Evil Rocks

I just saw an advertisement from Ebay where they make a joke about a certain group of people's tendency to buy shit they will never use (dear lord, grant me a job and disposable income upon graduation) just to get their logo in front of more faces. That confuses me so hard!

I just finished Medieval Machine, a book on the technological renaissance of the 1000-1360s era (yainorite?). I found an amusing tidbit in there: St. Thierry, during the theological phase of Christianity contemporary with above-mentioned time-period, suggested that God had made the elements and instructed them in how they were to interact with each other and that all else had arisen from these laws, including life and consciousness itself. A hundred years later, Christian theologians were trying to reach the divine through mysticism. Funny, that.

My proposal: rename Darwin Day to Theirry Day! Make people learn some freaking history.

I fucking knew it! Famous authors agree with me:

GM: The entity is still there. And what I think is that our consciousness is actually its consciousness. Like matter, like energy, consciousness can’t be created or destroyed. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t fit the way the world or the universe works. So I have to assume maybe consciousness ismore present than we assume it is. Consciousness, rather than being something that we have, is something we participate in. The same way that your cell is you until it’s just a dead, dry thing, going back to death, I don’t think that there’s an afterlife at all. When the giant organism grows up and becomes an adult, that’s the afterlife. I think we’re part of a larval entity; it lives in the planet Earth, it consumes the planet Earth as another part of its development in the same way a caterpillar eats leaves. If you watch the caterpillar, it looks like it’s destroying its environment, but it’s not. It’s actually just feeding to change into a butterfly. And I think that’s what’s going on with our planet right now.
Grant Morrison

In personal communications I've been arguing that the weakness of Gaian philosophy is that it traps the superorganism on Earth when if we thought of the planet as a seed we might actually make a Dyson cloud. Hippies hate this philosophy.

I suspect the universe of flouting coincidence laws: I start reading Cromer's Modern Egypt, a tale of the debt-negotiations that Cromer assisted in with Egypt in the 1860s that brought the Pasha Ismail to his knees through poor country management at roughly the same time that Dubai begins murmuring about their own default.

My father and I routinely come back to the point that "sovereign nations don't default" in our discussions of finance and global economics. That devolved to, "well, America doesn't default" this year. Convincing.

I enjoy entertaining totally irrational alternate explanations to accepted dogma (keeps the brain flexible, yaddidimean?). Take, for instance, the Toba Catastrophe Theory. In a nutshell, suggests that an Indonesian supervolcano pushed the total number of humans in existence down to ~15,000. Other theories hold that the population hovered at ~2000 in Africa for a long time. I offer no comment on the quality of these theories.

I just finished a paper titled brain evolution, theories of innovation and lessons from the history of technology. It was entertaining. The author suggests that the genetic changes leading to what we think of as modern cognitive function could have been the as simple as the acquisition of different regulatory systems for tissue differentiation in the brain. I triggered from this general description of small genetic changes leading to dramatic phenotypic shifts onto the TCT mentioned above. My alternate explanation for coalescence patterns in mitochondrial DNA is that the necessary shifts in regulatory structure mutated spontaneously in a bunch of different people, roughly at the same time. Those brainy wonders then outcompeted their genetic ancestors.

update: it's interesting how wikipedia both does and does not reflect scientific opinion on this issue. article says one thing, citations another. hrm hrm hrm hrm hrm.

This has interesting implications for the Jaynesian view of human cognitive development. I must, however, stop procrastinating and read textbooks.

I generally hold that as our industrial civilization hurtles off a cliff exploiting resources wages to your ambitious prospector will increase (along with the entire industry as capital investments begin to yield diminishing returns [which they have arguably been doing already in certain extractive industries]). This should reflect the degree of training knowledge, skill in finding/extracting resources.

I note that mining companies remain strong in the stock markets despite the 42% drop in exploration budgets for junior companies (Wall Street's best and brightest probably see this as only bad for the exploration subsector) and that new deposits are announced on a fairly regular basis. In addition, certain companies have already begun drilling for gold on the ocean floor!

And the ocean is where I want to prototype autonomous resource extraction robots. I find it less likely that I will have an opportunity to prototype self-replicating mining machines and refineries that I think necessary for exoplanetary resource extraction (2 models: haul bigass asteroid into orbit and mine there; OR, send autonomous fleet to asteroid belt, railgun knobs of refined minerals back to earth).

Someone once said: you can do anything but you cannot do everything. I'm in love with the idea of participating in the great American tradition of resource extraction (see: Howard Hughes and his revolutionary drill bit - as an aside, the Baker Hughes company is suing the pants off a rival for a case of what they call clear-cut industrial espionage - which is the kind of activity that pops to mind when I think "unfettered capitalism"). Furthermore, I grew up on stories of the West before the Great Federal Beast decided to begin exercising her so-called "writ of law" out here (which began interestingly enough with the disenfranchisement of women who ran prostitution businesses - the only powerful women in the west and the only power group willing to challenge marital legislation. Fascinating bit of history to be sure, but this is not the right place). Stories of Hooke and Darwin, world travelers and scientists extraordinaire in a tradition I admire (you'll note they built theories off bodies of evidence amassed in the real world in Darwin's case and in Hooke's case invented fucking everything including the first balance-sprung watches - critical for the evolution of our global coordinate system and finding one's place on the grid) drive me.

I wish nothing more from my life than to participate in something new, and I think this is where most of my frustration with American-style democracy arises. Everything is known, and everything is controlled. The state seeks to obliterate all citizens relationships under the weight of its own - the only interactions that matter to the democratic state are those between it and its citizens. It cares not one whit for the warp and woof of the social fabric its citizens must ride their entire lives upon, for as long as the citizens pay their parking tickets and respond promptly to juridicial summons they are good and compliant.

There is no room in this country for experiments in new living styles, new arrangements of responsibilities between adults. There is no room for a new social contract, for only one social contract can be legitimate under our current regime.

I have problems: they range from the trite ones of youth (problems with authority and being told what to do) to more existential ones that only arise in a full planet. I mean to say that there are no more frontiers. Granted, there are uncivilized corners of the world, but what's the mean distance to a Golden Arches these days? The max is 101 miles in the United States, and it does appear that Africa has a severe dearth of both Bad Coffee Inc. and Golden Arches. This doesn't mean that it's a frontier (because indigenous people are busy murdering each other over there [and the place is riddled with do-gooder 'journalists'] and taking their land would be a miscarriage of...something...compared to the way they generate wealth from the place. Not to mention that colonialism is a naughty word these days...) it simply means that civilization does not enjoy a particularly strong writ of law in Africa.

And I am no nation-builder.

No, I dream of frontiers and Carnegie-scale fortunes orbiting out beyond Mars, waiting to be plucked from their death-spiral into the sun and spun into epic habitats.

That's right - I aim to plant the seeds of a Dyson Cloud.

Oh, the arms I would give for a microarraying robot...

It occurs to one that the world by necessity must get weirder because I continue to exist, which is an unlikely event on an ongoing basis (statistically speaking). Something is imparting a lot of weirdness to the universe in keeping all the crazy shit that might potentially happen within the higher-order structure of narrative embedded in a probably estimable amount of zeros and ones around the world. Maybe that's the power of art and music and film and storytelling; to enjoin in a collective hallucination of what might be and so steer our raft through the four-dimensional matrix of the universe, avoiding major shoals like nuclear war or grey goo (which, frankly, sounds thermodynamically iffy in the first place) or as feared in the nineties, DINOSAURS!!!

Civilizations are a neat trick. I'd hate to lose ours.

Despite my deep and abiding hatred of my banking institution, I do admire their security. Anytime I log in from a computer I don't typically log in from, they demand double verification through my phone. Fairly good.

Apple design just gets better and better. Unibody construction - be still my heart. I could open and close this thing for hours, fascinated by the haptics of the magnetic latch.

I need to show this to a certain furniture-maker I know.

It is certainly delightful to know that consumer demand for innovative products is still strong. I had planned to sell a bunch of textbooks that I possess .pdf's for (don't ask) and thereby fund a Nook purchase, but apparently aggregate demand is so fucking strong the damned things are sold out through the holiday seasons.

I guess I shall simply accrue more textbooks and wait for the supply-demand curve to level out. In the meantime, I can count on kaizen to work its magic on the market. Perhaps someone will drop the phatness in ebook readers while B/N drag their manu-feet w/r/t the Nook.

First things first, I have a small man/writer crush on Jonah Lehrer. You see, he gets paid to write. I do this shit for practice.

Main topic: a book review by the paid science writer in question on Reading in the Brain.

The history of human neural development fascinates me. What madness must have been persecuted in the fertile crescent during the development of the ego, right? How crazy must things have got when symbol recognition began to co-opt the visual circuits for seeing gods and hearing voices (for more on this topic [albeit from the seventies, so you have to do lots of interpolation with modern research to really understand what I'm talking about - I'm not aware of a good synthesis]): Julian Jaynes)?

Subsequent studies of patients with pure alexia -- they can see everything but written language -- have located the specific contours of the letterbox area. Not surprisingly, it takes up a significant chunk of our visual cortex, as the invention of the alphabet seems to have usurped brain cells previously devoted to object recognition. (Dehaene refers to this process as "neuronal recycling.") He also speculates that, while "learning to read induces massive cognitive gains," it also comes with a hidden mental cost: because so much of our visual cortex is now devoted to literacy, we're less able to "read" the details of natural world. (Lehrer)

Reduced ability to 'read' details of the natural world suggests to me that reading and writing introduced a fundamental shift in the human experience. The student of modern culture notes the popularity of substances that provide windows into the shamanic existence.

Another, quote (more relevant to the biology of reading):

Deheane goes on to provide a wealth of evidence showing this cultural evolution in action, as written language tweaked itself until it became ubiquitous. In fact, even the shape of letters -- their odd graphic design -- has been molded by the habits and constraints of our perceptual system. For instance, the neuroscientists Marc Changizi and Shinsuke Shimojo have demonstrated that the vast majority of characters in 115 different writing systems are composed of three distinct strokes, which likely reflect the sensory limitations of cells in the retina. (As Dehaene observes, "The world over, characters appear to have evolved an almost optimal combination that can easily be grasped by a single neuron.") The moral is that our cultural forms reflect the biological form of the brain; the details of language are largely a biological accident. (Lehrer)

Another book to buy when I have things like disposable income.

I hear rumblings on the idea of a full-employment state. This is not scary, or startling. Many of those who lead our great, independent science and research organizations are wholly dependent on federal funding.

The defense industry is a great example of a jobs program for rich white folks. The problem is that the upper crust of the defense industry thrives on making bombs with which to kill brown people. This is a grain of sand in my much-atrophied conscience. Surprised? I'd hope so.

In the spirit of my last post wherein I mischaracterized all government employees as either bureaucratic leeches profiting off pork supposedly marked out for the poor or mindless practitioners of what goes by the name of Science these days (climate researchers, I castigate THEE). Grander claims (this research project will show that the earth will heat up so much we might ASSPLODE due to anthropogenic global warming/my non-profit will pull FIVE THOUSAND poor people into traditional American Homeownership) lead to larger funding. I attribute this to the quality of our governing elite - mall owners and third-rate lawyers (this being distinct from the pathologically clever bureaucrats who make up the civil service. The governing elite are always played for patsies by the bureaucracies they oversee in liberal democracies. In authoritarian power relationships, misleading ones patron typically has disastrous results unless you're really pathologically clever and not merely smarter than the elected patsies).

I'd rather see more programs funneling money into scientists pockets. We basically use a two-pronged attack right now (w/r/t getting USG money into civilians pockets): give money to scientists, and give money to poor people. I suggest a free-market approach, wherein we provide ludicrous salaries to humans working in the sciences and free education for any who wish to enter the sciences. That way, we provide a demand for a set of skills and a way to obtain the skills with no capital investment (what I see as the major barrier to class mobility in America. Incidentally, our best vehicle of class migration is the US Army, as it pays a pittance and creates reliable corporate cogs through the kind of harsh training the private sector can't quite get away with. The kind of training that a certain subset of the demographic require before they can function in modern American society). As structured now, we reward the skillless, and provide no incentive for skill-enhancement (relative to the investment in those skills). Furthermore, our very cultural fabric conspires against movement from the underclass: the only threads of wealth creation in this country with any traction in the people-at-large are those of "get rich quick" (lottery, flipping houses) and the fame and entertainment industries (move to Hollywood, release epic CD/movie, ???, profit). Oh yeah, and selling drugs which is incredibly profitable and if you live in the ghetto, have two neurons, can run an intuitive risk-reward analysis (which when you consider the rewards to other activities in the ghetto is infinity times better for selling drugs) almost inevitable.

This raises a question for me: should the country legalize drugs, what impact will that have on the communities in this country that are based on the import and distribution of psychoactive substances? Rage, crime, riots. The only way to pacify a raging democratic population is to give them jobs. Sometimes you give just a few of them jobs, but those few turn out to be highly lucrative. Chasing the few jobs available (and shooting each other over the outrageous profits that accrue to the aggressive capitalists) will keep the populace quiet and away from the throats of those with money earned in the taxable economy. I ask again: what will happen to the demographics whose wealth is rooted in the import and distribution of drugs?

A constant refrain of reactionaries what make up this e-noosphere is that liberal democracy is plagued by men and women who cook up cockamamie schemes under the labels of "science" or "social programs" and by selling them to bureaucrats in Washington (alternately the unmotivated, affirmative-action-exploiting, capitalism-fearing lazy and the scheming, affirmative-action-exploiting, power-hungry and aggressive, depending upon who one reads) provide themselves with grants upon which to sustain a life that went awry studying miscellaneous hurt feelings in the Academy.

These men and women can be the noble geologists, paid by their local states to survey in advance of dam construction (to avoid punching holes in the local plate) or the evil, villainous, child-exploitation-enabling mortgage assistance programs for the poor and underserved (who are poor because they are underserved by lenders, typically the former because the latter deem them poor investments. An unfortunately self-reinforcing cycle of poverty). Yes, I'm talking shit about ACORN. They are only a convenient example of graft stemming from the Academy's integration with our ruling structure, however, and I have no idea if they have guidelines in place supporting the sex trade in minors. Such things are not my domain - systemic corruption, however, is my domain. I have been specializing in systemic corruption from middle school when I discovered the insensibility of farm subsidies.

(NB: I do not think that all those who graft the government under the label of Science are honorable nationbuilders. Nor do I think all social programs serve no purpose but to line their administrators pockets. Both groups think they are doing the lord's work on earth, and who am I to pass judgement on those seeking to improve the miserable underclasses' place in this world? There are complexities in this world of ours, right? Most scientists just hold down a job, as do their social-program brethren. Malice and incompetence, utterly indistinguishable in the actions of our ruling classes.)

I come to this topic of Non-Governmental-Organizational funding. These groups are run by private citizens, and funded largely by grants from corporations with deep pockets or (hilariously, given the acronym) the local government. The classic authority-dependence relationship all over again.

I bring this to your attention by way of an article from Naomi Klein that I am currently munching my way through (mmm, granola). The title of the article is Minority Death, and it treats the topic of the Durban commissions run by the UN.

A digression: another constant refrain in reactionary discourse is that of large liberal-democratic bureacracies' ways and means of creating more work for themselves. These conferences are nothing but work for the participants. They are paid to make these conferences go off well, to do the politicking necessary to pull the parties to the table and agree to some chickenshit proclamation (in the case of Durban I/II, chickenshit meaning that the proclamation says nothing that is not conventional wisdom already and doubly chickenshit for proposing the same solutions the Washington Consensus style of nationbuilding allegedly never executes on. Bitch, who gonna build you powerplants, huh? Engineers from the Royal Academy of Zimbabwe?). I find this a very useful lens for looking at the workings of liberal democracy: more work for more loyal partisans! Form a committee, we need to make a consensus decision! Death of leadership in America, etceteras etceteras.

I quote from Ms. Klein, on the topic of the power relationships that drove the misinformation campaign discrediting Durban I:

This campaign had several long-lasting effects. Not only did large foundations, including Ford, cut funding for any projects remotely linked to Durban; human rights groups that rely on foundation funding started to fear that defending the Durban process was too risky. Ejim Dike, a New York anti-poverty activist, discovered this trend when her organization, the Human Rights Project at the Urban Justice Center, drafted an open letter to Barack Obama expressing "profound disappointment" with the administration's apparent plan to boycott the Durban Review Conference in Geneva, calling the gathering "a priority for many of us who supported your campaign for change." Although many grass-roots groups signed, she found that most of the large human rights and civil rights groups—even those that had been key participants in 2001, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA—were unwilling to sign the letter. Some told her it was too early to publicly criticize Obama, but the bigger problem, Dike discovered, was fear. People confided that they didn't want to lose their funding, and others talked about not wanting to get "targeted" again.

Ah, funding. Carbohydrates. Water of Life. He who controls the spice; controls the universe. Those granola-crunching liberal arts students never stood a chance against the might of the Zionists. As soon as the Islamists raised their heads at Durban and the Zionists got wind of the new ideological front the pressure came to a head. Mind you, this was in 2001, ca. the Towers event, when the Zionist lobby peaked in terms of controlling American political rhetoric around Israel, Palestine, Zionism (a dirty word, prohibited in polite conversation lo my entire growing-up-hood) and Islam/Islamism/Islamofacism (there is much creative etymology in this political sphere. I blame George Orwell and Noam Chomsky). The poor, nobly-intentioned NGO administrators tried their best but funding is always controlled by appearances. Ford's charitable arm exists not to do good in the world but to buff the image of the Ford company. Doing good in the world is the purview of liberal arts students and other do-gooders. Bill Gates, on the other hand, made a fortune and is now doing good works in the world - according to his values and his evaluative rhetoric. He is the authority in charge of disbursing funds, and so his dependents listen to him. Many NGOs are entirely dependent on their benefactors, who frequently boil down to large companies and government grant programs.

The silliness begins when those who are dependent try to rebel against those with authority. If the relationship is truly that of authority and dependence, then the dependent will always do the bidding of the relevant authority. I dropped out of school briefly. I supported myself making custom furniture. I am now back in school, having realized the benefits of having a patron.

So long as charity is performed at the behest of the corporatist state, it will always serve the interests of the state and corporations. If we could return this country to a reasonable standard of wealthmaking, we could theoretically eliminate the need for governmental charity. This will never happen because power has never and will never relinquish territory without a power struggle against another power, and the American people are too dumb and poorly organized to ever represent a real power against which our government might clash.

I opened the hall closet today, and a veritable wave of laundry-volatiles assaulted my senses (I do mean this in the plural - I felt shit condensing on my skin). It struck me that you know a particular box of detergent isn't fucking around when it sublimes to saturation density in your closet. Makes me want to put the detergents in a plastic bag or something but for the bisphenol-A.

I am put in mind of something my geology prof said this morning in class: "If you're safe from the earthquakes, you're sitting on a mountain of radon!"

Not that anybody's safe from earthquakes. Or subtle poisoning of the reproductive structures. You can't legislate safety into life. The government exists to make law and order (such as can exist between humans in a state of eternal warfare), not to take all the risk out of life. Risk is good! Bad investments should be rewarded appropriately, etceteras.

Determining the Effects of Lipophilic Drugs on Membrane Structure by Solid-State NMR Spectroscopy: The Case of the Antioxidant Curcumin

http://news.opb.org/article/6205-wyden-outlines-proposed-new-sex-trafficking-law/
Prediction: sex trafficking will ascend to take over drug prohibition as the golden cow for law enforcement types for the next twenty years. Nothing will change.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/24147
If you pump garbage into your rational decision-making structures, you will get nonsense as output. Constructing a worldview on faith, making assertions about what to do to people without faith and then acting on the jibber-jabber you produce will only result in bad nooz. "Qatada, a fellow inmate, went further. In a series of fatwas released in June 2008, he reflected on theological arguments legitimising the murder of Muslims who are opposed to Al-Qaeda." Gimme a break!

I just have a hard time getting into the head of someone not ruled by themselves. Anyone who submits their will to the direction of anyone else (without the twin constraints of authority and responsibility) just baffles me. I have to submit to my parents will, within certain domains, e.g. school/grades/graduating in a reasonable enough time to not bankrupt the family. However, I generally disregard their authority when it comes to my personal life (recreational drug use, tattoos, propagandizing against democracy in front of the children). How does a thinking human willingly suborn themselves with no payoff? I only let them tell me what to do in those limited domains because they have both authority over me and responsibility for me. In return I have the responsibility of carrying out their directives (with some wiggle-room). Creatures of religion give up much personal autonomy in terms of setting personal goals and creating consistent ethical systems (and heck, if you didn't write your own ethical system you's just a robot running a theologian's social code - the 12 Commandments, Sharia, Deuteronomy are good examples of running someone else's code) in return for the promise of everlasting life or some other reward of faith.

I plan to submit only as long as I'm dependent. Once I am no longer dependent, the authority/responsibility relationship will evaporate. Thirty years from now, it will reemerge but with my siblings and I in authority and the 'rents in dependence but I think there will be different layers by that time that will obviate the need for any micro-managing. Hopefully I can just write checks at that point.

Some people I know don't find anything particularly appealing about the theological side of the equation, but play along for the community benefits and because it provides a turnkey existential framework.

Here I would like to unite two unusual threads: ADD/HD and drugging children into success - the effects thereof on satisfaction-with-life and intrinsic drive and that of religion and the extrinsic drives it imposes.

I return frequently to the topic of drugging young children into submission for ease of parenting (what blue-blooded American doesn't want to buy a solution for every challenge in their life?). I hold that by giving children the crutch of amphetamines, we never force them to find something engaging that they're willing to throw their whole existence into. There's a similar problem at work when we sit our children down in front of the television for entertainment and time-wasting: they never learn to focus on entertaining themselves. At least on the internet one must embark on a search to find something with which to occupy one's time - similar to running around in the woods playing make-believe for a previous generation.

People who hew so strongly to religions as to articulate arguments for the murder of the infidel suffer from what I identify as a lack of intrinsic motivation replaced with religion's extrinsic motivations. The Anonymous drug-treatment meetings I have had to attend in order to appease the great law enforcement behemoth of this country stress again and again the importance of having a "higher power", whatever that higher power may be. It's an interesting brain hack: praying for guidance from something besides your own decision matrix. Lord help me stretch this baggie out. The reprogramming that happens in those meetings can sometimes come down to whether or not a person can develop that sort of extrinsic motivation to refrain from relapsing. Religious fanatics can do amazing things through the force of will, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that finding an extrinsic motivator would be totally clutch in breaking the iron grip of addiction.

So drugs and religion can both be a crutch that keeps a human from developing their full potential. Performance-enhancing drugs eliminate the need for a child to find something intrinsically interesting and worthy of their time and so they never learn to ask "what do I want to do?" Many religious frameworks do the same thing with their participants: the religion holds its tenets literally sacred, unquestionable, and forces all who play the game to play by its rules, evaluating their lives in its rubric.

In the cases I mention above, both systems remove the need for humans to find their own motivators. When a human can pop some blue study drugs to complete the homework or rely on a book to explain his or her purpose on this planet they need never embark on a quest to find their purpose here or find the degree worthy of completing the homework (or studying for the tests).

Mayor Adams, PDC are focused on small business success:

Small businesses and Portland area neighborhoods can now look to a specific section within the PDC to access resources to improve their storefronts, apply for loans and grants, seek technical assistance and access the broader economy.

“One of my priorities when I entered office was to create a division within PDC to focus on small business and community economic development,” said Mayor Sam Adams. “Byron Estes, the Director of PDC’s new Neighborhood Division, has helped to get this new division up and running and effectively reposition PDC as an organization that does much more than downtown real estate development.”

While it is nice that our city officials are into the whole urban renewal and development tip, they're making the same mistake they did at the beginning of their initiative to drive up the quality of life in the area and attracting young creative types to the region.

Someone needs money to shop at these new stores. That means wealth creation.

As I belabor here again and again, there is only one route to wealth-creation (beyond the scale of shopkeepers bank accounts) and that is innovation. Sam Adams' entire economic development team is trying bad idea after bad idea. First, recruiting broke young people from the surrounding suburbs to take all the service jobs once held by web-toed PDX kids.

It is all well and good to create an economic development agency that focuses on small-scale wealth creation, but this region suffers from a lack of ambition except w/r/t the biosciences (which is pork from the Good Leonard). No new manufacturers, no companies doing r/d (Vestas, maybe). Why not start an entrepreneurship program at Portland State between the business program and the engineering program? Funnel some fraction of the profits back into the university (and entrepreneurship program) to reduce the funding gap and buy sweet fabrication facilities.

Serious lack of ambition. So make kids graduate from my program with no goals beyond just getting a good job at a local employer - at twenty three! We're young and the world might be ours if we but demonstrate the balls and strength of will to get out there and work towards the accomplishments we dream of. There's nothing wrong with working your way up from the bottom at the local outpost of an international structural firm, but to graduate with no goals but "a good job"...breaks my heart.

Where has the innovative spirit that once drove this country's economic engine gone? Into the muffling depths of the television and American Idol, I fear.

Could one design a chemical supercap that reacted very quickly to generate lots of joules over a short period of time? If such a device could be designed, we could go about making them really really small and using them to drive railguns. think about that - selling the charge *with* the bullet - like the rest of the firearms industry. no more ridiculous

Applications: something that can shoot bullets down as they come in with smarter/smaller/faster bullets. Self-steering, etc. Lots of miniaturization (read: microcomponent design) work. Furthermore, if you can blast the smart projectile with a UV or IR laser power-beaming setup you can provide it the electricity it needs to run a rudimentary guidance system for picking off inbound bullets.

idle speculation and chatter. this is all in the same vein of thought that I troll through when designing rockets to be made with stereolithography techniques. microrockets! although I haven't done any sort of estimate on how much oomph one would be able to get out of a fuel supply of comparable scale...