jameswharris

PickensPlan.com

If you haven’t been to PickensPlan.com yet, please stop by and view the short video. T. Boone Pickens, the big oil man has big plans for wind power. This video should make you feel better about the current oil crisis. Just the thinking is a step in the right direction.

Mr. Pickens’ plan is pretty straight forward and sounds both practical and doable. It’s not a complete solution, but it would dramatically reduce the demand for oil and in a reasonable amount of time. We need more billionaires out there thinking up ideas like this one.

What’s amazing is there is so many people coming up with great ideas that I wonder why people do not feel more positive about the future. Just look at what the last two days of piddling good news has done for the stock market. It only takes positive thinking to create a bull market. Sure, we shouldn’t live in fantasy land and ignore our problems and failures. I can’t see why the nightly news can’t present at least a 50-50 mix of good and bad news, instead of a long stream of negatives with a token upbeat story at the end.

If the middle of America could be made into a giant wind farm, why can’t the deserts be turned into giant solar energy farms? I expect the next twenty-five years to be exciting and transformational. If every oil billionaire comes up with a substitute for oil we should be energy independent in no time.

Jim

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

I seldom read non-English speaking authors, so I have Carl over at Stainless Steel Droppings to thank for pointing me to this vivid little book, After Dark by Haruki Murakami. After Dark came out in Japan in 2004 and was published in English in 2007.

I wonder how much the translation to English altered Murakami’s prose? What we get is stark. Crisp dialog and vivid details suggests little of Japanese culture. It’s almost as if world culture has all melded together. After Dark had more American pop culture in it than Japanese. Was the cultural specifics converted for American readers, or do people in Japan eat at Denny’s and pick up milk at 7-Elevens?

Murakami plays with narration, telling the reader to pretend to be a movie camera, while weaving in unexplained fantastic elements. The novel was beautiful to listen to, but it caused so many questions to enter my mind while listening. Am I learning about citizens of Tokyo from reading this story? How many of them love American music and old LPs? Is the percentage about equal to American kids who love Anime, or is American pop music very popular in Japan? Is crime part of their culture like it is in ours? Why is the prostitute Chinese? Is Japan becoming an Asian melting pot?

Mari, the 19 year-old main character seems no different from young female characters in American novels. Now these observations are not meant to be critical of Murakami’s writing. What I’m exploring here is how much we’re all alike. One hundred years ago, stories from Japan made their people seem exotic and even alien. This story only confirms the Los Angelization of the world. Is that good or sad?

The story is full of detail observations, like Mari sitting at Denny’s smoking and drinking coffee, or surreal views of her sister, Eri, sleeping like Snow White. All the reviews I’ve read are positive and mesmerized by the writing. I know I was too. The writing is real and meta-real which pushes me to believe that After Dark has something to say, but I’m never sure what.

The story starts with Mari accidentally meeting with Takahashi, a jazz lover and musician late at night, who just happens to know her model beautiful sister. Mari has a mild adventure during the seven hours covered by the novel, and gets a glance at the seamy side of life. It’s not a major story with a gripping plot, but a quiet tale allowing the writer to show off his writing chops.

To be honest, this story left me wanting more. Like I said at the start, I live in the American pop culture and study English lit, so I don’t get far from my own language. I read books like Memoirs of a Geisha to travel to places and times I’ll never get to see on my own. That’s sad, but I try to make do. This book makes me want to know a whole lot more about Tokyo today. I wished my cable company got the Japanese equivalent TV show like our CBS Sunday Morning or The Today Show.

What is the best way to transmit a snapshot of culture from one part of the world to another, while changing languages at the border? Do movies do a better job? Did Priceless give me a good view of life in Paris? How accurate was The Band’s Visit of Israel? Or how does Jane’s Austen teach us about England in Pride and Prejudice?

Am I expecting too much by trying to travel via novels and movies?

Jim

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I became a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson when he came to Memphis to give a talk last April, where his comedic side had a chance to run wild. I’ve been noticing him showing up all over the TV spectrum for years, mainly on NOVA scienceNOW and The Universe on the History Channel. I bet he gets tired of the comparison, but Tyson has taken on Carl Sagan’s role as cheerleader for science.

Friday night at the Memphis Astronomy club we watched an online video of his Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Colloquium Spring 2008 speech called “Delusions of Space Enthusiasts.” If you have any interest whatsoever about space exploration this is one hour and twenty-five minutes excellently spent.

One reason why I love this speech by Tyson is he covers many topics I’ve explored too and come to the same conclusion. In one segment he attempts to calculate the number of space enthusiasts in the U.S., something that I’ve also attempted. I think I got 300,000 and he got 400,000, but he counted employees working at various aerospace plants that I didn’t count because they should have also been members of the various space enthusiast groups like The Planetary Society, The National Space Society and The Mars Society. Anyway, we both got a small number. Tyson goes a step further and lists many organizations with more than 400,000 members, like the NRA with 4.3 million and the Hanna Montana fan club, with a membership I’ve forgotten, but which dwarfs the total size of all the space groups combined.

First off, Tyson explains that the early days of the space race was political, and that the cold war sent us to the moon and not science or the quest for exploration. He shows how President Kennedy didn’t care for space exploration at all, but wanted us to beat the Russians. Tyson jokes, if you want America to go to Mars, convince the Chinese to say they are going first, even if they have no real intentions.

Tyson spends a great deal of the talk explaining the battle for funding between advocates of robotic and manned missions at NASA. He makes a great case that without manned missions there would be no scientific missions by showing graphs that reveal that the percentage of spending for science missions has always been a fraction of the total NASA budget that directly related to the manned mission budget. He says you can’t sell science to Congress. He says NASA needs more exciting manned missions of exploration to keep NASA moving forward.

However, Tyson doesn’t believe that grand missions to Mars with $400 billion dollar price tags will ever fly. His graphs reveal that NASA has always had about the same amount of effective budget dollars, even compared to the Apollo years, so any new missions beyond LEO will need to fit into those annual budgets. Evidently Tyson was on the brainstorming team that imagined the new Constellation Program and the Orion Crew Vehicle. This back to the future vision is very Apollo like.

One thing Tyson doesn’t cover is whether or not science missions will get the same level of funding once the Constellation Program ramps up. I would think you’d get a lot more astrophysics bang for the buck with robots, but it appears to be Tyson’s belief that manned missions excite the public to carry science along on its coattails.

I highly recommend you download this talk, and also suggest you get the latest version of RealPlayer. Friday night I saw the talk on an older version of the player and it had a lot of bad spots. My version plays the film very smoothly. It’s a shame they didn’t use built in Flash movie technology because video players like Real and Quicktime aren’t universally installed like Flash and discourage people from viewing the video.

For more Neil deGrasse Tyson science lectures with sparkling humor, just search on his name at YouTube.

Jim

Too Many Paper Towels

I’ve become a semi-bachelor this year when my wife had to take a job out of town. Because of this new status I have to do my own shopping, and I’ve always hated shopping. When we first got married over thirty years ago, I volunteered to do the laundry if Susie would do all the shopping. Learning to shop properly is hard to do, as I’ve discovered late in life. And with the current climate of shopping to save money while also being green, I feel like I need to buy subscription to Money Magazine, Consumer Reports and The Economist to effectively make a foray to the grocery story.

Susie always bought large bundles of paper towels that we had to squirrel away in all our closets that would take years to use. Well, the last batch ran out this past week, and since we have a couple of cats that love to groom and puke, paper towels are a necessity. Of course this could be a green issue. I could wipe up my feline family member’s hairball regurgitation with a rag that I could wash out, but that’s time consuming and messy, so I take the easy paper route of buying towels.

When I got to the store and the isle with the paper towels I made a troubling discovering – there are dozens of choices. I didn’t remember which brand Susie bought. I stood staring at the selection for several minutes not knowing what to do. I considered asking one of the many women passing by but worried they might have considered my genuine ignorance as feigned male stupidity for a pick up line. There were so many brands, so many styles, so many patterns, so many bundle choices, and I figured I’d needed a laptop and a spreadsheet to calculate which was the cheapest if I figured for length of roll, number of sheets, number of plies, and number of rolls in a bundle.

And even more confusing was trying to figure out quality. Some looked pretty cheap and were cheap, and others looked cheap and were not. And none of them claimed to be good for barf removal from rugs. I stood there totally befuddled, not knowing what to do when I saw the name “Brawny.” Hey, I remembered that from the TV, and it sounded manly, and I’m a man, so I figured that was a sign from God. I bought one roll, thinking I’d give ole Brawny the vomit patrol test. When my wife got home this weekend, all she said was, “I like the kind that have the half-sheet tears.” Well, they do clean up after Nick and Nora just fine.

The question now is did I get a good buy? I have no idea. I don’t know how much I paid for that Brawny roll. In my panic to select I didn’t look. Just now, I jumped on Google and started studying the problem. First off, I found that there are paper towels promoted as being green because they are made from recycled paper and less chemical processing. And there’s toilet tissue also made from recycled paper. This sounds like a no-brainer, so the next time I buy I’m going to look for recycled paper products, but I don’t remember seeing that at my store. GreenDealsDaily also recommended 100% biodegradable sponges, but that sounded nasty when I imagined how all those cat crunchies expanded with digestive juices would clog up its pores.

There’s lots of confusing information on Google, but after looking at several links, I found Paper Towels and Napkins vs. Cloth. Melissa Breyer rates various types of cleanup solutions by their friendliness to the Earth. I’m sold on recycled paper products, but she also makes a good case for cloth napkins and towels

If I go with cloth I’ll have to wash them, but I won’t have to shop for paper towels anymore – a relief that saves money. I wonder if I can live without them? Since I hate shopping, this decides the issue for me, and it gets me out of the math of figuring out which paper towels are the best buy. However, if I spot some of those green recycled paper towels I might buy them to keep for fast cleanups like when I hear the lovely call of a retching cat when I’m trying to run out the door to work.

Jim

The Economics of Inefficiency

During bad economic times people seek ways to get more for their money – in other words they try to become efficient spenders. The trouble with that thinking, it’s bad for the economy. What we want is a thriving economy where there’s a chicken in every pot and the future is rosy. Woefully, a thriving economy is highly inefficient.

Take saving money. All money advisors advise people get out of debt, save a portion of their salary and only buy what they’ve saved up for – good Puritan ideals. If everyone followed this advice we’d fall into a world-wide depression. The economic success of all depends on everyone spending as much money as they can. If we had a world where the only credit card spending was paid off at the end of the month, people wouldn’t buy nine-tenths of the crap that they do. That’s a lot of people out of jobs. And when those folks lose their jobs, even more bad things happen, and a recession becomes a growing snowball rolling down hill.

There’s always a silver economic lining, even to bad things. If everyone was honest we wouldn’t need jails, police, lawyers, judges, counselors, bail bondsmen, mystery writers, cop show producers, and so on, as I’m sure you get the idea. I hate the idea of crime. Crime is the true terrorism in America. But ending crime would be like one of those stories about a person finding a Genie in a bottle and getting a wish that turns out disturbingly screwed up. If someone did get to make that wish and tomorrow all illegal activity stopped we’d have a whole lot of honest people out of work, and a lot of criminals previously not working, would be looking for jobs too. Could the world’s economies handle the impact of so much ethical behavior? I’d much prefer a crime-free efficient economy and the main way to reduce crime is for the economy to produce a lot of good jobs. It’s a Catch-22.

The same reverse philosophy could be applied to the advice about eating right and pursuing healthy lifestyles. If everyone ate healthy, how many people would be out of work when all the fast food restaurants went belly up? Add in the junk food makers, their related industries, vending machines, packaging, salesmen, suppliers, warehouses, etc. And then think about all the health care workers that clean up after we lead lives of poor healthy choices. Sure, we’d produce a lot more sport fitness jobs, but would they make up for all the lost careers selling evil calories?

What if everyone bought the store brands instead of the big name brands? What if everyone jettison their designer clothes and shopped at Target and Penney’s? What if everyone wore sensible shoes and drove practical cars? What if people gave up vanity, putting the make-up makers and cosmetic surgeons out of business? What if everyone stole their MP3 songs and DVD movies?

Certain things in life are vital: air, water, food, shelter and jobs. And maybe jobs should be listed third because getting food and shelter without a job is very difficult. Right now America is in a panic over an economic downturn and we see everything about the future through the spectacles of fear. It doesn’t seem to matter that there’s more peace and prosperity now than at any time during all of history.

Everyone is wailing and gnashing their teeth that gasoline costs $4 a gallon. Forecasters have been predicting that for forty damn years – so why all the tantrums? Nor do people seem to notice that the high price of gasoline comes just at the perfect time when we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels because of war and global warming. It’s a good thing. It’s our second warning before economic hell comes to town. We knew back in the 1970s that living off of cheap oil was like borrowing from the Mafia. Is it so surprising they’re breaking our legs right now? And we really haven’t had a true oil crisis, because no one is going without yet. Wait until there are oil shortages. That’s when they chain cement blocks to us and throw us in the ocean. Are you ready for the day when there will be no gasoline for sale at the pumps? Gas lines are just one terrorist act or hurricane away.

Cheap fossil fuels made for wonderful sensible things like wooden toys made on one side of the planet, practical to sell to people on the other side of the globe. See where the economics of inefficiency come in? We use cheap fossil fuels to move our fat asses, which desperately need exercise, around in 6000 pound vehicles, instead of vehicles, if they were efficiently designed, weighing in at 500-1000 pounds, and use renewable energy instead of molecules sequestered by the Earth millions of years ago to get carbon out of the atmosphere and allow life to blossom.

We may be the smartest creatures in creation, but heck, we ain’t smart enough not to poison our only habitat. When you live in the basket with all your eggs, eating omelettes every day is dangerous.

To pull ourselves out of this economic mess we need to learn to consume more while using less, a Zen koan if there ever was one. Moving music to MP3 files is a perfect example. Distributing MP3 music requires an infinitely small fraction of the resources it took to make and sell CDs. The demise of the CD puts a lot businesses and people out of work, but if the music industry worked it right they could eventually create a lot more jobs. This economic theory fails if you steal the MP3s.

If everyone had solar panels on their roofs it would require the creation of whole new industries and millions of jobs. To feed and educate all the needy people in the world would create more millions of jobs. To build houses that withstand hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires and severe weather of the changing climate will create more millions of jobs. There is no end of jobs to be create because of need. There is plenty of economic activity, both efficient and inefficient if you have the vision to see it.

I know a lot of Americans are suffering because of the current economic crisis, but I have to agree with Phil Gramm that part of our economic recession is a “mental recession” and we’re doing too much whining. Hell, we’re not living in Afghanistan. What happened to that American spirit of when the going gets tough, the tough get going? I’m voting for Obama, but I didn’t like his quip about not needing another Dr. Phil. We need all the positive thinkers we can get. There’s lot about McCain that I like, and if he wins I won’t be too unhappy, but his spin-control pandered to voters rather than exploring the point I think Gramm was trying to make.

During election times all voters become beggars looking for handouts demanding that their politicians promise and promise and promise. Politicians get nowhere if they aren’t leaders. Of course sometimes they lead us off the cliff into places like Iraq, but didn’t George Bush take us there because he was playing off the country’s fear? We’re living in the current economic chaos because of greed and the refusal to think and pay attention. Do we really need brilliant hindsight to know that making house loans to people who can’t afford them is silly or owning SUVs are a bad idea when oil was predicted to run out forty years ago?

Our crazy economy reminds me of the classic science fiction story, “The Midas Plague” by Frederik Pohl, where consumerism drives the economy so much that the poor are forced to change clothes several times a day to keep up with production – because to make less would hurt the economy. In this bizarro world, the rich get the freedom to live without being consumers, but the poor must consume like hamsters on a wheel to keep the economy going.

Who’s fault is it if we take the most powerful and prosperous country in the world and run into the economic ground because we all like to make bad choices? For decades we have built an economy on inefficiency. What happens to China when we stop buying all that crap we don’t need? What happens to the U.S. if China suffers an economic chill? It’s like “The Midas Plague,” we could stimulate the economy by forcing the poor to go into debt and buy a new HD TV every month.

Right now everyone is panicking and cutting back on their spending, but if you wanted to help the economy, you should be doing just the opposite. Now, here’s the crucial part – your economic decision has impact. You can make an efficient choice, or a wasteful choice. If you buy a new HVAC that uses 1/3 the energy as your old one, then you have stimulated the economy and reduced the demand on fossil fuels, plus saved yourself some bucks. If you fly to Paris for a vacation, you have helped the airlines, but hurt the rest of us by increasing the demand for oil. You can’t win for losing sometimes. But if you had the choice between flying on a plane fueled by green technology or old technology, your choice could build a new industry.

We need to cowboy up and channel our ancestor’s pioneering spirit. We need to take responsibility for our actions. Like the old Pogo cartoon said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Whether gasoline is $2 or $4 or $7 a gallon, the choice is made by us, we set the price. If you want gasoline to go to $7 a gallon, keep burning oil like there’s no end of it, live like the oil companies will always find new resources, use it like we’ve been doing for the last thirty years. Keep panicking over the economy and oil prices will rise. Keep advocating going to war with Iran and oil prices will rise.

We need to get our heads together, overcome fear like FDR taught us, become frugal like our Puritan forefathers, develop green technologies, and oil prices will come down. If gasoline went to $10 a gallon, but we had cars that got ten times the mileage, it would be like getting $1 a gallon gas. When gasoline was $2 a gallon we could have been driving cars that made it equal to 50 cents a gallon, but we didn’t. We collective decided to drive cars that would force gasoline to become $4 a gallon. Our choice – so why bitch and moan now?

The other lesson of this current economic crisis is the world changes. We built our current economy psychology, retirement system, investment system, and all our financial expectations around the idea that the world won’t change and growth would be predictable. How stupid is that? Our current state of economic fear is because we’re having to deal with change. Change is as constant as time. People hate change, but we’re the dominant species on this planet because we’re adaptable. Humans can handle habitat change that puts all other species into extinction, but that’s at the species level. Cultures go in and out of existence like TV series. Because the U.S. is a very diverse culture, we can take quite a beating and still keep on ticking. Go study your Douglas Adams and Adam Smith, and don’t panic.

Jim