I think you're being kind of long-winded about it... The point would be that you can use evolutionary algorithms that get "smarter" without you understanding how they work. So the author's impression that we need to understand ourselves to surpass ourselves gets shot down.

I might just call these "microcosmic god" scenarios, myself-- this has the virtue of pissing off the author by referring to yet-another science fiction story.

As for this call to average the economic damage over industries, I think nuclear power is worth using, if the only alternative is coal.

Damn right. We get something like 20% of our power from nuclear and 40% from coal... wouldn't it be cool if we reversed those two numbers? It's weird that a notion like that is even controversial.

Nuclear is better than coal. But coal is not the only other option. That's another fallacious point I often see in favor of nuclear,

Nope, not a fallacious point: the idea that there's no need for nuclear because "renewables!" is what's completely fallacious. All accounts are the solar enthusiasts have reason to be encouraged, but they're a long way from even being able to do 10% of our power generation... and in the meantime, every time I say "nuclear" and you say "solar", those coal plants keep pumping it out. I've literally watched this paralysis go on for decades. By any reasonable measure, coal should be public enemy number one, and nuclear should be a well-regarded substitute, but instead it keeps dragging on.

There's supposed to be a climate crisis staring us in the face, there are some stunningly obvious things we should be doing in response-- the people who like to think they're the "reality based community" really should try facing reality.

Using number of deaths as a measure of danger is misleading.

Ha, ha, you caught me. We pro-nuclear people are always making up silly principles like a concern for human life.

By a measure like that, Hurricane Andrew was a lesser disaster than some bus crashes. Hydroelectric power could be considered extremely dangerous, thanks to the Banqiao Dam.

Right, and a conclusion like that would violate the prime directive, "nuclear power is always wrong".

A better measure could be the economic damage

Okay, now lets average it over the entire industry: nuclear incidents are dramatic, but infrequent. And don't forget to include estimates for climate change damage when you're comparing power sources (I love the "nuclear is too expensive" argument, made by people who also believe carbon emissions should be taxed heavily...).

When a plane crashes, we all just think about finding out how it happened, and what we can do to prevent it... you never hear "you see we have to ban planes".

All in all, I actually expect better from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Really? Why? They are an anti-nuclear, anti-science political lobby organization, and always have been.

Yeah, those former Manhattan Project scientists and engineers sure hated science.

Yeah, and check out the caliber of their Science and Security Board. They've got the author of "The Physics of Star Trek"!

Seriously, James Hansen is on their board also, which is a bit of a surprise. He's staunchly pro-nuclear power.

The problem is, as I keep saying, the human factor. Mistakes have horrible consequences because we can't easily clean up the mess from an accident. If we didn't have to wait centuries before contaminated land was again safe to inhabit because we could clean up after a disaster, it would be different. How long will it take for the Gulf of Mexico to fully recover from the BP oil spill? Decades, it seems. But that's better than the prospects of recovery from a nuclear accident.

You don't really have to wait centuries, even where something as bad as Chernobyl went down, we do stuff like that because we play things very safe where nuclear material is concerned... here's a thought experiment for you: if deaths from coal power were regarded as equivalent to deaths from nuclear, what areas would we need to evacuate immediately?

Seriously, the mass evacuations around a nuclear incident are a bad enough problem... there's no need to exaggerate.

And if you want to play dueling industial catastrophies, consider poison gas releases, e.g. Bhopal. Have you heard many people demanding we ban chemical plants?

I'm not opposed to nuclear because in theory it's a perfect energy source. In practice, however, it's built and maintained by humans, so it's not safe. Even a perfect nuclear plant wouldn't be earthquake proof, etc.

This is a fine example of a sentiment that seems wise and reasonable but is actually completely divorced from reality. By any practical standard, nuclear power has a very good track record-- it also has a few of dramatically well-publicized failures that people fixate on, even though it's average is really pretty good.

The "human factor" that you and a few others are going on about is very interesting. Maybe we should learn how to deal with human factors one of these days, since we're human and all.

This is an interesting case study for you: Onagawa: the japanese nuclear power plant that didn't melt down.

And as for GMOs... well you folks might actually want to read Brand's book: Whole Earth Discipline

Re: Javascript.

You forgot the broken scoping rules.

And lame unicode support (as of ES 5)-- but hey, it's only the "World Wide Web", and no one really uses the astral planes, do they?

Brand has mentioned that the original idea that it would be important to see a picture of the "whole earth" from space came to him via an acid trip. In one of his earliest projects, he was going around handing out buttons asking the question of why we hadn't seen such a photo yet.

More recently, he's mentioned that clearly the problem with LSD isn't brain damage, but "personality damage". He's also commented on how you can rely on enthusiastic freaks to push ideas too far and find out where the limits are (he mentions a friend who took a boat across the pacific trying to live entirely on a hold full of carrots, arriving at his destination tinted orange and hallucinating).

You could have replaced the ignition cylinder and then pretty much stopped there.

Reminds me: I was once driving a car where the ignition cyllinder had gotten fucked up (I suspect a clumsy attempt at stealing it, but maybe it was intentional vandalism), and I "fixed" the problem by just removing the lock. I kept a plastic bag draped over it after that to make it less obvious it was missing. (In my cars, a piece of plastic garbage kicking around the passenger compartment never looked out-of-place.)

In general, my advice on cars is (a) don't own one if you can avoid it, (b) if you're stuck owning one, get the cheapest, simplest one you can find-- you'll have fewer points of failure, repairs will be easier, and if it goes belly-up, no big deal.

Sadly, I've never experienced the joy of having my car chirp at me in a freindly eager fashion as I walk up to it, and yet I seem to be managing to make it through life...

You aren't hand cranking a 100hp motor in some cheapass econo box, and you certainly aren't crank anything in a normal car.

I used to drive a Toyota Corolla with a defective starter, just by push starting it.

I don't think you have a fucking clue what you're talking about.

I give up the ignition key when they pry my bicycle from my cold, dead hands-- oh wait, it doesn't have one.

The terrible, terrible problem with the GM ignition keys was they neglected to spend an extra buck per car to save around 13 lives, and as I understand it, those were apparently idiots who like to hang ten pounds of crap from their keys. Wouldn't it be cool if we had some form of rational decision-making in the modern world?

Oh well, how's my "internet fast lane" coming along?

You've got a fair grasp of what's going on, but this is crap:

a) Repeal prop 13, rent control, the below-market-rate program and all the other government meddling.

You'd think in this day and age people would think two or three times before going with laissez-faire free market "solutions", but there's a lot of you guys around at this point...

The trouble with these ideas is that whatever they say, people don't really *want* to leave issues like the character of their neighborhoods up to the whims of The Market. Rent Control is essentially a hack to slow down these kinds of changes.

Do you really want to see an unrestricted build out everywhere through out the Bay Area? Personally I wince every time I see a construction crane, because I know whatever it is they're building it's going to suck. Circa 1950 or so, The Market apparently lost the ability to build anything that isn't a piece of crap.

BTW, the techcrunch article you liked so much leads up to a recommendation for a Bay Area regional planning agency (presumably with the authority to tell Mountain View to shove their NIMBYism down their throat). It's not at all a plea to get the government out of the planning business.

(Myself, I think Google should get over that "don't be evil" business, and hire some of they guys who work for sports teams shaking down cities to build stadiums for them. All Google needs to do is *hint* that they're thinking about moving to Fremont, and I think Mountain View would come around.)

The really puzzling bits are where he talks about how it'd be a shame if the bubble popped because of all the cool innovative stuff those guys are working on... that's news to me, I thought it was all mobile-phone versions of sweatsox.com.

"Our knew app automatically counts sidewalk cracks, and allows you to post the total to your facebook page!"

Remember, the idea doesn't matter, it's only the execution that counts!

Ayn Rand's big complaint about the Libertarians was they were willing to sign-up people who weren't atheists. (True freedom lovers value ideological uniformity above all else.)

Anyway, yeah, the "Objectivists" hated Libertarians, and the Libertarians all thought that was pretty funny.

But then, I'm not up on this Neo-Contractionary Counter-Retractionary Libertarian Revisionation movement... who knows what the kids are thinking these days.