Category Archives: Future

Better Pharmaceutical Manufacturing via Continuous Processing | MIT Technology Review

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Better chemistry: To produce drugs in a continuous-manufacturing method, MIT engineers had to develop several new pieces of equipment, including this reactor, which enabled a faster reaction and eliminated the need for a toxic solvent.

This is a big breakthrough, this is part of the maker revolution though a long way from maker bot.  In the long run such a system can be miniaturized and stocked with a range of precursors which will allow a single system to produce any number of different drugs on demand. In the early days such systems will be huge and hugely expensive but will make drug exploration exponentially quicker and less expensive. In the long-term the system makes the whole pharmaceutical infrastructure we have today obsolete…except that it will probably increase the need for scientists, physicians specializing in individualized medicine, etc, etc. Old jobs go away new ones come on-line. And the new ones will generally be much more about the outer edges of technology and the connection between people and between people and their machines, instead of embedding people as cogs in the machines.

The article is pretty high level but a good quick read on the topic.

The Apple Machine

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I think there is some weariness in regards to apple product intros these days, I sense that the press (in general { there have been folks who’ve kind’a felt this way for a while}) is actually beginning to feel a bit used by Apple (and they are probably right though they only have themselves to blame.)  I feel the same way though I totally blame the press for not having the guts, smarts and knowledge to branch out more generally into tech reporting, there are vast areas of technology that are poorly covered and even ignored because they are boring old tech.  Much of this old tech is boring because no one reports on it and promotes it like Apple promotes their products…making it easy for the press to hang on like lampreys.

Apple uses the press as an advertising amplifier, its one of the things that the other tech companies have either lost or never had the ability to do.  It costs a lot to be a showman but it pays back, however its probably impossibly hard to quantify the cost or the payback to a financial guy before you go and do it.  Jobs knew what he was doing and how to do it in his bones, and inculcated it in the bones of his legacy but the MBA’s hate anything that is not quantifiable…this aborts new ‘Apples.’  But even at Apple, without Jobs, there is a good chance that the MBA’s will chip away at the Apple marketing/sales/advertising/etc machine in the name of profits and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

If you know we’re in trouble but can’t quite figure out why? Adam Garfinkle at American Interest has a key

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Great Primer on why bureaucratic / regulatory purgatory has descended on our heads in this blog post at the American Interest site.

America’s political institutions are so fouled up at both the politics/decision-making and the bureaucratic/administrative levels that one can actually make a plausible case that all the variance we are trying to account for lives here. One can make this case regardless of political affinities, too. Liberals argue that our economic situation, touched off by the financial collapse of autumn 2008, is all the fault of anti-government, market-fundamentalist types obsessed with deregulation. Conservatives argue that our economic situation is what it is because we are hopelessly in debt thanks to the futile and counterproductive meliorist entitlement policies of bleeding-heart liberals who invariably care more about intentions than outcomes. Both are partly right, but also partly wrong or, better, incomplete, in their analysis—which brings us to part three, next time.

Couple of updates, Alan’s post really starts here with Section 1 which provides background, that points back to Walter Russell Meade’s The Collapse of the Blue Model series I’ve posted about earlier.  Read it all, Alan says much more clearly and with more background what I have tried to say in various small ways for almost a year now.

The system is systematically broken, it has become so broken that it is self reinforcing and is pointing the nose of the ship of state down, harder and harder as we try to fix it.

China’s Maturing Modern Navy

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The Chinese Navy ( sometimes still called the PLAN/People’s Liberation Army Navy/) appears to have finished it’s experimentation~development with their premier surface combatant, the medium DDG 052C/D producing a rough equivalent of the western Aegis (at least in their boosters eyes.) the ship very obviously follows western design concepts but appears to be a very competent design, at least from “it’s likely right if it ‘looks’ Good metric,” though the radar and computer part of the system are probably not that good, yet. This good article in the Diplomat discusses this and its implications in some detail.

Not Everything that President Obama has done is wrong…and by the way he hasn’t shut down a lot of things that President Bush started either

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There are far too many conservatives of various flavors who seem to have gotten lost in their own narratives. Fortunately we have some smart conservatives watching out for the overspill.
This is an excellent piece by Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings blowing away a rather ignorant rant against NASA’s Space Station Commercial Access plans, which by the way is going well and attracting a huge amount of investment by pure play commercial space entrepreneurs.
I believe that what we are seeing today is what the first generation science fiction writers of the 30’s to 50’s predicted, it’s just taken a whole lot longer because the technology they thought would allow us to blast off (atomic energy) was shut down due to fears, founded and unfounded.  It has taken us five decades to develop technologies that enable us to get to space inexpensively (in relative terms) burning tons of liquefied oxygen and kerosene.in what are essentially tightly controlled explosions.