30/04: Weather modifying dreams...
My good friend and inventor Michael Fallwell is at it again. Previously he came up with a home-built revolutionary new telescope design, which is much cheaper than the existing designs because it leaves out all the unnecessary parts and the lenses can be grinded using parts of any old washing machine you can find on the road. Then he came up with a glider powered windmill that might soon make oil obsolete as there is much less electronical cruft involved compared with the static windmills as we know them today.
A spray turbine boat enhancing the weather
This time, Mike takes care of another of our current global problems: climate change. Mike's rainenhancer works in the following way: you have a fleet of ships moving around the coast, pumping all the seawater they can up about 10m into the atmosphere (in 100m wides stripes around 200m apart). Then some of that water will get stuck there and form clouds which will then move up 100--1000km inland before they rain out -- "like a little storm system," as Mike says.
Just like most socialists, Mike believes that change in the structure of society is closely connected to changes in technology. But while most socialists in some way or another are politicians and believe the necessary technology to permit for a restructuralization are present already and all that needs to be done is to organize for a social revolution that will leave society with a different (socialist) structure which will be able to take full advantage of the inventions that have been made already.
Mike with another one of his inventions -- a glider powered windmill
Not so with Mike -- as an inventor he sees the main driving force of human history to be the inventory spirit of mankind. If one wants changes, one needs to invent new ways of doing things -- social changes will follow as reactions.
Unrealistic? Well, maybe. But how can we know if we don't even try? I wish Mike all the luck he needs for getting it to work, but as a socialist I can't quite see how society will change without any human intervention at all. But maybe technological inventionism is what people focus on if social change seem impossible to start with...
A spray turbine boat enhancing the weather
This time, Mike takes care of another of our current global problems: climate change. Mike's rainenhancer works in the following way: you have a fleet of ships moving around the coast, pumping all the seawater they can up about 10m into the atmosphere (in 100m wides stripes around 200m apart). Then some of that water will get stuck there and form clouds which will then move up 100--1000km inland before they rain out -- "like a little storm system," as Mike says.
Just like most socialists, Mike believes that change in the structure of society is closely connected to changes in technology. But while most socialists in some way or another are politicians and believe the necessary technology to permit for a restructuralization are present already and all that needs to be done is to organize for a social revolution that will leave society with a different (socialist) structure which will be able to take full advantage of the inventions that have been made already.
Mike with another one of his inventions -- a glider powered windmill
Not so with Mike -- as an inventor he sees the main driving force of human history to be the inventory spirit of mankind. If one wants changes, one needs to invent new ways of doing things -- social changes will follow as reactions.
Unrealistic? Well, maybe. But how can we know if we don't even try? I wish Mike all the luck he needs for getting it to work, but as a socialist I can't quite see how society will change without any human intervention at all. But maybe technological inventionism is what people focus on if social change seem impossible to start with...
27/04: Millinkevich once more
You might remember my previous item on the matter, and our protest from the Left Alliance against Millinkevich, the pro-Western, pro-privatization candidate in Belarus. Last weekend, Millinkevich came to Oslo as a guest of the Norwegian Helsingfors Commitee. As noone else had, we ended up being the ones protesting him. And by the way, yesterday, I gave up all my positions in the Left Alliance. I decided upon that mainly for three reasons:
1. the youth has to take over (although several of them are older than me or have been in student politics for a longer time)
2. the student parliament is mainly limited towards having the powers of a student council at a high school. Now although it was pretty soon clear to me that those were it's formal powers, it took quite a long time for me to udneerstand that most other MPs also wanted it to remain that way and that they enjoyed having phony debates about things they couldn't do anything about -- without even getting the press involved to build up public pressure
3. I might, believe it or not, actually finish my career as a student this summer!
...well and then there are more interesting things/activities out there. So don't expect me to stop being active quite yet!
Update (04/30/06): The last session of the student parliament this year was actually on Thursday after I had written the entry, so technically speaking, I had one last meeting to attend to. And at that meeting, the student parliament called for a boycott of all the main occupation states: Israel, USA, China, Marocco, Turkey, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Great Britain, Pakistan, India and Indonesia. I really don't think it can get very much more radical... If you know Norwegian, you can read the entire text below.
1. the youth has to take over (although several of them are older than me or have been in student politics for a longer time)
2. the student parliament is mainly limited towards having the powers of a student council at a high school. Now although it was pretty soon clear to me that those were it's formal powers, it took quite a long time for me to udneerstand that most other MPs also wanted it to remain that way and that they enjoyed having phony debates about things they couldn't do anything about -- without even getting the press involved to build up public pressure
3. I might, believe it or not, actually finish my career as a student this summer!
...well and then there are more interesting things/activities out there. So don't expect me to stop being active quite yet!
Update (04/30/06): The last session of the student parliament this year was actually on Thursday after I had written the entry, so technically speaking, I had one last meeting to attend to. And at that meeting, the student parliament called for a boycott of all the main occupation states: Israel, USA, China, Marocco, Turkey, Russia, Iraq, Iran, Great Britain, Pakistan, India and Indonesia. I really don't think it can get very much more radical... If you know Norwegian, you can read the entire text below.
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