Scientific American News Site/Blog

There have been quite a few good news postings on the Scientific American website recently, especially on environmental issues, and where policy and Science intersect. Here are two:

May 30, 2008
Which U.S. Cities Contribute Most to Global Warming?
New study ranks U.S. metropolitan areas based on their climate change-causing pollution
By David Biello

If you care about reducing your emissions of greenhouse gases, then you might want to move to Honolulu, Los Angeles or Portland, Ore., according to a new study from The Brookings Institution. These three metropolises boast, respectively, the lowest three per capita levels of world warming pollution (read: carbon dioxide) in the nation’s top 100 metro areas.

“Large metropolitan areas give their inhabitants smaller carbon footprints,” says energy policy expert Marilyn Brown of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (ranked 67th), lead author of the study. “Footprints are the smallest in areas with high density and good rail transit.”

…

The report authors say the goal of the study is to show cities how to reduce emissions by taking a page from those already keeping a lid on them. The research also demonstrates that city dwellers in general are faring better than their country (or suburban) cousins, because of mass transit and densely packed populations in smaller areas.

And the link to the Brookings Institute paper mentioned in the article.

And’s here’s a story about the stormy weather ahead (again):

May 30, 2008
Stormy Weather: Weather Service Predicts Active Hurricane Season
Forecasters call for more than 11 tropical cyclones

The U.S. National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecasts six to nine hurricanes—including as many as five major hurricanes with wind speeds above 111 miles (179 kilometers) per hour—this six-month season in the Atlantic, which officially begins on Sunday and ends November 30. Independent experts at Colorado State University in Fort Collins foresee much the same, making this a more active year than most for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and Caribbean.
The total prediction calls for as many as 16 “named” storms, those whose winds reach more than 74 miles (119 kilometers) per hour. If one is born in the Atlantic Ocean or east of the international date line in the Pacific, it is called a hurricane; in the northwest Pacific, a typhoon; in the southwest Pacific and southeastern Indian oceans, such a storm is dubbed a severe tropical cyclone; in the north Indian, a severe cyclonic storm; and in the southwest Indian, a tropical cyclone. By any name, one of these storms can carry as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs—making them nature’s most destructive meteorologic phenomenon.

On the decreasing connectivity of the anti-environment disinformation machine

Or Environmental news round-up

Here are several news stories. One is about the boost that green industries have given the German economy, another is about a share holder movement at Exxon to make that company more responsible for the environmental destruction that company causes. The shareholders also wanted to remove Exxon from funding the noise machine denying anthropogenic Global Warming. I’d written about that here, and there is excellent coverage of that web of deceit here at exxonsecrets.org. Another story notes the neologism ‘envirogee’, meaning a refugee from environmental disaster, is becoming, unfortunately, a very useful word. And a story that shows that not all of these ‘envirogees are in Burma–some are right here in USA. Speaking of the USA, what about a green initiative to give a boost to the economy?

Taken apart these stories tell a picture of changes underway, but taken together there is certainly a common theme here: the network of those who are denying Global Warming and its consequences is very rapidly losing its moral connectivity, and although the shareholder initiative at Exxon failed this year, they will be back again and again. There is just too much news out there for anyone to maintain that something doesn’t need to be done.

Note that some of these stories are from the news site truthout, which has just re-designed its website. It looks great. I wonder who designed it.

Coming Soon to wikileaks

Here’s a story about a government program that, if it existed, would clearly not only violate the Constitution but also break enough of the rules of expect behavior that its disclosure would cause such loss of prestige to those who created it, that it would have to be kept secret. That’s true because the moral implications of the program are so repulsive, that if the program came to light, it would quickly be subject to scrutiny and debate and modification. For that reason, it is not unlikely that it will be leaked soon–all of the reasons to leak are there, and all it takes is exactly one moral person + web 2.0 and the program comes unsprung, probably after being posted at wikileaks So if the program exists, it’s not unreasonable to expect to read about it at wikileaks soon. The story:

From Radar Magazine:

THE LAST ROUNDUP
Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?

By Christopher Ketcham

In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president’s henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.

Ministry of Truth at the TLF

At the Technology Liberation Front, where I sometimes comment, rude behavior has become the norm for two posters. Adam Thierer descends into silly name calling, which is fine (to a point) but Jerry Brito really takes the cake in that he has decided to (generally) delete my comments. I would draw the distinction between Adam and Jerry and others such as Tim Lee, who has been overwhelmingly well-behaved and thoughtful in his posts and follow-ups to my comments. Jerry, or someone managing his posts, had been deleting my comments to his posts in the past, as I have noted here.

Deletions of my comments are not happening on a global basis at TLF (my comments to Tim Lee or most of the others don’t get deleted) and my comments to Jerry’s posts don’t always go into the moderated queue, they actually show up on the website but get deleted later. Why would this happen unless my comments are being deleted by someone managing Jerry Brito’s posts? I had sent an email to Jerry at his George Mason University email address, to give him an opportunity to respond, and if he does I’ll certainly post it here.

The interesting question for me is: why do my comments aggravate Jerry so much that they he feels he has to delete them? If he disagrees with my comments, wouldn’t it be more in keeping with the TLF’s professed goals of a high quality debate to respond to them? The answer, I believe, is that they show the internal contradictions in “libertarian” philosophy, and thus can’t be responded to, and therefore get sent to the ‘memory hole’ as George Orwell called it.

It is especially ironic that there is a post at TLF complaining about the uses of “Big Brother” metaphor when describing non-governmental spying or censorship, and here they are exercising the ‘memory hole’ that would do the Ministry of Truth proud. Let’s see if my comments to that post stay or if they get deleted.

Bldg Blog, Mike Davis interview

A great interview with Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums over at bldg blog from May of 2006:

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-mike-davis-part-1.html

I’d blogged about his books on March 05 2008.

But it was . . .

Just finished the book “Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed the World” by Brian Cudahy. It was an interesting and good book in many respects, but extremely frustrating in others. It really needed some diagrams and more pictures, as well as a little more discussion of how the global economy was affected by the development of the container ship. Towards the middle, the writing style and lack of diagrams or drawings both dragged it down a bit, so I am recommending the book with the advice to read Chapters 1-4 and 6, and then the others if you are really interested. There are many things covered very well, and discussion about the network effects of a very simple (from a technical standpoint) innovation goes to the heart of what innovation really means. So on a quality scale the book is 8/10, mainly for a lack of pictures or diagrams, but the subject matter rates a 10/10 on the importance scale. Also there are some very interesting examples of open-source methodologies, and the advantages of technology unencumbered by patent restrictions.

My favorite quote:

Measured against twentieth-century innovations in fields such as electronics or nuclear medicine, a thirty-five-foot box that can be securely stacked atop similar boxes and that can be lifted by a crane hardly seems like cutting edge technology. But it was,

Where’s the dilemma..?

A book about the broader effects of piracy that is next on my reading list gets a write up over at Ars. I have made many posts at TLF and IP Central weblog about the informational value of black markets and grey markets, a very interesting subject. It seems that there is much of interest for those looking at the intersection of web 2.0 and the production of cultural goods in this work:

Hat tip: Tim Lee

Ars Book Review: “The Pirate’s Dilemma”
By Nate+Anderson
Published: May 14, 2008 - 11:48PM CT

The strength of street knowledge
The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (buy)
Matt Mason (blog)

A really disgusting web site…

I can’t really believe this: despite the fact that the US Constitution is in the public domain, there is a website from Cornell that charges for it. No, I am not making this up:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html

So here it is, for free:

Constitution for the United States of America[1]

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Walkscore

Here’s an example of the internet making the older (even maybe the pre-industrial) work better. It’s a calculator that determines how walking friendly a neighborhood around any particular address is. The form of neighborhoods originated from basic ergonomic realities, so as we return to a more nature based urban structure (thanks to the sustainability imperative) it makes sense that measuring how human friendly these neighborhoods are, and making that measurement available, will accelerate demand for housing in these areas. Of course, these neighborhoods don’t really need that help-they are attractive for other reasons as well, as you can see on this website from my neighborhood.

Another example of the internet making older forms work better is here.

Oh, the website that measures how walk-able a neighborhood is is right here: http://www.walkscore.com/

To-do: correlate a location’s walkscore with it’s real estate value. Anybody know G.I.S. out there? It also fits in with the new topology of globalization, where the only necessary flows are expertise and information, with commodities becoming more difficult to move around the world and industrial goods becoming lighter and lighter, due to the cost of transporting them and the consequent ability for smart companies to intelligently re-localize the labor inputs so as to reap a decisive cost advantage vs. their competitors.