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Where'd the oil go?
8 AprA mashup of video coverage of the ‘end game’ of the Gulf Oil disaster. These people obviously don’t know what they’re talking about, or are deceiving themselves and everyone else.
Courtesy of ChangingTheEndgame.
Radioactive Currents off the Coast of Japan
6 AprMother Jones has a nice article about radioactivity off Japan’s coast, with lots of helpful graphics.
The good news is that the powerhouse of the Kuroshio Current—a humongous western boundary current like the Gulf Stream—appears to be forming a kind of firewall keeping the contamination away from Tokyo’s coast and funneling it east.
In conclusion:
Whatever pathways the Fukushima poisons take, they will certainly alter the springtime blossoming of Japan’s ocean, starting with the phytoplankton and working up the foodweb.As for the effects on the rest of the world ocean, it’s a matter of how much, how far, and for how long Fukushima’s newborn radionuclides go sailing.
Art and Civil Society in Tokugawa Japan
6 AprWith an extension to graffiti in late 20th Century
I first published this in The Valve back in 2007 under the title “Tokugawa Blogging: Best of 2006.” I’m republishing it here because it relates to the role Transition Teams are playing in moving our societies to a new, more sustainable, and more human way of life.
Back in September of 2006 I was looking through the current issue of Science and saw a book review (requires subscription) entitled “Through Art to Association in Japanese Politics” by one Christena Turner. Given my interest in manga and anime, the title caught my attention. That Science was reviewing a book on such a topic, that really caught my attention. So I read the review, of Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Amazon.com) by Eiko Ekegami.
According to Turner, Eikegami argued that
Japanese sociability is characterized by an extensive repertoire of practices for handling the problem of how to interact with strangers. Somewhere between friends and enemies lies the domain of strangers. Somewhere between intimacy and danger lies the domain of civility. “The degree of ‘strangership’ may be an indication of the degree of civility in a given society,” she claims. Civility permits ordinary people to be confident in interactions with those of unknown or different backgrounds, making it possible to form social bonds in the absence of friendship or kinship.
This is important because modern democracies requires a civil realm where individuals can form voluntary associations “outside the realms of both the political institutions of the state and the intimate ties of the family.” Ikegami argued
that networks of people engaged in interactive artistic and cultural pursuits created the bonds of “civility without civil society” that prepared the population of pre-modern Japan for its strikingly rapid transformation into one of the first and most successful modern nations outside of the West. Art created politics when participation in aesthetic networks taught people technologies of association among strangers that eased the transition toward institutions of a modern political economy.
That had me hooked. Not only would this book serve as “deep background” for my interest in manga and anime – “deep” because it’s about a period, roughly 1600 to 1850, well before the emergence of those forms – but it also promised to be a volume that argued for the social value of art on an empirical basis, as opposed to asserting ideals. Since I’d already argued that it was music that made apes into humans, I was eager to read a more empirical, less speculative, argument broadly, if only loosely, consistent with that. Finally, it seemed that Ikegami’s argument might be generally useful in thinking about how social networks function in the larger society.
Predicting the Future, NOT
5 AprBack in the mid-1960s, Dan Gardner reports, Olaf Helmer directed a group of RAND Corporation experts in forecasting the state of this that and the other in the year 2000, which is now well behind us. The following were deemed “very probable”:
Controlled thermonuclear power [fusion power] will be economically competitive with other sources of power.
It will be possible to control the weather regionally to a large extent.
Ocean mining on a large scale will be in progress.
Artificial life will have been created in a test tube.
Immunization against all bacterial and viral diseases will be available.
Highly intelligent machines will exist that will act as effective collaborators of scientists and engineers.
I don’t know about life in a test tube, but, by my lights, none of the others have come to pass. What’s the chance that we can predict the effects of producing more nuclear power plants, more waste, etc.?
Open Source Ventures, Alternative Currencies
4 AprSome interesting posts over at John Robb’s Global Guerillas.
We’ve been working on it for a couple of months now, and have learned some valuable lessons. The most important lesson is that starting an open source venture is just like starting an open source insurgency. You need a foco and an example (that provides a plausible promise).
Foco: “…small team, a vanguard if you will, that initiates the effort.” And an example “ignites the imagination.”
Is TPUSA an open source venture?
- Serve as a store of value.
- Enable a loyalty program.
- Jumpstart a local/virtual economy.
Radioactivity may leak for months in Fukushima
4 AprChief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano says that if the current situation continues for a long time, with accumulation of more radioactive substances, there will be “a huge impact on the ocean.”
From a summary of the current state of the disaster in The New York Times, 04/04/2011. A special issue of Nature is devoted to the disaster.
Ten reasons why new nuclear was a mistake
3 AprPlus One (1) makes Eleven (11)! Count ’em!
Alexis Rowell tell us why in this post at Transition Culture. Here’s the list:
- Nuclear power is too expensive
- New nuclear power stations won’t be ready in time
- Nuclear does not and will not safeguard our energy security
- Nuclear power is not green
- Nuclear power will do little to reduce our carbon emissions
- Nuclear power stations are inefficient
- Plane crashes are a risk to nuclear power stations
- Nuclear power kills
- It’s a myth that renewables cannot provide baseload
- Global expansion could lead to new nuclear security risks
- And we still have no idea what to do with nuclear waste
Here’s what we need to do:
- Energy efficiency
- Renewables (and possibly Combined Heat & Power in urban areas if we can find enough non-fossil fuels to run it)
- Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs)
Read the full post to find out more.
Thanks for your attention, your most precious resource . . . and ours.
My Father Cleaned Coal for a Living
1 AprA Systems Story
by Bill Benzon
My father was trained as a chemical engineer. He spent his entire career with Bethlehem Mines, the mining division of the Bethlehem Steel Company. He designed coal-cleaning plants, at least the system for actually cleaning the coal.
This is a story about the last plant that he designed, one designed to keep the air clean while at the same time reducing the cost of running and maintaining the plant. It was a beautiful and elegant solution to a nasty engineering problem. I offer it as a study in systems thinking – though my father probably never used that phrase.
Cleaning Coal
Before coal can be turned into coke (for subsequent use as a fuel in steel-making) it must be cleaned of impurities, mostly sulfur. Most cleaning techniques take advantage of the fact that the rocks containing the impurities are denser than coal. So, you crush the raw coal until all the particles are less than, say, an eighth of an inch. Then you float the crushed coal in some medium – generally, but not always, water – and take advantage of the fact that the rock sinks faster than the coal. There are several things you can do, as I recall, but whichever technique you use, you end up with wet coal when you’re done.
Wet coal is considerably heavier than dry coal. As railroads charge by the pound, it costs more to ship wet coal than dry. And, in the winter, a hopper car filled with wet coal at the mine – coal is generally cleaned at the mine, not at the steel plant – is likely to be filled with frozen coal when you get to the plant. How do you empty that mess from the cars?
So, you need to dry the coal.
The old drying techniques – drying ovens – leaves you with a lot of coal dust in the air. A lot. And coal dust is nasty stuff. You don’t want it spewing out of chimneys anywhere in your neighborhood. Or near your farm.
Truth and Traditions 