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Hat Jumps Out of the Rabbit

So, this is a little bit insular, a little bit out-sular, in an Osmond kind-of-way, but following the green by definition can have no limits.

The Google’s purchase of the The YouTube last year is costing it over $1.6 million per day to host all those citizen-to-citizen chef d’ouvres, as the comrades say. To deliver a little byte of all that content to each of us, Google is bleeding money in many areas, including bandwidth, content acquisition (they pay the likes of Sony for some of the fancier footage), revenue share and storage costs. This just goes to say that even a seemingly genius interweb business model merger like this remains an unfinished masterpiece, at best.

But why is that? We can concieve of the logistical issues involved of hosting/serving such mass quantities of unfiltered freedom, such that it would be necessary to imagine that there must be a God in there somewhere. But where mighteth she reside? Advertising is a lousy mistress in this scenario, and most among us will not admit that we’ve moved beyond selling in the classic sense, even as our wave is queenish and perfunctory. What we absolutely do-not-under-no-circumstances-no-matter-what want to contemplate is that we’ve moved beyond buying, in any sense.

But have we? The web is a classic attention economy, whereby people use different tactics to compete for attention. But an HP study reaches an uninteresting conclusion that becomes more compelling as a kink in the genius model above.

… a study of the success of videos uploaded to YouTube suggest that quality has little affect on success and persistence seems to actually reduce it.

Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman at HP Labs in Palo Alto, studied the hit rates of some 10 million videos uploaded by 600,000 users before 30 April 2008. They classified a success as a video that is among the top 1 per cent of those viewed.

Their rather depressing finding is that “the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold.”

Hmmm. The real question should be why you might find this depressing. And that’s only a chin-scratcher if you thought the internet was going to be some ultimate breakthrough against the general tilt (of anything) toward elitism – that it would (finally) enable quality-through-lottery scenarios. I hope that reads as foolish as it sounds. This expectation may be the basic structural flaw of the entire endeavor. Whatever fateful day-after when we reconsidered what we had wished for had this been at all possible would have been a sad one indeed. I am glad to take what the HP researchers consider to be bad news to be merely a restatement of the painfully obvious: popularity no equal quality.

Interested literary agents, please write for more details.

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Running up the Score

According to Kaplan, after Robert Gates was confirmed as George W. Bush’s defense secretary in late 2006, he went around giving speeches about the reforms his successor should embrace to undertake necessary changes at the Pentagon – everything from weapons procurement to the rampant practice of hiring civilian contractors. Who knew his successor would be him.

It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk – or, in effect, to “run up the score” in a capability where the United States is already dominant – is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable.  That is a risk I will not take.

That’s from Gates’ press briefing yesterday on the 2010 defense budget. Read the list; it’s ambitious, and there will be a non-trivial amount of push back in Congress, where the bloated defense budget looks the way it looks for a reason. Look forward to all manner of scary talk about how vulnerable we will be, should we decide to throttle back on spending 10X+ more on defense (an abstract noun which has almost entirely force-projected itself beyond meaning) than the rest of the world combined.

Alas, out-sized military spending is one of the great barriers to reconfigured budgetary priorities. This is equal opposite to the so-called La Vie en Vert, and vulnerable to all manner of country-destroying rhetoric (how I hate irony so); this is the planning-for-an-eventuality we use to scare ourselves into conjure a future we wouldn’t want for anybody’s children but in which we are damned but to invest lavishly. If it is not reined in, military spending – like corrections – has the potential to eventually zero-out the budget. Then it becomes a game of what-kind-of-country-do-you-want, where an occupied (?) solar power is imagined vs. a country of free patriots under complete lockdown. All generally self-fulfilling, you might say. I guess we could say this about many things, but we’ve been reluctant to begin down the road Gates is on, though everything that is talked about and become generally recognizable as a sustainable future depends on specifically this.

At least when/if we get to planning-for-an-eventuality to conjure a different future, we’ll be used to it.

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Running up the Score

According to Kaplan, after Robert Gates was confirmed as George W. Bush’s defense secretary in late 2006, he went around giving speeches about the reforms his successor should embrace to undertake necessary changes at the Pentagon – everything from weapons procurement to the rampant practice of hiring civilian contractors. Who knew his successor would be him.

It is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk – or, in effect, to “run up the score” in a capability where the United States is already dominant – is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable.  That is a risk I will not take.

That’s from Gates’ press briefing yesterday on the 2010 defense budget. Read the list; it’s ambitious, and there will be a non-trivial amount of push back in Congress, where the bloated defense budget looks the way it looks for a reason. Look forward to all manner of scary talk about how vulnerable we will be, should we decide to throttle back on spending 10X+ more on defense (an abstract noun which has almost entirely force-projected itself beyond meaning) than the rest of the world combined.

Alas, out-sized military spending is one of the great barriers to reconfigured budgetary priorities. This is equal opposite to the so-called La Vie en Vert, and vulnerable to all manner of country-destroying rhetoric (how I hate irony so); this is the planning-for-an-eventuality we use to scare ourselves into conjure a future we wouldn’t want for anybody’s children but in which we are damned but to invest lavishly. If it is not reined in, military spending – like corrections – has the potential to eventually zero-out the budget. Then it becomes a game of what-kind-of-country-do-you-want, where an occupied (?) solar power is imagined vs. a country of free patriots under complete lockdown. All generally self-fulfilling, you might say. I guess we could say this about many things, but we’ve been reluctant to begin down the road Gates is on, though everything that is talked about and become generally recognizable as a sustainable future depends on specifically this.

At least when/if we get to planning-for-an-eventuality to conjure a different future, we’ll be used to it.

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Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions

What if there was a way to provide a limitless and environmentally friendly source for generating electricity? For a time, a handful of chemists around the world thought there was; it was called ‘cold fusion’ and its arrival turned out to be a lesson in how not to release research results.

But since this week is the twentieth anniversary of that premature announcement and the American Chemical Society is holding a national symposium called “New Energy Technology” complete with fresh results from experiments in re-branded cold fusion (now known as low-energy nuclear reactions), it might a good time to look back, even as we struggle forward.

The first report on “cold fusion,” presented in 1989 by Martin Fleishmann and Stanley Pons, was a global scientific sensation. Fusion is the energy source of the sun and the stars. Scientists had been striving for years to tap that power on Earth to produce electricity from an abundant fuel called deuterium that can be extracted from seawater. Everyone thought that it would require a sophisticated new genre of nuclear reactors able to withstand temperatures of tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

Pons and Fleishmann, however, claimed achieving nuclear fusion at comparatively “cold” room temperatures — in a simple tabletop laboratory device termed an electrolytic cell.

But other scientists could not reproduce their results, and the whole field of research declined.

Umm… so close, and yet I guess it’s good to know that some chemists haven’t given up on this elusive solution, quite the contrary. I guess when you spend most of your adult lifetime thinking about something wonderful and it just doesn’t work, no matter how logical it seems, I guess you’re powerless to convince yourself to give up on it.

Okay… if you were not made uncomfortable with the direction of that last statement, I politely suggest that you are spending too much time in front of the screen with the blue glow.

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When Dashing was an Adjective

And until it is again. Someone reminded me of how many times per day we get into our cars to complete singular errands, multiple trips out and back; performed so quickly, even with great frequency, these trips have an implied efficiency about them – and what our ability to perform them says about us. All the while, we directly refer to these efforts as ‘running’ out. Without unpacking the load of obvious parallels, this is perhaps a semantic point we can leave until later.

But, the fact remains: we are wedded to an ability to make invisible and necessary an extremely wasteful method of performing necessary tasks.

With ‘taking longer’ identified as the real enemy, with a number of very explicit exceptions of course, we set about to shorten everything, supposedly whittling the fat down to essentials. Now we are not just running out quickly, but getting it all done (even if it takes multiple trips), introducing an, again supposed, tertiary efficiency to our moving about. All the while adding to copious amounts of wasted effort, time and brain power, creating unneeded effluents and emissions and depleting the resources much of our running around would be meant, in a more excellent world, to conserve.

Today’s question: will we be able to take any advantage of the many devices and methods we have contrived to save us time before the ability to power, control and organize them runs out*? We are approaching a point of diminishing returns that may begin to appear strikingly similar to what we are actually doing – as this happens, will we lose the ability to make distinctions between the two? If we begin not be able to recognize the certain things that are happening (as we warn ourselves against these, citing worst case scenarios that may already be underway), then what?

*As a clarification, I’m not talking about any end times fainting-couch hysterics, but merely the banal impossibilities inferred by an ill-matching task/skill set like… trying to use technology to fall in love.

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Flowr powr

Not that kind, but it will be increasingly important to sidestep the common stereotypes that have barnacled themselves to the various ‘isms’ promoting the environment, marginalizing its proponents as merely dirty hippies, hopeless and idealistic, man.

One of the cognitive leaps, and there will be a few, about embracing a new energy future is imagining what that future will be like and getting familiar with yourself and your surroundings within such a mental space. Then the climb down in consumption likely begins to seem more natural and preferred rather than punitive and lesser. Much as we self-identify with our cars now, you have to become one with several ideas, including but not limited to input problems related to carbon emissions and recognizing that the energy issues must cease to be framed by thinking that fossil fuel is energy rather than a material substance that has chemical energy.

How might we go about this? Maybe one of the places to make inroads on both counts is video games. This flies in the face of my own instincts, which is why I’m offering it up so deliberately, to both show and try to tell why this might work, in some small way. Because both issues referred to above are psychological, we seem to want to understand them less than we might be able, settling for merely what we know. It’s the crucial under-performance at which we excel. Present company emphasized.

So this game company, actually that game company, came up with this concept, and part of their description stuck out at me.

The game exploits the tension between urban bustle and natural serenity. Players accumulate flower petals as the onscreen world swings between the pastoral and the chaotic. Like in the real world, everything you pick up causes the environment to change (emphasis added). And hopefully by the end of the journey, you change a little as well.

So… I don’t know, and am willing to stand corrected. But I think that’s part of it.

Via.

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I ask you:

Is this a parody?

I myself believe in the sanctity of life. But the market has its own logic, and if we’re going to live with it, we must make the most of its choices.

…

An extreme case in point would be the Green Revolution, the introduction of modern technology in Third World agriculture in the 60s and 70s. Just for the sake of illustration, let’s give momentary credence to the most pessimistic figures and suppose that between 1970 and 1990, the number of hungry folks in the world excluding China did grow by 11%, and that the Green Revolution had something to do with it. Let’s even throw Bhopal into the mix, since the factory there made components for pesticides.

Would this be acceptable risk from our viewpoint? The answer is clear when you notice, on the one hand, that the Green Revolution was essential to modern agribusiness, being its most profitable experiment ever; and that, like climate change and other huge trends, the Green Revolution belongs to a type of risk case in which scientists do not all agree on the source of problems caused, or whether they even exist. Unless the precautionary principle comes to dominate government once again, there is little actual risk in such cases–especially interesting now at the dawn of the new “Green Revolution.”

Thanks, Andy. I think.

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Wanted:

Director of Creation (new position – salary neg.)

Experience with multiversal systems generation preferred but not required. Management and coordination of poorly understood direction and leadership in accordance with ill-defined goals and objectives of the organization to safeguard and grow the assets of the organization for future generations or until such time as original systems expire.

The Director of Creation (DC) is invested with broad responsibilities and authority. Portions of these may be occasionally delegated though not the overall responsibility for the sustainability and profitability of the enterprise. Hands-off approach favored by many stakeholders; direct interventionist line by still others. Ability to tread lines between the two a must. Evidence for existence/non-existence must be salutary and mutually self-refuting.

Stakeholders: Time. Space. Matter. Shifting array of personnel with varied attributes including but not limited to cognition, lifespans, opposable digits and other physical capabilities.

Key Competencies: Simultaneous demonstration of passion, enthusiasm and indifference. Imagination, thick skin, flexible construction parameters of embedded design evolution, with the ability to authorize destruction and/or extinction of poorly performing entities. Ability to provide for deprivation means-testing of sample populations based on populations’ abilities to perceive and mimic key competencies of the DC. Maintain a healthy balance between multiple dimensions, obvious solutions within reach and absolute breaches of DC protocol. Direct interaction with personnel definitively prohibited though solicited without cease.

Benefits Package: Poorly defined though perceived to be significant.

Apply Within.