Filed under: Amazon, Civil Rights, Climate Change, Connections, Constitution, Emergency, Failure, Feedback, Gardening, General Musings, Global Warming, Government, Kindle, Marketing, NPR, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Travel, Violence | Tags: Amazon, banking, blogging, climate change, direct publishing, drought, finance, gardening, Italy, jim downey, Kindle, literature, NPR, politics, predictions, Rome, science, Science Fiction, technology, travel
In about 47 hours I’ll be on the shuttle to the airport.
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There was a news item I saw the other day which indicates that this year’s extreme temperature records are starting to convince more Americans that global climate change is real.
Every summer it seems like a different kind of out-of-control weather pattern decides to strike. In the past month alone, we’ve experienced deadly Colorado wildfires, early-season heat waves and a wind-whipping hurricane, convincing formerly dubious Americans that climate change is actually real, according to the Associated Press.
“Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told the AP.
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Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said he was “dead wrong” when he dismissed media reports over trading in the bank’s chief investment office two months ago as “a complete tempest in a teapot.”
“When I made that statement I was dead wrong,” Dimon said in his Senate Banking Committee hearing on Wednesday, pointing the finger at the former chief investment office head Ina Drew, who Dimon said assured him that “this was an isolated small issue and that it wasn’t a big problem.”
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Dimon abruptly disclosed last month that JPMorgan has suffered at least $2 billion of trading losses in a few weeks. The estimate of the trading losses has since increased to $3 billion and maybe more, although Dimon reiterated in Washington that he expects the bank’s second quarter to be solidly profitable and suggested the losses are under control.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Investors are gearing up for a week full of earnings reports and domestic news, but Europe will once again be hard for U.S. investors to ignore.
Dozens of companies are set to kick off earnings season this week. All eyes will turn to JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) on Friday, as the company will post its trading losses tied to its bad hedge from its London unit.
Some estimate that the loss could be as high as $9 billion, though the bank’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, said back in May that the loss then stood at $2 billion.
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My garden is about fifty paces behind our house, in a lovely large & open area. There are large trees closer to the house, but nothing back further, so it gets plenty of sun. Decades before we moved in my (to-be) father-in-law maintained a large truck garden there. He had a good eye for the spot.
Every three days for the last few weeks I make multiple trips out to the garden, swapping the feed on the soaker hoses. Each hose is laid out to water two clusters of plants. And I run each one for about 20 minutes. This whole process takes two hours.
Today, as I walked out to the garden, for the first time I noticed the crunch of dry grass underfoot. I had been watching as the lawn slowly turned increasingly brown, but this was the first time I noticed the actual sound of the grass breaking underfoot.
91% of Missouri is now under what is officially described as either “extreme” or “severe” drought conditions.
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The biggest scandal in the world right now has nothing to do with sex or celebrities. It’s about an interest rate called LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offered Rate.
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LIBOR, as it turns out, is the rate at which banks lend to each other. And more importantly, it has become the global benchmark for lending.
Banks look at it every day to figure out what they should charge you for not just home loans, but car loans, commercial loans, credit cards. LIBOR ends up almost everywhere.
Gillian Tett, an editor with the Financial Times, says that $350 trillion worth of contracts have been made that refer to LIBOR.
So literally hundreds of trillions of dollars around the world, all these deals, are based on this number. Now we find out this number might be a lie. At least one bank was tampering with that number for their own profit.
This past week Barclay’s Bank was fined $455 million, and two senior executives (the chairman and the CEO) resigned as investigation into the scandal started to turn up evidence of the scope of the market-rigging. But many people familiar with the industry say that this is just the tip of the iceberg — that there will likely be a number of other multi-national banks proven to have participated.
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Climate change? Climate change.
Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change
Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature index, 1880 to present, with the base period 1951-1980. The dotted black line is the annual mean and the solid red line is the five-year mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates. [This is an update of Fig. 1A in Hansen et al. (2006).]
Figure also available as PDF, or Postscript. Also available are tabular data.
(I don’t put up with climate change denial here. Take it to your own blog.)
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Leaders shape the frame of argument. They delineate the forms of dissent and opposition. They define, both by what they say and by what they fail to rule out, whether we have a small “r” republican approach to government, or rule by the manipulators of the manipulated mob. When they stay silent they are the cowards of the headline, passive bystanders as their followers betray the basic principles of (small “d”) democratic politics.
Greece is a good place from which to think about this. You don’t have to go back to Agamemnon or to Plato; living memory—the civil war, the colonels, very recent memory indeed offer regular reminders of the fragility of government by consent of the governed. Words matter here, and have for millennia.
So it is in this place, with that history in mind, that I am reminded once again that the habit of dismissing crap like that spewed by Nicholson and Davis as wingnuts being wingnuts is not acceptable. The speakers themselves may not count for much, but for a nominally civil society to allow such speech to pass without massive retaliation, actual leadership from those who would lead from that side…well, that’s how individuals get hurt, and democracies die. It’s happened before, not many miles from where I sit as I write this.
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In about 47 hours I’ll be on the shuttle to the airport.
Of course, I don’t have everything done which needs to be done. And I really shouldn’t have taken the time to put together such a long and wide-ranging post.
But I wanted to take a moment and thank those who bought books yesterday. It may have been prompted by yesterday’s blog entry, it may not — I have no way of knowing. But thank you. It wasn’t a big day for sales, but it was a nice bump up from the single sale the day before.
I won’t be traveling to Greece, but to Rome. And it won’t surprise me if I find a new perspective or two while I’m there. I’m hoping that the change will allow me to integrate some of the many things I have been thinking about concerning the next book.
Things like spontaneous combustion. It seems that the world is ripe for it.
Again.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Government, Politics, Preparedness, Religion, Science, Society
From landing on the moon, to sequencing the human genome, to inventing the Internet, America has been the first to cross that new frontier because we had leaders who paved the way: leaders like President Kennedy, who inspired us to push the boundaries of the known world and achieve the impossible; leaders who not only invested in our scientists, but who respected the integrity of the scientific process.
Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources – it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it’s inconvenient – especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States – and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.
That’s President-elect Obama, in his weekly radio address this morning, announcing his top science advisors.
Compare that to the mindset we’ve put up with from the Bush administration, the latest round of which was announced yesterday:
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration announced its “conscience protection” rule for the health-care industry Thursday, giving everyone from doctors and hospitals to receptionists and volunteers in medical experiments the right to refuse to participate in medical care they find morally objectionable.
“This rule protects the right of medical providers to care for their patients in accord with their conscience,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt.
The right-to-refuse rule includes abortion, but Leavitt’s office said it extends to other aspects of health care where moral concerns could arise, including birth control, emergency contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research or assisted suicide.
Science hasn’t been a priority for the last eight years – conforming to ideological and religious demands has been. That may be a good way to make your political base happy, but it sure as hell is a bad way to deal with the problems we face as a nation and a planet.
Even with the misgivings I may feel about the prospect of an Obama administration, this is a very welcome breath of fresh air. We’ve got real problems facing us, and for once in a long while it feels to me like we have adults back in charge of dealing with them.
Jim Downey
Cross-posted to UTI.
Ever stand on the bank of a stream and watch a submerged stick oscillate up and down? Or maybe seen something similar happen when you were fishing, and a cork/bobber got pulled underwater, the way it will swing back and forth?
That’s vortex induced vibration. And it is a real problem for all kinds of engineering disciplines – just about any real world application which involves a fluid (or a gas, or even a plasma I suppose).
It could also be the thing which saves us from a carbon-based energy nightmare. Vortex Hydro Energy is a new technology which could supply clean, renewable energy. Professor Michael M. Bernitsas at the University of Michigan has helped pioneer this system. From his University profile:
Current Energy Conversion: Invented, designed, and model-tested for the VIVACE http://www.vortexhydroenergy.com/ (Vortex Induced Vibration Aquatic Clean Energy) energy converter (patent pending UofM#2973). VIVACE is an ocean/river current energy converter based on the idea of enhancing rather than spoiling vortex shedding, increasing rather than suppressing VIV under high damping, and harnessing rather than mitigating VIV energy. VIV was first observed by Leonardo daVinci in 1504AD in the form of “Aeolian Tones”. Since then, engineers have been trying to suppress VIV which damage aero, civil, mechanical, marine, offshore, nuclear engineering structures. The VIVACE Converter takes this destructive force in nature and utilizes for the benefit of mankind. The VIVACE Converter is designed to be in high damping VIV ? thus extracting energy at high efficiency – over the range of current velocity that is of practical interest: 0.25-2.5m/sec (0.5-5.0knots) [79-80]. Testing of the VIVACE Converter in the Low Turbulence Free Surface Water Channel of Ocean Renewable Energy Laboratory at the University of Michigan for high damping resulted in a power harnessing rate of PVIVACE=0.22pwDLU3 for current velocity of only 0.840m/sec (1.63 knots) [80-82].
News of this just broke, and the research is still very much in its early stages. So there is still a lot to be done to assess the potential power generation as well as the downsides of applying the technology. It is likely that placement of the VIVACE system would be critical, so as not to disrupt environmental conditions necessary to the maintenance of a healthy planet. But it strikes me as a potentially elegant solution to the problem of safe power generation with minimal environmental impact, and would avoid many of the issues that such technologies as wind power have.
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
(Via dKos. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Climate Change, Cory Doctorow, Emergency, Flu, General Musings, Global Warming, Government, Heinlein, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Tor.com, Weather, Writing stuff
Via BoingBoing, an interesting discussion over on Tor.com: The Dystopic Earths of Heinlein’s Juveniles. An excerpt:
It’s funny how it’s overpopulation and political unpleasantness that cause the problems, never ecological disaster. Maybe that wasn’t on the horizon at all in the fifties and early sixties? I suppose every age has its own disaster story. It’s nice how little they worry about nuclear war too, except in Space Cadet which is all nuclear threat, Venusians and pancakes. They don’t make them like that any more. Come to think it’s probably just as well.
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No individual one of these would be particularly noticeable, especially as they’re just background, but sitting here adding them up doesn’t make a pretty picture. What’s with all these dystopias? How is it that we don’t see them that way? Is it really that the message is all about “Earth sucks, better get into space fast”? And if so, is that really a sensible message to be giving young people? Did Heinlein really mean it? And did we really buy into it?
Yeah, he meant it. And further, he was right.
No, I’m not really calling into question the premise of the piece – that Heinlein had something of a bias about population and governmental control. And I’m not saying that he was entirely correct in either his politics or his vision of the future.
But consider the biggest threat facing us: No, not Paris Hilton’s involvement in the presidential election, though a legitimate case can be made that this is indeed an indication of the end of the world. Rather, I mean global warming.
And why do we have global warming? Because of the environmental impact of human civilization. And why is this impact significant? Because of the size of the human population on this planet.
And what is the likely response to the coming changes? Increased governmental control.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
For Communion of Dreams I killed off a significant portion of the human race as part of the ‘back story’. Why? Well, it served my purposes for the story. But also because I think that one way or another, we need to understand and accept that the size of our population is a major factor in all the other problems we face. Whether it is limitations caused by peak oil or some other resource running out, or the impact of ‘carbon footprints’, or urban sprawl, or food shortages, all of these problems have one common element: population pressure. We have too many people consuming too many resources and generating too much pollution. In fact, when I once again turn my writing the prequel to Communion, I may very well make this connection more explicit, and have the motivation of the people responsible for the fireflu based on this understanding.
So yeah, Heinlein was right. He may not have spelled out the end result (ecological disaster) per se, but he understood the dynamic at work, and what it would lead to. Just because things haven’t gotten as bad as they can get doesn’t mean that we’re not headed that direction. Our technology can only compensate for so long – already we see things breaking down at the margins, and the long term problems are very real. You can call it ‘dystopic’, but I’ll just call it our future.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Climate Change, Global Warming, Health, Hospice, Predictions, Science, Society
Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet’s geologic history has begun.
Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene. Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch:
- Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns.
- Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature.
- Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns.
- Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain.
The idea, first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, has gained steam with two new scientific papers that call for official recognition of the shift.
There’s more, basically explaining how the shift from the Holocene can be established. Worth reading.
I may post more later, but am fighting a bit of a sore throat thing that has my energy reduced. Brief update on my MIL: hospice nurse was in this morning to bring us meds and do a check up, and it is clear that my MIL is losing ground. We’ve stepped up her duragesic dosage again, to make sure that she stays comfortable, and Lisa (the nurse) went over some other things we can do if she gets into difficulty. We’re just taking things on an hour-to-hour basis.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Climate Change, Global Warming, Google, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech
I, and just about every other SF writer out there who has written about the near-term future (let’s say the next 50 years), have to some degree based our future on a so-called “hydrogen economy,” wherein hydrogen fuel has replaced fossil fuel for most of our energy needs. I don’t make a big deal of it in Communion of Dreams, but that was my basic assumption, and there are references in the text which show this.
Well, the future just got a little closer.
CHICAGO (AFP) – US researchers have developed a method of producing hydrogen gas from biodegradable organic material, potentially providing an abundant source of this clean-burning fuel, according to a study released Monday.
The technology offers a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water.
Numerous public transportation systems are moving toward hydrogen-powered engines as an alternative to gasoline, but most hydrogen today is generated from nonrenewable fossil fuels such as natural gas.
There’s been a lot of hype about hydrogen – a quick Google search of “hydrogen fuel” will kick up about 1.4 million hits. A lot of the predictions made about the use of hydrogen have been overly optimistic, since there are real technical problems still to overcome for it to be put into widespread use. But this is a big step forward – news which should make everyone concerned about global warming or climate change or just ‘peak oil’ happy.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 