- Long slog back to Denver, but I made it. Feels like I've been gone a long time. Can't imagine what getting back to Pasadena will be like. #
- Looking forward to the long slow return of the Sun. #
- It's a dark day when I hope for a long and dreamless night. #
- Gave up on sleeping after three hours of staring at the ceiling. #
- Going to get some groceries for the next couple of days. And booze. Plenty of booze. #
- It isn't easy to be the trouble I want to see in the world. #
- Halfway through Energy at the Crossroads (http://bit.ly/7HxYP8). We now return you to our regularly scheduled infinite Christmas music. Ugh. #
- Gifted skills and information for Xmas. Financial plans, compost, computational savvy. Roasted a turkey, making soup stock overnight. Yum! #
- Sitting in an Earthship outside of Taos. It's 80°F in here, and 25°F outside. We'll see what happens tonight… #
Monthly Archive for December, 2009
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of December 24th, 2009′
Where does our energy come from today, and how do we use it? How much does it take to live the Good Life, and what, really, should that energy be used on? Where might it plausibly come from in the future, and what does the Good Life consist of anyway? Energy at the Crossroads by Vaclav Smil at least attempts to get at this stuff, looking at humanity’s utilization of energy, in the past, present, and several possible futures. But the book is a such a dense mass of numbers and graphs that I think I’m going to have to do this in several posts.
The first two sections Long-term Trends and Achievements and Energy Linkages, look at how energy use correlates with other variables of interest, how those correlations have changed through time, and how they vary globally today. If there’s an overarching message here, it’s that nothing about today’s global energy system is straightforward. You can’t make many useful comparisons by looking at only one dimension, such as the total primary energy supply (TPES) utilized or the energy intensity (EI) of a nation’s economy, or by simply looking at mean values without considering the distribution they come from. These variables are not normally distributed. Another clear message is that the 20th century was an anomaly. The explosive global growth in fossil fuel utilization that we have seen over the last hundred years will not be sustained, for a variety of reasons, any one of which would be convincing, but which in combination are downright scary. Either the way our civilization uses energy will be utterly transformed, or the sources of that energy will change dramatically. Or both.
Continue reading ‘Energy at the Crossroads by Vaclav Smil (Part 1 of 2)’
- Finished the (long) eligibility questionnaire for George Church's Personal Genome Project. Gattaca, here we come. http://bit.ly/1agesJ #
- Revising AGU poster. Hoping there's some lemon merangue left. I wonder if Obama read HST's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972"? #
- Went to Richard Alley's (of the 2 mile time machine) talk at #AGU09. He speaks like he writes. Would be a fun guy to take a class from. #
- If you tell the other players you've got an ace up your sleeve, and they keep playing, is it still cheating? #
- Thai takeout from Chile Lime and Garlic for our beer swilling slumber party in downtown SF. #AGU09 #
- Got Sally's wireless internet connection set up. Glad the modem arrived before I left. #
- During this visit for the first time SF has felt comfortable and accessible to me, not confining and frenetic. I wonder what changed? #
- Glad I got the time of my flight back to Denver wrong in the right direction. Automatic timezone adjustment be damned. #
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of December 18th, 2009′
- I love going to bed tired, and waking up refreshed. However, that's not what just happened. #
- I have to choose between spending half an hour biking or 30 minutes waiting for the bus, in snowy, icy -10°C. #
- Enraged by how the financial "services" industry treats the people who trust it with their savings. Like marks at a traveling carnival. #
- Phantom winds rushing down from the mountains with no warning, shaking the house, setting off windchimes in all directions. #
- Ah well. So much for managing upwards. #
- Funny, I didn't see anybody else out cycling on the Bear Creek Path tonight. At midnight. In -10°C weather. Bonus: frostnip. #
- Rainy SF day w/ Sally. Pie for breakfast, then worms & compost, laundry & coffee, finance & tech consulting. Now time for dinner & a movie. #
- Bus driver made fun of me for chasing the bus (they come every 5 min) and I discovered timed BART transfers. Good mass transit is great. #
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of December 8th, 2009′
- I am reminded of Plutarch's dialog between Pyrrhus and Cineas on the eve of their invasion of Italy. #
- Is it me, or did the Google Toolbar just get real uppity? #
- Cormac McCarty joined the Santa Fe Institute at the invitation of Murray Gell-Mann. Who would have guessed? #
- Full moon light on fresh fallen snow. #
- I'm gonna go waaay out on a limb here and bet that my dissertation gets rejected for some kind of formatting minutia. #
- Grad school sez: "Your submission is complete". #
- Alas, submission does not actually appear to be complete. #
- In theory, I could be stoned out of my gourd on mescaline from now to Dec. 18th, and still get a PhD. But I should ask my attorney, Raoul. #
- It would be great if every time the government wanted to have a war, it had to levy a special transparently itemized tax to pay for it. #
- Currently hating my phone. iSync Plugins from Nova Media is borken. So now I have no contacts. Great. And I *paid* for this software. #
- Somebody should start a customer owned health insurance company, modeled after Vanguard's ownership structure. #
- I am weak and foolish. Having lost all the contacts in my phone, I am lusting with no real justification for an iPhone or a Droid. #
- I'm older than I've ever been. And now I'm even older. Let the catharsis begin: http://bit.ly/8oU0GH #
- Looking forward to a few more days of the swirling crystalline white stuff. #
- Once again, disappointed by AT&T. No iPhone upgrade for me. #
- Registered for a climate change science/media communication workshop at #AGU09 w/ Matt Nisbet: http://bit.ly/7NCqVU #
- Somehow @gregmortenson (http://ikat.org) manages to educate 22,000 students each year for the annual cost of 5 US soldiers in Afghanistan. #
- in SF 12/11-12/20 for #AGU09. I could probably linger for a month and not see everyone I know, so call/email if you want to hang out. #
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of December 4th, 2009′
In class Peter Goldreich once said “You don’t get smarter in grad school. You just get older.” I don’t know if I agree entirely, but there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere. It is a strange kind of scientific hazing ritual. An induction and an indoctrination. Highly skilled and intelligent people, doing difficult technical work, for years, earning something close to minimum wage. Why? Is it for a chance to play in the tenure-track tournament, with the odds stacked 10 to 1 against you? If you win, you can study anything you like (as long as there’s funding…). Is it because we think having a PhD will get us somebody’s respect? Whose? Our parents? Our advisors? Society at large? It’s certainly not because we’re seeking power or riches. That way lies law school, or the dreaded MBA. Is it because we don’t know how to do anything else? Because our self esteem has been so entangled with school for so long? Because we are a people addicted to understanding? What fraction of PhD students finish feeling good about themselves, or in love with their research? Or even learning in general?
