Made in Japan?

[Filo]

In my ignorance before this I always thought that where I lived I would be safe, we are about half to three quaters a mile from the beach, and in the '58 floods even tho the water could be seen from my parents house it didn't actually come that far, plus I'm on a bit of a hill...

Cut to the reports of this tsunami and the terrifying fact that it travelled at least 10 km inland, and the sobering thought that within seconds of a wave like that hitting my beach, we would be gone.
When you think to yourself, 10 km from my house takes me to................. THAT is when you finally realise just how huge this wave really was.

You want to hope that you don`t get a repeat of this then

Britains Biggest Earthquake

[RedJ]

It makes you appreciate how lucky we are to be virtually in the middle of a plate.

[billdoor]

There is going to be a charity conert for the Japanese Tsunami appeal
up to now Katrina and the waves, Beach Boys and Wet wet wet have agreed to perform

SINGING \"THE TIDE IS HIGH\" NO DOUBT!

[BillyStubbsTears]

In my ignorance before this I always thought that where I lived I would be safe, we are about half to three quaters a mile from the beach, and in the '58 floods even tho the water could be seen from my parents house it didn't actually come that far, plus I'm on a bit of a hill...

Cut to the reports of this tsunami and the terrifying fact that it travelled at least 10 km inland, and the sobering thought that within seconds of a wave like that hitting my beach, we would be gone.
When you think to yourself, 10 km from my house takes me to................. THAT is when you finally realise just how huge this wave really was.

You want to hope that you don`t get a repeat of this then

Britains Biggest Earthquake

Bugger that.

THIS is what yon Norfolk Yokels want to be having sleepless night over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga

Me, I'm glad I moved to halfway up one of them hill in Sheffield.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Billy, following on you post on a serious theme, the Japanese will be fine and will no doubt re-build in a manner designed to combat any increased threats to their structures.  The vast majority of their economy recovery following the second world war can be attributed to a gentleman called William Edwards Deming. He was sent to Japan by Eissenhower at the end of the war, and he told them that if they would embrace the principles that he taught them, they would have the rest of the developed world screaming for protection within 5 years.  The rest as they say is history, no one takes the piss out of Japanese quality now as they did when me and thee were kids eh?  Being in the industry that you are, can I recommend a book for your reading list. If you can get a copy of \"Out of the Crisis\" by William Edwards Deming Cambridge Press 1986 it will change your thought processes no doubt, it certainly did do mine!!!!

Never heard of that Savvy, but I'll definitely dig it out. Ta for the head-ups.

I find Japan fascinating. How a country can go from being more bestial than Nazi Germany (at Nakning in 1937, in three weeks of carnage they massacred Chinese civillians at 30 times the rate that the Nazis killed Jews at Auschwitz, and without the efficiency), to being flattened by American fire-bombs, to being a peace-loving, uber-efficient global manufacturing machine, to becoming a stagnant economic disaster-zone in the space of one lifetime is amazing. They must have a real culture of \"Yes sir - we do what you say.\" Fantastic when it is put to positive use - bloody awful or terrifying when it isn't.

[bobjimwilly]

In my ignorance before this I always thought that where I lived I would be safe, we are about half to three quaters a mile from the beach, and in the '58 floods even tho the water could be seen from my parents house it didn't actually come that far, plus I'm on a bit of a hill...

Cut to the reports of this tsunami and the terrifying fact that it travelled at least 10 km inland, and the sobering thought that within seconds of a wave like that hitting my beach, we would be gone.
When you think to yourself, 10 km from my house takes me to................. THAT is when you finally realise just how huge this wave really was.

You want to hope that you don`t get a repeat of this then

Britains Biggest Earthquake

from wikipedia: \"in London the head of the waxwork of Dr Crippen at Madame Tussauds fell off.\"

God forbid we have an earthquake that strong again - imagine the chaos if David Beckhams head fell off!

[Viking Don]

If you want to feel a bit less sympathetic I'd suggest watching a film called 'The Cove'.

At least Taiji will have been hit by the wave and hopefully wiped out the bas**rds that made their living there, they had it coming!

Brilliant film, pretty depressing though. Everytime i see pictures of people swimming with captive dolphins I think how traumatised they must be. Also amazing to know that dolphins can commit suicide.
Heres a picture to make you feel less sorry some of the people who have been killed:

And the film: http://www.megavideo.com/?v=BD9DT9KL

Yeah, all them kids what have been washed away deserved it, karma eh?

If only tsunami's could distinguish between people and dolphin murderers.

Who mentioned the kids or any other innocent victims like? I said the 'bas**rds that made their living there'. Those bas**rds were even poisoning their own kids along with the rest of the population. Yep, that's karma. A crumb of comfort.

[BillyStubbsTears]

'kin 'ell. If there's Karma like that going round, I'll make sure that none of my neighbours eat Bernard Matthews turkey rolls. There'll be a big chuffing asteroid on its way...

[nightporter]

LMAO! Dolphin murderers?? What about the evil Cod murderers? or Chicken killers? You've been listening to that green wellied brigade who'd have you believe dolphins are as inteligent as us. People deserved to die because they killed a fish? (I know) Next you'll be saying animal rights activists are right trying to murder scientists who use animals for research in an attempt to save humans.

[Ian H]

I'm not a fan of what I would consider to be barbaric hunting methods but I can't really relate Minimata, Nanking or Taiji to the effects that we are seeing in North East Japan, otherwise we start looking at Ukraine in 1932/3 or what used to be Yugoslavia, or Pol Pot or Rwanda.

Man has always been cruel - perhaps it is mankind that needs bumping off to enable the planet to survive and an earthquake anywhere would just be part of the natural scheme of things.

The people in that area of Japan appear to be showing incredible strength, and the economy of Japan will no doubt thrive on the full employment of the construction/utilities industry, but just for the moment I can smile at the dark humour as I sympathise with the people who for the time being have no homes and no belongings and missing families.

Meanwhile I'm seeing Ed Byrne tonight - I'll see if he comes up with something.

[Nudga]

Gallows humour is what the British are famous for.

When my grandad died I took the day off for his service, he was cremated. The next day I went back to work still upset and in the canteen, one of the lads says to me \"Have a nice barbeque yesterday?\" and about fifteen others pissed themselves with laughing. I laughed myself, even though it hurt. My mate who said it though came up and gave me a big cuddle, and the rest of the boys made a fuss and took me under their wing as I was a young lad then. This banter and support got me through a very tough time.

[Bristol Red Rover Jnr.]

LMAO! Dolphin murderers?? What about the evil Cod murderers? or Chicken killers? You've been listening to that green wellied brigade who'd have you believe dolphins are as inteligent as us. People deserved to die because they killed a fish? (I know) Next you'll be saying animal rights activists are right trying to murder scientists who use animals for research in an attempt to save humans.

Personally i am against killing animals. And these guys kill 25,000 dolphins a year, and sell most of them for $150 as meat. This meat is filled with dangerous levels of Murcury and other contaminants. This was being fed to children at schools as a way of keeping there dolphin meat selling. I accept that you dont care about dolphins being killed, but im pretty sure if kids new about how the dolphins in dolphinariums had been captured, they would feel different. So yes, i do think these few people deserved to die, but obviously not along with thousands and thousands of innocent people.

[Filo]

Dear Japan

Bit of a bas**rd when something sneaks up on you without any warning eh ?

Love all the lads from
Pearl Harbour.

[RedJ]

Don't you think nuking them was payback enough?

[Viking Don]

LMAO! Dolphin murderers?? What about the evil Cod murderers? or Chicken killers? You've been listening to that green wellied brigade who'd have you believe dolphins are as inteligent as us. People deserved to die because they killed a fish? (I know) Next you'll be saying animal rights activists are right trying to murder scientists who use animals for research in an attempt to save humans.

Yes, cos Cod are well known for being conscious, self-aware beings aren't they...along with turkey's etc...always in front of the mirror doing their hair

I'd look stuff up before making ignorant comments, it's nothing to do with being an animal rights activist (I'll happily eat anything that doesn't recognise itself in a mirror), why not read the evidence? And no, I won't be saying whatever other rubbish you may assume I'll say next...Jeez.

Start here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090914172644.htm

You also seem to have overlooked the 'poisoning their own children' part as well, in your Denis Leary type rant. Like I said in the first place, I recommend actually watching 'The Cove', not reading a shitty review and forming an opinion based on that. Then ask if people deserved to die because they killed a fish (I know too!). BTW, my answer is an unequivocal 'YES'. Had they found you in their town trying to uncover what they were actually doing, they'd have slit your throat, no qualms. If you doubt that then you've been listening to the blue or red wellied brigade who try and make you think everyone is like us. Naive to say to least.

EDIT: BTW talking of Grandads, mine spent 3 years in a POW camp run by....correct. I know for sure that had he been around today he'd have been leaping around for joy, the silly old bugger would never forgive them, even after they stopped worshiping their emperor as a God. Still, his legacy lives on in that I've never bought a Jap car.

Ian H, good post, what did Ed come up with?

[Viking Don]

Do we need nuclear/oil power?

Solar panels covering deserts, wind, tidal forces etc. would power the world, no problem.

We need nuclear/oil power because:

Individuals need to make lots of money. It'd be unheard of to have FREE energy, even though it's there for the taking anyway.

Not surprisingly, it's those individuals that try to 'educate' people.

Who's winning?

[BobG]

There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.

We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.

BobG

[BillyStubbsTears]

There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.

We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.

BobG

I've got a book for you Bob.

Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.

The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.

He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.

For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.

But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.

Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!

Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.

So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.

Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!

Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.

And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.

Here endeth the rant.

[Viking Don]

There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.

We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.

BobG

I've got a book for you Bob.

Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.

The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.

He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.

For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.

But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.

Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!

Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.

So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.

Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!

Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.

And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.

Here endeth the rant.

Haha BST. Eventually we'll all live forever and get on with each other forever. You know that is NOT going to happen, second law of thermodynamics init? Why would humanity be excepted, explain. You've heard of entropy. Philosophy loses over Physics.

As much as I'd like to say it's all going to be OK on the night, it isn't. It's all going to end, even every trace of what you are now. Humanity seeks order, and order leads to disorder. May as well don the black outfits now, as it's inevitable.

[Ian H]

Viking Don:

Either Ed hadn't heard any or decided that the couple of hundred folks from Grimsby area that bothered to turn out were too close to being a town on an East Coast to risk upsetting them.

My Dad was a POW in Burma in WW2 and he never talked about it - and he/we never bought electrical goods or cars labelled as made in Japan. Strangely he bought a Nissan late in his life and his reasoning was that it was assembled in Sunderland so that was OK ..... I think he'd have been OK with me having a VW though!

[hoolahoop]

Viking Don:

Either Ed hadn't heard any or decided that the couple of hundred folks from Grimsby area that bothered to turn out were too close to being a town on an East Coast to risk upsetting them.

My Dad was a POW in Burma in WW2 and he never talked about it - and he/we never bought electrical goods or cars labelled as made in Japan. Strangely he bought a Nissan late in his life and his reasoning was that it was assembled in Sunderland so that was OK ..... I think he'd have been OK with me having a VW though!

Like you Ian, my family circumstances were the same in that my Grandad also spent a long time in a Japanese POW camp in Burma. He too never discussed what had happened to him save........it was horrific and I don't want you ever to know son.
However he never (as far as I know) hated the Japanese nation per se. but he did look at lables on electrical items and cars and never knowingly bought anything Japanese. I am told his whole demeanour (as well as health) changed him for the worse for the rest of his life.
Do I hate the Japs............of course not but currently pity the weak and defenceless amongst them. They are a strong nation with a strong sense of national pride who will rebuild their lives and country bigger and better for the 2nd. time in the last 60+ years.

[Ian H]

He did let us buy http://www.capitalgardens.co.uk/nippon-ant-killer-powder-p-6373.html tho'  ...... Sorry, the thread was about our black sense of humour allowing us to cope - we've got to be able to laugh - too many tears!

[BobG]

Billy - agree entirely that technological development could cure many, many ills. But I had two points which you've not addressed:

1) technological development is going to be forced to focus on immediate things like providing food, managing wars, managing water and managing the climate. With more and more demands being placed upon it, and less and less resources with which to meet all the varied demands we all seem to blindly believe technology will meet

2) Humankind shied away from many of the big, big challenges. I gave some examples above. You can call it what you like, you can attribute it to what you like, but the bottom line is - we did. Personally, I put a lot of it down to vested interests and politcal manoeuvering - but that's just an opinion.

Put the two together and you have a case for humanity having reached the peak of its ability to deliver solutions. Who the fcuk, for example, cares about a bloody I-Phone when water is running out, and not much is being done about it, in a third of the world? Who the fcuk cares about HD TV when we're reducing the bio diversity of this planet by raping it to feed these stupid marketing gimmicks, and, permanently damaging our own well being by such a large rate each year that I'm frightened to give the figures?

We are in dnager of losing the capacity to deliver the solutions we're going to need. Electricty? Just where is it all going to come from eh? Nuclear? Unlikely we'll commit to enough. Oil? For a while, yes. But how much longer? Coal? Could be - but each megawatt of coal fired electricity chucks out something like 1000 times the pollution of a megawatt of nuclear. And it kills people. And it uses vast tonnages of oil moving it around and clearing up the waste. Wind? Some, yes. But not base load. It could give around 2% of world demand.  Hydro? Likewise. Burning waste? If we ever decide to do it, that too will only provide about 2%. Space generators? They would solve the problem entirely. But who's doing owt about it eh? We've failed the challenge I tell thee!

BobG

[BillyStubbsTears]

Bob.

That attitude has been put forward in every generation since Malthus. And every generation makes the same mistake - assuming that TODAY's technology us all that we'll have to solve tomorrow's problems.

You're right that those are big challenges. But they will be addressed by improvements in technology that we can't even begin to
Imagine yet.

Go back to Malthus, who \"proved\" in The early 1800s that population growth was bound to end in mass starvation. \"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.\" His conclusion was that the poor should be allowed to rot. Just like his philosophical descendant Teddy Goldsmith who started The Ecologist with similar underpinning thoughts. (And his nephew is now Cameron's environment guru - God f**king help us...)

Every one of them is steeped in a flat earth philosophy that sees technology as an enemy, when it is actually the drive that has taken billions of us out if grinding poverty, illness and early death. And over the next century, it will solve ALL the problems that you flag up.

Optimism! In 200 years time, your worries will look as foolish and short sighted as Malthus's do today.

[BobG]

It's a fair point Billy. History is full of Cassandra's crying 'woe is me'. Where I get hung up is on the notion that physical resources are not infinite, that the demands upon those diminishing resources are increasing exponentially and that missed opportunities don't often come around again. It might be years and years away yet - who can tell? - but at some point there has to be a peak - and a subsequent drop.

Bob

[BillyStubbsTears]

Sure Bob, but what are \"resources\"?

In 1800, who cared about crude oil? In 1600, who cared about coal?

In 2200, who knows what resources will be considered vital?

Ian Morris has a theory that technological developments occur when scared, lazy or greedy people work out ways to do things better, easier or more profitably, to make themselves stronger, more secure and wealthier. If the last 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution, tells you anything, it's that mankind has a phenomenal ability to work out solutions to problems that seemed impossible to previous generations. We're worried now about the Japanese reactors, but imagine going back 200 years and telling Napoleon that by 2011, 50% of France's energy would come not from muscle, horses, burning wood, windmills or burning coal, but by splitting atoms. If you'd have told Napoleon that France's very existence would have depended on a resource called Uranium, he'd have said, \"But that is worthless today. A few nutcases use it as a paint pigment.\"


Now extrapolate that 200 years forward and you see immediately that there will be technological developments and use of other resources that we cannot possibly imagine today.

[RobTheRover]

There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.

We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.

BobG

I've got a book for you Bob.

Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.

The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.

He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.

For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.

But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.

Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!

Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.

So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.

Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!

Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.

And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.

Here endeth the rant.

What utter rubbish!

Sinclair Spectrums had either 16kb or 48kb of RAM.  You are clearly thinking of the ZX81, which had 3.5kb of RAM (and an optional 16kb external RAM pack), or the original VIC-20 which had the same base RAM.

Tsk, shoddy work, BST.  Not up to your usual standard!

;-)

[River Don]

There were, at the very least, half a dozen viable ways that alternative and substantial power sources could have been developeed in the 70's and 80's. Geothermal inclines in the oceans, burning (and using as fertiliser the more compost like stuff) all our rubbish to creat heat to drive turbines, nuclear fusion (the funds allocated to that were and are plain shameful), satellite generators using the suns rays and beaming power down to Earth (that one's relatively easy I understand), one about using the sea as a source of some special atom thing and then doing summat dead clever with it, there's plenty more. But mankind and more particularly, his vested interests, killed every single one. So now we have no choice but to use fission - which is downright scary stuff.

We failed to face up to the challenge. Have you ever thought, the last 3 to 4 decades could easily have seen the peak of human development and achievement? With resources dwindling, humanity procreating, poisions slowly accumulating, vegetation (and therefore oxygen) plainly disappearing at a staggering rate, sea levels rising, weather becoming ever more crop unfriendly, the tundra already melting and so letting off more methane than even we could ever produce - and now cannot stop even if we tried. The pressure is mounting. It's an easy argument to make that humanity is about to pass beyond its best years of achieving anything.

BobG

I've got a book for you Bob.

Why the West Rules (For Now...) By Ian Morris. He's a Brit, from Stoke, who's now a prof of Archaeology and History at Stanford.

The book is breathtakingly ambitious, thoroughly researched but also, very. very readable. He set himself the target of figuring out why it is that the West (Europe/America) is currently more developed and powerful than the East (Japan and China). Which it is, unquestionably.

He goes back 20,000 years and follows the ebbs and flows of civilizations on both sides of the planet, developing a scoring system for how powerful and advanced they were.

For someone like me, who has a naive belief that everything will get better in the long run, it's both exhilliarating and terrifying. He describes dozens of advanced civilizations that rose and fell like waves over centuries and millenia. He shows how, after the fall of Rome, Europe didn't reach the same fell of development until the 1720. In the meantime, China had developed a civilization as powerful as Rome by 1000AD (I'd never heard of it!) which itself then collapsed and led to their own Dark Ages.

But the key thing is that it gives you a feeling for just how exponential the development in the last 250 years has been. Time and agains, civilizations got to the level that we were are by the mid 1700s, then collapsed. THIS time, the West broke through, had the Industrial Revolution and as a result we came to dominate the planet. This is utterly unprecedented in human history.

Morris reckons that the Romans' development (by his score) was about 40 in 100AD. We then dropped to about 20 for the next 1600 years before getting back to 40 in 1720. Now, he scores us at about 900!

Think about how rapidly technological development is now. It took well over 100 years for trains to go from 10mph to 100mph. In the last 50 years, we've gone from 100mph to 250-300mph. 30 years ago, a ZX Spectrum with 16k RAM and a 3.5MHz processor was the height of accessible computing. Today, for similar money you can buy a machine with 1000 times the processor speed and 200,000 times the RAM. Think about how rapidly the internet has revolutionised communication. It took 100 years from the telephone being invented, to International Direct Dialling being common. It's only taken 15 years for mobile phones and the internet to eclipse that type of communication 1000 fold.

So technology is developing capability at a rate that gets faster all the time. Think about what the technological world will look like by 2050. 2100. Never mind 2200.

Think about bringing a foot soldier from Wellington's army to the present day. Try explaining to him that you could call someone on the other side of the world using a tiny machine in you hand. That you could go onto a computer (explain waht a computer is) and use a rectangle of plastic (explain to him what plastic is) to take money from your bank account (explain what a bank account is) to buy a plane ticket (explain what a plane is) to fly within 24 hours to New Zealand (explain what New Zealand is). Now think about how utterly incomprehensible the technological world of 2200 would be to US!

Morris also admits that we have grave problems to get through over the next half century. But if we DO, technological development will take us to levels where today's worries are as trifling as we consider the worries of 1800 to be. Today, virtually no-one dies of smallpox, TB. Virtually no-one has leprosy, rickets, scurvy. In 100 years time, people will say the same about cancer, coronary heart disease etc. Over the next 100 years, the traditionally grindingly poor billions of China and India will attain lifestyles like ours.

And technological development will sort out the problems that come with that. Global warming will be sorted. Food production will be sorted. New fuels will be sorted. All by technology. As long as we don't go all Flat Earth and start going anti-technology. That's the reaction of comfortable westerners who can afford to complain from their centrally heated homes with their well-stocked cupboards.

Here endeth the rant.

It is worth remembering that all that Human development has largely been driven by simply burning things. Releasing a natural source of solar power stored over hundreds and thousands of years. The discovery of fire made the difference for early man. The ancient empires burned wood, the industrial revolution really got underway when we discovered we could burn coal. Then someone this liquid black stuff coming out of the ground burned and that pushed development on again.

I find it sobering when you think that for all our ingenuity and our technology most of it is still driven by burning things and in that respect, things haven't really moved as far forward as we like to think. For me, solving the energy problem remains our greatest challenge.

[CusworthRovers]

Does anybody think the day will come when man can harness Trouser Gas?

[Viking Don]

If we insist on eating Cows (and I do), then we should definitely burn theirs. Just a case of getting trousers that fit.

Billy: People ARE still starving today. Maybe not in Denaby, but balby...

And France is 75% nuclear. Thankfully they're not on a fault.