Xark!

An energy plan we can believe in

There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.

“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative. It represents a challenge to all Americans – in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

Well. There's a simple, visionary plan from a guy whose life has earned him the credibility and stature to propose it: Reverse the trend in carbon emissions, end our dependency on foreign oil (thereby changing our relationship to the Middle East) and kick start our economy with new industries, new products, new services, new public works projects.

We rallied around Kennedy's call to put a man on the moon in 10 years and to do other grand things, "because they are hard." Well, we've got a better reason to do this: Because it's going to save our sorry asses.

Sure, we'll have the usual people telling us this is just more stupid libtard stuff. And to put it bluntly, screw 'em. They've had their time, and they blew it.

Anyway, I've just started a group at MyBarackObama.com to encourage the explicit adoption of this challenge. I'll post the URL as soon as it gets processed.

Info R/Evolution, Intertwingularity & Xarkism

I built this blog began in the summer of 2005 based on a couple of insistent thoughts:

1. The standard media/cultural categories for topics and discussions were entirely too sterile and limiting for the way I wanted to think and talk;
2. Based on my mode of working as a reporter (diving intensely into one topic after another) it was increasingly obvious to me that my learning in one area (quantum physics) influenced my thinking about another subject (microbiology), which provided insight into seemingly separate topics (mass media, sociology, politics, etc.).

Hence, Xark began with a foundational statement: Because there are no unrelated topics.

Our thought? Maybe by involving people from multiple backgrounds in multiple topics, we'd have more interesting and productive discussions and insights. I based this on the notion that communites that grow up around "themed" blogs tend to evolve into monocultures. Ecosystem biology teaches us that a monoculture (tree farm) simply isn't as sustainable, healthy or as valuable as a naturally diverse ecosystem (rainforest).

These days I'm happy to observe how well those concepts fit into our developing understanding of knowledge and human intelligence in the networked world. From Peter Morville and his book Ambient Findability to Dave Weinberger and his Everything is Miscellaneous, the leading edge of the culture is rapidly incorporating radical ideas about the semantic structure of information -- quite literally, how the Web works better when we pattern our information systems on human-ness. The Web has rather haphazardly grown into an extension of ourselves. The next step (generically, The Semantic Web) may be very deliberately built as an extension of human consciousness.

So Ted Nelson's notion of Intertwingularity (1974) re-emerges in a new contest and reflects its futuristic light on the notion of Xarking.

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchaical, categorizable and sequential when then they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

So Anthropology professor Michael Wesch begins to make sense instantly: Everything is connected. Nothing is separate.

I suspect it was always this way. Perhaps we saw it differently before because information and communication was so slow and precious and difficult before. It took improvements in maritime and navigational technology before we could "see" the Earth as round. Maybe it takes the explosion of networked media for us to "see" that everything is an expression of the one, that technology is evolution by non-biological means, that political, economic and social systems based on keeping us artificially separate and oppositional are wasteful relics.

The rest of the world doesn't think this way right now. We're still in the minority. But that could change.

Too much information

From an excellent Natalie Angier article ("Blind to Change, Even as it Stares Us in the Face") in yesterday's NYT Science section:

Visual attentiveness is born of limited resources. “The basic problem is that far more information lands on your eyes than you can possibly analyze and still end up with a reasonable sized brain,” Dr. Wolfe said. Hence, the brain has evolved mechanisms for combating data overload, allowing large rivers of data to pass along optical and cortical corridors almost entirely unassimilated, and peeling off selected data for a close, careful view.

Which brings me to an observation that struck me whilst smoking pot back in the early 1980s: Pot-smokers don't forget what they're talking about in the middle of a sentence because pot makes them stupid, they forget because pot seems to take down the filters that keep sensory input at bay. They're distracted because it's almost impossible to concentrate when there's that much sensory noise.

Meme 2008: "Control doesn't scale"

Three words of infinite simplicity and value (via Dave Weinberger):

"Control doesn't scale."

Want to understand the convulsion that lies ahead of us? The transitions in economics, technology, management, politics, media and art that must be made if we're to benefit from the new tools? The divisions that animate our "culture war" bullshit sessions? 

Three words: "Control doesn't scale."

Think that's a recipe for anarchy? Think again. Think it's unprecedented? It isn't. Think distributed control is a geektopian pipedream? I disagree.

Human beings have been giving up control in exchange for the expanding wisdom and benefits of freedom for as long as we've been a species, so there's plenty of historical precedent to instruct us on what course to follow. The unprecedented part is actually the rate of change, which means that the challenge in the scaling issue really lies in the feedback loops we imagine. We can't wait around and expect the old culture to vet new ideas for us. We'll have to invent the "new normal" on the fly, and  we'll certainly screw that up a few times.

But this is the central issue. And the other thing history teaches is that the people who have control generally don't like giving it up. So that's our short-term future in a nutshell.

Our expanded selves & The Construct

I’m not a particularly active dreamer, so when I get strong messages in my sleep I tend to pay attention. On Saturday morning I woke up with an odd idea in my head, which made me take notice. On Sunday I woke up with more of it in place, as if my dreaming self had been installing the idea in segments.

It’s a Singularity idea, although I don’t think it’s necessarily just a post-Singularity idea. And here’s the way I think I’m supposed to introduce it:

We understand cyberspace to be the virtual space between all the nodes on all our computer networks. And I’ve defined my concept of Spookworld as being everything that exists between the nodes of organized deception.

This new concept is called The Construct, defined as everything that exists between nodes of intent. And since I’m really introducing two ideas here (The Construct and “nodes of intent”), I’d better start by explaining the foundational idea: scaling humanity to the Law of Accelerating Returns.

String theory in two minutes

Stop the Scientizing!

I'm a fan of science. I use it every day. I'm using it right now. And with a smile. But that doesn't mean, in my view, that science should poke its nose into everything. Particularly when the science under consideration is the kind that scientizes something just because it can. I'm talking here about two related phenomena: The first is for researchers to study and then quantify something that was more fun when it was explained via non-science, and the second is for news organizations to report such psuedo-science as, well, news. Not only does the scientization suck the fun out of these events, it also cheapens the idea of scientific journalism.

I bring this up because today, on three major (online) news outlets, I came across headlines for three articles detailing such scientization. These were: an ABCNews.com story on the mortality rates of rock stars, a CNN.com report on a study that "confirms" that men are attracted to attractive women, and a stop-the-presses from MSNBC.com about how scientists have (finally!) located the gene which controls skinny. My issue is not just that these studies seem a little unfocused (look at the sample rates, for instance), or that this is headline news (which it was on two of the three sites), but rather that I can't figure out the motive behind the stories and their newsworthiness in the first place. Why is it worth scientizing things that most people knew anyway? Who benefits from this research and reporting? What am I supposed to do with this information?

Fascinating new animal behavior study

Rain of fire, the Younger-Dryas, and extinction

From The Observer, on Sunday:

Scientists will outline dramatic evidence this week that suggests a comet exploded over the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago, creating a hail of fireballs that set fire to most of the northern hemisphere.

Primitive Stone Age cultures were destroyed and populations of mammoths and other large land animals, such as the mastodon, were wiped out. The blast also caused a major bout of climatic cooling that lasted 1,000 years and seriously disrupted the development of the early human civilisations that were emerging in Europe and Asia.

Science and media

A day after the Mooney/Nisbet article on "Framing Science" appeared in the journal Science, yours truly stood on a stage beside some truly distinguished company and tried to explain to a room full of graduate biology students, researchers and professors how -- from a journalist's perspective -- they could become more effective at communicating what they know.

Where do you begin? Well, I figured the best advice was to determine what you're trying to accomplish first and then work backward from that. Because there's no single goal of communication, and you can't judge effectiveness if there's nothing to which you can compare your results. After delivering that little piece of vague wisdom I counseled the students on the value of repeating key points and suggested that blogs were a really interesting medium with implications for scientists that we really don't understand yet.

I was, of course, upstaged by the great Bud Ward, whose talk included a New Yorker cartoon of two aging scientists in a quiet, darkened lab office. One says to the other, "Well, at least we never stooped to popularizing science." There's a lot of dark humor implied in that subject, and it's not related solely to scientists.

Kurt Vonnegut: And so on.

Now I'm thoroughly depressed, and it's only 8 a.m.

Day 3: Normativity

When my son was in elementary school he came home one day and mentioned that he'd told the teacher that I was Jewish. His reasoning: He knew I wasn't a Christian, and the only possible alternative was that I must be Jewish. Because what else is there?

Well, I'm not Jewish, and I can't call myself a Christian because Christian belief requires that one accept that Christ died on the cross and rose from the dead. I don't reject the possibility, but I don't have the faith required to say, honestly, that I believe that essential concept. I think it's proper to let a religion define its rules for membership, and regardless of my feelings about Jesus and the church's other teachings, I don't meet the Easter resurrection standard. 

This brings me, finally, to the last thing I want to write about on this three-day church-state binge: The mechanisms that make one thing "normal" and other things deviant.

Bruce Sterling: Dot-Green

Via William Gibson, here's Bruce Sterling writing in The WaPo on green economics for our "stricken world that bypassed the time for action":

In 1998, I had it figured that the dot-com boom would become a dot-green boom. It took a while for others to get it. Some still don't. They think I'm joking. They are still used to thinking of greenness as being "counter" and "alternative" -- they don't understand that 21st-century green is and must be about everything -- the works. Sustainability is comprehensive. That which is not sustainable doesn't go on. Glamorous green. I preached that stuff for years. I don't have to preach it anymore, because it couldn't be any louder. Green will never get any sexier than it is in 2007. Because, after this, brown will start going away.

Could I return to my first paragraph for a second? That part about me and the crowd of Serbian radicals? Serbia may be the world's single-greatest locale for a professional futurist. Awful things happen there faster than awful things happen anywhere else. The Balkans is a tragic region that denied stark reality, broke its economy, started multiple unnecessary wars, and basically finger-pointed and squabbled its way into a comprehensive train wreck. It suffered all kinds of pig-headed mayhem, all unnecessary.

That's just how the world behaved with the climate crisis, too. The time for action isn't now. The time for action was 40 years ago. Today we live in a stricken world that bypassed its time for action. We have wreaked science-fiction levels of havoc on the unresisting carcass of Mother Nature. The real trouble is ahead of us.

So what's the good part? They never gave up around here. On the contrary: There's a certain vivid liveliness in the way they're scrambling and clawing their way out of yawning abyss. The food is great, the women dress to kill, and sometimes they even laugh and dance.

You don't have to predict the future when you live in it.

Oh, and FYI -- this is what's on Gibson's mind at the moment...

Of course, Gibson says this wasn't the vision he had. "Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial."

Touchscreen interface

It looked really futuristic in Minority Report, but the future is here. Again.

Global Warming: A User's Guide

One of the things that drew me into spending the past 15 months at Charleston.net was the experience of conceiving a relatively simple Web product and discovering that the system we had in place simply couldn't (or wouldn't) support it.

That product was this package from April 2005, which attempted to provide people with a non-narrative way to examine the global warming debate. In its original conception, the full-page grid was to have appeared online with extensive hypertext linking to the original sources behind the summaries. Anyway, the material (sans photographs and graphics) still sits on Charleston.net, where nobody ever sees it.

But I want people to see it, and talk about it, and consider it -- left, right and otherwise. Because while the most basic science is resolved (and was already resolved in 2005), much of what's most important to human beings remains unknown. What should we do about the anthropogenic contribution to global warming? I dunno.

Anyway, since I've got a blog, I can repost it here. And tag it. And get it search-indexed. Like this...

Global Warming
Making Sense of the Debate
April 18, 2005
For most of us, the problem with understanding the global warming story isn't the lack of information, it's the glut of it, much of it contradictory.

Nor is it true that Americans just aren't paying attention. A majority of us say we're familiar with the global warming issue and are concerned about it.

Yet pollsters find an interesting trend when they examine our attitudes more closely. Not only are we unsure of what to make of global warming, we think others are, too. Half of us believe scientists still are divided over whether global warming is taking place.

So you might be surprised to learn that:

• An overwhelming majority of scientists now believe the basic questions about global warming have been answered, and the answer to the question, "Is it real?" is a resounding "yes."

• This scientific majority is reflected in the number of "peer-reviewed" articles (studies that are published only after other scientists vouch for the work's accuracy) that support global warming claims. An article in the January issue of the journal Science tallied the pro-vs.-con ratio at 928-to-0 in favor of global warming.

• Despite this apparent consensus and the charged political rhetoric that surrounds the issue, scientists as a group are not saying that they know what the outcome of unmitigated global warming will be. Rather, science is telling us that the possible outcomes of global warming include catastrophic risks that nations might be wise to address.

Though claims such as "global warming is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" are collapsing under the weight of evidence, the existence of global warming doesn't automatically endorse the argument for Kyoto-style solutions.

Global warming requires interdisciplinary science, and no single science describes the whole picture. A single-source solution seems unlikely.

To help untangle the global warming debate, we've broken it down to its component parts as simply as we could, with a comparison chart on Page 4D.

Take a look for yourself and decide how you frame the issues.

Additional links in the package:

• PDF of the positions comparison chart
  
• The Greenhouse Effect
• Ice Age weather
• The Great Ocean Conveyor
• Beyond the Hockey Stick
• The snows of Kilimanjaro
• Global warming theory: A timeline
• Global warming links

Don't let Inhofe off the hook

The real global warming debate ended months, if not years, ago, but as predicted previously here, the political and cultural deadenders continue to mount their spin insurgency. This morning was a particularly rotten day for science, as CNN's Miles O'Brien gave Sen. James Inhofe, R-OK, a chance to respond to the fact that even his political allies are publicly accepting the evidence* that anthropomorphic warming is taking place on a planetary level.

O'Brien's first move was to run a clip featuring James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Science. Hansen: "The human link is crystal clear. There's no question the increase from 280 to 380 ppm of CO2 is due to the burning of fossil fuel."

O'Brien to Inhofe: "So that's James Hansen. What do you say?"

Inhofe:

"I say that that's James Hansen, who is paid almost $250,000 by the Heinz Foundation, and I think he'd say almost anything you asked him to say."

Hmmm. Seems to me to suggest an immediate follow-up question:

So, Senator Inhofe, since you're paid $513,615 by oil and gas companies and electric utilities, does that mean you're just saying whatever they're telling you to say?

Well, that's what I would have asked the honorable Mr. Inhofe. Mr. O'Brien let the senator's ad hominem go unchallenged. I'm not particularly upset about that -- if you really want to prove the Inhofes of the world are fools, give them microphones -- because it can be hard to command every possible fact in an interview setting. But please: If you were going to be confronted by the Senate's leading global warming troglodyte, a man famously (and repeatedly) referred to as "Inhofe, R-Exxon," wouldn't you at least go in armed with a ballpark figure for his special-interests indebtedness?   

In a word: Eeeeeewww...

Here's a BBC headline that's sure to catch the eye, if only for the alternate ways it can be read: Victory In Dead Israeli Sperm Row.

So I read it, and it asks some interesting ethical questions, yada yada yada. But the truth is, I really can't get past the feeling that the whole situation is just vaguely... creepy. The science isn't really a big deal, but