Dialectics of Science and the Singularity

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Spiralman
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Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

Dialectics of Science and the Singularity

Post by Spiralman »

Spiralman and "Dialectical Historical Materialism meets Generational
Dynamics" were introduced in the topic Dialectics of History

In this topic, we post Spiralman's mailings on science, biology,
health, energy, information technology and the Singularity. ("The
Singularity" refers to the time, probably around 2030, when computers
will become more intelligent than humans.)



Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

HIV T Cells Transmission [through virological synapses] Capt

Post by Spiralman »

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23244/

very cool videos!

All previous research has focused on a mechanism that apparently doesn’t apply.
They assumed that virus particles was just freely moving about and then infecting each time independently infecting cells, rather than the infected cells were forming a synapse that enabled a massive transfer of virus from one infected cell to another.

Hate to say it, but here is a real case of ideological blinding to something that makes imminent sense.
The prior view chose to see each infection of the cell as an alien, external, independent individualistic cell process, instead of seeing infection as being ultimately a social process, even on the cellular level.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this has broad implications across many types of viral infections and the failed or mediocre diagnostic and treatment research results.

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

First Plug-in Hybrid in US; Q1 2010; $8,000 - $9,000; 140 mp

Post by Spiralman »

First Plug-in Hybrid in US; Q1 2010; $8,000 - $9,000; 140 mpg; ~12 miles all-electric range; 450 miles gas-electric range; 0-60 in 5 sec; top speed ~75 mph; needs 110 volt power outlet

http://www.hybridcars.com/news/first-pl ... 25661.html

A new generation’s interpretation of Easy Rider?

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Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

Could Renewables Supply 40 Percent of Global Power by 2050?

Post by Spiralman »

Could Renewables Supply 40 Percent of Global Power by 2050? & First Solar Has Produced 1,000 MW of Solar Panels & Even Thin Solar Can't Weather Silicon Glut

Could Renewables Supply 40 Percent of Global Power by 2050?
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/ ... r-by-2050/

The fact that this question is even being asked shows both how powerful the propaganda against solar and wind has been, but also how the reality of its unstoppable march toward cost lowering is breaking down the resistance.

And no force, neither Big Oil nor any government has been more of a problem for the advancement of solar and wind then alleged environmental campaigners who consistently understate the potential of solar.

The fact that every last one of the IPCC reports on Climate Change consistently broadcast CO2 emission scenarios that assume that there is minimal contribution from renewable energy is a testament to this campaign.

Every one of the alarmist articles about impending ecological catastrophe has accepted these IPCC assumptions of Little Solar

I have seen the same thing with Greenpeace’s annual collaborative report with the European Photoelectric Industrial Association where every year for almost 10 years they have failed to make an accurate prediction about how much solar would be installed in the years to come. For a while, no matter if they increased the predicted rate of installation, reality beat their estimates by an ever larger margin.

I call this overall dynamic whereby alleged environmentalists talk of the need for solar and wind and urgent change, yet they almost always add in the claim that “renewables will likely only make a small contribution,” Damning Solar With Faint Praise.

I could easily insinuate ulterior motives, but I won’t waste my breath right now.

Instead I will just flatly state the following:

1. Solar’s price drops at least Three-fold every decade, and has been doing so since 1970, ie. For 40 years!
2. This year solar power reached parity with grid-delivered retail electricity to residential and commercial users if produced on large-scales, ie not just on your family’s roof, where it costs twice as much.
3. By or before 2020, Solar will be as cheap as or cheaper than Coal, Oil, Nuclear, or natural Gas (King CONG), even at point of production utility grade wholesale electricity
4. Solar’s worldwide growth rate of installation last year was 92%; it has consistently exceeded a 45% annual growth rate for a decade
5. At that growth rate, and with the continuing plummeting of the price of solar panels, Solar power will produce < 400% of today’s Global Power by 2050


First Solar Has Produced 1,000 MW of Solar Panels
http://www.redherring.com/Home/25943
The company began commercial production in early 2002. It took six years to produce the first 500 MW and eight months to produce the second.
[How many weeks to produce the third?]

1,000 MW = 1 Gigawatt = baseload electricity for 1,000,000 households or full load for 200,000 heavy usage North American households.
This company a few weeks ago announced that it hit production costs of ~ <$1/Watt of panel, ie. 10c/kWh.

Even Thin Solar Can't Weather Silicon Glut
http://seekingalpha.com/article/128375- ... t-barron-s

[First Solar is one of the many Thin Film solar companies that have arisen (eg Nanosolar) or retooled (eg Sharp Electronics) in response to a shortage of Silicon wafers.
For decades, solar panels were made from excess crystalline silicon from the computer chip industry.
Starting in 2001 or so, the demand for solar had grown large enough that the leftovers from the computer industry weren’t sufficient, so prices escalated for crystalline silicon.

Silicon is the second most abundant element of the crust of the Earth (exceeded only by Oxygen).
1/4 of the Earth’s crust is Silicon.
When you are looking at sand dunes, you are looking at Silicon. So there is absolutely no shortage of Silicon.
But until just recently, there was a shortage of the processed Silicon necessary to make panels.

No longer!
The higher prices of crystalline silicon stimulated a lot of investment in new fabrication facilities, which are just coming on line this year. Already there is a glut of Silicon.

The glut is far worse than most anyone expected, driving silicon prices from $450/kilo one year ago to about $100.

First Solar panels convert 11% of the sun's energy to electricity, vs. 20% for comparable non-thin panels [ie Silicon]. But the firm admits that its competitive advantage evaporates the closer silicon feedstock drops toward $50/kilo.

So, we can now see that there is a serious dogfight between these two different technologies, and will drive the retail price of solar panels much lower, closer and closer to the price of production, which we now know via First Solar’s announcement, and by inference that they are facing serious competition via the lowering of the price of silicon, is $1/W.

In the end, Silicon will win.
It is everywhere. It’s made from sand.
Sand is in deserts.
Deserts are baked in intense, predictable, cloudless sunshine.
Deserts are perfect locations for solar-powered, Silicon fabrication plants to make solar panels which will be located in these same deserts.

Making panels takes very little labor, but it does require some energy. Solar panels capture 20-30 times as much energy as it takes to make them right now, but energy capture efficiencies are growing while energy to produce them is dropping all the time. (Thinner silicon wafers and concentrated solar using mirrors and lenses focused on smaller wafer squares, means even less silicon is used.)

Since the solar energy which powers these factories will effectively tend towards a cost of $0, solar panels will ultimately cost only a little bit more than the sand that they are made of.

Cost per 1W of solar panels
1970 $100.00
1980 $28.50
1990 $8.50
2000 $3.00
2010 $1.00 (equivalent to CONG retail electricity)

2020 $0.30 (cheaper than CONG wholesale electricity; these version 2.0 technologies are already visible)
2030 $0.10
2040 $0.03
2050 $0.01

Looking at that price cheapening trajectory, it is quite obvious that solar power replaces every other energy source on the planet, and enables every single human on the planet by 2050 (10B – 12B) to be affordably energized to the same level as today’s Americans.

>400% of Today’s Global Power will come from Solar by 2050

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

Magnetic Spin to Revolutionize Medical Scanning; Novel techn

Post by Spiralman »

Magnetic Spin to Revolutionize Medical Scanning; Novel technique boosts MRI sensitivity one thousandfold.

Magnetic Spin to Revolutionize Medical Scanning
Novel technique boosts MRI sensitivity one thousandfold.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22352/
The new method, published today in the journal Science, enables the magnetization of a broad range of molecules--including drugs such as nicotine, and organic molecules such as antibodies designed to bind to tumors--so that they can be used as contrast agents.

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

Japan uses Korean LEDs for agricultural lighting

Post by Spiralman »

Japan uses Korean LEDs for agricultural lighting

http://compoundsemiconductor.net/blog/2 ... uctor.html

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A staff of 'A' company said, "This project focuses on the LED lighting fixtures for farming which have high brightness LED with high light quantum, and especially optical wavelength of red and blue light can hasten the growth of plants so that enables stable harvesting from vegetable farming.

By participating in this project, Seoul Semiconductor confirmed their competitive power in the Japanese market having advanced technologies, and the possibility to expand the LED market as a lighting source for farming. This is expected to be a starting point in developing new markets. With artificial light source, the quality and quantity of plants may increase through farming without agricultural chemicals and influence of weather, leading to higher income of farm families. In the past, incandescent lamps, fluorescent lamps and sodium lamps have been mainly used, but in the present time, eco-friendly LED of high efficiency and long lifespan without carbon discharge is being popular. Also Seoul Semiconductor has supplied LEDs for agricultural lighting in Canada.

According to the report of Rural Development Association of Korea, assuming that we cultivate crops with supplementary lighting in about 3,000 ha by using LED, we can get 70% energy saving effect compared to incandescent lamps, which amounts to $12M per year. Especially, farming with artificial lighting became possible even in a dessert or the Arctic region. Therefore, it is expected to be helpful to remove food problems over the world.

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

The Brainome Project to map mammalian brain circuits & Why W

Post by Spiralman »

The Brainome Project to map mammalian brain circuits & Why We Sleep: Disappearing Before Dawn

http://www.physorg.com/news157717611.html
Mitra and his co-authors therefore advocate for "a concerted effort" to complete a first-draft circuit map of the entire mouse brain within two to three years, as a first step to mapping vertebrate brain architecture across species. The proposed project would ideally be pursued simultaneously by neuroscientists at multiple institutions according to standardized protocols. "In this respect," says Jason Bohland, Ph.D., a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at CSHL and the paper's lead author, "it would be analogous to the multi-institution effort to sequence the human genome, with the important distinction that our brain-circuit map could be completed much more rapidly and would cost a small fraction of the genome project - as little as a few million dollars ranging up to perhaps $20 million, depending on the redundancy in coverage that we commit to."

To date, research on the brains of mammals - typically, rodents and non-human primates - has described, using a multitude of different techniques, only a small fraction of the total set of neuronal pathways, in an unsystematic manner. Although spectacular advances have been made in neuroscientists' ability to examine and measure the output of individual neurons in the brains of living animals, such studies have shed little light on how the brain as a whole is wired together. In much the same way that the study of the genome has shifted to emphasize networks of interacting genes, neuroscientists are beginning to understand the importance of circuit-level properties in the normal and dysfunctional brain.
.....
Brain organization at the macroscopic level - the level of entire structural-functional systems and major nerve-fiber bundles - is somewhat understood, but provides an insufficient level of description of the overall wiring diagram. Some scientists have argued that it would be best to map mouse brain structure at the micro-level of individual synapses - the myriad gaps across which individual neurons communicate, with the help of neurotransmitters and modulators such as glutamate, GABA, acetylcholine, dopamine and serotonin. But this isn't technologically feasible to do on a brain-wide scale for a mouse, let alone larger vertebrate brains. [Huh? They just mean it will be expensive] Data storage at such a scale, which would involve storing nanometer-resolution images made with electron microscopes, could cost as much as one billion dollars [same cost as the human genome project], Mitra says.
$20 million for a macro level circuit map of the mouse brain seems like a bargain compared to many other big science projects; this should definitely be funded.

I don’t think it will be anywhere near as useful as the more detailed synapse-transmitter map, but you have to start somewhere; and once the science establishment has bought into the coarse granularity they will be more hungry for the more important details, and willing to make the $1B investment, and the costs of synaptic imaging and the data storage costs will be ten times cheaper by then. The crude map will also provide the scaffold to hang the other pieces onto.

Furthermore, the low cost of the crude circuit map will enable comparative maps between species and between individuals within the same species. And without comparisons, you basically know close to nothing. So this crude full circuit map would be comparable to having the broad vision of the chromosomal maps of different species with some synapse-transmitter data lit up in context on the crude map, just as the 1990’s genetics community placed the small collection of known genes onto the chromosomal maps.

Nonetheless, I have to say that I was seriously put off by Mitra’s cowardice over data storage costs, and citing that as a technological hurdle. Of all the technological cost trends that the world has deep experience with, we have almost perfect certainty of the cost reduction of data storage, and existing technologies and soon to reach market tech both drop costs by at least 100-fold over the next 10 years.

Why We Sleep:
Disappearing Before Dawn
http://www.the-scientist.com/2009/04/1/34/1/

Spiralman
Posts: 107
Joined: Wed Mar 25, 2009 5:07 pm

Nevada Discovers that Solar is Not a Monopolizable Resource

Post by Spiralman »

Nevada Discovers that Solar is Not a Monopolizable Resource

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... e=politics

The debate between the Senators and the Governor over whether they have to entice renewable energy companies to set up shop there vs try to tax them for access is very illustrative of a fundamental difference between Solar power and all the other energy forms currently in use on planet Earth.

The Earth is hit with 10,000 times the amount of energy that our civilizations use from all sources combined.

We need to use very little of the Earth’s surface to capture what we need from the Sun

The map below shows just how Unspecial Nevada is even with solar panels that are only 8% efficient (current silicon-based panels on market are 20% and up).

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Nevada is an otherwise useless wasteland......aside from having Burning Man and kite-boarding gatherings.

Nevada’s economy is collapsing because during a Depression, no matter how much people are still suffering from their Gambling Addiction, they have plenty of options closer to home whether online, buying Lottery cards at the 7-11, or going to the plethora of Native American casinos. And the companies that used to have to bribe their employees, distributors and sales force with a few days once a year of all you can eat steak and shrimp, endless shopping, cheesy shows from washed up entertainers and impersonators, and lots of T&A, now no longer have the cash or the need to do anything for anyone they are paying.

So, Nevada should thank the planet’s lucky star, Sol, that they have any marginal attraction left at all, and quit fantasizing that they are going to tax solar companies, otherwise those same companies will set up in some other more grateful location.

Because in the end, Nevada’s sunshine is only about 50% stronger than anywhere else in the US and has no advantage over Mexico.

Solar property ain’t Oil property.
Ain’t noone gonna make an OPEC of Solar.
Just look at that map you desperate dummies!

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