Between the morning of Saturday April 19th and the afternoon of Monday the 21st, I will be in Toronto. I am largely going in order to meet my father and spend time with family. That being said, if any friends happen to be around, perhaps we can organize to meet up for lunch, dinner, or drinks one day.
Month: April 2008
Climate change and the gom jabbar
In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the protagonist is tested using a machine that “only kills animals.” His hand is placed in a box that simulates the appearance and sensation of having it horribly burned. He is told that he will be killed if he pulls the hand out. The test is to see whether he can overcome his primal reaction: whether he can exercise will over instinct and live. At least according to those who administer it, this is what distinguishes ‘humans’ from ‘animals.’
In some ways, climate change is like a Gom jabbar for all humanity. We are now aware of the needle threatening our collective lives. We know that continuing to act on the basis of instinct will lead to our doom. The question is whether we possess the fortitude to endure what is difficult, in order to avoid what is lethal.
Trouble with aquaculture
Recently, Manitoba banned new hog farms in a wide swathe of the province due to environmental concerns. Now, British Columbia has suspended the issuing of new licenses for salmon farms. The ecological impact of these facilities has been mentioned here before.
Generally, the idea that open-pen aquaculture makes ecological sense for carnivorous species like salmon is fallacious. All it does is displace pressure from fishing activity from wild salmon themselves to the kind of fish they eat. Inevitably, an unconstrained fishery will destroy those stocks as well. Meanwhile, the salmon farms leach lice, excrement, and antibiotics into the waters around them.
Airsick
This short video on climate change, produced by Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk, is very elegant. It doesn’t have a great deal of substantive content, but it includes a lot of striking visual images. Rather than being shot continuously, it consists of 20,000 black and white still images.
The video, and some of the claims made in it, are being discussed on Metafilter.
Telecom immunity and the rule of law
A recent article in Slate discusses how legal policy in the United States should be fixed in the post-Bush era. There are many things in it with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Perhaps the most egregious case is in relation to providing immunity to telecom firms that carried out illegal wiretaps for the administration. Jack Goldsmith argues:
Private-industry cooperation with government is vital to finding and tracking terrorists. If telecoms are punished for their good-faith reliance on executive-branch representations, they will not help the government except when clearly compelled to do so by law. Only full immunity, including retroactive immunity, will guarantee full cooperation.
I think the bigger danger here is providing a precedent that firms can break the law when asked by the administration, then bailed out afterwards. Only fear of prosecution is likely to make firms obey the law in the first place. Providing immunity would invalidate the concept of the rule of law, and open the door to more illegal actions carried out by the executive branch. “Full cooperation” is precisely what we do not want to encourage.
If government wants to intercept the communication of private individuals, it must be a policy adopted through the due course of law. People need to know what it involves (though not necessarily the details of exactly how it works), who supported it, and how those supporters justified the choice. Greater security from terrorism at the cost of a more opaque and lawless state is not a good tradeoff. Company bosses should fear that they will be the ones in the dock when evidence emerges of their engaging in criminal acts, regardless of who asked them to do so. The alternative is more dangerous than the plots that warrantless wiretapping sought to foil.
Translation
Random literary insight of the day:
Trying to evaluate the authenticity of several versions of a text in a language you do not speak is much like being called upon to judge a drag queen contest when you have never seen a woman, and only ever had them described to you by others who may have done so.
I have had this experience in relation to texts originally in Greek, Latin, and Russian, and Old-Babylonian.
The Tetherballs of Bougainville
Virtually every page of Mark Leyner‘s book made me want to reach out and strangle the insufferably pretentious protagonist: a compulsion that sat awkwardly beside the way in which the author of the book has intentionally conflated himself with the central character (nested several times), even imbuing him with his own name. The Tetherballs of Bougainville is an absurdist collection of miscellanea. It cannot really be called satire because it doesn’t have enough direction to constitute a criticism. If anything, it both glorifies and mildly rebukes the emotional shallowness and obsessive character of society, as perceived by Leyner himself. The book can be funny, when one is in the right frame of mind, but it most frequently struck me in the way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas did the few times when it came across as crass and monstrous, rather than comic and off-the-wall.
The self-referential plot betrays the abject narcissism of the protagonist. In the opening section, a straightforward narrative of his father’s unsuccessful execution is presented. The second section consists of a screenplay written for a contest mentioned in the first. Again, author/protagonist Leyner is at the centre of the narrative. The same is true for the extended review of a fictional movie read by the Leyner character in the screenplay. The non-existent film is described at great detail, and also features Leyner as the protagonist. Screenplay Leyner, reviewing the non-existing Leyner-starring film judges it as “a movie that consistently subordinates meaning to titillation. And it is a movie that perpetually teeters between puerile perversity and puerile sentimentality.” It seems that author Leyner was hoping to achieve something similar with the book as a whole.
In the end, this book feels like the product of a high school student trying way too hard to be clever: writing impossibly detailed (though not error-free) dialogue as a kind of intellectual fantasy fulfillment. Nobody has the real-life inability to expound upon minutiae so extravagantly and tirelessly. In that sense, the book reminded me of The Gilmore Girls: it had the same tendency to replicate the idealized conversations of ex-Ivy League screenwriters. Leyner’s work is dramatically more explicit and tries to be more disturbing – the most successful attempt being an anatomically ludicrous by nonetheless revulsion-producing scene involving a woman without a cranium – but it has that same feeling of over-eager whiz-kiddery behind it.
Getting a gravatar
People reading comments recently will have noticed that this site now supports Gravatars. (Globally Recognized Avatars). These little pictures go beside any comments you leave, allowing you to express yourself a bit and others to identify you at a glance.
Getting one is free and easy and is done from the site linked here. Once you have one, it will appear beside all the comments left on this site using your email address, as well as on all other sites that have Gravatar support in place.
[Update: 5 May 2008] I am trying out Identicons as a default image for those without Gravatars. They are automatically generated based on IP address and may make conversations with many commenters easier to follow.
Impersonate Germany’s interior minister
Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister and a big fan of fingerprint-based security, is getting a personal experience with limitations in the technology. A German hacker group called Chaos Computer Club has gotten hold of his fingerprint and distributed 4,000 plastic copies along with issues of Die Datenschleuder magazine.
This highlights several major weaknesses in such technology. These include the fact that the readers can be manipulated: either physically or electronically. They also include the fact that a biometric token can never be revoked. Unlike locks and passwords, which can be replaced once they are known, a person’s fingerprints and retinal scans basically cannot be changed.
I have written about problems with biometric security before.
Advanced physics for carbon removal
While a lawsuit filed in Hawaii expresses deep concern about the possibility of the Large Hadron Collider producing miniature black holes, some physicists are highlighting precisely that capability as a mechanism for fighting climate change. Existing plans for carbon capture and storage (CCS) rely upon the storage of large quantities of CO2 in underground structures. According to MIT physicist Aprile Pazzo, the controlled introduction of artificial black holes into such structures could alleviate pressure, reducing the risk of future leakage. Due to the enormous energies involved in the collisions it will produce (up to 14 trillion electronvolts), the LHC should be the first man-made device capable of reliably producing black holes.
Present technology does not permit the containment of micro black holes since, unlike ordinary matter, they cannot be confined in solid vessels and, unlike plasma, they cannot be magnetically contained. As such, black holes produced in high energy collisions would need to be delivered directly into the carbon reservoirs. While precise information on the mass-absorbing capabilities of LHC generated black holes is unknown, Pazzo argues that the accelerator should be capable of neutralizing several million tonnes of carbon dioxide per day, once fully operational:
“Many people have expressed doubts about the worthiness of big science projects like the Large Hadron Collider. What this novel application demonstrates is that experimental physics can have real world applications – not just in terms of harmful technologies like the atomic bomb, but in terms of advanced solutions to serious problems like climate change.”
Many other physicists have called this rosy assessment into question, arguing that the production of black holes poses an intolerable risk, that the geography in the region near Geneva where the LHC will be operating is not suitable for CCS, and that the energy requirements of the accelerator itself will generate large quantities of greenhouse gasses.
If early trials at the LHC prove successful, many more machines of similar types may be built worldwide. At some point, the excess cost of shipping CO2 by pipeline will make additional accelerator facilities the most affordable option and it is clearly infeasible to transport carbon dioxide intercontinentally for absorption. The ultimate hope of scientists working on the project is that mechanisms for the safe containment of black holes might be developed – possibly utilizing interactions between Hawking Radiation and novel force-carrying particles like the Higgs Boson. If that proves feasible, portable black-hole based carbon disposal systems might find their way into future generations of cars, trains, and aircraft.