I no sooner mentioned the possibility of decentralized power in my previous post then I open last month's Wired Magazine to find that very idea in their Fix The Grid series of articles.
I've been thinking about it for some time, now, and I think it's not only a good idea, it's our only idea. Repairing the infrastructure is something we won't do until it's literally on fire. We're not a very proactive species (just look at petroleum), but small-scale problems, like large price increases in electricity, could be enough to motivate us to small changes in our way of life.
I think that a nationwide distribution of small-scale solar, wind, and tidal generation could be done for a cost measured in billions, as opposed to the trillions probably required for a revamp of the grid and all its plants. It could also be deployed faster. A grid revamp would, again, be measured in tens of years, whereas the small-scale project could be measured in mere years.
Obviously, wind, solar, and tidal won't solve all our power woes. We will still need to invest heavily into new plants, I vote nuclear, but this plan would likely take enough strain off of the primary plants and grid to make repairs to them something we could do over decades with no worries.
As such, distributed production is our only viable option.
(UPDATE: 15 Minutes Later) NPR has a fantastic interactive map showing how and from where our power comes.
The capacity of power plants is signified by the size of the dot on screen that represents the plant. Well, we hear wind and solar advocates frequently discussing new plants and installations capable of generating MEGAWATTS (oooooooh). This map reminds me how many of our plants are measured in gigawatts, with a "g". Almost all of them are either nuclear or coal, with the Grand Coulee Dam being one notable exception, which I think is our largest plant... just checked Wiki, it is.
It's obvious that centralized solar and wind is hopeless as a primary form of power. We have two choices on this map, coal and nuclear. So which is worse, a small chance of a core meltdown, or a guarantee of shit being pumped into the air?
There's a big debate going on about how to best handle the power problems facing the country. Some people say coal, others say nuclear (including me), while others still say to focus on solar and wind.
Still, the gorilla in the room is the power grid. It's old. It's falling apart. It' literally can't handle what we need it to handle. So why not simply take the grid out of the equation?
If we change from a centralized power generation model to one where lots of small plants generate the power, we no longer need a super-powerful grid. The weak grid and continuous-generation plants can simply back up the intermittent power from solar and wind. Every town has a wind turbine in it, and larger cities can mandate solar panels on the roofs, and smaller turbines on tall buildings. It's ersatz to a true solution, but we could deploy it immediately and relatively cheaply.
A few posts ago, I talked about how the internet is opening amazing new possibilities in media distribution. Old walls are disintegrating and a new era of almost-democracy in entertainment is being, painfully, born.
That birth is painful because the old companies who made all their money controlling the previous business model don't want things to change. And why should they? They were emperors in their time. No movies or music was made without their say-so, and the valuable transmission channels for that media made them filthy rich.
I was perusing YouTube for my Angry Suburban Music, specifically Nu Metal (helping white people feel badass since 1994), and I came across the video for Korn's Y'all Want a Single, and it just about says what artists, even hit artists like Korn, were feeling. I'd embed, but it's disabled. I guess Korn doesn't fully understand, either.
I can't blame them, even Sir Paul McCartney is pretty clueless.
UPDATE like, three minutes later: The blocked embed wasn't Korn, it was Sony/BMG. Regardless, I found an upload that isn't blocked.
Enjoy! And remember my fellow privileged white people, stay angry!
Here be an article about Wolverine. I mean the new movie Wolverine. It's one of soon-to-be-many X-Men backstory movies coming out and a mini-crisis has erupted over its leakage to the intertubes.
This is my first post on the subject, but it's been long-discussed with anyone willing to listen to me. The current media environment of piracy is not bad. It's new and filled with possibility. But, of course, Fox and all major movie studios have reacted to the Wolverine leak by increasing security and getting more paranoid.
Considering increased security, rampant lawsuits, oppressive laws, widespread and extensive campaign contributions, and about a dozen different forms of control technology has done nothing to stop or even slow the spread of file-sharing, one must really wonder when old media is going to get a clue.
They continue to rage against the darkness even though they are surrounded by unlit candles. Their old business models are dying, and since they insist on tilting against this elephantine windmill, they must ACTUALLY think that they can stop things from changing.
For example, let's say they are 100% successful. We never have a leak like Wolverine, again. Also, let's assume that file-sharing does in fact have a significant detrimental effect on movie revenue. All they will do is stop the effect on opening day. Because after opening day, a camcorder copy will appear online. A week later, a DVD rip from a screener. By the second weekend, hundreds of copies from different sources will be lighting up the interpipes.
Moreover, we are at a point in the development of the movie business where the bulk of a movie's profits are made not in the theater, but from EVERYTHING ELSE. For example, Spiderman 3 took in $336 million, but cost so much Sony wouldn't even say. Estimates ranged from $250 to $350 million. www.the-numbers.com puts the price at $258m, but Radar Magazine and Rotten Tomatoes put total cost at over $500m. Worldwide gross for Spidey 3 WAS $890m. But from that, you have to deduct the cost of marketing for each territory.
Now I can understand the studios are scared, since that opening weekend is critical to them. As The Economics of the Movie Theater over at the Movie Blog discussed, for big releases, the studio can take upwards of 100% of ticket sales for that first week. But over half of Spidey 3's take was after the first weekend, with around 30% happening between weeks 3 and 16, where the studio's take of ticket sales decreases to a point below 50/50. Which all means that, even though the studio makes buckets on opening week, we can only guess that around 70% of the total gross eventually goes to the studio, meaning that for costs possibly in excess of $500m, they earned $623m globally.
Basically, Spidey 3 broke even in the box office. Perhaps turning a profit in the single percentages. But Spidey earned buckets with merchandise, and $120m in DVD sales in its first four months on sale. Importantly, the "collectors set" of Spidey 3, and the Spiderman Trilogy collectors set both hit the top 10. If "the movie" was all that mattered, people wouldn't have bothered buying these.
What I'm saying is that studios have been kinda/sorta using theater showings as an advertisement for later sales for years, even this NY Times article from 1987, over 20 years ago, talks about how studios never make profit from the theatrical release.
The world is changing, and honestly, for a media company the future couldn't be brighter. If they stopped looking at this situation as an enemy, they'd see that it's fantastic marketing that's a whole lot less expensive than releasing a movie theatrically. Especially with a movie like Wolverine, they could release it theatrically, where it will be best experienced; release it free with toys, games, and other merchandise; engage the consumer with live discussions about the movie's production and with new, downloadable content; use the free movie to advertise package deals that people can buy that include dinner, the movie, and light, easily-produced Wolverine-related media like shorts, cartoons, or character backstories.
This new world breaks the chains of the old business model, and the fact that the studios aren't drooling over the possibility does nothing more than evince their short-sighted incompetence. When they die and allow better, smarter companies to move in, the world will be better off.
One concept I consider in justification is the number of potential realities associated with a statement. For example, let's say I think my dog has just talked to me. What is the possibility that explains my experience as true? The only option is that my dog actually just talked to me. But the number of alternate theories is manifold: schizophrenia, drugs, trickery and special effects, a ventriloquist in the next room, mis-hearing, etc.
The problem with this is that almost ANY proposition has a greater number of alternate theories than what appears true. Even something simple, like “this apple is red.” The only theory that explains it as true is that the apple is actually red. But it could be white in red light, or green in purple light, or I forgot I'm wearing red-colored sunglasses. The numbers on the alternate side are smaller, because the statement is so simple, but they still outnumber the truth theory. I think Occam's Razor was invented solely to deal with this interesting dilemma.
In light of this concept, I find the manifold religious theories to be immensely problematic, especially for those who are true believers. Because many of them believe that the right religious belief, usually theirs, is critical to the correct life and a successful afterlife. But the stunning number of religions must make this scary. If you are wrong, you're fucking screwed. I wonder how people are able to rationalize this problem.
I've talked before about my belief that art is much more important than many "practical" or "scientific" people are likely to say. While the truth of the world, whatever that may be, certainly won't be found in art, people perceive the world in artistic, interpretive ways. Art is reality vis a vis the human. As such, I think art as far as humanity is concerned is at least of equal importance to more abstract, harder sciences like physics and chemistry.
As such, what we call art is pretty important. How do we define art and what makes legitimate art or ersatz art. Indeed, is it even possible to have ersatz art?
I've always felt that art as art is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is eliciting images with words, while art is eliciting words with images. While they could both be considered "art," I don't say a beautiful poem is artistic, I say it's beautifully poetic. Both poetry and art are forms of expression in a totally human way. Truly, art can only be human, since whatever we find communcative does so on an emotional level, and our emotions are an evolutionary construct unique to us. We have no idea what an alien species would consider art because we don't understand their condition.
The art OF something is any non-quantitative analysis of an endeavor. The art of talking/flying/fencing/war. Anything that is quantitative necessarily becomes science or at least science-like.
I don't think there really is such a thing as bad or good art, only what underlies the art can be good or bad. Two books are fundamentally different, it's just that one book can be a hollow, inane story while another can be a complex masterpiece. The underlying message is what matters and how complex and well-communicated it is.
I guess to what degree skill allows the expression of those underlying ideas could be considered to be good or bad art. But that doesn't really make it better "art," it just makes it a better painting, and a good painting can have a great deal of, or next to no, artistic merit.
But the skill with which the former is exercised must always be taken into account, so in that sense, ersatz art can exist. But it's not specifically ersatz in its creation, since its creation might have had no artistic motivation at all. The art may exist in interpretation alone.
For example, I read two abstract poems. Neither is grammatically or syntactically coherent. It's chaos in words. But one is poetry, the other is nonsense. The first was written by a master of the language, who has proven in the past to write beauttifully coherent poetry. The second was garbled nonsense written by someone who doesn't even speak the language. Art and poetry are both expression, and if the artist or poet doesn't have the requisite tools for expression, than it can't be art.
But say I don't know the second poem was written by someone who doesn't know the language. I may read it and find it to be a powerfully moving poem. Even though the end result is the same, I don't think it's art. Art is expression, not interpretation. I can have a moving experience looking at a grand vista, but that's not art. It's not human. If we put the onus on the interpreter, anything can become art and render the label useless.
But back to assertion that art is the usage of imagery to elicit words. I say words as opposed to emotions because our world, truly our very selves, are constructed of words. While happiness and fear are both abstract emotions, we operate on our interpretations of them and application of words as labels to fully define each emotion. For example, fear and elation, physiologically, are very similar. Similar levels of neurotransmitters and hormones, but our interpretations of each emotion are radically different.
It is true there are underlying "truths" behind those words, but we don't operate on those. We operate linguically, with ourselves and with others. I don't deny that a human could operate roughly as a human without language, but the few examples we have of children being raised without langugage to structure their minds and worlds show them to be the proverbial wild children. Language allows us to construct a complex network if beliefs, apply labels, and then integrate new things into that system based on rules assocaited with the labels.
While we have vague emotions that may be difficult to apply words to, I think art's ability to communicate, and how good the art is, must be measured by how well words can be applied to it.
In the Wikipedia entry on art, it says that "a cup, which ostensibly can be used as a container, may be considered art if intended solely as an ornament." I actually think that this restricts art in such an un-needed way. Art is nothing more than communication, and in that sense, any human creation has an artistic element to it because no matter how rigid or objective the creator may try to be, they are still trying to communicate something with the creation.
That cup is artistic because all cups communicate something. For example, the cup on the left. It's highly ornamental. It is artistic. But why is it artistic? What words does it elicit? The closer we can get to a generally accepted set of words, the more effective the art has been at expressing what it's trying to express. I see "luxurious," "leisure," "wealthy," "decadent," "royal," and a multitude of other words. That's how I frame my interpretation of the cup. I use words. And whether I like the cup or not is super-subjective. If I want to feel rich, I may like it. If I hate rich people and listen to lots of Rage Against the Machine, I'd hate the cup, but it can't be denied what the cup communicates. It is, in that sense, perfect art. But it also highlights how incredibly subjective even that is. For example, why does the cup communicate those things? It does so because of a shared history. We all understand decadent European and classical history, which this cup elicits. For someone not aware of that, the cup may still communicate its being expensive, and detailed, and wealthy, but perhaps not the undertones of decadence and royalty, or of classical culture. As our culture becomes more global, the shared artistic language will probably allow greater universality of these artistic concepts.
Now let's look at the cup to the right. No grand details, or metal accents. It literally is just a cup. But think about the designer and what words the cup elicitis. Simplicity. Humbleness. Directness. An almost clinical level of cleanliness. This is the cup of a man who wears a perfectly pressed suit to work every day. That is the cup the designer wanted to make, or else they would have designed it differently. Even something seemingly simple communicates ideas when the human condition is applied to it. As such, there is art in every cup. If a cup is used as an ornament, like in the Wikipedia entry, then whatever artistic quality is in it insofar as it communicates words is added to its quality of being a cup. So its nature as a cup is now used to communicate something artistic in the endeavor. For example, I make a decadent cup like the first example and it communicates ideas like wealth and royalty. I then take those cups and glue them to a female mannequin, now, not only do the cups express wealth, they express being a cup. Now my art can be seen as expressing a woman's need to appear rich and able to entertain. This new usage of its nature as a cup to express art doesn't negate that it has artistic qualities separate from being a cup.
Moreover, my earlier example of a non-speaker using a language to write abstract poetry doesn't apply here. A designed cup must be understood be its designer. It's impossible to have an abstract cup. Because if the artist creates something abstract, like Barbara Hepworth, and I find I am able to use it as a vessel for storing fluid, it doesn't matter because the artist never called it a cup. Just because I can "interpret" it as a cup, as in use it to store fluid, that doesn't mean it's a cup. It can still elicit words. For example, a curvacious abstract piece can appear feminine and human, and elicit words like "sexy," or "relaxed." It's still art. It's just not a cup. And those interpretations requires a more basic understanding of the human condition. It requires an understanding of human form, as opposed to the trappings of more advanced human life, like dishes.
Still, the important factor in all of these is what words the art communicates. If the art can't be broken down into words, its effectiveness as art is limited. That's one of the problems with abstract art, and why we have comical cases of five-year-olds selling paintings for thousands. I'm not saying that there is no artistic merit to the works, it's just that when we obfuscate expression under chaos, it must be tightly controlled to be communicative. Moreover, only very broad concepts can be communicated. You can't hide details in chaos; they get lost.
Art is an expression of the human condition. The human condition is defined by words and labels; It's how we organize our world. Thus, art must be defined by words and labels. And so my defition of art as using visuals to elicit words.
April fools is an interesting day. I had been thinking about it because of the now infamous Conficker virus and how so many people were convinced it was all a hoax because of April Fools. In fact, I JUST talked to someone who thought it was a joke that no one has owned up to, yet... It's April 13th! She thought this because Conficker was kind of a no-show. Nothing really happened. Although, things are happening, just nothing apocalyptic.
I just find this all interesting because April Fools day is the only day when the entire population actually exercises some sense of incredulity or skepticism. On any other day, whatever people read in the paper, it's true. On April Fools, NOTHING is true. In that sense, on that day, people are the most philosophical they're going to be in the entire year.
I'm watching a documentary on Independent Lens, The Order of Myths, on PBS. It's about the Mobile, Alabama Mardi Gras celebration which is segregated between blacks and whites. Aside from that fact that this does nothing to assuage my perception that southerners are ugly, and very, very stupid, something else hit me.
During one of the interviews with the numerous Nobel Prize winning white people, the interviewee repeatedly talks about "the blacks" and "the whites" and how they all get along. It just struck me how much it sounded like a dumb, southern version of The Sneetches.
Furthermore, on the website, it says that "Separate but unequal royal courts preside—one queen, from a family of outlaw slave traders, the other, a descendent [sic] of runaway slaves. Beneath the surface of pageantry lies a complex story about race relations and the ever-present racial divide that persists in America today."
Ok, ever-present racial divide? We just elected a black guy president. Granted, I don't really consider him "black." I just think his skin is dark. He's just as much black as he is white. Calling him black is superficial. Moreover, this isn't America. This is Mobile-fucking-Alabama. It's as much representative of America as SoHo is representative of Appalachia.
There's an excellent article/biography of Dyson Freeman, a scientist of whom I knew very little up till now. A super-genius and all that good stuff, and, importantly, a global warming skeptic.
I won't go into detail about what he has to say, I'll only go so far as to say that his points are very well made. I still disagree with him, but I actually have an out because the bulk of my views don't come into conflict with his, namely:
I don't care about the Chinese. They can do whatever they want. I want change in my country and my country alone. Other countries are free to do anything at all.
Whether we're causing global warming or not is irrelevant. We are a rich nation and can afford environmental advances that are good for reasons beyond their being green. As I've said before, the goal is not to be green, but to be efficient.
Our course of action is dictated apart from the reality of global warming. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant and we must invest heavily into high-efficiency, green technology.
I also fully disagree with a few of his points.
I disagree that there is no such thing as an ideal ecological system. The concept of ideal requires that certain parameters are set. I think that we can, in fact, set those parameters. Yes, in the grand scheme of things, whatever we do doesn't matter since the planet will just change and evolve. Yes, evolution is happening as we speak. Yes, life goes on. Too bad we live and exist on small scales and I would very much like to keep the world as is, if at all possible. I think it's very nice, now.
Solar energy will be a viable form of energy in much shorter order than 50 years, and shifting focus away from that to coal is, I think, a terrible error.
Also, he considers himself a skeptic and that's cool. I love skeptics. But some of the best skeptics on Earth all support that theory that human action is having a significant impact on global warming. These are not easily-convinced people. James Randi, Michael Shermer, and the whole of the crew who produce Skeptic Magazine, all of them support the theory. I find this sort of weight hard to argue.
A surprisingly nasty problem in philosophy is trying to determine what existence is. Or, perhaps, what I should ask is what does it mean if something exists?
Lots of answers have been tried, such as being extended in space. This means that anything that somehow takes up space exists. Lots of philosophers argue that we can never know what actually exists, because all that exists to us is what's in our own mind.
That's a pretty good argument, I think. Even modern psychology has, under one of its assumptions, a recognition that the world we see is not how the world is. The object we "see" is disconnected from "us" by the object, the light that travels to our eye, our eye receiving that light, the signal of the eye coming to our brain, and our mind eventually paying attention to that signal.
There are FOUR middlemen between the object and us. As far as psychology is concerned, the world appears to us not as the world is, but in such a way as to aid us in making decisions. That's called evolving to correctly interact with an environment. Red is red because it was beneficial to see red as something bright and outstanding. Be it for fruit or blood.
So does anything "exist" if all we can know are ideas in our own heads? While I think this reinforces my support of coherentism, I also think that things actually exist, whatever that means. I think existence might be a primary concept. In the same way that some words are basic words that cannot be defined beyond being a basic concept. Saying that something exists means it exists. It's something of a tautology, I know, but I think it's as far as we can go. Anything beyond that is impossible to define and, importantly, useless. I'll explain.
(UPDATE: I've changed my view on this. I entertained the possibility of existence being a primary concept and have rejected it entirely. All examples I can conjure require sense perception at some point for it to be shown, a hypothetical entity without any sense wouldn't have a concept for existence since the only thing would be what's called the metaphysical agent, i.e. the person or "I." As far as I is concerned, I doesn't exist, I simply is an assumption in the same why that the eye doesn't exist as far as the eye is concerned, it only assumes its existence to explain why it's seeing. Existence is not primary, it must be linguistic.)
If we were to dig further into the issue, I'd have to say that existence is predicated on sense. If we sense something, it exists. I know dogs exist because I've seen them. I know small things exist, because through experiments, things like atoms have been confirmed. As such, something can only be said to exist if it has been detected.
An issue I see is with a metaphysical proposition. "There exists a planet with two-headed people on it" is either true or false. This is a metaphysical issue because it is attempting to reach beyond our sense to a greater form of truth.
It is definitely true that a planet with two headed people either exists or doesn't exist. But until we detect that planet, can we actually say that the planet exists? Our language is limited by our being human.
If we detect the planet, we can then say that it exists and that it existed in the past, but it is a post-hoc philosophical statement. The planet did not exist before we detected it since the very word 'exist' relies on our human condition and what words mean to us.
Existence as a potentiality would fit this problem. Anything that has the potential to be detected exists, as such, the two-headed people planet exists because we could detect it if we were there, but we can't reach past our own sense. The metaphysical issue of the planet's existence is resolved, but it is a solution that is beyond us. We cannot say that the planet exists until we've seen it, even though it definitely exists, whatever that means.
I think in general usage, people will use the word 'exist' in a nebulous way. A good definition for 'exist' in popular use would be that something is "out there." How is something "out there?" Not sure, really. Since trying to explain it further runs into metaphysical issues that are beyond human sense and logic, we can only say that something exists if it exists. How do we know something exists? By sensing it.
So yes, there exists things that we have not sensed, but it still seems to make sense that they exist. It makes little sense to try and say anything beyond that because we are already at the limits of human language, logic, and sense.
I'm a stickler for well-formed logic and meaning, so I'm inclined to say that existence is entirely dependent on sense. Dogs exist because I've seen them. Atoms exist because I've seen the results of particle accelerators. The two-headed people planet does not exist, even if it is somehow "out there" doesn't matter. My word "exist" relies on the human experience and as such it only makes sense if its definition comes back to it.
I frequently rant and rave about the government and corruption therein, but even this pushes me to the limit.
I am an advocate for the elimination of speed limits on the highways. I am an advocate for the complete rewriting of most traffic laws with real safety in mind. Why do I say real safety? Because many traffic laws have nothing to do with safety. They're either formulated with honest concern for the safety of the citizenry and just wrong, the result of political grandstanding, or for revenue generation.
Six US cities, that I know of at this time, have been caught actually shortening yellow light times in an effort to generate more ticket revenue from the red light cameras that automatically generate citations. I hope you realize what that means. It means that your friendly neighborhood government is willing to kill people for money.
Never trust the government. You don't have to go all X-Files on us, but distrust is healthy. You can even safely assume that most people in government are honestly trying to do good. Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Those intended to look out for your best interests are frequently idiots or tragically uninformed or just straight up corrupt.
Senator Charles Schumer of New York has made his support of Gay marriage official. I'm glad there are rays of light of a few major politcal figures willing to make the move and support what IS AN AMERICAN RIGHT.
American? Yes. Pursuit of happiness, and all that rot, remember?
I certainly hope these days will be looked back upon with self-satisfied amusement. Laughed at by people who will feel secure in their total moral superiority over the past just as we do when reading about a time when women and blacks couldn't vote, or Irish immigrants were beaten to death in the street.
I think that absolute power, or positions of almost any degree of power, attract those who are easily corruptible. That's why politicians are so frequently corrupt. They want power. It's the only reason they run. And let's face it, this paradox of rule has been well known for, thousands of years. Plato himself discussed in The Republic, that a perfect society must literally breed leaders. It is recognized that the only good leaders are those who don't want to be leaders, but feel a solemn obligation to do so.
It's that paradox that our founding fathers also recognized, and the reasons why they formulated so many parts of our government as they did. It is also the reason I distrust all politicians, managers, cops, meter maids, and anyone who's name is a sequel to their father.
While in this day and age, the possibility of the government every becoming tyrannical is next to zero, the possibility is still there. That fundamental distrust of the government is an irrevocable part of a healthy society. And while this should not evolve into paranoia, thus preventing the government from working well and providing things the government can and probably should provide, such as socialized health care, it should nonetheless be present.
George Bush and his "reign" did more to convince me of that position than anything else that has happened in the last fifty years. Even Nixon was just stupidity. But Bush... Bush came closer to tyranny than I honestly thought possible in our country. Obviously, he was still far, far away from actual tyranny, but he still got closer than I thought anyone could, and that scared the hell out of me.
Just to let you know, I'm a raging geek. Not a nerd. That's a different species that implies I was good in school. No. I'm the other kind of social outcast that was terrible in school but could program in C++ in eighth grade.
As such, I bought an Xbox 360. I pre-ordered the sucker some six months before it came out. That means that I got one of the very first systems off the line. I have never had any problems save for a game freezing now and then. That's it. The system has been the very definition of bulletproof for the past three years.
I've had my fair share of problems, usually ideologically, with my sist... whoa, Freudian typo, SYSTem. Nothing hardware. SOooo, yeah. Good show, Microsoft.
UPDATE 7/30/2009: I ran out of luck. My Xbox RRODed a couple of months ago. I sent it in and Microsoft duly replaced it. I'm very happy with my service. It has been running fine ever since.
Well, that was fast.
