I Know What is Wrong With The World - and there is no way to fix it

I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world in three words:

People Are Stupid.

We like to think we are the pinnacle of evolution (in itself a stupid misconception of how evolution works) and that our vast intelligence separates up from the animals (sorry, stupid mistake, the other animals, I mean), but the fact is that we're not all that bright. We have a few advantages over, say primates, language and better memories for example, but research suggests that when it comes to sheer reasoning ability, we're not all that much brighter than chimps. I don't want to get into an IQ debate here, but let's assume there's some correlation between general intelligence and IQ. The average is around 100 (it varies from group to group and culture to culture - mainly because we're too stupid to devise a sensible test where the average is always 100 for every place and time).

Give or take a couple of standard deviations, most of us - like 96% of us - have that IQ. And it's abysmally low. It's the IQ of the kind of person who reads Murdoch newspapers, the IQ of the kind of person who watches soaps (even if it's the slick US cop show or medical show type and you think it's somehow better than Home and Away), and the kind of person who believes in the supernatural ("well, there has to be something more than this, doesn't there, science can't explain everything").

If you're still reading, it probably means you think you're not one of the stupid people I'm talking about. Well, you're wrong. Here's a little test to show just how stupid you are. 

• Q1 Can you solve world poverty? 
• Q2 Can you stop war? 
• Q3 Can you stop the persecution of minorities?
• Q4 Can you devise an economic system that treats everybody fairly?

The answers to all those questions are "No". I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of other questions that you would have to say no to, too. The fact is, we are all, even the very brightest among us, deeply and unutterably stupid. We can't solve the world's problems because we're too thick. We've been trying throughout recorded history (and presumably long before then) and we have failed. Failed dismally. Failed in a way that should be excruciatingly embarrassing to all of us. Let's face it, we're a bunch of chimps with cars and cell phones and we haven't got a clue.

And that's why there is no way to fix the world; we just haven't got the brains. We might as well give up, go back to the trees and scratch our arses until we're extinct.

Oh, hang on, we can't do that, can we? We stupidly cut down all the trees.

Now how did he get here?

    

It's All About The Guns, Stupid

Another damned mass murder, this time in Winnenden in Germany.

The boy who did it was described by Heribert Rech, interior minister of Baden-Wuerttemberg state as "completely unremarkable, there was nothing in his background to suggest this could have happened." Except the boy was a trained marksman! Except he had access to firearms! Except that he was an isolated loner who played computer games all day!

For God's sake, wake up! If you give weapons and training to disturbed children, some of them are going to go nuts and shoot people.

Here's a simple way to stop young men from shooting their classmates: don't let them anywhere near guns! It isn't hard. It isn't rocket science. If you give kids guns, they will shoot people. Incidentally, the same goes for grown-ups.

And while I'm ranting on the subject, how is it we can, as a society, spend billions setting up evesdropping services like the famous Eschelon, that listen to everybody's phone calls and read everybody's emails, trying to protect us from the extremely minor 'threat' of terrorism, but we can't use the same technology to monitor the Web for kids who openly brag that they are going to shoot their classmates? Like the German killer-nutcase did seven hours before he went on the rampage in Winnenden- and as so many others do. If we're going to lose all our privacy to the NSA and MI5 anyway, why can't they at least do something useful with their supercomputers like stopping assholes shooting children.

End of rant. Thank you for your patience.

So now I'm a writer. Maybe.

Thing is, I write all the time. I write this stuff. I write stories. I write books. Trouble is, I'm a disillusioned, cynical writer who feels that getting anything published is such a lottery that it isn't worth even trying. I don't buy lottery tickets, or scratchies, or raffle tickets, and I don't submit my writing to publishers for the same reason - the odds are too long.

So how come I'm here at a 'writer's retreat' on beautiful Bribie Island off the Queensland coast? Well, it's a long story - which I won't bore you with - but, basically, I won the lottery (a writing competition) and the prize was this.

And for the first time in my life I have spoken to a publisher, a very charming lady called Bernadette Foley at Orbit (the speculative fiction bit of Hatchette Livre in Australia). Not only did I speak to her but we spoke about my latest manuscript - a novel called Time and Tyde - which she'd read! What's more, she had read it carefully and said such flattering things about it that she's achieved the unthinkable and given me hope. Of course, I may live to curse her for toying with my emotions like this, but right now I'm thinking 'Well, maybe I should give this publication thing another go.'

And what does that mean in practical terms? Have I rushed out and stuffed a dozen envelopes with short stories and novels and cast them on the winds of chance? Not a bit of it. What I've actually done is to start another blog (how many is that now?) This one, called 'Graham Storrs' (that's me, by the way) is intended to chart my progress as I try to get Time and Tyde published and to talk about my other literary endeavours.

It seems us writers need to market ourselves. Our names must become a brand. Our work must generate 'buzz'. So I thought I'd start with a bit of a blog, just to get the ball rolling. Later - probably if the book is published - I might start a whole website. But let's not go mad, eh?

So, if you'd like to follow the ups and downs of my budding literary career, you might like to click your way across to Graham Storrs: The Blog and scratch your itch. And, for the dedicated reader of Waving Not Drowning (that's this blog for those who don't read banners) don't worry. All the juicy stuff in my life will still be here.

Scramjets Are Taking Off

I've been watching Australia's work on scramjets with interest for a few years now, mildly pleased that the country is doing something vaguely space-related. A recent milestone in this work is a successful test-flight, a couple of days ago, of a scramjet that took off from Woomera, South Australia and flew at Mach 10 at a height of 530 km before falling to the ground (as planned).

Now Mach 10 is fast but not nearly as fast as these things could go. Speeds of up to Mach 25 are considered possible, and this, they say, would dramatically reduce the cost of putting a payload into orbit (for which a speed of Mach 30 is needed – just a bit of an extra nudge from a rocket booster would do the trick) and would revolutionise commercial air travel.

But would it?

Scramjets are essentially simple devices. You push air into one end of a tube at supersonic speeds (between Mach 5 and Mach 7 – so you need to strap on a rocket or a ramjet to get them started), pass it through a constriction to compress it a bit, then burn a fuel with it (hydrogen, say) and vent the exhaust gasses (now moving much faster than the intake speed) out the back. The complexity lies in managing the supersonic flow of air and burning fuel in the engine, ensuring a complete mix and burn of the fuel within the engine during the very brief period that is available, and finding designs, materials and cooling systems that can cope with the extreme heat that is generated by friction with the air. Pushing a scramjet along at Mach 25 generates similar amounts of heat to a spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere – and for considerably longer if the often-quoted trip-times of 2 hours between Sydney and LA are ever achieved.

So, you need to use a rocket to get it airborne and going fast enough to work, when it's working, you're barrelling through the upper atmosphere like a meteorite, and then you need some other kind of engine to get it back to a safe landing (unless you glide it down like a space shuttle – with all the air traffic control problems that would cause!) Even if you weren't considering putting people inside such a vehicle and planned to use it to put payloads in space, you now need two rocket engines (one for take-off and one for orbital insertion) and you have two periods of re-entry-style heating to worry about (a scramjet can't just go straight up like a rocket – it hasn't got the thrust required – so it needs to travel along in the atmosphere until it has built up enough speed). Given the problems NASA has with the shuttle and its ceramic heat shield, I can't see a future scramjet being any less problematic.

Nevertheless, once all these difficulties have been surmounted, scramjets should be able to get into space more cheaply than a rocket could, and they should be able to get from one point on the Earth to another in dramatically shorter times than even the best military jets. Which sort of explains why, despite all the talk of revolutionising commercial air travel, it is the USA's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation which were the collaborator's on Saturday's test.