Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Over on Facebook, I posted that I’m thinking about 1973. Someone asked me why. The answer is that was began the worst economic recession I’ve known. Not that 2001 was exactly pleasant, but 1973 began a long decline for my town, which had been a manufacturing town with a small college. Granted, I was nine in 1973, and maybe youth colored my views. On the other hand, unemployment in my hometown hit 20 percent at one point, and stagflation was just nasty for everyone.

The whole experience colored my college years — it was strange to read pieces in the Chicago Tribune writing about the booming economy (this was the big market run-up in the 1980s) when I knew the once-profitable family-owned steel plant I had walked by every day on the way to Junior high had been run into the ground by the big steel company that took it over and a bunch of the parents of kids I grew up with were out of jobs (as were some of the kids).

The last factory of any size in my hometown shut down about a year ago. So now my town is just a college town, and the shift to the service economy has been harsh.

I expected something like that recession in 2002’s downturn. I’m expecting it again now. I hope I’m as wrong as I was in 2002.

I did get a laugh out of this gem in the Wall Street Journal’s “Today’s Markets” column today:

“The bond market has already priced in that nobody will ever be able to sell a house again in his lifetime,” said Michael Davis, an independent trader in the Chicago Board of Trade’s bond-futures pits, which heavily influence the price of everyday mortgages. “It’s not as if there’s more bad news that we could factor in fundamentally; it’s just that the market is taking its cue entirely from stocks.”

Panic plies its way through the paper pushing parasites of high finance. Now if I only knew what that meant for me.

In one of my Prototype columns (It Takes Deep Pockets to Fight Global Warming) last year I looked at some of the technological approaches that could stave off global warming. One of these was the parasol effect, the idea of shooting particles into the atmosphere to bounce sunlight back into space. In favor of this idea are that it could help us regulate the temperature of the earth while we try to scale up production of energy that doesn’t come from fossil fuel.
Later on I was going through a copy of the Wilson Quarterly that I’d buried under a stack of other magazines. The cover story was “The Climate Engineers.” In it, James R. Fleming looks at the history of climate engineering and gnashes his teeth and rents his robes. Much of that history comes from looking at ways to use the weather as a tool of war, and many of those who’ve tried have been charlatans.

He also shreds the notion that it will work. And he takes this jab at those engineers who continue to back it:

If there is one lesson from the long history of efforts to modify the weather and climate, it is that neither commonsense criticism nor flops deter geoengineers.

I found one blog post that assaulted Fleming, on Ansible

Gregory Benford on James Fleming, as quoted in A239: ‘The Wilson Quarterly piece was yellow dog journalism at its finest.’ From his letter to TWQ: ‘James Fleming’s fantasy about the NASA workshop we both attended is rife with errors. He also violates his pledge to not quote participants without their permission. When Fleming says of me, “He, like his fellow geoengineers, was largely silent on the possible unintended consequences of his plan.” I simply point to the Workshop Final Report, which documents much thought on just this. […] Fleming routinely conflates early rainmaking and meteorology with trying to offset global warming by reflecting sunlight. His talk at the workshop similarly erred, and he was much criticized for this. […] I found Fleming’s irresponsible reporting deplorable.’

Fleming’s piece, nonetheless, is worth a read, even months after it was published.

I talked with Howard Herzog about the prospects of carbon sequestration, burying carbon dioxide in what amount to carbon landfills. He’s one of many people who are excited by this idea as part of the answer to global warming.

It was clear from talking to him that beating global warming does not mesh well with the short-term perspective we have in our market economy. Herzog wants a billion dollars for research into carbon sequestration, “so in the 2020s and 2030s carbon sequestration can start being a major player, along with some other technologies.”

Nor does it proffer ‘the answer’ for global warming. Said Herzog:

No technology’s going to do everything for you. The more options you have for your portfolio, the better you’ll do. So we feel that there hasn’t been enough R&D money to go around for all the technologies. The case that I would make for carbon capture and storage is the United States has a lot of coal and carbon capture and storage is a way for us to use this coal cleanly as opposed to letting it sit in the ground.

Here’s the Q&A as I submitted it to Shukan Daiyamondo. It was published in the November 17 issue.

Herzog Q&A

Bernd H. Schmitt’s book Big Think Strategy claims to have a systematic way for companies to come up with big ideas. In effect, he says he has at least a partial answer to Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma.

I examined his system for producing big ideas in two posts on the Big Think:

Bernd Schmitt: How to Make All Your Thoughts Big

How to Build Bernd Schmitt’s Trojan Horse

My latest Prototype column in the New York Times, Capital Ideas and Social Goals, looks at what might be a heartwarming development: more efficient ways to fund social entrepreneurs.

It seems like a stupid question. After all, shouldn’t the digital world emulate the real world as closely as possible?

But the people I interviewed for a piece on the addition of 3D maps, Online Map Makers Gathering Data to Render 3-D Landscapes for Web Surfers, Mobile Phone Users didn’t have a lot of tangible reasons why digital maps needed to be in three dimensions. But one, Rich Gibson, pointed to future reasons why 3D might matter:

For now, he says that 3-D maps are just a baby step toward developing more useful maps. “It’s the scaffold, the framework upon which the things we do in life can rest,” he says. When 3-D will become really important is when sensor networks develop over time. That will make it possible to enhance 3-D maps with any variety of features, in real time.

I ran across that line in a poem today and I just loved it. Maybe it’s my mood. Here’s the whole thing, profound and puckish and pulsing with life:

Against Which

habit smacks
its dull skull
like a stuck bull
in a brick stall

and my version
of what I know
is like eye surgery
with a backhoe

on grace
so much beyond
my pitiful gray
sponge of a brain

I’d not believe it exists
except for such
doses of felicity
as this.

–Michael Ryan

from Poetry, November 2007

I typed this in because Poetry wasn’t posting poems online, but now it is. Here’s Against Which on their site.

The Chicago Tribune’s Public editor raises the question of what is the middle class in modern America. He doesn’t define it, because he says it’s a shifting target. He cites that Harvard is now limiting tuition payments to a mere 10 percent of income for families making up to $180,000 a year, and free for families making below $60,000 a year (there’s still that little matter of housing and feeding students in high-priced Boston). Median income for the Chicago area (half make more, half make less) is a shade over $41,000, he notes.

Personally, I think that in most of urban America, and certainly in the urban-sprawl of coastal America, there is no middle class. There are the legitimately rich, and there are the poor. In between sit the lower classes, broken into grades: lower lower-class, middle lower-class and upper lower-class (or if that’s confusing, super lower-class). Harvard’s cut-off of $180,000 a year sounds like about the right cut-off for the upper lower-class. There is a sliver of the populace where household income are between, say, $200,000 a year and actual richness (I’m not sure where that cuts off, exactly). Maybe that’s the lower upper-class.

An interesting new study using FMRI suggests that the brain processes facts and convictions in similar ways.

Or, as the scientists said,

“The fact that ethical belief showed a similar pattern of activation to mathematical belief suggests that the physiological difference between belief and disbelief may be independent of content or emotional associations.”

See Different areas of the brain respond to belief, disbelief and uncertainty

A photo I took of Corpus Christi College while in Cambridge, England this summer was chosed for the Schmap Guide to Cambridge.

The Schmap Guide is interesting for allowing people to put together their own maps of places. And for using cheap free content (like my photo) to round out its guides.