Some science-flavored links for your enjoyment:

• Viruses make you gay
• Viruses make you a cat lady
• Nothing at all might make you a gay cat lady, too.
• Ice Age or bust! Given a choice of civilization-ending climate calamities, I’d prefer an Ice Age. I have cross-country skies, and I know how to use them.
• DHS says we are woefully underprepared for a repeat of the Carrington Event. Ya think?

So, we’re all going to become gay cat ladies, then freeze to death in the new ice age because all the power was knocked out by a stupendous solar storm. Then, the ice weasels come.

It is a commonplace that the advance of technology killed the Feudal age. The cost of training, equipping and supporting the Medieval knight was large, relative to the economic output of the era. And this cost was necessary because in many respects it was the best bang for the buck given the technological and economic realities. So the military necessity, the social structure and the available technology mutually created and supported each other in an environment where there had been significant collapse of large-scale institutions and in which there were powerful threats to local populations.

As technology fitfully advanced, new military paradigms arose. The rise, first of archers and pikemen and then the firearm, created a tactical environment unfriendly to the armored knight, which then made the cost of training, equipping and supporting the expensive and arrogant knight sufficiently unpleasant that he faded from the scene.

Technology didn’t stop with killing the knight. Masses of musket-equipped soldiers were eventually joined with mass-produced muskets, mass-produced canned goods, and eventually mass-produced mass production. Soon, even the emaciated descendants of the knight – the aristocracy – was on its knees.

Democracy triumphant! Workers of the world unite, and eat the rich! Buy large quantities of Chinese trinkets!

However, the rise of capitalism and democracy were not without their downsides. While the initial wave led to decentralization of economic and political decision-making, the system did not provide much in the way of safeguards against the eventual re-centralization of power using the techniques and technologies that the age of mass production and eventually the information age provided.

Crony capitalism, regulatory capture, the unfettered rise of the financial industry – we are seeing that allowing these things to happen, and especially to happen with the seal and approval of a democratic mandate, equivalent to the mandate of heaven – is probably not a good idea. In fact it likely will lead to the collapse of modern society – and if you read zero hedge, you’ll know that this will happen sometime before next Tuesday.

There are new technologies on the horizon. The maker movement, 3D printing, home fabricators, automated CNC routers, the nascent technological cornucopia will soon force upon us vast changes, fully equivalent in scale to the changes brought by the industrial revolution, and before it the late medieval technology boom in metallurgy and clockwork and the harnessing of wind and water power.

These technologies, if you listen to the hype of their creators and promoters, will lead to a golden age of libertarian skittle-shitting unicorn rainbow happiness. And hey, they might be right. It might be stage one of the rapture of the nerds, and all humanity will just leap forward into the promised land where everyone is safe from obnoxious jocks with big muscles and little understanding of the wonders and nuances of star trek minutia and WoW guild politics.

But will it?

Just to be contrarian here for a moment, what if the new technology does not result in further democratization and libertarian society fertilization? Okay, sure, the cost of many things will go down, and that would be an argument in favor of the established perception of the economic and social potential of this complex of technologies. Global design and local production will surely have a vast effect, one corner of which will be lower cost of some goods.

But will the cost of absolutely everything go down? I think, yes and no.

The rifle is a simple piece of technology. Mass produced in quantity and distributed, it is and has been the center of large national armies for half a millennium. To be sure, we have accreted a lot of things around the hoary and grey-bearded rifle-equipped infantryman. Artillery, air forces, etc, ad nauseam. And those can generally only be produced by nation states because you need to own the factories to make these expensive items that allow the democratic citizen soldier to prosper on the battlefield.

The concentration of power enabled by mass production and democratization has been focused on the nation-state, and increasingly on the parasitic large corporation/finance behemoths that interpenetrate and influence the nation-state. As Aretae recently pointed out, the interference of the nation state in even simple things like transportation networks hugely distorted the ‘natural’ growth of economies. And this leads to interesting thoughts.

The growth of new methods of production might lower the cost of some things enough that the cost of other things, especially networks of things will go up, relatively speaking. (If useful things become cheap enough, you can get lots of them. If they are intelligent things, having lots of them will grant capabilities beyond a linear extrapolation of having just one would lead you to expect.) Will the cost of these networks of things rise to the level at which you need the concentrated essence of economic power – the nation-state – to effectively field fighting forces with them? The likeliest case, given the wider range, is that the cost would fall between the normal individual’s means and national-debt-inducing.

If there is a collapse, or pseudo-collapse, in national and international economies and society as a result of the recent and ongoing unpleasantness – what will happen? Local-producing makers and fabricators will create regional trade networks. Trading designs globally, but producing locally, we can imagine whole new industrial ecosystems growing up around descendents of today’s maker spaces. The modern smithy will be a fab lab where the local artisan can produce circuits, finished parts in plastic and metal or wood – customized and perfectly suited to the task at hand. No more mass-produced assembly line toys from China – if you want something, you go to the smithy and he makes it, just like of old.

But the thing is, a fully realized maker fab will be able to create enormously sophisticated devices and indeed entire infrastructures on a custom and ongoing basis. This goes far beyond printing interesting dildos in pink ABS plastic. Drones, drone controllers – and therefore systems of surveillance, mini-missiles, over the horizon attack capabilities, metalstorm pods, munitions, AAD systems, all networked and controlled by systems of software modeled on modern game software.

Producing rifles – even super-cool, electrically activated, rapid-fire, armor-piercing, self-homing bullet firing metalstorm rifles – with this nearly automated manufacturing technology would be the smallest thing. Equivalent to the medieval smith making a knife – a trivial exercise.

In a world that is suddenly regionalized (at best) or hyper-localized (at worst), where large-scale institutions are enfeebled both by the growing power of new technologies and the economic systems that evolve around them as documented by people like John Robb; and of course by their own inherent flaws as ably documented by Moldbug and Foseti – you have something that starts to look a lot like the pre-feudal age where the common folk are at risk from the still powerful remnants of the old order, and from out of context threats like vikings and other mobile bandits.

And what defends local communities from threats? A defense infrastructure that is complicated to produce, and difficult to utilize. While the local maker can produce any simple tool almost at cost from scrap metal and plans pulled out of the cloud (just as the medieval smith could produce simple tools from pig iron and the sweat of his brow) creating a complex of drones, missiles and automated defense systems that might be very like that imagined by Daniel Suarez in his books Daemon and Freedom(tm) is more on the order of a highly skilled armor smith producing a complicated and effective suit of armor, and the sword smith creating a usable and durable sword out of high-grade steel. And the horse breeder providing destriers, and the community providing for the feeding and training of the knight who used them…

What if the new proto-medieval knight (the old one was the thug who was skilled at arms, and seized the opportunity to create an economic situation that would support him and provide defense for the people sufficient enough that they accepted the rest) is the techno-geek gamer who understands the means of designing and utilizing the new high-tech to provide for the defense of the commons. And whose training to be effective takes years, and requires the output of a significant community, and works best when the skills are transmitted in a master/apprentice mode.

Because one guy with a rifle won’t be an effective combatant in a world with networked drones, micro-missiles, sensor networks, and who knows what else that could be created with a mature fabbing technology. And as easy as a rifle is to learn to use, learning to use complex networks of weapons won’t be.

Technology forces cultural changes. But not usually in ways that we expect. Our current system is between two and four centuries old, depending on how you count it. Technology is undermining it, along with its own inherent and multiplying flaws. That’s about as long as things generally last. In times of great change, things don’t normally continue on a linear extrapolation of current events, or even the events of the last century. We are perhaps foolish to imagine that the result of the changes taking place will be merely the elimination of only the bad parts of the current system.

Found a thing called ifttt – If this, then that. It glues interweb thingies together.

So far, I set up a task to mirror all my Google+ posts to my Facebook wall. I set up a task to automatically add any item I star in Google Reader to Instapaper. I set up a task to text my phone when the forecast calls for rain. Those were all found task recipes that were on the site.

The previous post is my first attempt at creating brand new tasks. If I share something with a note in Reader, then it should appear here on Perfidy. However, if it just posts anything I share at all, then I’ll have to start over.

Interesting tool, check it out.

[wik]: Okay, it just posts anything I share.  Not so good.

[alsø wik]: Tried another way.  Better in that it only picks up things I share with a note, but I can’t use the note for the blog post title like I can if I’m pulling from reader.  Hmmn.

[alsø alsø wik]: Tried to do it via email, which does allow me to control the title, and which ones would go here to Perfidy; but it trashes all links because it’s taking the plain text of the message body.  Which doesn’t work.

[Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?]: Well, I can get a standard title, like, “From the feed” or something, and have the comment appear in the body of the post.  Which works well enough.  Still have the problem of it posting everything I share, which is more than I want to go here.

[See the løveli lakes]: Very frustrating.  You can trigger off starred, liked and shared items.  But only shared items have access to the comment.  Ick.  And using a standard feed as a trigger buries the comment in with all the other text, and you can’t control the post title at all.

[The wøndërful telephøne system]: So, if I change my sharing behavior – that will affect two people, and not greatly.  I can cope with that.  But I still have the mildly annoying issue of using the comment field either as post title, or as post content, but not both.  Using the shared item’s title as the post title is awkward, because I can’t control the length or formatting – for example, Instapundit always has titles in all caps.  (Shouting at the world since 2001!)

But using a standard title, like “From the feed” gives the reader no clue as to the content, and funny (or at least mildly amusing) titles are kind of a thing for blogs and Perfidy.  But if I use it for that, I’m left with just a link in the body of the post.  I can’t actually comment on the thing I’m linking to.

I think I’m leaning toward using the comment for actually commenting.

[And mäni interesting furry animals]: The thing that will annoy me is the repetitive, “From the feed” titles.

Now this makes more sense than a barrel full of sensible stuff.  People have been arguing about how those crazy Egyptians built the pyramids for, literally, thousands of years.  Now some French dude thinks he’s got it sussed out:

A radical new idea has recently been presented by Jean-Pierre Houdin, a French architect who has devoted the last seven years of his life to making detailed computer models of the Great Pyramid. Using start-of-the-art 3-D software developed by Dassault Systemes, combined with an initial suggestion of Henri Houdin, his engineer father, the architect has concluded that a ramp was indeed used to raise the blocks to the top, and that the ramp still exists–inside the pyramid!

The theory suggests that for the bottom third of the pyramid, the blocks were hauled up a straight, external ramp. This ramp was far shorter than the one needed to reach the top, and was made of limestone blocks, slightly smaller than those used to build the bottom third of the pyramid. As the bottom of the pyramid was being built via the external ramp, a second ramp was being built, inside the pyramid, on which the blocks for the top two-thirds of the pyramid would be hauled. The internal ramp, according to Houdin, begins at the bottom, is about 6 feet wide, and has a grade of approximately 7 percent. This ramp was put into use after the lower third of the pyramid was completed and the external ramp had served its purpose.

The design of the internal ramp was partially determined by the design of the interior of the pyramid. Hemienu knew all about the problems encountered by Pharaoh Sneferu, his and Khufu’s father. Sneferu had considerable difficulty building a suitable pyramid for his burial, and ended up having to construct three at sites south of Giza! The first, at Meidum, may have had structural problems and was never used. His second, at Dashur–known as the Bent Pyramid because the slope of its sides changes midway up–developed cracks in the walls of its burial chamber. Huge cedar logs from Lebanon had to be wedged between the walls to keep the pyramid from collapsing inward, but it too was abandoned. There must have been a mad scramble to complete Sneferu’s third and successful pyramid, the distinctively colored Red Pyramid at Dashur, before the aging ruler died.

Well, yeah.  And, he’s got the evidence:

A microgravimetric survey done in the 80s revealed what looks like a blocky spiral on the inside of the pyramid.  Pretty cool.  Read the whole thing, here.

Discovered Locklin on Science a little while ago, and I’ve been trolling through his archives. Found several gems – Spotting Vaporware, Nano Nonsense, The Airship: An Aesthetic Appreciation, The Atlantic: Tool of the Oligarchy, To Learn About the Future, Study the Past, How Hackers Ruin Everything With Computers, and finally, A Peregrination on the Nature of Money. That’s a lot of links, but I commend all of them to you.

The Amish don’t get Autism. This goes into the whole vaccination/autism thing, about which I am undecided. I probably lean towards vaccination.

Homeless Planets may be common. I thought homelessness never appeared in the media unless there was a Republican in the White House. Some catastrophists have speculated that Saturn and its moons were homeless, until captured by our Sun. It is interesting that several planets have almost identical axial tilts.

Comet collides with Sun during massive CME.

According to NASA’s SOHO, a bright comet, most likely from the Kreutz family of comets, which was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov, slammed into the sun, but as it dove into it a coronal mass ejection blasted out. There is no correlation between the strike and the solar eruption; it was just a coincidence.

I guarantee it was not a coincidence. As the comet comes in from the outskirts of the Solar System, it will be moving into a differently charged regime. That is why comets have tails. This was an electrical connection between the comet and the sun, and this isn’t the only time that this has happened. There’s a whole bunch of EU comet articles here.

Comet theory of North American extinctions coming under fire. Shame, it was a cool theory.

Looks like there is a link between cosmic rays and cloud cover, modulated by solar activity. This, if true, would invalidate most of the AGW we’ve had shoved down our throats for the last decade or so.

Alfven and the electric universe.

In an ESA report last month the high-resolution of the Herschel space observatory produced another surprise, “The filaments are huge, stretching for tens of light years through space and Herschel has shown that newly-born stars are often found in the densest parts of them… Such filaments in interstellar clouds have been glimpsed before by other infrared satellites, but they have never been seen clearly enough to have their widths measured. Now, Herschel has shown that, regardless of the length or density of a filament, the width is always roughly the same. “This is a very big surprise,” says Doris Arzoumanian, Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, CEA/IRFU, the lead author on the paper describing this work. Together with Philippe André from the same institute and other colleagues, she analyzed 90 filaments and found they were all about 0.3 light years across, or about 20,000 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This consistency of the widths demands an explanation.”

So what is the favored conventional explanation? What else but “sonic booms” generated by “exploding stars!” But where are these exploding stars? And explosions should impose some degree of radial curvature on these filaments. But what we see is more like the tortuous paths of cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts. For that is what they are, in fact, on a cosmic scale.

The ‘father’ of plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén, wrote in 1986, “That parallel currents attract each other was known already at the times of Ampere. It is easy to understand that in a plasma, currents should have a tendency to collect to filaments. In 1934, it was explicitly stated by Bennett that this should lead to the formation of a pinch. The problem which led him to the discovery was that the magnetic storm producing medium (solar wind with present terminology) was not flowing out uniformly from the Sun. Hence, it was a problem in cosmic physics which led to the introduction of the pinch effect…

However, to most astrophysicists it is an unknown phenomenon. Indeed, important fields of research, e.g., the treatment of the state in interstellar regions, including the formation of stars, are still based on a neglect of Bennett’s discovery more than half a century ago… present-day students in astrophysics hear nothing about it.” [Emphasis added]

The constant width over vast distances is due to the current flowing along the Birkeland filaments, each filament constituting a part of a larger electric circuit. And in a circuit the current must be the same in the whole filament although the current density can vary in the filament due to the electromagnetic pinch effect. Therefore the electromagnetic scavenging effect on matter from the molecular cloud, called Marklund convection, is constant along each current filament, which simply explains the consistency of widths of the filaments. The stars form as plasmoids in the Bennett-pinches, also known in plasma labs on Earth as Z-pinches.

Here’s two sites which, regardless of whether you end up buying it or not, are just fun: Ancient Destructions and Saturnian Cosmology.

And, Bosnian pyramids.

And Zero Hedge dips into weird science: Earthquakes and Weird Atmospheric effects. Strange phenomena have been associated with earthquakes since the classical era, but seem to be largely dismissed nowadays.

Effing hilarious.

I can’t really excerpt, you have to read the whole thing, as the effect is cumulative.

[wik]: I was startled, when I actually opened the link in a browser, at how ugly the page is.  I read most webpages now through my rss feed reader app, Reeder.  It does a remarkable job displaying ugly websites in a clean, easy-on the eyes manner while retaining useful semantic markup.  If you’re a mac or iphone/ipad user, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

[alsø wik]: h/t to my pal Christian.

Instapundit linked this item – Compact Fusion Experiment Demonstrates Confinement of 100 keV (Billion-Degree) Ions in Dense Plasma which is indeed cool news:

In a breakthrough in the effort to achieve controlled fusion energy, a research team at Lawrenceville PlasmaPhysics, Inc. (LPP) in Middlesex, NJ, announced that they have demonstrated the confinement of ions with energies in excess of 100 keV (the equivalent of a temperature of over 1 billion degrees C) in a dense plasma. They achieved this using a compact fusion device called a dense plasma focus (DPF), which fits into a small room and confines the plasma with powerful magnetic fields produced by the currents in the plasma itself. Reaching energies over 100 keV is important in achieving a long-sought goal of fusion research—to burn hydrogen-boron fuel. Hydrogen-boron, (also known by its technical abbreviation, pB11) is considered the ideal fusion fuel, since it produces energy in the form of charged particles that can be directly converted to electricity. This could dramatically cut the cost of electricity generation and eliminate all production of radioactive waste.

The dense plasma focus has been studied for over 40 years. However, LPP has been able to make great strides since its ―Focus-Fusion-1 experimental device started producing data in October, 2009, due to its unique, patented design. Most importantly, its electrodes, which produce the self-pinching action that concentrates the plasma and current, are much smaller than those of other DPF devices with similar peak currents. The electrode assembly is only 4 inches across and less than 6 inches in length.

The fusion energy yields achieved in these experiments are still far less than the energy used to run the machines. However, LPP hopes to make rapid progress in the coming year when the machine will be running with hydrogen–boron fuel for the first time.

They’ve made more progress in fusion in the last couple years than billion dollar efforts achieved in decades.  What may not be apparent at first sight, though, is that the lead researcher behind all this progress – Eric Lerner of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics – is the author of The Big Bang Never Happened, and his proposed ideas regarding plasma cosmology – quasars and the like.

Robert Bussard of Bussard Ramjet fame had another line of investigation that was similar in some respects – the Polywell – but funding ran out and then he died from multiple myeloma.  Research does continue though.

Gary Taubes, author of the life-changing (for me, at any rate) book Good Calories, Bad Calories now has a blog, and  a new book coming out this month – Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. That would make a nice late Christmas present.

Coming out two weeks before that, in fact, this next Tuesday, is Tim Ferriss‘ new one, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. I enjoyed his first book, the 4-hour Workweek, which, while not exactly containing world-shattering new information is useful in providing in one place information and a perspective that would have taken vast effort to compile. It hasn’t changed my life – but I hope it will in the new year. At least a little, anyway. I think the new one will be a useful companion piece to the information I’ve already assembled for the whole diet/exercise program I’m now following.

I’ll post a review once I get it.

The Hawaiian Libertarian drops a big post on the whole smoking is bad for you thing.

I don’t know what would piss off Mrs. Buckethead more – me continuing to smoke, or continuing to smoke and justifying on the basis that the government is lying.

There’s a few links in the article – ones that Aretae didn’t include in his posts on the subject a while back.

I think I will switch to American Spirits or the like, though. I’ve been smoking cowboy killers for too long. I don’t really want to go to the trouble of roll your own, and smoking organic would fit in (a bit, kind of) with my general trend toward healthier stuff.

[wik]: The other posts in the red pill series over at HL are all worth reading, if you haven’t already. And you should have. Slacker.

If you pay attention to science news, you may have noticed this sort of headline: “Scientists Shocked” or “Scientists Baffled.” The teaser headline leads you to a heroic story of hero scientists heroically unjamming the gears of science.

What you may not have noticed is the pattern. Six or seven times out of ten, the scientist is an astronomer or cosmologist. And if you read even more closely, you’ll find that the same sort of shocking results crop up at regular intervals. For example, every time a probe gets near a comet, we see a rash of reports of baffled scientists running around with their heads cut off, shocked at the results reported back by our robotic emissaries. Often, in the second paragraph, or perhaps the last, you’ll see a comment along the lines of “It’s back to the drawing board.”

But two years later when the next probe arrives, the same confusion reigns.

Clearly, someone did not go back to the drawing board, and paradigms were not altered.

Aside from comets, one of the most common sources of bafflement is electromagnetism in space. Keep this in the back of you mind next time you scan the science news. Remember that hot gas is plasma. Plasma is electromagnetic. The easiest way on earth to generate high energy radiation – gamma, x-ray – is with plasma devices, entirely without the need for rapidly spinning gravitational sources. Finally, there’s no such thing as magnetic field line reconnection – field lines are as real (though fully as useful) as lines of longitude or latitude. They can’t reconnect.

Now read an article like this one. It’s typical.

Here’s a fun one about ball lightning, with a space connection.

In other science news, climate models are awesome. Borepatch weighed in on that one, too. And sunspots may have had something to do with the little ice age.