peristaltor

kmo delivered another great podcast the other day, interviewing economist Frank Rotering. Prof. Rotering has an interesting take on human progress and the limits the planet itself places on our expansion, part of which resonates well with what I accept.

For example, I whole heartedly agree that our biological imperative drives our expansion, the desire to eat the richest food (to give us strength and build our energy reserves as fat) and live in the best areas conducive to sating our desires to, well, eat and reproduce a lot. The number of simple behavioral studies that reveal this simple unconscious drive abound, each confirming that despite what we say, we are greedy little piggies that crave tasty (meaning energy-rich) foods and sex with the most reproductively viable candidates. Remember, folks, Darwin's "survival of the fittest" referred to reproductive winners, the organisms that most successfully got as many biological copies of themselves made before they croaked.

Where Frank went off the rails in the talk with kmo, though, was where he started talking about . . . capitalism. Wait, haven't I gone over this already?!?

But then the Professor did something very few who throw the C word about willy-nilly actually do: He explained what he meant. I'm not saying he got it right in my eyes, but I will say he at least had the courtesy to quote Marx's writings directly and explain the nitty-gritty details that might elude the less familiar. Someone who has obviously read Marx so carefully is rare to find even amongst Marxists. That was refreshing.

This explanation, though, confirmed something that has been nagging at me for quite some time: That Marx himself missed the most salient element of capitalism's expansionist tendencies, specifically by ( by conflating the necessity to expand with the ability to expand. )

My brother metalmensch was sent to work in India a few years ago. Being my brother, he had his eye trained for things I, too, would find interesting, things beyond the travel brochure, things alien enough to folks like he and I that they verge on the outright fascinating.

He found such fascination in . . . trash cans. They weren't ordinary trash cans, no sirree. Check out one such can:


Litter can in Ramoji Studios

A few details simply must be noted. First, his Indian friends consider these cans "fiercely" embarrassing. That he was constantly shooting pictures of them in scenic areas like Ramoji Studios and the Taj Mahal was even worse. Shouldn't he be taking pictures of things worth viewing? Details of Indian life that might put the sub-continent in a pleasing light?

I'll get to why his friends thought his actions embarrassing in a bit. Right now, though, I'd like to share some podcast material that illustrates why I think we in the United States might have even more reason to feel fierce embarrassment: ( Simply, many of our buildings and neighborhoods are just as freakish and ugly as these cans. )

I have an iPod. Not the fancy, wheel-controlled or touch-screen equipped money pits, but a simple iPod Nano (without the proprietary DRM earbuds). It does what I want of it. It provides audio content while costing less than my $60 limit, the amount of cash I am willing to spend on any gadget I bring to work.

When new, this little gadget did all that was promised and more. Funny thing though: Its functionality ( stopped right at the threshold of 'more.' )

Addendum, the next morning: Oh, and I completely forgot the strangest part, the part that leads me to believe there is a programing error in the pod's OS. There are only two slider switches on the Nano, Power On/Off and Shuffle On/Off. Shuffle off plays items roughly in the order you select on the sync page (see entry for infuriating limitations) -- but plays MP3s, then MP4s, Apple's proprietary format. Switch to Shuffle On -- you're going to love this -- and the unit only plays MP4s, ignoring any MP3s currently loaded.

What's more, this is the second Nano I've owned. I mentioned the shuffle switch weirdness (and some other strangeness) at the Mac store to a floor guy, prompting him to take my old one to the back and declare it FUBAR in ways no one in the back claimed to understand. He gave me a new unit . . . which does exactly the same thing.

Once I can write off as a unit malfunction. Twice and we have a design flaw.

Major Addendum, August 17, 2009: It looks like the latest iTunes upgrade (to 8.2.1(6) ) has corrected the ordering problem! By gum, the darned thing is now playing the order I want!

Now to get them to fix that podcast Autofill and we're on the verge of normalcy!

General Motors will soon be bankrupt. I'm not saying this out of spite, out of schadenfreude, out of a need to lash out at the auto behemoth. Rather, my judgment stems from a realization that the monster has become not only too big to turn its business practices around, but is further infected with a corporate culture that lacks the initiative to even attempt such a reversal of practices and fortunes. Anyone can see this to be the case. All you need to understand are the concepts of corporate culture and how they differ from business to business, from culture to culture. Right now, the biggest three auto making countries are the US, Japan and Germany. (Other car making countries like Korea, China and India are growing in importance, but their products and histories are not really available for me to judge, so I'll stick with the big three as I tick off the elements of each that give my argument some weight.)

Let's start briefly with Germany. ( Years ago, I worked with a deckhand/diesel mechanic named Jack. )

PBS's Frontline recently tackled global warming and the corporate forces against change in its most recent episode, Heat. (You can watch the full two hour episode at the site.) Among the interviews, they examined GM's new concept plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt. If you happen to follow the link to the Volt's official site, you'll notice a dearth of actual information on the damned thing, let alone any tech-specs that make such sites in any way interesting. There's a reason. The Frontline crew was invited to shoot some road footage of the Volt as a part of "Heat." The prototype slowed to under 10mph on a gentle grade, finally stalling at the top of the hill. It had to be pushed into the truck that brought it to the shoot.

Martin Smith also interviewed a GM PR hack, asking the one question that everyone in the entire world needs to be constantly asking anyone associated with the Evil Behemoth: Why build the Volt when you had a perfectly good electric in the EV1, a car you recalled and crushed. . . ten years ago? The hack tried to correct the record, noting the cars were near the end of their life cycles had been "recycled," and that several had been donated to museums and universities.

The first part about the cars being "too old to drive" was bogus through and through. Most of the lessees protested the end-of-lease recalls. Many of them offered to buy the cars outright for far more than the market would warrent. Really, see Who Killed the Electric Car. The PR hack's last bit about the museum and university donation program proves only partially true; the donated vehicles came disabled and enjoined with strict warnings for the receivers to never, never, never try to restore the cars to working condition and (gasp!) actually drive the cars. Most of the cars were delivered with key components of the drive system removed. In fact, only the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) got a complete car:

Only 40 EV1s were preserved, according to Jill Banaszynski, manager of the EV1 donation program, to be given to museums and institutions or kept for research by GM. Of these, the only fully intact EV1, complete with its (now inert) lead acid battery, is today part of the NMAH collection. “Our requirement is that all the vehicles in the museum have to be complete models,” says Withuhn. “We may remove parts, but we have to know that if we wanted to drive a car, or a steam engine, we could -— not that we would. It’s a question of authenticity.”

This stipulation initially posed a problem for GM, which had decided to take the cars off the road because only a relative handful of technicians knew how to work safely on the powerful batteries. But a series of negotiations proved fruitful, and the museum, in March of 2005, received its own complete example of an exemplary machine. (Emphasis mine.)

That line suggesting that "only a relative handful of technicians" proves reason enough to disable the cars? Bull. Complete and utter bull. Sure, the EV1s do have a pretty high voltage pack, over 400 volts, IIRC, but there are lots of folks out there who work on similar voltages daily. . . and many of them can be found at universities. Duh. No, the EV1 was disabled to prevent anyone from seeing those cars on the road ever again.

You see, it turns out that folks sitting high in GM's corporate office towers, the people who make the core decisions regarding what products it will produce and why, have funny feelings compared to the majority of, say, the majority of scientists in this world. Stephen Colbert reinforced that lesson when he had GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz on his show. Take a peek:



Here Lutz is promoting the car that has at least a chance of pulling GM out of the toxic sea of red ink in which it currently gasps and bobs, and Lutz openly shares the fact that he doesn't believe carbon dioxide build-up causes global warming. "32,000 scientist" believe GW is caused by sunspots? Really, Bob? Really?!? Way to sell the whole Volt concept. I'm sure your target market would agree.

The Bottom Line? General Motors is run by a bunch of old fogies that are not only running their company into the ground, taking all of their employees with them, they furthermore haven't the slightest idea what they are doing wrong, and are therefore highly unlikely to change their corporate course in any positive way anytime soon.

I'm sorry, but when any group runs pell mell through a crowd with a revving chain saw, it's time to act. The sooner GM closes its doors and cedes its market share to companies that don't suck so very, very much, the better everyone both in front of and behind the tailpipes will be.

It's just sad.


*The "Die, Die, Die," of course, refers to a corporate death, not literal death. I may not share, er, any opinions with GM corporate, but that certainly doesn't mean I wish them ill.

A few years ago, my sister and her hubby took some of their extra cash, bought property and built their dream house, one she designed herself. She also pressed her builder to stop with the head-scratching and provide the house with the most energy-efficient design the house size would allow; they got structural insulated panel construction with a radiant floor fueled with an oil boiler. (The oil boiler was my suggestion. Though they have a proven track record, propane tanks can fail, sometimes spectacularly. Keep that much pressurized flammable gas around and one day, you might spring a leak. Oil tanks can also leak, but since home heating oil (essentially, low-grade diesel fuel) has a high flash point one can drop a lit kitchen match or cigarette into the tank and safely watch it fizzle out. That level of redundancy in safety appealed to her.)

She called the other day with news. Since they have been in the house a few years and have smoothed many of the unforeseen design wrinkles, she felt it was time to start further improving the energy consumption profile. Her builder suggested a Thermomax solar array (like the one The Wife and I are contemplating) backed by an on-demand electric water heater. Why electric? With the crest of Peak Oil probably upon us, electric has become a cost-effective alternative to either oil or gas for home heating. The builder estimated she and her hubby would pay for the oil boiler replacement in 7-10 years.

Me? ( I had to balk. )

X-Posted to home_effinomic.

A few weeks ago, kmo had a great interview on his C-Realm Podcast with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist of the NASA Langley Research Center. Mr. Bushnell is, to say the least, an immensely qualified individual. Just listen to the introduction kmo gives him. (If you don't have time for that, someone was good enough to transcribe the interview here. You can read instead or listen. I'll be using that transcription for my quotation source, with some corrections.) Mr. Bushnell touches on quite a few topics that interest me -- global warming, alternative energy, to name just a couple -- so I found myself listening to it on the iPod thingie more than once.

After the second listen, something started nagging me, a concept with which I found myself quite unfamiliar. Though he speaks well and concisely, Bushnell kept making references to atmospheric conditions I didn't understand. I thought it best to go and read the source Bushnell lists in the interview:

(T)here is a book which, I believe, will be considered a milestone in this whole energy and warming discussion and that is Peter Ward's recent book called Under (a) Green Sky.

I've read a few other Ward books, so this wasn't too much of a hardship. ( What I read scared the living crap out of me. )

After I read Green Sky, I put on the headphones and went for a walk with Dennis Bushnell once again. ( As low as Ward got me, something I missed from Bushnell hit me that much harder. )

X-posted to boiling_frog.

. . . Can someone tell me how BlackLight Power might work? This is something my neighbor sent my way. He's far more formally educated on the sciences, and even he had never heard of a "hydrino:"

In (the company's patented) process, the electron in an ordinary hydrogen atom is induced to move closer to the proton, below the prior-known ground state to form more stable hydrogen atoms called hydrinos. The large energy released exceeds that required to extract hydrogen from water, such that water may serve as the hydrogen fuel source for the process.

For a hint that this might be a scam, let me direct you to their company logo:



Compare that to a more familiar image:



Coincidence? We'll see when their tech emerges from the lab. . . if it ever does. Hydrinos might be finicky things.

Back in Jr. High, we had to undergo a couple experiments in education. Let's call them Simulation Gaming. In these exercises, we had to form groups and pretend to make the same decisions faced by early settlers to the continent, to the west, that sort of thing. How much of our money should be used to buy food? Machines? A decent ox? In the end, the team that prospered won. Supposedly we learned stuff on the way, mostly lessons in how any game can be gamed.

With all this talk about government/industrial collusion affecting the current spike in fuel prices, why not start the next generation right ( by teaching them how the oil market really works? )

Other than the intricacies of business and personal life management, simple book balancing and the importance of planning for the future, what should this simulation teach the class? The market is more than just a nebulous "other." The market is all of us, each working hard to maximize our own quality of life and forward our own interests. When supplies of any limited resource become too necessary, when we sacrifice self-dependency for convenience, simple shortages become life-changing, perhaps even life-threatening.

Oh, and to hell with limiting this to a class. I'd like to play this game myself.

X-Posted to peak_oil.

Very few news or opinion pieces concerning the future of our electrical grid seem nowadays to lack a nice picture or two like those above and below these words.



What makes these two technologies possible, however, often eludes the corresponding press pieces, perhaps because even the reporters writing the stories ( fail to appreciate the beauty and promise of distributed generation. )


X-Posted to home_effinomic.

Robert Newman explains the historical politics behind oil. It's long but very informative. And funny. I've mentioned some of the points he makes before, but lots of his information is new to me.

Enjoy.

The ash surrounding some coal plants can contain up to 100 times more radiation than the soil outside a nuclear plant.

The result (of a 1978 study published in Science): estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities. At one extreme, the scientists estimated fly ash radiation in individuals' bones at around 18 millirems (thousandths of a rem, a unit for measuring doses of ionizing radiation) a year. Doses for the two nuclear plants, by contrast, ranged from between three and six millirems for the same period. And when all food was grown in the area, radiation doses were 50 to 200 percent higher around the coal plants.

Link verbiage edited to provide better accuracy than the linked article itself.

That's right, folks, I've gotten three different television sets in as many years. What's interesting, though, is that each newer set came to us free. Gratis. Cuestan nada. Also interesting: Each newer set got bigger and better. It also brought to mind a quirky personal statistic, that though I have never been without a television in any home in which I've lived, I've never bought a set. Whether there was already a set owned and made available by a roommate, or someone gave me an older set, or both, the glass teats have always presented themselves to my suckling eyes without cost.

( More big-ticket items for which I've not paid! )

Addendum, the next morning: I've decided we need a new word for items with utility that one gets from folks who would otherwise simply dispose of them, simply toss them away. How about

Toss-me-downs?

Last Wednesday, a coworker drove his coach back from Seattle toward Issaquah and saw the sun rise suddenly -- and very early -- only to set seconds later and leave a streak of green. He managed to see what I had not yet gotten out the door to witness, a suitcase-sized chunk of space rock that burned up in our atmosphere.

This got me thinking of a conversation I had years ago, and some advise I can offer to anyone caught in a hot debate: ( If at all possible, agree with your opponent. )

Peter Ward

I just finished a very thoughtful book, Peter D. Ward's Out of Thin Air. The entire book introduces and supports his theory that mass extinctions, while helped by meteor strikes, volcanism and the other usual suspects, hinge almost entirely on the gaseous content of the atmosphere:

Why do organisms bother with oxygen at all? Today there are huge areas of Earth, most underwater, that have little oxygen, so a body plan that helps an animal to live in low-oxygen environments would be very useful. But no animals use this kind of body plan. Why not? Aerobic respiration, the chemical reactions of metabolism in the presence of oxygen, yields up to 10 times more energy than does anaerobic respiration, a kind of respiration used by many bacteria. . . . Complex life requires vast amounts of energy to meet its needs. . . . There is an old adage: it takes money to make money. This same idea can be analogized to energy. (Ward, Out of Thin Air, Joseph Henry Press, 2006, p. 12.)

Ward lays a compelling case for his theory, citing recently compiled data on the atmosphere's gaseous content, specifically the percentage of oxygen and carbon dioxide, dating back almost 600 million years. At each major and minor extinction, he notes a drop in oxygen or a rise in carbon dioxide -- or both. This leads to his main hypothesis, that all leaps in evolutionary change and the subsequent diversity these changes bring start with periods of low oxygen and stagnate in periods where oxygen concentrations are highest.

I'll leave the obvious lesson regarding our current carbon change disaster for those inclined to do so. ( Instead, let's compare the dinosaurs of the past with our energy use today. )

Here's a stark thought: Perhaps we and the economy we have created is the idling dinosaur here, just waiting to gasp our last? No matter. When our economy fails, more efficient users of energy will be happy to move in.

Allow me to share a passage from the last Wired magazine I will be buying in a long, long time:

Smart Fortwo Though this king of microcars has been scooting around the EU practically since before it was the EU, the Fortwo is finally making its way stateside. It's about time! Americans like to save gas too; now we don't have to shell out Prius bucks or duck into the gray market. The Smart's 36 mph is worthy of a hybrid but will set you back far less (it starts at $11,590). Better late than never. (Emphasis mine.)

Let's examine this passage, shall we? That bit about the "gray market" I fully understand. I posted about ZAP's involvement earlier. Whatever ZAP touches, I don't. 'Nuff said. From the same sentence, though: "Prius bucks?" Let's see: they're trying to equate a $20K four-door, four passenger sedan with a gasser just a bit bigger than a golf cart that costs almost ten grand less? Four seats vs. two, more than double the carrying capacity, and the larger gets better mileage. Uh, utility-wise, I would say the Prius represents a far greater value.

Oh, and let's finally note the elephant in the phrase, shall we? Not only does the Prius give more space for the money, it gets better mileage. Like 15 or more mpg better. Hell, my '86 Honda Civic has four seats and almost gets better mileage. What gives?

Well, no one is saying what gives, and that really pisses me off. I have some speculation to offer, though, ( conjecture that focuses on the importance of companies to brand themselves. )

I was writing a very nasty note to Wired expressing my opinion. After I started it, though, I realized they haven't published any of my other nasties, and definitely won't commit this one to print. Why? The only letters from readers they print concern matters outside of their business model. No printed letter calls bullshit on their blatant product pushing and refusal to confront advertisers on their questionable claims.

Coincidentally and conveniently, the offending blurb spewed from the last issue my subscription had to offer. I'll just let the 10+ year subscription lapse with this lasting insult to the readers' intelligence. Good riddance to them.

From The Angry Bear:

A little industry has arisen whose primary purpose is to throw gray dust into the facts surrounding global warming. I say "gray dust" purposively. It does not fool the thousands of scientists who are actually in the field, but it is enough to fool those with neither the time nor the ability to do any serious research. . . .

Unfortunately, those quips serve the purposes of the big boys--coal and oil and others--who have some serious money on the line. If I have learned anything from reading as ecletically as I have it is this: All things are connected. Study the ant you may understand how swarms function in nature...and maybe in economics. No politician would ever fund a study that examined the size of finch beaks over a period of time. Yet that study of the beaks of the Galapogos finch gave us profound insight into how populations evolve as resources change. All things are connected.

That was just a taste. It's a good read.


X-posted to boiling_frog.

Yes, oil has reached the magic number, $100/barrel. However, as the Angry Bear notes, since 2001, the United States had less to do with breaking the price glass ceiling than many shrilly declare.

Don't believe me? Check out this graph, which shows flat US imports of both crude and refined fuels since 2001. Had our profligate nation been wholly responsible, this $100 benchmark would have been reached much, much earlier.

Frankly, I was a bit surprised by this, but I shouldn't be. After all, a few years back something monumental may have happened to oil supplies. I do wish the Angry Bear would have shown worldwide delivery of oil, not just national. Such an analysis might have through the smokescreen of Byzantine exceptions OPEC members use to inflate their own production numbers.

(OPEC production allowances each year are based upon production numbers from prior years. Thus, if, say, Saudi Arabia delivers a few million barrels to Qatar, and Qatar then sells this same oil back to Saudi Arabia in the same year allowing the Saudis to then put the oil on a ship, the Saudis can list both deliveries, the one to Qatar and the one to the ship, as production. They don't have to declare their imports, thus making an actual determination of how much they extract from their wells difficult.)

Back to the expensive barrel: Sure, the US imports were flat, but I'll put a small wager out there, and say that worldwide imports of ground-extracted crude is also flat.

But that's not what we're hearing, is it? "While daily price rises have been blamed on unrest in oil-supplying countries such as Nigeria, an underlying and significant factor has been an increase in demand from China and India." Other sources add poor weather in Mexico's fields to the list of blame.

Red herrings, all. Excuses, excuses, excuses. I say excuses because in the decades prior to today, the world has seen unrest, bad weather and consumption competition, but has never seen oil prices this high in real dollars.

These citations, this laundry list of excuses, addresses only specific supply/demand hiccups and avoids the Uncomfortable and Difficult Overlying Possibility; that a planetary peak in oil supply verses demand must be substantively addressed with real policy change, not excuses.



Chicken Little gets a bad rap; but sometimes the sky really falls.

Over the past few years, most everyone to whom I've mentioned Peak Oil has rebutted with the hope biofuels offer. Though I've tried, I have yet to convince many of the biofuel downside.

Until now:

Driving these increases are a complex range of developments, including rapid urbanization of populations and growing demand for food stuffs in key developing countries such as China and India, speculation in the commodities markets, increased diversion of feedstock crops into the production of biofuels, and extreme weather conditions and other natural disasters associated with climate change. . . .

The food crisis is intensifying social discontent and raising the likelihood of social upheavals. The FAO notes that political unrest “directly linked to food markets” has developed in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Guinea, Mauritania and Senegal. In the past year, cereal prices have triggered riots in several other countries, including Mexico, where tortilla prices were pushed up 60 percent. In Italy, the rising cost of pasta prompted nationwide protests. Unrest in China has also been linked to cooking oil shortages. (Emphasis mine)

And all this less than three years after peak oil extraction. Folks, the future looks bumpy.