Picture of the Day

Why is democracy messy? Why does it take such a large amount of insult and injury to arouse the populace? Just look at what this woman will soon discover as she attempts to voice her viewpoint.

The state loves to tell you about your "rights" but don't you dare try to exercise them. People are smart enough to know that, so it takes a hell of a lot to arouse the populace. But when it gets outraged, it tends to take down not just the worst of the worst, but most of the worst and even a fair amount of the innocent. A social change is a messy affair. It is so much nicer to use the instruments of democracy to effect change, but when the elites refuse to listen, then you get blood in the streets.

Death & Physics

I enjoy Jenifer Ouillette's Cocktail Physics blog. Here is a bit out of piece she has written on Robert Wilson:

... nobody forgot that the work they were doing at Los Alamos was both vital to national defense, and highly dangerous due to the radioactive substances involved. Wilson recalled his own brush with death while assisting a physicist in the Critical Assemblies Group with another experiment to determine when criticality was reached as one stacked a series of enriched uranium hydride cubes. He was surprised, and a bit dismayed, to find that the group didn't rely on the usual elaborate safety devices commonly used at cyclotron facilities at the time. Instead, the physicist arrived with a simple set-up involving a wooden table, a single neutron counter to monitor criticality, and a whole bunch of cubes of enriched uranium hydride.

Wilson watched, rapt, as the physicist started stacking uranium cubes, and then noticed with alarm that the neutron counter wasn't, well, counting. Upon inspection, he discovered that the voltage supply was burnt out. When the counter was turned back on, it lit up immediately, to Wilson's horror. "A few more cubes and the stack would have exceeded criticality and could well have become lethal," he recalled. Furious, Wilson chewed out the physicist, his division leader, and even raged about it to Oppenheimer himself, but he had to leave for Trinity the very next day, so he let the incident drop. Had he stayed and pursued the matter, Wilson believed, "I might have saved the lives of two people. To this day, the incident is on my conscience."

Those two people were Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. and Louis Slotin, both of whom died of radiation sickness after accidents that occurred while conducting critical experiments with a plutonium core -- known as "tickling the dragon."

More on Louis Slotin from Wikipedia:

On May 21, 1946, with seven other colleagues watching, Slotin performed an experiment that involved the creation of one of the first steps of a fission reaction by placing two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around a plutonium core. The experiment used the same 6.2-kilogram (13.7 lb) plutonium core that had irradiated Harry K. Daghlian, Jr., later called the "Demon core" for its role in the two accidents. Slotin grasped the upper beryllium hemisphere with his left hand through a thumb hole at the top while he maintained the separation of the half-spheres using the blade of a screwdriver with his right hand, having removed the shims normally used. Using a screwdriver was not a normal part of the experimental protocol.

At 3:20 p.m., the screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a "prompt critical" reaction and a burst of hard radiation. At the time, the scientists in the room observed the "blue glow" of air ionization and felt a "heat wave". In addition, Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand. Slotin instinctively jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere and dropping it to the floor, ending the reaction. However, he had already been exposed to a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation. Slotin's radiation dose was about four times the lethal dose, equivalent to the amount that he would have been exposed to by being 1500 m (4800 ft) away from the detonation of an atomic bomb.

As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. Slotin's colleagues rushed him to the hospital, but irreversible damage had already been done. His parents were informed of their son's inevitable death and a number of volunteers donated blood for transfusions, but the efforts proved futile. Louis Slotin died nine days later on May 30, in the presence of his parents. He was buried in Winnipeg on June 2, 1946.

At first, the incident was classified and not made known even within the laboratory; Robert Oppenheimer and other colleagues later reported severe emotional distress at having to carry on with normal work and social activities while they secretly knew that their colleague lay dying.

The core involved was subject to a number of experiments shortly after the end of the war and was used in the ABLE detonation, during the Crossroads series of nuclear weapon testing. Slotin's experiment was set to be the last conducted before the core's detonation and was intended to be the final demonstration of its ability to go critical.

The accident ended all hands-on critical assembly work at Los Alamos. Future criticality testing of fissile cores was done with special remotely controlled machines, such as the "Godiva" series, with the operator located a safe distance away in case of accidents.

One of the jobs I had was software safety for the detrous manipulator being built for the Space Station. It was hard to get the engineers to think hard about "what could go wrong". We are all optimists by nature. We love to extrapolate the upside. It is really hard, however, to think about failure modes, the "what if" when things go wrong. It helps if you've had previous experience to guide you. But the problem with new technology is that it is "new". We all love to see the wonderful new possibilities of the new, but few like to muck around with the grim downside. Worse, when people do consider what can go wrong, they tend to overshoot and come up with real gloom-and-doom scenarios (e.g. gray goo or the singularity) rather than the more mundane cascade of of unlikely faults that have hidden connections that lead you into a major disaster.

Do-Gooders and the Evil They Bring

I was watching the new Ken Burns documentary on the American Prohibition era. It was the result of "do-gooders" who wanted to legislate morality. Their efforts led to deaths from adulterated alcohol, blindness, paralysis. It also led to the rise of organized crime and a couple of thousand gangland killings. It also helped corrupt police forces, the judicial system, and government administrations all across America.

My mind wandered onto this as I was reading stories about 20,000 Ugandan farmers chased off their land by gangs what are selling "carbon credits" for this confiscated land. From the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Land tenure in Uganda is a subject of much dispute, and last year's farming evictions have left 20,000 homeless

...

Longoli and his family of six lost everything last year when, with three months notice, the Ugandan government evicted him and thousands of others from the Mubende and Kiboga districts to make way for the UK-based New Forests Company to plant trees, to earn carbon credits and ultimately to sell the timber.

Today, the village school in Kiboga is a New Forests Company headquarters. More than 20,000 people have been made homeless and Longoli rents a small house in Lubaali village. He says he cannot go back for fear of being attacked.

And as I read the following from the UK Guardian about murders in Honduras as gangs are enforcing land seizures to earn "carbon credits":

EU carbon credits scheme tarnished by alleged murders in Honduras

...

The reported killing of 23 Honduran farmers in a dispute with the owners of UN-accredited palm oil plantations has called into question the integrity of the EU's emission trading scheme (ETS), as carbon credits from the plantations remain on sale.

The "do-gooders" never bother to ponder the possibility of "unintended consequences" from their moral pushiness. All they know is that they have a vision of a "higher morality" and they are going to beat us with sticks until we agree to worship at their twisted view of "the good and moral life". They are a menace with their militant moralizing. History is littered with deaths and injuries of innocents caused by these self-important moral campaigners.

Dominic Streatfeild's "A History of the World Since 9/11"

This is an excellent history of our times. I expected a typical history of events, leaders, and themes. But instead this author presents 8 chapters which introduce a policy stance then burrows down to look at a small handful of "ordinary" people affected by the policy. The author's intent is to lay bare just how badly wrong the "war on terror" has gone. Here is a nice summary of the author's view from the Epilogue:

Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in the products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There's enough to go round.

Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn't.

As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It's one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn't threaten our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

The book has some wonderfuly graphic stories of individuals and the very real effects of 9/11 on them:

• Chapter 1 looks at Bush's dictum that "the rules have changed" and that "we must take the war to them" and that pre-emptive war was necessary. It ties this with a crazy criminal character in Texas who goes unhinged after seeing the towers fall on 9/11 and decides to go after "the enemy". For him this is anybody ethnically Middle Easternish and he ends up killing an innocent immigrant from India, a Hindu. Streatfeild lays out these characters in great detail. The hard struggle by the Hindu to build a life in America and provide a business built on serving his customers. A very nice guy who worked hard but ended up killed by a madman lashing out at "enemies" to pre-empt their attack on his beloved America. A madman with a criminal past and a mind twisted by drug abuse and violence. Tragic.


• Chapter 2 looks at the "gloves are off" and "the rules have changed. It focuses on a family fleeing Iraq prior to 9/11 but who get caught at sea in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and harshly interned by Australia. The Australians tried to turn away the boat but the desperate immigrants tried everything to prevent being turned away. The brutal treatment left many deeply injured, some insane, from the years spent in limbo under vicious treatment by an anti-refugee policy by Australia. Tragic.


• Chapter 3 looks at the idea that the "war on terror" had to be fought viciously and that all deaths were the fault of al Qaeda and not of those in the West responding to having been attacked. This chapter looks at the excited and joyous planning of a wedding in Afghanistan. Unfortunately this was in the home province of Mullah Omar and the Americans with their "too little boots on the ground" incompetent intelligence decide that Mullah Omar will show up at the wedding. So they unleash the hell fire of US weapons on innocent people 48 were killed and 117 wounded. This disturbing story is only one of many, many in Afghanistan over a decade of "mistakes" by Americans in their war against a nearly invisible enemy.


• Chapter 8 looks at the "unintended consequences" of a war. In this case, it focuses on the world-wide program to eradicate polio. This program was within a year or two or three of success when 9/11 happened. Sadly, it now appears the world has utterly failed to eradicate polio and since there is now billions with no experience with the disease and many hundreds of millions of children with no immunity, the disease is poised to strike back worse than it was during the height of the great polio epidemics of the mid-20th century. This chapter focuses on the tale of a very dedicated, wonderful doctor who struggles to complete the fight against polio in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Sadly, the Muslims come to believe that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize them and that the drugs given to them are adulterated with female hormones and pig fat, they refuse the vaccine. Worse, they blow up the car in which the vaccine team is traveling and kill several including this doctor. Another tragic "consequence" of the war.

The other chapters focus on big policy themes and make them real by looking at the level of individual lives. It is all very tragic. But it makes this book especially powerful and poignant. Wars have consequences. How you fight them is very important. Sadly, the Bush administration was cavalier (cowboyish?) in its conduct of a war that has now killed hundreds and soon thousands more than were ever killed on 9/11.

One final quote from the book to hammer home the obscenities that have come out of "the war on terrorism":

Meanwhile, most of these nations seized on the exceptional nature of the post-9/11 threat, then used it as a justification for enacting domestic legislation that aped US policy regarding human rights: restrictions of rights for foreigners and asylum seekers; indefinite incarceration of suspects without trial; withdrawal of the right to an attorney; suspension of habeas corpus; enhanced surveillance techniques. The list went on and on.

'I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups to kill and destroy,' conceded Lord Hoffmann in a famous judgement on the incarceration of terror suspects without trial in the United Kingdom in December 2004. 'But they do not threaten the life of the nation.' The real threat to the United Kingdom, he warned, 'comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.'

Five years later, the Human Rights Council's Eminent Panel of Jurists on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights agreed. After an exhaustive three-year study of the effects of the War on Terror on human rights globally, the Panel concluded that human rights protections, assembled over the last sixty years, had been corroded to the point where the international legal order was in jeopardy. Especially worrying was that the nations that had previously argued for the primacy of human rights were the very same nations now busily opting out of them. The result was 'perhaps one of the most serious challenges ever posed to the integrity of a system carefully constructed after the Second World War.'

Everybody should read this book. It will make them sit up and pay attention to the "war" that has been conducted "on their behalf". It will change their way of viewing the world.

Living in an Economic Paradox

Here is a bit of a presentation by Paul Krugman explaning the "paradox of thrift", "paradox of deleveraging", "paradox of deflation", and "debt deflation" ...

Tim Harford's "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure"

This is an excellent survey of adaptation as a strategy to deal with complex environments in which a top-down rational planning simply can't find solutions. There are many excellent stories, but this one bit speaks to me, a 1960s generation person:

When the US Army faced the 'disruptive innovation' of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army's hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, "I'll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war."

That ranks up there with the infamous statement by a US Major "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." as reported by Peter Arnett.

This book is richly illustrated with examples of how an evolutionary strategy can find a solution where managerial dictum or top-down planning fails miserably. Some of the best examples are from business.

He does a very good job of reviewing:

• The disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and how a bottom-up effort by rebellious colonels and captains finally changed the US military tactics off their dangerous track and toward a more successful approach.


• The regulatory failures and coupled risks that led a meltdown in a constrained "sub-prime real estate" market to the globe straddling collapse of financial markets in 2008. He walks the reader through the failure to listen to whistle-blowers and the reluctance to effectively change the banking rules to prevent another catastrophe.


• The mindless simplifications of a greenhouse gas enthusiast compared to the known complexities of trying to identify a proper "green strategy". He walks through a day's choices of "green alternatives" and shows why each and every one was wrong because the underlying reality is far more complex than the simplistic green enthusiast ever could imagine.


• He examines nuclear safety and shows how the various catastrophes were waiting to happen because the systems are designed with too much complexity and coupled failure modes.


• He looks at two big oil rig diasters, the Piper Alpha in July 1988, and the Deepwater Horizon in April 2010. He walks through the failure in design and safety systems. He shows why these were accidents waiting to happen.

I like his discussion of Philip Tetlock who did a scientific study of the ability of pundits, gurus, and consultants to provide accurate predictions of the future. In a previous post I reviewed Dan Gardiner's book "Future Babble" that explores this topic more deeply.

I worked in a company where they paid lip service to the idea that "there is no failure, just a learning opportunity" and that projects, especially in the R&D lab, should expect a high failure rate. But in reality, failures were punished, so creativity was suppressed and lessons really weren't learned. Tim Harford gives a glowing review of Google as a learning environment with adaptive engineering practices, but I'm cynical. It is hard for managers to accept failure. Corporations are always going to get atherosclerosis. The big old successful corporations are always going to fall to the young, rising whippersnappers.

I also worked closely with QA (Quality Assurance) people and watched them play their role. In theory they were the frontline defence against obfuscation and deception on the part of managers and teams that are failing but want to pretend that things are going teckety-boo. The org chart showed them reporting independently right up to the CEO to ensure independent and timely information about project problems. But in reality project managers had a "right" to demand issues first be heard by them and they could muscle most QA auditors into silence. Similarly, I was involved in a ISO 9000 initiative within the company and quickly discovered that most of our "learning organization" capabilities, such as our extensive audited written procedures, were in fact window-dressing. In short: it is hard to build and maintain a truly adaptive organization that uses evolutionary strategies for problem-solving. Humans don't like uncertainty and they love hierarchical organizations. I like the message in Tim Harford's book, but I'm sure it will get more lip service than real implementation.

There is much wisdom in the book, much to learn, I strongly recommend it to everyone. It will open your eyes to the complexity that is out there. It will stun you to realize how badly our engineered "safety systems" have failed. And it will give you an appreciation for a need for more experimentation and a healthy acceptance of failure as the technique for learning.

The Hidden $100,000 Tax on Americans

Here is a post by Paul Krugman looking at the waste caused by this Little Depression that has been going on since 2008. That's nearly 4 years. The cummulative lost production is nearly $2.8 trillion. And the US population is 308 million. That is almost $100,000 per person of lost dollars because of this Depression of 2008. When the Republicans go on and on about "taxes", why don't these consider the tax of lost production? That $2.7 trillion would have built a lot of schools, paved a lot of roads, built a lot of bridges, etc. Just by itself the $2.7 trillion is enough to pay off most of the outstanding mortgages in America and end the home foreclosure crisis.

Here's the post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

The Waste

Click to Enlarge
FRED now makes it easy to compare potential GDP, as estimated by the CBO, with actual GDP; data here. To make it easier to interpret the numbers, I like to compare nominal (current dollar) values rather than stuff in 2005 dollars; that’s what is shown above.

If we believe these estimates — and I see no good reason to believe that CBO is overstating the output gap — we’re now sacrificing output we should be producing, goods and services that we have the capacity to produce but aren’t producing due to insufficient demand, at the rate of more than $900 billion a year. By the way, the cumulative loss since the recession began is almost $2.8 trillion.

So next time someone tells you that it would be irresponsible to engage in more stimulus, monetary, fiscal, or both, ask: in what universe is wasting almost a trillion a year, not to mention the human costs, a responsible thing to do?

Math Reality Rises Up and Bites You

Here is a talk about how the bloodless world of math has crept into the real world and now has risen up and is biting us, not just biting, gashing, chomping, and devouring use.

From a TED talk in July 2011...



The bit around 09:00 in the video where he talks about "the physics of culture" and worries about those algorithms crashing is really, really scary.

The future belongs to the algorithms... and we are hanging on tight hoping we are lost as the future races away.

Trying to Control the Uncontrollable

We all want to be safe. We all want "the authorities" to protect us. I'm as guilty as anybody else in hoping for a quick fix by "passing a law" to stop something.

There is a good reason why the founders of America set up a divided government and threw in lots of blocks to slow down a "rush to judgment". We are generally too simplistic in our thinking and don't understand the "unintended consequences" of our actions.

Here's an excellent example from Lenore Skenazy on her Free Range Kids blog. Here are the key bits:

SEX OFFENDER OR TEENAGE JERK? by Lenore Skenazy

Ever look at a map of the local sex offenders, the ones with little dots showing where the guys live who prey upon helpless little children? Well, as of this week, there are two dots that won’t come off until the guys die of old age — which could be quite a while.

Right now, they’re both 16.

The boys committed their crime at age 14. And just what was it?

Horseplay. Stupid, disgusting horseplay. According to NJ.com, the kids pulled down their pants and sat on two 12-year-olds’ faces for the simple reason that they “thought it was funny” and were trying to get their “friends to laugh.”

That’s how one of the teens explained himself to a Somerset County, N.J., judge back in 2008. (His friend headed off a trial by pleading guilty to the same act.)

The judge then considered what he had in front of him, and rather than think, “These punks could use some community service time and maybe a suspension from school — plus an in-person apology to the kids they sat on,” he thought, “These two are sex offenders.”

After all, what they had done was, technically, “criminal sexual contact” with intent to humiliate or degrade. And so sex offenders he ruled they were. That meant they were subject to Megan’s Law. In New Jersey, such offenders, even as young as 13, have to register for life.

This past week, the young men appealed their sentence and lost.

What does it mean to be on the sex offender list? First of all, the public knows where you live. Websites and newspapers can publish your photo. So can TV news. Parents can warn their kids never to go near you.

In many states, registered sex offenders have to live a certain distance from where kids congregate, be that a school, day care center, park or bus stop. So these young men may have to move to the sticks.

When they get a job (Good luck! Not many places are dying to hire registered sex offenders), they have to notify the authorities of where they’re working.

They also have to re-register four times a year, and if they miss an appointment, they can go to jail. In some communities, they have to turn their lights off on Halloween. In others, they have to answer the door saying, “I’m a registered sex offender.” All because of this stupid prank they pulled at age 14.

...

These guys are more like Dennis the Menace, which is why we have to change the criteria that land folks on the registry. These young men were never “predators.” And as the years go by, the idea that they pose a danger to children will become even more ridiculous. When you’re 20, 30, 40 — 80! — you don’t do the things you did as a 14-year-old trying to impress your buddies. Why is Megan’s Law blind to human nature?

If it were making kids safer, maybe we could overlook how obtuse it is. But a 2008 study found that, in New Jersey at least — where little Megan Kanka, for whom the law is named, was murdered — the law showed no effect in reducing the number of sexual re-offenses or reducing the number of victims.

It’s time to change the law and the registry. Otherwise, too many of the dots on a sex offender map will be victims, not criminals.

I have no solution (except maybe sunset conditions set on every law to get bad laws off the books without requiring politicians to stick their necks out).

Oh, I guess I have another solution: require politicians to consult with academic experts before they pass laws. Treat the "academic review" as just another layer of built-in hindrances to stop a rush to judgment or as another division of power to force "sober second judgment" before passing laws.

Ultimately there is no fix. There are things we can do for now until they don't work or we discover they have counter-productive side-effects. Sadly, life is an experiment and not a formula. We don't get to calculate the best strategy. We are forced to fiddle our way forward as best we can. This means dead-ends and retreats in the face of circumstances we didn't foresee.

The Joys of Technological Progress

I enjoy creator of the Dilbert cartoon Scott Adam's blog site. He loves to put out off-the-wall controversial stuff to see what reaction he gets. I must admit I go ballistic on some of his stuff. But on things like the following, I simply bask in the joy of reading material that is dead on in its critique but sly and humourous at the same time. He has nailed the joke that is "technological advance":

I remember when my only communication device was a phone connected to the wall. I'm old! Then came wireless handsets. They seemed so space age. I was untethered! I could wander all over the entire living room without dropping a call. The bedroom was too far for the signal to travel, but hey, you can't have everything.

Time passed.

Then along came the brick-sized cell phone. I thought of it as more of an emergency device. I kept it in the car and tried to use it as little as possible.

Then came the Blackberry. OMG. It was like a little miracle in my hand. Not only could I walk around (anywhere!) and talk on the phone, but I could do email like a demon thanks to its nifty keyboard. I was talking and typing all day long. I was addicted. I was a communicating fiend.

Then came the iPhone. In theory, it would do all that the Blackberry did plus apps! In practice, it dropped every call that lasted more than a minute. That has more to do with the AT&T network where I live and how the iPhone works with it, I'm told. No problem. I weaned myself off of voice calls. I don't like talking on the phone anyway. I trained my friends to use email to contact me.

But I couldn't do email anymore either. At least not much of it. The iPhone keyboard was too frustrating. Every message came out like xmopoi aljsdo vooe. I could go back and fix each word, but it wasn't worth the time. Instead, I used the iPhone to check incoming mail, but I waited until I was back at my computer to respond with more than a sentence.

Then came the Android phone. I just got one. I can make phone calls again! It's just like the 1970s! I sound like I'm underwater in a barrel, but you can usually tell what I'm saying, unless I call another cell phone, in which case the call is largely unintelligible. And that's not counting the dumbass things I actually say that don't make much sense even if you hear me perfectly. I'm just saying you should email me. Don't call.

To make things worse, a call between cell phones creates just enough of a transmission delay that I can't interrupt the other person. And if you happen to get a talker on the other end, you're in for a long ride. You can't break in.

By the way, if you're one of the people who owns a cell phone and doesn't understand that you have to use it like a CB radio, meaning you say your part and then pause a second to see if there is a response, let me be the first to say everyone hates talking to you on the phone. Talk briefly, pause at least a second, and listen for a response. That's the rule. The talk-until-you-get-interrupted model is something that only works in person and on landlines.

Anyway, my Android phone works most of the time for voice calls. But I'm afraid to actually use it because the battery life is about an hour and it's no good to me with no power.

Now I only think of my phone as an emergency device, like my first brick-sized cell phone. I wouldn't use it to make a social phone call. My battery wouldn't last. And I wouldn't often use it for email because the keyboard sucks and the battery drains then as well.

Yes, I have researched all the many ways to save battery life. I have apps that kill other apps. I turn off Wi-Fi and 4G and Bluetooth until I need them. Nothing seems to keep my battery from draining like a frat boy's bladder on a Saturday night. Result: I leave my Android plugged in all the time, whether I am at my desk, near my bed, or in the car.

Thank you Google for inventing a corded phone. I can't wait for your next innovation: the butter churn.

I confess I'm an old fuddy-duddy who hasn't had anything other than the old fashion corded phone. I worked in the high tech industry. I learned the hard way that most of the "advances" were painful and costly and really didn't provide any functionality that you need. But the stuff was exciting. I did jump onto the personal computer bandwagen and of course wasted money on devices that quickly became orphaned and unsupported. I became bitter. So I refused to join the parade with the succession of cordless phones. The above warms my heart. I feel rewarded for holding back and missing out on all that pain.

Sure I made phone calls to guys with mobile phones, but half the time they would wander in and out of cell phone range and I would strain to make sense of the static-filled, on-and-off voice. Sure it sounded grand and exciting as a concept, but I just couldn't see the point of having a device with such crappy service.

So I'm off the tech train to the future. I feel no need for a 3D TV (or 3D movies). I'm not interested in smart phones with cameras that let you do videophone calls (that was technology tried back 30 or 40 years ago and people didn't want it and they still don't) or run apps that make you squint at a 3 inch screen. I'm at the age where a 14 font is getting hard to see and I need at least a 30" screen to give me the footprint to see the "big picture".

I love it when tech companies create stuff that is useful like spreadsheets and word processors, but I hate it when they foist techie crap and hype it and convince millions to throw good money after an ephemeral vision of a "tech future".

Why Deficits and Not Jobs Has Galvanized Washington

Paul Krugman has a post on his NY Times blog that makes sense of the crazy drama over debt in Washington:

Jonathan Chait is puzzled by the behavior of the anti-deficit lobby, which persists in blaming Democrats for the failure of Republicans to act responsibly:

The anti-deficit lobby is a powerful force in American political life. The lobby consists of a loosely aligned network of think-tanks, institutions (many funded by Pete Peterson), and allied journalists. Of course, the anti-deficit lobby does not always win — indeed, it usually loses,as its basic mission runs in opposition to the general tendency of politicians to avoid unpopular choices as well as the specific ideology of the modern Republican Party (“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”), which refuses to accept the notion that revenue levels ought to bear any relation to spending. The anti-deficit lobby has had extraordinary success, though, in making the deficit the top item on the Washington agenda.

…

But this strange analytical tic is perfectly reflective of the anti-deficit lobby’s style. You have one side embracing its proposal, and the other side rejecting it, and the instinct of the anti-deficit lobbyist is… to urge the former to embrace its position. Aside from the bizarre disconnect from political reality, this simply highlights a huge problem with the incentive structure. Aren’t you supposed to reward politicians who agree with you, and impose some cost on those who oppose you?

As he says, it makes no sense — unless you consider the possibility that the anti-deficit lobby doesn’t really care about deficits. If you believe that its real agenda (not always consciously) is to dismantle the welfare state, with deficit fears as the excuse, then the seemingly bizarre positioning makes perfect sense. Democrats trying to preserve the essence of the New Deal and the Great Society are always deemed insufficiently committed, never mind the numbers, while Republicans eager to tear the whole thing down are serious people, never mind their obsession with budget-busting tax cuts.

You can’t make any sense of American political discourse if you give everyone credit for really wanting what they claim to want. My sense is that there are very few true deficit hawks; the vast majority of those who claim that title are really just using the deficit to pursue the goal of a more unequal society.

I find that Paul Krugman is the best informed, most honest, most sensible commentator on the crazy politics of Washington. He isn't an extremist. He is a sensible guy who wants the country to regain the solid economic growth of the golden 1950s and 1960s (read his book Conscience of a Liberal). Sadly, Krugman is on the outside looking in. All the "experts" in Washington ignore him. But the "experts" are invariably wrong about everything, but they keep their cold dead hands firmly clutching power and guiding the US from mistake to mistake. Tragic.

Polls show that 80% of Americans are concerned about jobs and less than 30% are even mildly concerned about deficits. But the politicians who are elected to "represent" their constituents ignore the real issues while they play games with debts and deficits as part of a bigger ideological struggle. The really cruel joke is that they very may well drive the ship of state over a waterfall and crash on the rocks below. They are so intensely caught up in the political games that the bigger picture, the needs of the country, have been lost.

The Greening of Solar Power

Alternative energy sounds so appealing. Replace all that dirty old technology with new "green" technology and we have a wonderful, no muss no fuss future.

But I see a green nightmare:


The above is from a post on the blog NoTricksZone with the title "Weed-Covered, Neglected Solar Park: 20 Acres, $11 Million, Only One And Half Years Old!".

I'm no expert in solar power, but I would bet that you get a lot less power generation when your panels are shaded by weeds. Your fixed costs are fixed, but your income is variable depending on sun vs. cloud and this -- surprise! -- need to maintain a solar power plant by chopping down weeds and doing various maintenance tasks. I'm guessing that all those optimistic scenarios about "low cost solar power" ignore the problems with weeds and the costs of maintenance.

An Honest Reassessment of the Singularity

Ideas inevitably backfire because our initial enthusiasm and rush to achieve them overlook the complexities, and the darker aspects of reality. The transhumanists for many years have been selling the snake oil of "the singularity" with a doctrinal purity that overlooks the grimy details of real world shortcomings and short circuits and darker motives.

Here is a nice post by Brad DeLong on his blog Grasping Reality with Both Hands that looks at the singularity and discovers that we've already had several experiences of it:

Charlie Stross does not fear (or anticipate) the Singularity:

Three arguments against the singularity: I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think....

First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely... you get there... by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely.... [H]uman intelligence... an emergent phenomenon of human physiology... only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way. Enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness are not much use to a machine, or to people who want to extract useful payback (in the shape of work) from a machine.... We may want machines that can recognize and respond to our motivations and needs, but we're likely to leave out the annoying bits, like needing to sleep for roughly 30% of the time, being lazy or emotionally unstable, and having motivations of its own.... We want computers that recognize our language and motivations and can take hints, rather than requiring instructions enumerated in mind-numbingly tedious detail. But whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don't want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project....

Uploading... is not obviously impossible.... Our form of conscious intelligence emerged from our evolutionary heritage, which in turn was shaped by our biological environment. We are not evolved for existence as disembodied intelligences, as "brains in a vat", and we ignore E. O. Wilson's Biophilia Hypothesis at our peril; I strongly suspect that the hardest part of mind uploading won't be the mind part, but the body and its interactions with its surroundings.

Moving on to the Simulation Argument: I can't disprove that, either... it offers a deity-free afterlife, as long as the ethical issues... are ignored.... [I]t would make a good free-form framework for a postmodern high-tech religion. Unfortunately it seems to be unfalsifiable, at least by the inmates (us)....

This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment — machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses. We may eventually see mind uploading... but beyond giving us an opportunity to run Nozick's experience machine thought experiment for real, I'm not sure we'd be able to make effective use of it — our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it. Finally, the simulation hypothesis... suggests that if we are already living in a cyberspatial history simulation (and not a philosopher's hedonic thought experiment) we might not be able to apprehend the underlying "true" reality.... Any way you cut these three ideas, they don't provide much in the way of referent points for building a good life... it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime.

I'm done with computational theology: I think I need a drink!

Me? I think about four moments:

1. Pre-linguistic homo sapiens, who: (a) knew about fifty people; (b) hunted, gathered, cooperated, fought, and raised children; and (c) learned stuff only by watching what others did and what happened to them.


2. Linguistic hunter-gatherer homo sapiens, who: (a) knew perhaps fifty people--but had heard stories about up to 500 more; (b) hunted, gathered, cooperated, fought, and raised children but also bargained, allied, and promised; and (c) learned a huge amount of what had happened outside of his or her sight and hearing by talking and listening--was an anthology intelligence with the memory and experience not of one but of a hundred.


3. Agricultural metal-working chariot-driving reading-and-writing homo sapiens--at least the upper classes, the Atreids and the Chryseids--who: (a) farmed, herded (or took stuff from the farmers and herders), wrote down stories, claimed to have special knowledge of gods, claimed to be descended from gods and have the right to rule, trained as technologically-advanced chariot-driving specialists not just in human-on-animal hunting violence but in coercive violence, kept track of accounts, built or ordered the construction of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, etc.


4. Modern post-industrial high-mass-consumption web-surfing humanity--or at least the first-world upper middle classes--whose lives we know very well.

All of these strike me as partial singularities: in each case, about three-quarters of life is more or less the same as it had been earlier--and one-quarter is transformed utterly.

I like DeLong's take on this, i.e. we've seen this movie before and it isn't the showstopper that the promoter promised. Sure it is exciting but not in a way that anybody passing through the portal of then to now would really appreciate.

The part that DeLong doesn't play with is how snake oil salesmen only talk about the revitalizing and curative powers of their potion in a bottle. They don't mention the side-effects. They never point out that to get the miracle cure your teeth will fall out, your face muscles will go slack, and you will drool.

The message is simple: the future will be a lot like now. And if there are some benefits to be had, the rich and the powerful, the criminal and the impatient, will beat you to it and open Pandora's box and discover the surprises within. If it is truly better, then they will pull a Clarence Thomas, climb up through the singularity, and pull up the ladder after them leaving us to watch as they take the mothership to a place far beyond where we in our miserable grubby lives will ever go.

I don't know how the future will unfold, but I know it will be more complex, more nuanced, more surprising, and more disappointing than any hawker of singularity has ever presented.

What is the IQ of a Politician?

I find it funny when right wing politicians get their wish by passing tough new laws, but then discover that they didn't really understand what they had wished for. In short, they never considered the possibility of "unintended consequences".

Here is a post from the BoingBoing blog:

Georgia's anti-immigrant law leaves millions in crops rotting in the fields

by Cory Doctorow

Georgia's tough anti-illegal-immigrant law drove a sizable fraction of the migrant labor pool out of the state, and as a result, "millions of dollars' worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops [are] unharvested and rotting in the fields." The jobs the migrants did paid an average of $8/hour, without benefits, a wage that is so low that the state's probationed prisoners have turned it down. Guest-writing in the Atlantic's economics section, Adam Ozimek doesn't believe that the farms would be viable if they paid wages that legal American workers would take: "it's quite possible that the wages required to get workers to do the job are so high that it's no longer profitable for farmers to plant the crops in the first place."

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars' worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they've done to Georgia's largest industry.

Ga's farm-labor crisis playing out as planned.

Cory Doctorow left out this bit from Jay Bookman's original post that, for me, is even more poignant:

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.

In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.

We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

This modern story of misguided right wing politics reminds me of bigger "lesson" from recent history: Right wing nationalists gathered to support Hitler because they liked his "tough line" on reparations, his glorification of patriotism, his obvious good sense wanting some "lebensraum" in the east, and his policy of punishing the class of people that lots and lots blamed for losing WWI, the Jews. They got a big surprise. Hitler really did plan to carry through with his policies. He plunged Germany into WWII and reduced their beloved nation to a pile of rubble with starving "patriots" running from this pile of rubble to that pile trying to find shelter and digging around hoping to find some food that some other starving group hadn't already spotted. Hitler turned a proud people into the pariah of nations because of his racist policies that very nearly exterminated an innocent people, the Jews. The Germans who survived this disaster paid a very high price for all those ignorant dreams of right wing political types. The lesson to be learned? If you preach political hate, you may -- unintentionally -- reap hate.

I always wonder how much of these "lessons of history" that the right wing "patriots" in the US have really absorbed from history.

Everyday Exceptional Physics

I found this story about the Mpemba effect to be very interesting. From the Skulls in the Stars blog I've excerpted some interesting bits:

Mpemba made his accidental discovery in Tanzania in 1963, when he was only 13 years old and in secondary school. In spite of widespread disdain from his classmates, he surreptitiously continued experiments on the phenomenon until he had the good fortune in high school to interact with Professor Denis Osborne of the University College Dar es Salaam. Osborne was intrigued, carried out his own experiments, and in 1969 the two published a paper in the journal Physics Education.

This article is, in my opinion, one of the most remarkable in all of the history of physics. Aside from its title, “Cool?”, it is also unusual in being presented in two parts: Mpemba gives a first person account in his own words of his discovery in the first half, and Osborne picks up the story and describes the follow-up experiments in the second half. Mpemba’s own account is so charming and fascinating that it is worth quoting from liberally:

My name is Erasto B Mpemba, and I am going to tell you about my discovery, which was due to misusing a refrigerator. All of you know that it is advisable not to put hot things in a refrigerator, for you somehow shock it; and it will not last long.

In 1963, when I was in form 3 in Magamba Secondary School, Tanzania, I used to make ice-cream. The boys at the school do this by boiling milk, mixing it with sugar and putting it into the freezing chamber in the refrigerator, after it has first cooled nearly to room temperature. A lot of boys make it and there is a rush to get space in the refrigerator.

One day after buying milk from the local women, I started boiling it. Another boy, who had bought some milk for making ice-cream, ran to the refrigerator when he saw me boiling up milk and quickly mixed his milk with sugar and poured it into the icetray without boiling it; so that he may not miss his chance. Knowing that if I waited for the boiled milk to cool before placing it in the refrigerator I would lose the last available ice-tray, I decided to risk ruin to the refrigerator on that day by putting hot milk into it. The other boy and I went back an hour and a half later and found that my tray of milk had frozen into ice-cream while his was still only a thick liquid, not yet frozen.

I asked my physics teacher why it happened like that, with the milk that was hot freezing first, and the answer he gave me was that “You were confused, that cannot happen”. Then I believed his answer.

Here we have the beginnings of a classic story of science — an accidental discovery, scoffed at by the “establishment scientists”.

... Professor Osborne came to lecture on physics, giving Mpemba a valuable opportunity:

When Dr Osborne visited our school we were allowed to ask him some questions, mainly in physics. I asked: “If you take two similar containers with equal volumes Of water, one at 35 °C and the other at 100 °C, and put them into a refrigerator, the one that started at 100 °C freezes first. Why?” He first smiled and asked me to repeat the question. After I repeated it he said: “Is it true, have you done it?” I said: “Yes.” Then he said: “I do not know, but I promise to try this experiment when I am back in Dar es Salaam.” Next day my classmates in form six were saying to me that I had shamed them by asking that question and that my aim was to ask a question which Dr Osborne would not be able to answer. Some said to me: “But Mpemba did you understand your chapter on Newton’s law of cooling?” I told them: “Theory differs from practical.” Some said : “We do not wonder, for that was Mpemba’s physics.”

There are many remarkable points in this short passage. First of all, we see an admirable open-mindedness of Professor Osborne in his dealings with Mpemba, and that open-mindedness would quickly benefit them both. Conversely, we see a dangerous “groupthink” amongst Mpemba’s classmates regarding science, in which they are genuinely offended by Mpemba questioning the status quo. Mpemba shows great wisdom in his answer: “Theory differs from practical”. This is an important point for anyone studying physics: we like to create simplified models to explain nature, but those models often lose real-world aspects in the process of stripping them down.

Mpemba actually continued his experiments in a kitchen refrigerator, with the permission of kitchen staff, and convinced his classmates and the headmaster of his school of the accuracy of his findings.

At Dar es Salaam, Osborne was true to his word and looked into the phenomenon himself. As he notes in the continuation of the paper,

It seemed an unlikely happening, but the student insisted that he was sure of the facts. I confess that I thought he was mistaken but fortunately remembered the need to encourage students to develop questioning and critical attitudes. No question should be ridiculed. In this case there was an added reason for caution, for everyday events are seldom as simple as they seem and it is dangerous to pass a superficial judgment on what can and cannot be. I said that the facts as they were given surprised me because they appeared to contradict the physics I know. But I added that it was possible that the rate of cooling might be affected by some factor I had not considered.

Osborne sets a great example for all physics educators! It can be difficult at times, but “No question should be ridiculed” would be a great part of a “Hippocratic oath” for teachers.

One other anecdote from Osborne’s account is worth quotation:

At the University College in Dar es Salaam I asked a young technician to test the facts. The technician reported that the water that started hot did indeed freeze first and added in a moment of unscientific enthusiasm: “But we’ll keep on repeating the experiment until we get the right result.”

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to explain what is scientifically wrong with the technician’s attitude!

I like the story for many reasons. First, it is a mystery. It sounds wrong, but experiments actually produce the effect, so there must be a cause. Second, I like the "underdog" aspect of it. A student is maligned for reporting a result and struggles against social opprobrium and finally gets his experiments validated. Third, the write-up is very good with the author making points about the science, the practice of science, and the practice of teaching. Valuable stuff.

Now for something completely different... the professor of optics who runs the Skulls in the Stars blog has this post which I find amusing. Be sure to watch the video of David Brooks watching the elaboration of the David Brooks meme!

The Wrong-Headed Tilt of US Economic Policy

Here are some interesting bits from an article by Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times:

In the wake of the Great Recession, why has employment been so slow to recover? One answer is that an important but widely unrecognized change in fiscal policy has taken place.

Due largely to the influence of supply-side Republicans and many Democrats who embrace growth policies, policies that were originally intended to stimulate innovation in the private sector were applied to the government sector and infrastructure spending. This change in policy that puts growth at the forefront has shifted resources and attention away from traditional policies that could have reduced joblessness at a more rapid rate.

To understand the change in policy, it’s useful to divide fiscal approaches into two broad categories: supply-side policies designed to enhance the economy’s long-run growth prospects and demand-side policies designed to stabilize short-run business cycle fluctuations.

...

In past recessions, fiscal policy operated differently. The main goal was to increase aggregate demand through additional government purchases of goods and services, tax cuts, or even through government- created jobs that provided people with the income they need to go out and purchase goods and services themselves. Infrastructure spending was part of the mix, but the main goal was to stimulate demand and boost the economy; the impact on long-run economic growth was not the important consideration.

For this reason, in the past we were much more likely to consider “make-work” as a stabilization tool. Make-work is generally summarized as “paying half the unemployed to dig holes, then paying the other half fill them in again.” But that is a bit unfair since the goal is always to spend money where it does the most good, for example, to clean up a city park that has fallen into disrepair even if that doesn’t directly have an impact on long-run growth.

But as noted above, in the most recent recession, due largely to the influence of Republicans devoted to supply-side economics and to many Democrats who embrace growth policies, supply-side policies that were originally intended as a means of stimulating innovative activity in the private sector were extended to the government sector and infrastructure spending. Republicans would not have approved any other type of policy to combat the recession, particularly policies of the “make-work” variety. Growth had to be at the forefront, and Democrats accepted this approach to stabilization policy. The result was that, contrary to past policy where growth and stabilization policy were independent, present policy addressed both supply-side and demand side concerns simultaneously.

...

In the past, we did not pay enough attention to whether the policies used to fight a recession would also help with long-run economic growth. But in the present the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction – long-run growth should not be the only consideration when selecting stabilization policies.

In the future, we must do a better job of attacking the unemployment problem when recessions hit the economy even if it means implementing policies that do not directly have an impact on long-run economic growth. Those who promote supply-side policies above all else might be surprised at how much growth will be helped nonetheless by policies that avoid the long-term problems associated with high and persistent unemployment.

What I like about this article is that it recognizes that political "solutions" go in and out of favour, that the mood shifts like a pendulum, and that the last 40 years has let the pendulum swing too far toward "supply side" economics while giving "demand side" economics the short shrift.

Technological Narcissism

Here is a scary talk by Ari Pariser about how Google and other "friendly" corporations are walling us away from the wider world and cocooning us in what they think we "want" to see...



It is really important that "friendly" technology doesn't blind us to what is in the wider world. We may not want to see the ugly side of reality, but being ignorant is not a good strategy. If you really want to live in a better world, you have to help clean up the mess around you. That means you have to be aware that there is a mess "out there".

The Computers are Taking Over!

How can a book which was originally published in the early 1990s for a price of around $50 become listed by two reputable book vendors in 2011 for a price of over $20 million?

Well... it happens when you let the computers run your world, and sadly we are doing more and more of that. For the gory details, read this post by an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley who was trying to buy the textbook for his lab and discovered this insane pricing:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

...

The price peaked on April 18th, but on April 19th profnath’s price dropped to $106.23, and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $106.23 * 1.27059 = $134.97. But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Having worked in the computer industry for 30 years, I for one will not be happy the day the computers take over. These machines are not like biological machines which have great redundancy and soft failure modes. Computers simply crash. And like the above case, they simply go nuts from time to time. Humans don't have the abililty to program a truly complex system that is meant to be autonomous. The idea that robots can "do their thing" is scary.

On the other hand, it is inevitable that the computers will take over. We are in a headlong rush of technological development and along the way we keep ceding more and more turf to them. The day will come when they are "in charge". Hopefully I won't live long enough to see that day. Don't get me wrong. I love computers. I'm fascinated by them. But I realize how the industry has grown too fast with too little regard for the robust safety needed for truly autonomous decision-making.

The future will be "interesting". That is both a curse and a promise.

Unintended Consequences of Renewable Energy

Those who rant for simplistic solutions often overlook "unintended consequences" of their choices. Here's a bit from a newspaper article from the Seattle Times noting a conflict between wind generated power and hydropower from large dams in the state of Washington. I'be bolded the key bit:

Pacific Northwest wind-power producers are battling a proposal that could force them to periodically shut down their plants in the months ahead, potentially costing them millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) officials say that limiting wind production could be required to free up space in the regional transmission system to handle hydropower generated from the melt-off of a huge mountain snowpack this year.

...

The dispute reflects major strains on the regional power system, which has been reshaped by a dramatic expansion of wind power in Washington and Oregon. Most of that power is exported to California and other markets outside the Northwest.

Wind-power producers say the BPA should compensate them financially for any prolonged shutdowns ordered by the agency. Their ranks include Puget Sound Energy, which has built wind farms in Washington.

BPA officials say the shutdowns will only happen as a last resort and that wind producers should not receive compensation.

Such payments would raise operating costs and could push up rates for the BPA's major customers — Northwest public utilities, including Seattle City Light, which have endorsed the agency plan.

"We think that is not a fair transfer of costs and puts too much of a burden on public-utility ratepayers," said Doug Johnson, a BPA spokesman.

During the past decade, wind power has attracted billions of dollars of investment, driven in part by tax incentives and state requirements that utilities buy renewable energy other than hydro power.

When the winds are fierce, the Northwest farms are capable of producing up to 3,500 megawatts of power. That's more than triple the energy of the Northwest's sole nuclear-power plant.

Total wind-power capacity could double by 2015.

The BPA manages the regional power-supply system by balancing, minute by minute, the flow of electricity surging through the system with demand.

As the wind industry expands, the BPA has found it more difficult to transmit all that power and still meet other responsibilities, which include selling hydro power outside the region and spilling water over dams to aid the passage of migrating salmon.

Last June, the BPA balancing effort turned into a high-wire act as a late snow melt unleashed a gusher of water down the Columbia River at the same time that winds whipped up the power turbines.

BPA officials said that they couldn't divert all the water around the hydroelectric turbines without putting too much dissolved gas into the river and placing salmon at risk. So they ended up running more water through the dam turbines and giving away their surplus power to utilities all over the West.

That spurred the agency to develop a new proposal to periodically shut down wind-power farms to help balance loads. The plan was embraced by public utilities across the region.

The idea that variable power sources like solar and wind generated electricity can be simply "mandated" politically with no consequences is foolish. Voters who act on "good feelings" and without "hard thinking" create problems that they are completely unaware of. Sad.

Unintended Consequences

James Fallows has a series of guest bloggers putting material on his site. Here is a bit from Julio Friedmann that caught my eye. This is what a lot of advocates for "fixes" never bother to consider. This is why a lot of "fixes" sound so simple. They ignore unintended consequences:

Every energy technology we have scaled up has problems and unintended consequences. Recently, we saw that with the 2007 ethanol push. The drive to corn ethanol helped create a food crisis world-wide, and ended up increasing global CO2 emissions when soy farmers started plowing under rain forest to grow more soy (what economists euphemistically call "leakage"). It's reasonable to imagine that scale up of wind, clean-coal, biofuels, and solar may also have perverse consequences yet to be mapped.

I believe that Julio Friedmann's worries about "global warming" are overblown for many reasons. Smart people can disagree and still be smart and fully honest. He's busy feeling the elephant's trunk and screaming "it's a snake!" and I'm at the other end of the elephant saying "no, it's a fan and sure helps cool us down". He believes the models. I did computer modeling and I distrust any computer model of something that is even moderately dynamic and complex. Sure we can model simple linear systems. But give me a system with the kind of dynamics that scare Friedmann, the "non-linear, high-impact responses to climate change" and I will tell you that you are looking at something that is difficult to model.

But I do appreciate that Fiedmann, unlike a lot of climate alarmists, is willing to admit that "simple fixes" may come back to bite you.