Fire and Knowledge

From Engadget:

[A] startup called ExRo has developed turbines that it says are consistently 30% — and in some situations as much as 100% — more efficient than the standard kind. The traditionally-used mechanical transmissions have been replaced with an inexpensive electric alternative that can adapt to changes in wind speed more efficiently.

Sounds like good news to me.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.

—An African proverb as quote in Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat (2005), p. 114.

Kevin Kelly changed his mind about wikipedia. Here is an excerpt:

Much of what I believed about human nature, and the nature of knowledge, has been upended by the Wikipedia…. The success of the Wikipedia keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing….

The Wikipedia is impossible, but here it is. It is one of those things impossible in theory, but possible in practice. Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else that is impossible in theory might work in practice.

Steward Brand, author and editor, talks about what he changed his mind about last year: “Good old stuff sucks.”

Factory automation and labor-saving appliances were supposed to have all but eliminated the need to work. Yet in the past twenty years there has been an increase in the average number of hours worked in North America. Increased productivity was supposed to create universal affluence, to eliminate poverty as we know it. Yet despite the fact that GDP in Canada has doubled since the ‘70s, the level of “basic needs” poverty has remained unchanged. And what about those flying Jetson cars, or at least clean high-speed trains? Commuting has become a nightmare for most city-dwellers. And far from being clean, the average fuel efficiency of vehicles in North America has dropped.

Who could seriously have predicted, thirty years ago, that this is how things would play out? How is it that we can produce so much more wealth and yet fail to secure any measurable improvement in satisfaction?

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), pp. 100-1

It is certainly much less violent now than it was three centuries ago. In most hunter-gatherer societies, the number-one cause of death is murder. In Canada, it is fourteenth (at a rate half of that of accidental falls).

Public violence, in the form of torture and execution, was a stable of European life right through the middle of the 19th century. Imagine watching someone being burned alive. Or considered what it means to be “drawn and quartered.” Yet not two hundred years ago, parents used to bring their children to observe such spectacles. The guillotine, when first introduced during the French Revolution, was a symbol of enlightenment and progress. Previously, the executioner would often have to chop away four or five times in order to sever a convict’s neck. The guillotine was quite humane by comparison.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 45

With the so-called bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, there was a gradual elimination of aristocratic privilege in Europe and, above all, in the United States. But rather than abolishing class domination altogether, the effect of these revolutions was primarily to replace one ruling class with another. Instead of being peasants, ruled by an aristocracy that had control of all the land, the masses were gradually transformed into workers, ruled by capitalists who controlled the factories and machines. As the nascent market economy began producing wealth on an unparalleled scale, money quickly become more important than either land or lineage as the basis for privilege.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 19

It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.

–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), p. 83