Recently in Extropianism Category

Aubrey de Grey gave a Tech Talk at Google's Mountain View campus this week, and I was privileged to attend. I've seen him give a longer, earlier version of this presentation before - at Stanford in June 2005 - and was impressed more than ever. Enjoy:

ABSTRACT

It may seem premature to be discussing approaches to the effective elimination of human ... all » aging as a cause of death at a time when essentially no progress has yet been made in even postponing it. However, two aspects of human aging combine to undermine this assessment. The first is that aging is happening to us throughout our lives but only results in appreciable functional decline after four or more decades of life: this shows that we can postpone the functional decline caused by aging arbitrarily well without knowing how to prevent aging completely, but instead by increasingly thorough molecular and cellular repair. The second is that the typical rate of refinement of dramatic technological breakthroughs is rather reliable (so long as public enthusiasm for them is abundant) and is fast enough to change such technologies (be they in medicine, transport, or computing) almost beyond recognition within a natural human lifespan. In this talk I will explain, first, why (presuming adequate funding for the initial preclinical work) therapies that can add 30 healthy years to the remaining lifespan of healthy 55-year-olds may arrive within the next few decades, and, second, why those who benefit from those therapies will very probably continue to benefit from progressively improved therapies indefinitely and thus avoid debilitation or death from age-related causes at any age.

What a day! Just as I'm getting ready to attend Aubrey de Grey's talk at Google, I find out that a martial arts training buddy of mine, Dr. Pete Lohstroh, recently left his research position at UC Davis to take a senior scientist position at Telomolecular Nanotechnologies, specializing in the application of nanocircles to telomere extension therapy (one of several approaches they're taking). Congratulations Pete!

Nanomedicine opens the way for nerve cell regeneration

"The ability to regenerate nerve cells in the body could reduce the effects of trauma and disease in a dramatic way. In two presentations at the NSTI Nanotech 2007 Conference, researchers describe the use of nanotechnology to enhance the regeneration of nerve cells. In the first method, developed at the University of Miami, researchers show how magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) may be used to create mechanical tension that stimulates the growth and elongation of axons of the central nervous system neurons. The second method from the University of California, Berkeley uses aligned nanofibers containing one or more growth factors to provide a bioactive matrix where nerve cells can regrow..."

Nanoparticles Delivery of 'Suicide DNA' Kills Prostate Tumors

"...using nanoparticles developed by members of the Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer, a team of investigators at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research, in Philadelphia, has developed a DNA-based therapeutic agent that has the potential to treat both enlarged prostates and localized prostate tumors. When tested in mice, this new agent specifically targeted prostate tissue, producing no toxic effects in surrounding tissues..."

I'm about a month late in actually publishing a mention of my friend (and Reuters reporter) Tom Burroughes' interview with Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey De Grey, "Lifespans soon to be decades longer", which, interestingly, seems to have been syndicated on the Indian version of Yahoo! News.

Forwarded to me by Perry Metzger, and independently brought to my attention by Tom Burroughes, published in Science as "Cancer Regression in Patients After Transfer of Genetically Engineered Lymphocytes":

Using adoptive transfer of lymphocytes given after host immunodepletion it is possible to mediate objective cancer regression in patients with metastatic melanoma. However, the generation of tumor-specific T cells in this mode of immunotherapy is often limiting. Using a retrovirus encoding a T cell receptor, we report here the ability to specifically confer tumor recognition by autologous lymphocytes from peripheral blood. Adoptive transfer of these transduced cells in fifteen patients resulted in durable engraftment at levels exceeding ten percent of peripheral blood lymphocytes for at least two months post infusion. We observed high sustained levels of circulating, engineered cells at one year post-infusion in two patients, that both demonstrated objective regression of metastatic melanoma lesions. This study suggests the therapeutic potential of genetically engineered cells for the biologic therapy of cancer.

I have the full paper, forwarded to me by a friend, which I'm reading slowly.

Libertarians should not be denying scientific fact. We should instead spend our time combatting the religious impulse of people to think the modern world is evil and that we must repent for our sins by living cruddy lives and waiting for (in their minds) our inevitable and justified doom at the hands of a wronged Gaia.

Perry E. Metzger

Property "rights" are basically an epiphenomenon arising from respect for voluntary agreements. As such, if a society doesn't respect voluntary agreements, private property doesn't last long. You can't even decide who owns something unless voluntary agreements are respected.

Perry Metzger, by permission, from a private mailing list

Frank Bieser writes:
> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> Without enough people working on the problem, we won't finish in
>> time. Right now, I'd say smart people are the biggest missing resource.
>
> And why might that be? Where did all the smart people go?

They didn't "go" anywhere. They've never been in the field.

How many smart people were working on orbital rocketry in 1920? A half
dozen, perhaps. Lots of people claimed the whole idea was bunk, too,
including the New York Times. Later on, lots of people joined up.

Today, not many people are working on Drexler's vision. That doesn't
mean it isn't worthwhile -- it just means that the field is young and
lots of people are still skeptical about it. I suspect that the number
of people actively working on it numbers less than 20, and possibly
less than 10.

There is enough work for thousands of people to push on this for many
years to come. At some point, we'll get IA or AI and the pace will be
able to pick up, but that point still seems pretty distant. Meanwhile,
direct molecular manipulation and molecular manufacturing pose a very
hard set of problems -- possibly the hardest engineering problem yet
faced by mankind -- and we need more minds to make progress. On the
flip side, MNT will also bring the biggest revolution in civilization
yet experienced, dwarfing everything that came before, so I see it as
a worthwhile problem to attack.

Still, we lack enough smart people working on it. As any good VC can
tell you, money is something of a commodity, but smart people are
rare. More smart people are needed.

Perry

I occasionally attend some rather memorable lectures on topics of extropian interest, such as Aubrey de Grey's lectures at Stanford last summer. I've gotten permission to post some of the recordings I've taken with my iPod/iTalk combination, but have not yet aggregated those recordings for public consumption. With yesterday's announcement by audioblog.com concerning their "unmetered bandwidth" plan, I just may have found my venue. Stay tuned.

A week ago, I caught a short segment of Fox News' business anchor Neil Cavuto interviewing Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, who was promoting his company's Deep Space DSE-Alpha program, a privately-funded Soyuz-based circumlunar expedition. I noticed, not for the first time, a surprising skepticism about private space travel from the normally highly pro-free enterprise Cavuto, who seems to be nurturing a serious blind spot on the matter, a dangerous case of NASA-romanticization.

Me, I'm sanguine about the DSE-Alpha, and hope to see Anderson's enterprise succeed. In the meantime, someone needs to buy Neil Cavuto a copy of Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier." Abolish NASA, get the government out of the space business, and let people like Anderson do their thing without subsidy or interference.

An interesting blog article about the use of dendrimers in targetted drug delivery systems, sent me by Tom Burroughes in London.

University of Michigan scientists have created the nanotechnology equivalent of a Trojan horse to smuggle a powerful chemotherapeutic drug inside tumor cells – increasing the drug's cancer-killing activity and reducing its toxic side effects.

Previous studies in cell cultures have suggested that attaching anticancer drugs to nanoparticles for targeted delivery to tumor cells could increase the therapeutic response. Now, U-M scientists have shown that this nanotechnology-based treatment is effective in living animals.

This type of news carries a special type of urgency for me, as I've recently been informed that my good friend Chris Tame, in London, has been diagnosed with epithelioid angiosarcoma of the bones (spine & hip so far.) His oncologists are working hard to find the primary source of the cancer. In the meantime, any new developments in the effectiveness of chemotherapy with short & medium term time horizons are of great personal interest to me and my friends.

...the digital (PDF) version I'm reading now, but Charlie Stross tells his readers not to do so. I will, however, be buying several copies from Amazon as gifts to friends. Damn it's good!

I would much rather see transhumanists delve into real research or produce real results rather than just recruiting "believers". I [would] rather have fewer people working on the right things than a much larger number who believe in mistaken ideas.

...sadly, the transhumanists themselves will be a large part of the faulty advertising that lead humanity astray with outrageous claims, false beliefs, and preferring quantity over quality. I see nothing in most of our PR efforts that will actually help us attain our goals. Having a couple of hundred people join a science fan club worldwide will have little to no effect on progress.

Harvey Newstrom

Cambridge biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey will be speaking next week at Stanford University, on "Why the prospect of dramatic life extension matters now." Talk will occur Wednesday evening 7:00-8:30 PM, 8 June 2005, at the Clark Center Auditorium. Thanks to Tyler Emerson for forwarding this to me; I do plan to attend.

Cops are armed when civilians can't be, often with weapons civilians can't have. I can't tell you how sick I get of seeing notations in catalogs like Brigade Quartermaster that certain items are for cops only.

Cops live and operate within a strict hierarchy, usually with titles like "sergeant", "lieutenant", "captain", and so forth. Most of them wear military-style uniforms, and an argument can be made that so-called "plainclothes" operations ought to be outlawed. Increasingly, they wear military battledress and carry military weapons.

Cops form a culture all to themselves, like professional soldiers, and usually have little to do with those who are not cops. They do call us "civilians". I never heard this term "little people" before. They also call us "assholes" and say that the public just consists of criminals who haven't been caught yet. I know because I was there at one time.

Yeah, I understand the theory that they're civilians, too. I repeat that it's bullshit. What they are, in fact, is an occupying military force, with strategic bases in every hamlet in the nation -- which is why they and their hangers-on lie to us and possibly to themselves about being civilians, too.

They are the very standing army that the Founding Fathers were afraid of.

And for good reason.

L. Neil Smith
In response last night to a post I made on a mailing list about how cops refer to non-cops as "civilians" when they, too, are in fact "civilians."

Indeed, I am opposed even to free market supplied "police" in the conventional sense. The potential - indeed, universal reality - of armed agencies abusing their power is such that I believe that it is foolish for individuals to delegate their use of just force and to rely on third parties. We need an armed citizenry, the "hue and cry", and the use of specialist/expert "martials" for arrest only in restricted cases.

Dr. Chris R. Tame
Excerpted with permission from a recent private correspondance

I just got back from a meeting of an organization of which I'm a member, and was talking with a Polish acquaintance at the potluck which followed. We were discussing the until-recent history of Russian occupation of his country, and he told me that some Poles he knew had during that time advocated "Layered Communism":

"Layer of Communists, layer of sand, layer of Communists, layer of sand..."

Capitalism is the only moral social system because it allows each man to work for his own profit and because under a capitalistic system men only have to work with each other through voluntary action for mutual benefit. Capitalism maximizes wealth, prosperity and happiness.

Valara Forsythe

Thanks to Perry for bringing this to my attention: "Rapid Gene Synthesizer Will Enable Custom Microbe Construction."

Today after work I headed up for Thursday night Bujinkan training (the weekly outdoor session, which I'd been missing until recently due to school), and had a great time tonight. Before heading to San Francisco, I did a quick search for late night coffee shops with free wireless internet access, located within a reasonable drive of the training park, and found the Samovar Tea Lounge in the Castro/Mission district.

I'm sitting there right now, having "Russian High Tea" way too late in the day. Service includes all-you-can drink high-octane self-serve tea from - you guessed it - a samovar: "dilute to taste" is the operative term. This place is genuinely cool, and I highly recommend it.

About the "just because I can" thing: an acquaintance of mine, Marc Stiegler, once wrote in one of his novels that it's vitally important to maintain a childlike sense of wonder about the world. Here I am, sitting in a friendly place, an oasis of light in the darkness, warmth against the wind, music from the walls, and good food I would never have thought of making myself, talking to people in other cities on a 4-pound device that I use to bring me money... life is a good thing.

This just in from my distant friend James Bennett: his announcement today of the website supporting his new book "The Anglosphere Challenge." This seems like a very enticing book, and I plan to read it during winter school break.

Most of us are familiar with the events marking the Ansari X Prize winning flights of SpaceDev's SpaceShip One recently. Far fewer, however, know of the story of the American Rocket Company (AMROC), the pioneering company whose intellectual property lives on in that prize-winning ship: the revolutionary hybrid rocket engine that sent it to the edge of space, twice. Read on...

Here's a term I'd not expected to hear: "cosmetic neurology" (via John Venlet).

Anton Sherwood has moved his musings to a blogging system with a commenting facility and much friendlier navigation. No trivial feat, given that he's been blogging (in one place) since February 2002... this meant converting over 1400 postings! Take a look.

You might want to take note of the interconnection between purpose and action in the minimal State. The minimal State does not, for instance, build art museums, because it does not exist to promote art but to enforce agreements and provide mutual defense. In order to build an art museum, the State would need to acquire the resources with which to build it. If people are willing to donate those resources freely, there is no need for the State to build the museum — it could be built privately. If people are not willing to donate the resources freely, then the act of forcibly taking the needed resources turns the purpose of the minimal State on its head — instead of enforcing the decision by the participants to respect each other's lives and property so that their own lives and property will be respected, the State then becomes an agent for some to abscond with the property of others. I may think it is a good idea to build a home for orphans, but if I take your resources against your will to do it, whether I'm an official of the State or a private citizen, I have violated the truce. To obey the truce, I must convince you to voluntarily provide resources for my goals, whether by trading with you or appealing to your charitable instincts.

In short, if the justification of the minimal State is that it exists, at the behest of a collection of sovereign individuals, to enforce a mutually beneficial truce among those who choose to participate in it, and to organize mutual defense against those who choose not to participate by violating the truce, then that justification does not reasonably permit the expropriation of resources for the purpose of projects that are merely laudable.

Note that this view of the minimal State cannot provide a justification for initiating warfare in distant lands which are not a threat its citizens' safety, regardless of how laudable it might be to re-arrange the social structures of those foreign places to suit enlightened tastes. However, by the same token, neither position prevents individuals from engaging in such activities on their own, at their own risk and with their own resources.

Perry Metzger, in "What is the Role of the State?" today

Perry Metzger reports a fantastic bit of news about the reconstruction of a man's jaw using a fusion of prosthesis and a novel bone re-growth technique.

Prakash Chandrashekhar, a libertarian blogger in India, recommends L. Neil Smith's "The Probability Broach" on AnarCapLib.

Thanks to Chris Tame for passing along this article: "Scientists Identify Compounds That Mimic Calorie Restriction."

I really enjoy this woman's writing: "Science Friction," by Monica White.

Relatedly, Monica has informed me that she's working on an extended, adapted version of her Firefly review (of course she loves it too) for The Atlasphere, which I'll pass along when she tells me it's been published.

About three weeks ago, I wrote that my friend Monica White had indirectly informed me (through her blogroll) of the existence of the Quent Cordair Fine Art Gallery in Burlingame, California, about a mile from San Francisco International Airport.

Well, on Saturday - on a whim - I suggested to Peggy that we head up to the gallery for the short remainder of the afternoon. We arrived about two hours before closing... and left about an hour after closing.

I'd called ahead to confirm that the gallery was, as indicated on their website, indeed open for the afternoon. When we arrived, a friendly lady greeted us and, upon hearing my voice, recognized me from my call-ahead. When I mentioned my name, she remarked that it sounded familiar, and that she'd actually - somehow - come across my blog recently and had even recommended that a friend of hers named "Carter" (whose contact I welcome) contact me about gun-related issues! I was happily astounded. I quickly found out that this friendly - and sharp - lady is Linda Zimmerman, the director of the gallery.

Linda spent the better part of three hours talking with me about the purpose of the gallery, the only one of its kind in the world, specializing strictly in high-quality painting and sculpture of the Romantic Realist variety (see Ayn Rand's "Romantic Manifesto" for an in-depth introduction to the genre.) I was deeply impressed at the operation, the selection, and the director. The storefront has had 8 years of profitable operation, but its recent years of online operation alone keep it sufficiently profitable that it can continue in business, without diluting its collection with low-quality pieces which would otherwise meet "school of art" requirements or with technically high-quality pieces which are outside those stated requirements.

The gallery itself has on display about one-third its total collection, the other two-thirds of which is in storage, but pieces of which can be viewed by the seriously interested. The walls are arrayed with paintings, as would be expected, and a number of bronzes are also on display. Linda encourages a healthy, tactile approach to the sculptures: touch them. At one point in our long, animated chat, she took my right hand and placed it on the hip of this statue, "Gratitude" by Danielle Anjou:

This is a lovely piece, and was strangely reminincent of the 1987 Boris Vallejo cover art for the Robert A. Heinlein novel "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," itself a triumphalist riff on Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus." I love it, probably as much as Monica White loves Bill Mack's alto-relief sculpture "Forever," which was not on display the day I visited... but which I hope Monica can eventually acquire.

Linda and I talked each other's ears off, happily, while Peggy enjoyed one of the overstuffed leather couches near the front of the gallery. We talked about the business of art, and the multifarious ways the gallery has connected Romantic Realist artists, including the recently immigrated Chinese master Han Wu Shen, with deeply appreciative customers, including passionate-but-temporarily-impecunious college students who've arranged payment plans for their "must have" pieces. We talked about a great many other things, with most of the conversation led by Linda cheerily educating me in the business of her gallery, and with me responding with semi-articulate "Wows!" and "Cool!"

I do plan to spend quite a bit more time in the gallery, and may even hold a party of friends there in the near future. Yes, I did say "party"... anyone interested? It would be a great excuse to gather a few dozen of my closest friends and acquaintances in a fantastic setting near the near San Francisco. This is a very real possibility, since Linda did say that the gallery encourages people to hold their parties there. I'm thinking sometime in September, when my good friend Tom Burroughes is in town visiting from London with his girlfriend: first a morning sailing on the Bay (Tom's a qualified yachtsman), then shooting at the range, then a catered affair that night - after cleaning up - at the Quent Cordair Fine Art gallery... sounds like good living to me.

This is not to say that I believe all religious people are readily capable of murder. Rather, I claim that once you structure your life around ideas that you are not permitted to test, but which you accept as beyond testing (that is, on "faith"), you've abandoned your most important survival tool, namely reason.

Introduce a bad axiom into a mathematical formal system, you can prove anything. Similarly, if you abandon reason for "faith", you lose your only tool with which to distinguish the truth. This could leave you helpless to escape the idea that "God" demands that you kill, and from there it is a short step to shooting abortion doctors or flying planes into skyscrapers.

Perry Metzger

The concept of luck is also an insult to those who have truly earned what they have. It's an easy way for others to write off hard work and perseverance as merely a kiss on the forehead from the fates.

You see, I find it invariably true that 'luck' strikes those that are well prepared to receive its bounty. By preparedness I mean that they have educated themselves, unerringly pointed themselves in the direction of choice and put themselves forward again and again as a person who desires the chosen end result. I'm as unsurprised by these kinds of people being struck by ‘luck’ as I am by the tallest grounded antenna being struck by lightning.

Monica White

A few weeks ago, on a mailing list I run, it was reported to me by a good friend that the present management of the Extropy Institute disavows free-market libertarianism as its politico-economic root. As a matter of fact, we're told, extropianism was never about liberty and its deepest ramifications. To those people, I have a large number of examples from the early history of the extropian movement which contradict that claim, such as this reprint of a short declaration by law professor Tom Bell, writing in 1988 as "T.O. Morrow," a piece called "Economics and Politics" (words in brackets below added by me for clarification):

As information processing systems, good economic and political systems must meet the same standards that apply to any of their kind; they must achieve their ends efficiently. Researchers such as Friedrich Hayek have demonstrated that the most efficient economic and political systems are those that exert a minimum of control, allowing spontaneous orders to flourish. Economic and political systems must furthermore advance (trans)human ends. Extropy [magazine] takes the [editorial] point of view that these two qualifications are entirely compatible; the most efficient economic and political systems are those that maximize human liberty. Thus the best economic systems are free market, and the best political systems libertarian. (Libertarians assert that the state, if one is neccessary, should permit all acts except assault, theft and fraud.) Extropy [magazine] will pursue such free market and libertarian analyses of economic and political systems, working toward the day when economic and political systems serve us, rather than we them.

(T.0. Morrow, '88-'98. All Rights Reserved. Please attach this paragraph to all copies. Fully attributed noncommercial use of this document hereby permitted.)

This was, as mentioned, published in the paper version of Extropy magazine (a copy of which I own), and is notated "online version, edited Nov. '96." I plan to publish many more such examples as I run across them, at my convenience. Why? Well, while I do acknowledge that the term "extropian" has been diluted to the extent it's indistinguishable from standard socialist transhumanism - and this is a tragic thing - I will not stand for the historical revisionism being pushed by some of those in the existing "extropian" movement... especially since I've been around that movement from the very beginning, and will not drink the Kool-Aid.

An excellent essay by Eric Raymond, "Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun: What Bearing Weapons Teaches About the Good Life." (Thanks to Steve Pegram.)

To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is... to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from the dignity of a free man would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.

This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them.

I'd mentioned yesterday I'd be seeing this film, and I did. I also mentioned in a short comment followup that I'd seen a few old friends leaving the cinema, who confirmed my suspicions that the film was very loosely based on Asimov's work of the same name, so I went into the cinema not expecting a film realization of the original story.

There were tips of the hat all over the film to Asimov's original work, mostly in the naming of characters (Sonny, Dr. Susan Calvin) and in partial buzzword compliance (e.g. "positronic"), but as the credits honestly acknowledged, it's "based on a work of" Isaac Asimov. With that in mind, I determined to enjoy the film on its own merits, and was not disappointed. I was particularly impressed with Alan Tudyk's portrayal of Sonny (as an aside, I hope whatever name recognition this earns him - as a greenscreen actor - helps in the success of the forthcoming Firefly movie "Serenity".)

It's interesting to see that the movie treated Asimov's 3 Laws as sacrosanct, considering that Asimov himself later saw flaws in that approach to robot safety, working in a hack he called the "Zeroth Law." See this interesting commentary for a summary of the Laws... which might have prevented the disaster dramatized in the movie (that's the closest I'll come to a spoiler), or might not, given the rationalizations employed by the villain, which were the same as almost every tinpot dictator of the 20th century or before.

Here's a related amusement: the Singularity Institute apparently saw fit to ride the wave of the movie's popularity by launching a website called "3 Laws Unsafe".

My old friend Perry Metzger gave in today and finally started a blog. Now to convince him to add a comment mechanism...

First, we see that "public goods" are rare things. There's a great collection of essays by economists called "The Theory of Market Failure" edited by Tyler Cowan, which includes descriptions of the way private organizations historically built lighthouses, and the market for honeybee pollination (lighthouses and pollination are both classic examples of public goods in econ texts which are in the real world not public goods.)

Second, even if we are confronted with a public good, given the general incompetence of a non-market signaled monopoly organization with an unchecked budget at accomplishing anything, why would we imagine the organization would be able to figure out the "true" demand for the public good and supply it at the economically efficient level? Also, why do we imagine that the extraction of funds from all sorts of weird tax sources in any way properly reflects the "true" consumption of the good by the populace? "Solving" the public goods problem with government is like searching for your car keys under a street light 500m away from where you dropped them because the light is better there. Sure, it makes you feel as though you are doing something, but does it actually get you any nearer to your goal?

Perry Metzger

...the first highways were in fact privately funded, and, it can be argued that Xerox's networking protocols were better than TCP/IP at the time, but that's all another story. The general point is, sure the government does some good sometimes, just as even that crazy neighbor who no one suspected would go off and kill 50 peoples always seemed so quiet and did great things for the community playground project. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. I can
point at dozens of things the government has done reasonably well, but there is no feedback mechanism that rewards the bureaucrats who did the good things and punishes the idiots who run the DMV for doing bad things, so there is no likelihood those seeds will sprout into oaks.

Meanwhile, though, dumb companies that piss off customers go under all the time, and good ones make people rich. It isn't that the same sort of idiots who run government agencies can't get their hands on companies for a while -- it is that they can't keep running things that way for long before the well runs dry.

Perry Metzger

This is very much like the arguments I've been having with those who believe only government is capable of "real" science, of "pure" research. Yes, indeed it did take 43 years for private efforts to repeat the sub-orbital flight of [Alan] Shepherd.

But Rutan['s ship] returned to earth with everything he left with except his fuel, a feat that Government has never achieved.

Curt Howland

Recommended by Monica White: the blog "Bizarre Science."

Anders Monsen informs us of the publication by Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings of "ANARQUÍA: An Alternate History of the Spanish Civil War," which sounds like a great deal of fun in the vein of L. Neil Smith's "The Probability Broach." I'm a fan of Linaweaver's work, such as his excellent "Moon of Ice," which comes to market far too rarely.

The New Scientist reported yesterday that experimental progress in growing replacement teeth in situ has been made... yet another reason to pressure the federal government into repealing all its vile, stupid laws against stem cell research.

This is nasty and upsetting news from Steve Pegram: "Rocket Hobbyists Dropping Hobby" due to hamfisted, jackbooted regulation by the goons of the BATF. Just when we're seeing the spirit of innovation in rocketry and space travel rekindled, the government is working to snuff that spirit. This crap needs to be fought... which seems to be happening by default, since many rocket hobbyists have chosen to ignore F-Troop anyway.

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik has a blog.