The God species

Biosphere 2 was a giant sealed world. Eight humans were locked in with a mass of flora and other fauna, and a balanced ecosystem was supposed to naturally emerge. But from the start it was completely unbalanced. The CO2 levels started soaring, so the experimenters desperately planted more green plants, but the CO2 continued to rise, then dissolved in the "ocean" and ate their precious coral reef. Millions of tiny mites attacked the vegetables and there was less and less food to eat. The men lost 18% of their body weight. Then millions of cockroaches took over. The moment the lights were turned out in the kitchen, hordes of roaches covered every surface. And it got worse – the oxygen in the world started to disappear and no one knew where it was going. The "bionauts" began to suffocate. And they began to hate one another – furious rows erupted that often ended with them spitting in one another's faces. A psychiatrist was brought in to see if they had gone insane, but concluded simply that it was a struggle for power.

Then millions of ants appeared from nowhere and waged war on the cockroaches. In 1993 the experiment collapsed in chaos and hatred.

-- from Adam Curtis on How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means

By the numbers

Our typical math skills seem quite undeveloped relative to our nuanced language skills [perhaps because in the world in which we evolved] communication was life and death, math was not. Have you not admired, as I have, the incredible average skill and, perhaps more importantly, the high minimum skill shown by our species in driving through heavy traffic? At what other activity does almost everyone perform so well? Just imagine what driving would be like if those driving skills, which reflect the requirements of our distant past, were replaced by our average math skills!

-- Jeremy Grantham in Quarterly Letter, April 2011

An estimated 1,400 billion tons of methane is stored in [East Siberian] deposits. By comparison, total human greenhouse gas emissions (including CO2) since 1750 amount to some 350 billion tons...Release of ECS methane is already contributing to Arctic amplification resulting in temperature increase exceeding twice the global average. The rate of release from the tundra alone is predicted to reach 1.5 billion tons of carbon per annum before 2030...

-- Agnostic and Daniel Bailey on Wakening the Kraken at Skeptical science.

Transmutation man

Acord was in favour of nuclear energy, and saw changing one element into another as the realisation of "mankind's most innate desire": alchemical transmutation. But he was wary of the nuclear industry's secrecy. Acord saw art as the way to wrest power from the hands of nuclear scientists. His aim was "to increase understanding and openness and transparency about nuclear issues".

-- from an obituary of the remarkable James Acord

Guerre des Etoiles Existentielles

Consumption

We spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to make impressions that don't last, on people we don't care about.

-- Tim Jackson quoted by Pat Kane

The nation delights in servitude

We fought for the public good and would have enfranchised the people and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation, if the nation had not delighted more in servitude than freedom

--John Cooke, quoted by Geoffrey Robertson

Hitch

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

-- Christopher Hitchens

Home of the unfree

America now jails more of its people than any country, including all totalitarian states. We pretend to a war against narcotics, but in truth, we are simply brutalizing and dehumanizing an urban underclass that we no longer need as a labor supply.

-- David Simon

The sense of time

Time isn’t like the other senses, [David] Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling...But a sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It’s there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. “There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

-- from The Possibilian by Burkhard Bilger

Not getting somewhere, but being somewhere

Once, our ancestors walked the world. Then came domestication of animals and the wheel, and now the car. Today walking can be hard, as settlements and transport have become rearranged beyond our control. Many people still walk for pleasure, in urban parks or in the countryside. But few of us now walk far as part of daily lives. This disconnection from regular contact with the land has shifted our perspectives on memory, place and time. A few people have walked all their lives, and have seen how the land has changed. Ronald Blythe remembers that footpaths were once full of people moving about, working, interacting. These were like today’s main roads, except people talked and walked and watched. The old countryside was peopled. Blythe writes, “friends never tire of telling me that my life would be transformed if only I could drive a car, quite forgetting how transformed it has been because I cannot.” The trouble is, we get out less today, and the resulting alienation from nature is contributing to environmental problems. We are suffering in short from an extinction of natural experience. “I wish to make an extreme statement”, said Thoreau, “walking is about the genius for sauntering. It is not about getting somewhere, but being somewhere.” Edward Abbey was blunter: “you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees.”

-- Jules Pretty

Opening up the dimension of time

With Yasujiro Ozu, Orson Welles and others like Jean Renoir, you get images that no longer are strictly driven by the narrative purpose but start to take on a descriptive function.

The link between perceiving the world...[and] knowing how to act on it in order to transform it, that link has now undergone some kind of crisis, some kind of breakdown.

-- from Alan Saunders and Robert Sinnerbrink on Gilles Deleuze and the philosophy of film

Sinnerbrink calls two recent Australian films -- Samson and Delilah, and Ten Canoes -- Deleuzian. Agreed. Another could be a film that influenced many that came after it: Walkabout.

Korczak

His profound courage and his rigorous compassion held till the very end.

-- from Eva Hoffman on Janusz Korczak

'Incalculable'

The total costs of coal may be high, but the total costs of nuclear power are, in any meaningful sense, incalculable.

-- Thomas Noyes

P.S. 6 April: a roundup on the nuclear debate by Mike Child, and Joe Stiglitz on risk

P.S. 15 April: (surprise!) nuclear operators in Europe 'want liability capped at €0.7bn or at most €1.3bn '

Jeremy's stiffs

Last year I suggested that Jeremy Clarkson be held to account for extra deaths attributable to the switching off of speed cameras in Oxfordshire. Now it looks as if the evidence is in:

Speed cameras in Oxfordshire, which were switched off for cost-cutting reasons, have been turned back on again following publication of higher casualty figures...

...Superintendent Rob Povey, head of roads policing for Thames Valley, said: "This is important because we know that speed kills and speed is dangerous. We have shown in Oxfordshire that speed has increased through monitoring limits and we have noticed an increase in fatalities and the number of people seriously injured in 2010."

P.S. 20 May: 'Speed camera switch-off empowers reckless driving,' writes George Monbiot.

'Trump in 12'

In 2004 I took the URL for this web site from what seemed like a third rate joke. If I were updating it now I would call it 'Trump in 12'. Thanks to Lewis Black for showing the way.

Joe Stiglitz anatomizes the consquences of the rule of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.

Nuclear doubts

George Monbiot's recent post on nuclear power is a valuable contribution to the debate. My doubts include the following:

If measures taken now to prevent climate breakdown are already 'too little too late' then how wise is it to build a new generation of nuclear plants for societies likely to be stretched to near or beyond their ability to cope with disruptive change?  In a more turbulent world, regulatory systems are likely to be even more vulnerable to capture by corporate profiteers (privatising gains, nationalising losses) while security systems are likely to be more vulnerable to breach by hostile actors. What could be the actual costs of just one major terrorist incident at a nuclear power plant in a densely populated country?

What if PV does end up costing $1 per Watt in ten years or so (recent breakthroughs suggest this may be possible, albeit very far from certain), while the cost of nuclear power does not decline significantly from its current level (something that may be quite likely, especially if the costs of security measures and waste management are taken into account)?

I would be glad to see these doubts dispelled/shown to be mistaken.

P.S. a view (pdf) from Paul Mobbs

P.S. 1 April: John Vidal says the actual impacts of nuclear accidents are much worse than is often claimed. Evidence or anecdote? Testament to psychological impacts rather than quantifiable physical ones?

'The inconceivable nature of nature'

Libyan dilemmas

Even if one's instincts are to help those fighting Gadaffi, it is no longer enough just to see it as a struggle of goodies against baddies. For it is precisely that simplification that has led to unreal fantasies about who we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Fantasies that persist today, and which our leaders still cling to - because they give the illusion that we are in control.

-- from Goodies and Baddies by Adam Curtis

Some things are clear, though. In Benghazi, an influential businessman named Sami Bubtaina expressed a common sentiment: “We want democracy. We want good schools, we want a free media, an end to corruption, a private sector that can help build this nation, and a parliament to get rid of whoever, whenever, we want.” These are honorable aims. But to expect that they will be achieved easily is to deny the cost of decades of insanity, terror, and the deliberate eradication of civil society.

-- from Who are the rebels? by Jon Lee Anderson

Fictions

As recalled in a recent post here, Werner Herzog distinguishes between what he calls "accountant's truth" and "ecstatic truth." Interesting to note, then, that (as Richard Brody notes) Frederick Wiseman (who is supposedly among the most realist and non-inverventionist of documentary film makers) calls his films works of imagination, and says, "They have nothing to do with reality!"  Is he serious?

Wiseman likens his work to that of a director or writer of fictions: "I ask myself the same questions of narration, of abstraction. Like them, I have to find a dramaturgy."

Nuke notes

The most pertinent challenges, argue Hugh Gusterson and Elizabeth Kolbert, may be regulatory and political (not to mention economic) rather than technical.

Julia Whitty has hair-raising primer on nuclear pollution of the oceans.