All posts by Andrew Case

General

Seasteading

Sooner or later pretty much everyone with libertarian leanings comes up with the idea of living on the sea in international waters, and I’m no exception. This came up in a conversation with Sean Lynch at the Space Access Society conference, and he pointed me to a very interesting site by some people who are actually making serious plans to do just that. I was on the Oceania project mailing list for most of its life, so I got a chance to see one way not to do this. The greatest value of the Seasteading site is its list of things that have been tried, a much larger list than you might expect. The only real success so far is Sealand, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Continue reading Seasteading →

General

Honor Principles

Via Brad Delong, an article about a guy who makes a living selling donuts and bagels on the honor principle. Take an item, drop some money in the box. There are some very interesting regularities in who cheats and when they cheat. Who cheats is basically in line with my expectations based on dealing with people in different lines of work. If it confirms my prejudices, it must be true 🙂

Anyway, grab a donut, drop your coins in the slot, and read the article.

Political Commentary

Partisanship

David Brooks has an excellent op-ed in the NYT on partisanship. It’s as balanced a piece as you’ll find anywhere, and it’s backed by real data. This is a pet interest of mine, as it’s a pervasive cognitive phenomenon. People create a model of the world and then select data which reinforces it. Man is a rational animal only occasionally.

General

Sing Goddess…

I finally got to see Troy (the movie) tonight. My wife had already seen it and she was unimpressed. She particularly disliked Achilles, because he’s a selfish, arrogant jerk. Just like in the book. She hasn’t read the Iliad, so she didn’t know what to expect. Over the last 2800 years or so we’ve become a lot less tolerant of flaws in our heros. We demand that great deeds be accomplished by men incapable of error. This cuts two ways, both on the part of the hagiographer who plasters over the gaping flaws in a man’s character, and in the critic who points them out as if this in some way diminishes the greatness of the deed. We look to the Greeks as the founders of our civilization, and their clear-eyed view of human failings should be revived. Heroes are heroic because they do great things, not because they are without failings. By acknowledging this simple fact we are better able to see the greatness in others, and the potential for greatness in ourselves.

The world just lost a man who will be remembered by history long after most of us are dust. I disagreed with much of what he did, but no amount of kvetching on my part can take away from his legacy, which is no less than to liberate the world from totalitarian communism. The Soviet Union is dead, and Ronald Reagan killed it. The rest is details.

General Science

Fusion funding: A Proposal

I’m a member of a group of young fusion researchers who are trying to figure out how to make fusion happen in our lifetimes. This is nontrivial because ‘young’ in this case means under 40, and current plans from DOE don’t put fusion power on the grid for another 35+ years. Given the accuracy of government forecasts a whole year down the line, I’m not holding my breath.

I think that the single largest factor holding up the development of commercial fusion is not physics, its program structure. We need to revolutionize the way fusion research is structured, and the best way to do that is to bring the power of the market to bear. Prizes have been suggested (notably by Bob Bussard). I offer here an alternative proposal, seeking your feedback.

The goal is to encourage private funding. This means finding a way to reduce the risk to investors in potential fusion schemes. If a given idea can pass a basic peer reviewed sanity check (doesn’t violate any laws of physics), DOE should offer to insulate investors from some measure of risk. As a concrete proposal, say DOE will purchase all the intellectual property assets of any innovative energy company which closes down after raising private venture funding. There would be some limit, indexed to the amount of money raised, say 1/2 the total venture funds raised, up to a limit of $50 million expended by DOE per company. The physical plant would remain property of the investors or creditors. DOE would pay an external auditor to catalog and organize the intellectual property assets, and would make them freely available to interested parties.

There would have to be sensible mechanisms for peer review and for deciding when to shut down (presumably the investors would make that call), but I don’t see showstoppers there. I think the idea would work, but getting congress to agree is likely to be hard. There’s a real danger of the money disappearing after a venture is funded, thanks to diversion to some more worthy cause, like rainforests in Iowa.

Anyway please comment, kvetch, suggest, advise, discuss, either in comments here or in email to me.

General

The Philosopher’s Magazine

If you’re interested in philosophy but don’t have a background in it, check out The Philosopher’s Magazine. It’s a philosophy version of Popular Science or Discover Magazine. I’ve subscribed for a year now, and I’m happy with it. It’s not mindbogglingly deep, but it also doesn’t presume familiarity with lots of jargon, so it’s a nice way to stimulate the mind without the frustration of running to the dictionary (or Google) all the time.