WHY STAY ON OIL?

INTRO

Let's imagine a world in which there is no more oil for internal combustion engines, but a cheap recyclable fuel that only needs a first load and lasts until the engine ends its life cycle. ¿Is it possible? I found the hypothetical answer some twenty years ago and I am a lawyer, not an engineer nor a scientist. I cannot test it because financially I live just at minimal human acceptable condition. But I am sure the core idea is running everywhere and already has been tried by powerful corporations and maybe it is under patent protection so noboby can use it. In my simplistic view, it can be adapted to current engines with a few tweaks, except for jet engines that would require an important new approach. But maybe jet fuel could be based on alcohol with new environmentally improving technologies.

WHY REMAIN ON PETROLEUM?

• Oil is still abundant and more profitable as it becomes harder to extract
• It makes a few Middle East countries powerful and rich
• There are many oil byproducts that are still useful and fortune making, such as plastics, lubricant oils and other which are environmentally poisonous too but very profitable
• The most important reason for oil to stay as the blood of current civilization: The United States is the main oil-technologician and keeps its own in-ground reserve well protected. This guarantees their true world power in case of crisis or planetary war. US reserves are estimated so huge that could keep the world running on gasoline for centuries.

OUTCOMES
One result from this is that the world will keep emitting carbon to the atmosphere and changing our environment into something less oxygenated and more vegetation-oriented by favoring photosynthesis, yet the true effect on plants is uncertain. Will humans easily adapt to a less oxygenated air? Another outcome is that oil derivatives are going to remain expensive so the world will keep growing slowly. Is this good or bad? If the whole planet's economic growth raises a lot, there will be more consumption and waste, but at the same time, better developed countries become more environmentally efficient. So the net outcome of a slowly growing world could be renewable resources exhaustion, at least in poor countries, while non-renewables might expand their availability.

CORE REASONS

I made the assumption that high oil price is leading the world economics to a slowdown. But the true cause for this might be more difficult to attain. Perhaps oil price is part of the answer but automation and robotics, big corporations' over-accumulation of wealth, rich countries too focused on making cars while the market could have reached its limits or people just shifted desire from cars to other things (maybe because of gas prices) or even rich countries might have peaked their enthusiasm for growth and are just bored and not wanting to keep on leading the world. Scarcity of commodities (renewable or not) other than oil could be part of the problem. The economy of information and fun seems not to be creating as many jobs as needed to boost a depressed planetary economy.

More links:
CO2 on plants

http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/why_plants_cant_sequester_excess_co2

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2002/december11/jasperplots-124.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Increasing-Carbon-Dioxide-is-not-good-for-plants.html

Oxygen decrease

http://survivalacres.com/blog/oxygen-levels-are-dropping/

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/a_looming_oxygen_crisis_and_its_impact_on_worlds_oceans/2301/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/09/30/carbon-emissions-threaten-the-fishing-industry-by-shrinking-fish-sizes/

On oil
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_product

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2012/12/03/what-happens-when-america-no-longer-needs-middle-east-oil/

http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/reserves/index.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_refinery

Aviation fuel

http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123308337

On economic growth
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-23/business/36496291_1_olivier-blanchard-euro-zone-imf-chief-economist

UBERMACHINES

DISRUPTIVE DRIVES

Solid state drives that are more like huge usb-stick memories are going to disrupt all the computing world, when they replace the conventional hard disk. From operating systems to main processors, nothing will be the same within the next five years. Until now, disk drives have been passive receivers of data waiting for a database update, software configuration change, a new program to install or some other input/output task. All the software development has been conceived in the way of open/close files or  read/write data from the disk to main memory. Computers are turned on and off. These new memories, when fast and cheap enough will eliminate the need for the famous RAM memory and maybe letting just some memory space within the processor itself for a more quickly processing (buffering or whatever). Turning on and off will disappear, and the processor will be designed to function in wake-sleep modes only. The sleep state will serve to process some chores that do not require user's participation and maybe help them solve some kind of internet-search problem, prepare the next session with interesting stuff according to user tastes. The most interesting feature of these drives is that their whole space could be used as main memory. So very complex software will be able of performing intelligent activities such as better user-machine interface with audio and video interaction and more intuitive human-machine connection. The input/output or read/write logic might be discarded from programming languages. I think that processors won't be a single chip anymore but distributed ones (embedded into the main memory drive) with more simplistic tasks and maybe one main processor to guide the general operation.

ISSUES

I read somewhere that solid state drives are prone to fail when intensely used, so perhaps they should be developed to last longer for the prior ideas to be implemented. But it would be more interesting if those new memory drives were able of automatically replacing their own hardware, such as living tissue does, so they can live for many years. This could allow the development of personalized computers suited for each one's particular needs.
A link to a possible solution:
Phase change memory
Self repairing hardware

A FEW CONJECTURES

Maybe bigger platforms carrying SSDs could be based upon artificial intelligence. Then a few questions come out. Will the conventional directory tree and file system be replaced by an associative data storage? What kinds of associations? What could be the minimum data unit? Perhaps an idea could be that minimum. And what is an idea? Would these techniques mimic the chaotic human brain way of thinking? Could machine memories be as dynamical as human ones, being rebuilt every time one recovers them?

Interesting link from a comment on G+:

Phase change memory

ABOUT ADDICTIONS

Note: this is not a scientific material. If you need help, seek professional assistance. Translated from Spanish.

Document written long ago. Maybe there will be some change.

THE BACKGROUND

An addiction is anything you can not fail to do that hurts you. I heard this on Dr. Nancy Alvarez’s show. I think the concept should include alcoholism, for simplicity. Otherwise, there is a long list of definitions for alcoholism. A trap of addictions is that if you manage to leave one, you start another one. Some even have their positive side. The workaholic may achieve their fortune. But almost certainly they will die early from heart attack, cirrhosis or some other illness. An addiction is a manifestation of an underlying problem, an unresolved internal struggle. I almost dare say the addict to one thing, is to other ones too. Thus, as described above, the super worker also is an alcoholic, drug consumer, seeks sex without control or has a reckless behavior. What characterizes an addiction is that it is self-destructive.

The trick to a solution lies in finding the underlying problem, the inner battle. It might be some abuse in childhood, or a situation too traumatic at any stage of life. My bet is that generally it is a conflict between what parents demand from you and what you do or want to do with your life. I get the impression that this is a failure that comes from the beginnings of mankind.

MY APPROACH

It might exist a causing trauma to an addiction. Although they are usually a manifestation of the subconscious struggle between what your parents (or whoever raised you) decided should be your life, and what you're doing with it or want to do. In part this happens because they longed for a certain type of child. But parents drag their internal battles from the clash with their own parents too. And this non resolved conflict, parents channel it on you in the form of possessiveness, control, contradiction, penalty, claim, hardness, cruelty, and sometimes indifference. It is an endless chain. Perhaps you will do it with your children, or you are doing it already. Up to this point I have not considered the possibility of a mental illness like schizophrenia or some other unmanifested. The ways of conflict are many. It may be that your parents live in a power struggle and you became a disaster as an outcome. Or they have migrated and left you behind, or went into a separation.

SOME TRICKS

I learned this from a television show so long ago that I forgot about it. To face an addiction you have to think about the immediate negative effects. For example, if you smoke, as was my case, you have to remind you rself again and again that it leaves your clothes stinky, ruin your breath, makes you nervous, causes headaches, gets you tired when walking, the smell bothers most women, it's something that makes you look like someone problematic, etc. Do not torment yourself with guilt. This will lead the internal struggle to maintain and increase the problem. If you think about the long-term effects of an addiction, such as cancer, it can even raise the addiction. It sounds absurd, but that is the result. An addiction is a self-destructive behavior rooted in the subconscious. And if you think of the worst effects, it will increase. Another trick I guess I discovered myself, is not to finish the issue at once. This means, not to think you are never going to re-do or are going to stop it permanently. The idea is not to put much pressure on the decision, to prevent the desire for what your leaving from growing. In my case it worked. I do not know if it is useful to others. I sometimes smoke a cigarette (tobacco), only to end up with nausea, headache, dizziness and nervousness. You must resolve the mess inside from the very bottom. Otherwise, you will leave a vice to start another one.

You will solve your problem within yourself and not fighting against your parents or complaining about them.

From wikipedia:

Addictions

THE MEANING OF DREAMS

Warning: This document has no scientific or counseling purpose. If you have any problems seek professional help. Translated from Spanish, so it is not the best English style I could try.

When you remember what you dream, it means that you had a bad sleep, or you did by the day. Dreams can be fun because they have very little structure and seem too real. I usually enjoy recalling a nightmare. What makes them something terrible is the emotional dark aspect in which they operate. Sometimes I dream of dangerous things and I have seen them as an adventure film. The emotional side of the dream is what determines whether or not it is a nightmare. It's like the background music of movies. I've seen entire television series that teach you how to interpret dreams. I have tried to follow those ideas. And I got a bit unstable. I believe that dreams are the most common way the subconscious thinks. It's a fairly chaotic and disorganized thought process. I guess it helps you find creative and unexpected solutions to everyday problems. This thinking is hidden while you're awake to avoid being confused. I imagine that the preconscious is some kind of evaluator of the subconscious processes, which compares these with your daily activity. And when it finds something interesting, throws it in the form of spark or intuition: Finally got it! How I had not noticed that before?! The fact is that dreams should not be remembered. And when that occurs, you must be alert because it means that something important is happening in your world. I think the preconscious sends you the whole video of the dream or nightmare, raw and unedited, to warn you that there is something requiring urgent attention. And that the preconscious is overwhelmed and cannot find a way to solve it. It can be a health problem or conflict at work, maybe you are about to get fired and you're missing signals. It might be many things. The key is to take the dream or nightmare as a warning to check what is going on around or inside you. But the dream itself should never be interpreted. Why? Well, once the dream is installed in your aware mind, the subconscious registers it as an event that happened in reality. When analyzed consciously, it is reinforced. The subconscious puts it back into its blender of disordered processing. And creating chaos in something that was already chaotic, does not produce good results. Maybe you'll just get emotional instability or disconnection from reality. Besides, putting yourself to interpret dreams, you can reach tons of different conclusions. And end up more confused than if you did not attempt to analyze them. If you want an objective interpretation of a dream, you should find a psychologist who specializes in this area. If not, you'd better check around you and within you, to see how things are changing.

FUTURELAND

Here are some ideas on how I see the next hundred years.

THE END OF GAS

There will be no more gasoline internal combustion engines. A simple and wasteless fuel will take over. Powerlines will not be necessary anymore. You will have your own power station at home. Cars won't need refueling. The price of traveling and transport  will decrease dramatically so people will mix a lot with diseases spreading worlwide and goods being produced anywhere on earth.

AUTOMATION AND THE EXPIRATION OF DEMOCRACY

Automation and robotics are a current revolution. The world will be very different in some 30 years due to the economic shift of a majority of people not working but plenty of goods being produced by machines. Maybe there will be less democracy because governments will rule the economy in order to distribute the welfare generated by self-driven machines. This automated society will behave very differently than we currently do. Maybe poor countries will stop working at all and accommodate to receive full help from the robotised rich world; therefore the gap between developed countries and the third world is going to magnify.

PLENTY OF WATER AND FOOD

I guess there will be an important discovery on how to process salt water from the sea into drinking liquid on a very cheap way. Biotechnology will increase productivity at the top and instead of farms, food will be harvested in many floors(*) buildings inside cities (levitating towns).
Link (Dec-27-2012):
Water purifying technique.

THE OPEN SOURCE PARADISE

At some point, when abundance in rich countries assures all life conditions for everybody, technology and science will be released by companies and governments or at least there will be a great share of knowlegde-exchange because current rules of competition are not going to be a need to survive. There will be no more struggle to overcome the other one, so knowlegde-secrets will not be an advantage anymore. As a result from this, human evolution is going to accelerate and more advancements and discoveries will take place. Link: Open Source Initiative.

ON FILMS

I think movies are going to be developed entirely by software, even from the script. So very few people will be in charge barely on the most refined work or minor shifts. But since nobody wants imaginary artists -people want real blood- there will be true people holographed in files that will be used for making films. These persons are going to true-film the dangerous scenes, or at least pretend they are. They will be forced to lead lives that resemble their movie characters and maybe even participate in dangerous situations in real life, or fake them. Maybe some of this is already happening, I am not too much a movies man.

FLIGHT AND LEVITATION

My last guessed revolution has to do with flight or levitation. I think there will be a major breakthrough on how to keep things floating in the air or escaping the gravity attraction. So flying will not require wings and maybe there will be floating cities. Perhaps space flight will be easy and humanity will settle on the moon, mars and other worlds, creating new countries and political problems.

Biotechnology, genetical engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will complete this new world that comes.

WORKERS OF THE FUTURE

I think there will always be jobs for the less educated but very little. Most of the workers in this new world will be scientists, philosophers, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, entertainers, judges, managers, social carers, teachers, motivational trainers, law enforcement, planners, politicians,  religious leaders and everything related to automation that cannot be performed by machines.

(*) I had used the word "stories" but I think it is wrong. My Englis is not really good.

SOME IDEAS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I did not make any web search around intelligence. I chose to go the naive way and then maybe discover the theory. Perhaps what I am writing is outdated or discarded but I am having fun with this. My point of view is that intelligence is not an abstract skill based only upon logic, math or some other human theoretical creation. Logic (maybe algorithms) seem necessary for any thought or emotional process but maybe conventional logic is not enough to grasp the whole mind's dynamics.

THE GUESSING PROCESS OF THOUGHT

Uncertainty is at the core of any thinking process. We will never be able to know everything, so we guess. Religion is a very useful tool to give meaning to the unknown; but science or philosophy give more accurate explanations. Science is an excellent tool yet there is always a limit to it. There are some questions that science does not approach; philosophy fills that space and then religion or even fantasy. Us humans organize things according to categories, similarities or convenience. Then we assign names to those categories and things. We link a thing to a category and both get a new meaning. Emotions are present at any thought process of course. So there's an emotional side for any connection or idea.

WANDERING ME

To my knowledge artificial intelligence aims to emulate the human conscious mind or solve problems based on rigid logic. Human brain runs on unexpected paths even when fully aware. You can amaze yourself playing an automatic video of stabbing some coworker on the back just because they raised the voice at you; then you come back to reality and try figure out why they did so. Psychology has determined that we have a parallel mind labeled as unconscious self that flows chaotically and apparently not following any ethical rule. This unconscious mind devises strange worlds in which the known rules of reality are barely followed and events do not happen in a linear-time way. This strange form of thinking affects our decisions however it seems artificial intelligence theorists and developers do not consider it at all.

CURIOSITY

Artificial intelligence can be whatever we humans decide it should be. We are its creator so we define how it functions. Until now, AI serves the purpose of helping us do tasks that are impossible for our natural brains. But we want artificial brains to behave as our minds work. It seems technology is not currently capable of this kind of feat. I think for a machine to cogitate like humans do, it takes perceiving reality same way as we do. This means eyes, skin, a sense of smell, ears and instinctive reactions such as our own. A full nervous system that current electronics cannot achieve. Maybe nanotechnology will solve it. Animals focus on things that start moving before them. This is an instinct for self defense and maybe for hunting. A little child is fascinated with the light of a candle, he tries to grab it and then he feels the hurt that warns him of the danger and quickly retreats. So there is a process of watching, guessing, comparing with other already known things, and when realising it is something new, beginning to explore. We learn from others too. This little kid might be warned of not touching the flame. Maybe he will obey.

PENDING: INSTINCT, EMOTIONS, TACT, MEMORIES...

Originally wrote phylosophy but there was a bell ringing until I checked the spelling.

THE PERFECT BLOG

I have been thinking of what an electronic text should look like. 

The core strategy is readability, which means:

• Simple and easy to understand fonts
• A single basic font and color
• Not huddled letters
• A pale background either yellow, brown or mustard
• Reduced width (some five inches)
• Some space between lines

Then it comes the content itself. It should be:

• Grammarly correct
• Easy-to-understand sentences
• Original
• Interesting
• Short
• Moving to reflection or action