New climate change site from Nature

Nature, the respected scientific journal, has a new climate change portal full of free content. A free issue in the Nature Collections series on Energy is available as a PDF.

When relatively exlusive publications try to open themselves to a more general audience, the results can be interesting. In trunks back in North Vancouver, I have hundreds of issues of The Economist where all the images are black and white, and the pages are just columns of text sometimes accented in red. In the previous span where I subscribed to Scientific American they also made a big shift towards the mainstream. I doubt that Nature will undertake such a shift. It is, after all, a peer reviewed scientific journal, but it will be interesting to see whether their attempts to promote the visibility of some scientific data and analysis will shift the overall journalistic picture of climate change at all.

Oryx and Crake

Fire truck valves

Margaret Atwood‘s novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, portrays a future characterized by the massive expansion of human capabilities in genetic engineering and biotechnology. As such, it bears some resemblance to Neal Stephenson‘s The Diamond Age, which ponders what massive advances in material science could do, and posits similar stratification by class. Of course, biotechnology is an area more likely to raise ethical hackles and engage with the intuitions people have about what constitutes the ethical use of science.

Atwood does her best to provoke many such thoughts: bringing up food ethics, that of corporations, reproductive ethics, and survivor ethics (the last time period depicted is essentially post-apocalyptic). The degree to which this is brought about by a combination of simple greed, logic limited by one’s own circumstances, and unintended consequences certainly has a plausible feel to it.

The book is well constructed and compelling, obviously the work of someone who is an experienced storyteller. From a technical angle, it is also more plausible than most science fiction. It is difficult to identify any element that is highly likely to be impossible for humanity to ever do, if desired. That, of course, contributes to the chilling effect, as the consequences for some such actions unfold.

All in all, I don’t think the book has a straightforwardly anti-technological bent. It is more a cautionary tale about what can occur in the absence of moral consideration and concomitant regulation. Given how the regulation of biotechnology is such a contemporary issue (stem cells, hybrid embryos, genetic discrimination, etc), Atwood has written something that speaks to some of the more important ethical discussions occurring today.

I recommend the book without reservation, with the warning that readers may find themselves disturbed by how possible it all seems.

A storm by any other name

A couple of interesting facts relating to meteorological nomenclature:

First, a ‘cyclone’ is any “system of winds rotating around a centre of minimum barometric pressure,” according to the OED. Once those winds reach hurricane speeds (64 knots), the storm is called a ‘hurricane’ in North America; a ‘typhoon’ in the Northwest Pacific, west of the International Date Line; a ‘severe tropical cyclone’ in the Southwest Pacific, west of 160°E or the Southeast Indian Ocean east of 90°E; a ‘severe cyclonic storm’ in the North Indian Ocean; and a ‘tropical cyclone’ in the Southwest Indian Ocean.

Secondly, the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) names cyclones in a number of different regions several years in advance. If the list of names assigned for a season runs out (there are 21 assigned names per year) subsequent storms are named after the successive letters of the Greek alphabet. Short, distinctive names are used because doing so was found to produce fewer errors than designating storms on the basis of latitude and longitude. Sometimes, a storm is “so deadly or costly” that the NOAA retires the name, for reasons of emotional sensitivity.

The bike search

The first day of bike searching has yielded no success. I investigated the Bike Dump on Catherine and learned that they only have a single dingy old hybrid for sale – for $265 – and will get no more for weeks. A shop on Bank Street was no better, nor was another in the Byward Market.

Tomorrow, I will try the Bike Co-Op. Also, I will keep trawling Craiglist. I want to get something soon enough that I will have a chance to explore before cold and ice makes cycling here hazardous.

PS. All this demonstrates, once again, the inefficiency of moving often. It means you need to do time consuming things over and over again. Also, you need to suffer all the inefficiency of not knowing which places are likely to provide what you are seeking, as well as the loss associated with selling it all at the end (or frantically giving it away, as became the case in Oxford).

Types of goods

In economic theory, most things you can buy are ‘normal goods.’ This means that, as the price rises, people buy less of them. Conversely, people buy more as the price falls. This is all quite self-explanatory but it is interesting to note that there are other types of goods that operate in different ways.

The most common example may be inferior goods. The richer people get, the less they spend on inferior goods. This includes most kinds of discount items: once people can afford something better, they make the switch. Inferior goods reflect this property both at the micro level (an individual gets a big raise and buys less cheap IKEA furniture) and at a macro level (the mean income in a state rises and demand for low-cost gruel falls). Long distance bus trips are a classic example of an inferior good, as anyone who has spent more than twelve hours in a smelly, noisy coach can easily understand.

A somewhat perverse counterpoint to inferior goods can be found in Veblen goods. Named after the economist Thorstein Veblen, these are products for which the demand actually rises as the price does. This is essentially on account of their exclusivity. People buy Velben goods (such as Rolls Royce cars and $50,000 cell phones) precisely to demonstrate that they can. Of course, this makes them a godsend for those hoping to part status conscious rich suckers from some of their wealth.

A final possibility, which may not actually exist, is a Giffen good. To qualify, the good needs to be inferior (in the sense described above), there must be a lack of close substitutes, and the good must comprise a significant share of the purchaser’s budget. With these goods, price rises also lead to people buying more, though for a rather different reason. People who have become too poor to buy a better option fall back on a worse option. The failure of economists to find any well-defended empirical examples suggests that this kind of good may exist only in the minds of academics.

Both Giffen goods and Veblen goods exist because of possible characteristics of the buyer, rather than of the good itself. Whereas Giffen goods are easy to reconcile with ‘rationality’ as understood by economists, Velben goods do so only when they are viewed as inputs in the manufacture of the commodity actually sought: such as social status or prestige.

People wanting to read even more about goods and economic theory can look into the distinction between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods and excludable and non-excludable goods. The two ideas together define public goods and common property goods, the existence of which make even the most hard-nosed economist recognize the efficiency of governmental action to regulate markets.

Heavy reading

Residential towers

I need to alternate my reading material a bit. Taking breaks from reading about Iraq and climate change in the newspapers, I have been reading Fugitive Pieces, which is beautiful but full of anguished Holocaust imagery, and Oryx and Crake, which is depressingly plausible, despite probably being intended as an Orwellian satire. One wonders whether any implausible elements included in the latter relate more to the likely course of technological development, or the dynamics according to which technology and society interact.

Having a clear-eyed view of the world, and its future possibilities, is essential for good planning and ethical behaviour. That said, having too much of the heavy cloth of reality wrapped around you can make it awfully hard to swim.

Pressure and the price of gas

The tendency of gasoline to increase in price during the summer is well known. Partly, this reflects increased demand (which leads to an increased quantity sold at an increased price, given a particular supply curve). Partly, this is the consequence of how summer gasoline is a different blend of hydrocarbons. The reason for this is the need to prevent too much pressure from building up inside gas tanks as more of the liquid turns to vapour in the summer heat. This is standardized in terms of Reid vapour pressure (RVP): the pressure of any particular gasoline blend at 100°F (37.8°C) expressed in kilopascals, calibrated to a standard atmospheric pressure of 101.3 kPa.

RVP is used to specify which blends of gasoline are acceptable for sale at different ambiant temperatures. Gasoline with an RVP of over 14.7 will fairly easily pressurize gas tanks and gas cans in summer heat. It will also boil if left in open containers. As such, regulations require summer gasoline to contain less butane than the winter sort. This is on account of how butane is relatively inexpensive (making companies want to include more of it), but is also the most active contributor to vapour pressure. As such, the butane content of summer gasoline must be very low – one factor behind the higher price.

I learned all this from R-Squared, an energy blog that seems to be commonly cited. The blog makes one other important point: anyone considering storing cheap winter gasoline for use in the summer should consider the dangers of having the butane therein turn to vapour and start pressurizing the container in which it has been stored.

Hired guns

I heard a lot fair amount about mercenaries when I was at Oxford, but this is the most interesting thing to happen in relation to them in decades. The degree to which war has been privatized would probably shock Eisenhower.

What remains to be seen is the degree to which the United States will respect the sovereignty of the democratic government that all the entire second Iraq war was meant to create.

Two months in Ottawa

Unibrou glass

Today, it seems like a good idea to provide a brief personal update, rather than a few hundred substantive words on a random topic. Life at the moment is quite heavily dominated by work – which is proving to be interesting, as well as important. I have finished one big project already, and have moved on to a collection of smaller things. At the moment, I am digging out my hazy recollections of parabolic functions and calculus. My co-workers are engaging and helpful and, while I remain largely ignorant about the mechanisms by which this organization functions, much of what I studied as an undergrad and master’s student is directly applicable to the work we do. There seems to be a reasonable chance of converting my one year contract into an indefinite position, on the basis of a competition taking place during the next few months.

My level of integration into Ottawa life is roughly where it was a month ago, though I will hopefully be getting a bike on Saturday and I have joined the Ottawa Hostel Outdoor Club. Once my membership materials arrive, I am hoping to start doing some weekend hikes with them, with the possibility of cross country skiing later in the year. Having met so few friends here thusfar is frustrating, though it has been as much a product of my time usage as anything else. Until I have a reasonable circle of Ottawa friends who I didn’t know before coming here, I don’t think I will really feel like I live in this city.

In mid-October, it seems as though Tristan and Meaghan will be coming to visit me, which should be excellent. Having Emily here back in August was amazing. At the end of the October, I am going to a conference in Montreal, then staying for the weekend. For Christmas, I hope I will get the chance to spend a reasonable amount of time in Vancouver. It seems unlikely that any substantial quantity of work is going to be ongoing at that time, anyhow.