SRF Heavy Industries

I’ve been indulging my most horrible hobby lately: looking at all the busted things and wondering how to fix them. That obsession’s been at the core of every job I’ve had (at which I was successful, anyway), and even for my writing, because at the core of it, the problem I’ve been trying to fix has been the inherent brokenness of a blank page.

It’s still evil out there. There’s a lot that’s broken.

The more advanced I am in my career(s), the more I’m required to look at the larger picture — not just at the project on which I’m working, but how that project dovetails into the larger puzzle. Nothing can be designed for a pristine laboratory environment. Whatever you build has to be handled by a thousand hands, dragged in the dirt, and put to a hundred uses for which you never planned. Including probably being used for a weapon.

I’m reluctant to turn out even a single paragraph in these circumstances. With so much fear and uncertainty around, people are just looking for a way to appropriate whatever you give them and turn it into a supporting argument for their own attacks and defenses. In times of fear one’s own sense of reality is weakened and people will grab onto anything that can be twisted to provide an illusion of control over one’s environment or support one’s view of the world around, regardless of whether it’s inherently positive or negative, and with no respect whatsoever for that view’s grounding in reality. Or more importantly, lack thereof.

For some reason it’s okay for the world to seem more awful than it actually it is as long as you know it’s just behaving according to the rules. C.f., Murphy, et al.

If you’re reading carefully, you see I’m admitting to being tempted by the same trap, seeing evil everywhere because that’s what I’m focusing on, recognizing evil because I “know” things are evil out there. I’m going to continue to call it an obsession, because that has the necessary connotations of illness. It is, in fact, interfering with my health. And not for the first time.

From where I’m standing, evil is in the bigger picture I find myself forced to consider. We’ve created giant hulking machines out of ourselves, aggregate machines that are as alive as we are, whose goals and interests are not our own, and which are allowed to eat us for their sustenance. A small percentage of ourselves ride them like parasites and predate on them — and thereby us — and that’s as evil as attacking us individually and directly.

And there’s no existing morality that defines good or evil with respect to these aggregates. In that vacuum, people use them without the kindnesses they’d direct even to livestock. They use them as condoms for raping people they’d never have the guts to rape and steal from in person. That level of organizational insulation protects those who profit from guilt, but nothing protects the victim from misery.

If our institutions of governments and religions don’t start addressing the problems of these new life forms, I may have to break down and found one that does.

So I can stop obsessing and allow myself to see a bit more beauty again.

[*]

Raw petroleum is slimy and icky and makes the fish taste funny. It’s pretty bad to have millions of gallons per day just gush up into the ocean and get things all messy and coat the animals and birds. But frankly, the massive petroleum spoogefest is nowhere near the worst part of the ongoing problem.

Poke through the following in approximately this order:

• National Geographic video: “Nature Untamed: Death Fog”
• Wikipedia details: methane clathrates
• NakedCapitalism article “BP Official Admits to Damage Beneath the Sea Floor” (Look for the phrase “catastrophic geological failure”)
• History Channel’s Mega Disasters (typically sensationalist) segment on seabed methane bubble release
• Recent comprehensive writeup being pushed around the internet: “Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event” (“The seabed in the region has risen an astounding 30 feet.”)

Here’s the upshot.

Where you have oil, you have methane. It’s “natural” gas — a term created by energy industry marketroids to make us feel better about burning it, as opposed to, say, any of a selection of unnatural gases. It’s just a kind of petroleum, which, in turn, is nothing but chains of carbon atoms of various lengths bonded to as much hydrogen as can be made to stick. A “chain” of one carbon atom is methane, two is ethane, three is propane, four is butane — and after that, they tend to be liquids at typical room temperatures and atmospheric pressures, and we start to call them names like pentane, hexane, heptane, octane, etc., all the way up to hydrocarbon sludge. Petroleum distillation is largely just sorting those molecules by length into various buckets.

Methane can be produced as a product or byproduct of metabolic processes and is the major component of a fart. But it’s also one of the substances you get in a post-supernova cooldown, and since hydrogen and carbon are really common elements, you can come by planets with oceans of the stuff. So it’s tough to say whether our petroleum deposits are condensed/compressed interstellar carbon or the result of biological decay, but it’s probably both.

In any case, we keep precious little methane (or ethane, or propane, or butane) in our atmosphere these days — and we like it that way. For the past four billion years we’ve worked hard to process that stuff out of our sky and turn it into water and carbon that we can turn into, well, us.

A bubble of methane in the sky some twenty miles across is just a bomb — but a bomb that is as much of a planet-killer as a hefty asteroid traveling at speed. In fact, the devastation from some of our asteroid strikes may have been assisted by the methane bubbles they shook loose from the ocean the way thumping a glass of something carbonated can make it foam up and overflow the glass.

The water is a mile deep where the Deepwater Horizon well is, but the oil pan from which they were sipping is 2.5 miles below the well-head. I’d dearly love to know what forces could have lifted the sea bed by thirty feet where the well-head is, especially when all of the action is supposed to be 2.5 miles below that. And I’d love to know how concerned we ought to be about that particular pimple popping — what will be released, and what will happen when the seafloor drops back to where it was. Or below.

Tsunamis, earthquakes, the sky on fire, raining carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and various unsavory chemicals — all of these are on the menu. What entree will this crisis pick?

[*]

Yes, the Thursday Emu Report has returned.

Today’s feature is Louisiana chef Dale Bourgeois’s cookbook for the American Emu Association, largely to let you know that there is such a thing as the American Emu Association, and that they, in fact, have a cookbook. And possibly members. And probably lobbyists.

More lobbyists than you, I’d imagine.

Click here for a list of handy recipes should you happen to put your hands on, accidentally or on purpose, a wad of emu meat or an egg or two.

Click the emu to see an article on How Stuff Works to, at least theoretically, discover how emus work.

Amazon’s new grocery ordering service doesn’t yet cover emu eggs that still have the payload inside, as it were, but they have a nice price on clean and empty shells.

The people in this video managed to put their hands on a loaded one.

I personally recommend videos from this link, as they are more representative of my own experiences with emus.

As you were.

[*]

Whenever I think I’m going to sit down and write some cool weird original fiction I stumble across something like this magical penis thieves article and realize I’m going to have to try a little harder to top reality for strangeness.

I will note that the above article makes some intriguing mentions concerning certain classifications in the DSM-IV and how the illnesses referenced seem quite a bit more rare in non-Western cultures, indicating a certain amount of bias toward which diagnoses might be “culture bound” and which are more universal. Scan down until you see the phrase “Healthy Migrant Effect”.

In any case, if such things interest you, a couple hours researching Koro might do you some good. Or do you some damage. Depending.

[*]

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that for some people, words are hard.

I don’t have illusions that I can make myself understood to everyone, but some of the things I do nearly automatically are unavailable to some people. When I talk to someone, I have a sense for the feeling of engagement. I can tell when the engine revs too high or starts chugging and lurching, and maybe it’s time to change gears — either complexify or simplify the syntax to make the information load more efficient, open up or close boxes of topic-specific jargon to suit the background of the other conversant, construct metaphors to bridge between disciplinary backgrounds, or give up on traditional language entirely and draw a #^@&ing picture.

Writing is a bit harder. You can’t see the face of the person you’re talking to. You have to imagine them from little bits of whatever feedback you’ve gotten before. Starting a new conversation with an unknown audience is completely hit or miss.

The past two days I’ve been visiting Space Collective to try to make out what they’re about, browsing around in something closer to the traditional definition of the word “browsing” — a nibble here, a nibble there — and I see some important things being discussed. But mostly what  see is a discussion among maybe fifty to a hundred people, much of which is a bit evangelical, but most of which is couched in language that’s pretty exclusionary and jargon-filled. The upshot is that their only possible audience is each other.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Experts discussing difficult concepts in their own fields can have much more efficient and unambiguous conversations if they revert to a subset of the language constructed to bear the semantic load, rife with and accelerated by jargon. This is a critical part of refining the concepts in question. It’s why there are professional conventions.

But I also sense some frustration in the conversations about why there isn’t a larger audience and/or more participation for such important concepts as, well, what humanity (or some substantial portion thereof) will be like in the near future. What we are, or possibly are, or could potentially be, becoming.

I don’t know how much of the isolation the discussions are experiencing are deliberate and how much is accident of not having the toolset to convey the concepts to outsiders.

On pursuing a similar topic, I once ran afoul of the transhumanists (the Ray Kurzweil/Max More/Natasha Vita-More crowd) and wandered quickly away once I began to see it as rife with an elitist disease — a playground for the cultural and financial and intellectual elite which was (possibly still is, but I haven’t really been back to check on them) quickmarching toward outright bigotry against those who are unwilling (or simply can’t afford) to surgically or chemically accelerate their own personal development — and for some, the construction of a new master race.

Seriously, those people ought to play some Bioshock. The storyline is quite educational.

For those people, isolation seemed to be, on the whole, deliberate. And bidirectional.

The future arrives first for the wealthy and privileged. That is merely an unfortunate fact. But you don’t have to deliberately enforce it via the Republican fallacy — that your good fortune is exclusively the result of the sweat of your own brow and/or Divine Will or some combination of the two via the mechanism of (wealthy, privileged) Ben Franklin’s maxim of “God helps thofe who help themfelves.”

A sideline thought, but an important one: It’s not God’s will that millions of people starve to death every year. It’s the collective will of those wealthy enough to contribute a bowl of gruel every now and then, but, somehow, rationalize that upgrading their iPhone is more important. Call it a systemic problem. If you must.

The playground that Space Collective is playing in is an attempt to predict and, to a certain extent, attempt to steer the future of humanity towards a suite of more positive and powerful expressions, some more inclusive than others. But, back to my original point, the language being used to discuss the phenomena in question is excluding to outsiders because of an extremely high jargon content and apparent linguistic assumptions of the audience already being insiders….

And that’s unfortunate. And probably unintentional.

It can sound a little hubristic for a writer to say that the very evolution, and possibly definition, of life began with writing, but it’s true — at least in the sense that certain self-replicating forms of chemistry found a way to physically record a mechanism for the process of duplication in a central location (call it RNA-ish precursors to DNA) and transformed the process of replication from a strictly competitive process, each molecule grubbing to consume all resources present, into a cooperative process. Over a billion years that offloaded information has extended capabilities for organizing intracellular coordination to extracellular cooperation and beyond — to an extent that only a few scientists and mystics seem to realize (and realize that I’m not really including myself in the set that have grasped all the ramifications).

Communication in general, but writing in particular, enables the scripting of behavior of an arbitrarily large number of individual organisms and allows them to act, as it were, in unison. Or in concert. And, of course, the ability to read, or at least to understand when someone else reads to you, is also important. (Strong oral traditions also count as writing, but if you’ve played the gossip game, you can understand that the capabilities of oral traditions are weaker when the stories and/or rules can mutate accidentally, intentionally, and, more importantly, undetectably as copies are made.)

It really is the ease of copying written (for various definition of the term written — call it externalized and easily error-checkable against the original) information that enables the formation of massive cooperative organizations composed of individuals that used to compete. The printing press, the computer, the Internet — these all enabled, in their time, the massive copying and duplication and error-prevention regime necessary to unify religions and nations.

That process isn’t over. Not by a long stretch.

Cells — single-celled creatures — are a cooperating suites of specialized chemicals, organized by strands of RNA or DNA or variations on that theme. Organisms are cooperating suites of specialized cells, the more successful examples of which are organized by some nod towards a centralized storage of behavioral data and process replication. Call it a brain or centralized nervous system, but the most critical part of that centralization is the storage of memories. Organizations are cooperating suites of specialized organisms, organized by some set of slow-to-mutate principles to which everyone has either direct or second-order (interpreted by a specialized fellow) access.

The process would appear to be open-ended. You are probably already aware of meta-organizations composed of cooperating cartels of organizations, either financial or governmental or perhaps following some other meta-ecological specialization…

In any case, the success of evangelism, or recruitment to organization and/or organism, is reliant on the ubiquity and accessibility and understandability of your organizing principles. Or documentation. Or stories/moral tales. This seems obvious to me, and I’m frequently confused when it doesn’t seem obvious to others.

Directing this process intelligently includes developing a toolset of grammar and syntax, of vocabulary and metaphor that is as universal as possible. Debabelization, if you will.

I really don’t know who is still reading at this point. It’s one of the drawbacks to the written word. But for the one or two of you who are writers/communicators for your causes/evangelists, may I recommend an emphasis on inclusivity and accessibility of your message?

Perhaps you could enlist the aid of a few people for whom words are easy.

[*]

Some quick bullet points.

In a tanking economy, companies that are unfit for the situation will also tank. Many, many small and midsize companies did tank.

The ones that did not crash and burn were the ones that were able to reduce costs and overhead as income also shrank.

Reducing costs and overhead means these things: accepting tradeoffs in terms of taking performance hits in flexibility, in uptime, in turnaround, in inventory; outsourcing everything that can possibly be outsourced in terms of infrastructure and labor; reducing headcount; reducing payroll/compensation/benefits

Until companies require the extra flexibility and speed of turnaround and reliability, they will not tolerate the expense of adding these things back in. Companies will not require these traits until there are more companies competing with each other. When the herd got thinned, competition was reduced. With corporate/business credit availability depressed, there will be no startups or spinoffs leaping into the fray.

Of the business components that got outsourced… those aren’t coming back either. Manufacturing, skilled labor and assembly, IT infrastructure (including telephony, training/support, even applications and office automation), sales, customer support — it is a flexibility hit to have these things offsite, but good planning replaces the need for flexibility to a huge extent. These jobs now only exist in huge farms that work for many different companies, composed of teams of people and pools of resources that shrink and grow without the need to hire and fire and train.

No company who has made a transition to this form is going to say, “Now that profits are back up, let’s rehire 30% of the sales force we outsourced. Let’s bring our Google-hosted email back onsite. Let’s reopen a customer-facing datacenter in our basement and migrate our data back to a custom in-house application maintained by a small team of onsite designers and developers.” Instead they will say, “Spend a few extra bucks expanding our outsourced capacity and dump the rest into that marketing firm we hired.”

If your work was in sales, in customer support, in application development, in infrastructure support, in training, in marketing, in manufacturing, in skilled labor — your job is never coming back. You have no choice but to sign on with one of these huge pooled-resource scenarios — if the one that replaced you is actually in the country — or retrain for something that is impossible (for now) to outsource. Like hands-on healthcare. Or K-12/college/university teaching. Automotive repair. Construction. Mining. Transportation. Bureaucracy.

The cataclysm has happened. Extinctions have occurred. Your old niche no longer exists. It has gone to where all the Hummers have gone.

[*]

I’m extremely grateful to the government of the Netherlands for the exoneration and apology that they have given to a dear friend of a dear friend concerning one of the strangest miscarriages of justice in the modern-day industrialized world.

In 2004 Lucia de Berk was convicted of murdering patients who died in her care, starting with an infant that was suspected of dying from an overdose of a medication that it had been prescribed, back in 2001. From there, prosecutors performed a truly brain-damaged statistical analysis of deaths that occurred within 24-hours of her having been on shift (several deaths potentially attributed to her had to be removed from the list after reviewing attendance records) and made some truly juvenile errors in their statistical approach. These errors got her a conviction for three deaths, only one of which could have been classified truly as a murder, if not proven to be an accidental overdose.

When her case came up for review/appeal in 2006, the errors were REPEATED AND MAGNIFIED, and even more deaths were tacked on to her conviction. Shortly after receiving this news that her conviction and life sentence were to be upheld, Lucia suffered a stroke.

Thankfully, in 2008, the convictions started to unravel. In one of the early infant deaths, it was showed that the “overdose” was in high risk of being a false positive for the test performed because of the breakdown products of decay of the corpse. A better test, which took these breakdown products into account, showed a negative. But the results had “gotten lost” and were not presented in her defense at her original trial.

Examination after examination failed to show any conclusive evidence of foul play in these other deaths for which she had been convicted. Expert after expert showed that, statistically speaking, deaths on shift had decreased after Lucia had been added to the staff. Expert after expert showed the correct way of doing the math involved, showing that any nurse on staff would have had a one-in-nine chance of being the one who had been the victim of a bizarre witch hunt like this in any similar hospital. No matter how low an opinion we might have of having to go to a hospital, we can’t believe that one nurse in nine is a serial killer. It was just dumb luck. Any nurse on staff could have been the victim of this kind of crappy math.

There were no murders. There is no murderer or murderess. Lucia lost six years of her life, away from her partner and growing daughter, and is still hoping for some kind of reasonable compensation for these missing years of her life and her suffering.

But today she is free.

It was quite a blow to Dutch pride to have to admit the huge chain of mistakes that snatched a mother away from her family, out of a rewarding career of helping the sick, and threw her in prison for life. They missed the boat a number of times to prevent this travesty, to reduce the impact, to turn things around when things started to smell. I respect them deeply for swallowing that pride and coming to Lucia today with an official exoneration and a sincere apology. And I am counting on them to help her reestablish herself as completely as possible, considering everything that has happened.

[*]

The essentials: Air, water, and food. The typical model is a terrarium, where a closed cycle of water, breathable gases, and biomass can be maintained. In free space, you can expect no significant additions to materials to be converted into biomass. On the moon, I see no reason to expect that the mineral resources there would be significantly different from untouched volcanic soil on earth. Mars’ soils could be a bit more problematic, but could be refined, possibly even via a biological process, to remove metallic taints. Extremophile bacteriological processes currently being studied should point the way. In the cases of the moon and Mars, it may be useful to build underground for the purposes of maintaining proper temperature insulation. Electrical power may be generated easily on the surface from materials that are photoreactive or undergo physical changes with cyclic changes in temperature, or thermocouple devices with conductive probes located in different temperature environments. Generators that run on biomass conversions may also be added to the equation as long as they are affordable ecologically speaking and fit into the terrarium model.

The people. Make sure you’ve selected people with relevant fields of expertise. Also, make sure there is plenty of overlap among the fields covered. At least coarsely, make sure each person has a primary field of expertise at which they are an authority, has a secondary field at which they can function with assistance, and a third field in which they can provide assistance if necessary if provided direction. Make sure every critical field is represented at every level so that there is sufficient redundancy in case of accidental incapacitation or death.

The fields of expertise. The concept here is microcosm. The colony should be as self-supporting as possible, including not only engineering and agricultural support, but also low-level maintenance and social support, including religious counseling and entertainment. Gentle leadership and conflict resolution must be emphasized.

Governance. A colony must be self-governing, at least at the operational level. A charter delineating operating policies should be provided that emphasizes primarily the survival, health, and rights of the colonists and the survival of the colony itself, and then the operating goals of the colony, which may require periodic modification to prevent sapping energy and resources for the colony’s survival and/or to maximize the returns on investment. Justice, rewards, and punishments may need to be modeled on various examples of encapsulated systems, like those used on board ships, due to increase in risks of negligence and greater need for efficiency in terms of expertise and labor.

The goals. A colony must export some resource that’s needed elsewhere, though “export” can be a pretty flexible term. Exports can, of course, include raw mineral resources and, as manufacturing capabilities increase, manufactured goods. An orbital colony could, for instance, export vacuum. In sufficiently sealed and correctly constructed containers, enough vacuum could supply lift for lighter-than-air vehicles and platforms and reduce the weight of load-bearing foamed materials, including metals and ceramics. The moon could, for instance, export orbital crafts, probes, and satellites once sufficient manufacturing facilities are in place. The escape velocity for the moon requires a good deal less energy to put objects into earth orbit or to send farther out into space, meaning cost savings also in hardening delicate systems to survive the trip. There may also be added benefits to producing agricultural products in one-sixth of earth-gravity that may be worth exploring. Mars is at one-quarter of earth’s gravity and could also provide plant an animal life that could be more efficient in terms of ratios of nutritious material to inedible structure. Any or all colonies could provide for a tourism and/or education industry, or a medical industry to provide long-term or short term therapies that would benefit from various levels of reduced gravity.

The funding. Startup for a colony off the surface of earth would be enormously expensive, and thus largely dependent on the agencies and organizations with the largest amount of disposable funds. Usually this involves governments, but it doesn’t have to. And, in fact, probably shouldn’t. The purposes of a government include collecting funds as fairly as possible and using those funds to provide resources, infrastructure, and services for the public benefit. A colony, however, is almost certainly a for-profit venture (unless the “exports” are entirely military, scientific, health-related, or educational) and should be funded by investors or trade agencies that are comfortable with high-risk ventures that may not reap benefits for decades. Colonization of the western hemisphere was enacted by governments at first, and then by companies that were interested in discovering new wealth and founding bases for launching future exploration. Currently the only potential investors are governments that could, in ten to twenty years’s time, use some dividends to pay back huge debts that have been incurred, certain corporate concerns in the energy sector, a number of hedge funds that made out like bandits over the most recent economic collapse, and maybe Monsanto. Certainly a new corporation could be formed that would consolidate investments and put them to cooperative use.

[*]

If you’re wondering how that ludicrous “Death Panel” thing got started, here’s how it goes as I understand it:

1. When you are past a certain age or battling a potentially (or guaranteed) terminal illness, you may wish to discuss your concerns with your doctor, particularly with respect to whether you feel you wish to undergo “heroic measures” to keep you alive once your quality of life has seriously started to decline, particularly if those measures will leave you in an even further reduced state.
2. You doctor can (and should) bill you for this time. If you carry insurance or are on Medicare, your doctor may bill them instead. There’s even a handy code for billing for “end of life” counseling.
3. Your insurance company, being basically The Enemy, may decide whether or not to honor this or any other claim.
4. Your government, were it ever to step in as a “single payer” — which last time I checked was off the table — would take the place of the insurance company in item 3, and (supposedly) whatever passes for a panel of experts would decide under what circumstances a claim for “end of life counseling” would get paid. Not that I have any idea what the problem getting the government to cover an “end of life counseling” claim might be. Medicare does it all the time — as long as the patient’s age and/or general state of health warrants it.
5. From here it kind of takes a panicked moron to take it from panel of government experts deciding which claims to pay under which circumstances (as if that’s any different from an insurance company’s panel of experts deciding which claims to pay under which circumstances) to a panel of government experts paying a doctor to talk to you about dying if they don’t want to pay for your expensive procedures anymore.
6. Yippee! Death Panels!

“Death Panels” aside, if you’re worried about this shadowy panel of experts who decide what claims get honored and which get rejected, odds are they’d just use the same shadowy panel of experts they’ve been using to judge Medicare claims for many decades, whose names are a matter of public record and whose opinions are published with much documentation in every edition of the freely available, published online monthly (if a bit hefty in page count) Federal Register.

Conversely, it would probably take a team of spies and possibly a thug with a crowbar to reveal who the @$$hole is at your health insurance company who has turned down treatment for your teenage daughter’s sexual assault due to it somehow being a “pre-existing condition”. (Actual example from recent press — look it up on Google if you missed it.)

You’re welcome.

[*]

Lucia de Berk’s conviction will go down as one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in Dutch legal history, according to the Dutch daily newspaper NRC.

I originally wrote about this case back around Halloween of 2007 here. If you haven’t read the background first, I recommend you go take a peek. It was some damned good writing, if I do say so myself — good enough to thoroughly alienate a few Dutch friends of mine.

Anyway, the Dutch equivalent to our Attorney General’s office has decided that there were actually no crimes committed, thus it’s pretty unlikely that Lucia de Berk is a murderess, serial or otherwise, and maybe she shouldn’t have spent all that time in jail away from her partner and growing daughter. It’ll take another month for the ruling judge to come back with his final verdict, and THEN there’s the matter of compensation for being unjustly imprisoned and having her life yanked out from under her feet like a cheap rug by a DA who was hot for the glory of putting away a rare pretty female serial killer.

She might not get as much recompense as I would’ve hoped because there were some problems with her qualifications for having gotten her job as a nurse in the first place, but anything would be good. Currently she’s on the dole because 1) she had a stroke in prison and is possibly worse off from that than she should be because no one was around (like, say, family) to notice quickly and get her to treatment and 2) no one will hire her for anything because, like, she’s still a convicted serial killer. Oh, but she’s NOT ACTUALLY on the dole because they don’t give out welfare to convicted serial killers.

But hey, at least she’s not still in jail.

This won’t be over until she has some kind of compensation in hand for what this failure of the Dutch legal system did to her. Let’s see what happens NEXT month.

[*]