Just running a test. I’ve been having some issues with Movable Type that I’m trying to resolve. If this actually posts, then just take it as fair warning that posts may be sporadic until I get my technical issues resolved.

According to an article in the New Scientist, physicist Jonathan Huebner, a physicist at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, says “the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.”

he plotted major innovations and scientific advances over time compared to world population, using the 7200 key innovations listed in a recently published book, The History of Science and Technology (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). The results surprised him.

Rather than growing exponentially, or even keeping pace with population growth, they peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since (see Graphs). Next, he examined the number of patents granted in the US from 1790 to the present. When he plotted the number of US patents granted per decade divided by the country’s population, he found the graph peaked in 1915.
. . .
He likens the way technologies develop to a tree. “You have the trunk and major branches, covering major fields like transportation or the generation of energy,” he says. “Right now we are filling out the minor branches and twigs and leaves. The major question is, are there any major branches left to discover? My feeling is we’ve discovered most of the major branches on the tree of technology.”

I have major reservations with this theory. First is the connection between population and technological advance. I’m not sure the two are related. We could plot technological advances against number of Star Wars DVD sales per year and, clearly, the year 1900 would have a much better ratio than today. The second is that time and time again over the course of history, we’ve heard people suggest we’ve “discovered it all.” That’s usually right before a major technological explosion takes place. (Kind of like you should stuff your money under the mattress when you hear someone talking about how we’ve tamed the cyclical market.)

From time to time, I get letters. By way of full disclosure, this wasn’t directly in response to one of my blog entries but rather this was an e-mail sent to me in response to one of my comments to a post at the blog, In The Agora:

You’re a fucking idiot. What makes you so fucking smart? I hope someone
murders you.

I’ve said some inflammatory things in my time, but I tend to keep my discourse civil at In the Agora since it’s a forum that leans pretty well to the right, but is generally a good place for more or less rational discussions. So, I have absolutely no idea what sent this yahoo off his rocker.

Jeeze, hard times ahead. GM chairman: Automaker to cut 25,000 jobs. That’s out of a total of 110,000 hourly workers. He cites the insane cost of healthcare. Our failure to control healthcare costs is now very visibly cutting into our bread and butter economy.

Just a thought I had a few weeks ago. But, as I recall my WWII history lessons, part of our success in that war was our ability to convert domestic manufacturing capacity into military manufacturing capacity. If another war comes along where we need to be able to build a lot of hardware, we might just have a hard time doing it with our ever diminishing domestic manufacturing capacity.

The Terre Haute Tribstar finally addresses the important issue of carnies! Unfortunately, they don’t talk about bearded ladies or game-operating grifters. Just the hard working operators of Luehrs’ Ideal Rides Inc. of Belleville, Ill. – a traveling carnival.

“You can’t out-smart carnival folk. They’re the cleverest folk in the world. Just look at the way they sucker regular folk with those crooked games.”
—Home Simpson.

The Evansville Courier Press has an article on low power radio stations entitled Low Power, Higher Calling. Back in 2000 the FCC passed rules that allowed for low power radio stations. Seems like they got hung up back in ’96 or ’98 or so, and I stopped paying attention. I remember having been annoyed because I had visions of garage-based operations playing obscure music, discussing things of local interest, and generally providing an alternative to the same-old thing.

Turns out about half of these licenses have been snatched up by Christian groups. According to the article, there isn’t much local involvement in programming the station. The folks they interviewed basically plug in network offerings out of Nashville and let it go. That’s disappointing to me. Already, if you listen to shortwave, most of the English speaking offerings seem to be the BBC, Voice of America, maybe the CBC if you’re lucky, and wave after wave of Christian broadcasting. More power to them if they have the will and the ability to fill up the spectrum. I’d just like to listen to something else. As it is, I went to XM — at least they provide musical offerings that isn’t the same old thing. But, for obvious reasons, they don’t have any particular local offerings.

The FCC has a Low Power FM Radio Service at: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/lpfm/

You can search that site for offerings in your area. For example, I see that in my area there is:

White Horse Christian Center out of West Lafayette;

Harvest Chapel out of Lafayette;

Seventh Day Adventist Broadcasting Company out of Kokomo.

Calvary Chapel out of Crawfordsville.

I just noticed this story in the Richmond Palladium-Item. Primarily, I noticed it because it talked about students drinking at Miami University just over the border in Ohio. As luck would have it, I was known to occasionally have a drink or two at Miami University. O.k., o.k., so the bartender knew my name . . . even 5 years after I’d graduated and left town.

All levity aside though, the article is about 3 students who died in a fire, at least in significant part because they’d been drinking and were likely passed out when their off campus house caught fire. Some “smoking materials” caught the downstairs couch on fire and the students apparently never woke up. This one caught my attention because the fire was about a block away from where I used to live.

During the day, uptown Oxford is relatively calm, with students walking to class or taking some time to window shop. Come back at night, though, and it’s not uncommon to see long lines forming in front of uptown bars with students, locals and out-of-towners looking to have a good time.

The administration, police officials and Miami students agreed drinking — both legally and underage — is one piece of the entire puzzle that makes up Miami’s lifestyle.

“I think it’s obvious that there is a drinking culture on this campus as well as many residential campuses,” Wissing said. “I think (drinking) is associated with the collegiate lifestyle nationwide.”

When I was there, there were 15 bars in 3 blocks. I’d say Miami very much has a drinking culture. My favorite bar had beer specials as follows: Monday – 50 cent 16 oz beers; Tues – $1.25 longnecks; Wed. – 50 cent 16 oz beers; Thurs – $1 Gennessee pounders (16 oz cream ales); Fri – $2 32 oz beers; Sat. – $3 pitchers (64 oz); Sun. – no special. With that kind of bar concentration and those kind of beer specials, you’re going to have some binge drinking. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it while I was there. But, if you’re serious about taking down the drinking culture, reduce the number of alcohol permits and figure out a way to get the bars to jack up their beer prices. On the other hand, instead of another round of hand wringing about binge drinking, student housing was ridiculously run down — you might get serious about making sure those tinder boxes are up to code.

Adding to my ongoing concern about the tension between science and religion, I see that our activist, anti-religious courts have allowed a reckless homicide conviction against a couple who didn’t seek medical attention for their critically ill child, instead relying on the power of prayer. The Indy Star has an article entitled Jury rejects prayer defense in baby’s death.

What the Schmidts did to help their critically ill daughter, Rhianna Rose Schmidt, was not disputed at trial. They never sought medical assistance or treatment. An autopsy showed Rhianna died of sepsis, a blood infection contracted at birth — an infection that could have been cured easily, a doctor testified.

Rhianna did not breathe for 38 minutes after birth, Maleta Schmidt testified. The infant stopped breathing three other times.

The Schmidts testified that in each instance, they turned to prayer and the elders of the General Assembly and Church of the First Born to heal her.

From my experience using sarcasm as a means to critique the anti-gay marriage amendment, I know that a disclaimer is necessary. Some folks wouldn’t recognize sarcasm if it hit them upside the head. When knowledge obtained from scientific observation contradicts knowledge received as religiously revealed truth; I’ll side with the scientific observation every time.

I don’t know the details of this child’s health prior to death. If the child was far enough gone, prayer might have been more helpful than taking the kid to a hospital to have wires jammed in her before she died. But if there was a reasonable shot at survival, we can’t let parents’ religious beliefs cause the death of their children.

Forbes ranked Bloomington, IN #10 and Lafayette #24 in its list of best small cities for businesses and careers. The Top 25:

1 Sioux Falls SD
2 Rochester MN
3 State College PA
4 Fargo ND
5 Bismarck ND
6 Rapid City SD
7 Lincoln NE
8 Las Cruces NM
9 Iowa City IA 58
10 Bloomington IN
11 Pocatello ID
12 Charlottesville VA
13 Billings MT
14 Missoula MT
15 Bryan TX
16 Dutchess County NY
17 Cheyenne WY
18 Brazoria TX
19 Wilmington NC
20 Fort Collins CO
21 Casper WY
22 Lawrence KS
23 Lafayette IN
24 Flagstaff AZ
25 La Crosse WI

This is just generally cool. As reported in National Geographic (among other places) in an article entitled Papyrus Reveals New Clues to Ancient World, Oxford University scientists are using a multi-spectral imaging technique to read ancient papyrus documents that have faded.

Salvaged from an ancient garbage dump in Egypt, the collection is kept at Oxford University in England. Known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, the collection includes writings by great classical Greek authors such as Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Using a technique called multi-spectral imaging, researchers have uncovered texts that include

parts of a lost tragedy by Sophocles, the 5th-century B.C. Athenian playwright;

sections of a long-vanished novel by Lucian, the second-century Greek writer; and

an epic poem by Archilochos, which describes events that led to the Trojan War.

. . .

Researchers hope to rediscover examples of lost Christian gospels which didn’t make it into the New Testament, along with other important classical writings.

The papyrus manuscripts were found at the site of the disappeared town of Oxyrhynchus in central Egypt more than a hundred years ago. The text in much of the collection has become obscured or faded over time.

. . .
[T]he Oxyrhynchus collection holds a lot of information about the rise of Christianity during the Roman period. (Egypt became part of the Roman Empire after Cleopatra’s fleet was defeated at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.).

“[Christianity] starts out as a small social phenomenon, then just takes over everything,” Obbink said. “You can see other cultural sea changes taking place—changes in taxes, changes in rule. It’s all reflected in the papyrus.”
. . .
So far 65 volumes of transcripts and translations have been published by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which owns the collection.

The latest volume includes details of fragments showing third- and fourth-century versions of the Book of Revelations. Intriguingly, the number assigned to “the Beast” of Revelations isn’t the usual 666, but 616.

About 10 percent of the Oxyrhynchus hoard is literary. The rest consists of documents, including wills, bills, horoscopes, tax assessments, and private letters.

“It contains a complete slice of life,” Obbink added. “There’s everything from Sophocles and Homer to sex manuals and steamy novels. But it’s in pieces, and it all has to be put back together.”