jims musings

Today’s mood: stunned.
Wow. Seems some peo­ple have really lost their grip:

Many Dutch pre­pare for 2012 apoc­a­lypse
Pub­lished: June 23, 2008 at 7:25 PM
AMSTERDAM, Nether­lands, June 23 (UPI) — Thou­sands of peo­ple in the Nether­lands say they expect the world to end in 2012, and many say they are tak­ing pre­cau­tions to pre­pare for the apoc­a­lypse.
The Dutch-language de Volk­skrant news­pa­per said it spoke to thou­sands of believ­ers in the impend­ing end of civ­i­liza­tion, and while the­o­ries on the sup­posed cat­a­stro­phe var­ied, most tied the 2012 date to the end of the Mayan cal­en­dar, Radio Nether­lands reported Mon­day.
De Volk­skrant said many of those inter­viewed are stock­ing up on emer­gency sup­plies, includ­ing life rafts and other equip­ment.
Some who spoke to the news­pa­per were opti­mistic about the end of civ­i­liza­tion.
“You know, maybe it’s really not that bad that the Nether­lands will be destroyed,” Petra Faile said. “I don’t like it here any­more. Take immi­gra­tion, for exam­ple. They keep let­ting peo­ple in. And then we have to build more houses, which makes the Nether­lands even heav­ier. The coun­try will sink even lower, which will make the flood­ing worse.“

I love it. Where to even begin the mock­ing? Do I start with the idi­otic belief that the Mayans some­how knew the world would end in 2012? Or that idea that the Nether­lands are a real drag now, with all those lousy immi­grants? How about all those heavy homes? Will a life raft really save you if your coun­try slips beneath the waves overnight? What sort of equip­ment do you need to sur­vive the End Of The World? A chain­saw? (Good for res­cues and for mow­ing down zombies!)

Just for the record, though, the west­ern Nether­lands are sink­ing because of geo­logic forces. The fact that the ground is sub­sid­ing even more due to the removal of ground­wa­ter isn’t help­ing. The San Joaquin val­ley in Cal­i­for­nia has sub­sided some­thing like 50 feet or more because of the removal of ground­wa­ter.

So… surf­ing around my favorite sites, I came across a lit­tle review and com­men­tary on Robert Kaplan’s book The Ends of the Earth. The book sounds inter­est­ing; what really caught my atten­tion was a pro­found obser­va­tion made by Kaplan: that basic main­te­nance– paint, pick­ing up the trash, etc. — is a sign of a belief in the future.
In other cor­ners of the earth, main­te­nance is not done. While in Africa twenty years ago, I saw hun­dreds of dead cars scat­tered in ran­dom places along town roads and in the mid­dle of the Serengeti. Some had obvi­ously been sit­ting for years. I learned that most of the cars merely needed sim­ple main­te­nance– a water pump, a new bat­tery, a car­bu­re­tor adjust­ment. At the time, these prob­lems were chalked up to a lack of edu­ca­tion, although that didn’t seem cor­rect. After all, not every­one in Amer­ica knows how to fix a car.
In the years since, I have learned that there are many cul­tural and per­sonal atti­tudes which are essen­tially defeatist. “That’s how life is”, “I’m a loser” or “God wills it to be so.” For what­ever rea­son, how many bil­lions trap them­selves into poverty or accep­tance of the sta­tus quo and put forth no effort to change things?
The Amer­i­can spirit, some­times described as a “can-do atti­tude”, is the oppo­site per­spec­tive. “I can change this, things can be bet­ter” is the hope­ful, opti­mistic pos­ture which seems to be com­mon in west­ern soci­eties. Per­haps this is why democ­ra­cies tend to elect lead­ers who present a belief in a brighter future. We respond to opti­mism and eschew pes­simism.
Indeed, this is a core mes­sage of Chris­tian­ity. A faith which informs us that a bet­ter world exists beyond the one we now inhabit. That if we fall short of divine com­mand­ment, we can pick our­selves up, repent, and keep climb­ing up. That ulti­mately, the wrongs of the world will be set right and we will be rewarded for our efforts. This requires a deep belief in the future– believ­ing that more exists past the por­tal of death.
It seems to me that a faith­less or pes­simistic atti­tude would dis­cour­age under­stand­ing of seem­ingly sim­ple con­cepts like Cause and Effect. If you believe that you are going to fail a test, why would you study? If you believe every­thing is in the hands of God, and there is noth­ing you can do about it, then why try? If you believe the future is fore­or­dained, then why lift a fin­ger? Per­haps this would also encour­age oth­er­wise ridicu­lous behav­iors– that with­out some magic tal­is­man or rab­bits foot, events will be stacked against you? I can see how a fear of the future could encour­age super­sti­tious beliefs and a accep­tance of mag­ics… tired and fear­ful, peo­ple will turn to the super­nat­ural in a futile effort to bring rain, encour­age love or avenge wrongs.
Another response to the faith of fail­ure is blame. Shift­ing respon­si­bil­ity for self to another per­son is a poi­son that leads to accep­tance of vic­tim­hood. This is really just a ver­sion of “God did this to me,” except you now can point your fin­ger and feel hate. I can only imag­ine what a dark and scary world these peo­ple see.
Unfor­tu­nately, chick­ens, can­dles and beads do not change the future or improve life. Nor does the expec­ta­tion that some­body else is respon­si­ble to fix your life prob­lems. The most pow­er­ful magic that a per­son can wield is work– work to make, work to repair, work to improve. We are agents respon­si­ble to cre­ate our own future.
This is the foun­da­tion of west­ern civ­i­liza­tion, that a per­son has con­trol over their future. Beware those that would have you sur­ren­der your future– through debt, through drugs, through sub­tle per­sua­sion over the ulti­mate good that will be done… once you relin­quish your future, you have sur­ren­dered your self and will become nothing.

Apolo­gies. I’ve been work­ing on this entry for some time.

Power. Our mod­ern world depends on vast expen­di­tures of energy. Petro­leum and coal have been the key sources of that energy until very recently.

Now, for a vari­ety of rea­sons, it is becom­ing imper­a­tive to find other sources of energy. Because of the stag­ger­ing scale of the need, these energy sources must be large. Because of the costs of dis­tri­b­u­tion, they must also be rel­a­tively com­pact and close (within a few hun­dred miles) to the place of con­sump­tion. Because of the large amounts of power used, the cost of power must be low, bor­der­ing on free.
Many alter­na­tive energy sources have been men­tioned, but only two have any chance of meet­ing our needs: Solar and Nuclear. All other energy sources– bio­fuel, wind, tidal, geot­her­mal, etc. all fall short in terms of scale, size or loca­tion. Nuclear and Solar are where its at.
The pri­mary con­cerns with nuclear energy are the ‘side effects’: waste, poten­tial for scary dis­as­ters and ugly loom­ing power plants that nobody wants in their back­yard. On the pos­i­tive side of the scale is the abil­ity to put a nuclear plant almost any­where and the great safety record estab­lished over the last 30 years by the nuclear power indus­try. The nuclear waste issue could be largely fixed if we allowed repro­cess­ing of spent fuel rods. (Pres­i­dent Ford banned repro­cess­ing by pres­i­den­tial direc­tive in 1976; Rea­gan lifted the ban in 1981, but the busi­ness cli­mate for estab­lish­ing repro­cess­ing plants has been less than great since then.) Other nations with nuclear plants reprocess their fuel and vastly reduce their radioac­tive waste as a result.
Solar has a good rep­u­ta­tion but very poor effi­ciency, so the cost of solar elec­tric­ity is quite high. Large areas of land are needed, and large stor­age mech­a­nisms and sub­stan­tial excess capac­ity is needed to man­age cloudy days, night­time and other prob­lems. The Nel­lis Solar Power Plant, the largest in the North Amer­ica, cov­ers 140 acres and pro­vides 25% of the power for the base and its 12,000 peo­ple. Run­ning with those num­bers– 140 acres to pro­vide power for 6,000 peo­ple (I’m guess­ing an 24-hour air­base uses more power than a neigh­bor­hood with the same num­ber of peo­ple)- New York City (with 8.2 mil­lion peo­ple) would require around 300 square miles for a sim­i­lar sys­tem. Need­less to say, solar power has prob­lems.
So, right now at least, Nuclear power is the only way for us to go.
For­tu­nately, there are moves in this direc­tion. Sev­eral appli­ca­tions to build new nuclear plants, the first in 30 years, are wind­ing their way through the approvals process now.
For the deep future, a gen­er­a­tion or more from now, even Nuclear will not be suf­fi­cient. As glob­al­iza­tion con­tin­ues its course, and as the pop­u­la­tion of the earth increases its use of energy, we will not be capa­ble of gen­er­at­ing all the power we need here on earth. We must go to space.
In orbit, were grav­ity is not a con­cern and weather and night­time are almost nonex­is­tent, giant solar pan­els could be built. Using microwaves (in the radio range, not water fre­quen­cies, to avoid cook­ing things), the elec­tric­ity will be beamed to earth where it will be cap­tured by recten­nas. All this needs is reli­able and rel­a­tively cheap access to space, but space is where solar really can shine (haha). With­out the atten­u­a­tion from atmos­phere, and free from the con­straints of land usage, space-based solar can pro­vide reli­able power any­where on the planet.
The polit­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions are sub­stan­tial, as well. The abil­ity to pro­vide power, whether per­ma­nently or in time of cri­sis, would be a sub­stan­tial ‘soft’ power to wield. Large amounts of power enable nearly mirac­u­lous things; water short­ages become uncom­mon through desalin­iza­tion. Refrig­er­a­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, com­pu­ta­tion and man­u­fac­tur­ing become cheaper. The envi­ron­ment ben­e­fits as well, with a reduc­tion in earth-based power gen­er­a­tion (and the reduc­tion in related drilling and mining).

Mate­ri­als and ref­er­ences:
The case for solar power from space
Space-Based Solar Power As an Oppor­tu­nity for Strate­gic Security

From Mr. Obama (quoted widely around the web):

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other coun­tries are going to say OK”

Under­stand­ably, waste and glut­tony are bad things, and I’ve no con­cerns there. What does worry me is the atti­tude from a would-be pres­i­dent that some­how the feel­ings of other coun­tries should have a para­mount role in US pol­icy. If Mr. Obama had stated it this way:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … its tremen­dously waste­ful and Amer­i­cans can do better.”

Per­haps I’d be inter­ested in what he has to say if deeper atti­tudes weren’t so anti-American.
Anti-American how, Jim? What a hor­ri­ble thing to say, you insen­si­tive clod!
Anti-American in this way: I believe in an Amer­ica were indi­vid­ual rights are pro­tected, where the pow­ers of gov­ern­ment are lim­ited, and cit­i­zens reap the rewards of their labor. Gov­ern­ment is small, Jus­tice is equal and cit­i­zen­ship means something.

The United States of Amer­ica gained its posi­tion in the world through the Con­sti­tu­tion. The far­ther we drift from the what our found­ing fathers built, the far­ther we will be from the coun­try we want. As long as the lib­eral left con­cerns itself with non­re­al­ity, and the con­ser­v­a­tive right focuses on impos­ing on oth­ers what Amer­i­cans would not accept, we will remain in a pre­car­i­ous place. This coun­try is divided because most have been per­suaded that fol­low­ing the polit­i­cal right or left is the Solu­tion, when in real­ity that– devi­a­tion from the Con­sti­tu­tion– is the prob­lem. We see this reflected by inter­na­tional polls– peo­ple don’t like Amer­ica. Sup­pos­edly Amer­ica was loved in the past– but what has changed? Sim­ply, we are not the same coun­try we were 50 years ago.

This coun­try is rapidly mov­ing towards a deci­sion point: either we become a social­ist democ­racy, some­what like Israel, or we become a demo­c­ra­tic empire, some­thing the world has not yet seen and which will likely be short lived. A return to the Repub­lic is very unlikely at this point. The for­mer involves a renun­ci­a­tion of our global super­power sta­tus (we can’t pay for every­thing) and the later will be marked when crim­i­nal charges are seri­ously antic­i­pated against an out­go­ing president.

I have a voice in my head.
Some peo­ple might worry about hav­ing a Voice, but its really not bad. Its like hav­ing a friendly Jiminy Cricket on my shoul­der, giv­ing help­ful advice. Over the years, watch­ing peo­ple, I’ve begun to think that every­one has a voice.
My voice is the voiceover from Home Depot com­mer­cials. It tells me to fix things… I think my wife’s voice is Mr. Clean. What is your voice? Though Tony the Tiger would be grrrreat!, but I would really feel badly for you if it was Paul Reubens.
What is your voice?

Peo­ple just don’t under­stand drag. I know it’s not exactly an intu­itive con­cept, the fric­tion induced by a pass­ing fluid, but jeep­ers, can’t peo­ple think about drag just a lit­tle bit?
I’m not even talk­ing mach tran­si­tion drag, where shock waves and reflected shock waves need to be con­sid­ered, let alone high-mach drag where the heat from fric­tion can melt alu­minum and steel. Just your every­day basic drag, which of course increases with the square of veloc­ity.
In short, the big­ger the thing, and the flat­ter the front, the more drag it will have.
Okay?

I have a house. I just bought it, actu­ally, and I think it is a fine place to be. It was built before Rea­gan told Gor­bachev to “tear down this wall”. Com­pared to homes built today, my home is ruggedly built with lots of solid wood beams, rather than lam­i­nate ‘engi­neered lum­ber.‘
In con­trast to the con­struc­tion of the house, the schmo who installed the ven­ti­la­tion ducts leaves much to be desired. I have spent many hours inspect­ing, dis­as­sem­bling and reassem­bling ducts in the base­ment. I am aston­ished how poorly some things have been done:

• The flue which con­nects the fur­nace to the roof vent was dis­con­nected, expos­ing occu­pants of the house to car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing. A small pos­si­bil­ity per­haps, but this lit­tle over­sight could have killed someone.
• The ducts which dis­trib­ute hot and cold air through the house are leaky and often mis-connected, by which I mean giant holes with air pour­ing out into wall spaces. Pre­sum­ably the mice were comfortable.
• Other ducts go… nowhere, sim­ply dis­ap­pear­ing into walls with no appar­ent outlet.

It is obvi­ous that the ducts were not done right, and have been wrong since before the Berlin wall fell. The exces­sive cost to heat and cool this house over the inter­ven­ing years must surely run into the many thou­sands of dol­lars. I am now spend­ing tens of hours to fix, inso­far as pos­si­ble, these prob­lems.
Com­pared to the triv­ial min­utes it would have taken to do it right the first time, my sit­u­a­tion is a fiasco of won­drous pro­por­tions…
Doing it right the first time can really pay off.

Con­tin­u­ing in the vein of What Every Adult Should Know about Tech­nol­ogy, I must de-mystify how elec­tron­ics work.
It is not lit­tle gnomes. Not even really lit­tle gnomes.
Most peo­ple are under the delu­sion that ‘elec­tric­ity’ or ‘elec­trons’ or ‘tran­sis­tors’ are involved. I will for­give those guilty of the inter­mis­sion of thought this silly benighted belief implies.
No, ‘elec­tron­ics’, despite the decep­tive name, rely upon a mag­i­cal blue smoke invented (some say dis­cov­ered) in 1784 by Sir George Philo­dan­derthop, Fifth Earl of Buck­ing­ham­sire. It was quite acci­den­tal, appar­ently. All those poor sheep…
…but any­way, before get­ting side­tracked with that story, mod­ern soci­ety owes much to Sir Phi­lan­der­erpork­chop. With­out his magic blue smoke, where would we be? Descen­dants of Ben­jamin Franklin would be frit­ter­ing away their time with kites and keys and light­ning to this very day. Indeed, a myr­iad of clever lit­tle devices sim­plify our lives and bring hap­pi­ness to our souls. Our night skies are illu­mi­nated, our ears and eyes are enter­tained, and the com­forts of our lives mul­ti­plied. Three cheers for Sir Plumber­strop!
Unfor­tu­nately, the secret of Blue Smoke is tightly con­trolled by a close-knit cabal of greedy cor­po­ra­tions and shad­owy gov­ern­ment fig­ures, secretly bent on destroy­ing human­ity and the world. Known as ‘Repub­li­cans’ or ‘Cap­i­tal­ists’, these Machi­avel­lian char­ac­ters sad­dle us with coun­ter­fac­tual con­fab­u­la­tions of ‘elec­tric­ity’ and so forth. What are they really incin­er­at­ing in those tartarean ‘power plants’ of theirs? Endan­gered species, that’s what! Start­ing with the highly flam­ma­ble dodo bird, these pan­de­mo­niac plu­to­crats are method­i­cally destroy­ing the ani­mal king­dom. Baby harp seals, spot­ted owls, bald eagles (really, who wants a bald bird?), polar bears, dol­phins (you think that’s ‘Tuna’ you’re eat­ing?), whales (burn­ing those bad boys in oil lamps wasn’t fast enough), panda bears (they’re fin­ger Ling-Ling good!), rhi­nos and Nean­derthals– just to name a few– are cur­rently being con­sumed in their mad quest for ‘power’. Hah! All in the name of ‘elec­tric­ity’.
You can see right through their scheme. Haven’t you ever burned out a mixer, or spilled water on a so-called ‘elec­tric’ device? What hap­pens then? The magic blue smoke gets out, of course!

The first thing to know is about Tech­nol­ogy is that it con­tin­u­ally changes. This is partly the nature of the beast, because new knowl­edge and dis­cov­er­ies enable new things, and partly because cap­i­tal­ist mar­kets have learned to use tech­nol­ogy change to foist new prod­ucts on the masses. Thus, we end up with the 2008 iPod, which does much the same thing as a 1908 phono­graph.
I know which one I’d rather jog with, how­ever.
So, tech­nol­ogy changes, con­stantly. What’s next?
As alluded to pre­vi­ously, new tech­nolo­gies are being har­nessed to pro­vide ser­vices and devices that you want– even if you didn’t know you wanted them. Thus, we have credit cards, fresh fruit in our gro­cery stores all year, dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, highly secure quan­tum encryp­tion between banks to pro­tect our finan­cial trans­ac­tions, and high-definition dig­i­tal tele­vi­sion deliv­ered via satel­lite trans­mis­sion so we can see every wrin­kle on Katie Couric’s face. Unfor­tu­nately, these same tech­nolo­gies are har­nessed to be used against us, and we end up with spam, com­puter viruses, iden­tity theft, incred­i­bly potent weapons, and Brit­ney Spears. Not to men­tion acci­dents or unin­tended side effects, like Cher­nobyl, thalido­mide and our Dis­pos­able Econ­omy.
So, watch out, tech­nol­ogy is work­ing for you and against you. I’m going to address the ‘watch out’ part in the fol­low­ing para­graphs; I’m assum­ing you, like me, enjoy the ben­e­fits of tech­nol­ogy. What would Cae­sar have given for a daily hot shower in his room?
Most of us have per­sonal com­put­ers, if only to send and receive email. Some­times we use them to work out taxes, write jour­nals and man­age dig­i­tal pic­tures or more advanced things. You need to know that your com­puter is a pop­u­lar point of attack.
First, think of your com­puter as a work­room. It is a place in your home where you do things and keep lots of infor­ma­tion lying around. Thieves want to get in there and see if you have some­thing they want.
Through email and even web pages, thieves can attack your com­puter. Just like pick­ing the lock on a door, they can poke around your com­puter until they find a way in. Some­times you even open the door for them by open­ing an email from some­one you do not know. Com­put­ers can work so fast that the bad guys can be inside your com­puter before you fin­ish click­ing on that attach­ment in your email.
So, basic rules for your computer:

1. Use a good virus scan­ner. I use AVG, but there are many others.
2. Don’t open email attach­ments from peo­ple you don’t know. Period. Most of the jokes and videos aren’t that funny, anyway.
3. Again, don’t open that email.
4. When send­ing email out to a group of peo­ple, use the CC (“Car­bon Copy”) box. This will send out indi­vid­ual emails to each per­son. This pro­tects peo­ple, because if you don’t use CC, and one of your recip­i­ents is com­pro­mised, you may have just fed your email list to a spammer.
5. Have a sec­ond email address, like Johnny_no_spam@hotmail.com, that you use on web­sites that want an email address from you. Then spam goes to that address, not your real one.
6. Use good pass­words. I use three– one for highly secure stuff, like my bank and invest­ments, a medium one for shop­ping, and a sim­ple one for places that don’t really mat­ter. I use pass­words that are a phrase, but with let­ters replaced with sym­bols, like this: v3ry_53cur3, or Very_Secure.
7. Keep your data safe. Hard dri­ves do crash, or are some­times destroyed by viruses. Get an exter­nal hard drive and copy the data from your com­puter the exter­nal drive every few weeks to months, depend­ing on how fast you gen­er­ate new mate­r­ial. By the way, this also makes it eas­ier when you upgrade computers.
8. Use Help. Every­one knows a com­puter geek. Geeks get asked lots of ques­tions about com­put­ers and how to do some­thing. Geeks mind this, and we don’t… we like to help and make things work, it’s what we do, after all… but please, con­sult the online help first. If you watch, it’s what a geek does, half the time any­way. Some­times more, but we hide when we do it so as not to offend.
9. Don’t open attach­ments from peo­ple you don’t know.
10. Per­cus­sive main­te­nance rarely fixes elec­tron­ics or other high-tech items.

Just wanted to point out an arti­cle dis­cussing some, um, holes, in the global tem­per­a­ture records.

The short story, NASA’s records are incom­plete, incon­sis­tent and do not sup­port the con­clu­sion that the earth is warm­ing. Bunkum I say!

Another ques­tion for warm­ing advo­cates: exactly why are we con­cerned with the tem­per­a­ture increas­ing a few degrees, again? Was the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury some­how at some ideal tem­per­a­ture level?