August 27, 2013

Plan for viewing platform at top of Forth Rail Bridge

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-23814637

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This bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge, have been my favorites since I was a little kid.

August 22, 2013

Cheap fusion would be among the worst things that ever happened to earth.

Imagine industrial populations growing and spreading without limit.

Humans would consume what's left of the natural world, turning everything into more humans and more garbage.

If I discovered how to make an H-bomb out of ordinary hardware store materials I wouldn't tell anyone. If I built a working fusion power plant, Tony Stark style, I still wouldn't tell anyone.



Our species is a three year old playing with matches and we've lit the house on fire.

Global warming and overpopulation are symptoms of our civilization's immaturity, not problems that can be "solved" with increasingly powerful technologies.

We have all the tools we need today to stabilize our population at sustainable levels, and provide a good standard of living for everyone.

If we want to stop using fossil fuels now, the solution is simple: Stop using fossil fuels!

The difficult part is not finding a "replacement" source of energy, the difficult part is creating a society where we don't need more energy.

I can easily imagine a society where most people have never smelled gasoline, never driven a car, never seen a high voltage power line, yet still live in comfortable leisurely sustainable ways with good shelter, good food, appropriate medical care, and easy access to worldwide communication and transportation networks.

This can be accomplished with existing technologies. From there, who knows where we might go? But in our current society cheap fusion would simply add fuel to the house fire. We'd build more cars, mine more materials (how about those fusion powered tar sand refineries, eh?), and generally make a bigger mess of things than we already have.

August 11, 2013

Anyone can write and I don't think that's a bad thing.

The greater problem today is finding authors I enjoy reading, even from established publishers. Maybe especially from established publishers.

Sometimes it seems I'm as likely to find fiction I enjoy on a fan site as I am on a New York Times best seller list. I've found enjoyable books here on DU, free epubs and amazon books recommended by friends of the authors.

Before computers and word processing my mom was a world-class typist and proofreader. She's also a published author. Writing books was never her day job, which was usually advertising, but she can write.

My mom is a little old retired lady now, living with my dad in one of the world's remote places. Her arthritis has slowed her down a bit, but sometimes she'll work for friends. When I was a kid I remember my mom transcribing audio tapes without much pause. She could turn chicken scratches on a yellow pad into polished manuscripts. People would pay her well for this work but most of the writing she worked with was crap. Crappy Hollywood scripts, crappy autobiographies, crappy pornographic novels, crappy academic papers for crappy academic journals...

Theodore Sturgeon was right.

My personal perspective is that writing ought to be encouraged. As with many arts it's an activity with low environmental impacts. With a generous welfare system, with free education, we will discover those artists who are truly brilliant while keeping the hacks out of trouble.

The problem today is not terrible writers, the creators of crap, the problem today is sorting the gems from the bullshit, and keeping the starving artists out of trouble.

August 6, 2013

The USA was in a big hurry to test the bombs on living cities before the war ended.

That's all there is too it.

Our capacity to produce these things was huge, enough to destroy both Germany and Japan, while scaring the hell out of the Soviets.

But the Nazi war machine collapsed before we could use the bomb there.

The plan to invade the Japanese homeland was a deception from the moment the guys at Los Alamos calculated their plutonium bomb would work. The actual plan was to drop nuclear bombs on Japan until their war machine was extinguished. There were many more bombs in the pipeline, literally tons of plutonium in production.

After Japan surrendered, the plutonium production reactors at Hanford were shut down briefly to rework them for "Cold War" use. Shortcuts and problems that were considered acceptable risks during the war were not so acceptable in times of an uneasy "peace." But once these safety upgrades were made plutonium production resumed.

"The bomb saved American lives" is bullshit myth building.

U.S. leaders knew they had the ultimate weapon and chose not to tip their hand. In 1950 the U.S.A. "retired" 120 (!!!) Mark III "Fat Man" bombs of the sort that was dropped on Nagasaki. The USA had created, during the war, a weapon that would have destroyed both Japan and Germany. In some ways humanity was lucky only one of these plutonium weapons was used in warfare.

I knew a woman who survived the fire bombing of Dresden. She lost her mother, her dad was a German naval officer who survived the war. She'd suffered severe malnutrition as a child. She was my mom's age, but always had health problems. When I think about the horrors of war, I think about her. Like my mom she was just a little girl during the war. Most of those who suffer in war are entirely innocent.

Nobody "deserves" to have fire bombs or atomic bombs dropped on them.

The decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan was disgusting.

August 2, 2013

There's a lot of right wing Christian Fascist rot and corruption in the Air Force...

... my first choice would be to throw the bad apples out and disperse the rest of Air Force among the Navy and Army.

Do you do business with a guys who have "The Fish" in their Yellow Page ads? I don't. It's almost a sure sign they'll try to cheat you if you are not one of them.

Nevertheless all the military services need to do much, much more to halt sexual abuse.

I know a guy whose life in the Air Force was hell because some of his mannerisms were "gay" and he was comfortable with women. The defense of our nation lost something when he was discharged because in a time of catastrophe this extremely intelligent guy would have outperformed a dozen Christian-fascist-rapist morons.

My grandfather was a major in the Army Air Force of World War II. I think the creation of a separate Air Force with nukes was a bad idea.

Too many of these assholes thought it was God who gave them The Bomb.

July 30, 2013

I suspect nearly all periods of rapid climate change in earth's history...

... are a consequence of biological innovation.

We tend to think of life adapting to physical changes in the earth's environment, but it goes much further than that because these physical changes are usually caused by biological innovation.

In a very substantial way it was the evolution of C₄ plants that created the chaotic climate conditions our ancestors adapted to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_photosynthesis

If not for this biological innovation by PLANTS we'd probably still be bonobo-like creatures living in the forests.

The common image people have of paleontologists is someone looking for fossil bones, but it's the evolutionary innovations in biochemistry that have left their mark everywhere in the geological record.

If modern industrial human soon goes extinct, which seems very likely, the greater consequences of our existence, the geochemical changes, the reduced biodiversity, will be rapidly erased.

I think humans are still a "flash in the pan" at this point. Time will tell, but none of us are likely to be around ten million years from now.

I'm not dismissing the environmental damage we do, but our industrial species of human will probably be one of the species lost.

A decrease in intelligence is as likely as an increase simply because it takes a lot of energy to maintain intelligence, and with greater intelligence there is more to go wrong in the developmental process.

July 23, 2013

They talk about their green cars at the Sierra Club...

... and their eco-vacations to Costa Rica.

But nobody wants to sit next to the guy who rides his old bicycle to the meeting, buys his clothes at the thrift store, and doesn't dress up in freshly washed outerwear every day. My most infamous conflict was with my wife... she took my old winter jacket to get cleaned. It's not like it smelled like rotten fish or feces -- it simply smelled like a winter jacket that had never been washed. The benign bacteria living in it were doing a good job eating hostile invaders. It's my opinion they should have been left alone.

I don't wash my cars either, except for the windows. My cars have lichen growing on them. Sorry kids, drive mine or buy your own. I hate my cars and they hate me. That's why they last so long. They've got mileage to the moon and now they are coming back. It's a balance of nature thing.

Yes, I am a dirty hippie.

I was a member of the Sierra Club for a long time, since I was fourteen years old, but it got to be ridiculous. I couldn't relate to the people at the meetings, and they couldn't relate to me. My idea of conservation was riding my bike to a "wilderness adventure" in the local mountains, eating rice and beans, living in a shack, hanging out in the computer lab all night.

Meanwhile they were talking about the MacIntosh computer they just bought, or the expensive cameras and backpacking equipment they were testing out in the Yosemite back country. One of the greater consumerist splurges of my life was an Olympus XA-2. I still have it. Cost me a day and a half moving furniture. I haven't bought a fancy camera since, except in thrift stores. My 35mm SLR with the very nice lenses cost $16. My digital cameras are crap but I'm quite fond of them. Pictures for free!

I was as guilty as anyone burning gasoline whenever my clunker small Toyota worked. After all, I could fill the gas tank for less than an hour's work and drive to Yosemite or Baja California for the weekend. But mostly I was happy to be where I was, wearing the same blue jeans and flannel shirt for five days in a row (changing only socks and underwear), mostly walking where I wanted to go, and feeling happy whenever I scored a few hot sauce packets abandoned at Taco Bell, or whenever I traded something for government surplus powdered milk which I'd turn into rich delicious buttermilk.

Personally, I don't think sustainability requires great "sacrifice." Most of the things modern society sees as "necessities" are actually great burdens. Private automobiles are one of those burdens. Airlines are another.

Adequate food, shelter, universal literacy, birth control, and medical care are not unobtainable goals -- the current world economy is much, much larger than that.

But the more powerful among us piss it all away and that unwitting elite group of feudal lords includes many Sierra Club liberals.

July 21, 2013

Our local grocery store has a sign on the front door: "NO FIREARMS."

Knowing the manager and the cops he is friendly with, they might find prying a gun out of cold dead fingers acceptable terms.



Seriously, the only people who carry guns in our city are cops and gangsters. And too many of the gangsters are fourteen and fifteen year old idiots who can't shoot straight.

My wife sees young gangsters who've been shot, and in another city my sister scrapes them off of the streets, and invariably these kids are surprised how bad it hurts to get shot or that they are not dead, except when they are dead.

Carrying a gun does not protect you from idiots like this. They don't give a shit. Odds are if you are caught in the crossfire you won't even know what's happened when you are bleeding on the ground and the dip-shit shooters have run off or driven away.

I've talked to war veterans too. Usually shooting is a surprise that's over a second or two after it starts.

It's never like the movies. No drama, no music, no slow motion, just "bang-bang-blood."

I have a friend who has never gotten over killing the Vietnamese kid who shot him. It got worse for him when his own kid was a teenager, same age as the kid he killed.

July 18, 2013

Hunter is in a bad mood. He will take guns from cowardly idiots, and he will not give them back.

Crazier than his grandma, mom, a few of his siblings, and many ancestors.

Zero tolerance for idiots with guns, and I have art to make. Your gun meets Mr. Lincoln Arc Welder.

Want to play Wild West? I can do that.

July 18, 2013

I'm happy at 35mph.

If I was Emperor of the Earth I'd make 35mph the universal speed limit and I'd use my space fortresses to vaporize any man-made vehicle traveling faster than that. With the exceptions of wind powered, human powered, emergency services, or peaceful space exploration machines.

Yes, you'd better put a speed limiter on your antique Corvette or you will be turned into hot stinky smoke. Jet airplane? Gone. All vaporized on the runways after fair warning.

Might as well tow your old car with an oat-powered horse, Amish style.

If you must go fast go get yourself a bicycle, put on a helmet, and find a long steep hill to ride down.

Highway 154 down to Santa Barbara used to work for me on a bicycle, and I've done far, far worse on absurdly powerful motorcycles... But I am older and wiser now, and fortunately not dead with scars to prove it.

Yep, these days I'm an environmentalist fascist. I hate your car as much as I hate my own. Our family cars have mileage to the moon and now they are working their way back. They are old enough to vote. They continue to live only to spite me. They hate me as I hate them. This is not a positive relationship. Fuck you, car, you didn't pass the smog test? I can make you pass the smog test. Oh yeah? My fuel pump relay will burn out in a bad neighborhood in Oakland at 1:13 in the morning.

Look, threatening dude, you don't want nothing I've got. C'mon, you think I'd be driving this car if I had money??? Okay, I've got $3.16 in my pocket, a VISA card well past it's limit, and maybe once I get these wires twisted together I can give you a ride. Want some coffee? Threatening dude is bought off with $2.00. His life must suck way more than mine.

I don't understand why everyone is in such a hurry to go nowhere. Life is nothing if you are not enjoying the ride. Get on a big, luxury, high tech sailing ship and cross the oceans. Enjoy the ride on slow trains spanning continents. Open the windows, stick your head out, and smell the air just like a dog in a car.

Tour the world? Sure! A few years on slow boats, trains, on foot, on electric scooters, legs, or wheelchairs. Wonderful! No hurry, no deadlines. Wherever you go, there you are.

Retired mom and dad are calling from Australia. They'll be back in a year or two, or maybe not. But they are having a great time.