jameswharris

What If Carbon Pollution Was Visible?

If automobiles had never been invented and transportation still depended on horse power, we’d be knee deep in horse you know what. We’d probably have some very strict equine pollution laws. Now imagine if cars pooped out solid carbon pellets – lets imagine them to be orange and about the size of golf balls so they could shoot out existing tailpipes – then according to CarbonCounter.org my mid-size pickup truck would leave more than 10,000 of these car turds on the highway and streets every year. My house would excrete more than 26,000 of these scat balls piling up around the yard.

Carbon is invisible and goes way up into the atmosphere. It’s easy to think we’re not doing anything to the climate. But if pollution was solid and visible, we probably couldn’t see anything else. What if every kind of pollution was a color coded feces. Methane could be green balls, sulfur could be brown, etc. Try and imagine what our streets would look like. I doubt they would be drivable.

If we could see the invisible pollution we’re putting into the air, or into the sea, we’d realize that we have a huge problem. I don’t want to take the time to do the mathematics, but I bet we’d all be standing pretty deep in piles of colored balls. And the funny thing is, if we had cars that made solid pellets out of carbon we would not need to worry about the greenhouse effect. People are trying to invent technology to sequester carbon underground. To understand the magnitude of that problem, once again picture how many colored balls would be laying around to be picked up and put somewhere.

Think about it another way. What if you had to pay $1 for every pound of carbon you polluted and the only way to get a deduction from this tax was to produce less carbon? If my wife and I worked to be more efficient, we might could reduce $50,000 a year down to $20,000, but that’s still leaving a lot of pollution. And when you think how the standard of living is rising all around the world, we’re quickly back to being waist deep in carbon doo-doo.

When environmentalist talk about rolling things back to how it was before 1990 or 1980, and that means asking Americans to consume 50% less, it would also mean asking a billion people that climbed from underdeveloped to developed to step back into poverty. If Americans could find a mode of transportation that had 1/20th of the impact on the environment, then the rest of the world could come up to our standard – but then we’d all need to cut consumption by half.

The magnitude of the problem is just horrendous. And we really don’t see it because carbon is invisible. How sneaky. I’m a positive guy. I like to believe we can solve this problem. I like to think humans can overcome anything, but if you read Jarrod Diamond you know our track record 0 in N tries. Why didn’t all the brilliant MBAs running Wall Street not see the sub-prime fiasco coming? As a race, civilizations seem to prefer to collapse, and then pull a Phoenix, rather than do a caterpillar and butterfly act.

Lots of people love spectator sports. I like watching all the nations on the Earth play the game of survival. The United States has no trouble facing any odds if it can play the game with guns, but for some reason we don’t want to compete when science is the weapon of choice. Science fiction writers really should help us see what lies ahead, so more people can see the invisible coming.

Jim

Credit Card Trickery

There’s a new danger you need to watch out for regarding your credit card. It’s perfectly legal and not really dishonest, but it’s on the slippery side of things in my opinion. I’m referring to paying for magazine subscriptions with credit cards and having publishers automatically renewing your subscription almost a year later because they kept your credit card number on file. A variation on this is offers to try free trial subscriptions that requires a credit card to start. Or even worse, getting a free magazine at a store and having that store giving you credit card number to the publisher so they can automatically renew the free magazine later. There must be fine print somewhere that we agree to all of this, but I never noticed it.

The first time this happened was when my wife got a free subscription to Sports Illustrated from Best Buy. I think it was for four months. She assumed the magazine was free until the sub ran out and it would quit coming. One day, after we had been getting the magazine much longer than I thought we should, I asked her to check her credit card statements, and indeed she discovered she had been charged for a renewal automatically. A call quickly fixed the problem, but ouch.

Another time, with Time Magazine, and later with PC Magazine, I got small postcards in the mail, with teeny-tiny print saying my subscription would be automatically renewed at a future date unless I contacted the publishers and canceled my subscriptions. These cards looked like junk mail that normally I would have put directly into the recycled bin. I realized I had gotten these subs from very cheap online offers that I paid with a credit card. I called and had both magazines canceled.

The trick is to pay with checks when first subscribing. I did that for both PC Magazine and Time after that. I let Time lapse when they wanted to up the subscription from $29.95 to $49.95. The other day I got an email asking me to come back for $20.00 – but it required paying with a credit card. I didn’t bite.

Last week I got an online offer from Encyclopedia Britannica to get their Ultimate DVD collection for $19.95 and with the added bonus of a free one-year’s subscription to their online edition. I had done this a couple years ago and decided I would again go for such a great bargain. Back then the free one-year subscription came as a code on a piece of paper that I registered online. This time when I registered the 2009 Ultimate DVD they told me I had to give them a credit card number to start the free one-year online subscription, with the warning they would automatically renew the subscription in one year for $49.95 unless I canceled a year later. I’m not going to remember to do that.

I felt cheated by this, because I paid the $19.95 really for the free one-year subscription to the online version. I planned to compare the online edition of EB to Wikipedia. I think this is the last time I will buy anything from Encyclopedia Britannica.

I get all kinds of enticing magazine subscription offers in my email. Legit ones, but I know they will store my credit card and automatically renew and I don’t like that business plan at all.

I’m starting to wonder if there should be a law against storing people’s credit card numbers. It would make ordering books from Amazon.com a little more time consuming, but overall I think it would be safer for the consumer in general.

And I understand that magazines don’t want to waste tons of money sending out endless subscription reminders. My solution to magazines is to quit sending those paper reminders by mail and send electronic reminders by email. It’s better for the environment and it will save you money. If you wouldn’t store my credit card number I might even be willing to pay online. Otherwise, I’d print out the email and send in the payment.

Since I’m working to abandon paper magazines this doesn’t matter, but if publishers want me to subscribe to electronic editions I need to know they aren’t going to automatically renew my subscriptions.

One way I was inadvertently helped to fight this problem was when my credit union switched credit card companies. It was then when I realized how many businesses kept my number on file. They all contacted me telling me my old number wouldn’t work anymore.

I wished that VISA and other credit card companies had a way for me to charge with a number that had a limited lifetime. What I might need to do to create a workaround is to change credit card banks every year.

Jim

Further Adventures with eReader on the iPod touch

For some reason I’m getting more hits on the iPod touch eReader eBook post than anything else I’ve written lately, so I must assume that the iPod touch and eReader are a hit combination. Since I wrote that post, eReader has come out with version 1.2 that offers many nifty new features and they’re promising 1.3 real soon now. Also, the eReader.com site, a spin-off from fictionwise.com, seems to be expanding daily, which implies another kind of success. eReader software isn’t just for the iPod, there’s also versions for Palm, PocketPC, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Windows, Macintosh and OQO systems.

When the Kindle came out stories about it on the blogosphere were more common than stories about Sarah Palin today. Using the iPod touch and iPhone for an ebook reader hasn’t garnered that much notice. I prefer the larger screen of the Kindle, but never wanted to carry it around. The touch/iPhone is designed to commute wherever you go, and wherever you go you can now read your book when you get there. That’s pretty cool.

The screen of the touch/iPhone is better than PDAs and most other smart phones, so for a portable reading device it does very well in the visual department. The screen is physically about one fourth to one third the size of a paperback book page, but the number of words varies because you have several font size settings. Even though the screen is smaller than the Kindle, it’s brighter and sharper. Overall though, the Kindle’s screen is much nicer to read from because of it’s perfect size.

Flipping pages is much nicer with eReader on the touch/iPhone than with the Kindle or the eBookman I used to have. You can set eReader to swipe or tap for page turning. I set mine to tap, so I just touch the right side of the screen to page forward, and the left to go back. Having a touch screen greatly reduces the need for buttons.

My 1st generation touch has 2 buttons, and the newly released 2nd generation touch has three, adding a volume control and tiny speaker, something I wanted. I’m quite anxious for another button though, an on/off switch for the Wi-Fi for the iPod touch. The wireless system drains the battery fast. My touch will drain in 1-2 days even doing nothing if the wireless is on. I now have to go through several taps to turn the wireless on or off. An even more sophisticated solution would be software that turned the wireless on when I sent a request out on the Internet and turned it off after a set period of time.

The iPod touch is about four times heavier than a Nano, and much bigger, so it’s more of an effort to carry around, but still just 4 ounces, or 120 grams. It fits in my shirt pocket like the Nano, but its very noticeable there, whereas the Nano is unfelt. I’ve started carrying my touch some, but I’ve got to admit I’d rather carry the Nano. Whether I carry the touch all the time will depend if I get completely hooked on it. 99% of my use is for listening to audio books, so unless I start using the touch more, I might go back to my Nano. I think I’ll need several months to grow into the iPod touch, to know if I regularly need all of its features.

The frequent low battery message is what keeps me switching back to the Nano. I can get a lot more time if I shut off the Wi-Fi, but that’s annoying to keep up with. Another way to improve battery life is shut off the screen. This is only good for listening to music and audio books, but eReader does have a feature for showing white text on a black background. I wonder if that saves energy. The claimed battery life improvements in the 2nd Generation iPod touch makes me wished I had waited a month to buy a new iPod. I certainly wouldn’t buy a 1st generation touch now unless it was very cheap.

One way to adapt to the touch’s battery weakness is to buy a cradle and leave it on it whenever I’m not using it, but with the battery supposedly only good for 400-500 full cycles of charging, would that be good for it? The iPod touch loses it’s charge so fast when the Wi-Fi is on that I’m thinking mine is either defective or it has a serious flaw. The Kindle, even with the broadband on lasts four or five days.

The iPod touch also does not seem as robust as the Nano. Upgrading to iTunes 8.0 crashed it completely and I had to do a restore, which took a bit of fiddling to get done. I kept wondering why the touch was always backing itself up, well now I’m glad it had. The restore loaded my upgrades, settings, eReader books, and extra applications, but not my music and audio books.

I bought the iPod touch because I wanted walk-around access to the Internet. I was also thinking of buying the Asus Eee PC for the same reason. After a few weeks of ownership I’ve learned that I don’t actually need to access the Internet that often when I’m away from my work or home computer. It is fun to play with the touch while reclining in my La-Z-Boy, but weirdly the best function I’ve found for those idle moments is cleaning out old email. Browsing the web on the touch’s 3.5″ screen is the coolest I’ve seen on a small device, but it’s not any fun in practicality. Good for emergency searches.

When it comes down to it, the real use I have for an iPod is audio books. I spend hours and hours every week listening to audio books, and the Nano is far superior for that task. The best thing I love about eReader is getting free classic books, but not to read. When you listen to books you never know how many names and words are spelled. Having the text on eReader makes a great supplement to audio books. It’s not something I use often, but it’s very nice.

Audio books have ruined me for reading printed books, so when I do read with my eyes it’s mainly email, RSS feeds and the web pages. That makes the touch good for email and RSS feeds if they are nearly all text. HTML email is better read on a big screen.

The iPod touch is a novelty that I may or may not get addicted to carrying around. Buying it made me glad I didn’t rush out and buy the iPhone. I love the Internet as seen through my 22″ Samsung LCD. But anyone who grew up carrying a Gameboy around will probably find the touch a fantastic device.

Jim

Genetics Versus Choice in Politics

Charles Gibson, from ABC News, interviewing Sarah Palin asked her about homosexuality, giving her the choice between genetic or learned. Palin dodged the question, but I got to wondering about the implication of that question. I assume Gibson was using it as a touchstone question for gauging just how conservative Palin might be. Conservatives want to believe everything in life is a choice and that we’re morally judged by our behavior. Liberals consider some behavior genetic and believe that changes how society should be run.

What if some behavior was absolutely proven to be genetic? How would that affect politics? Scientists often say they have found a genetic link to various diseases and conditions, but I don’t think all people accept science at this level as being true. To many people it’s as vague as understanding the theory of evolution. What would it take for science to convince the majority of people that genetics is a fact of life? Most people accept the science of aerodynamics even though they don’t understand it because they buy airline tickets.

If the science of genetics evolved to the point with near 100% accuracy to predict future behavior from pre-natal testing would that be convincing? If all pregnant women got a blood test and one of the factors given was a 75% chance of having a homosexual kid, and studies later showed that 75% of those kids did indeed turn out to be homosexual, would conservatives accept the science of genetics and its implications?

We know that conservatives can radically alter their positions – Sarah Palin is proof of that because accepting her as suitable for commander in chief asserts an acceptance of radical feminist ideals from forty years ago. If homosexuality is proven to be part of nature, will conservatives accept that and love their gay and lesbian kids? Or will their loathing of homosexuality change their position on abortion?

What if the science of genetics goes further. What if genetic testing could predict that children will become atheists, criminals, terrorists or even Democrats or Republicans? Will fundamentalists be willing to abort Democrats as fetuses, or a family of Yellow Dog Democrats want to abort a young Republican?

Am I an atheist because of genetics or choice? Growing up I thought at age 12 I was making a decision on my own to abandon primitive superstition, but as I’ve grown older I’ve sometimes wondered if atheism isn’t just my nature. I went to the same schools as my peers, and went to church with them too, so why do 90% of boomers think about God, and us other 10% don’t? Maybe there’s a constant 10% of skeptics in every generation, no matter what the educational system is like. Would pro-life fundamentalists accept abortion if they thought they could stomp out atheism in a few generations?

Or would conservatives feel less threatened if they knew that homosexuals and atheists were just weird breeds in the population like Calico cats. I’m not the kind of atheist that wants to convert religious people. I believe that genetics makes some people religious and it does no good to try and make them scientific. To me, atheists who try to convert for their cause are like religious people who try to shanghai people into their belief systems. I’d like to believe if people read and study enough on a subject they will come to their own conclusions, but I don’t know if that’s a scientific truth.

What I would like is a political system that allows everyone to pursue their on beliefs as long as they don’t interfere or harm other people and their beliefs. And I think that was what the American founders intended for our American way of life. The problem we face today is some people think their personal beliefs, maybe genetic in origin, should be how 100% of people should believe and those beliefs should be codified into law. Some of the extremes of this thinking would like to get rid of homosexuals, atheists, liberals and environmentalists.

To these thinkers, that’s the path to a successful government and a happy population. But think about this. If GM and Ford, and the auto unions had supported conservation and environmental recommendations from back in the 70s and 80s instead of seeking to politically change laws to meet their own self interests they wouldn’t be heading down that steep economic decline towards bankruptcy.

I know this illustration might sound like it’s coming out of left field, but hear me out. What I’m saying is government laws that were meant to protect all people would have been much more beneficial to the special interests of the auto industry if they had not interfered. The American auto industry inflicted it’s own near mortal wounds by getting laws customized for their way of thinking. If they had had to compete with world auto makers under the laws that were meant to help everyone, they would still be prosperous today.

Whether our behavior is learned or programmed by genes, it should not matter to our laws. We need laws designed for the common good that ignore special interests. We need to accept diversity and account for it in our legal system. Gays getting married should not affect fundamentalists who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, if we have a system that allow for both. To me the solution is simple. Have two kinds of marriages, the first, a basic legal marriage that meets state and federal laws, good for all people, and a second marriage within churches that meet the laws of their gods, for those people that have extra special interests.

My mother-in-law never believe my wife and I were properly married because we weren’t married within the Catholic Church, but the laws of the nation believe we are married. If I believed like my mother-in-law, I would have converted and gotten married in the Catholic Church. The law of the land would have no affect on that.

By the special interest beliefs of Catholics, anyone not married in the Catholic Church is not married. Should that be the law of the land? See my point. This world will never know which religion is right so we have to create laws that work for all religions. We need generalized rules for laws, and let people pick their own specialized beliefs that they keep to themselves.

I don’t know if our behaviors are programmed or created by our free will, but should that affect the political system? We need a system that works either way, or any combination of the two. As long as I can be an atheist I don’t care if other people are Christian, Jew, Muslin, Pagan or Hindu. Governor Palin should have said to Charlie Gibson, “It doesn’t matter if homosexuality is learned or genetic, the American way should protect them to the fullest extent of the law.” Our only enemies that we should abort are those that threaten us physically or interfere with our ability to pursue happiness through American ideals. Those are the true terrorists, whether from outside of the country that want to attack our way of life, or criminals that want destroy our system from within.

Jim

Has Reading With My Ears Ruined My Desire To Read With My Eyes?

I have hundreds of unread books sitting on my shelves wagging their tales anxious to be read, but of the 28 books I “read” so far this year, only one was read with my eyes. And that one, Marsbound by Joe Haldeman, was read as a magazine serial. Had it been available on audio at the time, like it is now, I wouldn’t have read any printed books this year. Of the 39 books I read last year, only two were printed. Before I discovered audio books on digital players through Audible.com in 2002, I read on average 6-12 books a year. After digital audio, I’m reading 35-55 books each year.

I read more audio books now because, one, I can multitask reading with walking, driving, doing the dishes, eating alone, and other quiet mindless activities. Second, I listen to more books than I read because I’m enjoying them more. When I was kid I was a real bookworm, often reading a book a day for weeks at a time. I discovered a lot of fun books back then, but I have since reread some of those books on audio and discovered I missed a lot from reading too fast and poorly. Third, audio books got me out of my science fiction rut and into a wider range of literature because listening gives me the patience to read books with my ears that I would never take the time to read with my eyes. Fourth, and this is the most important, I think I experience books better through audio because I’ve discovered I’m not a very good reader, and the quality of audio book narrators have constantly improved in recent years and I flat out prefer listening to a great reader than doing a botched up job myself.

Now, the the question is: Has reading with my ears destroyed my desire to read with my eyes? When the seventh Harry Potter book came out last year I raced through it like everyone else, so I know I can still enjoy eyeball reading, but the whole time I wished I had waited for the audio edition to arrive from Amazon.

To force myself to read a book with my eyes, I bought Incandescence, a new novel by Greg Egan. I was in the mood for some cutting edge science fiction and it wasn’t available on audio. And, I am enjoying reading it. I read slower than I used to – that’s something listening has taught me. But as I go through the sentences I can’t help but think this book would sparkle far greater if I was hearing it read by a fine reader.

So, have audio books become a crutch? Or have I just discovered a better way of experiencing books and have become addicted? If EMP killed off all the iPods in the world I think I’d want to try and recreate audio books in the old fashion way. I’d want someone to read to me, or I’d want to learn how to read aloud and try to dramatically present stories like the narrators I love so much to hear.

Yet, if this return-to-the-19th-century catastrophe happened I might end up reading more books because all the computers and televisions would be out of commission too. I started reading like crazy in junior high school when I outgrew Gilligan’s Island and I wanted to break away from my family unit. I had lots of time and even though I had plenty to do, I preferred the laziness of reading.

In our society, literacy is a virtue, but being a kid gorging himself on science fiction does not confer a lot of social status. It was plain old escapism. If iPods and Audible had been invented in 1965 I would have grown up listening to books, and I would have listened to better books than I had been reading.

I’m currently listening to The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. That’s one book I would never read with my eyes, but if I had read it and The Age of Innocence at 13, I would have had a much better understanding of those scary junior high girls. I think I’m a much better person at 56 for reading Wharton. That wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for audio books, and I was an English major during my college years. I had a hard time reading classic novels – I kept hoping they’d assign fun modern novels, but they didn’t. If I had gotten to hear the classics back then I would have been a much better literature student. I know this is true because when I took three Shakespeare classes I listened to the plays on LPs and aced my exams, plus I admired the writing so much more.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting you should give up reading with your eyes. I think many people are better than I am at reading. I just discovered late in life, at around 50, that I was a lousy-ass reader. When I do read now, I do try harder try to hear what I’m seeing. That requires reading slower and thinking about the dramatic quality of the sentences in front of me. I wish I could read like Jeff Woodman or Jim Dale, but I don’t.

Last night I pulled down several novels that I’ve been meaning to read and read a few pages from each. I admired the writing but I realized I would never read them. Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Call It Sleep are just too dense for me to read with my eyes. I brought them to work today and put them on our book give-away table. They disappeared in a few minutes and I hope they have found good homes.

Audio books have greatly enriched my life. I truly don’t think they have ruined my urge to read with my eyes, because that urge was already fading. Without audio books I’d probably continue reading 6-12 books a year for the rest of my life. Before I turned fifty I was thinking I might only read another 200 books before I died, and wondered why I owned 1,200 and was buying more all the time. I’ve already listened to more than that planned 200, so audio books have already expanded my reading lifetime.

My desire to “read” books is greater than any other time in my life, but strangely I’m going to stop buying books, ones printed on paper, that is, because they will sit on my shelves, unread, and I’m feeling way too guilty to add any more lonely unread pages.

Jim