Another Decaying Orbit?

I was at the Cafe Wellstone in Second Life last night when the Occupation went bad in Oakland and the police attacked, so like just about everyone else there, I pulled up the live feed and tweet channel. The following is what I personally saw.

 The tweets were talking about flash-bangs, rubber bullets, and a sound cannon.  The live feed from ABC was cut.  Howls went up on twitter. The story was that two news choppers were being refueled.  Ten minutes later the live feed came back.  The cops were lined up in a double phalanx, clearly getting ready to move against the protesters.  Then the live feed went down and didn't come back.  The TV news channels and networks were showing nothing of any of this.  Normal moronic programming.   This morning it's obvious that things went from bad to worse last night after the feed was cut. 

I have a few thoughts.

I saw this before with the antiwar movement in the late 60's. It didn't take long for some to become radicalized and start blowing things up. The Occupation threatens the status quo far more than the antiwar movement did.   Look to the early history of the labor movement for a better parallel. 

In the 60's we all saw blood.  We saw war footage every night, we saw the bodies at Kent State, and we saw the police brutality in Chicago.  When's the last time you saw footage or photos from the war in Afghanistan? 

And here's a question:  Is there a difference in kind--a qualitative difference--between governments here in the US and those anywhere else, like Egypt, Israel, or Syria?  I don't know.

You can be sure of one thing, at least.  Your TV is spewing kool-aid.  Turn it off.  Better yet, kill it and toss the corpse into the street.  Look elsewhere to find out what's going on.  Good luck!

Pottery Shards

Chasing a tangent of a conversation this morning, I dug out my dusty copy of The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell  with Bill Moyers.  I spotted something I'd highlighted years ago. Moyers noted that Campbell saw judges in mythological terms. They wear black robes instead of suits.  Why? 

Campbell believed religion and culture and language transmit myths to us, even though we usually don't realize it. Those bits of myth "line the walls of our interior systems of belief, like shards of broken pottery in an archaeological site." But those broken shards aren't just junk. Campbell believed they could be energized through ritual, as for instance in the rituals of a courtroom.

"For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized.  So must much of life today...from religion and war to love and death."

Campbell died in 1987.  I wonder what he'd make of things today; the greed, partisanship, and deepening poverty in the U.S. and much of the world. 

Love is ritualized in marriage. But half those marriages end in divorce. 

How about death?  We have rituals, but compared to what's practiced in much of the world they aren't much.  Ours take a few hours and we pay contractors to do most of the work.  Compared to the way our great-grandparents buried their dead, we've pretty much skipped out on the whole thing. 

War?  Well, the US is at war right now.  But most of us don't give a rat's ass. Most of us don't know anyone who has anything to do with that.  Our wars are handled by a small underclass who ultimately get thrown under the bus when they're done fighting. 

Religion?  Our religions have become mostly politics. 

Does the law have any power today beyond coercion?  You tell me, but it doesn't seem like it. Our behavior, especially at the top of the pile, seems limited only by what we think we can get away with. 

I'm just making observations.  I have no prescription in mind.  Maybe there isn't any for a culture amputated from its own roots and left to find meaning or purpose in nothing more than digital networking and credit ratings.  Our ancestors left the trees so we could invent Facebook.  Great...

Ooooo! Pretty lights!

The subject of "automation addiction" among airline pilots is all over the news suddenly, again.  New report comes out, the media runs with it, and lots of us will care for a few minutes, until our iPhones go off again.  Well, kids, we ought to stop and think about this a little longer. 

Once your next flight leaves the runway, those two pilots in front may only spend about 3 minutes  actually flying that plane.  The rest of the time they'll be "managing" the flight.  Here's one summary of the issue and you can search that subject for yourself and pull up a whole bunch more. 

Just to be clear, here's what those kids in front are "managing."  This is the cockpit of an Airbus A320. The newer Boeing airliners look about the same to those of us who don't actually sit in them for a living.

Cool, huh?  I think so. Ahead warp 6.  Engage, and all that.  I can well imagine how a couple of guys could snuggle up in there, hit the Wild Blue for Minneapolis, put er on "auto", get the laptops out, turn the radios down, and fly right past the whole damn city by a couple of hundred miles. Hell, that could happen to anybody. Perfectly understandable.

That incident had a happy ending.  The aircraft was never out of control, just the crew. Everybody lived.  If you were on Air France 447 you didn't.  Same basic problem, though.  It's all those pretty lights and what they do to us.

The Air France 447 plane (the plane, not the crew) got confused about how fast it was going.  That confusion lasted less than a minute, but the plane shut off its own autopilot and said to the crew, "You drive."  The pilot was clearly confused.  He did exactly the wrong things.  The plane stopped flying and hit the Atlantic at over 10,000 feet per minute.  That wounded duck death plunge from 38,000 feet lasted roughly as long as a top 40 song on the radio.  Find something on your iPod that's 3 min 30 seconds long, and scream through the whole thing.  I picked an old song, "I'll Be Seeing You" by Sinatra. 

What's my point? 

I used to have a head full of phone numbers. If you're old enough, you probably did, too.  But right now, if Peaches the pit bull eats my cell phone, I'll have to dial 411 to get the numbers for my own children.  This isn't funny. Peaches has already chowed down 4 TV remotes in her short life. 

There was a story a few years ago about a group of people who jumped off a perfectly seaworthy yacht in the Atlantic, in good weather, got into a raft, and set off their emergency locator thingy, while the yacht sailed away.  Why?  The GPS quit!  The boat made it home.

Urban legend? Maybe.  But don't be too sure. 

Here's an interesting exercise for you:

Make a list of things you can do well, or subjects you know well, without the help of electronic gadgets, talking robots, wifi hotspots, Blackberrys, or instructions of any kind.  What can you cook without your recipe file?  Could you find the Grand Canyon or Detroit on a paper map, and actually get there without a GPS?   Think you could build a fire in the woods on a rainy day with a pocket knife and three matches?

Science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
 
How we doing, do you think?  It's a noble goal, at least.

Peaches is a bit bigger now. This was January 2011. She had Parvo and was left to die in a vacant apartment.

 
Be well.  Work for peace. Learn something new everyday. Watch your back-trail.  Let's be careful out there. 

Identity: Will the Real Me Please Stand Up?

Yup. Eric Shcmidt, heads up, buddy!  I'm outing myself.

Unless Google changes its hive-mind policy on identity, I'll be moving shortly. Google chairman Eric Schmidt thinks I'm a fraud.  I think he knows better, but he chooses to peddle his snake oil anyway.  He's right about one thing, though:  Google, Google+, Blogspot... these are optional. 

Yesterday in the Guardian there's a good essay on what's wrong with the Google identity policy, and I'm not going to rehash it.  Go read, if you like.  Watch out, though.  It was written by "Cory Doctorow" and I have to wonder about a famous last name like that.  In my youth I sometimes signed unimportant stuff with famous names, just to see if anyone noticed.  (Nobody did.)  Pen names and stage names have been around forever, and I'm not worried about Cory. I don't care what name is on his passport. He wrote a good piece. Mark Twain wrote good pieces, too, but that wasn't the name on his steamboat license.

At least until the Department of Homeland Security came along, there has never been anything illegal about using any name you choose.  Not in the U.S., anyway.  It's done all the time, and has been for centuries. Silence Dogood showed up in 1722 from soon-to-be   notorious bad boy and traitor to his king Ben Franklin.  A pseudonym only becomes an "alias" if you do something illegal.

Okay, as much as I may be a legend in my own mind, especially if drinking heavily, I agree with you.  I'm not Ben Franklin, or even Cory Doctorow.  Not Mark Twain, not Joseph Conrad, not William Shakespeare.  I blog a little bit.  I was in the newspaper business once, long ago.  I could blog under "Wilma Flintstone" and it would make no difference to anyone but me. 

I set this blog up under "Red Sparrow" because I wanted something that sounded vaguely partisan. My mission, after all, and insofar as I have one, is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus by comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.  I'm much better at the second part. What's a poor girl to do? Answer: Play to your strong suit, even if it's only clubs.

It's not too hard to figure out that my "real" identity is Sparrow Letov.  But hold on.  Don't call 411 just yet. Sparrow Letov was born 13 Novemeber 2007, courtesy of Linden Labs and Second Life. At that time, when you created an SL account, you had to pick a last name from a list of a few dozen options.  I picked "Letov" because it's short, easy to remember, has a good beat and it's easy to dance to, and because Russian writers and poets are so wonderfully tragic and romantic.  Or as we used to say back in the day, they're kozmic. 

"Sparrow" has nothing to do with the moronic pirate movies.  That comes from an excellent novel, Bone Dance, by Emma Bull, now sadly out of print. 

If the DHS or the NSA or the FBI want the name printed on my driver's license, that's easy. Linden Labs has that information, and so does Comcast, my ISP for many years.  A few folks in my Google+ circle have it, though very few and only in cases where (a) there's a reason, and (b) trust is pretty damn total.  Of course, the name on my driver's license isn't the same as the ones on either of my two very valid birth certificates.  And those two documents show different names. My old-old passport shows a different name than my old passport. So all you identity wankers who agree with Eric Schmidt, tell me:  What's my real name?  Must be the one on my credit card, huh?

If you've entrusted a bunch of computer geeks and corporate buccaneers at Google and Facebook with your personal information, or hung it out there in public, I think you're a fool, frankly. You've made yourself part of a target-rich environment for every sociopath and evil-doer on the planet.  Good luck. My friends and my family have my phone number and address.  They're free to use them anytime.  And that works both ways. If I went to high school with you in 1963 and we haven't seen each other since, don't expect me to be very interested in what's gone on in your life.  I'm not.  And I'm not interested in telling you about mine.  You're not an "old friend" I can "reconnect" with, you're merely another stranger in this strange land. That's not a bad thing, it's just the way it is.  The past exists only in our minds, and very imperfectly. 

Safety on in the Internet?  Not likely.  Careful as I try to be, anyone who hacks any one of several databases can clean out my debit account.  They could come knocking on my door anytime. So be it.  I'll take those risks.  At least they won't know who's going to answer the door, and they might be surprised. 

Be safe.  Work for peace. Be careful.  It's dangerous out there.

Looking Over the Edge

New Jersey from the ISS.  Very pretty.  But where does the food come from?

In the fantasy land of my own romantic imagination I'm a post-apocalypse kind of gal.  Or  I was until I read The Road.  Or tried to.  Frankly, if I have to choose, I'll take a nice clean asteroid impact anytime, over a wasted planet where we become our own last food supply.  I don't think our prognosis is necessarily terminal, but no pom-poms or snappy cheers from me.  Our response to the unfolding climate disaster, especially, shows that we're collectively not much smarter that those deer I wrote about who yard up and die for lack of critical thinking.  But we might survive what we've done to ourselves. It's possible.

We are developing good technology to solve our energy issues.  We might be able to survive the next couple of centuries' worth of climatic consequences if we move fast enough.  But our core problem is paradoxically the one that's both the easiest and hardest to fix; population growth. I've tried to explore how our energy and population problems are converging. No matter how much sunshine you smoke, it's pretty clear that the rest of this century is liable to be a  horror show. But a lot depends on how fast we can adapt to the end of oil. 

Our brightest hope is hydrogen, the original stuff of the universe. (At least matter-wise.)  This really can be a permanent solution to the energy problem if we get our numbers stabilize at a sustainable level. We just need to find practical technologies for using it.  There's actually a new technology that looks big, as least initially:  nano-porous micro beads.

Cella Energy reportedly has a found a low-cost way to trap hydride compounds inside nano-porous polymer micro beads, thus creating a safe way to store and use hydrogen as safe liquid fuel.

"The hydrogen storage materials are stored at ambient temperatures and pressures, this means that the Cella Energy hydrogen storage materials can be packaged in a regular shaped fuel tank. They do not require the large heavy cylinders designed to withstand high pressures normally associated with hydrogen storage."

Reportedly these micro beads can even be mixed with conventional petroleum fuels and used in existing vehicles with little or no modification.  If this really works and has no unacceptable down-side, this could provide a way to transition off petroleum fuels using existing infrastructure and  resources.  It really could happen, and start happening almost immediately.  Very good news. It could mean we won't have to strip-mine the US and further foul our planetary nest with a massive synthetic fuels program. 

There's still hope for hydrogen fusion, too, although it's hard to be optimistic after 50 years of "just around the corner." 

But we've got to manage our population.  As Issac Asimov and others have pointed out many times, liberty, prosperity, human dignity, and ultimately we ourselves, cannot survive population growth, no matter how slow it may be.  The simple math will kill every last human on earth, just as it did on Easter Island.  For all we know the universe is littered with the ruins of civilizations that did just what we're doing now; ran off the edge of the population cliff at full speed while cutting down every last tree on the island.  Let's hope we can wake up in time. 

San Francisco Bay from the ISS

Be well.  Work for peace.  Keep your powder dry. Don't make babies.   - RS

Consider the Coal-Fired B-52

                            A B-52 flying out of Minot, ND, reportedly on 50-50 synthetic fuel.

There's no such thing as a coal-fired B-52.  Or is there?  It seems there is. 

The US Air Force has been looking at synthetic fuel for years. I found a paper written by Dr Carlo Kopp, a well-known civilian defense analyst and author. His paper, The US Air Force Synthetic Fuels Program, was published by Air Power Australia, an air defense think tank he founded. The paper was last updated in 2008. It's very interesting reading.  I will also point out that the author, Dr. Kopp, is not some cheezy internet blogger pulling nonsense out of his butt. He's a senior member of both the IEEE and the AIAA, and a working computer scientist and EWAR researcher.

He states:

In the US, the Defense Department launched its Assured Fuels Initiative (AFI) in 2001, with the aim of developing domestic sources of clean fuels, using coal and natural gas. This is an ambitious effort intended to break dependency on imported crude oil products. The US Air Force alone burns around 3 billion gallons of aviation kerosene annually, more than half the consumption of the whole US military machine.

Michael A. Aimone, the US Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics, recently commented 'Our goal is by 2025 to have 70 percent of our aviation fuel coming from coal-based sources'. This is an aggressive but clearly very achievable planning goal.

Conventional oil reserves with essentially be gone very soon—within decades. This is no secret except to those who don't want to think about it. For the Peak Oil doomsday theorists, this is the end of the trail for industrial civilization. Well, not so fast. Not quite.

You can't power a jet fighter or a tractor with coal. (Actually, you could a tractor but it would be ugly.) But there are many mature technologies for converting coal, oil shale, and natural gas to liquid fuels just as good as gasoline or diesel. Canada and China are both doing it today. China is investing heavily in this effort.

Kopp gives a good summary of the available technologies. He also makes several striking statements. Here's one:

In terms of coal reserves, the US is well positioned as it is ranked first globally with 26 percent, followed by Russia with 23 percent, China with 12 percent, and Australia with 8 percent. No less importantly, the US has large reserves of oil shale in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, forming the Green River formation, which is estimated to contain around 1.5 trillion barrels of oil, cited as 'more than five times the stated reserves of Saudi Arabia'.

Natural gas as a potential feedstock for synthetic fuels is no less abundant, with Russia ranked first, the US ranked sixth, and Canada nineteenth.

Great news, huh?  We're out of the woods.  The sky isn't falling! 

Not so fast, there, Chicken Little.  You've got that nonsense in your head about "500 years of coal reserves," don't you?  That "500 years" is probably less than 50 when you start plugging in what might happen to demand.   And we're going to have to strip-mine a lot of the country to get at it.  Synthetic fuel production processes are dirty.  Coal mining is dirty.  Environmental concerns?  Forget those.  They're gone.  We can't afford them. We've got a greedy world to fight off, mouths to feed, and a landscape to rape.  You tree-huggers better shut up if you know what's good for you. 

If oil consumption goes up just 7 percent per year, that means it doubles in 10 years.  And we know that globally, it's going up a lot faster than 7 percent. 

Coal fuels most of the power grid in the eastern US, and coal and natural gas together fuel almost all of US electricity production.  Nuclear and renewable sources contribute tiny fractions to the total. That's not likely to change. Right now demand is essentially flat. But consider what happens to demand for coal and gas when we start wholesale conversion to synthetic liquid fuels. 

Let's be conservative and say that as we start a wholesale shift to synthetic fuels, demand for coal increases 10 percent per year for awhile.  That's not much, right?  That's a believable number.  Well, that means we have to double our coal production every 7 years.
Put another way, we will have to mine more coal in the next 7 years than we have so far in our entire history.  That's what "doubling time" means. 

If demand for coal rises 30 percent per year, for even a few years, that means coal production has to double every 70/50 = 2.3 years!   

Here's a last tidbit to consider.  Those nice Canadians have all that oil up there. Right now it looks like a lot, and they're happy to sell it to us. The party is going fine so far.  We buy more oil from Canada than from anyone else.  (Think about that Keystone pipeline again.)  But the US is a greedy energy pig, and one day soon the Canadians may realize that their oil reserves aren't really that big at all.  What happens then? 

Whose Oil Should We Use First?

The graphic above is from our friends at Wiki.  It shows the world's proven oil reserves.  Darker = more.  Let's assume this is reasonably accurate and close enough for our purposes.

First, it's important to understand that oil is running out quickly.  We're at peak world production now, meaning plus or minus perhaps five years.  During the latter part of this century world oil production will be a fraction of what it is today. We have increasing demand pursuing a finite resource and there's only one way that can end.  If you don't believe this, you don't understand exponential growth.  Go here and learn.  It's a little arithmetic lesson by physicist Al Bartlett. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=related 

Of course, you can bat your eyelashes and titter something moronic about never being good at math.  Cute dosen't fix stupid, but that's okay.  You'll be happier if you don't know what's really going on.   

Oil is food.  Agriculture is the process of converting petroleum into food.  World population already exceeds the carrying capacity of the earth by at least 4 billion people. That's how many people eat today only because of oil production.  No oil, no food.  And there are lots more people arriving every day. 

A lot of us have been concerned about the levels of oil imports and the national security implications.  I made some noise about that here, the other day.  I've listened to T. Boone Pikens and wondered why the government isn't listening.  Well, I think I figured it out. 

Imagine you're elected President and you're suddenly confronted with what our intelligence planners know; oil is going to be very, very scarce in only a few decades.  Those intel folks understand exponential growth vs. finite resources every bit as well as Dr. Bartlett in his video.  From a national security standpoint, it's very important to be the last country standing with oil  It makes far more sense to hoard your own reserves now and buy foreign oil in todays dollars, which will be worth less tomorrow through inflation. We're still in deep trouble.  We're still running out.  But the rest of the world may run out before North America does.  We'll fend off mass starvation longer. We'll be able to defend ourselves longer. 

So why doesn't anyone talk about ths?   

Do you want to be a President or politician who stands up and starts telling America that the world really is running out of oil, and your children and grandchildren may well face starvation and a collapse of civilization as we know it?  Do you want to try to explain why we need population decline, not growth?  Or economic contraction rather than expansion? Welcome to recession, the new normal. Would anyone listen?  Is anyone listening to those who are saying it now? 

The data's all there, folks.  It's all available.  Do the math for yourself.  Every major news outlet fails to do the math, or else does the math and then lies for their own purposes. 

Don't drink the kool-aid.  Do the math yourself.