Author: Devilstower

This is a diary about the end of the world.

No, I haven’t been going over my newspaper with a highlighter, looking for signs of the end times.  I haven’t been studying the proper type of cow needed to sanctify the Second Temple.  I haven’t been contemplating the probability of a bird flu pandemic, or the effects of the Russians marketing long range bombers to the Chinese.

This is about a quieter end.  An end with all the inevitable entropy-driven ignominy as that which awaits us all personally.  What I’m going to talk about is not a popular thought, and not yet mainstream thought, but for some people it’s starting to look like a sickeningly sure bet.  For everyone who has that little achy feeling down deep in their guts that Things Just Aren’t Quite Right… this one’s for you.

And it starts in 1989.

Part I: The Most Unpopular Man in Science

Actually, the story starts better than two million years ago, when hominids figured out that stone plus pig skull equaled a lot more bacon for diner.  Some time after that came the fire thing.  Around 40,000 years ago, there was an explosion of technology — almost the Cambrian of the mind — and about 30,000 years after that, along came agriculture.  After that, it was all just fiddly bits.

What happened in 1989 was that Scientific American writer, John Horgan, began to follow around some of the top scientists and researchers in the world.  He shot the physics breeze with Roger Penrose.  Discussed evolutionary science with Stephen Jay Gould.  Put some hair on black holes with Stephen Hawking.  And contemplated structures with Freeman Dyson.  

Jealous much?  I know I am.  And Horgan wasn’t limited to this foursome.  He interviewed scores of scientists, from the old guard to the young Turks, across almost every field imaginable.  He didn’t limit his discussions to only the so-called “hard scientists,” but branched out to talk with luminaries of the mind like Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky.  He interviewed these men (and precious few women) in their homes and laboratories.  He talked to them about their personal lives and their professional dreams.  

In 1996, the results of his world-wide science groupie junket were published, but even the title of the book was enough to set teeth on edge for many of the people he had interviewed.  Horgan called his book The End of Science.

Once, Horgan said, science had made great discoveries.  Scientists had ferreted out the structure of the atom, the cause of evolution, and the nature of DNA.  They had taken electricity from side-show wonder into the lab, and into the home.  Where man had once lived in a state of decidedly non-blissful ignorance, full of disease and superstition, science had allowed us to understand and manipulate the world around us.  Science had produced one big idea after another, and all those ideas had reshaped the world.  The trouble was, according to Horgan, the well of ideas was running dry.

Where once physicists grappled with the whole idea of elementary particles, now they are reduced to seeking ever more elusive variants of quarks, and even then any discovery they made was unlikely to have more than negligible impact, even in their own field.  Where geologists and astronomers had once upended the views of a young universe, they were now limited to wondering what happened in only the first fleeting microseconds of an origin pushed back billions of years.  Biology had gone from understanding muscles and tissues, to genetics and increasingly well defined molecular chemistry.  In short, the era of big ideas was past.

Modern scientists are limited to studying the very big or the impossibly tiny, and to make progress at either end demands experiments so expensive that they are inconceivable to any but the richest governments.  Unfortunately, the rich governments are less and less inclined to support these experiments, because the returns they deliver and tougher and tougher to quantify.  No one has to speculate about the return on investment of self-funded 18th century gentlemen dabblers who laid much of the foundation for today’s science.  But start a debate over the economic benefits of the space program, and you’ll see how divergent the views can be.  Can anyone really promise that the returns from the proposed (and now abandoned) Super-conducting Super-collider would really cover its multibillion dollar price tag?

The universe may be infinite, but ideas about how the universe works are not.  Every idea developed is one less that can be developed in the future.

Horgan’s work is not without its critics.  In fact, finding a supporter of his contention may be more difficult than getting a good photo of a neutrino.    But the more that people argued against Horgan’s point, the more that others came to admit that there might be something in his contention.  As we prepare to celebrate a century since Einstein first scribbled down the famous E=MC2 equation (please excuse the lack of superscript), the lack of such blinding insights over the interim seems at least puzzling.

Sir Isaac Newton once famously said that if he saw further because he was “standing on the shoulders of giants.”  Scientists today had not only Newton’s shoulders to climb, but Einstein, Planck, Bosen, and a host of others.  Plus, they have dandy new instruments for looking.  So why is it, the things they’re seeing seem so incredibly dull?

Part II: The iPod Illusion

Somewhere — I suspect back around the time that H. erectus was learning how to nap flint — there came a break between those who studied stones, and those who concentrated on turning out the spear points.  Since then, there’s been a irreparable schism between the “ivory tower” researchers and the “sell out” technologists

Even while most scientists would be loath to accept Horgan’s gloomy positions, they’ve long been making the case that basic research — the kind of contemplation that leads to developing one of those Big Ideas — has been supplanted by the kind of “practical research” that goes toward making ideas into something you can purchase at your local Radio Shack.  The public rarely thinks of this one as a problem.  While the Big Idea guys are frustrated by the lack of bucks, the idea that the investments are going into consumer products is something that keeps us all reading the catalogs.

Here’s a phrase for you, see if you’ve heard this one “the ever increasing pace of technology.”  Sound familiar?  It should.  It’s become as big an assumption about the world we live in as gravity.  Things change, and they keep changing ever more quickly.  Oh, what a hectic, hurried life we live.

Everyone knows that the pace of technological change is increasing.  Just like everyone knew that a heavy ball would fall faster than a light one before Galileo paid a visit to the leaning tower.  

But in 2000, Phillip Longman put out an article entitled The Slowing Pace of Progress.  Longman based his article on a statistic called Total-Factor Productivity (TFP).  This number tracks a kind of over-all sense of how effectively raw material is being turned into goods, and how quickly new kinds of goods are coming onto the market.  When you look at these numbers, the results are surprising to anyone who thinks this is the go-go high tech wonder age.  

 
After delivering your best Jon Stewart Whhhhaaattt?  Sit back and contemplate one of Longman’s examples.  Say you took a typical couple from the 50’s and dropped them in a home of today.  What is there that they would not understand?  Well, there’s computers and… computers.  The TV is still a TV, even though it might have a better image and have assorted gadgets attached to it.  The stove is a stove, the oven an oven.  A vacuum cleaner still sucks — even if it does so on a zero-radius ball and a cool vortex cleaning system.  

The gap looks even worse if you contemplate our technology vs. that from the late 1970’s.  Home computers?  Check.  Portable music player?  Sure.  VCR?  Microwave?  Hey, both of those were invented back in 50’s couple time.  

Do we have better gadgets today?  Boy, and how.  I’m writing this on my keen little Mac Mini (complete with iSight camera, iPod, and iLoveGlossyAppleGear).  But what we have is only a refinement of what was already there decades before.  

Now reverse the thought experiment.  Take our 50’s couple and toss them in the Way Back machine to 1900.  What’s left of the technology they knew?  Precious little.   That previous fifty years saw the rise of so many new technologies, the difference is astounding.  

So why was 1900 to 1950 (or 1800 to 1900) so radically better at cranking out new tech than we are today?  Far from living in a the most rapidly changing time in history, we may be living with the slowest change in technology since the Dark Ages.  We celebrate each increase in computer speed, each new wire for delivering more data to our homes, or each improvement in the rate at which we can pop popcorn.  But when’s the last time a technology was introduced that changed the world like the telephone?  Radio?  The automobile?

It would be easy to dismiss Longman and his funny statistic, but other researchers have approached the problem from other directions, and they keep coming to the same conclusion.  Face it, we’re techno-slackers.

There are two possibilities here, and neither one of them is all that pleasant to contemplate.  Either we are too stupid to make the kind of breakthroughs made by our parents and grandparents, or our technology problem is directly related to our research problem. Maybe, with no new Big Ideas, we don’t have the basis for any new Big Breakthrough.

And you always wondered why we didn’t have didn’t have any flying cars.

Part III: Brother, Can You Paradigm?

One a road marked by a shortage of both Big Ideas and Big Inventions, there’s really only one destination: doom.   We’ve coasted for decades on cheap energy and the disparity of the global labor market (in other words, we suck at science and technology, but we’ve become aces at exploitation).  Faced with a decline in the ready availability of energy and raw material, we’re approaching that ugly tipping point where the cost of basic commodities once again becomes the primary factor in the lives of all but a very few.  It’s not even a matter of going back that fifty years, or a hundred, because we’ve already done such a fine job of exploiting the resources that made a non-technological life style possible.  

To put in terms that would make any geek cry, imagine that there’s not going to be any real Star Trek.  Ever.  Never ever.  In fact, it’s increasingly likely that the handful of landings we made on the moon were high tide for mankind.  We lapped this far into the universe, and no farther.  No warp drives.  No interstellar federation.  Heck, we don’t even get to see BladeRunner, much less Captain Picard.

If oil really is as restricted as all the models now indicate, don’t think “how much will a tank of gas cost me in ten years,” think “how many burgers can you make from a dachshund?”  Because not long after the supply crunch really hits, the glossy advertising-driven world we’ve built gets revealed as a shaky construction with a good paint job.  Then we discover that the future looks more like the Flintstones than the Jetsons.

But wait!  There are outs.

First off, all these guys could be wrong.  Believe you me, no scientist wants to think Horgan is right about the dust at the bottom of the idea well.  Nobody at Sony or Microsoft welcomes Longman’s idea that they’re squeezing the last drops of engineering milk. No one likes to think that the end is inevitable, no matter how many times Team Entropy cleans up on the rest of the universe.

So where do we look for some sunlight at the end of this very gloomy tunnel?  Into the mystical mirror of the paradigm change.

Imagine you’re living somewhere in Northern Africa around 12,000 years ago and the business of tossing rocks at meat is starting to look a little, well, old.  Spears and scrapers and the rest of the hunter-gather kit have been around for a long while, and you’ve worked up just about every variation on how flint can be flaked and how weapons can be made.  Sure, you’ve got new colors in the beadwork, and there’s new songs around the campfire, but nothing is really improving.  Worse, with a growing population of people and fewer big critters ripe for the stabbing, you’re starting to worry that the whole system has a serious flaw.

Then along comes the agriculture paradigm.  Bang, everything changes.  

The tricky thing about a paradigm shift is, you can’t see what’s on the other side.  Hunter-gatherer man can’t even contemplate what lives in agriculture world.  If he could, he’d have invented it already.  Paradigms are a wall.  A crazy mirror.  You look toward the future, expecting more of what you’ve already seen.  Only shinier.  But with a paradigm shift, it’s like an alien invasion.  You can’t even think like those people over there, so don’t try.

So far, paradigm shifts have come along and kicked people into the next gear at several phases in history.  And if we ever needed one, we need it now.

There are a couple of good potential candidates for a paradigm shift.  The first one lies in that “big and little” problem facing science.  Yes, physicists trying to understand the nature of reality are restricted these days to looking at the extraordinarily large and the unimaginably small.  However, the two theories that describe the behavior of the large (relativity) and the small (quantum mechanics) have proved surprisingly hard to pull together.  Even among scientists who study these fields, there’s a general feeling that neither theory actually tells you what’s really going on.  Both are only sort of convenient mathematical models that are awfully good at predicting how things work under most conditions.  What’s really happening may be infinitely niftier.

Putting the big and the small together may yet reveal a different model of the universe, as divergent from what we understand as Newton’s world from Einstein’s.   That alone would add at least a few inches of fresh water at the bottom of the idea well, and may actually prove to be a spring, providing a source for a lot more big ideas to come.  I hope so, because while there are a few other dark corners in scientific theory that look like they might hide possible doorways into new rooms, they are precious few, and every one of them is a long shot.

The other candidate for a big shift, is a shift in the way we think.  It may not be that we’re running out of big ideas so much as that science is running out of big ideas.  It’s almost impossible to talk about this possibility without sounding like a mystical kook, but it may be that the whole “scientific method” approach is so limiting, that we’re ignoring a lot of what’s possible.  Mr. End of Science himself, Horgan, has become an advocate of this idea, which is pushed in his latest book, Rational Mysticism.  

I have a hard time with this one.  Partly it’s because I don’t understand it.  Mostly it’s because I deeply resent the idea that the future may be more influenced by Deepak Chopra might have more to say about the future than Hawking or Penrose.  There’s also, weirdly enough, a techno option on this, as some people have proposed that the flurry of information now available (through mind-bending sources like this diary) will itself lead to new ways of exercising the gray matter.  Personally, while I like to think the blogs are both informative and helpful, I have a problem believing they’ll save humanity.  

Still, I expect we’ll escape.  Yes, I have that sneaky, icky feeling down in my stomach.  The feeling that we’ve bounced a few fundamental checks and the repo man is already warming up his truck.  But I’m optimistic.  Or in deep denial, take your pick.

In any case, I’ll spare you the semi-inevitable T. S. Elioit quote.

Every now and then it’s nice to see something cool on the oil / environmental front — and this is cool.

A week ago, five drivers took a car to a little stretch of road in Pennsylvania.  After a whole weekend of driving in four hour shifts, they had achieved fuel economy numbers that seem almost magical: 110 MPG.

So what was the secret?  It wasn’t some miracle fuel additive, some secret engine design, or some low friction track.  This was an ordinary car, running on ordinary roads, using ordinary gas.  The answer lies in two things: a unique ability of the Toyota Prius, and good driving technique.
This wasn’t the first time these drivers had achieved extraordinary mileage.  One of the drivers first posted about a 818 mile tank he had gotten over on PriusChat.com and challenged other drivers to beat him.  Within a week, reports came in of a 900 mile tank.  Then 967.  Then the first driver edged 1000.

With that experience behind them, the best of these drivers teamed up for a experiment in pushing the Prius to its mileage limits.  With a camera crew from HBO in pursuit, and lots of local media monitoring their progress, they set out on the Prius Marathon Run, hoping to get 1200 miles from one 12 gallon tank of gas.

For this run, they made only very slight changes to the car.  They pumped up the tires to 60psi to cut rolling resistance.  And they added some electronics.  Only the electronics weren’t really to improve the mileage, they were just to monitor the mileage.  The regular displays on the Prius only go up to 99.9 MPG, and these guys knew they were going to top that, at least for part of the trip, so they loaded in some aftermarket gear.

This thread in PriusChat details their progress, along with the comments of Prius fans (like yours truly) “watching” over the Internet as drivers came off their shifts and posted the results.  For those of us tracking the progress, this thing was every bit as exciting as any NASCAR race.  When the ‘add fuel’ warning began to flash around 1,000 miles, it seemed like the predicitions of 1100-1200 miles were going to be right on.  But the car kept on going for almost nine hours with the add fuel blinking all the way, finally reaching 1,397 miles before the well ran dry (and only then because the exhausted drivers finally decided to try to waste some gas).

The Pittsburg Post-Gazette caught some of the MPG-fanatic action:

Over on AutoBlog scoffers stood by to pan the event as “not real world numbers,” but one of the drivers, Wayne Gerdes, had an answer for them:

For someone who has a Prius but “only” gets 52MPG, these guys have set a high bar.  Excuse me while I practice my technique.

You thought the Republicans scored a coup when then managed to turn the Estate Tax into the “Death Tax?”  Think they pulled the wool over America’s eyes with tax cuts for the super wealthy?  Think again.  That was just the warm up.  

Having delivered on the Estate Tax, having easily picked off insane tax cuts for the billionaire boy’s club, having tossed mega-bucks to oil companies currently raking in record profits, the Republican hyper-privileged are not going to stop.  They’re swinging for the fences.

With 2006 elections practically on us, and every justification of the Neocon revolution in tatters, they’re going to be looking for a new causus belli – another sharp stick to poke in the eye of Democrats everywhere.  Like the Grinch, they’re going to “think up a lie, and think it up quick.”  And buddy, this one is going to be a whooper.  

The Republicans are going to run on eliminating the Income Tax.  And stopping them is not going to be easy.
A decade ago, no one would have thought the Estate Tax would fall like rotten fruit.  After all, it had been in place for most of a century, worked well, and affected only a tiny percentage of the nation.  Why should ordinary citizens take a hit so silver-spoon babies could keep more of daddykins billions?  Even most Republicans didn’t think this tax was vulnerable.  But never underestimate the effect of a good PR campaign.  By re-labeling this as the “Death Tax,” and through careful phrasing, the wealthy elite managed to convince even average citizens that the tax was unfair.  

True, the public is awake enough now that making the cuts permanent is going to be a little harder than passing the original hornswoggle, but they’ll wait for the right moment of distraction, or tack it onto the next “you have to support the troops” bill to fund the Iraqi fiasco.  Then they’ll get serious.

What’s next?  Tax cuts are so passé.  A Flat Tax is so Steve Forbes.  No, they’re going to push for a complete and total scrapping of the tax system.  

Frankly, the Republicans were going to take this step anyway.  If Iraq had worked out according to their rosy predictions, they would have ridden the coattails of that victory straight to the steam rollers smashing the IRS.  But just because they’ve been wrong on every important issue of the last decade, don’t expect them to even stop for breath.  After all, look at the Bush approach.  Tax surplus?  Why cuts are the answer.  Tax deficit?  Even more cuts!  

Besides, the party of Halliburton is in need of a major-league distraction.  And what better distraction than promising the most massive “something for nothing” deal in all of history?  

If you want a preview of the 2006 Republican platform, you need look no further than the bestsellers at Amazon.com.  Specifically, look at The Fair Tax Book by Neal Boortz and John Linder.  John Linder would be Congressman John Linder, R-GA.  Neal Boortz is a syndicated radio host on the Cox Network with a pitch that’s a good-ole-boy mish-mash of radical libertarian and terminal stage rabies.   What do these two intellectual giants promise in their book?  Everything.  At a discount.

In other words, in the 2006 elections, the Right is going to offer Free Money.  They’re going to tell the average middle-class American that they can get a 20% raise, and all they have to do is vote Republican.  It’s going to be the biggest bribe ever offered to the American public.

And explaining why this is nonsense, is going to be hard.

In a nutshell, here’s the Boortz-Linder thesis:

1. We eliminate the IRS – including not only personal taxes, but all corporate and business taxes as well.
2. We replace the income tax with a 23% sales tax.

Wait a minute, now.  If we replace the income tax with a sales tax, doesn’t that just shift the tax burden from one transaction to another?  No, say Monsieurs Boortz and Linder, because by freeing the corporations of their tax burden, they will immediately pass on the savings to their customers.  They promise that companies will be able to cut the prices of goods enough to eat all the increase in sales tax.  In other words, if you’re paying $40 for a toaster today, you’ll be paying $40 for a toaster tomorrow.   Only you’ll have more money to buy toasters.

With this miracle achieved, the economy will grow like never before.  Citizens will find themselves stuffed with tax savings, more confident, and ready to buy more goods of all sorts.  At the same time, American companies, freed of taxes, will be able to make goods so cheaply that they’ll be able to out compete factories overseas.  Manufacturing jobs will return even faster than they left.  In fact, as the world’s new tax haven, corporations will flock to America.  With all the new jobs brought in by this influx, Americans will have their choice of plum jobs at hefty salaries.  There will also be a huge increase in revenue as many of the industries now forced underground by “crushing tax burdens” pop up to play (vote Republican and make those prostitutes and drug deals pay their fair share!)

All this, and they promise that for the government the tax will initially be revenue neutral, matching the current income tax.  Long term, what with that expanding economy buoyed by new jobs and fat wallets, the tax base will actually grow.

They don’t exactly promise that their proposal will turn water into wine and make every woman look like Diane Lane, but then, I didn’t get through the last couple of chapters.  Oh, I forgot to mention that the plan includes an amendment to the Constitution, outlawing any future income tax.  Nice, huh?  

Of course, there are major problems with this fairy tale.  To shine a spotlight on the more obvious points:

1. Most goods sold in the United States are not made here (remember that goofy Perot guy and his “giant sucking sound?  Score one for the man with the ears).  So cutting the taxes that corporations pay will have next to no effect on what you load in the shopping cart.  Put on a 30% sales tax, things are going to cost 30% more.  Period.  (The book says 23%, but Mr. Boortz and Congressman Linder seem to have missed the 6th grade class on calculating percentages – they did it backwards.)
2. Taxes are a tiny fraction of the cost of goods.  The major costs are materials, energy, and labor.  Having no taxes will not bring corporations back to America so long as they can find the mix of those three components at lower prices outside our borders.
3. The book does not appear to address state taxes at all.  If the same tactic were applied there, expect the sales tax (the “it’s not a VAT!” VAT) to rise north of 40%.
4. Instead of “drawing money into the light,” this system would be much easier to avoid than the IRS.  Many transaction would be moved off the books, or converted into barter transactions to avoid paying this huge sales tax.
5. There would be a huge sales tax on homes, cars, and other large goods.  It might be nice to pretend that the cost of a toaster is going to magically decline, but does anyone really believe home prices will sink 30% and then some to make up the difference?  This plan promises to directly attack the one industry that’s been driving the economy for the last five years.
6. Say bye-bye to charities, as there’s no way to handle deductions under this plan.
7. While getting rid of the IRS might free up some D.C. office space, Boortz and Linder actually just replace the IRS with a new bureaucracy to handle the sales tax.
8. The plan would indeed make the US a tax refuge – and a spending wasteland.  Every incentive would be for companies and individuals who can afford it to make money here, and spend it elsewhere.

What the whole thing amounts to is nothing less than removing the tax burden completely from corporations, and almost as completely from the rich.  CEOs can make your money on the backs of US labor that pays 30% on every loaf of bread, then spend the dough in Monaco and laugh all the way to the bank.

For all that, this is going to be a hard fight.  A much harder fight than you might realize.  Boortz and Linder’s book is only the latest of several shots meant to soften up the public to this idea.  

While this might not end up as a major part of the 2006 campaign, it shows every sign of being this year’s model from the people who brought you such fine products as Iraq 2002 and Supply Side Economics 1980.  Right now, these ideas are all over right wing radio.  Right now, Republican pollsters are working “Fair Tax” questions into the spin they’re cooking for next season.  If they get any sign of traction, expect them to step on the gas.

The idea of killing the IRS and seeing your paycheck balloon will make fine 30 second sound bites.  As always, explaining why this is an absolute lie will be harder.

Praise Dean and pass the ammunition, because this fight is coming.

Last week, in the storied tradition of Saturday Morning Garden Blogging, I started  posting a series of diaries about my little spot of alternating paradiso and purgatorio — The Sticks.

Those of you who have occupied your minds with the weighty matters of politics, treason, the oil supply, melting ice caps, and the outcome of the latest Big Brother are once again invited to come on down, find a shady spot, and camp out.  I’ll make the lemonade.
It’s been a blazing hot, painfully dry summer around here, and neither the forest nor the garden have much appreciated it.  We (by which I mean, my wife) have picked up a wheelbarrow load of fallen branches every day, and reliable old plants like peonies and columbine have wilted before the heat.  Even the big peach tree — usually so loaded down that we have to use string and planks to keep it from committing peachicide by ripping itself to pieces under the weight of all the fruit — produced only a handful this year, and the deer nabbed those few before they could find their way onto my pancakes.

As usual, the one group of plants that seem to thrive in the worst conditions of the year are the coneflowers.

This year, the little volunteer tiger lillies have also spread quite well — though this seems to have come at the expense of the yellow coneflowers.

Last week, there were complaints that after showing the garden and the road, I failed to give a glimpse of the house.  So, here’s that first look at The Sticks itself.

This is the northern third of the place, minus the part that holds the den and kitchen, the breezeway, and the new garage.  Once I can convince my college age son and his friends not to leave a convoy worth of cars in front of the rest of it, I’ll try and get a shot of the whole sprawl.  But this shot should give you a pretty good sense of the place.  It’s logs.  It’s a house.  It’s a log house.

The Sticks would never make the cover of one of the log home magazines.  It doesn’t have handcrafted custom logs made from thousand year old spruce (it’s plain old southern yellow pine, made popular as telephone poles).  It doesn’t have a three story front window, or a ten person jacuzzi, or landscaping done by someone who won an Oscar.  But it’s one big pile of sticks, it is.

Last week, someone also mentioned that they would like to sit down on the porch swing.  Well, it’s ready any time.  

This particular swing was made by some folks at an Amish community off to the west of us.  That would be more special if I didn’t know they’d kicked out dozens of swings almost identical to it — even the Amish practice their own form of mass production.  

Note the peachy-keeno turntable in the background, highly suitable for playing scratched up America albumns.  The turner also works just fine for listening to This American Life or Car Talk.

If the front porch doesn’t charm you, you’re also welcome to find a seat on the breezeway.

We tacked a new garage onto the place, and the only spot where we could fit it without knocking down a half dozen trees was set off about 30′ to one side of the house.  So we connected the two with a new screened in breezeway.  This is the primo spot to sit on a cool morning.  There’s a hummingbird feeder, big tray feeder, and a squirrel-proof (ha!) feeder just off to one side, so those binocs on the table gets used frequently in peeking at our avian visitors.  

If someone has an idea what might be emptying the hummingbird feeder each night, without so much as removing the little yellow flowers over the openings, let me know.

Okay, that seems like enough for one week.  Next time, I’ll either move inside, or maybe start talking up some of the endless list of projects underway.  Or I could intro some of the critters.  Hmmm.

And make it a loud shout, because this baby is out there.

There have been several false alarms lately about a “10th planet” as scientists have picked up new bodies orbiting around in the (not so empty) void beyond Pluto.  In fact, there have been so many new items found out there in Oort land, that we’ve almost become jaded.  There have even been moves to have Pluto “delisted” as a planet, since it’s now clear is has so much kin in the outer Solar System.  

Expect that debate to reappear, because after this week, we’re going to have to decide if we have 8 planets or 10 — this newcomer is actually bigger than Pluto.
The discovery was annouced today by Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University.  Both Pluto and the new planet (a name has been proposed, but not yet approved) have eccentric orbits (by which astronomers mean that their path around the Sun is “not even close to round”) so depending on where each is in its relative “year,” the new discovery is between two and three times as far away as Pluto.  Which is far — about 97 times as far as the Earth is from the Sun.

With the discovery of this new object, and with a new generation of monster telescopes likely to spot even more distant rocks, expect the debate to rage again about what consitutes a planet. Brown’s team discovered an object about 800 miles across in 2002, and just last year found one almost as big as Pluto — both of which help start the “is Pluto a planet” ruckus.  

But while other Kuiper Belt objects have been smaller than Pluto — whose own status as a planet is itself in doubt — this latest discovery may have to be added to the charts on the basis of size alone.

 This gives the discovery a size of around 3,000 km.  If you’re comparing the size of this object to other planets, that puts it between Pluto and Mercury, and about 1/4 the diameter of Earth.  And, because the planet is so far away and it’s difficult to tell what it’s made from, there’s a chance it could be larger.

 One year on the planet will take about 560 Earth years.  In any season, it’s going to be one cold little ball, as from that distance it will be hard to pick the Sun out amongst the other stars.

“Brilliant” Roberts.  “Moderate” Roberts.  “Fair” Roberts.

How about this Roberts.  You know, the racist, anti-abortion advocate Roberts who moved to take down barriers between church and state and said that the the Supreme Court should not be able to get in the way of the radical right.
Just what did Roberts do?

 Hey, that sure sounds like a fair and balanced judge that America can get behind, huh?  A man who advocated that the Supreme court should surrender it’s power to the other branches.  A man who isn’t opposed to just Roe v. Wade, but from this description wants to overturn Marbury v. Madison.

As the documents come out, a very different picture of “fair” Roberts is emerging.

When Republican bills were floated in Reagan days that would have taken power away from the Supreme Court on the most crucial social issues, even Reagan’s attorney general disagreed.  But Roberts was all for stripping the court of its power and ushering in the theocracy.

Ah yes, this is exactly the kind of man we want to have a lifetime appointment to the court.  Opinions like these make Scalia look moderate.  In fact, these opinions go beyond left or right — Roberts is a radical advocate of destroying the third branch of the government.  Putting him on the supreme court makes about as much sense as making a termite on the board of a lumber company.

In the spirit of Saturday morning garden blogging, I wanted to invite everyone to come spend Sunday in the country.  

Five years ago, my family bought a half-finished log home that’s located only about thirty miles outside St. Louis, but might as well be in a different time zone.  Since them, I’ve learned to be a (bad) carpenter, (poor) bricklayer, (miserable) landscaper, and (awful) lumberjack — all just to try and stay even.  Having this place has been an adventure, a blessing, and sometimes a curse.  Come on in for a visit.
The house is made of some 2,500 6″ southern pine logs.  It’s set in a mixed oak-hickory forest, with scrub and undergrowth that pops up faster than I can cut it down.  All houses deserve a name, and this one quickly got the name it deserves, “The Sticks.”  

If you’re coming along the road to The Sticks, watch out for the local wildlife.  

And yes, that thing the birds are standing on is the road you follow to our house.  Many a friend or would-be contractor has turned back after a good look at the road — not to mention the thirty degree pitch the path makes as it dips toward the house.

These young turkeys like to perch on the branches of a big white oak in the front yard.  There, they can swoop down over people who don’t expect them, doing a passing immitation of a pterodactyl.  We’ve got the rest of the standard midwestern wildlife compliment — whitetail deer, fox, coyote, rodents of all sizes and tail configurations, possums, and many, many racoons.  The racoons get into everything.  They’ll steal cat food in midday (nocturnal my behind), and will tip the hummingbird feeders to slurp down the sugar water.

With nearly five acres to tend, we have a lot of space for gardening.  At first we tried to be formal about it — sitting up a giant chess board with a fruit tree at each corner and different plants on each side.  That didn’t turn out so well.  The plants that are native to the area are the only ones really able to cope with the hard clay soil and blistering hot summer days.  So the “formal” garden ends up looking something like this:

Not very formal, huh?  Purple Coneflower,  Black-eyed Susan, Yellow Coneflower, Ox-eye Daisies — these are the characters that have wandered everywhere in our property, swallowing all pretense of order.  Those that think dandelions are tough to deal with, have never faced the wrath of daisies.  Here’s one more shot of the daisy brigades.

These pictures make it look like the whole thing is sunshine and prarie, but the truth is less than an acre is really cleared.  The rest of the time we’re dealing with shade.  After five years, we’ve planted more than two hundred hostas along with ferns of all descriptions — and learned the reward you get when you take care of moss.  I’ll save that for next time (assuming anyone reads this time).

All right, everybody back to war, treason, and disaster!

A couple of times now, I’ve been called on to duke it out with creationists trying to “balance” a school curriculum.  Actually, to be fair, once I was called on, once I volunteered — loudly.  Several other times I’ve made my pitch from the audience.

In all cases, I’ve successfully sent the anti-science crowd packing.  This isn’t because I’m brilliant, or because I have enough sheepskin to cover a couch.  It’s not because I’m a great orator.  It’s because I keep my head and realize: this is not a debate.

Over at kos, DarkSyde has done some nice evolution primers, but this isn’t about explaining science.  This is about sending them back humming the theme song to Inherit the Wind.  All you have to do is keep a few things in mind.

1. It’s not a debate because you’re not trying to convince anyone.  This is true for several reasons.  First, the folks arguing on the other side often don’t believe a word of what they’re saying — they’re just there because it’s another way to smack down “liberals.”  Secretly, most of these people already know you’re right.  The ones that don’t, the true believers, are your allies.
2. Don’t worry about convincing the school board.  They know you’re right too, but every school board member is also sure that they’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from being congressman (or senator, or president).  They’re politicians writ small, and they’re there to play politics.  They don’t care a fig about who’s right.

So if you’re not there to convince your opponents, or the school board, or even the handful of other community members who have nothing better to do than attend school board meetings on a work night, why are you there?  Don’t convince them, embarrass them.  You have to demonstrate that there’s nothing to what your opponents are saying but hot air and religious platitude.  Keep smiling, make jokes, and be relentless in your pursuit.  Once you’ve adequately demonstrated that the emperor is buck naked, or you’ve backed them into using the “G” word, your job is done.  The school board can relax and go back to wondering how they can skim money from the soda machine contract.

All right, the job is to make these crusaders swallow their own arguments.  So how do you do that?  It’s really not that hard because of one big factor: they don’t know anything about evolution.  Even better than that, they think they know something about evolution.  This gives you a tremendous advantage.  You know what their arguments are going to be, they don’t know diddly about what you’re going to say.  This is true even when your opponent’s spokesperson has a PhD or MD after their name.  Believe me, if it didn’t come from one of “Black Box” Behe’s books, or out of a fine quality “Chick” publication, they haven’t read it.

So what are they going to say?

The No Evidence Argument
Bet your bottom dollar that your opponent will say there’s no evidence for evolution.  They get this from both sides, and the bozos who make their living writing an endless stream of Intelligent Design books lie to them about this every single time.  They’ve been told there’s no evidence so firmly, that they’ll just start shaking their head when you give a counterargument.  Again, remember you’re not out to convince your opponent, only to make them look bad so they can’t foist this hoax on the school.  You can come at this argument from two directions: the fossil record or the panda’s thumb argument.  I prefer the fossil record because it’s easier to hit in short sentences, and it’s guaranteed to draw the parry “even Darwin said the fossil record is incomplete.”  Behe makes a big deal of that in his bestselling book, and you should all thank him, because this shows the “intelligent design” position as foolish right off the bat.  You couldn’t ask for a better set up line than that, because Darwin delivered his statement in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Just ask them how well physics was understood in 1850.  Would they take a statement made in 1850 as the last word on electricity, rockets to the moon, or computers?  Darwin was smart, but he never claimed to be able to see the future.  Since Darwin’s day, we’ve expanded our knowledge of prehistoric life just as much as we have any other field of science.  And what we’ve found is millions of examples of evolution. The fossil record is a wonderful, rich, incredible record of life on Earth and our understanding grows with each year (at this point, I usually launch a digression about the ancestry of whales, or discuss dinosaur digs I’ve worked on).  There is no creature on earth, least of all man, that is lacking lineage in the fossil record.  If you’re big on humanoid evolution, feel free to dazzle them with facts about the widespread nature of ancient man, and the sheer volume of fossils that have been found.  Frequently, your opponents will believe that there are only one or two specimens of each species (because that’s what they’ve been told), and these can be explained away by disease or as “freaks.”  I’ve literally had one of these guys argue that the “only” specimen of Neanderthal was “just an old man with arthritis.”  Ah, we should always be so lucky.  Catching them in these statements, by showing the real nature of the evidence, can be fun.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics Argument
I think this one has fallen out of favor.  Creationists used to like it because years back it came so far out of left field that it would leave scientists stuttering.  But it’s easily demolished, and I think they’ve retired this one from the official creationist play book.  A thirty second statement along the lines of “the second law only applies to systems where no energy was coming in, and last time I looked there was something up there called the sun” has handled this on the few occasions where it’s popped up.

The Common Sense Argument
This is the one you’ll get the most, now that creationists are all wearing Intelligent Design clothing.  The whole house of cards created by Behe and the ID crew is based along something very like this: I know the difference between something created and something that’s ‘natural.’  The typical example is a stone and a pocket watch lying in a field.  You can see that the stone is natural, and you can see that the watch is ‘designed.’  How can you tell there?  Well, it’s just common sense!  In other words, skip all that science stuff and substitute your own opinion directly.  It’s so much easier that way.  And when you look at how complex livings things can be, common sense says they have to also be designed, QED, QEF, WWWWW, ipso facto, etc.  The best thing about this argument is that the guys advancing it think they’ve got you.  Arrgh!  I never expected the “a single flagellum on a bacterium is too complex to arise by chance, much less a whole organism” argument.  Let me just stagger out of the room and… oh, wait.  One little thing — your inability to understand how something happens does not mean it can’t happen.  You may not know how a jet engine works, but that doesn’t cause planes to fall.  In physics, there are many items – maybe even the majority – that defy common sense.  Why is light an absolute speed limit?  How do quarks jump from one spot to another without moving through the values in between?  It’s common sense to think that time is the same everywhere.  It’s also wrong.  Once, it was common sense to think the world was flat – everyone just knew it was true.  They were wrong, and so are people who think complexity can’t come from simple sources.  Given an input of energy and enormous periods of time, simply anything can happen.  To repeat: “common sense” is not science – science often defies the obvious solution.  Likewise, an inability to understand a complex process is not evidence against that process.  Plenty of people don’t understand the tax code, but the IRS persists.

Scientists are all conformists who don’t like change. .
This can be couched in nice terms that make it seem as if they’re challenging the control of the scientific press, or the tenure system at universities.  They may even pull out ideas that had a hard time breaking in as the “standard view” (oddly enough, Copernicus seems to be the go-to guy).  No matter how it’s phrased, implicit in this the idea that scientists are all godless automatons, motivated by nothing but conformity to their robot masters.  The response to this one is simple.  Ask them to name a scientist.  Odds are hugely in favor of them naming Einstein.  I’ve also had Jonas Salk and one Edison (er, okay).  Then ask them if these scientists are remembered because they went along with the way things were, or because they had new ideas.  Every scientist wants to be remembered.  Every professor at every school, every researcher in every lab, every field tech brushing sand away from a bone, is hoping to make their mark.  They know they won’t do it by writing a paper that says “yup, the world looks just like we thought.”  They’re dying to be rebels. And the colleges are dying to hire these mavericks.  The journals are dying to print their papers.  Science thrives on controversy.  If there was one piece of evidence for Intelligent Design, there would be professors clamoring to write about it, magazines lined up to publish it, and new chairs being endowed in geology departments across the country.  But there isn’t, and there aren’t.  Right now, when it comes to evolution, scientists in the field do all think the same – because all the evidence is on the side of evolution.

The Micro vs. Macro argument
Kind of the “death by a thousand paper cuts” of counter-evolutionary argument.  Your opponent professes to believe in “micro” evolution – changes in colors of moths, that sort of thing.  Generally, they’ll say there’s no evidence of evolution within a species, but no evidence of change from one species to another.  Of course, your opponent will not have the slightest clue what species really means, but then, neither does 99% of the population (including a good number of biologists), and your luck in explaining it is likely to be no better than mine (unless you have some killer metaphor, in which case, please share).  Instead, you’re better off pointing out that all evolution is micro over the short term, macro over the long term.  Lead them down the path of small changes, and you can likely find your opponent admitting to changes that clearly cross the species (and genus, and family) boundaries.  So far, I’ve yet to meet a real “God created all the species in a fixed state and none of them have ever changed” person.  They probably exist, but they don’t bother trying to argue their points in front of school board.  Maybe they’re all too busy hosting shows on Fox.  Believe it not, this argument can veer into the “if people came from monkeys, why are their still monkeys?” territory.  You will want to scream when it does.  Bite back the scream, explain how evolution works on individuals and small populations, and move on.  You don’t have to say your opponent is an idiot.  If they go down this path, they’ve done it for you.

The Just a Theory / Closed Mind Argument
This one generally appears toward the end, when the “facts” have failed to hold up the creationists mythical positions.  It can be said a number of ways, but it always boils down to “evolution is just a theory; we owe it to the kids to teach them all the alternatives.”  Good luck trying to argue that “theory” in science doesn’t mean what they think it means.  The word is in too common coinage for anyone to believe they don’t understand the meaning.  Instead, point out that everything in science is a theory.  The idea that the sun is powered by fusion is a theory.  Quantum mechanics is a theory.  In science, we teach the current working theory, the one that’s supported by evidence and trial.  We don’t offer unsupported theories any more than we offer alternate theories of history.  Someone may believe that Benedict Arnold was a hero and George Washington a traitor (indeed, a great many Brits may do so), but we teach what best fits the information at hand.  There’s no obligation to indulge in theories that don’t fit the facts.   The emphasis in this argument used to be the “just a theory” section.  Now it’s more “we should keep an open mind for the sake of the children” drivel.  At the last meeting, I actually had an English teacher swayed by this, who began to argue that we shouldn’t exclude views from the classroom because it wasn’t “Democratic.”  I answered that facts were not democratic, they were just facts.  I then asked her if she taught that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon.  I’m not sure she got the point, but she got mad and started screaming, which was almost as good.  When your opponents are frothing, you’ve won.

The Obligation to Faith Argument
This one has come up several times, so someone must have put it down on paper.  It runs along the lines of “we have a responsibility to present information that’s sensitive to the faith of the majority of Americans.”  This from the same people who usually complain about any attempt to be “politically correct.”  I go personal on this one, explaining that I am a Christian, but that I find no conflict with my faith.  I also suggest that facts don’t change just because the majority finds them inconvenient – although the Right seems to have a slippery hold on reality these days, so that last may not work.

All right, go stick ’em in the eye.  And if things start to get sticky, and they’re really huffing and puffing, give them a blast of the old reductio absurdum.  After all, if living things require a creator, isn’t It more complex still?  So, who created the creator?

Good hunting.

For decades, scientists have worked toward the dream of harnessing a fusion reaction.  Fusion, which involves the joining together of two light atomic nuclei, should produce much more energy and much less radioactive waste than the current nuclear reactors which are based on fission (splitting) of uranium.  Unfortunately, making a controlled fusion reaction has proved a lot harder than many people would have thought.  For years, the joke has circulated through energy circles: fusion is the power source of the future, and it always will be.  Things are not completely bleak on the fusion front.  Just last week, France was selected as the site for a massive international effort to build the first practical fusion reactor.  If all goes as plans, the reactor could be operational by the end of the decade.  Maybe.

But this diary isn’t about fusion.  It’s about that other kind of nuclear reaction, the kind in use around the world today — fission.  It’s about how we might be able to make fission not only cleaner, but 100% safe.

Commercial reactors run on uranium.

That’s the way it’s been since the first commercial reactors were started up in the 1950’s.  Put in uranium, extract an admix of uranium, plutonium, and assorted byproducts.

Only the reasons for using uranium don’t all have to do with producing power.  In fact, reactors were designed around uranium for a very different reason.  

Uranium was picked, not because it was the cleanest or safest possible fuel, but because it was both dirty and dangerous.  Its waste products include everything you need to start up your own Cold War era bomb assembly line – which is exactly why we’re so antsy about Iran having nuclear reactors based on this fuel.  Building uranium reactors was easy, since the reaction is self-sustaining, which is exactly why it’s also easy to have a reaction run out of control.

Traditional power plants, which involve fuel rods stuffed with pellets of uranium regulated by various means, had some degree of inherent instability.  Some of these designs are worse than others (i.e. Chernobyl).  Newer power plant designs, like the Pebble Bed Reactor enclose the uranium fuel in small “pebbles” that make it nearly impossible for the reactor to ever run out of control.

But what if there was another choice?  What if you didn’t run your fission reactors on uranium at all?  What if you ran them on another element, one that’s much more common, produces less overall waste, and whose use creates much less of the plutonium suitable for making nuclear weapons?  What if you ran reactors on thorium?  

Why throrium?  First of all, it’s a lot more abundant than uranium.  

40x as much energy available from thorium, and thorium is not only available in the United States (which has a decent supply of uranium), but also in countries where uranium is much more scarce.  Further, since thorium can’t be as easily refined to make nuclear weapons, it can be shipped around the world with less concern.

If we were running our reactors on thorium, we would produce much less waste.  If Iran was running its reactors on thorium, we’d be a lot less concerned about them turning spent fuel into weapons.  So why don’t we run on thorium?

Well, there’s a problem.  

Oh.  That sounds pretty bad, huh?  A reaction that can’t be sustained is back into fusion land – looks good, but not very practical.  However, what looks like a problem on the surface, is actually another benefit of using thorium as a fuel.  It is possible to sustain a reaction in a thorium-based reactor, but to do so you have to stimulate it using an “Accelerator Driven System,” or ADS.  In an ADS, a high energy accelerator is used to spawn additional neutrons through a process called “spallation”.  This does make sustaining the reaction more complicated, but it has a big advantage: turn off the ADS, and the reaction stops.  A “subcritical,” ADS-based reactor can never run out of control.

So thorium is more abundant than uranium, a reactor based on thorium makes it much tougher to make weapons, and a thorium reactor can never “go Chernobyl.”  How about nuclear waste?  

There’s one other big advantage of using an ADS system.  With it, you can “burn” some of the waste products (in this case, the actinides) down to stable isotopes, eliminating a good percentage of the waste.  It’s not an absolute positive, as the short-term result is even more energetic radioactive isotopes, but over a longer period, the resulting waste should be less radioactive than uranium ore.

With all these advantages, thorium has finally started to get some attention over the last few years.  There’s been some significant research in both the United States and Russia, and for nearly a decade, India has been running a research reactor on uranium-233 created from thorium fuel.  Now India is getting ready to make the next step.  They’re going to test their own ADS-based, thorium reactor.  They have high hopes, and so does the thorium mining industry.  

How likely is Shaw’s “we all move to thorium” scenario?  Unfortunately, none too likely — at least, not in the short term.  The current nuclear industry is entrenched in the uranium business.  From mining to refining to the reactor, uranium is what they know.  Market prices currently put the cost of thorium only slightly below uranium, not enough to cause any major company to consider making the switch.

However, there’s one factor overlooked in the current pricing – the cost of waste disposal.

 Current waste fees are calculated only on the output of the plant, with no regard to the toxicity of the waste.  If waste fees were calculated so that the creation of plutonium was discouraged, thorium would suddenly look a lot more attractive to the US industry.

Changing this fee structure is just one of the many items that should be involved in a effective national energy policy.  It’s one of those minor things, easy to overlook in the glut of new tax breaks for oil companies, that might just lead us to safer power plants.

After two terms of neo-con rule, the nation is looking at thousands dead, hundreds of billions wasted, a national reputation in tatters, record oil prices, record deficits, and an economy so antsy it goes from red to black and back again in a day.  It’s now clear that the president lied to get his war on, and that his head advisor outed a CIA agent in a fit of spite.  Ever wonder how Republicans can hope to beat Democrats in the next round of elections?  Answer: they don’t.

In fact, Republicans don’t even plan to confront Democrats.  Not real Democrats, anyway.  Because what the Republicans are up to now is the business of constructing an enemy they can beat.  They’re stewing up an enemy so vile, so evil, so distasteful that it makes the Khmer Rouge and Idi Amin look warm and fuzzy.  Instead of taking on real issues, they’re creating fake enemies — Straw Democrats.  

How to spot a Straw Democrat

A Straw Democrat hates Christians.

A Straw Democrat is too soft to fight America’s enemies.

A Straw Democrat isn’t patriotic.

Straw Democrats hate America.

Straw Democrats support “terrorist” teacher’s unions instead of education.  

Straw Democrats buy the votes of minorities they secretly hate by keeping them in a constant welfare state.

These are all good signs of Straw Democrats, but the biggest clue is Straw Democrats don’t have names.  They’re a faceless hoarde of tree-huggers, out to hand over our country to Osama while growing the government to the size of the solar system.  They’re a bunch of namby-pamby stuck up snobs who want to take away everything you ever valued.

And the very best thing about Straw Democrats?  They never fight back.  Which is what Real Republicans, and Real Media need.  Real Republicans — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and on down the line — have screwed the pooch too badly to ever outpunch another flesh and blood opponent.  But as long as the Real Media allows them to shadow punch again Straw Democrats, they’ll do just fine.