A couple years ago the gadget sites reported on a patent for a water-powered jet pack. Judging by the super-cool video below, it seems that patent has been made good on. So epic.
In less pleasant news, a local bodmod practitioner was just busted here over implant and other procedures… They were threatened with “medicine without a license” type charges, but so far they’re being held only on assault charges (the complainant being a parent of the over-21 “victim”), which to me seems totally bogus. What’s next, getting charged with attempted murder because you go to kick boxing class? Rape over consensual sex? Clearly an assault charge is totally inappropriate when there’s no real complainant and everything is consensual. Hopefully the whole thing gets dropped as an abuse of power…
Time asks, Can Jihadis Be Rehabilitated?, and I’d take that one step farther — can the “terrorists” locked up at Guantanamo become productive members of society? So I was thinking about other terrorists and what’s become of them… Take the much-mentioned members of the Weathermen in the US, who caused riots, bombed and burned buildings — Bill Ayers is a respected professor and civic activist, Jeff Jones is a reporter and consultant, and Bernardine Dohrn is a law professor. Looking at the more violent members — who are still in prison — Kathy Boudin for example has become a public health expert, Judith Alice Clark formed an AIDS counseling program, and so did David Gilbert.
Looking here in Canada at members of the FLQ, who did a decade of bombing and robbery in Quebec, and kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and killed the Vice Premier of Quebec… Take the four members of the Chenier Cell who spearheaded these acts — Paul Rose has been a candidate for the NDPQ and is a trade unionist who still works in the Quebec sovereignty movement, Jacques Rose owns a contracting business, Francis Simard is a writer. Or the Squamish Five who bombed a factory that made cruise missile components — Ann Hansen is a writer, Brent Taylor earned a degree from Queens University while in prison, and Gerry Hannah is a musician. Michelle Duclos who was arrested in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty has since become a Canadian government official serving as a representative to Algeria.
Anyway, I think people become “terrorists” because they have an overwhelming sense of ethics that brings them to commit extreme acts to help achieve a worldview that they feel is just. Help them mature and understand that there are less violent ways to achieve ethical change in the world, and they will often become agents of positive change in the world. A terrorist is just a person who’s chosen a poor method to try and make the world a better place. As much as I think religion is idiotic (none of the examples I’ve been able to find were religiously motivated, and that may make a big difference in rehab), I am aware that there are plenty of “good” people who are religious… So I don’t see why an Islamic terrorist can’t find a good way to work toward a better world for all of us, given the right therapy.
I was thinking about the various world-changing technologies that will likely be developed during Nefarious’s early adulthood… Things like machine sentience, and the space elevator, which I was reading about today. One Wikipedia article made the claim that the cost of actually building it would be somewhere between $6 and $40 billion — a relatively minuscule amount of money. As is often said, what a shame it is that so much money is misdirected into war. I can’t begin to imagine what an amazing place the world would be if we invested money into building the future rather than destroying the present.
The advantage to the space elevator is of course that it brings the cost of bringing things to orbit to a couple hundred dollars a kilogram — a fraction of what current launch systems cost. To make it obvious, imagine if you lived in an apartment building, and you had to take a rocket to get to your 20th story apartment rather than taking the elevator… it would be ridiculous. Well, rockets to space may one day be just as silly and outrageous wastes of money. Still, thinking about space elevators got me reading about launch systems of the past. I was surprised to read about the massive size of the Saturn V rockets used in the moon project — they’re as tall as a 36 story building. WOW. Watching them take off would have been like watching a skyscraper fly into the sky.
After America went to the moon, Werner Von Braun and NASA had their eyes on a Mars shot — how sad that America lost its way and decided things like the Vietnam War were higher priorities — and they needed even bigger rockets. The Nova rockets in the picture above were truly massive — five hundred feet high, seventy feet across, and able to bring over a million pounds of gear into orbit in a single mission. WOW again. Some of them had rocket engines generating three million pounds of thrust. Sadly, the next era of American rocketry devolved into nuclear missiles, and America’s sights became shamefully low.
I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but that pales before the even more extreme Project Orion — although it’s not really fair to compare them since Nova was “real” and Orion was “theoretical”. Project Orion was another skyscraper sized rocket intended for interplanetary missions, powered by series of nuclear bombs pushing it into space… The largest of their designs was an eight million ton behemoth with the potential for interstellar ark-style travel. I doubt we’ll see nuclear spaceships, but at the same time, now that we’re discovering so many exoplanets, including some earthlike ones, now would be a wonderful time to set our sites not just on the other planets of our solar system, but on the stars.
It’s my hope that one of the side effects of Obama’s presidency is a renewed interest in science and futurism in America, and that we see new technological races, and we return to a world that looks forward with a sense of wonder and optimism. In any case, anything would be better than another eight years of resources squandered in war.
Given that today — another sick day — has been all video games and reading (yesterday we read “Vidia and the Fairy Crown” cover to cover), I think it’s going to be difficult to convince Nefarious to go back to school tomorrow even though she’s feeling much better… But this Friday is my rescheduled pizza lunch at her school, she’d better go! I think Nefarious will definitely grow up to be a reader — we go through tons of books, and she’s enjoying longer and more complex books, which is nice for me. The Disney Fairies series of books has been surprisingly bearable… I’ve promised her that when she goes to visit her mother for about a month this summer that I’ll record her lots of stories so she can listen to them any time she misses reading. That said, at this point she can actually read those books herself, but because she’s not a fast reader yet, it’s better when I do it.
Wonderful snow storm here all day in Toronto by the way… I really hope Nefarious has the energy to go sledding tomorrow. Anyway, now to cook some supper for us.
I had a morning doctor’s appointment, plus Nefarious is home sick from school, so there wasn’t as much time for it and other things, but I started doing a little painting on ‘The Fountain’ page of the book;
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
