The topics:

• The Small Talk:
  • Phil has enjoyed keeping it in Vegas.

  • Stephen saw Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut

    He was very impressed (4 out of 5 stars). Other reviewers liked it as well:

    In recent years, the term "director's cut" has undergone a devaluation. It has become a marketing term, appended to DVDs to enhance their salability. Often, a "director's cut" will be essentially the same as the theatrical cut, except with a few trivial snipped scenes restored. It's no wonder that consumers can no longer tell the difference between a "director's cut," an "extended edition," and an "unrated version." Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut, is a rare title that deserves the label. Radically altered from the financially unsuccessful version that unspooled in theaters in the summer of 2005, Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut restores 45 minutes of footage and transforms a compelling-yet-frustrating movie into a breathtaking epic.

  • Stephen is also looking forward to Tuesday's release of Lonesome Dove on DVD and, for the first time, on Blu-Ray. Other firsts: its digitally remastered, its in widescreen, and its got 5.1 stereo sound.

• The Big Talk. Solving the world's problems the Speculist Way:
  • Solving cancer. Cancer Immunotherapy. Zheng Cui is developing GIFT therapy. We use cells from patients that show a high degree of cancer immunity. Those cells are transfused into cancer patients. This therapy has been very successful in mice. Its being tested on humans this summer.

    Another group is tried something very similar. They took immune cells from a cancer patient. Grew them in vitro, and injucted them back into the patient. The patient is now in remission.

  • Curing infectious disease. DARPA's "Unconventional Pathogens Countermeasure" program. More here.

    Big news on HIV/AIDS. Doctors have engineered an abzyme that disables the AIDS virus. This is in human trials now.

  • Ending War. Suraya, nonseriously, suggests we nuke 'em. Being geeks, Phil and Stephen, talked seriously about why we don't do that. If "successful" and you kill everyone else without being taken out by a counter-strike, you'll have civil war. And Stephen thinks it would be bad for business.

    Will Brown called in to talk about War. He believes that war is intrinsic to the human condition. We humans engage in positional advancement with and against our fellow humans.

    Phil points out that democracies don't go to war with democracies. He suggests that those countries still advance their positions with and against other free countries, but in other ways - economically, memetically. Will agreed and gave an example of how Alaska just negotiated a natural gas pipeline through Canada to the lower 48.

    Phil thinks China is advancing their position with the Olympics.

    Stephen pointed out that our tolerance for losing soldiers in war is less. We expect to accomplish more with fewer deaths. More soldiers died in civil war battles than in the entire Iraq War.

    Will thinks we expect technology - UAV's and even armed robots on the ground - to take up the slack. He believes that its important for the world to believe we are capable of waging war. This belief keeps the peace. Check out Will's post "Will There be War?"

    Stephen believes we move away from war via three things - democratic development, economic development, and education of the populace.

  • Cleaning up the Environment. Stephen believes that the developed societies (that ones that fight fewer wars) require a lot of energy. But producing energy can be dirty. Cleaner methods are available though - wind, solar, nuclear. And, ironically, developed countries are cleaner in today's world than the poorer countries. Stephen thinks its because they can afford to care.

    Phil brings up the other environmental problem - our waste. He believes that waste will be a huge resource in the future. Waste can be used to make fuel or could be the raw materials to make new goods.

    Even the old means of producing power - like making electricity with coal powered plants - can be made cleaner by using the smoke as a resource. The CO2 from the smoke could be used to make fuel with algae.

    Phil hopes that, ultimately, we can bring back lost species to improve our genetic diversity.

    Stephen points to a May article in Wired. Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green. From the article:

    Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism's sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. We need to take advantage of the energy efficiencies offered by urban density. We must accept that the world's fastest-growing economies won't forgo a higher standard of living in the name of climate science — and that, on the way up, countries like India and China might actually help devise the solutions the planet so desperately needs.

• Stay tuned for Wednesday's announcement on which listener wins the FastForward Radio coffee cup!
  

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Mutlu. The song is "Hello Morning."

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