Category Archives: Science

Power, Saving the World, Science, Technology

Energy from Thorium

February 12, 2014 admin Leave a comment

Thorium as an energy source, particularly as delivered by the Molten Salt Reactor Technology known as LFTR (Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor) may be the disruptive technology that is required to jolt us from the status quo. It promises to provide universal cheap safe green electricity and has to potential to deliver a bunch of other benefits, anyone of which would normally be incentive enough to have money thrown at its development.

This solution has been around since the fifties. The problem with promoting a solution that simultaneously solves multiple problems is that for some reason it gains less support than a focused single problem solving solution.

Perhaps, there lies the parallel to Kahatika.

Business, Fair - Justice, Power, Saving the World, Science, Technology, Tools

Accelerating Innovation

February 19, 2010 admin Leave a comment

The following TED talk delivered by Bill Gates speaks of his one wish to halve the cost of energy while simultaneously reducing carbon output from the production of energy to zero. He speaks of energy miracles and explains his preference for a particular miracle he favours.

I started to wipe the sweat from my brow. I don’t have to do this “Save the World” thing. Someone else is about to do it. Not only that, it’s Bill Gates. He has a track record of performing miracles. He has more resources at his disposal than any other individual on the planet. This will get done.

Then again, if you take note of what Bill has to say 15:20 -> 17:00 into his talk about the 2020 report card. He realises his punt on a miracle may be wrong. To reduce risk, others must also take a punt. We must accelerate innovation in all realms and even he doesn’t have the resources to back all of it.

His releasing fireflies into the audience indicated that we need to think about all ideas as it’s ideas where innovation comes from.

Only a small proportion of the global population regard their individual role as one of Research and Development, yet it’s Research and Development that we hold responsible for innovation. Bill Gates pleads for Government direct investment and incentives for R & D and yet delivery mechanisms will only deliver investment to a small portion of potential innovators. This is conventional wisdom and doesn’t look outside the box.

Perhaps changing the system of innovation to increase individual participation is the way of meeting our new world goals. Not surprisingly, this smacks of Open Source Philosophy and hence not mentioned in his speech. What is mentioned in the Question and Answer session at he end of the Talk with Chris Anderson is Bills inability to share detail due to the conventional wisdom of non-disclosure agreements.

At this point I remember that Kahatika is a way of having your cake and eating it too.

Fair - Justice, Power, Science, Technology, Tools

Conservation will not Save the World

January 13, 2010 admin Leave a comment

When I speak of my “Save the World” goal I don’t mean saving the planet. After all, the known life cycle of the sun dictates the ultimate demise of our planet. Saving the sun is not on the agenda.

So when I say I want to save the world I actually want to save our species, or more correctly I want to save our species long enough for it to evolve into it’s next revision.

In the long term there appears to be only three alternatives for that to happen.

1. God rewrites the physical world laws to reveal a new reality that our species can survive in.

2. A more advanced extra-terrestrial life-form than ourselves takes pity on us and facilitates our escape from our doomed planet.

3. Our science and technology develops sufficiently for us to escape.

Both 1. and 2. I can only hope and/or pray for, and as I really don’t want the responsibility of saving the world, would be really cool alternatives.

Unfortunately in my reality, three is the only alternative that I can take action on.

OK, now that we are all convinced that without science and technology advancements we are eventually doomed. We being us and all our plant and animal friends. We necessarily can only use conservation and sustainability measures as a means to delay premature destruction of our planet long enough for our species to get off it. It seems logical to use science and technology as a means to advance conservation and sustainability to give us that time and as a byproduct keep our hand in; High tech conservation and sustainability techniques are sure to aid our escape.

I guess that means that only some of us will have the luxury of going back to a simpler less technology driven lifestyle, and only then, for a few billion years.

Some of us will need to carry on pushing the envelope of science and technology and converting our new findings into something useful using the change agent of business. This is where Kahatika fits in.

P.S. Yes I know about the “Big Rip” Theory. If it is real I guess I’m working to give us enough time for us to develop technologies that will enable us to pass to another universe. i.e. I’m on the road to the multiverse.

Business, Love, Science

Distillation of Information

December 16, 2009 admin Leave a comment

Watching the World Debate on the BBC last night I noted co-winner of the Nobel prize for physics 2009 Willard Boyle’s take on the internet.

[stream flv=x:/blog.kahatika.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/willardboyle.flv width=480 height=272 img=x:/blog.kahatika.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/preview.jpg title=Willard Boyle /]

Like him I often find the Internet Plaghh!

His idea of entrusting organisations to distill information for human consumption is a little bit like entrusting a government formed through representative democracy.

None of us have time to sift through the vast amount of information to come up with an informed opinion on science. Take climate change science as a case in point. In the end we have to trust the system. Deep inside all humans we search for love and truth and therefore, unfettered, the scientific process will eventually deliver something closer to the truth than we previously had.

Now if I could just figure a trustworthy method of distilling the wisdom inherent in our most powerful change agent, business.

Business, Fear, Saving the World, Science, Technology

Spreading Dangerous Ideas

December 8, 2009 admin Leave a comment

I’ve just read a blog by Seth Godin about Protecting vs Spreading Ideas. The moral of his blog, as far as I can tell, is; “Get good at what you do”; “Spread your Ideas Freely” they belong to everyone.

I agree with this philosophy but have often agonised over possible exceptions to this rule.

Lets take a hypothetical rewrite of History. Lets say Rutherford split the atom and kept it to himself, he went on to do a few more experiments and discovered in isolation the power that could be obtained from such activity and kept it to himself. Pondered a bit more he decided to try the reverse of splitting the atom and discovered that fusing together atoms was even more powerful than splitting them. He still didn’t tell anyone. Experimented a bit more and came up with a working fusion reactor. This he told. In fact he gave building instructions, that an idiot could follow, to every country in the world.

Japan now had the energy they previously went to war over, no nuclear bomb got dropped, in fact it never got invented because there was no need for it.

Now lets assume instead that anywhere along this time line that Rutherford dies taking his ideas to his grave.

No splitting of the atom, no discovery of fission, again, no bomb.

OK I’m not a science historian. I have no knowledge of how long it would have been before someone else would have discovered the splitting of the atom bringing the world through the sequence of discoveries that have got us to where we today rather than the impossible events that lead to my Utopian scenario. It does however illustrate the possible need for exceptions and why I spend time agonising over it.

Are nanotechnology ideas going to progress or harm humanity’s progress? How about genetic engineering? Biotech?

Was the letter, sent to the American President, which sparked the Manhattan Project, and signed by Albert Einstein, an exception to the rule?

History documents Einstein’s anguish over the decision to send that letter.

Business, Family, Love, Power, Saving the World, Science, Technology, Tools

Symptoms of Love

December 1, 2009 admin 1 Comment

“The world would be saved if we could just love one another.”

An airy fairy statement used by hippies and dreamers?

No matter how true the statement may be, it is hardly a pragmatic plan of attack to “Save the World”.

Defining love is difficult in many ways. It’s association with sexual intimacy, and it’s broad context of use where many contexts are deemed socially unacceptable to even have a hint of that association, make in depth discussion of love uncomfortable for many.

Love your spouse
Love your Children
Love your Parents
Love Trees
Love a Business Idea
Love a good Steak
Love your God

There are so many different contexts where the word Love is used that it is impossible to determine if the world is increasing or decreasing in it’s level of Love.

In science, technology and business, when you have something you wish to measure, which is seemingly unmeasurable, you look for substitute characteristics, or if you are lucky, a substitute characteristic, which correlates strongly. Then you measure that. Interventions can then be trialled and reasonable assumptions on those interventions’ success or failure can be made from the analysis of data. Society moves in some direction or another as a result.

Pretty simple stuff, but what would be a measurable substitute characteristic for Love? I guess we are looking for an indicator or a “Symptom of Love”.

Furthermore perhaps we are looking to build the technology to provide the interventions, measure the results, analyse the data, and rework the interventions where appropriate to maximise the love.

Perhaps if this helped us practice the Symptoms of Love we could and would, over time, generate genuine love.

Use the old “Fake it until you make it” technique of self improvement on a global scale.

Now if I just had such a thing……….I reckon I’d call it Kahatika.

Communication, Love, Power, Saving the World, Science, Technology

Yet we still Trust

November 27, 2009 admin Leave a comment

Having just written about a Crisis of Trust I must recognise that, as a society, we still trust.

The following TED talk I found reassuring. His observations provide partial reason for why my Plan to “Save the World” may just work.

Like every world changing idea now-a-days, mine too involves the internet to a very limited degree. More importantly it involves some aspects of Human behaviour Jonathan touches on.

Agnostic, Business, Fear, Love, Power, Saving the World, Science

The Climate is Changing?

November 25, 2009 admin Leave a comment

The world needs saving because the climate is changing. This is impacting on the way we as humans currently live and we are all worried.

Being agnostic I find I just don’t know what the truth of the situation is. There is so much conflicting information out there that seems to be so complicated and with so many compelling reasons for it to be presented in a particular way that I can’t trust what I see or hear.

But nobody likes a fence sitter. You have to decide.

Anyone could be forgiven for deciding that this is where you concentrate your efforts to Save the World.

Our planet is under attack, and it’s under attack by us.

Seas are rising, ice is melting, floods are massive, droughts are long, hurricanes are bigger and more frequent; and that’s just the start. We are also going to freeze to death. As individuals we must all do our bit, right? Rah rah rah speeches, social media campaigns, politics, advertising.

How do we keep everyone on track?
How does everyone stay engaged?

You can generally get everyone on the same page for a short period of time when in a time of war. Define an enemy, generate some hate by laying blame, tell everyone what to do. If they don’t do it, kill them. Unfortunately the enemy seems to have been defined as all of us. If we use the same strategy we’ll legitimise killing our neighbour simply because they don’t car pool.

The generation of an enemy to accelerate change unfortunately works but it is wrong, when the enemy is us, it is really really wrong and self-destructive.

If Deming was right and over 90% of the problem is due to the system not the people we must look at the system.

Regardless of the debate over climate change; and there is still significant debate, moving around the proportion of responsibility for action is simply an elaborate dance.

Business for better or worse is always going to be the main change agent. Inventing the light bulb didn’t change the world, commercialisation of the light bulb did.

A seemingly forgotten base principle of business needs to be revived. “More with Less” (See Buckminster Fuller Institute, Deming Institute, Excellerated Business Schools)
Following that fundamental principle in combination with following the principle of, “Think Global act Local” would render the debate redundant. There would be no reason to debate if the climate was changing or what was causing it. The consequence of following sound first principles simply because they are the right thing to do puts us on the right track and eliminates the need for an enemy.

Furthermore the original reasons for incorporation of a business needs to be remembered. The law was originally written to produce entities to serve the people. “Us”. Build roads, bridges, railways etc. Through a succession of bastardisations of that original law do we get the entities we have today. (see the movie “The Corporation”)

We also need to remember that it’s not that the climate is changing it’s the speed of predicted change that is the problem.

Assuming the climate will follow these predictions how do we get our biggest most powerful change agent to respond quickly enough?

Thats all I can remember that we should remember. I’m sure there are other things, I just can’t remember.

Love, Peace, Bellbeads 🙂

P.S. This is not the solution but it is related. Read on.

Power, Science

There are no such thing as “Rights”

November 23, 2009 admin Leave a comment

You have no “rights”. Not even to eat, drink, breath or even to be born.

Everything we regard as rights has taken energy to give the appearance of being a right.

Institutions which consolidate that appearance require constant energy to maintain them.

Like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics without energy to bring order from disorder a system will naturally tend to chaos.

Where does that energy come from?

I like to think the “Boundless energy of the Human Spirit”.

Destruction is therefore a waste of the efforts that came before us and shouldn’t be undertaken lightly.

Constant, never ending Improvement is a far more productive and is part of the solution to “Save the World”.

Kahatika