Change technology, change society?

Arthur Dobrin had this to say about Mitt Romney, well, ostensibly about him, but more about creative destruction.  The core of Dobrin's argument seems to me to be not very much about economic models, but about innovation. Selected quotes:

> Innovation is the way of capitalism.

> This is all to the good if the extent of the destruction is the replacement of one product with another (the TV for the radio).

> You cannot support both unleashed capitalism and a stable social order. Along with new products come new ways of doing things; along with new ways of doing things come new ideas.

It sounds as if Dobrin is saying that innovations in products can lead to changes in society, more profound than just exchanging one product for another or one employer for another. I suppose one obvious example is the Pill. Thus promoting innovative businesses is at odds with conserving society, and someone like Romney should not, with a straight face, claim to be a social conservative.

The question of what responsibility falls on an innovator as a result of the social changes his/her products bring about, or on the society that benefits from those products, does seem to me to be important. Gov. Romney is not the one on trial here; the whole idea of unrestrained innovation is being examined.

eating gamma rays

I would have rejected this as impossible until the day I read it in Science News. It reminds me of a ghastly blurb for one of Hal Clement's books asserting that "in science, nothing is impossible!" I still feel sure that plenty of things are impossible ... but not necessarily the things we thought were impossible.

In case you have trouble with the link, a quick summary is as follows: a fungus has been found that actually harvests energy from gamma rays, using the well-known pigment melanin. Do not try this at home.

Who cares about warming

Global warming is going to take a long time, but could be very costly if it happened the way some people expect, and yet, it's hard to estimate the probability that it will happen that way, given the evidence we have now.

So, logically, we should entrust our precautions against it to an organisation that knows how to plan for events that are uncertain, long-term, but very costly. Definitely not a political party ... we know how long-term they think ... much less an environmental pressure group, because they treat all propbabilities as either 1.0 (if it's something they want us to be frightened of) or 0.0 (if it's not frightening enough) ... but such organisations do exist, and have existed for a long time, and many of us know them, though few of us love them.

Have you guessed yet?

That's right: insurance companies. And they're making a difference.

Myths about heroin addiction

This one is simply wonderful. Read the first two or three paragraphs if you are short of time. One-line summary: bureaucracies usually perpetuate the problems they set out to solve. Well, there's a good deal more, and all of it good, talking about how people really become addicted and why they really stay that way (summary: they have nothing better to do or to be), but the beginning is the most widely applicable part. If I were writing the article, I might risk my skin by pointing out that the same applies to many other organisations who claim to be fighting one kind of evil or another.

I've found a fair amount of good stuff elsewhere in TheAustralian especially in the Books section.

health and housing

When I think of the difference between where I grew up (England) and where I live (the USA), I think of space. No, not SpaceShipOne. Lots of land, an acre per house at least, one one side of the Atlantic, and small gardens on the other side. Correspondingly, sprawling cities and long commutes along traffic-choked freeways, versus compact towns in which a walk or short bus ride would get me anywhere I wanted to go. (In compact towns, buses and the like are actually useful. In sprawling cities, they are a waste of time, money, fuel, or quite possibly all three.)

The huge cities of California are well known for their smog. And Americans are stereotyped for never walking if they can drive. And neither of these is believed to be healthy. And now there are numbers to prove it.

Better than online book ordering

This article on CNN briefly tells us that something is finally arriving that many avid readers have been wanting for years: a machine that can download and print a paperback book on request. I expect this to be a real boon for obscure authors (nowadays, that can mean anyone this side of Stephen King) and their fans.

Personally, I'm rather fond of reading books on screen, though I'd be a lot happier yet if the E-book publishing industry would cease-and-desist from "paving the cow path" by forcing on us formats that simply imitate the paper-page book with all of its disadvantages, such as separating the beginning of a sentence from its end and a diagram from the text that explains it. But my world has a place for paper books, and I still read many of them. This new piece of technology can, in effect, combine the convenience of paper pages with the commercial advantages of E-books, in that publishers no longer have to guess how many copies they should print in advance, and lose heavily if they guess wrong. And the forests will be grateful too, because publishers tend to print a few extra copies just in case, and I know of no efficient way to turn unread books back into living trees.

Still, don't underestimate the usefulness of a library, where you can find many more books than you would be likely to own yourself, and of second-hand bookshops, where you can buy a book that you only want to read once or a few times before passing it on. There are even E-book libraries such as Libwise where you can read an E-book without having to own it, though I pay a subscription fee for that privilege. It all helps to reduce clutter in my house and conserve trees.

Here's an idea (doubtless not original, and feel free to use it if you have the connections): equip libraries with E-book readers where patrons can view the book of their choice if the library doesn't have a paper copy of it. I dare to hope that this will not be hamstrung by the same pointless DRM arguments as E-music, because

• consumers understand that they should pay for books if they want to keep them

• publishers understand that they benefit from allowing their books to be borrowed and read in libraries

Some simple technological precautions would be necessary to prevent illicit copying, but the main protection against this has always been that consumers don't mind paying for value received. I'd also be in favour of a Public Lending Right scheme that rewarded the authors of books that were read often.

Oh yes ... an article about downloading music, by a musician I respect.

Why Software Has Bugs

Slashdot led me to this article inTech Review in which Bjarne Stroustrup says, among other things, "People reward developers who deliver software that is cheap, buggy, and first. That's because people want fancy new gadgets now." I've agreed with this for quite some time. The converse of it is that, for areas where the pace of innovation has slowed, or where bugs will cause serious inconvenience to people who use the software, quality can be (and is) much higher. Early cars, or even later cars like the ones my parents drove in the 1960's, were unreliable by today's standards, and don't even ask me about the TVs of the 1960's. Most of software is in that era now. In a few decades it'll work much better, not because of dramatic advances in technology, but because customers just won't want to pay for sloppy workmanship any more.

So why did people buy those cars and TVs? Why do they use today's software? Simple. What came before was even worse. There's an interesting book called "To Engineer Is Human" (find it at your favourite book place) which argues that engineering, as a discipline, makes progress by learning, and it learns by failing. I've been working in the software industry for twenty years and I've still got a lot of learning to do!