The problem with the act of writing, these days, for me, is of listening to my thoughts and determining which, if any, is clearly more emphatic and distinct than the rest. And isn’t about what I’m doing at work, since I can’t talk about that. (Unlike some Cocoa software developers, but like many other software developers, we keep our cards close to our chest. We emulate Apple in that regard.)

Outside of programming, the pre-eminent question in my mind is rather vague and abstract. How do we organize people to get them to do what’s best for everyone in the long run, instead of everyone doing what they think is best for them in the short term? How do we convince people that what they think is in their best interests probably isn’t? And who are “we”?

Read the rest of this entry »

Now that I’m employed in the job I’ve been working towards for over ten years, it’s consuming most of my intellectual and creative effort. We’re quite busy at Marketcircle, working hard on both improved and new products. Our mission is to write software that makes people more productive, focussing on the small business workplace. It’s an honourable effort. But I’m not sure how to measure our success. I’m not sure how to measure my own success.

Read the rest of this entry »

The only constantly updating site I read regularly is Google News, because it’s right there on my home page. Sometimes I go by Slashdot or MacMinute. I used to read New Scientist news; the last time I went by there, it was no longer friendly to non-subscribers. Every once in a while I go and try to read the Internet-at-large. By which I mean, read some news or commentary on a personal blog. Blogs are a vast conversation. I am not, by nature, a conversationalist, so most blogs annoy me and feel like a waste of time. I just don’t find other people’s opinions interesting. Quite the opposite. They are tedious, often egregiously uninformed, and make me surly. Blogs make me feel like punching someone.

I don’t go near facebook anymore, let alone those other social networking sites. They just aggravate my contempt for the self-absorption of society. There are so many problems in need of solutions, so many questions in need of answers, so much of value being left in neglect, and yet what concerns most people is the most superficial crap. I suppose that’s my contribution to the cesspool of worthless opinion.

These days I spend my time working (programming), playing (computer games), or doing real life things (keeping house, mostly). When I use the Internet, it’s for looking up documentation, contributing to my open source project, exploring virtual Middle Earth, or downloading stuff (only legally distributed things, of course!).

What does amaze me about people is that the more insignificant and trivial the fact they are concerned with, the more passionate they get about it. Also, the less creative people are, the more fixated they are on things other people are doing which might negatively impact them as a result of their inability to adapt to the realities of whatever situation they are in. If you have time to complain, it means you suck. Go do something useful.

An article in the Vancouver Sun, by Craig McInnes, asks the question that seems obvious, but isn’t addressed nearly enough: “What happens if we all get climate change religion?” Specifically: what happens to the economy if we give up our lifestyle of conspicuous consumption? Because it’s consumption which drives growth, and allows everyone in the supply chain, plus the government, to take a slice.

I am not an economist, but last I checked, the central tenet of free-market capitalism is that market agents (buyers, in this case) are free to buy what they want, or, as the case may be, to not buy. Or is this just another of the real truths that arise when people contemplate actually allowing free-markets to happen? That there is in fact a moral imperative to buy, whether you want to or not? How can you say we’re “free” agents when we are compelled to behave a certain way? Why is it that free agency is only good when it’s good in the particular example being cited by whomever is espousing it? Why is it that the market it only recognized when it’s the one we’re used to, the one that supports the status quo? Who truly believes in real free markets? Last I checked, nobody.

What happens, Craig McInnes, is that the people who used to earn a living from making and selling the hallmarks of success—expensive vacations, luxury automobiles, iPods—will have to learn to earn a living making or selling something else: something that isn’t disposable, or ephemeral, or gratuitously symbolic of social status.

When people come to their senses and realize that our culture—the one of equating ownership with status—is bankrupt, we will make do with something else, and that, too, will still require the hard work of everyone.

The problem is not that people will be out of work. The problem, really, is that most people are lazy, stupid and uncreative, and as a result, they resist either learning new skills or in general in adapting to changing circumstance. Most people are glad to have a small number of people creating businesses and markets and industries: laying the groundwork and writing the rules, within which they can prosper by mostly just doing what they are told.

The real question is not what will people do when their company closes down because it’s been made obsolete. The real question is whether there will be any people with the stones to see the opportunities inherent in such a cultural sea change, and whether they those few entrepreneurs will be able to find busy work the vast armies of drones who fill up most of the space in our cities and towns.

If we freed up fifty or seventy five percent of the work force, what would you want them to do with their time, assuming you wouldn’t vote to just let them starve to death?

Maybe we could return to the days of buildings things of quality, beauty and craftsmanship. The problem there is that those kinds of things are too expensive to be commissioned by any except a small group of individuals and businesses (and it’s really not the place of businesses, as we know them, to spend profits by donating them back to their society, more’s the pity). Instead, it would take consortiums of individuals, in the form of non-profit organizations, to do this. I mean, all this money that’s not being spent on gadgets and frippery has to go somewhere. Why not beautify our cities? That would employ many people. Or provide free education?

The possibilities are limited only by the rust which has frozen your imagination, Mr. McInnes.

World Energy and Population, that is. By Paul Chefurka.

What intrigues me about energy use per capita, as with most economic analyses, is the apparently necessary assumption that we buy things with “money”, and that “money” is somehow a real good with intrinsic value. But, of course, it is not. Any currency can be devalued at any time, if the economic entity (country) which underwrites its value becomes drastically less capable of honouring the original evaluation of its currency. So how does a country underwrite its currency? Through its ability to convert raw materials into useful stuff that keeps people alive, secure and happy.

Discussions of energy treat various energy “sources” as though they are goods. To a certain extent they are, however their value is dependent on industrial capacity to extract energy from these sources and convert it to some form of work, typically in the form of machines. Before the industrial revolution, the only ways to procure energy from an energy source were a) to eat it (or feed it to a work animal), and, b) to burn it. To this day, most non-renewable energy sources provide their energy by combustion. Hydro-electric dams and other sources are exceptions. Even eating is akin burning, in that it is ultimately a chemical reaction.

The kind of complex work human beings do in advanced industrialized countries is to find new and novel ways to combine raw materials, including structural and fuel materials, into useful tools and goods like buildings, clothing, cars, books, computers and such. We work with our hands and our minds to do this work.

Money, then, does not represent the goods which we produce, but the capacity to produce them. Money, therefore, is just a means to represent energy, including the energy needed to train people in the knowledge of how to run complex industrial and information economies. That is, the energy is the money, or at least part of it: energy is currency, in its natural form. So if you don’t have energy, you can’t buy it—in fact, to talk of buying energy is in some sense ridiculous. As the saying goes, it takes energy to make energy.

Another interesting thing about energy, if you know any physics, is that it can’t be created nor destroyed, but only moved around. Generally, it is the dispersal of high concentrations of captured energy, such as the energy inherent in chemical bonds formed over aeons getting dispersed, ultimately, into heat and noise in engines, which is important, not the energy itself. That dispersal process, which is going on all the time, anyway, we merely harness in order to direct a portion of it in some useful direction, like turning wheels or stimulating electrons, instead of just rotting or breaking down in some other manner, like getting trapped in bogs or at the bottom of the sea. And the real trick is that the dispersal has to happen quickly, in the scale of seconds, instead of the usual days, months, years or what-have-you for most natural chemical processes.

What we’re really looking for, then is an idea for a new process that will allow us to do what happens naturally—the conversion of raw materials into interesting things like life forms and refrigerators through the capture and absorption of solar energy—and make it happen more quickly, by focussing it, either mechanically or chemically or biologically. But more importantly, we need to be able to capture more solar energy per unit time. The energy is there. It’s just not in a form that we can exploit easily. We know how, but we just aren’t making the investment, because it would mean sacrificing things like blockbuster movies, advertorials, pet toys, pornography, SUVs, iPods, and all the other useless junk we mistaken consider so important because it gives us a synthetic sense of our own importance. And we’re going to learn this the hard way in the next few decades; self-deception is only self-destructive in the long term.

Moved into a new place, with Kim, beginning of the month. Can’t remember if I said anything about that. (I don’t journalize. Though sometimes I summarize. And frequently tangentialize. And make up words.) The bored one grows up. Or something like that. Nice place. Good location. Spacious. Quiet. Room for dinner parties. Maybe have the boss over some time. Oh, boy, I’m middle class. Wasn’t I supposed to be different? Make a difference? Change the world? Does anybody change the world? Does the world change? Does it ever stop changing? Do I ever stop asking rhetorical questions?

When you read this, you have to read slowly. Leave long pauses between sentences. Or you won’t hear what I’m saying. It’s true: I speak the words in my head as I write them. I’m an orator, a speech writer. The sound is important. The delivery is important. You have to hear the words. If you read them, and don’t hear, them, you won’t understand them. You will not discern the import amidst the vacuous.

I think that some people are born paying close attention, while others, though sure that they are focussed, are in fact oblivious to the important things: to what’s going on around them. To their surroundings. To their context.

Moreover, I’m sure that there are different kinds of people in the world. That is, there are different kinds of minds, even brains. That, perhaps, the brain, as a complex organ and information processing—nay, a signal processing—machine, is composed of different components, or sections, and that the relative dominance of these vary from person to person.

I’m not saying that people are fixed in who they are. I don’t buy into that. But there are limits of some kind to what we can become, based on the patterns we make in response to our experiences. People can change, but only within the boundaries of their ability to observe, to interpret, and to understand what goes on around them. If you can’t see in the dark, then you can’t avoid the chair placed in your path.

I’ve met perfectly good atheists who nevertheless believe in something or other that they’re too self-deceived to admit to themselves is God. Love. Family. Truth. Justice. Pleasure. They seek the holy, the sacrosanct, and the spiritually transcendent experience as avidly, as desperately, as any religious believer. They may mock the facts of faith held by others, but they have the same sacred cows. If you need it, you’ll find it, somewhere, in the pattern-making pathways of your brain. So, in that way, I think we’re all alike. It’s an indelible part of the human condition to seek an answer to a question. We just all phrase the question differently, and in large part, if not wholly, it is shaped to fit the unique character of our self. We all believe in something. And it’s all our own invention.

There’s a great DVD store near my new place. Within a good walk’s distance, just off Eglinton, West of Yonge Street. I spent an hour in there on Friday after work (at home), soaking in their exceptional collection. Movies are, to me, part of the answer to whatever the question is for me. Books and computers, too. And lots of things, but mostly, those things. I love the way that the questions posed by others come out of these things, through their answers—in the form of their actions. I love what they reveal, and the promise they offer of what more there is to learn. Understanding. Interpretation. Experience. First or second hand, in stories: in histories and fictions.

So many people. So many viewpoints. Not quite so many viewpoints as people, it seems sometimes. But then, how many people give their real point of view, honestly and transparently? That’s not exactly encouraged. Not amongst that species we know as the middle class. But every stereotype is the same: they all have their official line. They all have their list of goods and evils and their list of acceptable topics about which it’s allowed to argue. And everybody strays a bit, in their way. We conform, and we rebel; the pathways of our minds don’t all follow the ones agreed upon by the majority to be the right ones. And the majority view changes.

What’s right, what’s wrong; what’s good, what’s bad; what’s real, what’s imaginary; what’s true, what’s false; what’s sacred, what’s degenerate; what’s just; what’s unfair. No two people agree on everything. Why not? It’s like we’re this vast experiment, but the whole world’s the lab. It’s random, but it’s statistical. We choose, but we’re predictable, nine time out of ten with a five percent margin of error.

It’s just crazy.

The Register gives us Top US boffin plans jizz-based LEDs.

From the article:

It seems that the US Air Force Research laboratory, funding Steckl’s research, was especially keen to consider sources of supply in developing a new generation of electronic components. They wanted to use materials which would involve no environmental damage, and which were not controlled by sinister foreign powers.
You or I, not being top scientists, would perhaps be stumped if asked to find a source of DNA - in industrial quantities, mind - which fulfilled these requirements. But not Steckl, who came up with sperm.

The older I get, the more conscious I become that the society in which I live is in trouble.

I have always been doubtful, even dismissive, of the capitalist theory of economics—that the market is the best determinant of how human effort should be organized. What the hell does the market know? It’s the equivalent of an infant: all it knows is how it feels right now. Is it hungry? Is it tired? Is it bored? It has little or no memory, and no sense of the future, and yet, the people in charge of our government and industry our content to leave this fickle, emotional and—let’s face it—stupid beast to rule all of our lives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not a new observation, but gaining traction, though most people are still resolutely ignoring the reality of it: Peak Oil. Also see Life after the oil crash for the most succinct and convincing arguments about the looming energy crisis.

In brief, oil is finite, in fact, it’s running out. However, the world’s appetite for it is still growing—exponentially. The oil wells aren’t literally drying out, but their are emptying. The less they have in them, the harder it is to get it out. No major new oil finds have happened in decades, and the smaller finds are more expensive to tap.

Alternative energy sources combined can probably only provide between 10 and 25 per cent of the energy we currently derive from oil, but most of them will not even work for transportation, which is the leading consumer of energy. Even if we could convert our infrastructure and manufacturing and transportation to other forms of energy, there will still be other shortages: plastics and fertilizer, which come from petroleum, and minerals and metals used in alternative energy technology, and, finally, land. Many alternative technologies (wind, solar, bio-fuels) are land-use intensive. And then there’s coal.

Some people believe that the oil production peak has already happened. Others that it is as close as three years or as far as twenty-five. But it’s within your lifetime, probably, and your children’s, definitely. The world’s standard of living is going to drop (if you use contemporary industrial lifestyle as your measure of standard of living).

Personally, the great, sad realization is not the loss of refrigerators, the Internet, cheap holidays or the like, but the certain end of space exploration and the relegation of the human race to stagnation and decline on this single lump of rock to which we cling precariously. Knowledge and discovery will slow and finally stop, and we will enter a new “dark” age. The window hasn’t completely closed, but it’s closing fast. Only the most outrageous science fiction ideas can possibly save us: self-replicating robots loosed into the solar system that can assemble factories and equipment from the asteroid belt, slowly, and return raw materials back to earth orbit, coupled with draconian measures of resource conservation and a complete restructuring of the human economy: replacing our current free market, growth-based system with one that is static and heavily planned and controlled.

Personally, I’m happy to go back to reading books, limited rail travel, buying locally: in effect, a return to the eighteenth century, technologically speaking, for the bulk of daily life and work. It would be better than another world war being fought over oil and the freedom to waste it on Karaoke and Dodge Vipers.

Addendum: The one beacon of hope that I’ve found goes by a number of names, and is in fact a very old idea: concentrated solar power (CSP). Here is an article at The Oil Drum. Another nice thing about CSP is that it can counteract the greenhouse effect by capturing solar energy that would otherwise be absorbed by the ground and then radiate as infrared (heat), which is what is principally absorbed by the CO2 in the atmosphere. It could also possibly offset the loss of reflectivity due to melting polar ice (though there’s still the problem of the polar oceans absorbing heat directly).

However, the economy shake-up cannot be avoided by CSP alone; even if CSP could satisfy our energy hunger, it can’t give us the fuel we depend on for transportation, which gobbles up 70% of oil production. You can’t fly jets with batteries! If CSP can be utilized to produce hydrogen, we may be able to use that as a portable fuel, but there are still concerns, such as volatility and evaporation. Possibly we can forgo most jet travel and switch to dirigibles (blimps) and electric trains.

Yes, the world is going to change dramatically, but it will only turn out good if we actually make the decisions and follow up with effort. Don’t just wait for the scientists, corporations and governments to solve the problems that YOU helped to create. Demand that your governments fund alternative technology and plan for the long term, not just the next election. Make the next election depend upon the long term.