Only the Ft Lauderdale airport is so much better…

Joseph William Kittinger II (born July 27, 1928) is a former Command Pilot and career military officer in the United States Air Force. He is most famous for his participation in Project Manhigh and Project Excelsior, holding the records for having the highest, fastest and longest skydive^[1] and as being the first man to make a solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in a gas balloon. Serving as a fighter pilot during the Vietnam War, he was shot down and spent 11 months in a North Vietnamese prison.

Captain Kittinger was next assigned to the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio. For Project Excelsior (meaning “ever upward”), a name given to the project by Col. Stapp as part of research into high altitude bailouts, he made a series of three extreme altitude parachute jumps from an open gondola carried aloft by large helium balloons.

Kittinger’s first high-altitude jump, from about 76,400 feet (23,300 m) on November 16, 1959, was a near-disaster when an equipment malfunction caused him to lose consciousness.^[2] The automatic parachute opener in his equipment saved his life. He went into a flat spin at a rotational velocity of about 120 rpm. The g-forces at his extremities have been calculated to be over 22 times the force of gravity, setting another record. On December 11, 1959, he jumped again from about 74,700 feet (22,800 m). For that leap, Kittinger was awarded the “Leo Stevens Parachute Medal”.

On August 16, 1960, he made the final jump from the Excelsior III at 102,800 feet (31,300 m).^[2] Towing a small drogue parachute for initial stabilization, he fell for four minutes and 36 seconds, reaching a maximum speed of 614 miles per hour (988 km/h)^[3][4] before opening his parachute at 18,000 feet (5,500 m). Pressurization for his right glove malfunctioned during the ascent, and his right hand swelled up to twice its normal size.^[5][6] He set historical numbers for highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest drogue-fall (four minutes), and fastest speed by a human being through the atmosphere.^[7] These are still current USAF records, but were not submitted for aerospace world records to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).

These jumps were made in a “rocking-chair” position, descending on his back, rather than in the usual face-down position familiar to skydivers. This was because he was wearing a 60 lb (27 kg) “kit” on his behind, and his pressure suit naturally formed the sitting shape when it was inflated, a shape appropriate for sitting in an airplane cockpit. For this series of jumps, Kittinger was decorated with a second Distinguished Flying Cross, and he was awarded the Harmon Trophy by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Laird Hamilton (born Laird John Zerfas, March 2, 1964, San Francisco, California) is an American big-wave surfer, co-inventor of tow-in surfing, and an occasional fashion and action-sports model.

It was Hamilton’s death-defying drop into Tahiti’s Teahupo’o break (commonly known as, CHOPU) on the morning of August 17, 2000 which has become the measure of his surfing career to date, and has firmly established his reputation as the greatest and bravest big wave surfer in the recorded history of surfing. A wipeout at Teahupo’o reef on a “big day”, a particularly hazardous shallow-water reef break southeast of the Pacific Island of Tahiti, could result in a surfrider’s death.^[7]

That particular day at Teahupo’o reef, Hamilton dropped into what is widely considered to be the most dangerous wave ever ridden, due to the sea “sucking down” into a huge well and forming a never-before-witnessed enormous mass of moving water –under, behind and over Hamilton — throughout his ride.

And on that day, a larger than normal ocean swell, “The Wave”, approached. Darrick Doerner piloted the watercraft, with Hamilton in tow on his surfboard, into position. In an instant, the big wave jumped and the ocean floor dropped into a monster wave, an über wave. Pulling in and gracefully releasing the tow rope, Hamilton physically ‘drove’ his surfboard and body down into the well of the wave’s enormous tunnel vortex, possibly betting his own life on the wave-punishing Kamikaze ride, in full view of the boat-based photographers’ and videographers’ cameras recording the unexpected. With his signature artistic flair and grace on big waves, Hamilton continued deeply carving water through this high speed epic ride of a lifetime, emerging back over the wave’s shoulder without a moment of faltering. Cheers and screams came from all present on the surrounding watercraft who witnessed the feat. As if Hamilton had ridden the giant as a disciplined “wave-riding man-machine”, his ride there on that day, chronicled in photographs and video, is known by surfers worldwide ever since simply as “When Laird Hamilton rode ‘The Wave’”, and a still photograph of him riding The Wave (appearing as if it were a giant mouth of water about to gulp him up) made the cover of Surfer magazine, accompanied by the caption: “oh my god…“^[8]

du·ress noun \du̇-ˈres also dyu̇-\

Rhymes with DURESS

abscess, access, address, aggress, assess, bench-press, caress, clothespress, coatdress, cold-press, compress, confess, cross-dress, CS, depress, de-stress, digress, distress, drill press, egress, excess, express, finesse, fluoresce, French press, full-dress, handpress, headdress, housedress, idlesse, impress, ingress, Meknes, much less, nightdress, noblesse, no less, obsess, oppress, outguess, possess, precess, prestress, princess, process, profess, progress, recess, redress, regress, re-press, repress, shirtdress, side-dress, SS, success, sundress, suppress, tendresse, top-dress, transgress, undress, unless, web press, winepress, word stress

abscess, access, address, aggress, assess, bench-press, caress, clothespress, coatdress, cold-press, compress, confess, cross-dress,

shit-hot

The agony of a coaster heading inland

At the beginning of the decade, I would spend the daylight hours of at least a Saturday or a Sunday coming thru the bins at Plastic Fantastic, Repo Records in Bryn Mawr / Philly, Space Boy in Philly, etc., etc. I would on occasion spend upwards of $20 for import, or more for rarities…

Now I “buy” my music via the internet either directly from the label, from itunes, and, erm, other sources. Nothing, I say, nothing is unavailable. Rarities / imports / out of print records are obsolete!

At the beginning of the decade I negotiated stacks and stacks of cds, milk crates of lps, clattering boxes of cassettes…

Now I have a 120 GB iPod that hold all of that and more…

At the beginning of the decade I could pass the time via an occasional re-org of my collection (by alphabetical order, by genre, by release date, etc.), pausing along the way to savor the album art and play (literally) favorites…

Now I “shuffle” through my album art and create “Smart Playlists” via itunes…

I used to wonder whether this change was good or bad. I certainly miss the record store experience, but it was time consuming, expensive and at times frustrating. I can admit to missing the tactile element of engaging album artwork, but (with the exception of LPs), said artwork was entombed in plastic, which took up a lot of space, signified a brand of personal detritus that would survive me by perhaps 10x in some future landfill, and consumed precious resources. Perhaps I note some nostalgia for time spent wallowing in the details of my records, cds and tapes, but now they are all in one portable, rapidly referenceable place (i.e. my ipod). Perhaps I miss the community involved in finding out about new artists to be found at record stores, on mix tapes, in cds I could lend out (and then never see again), but there are blogs so specialized in genre or mood that it is hard to complain.

The 00s should go down as the decade that the music fanatic entered an entirely new world. For the most part, I say it is good.

dfkaljf;aldfjakl;fjd;f

Copenhagen

The climate change convention in Copenhagen begins today. Diplomats from around the world will spend the week hammering out a frame work to deal with climate change. The frame work will ultimately lead to a replacement for the (in)famous Kyoto Protocol, which practically every nation on earth (e.g. those that have telephones) has ratified, except the United States. This time, the aim is to get the U.S. involved.

Among the other key issues is how to deal with the BRIC, or the rapidly developing  mega-economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Many of these nations will essentially ask the developing world to pay them to reduce emissions.

But of course the really big deal is how much the world will agree to reduce emissions. As the negotiations proceed, you can follow this bottom line in real time w/ the above scoreboard, from climateinteractive.org.

If you need catching up, the NYT has a timeline of climate change science and policy going back ~200 years!

Horns Rev offshore wind farm, Denmark

Next week begins international deliberations in Copenhagen, Denmark. The topic: how to move forward with on a multi-national framework to curb climate change.

At the meeting Prez Obama is expected pledge to cut US greenhouse gas emissions 17% on a 2005 base by 2020. (The EU has pledged to cut at least 20% by 2020 on that base.)  In doing so, Obama-san is going out on a limb, as Congress is still months away from passing a climate bill.

Expect more than the usual climate hoopla & hand wringing as America’s scientists and leading businessmen (& women) argue for a commitment for a climate-friendly economy and dinosaur energy interest wind up Toys for F.U.D. One favorite of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt Crowd is America’s lack of renewables (when in fact it likely leads the world in renewable energy resources). It is always welcome, then, when news of new, bountiful sources of clean power make strides towards commercialization. (It’s less welcome, when, as happens all too often these days, the news comes from abroad).

Here’s tell of one source of renewable power you’ve likely not heard a lot about: osmotic power!

TOFTE, Norway (Reuters) – Norway opened on Tuesday the world’s first osmotic power plant, which produces emissions-free electricity by mixing fresh water and sea water through a special membrane.

State-owned utility Statkraft’s prototype plant, which for now will produce a tiny 2-4 kilowatts of power or enough to run a coffee machine, will enable Statkraft to test and develop the technology needed to drive down production costs.

The plant is driven by osmosis that naturally draws fresh water across a membrane and toward the seawater side. This creates higher pressure on the sea water side, driving a turbine and producing electricity.

“While salt might not save the world alone, we believe osmotic power will be an interesting part of the renewable energy mix of the future,” Statkraft Chief Executive Baard Mikkelsen told reporters.

…

The main issue is to improve the efficiency of the membrane from around 1 watt per square meter now to some 5 watts, which Statkraft says would make osmotic power costs comparable to those from other renewable sources.

The prototype, on the Oslo fjord and about 60 km (40 miles) south of the Norwegian capital, has about 2,000 square meters of membrane.

Future full-scale plants producing 25 MW of electricity, enough to provide power for 30,000 European households, would be as large as a football stadium and require some 5 million square meters of membrane, Statkraft said.

Once new membrane “architecture” is solved, Statkraft believes the global production capacity for osmotic energy could amount to 1,600-1,700 TWh annually, or about half of the European Union’s total electricity demand.

This is a particularly interesting source of energy for at least two reasons 1) places where fresh water meets salt water tend to be close to large population centers (e.g. the entire Atlantic seaboard) and 2) power of this sort would behave more like “baseload” resources such as nuclear or coal, in that they could generate power 24-7, as opposed to solar or wind, which, at least locally, are intermittent.

Another promising tool for meeting the domestic and international commitments to combat climate change inevitable in our nation’s future. The question that remains: will we lead or follow?

See, according to the tired old geezer who narrates, the RAM’s tank is FULL, goshdarnit, meaning, one must suppose, that it is beyond mere optimism (not to mention pessimism), and onto something w/ much more gusto, something down right spirited. What is it?

See RAM’s parent company, Chrysler, has lost half its sales over the past few years, has ranked consistently low in customer satisfaction surveys  and just recently exited bankruptcy. That after receiving more than $9 billion in taxpayers loans, which it is unlikely to repay anytime soon, and selling itself to an Italian company. What could be more brawny, brainy and overacheiving than that?

More likely, the “my tank is FULL” thing merely indicates that Chrysler is in a manic phase.

Because in truth, RAM’s tank is full at exactly 26 gallons. That will take you 351 miles. Enough to get lost, certainly. Compare to a Toyota Prius, which will take you 536 miles on 11.6 gallons . (Respective combined miles per gallon are 15 and 50 for the mismatched autos). So the tank isn’t full for very long, folks.

More to brag about from EPA’s fuel economy website:

 

You could lease another car for the price of RAM’s gas. Sorry to drink this glass half empty, but unfortunately for Chrysler, RAM (and the dude who buys it) is more Forest Gump than Einstein, more Sonny Liston than Muhammad Ali.

It’s like cigarettes or alcohol. You gotta want to like ‘em at first. Then, it’s all to easy. (Note: This version of MOB traces the career of SD Mach I).

1. Can’t Buy a Thrill

Most of you who have spent anytime in a car w/ FM radio will be familiar w/ the majority of tracks from this album.  “Reelin’ in the Years”, “Do it Again”, “Dirty Work”, etc. are all long wave warhorses, and deservedly so. But the album is chockablock w/ deep cuts.  Released in 1972, a year in which Nixon was reelected in a landslide, I think I hear some voodoo going on in “Kings” and “Changing of the Guard” — must have worked, ‘cuz Watergate broke shortly thereafter… I listen to “Kings” now in 2009 and get a good feeling about a recent “Changing of the Guard.” Hard to imagine it was the hey-day of Glam Rock with a joint like this going off.

Kings

2. Countdown to Ecstacy

The album title is great Americana. The record is my favorite (also said to be Fagan’s). “My Old School” is irresistible unless you were one of “those guys.” “Pearl of the Quarter” was covered by CCC. This is where their literary, V.U. meets Bukowski lyrics really start to get salty and here they are matched by the grinding, winding, insinuating tunes inimitably.

My Old School
Pearl of the Quarter

3. Pretzel Logic

AMG has this as the Dan’s best. I dunno. It is easy to listen to. The songs are compact, stylistically distinct. It’s an album. I guess this is the band showing that it can do it all. “Charlie Freak” has a great ramble-tamble piano hook climbing up and down over an interstellar guitar lead. Sleigh bells top it off. Tight. “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” was apparently a big hit for he dudes. Is it possible that it was the inspiration for Phil Collins’ insipid “Don’t Lose My Number” ? When you are atrocious as Phil, anything is possible, no jacket required.

Charlie Freak

4. Katy Lied

Queer album cover w/ some sort of funky insect (Katydid?) checking you out. “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More”… what can I say? You can hear the fingers flying on the guitar lead and you don’t hear it equaled often. Hand claps. Swelling keys. Damn, son. “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies” is a vibed-out joyride until you digest the lyrics. Pedophilia anyone? How many other bands can make you feel so creepy about tapping a toe?

Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More
Everyone’s Gone to the Movies

4. The Royal Scam

This one is a major grower. The album cover is atrocious and just gets worse. “Kid Charlemagne” is the ultimate tune, retelling the story of the tragicomic psychedelic 60s through the figure of Owsley Stanley, who first synthesized LCD on a large scale for the hippies of San Francisco. Like the Gimme Shelter film (“People…”) or Vineland, it details the failure of the hippie “counter-culture” to achieve any lasting social-political value: “look at all the white men on the street.” Indeed. When will we be free from these hypocrites? “Haitian Divorce” is an anti-love story set to a fantastic reggae-esque arrangement. I love the intense wah-guitar character mocking the whole affair.

Kid Charlemagne
Haitian Divorce

5. Aja

People are nuts about this record. I know a girl whose parents thought it worthy of their daughter’s name. You might also. Jazz musicians dig it. A triumph for Steely Dan, I guess, but for me (a jazz non-fan) not so much. Kind of aimless and self-absorbed in the same way I receive the genre (jazz). I suspect this album is responsible for a lot of the “smooth jazz” misery I’ve experienced in various dentists’ offices. Trauma.  “Deacon Blues” has some great lyrics though, another classic (jazz) rock jab at Alabama. Lynerd Skynyrd weren’t equipped to respond to this one, obviously.

Deacon Blues

6. Gaucho

This was like the “Loveless” of the seventies, I gather (tho’ technically released in 1980): cost a sh*tload of money, took a long time, everyone on drugs and it pretty much ruined the band. Give it to me Wiki:

The pair are well-known for their near-obsessive perfectionism in the recording studio, with one notable example being that Becker and Fagen used at least 42 different studio musicians, 11 engineers, and took over a year to record the tracks that resulted in 1980′s Gaucho — an album that contains only seven songs.

Too bad it isn’t close to being a Loveless or a Pet Sounds or whatever freakout album you prefer. Its essentially more of the smooth jazz rock pioneered on Aja — pretty much as far from freakout as you can get. Sounds decent enough in the background, cooking something gourmet in the kitchen maybe. Here’s a track that gets used as a segway lots on Fresh Aire w/ Terry Gross, detailing the glitzy life  & times of an LA  coke dealer to the NBA stars. Maybe I’ll understand these last two Dan albums some day.

Glamor Profession

I’ll admit to being a fair(merri?)-weather Animal Collective fan, having failed to gain satisfactory entrance into the aesthetic realm of their first 9 years or so of output –  bands like early Mercury Rev, Boards of Canada, and maybe very early Sonic Youth, being about the only relevant stamps on my passport.

However, I’m in with the outcrowd in saying that their Merriweather Post Pavilion album is this year’s best release. Verily, it is a solution to a conundrum I broach quite frequently w/ compañeros who’ve lapsed catholic on the music scene. They say:

It’s crap these days. All these internet, computer-recorded bands (oops), w/ fat indie promotion accounts, clogging up the blogosphere w/ faddy pastiche. Many cite the late 80s / early 90s as a highwater mark of genre-bursting inflorescence that glowers down on today’s indie output, aurora borealis-like. Young bands now naively mine these rich skyveins and there’s nothing new under the sun.

Of course that is bollocks, spiced meagerly w/ truth. Not appetizing. It’s bento boxes  like the A.C. that demolish the premise. Mixing synthetic and acoustic instrumentation; relying on seamless deployment of loops, electronic beats, noise and atmosphere; emoting circular murmurs and shrieks conjoined with  sunny pop vocal hooks, rice, the Animal Collective makes you think its ecological music is the sound of things to come. If so, what a weird place we will be living in…

Now, I wish it were true. An earthquake might open terra firma and take the Disney Culture Industry down into some sequestering saline aquifer, allowing us all to heal. That’s doubtful of course, almost by definition, since what A.C. does is so nigh idiosyncratic. Alas. Now they’ve bookended 2009 with the release of their Fall Be Kind EP, excerpted above. It is just as good as Merriweather and a fantastic embodiment of EPitome.  “What Would I Want, Sky” samples a Grateful Dead song, channels Mad Richard era Verve, and generally chimes along in “Empire State of  Mind”-beating uplift, since I don’t live in NYC, and I still have to face the day. In life, we can’t all be the Yankees.

Gene Wilder

This month’s WIRED magazine features a hand-wringing article about growing pains at Twitter, allegedly a company worth millions (or is it billions?) on the basis of a service that reportedly allows its users to post 140 character messages (we’ve already exceeded that limit in this post) to people who are said to sign up to receive them. Legend has it that over 1 million people have “subscribed” to the 140 character musings of Kelso, from That 70s Show, apparently while I have been watching reruns of That 70s Show.

It is said, in an effort to realize some revenue from this  concept, the masterminds behind Twitter have been making what sound like minor (but admittedly difficult to parse) changes to the service that have upset its users, allowing the author for WIRED to enter into arcane explications of various (said to be extremely intelligent) persons’ use of @ and # (I think…) and their extreme significance to what is supposed to be a lot of people (whom I have never met).

Prompted (out of a strange form of curiosity) to read the article by a friend for whom Twitter is avowedly a large part of social life, I was relieved by the following:

It [Twitter] rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. … Though the company held a discussion earlier this year called “What Do We Want to Be When We Grow Up?” the mission statement is still a work in progress. “If there are three sentences I’d use to describe Twitter,” Stone says, “one of them would be ‘I don’t know.’”

That makes me feel better because the people who use Twitter claim to know what it is, but I don’t understand it and neither do the guys who made it up, according to the article (which sheds no light on what it is either). But I sense a certain kind of magic here, and today’s experimental efforts are designed to wield it fiercely for the benefit of crix crax crux.

Twitter! I beseech you! #! @! GROW my PRESENCE!

The good news offered by the work is that these pedestrian deaths are preventable by rethinking the design of our roadways. Traffic calming (or measures that reduce the speed of traffic in intersections), complete streets (or streets that are designed for walking, bicycling, mass transit and cars), and walkable neighborhoods (or places to live that aren’t predicated solely on auto transport) are a few of the solutions they advance.

There is obviously a long way to go, however, and for one state, a larger distance to travel than others.

Florida’s four main metropolitan regions rank as the top four most deadly cities for walking or bicycling. As Chicago’s Daily Herald puts it: “Florida’s Orlando is no magic kingdom for walkers.” Beyond Florida, the top ten cities are in the South. Fast growing Southern regions (both east and west), in fact, dominate the list, implicating our most “modern” patters of development as the most unsafe. That is ironic considering the modern obsession with safety, but it follows from the modern dependence on the car.

Not content to wait while the Nation’s Southern cities make the transition to calmer traffic, more complete streets, and walkable neighborhoods?

This week, that pulpy ranker of things, the US News & World Report, ranked the top 15 cities for “people who hate driving and long commutes”. Don’t worry, none of the top 15 are on the “deadly by design” list.

In fact:

“The list is heavy on college towns, for a few good reasons: Such places are good fits for nondrivers because they are often compact and dense, and they often have liberal populations that demand more investment in public transportation.”

The top cities include: Cambridge, MA; Pittsburgh, PA; Boulder, CO; Davis, CA; Ann Arbor, MI; New Haven, CT; Chapel Hill, NC; Minneapolis, MN (lowest ranked on the Deadly by Design list); Portland, OR; Ames, IA; Madison, WI; Honolulu, HI; Provo, UT; Eugene, OR; and Syracuse, NY.

Another day, another journalist doling out another equivocal story on the promise of fusion energy technology.This time, its Daniel Lyons and its in this week’s Newsweek:

Maybe this means I’m an optimist. Or even a sucker; a fool. All I know is that when I meet [Edward] Moses, the 60-year-old scientist who runs this place [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and he shows me a tiny pellet, about the size of the multivitamin I take every morning, and swears it will provide an endless supply of safe, clean energy, I want to believe him. It seems so ridiculously simple, so utterly doable. The pellet Moses holds is a model, but the real version will contain a few milligrams of deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen that can be extracted from water. If you blast the pellet with a powerful laser, you can create a reaction like the one that takes place at the center of the sun. Harness that reaction, and you've created a star on earth, and with the heat from that star you can generate electricity without creating any pollution. Forget about nuke plants, coal, oil, or wind and solar. "This is the real solar power," says Moses.

Okay, since fusion is the topic, you'll excuse my a bit a of hyperbole. We don't get fusion articles every day, but having read Charles Seife's book, Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Fusion, I'm inclined to take this latest atom-smashing news as as less than earth shaking. From Booklist's review of Seife's book (written by one Gilbert Taylor):

It’s the energy source of the future, and always will be; that’s the rap on nuclear fusion. Reviewing its development—which at present is embodied in two big-science installations in California and France—Seife clarifies the devilish complexities of containing a fusion reaction. The idea’s tantalizing physical simplicity and the allure of earning unbounded riches from unlimited power has repeatedly tempted scientists, whose excess optimism, hubris, and self-deception propel the technical side of Seife’s account. A seasoned science author (most recently, Decoding the Universe, 2006), Seife shines in explaining how hydrogen’s behavior at solarlike temperatures has so far defeated the two conventional devices for taming it: magnets and lasers. With high-energy physics at an impasse, eccentric claims of room-temperature fusion gained a hearing. Remember the cold-fusion nondiscovery of 1989? Seife writes up two other claims of low-temperature fusion that similarly could not be replicated, the sine qua non of scientific proof. Informed and perceptive, Seife ably melds physics and public policy (fusion has consumed billions of dollars) into a fine presentation for general-interest readers.

Still, its just one book, and I'm just another bloke; this time could be the time right? We'll see.

Till then, there's at least two ways to think about this fusion stuff: (1) it's bullsh*t (2) it's just around the corner. Let's take 'em in order.

1. Fusion is fiction. Seife’s book is nonfiction, and, again, its a good read on this particular perspective. Which begs the question: if the history of fusion science amounts to nearly 7 decades of failure, why does it keep winding up in this week’s Newsweeks? Why do people like the products of the Disney Corporation? (“When you wish upon a star…”). Global warming sucks, running out of oil is no fun, paying ever higher energy bills hurts. When we reluctantly have to admit that life is not fair, at least in the U.S.A., we can pop our copies of Cinderella of into the DVD player. No one likes to hear the word “no.” So, fusion is like science’s version of returning to the womb. Might that explain the billions and billions of tax payer dollars our government has sent chasing after this particular dream? Does that make it okay?

2. Fusion is (more than) da bomb, yo. That sh*t works! Problem solved right? For all intents and purposes that would mean an endless supply of clean energy. With practically endless supplies of cheap, clean energy, what couldn’t we do? Wait. What couldn’t we do? With fusion, no one has a reason to reassess the world’s present hyper-consumptive pattern. That means more car-abetted, sprawling land use, more resources extracted, more chemicals synthesized, maybe a few billion more people than the 9,000,000,000 projected for 2050, which would mean more mouths to feed, more food to grow, more animals to husband, more fish to catch, more trees to fell–a lot more. You could do it all (and die trying). Fusion just might be a fast road to bigger problems that we might be forced to solve without it.

Admittedly, this is just about as rank & speculative as the Newsweek article that started this whole post, but not quite…

When You Wish Upon A Star (Fusion National Anthem)

Music by Leigh Harline / Lyrics by Ned Washington
Performed by Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards)

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do

Fate is kind
She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of
Their secret longing

Like a bolt out of the blue
Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true

College Hoops: becoming deflated?

This week: time for another season of men’s college basketball. Sure, there have been some games played here an there before now, and yes the season doesn’t really begin until next year when conference play gets going, but the former greatest game in America begins making its primetime TV debut this week, with matchups between Michigan State and Kansas and Memphis v. Gonzaga airing tonight and other great match ups (UNC v. OSU) waiting later in the week, and plenty more great basketball before the close of 2009.

And yet, we can hear a moral minority out there say: so what? College basketball is no longer what it was.

Last week ended badly for this writer as high schooler Harrison Barnes announced he would play for the University of North Carolina next year (it ended great for Chapel Hill’ers). In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s the next Kobe or at least basketball’s latest Messiah. Barnes takes the place of John Wall, last spring’s divine avatar of roundball. He is gracing Kentucky University’s roster this season, taking them from NIT also ran to preseason #4 in the nation.

“Who cares?” say the conscientious few. Gone are the days when Magic sparred with Bird, or Jordan faced Ewing years before they would memorably clash in the NBA. That’s a college basketball of the distant past, before the NBA began a policy of systematically colonializing the sport, harvesting basketball’s brightest before ripe, importing them to a homogeneous professional marketplace, where they digest blandly in the estimation of the consuming public, leaving behind a college ecology of oddly shaped, irregularly speckled talent, competing in what amounts to some kind of lackluster minor league. The Barneses and Walls of 2010 (and the Roses, Durants, Odens and Anthony’s of previous seasons) are an emblem of the college game’s decline they say. Is it true?

Before 2006, the best talents in the basketball avoided college all together. Kobe, LeBron, Garnett never enrolled; they graduated from high school and into an NBA franchise. In a few years (or immediately) they were “stars” and multimillionaires. Every year a few (a small few) made this leap from high school to professional, leaving the majority of players to suit up in a place of higher education.

One & Done, or Money in the Bank

Then, in 2006, the NBA unveiled what has come to be known as the “one & done” rule: NBA players must be at least 19 years old and year out of high school. As a result of this rule, basketball prodigies must spend a year — no more; not when NBA millions await — behind a college jersey. NCAA officials cheer: they say the rule causes high schoolers to hit the books in order to achieve the minimum SAT score to enroll in a university, spurring a lifelong love of learning:

[NCAA President Miles Brand] thinks the great benefit [of the one & done rule] is “hundreds, maybe even thousands, of young men each year who are now taking their high school studies more seriously rather than thinking, ‘I can blow off high school and go right into the NBA.’ … That’s going to put them in good stead for their lives.” Read more.

And what does the NBA get? Well, I couldn’t find a quote from NBA Commissioner David Stern to illustrate it, but the biz gets a year of free, 24-7 media hype for next years’ crop of rookies, a built in fan base of earnest college alumni for this or that NBA franchise, and more tickets, more merchandise, more revenue…

Few buy the NCAA’s story. Kids are probably marginally better of having spent a semester taking crip courses, and another flunking out before winging for the pros, but only marginally. A lot of us (literally) buy the NBA’s story (otherwise the League would be even more boring). But here’s what one coach thinks the NCAA actually gets (from ESPN Magazine, Nov. 16, 2009):

Paul Hewitt hates the one-and-done rule. For years, the Georgia Tech coach has argued that high school players should be able to go right to the NBA. But once a player hits the quad, Hewitt thinks he should have to stay two years, to give the program some stability. Still the man is a realist. “Unless I can convince [UNC coach] Roy Williams to stop recruiting,” he says. “I’ve got to keep going after the best players out there.”

He’s not the only one. As Michael Wilbon argues here, the one & done rule isn’t college ball’s only problem, but it’s a big one that would be solved, to the betterment of the game and its would be “student-athletes,” by adopting a rule similar to the one described by Coach Hewitt. Football has certainly figured this out, with its rule requiring a 3-year stint in college propelling the undergraduate game as well as the pro into the forefront of American sport.

So what to do about this season of college hoops? Should we care? Or give into that small, but nagging coterie of naysayers?

I offer my own vote of confidence, for what its worth, if for only one reason: the games season ending tournament, sport’s penultimate event (second only to the world cup), a.k.a. “march madness.” It is still intact, still thrilling, and still largely immune from the the one & done phenomena.

Still sports' 2nd Greatest Spectacle

Last years’ championship team, UNC, featured a stellar roster of juniors and seniors rocking the Heels’ predictable run & gun style to a level of perfection they failed to achieve in two previous seasons of good-but-not-greatness. The winning Kansas team of 2008 was similarly comprised of upperclassmen, defeating one & done’er Derrick Rose & Memphis with a buzzer beater from junior Mario Chalmers’ hands. Florida’s 2007 title team featured a band of junior brothers, back to repeat of their 2006 Championship (instead of cashing in for the pros). You have to go back to an anomalous Syracuse in 2003 for the only instance of a team riding a ephemeral frosh to the right to the ultimate ladder & pair of scissors. Meanwhile, the number of one & done’s drafted in the NBA has increased every year.

So, grin & bear it this season. Ignore the hype, and root for the likes of Cal, Purdue, WVU, Texas, Missou, MSU, and UConn (okay, not UConn) come tourney time. They (have teh most experienced starting line-ups). Savor the unforeseen ways in which Kentucky and its mercenary band of erstwhile coeds will stumble (they’ve got the most highly touted freshman class in the land). If history is a guide, one & done or none, it will be the team with experienced savy players — bumps, bruises, warts & all — playing fundamentals of the game at a very high level, that will cut down the nets in one of sports’ greatest spectacles, the NCAA men’s basketball championship, in what remains one of sports’ best games, college hoops.

Let the madness begin!

Nicholas Nassim Taleb makes it easy on us. At the beginning of his book The Black Swan he goes ahead and tells us exactly what its all about:

To summarize: in this (personal) essay, I stick my neck out and make a claim, against many o four habits af thought, that our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according to our current knowledge)–and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, foocusing on the known, and the repeated. This implies the need to use the extreme event as a strating point and not treat it as an exception to be pushed under th erug. I also make the bolder (and more annoying) claim that in spite of our progress and the growth in knowledge, or perhaps because of such progress and growth, the future will be increasingly less predictable, while both human nature and social “sciences” seem to conspire to hide the idea from us.

Taleb’s book was published in 2007. So what? Well I’ll tell you what. His basic contention, that we live in a fundamentally unpredictable world (at least as it concerns the socially constructed parts of it, which means pretty much all of it), does not exclude economics, or the markets. In fact, he goes to great lengths to show that all the hedging, and risk management, and portfolio building that goes on in finance–from your neighborhood stock broker up to the high-flyers on Wall Street–is pretty much bullsh*t and setting everyone up for a big surprise one day.

Well, that day came w/ this whole mortgage-backed-economic debacle we are in now, and this book (published in 2007) basically predicted it.

But the author, who spent most of his working life as a trader on Wall Street, certainly wouldn’t take credit for the prediction. But he probably would take credit for being prepared. That’s kind of the crux of the book.

The Black Swan is rife w/ concepts which form a fairly coherent philisophical view that just may change the way you live.

At the heart are two worlds. On the one hand, we have Mediocristan, a predictable place described by common notions of probability and statistics. Unusual things happen, but they don’t affect average conditions. The natural sciences tend to study these phenomena and build physical laws  out of them. On the  other hand we have Extremistan, where the “black swan” lives. The black swan is an improbable event with outsizes impact. Its onset really shakes things up, even to the extent that it alter the world. The result is that, in Extremistan, the way things are now are no good indicator for the way things might be, since one never knows when a black swan might swoop down and change it all.

For better or worse, humans don’t really live their lives in Mediocristan (though some features of our day-to-day share some of its features); we live in Extremistan. As Taleb puts it:

Note that before the advent of modern technology, wars used to belong to Mediocristan. It is hard to kill many poeople if you need to slaughter them one at a time. Today, with tools of mass destruction, all it takes is a button, a nutcase, or a small error to wipe out the planet.

The problem with living in Extremistan is that Donald Rumsfeld was right.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

But as Taleb shows, we tend to forget about the unknown unknowns, or pretend they don’t exist. We mis-use mathematics and and theories and history to give our selves the false sense of knowing what’s going on in our social world (examples include the effects of natural disasters on our built environment, the fate of financial markets, social trends, deaths from terrorism, the evolution of technologies), when we really don’t, and probably can’t. When black swans arrive we are caught unawares , often with disastrous consequences.

There are two reasons to read the book. One: for the rush of discovering in detail how the way everyone thinks about the world is a little bit wrong. Two: for some tips for how to deal w/ a life dominated by lurking uncertainty. One example is to avoid specialization. Another is “barbell strategy,” or being hyperconservative and hyperaggressive, instead of mildly agressive or conservative. There are more, but you can read.

Okay, there’s one more reason to read this book. Unlike nearly every other non-fiction book I’ve ever read, the author mixes in the facts at hand with autobiography, fictional vignettes, philosophical speculations, and humors asides — all with a entertaining self-righteous irreverence–that almost puts the book in the same company as wild post-modern novels.

It’s not boring. And its a little scary.

But don’t worry, afterward you can retreat into the fantasy of Mediocristan, with the very not-mediocre  “Ride a White Swan” as your soundtrack, courtesy of the even less mediocre Marc Bolan & T-Rex:

According to research by the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, run by the USDA, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. So Mr. Gundersen uses small-diameter trees as rafters and framing in his airy structures, and big trees felled by wind, disease or insects as powerful columns and curving beams.

Taking small trees from a crowded stand in the forest is much like thinning carrots in a row: the remaining plants get more light, air and nutrients. Carrots grow longer and straighter; trees get bigger and healthier.

And when the trees are left whole, they sequester carbon. “For every ton of wood, a ton and a half of carbon dioxide is locked up,” he said, whereas producing a ton of steel releases two to five tons of carbon. So the more whole wood is used in place of steel, the less carbon is pumped into the air.

These passive solar structures also need very little or no supplemental heat

And now for something entirely different:

Memo to Kanye: the “Champion” from the Dan song was Owsley.

In a rare & welcome show of regulatory backbone, the Florida Public Service Commission pushed back on proposed energy-saving goals for Florida utilities.

The commissioners characterized the proposal, drafted by their own staff, as a giveaway to power producers, who have long advocated weak (or non-existent) goals.

“When you have incentives, the goals need to be robust,” said Commissioner Nathan Skop, “not less than what the utilities proposed in some instances.”

Under the staff’s proposal, utilities would essentially get more money for doing little more than the status quo when it comes to helping their customers save energy.

The Commission’s decision to reject that arrangement was in line with the editorial pages of at least 5 Florida newspapers, which have generally agreed that it is time for Florida to join the rest of the country (beyond the Southeast, that is) in seriously promoting energy efficiency as a resource alternative to new nuclear, coal or gas power plants — not just a educational sideline to the utilities’ usual efforts to build stuff and raise rates.

The staff now has until December 1st to come back with a new proposal.

The staff’s argument in siding with the utilities was essentially that focusing on energy efficiency programs would cost money, which would necessarily raise rates, which is unacceptable in the current economic climate.

What the staff apparently fails to recognize is that utilities are already attempting to raise rates to build huge new power plants. These plants cost three to four times more than an equal amount of power saved through energy efficiency programs. So both building power plants and energy efficiency programs can raise rates. The question is why the more expensive option would be preferable?

But it doesn’t end there. Unlike power plants, which just generate power and actually compel utilities to sell you more of it than you need, efficiency programs actually save energy. Meaning that the more your utility works to help you save, the lower your power bill, the more money you keep in your pocket –  even if  rates go up a bit in the process.

I don’t know about you, but I am more interested in what my bill says I have to pay than my rates. Seems like lowering bills is exactly what the staff of the Public Service Commission should be promoting in these strapped economic times.

So why aren’t they?  Thankfully, Florida’s PSC asked that question.

How cold is your office? How warm? Chances are, its either too much of one or the other, depending on the time of the year. For instance, large, box-shaped office spaces are so inefficient and divorced from ambient conditions that the heating, ventilation and cooling (HVAC) system typically must run to cool the center of the building even during the coldest winter day. Compare to office buildings of the pre-war (WW II, that is) era, in which work areas are never far from an operable window and natural light (and which still function comfortably today).

Everybody seems to realize that the comfort of their office environment sucks. For instance, in the South, many office environments seem to be calibrated so that men can maintain the ridiculous tradition of wearing suits in July, while more sensibly dressed women shiver. Here are some highlights from a recently publicized survey conducted by Johnson Controls, who presumably would like to make some dough fixing our work-a-day fix, that reveals that the workers know what’s up:

According to a new survey of office workers, 69% said they would be willing to sacrifice their preferred ideal temperature in the office to help their company conserve energy.

…

Almost all participants said their office has been too hot or too cold at some point (98 %) and when that occurs, most (78 %) said they are less productive. Not only does workplace productivity suffer, individual actions – such as bringing a heating or cooling device into the office – result in increased energy use.

…

American workers expect their employers to take action. The results indicate that 45% think their employer is not doing enough to make their office environments energy efficient.

In other words, we are willing to suffer for a cause, but not for incompetence. And likely, we wouldn’t have to suffer at all, because our offices are already too hot or too cold at the wrong time. Simply achieving a comfortable office environment would save energy and boost productivity. Translation for managers: $$$. Here’s hoping your boss reads this stuff. (Translation for readers: they won’t).

Tonight.

More Later

Click for a great NWF article about English Hedgehogs

click for larger image

Jarod Charzewski is an artist currently based in Charleston (but original from the Canadian Mid-west) whose work, in his own words “reflects nature’s response to man, and mankind’s
impact on landscapes.”

He work Scarp was recently exhibited at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in otherwise dogmatically anachronistic Charleston, SC. Sayz Halsey:

For his installation on the second floor of the Halsey, Charzewski has created Scarp, which references the earth and our place in it. There is what appears to be a geological formation made out of several tons of carefully folded clothing. The various strata reveal dense deposits of denim, corduroy, cotton, and different synthetic fabrics united by color and type. The artist states, “This project is about fabricating history with our own synthetic and fleeting artifacts as the medium.”

I particularly enjoyed the Kluge-esque schematic below, presumably developed by the artist for the benefit of bewildered Charlestonians and lost tourists. Quoting the artist:

The purchasing habits of the North American consumer requires the extraction on (sic) our planet’s resources only to replce  (sic) them with processed goods in the form of discarded merchandise. This geologicial cross section shows the new and improved layers of the Earth. Through our ever expending (sic) and multiplying landfill sites these new layers will provide us with a plent rich in synthetic nutriants (sic) and chemically enhanced goodness.

Notice all the mispellings (sic) and punning diction. Intentional, I think.

As I told a pal who has seen the exhibit in person (I have not), this is a fantastic artistic representation of the concept of the Anthropocene, popularized recently on this blog. The notion is this: beginning sometime after the industrial revolution, humankind’s impact on the environment has become so great as to express itself in the geology of the planet. Sayz Wikipedia, global arbiter of deathless knowledge:

Anthropocene was coined in 2000 by the Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen by analogy with the word “Holocene.” The Greek roots are “anthropo-” meaning “human” and “-cene” meaning “new.” Crutzen has explained, “I was at a conference where someone said something about the Holocene. I suddenly thought this was wrong. The world has changed too much. So I said: ‘No, we are in the Anthropocene.’ I just made up the word on the spur of the moment. Everyone was shocked. But it seems to have stuck.”

Crutzen’s epiphany presumably was occasioned by phenomena such as abnormally high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or increasing acidification of oceans,  or mercury deposition, or soil changes due to intensive farming practices, or etc. In other words, our acts rank up there with volcanic eruptions and earthquakes now, at least as far as future geological strata are concerned. Future geologists will be able to explain what the find in the earth’s crust by pinning the tail on this donkey. Oh well. F#ck it.

For another view by a first hand witness, check our this essay by E. Payne.