Hoy mañana tuve que ir a Seul, a la embajada estadounidense para intentar arreglar la cuestión del papeleo de mi visa.
La foto muestra la gran avenida que está directamente en frente de la embajada imperial. A veces cuando me meto en el metro, llevo un pequeño libro que encontré en una librería en Minnesota, que es una versión en español del segundo libro de la serie marciana de Edgar Rice Burroughs: Los dioses de marte. Me gusta leer el libro en el metro porque tiene apariencia de algun librito devocional, y no pinta de ciencia ficción.
En el libro leí estas palabras de la princesa Faidor, hija de Matai Shang: “Pues si los hombres pueden comer carne de animales, los dioses pueden comer carne de hombres. Los Sagrados Therns son los dioses de Barsoom.”
Bien, la teofagia es la práctica de comer dioses (digamos, simbólicamente, por ejemplo en el eucaristo cristiano). Pero parece algo interesante y raro la idea de dioses antropófagos, ¿no?
Category: Science & SciFi
Caveat: Carbon Amortization
I was reading an article about Priuses in the New York Times (online) that caused me to think, once again, about something I find very troubling about all the discussion of reducing the carbon footprints of the automobiles we drive, about legislating improved mileage and/or offering incentives to buyers of lower-carbon-footprint cars. And it is this: what about the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process? What about other environmental impacts of new cars? Bear with me, while I try to think this through.
Suppose I have a Hummer. It’s a nice, ecologically disastrous beast, with a very high carbon footprint, that I bought in a solipsistic moment some years back. I don’t know enough to actually assign a meaningful number to its day-to-day carbon footprint, but lets say its daily value is “10.” So, one morning, after a long talk with some friends, I wake up feeling guilty, and decide to buy a Prius. So I buy the Prius – and lets say, for the sake of argument, that its daily carbon footprint is “2” – i.e. it puts out 20% of the ongoing emissions as the Hummer.
But what was the carbon footprint of manufacturing the Prius? Is it unreasonable to imagine it might be some rather large number compared to the daily value? I mean, just the delivery from manufacturer to dealer is going to be some largish multiple of the daily footprint, e.g. 20 or 50, right? There’s steel, engine, tire manufacturing. And farther back, there’s high-paid executives and designing engineers at Toyota and their contractors, sitting in air-conditioned offices over years, making the Prius a reality. ALL of that is part of the vehicle’s carbon footprint. Is it unreasonable to imagine that the carbon footprint of the creation of that new Prius might not be, say, in the 1000’s? 10,000’s? What if I go out on a limb, and guess, say, 8000 “units”?
The consequence is as follows: I’m reducing my personal carbon footprint, by switching from Hummer to Prius, by 8 units per day. But the Prius’ manufacture entailed a footprint of 8000. So, that means I will have to own the Prius for 1000 days before I “break even” in terms of carbon footprint. That’s almost 3 years! Wouldn’t it be better for the environment to urge people to KEEP their current cars longer, rather than switch out to lower-footprint vehicles? This would be true regardless of the type of vehicle they currently own.
And I understand very well, I just pulled these numbers out of a hat, and the analysis could be extremely mistaken. But what I wonder about, is why don’t you ever see anyone doing this kind of analysis, in the media? And there are other issues – the Prius has a contingent of non-carbon-related environmental issues, around its high-tech manufacturing processes, and its massive array of batteries – these are not in any way resolved. What about battery disposal? What about the toxics involved in battery and plastics manufacture?
I cannot argue that in terms of real, long-term life-of-product carbon footprint, my father’s 1928 Ford Model A is lower than almost anything else on the road (or, er, in storage, at the moment), because of its under 20 mpg and “dirty” exhaust. But it nevertheless represents maximizing the utility of the manufactured object vis-a-vis its intended purpose. The carbon footprint of the car’s manufacture has amortized for 80 years now! Meanwhile, that self-righteous bastard driving the 2008 Prius, which replaced his 2005 Corolla, which replaced his 2000 VW, which replaced his 1992 Chevy, etc., etc., has left a landscape strewn with massive-manufacturing-footprint disposed-of vehicles. If he had kept each of his earlier vehicles for three or four years longer than he did, and avoided the Prius completely, he’d probably do more to reduce his carbon footprint than a lifetime’s worth of Prius driving.
I’m going to call this problem the problem of “carbon amortization.”
Below, is a picture of my mom, my sister, and me, with the family car, somewhere in Oregon, 1970.
My father still has this car. He hasn’t had it running in a few years, due to financial constraints, but I know he intends to drive it many more miles – as do I.
Caveat: The Ironies of Theoretical Physics
I'm reading a book by Lee Smolin, entitled The Trouble with Physics. It's an interesting book – one of those layman's accounts of all kinds of weird and interesting things about what's going these days in the world of theoretical physics. A "popularization" I guess it's called. Partially, it's a rant (though a largely courteous one) against the domination of string theorists in the current world of physics academia.
Anyway, I re-learned something I remember learning before, and for some reason it struck me as incredibly funny. The graviton (an as yet not-well-documented fundamental particle which is the "carrier" particle of gravitational force, much as a photon is a "carrier" for electromagnetism) is a necessarily massless particle. That's right – the graviton is massless. Isn't that… funny?
Caveat: The Quest for the Google-Killer
In the world of internet search technologies, there has arisen a trend where people are constantly looking for the "google-killer" – the "next big thing" in search algorithms or interfaces that will finally vanquish google's market dominance. There are problems with this quest, that render it somewhat unpredictable if not quixotic: first of all, google is a moving target, meaning they are constantly innovating their algorithms and methodologies behind the scenes; second, google, like many other large technology companies, has realized that brand-image is king, and as such, that marketing and design trump genuine innovation and genius (in this, they've learned well from Applecorp).
The technological problem of finding a better "search engine" is daunting, as we are right at the borders of AI (artificial intelligence). Thus, the next step seems to require real breakthroughs in natural-language- (and/or web-meta-language-) processing and interpretation. So-called "semantic webs" come into play – and somebody has to build these huge semantic databases, "tag" them appropriately (i.e. figure out how to automate the "tagging" process), and then spider through them effectively and rapidly.
A recent offering seems to go in the right direction: powerset.com. Right now, it's limited to a small, largely well-formed subset of the World Wide Web – namely, my own favorite haunts at wikipedia. But its ability to make sense of my "natural English" questions and find appropriate articles is pretty amazing. Try it out.
I'm listening to Jason Bentley on KCRW – he's playing The Black Ghosts' "Here It Comes Again." Great track… Jason Bentley rules.
Quote.
"I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." – President U.S. Grant, on the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, in which he served as a decorated junior officer.
Caveat: Where to Go When You Visit Alioth
Alioth is a star in the big dipper, also called Epsilon Ursae Majoris, and one of the 50 brightest star in the night sky. Apparently, someone has managed to create a rough "map" of this star – meaning of its surface, I guess – despite the fact that it is more than 80 light years distant from Earth. This is possible because of the peculiar fact that the star's strong magnetic field's poles are at 90 degrees to its axis of rotation, meaning that the magnetic pole and the distortions it causes in the spectral make up of the star's surface swing past the Earth's vantage point with the interval of the star's spin. This allows astronomers to create a map of the different elements that compose the star's surface (which is irregular partly due to the strong magnetic field), as they swing past their viewpoint.
I like the idea that we can make a map of something so far away, just based on deductions from viewing the spectral lines. And once we have a map of something, we can write a tour guide, and tourists can't be far behind, right? Let's all go to Alioth for the summer!
Caveat: The Mexican Space Program
Both chambers of the Mexican congress have approved initial versions of a law which will create, for the second time in history, a Mexican space program, under the title Agencia Espacial Mexicana (with the unintuitive acronym AEXA – probably chosen more because it looks cool than because it makes any sense at all). I say "second time in history" because few people realize that the Mexicans actually had a space program in the mid-sixties, including rocket launches and collaboration with work by NASA during the same period, that was actually at least mildly significant.
I don't know why I find this fascinating. Part of the reason is that, as part of a running joke about "good names for rock bands" with some friends many years ago, one of the most popular ideas for a name for a rock band was "The Mexican Space Program" – perhaps because it goes against cultural stereotypes, and inevitably conjures images of some vato-ized low-rider space shuttle or maybe a burro in a space suit and a meal of freeze-dried tacos.
But I've also been fascinated because Mexico, as the one of the most "developed" of the developing-world nations, and as a significantly sized nation in terms of GDP and population, deserves one, and it has been one of the few mid-wealth nations in the world not to have one in recent times (compare Brazil or India – or Korea, for that matter – all of which have space programs, if not terribly ambitious ones).
Other thoughts…
Sometimes I feel as if I'm getting to be a first-hand witness of a major generational shift here in Korea. Without exception, my students come from basically middle-class, suburban families cast in a "1950's America" mold: father works, mom stays home, 2.1 children.
Yet as I interview my students and ask them about their interests and ambitions, I get some startling answers: boys who want to be sushi chefs, graphic artists and lounge singers rather than the typical businessmen or engineers, and girls who energetically discuss their plans to be police officers, chemical engineers, politicians, dentists and even one who told me confidently that she intended to be a world-traveling "free spirit" (not quite sure where she picked up that phrase, though I suspect I must have given it to them at some point).
The young of any generation exhibit more ambition than they ever live up to, of course. That's human nature. But I find it fascinating that I am getting to participate in my very tiny way in what will be the first generation of Koreans who are growing up in a world where men and women are no longer so constrained to traditional roles, and where anything if possible, at least in their dreams.
Caveat: A lot of monkeys…
… does not a masterpiece create. At least not using typewriters. As physicist Seth Lloyd explains: "No matter how far into Hamlet a monkey may get, its next keystroke is likely to be a mistake." But then he goes on to explain that if you assume the monkeys are typing on programmable computers, they very well might come up with Hamlet. This is a counterintuitive distinction, but it gets at the heart of his thesis, which is that the universe's complexity is a consequence of its underlying programmaticity (I made that word up, not him).
Caveat: qubits
I'm reading a book I bought by someone named Seth Lloyd, a physicist, about quantum computing. I'm trying to figure it out, but I can't, for the life of me. It's profoundly counter-intuitive. I'll let you know if I make sense of it.
I'm not very happy about xmas. I generally don't care much about it… but I'm feeling rather isolated, I confess. Well, I'm not here to moan about it. But it's been a kind of gloomy day.
Caveat: More Nonsense, or Immanent Cybersoul?
In other news: I found a blog that is stunningly bizarre. Go take a look at it. I dare you. [Update: the link is dead. The strange blog has disappeared. Which supports the spam theory, below.]
OK then. I’d like to hope that it is some kind of strange inside joke. Or the product of a random text generator of some kind, like that Kant engine I found some time back (see my blog entry from 2006.05.02). Or, at the least, I hope it is the output of some weird automated translation engine, from some profoundly syntactically un-English language.
Actually, I think it must be the output of some kind of automated, text-spewing tool: a database-driven textual abstraction engine of some kind? a spider-phisher (meaning a tool for attracting the attention of automated internet indexers, such as Google)?
But part of me enjoys imagining that there is a real, human author of the blog, who is actually sharing the poorly edited contents of his/her actual brain. I mean… what a remarkably strange brain that must be, to be inside of!
Actually, another thought occurs to me: this is an emergent symptom of a new, global, incipient cybersubconscious. Immanent (imminent?) oversoul of humankind. I’m sure some of you will be quite skeptical… but let’s think about it.
The internet today is an almost unmeasurably large text. Borges’s infinite library, maybe. But it is not just a passive text, sitting there for all of us internet-connected readers to read. It is also inhabited by a seething, swarming plethora of text-reading and text-generating machines (e.g. google-spiders and spambots, respectively). A vast ecosystem of predators and prey, living and dying, battling and fortifying, all in a text-based universe. The word made virtual flesh, but not incarnate. There be dragons.
So it is an unmeasurably large text in constant dialogue with itself – if not particularly self-aware dialogue, if not particularly meaningful dialogue, it is nevertheless a huge babbling demon. A giant idiotic infinitely schizophrenic mind. Grendel ruminates incoherently in his deep. The internet becomes humanity collectively dreaming.
Caveat: Emotionally Attached to your Roomba
I was listening to the radio (a Canadian radio show called "As It Happens"), and heard about people who become emotionally attached to their Roombas. A Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner – you put it into a room, and it navigates around using a low-level artificial intelligence, and vacuums the floors. These Roombaphiles name them, attribute to them a gender, give them little bits of clothing (some kind of cover), and have even taken them on road trips. A woman interviewed had named her 3 Roombas Nigel, Basil and Clyde. The question arises: is it possible to love a Roomba too much?
Maybe I need a Roomba? To be my friend?
Caveat: Development and Sustainability
From the standpoint of economic development, South Korea is the miracle of miracles. In 1955, it was one of the poorest countries in the entire world. Poorer than almost anywhere than Africa, it was utterly devastated by 50 years of brutal Japanese colonialism and war. Fifty years later, it is, by many indices, part of the “first world” – or even ahead of most. And unlike other postwar miracle economies such as Japan or Germany after the war, it didn’t have the same kind of Marshall plan for rebuilding, nor did it have solid prewar economic/cultural habits to build on.
Even compared to 15 years ago, when I was here while stationed in the Army, the country has changed so much. In 1991, Korea reminded me a great deal of Mexico in many ways, when thinking about the level of economic development and the patterns of economic behavior. Yet now, such a short time later, though there are still traces of that older Korea, the country has seemingly levitated directly into the post-industrial condition, with the proliferation of consumerism and electronics and bourgeois lifestyle.
So the dark side: we read a great deal, these days, about the fact that if all the world lived at “first world” levels of consumption, it would be utterly unsustainable with respect to what the would can support. And I think, well, it’s great that Korea has managed to leap into the developed world the way that it has, but is this the right path? Is this the way China and India are trying to go? Wouldn’t the world be better off, ecologically, if Korea, China, and India were more Mexican? Meaning, of course: if these countries were more notably incompetent when it comes questions of development? For that matter, wouldn’t Mexicanizing (or better yet, Congoizing?) the US or Europe or Japan ultimately help the planetary environment? What about the human costs?
Robinson Jeffers, way back in the 1930’s, commented on apparent conflict between respect for the natural environment, on the one hand, and respect for human dignity, on the other. That there was somehow a kind of “either/or” proposition. And he propounded and extolled what he called “inhumanism” – meaning he voted against human dignity, in favor of “god” and the natural world. His poem, “Carmel Point.”
But I think about a comment, I think it was McLuhan (or maybe David Brin?!), on the other hand, who said something to the effect that ours was the first “adolescent” civilization. And I would add that adolescence is a time for making mistakes – e.g. vast wars of genocide, irresponsible arms races, environmental holocaust. Not all adolescents survive to adulthood. Especially orphans, which our “adolescent” civilization would best be characterized as, since, but for god – our imaginary father who art in heaven – we are indeed quite alone.
Or are we? “Mother Earth” is right there, all along, but, like adolescents throughout history, we choose to pretend we’re an orphan because it’s more exciting, more romantic, makes for a more compelling narrative?
The absent, uninterested, fictionalized father… the never-acknowledged-because-neurotic mother – we keep her locked in a closet, denying she might offer wisdom. Or…
OK… maybe all this consumerism/consumptionism is a variety of adolescent “acting out” – a passing phase on the road to a responsible adulthood. Certainly it has always struck me that it is only societies that reach a certain very high level of wasteful consumption that are capable of beginning to become conscious of environmental issues. Suddenly South Koreans “care” about the environment – good luck finding Mexicans (aside from the small middle class) who feel that way. What translates this “caring” into responsible social action, and transforms that into sustainability?
I’m optimistic. Weirdly. I think of someone learning a new skill… say, a martial art that, when practiced maturely is graceful and beautiful but, for the beginner, is a jumble of unlikely motions and clumsy flinging about. Our global civilization is still a clumsy adolescent. Making mistakes and being unacceptably selfish. But it’s a passing phase. Perhaps it will grow into a stunningly beautiful young adult.