Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too

There's all sorts of stuff I could write about: I just got back from Halifax; I've been to two scientific conferences in the last 2 weeks; the gardens (there are two this year) are in and growing; there are countless other things in my head right now.

But there's something that's been bugging me for a while, and the way the markets are behaving right now has reminded me. It's like, deep down inside, people are terrified that the current system is broken, but they don't really know what to do about it because there is no alternative, so they're just swinging their money around panicky willy-nilly.

All the while, the so-called experts are saying that everything is fine, the system is on the mend. Nothing was wrong with the foundations of the old system, it was only some dead wood that needed removing. So go ahead and invest in banks and manufacturing and all those other things which led to the economic catastrophe. The experts can see the future and it is good.

But wait, aren't these the same experts who spent 6 months telling everyone that the financial meltdown wasn't their fault because "no one could have predicted it"? Ah, so, don't blame you for the crisis because you don't have a crystal ball, but listen to you now because you can forsee the recovery?

Well, which one is it, guys? Can you predict the future or not? Evidence suggests not.

It's What's For Dinner

Yay! Green things finally come from Ontario again! Not many; just asparagus and baby spinach, really. It's early in the growing season yet. In any case, in our ongoing effort to try to eat more locally, L and I had this for dinner last night. L had hers without the tomatoe sauce. It was de-freakin-licious, I highly recommend it.

And since I can't miss an opportunity to get up on my soap box, this is a friendly reminder that when you eat food grown locally in season you get fresher, more healthful, more delicious food and you put less pollution into the air. It's win-win-win. Your tongue, your waistline* and your lungs will all thank you. So next time you're at the grocery store, take a second to check where it was grown before you buy it.

* I'm assuming that you're choosing local produce over some processed thing full of junk ingredients, here.

Like a Better Me

I haven't been writing here as much as I'd like lately. There are a number of reasons for that. First off, I'm hellabusy being a born-again student; grad school is exactly like I remember my older friends/colleagues describing it. Secondly, a lot of my creative thinking drifts very quickly in the rant category these days and I'd like to spare my readers too much of that. And finally, sometimes I have trouble expressing my ideas in ways that are understood by people who don't spend all their time inside my head*.

So imagine my delight when I came across a very well thought out piece which expresses many of my very own feelings in crisp, compelling prose. It is actually the introduction to a book which I have now reserved at the Toronto Public Library. If I had to summarize the article, it would be a phrase I started using sometime shortly before the housing bubble burst: home ownership is the new serfdom. But that is a very cursory summary, indeed.

I found the article by trying to learn more about a particular guest blogger on boing boing after being taken in by some of his posts. He puts very elegant words to some pretty complicated thoughts I've had: it's like reading what I would write if I were a better me. Which sounds a bit vain, but really, if you stumbled across an author like that, wouldn't you bask in your discovery for a little while?

Set aside a good chunk of time before clicking the link: the article is a bit long, but I think it's well worth sticking with. I strongly encourage you to read it, if only so that some of my rants sound a little less insane and baseless the next time we speak. And maybe it will stir in you some of the same thoughts and feelings it did in me.

Introduction to Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.


* As a solipsist, I know that everyone spends all their time inside my head. Unfortunately, not everyone else knows that.

Guilty Pleasures

In the last few years I have learned a lot about nutrition. My first foray into that controversial cesspool of knowledge was a book called The Longevity Diet. The idea goes something like this:

In the 30s, an Italian researcher needed dwarf mice for an experiment. So he starved them and sure enough they were tiny. However, a strange thing happened: they lived 50 to 60% longer than normal lab mice. Nobody really paid much attention to this til years later. Now there have been experiments performed on a variety of different types of organisms and it turns out that if you greatly reduce the amount of food a creature eats, it lives longer. Unfortunately, as primates tend to have long lifespans, it's hard to say yet whether this effect actually carries over to humans.

I usually get one of two reactions to this: 1) you are insane; 2) it only feels like you live 50% longer if you don't eat a lot of food. However, living longer is not the real reason I think this book is important. If you eat only the very minimum amount of food required to survive, you have to be extremely careful about what that food contains: simply starving yourself is going to have the opposite effect. So the calorie restriction people have done a lot of research into what things are very important in human nutrition and done an excellent job of compiling that information in the Longevity Diet.

Not a day goes by that I don't hear about the obesity epidemic. I'm never really sure what causes it: ignorance, stupidity, or laziness. I expect the reason varies on an individual basis and exists as a continuum. The internet, however, is perfect for fixing the first cause and so, many people have put up blogs and suchlike in the name of educating people about what they're actually eating, or, in some cases just guilting people into eating better.

If I'm busy, I forget about food. Then, along comes one of these delicious looking links and bam, I'm drooling all over my keyboard thinking "mmm.... blizzard." Or worse, wandering down the hall to the snack machine wishing I had some gravy and cheese curds to put on my overpriced bag of doritos.

I suppose the one consolation in all this is that, whether or not they are helping curb the obesity epidemic, they are at least helping to spur the economic recovery, one chili-cheese-pizza-dog at a time.

21,108 Days Remaining, 13,305 of Them Happy

I got a very strange email the other day. The subject line was: [Reminder] 10,000 days alive @ Sat Apr 11, 2009. After racking my brains and asking a few friends if anyone had hacked my google calendar, I eventually concluded that I set this reminder myself. I used to work with a lot of time data and it would have been a trivial task to write a little computer program to tell me the date of my birthday + 10,000 days. Today, Earth Day, April 22, 2009, I am 10,011 days old.

According to the Happy Planet Index survey, this means I have 21,108 days remaining. My overall score was 54.7, which I have equated roughly to "years of sustainable happiness." If we assume that I've already used up some of them by living happily 2/3 of the time, then I have 13,305 days of happiness remaining: about 2/3 of the total days I have remaining, which is a comforting thought.

I stumbled across the Happy Planet Index , ironically, not really thinking about Earth Day at all.

GDP is frequently used as an indirect measurement of happiness. And whenever you can only measure the success of a goal indirectly,i.e., by measuring something which is related to the goal, sooner or later, there will be a subtle shift in efforts from achieving the ostensible goal to achieving increases in the thing being used as a proxy for that goal. And so, in an effort to measure how happy people are, we measure the GDP. Except that somewhere along the line increasing GDP replaced our happiness as the end goal. And now, the entire economy is hell-bent for election on increasing GDP without regard to how it affects our happiness.

There has got to be a better way, I thought. So I started looking into it. It turns out that the wikipedia article for GDP contains a list of alternatives to the GDP. I strongly urge you to check out any or all of them. The one that struck me as including most of the things that are important to me while still being simple enough to calculate with real data was the Happy Planet Index. It includes both subjective happiness and objective sustainability.

So if you didn't do anything else to celebrate Earth Day, go take the test. And if you did do something to celebrate Earth Day you'll get a better score on the test. And isn't that the important thing? Getting a better score?

Part of the Precipitate

I came up with a plan, last week, to solve both the economic crisis and the climate change crisis. Climate change is caused by an imbalance between the energy coming into the earth-atmosphere system and the energy exiting that same system. Almost all of the energy coming into the system is in the form of light from the sun. Almost all of the energy exiting the system is radiation, the amount of which is dependent on the temperature of the earth-atmosphere system.

At present there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than there has been for a very long time. CO2 effectively blocks some of the radiation that is trying to leave the system: there is now more energy coming in than there is going out. The result is that the temperature of the earth-atmosphere system will go up, shedding more energy in the form of radiation.

If the problem will correct itself as the temperature of the system changes, who cares? Well, there are a few important things to consider:

1. We keep adding to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere which means the temperature has to increase at an even higher rate to keep up.
   
2. As the temperature of the system increases, more water will evaporate, which will block radiation from leaving the system, which will increase the temperature, which will cause more water to evaporate.
   
3. Coral reefs are sensitive to temperature. If we let the temperature rise too quickly we could find that 70% of our planet's surface is covered by septic tank rather than ocean.
   

The way I see it, if things stay the way they are, we will turn the whole planet into a giant cesspool.

Solutions to this imbalance come in two flavours: decrease radiation entering the system; increase radiation leaving the system. Actually all of the currently proposed solutions that I know of are of the first flavour. So why, thought I, aren't there any of the second flavour?

My proposed solution is this: We build an enormous geothermal power plant. Normally this would result in no net change in the radiation of the system. But, what if we use the electricity generated by this system to power a giant laser which is tuned to the atmospheric window? Bam, we have now increased the amount of energy leaving the planet. And, since building a giant laser and a massive geothermal generation facility is no mean feat, we will have to employ thousands of labourers, thus sovling the world's current economic woes.

No plan is perfect, of course. Drawbacks of this plan include a defacto no-fly zone in the beam of the laser (I propose we place the laser in an area with a high seagull or pidgeon population) and the possibility that we will accidentally hit a distant planet, thus precipitating an interplanetary war thousands of years in the future. But really, that is some future generation's problem.

Shooting the Moon

A lot of my computer gaming came, unfortunately, before there were very many cool computer games and before I could afford the few cool computer games that existed. As a result of this, as a teenager, I played a lot of hearts in Windows 98.

Hearts is scored like golf: lower is better. Each heart you hold at the end of a hand is a point against you. The goal of the game is to wind up with as few hearts in your pile as possible. Except there's this thing called "shooting the moon," whereby you collect all the hearts in a hand and instead of adding 26 points to your score, you subtract 26 points from your score. Obviously this is quite a risky move, since, if you miss a single heart you are screwed.

I sort of feel this way about the idea of using technology to "fix" the environment. This planet has had a few billion years to work out the kinks. Humans, on the other hand, have had a scant few hundred thousand years to get themselves together and an even shorter time to figure out all this science and technology stuff.

Don't get me wrong: all this science and technology stuff is fabulous. I have been studying both quite hard for quite some time now and I still find them fascinating. I think using science and technology as a way to improve human life is a great boon to the generations surrounding mine. But technology is rarely without its consequences, frequently unintended, sometimes harmful to the environment.

The idea of piling one technology on top of the other in an attempt to curb these deleterious effects while maintaining our own comfort brings me back to the game of hearts: if we are successful in chaining all those technologies together to cancel out their negative side effects, if we succeed at shooting the moon, then everybody wins. But if we miss just one link in the chain, we risk making the world very uncomfortable or even uninhabitable for humans.