The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Even though I was very naughty and didn’t publish anywhere near enough stuff, I’m still appreciative of almost all the visitors. (The spammers and other delinquents can go get themselves stuffed.)
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 12,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 20 years to get that many views.
Warning: this is a long one; and I’m very much in favour of gun control.
There’s plenty wrong with Canada, but one thing we’ve got right (in principle at least) is a strong gun control. Given the recent spate of shootings, both in Canada and the US, there has been a lot of discussion about gun control. I’d tried to argue for strict gun control on Google+, but the arguments became scattered over several discussions and so may have lost some of their effectiveness. So I’m going to try and put them all in one place here, in the hope that my position will make more sense.
I wrote a mini-review of The Conundrum, by David Owen, and posted it on Google+. It’s a book about climate change, resource depletion, and that science and technology will only make matters worse.
I didn’t like it, not just because I’m a science geek, but because Owen makes poor arguments in it. Unfortunately, I agree with him on his major premise – that only massively lowering consumption will work to save humanity in the long run – but his book offers nothing useful to advance or even defend this position. Read my Google+ post for more.
Short version: doesn’t bother with The Conundrum.
I’m Canadian; I’ve never even visited Penn State; and I hate football. Some might think that disqualifies me from having an opinion about the recent sanctions taken by the NCAA against Penn State. I can understand that. But also, sometimes, “fresh eyes” and “distance” can yield something useful; it’s in that spirit that I write this.
Today I heard an attempted debate on CBC Radio 1′s The Current, titled Did the NCAA come down hard enough on Penn State, between Buzz Bissinger and Gary R. Roberts. I say “attempted” debate because within a few minutes of beginning the discussion, Bissinger threw the rulebook of civilized discussion out the window and launched a tirade the likes of which I’ve only ever heard during American political debates.
The positions of the two men are quite clear; the New York Times ran a “debate” of sorts in their Opinion Pages on 16 July that included both men. Their principal arguments were the same on CBC.
Bissinger called for a “ban on football.” And he doesn’t mean just at Penn State. As is evident in his WSJ piece of 8 May, he thinks College football should be banned in its entirety for at least two years. He writes, in the Times debate, “The argument that the extensive cover-up had nothing to do with football is absurd. Jerry Sandusky was treated the very way he was, as if he were the victim, because he was a member of the Penn State football family. Like the Mafia, it’s a membership for life as long as you don’t snitch on other made members.” Setting aside his pointless shrill sensationalism, he’s arguing that the culture of college football was a fundamental enabler of Sandusky’s and Paterno’s actions. Furthermore, since the culture of football is ubiquitous in many American colleges, it stands to reason that similar crimes could very well be going on at other colleges too. Hence the universal ban.
Roberts, on the other hand, argues that the US criminal court system has yet to consider the allegations. He calls for calm and dispassion, noting that though the courts may seem to move slowly, they do so for good reason: to ensure that the truth does come out, based on evidence and not spittle-soaked invective. He also argues that the NCAA has neither the authority nor the mandate to punish Penn State, especially since the sanctions seem to also condemn countless students and faculty who had certainly nothing to do with the actual events, whatever they may turn out to be once the court proceedings have run their course. This statement by Roberts, from a piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, sums up his view nicely: “The N.C.A.A. is a nonprofit, member organization that exists to regulate intercollegiate athletic competition and facilitate that competition. It is not, and should not become, an organization that exists to enforce legal or moral standards.”
I think both Bissinger and Roberts are wrong.
Nothing good will come from Bissinger’s inflammatory rhetoric. Mafia? Really? I suppose he’s playing on Paterno’s Italian roots. Ha-ha. Cuz we all know that all Italians are mafiosi. Message to Bissinger: stop being such a dick. But if we try to cleave his Chicken Little rantiness out of his writing we’re left with a key proposition: the culture of football is the root cause of the terrible things that happened at Penn State, and that those things just a symptom of a broad and pervasive mentality that places football above all else.
This is only half-right, which in essence makes it all wrong, because there is no linear cause and effect here. We’re talking about a massive system, including dozens of colleges, hundreds of faculty and staff, thousands of students, banks, legal firms, television networks, advertisers, merchandizers, fan clubs, and who knows what other groups. All these elemental groups interact in complex, non-linear, and opaque ways. No one – not one single person – has an overview of the whole thing. No one truly understands it. Furthermore, this gargantuan system has emerged, evolved, grown slowly over more than a century. Feedback loops – and there must be thousands if not millions of them – have been slowly reinforcing some phenomena and dampening others. Because no one fully understands the complexity of the system, no one can recognize the feedback loops, so no one can spot the problematic ones. There is no doubt in my mind that unacceptable behaviours have been going on in College football for a very long time – not because football is somehow prone to it, but because unacceptable behaviours will happen everywhere given enough time. The terrible things that happened at Penn State are, I think, just more of the same – perhaps worse than any others to date – but still phenomena of a type that has gone on for a long time. As such, those acts are both causes and effects, because they are participants in feedback loops within the system.
And you can’t fix a bad system by just bashing on one of its elements. There are ways to fix systems, but they are far, far away from Bissinger’s hysterical proposals.
Roberts, on the other hand, certainly seems the voice of reason in all this. The rule of law is a keystone of American society. Vitriol and raw emotion never lead to a good outcome in these matters, because fairness is an essential prerequisite for justice, and fairness requires rationality.
But there’s two things wrong with the application of these principles, in this case. First, we are talking about the USA here; it’s the land of the “1%,” the country of Citizens United. It is not entirely obvious to me that legal proceedings involving the multi-billion dollar industry of US College football will lead to a just result. There is, currently, significant distrust of the American legal system. Not all of it is warranted, but the distrust is still there. To place one’s faith so firmly in it, as Roberts does, seems rather disingenuous.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that the judicial system will find anything other than guilt or innocence of a few individuals. And it seems incredibly unlikely that it will find a real solution that involves investigating, mapping, and analyzing the complex system that is US College football. Yet without such analysis, and finding instead only the guilt or innocence of a few individuals, it will do absolutely nothing to address the systemic problems that are in play. Such proceedings are necessary, to be sure, because anyone who willfully does such terrible things and anyone who conspires to protect such individuals needs to pay the price society sets for such things. Legal proceedings are necessary, but not sufficient.
While Roberts arguments seem to me the lesser of two evils, neither seems truly appropriate to come to a real understanding of the system, and thus find a truly appropriate solution. The real solution will involve a lot of effort and money and time, it will involve bringing in a diversity of systems experts, and carefully finding out exactly how the system works. It will involve getting all the stakeholders involved (anonymously, if necessary) to map out how all the elements of the system interact. It will involve analyzing that map to discover what interventions, gentle nudges to the system, in perhaps unlikely places will bring about the desired changes.
Some of you may think that this is an intractable proposal; there’s just no way to marshall the resources needed to make it happen. In response, I would ask you to reconsider the alternatives as proposed by Bissinger and Roberts. Are they really any better?
This is a really bad design for cleaning up the Pacific Trash Vortex.
I came across a post at Core77 about a concept design for a device to clean up the Pacific Trash Vortex, a region of the north Pacific Ocean that seems to be gathering garbage, particularly plastic, where global ocean currents converge. Unfortunately, it’s a really bad design. I will sketch a solution that I think is much better.
The Pacific Trash Vortex is an interesting phenomenon that no one really saw coming till the 1980s, but, in hindsight, seemed rather obvious. Floating garbage will be carried by currents. Any gyre where several such currents meet will result in collections of garbage. This garbage eventually starts to poison the water and the wildlife that lives in it.
The idea behind the design in the Core77 post is that a device slowly wanders through the Vortex, collecting garbage in its net. When it’s full, it gets pulled up to a “mothership,” emptied, and then sent back for more.
My disdain for this design caused me to post about it on Google Plus. The ensuing discussion got me thinking more about it, and that motivated me to post about it here. I should note that some of the points I make here are based on comments posted by others on G+. Rather than reproduce their names here to give them credit, I will just refer you to my G+ post (linked above) which shows who everyone is.
Let’s start with the problems in this design.
First, most ocean-going organisms (and vessels) have some kind of control surfaces, even if it’s just an asymmetry of general shape. That’s because one needs to stabilize oneself with respect to cross-currents and inertial forces. The only way to do that, that I can see, with this design, is to pivot the thrusters extending from the front collar of the thing. Except that, without knowing about the actual dynamics of the thing, it’s not clear to me that using the thrusters will be an efficient solution. Indeed, I suspect it will be terribly inefficient. And the last thing we need if for a device like this to be unnecessarily inefficient.
Second, what happens to the garbage when the device is full, and it’s emptied into the “mothership?” So far, all you’ve done is gotten it out of the water. While that’s a good start, you’re still not out of the woods. Presumably, the mothership would lug the garbage back to terra firma, where it would be processed. That will itself have an environmental impact. And considering that, by some accounts, the size of the Pacific Trash Vortex is comparable to the USA, I can imagine it will take quite a few trips to clean the Vortex up to any significant degree. Remember, too, that more trash is always arriving at the Vortex from all over the Pacific Rim. For this design to make sense at all, one would have to have enough of these devices, and enough motherships, to pull the garbage out of the water faster than it accumulates. But all this design does is move the garbage around without actually doing anything with it; and it does so at some environmental cost. That doesn’t really sound useful to me. Clearly, systems thinking was not on the designers’ minds when they concocted this thing.
Third, it is suggested that some kind of irritating sonic signal will be used to keep fish and other marine life out of the device. Obviously, that’s a concern. These submarine vacuums are probably at least the size of pick-up trucks if not much larger. We don’t want to be killing the ocean life that happens to wander into them by mistake. But the sonic signal thing doesn’t wash. Sound is already considered a source of pollution under water. Sounds made by boats and other machinery may already be damaging submarine ecosystems. Do we really want to go down that road? And which sounds will work on which organisms? And will some sounds repel some organisms but attract others? I just can’t see the sonic thing working out at all.
So, let me suggest an alternative design, which I came up with in a matter of minutes – so it’s not very polished – that I think will actually do the job much better.
Build a massive floating platform and float it into the Vortex. The facility will collect garbage from the water and process it directly on-site, thus generating usable products and raw material rather than garbage to be transported elsewhere.
The platform will generate its own power via a combination of ocean thermal energy (OTEC) and solar energy (both PV for electricity and solar thermal for hot water). It will probably need lots of electricity. The convergence zone for the garbage seems to be at a latitude comparable with the southern USA. This suggests an area of medium to high insolation – and therefore suitable as a solar power source, and an area with a good vertical water temperature differential to run the OTEC system.
The platform will be large enough to contain greenhouses, and maybe even grazing land for small animals like rabbits and goats, for growing food for those who work there, thus minimizing the number of cargo transports that will add to the system’s environmental impact. These green areas will also act as green “roofs” to help insulate the living areas of the platform. Obviously, waste will be recycled on-site too.
A substantial amount of heat will be generated by the machinery and the biomass on the platform. Areas of the platform will be designed using Passivhaus design principles to keep ambient heat out, and also use that internal waste heat for other purposes (e.g. pre-heating water).
The OTEC system itself will require a structure extending from the surface down to quite a depth. That same structure can be used as a spine on which waste collection units will be attached. The only reasonable way to collect garbage is just suctioning water and straining the garbage from it. Once filtered of garbage, the water is used by the OTEC system to generate electricity.
This leaves the fish problem. I’m not sure how to deal with that, but I think a number of different measures will be needed (i.e. there’s no silver bullet). If the suction is mild enough (and made up for by the rather massive size of the installation and the number of input vents it would have), then we might consider using light and scent rather than sound. Light, especially at depth, could very well keep some organisms away. A scent of some predator species might also work. The system could be designed so water containing scent will very quickly be sucked into the system, where the scent chemical can be removed and reused. It might even be useful to actually use large predator organisms – sharks for instance as deterrents to other organisms. The system could be designed so that the sharks are too powerful to be suctioned into it, yet they will eat anything that’s alive near the inlets. There might even be solutions to this problem using magnetic fields that may disorient some organisms. Or perhaps a particular maze-like shape will discourage organisms. In any case, what I’m saying here is that there are probably a wide variety of solutions to keep organisms away from the inlets. I don’t know enough to offer a solution I think would work, but I do know enough to believe such solutions exist.
A small scientific station will also be located on the platform. The station will accommodate scientists who will study the phenomenon of the Vortex, its contents, its growth, and its impact on the marine ecosystem.
Finally, we get to the garbage itself. Rather than ship garbage, the platform would act as a manufacturing facility, turning the garbage into useful products. Indeed, some of the manufactured goods could be used directly on the platform itself. Perhaps it could manufacture recycled plastic bottles or containers. Perhaps it could use the sea water itself, and concentrate sunlight on a slurry of water and garbage to make it decompose into more easily manufactured materials. Whatever is done, the point is that the material shipped from the platform would be usable, not garbage.
There’s a lot of open questions here. I did about 10 minutes research while writing this post. I can’t even decide if the idea is feasible.
But it’s not impossible. And it has the potential of being a serious solution to the problem of the Pacific Trash Vortex. (And the other trash vortices – the one in the Pacific isn’t the only one.)
Last year, I wrote a post about the abominable notion of endless growth. The point of that post was to indicate how absolutely delusional it is to think that things like the economy will always grow, and that the bigger a thing gets the more catastrophic the failure when it finally fails.
Today, nearly a year later, I found a blog post – the first on the wonderful Do The Math blog – dating back to just a few days before my own, and that covered the same topic, the absurdity of continued growth, but from a strictly mathematical point of view. It’s a great post that shows that – at our current rate of growth of energy consumption – we will become a galaxy-consuming civilization in a mere 2,500 years.
I tip my hate to Tom Murphy’s excellent blog. If you’ve not subscribed to Do The Math, you’re missing something special.
Design-Related CFPs My Productivity Blog: Do Fast & Well
