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21 Nov 2009 08:41
November 20. By now you've all heard that hackers leaked some confidential emails by climate scientists, and they don't look good. Here's some damage control on The CRU hack from RealClimate.org. My take on this is going to be different from almost everyone else's, because I'm a long-time student of fringe science. It turns out that dominant climate scientists are disrespectful of the opposing side, and while they have not falsified data, they have conspired to present the data in such a way that their position is stronger and cleaner. What most people don't understand is that this is the way all science works. For that matter, it's the way all non-fiction works, and certainly fiction too. In fact, every kind of human model-making and storytelling depends on excluding anomalies and filling in blank spots to make a good picture. If you want to explore the legions of anomalies excluded by dominant science, I recommend the books of Charles Fort and William Corliss Now, does this mean climate science is false? I wouldn't say that, because I don't believe in objective truth. We have experiences, we build mental models to make sense of those experiences, and those models are more or less useful. If we're smart, we continually adjust our models to fit new experience, which is the root of the scientific method. I continue to expect catastrophic warming in my lifetime, based on what I've read about melting glaciers and icecaps, species moving northward, CO2 measurements, methane feedback, and the political difficulty of reducing carbon emissions (and now it's going to get even harder). But I'm also mentally prepared for catastrophic cooling. "That's impossible" is not a good survival strategy.
September - November 2009 -
19 Nov 2009 21:01
November 19. Especially good Archdruid post, How Relocalization Worked. Greer explains how the Medieval guild system was necessary in a local economy: a skilled blacksmith would get most of his business from stuff that anyone could do, but if unskilled blacksmiths were allowed to compete with him, he would be driven out of business, and then there wouldn't be anyone to do skilled work. There was also an unintended benefit of price fixing: if craftsmen couldn't compete in price, they had to compete in quality and innovation. Ironically, this led to so much innovation that we now have a high-tech global economy where price competition has driven quality into the gutter.
Also, Greer links to this exceptional piece by Ugo Bardi on the fall of Rome. Bardi concludes that the best thing for the Romans to do, if they had understood their situation, would have been to go voluntarily into the Middle Ages, to decentralize, demilitarize, and regrow forests, through reform instead of through catastrophe.
In January I'm planning a road trip down I-5 and the coast, maybe as far as Mendocino county. If anyone would like to host me, drop me an email at ranprieur and the domain name is gmail. -
19 Nov 2009 00:17
November 18. Oil Production is Reaching its Limit is a thorough new overview of peak oil, going all the way from the basic stuff to the latest research on the connections between oil prices and the economy, for example: "above $80 or $85 a barrel, the economy tends to go into a recession." Continuing the declining empire subject, a reader sends this great Joe Bageant piece about how the American left has lost compassion and betrayed smokers and fat people.
Those who remain politically involved have internalized politics as ideological warfare... For the common people, ideological adherence can only be demonstrated by zeal. And in their zeal, which is really unarticulated frustration at their powerlessness, the people start to cannibalize one another...
It seems like the only good news anymore is from worlds that aren't real. Here's a nice article about innovations in video games: Can DIY Supplant the First-Person Shooter?
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18 Nov 2009 07:00
The article doesn't stop there, but goes on to explore Ayn Rand's obsession with intellectual property. It never occurred to me that Rand had two distinct ideologies which totally contradict each other. One is basically Nietzsche, or Harrison Bergeron: the exceptional individual, wild and free, weighted down by the mediocrity of the average. The other is Ebenezer Scrooge. Rand's genius was to use the former as a front for the latter: because we are strong and independent and creative, we should never have to give anything to the lazy idiots. She was personally so miserly that she sent Nathaniel Branden to prevent her followers "from using the word Objectivist, to prevent them from using quotes from John Galt, to prevent them even from advertising lectures on the topic by students of her ideas." And "she ended up feeling robbed and looted by everyone who was influenced by her."
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17 Nov 2009 14:49
November 17. Thoughtful essay on intellectual property, If you believe in IP, how do you teach others? My position is that property is theft, and intellectual property is theft on stilts. Now Harvard and the University of Texas are actually prohibiting students from sharing what they learn in class. If you take this to its logical conclusion, you can pay for an education, go on to use what you've learned in a job, and if you didn't get the professor's explicit permission to use it, you can go to prison.
The article doesn't stop there, but goes on to explore Ayn Rand's obsession with intellectual property. It never occurred to me that Rand had two distinct ideologies which totally contradict each other. One is basically Nietzsche, or Harrison Bergeron: the exceptional individual, wild and free, weighted down by the mediocrity of the ordinary. The other is Ebenezer Scrooge. Rand's genius was to use the former as a front for the latter: because we are strong and independent and creative, we should never have to give anything to the lazy idiots. She was personally so miserly that she sent Nathaniel Branden to prevent her followers "from using the word Objectivist, to prevent them from using quotes from John Galt, to prevent them even from advertising lectures on the topic by students of her ideas." And "she ended up feeling robbed and looted by everyone who was influenced by her."
When you think about it, the most exceptional people should be the most generous. If you're truly confident in your ability to create things of value, you don't mind losing everything, because you can just make more. -
16 Nov 2009 23:09
November 16. I've mentioned Charles Mann's book 1491 several times, read it a few years ago, and integrated some of its ideas into Beyond Civilized and Primitive. Way back in 2002, before he wrote the book, Mann wrote an article for the Atlantic that covered the same stuff, and it's recently been making the rounds. So by popular demand, here it is: 1491.
There's a new internet abbreviation that I like: tl;dr, for "too long; didn't read". At first it was used as a criticism of long stuff, but increasingly it's being used at the end of a long post to indicate a summary. So the tl;dr for 1491: "Indians" were just as advanced as Europeans in some bad ways, like public executions and empires, and more advanced in some good ways, like horticulture, but then they got killed by smallpox and Europeans saw the post-crash survivors and thought they'd always been that way.November 16. Last night I changed the photos on the about me page, which were a year and a half old. The new ones were winnowed down from over 100, and I noticed that in a great many of them, I looked depressed or pained. I feel fine, but I tend to trust the camera. Maybe traveling will perk me up: in a week I go to Seattle, then on a family trip to Baja California, then briefly back to Spokane.
In January I'm planning a road trip down I-5 and the coast, maybe as far as Mendocino county. If anyone would like to host me, or knows of a good New Year's Eve party in Portland, drop me an email at ranprieur and the domain name is gmail.November 16. Readers send a couple permaculture links: Turning Desert into a Food Forest, and Composting with Urine.
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15 Nov 2009 16:37
November 15. Book review! A month ago I linked to the Wikipedia article on the Noosphere, in which I read this:
In The Gone-Away World, a novel by Nick Harkaway, Earth is devastated in a war fought with "Go-Away Bombs" -- weapons which erase the information content of matter, causing it to disappear from reality. The fallout of these bombs, called "Stuff", subsequently draws information from the noosphere, "reifying" human ideas and thoughts into physical form and creating a fantasy landscape of monsters and horrors.
Of course I had to read it, and that's mostly what I've been doing for the last week. Harkaway is the son of John le Carre, and he's certainly good with words, but I wish he wouldn't try to be funny. In the acknowledgements he credits his wife's laughter for making the book funnier. She must really love him, because I didn't laugh once, although I did learn to skip paragraphs and sometimes pages of tedious jaunty diversions from the main story. Also there's too much dick-wagging: "This guy thinks he's a bad-ass, but this other guy is a real bad-ass, and this third guy can beat the second guy in a fight without hardly trying." And there's too much skill porn, one character after another so impossibly good at what they do that you just get numb. But when Harkaway is trying to be deadly serious, he's brilliant. The book contains powerful stories, memorable characters, compassion, and I'm especially happy with the philosophy, which matches my own in both politics and metaphysics. Specifically: the world is full of good people doing evil because of roles they play in brutal social organisms driven to exterminate whatever they can't control. And: the basic fabric of reality is dreamlike chaos, in which we have built a little island of predictability and consistency, and we must inevitably venture outside it.
! I immediately put it toward a Serfas FMP-500 floor pump for my bicycle and truck. If a useful workout doesn't bother you, it's surprisingly easy to inflate car tires with a bike pump. Even with a little one, I've found it only takes 40 pumps to add a pound of pressure. Other tools I've bought lately include the new (four year old used) computer, a one inch diamond drill bit to see if I can break up boulders on the land, and a
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15 Nov 2009 00:58
November 14. Thanks CF for a $30 donation! I immediately put it toward a Serfas FMP-500 floor pump for my bicycle and truck. If useful exercise doesn't bother you, it's surprisingly easy to inflate car tires with a bike pump. Even with a little one, I've found it only takes 40 pumps to add a pound of pressure. Other tools I've bought lately include the new (four year old used) computer, a one inch diamond drill bit to see if I can break up boulders on the land, and a Radius Garden digging fork, which I've been using enough that I can highly recommend it.
November 13. Off the usual subjects:
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13 Nov 2009 14:48
November 13. Fun article off the usual subjects: Let's have fun with the Google search box.
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12 Nov 2009 21:02
November 12. Slow week. This month is the 100th anniversary of the publication of E.M. Forster's story The Machine Stops. If you have a spare hour it's worth reading. Decades before computers or television, Forster imagined a global information network that enables people to sit in their rooms all day distracting each other while industrial civilization falls apart.
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