Arrogance, Irresponsibility, Greed. AIG.

Now that even the crappiest mortgages could be sold to conservative investors, the CDOs spurred a massive explosion of irresponsible and predatory lending. In fact, there was such a crush to underwrite CDOs that it became hard to find enough subprime mortgages — read: enough unemployed meth dealers willing to buy million-dollar homes for no money down — to fill them all.

-- Matt Taibbi, The Big Takeover

You mean, it wasn't poor, innocent banks being forced to hand out bad loans by an evil, socialist government? You, sir, have crossed the line.

If you want to know how we got into this mess, and which people don't deserve to be pulled out of it, read the article.

Recycling coal plants?

So I was doing some research concentrating solar power (read: wandering around Wikipedia), when I clicked on a link to a supposed solar project using a fresnel collector. Huh. Looks like a coal plant. Read read read... it is a coal plant.

Why is this coal plant on Wikipedia's list of solar thermal projects? It seems so obvious in retrospect. Coal fired plants burn coal, which heats water, which drives a turbine. Solar thermal arrays heat oil, which heats water, which drives a turbine. So the plant simply set up a solar collector next to the plant, hooked pipe A up to pipe B,* and turned it into a combined-cycle coal-solar plant with 35MW of solar capacity.

Very clever. I approve.

If we can find existing coal plants in the western states that are also in particularly sunny areas, this would be a fast, cheap way to ramp up our existing solar capacity. Concentrating solar is already cheap, but this would make it even cheaper, by eliminating the need to build the actual generators. The coal plant already has them. It also eliminates the (somewhat overhyped) argument that solar is too intermittent, because the plant can always burn more coal when the solar isn't producing.

True, solar contributes less than 2% of the Liddell plant's energy production. While that's going to double soon, it still seems like a pretty small gesture. Perhaps I should wait until I hear of a coal plant switching over to 50% solar before getting excited.

But it seems like a way forward.

To kill time, I started looking for coal plants in Utah that might be suited for such an upgrade. Most of Utah's coal plants are located in Central Utah, which may limit their utility in the winter, but it's still interesting to contemplate. Thanks to the ever-helpful Sourcewatch, I found The Intermountain Power Station, a plant in Delta. Just going by the Google Maps satellite picture, it looks promising. It's in a flat area, and surrounded by empty space.

Best of all, the plant is owned by the City of Los Angeles, so it may be unusually responsive to political pressures. I think a lot of Los Angelinos would be surprised to find out that their city even owned a coal plant.

But as I said, it's a little outside the sunbelt. Arizona would probably be a more likely target.



* I believe I may be oversimplifying here.

Clay Shirky's cognitive surplus

Clay Shirky's Gin, Television, and Social Surplus was written back in the dark ages of the Internet (early 2008), but I still get a kick out of it. Like me, Shirky is fascinated by online collaboration, and how it's remaking society from the ground up. Unlike me, people listen to him.

Highlights: Wikipedia was built with fewer man-hours than America collectively squanders on watching commercials on a given weekend. As infrastructure develops for capturing societal knowledge in useful ways, this sort of useful, consciously creative activity will supplant much of our TV watching time, and the results will make for a much more intricate and interesting society.

Right now, Shirky says most of the examples we're seeing are special cases: a Wikipedia here, a Facebook there. But we'll develop more general-purpose systems that can capture more of our thinking in useful forms.

Also, four year olds demand that their TVs have mice, and even Warcraft is more fulfilling than trying to decide whether Ginger or Maryann is cuter.

Afterword: Writing this, I've just realized that I'm in phase three of the road to personal technological obsolescence*. I believe the road was first described by Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy). It goes, roughly:

1) Age 0-15: this is just the way the world works. It would be unnatural for it to be any other way.
2) Age 16-22: This thing I'm doing is nifty.
3) Age 23-35: This thing other people are doing is nifty, and I think we can make use of it.
4) Age 36-100000: Bah! Why can't kids these days just do it the old way?



* Note: This is a very hard word to spell.

So, who's been president this last week?

Thanks to Stephen Colbert for first asking the question.

The stock market is way up this week, on news that Obama is canceling his original agenda in favor of an "all tax cuts, all the time" program. He's dumped health care reform, kicked carbon dioxide caps to the curb, and brought Grover Norquist in as a special adviser.

In the right's wildest dreams. In fact, the only thing true about that paragraph is that the market is way up.

The Republicans have been piling on since Obama took office, saying that every new slip of the Dow was a vote of no confidence by the economy and -- by extension -- the American people. Forget that it started sliding nearly eighteen months before Obama took office. Forget that we're still uncovering new ways in which our financial institutions screwed us this last decade. Forget that it took Reagan -- the Right's exemplar of how to run an economy -- two years to get the Dow back up to where it was when he took office. No, Obama must immediately turn back the landslide, or be branded a failure.

Hell, that guy who wrote Dow 36,000 at the absolute peak of the tech bubble was even shoveling it out, calling Obama a "Manchurian candidate" sent to assassinate the economy. In the author bio after the article, it touts the fact that that John McCain was taking economic advice from him during the 2008 campaign. That explains a lot.

But I ask you, now that the stock market is rising, in the absence of any indication of a presidential rightward turn, will they start singing the praises of Barack Obama, Economic Wizard? Will they even admit that it might have been simplistic to link the fortunes of the Dow too closely to every presidential utterance?

I doubt it. I think that, for the duration of the Dow's recovery, those arguments will be quietly put into storage, in the hopes of keeping them sharp and free of rust for the next downturn. In the meantime, expect Sean Hannity to take to the airwaves and explain that the market isn't recovering, it's "crashing upwards."

Afterword:

Dow 36,000 guy made some interesting -- and by "interesting", I mean the opposite -- claims about how Obama's agenda would destroy entrepreneurship and innovation. He seem especially disturbed about the idea that some people might start getting free health care. I'll cut and paste my response from Dan Gillmor over at boingboing:

America's health-care system makes it all but impossible for an older worker to try something new.

Even younger startup owners who are relatively healthy and have insurance are just a half-step from disaster. The insurance industry is in the business of not paying claims whenever possible, after all, and health insurers are working hardest to find ways not to cover people who might get sick even as they deny as many claims as possible from people who've been paying premiums.

The day we have national health care is the day that we unleash a wave of entrepreneurship the likes of which we've never seen before. That's one of the best reasons for moving toward such a system.

wherein I point out that Rush Limbaugh is Fat

I'm always the last to the party, but here's my take on the Obama/Limbaugh kerfuffle, with some asides on why Oprah exceeds Rush.

Also from Salon:

On Monday, at 8:30 a.m., I turned on CNBC and started watching the business channel for the first time in my life. Twelve hours later, a long stare through the peacock-colored looking glass had shaken me. I was huddled in the corner of my living room couch, arms hugging my knees, wondering why the angry faces on-screen were yelling at me. [src]

A picture is worth about 40% of what you paid for it

Gather 'round, kids, while grandpappy Bryce tells you how he squandered your inheritance.

The Big Black Book o' Crazy Doom

Gratuitous haiku of the day:

Exponential minds
singing to the infinite
kill squishy humans

I've recently attempted, with my puny and unenhanced human brain, to read Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. It's one of those books that walks straight up to the line between brilliance and madness, and hits it with a sandblaster until it's rubbed out.

Premise: the rate of technological change is accelerating. Kurzweil believes this, and he has a ton of graphs and charts to back him up. Because the rate of change is accelerating, and because most of us make predictions as though the rate were constant, our entire society has greatly underestimated how very different the future is going to be.

Kurzweil paints an alternate future: by 2045 (give or take a few years), artificial intelligence will no longer need us. It will be good enough. It will be smart enough. And doggone it, people will like it. Like other lines mentioned earlier, the line between artificial and natural intelligence will be blurred out of existence. Some of us will have our intellects augmented, some of us will be pure software, and the Amish will have their own cyborg armies.

Our bodies -- or at least the bodies of those of us who choose to keep them -- will be full of nanomachines which will provide the same services to our bodies, only better. They'll also repair our cells faster than living damages them, effectively rendering us immortal.

Most important, the brainpower available to society will have exploded exponentially. Hundreds of billions of artificial brains, working much faster than normal brains, and not having to waste their time with sleep and bathroom breaks, will drive ever faster acceleration. Technological barriers will crumble instantly, and the gap between what humankind can do and the limits of the physically possible will slam shut.

Then we will be gods, the living music which infuses the cosmos with understanding and meaning. It will be nifty.

But I'd just settle for the robotized blood cells that allow me to hold my breath for hours.

It's a compelling vision, and very coherently argued. He seems to have glossed over a few of the difficulties, but I think he nailed the two biggest ones. I think the bulk of his vision hinges on two factors: Moore's Law* has to hold for about forty more years, and we have to invent the ability to simulate the human mind in an effective way. The first one may be tricky. Using light to burn silicon paths on a chip can only get us so far. I've seen predictions that it will run its course by 2019, 26 years too soon. Unless something supersedes it, we'd be left with computers about 1/8000th as powerful as they would need to be.

The author, of course, thinks that a better technology is inevitable. He's probably right.

The second feat -- simulating a human brain -- may turn out to be the easier half of the equation. Our tools for observing and understanding the brain have been undergoing the same sort of exponential improvements that our computers have. By the 2030s, Kurzweil figures that the tiny machines in our brains will be able to record our brains in arbitrarily complex detail, down to the structure and firings of each synapse. This will allow us to copy brains and simulate them in software. The nanobots will also be able to cause and suppress brain activity, allowing our brains to experience anything, from virtual reality to the recording and playback of sensory and emotional experiences, to a form of telepathy with other brain-hacked people.

But most important is the ability to simulate brain activity in software. If I had to guess, I would say that Kurzweil is actually being conservative about how much processing power that would take. We could very well figure out how to simulate some of the brain's substructures in a greatly simplified way. But that's the thing about Moore's Law: regardless of whether the brain simulation is a thousand times simpler than Kurzweil estimates or a thousand times more complicated, it barely alters the timeline.

If we assume that Moore's Law continues to double the amount of computational power available every two years, a thousand-fold increase in the complexity of the simulation only pushes the result about twenty years (ten doublings) into the future. A thousand-fold simplification of the problem only pushes it twenty years closer.

The amazing thing is that Kurzweil can make such fanciful predictions without striking me as a kook. That is either a tribute to his insight and rhetorical skills, or evidence that I myself am also a kook, and that we kooks often sound quite sane to each other. His conclusions also fulfill some unmet emotional needs for people who don't believe in an afterlife. When faced with an idea that I would clearly want to believe, my second instinct is to temper my enthusiasm for it.

My first instinct, of course, is to believe it. I have no idea why Kurzweil hasn't used this as the basis for a new religion. He'd make a boatload.

I'm going to make my own, much more humble prediction: someday, your cell phone will double as a universal remote. It will be a golden age of humanity.

Update: Leon says the iPhone already does this.


* I mean the soft, fuzzy, bastardized version of Moore's Law, which says that computers keep getting exponentially faster. Look upon my misuse, ye pedants, and weep.

Tim O'Reilly - Pascal's Wager and Climate Change

Tim O'Reilly -- after succinctly laying out excellent arguments for responding to global warming, even if it turns out to be a hoax -- writes:

Climate critics like Bjorn Lomborg like to cite the cost of dealing with global warming. But the costs are similar to the "costs" incurred by record companies in the switch to digital music distribution, or the costs to newspapers implicit in the rise of the web. That is, they are costs to existing industries, but ignore the opportunities for new industries that exploit the new technology. I have yet to see a convincing case made that the costs of dealing with climate change aren't principally the costs of protecting old industries.

The full post is worthwhile.

Update: Welcome, new reader!

Here's the steaming pile of thought I left on change.gov's doorstep. Then I set fire to it, rang the doorbell, and bolted.

Thought #1: I like filling out web forms.

Thought #2: It seems like the health care discussion usually revolves around the problem of health insurance reform. I know that lack of health insurance is a huge concern. But I believe we should be broadening this into a discussion about "health reform." Such a discussion would go beyond affordable health insurance, or even driving down the costs of running our health care system,

Such a discussion would involve every aspect of society that touched on the health and happiness of the American people.

There are a few subjects that this discussion would encompass. We need to talk about the American diet, how that diet leads to skyrocketing health care needs, and how government policies like the current agricultural subsidy system have gotten us to that state.

I'm not sure how I feel about the choice of Tom Vilsack to lead the Agriculture department. He feels like a very "stay the course" nominee, which wasn't what I expected from someone who seemed to "get" Michael Pollan's article for the NYTimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html

But mainly I wanted to discuss some thoughts I had while reading a book called "Brain Rules" by John Medina. He's a molecular biologist who is fascinated by how we learn and think, and his book gives handy, everyday advice for getting the most out of our craniums (crania?).

The first thought is just for Mr. Obama and his staff: get plenty of sleep and exercise. Tired brains make bad decisions, brains with good blood flow make better decisions. We need good decisions from you folks. Moving on.

The second thought is that very little of this new research has trickled down into our everyday lives. This lack seems especially severe in our educational system. Teachers and parents need a better understanding of how learning happens, and how things like sleep, exercise, and (most important) stress can affect how children learn.

Stress is especially important, because too much stress in a child's home life can destroy his or her ability to learn in school, setting them up for a lifetime of failure.

I'm not alone in my thinking. I saw Geoffery Canada, founder of the Harlem project, on the Colbert Report a while back. One of his many inspiring missions is to get the knowledge of child development and learning into the minds of the impoverished parents whose children he serves.

I would guess that you're already familiar with the Harlem Project. Nonetheless: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507E7D91030F933A15755C0A9629C8B63&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=print

Medina understands that there is a lot that we still don't know about the brain, and a lot more that we don't know about structuring our schools and workplaces to take advantage of this new understanding. But I think that research and pilot programs should begin as quickly as possible. The payoff is a smarter, healthier, better educated American citizenry.

Thought #3: This box I'm typing into is far too small. If you want to elicit big thoughts from people, you have to give them a big canvas.

I'm not sure how effective the whole change.gov site is. Right now the comment section seems to be "all Rick Warren, all the time," which is disheartening.

The state of our tummies

Here's half of what's wrong with the American diet, in one handy graph.