From Phil Bowermaster.

Looks like they’ve figured out how to clone primates.

There’s long been some sort of quasi-religious belief for some that there is something more fundamentally difficult about cloning humans that means it will never happen, or not for decades. (“OK, you can clone a mouse, but you can’t clone a larger animal. OK, you can clone a sheep, but not a monkey.”) Well, it seems to me that the cloning of humans is inevitable, and now not very far off.

Of course, unlike conservatives (and one of the many ways in which I’m not one, “neo” or otherwise, despite confusion on the part of some apparent simpletons who comment here), I don’t have any intrinsic problems with cloning. It’s just a technology, and one (like all technologies) that can be used for good or ill. I in particular have no problem with cloning that provides directed organ generation, such as a liver, and think that the notion that such a growth would be a human being in its own right, and entitled to personhood status, nonsensical.

I also don’t have any intrinsic problem with cloning people and raising them to adulthood (despite the “yuck factor” issue that many seem to have with it). It just seems to me that it’s taking gene selection (something that we’ve been doing with offspring, consciously or otherwise, since the beginning of the race) to a new level. I don’t think that so many are going to do it that we become a monoculture, and that there will remain plenty of genetic mixing, as long as we consider it necessary as humans.

In any event, I welcome the development, and if it causes problems, then we’ll deal with them as they arise, but I certainly don’t want opposition to it to prevent the beneficial effects. If I have to go to Thailand or South Korea to grow myself a new liver, I’ll certainly have no moral compunction restraining me from doing so.

[Update in the afternoon]

Here’s a Reuters story that’s kind of a mess.

I wish that we could come up with some other word for growing stem cells and organs from your own cells than “cloning” because it creates the kind of confusion expressed in both the UN resolution and in the article. It strikes me that this is mainly a “feel good” resolution, since it’s non-binding, and everyone realizes that there’s no enforcement mechanism even if there were. This technology is going to happen, regardless of debates in Turtle Bay.

And this sentence makes no sense to me at all:

The authors said laws should grant clones full human rights to protect from discrimination.

Otherwise, opponents of clones in an inheritance dispute, for instance, might say that a clone and the person from whom their cells were grown should only get a half share each.

Huh? What is the legal scenario here? Who was cloned here, and what is their purported relationship with the person from whose cells they were cloned? If a couple, after reading my blog, and despite my physical appearance (or vice versa) decided that they wanted to create and raise a clone of me, there would be no legal relationship between me and him (or her). I’d like to think that they would need my permission, but as far as I know, there’s no clear law against stealing a lock of my hair and doing so. That person would be a legal child of that couple, with nothing to do with me, unless some prior arrangement were made for it. We are completely separate legal persons. If I were to inherit something from someone, that clone would have no claim on the inheritance simply because (s)he shared my genome.

On the other hand, if I were to create and raise such a clone, it would be my legal child, and no more or less entitled to my inheritance from (say) my father than any other child of mine would be.

But granting (assuming that this is the line of thinking here) that a clone is somehow a second instantiation of the same person, with the same legal rights, it makes no sense to complain about both being entitled to only a “half share each” of an inheritance. How much more could it, or should they get? If there is a whole inheritance that must be split evenly (and thus “fairly”) between two inheritors, how could each get any more than half? Do these people want to defy the laws of mathematics, or did they go to the Leo Blum school of accounting, in which he sold several thousand percent of a Broadway musical? Did the Reuters reporter give this statement any thought at all when writing it?

Expect a lot more confused argumentation, and reporting, as these technologies get closer to fruition. I think that it also points up the fact that people who were raised reading a lot of science fiction are both more familiar, and more comfortable with these concepts.

Here’s Richard Garriott on a recent Austin ZEROG flight

Fellow Austinite Richard Garriott talks more in the December issue of PC Gamer about his upcoming trip to space:

I grew up with an astronaut father, and space has been my pinnacle interest since I was young…. the probability of me going [to space] the same way my dad did was zero….

Since earning my earliest profits in the games industry, I have been investing in privatizing space….

Here’s how he enabled Dennis Tito to get into space with his investment in Space Adventures.

I am also involved in Zero G, which has given me a taste of what I might experience in space. Zero G uses a modified Boeing 727 to take people on parabolic flights into microgravity. Anyone can book these flights and I tell you, it will change your life. People get giddy on these flights; they experience true happiness and living in the moment. I enjoy these flights so much that I recently chartered four of them to help promote the release of my space epic MMPORG Tabula Rasa. And my experience on them solidified my desire to get private citizens into space as well–even those without bazillions of dollars.

… I am lucky enough to be able to go into space myself through our work with the Russian Government! Earlier this month, we announced that I will be going into space as the seventh private space explorer, and the first second-generation astronaut, next year. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. But I’m still my father’s son[;] I will be part of a team conducting experiments and bringing back new knowledge and data concentrating in four areas: commercial, educational, environmental, and artistic. This isn’t just a joy ride for me; it’s something I need to do.

Amen on the ZEROG flights.

There’s a little more in his trip-to-space blog.

Here’s Richard Garriott on a recent Austin ZEROG flight

Fellow Austinite Richard Garriott talks more in the December issue of PC Gamer about his upcoming trip to space:

I grew up with an astronaut father, and space has been my pinnacle interest since I was young…. the probability of me going [to space] the same way my dad did was zero….

Since earning my earliest profits in the games industry, I have been investing in privatizing space….

Here’s how he enabled Dennis Tito to get into space with his investment in Space Adventures.

I am also involved in Zero G, which has given me a taste of what I might experience in space. Zero G uses a modified Boeing 727 to take people on parabolic flights into microgravity. Anyone can book these flights and I tell you, it will change your life. People get giddy on these flights; they experience true happiness and living in the moment. I enjoy these flights so much that I recently chartered four of them to help promote the release of my space epic MMPORG Tabula Rasa. And my experience on them solidified my desire to get private citizens into space as well–even those without bazillions of dollars.

… I am lucky enough to be able to go into space myself through our work with the Russian Government! Earlier this month, we announced that I will be going into space as the seventh private space explorer, and the first second-generation astronaut, next year. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. But I’m still my father’s son[;] I will be part of a team conducting experiments and bringing back new knowledge and data concentrating in four areas: commercial, educational, environmental, and artistic. This isn’t just a joy ride for me; it’s something I need to do.

Amen on the ZEROG flights.

There’s a little more in his trip-to-space blog.

Here’s Richard Garriott on a recent Austin ZEROG flight

Fellow Austinite Richard Garriott talks more in the December issue of PC Gamer about his upcoming trip to space:

I grew up with an astronaut father, and space has been my pinnacle interest since I was young…. the probability of me going [to space] the same way my dad did was zero….

Since earning my earliest profits in the games industry, I have been investing in privatizing space….

Here’s how he enabled Dennis Tito to get into space with his investment in Space Adventures.

I am also involved in Zero G, which has given me a taste of what I might experience in space. Zero G uses a modified Boeing 727 to take people on parabolic flights into microgravity. Anyone can book these flights and I tell you, it will change your life. People get giddy on these flights; they experience true happiness and living in the moment. I enjoy these flights so much that I recently chartered four of them to help promote the release of my space epic MMPORG Tabula Rasa. And my experience on them solidified my desire to get private citizens into space as well–even those without bazillions of dollars.

… I am lucky enough to be able to go into space myself through our work with the Russian Government! Earlier this month, we announced that I will be going into space as the seventh private space explorer, and the first second-generation astronaut, next year. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. But I’m still my father’s son[;] I will be part of a team conducting experiments and bringing back new knowledge and data concentrating in four areas: commercial, educational, environmental, and artistic. This isn’t just a joy ride for me; it’s something I need to do.

Amen on the ZEROG flights.

There’s a little more in his trip-to-space blog.

This technology seems to be moving along pretty well, and it’s one of the revolutions that will constitute a major solution to our energy problems.

This approach allowed the engineers at Standard Oil to build a multifarad device. At the time, even large capacitors had nowhere near a farad of capacitance. Today, ultracapacitors can store 5 percent as much energy as a modern lithium-ion battery. Ultracapacitors with a capacitance of up to 5000 farads measure about 5 centimeters by 5 cm by 15 cm, which is an amazingly high capacitance relative to its volume. The D-cell battery is also significantly heavier than the equivalently sized capacitor, which weighs about 60 grams.

I’ve probably told this story before about innumeracy, even of physics students, and the inability of some to think through a problem. When I was teaching an E&M lab in college, we were doing experiments with capacitors, and someone came up and said, “The lab instructions say to use a microfarad capacitor, but this one says MFARAD instead of (greek letter mu–the symbol for micro)FARAD. I assume it means megafarad. Don’t we have smaller ones?

I explained to him that the largest capacitor I’d ever seen (this was in the late seventies) was a quarter farad, and it took a truck to deliver it. Did he really think that he was holding something in his hand with four million times that capacity?

The article is also a good tutorial on capacitors in general, for those unfamiliar with how they work. The way that I like to think about this is that the positive charge accumulates on one plate, and the negative on the opposite one. They are held in place by their mutual attraction (being opposite charges), but cannot combine because of the insulation gap represented by the dielectric. The more accumulated charge, the higher the attraction (and field force) and accompanying voltage and potential energy. When the plates are allowed to connect to each other through an external circuit, the charges flow toward each other and create current (and power). The breakdown voltage is the voltage at which the gap can no longer restrain the attraction between the two groups of charge, and they jump across it to meet their destiny. This is to be avoided.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry, link was slightly mangled (though usable) before. Fixed now.

Buy a cell phone jammer if you want to project 30-foot cones of silenced phones. Or if you don’t want to be arrested for using a jammer, build yourself a Faraday cage: no signal and no interference.

blocked call out

And here’s a discussion of another kind of blocked call out.

I’ll also be doing light posting. I’m having dinner and a ZEROG flight with Buzz Aldrin. There still appears to be some availability. If you can get to Vegas by 6:30 tonight, you can make the dinner and the ride prep starts tomorrow at one. The price is $8,900; it’s more than the regular price of $3,500, but less than $144k for a flight with Stephen Hawking. At $3500 for 25 seconds * 12 parabolas at 0g is $700/minute. That’s about a quarter the price per minute of a week in 0g on the International Space Station.

Here they are. I’d read most of them before, but it’s nice to have them all in one place. They’re missing Vannevar Bush’s quote about ICBMs.

Intercontinental guided missiles, Bush contends, need not be feared at all

Joel Garreau has an interesting WaPo piece on Aubrey de Grey.