Read All About It In the Sunday Papers-September 27, 2009

LEAD STORY-The (UK) Independent: In the Future, We’ll E-Mail Toast. Oh, and Live Forever.

A Baby Boomer’s Dream, and IT COULD HAPPEN. The living forever part. Not sure how the Series of Tubes Called the Internet will adapt to melted butter:

…or at least that’s what Ray Kurzweil thinks. He has spent his life inventing machines that help people, from the blind to dyslexics. Now, he believes we’re on the brink of a new age – the ‘singularity’ – when mind-boggling technology will allow us to email each other toast, run as fast as Usain Bolt (for 15 minutes) – and even live forever. Is there sense to his science – or is the man who reasons that one day he’ll bring his dad back from the grave just a mad professor peddling a nightmare vision of the future?

An immortal El Somnambulo? How could anyone consider this a nightmare scenario? I mean, infinite “Music for the Masses”? Just wait’ll ya see what I’ve got lined up for Gregorian Chants! C’mon, people! Anyway, here’s the theory behind Kurzweil’s vision:

To understand exactly what he means, and why he thinks that his predictions bear up to hard scrutiny, it’s necessary to return to the title of the above-mentioned book, and the grand idea on which it’s based: “the singularity”.

Borrowed from black-hole physics, in which the singularity is taken to signify what is unknowable, the term has been applied to technology to suggest that we haven’t really got a clue what’s going to happen once machines are vastly more “intelligent” than humans. The singularity, writes Kurzweil, is “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”. He is not unique in his adoption of the idea – the information theorist John von Neumann hinted at it in the 1950s; retired maths professor and sci-fi author Vernor Vinge has been exploring it at length since the early 1980s – but Kurzweil’s version is currently the most popular “singularitarian” text.

I know this might sound like a dry article, but it’s not. First of all, Kurzweil is an exceedingly-accomplished scientist,  not just some crackpot:

In 1976, he created the first machine capable of reading books to the blind, and less than a decade later he built the K250: the first music synthesizer to nigh-on perfectly duplicate the sound of a grand piano. His Kurzweil 3000 educational software, which helps students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, is likewise typical of an innovator who has made his name by combining restless imagination with technological ingenuity and a commendable sense of social responsibility.

Secondly, for those of you who have ADD but not the Kurzweil 3000, there’s even a cool Top 5 list of upcoming technologies you’ve never heard of, including Blue Goo.

Exercise your brain. Read this article. And, UI, you’re welcome for the series of articles that this will invariably suggest for you. Run with it, make El Somnambulo immortal!

Washington Post: The Fed-The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark

Comprehensive and detailed reporting by Binyamin Applebaum on how the Federal Reserve Board allowed the sub-prime market to operate in an unregulated vacuum. For the brain-dead alarmists raising terrible hypotheticals about governmental over-regulation, this is what happens when there are no governmental regulations. The big financial corporations will never police themselves, they’ll just look for the next big $$’s loophole. This story has it all, including Phil “Holy Cash Cow” Rizzuto:

Under a policy quietly formalized in 1998, the Fed refused to police lenders’ compliance with federal laws protecting borrowers, despite repeated urging by consumer advocates across the country and even by other government agencies.

The hands-off policy, which the Fed reversed earlier this month, created a double standard. Banks and their subprime affiliates made loans under the same laws, but only the banks faced regular federal scrutiny. Under the policy, the Fed did not even investigate consumer complaints against the affiliates.

“In the prime market, where we need supervision less, we have lots of it. In the subprime market, where we badly need supervision, a majority of loans are made with very little supervision,” former Fed Governor Edward M. Gramlich, a critic of the hands-off policy, wrote in 2007. “It is like a city with a murder law, but no cops on the beat.”

Which, of course, is where Phil Rizzuto comes in:

After the Fed’s decision, several of the largest bank holding companies added finance arms, expanding into the regulatory vacuum.

In March 1998, First Union bought the Money Store, a California lender with a ziggurat for a headquarters, ads featuring baseball Hall of Famers Jim Palmer and Phil Rizzuto, and a catchy phone number: 1-800-LOAN-YES.

“Thank goodness you can buy all of the things you need with a fixed-rate second mortgage loan,” Rizzuto told audiences.

Folks, read this piece lest any of you still doubt the need for industry regulation. Left to their own devices, big financial institutions will circumvent the law at the public’s expense every time if a few extra billion can be made by doing so. And if the regulations get too onerous, they can always convince lobbyist wannabes like Tom Carper that they are being abused. Bring donations. He’ll listen.

NYTimes-How Companies Avoid Environmental Laws…They Smuggle Waste to Poor Countries

I’m sure proponents of the Chicago school of cost-benefits economic analysis would praise companies for doing this.  After all, to them, poor people are no more worthy than Ford Pinto owners:

Exporting waste illegally to poor countries has become a vast and growing international business, as companies try to minimize the costs of new environmental laws, like those here (in Europe), that tax waste or require that it be recycled or otherwise disposed of in an environmentally responsible way.

Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

Of course, the Bush Administration was one of the few refusing to sign a ban on the exporting of this type of waste. So America can legally export and exploit to its heart’s content. A State Department official says that the Obama Administration will revisit this policy. Don’t know why. As some conservative economist will invariably point out, those bleeping kids in India exposed to he environmental waste would probably never buy a Ford Pinto anyway.

Asia Times: ‘Serial Entrepreneurs’ Promote Asian Reforestation

The environmental news is not all bad. Creation of this grassroots tree-planting program on steroids is a great example:

HONG KONG – Cutting down Asia’s forests has for decades been an easy way to get rich. Now a trio of pan-Asian “serial entrepreneurs” hope to prove planting trees can be a moneymaker, too. Paolo Delgado, Paolo Conconi and Victor Yap started Project Oikos last year hoping to profit from concerns about global warming. But their primary goal is to educate Asians about the benefits of tree planting and protecting forests.  

“I grew up active in the Boy Scouts, then became an avid mountaineer and scuba diver,” said Delgado, whose family links to Boy Scouts of the Philippines (BSP) span three generations. “When you grow up around these influences, you become quite aware of the environment and our impact on it.” 

Those scouting links led his family’s logistics company, Delgado Brothers, to partner with BSP and Coca-Cola on “Go Green”, a project to plant 200,000 trees across the Philippines using saplings grown in BSP nurseries. The connection gave Delgado a potential source for trees and a process for planting them. Yap, a Hong Kong native who has worked with a variety of multinationals, joined the team to provide international marketing expertise, and Project Oikos was born. 

The name Oikos traces to ancient Greece. “Oikos was the basic family unit, the shared center of an individual’s world,” Delgado explains. “In today’s globalized world, we believe the environment has become our modern oikos. It is the center of our world, and we all should care for the well being of our shared oikos.”

Planting events have been held in several areas of the Philippinesand Malaysia, where co-founder Conconi now lives, in partnership with environmental groups, schools, community organizations, government and publications. Conconi says Project Oikos hopes to expand its base of corporate clients to build joint marketing campaigns. Targets include high profile polluters such as airlines, using trees to offset carbon emissions from passengers’ travel.

Any entrepreneur interested both in doing well and doing good should read this article. There is no reason why this business model, which accomplishes so much good, can’t be replicated elsewhere.  

Philadelphia Inquirer: Philly Aims to Tame and Green Its Water Supply

Answer this for me? If you were to make a list of cities looking to do something this ambitious, would Philadelphia be anywhere on that list? But it’s Philly leading the way on tackling water woes:

Philadelphia has announced a $1.6 billion plan to transform the city over the next 20 years by embracing its storm water – instead of hustling it down sewers and into rivers as fast as possible.

The proposal, which several experts called the nation’s most ambitious, reimagines the city as an oasis of rain gardens, green roofs, thousands of additional trees, porous pavement, and more.

All would act as sponges to absorb – or at least stall – the billions of gallons of rainwater that overwhelm the city sewer system every year.

While the plan must still be approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, early feedback from the EPA is positive:

“This is the most significant use of green infrastructure I’ve seen in the country, the largest scale I’ve seen,” said Jon Capacasa, regional director of water protection for the Environmental Protection Agency, which has the final say on whether the plan passes muster.

This is an in-depth look at the problems caused by sewer overflow, excellent work from Inky reporter Sandy Bauers.   And this is a major issue with municipal sewer systems throughout the country, including Wilmington. If successful, this green infrastructure will likely find its way here.

Sacramento Bee-California GOP Eating Its Own

This time, it’s ex-E-Bay CEO Meg Whitman on the chomping block.

Seems she didn’t even register to vote until 2002:

State Insurance Commissioner Poizner told The Bee in an interview at the California Republican Party convention in Indian Wells that Whitman’s voting record made her “unelectable (as governor).” On Thursday, the day the Bee story (about not being registered) was published, Poizner communications director Jarrod Agen first called on Whitman to “step aside.”

Extra Bonus Points for the guy in the chicken suit, a much-underestimated political tactic, and one of my favorites. But you’ll have to click on the link to see it…

Speaking of guys in chicken suits, time to go to work.