Jinn of Quality and Risk

The oft-quoted figure that 40,000 species are lost every year was not based on any evidence, just on Myers's speculation that one million species might be lost from 1975 to 2000... 

Secret des coups de langue de la grande rousse: J'utilise différentes méthodologies, trucs et astuces pour fourrager la Toile, souvent aidée du plus pur hasard. Mais je me dois (et lui dois) de révéler au grand jour le travail extraordinaire de François Pecheux, qui entretient depuis novembre 1997 un répertoire de sites savamment nourri et consciencieusement mis à jour. 

I've received this message (with slight variations) multiple times... I am so sorry I don't have the "brain snapshot device" to help out. And fwiw I do time travel, but only in one direction, and I am disguised as human, but shhh! nobody must know!

If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human, I need your help! My entire life and health have been altered and messed with. I have suffered tremendously and am now dying! The type of time travel which I think is most suited to my situation is having my consciousness transferred to my younger self using either the carbon copy replica method, or brain snapshot device. Please explain your method and how safe it is. I am in great danger and need this immediately.

I should point out that a character actually experiences time-reversal, i.e. suddenly starting to grow younger and accordingly losing memories, in the novel Hyperion (very decent science-fiction inspired by Keats). [cue: insert picture of the Shrike to suitably scare the hell out of unsuspecting readers] 

Acccording to BBC News, describing a United Nations report on the state of the global environment: a quarter of the world's mammals face extinction within 30 years and one in eight bird species is in danger of extinction. These are very high, worrying numbers. Should we believe them (and hit the panic button)?

Certainly not. Let's dig into the facts. There are 10,000 known bird species. At most from one to several bird species go extinct annually — hence a 0.01-0.03% bird species extinction rate per year. But threatened bird species receive an extraordinary amount of human intervention: The real figure of observed extinctions would be much higher, very likely 10 (0.1%) per year or more, were it not for heroic efforts to save species on the brink of extinction. [Reference: a pro-environmentalist article by respected biologist E. Wilson, Harvard professor for four decades. More conservative data accumulated by Simon and Lomborg has not been used here.]

In other words, according to prominent scientists: without the protection we afford endangered bird species today, there may be up to 280 extinctions by 2030; however, there may actually be at most 30-90 extinctions by 2030 — a very far cry from the 1,250 extinctions that the UN and BBC are predicting. The only question that remains is: why are they lying to us? or: what are they selling? 

There is a natural balance that can be mastered between both intensely imaginative, and passionately logical lines of thought. It's my claim, echoing many people before me, that we need to seek out this synergy to be good at design. 

The cost of shipping was dramatically affected by the railroad... It improved by about a factor of ten. The price of steel improved by maybe a factor of three. ... Whereas from the first transistor to today, the improvement was something like a factor of a billion. ... There are dozens of areas undergoing a similar kind of exponential growth. The technological revolution for the 21st century is going to be based on which areas those kinds of exponential growth rates catch hold in, and which ones don't. ... The Human Genome Project was a gigantic project, eight years, $12 billion, to sequence the entire human genome. [Myhrvold believes] it'll be down to the $10 range to sequence individual genomes. 

Visual tips for effective networking at a conference.