslims to our colleges and universities annually?
Money.
We KNOW they’ll turn every gift we give them into bombs and misery and weapons to destroy us in the end. Why do we do it???
Money.
Did anybody think this out?
No. But Robert Heinlein thought that the answer to every question that begins with the word “Why” is “money”.
Tcobb:
Before any civilization can attain the level of interstellar travel, the technology must grow to the level that one psychotic can destroy that civilization by products grown in its own garage lab.
That makes the assumption that every civilization has psychotics. The entire human race is psychotic, in a way, by necessity, since we do not have large teeth or sharp claws and therefore we had to become extremely mean and vicious to compete with other predators when we dropped out of our trees and joined their club on the savanna. Those individuals that we do deem to be psychotic are merely on one far end of a bell curve, on the other side from Ghandi.
It also makes the assumption that interstellar travel is within the technical grasp of any civilization, and I argue that it is not. Voyager 1 was not launched in the direction of the nearest star, but it will take forty thousand years for it to reach the corresponding distance of Proxima Centauri from our sun. The exhaust velocity of a fusion rocket is only about a hundred times faster than with chemical rockets. This means our hottest (and therefore fastest) theoretical engine would shave the time of flight to Proxima to four hundred years. Certainly we could send a machine there, but not an individual, and most certainly not a colony.
21/Darren. According to the studies I’ve read, the incidence of MS is much, much higher in people with a vitamin D deficiency. It is possible that maintaining a relatively high D level could help guard against insidious airborne auto-immune triggers. I keep my D high in the hope that it really will help retard tumor growth. YMMV.
22/Don. I am concerned not with the skill set of the public sector workers but with the elasticity the private sector would need in order to grow quickly enough to accommodate/absorb any large influx of new workers. The shrinkage of the economy is risking employment saturation in many fields. It will be interesting to see, as push comes to shove, which fields will surge forward as the private sector rebounds/expands. I have a lot of friends who are working hard to convert their hobbies into productive income streams. I’m designing a new line of dog sweaters this week. Never ever thought I would knit dog sweaters, but it’s a cold winter and thus a thriving niche.
Silicon Valley still has venture capital flowing in, not at the pre-Obama rate but some start-ups are getting B and C rounds. Some of the ones doing rapid expansion are hiring like crazy and will do a cull after their first big release, if they follow a typical pattern. I miss the years when business was booming. It’s pretty normal now for companies to have empty desks. On my walks I see empty office spaces on nearly every block. Restaurants that used to be packed at lunch hour now have empty tables.
Two practical links for those interested.
Gas Mask Reviews
Where my group gets it’s NBC gear.
ApprovedGasMasks.com
Don’t buy some cheap milsurp masks or gear unless you can verify it’s condition and if replacement parts such as filters are available and are/have been tested. One rule of thumb. If it’s price is low, don’t buy it.
Papa Ray
Papa Ray
Gare du Midi
A nondescript express in from the south,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face
To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: something about the mouth
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.
Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may just have arrived.
The ever prescient, ever topical, W.H. Auden
Tcobb #26
I read an alternative explanation to the Fermi Paradox today. A scientist says that with the replacement of high power TV transmissions with cable TV and lower powered digital TV transmissions, Planet Earth will be undetectable by ET’s very soon. Even twenty years ago we would have read Wretchard’s piece in some magazine and we would be discussing all of this on 20 Meter Single Sideband, with the radio waves going on out into the void. Today we are on the Internet. So maybe They Are Out There but they’re on their own Internet.
Wretchard #25
The problem with working for a large bureaucracy, especially a government one, is that they insist on you becoming proficient in things that are important only to them. You end up knowing how to do something very well that is totally irrelevant to the real world or even to another bureaucracy.
But I will admit that figuring out what you should study and become proficient in seems to be pretty much a crapshoot. 30 years ago I got called off my assigned job to perform a special duty. And 10 years ago that came to define what I do today. Who was to know? The good news is that it is interesting, I am one of the top experts in the field in the entire world and it has led to my being hired to do some rather obliquely related things. The bad news is that there is no reliable way to make a living doing it, so it is a good thing I was careful and saved my money.
There are opportunities out there, you can bet on it. Back in 1977 I went looking for a good quality cassette tape player, one you could use to play store-bought cassette tapes. And I found … nothing. Believe it or not, there was no such thing available, if you did not count a $350 tape deck with built in amp. A couple of years later Sony came out with the Walkman. In retrospect, it is obvious.
I am tempted to go into business selling kits to remove the alcohol from gasoline. I know a simple way to do it, and there are quite a few people who want to buy auto fuel that does not have alcohol in it, and I am going to have to do it for myself. That is not a business anyone could have predicted a couple of years ago and it very well may go away a couple of years from now.
Gare du Midi
A nondescript express in from the south,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face
To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: something about the mouth
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.
Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may just have arrived.
The ever topical, the ever prescient W. H. Auden
RWE, my recollection of tape deck availability and prices does not correspond to yours, I still have a 1977 cassette deck right here that IIRC paid about $180 for, medium quality, in then-current dollars. Walkman came out a few years later – but was still rather pricey, at least the first year or three. I recall when they got cheaper, buying an Akai “walkman” with some early amped plug-in mini-speakers, might still find that someplace … oh, the old days.
Why would you want to remove alcohol from gasoline, have some classic cars to run?
I know an an elderly organic chemist (85+) who has had his own laboratory since he was 11 years old.
He invented ion exchange resins for Dow. He still does chemistry for himself.
I think more people should do science, and do science at home. Some of us can make more than meth…
DIY mag
http://makezine.com/
DIY bio
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/diy-bio-growing-movement-takes-aging
People make lemonade. At least potentially we are empowered by distributed techology. Perhps one day there will be an epidemic, perhaps caused by the nondescript man with his briefcase from allah. While the CDC and the FBI and the great university labs do there best, which is very good, they will also see energy and most inportant time sapped by turf battles and red tape and the need to prepare hourly reports to six other agencies and Congress. In the meantime, possibly if we are lucky and the wind is in the right direction and the creek don’t rise, an Army of David’s may be coming up with an answer through a distributed network of trial and error and small efforts.
Will mistakes be made and is there a risk of increased contamination? Sure there is and it may not be worth it but then again it may be nd the usual rule is that the cat doesn’t go back in the bag. Once the people know how to do simple chemical engineering they will keep that knowledge and knowledge is power.
If the government does not have a monopoly on the cure then they do not have a monopoly on the technology. That also means that they do not have a monoply on retaliation. The United States never was an appendage to a government that could be conquered by seizing the Center. In the future that may become even more obvious. This has the potential to do for the freedom of the people before international threats what the 2nd Amendment does for the liberty of the people before domestic threats. It flashes a large do not tread on me sign before the world.
I was doing some airflow testing on some power amplifiers and needed a reliable smoke generator to evaluate different flow patterns. Anyhow, I set up a small assembly line in my kitchen with rocket motor igniters, et al. I had three batches with different additives for different colors. About the time I finished the second batch the third batch, which I had left on the stove, lit on fire. It spewed little fire balls around the kitchen, burning the floor, lighting the curtains on fire, setting off the main batch which scorched my cabinets and then all of the finished smoke generators went up spontaneously. I burned my hand pretty bad throwing the melting aluminum pot out of the side door. This all happened last November. I had a hard time explaining why I was late from lunch to my boss and an even harder time explaining the mess to the fire department.
RWE –
Benzine, molecular sieve or precipitation?
Dear A. Mouse,
Have you thought of distilling your experiences to a new “Pink Panther” script?
Your story has all the hallmarks of Inspector Clouseau.
I’m still cleaning up the soda pop I snorted out my nose. That stuff burns.
“the commission concludes that the Obama administration, like the three administrations before it, has failed to pay consistent and urgent attention to increasing the nation’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to a germ attack that would inflict massive casualties on the nation.”
Weaponizing the influenza, smallpox or ebola virus has to be high on the list of our collectivist enemies: al Qaeda, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China…. The new arms race will be genetic vs. genetic. For every weaponized virus there will be a genetically engineered cure; the weapon via genetic engineering of the viruses’ genetic code (DNA), and the latter via drugs working through RNA interference. Existing vaccines will not be helpful during the attack if the viral strain is new.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3210/02.html
Jeez, Here is the way we made Smoke Bombs fifty or so years ago. It’s a lot safer I would think.
As far as the colors go, you will have to look that up on the intertube.
Papa Ray
“I still remember the tingly feeling the first time I cloned a piece of DNA.”
Hmmm. Maybe the tingledy feeling was because the cloned DNA was busy rearranging the writer’s innards.
I get that way sometimes just sampling my own fermentation experiments.
Mad – I tried to keep a lid on it as much as I could at work but it got out and has been the subject of more than a few giggles. On the other hand, it has given some people reason to respect me a little more, after all, you wouldn’t want to piss someone off who might come by and burn your house down.
The irony is that I remembered doing this when I was bored and listless 9 year old and it worked out OK back then. The article that I got off of the internet said something to the effect “fun for the whole family, adult supervision required”. They might have mentioned that you should not multiply the recipe by a factor of 10.
This is why I don’t EVER list anyone in my immediate family as a reference when I apply for loans or a job.
The big difficulty with bio-warfare (whether national or terrorist) is containment. Success would likely end up like the Medieval Black Death — spreading rapidly and killing one third of the population around the known world.
But killing only one third, or so. Mostly likely biased towards the sick, the old, the under-tended young. (Suddenly, Social Security & Medicare would be solvent).
The real issue might then turn out to be which society can re-establish itself the fastest in the aftermath of someone having hit the global ‘Reset’ button. A society of with widely distributed knowledge & individual capabilities might bounce back much faster — and then visit the Wrath of God on the perpetrators. The Law of Unintended Consequences applies as much to terrorists as to anyone else.
I’m excited about the potential of fab-labs and desktop manufacturing. These kinds of applications are similiar to the DIYbio in that they have the lure of empowering the proverbial guy in his garage into doing revolutionary things. But with fab-labs and desktop manufacturing the thrust would be more into applied science, engineering and inventiveness rather than research science.
The problem with DIYbio is the enormous investment for nebulous payoff. They’re the potential DARPA of the garage engineering world. Big idea guys with big, long lead times, and the occasional spectacular result. But right now you can buy some pretty neat milling and fab machines at ever falling prices and ever expanding capabilities. We’re going to have a literal cottage industry of these more practical types pioneering how to make profitable things that required big capital before. They may have the potential to launch a second industrial revolution. We had the first one, say Henry Ford seeing how to take the automobile out of the hands of the artisan tinkerers and putting them on the assembly line. Conceivably, we may now see the revenge of the garage men – making an artisan product that can compete in price with the mass produced one rolling off the big lines.
Cowboy @ 51
The average housewife can now create a better home schooled child than the average high school.
Slightly off-topic——okay way off topic——
but sorta related:
Check out the “Zombie” thread about pro-lifers vs pro-choicers in San Francisco. Really, do not fail to do so.
Then have the band play “The World Turned Upside Down”.
Something is happening out there. New set of logistics and looks like an improving set of logistics.
Langley@52
Having taught college for 16 years, there is some truth in this.
However, in my experience, some home schooled kids are the most doctrinaire and demogogic individuals I have taught. At least, initially.
In the long run, they emerge as, generally, the most unable to stand up to the liberal BS in terms of producing rational and persuasive arguments to their peers. The most capable kids, in this regard, have gone through the ordeal of fire that is public high school.
Probably 80% of the home schoolers I have taught, have succumbed to liberal preaching by the time they exit college and I teach at what would be seen as a moderate institution (yes, such things exist). Generally, closed, home schooling communities have not prepared them for the onslaught of college.
A colleague of mine suggests home schooling his college age children. That is merely perpetuating our weakness.
They are losing the culture wars. They need better preparation. Closeting them is not a solution.
Apologies for running off topic. First time to this site.
Interesting threads.
Liminal reminds us of the Irony Rule –which in turn reminds of the 80-20 rule, i’d guess applied here would be homeschooling pluses to homeschooling minuses. Also the low enculturation level is one of the two big reasons to homeschool, and the high resistance of public school kids to liberal BS is right in line to become an overall ennervating cynicism about the entire system of life on earth. it all comes back to parents –it’s a big job.
Josh #39: Oh, I have a tape deck of that vintage too. But you needed an amp and speakers to use it with anything but headphones. I essentially wanted a boom box -and in those prehistoric times there twern’t any.
Annoy Mouse: I need the non-alcohol fuel for my airplane, as do others. Other users include boaters, lawn service companies, and classic car enthusiasts. I would mix water with the gasoline and then after the two fluids separated due to specific gravity differences, which is clearly visible through a clear container, drain off the water/alcohol mixture. Probably could find something to do with the alcohol/water mixture, too. Maybe sell it as windshield washer cleaner.
As for smoke bombs, if there are any cruise ships that operate near you, go find out who refurbs their lifeboat kits. By regulation, the first aid kits and emergency signaling devices, like smoke bombs and flares, have to be swapped out every few years. The people who do that will give you the old ones if you are nice and friendly. However, a real, professional smoke grenade probably puts out more smoke than you want, so be prepared to clear the area before the helicopters arrive.
And in your case, you might want to ask for one of the old lifeboat first aid kits, too….
A little O/T here, but maybe puzzle piece or food for thought. What exactly is being cooked up in these “private communities” that are located in semi-secluded places around the nation? Like the one at Islamaburg, NY?
This thread and the recent arrest in Va of the individual with the .50 upper reciever on his Bushmaster got me thinking… the article mentioned off-hand about him being connected with an “out of state civilian community”. I’m doubting it was a Pennsylvania Dutch settlement, more likely the “red and white traditional headdress” that he was in possession of describes this community best.
To tie off my rambling point… Morton D mentioned that the very things that make us modern and free are also assets utilized by the enemy. I wonder if there’s a zealous dedication to science on the curriculum at Islamaburg? At the very least they’re procuring some very useful tactical gear… those .50 bolt action uppers are the cheapest way to get to a .50 BMG weapon. Which tells me that they’re running on a budget and said budget would get the most bang for the buck from bathtub chem or bio products.
One of the local universities, UCSD, reports that they take in the top 25% of local high school graduates and 60% of them require remedial reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. That’s something you probably don’t have to worry about with home school kids. The chances that mom is a communist proselytizer is about 99% less too. University should be focused on teaching critical thinking instead indoctrinating left or right. Perhaps a good course on rhetoric in political science would put it in perspective. Leave the armed conflict to public schools, they do that so well.
RWE – “professional smoke grenade probably puts out more smoke than you want”
Touche that was the whole idea of making my own so that it would be smaller and more controllable. Also, you’re right about the boat supplies… I have a sailboat have a bunch of expired pyrotechnics. Anhydrous alcohol has the peculiar quality such that mixing with water the resultant volume is less than the mathematical sum of its two parts since they chemically combine. (Binary azeotrope) Benzine is used similarly to separate the last amount of water from alcohol as is a molecular sieve. I used to fly back when I could afford it and I recall draining out bits of water from the tanks on preflight. That would work handily though I’d be a little more spooked with getting water in my engine than alcohol, though I guess anhydrous alcohol only bonds with a few percent of water anyhow so it makes sense that it will work.
Iowa Army Ammunition Plant is a Group Technology Center for missile warheads, tank ammunition, artillery rounds and demolition charges. The plant is a one-of-a-kind national resource that provides “total munitions solutions” for the Defense industrial base, which includes research, development, production, inspection, testing, assembly, packing and demilitarization. The Iowa AAP’s 1,500 building facility is built on 19,300 acres in southeast Iowa. Less than a third of the IAAAP’s 19,015-acre (30-square-mile) property is occupied by active or formerly-active production or storage facilities. The remaining land is evenly divided between leased agricultural acreage and woodlands
I think that the decentralization of scientific research is a wonderful thing. I also think that we shall soon see, if it does not already exist, the “interversity” where the most sophisticated subjects will be taught/learned online among groups of highly motivated students, and completely outside the formal educational infrastructure.
Not only will the decentralization of science and education produce its own rewards but it will help reinforce the ethos that individuals have the power and the ability to make their own future.
If liberty, free expression, and social mobility are going to continue to exist beyond the 21st century then it will only be outside the reach of the central authority. The Planners are way ahead in points and already have the organization, the IRS, the courts, the cops, and the guns to enforce a political and economic system that rewards only conformity and cooperation.
The difference between homebrew geneticists and the tinkerers of the last century and the one before is that people mucking around with macroscopic tools are unlikely to make something dangerous, certainly not on a global scale. Louis Chevrolet was trying to win a race and was unlikely to accidentally create a self-replicating car, or a Transformer if he didn’t get that one bolt torqued down just right. The Homebrew Computer Club in the Bay Area of the 1970s was unlikely to write a self-aware program, or take down a major computer network. The tools they used were local, even Alfred Nobel was not a threat to people off of his property when he was experimenting with early versions of dynamite. It’s not as if he would suddenly create an implosion nuclear weapon by accident, but the chances of some biological experimenter doing the equivalent are much higher than in any previous generation. The range of what is known in terms of autoimmune interactions and behavior of viruses is far smaller than what was known about the behavior of metal under stress or the power generated by expanding gases.
The problem with biological experimentation is that the wrenches and soldering irons of this toolkit are strains of bacteria and viruses that are common, and they are common because they are effective at living outside the laboratory. A few wildtype reversions and all that additional genetic information is now in the wider pool of viruses and bacteria, and it’s not as if the bacteria needed more help.
The idea that “we’ll just have to stay ahead of them” is calmative, until you consider what that implies — Neal Stephenson’s “toner wars” in which nanoscale weapons tangle with each other in the atmosphere, each side releasing tailored agents and counteragents in a rapidly-evolving arms race. The “breakthrough” won’t be something like rifling, that allows killing of one man at a greater distance with improvement to an existing weapon, it will be a target that allows the elimination of whole classes of Other based on their genes. We understand so very little about epigenetics, protein expression and a host of other biological processes that it is the equivalent to plopping down Cousin Eddie and his motor home within seconds of landing on a new planet with a sentient species, and Cousin Eddie disappearing over the horizon in a cloud of oil-streaked smoke to “go find stuff”. There may be some good that comes from that, but Cousin Eddie dumping his waste tank in the local stream wearing a short robe is unlikely to generate much goodwill. Even the professionals are at a loss for knowledge, encouraging the amateurs to “go find stuff” with their Snap-On Home DNA Sequencers is pretty silly.
Another analogy would be sending the Mountain Men and the Settlers across the American West at the same time. Reward? Maybe. Risk? Definitely.
The biotech genie is out of the bag as well. Biotech is still huge in San Diego and I did some engineering consulting for one of the more successful ones. Kind of a funny story, I worked in the R&D building and could smell what I thought was the whiff of a smoky sweet smelling alcohol while walking down the hallway every Monday. It turns out the cofounder of the company would have “meetings” on Monday evenings and they would sample a few of the very finest aged scotches. Half kidding one time I asked “what’s it take to get invited to that meeting?” and he invited me. I have considered myself pretty smart before but sitting in with a room full of biotech geniuses made me feel real small. Eventually, I stopped going to the meetings and felt like an ignorant schmuck. The manufacturing engineering department, incidentally heavy in robotics, was run by a very wide ranging group of Europeans from Switzerland, Greece, Bulgaria, and more. I moved on to other things.
There are so many vast inter-universes as to be chaotic. It is no wonder that Einstein failed to conjure up the Grand Unified Field theory. Until then we’ll just have to leave it up to God.
Annoy Mouse,
I’m an MD with a fairly broad general knowledge background and to me the cavern systems of specialized knowledge below the crust of Wikipedia makes the caves of Oxaca seem like a root cellar by comparison. The joke in medicine was that either you were a generalist, who would eventually know almost nothing about everything, or a specialist that would eventually know everything about almost nothing. There are folks like the ones at your SD Biotech firm that do indeed know a vast amount about nanoscale biological processes, but what they don’t know dwarfs what they do. The problem is that they really don’t know how much they don’t know and and are unable to figure out how much they don’t know from what they do know. Amateurs piggybacking on the processes that Kary Mullis and others have simplified down to button-pushing only gives the illusion that we really know what we’re doing. People could accidentally take out a whole HLA haplotype. It is a Black Swan problem writ large.
Disseminated biotinkering is not like other tinkerings, though. At least the pros have a slightly better chance of understanding when it’s likely that the experiment they are undertaking should be better done in a BL-4 lab.
OT,
Commented on the PJM thread on James O’Keefe getting arrested in Senator Landrieu’s office. Three others were arrested, including the son of the Federal Prosecutor for the Western District of Louisiana. This is a bad thing. They will go after Breitbart now. Hope for the sake of the accused that they can prove entrapment or so many stories of Democratic/Acorn/Landrieu family corruption start coming out that the DoJ moves to drop it.
I saw that movie, the black dude in the red shirt dies first.
Worst case scenario, if something does get out of a home biotech lab like hemorrhagic fever with legs or a new smallpox then it might kill 20-30% of the population in the post industrialized 1st World and it would probably kill at least twice as large a percentage of the population in the 3rd World. That would essentially wipe out the Ummah and depopulate all but the wealthiest enclaves, who could afford extraordinary defenses and medical care, in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The aid from the wealthier nations that poor nations depend upon to survive would stop. There would be no rescue for a devastated Haiti in such a future. Iceland could inherit the world. If al-Qeada produces this it is the ultimate suicide bomb. My worry is that some apocalyptic nut case like a racist version of the Unibomber will decide that he likes those odds.
In such an event anyone who calls for destroying capital and spreading poverty because of a fear of Global Warming would quickly have a mob introduce them to room temperature.
To be blogged under the title “The Kaczynski Future.”
17. wws:
“I wonder what the “something better” was?”
nationalized health care. (rimshot)
————————————————-
If bio-hackers start creating organic viruses with
the same gay abandon with which computer hackers
create computer viruses, what health care system
(nationalized or not) could keep up?
Rember that computer hacking started with nerds
fooling around at home. Now crime syndicates use
it to extort money, and intel agencies use it to
wage deniable warfare.
If bio-hacking follows a similar progression, we’re
in for a bumpy ride.
It’s interesting that Wretchard should post this on the same day that Instapundit links to a Wired article about the same general topic. Great minds and all that.
Instapundit:
CHRIS ANDERSON: In The Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are The New Bits. “The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.”
I had a column on this a while back.
UPDATE: Reader Ry Jones emails: “You can rent makerbots and lasers in Seattle, by the minute.”
Posted at 6:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds
Wired:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1
There are three ways that bureacracies can harvest new innovations in the new economy. The first is — using the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld–harvesting Unknown Unknowns.This answers to the question–how do find solutions to problems you don’t understand. This is done by setting up prize money for the best solution to a problem–and then advertising the prize colleges all over the country–and sometimes paying a bit to each that participates. Typically the research bang for the buck is on the order of about 10 to 1 over ordinary research dollars spent. DARPA began this program with the Xprize and it has subsequently spread to other agencies.
The second solution answers to the question: How do you find answers to problems you do understand but don’t have the money time or brain power to solve for. That is how do you answer known unknowns. One solution is go to websites that connect to inventors at home. You specify the problem and put up how much you’ll pay for the solution. The inventors will counter with how much they’ll charge etc. And then the inventors come up with a solution.
The third problem for bureaucracies is how to deal with competing solutions to the same problem. That is, how do you choose among known knowns. Usually the people who are in charge of allocating money are furthest from the solution providers/inventors/researchers/investigators. So people in charge of allocating money only hear about what’s happening second and third and fourth hand. In front line companies they’ll set up bidding situations like you’ll see for presidential elections. Only in this case the bidding will be for inventions or solutions.
LOTM,
You are optimistic. So far the post-industrialized First World is 0-fer against viruses with the exception of vaccines, which allow you to essentially avoid infection at a scale that produces disease…most of the time. Things like DNA vaccines may help, because if a vulnerable protein can be identified quickly enough, DNA sequencers can crank out loads of vaccine far faster than the chicken egg method. Should something truly nasty get out like that, there will always be some pencil-neck who points out that DNA vaccines are not FDA approved and need to be tested. On the plus side, in that person I believe we have found Test Subject #1.
The best response I have heard to how to deal with a patient with a viral hemorrhagic fever is 20 years old and from my microbiology professor, who said, “Build a giant autoclave, and put the patient in it before they infect someone else.” The kill rate on those is greater than 80% for the nasty ones like Marburg and Ebola. Luckily, those are hard to come by in CONUS, but if they’ll publish the DNA sequence of the 1918 H1N1 how long can it be before the .txt files for filoviruses can be obtained?
It did take the not-inconsiderable scientific and technical might of the former Soviet Union to, according to Alibek, breed an anthrax strain that was highly pathogenic as well as resistant to virtually all known antibiotics at the time. Something like that is probably beyond the abilities of a garage scientist, but it’s not the known biological threats that are the real danger. It’s the accidents, the unintended side-effects that are the real threat, and the unknown space there is huge. One example of a chemical unknown threat was the MPTP episode in 1982. At least MPTP is not self-replicating, or contagious.
Mongo tried to be uddybay arsenlay once again, and it worked for a few posts, then i tried to link a Bing search containing an array of articles about h*1*n*1 bearing a lab print somehow (from 1977, said one such), and upon edit (tried to add a few words) it flashed a pink “you are spam” sign, and now the whole comment is gone. Why do this keep happening to Mongo’s dopplegangbanger? mongo feelings hurt.
RWE #37
There are a lot of Light Sport Aircraft (LSA) that use the Rotax engine. The Rotax runs fine on 93 octane automobile gas, but a lot of related aircraft products are not designed to be exposed to alcohol. There have been a number of problems with the alcohol destroying gaskets and seals in fuel systems. There is a ready market for a kit to remove alcohol from automobile gas.
Just a minor correction: Prof. Pande’s first name is “Vijay”, not “vinjay”.
61 Peter Boston: Hear Hear!
Not to give anyone ideas, but the simple seeding of currency with pathogens like anthrax, even in a few relatively isolated locations would bring our nation to a standstill for sufficient time to wreak havoc. This is the same metric applying to disrupting air commerce, or retail commerce in malls.
Bin Laden just parasitized the “failed pantybomber attack” and transformed it into a successful Muslim attack with a mere cassette tape and the aid of al Jazeera. It doesn’t take much for our enemy to place our system under sustained attacks.
The Muslims don’t need a targeted genetics like Darren’s “breakthrough” above, though I have no doubt that Muslim grads from our universities are floundering around in their various Islamic redoubts concocting exactly that type of weapon. All the Muslims need to sow terror is the periodic Beslan, the periodic 7/11 attack in London, the Madrid attack, the Mumbai attack, or the anthrax attacks.
Just see how well our enemy has us pegged. Eight years after 9/11 a majority of the American populace had bought into the lie that a president with the middle name of Hussein would appease our Muslim enemies, and GW Bush approved tens of thousands of additional education visas for Saudis to enter America and parasitize our sciences and engineering to weaponize for the Jihad.
Further, as a measure of the effectiveness of Muslim terror and Jihad:
*There are more mosques on American and European soil today than there were on 9/11 — not less
*There are more Muslims in American and on European soil today than there were on 9/11…
*The Muslims have successfully coopted virtually every major politician, most of our academy, and nearly all of our press to proselytize and propagandize for the Religion of Peace.
*One of Obama’s first acts as president was to whitewash the words “terrorism” “Jihad” and “Islam” from the Federal lexicon
*In the UK, they began calling Islamic terrorism “anti-Islamic acts”
*Barrack Hussein’s first press interview as POTUS wasn’t directed to the American people, nor was it through an American or Western agency. His first press interview was on Al Aribiya, a state owned Jihad megaphone owned by Sheik Khalifa of Qattar, with ties and financial links to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
*We are flirting across the West with outlawing speech against Islam and Muslims as prohibited “hate speech”, in essence, enacting Sharia laws for their protection at the expense of our inherent rights as a people.
With all of the above and more, with our insane stance on Muslims being so protective of them, so positive in our assertions their religion has been “hijacked by extremists”, do you think they are saying in their mosques across our land: “Brothers! We are LOSING the JIHAD!”??? Or do you think they are rubbing their hands, licking their fangs and saying something like: “Allahu Akbar! Brothers!!! We are winning the Jihad!”? It doesn’t take millions of dead from WMD — through our idiocy and connivance, their Jihad works. Islamic terror is succeeding admirably.
Wretchard:
Been running Folding@Home in my basement on home-built Linux boxes for close to 5 years (I think – the memory fades). There is a surprisingly large community of folks around the world doing the same. There are teams of individuals, competitions, etc… A neat idea, really. You get a burn-in program for your new build, and Stanford gets data back that may well point to a cure for Huntington’s, cancer, etc… Everyone benefits – in my case, the heat added to my basement helps keep our ground floor warmer than it might otherwise be, reducing the need to run the gas heater in winter… bet even Algore would love that!
Triton
Mongo — didn’t someone jokingly post under your nic some time ago ? Perhaps the system looks out for that kind of thing and assumes the worst… Perhaps try taking off that old smelly hat and bathe once in a while — it might work..
Just some ideas.
I used to run SETI at home on a bank of computers I used to own. No effort on my part and it was kind of fun being part of the search for ET.
#77. Triton’sPolarTiger:
So rather than throwing out my SGI predator (worthless after 10+ years for production), I could heat my house AND help cure cancer! Love the idea. It’s still a very powerful computer and/or heater…
MD, ha ha ha…heh…(*gulp*)
Darren / 71
I am also a physician. The trouble with vaccines, even if immediately available after a bioweapon attack, is that the human immune system takes approximately 6 weeks to crank out specific T-Cell immunity or B-Cell IgG immunoglobulin. Long before that the individuals in question will die because weaponized viruses will likely kill within days to a few (less than 6) weeks. Vaccination would have to occur at least 6 weeks prior to the attack.
RNA interference drugs, if they can be perfected, offer hope for immediate treatment – but these drugs must also be specifically tailored to any newly minted weaponized virus, and produced with great haste. Distributed DNA or RNA sequencing of the weaponized virus, and RNAi manufacturing would be essential.
Matt #73:
Yes, and aside from the engines themselves there are other considerations. Fiberglass and aluminum fuel tanks do not do well with alcohol. But probably the most immediate problem is that alcohol acts as a cleaner. All the accumulated deposits from years of gasoline use will come out of the tanks and gum up the entire system – and this is true with even small amounts of alcohol, such as a half gallon.
I also understand that two cycle engines don’t like alcohol in the fuel.
Thus, to separate the alcohol you dare not simply pour it in the tanks, add a suitable amount of water and drain the sumps until the water comes out. Instead, you need a suitable clear container in which you can pour the fuel, add water and then invert the whole thing and wait for the separation line to appear. Then you can drain it from the bottom down to the separation line and what is left is just the gasoline.
The question is, where to get suitable clear containers? Old fashioned glass dewars would work well but I don’t know where to get them. Those 5 gal plastic bottles that water coolers use might work and I have a couple to try.
And of course, the left over water/alcohol mix is theoretically drinkable, so we may end up creating a new breed of moonshiners. If nothing else, it should be possible to set up solar-powered distillers and use the pure alcohol as lamp fuel.
The Wilders trial: Torquemada would be proud
“It is irrelevant whether Wilder’s witnesses might prove Wilders’ observations to be correct”, the ‘Openbaar Ministerie’ stated, “what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal”.
Unexpected and breaching court procedures the detailed indictment of 21 pages, which Wilders received on the 4th of December and sums up in verbatim all of his Islam and Koran critique in interviews and Fitna, was amended with new accusations of racism against muslims and Moroccans. On top of this, Paul Vellerman, the public prosecutor of the Amsterdam Court decided that the Wilders trial had to be regarded as “an ordinary trial open for public and with a normal procedure, which doesn’t deserve the Department of Justice’s highly secured bunker. His is a normal case and we’ll treat it as such”.
It’s sad to note that Mohammed Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo van Gogh, and Volkert van der Gaag, the assassin of Pim Fortuyn, were tried in this specially designed bunker, but that Wilders has to rely on his personal bodyguards and full metal jacket to ward of terrorists. No safe room for him, which recently secured Kurt Westergaard and his granddaughter, but for months on end the vulnerability of a sitting duck.
Stop the Trial of Geert Wilders
A Dutch court is forced to compare Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and the Quran.
RWE
2 Cycle Model Airplane Engines run fine on methanol.
By the way on a somewhat related topic brought up in an earlier AGW thread, the Haiti earthquake causes me to ask: “What happened to AIDS?”
Anyone recall how AIDS was rampant in Haiti and the population was supposed to be ravaged by it? In the early 90’s, people changing planes in Port’a Prince were told not to leave the terminal. But none of the relief agencies seems to be concerned about the rampant AIDS now, and cruise ships even put into Haiti for recreation.
Did we cure all those people? Or did somehow a nearly lawless society take drastic quarantine measures to stop the spread of the disease? And what about Africa, which was supposed to be even worse off? Recall how some Third World countries were defying patent rights to produce lifesaving AIDS drugs?
What happened to AIDS? It seems to have dropped right off the radar screen. No one is yelling any more for free distribution of AZT and the other drugs that were supposed to be the only hope. The Feds admitted awhile back that the forecast breakout into the general population was not only wrong but constituted a big mistake and a terrible diversion of resources from those who needed it.
Storm Rider, Darren, Bueler, … Ferris Bueler? Anyone have a clue?
Doug “what’s relevant is that his observations are illegal”
for a moment I thought you were talking about Oscar Wilde.
“But none of the relief agencies seems to be concerned about the rampant AIDS now”
Give the UN aid workers about 6 months and check back. The difference between the AIDS “crisis” and the AGW one is that AIDS was real though the threat of it making its way out of certain behavioral cliques was not what it was made out to be. Gays successfully turned it into an everybody’s issue because everyone has an A hole, it is just that not everyone uses them in the same way. Part of the problem is that homosexuals always felt alienated by their parents so therefore needed big Uncle Sam to hurt people on their behalf. It makes them feel good about themselves, punishes the innocent, and gives them legal access to indoctrinate your children about adult sexual roles and Marxist causes. The built in convoluted counter-argument against human existence is there is no god and they were born that way, using their A holes like they do, and therefore it is a constitutional rights issue more important than African American suffrage. The government loves to settle disputes like this with siding with the minority aggressor much the same way they side with illegal immigration and nomadic jihad. Basically, your government hates you and wants you to die (but not gays).
RWE / 85
The AIDS virus (HIV) is not so easily transmitted from person to person – it essentially requires sexual intercourse – with anal sex more risky than ordinary sex – otherwise it can be acquired through dirty needles or tattoos. The risk of AIDS from blood transfusion has fallen to near zero since the blood supply is effectively screened using genetic methods.
If AIDS were more easily transmitted, as is the case for influenza via the respiratory route; then the human race would already be on the way out.
One idea for weaponizing viruses such as Ebola (or HIV) is to genetically engineer them in such a way as to render them transmissible by the respiratory route – sneezing and coughing.
We need a Manhattan project for both nuclear and bio-defense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_adult_prevalence_rate
Speaking of ”what happened to AIDS” it occurs that the current fluffle about the ”error” made by one IPCC chief regarding the Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 is probably another manipulation from the AGW privy council.
To wit: Al Gore, Price Charles, all the celebs who predicted immediate collapse of –uh–the climate, all need some cover now. Not intellectual cover, forget that, but cover for their ability to leave the house without passersby belly-laffing at them.
That’s what the Indian fellow who has admitted making the Himalayan glacier error is for. A ‘fall guy’, who will be (*cough*) appreciated (and how) by the bigwigs, who will, when confronted over the non-impending doom (which BTW didn’t scare any of the officials at Copenhagen –who is the IPCC’s continuity director anyway?), can shake their heads and roll their eyes, and say “Can ya BELIEVE that Himalayan glacier guy, fooling us like that?”
#85 RWE
What happened to AIDS? It seems to have dropped right off the radar screen.
You are behind the times. The current variation of “the sky is falling” is AGW. Concern about AIDS is so yesterday.
At times I would declare to my co-workers, in a smart-ass fashion, that I did indeed have all the answers, I just didn’t know which questions they fit with.
Progressives are sort of like that. They know the answer is socialism (although you’re NOT supposed to call it that– the peasants are superstitious you know and really wouldn’t understand) they just need the right question to fit it to. The search for that question continues.
If AIDS were more easily transmitted, as is the case for influenza via the respiratory route; then the human race would already be on the way out.
Not really. Some percentage of the population is naturally resistant. I recall reading the AIDS virus uses the same gateway into the cell as the bubonic plague bacteria – for which the European and world populations were “heavily selected” for several centuries. There is at least one gene involved, you can have zero, one, or two copies (and maybe more?) to increase resistance, yada yada. Could it be a disasterous pandemic? Of course. But we’re tough, in the aggregate, strength thru diversity, we’ve been evolving right along with the rest of the biome for billions of years.
And the virus itself has been around for eons, so if it were that transmittable, presumably it would have transmitted long ago and it would be a moot point now. But you’re asking, what if it learned a new trick tomorrow.
Storm-Rider, how about antibody “vaccines”, should be effective immediately? Also other metabolic modifiers that just make the virus survivable, I’ve wondered if modern immune modifiers might make rabies survivable.
Ot Just in House close to an agreement to approve the Senate health bill with few changes the Senate will agree to before vote by House.
I had a dream once that there was this great biological plague that killed most everyone and the few survivors were all mutants who hated the light except me. So I walled off a nice townhouse in New York and got a whole bunch of weapons to hunt them down with, but they kept coming after me. And then I figured out that it was something in my blood that protected me so I worked on distilling it and gave the innoculation to some kids I found and helped them get out of town so they could restart the human race, but I stayed and fought the mutants to give them time to leave and I got heroically killed. The ending was really symbolic and stuff.
or maybe that was a movie I saw.
R/92; They need the cold weather to hold down the streets.
Josh – 91
The percentage of people naturally resistant to HIV is very low – but you are correct – a few would survive a weaponized version of HIV.
http://www.cig.salk.edu/extra_html/etc_natural_resistance.htm
Antibody “vaccines” are not really vaccines – this refers to specific immunoglobulin transfusion – passive immunity – and yes it is immediately effective – but this would probably not be available for 300,000,000 people due to the expense. It appears to me we’ll have to rely on the usual forms of vaccination in combination with RNA interference drugs – but unfortunately we don’t currently have either for Ebola or HIV.
Well, my opinion – based not on my own conclusions, but others – is that the whole AIDS/HIV story quietly fell apart and is no longer being discussed. Dr. Duesberg has explained that HIV became the cause of AIDS because people expected a virus to be cause.
As Annoy Mouse so indelicately explains, AIDS became a Civil Rights Issue, which stopped all rational discussion and required it be covered up that research showed quite definitively that, unlike the vagina, the rectum is not a good place to put alien DNA and that most of the cases could be explained by that Lifestyle Related practice.
“Support” (i.e., $$$$) for AIDS was based on constantly expanding the definition of the disease, therefore making it appear that it was an epidemic.
I have no doubt that some valuable research was done in the name of AIDS, but then again, some of the AGW stuff probably is of some use, as well. If we decided on a national objective to build automobiles out of paper mache we would no doubt develop some useful technologies there, too.
Tcobb #90:
I fear you are correct, that the human race, or at least that part of it rich enough to be frivolous, is fated to constantly have to deal with – and have its pockets emptied – by yet another new contrived disaster.
AIDS dollars came out of somewhere –likely such as cancer and heart disease research dollars. Nothing like new paper mache technology for the paper mache community but if cost isn’t a legitimate factor then there’s no limit on how diminished diminishing returns can get. the UN’s AIDS programs, designed, staffed, and personally run in the beginning by such green goddess ecstatics as ‘population reduction by any means necessary’ Maurice Strong, strikes me as something we’d be better off not ever –for sanity’s sake –knowing the details of.
What happened to AIDS is that those nasty Big Pharma companies figured out how to make protease inhibitors and turned AIDS from an 18-month death sentence to a treatable condition. Magic Johnson was found to be HIV positive in 1991 or so, he’s still alive almost 20 years later. It’s amazing what you can do with the ability to afford modern medications and the discipline and social structure that allows steady access to them and the ability to take them. The WSJ article I read when crixivan (the first protease inhibitor) came out said that the chemical engineer who designed the process to make such a complex molecule was fortunate that he didn’t know what everyone else did — it couldn’t be done. Crixivan was, at the time (early 1990s) the most complex molecule synthesized on an industrial scale. Took six months to cook a batch, probably still does. Big Pharma earns their ‘big’ in my book, that is not an easy industry.
There is a pretty good book called “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Terry Kidder that is mostly about Haiti and Paul Farmer, a Harvard-trained medical anthropologist and infectious disease specialist. He just begged, borrowed or stole first-world therapies for his third-world patients and got the job done. Farmer says that Haiti had an undeserved bad rap for prevalence of HIV. His main focus now is multi-drug resistant tuberculosis — which, frankly, is a lot scarier for the first world than HIV ever was. TB strains that are resistant to all five major and minor TB agents are very dangerous, and naturally airborne as well.
AIDS is still rampant in Africa and other places. It just never really broke out into the heterosexual non-IV drug abusing population of the United States, and as previously stated, the blood transmission issue was taken care of. Most of the poster children from the early 1980s died off and the media went on to other things.
There is a theory that much as humans adapt to disease, diseases adapt to humans over time. Syphillis is an example, it was much more virulent in the 1600s and has become progressively less so. Ebola outbreaks are limited more by time than infectiousness, people get so sick so fast they really aren’t able to travel very far once they get ill. Horrifically pathogenic diseases that kill quickly also are selecting against themselves unless they have a reservoir host they can live in when not killing humans in carload lots. It’s possible that HIV over subsequent centuries will become less pathogenic in order to survive better, but given the lead time between infection and disease it is arguable that HIV is pretty well-adapted to people as it is.
Darren – “Magic Johnson was found to be HIV positive in 1991 or so, he’s still alive almost 20 years later.”
Yeah, but don’t you see how debilitated he is now? He’s hawking ads for Rent-A-Center. Poor lad.
about the title; hotdogs and beer?
Darren/98: “Horrifically pathogenic diseases that kill quickly (viruses like ebola)also are selecting against themselves unless they have a reservoir host they can live in when not killing humans in carload lots.”
Hostile nations &/or terror groups can become the reservoir of weaponized viruses, so there is a fly in the ointment. I believe bio-defense should be a high national priority – more vaccines and RNA interference technology. It’s probably a matter of time before a weaponized virus is used against us.
The Japanese have developed an attenuated third-generation smallpox vaccine (LC16m8) which was administered to 3221 Japanese adults (half with no previous immunization – half with prior immunization). The vaccine was successful in 94% of the former and 87% of the latter – with no adverse events. We need about 300,000,000 million doses here – this vaccine appears to be superior to the one we currently have ACAM2000 (Acambis, Inc), which is a derivative of our 1931 smallpox vaccine. Our current smallpox vaccine has a 1/million death rate, 3/million rate of encephalitis (almost all in children age 7 or less), and myocarditis &/or pericarditis occurs in 600/million. The smallpox vaccine is a live virus known as vaccinia.
WRT Mr. Ivines,
I’ve become interested in the significant infiltration of our bioweapon R&D by Jihad. There is reason to believe that Amerithrax was taken from Iowa State University by said agents of AQ, silica and all. About a month after 9/11 all ISU samples were destroyed with gov approval. Possible delivery man died on flight 587, 11/27/01.
Teresita’s foreign money funding foreign education here ties in dangerously with what Wretchard is pointing out in this article.
Smallpox is a real threat because North Korea is belived to have it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061200704.html
Darren,
Thank you for the contributions that you and other practitioners of the healing arts bring to our discussions. Your point about our absolute lack of sure defenses is well taken. My point was simply that we are relatively better off to either prepare or respond than people in less developed societies. Therefor the results of such pandemics should be a transfer of even greater power to what would be the increasing proportion of humanity in wealthier countries.
Thank you for calling me an optimist. When facing the Apocalypse I can think of no demeanor that makes as much sense as one of good cheer.
Why do doctors and lawyers expect us to pay them when they attend to their practice? Why don’t we ever get to see them after they learn to do it right and stop having to practice?
To be blogged under the title “Practice Practice.”
when faced with Apocalypse, de meanor de better