Too Big to Know? So What?

The other day someone pointed out an article for me by David Weinberger which appeared in The Atlantic, plugging his new book Too Big to Know. It was a strangely breathless article, but I'm not sure that Weinberger's point is a very interesting one. Essentially, he seems to be saying that we have been developing data sets that are so vast they are beyond what people - with our limited brains and short life-spans - can possibly analyse and understand without the aid of computers. What's more, when we let our computers loose on these huge data sets, the derivation of any new knowledge they come up with (usually by running computer models or simulations on the data) is not accessible to us. To understand why the weather bureau's model predicts a 40% chance of rain in South-East England today would take teams of humans years to calculate by hand using the same rules and the same data. To all intents and purposes, these models might as well be black boxes. Worse than this, there are programs that can derive new mathematical and physical laws and relationships - new knowledge whose creation is forever shrouded in mystery because the cost of understanding how it was discovered is astronomically high for unaided humans. 

While some gasp at the epistemological implications right along with Weinberger, my own reaction is one of puzzlement. After all, isn't this and hasn't it always been how nearly all knowledge comes to us?

At one level, we have been hugely successful at seeing the underlying patterns of the world, without the aid of computers - General and Special Relativity, and the Standard Model reduce everything to a handful of very simple equations and constants. On another level, we have the complexity of chemistry, biology, fluid dynamics, and so on, which, while following the rules of basic physics, have lots of interacting parts that we can only model statistically. That the predictions of some of these statistical models can only be made if they are based on huge data sets and worked out by big, fast computers, doesn't fill me with the same kind of trepidation with which it seems to fill Weinberger. Even the fact that the predictions of many such models are acutely sensitive to their initial conditions is hardly cause for concern (unless you're planning a camping trip and need an accurate weather report).

It's true that the models themselves can be generated or learned by second-order systems and that we do not necessarily have any meaningful way of knowing how they work (something researchers in neural networks have been grappling with for several decades already). But that isn't a particular cause for anxiety either. Such models are in principle analysable, if we should ever want to do that (which, I suggest, removes any hint of scariness). Generally, it is not important to know how a model does its job, as long as we are confident about how it was constructed and have verified its behaviour against the data. If we want to verify their outputs or increase our confidence in what the models are doing, we can always set up a second, third, or nth model to cross-check the first or poll their outputs. (Weather models tend to be run over and over and their results combined, for instance.) The thing is, these models tend to be of systems that do not have the scientific significance of E=mc^2, although they may have ample practical significance for campers and drug companies. 

I used to work in artificial intelligence and I made a particular study of a field called "argumentation". It's all about how and why we find arguments convincing - like a modern Rhetoric. The early pioneers of expert systems understood well the issue this article raises. If you run a system with more than a handful of rules, it quickly gets to the point where you can no longer understand or predict the outputs - not without a disproportionately huge effort to delve into the workings. So they tried to devise schemes for expert system to explain their own reasoning (which boiled down to traces of rule activation - presented with varying degrees of clarity). I worked on some particularly massive rule-based systems and I can attest to the fact that presenting a conclusion is not enough - people need more - but presenting the machine's reasoning is a very difficult task.

However, I believe it is doable. People just haven't put much work into it yet.

There is an example of a massively parallel supercomputer of immense power but which is virtually a black box as far as the question of how it reached its outputs are concerned. In fact there are many such examples. One of the best was Albert Einstein. This processor came up with some astonishing physical laws by a process that nobody understands even a hundred years after they were derived. However, the Einstein processor was able to explain its reasoning and the derivation of its laws in a way that satisfied everyone who was able to understand (and the rest of us have been happy to take their word for it). I've read a few books on relativity now and I must say, the fact that I don't know how Einstein derived it from what was known at the time doesn't bother me at all. The rules are logical, consistent, match the evidence, and (having been shown the way) are derivable by other, similarly-endowed processors.

Certainly machine-derived knowledge raises questions in epistemology and ontology. Does it mean something different to know a physical law derived by a machine, for example, especially where the reasoning processes involved are hidden from us? My argument, already stated, is that it doesn't. In fact, it is similar in all important ways.

The question of how much we can trust machine-derived knowledge is a different kettle of fish. Here, I'm happy to use all the usual methods of improving my confidence - particularly the Gold Standard, empirical testing.

There is a possibility that knowledge could be derived by machine that is so far beyond our human understanding that only other machines of similar capabilities could peer-review it, or understand how to devise and run empirical tests, or interpret the results of such tests. When that day comes, we are put in the position that most of us are in now vis-a-vis the great scientists. Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein and the rest may have been able to understand and devise tests for each others' discoveries in quantum mechanics, but most of humanity could not. To us, it is entirely a matter of trust - even of faith.

It's like the climate change "debate". Here the science is simple enough that any intelligent layman can follow it. You could replicate John Tyndall's experiment that first measured the greenhouse effect in your own kitchen with some pipes and jars and rubber tubing. Yet still, for the majority (especially GOP politicians), it is all incomprehensible scientific mumbo jumbo. They can't grasp the principles. They can't separate out the scientific claims from the denialist obfuscation. They are so far from being able to judge the validity of what the scientific community is telling them, that they can have no confidence in what they are hearing - leaving them free to dismiss it as "scare-mongering" or a left-wing conspiracy to increase government regulation of our lives, or any bizarre rationale they can come up with.

One day, even the brightest of us will probably be in that position, when the machines have taken it all to a new level, way beyond our understanding. Will we look like simple-minded denialists to them when we question what seems to us to be the unfounded gibberish they will be spouting? I think so. Or maybe, being so much cleverer than us, the machines will be rather better than human scientists at explaining what they mean and why they're saying such outrageous things.  

Asset-Stripping

What kind of rubbish is this? An online newspaper I read just published an article about an article in a print newspaper called The Australian. Since when was quoting another news outlet's opinions considered news?

The piece in The Australian - a newspaper famous here for being a mouthpiece of the Rupert Murdoch view of life and a front-runner in his stable's race to the bottom -  was about how low the planned Chinese carbon tax would be and how high the Australian one is and how "out of step" with the world our carbon tax is.

And what a surprise, a Murdoch-owned newspaper doesn't like Australia's carbon tax. Big deal. Murdoch and his cronies in the mining, coal and oil industries can spout off all they like, his opinions are hardly news any more and I'm sick of hearing them over and over from all the newspapers and TV and radio stations he owns.

The fact is, China's move to a carbon tax (however low they've started) is the most important and significant event since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It's a major triumph and I'm sure Australia's dramatic recent move had an influence. The whingers at the Australian should remember that China has already made big steps towards becoming a 21st Century, clean economy. This is another one.

If the West wants to keep up, we need to force our old industries to change - and fast. They won't do it themselves. These old, polluting dinosaurs will drag Australia down to Third World status if we let them. And when they've asset-stripped Australia, they'll move on to their next victim.

I Know What is Wrong With The World - and there is no way to fix it

I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world in three words:

People Are Stupid.

We like to think we are the pinnacle of evolution (in itself a stupid misconception of how evolution works) and that our vast intelligence separates up from the animals (sorry, stupid mistake, the other animals, I mean), but the fact is that we're not all that bright. We have a few advantages over, say primates, language and better memories for example, but research suggests that when it comes to sheer reasoning ability, we're not all that much brighter than chimps. I don't want to get into an IQ debate here, but let's assume there's some correlation between general intelligence and IQ. The average is around 100 (it varies from group to group and culture to culture - mainly because we're too stupid to devise a sensible test where the average is always 100 for every place and time).

Give or take a couple of standard deviations, most of us - like 96% of us - have that IQ. And it's abysmally low. It's the IQ of the kind of person who reads Murdoch newspapers, the IQ of the kind of person who watches soaps (even if it's the slick US cop show or medical show type and you think it's somehow better than Home and Away), and the kind of person who believes in the supernatural ("well, there has to be something more than this, doesn't there, science can't explain everything").

If you're still reading, it probably means you think you're not one of the stupid people I'm talking about. Well, you're wrong. Here's a little test to show just how stupid you are. 

• Q1 Can you solve world poverty? 
• Q2 Can you stop war? 
• Q3 Can you stop the persecution of minorities?
• Q4 Can you devise an economic system that treats everybody fairly?

The answers to all those questions are "No". I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of other questions that you would have to say no to, too. The fact is, we are all, even the very brightest among us, deeply and unutterably stupid. We can't solve the world's problems because we're too thick. We've been trying throughout recorded history (and presumably long before then) and we have failed. Failed dismally. Failed in a way that should be excruciatingly embarrassing to all of us. Let's face it, we're a bunch of chimps with cars and cell phones and we haven't got a clue.

And that's why there is no way to fix the world; we just haven't got the brains. We might as well give up, go back to the trees and scratch our arses until we're extinct.

Oh, hang on, we can't do that, can we? We stupidly cut down all the trees.

Now how did he get here?

    

There Ought To Be A Law Against It

They should make it illegal to talk crap. I can't think of any other way to stop the flood of bullshit that threatens to drown out all sensible discourse. It should be a crime to say or write anything for public consumption that is provably wrong at the time it was said.

The irritating and most visible manifestation of the untrue rubbish people spout is in advertising. I don't just mean ads that say processed food X is "wholesome" or  indistinguishable from real food, I mean the lying nonsense about the beneficial powers of inert food supplements, or magnetic mattresses, or "quantum energised" crystals. All that New Age quackery, all that techno-babble, all that distortion and half-truth designed to mislead!

It gets beyond mere irritation when you hear garbage spoken by politicians. Many of them (particularly on the right wing) talk about medical issues, about welfare reform, about incentives, about wars on drugs, about the criminal justice system, about education and about tax reform, as if we haven't had a century of psychological studies, sociological studies, criminology, medical science, and anthropology. The evidence is all there if they had the wit to grasp it. Yet they go on, year after year telling us the answer is more police on the streets, stiffer sentences, getting back to the three Rs, sacking civil servants, etc., etc., etc.. I know politicians are just ordinary people with monster egos, and most of them don't have the intelligence to read research reports (from actual scientists, I mean, not from "think tanks"!) but if there were criminal penalties for being caught saying untrue things in public, maybe they would actually start to care about what they say.

And, of course, politicians lying to the public (wilfully or out of ignorance) can do real harm. It can blight lives and hobble whole societies. It can kill. But the people with the real power, who can do most harm, are the corporations and their various mouthpieces. We've seen endless examples of how the tobacco companies lied about the harm they cause, how the oil, coal and gas companies have lied about global warming (and pollution in general), and how the big news media corporations lie to ensure the political outcomes they favour. Yet there are no penalties. The Big Tobacco spokesperson may be responsible for thousands of deaths, but they are not tried for mass murder. The Big Oil CEO who sponsors obfuscatory research that may lead to hundreds dying in floods and droughts, doesn't face jail time, nor do the scientists who take his money and publish his papers. And the Big Pharma PR guys who tell the doctors lies about their products, are not being prosecuted wither, and nor are the doctors who sign their names to academic papers written by those same PR guys.

We live in a world where solid scientific evidence is ignored or actively disparaged, just so that people can sell you things, or feather their nest in some other way. It is a world where religious groups are allowed to teach anti-science courses which are nothing but insupportable nonsense - presumably so that young people aren't exposed to ideas or rational thinking or something equally horrible. There seems to be nothing anyone can do about all this lying and misleading and distortion and outright fraud. Or nothing anyone is willing to do. After all, the lawmakers are among the worst offenders.

Yet if there is anything there should be a law against, this is it.

The Price of Christmas

I see that a priest in York, England has recommended that his parishioners steal the things they need this Christmas since no-one else is going to help them out. Is conspiracy to commit a mortal sin a sin too? The theology could get tricky. However, the humanity is plain and simple. The plight of the homeless in the UK - while not nearly so bas as that of the homeless in the USA - is heart-wrenching. No decent person can witness it without revolting against the system that creates and sustains it.

And that system is capitalism.

Christmas may be a good time to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The food heaped on our plates, the mostly-unwanted gifts, the treats and indulgences, the lights and the shiny, plastic baubles, all have to be paid for.

In a capitalist society, the payment is made by the consumer - you and me - from money we get by selling our labour to the people who control the capital. They get their money by selling the product of our labour back to us in the form of meals, plastic baubles and so on. The magic of capitalism is that, by this process, capital increases. Somehow value is added by the act of production. Where does it come from?

It comes from various kinds of exploitation, but two in particular: the exploitation of workers, and the exploitation of the environment. Workers are exploited by not paying them anything like the value of their product would suggest they should be paid. The excess goes to the owners of the capital. These days, when workers in the consuming countries ask to be paid more fairly, their jobs, and the exploitation, are moved overseas to places where workers are paid even less and can be more thoroughly exploited. That this leaves people with no source of income because they have lost the ability to sell their labour, might be seen as a bad thing, but for capitalism it is good, it means that labour becomes a plentiful commodity that can now be bought more cheaply. (This is also one of the reasons why capitalists like population growth.) It means that the workers who were once in danger of earning enough that they were no longer so badly exploited, but who lost their jobs, are now forced get new jobs at lower wages and be properly exploited again. To keep capital growing, exploitation of workers has to be increasingly efficient and widespread. It is called 'productivity'.

Even so, you can only take the exploitation of workers so far before the rate of increase declines. For capital to keep on growing you have to keep pumping new wealth into the system. That's where the environment comes in. Along with people's work, the environment is the source of all wealth. Fuels and materials dug from the ground, animals and plants taken or farmed in the seas and on the land, are the raw feedstock of capitalism. To keep capital growing, the people with access to these resources, must keep acquiring them in ever-larger amounts. The consumption of raw materials by our 'primary industries' is nothing less than the consumption of our planet. With increasing speed, capitalism is taking whatever is usable from the world, using it to fuel growth, and dumping the rest as polluting slag - on the land, in the seas, and in the air. What's more, like the exploitation of workers, the exploitation of the environment must also be driven to ever-greater efficiency.

It is clear to everyone who thinks about these things, that capitalism cannot survive forever - or even for very much longer - without finding more things to exploit. The 'global market' has now, pretty much included every possible worker on the planet in capitalism's web of exploitation. There is plenty of of opportunity for growth there still, but the resource - us - is finite. The environment is starting to show signs of breaking down under the strain. Global warming, peak oil, extinctions of fish stocks, and global food shortages, are all signs that we are using up what is there at an unsustainable rate.

Technology has always been capitalism's friend. The need for more efficient exploitation has always driven technological development. The people who control capital - and the people who depend on its products - are in a precarious position just now. It looks as if the environment might collapse, or run out of key materials, before technological fixes have been found for these problems. We need new places to exploit - the asteroids? other planets? - before this one runs dry. We need ways to keep the environment patched up long enough to bring these new resources online. And, we need more efficient ways to exploit labour (global recessions are good for capitalism, but they do carry the risk of revolution.)

Capitalism is great for the owners of capital, it's not bad for many of the rest of us either (as long as we temper its worst excesses with democracy,) but it isn't a free lunch. In the end, we will have to pay the price for all this wealth.

Some, like the homeless, the people on welfare, and the working poor, already pay that price for us. It is by putting a certain proportion of us in such misery that capitalism ensures the low cost of labour and hence adequate returns on investment for the owners of capital. The suffering of the starving and the homeless in our cities is helping to put the lights on our trees, the iPods in our pockets, and the piles of food on our plates this Christmas.

Is it really so bad if they snatch a can of ravioli from a supermarket shelf in their desperation?

Sea-Walls and Dykes Are Not The Answer

The Australian government is considering measures that would force property owners close to the sea to give up their properties if threatened by coastal erosion or repeated flooding. It is estimated that about 80% of Australians live by the coast. The figure is not so high for other countries but everywhere faces the same problem: global warming is causing sea levels to rise, possibly by as much as 2 to 4 metres in the next fifty years. Coastlines are being eroded and flooded and it will get worse and worse.

Of course, property owners are incensed. There has been a recent 'sea change' rush to the coast and coastal properties have soared in value over the past decade. Owners believe the government should build coastal defences. Failing that, they believe the government should compensate them in full if it pulls them off their land.

Here's what I think. Anyone moving to the coast in the past 10 years must have been off their heads. Anyone investing in coastal properties in the last ten years has made a truckload of money but now the party is over. We've known for a very, very long time that global warming was happening and that sea-level rises were inevitable. If people want to gamble on global warming not happening then that's fine, but it's a gamble they have lost. Tough luck. Maybe next time they'll buy an ostrich farm.

Anyone who has continued to live on the coast despite the sure and certain knowledge that sea levels are going to rise, is also nuts. How many times have they moved house in the past 20 years? How many opportunities have they had to move inland? And now they want the government (i.e. you and me) to build futile sea defences, or to pay them to move elsewhere?

I don't think so.

A compassionate government should provide rehousing assistance to the feeble-minded or gamblers who end up with nothing. As a nation, Australia needs to build more low-rent housing anyway. But no-one forced anyone to buy investment properties near the beach and throw up monstrous high-rises. No-one forced well-off city-dwellers to grab up coastal properties and build million-dollar houses there, turning every seaside town into a yuppie retirement community.

And no-one can force the tax payer to bail all these gamblers and fools out now their 'investment' has turned bad. Surprise, surprise! Climate change is real. Even at the beach you can't bury your head in the sand forever.

Jobs, Justice and Climate

In the UK yesterday, Trades Union Congress general secretary, Brendan Barber, said this to world leaders assembling for the G20 summit meeting next week. "The old ideas of unregulated free markets do not work, and have brought the world's economy to near-collapse, failed to fight poverty and have done far too little to move to a low-carbon economy."

The Metropolitan Police estimate that 35,000 people marched through London on the 'Put People First' demonstration, the first of many events planned for the G20 summit. Put People First's slogan is "jobs, justice and climate".

With civil unrest growing across Europe as job losses mount and the recession bites ever harder, I really hope that the G20 leaders are listening. We've had decades of unfettered greed and government-backed corporate callousness, the rich have got richer and the poor have starved. The fiction that 'economic growth' will filter down to the poorest and make everybody better off has been exposed, and the future is looking bleak for working people everywhere as the value of their pensions has halved in a single year.

We might struggle through this recession but worse ones are coming. Peak oil is nearly upon us. Climate change is now unstoppable. The population is still growing and resources are still dwindling. Economic growth has natural limits and we are reaching them. Managing global capitalism requires more skill and ability than the world's capitalists and their governments are able to provide.

This is the kind of future that leads to uprising. It is the kind of future that leads to riots and even revolution. I hope the G20 leaders, isolated as they are from real life by their power and wealth, do not underestimate the amount of anger there is among the people they have been exploiting for so long. That crowd of 35,000 in London is the tip of an iceberg of resentment and disgust. It could easily turn from a peaceful march with reasonable requests into a furious mob, burning effigies and storming the parliament.

More hope than you can shake a stick at

(Cross-posted from my writing blog)

Remember that four-part magazine I told you about - put together by speculative fiction fans and full of stories and artwork donated by Australian writers and artists? Well, the first edition has now been published.

All the money raised by the sale of this magazine will go towards the disaster relief fund for the survivors of the recent catastrophic bush fires in South-Eastern Australia. So get out your credit cards and visit this page to make your donation and get your copy. I've seen the first edition and it is astonishingly good - packed to the rafters with the work of top-notch writers and illustrators. The quality is so high, you'd want to buy it anyway.

To get out a magazine like this in just a couple of weeks is an astonishing achievement. My hat is off to Grant Watson, Ju Landéesse and Maia Bobrowicz, who made it happen - and to all the many Australian spec fic writers and artists who contributed. For the likes of me, giving away a story doesn't cost a great deal - since I don't get paid so much for them - but for some of the big-name contributors, this represents a significant donation. Make sure this generosity isn't in vain, order your copy of Hope #1 now. In fact, why not order all four of them?

Death and Suffering in Australia

At the time of writing, the bush-fires that are still burning in south-eastern Australia have claimed 173 lives, with hundreds more injured and almost a thousand homes burnt down. It is Australia's largest natural disaster ever. Whole towns have been wiped out. Whole families.

Up in the north-east, there are record floods. Some towns have been cut off for weeks. Several people have died, several more are missing. Homes have been wrecked, businesses devastated, crops are standing under water, choked with mud.

I've got no point to make, no axe to grind. I just want to acknowledge this terrible moment of suffering and grief, this horror, literally all around me.

What's Up With Printers, Huh?

I bought a new printer yesterday. Funny thing is though, I only went into the shop to buy some printer ink.

My last printer (a Canon MP160) I bought after the one before that broke down. I found it in a KMart going cheap. At $67, I didn't much care what it's features were as long as it worked. And it did. Very well. When I ran out of ink, I went to but a new cartridge and found myself paying $94 for a pair (one black, one colour) - and this was a very good price. Since then, I've seen then at anything up to $120 a pair!

When I went out yesterday to buy another cartridge, I didn't have much time. I could only take 10 minutes in OfficeWorks in Brisbane in between other appointments. To my dismay, the black cartridge I wanted was $58. However, to get to them, I walked past a pile of Canon MP480 printers - almost identical spec to my Canon MP160 but with a much more attractive number - going for $99, including two full ink cartridges. It was a no-brainer really, especially when I discovered that the refill ink cartridges for the MP480 cost about half as much as those for the MP160. So I bought one. A new printer, that is.

The whole transaction has been bothering me ever since. For a start I can't understand why printer ink is SOOOO expensive. Is it just the printer companies ripping us off, or do they really make it out of orchid pollen, platinum, and the gonads of endangered bats? Something must account for why it is one of the most expensive liquids in the world, costing as much as $8,000 per gallon ($2,100 per litre) according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Secondly, since the printer, its software, its manuals and all that packaging is collectively worth about as much as one ink cartridge (because two cartridges and the printer (etc.) come to the same price as three cartridges) and it has circuit boards, lamps, motors, a colour LCD screen at least as good as the one on my 3G phone, many moving parts, and the look of something they paid an industrial designer to cast her eye over, why aren't all consumer electronics dirt cheap too?

And thirdly, given that printers are essentially disposable now (like the similarly-priced ink cartridges) where do printer companies get off not running printer recycling schemes so you can dump your old one responsibly and pick up a new one when your ink runs out?

There is something horribly wrong with this whole situation and I suspect it all comes down to massively inflated prices for printer ink. Why, for instance, are there so many different cartridge sizes? There have been printers around for decades now and nobody has come up with a standard format? And why are ink cartridges not refillable (and I mean from a bottle of ink I can pur into a reservoir in the printer)? And why don't ink cartidges say what their content by volume is? Or their content by square centimetres of printed surface? Or give any clue whatsoever what their capacity is? Could that be so that you can't make a rational choice about which printer to buy or which manufacturer's cartidges?

This has got to be a scam. Someone is cheating and profiteering. Call me paranoid but, when it gets so bad that a printer costs less than a complete ink refill, I smell a rat.


(Picture is from the San Francisco Chronicle, see link in text.)

One Small Step...

For eight years now, you've been a rogue state. You've held and tortured people without trial. You've invaded and occupied a country with no good cause. You've undermined the authority and effectiveness of the United Nations. You've refused to ratify important, global climate change agreements and have bullied and suppressed scientists who tried to speak out on climate change issues, delaying effective action that is urgently needed. You've allowed religious fundamentalists to dominate your domestic policies on science and education, setting medical research and other fields back many years. You have tied foreign aid to fundamentalist religious agendas concerning contraception and sex education which are known to be ineffective and which have damaged countries you should have been helping. You have created a legal and regulatory environment that has supported and encouraged radical, free market ideologies that have not only helped widen the gap between rich and poor, at home and around the world, but have directly led to the financial crisis that has plunged the world into recession. You have bullied and alienated your friends overseas, and given your enemies many more reasons to hate you.

With the election of Barak Obama, I hope this will stop, and that the USA can be welcomed back into the fold of civilized nations. This election is the first good news I've heard from America since before Bush was elected. Please, please, support the man now that he's got the job. This was just the first, small step. There is a long, long journey of reform ahead.

Focus Fusion: Will It Save Us?

I've been reading a bit lately about focus fusion – a radically new approach to producing power from fusion reactions. The research is spearheaded by Eric J. Lerner and his company Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc. (LPP) and has been financed mostly by Government organisations like NASA and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission .

The basic principle is to use Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) to confine a proton-Boron mix (pB11) at extreme temperatures (a couple of million degrees) so that a fusion reaction can take place. The DPF technology has existed for decades but the theoretical work needed to enable a controlled fusion reaction has not existed until very recently. Now, LPP has received a USD600,000 grant from Swedish firm CMEF (the first part of ten million dollars if all goes well) to develop a proof-of-concept reactor.

Focus fusion has none of the major drawbacks the Tokomak programme has laboured under. It doesn't suffer the plasma stability problems Tokomaks do, it does not generate 'hard' radiation like Tokomaks, and it can feed electrons directly into the grid without the need to generate heat to drive turbines. It could potentially generate electricity at a hundredth of the cost of existing power generation techniques. It is also suitable for small-scale, distributed power production (a 5MWatt reactor could fit inside a garage). That means focus fusion reactors could power railway locomotives, lorries, ships and aircraft. What's more, electric cars would vastly outperform petrol (economically). If focus fusion works, we could easily be looking at a completely petrol and coal free world in just a few decades!

Obviously this would be a disaster for the Middle East and for the big petrol and coal companies (and, hopefully, the governments they prop up). It would probably also be a disaster for the major coal-exporting countries like Australia – which is a bit unfortunate since that's where I live. It would also mean the end of renewable energy technologies (I don't suppose anyone will be sad to see the end of wind farms!) and it would, at last, kill off nuclear power as a viable commercial concern.

All-in-all, it would be a miraculous technical breakthrough that would save us from global warming and make electricity virtually free for the whole world. It is estimated that there is enough boron in the world to keep us in power for a billion years and the only wast emission you get from focus fusion is Helium – an inert gas with no greenhouse effect.

Too good to be true? In a world already beset by food riots and the first petrol riots, a world that is just a few decades from a catastrophic climate change tipping point, where the first resource wars have already been fought, for all our sakes, let's hope not.

Sterilising My Drinking Water The Easy Way

One of the many things about living out here in the bush with which I am unfamiliar, is the way water is collected and treated. My new house has three separate water collection systems. One is a ginormous plastic tank which collects the run-off from the house and shed roofs. The next is a small pond (or 'dam' as we call them here) that collects water that runs off the ground. The third is a pair of large plastic tanks which constitute a waste treatment plant for sewerage and other domestic waste water. The waste water plant generates relatively clean water which it then pumps out into a garden sprinkling system. The dam water is untreated and also has a pump, which we can use as required for garden watering or whatever. Water from the ginormous plastic tank that catches rainwater from the roofs, is pumped up to the house to provide our domestic supply.

The dam water and the treated waste water don't bother me. We only use them on the garden (or will, once we have a garden). It's this rainwater/drinking water system that bothers me. This water comes off the roofs straight into the tank where it sits for very long periods before being pumped into the house. The tank is closed (apart from two fat overflow pipes with a mesh over their ends) but the water that flows into it comes from the roofs and gutters. Apart from whatever airborne dust, smoke, pollen, and other organic matter landing on the roofs, there must inevitably be bird droppings and dead insects falling onto them all the time. Surely this means the water can't be quite sterile and must have quite a lot of stuff living in it?

It's not such a big deal because Wifie and I never drink unfiltered tap water anyway and any other water we consume in our food is always put through some kind of cooking process that would sterilise it. Yet it is just a little bit unsettling that the water we consume has been used to wash a roof with and has then sat in a big tank in the hot sun for weeks or months before we get round to pumping it into the house! Also, the fact that more and more people around the world are drinking re-cycled rainwater from just this kind of system and no-one is jumping up and down and saying what a health hazard it is, is actually quite reassuring.

Yet I have been wondering what to do to remove any risk whatsoever. And I think I have the answer: make rainwater tanks out of clear plastic.

I came across this idea in August 2000 when New Scientist reported on an Oxfam meeting that discussed the use of solar disinfection to combat a shortage of chemical disinfectants in Assam, India. (Issue 2253, New Scientist magazine, 26 August 2000, page 14. You may need a New Scientist subscription to read this online. Otherwise, your library probably has it.) A team of Swiss researchers in Duebendorf has show that filling a plastic bottle with water and leaving it in the sun can effectively disinfect it in as little as one hour. Martin Wegelin, who headed the Swiss research team, says that if you paint half the plastic bottle black and stand it on corrugated iron, it will heat up much faster and cut the time needed for thorough disinfection. The combination of heat (the water temperature goes above 50 degrees C) and ultraviolet radiation kills most micro-organisms, including 99.9 per cent of Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae (which causes cholera), and the parasite Cryptosporidium (which causes severe diarrhoea). This last is particularly interesting to me since I remember an outbreak of Cryptosporidium and that other popular faeces-borne parasite Giardia intestinalis that hit the water treatment plants in Sydney one year when I was living there and meant that we all had to boil our tap-water before using it for several weeks until they got the outbreak under control.

So, if it works for a couple of litres in an old Coke bottle, maybe it also works for five thousand litres in a clear plastic rainwater tank. If no-one has done the science yet, remember you heard it here first and don't forget to add my name to the patent, please.

A New Climate For Australia

Tim Flannery, Professor of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University and Chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, wrote the editorial in this week's New Scientist (16th June 2007) and I'd like to summarise what he said, just because if it is repeated often enough, our cloth-eared politicians might just hear it.

• Southern and eastern Australia has lost about 20% of its rainfall in the last 50 years.


• The decline in flow of Australian rivers in the same period is about 70% (no, that's not a typo)


• Flannery says we should stop talking about 'the drought' – the worst in a thousand years, some say – because it is a transient phenomenon. Instead, we should start talking about 'the new climate'.


• Although rainfall has increased in the sparsely-populated north-west, the likely cause is Asian haze shifting the monsoon. Politicians wanting to pipe this water south and east, or move people up to where the water is, are therefore gambling on Asia not cleaning up its air pollution.


• The only way for Australia to survive is for it to make far more efficient use of the little water it has left.


• The price of water needs to reflect its value in the new climate – so that industry and individuals do not squander it.


• Australia needs to shift to a new energy economy – and fast. That means shutting down the old water-guzzling, pollution spewing, coal-fired generators and finding clean alternatives.


• Australia needs a new and efficient irrigation system. Fixing up the existing one just isn't good enough.


• The cities need to catch their own water instead of relying on dams which can no longer do the job. Installing water tanks for every house is not only more economical than building new dams but with the river flows falling at three times the rate that rainfall is decreasing, catching and using rainwater in the cities is the only long-term solution.


• Recycling of water and building desalination plants are measures that should be put in place at once (Brisbane, for example, may have only 18 months before it runs dry).


• Finally, Australia should throw its voice and influence behind global efforts to cut carbon emissions. It should ratify the Kyoto treaty (and sod the USA). As one of the early casualties of global warming, instead of dragging its feet, Australia should be out in front, urging on global efforts to save us all from the even worse times that lie ahead.

I don't think Flannery could have put it any more clearly but, just in case you missed the message Australia: We're in trouble. We need to act fast. There's an election coming next year. Vote to save the country. Meanwhile, save water.

Telling The Human Story

Do you ever wonder about how we tell the human story? I was reading Peter Ackroyd's The Fall of Troy over Easter – a novel about the discovery of the ruins of Troy – and it took me back, inevitably, to the story told by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey of the great heroes and their gods. And this, in turn, reminded me of the many Celtic folk tales I've read and which were once part of my own oral tradition of storytelling.

In my mind, a river of stories runs down the ages from there: the Aeneid, the legends of Arthur, Beowulf, Héloise and Abélard, the Canterbury Tales, and on through the Renaissance to modern times, the river growing broader and faster with each passing generation. The source of the river was probably a lakeside camp-fire in Olduvai Gorge with a small cluster of half-human families settling down for the night, confabulating tales of spirits and magic. And here we are, in an age when every man, woman and child with Internet access is able to tell their story to the whole wide world.

Not so long ago, our stories were learned by heart during long apprenticeships and told to audiences hungry for information and revelation. More recently, when writing was new, books were precious things, carefully crafted and lovingly read and re-read. Now books are churned out by the millions, can expect a few weeks on the bookshop shelves if their author is very lucky, and then become old and forgotten as the next month's batch is produced. Alongside them, are the newspapers and magazines and, of course, the Web. Much of what is written today is good for a few hours and then is disdained. Our story is being told now at a frantic pace, almost in real time. While it grows increasingly detailed, domestic and trivial, it grows more grandiose, global and profound.

Domestic and trivial: like the TV networks, where soaps and 'reality TV' shows begin to predominate as they try to find cheaper and more engrossing alternatives to drama and documentary, or the publishers that drop tired old literature in favour of romantic novels, action novels and 'sword and sorcery' fantasies, the Web feeds us two-paragraph news items and blogs – the daily minutiae of tens of millions of people's lives.

Grandiose and global: like a TV serial in its fourth season, the plots grow more exaggerated and earth-shattering as the audience grows more bored and demands more titillation. The old stories of heroes and their great deeds are too tame for us. What is the fall of Troy when on a whim the whole of Iraq can be crushed by invading armies? What is the slaying of Grendel when a billion people wait to die in the next flu pandemic? What is it to us that Atlantis sank beneath the waves when half the major cities in the world may disappear the same way over the next hundred years?

Credit Cards, Human Hearts And A Technical Fix For Global Warming

It’s a funny old world, as my old friend Steve used to say. Steve himself was an illustration of the fact. He was an ugly bloke with a personality that drove most people to want to thump him sooner or later, yet he played the guitar with more skill and innate musical ability than anyone I have ever known. Oh yes, and he was a policeman.

I’m often struck when reading the news, that Steve’s far-too-often-repeated homily, is pretty much on the money. It actually is a funny old world. And what makes it so funny? Why people, of course.

Take today, for instance. I find an article on the British Psychological Society’s website describing some research that suggests people who let debt accumulate on their credit cards (thus incurring interest charges) are precisely those people who pick credit cards with low annual fees and high interest rates – which is exactly the wrong strategy. These people have what the researchers call ‘unrealistic optimism’ about paying off their monthly balance, or, as it is described in another study, ‘wishful thinking’, so the low fees seem like a good deal to them. In a caring society, we would make people take personality tests when applying for credit so that the bank could be forced to issue appropriate cards to them.

Then, turning away from tales of sad losers, I read that Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub and a team at the Harefield Hospital in the UK have grown a heart valve from stem cells. They predict they could be using artificially grown heart components like this in patients within three years and possibly transplanting whole hearts in ten. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that in the same world there are people who can’t judge which credit card is best for them while others are out there growing new body parts?

My guess is that the same people who get the credit card thing wrong are also unrealistically optimistic about whether they will get heart disease from eating Big Macs. They may even indulge in wishful thinking about their chances of suffering smoking-related heart disease. It’s just as well then, that there are people around like Magdi Yacoub and his team who have spent the last ten years of their lives working on how to grow spare parts for wishful thinkers – not to mention the thousands of other scientists and clinicians all over the world who have contributed to this incredible achievement.

Of course, the people who are presently stuffing their faces with hot dogs and smoking four packs a day in the unrealistically optimistic hope that it’ll all be alright in the end, might actually turn out to be the smart ones – when they are rolled into the operating theatre, ten years from now, and their surgeon slots in a nice, freshly-grown heart for them. I bet those guys on Magdi’s team are going to feel pretty stupid thinking about the two decades they spent peering into microscopes late into the night when they could have been at home with their feet up drinking Coke and smoking cigars.

Oh, and the global warming thing? I guess we're all just wishful thinkers.

Bush Turns US Energy Policy Into A Corny Joke

It’s quite possible that George Bush is genuinely insane. After all, he does believe that he can hold conversations with invisible beings, and he did seem to believe that the Iraqi people would welcome the ‘liberating’ American army – something almost everyone else in the world could see was a mad delusion. The scary thing though is that, because he’s the Commander-in-Chief of the biggest military force on the planet and the veto-in-chief of the world’s biggest economy, people actually take him seriously. Invading Iraq was clearly the work of a madman – whatever his real motives, it was just mind-bogglingly stupid – but his more recently-announced plan to replace 20% of the USA’s petrol consumption with ethanol produced from corn is just breathtaking in its idiocy.

Such staggering amounts of corn would be needed to achieve even a tenth of this goal that it will completely distort and disrupt world agriculture. It will send the price of corn through the roof (it has already doubled since the January 2007 announcement) and will cause widespread hardship throughout the world – especially the third world. Even here in the West we can expect price rises in many staples including meat and dairy produce as high feed prices work their way up the food chain.

Now, I’m not saying that 3 billion people will die of starvation, as Fidel Castro did recently, but I am saying that there is going to be a lot of disruption and a lot of suffering and probably a lot of starvation (easily enough to put the death toll in Iraq well into the shade). There will also be some inflation. And there will be more negative reaction from around the world, reinforcing the impression that Americans are selfish and callous and careless of the way even their domestic policies can affect poor countries.

Even domestically, replacing petrol with ethanol is a slightly longer-term option as it relies on some technical problems being solved first – and they all require more energy to produce than you get back from the ethanol!

It’s not all bad news. Bush won’t be president for much longer and all his savage, neo-con cronies will be dumped along with their disastrous policies at the next election. Maybe the new Democrat government will reverse this particular policy and find a less destructive way of reducing domestic petrol consumption. We can only hope. Sadly, there are no left-wing governments anymore, it’s just a matter of how far right they are. So I’m not expecting too much compassion from the new administration – but some would be nice.

And can we have someone at least half sane in the Oval Office next time, please?

Recycled Water - Suck It Up Queensland!

If there is one thing the people of Queensland have got to do, it is to drink recycled water. There is just no other option for them. Not enough rain is falling here. People are moving into the State at the rate of 1500 per week. The Brisbane reservoirs are down to 20% capacity and still falling. Watch my lips, Queensland, there is no more water. You’ve drunk it all! You’ve poured it on your fields, you’ve boiled it in your power-plants, and you’ve sloshed it through your mines and smelters. You’ve washed your four-wheel drives with it, you’ve filled up your swimming pools with it, and you’ve even washed the leaves off your drives with it. And now there is none left. It has gone and there isn't enough coming to replace it.

The time has come to stop being so precious about drinking recycled effluent and accept reality. Squeamish idiots running scare campaigns against the idea are a complete irrelevance. There is just no alternative. If you want to live here, you have to stop squandering your water. And that means recycling it.

Full stop.

Timothy Ball of Confusion

I noticed in the Telegraph (a UK newspaper) that Dr. Timothy F. Ball has been receiving death threats. This is because he does not believe that climate change is caused by human activity. I was appalled by this. No-one should be threatened with violence because of what they believe, or what they say. If we condone such behaviour, we have no moral credibility at all.

Moral outrage aside, it was surprising to me that there are still people around who don’t accept what science is telling us about what we are doing to our world. Even the world’s right-wing governments (and let’s face it, they’re all right-wing these days) are beginning to accept it (the Dick Cheyneys and John Howards excepted, of course). The highly-conservative views of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) are far from alarmist and represent a global consensus by scientists that we need to act now to prevent serious degradation of our environment over the next 100 years. Even the economic argument that we would ruin our national economies by responding to the climate change threat have been trashed recently by the Stern report which shows that failure to act will have far worse economic consequences. Yet there are still people like Ball telling us that man-made climate change is not happening.

Ball is not just a ‘climate sceptic’, he is a vociferous advocate of his position. He is a member of the right-wing Fraser Institute which also argues against any response to climate change. He is also Chairman of the National Resources Stewardship Project – a Canadian lobby group against climate change control. His views are summed up in Global Warming: The Cold Hard Facts, if you’re interested.

I really don’t get it. Ball seems to believe quite genuinely and passionately that CO2 does not contribute significantly to global warming, and that all those thousands of other climate scientists, chemists and physicists have simply got it all wrong. Ball’s various arguments (solar cycles, urban hot-spots, fudged data in the famous ‘hockey-stick’ graph, errors in the satellite data, etc.) have all be systematically studied and dismissed by the scientific community. New evidence, new studies, by dozens of different research groups suggest that Ball is wrong on all the evidence he cites in favour of his position.

Which is not to say that Ball is actually wrong. I’m no chemist, physicist or climatologist. I’m in no position to judge the evidence. However, I do have confidence in the self-correcting nature of science itself. It is quite easy for scientists to go haring off in the wrong direction, led by a few exciting results to believe they are onto something. However, as new evidence mounts, incorrect interpretations quickly become untenable, the error is spotted and the excitement fades. Over the past thirty years, the evidence that climate change is caused by our own activities has overwhelmingly corroborated the hypothesis.

Having read what Ball says (no scientific evidence, as it happens, but lots of assertion) I get the impression of someone who is a bit of a nutter who is being used as a pawn of the energy industry to promote anti-climate change ideas that they would dearly like us to believe. The fact that he receives funding from Canadian oil and gas companies (money that has been passed through the Calgary Foundation, to the University of Calgary, though a body called the “Science Education Fund,” and on to another lobby group with which Ball is associated called Friends of Science – according to the Globe and Mail, as reported by Jim Hoggan in desmogblog.com) is neither here nor there. Why should he not accept their funding when he has completely congruent objectives? And, frankly, who else would fund such a fringe position?

Unfortunately, right or wrong, Ball is doing the wrong thing about it. If Ball is wrong about climate change – and the chances seem excellent that he is – he could be doing terrible harm to everyone by lobbying governments to ignore the evidence. If on the off-chance he is right that it is a natural phenomenon and nothing to do with us, then he should be out there lobbying even harder to cut CO2 emissions because the world is still warming up – even he doesn’t deny that – the icebergs are still melting and the droughts, storms, floods, disease and starvation are still coming, and we still have to do what we can to save ourselves.

A Lie Told Often Enough...

Sorry to keep banging on about the Australian government but these people make me so angry sometimes.

What would you say the purpose of government was? I’d say it had the function of managing and distributing power to people who want it, in return for which they administer the law and distribute the resources for the rest of us. The function of democracy is to ensure that the people with the power have to consider the rest of us while they’re having their fun. That’s why it’s a Good Thing.

The trouble with democracy though, is that it works effectively only when the people doing the voting are well-educated and well-informed. So it has become one of the common tricks of governments to manipulate education and information so that they can get away with more.

In the past few years, we have seen this policy in action on a grander scale than usual with the Bush administration (mis)leading the people of the USA (and its lapdog allies) into an invasion of Iraq, and attempting to silence scientists attempting to warn us about global warming. Why did they really want to invade Iraq? Because they had the harebrained idea that they could democratize the Middle East by force. Why have they been trying to hide the evidence for climate change? Because the big energy corporations don’t want the American public voting for a government that might pull their snouts out of the trough.

If you want to find out more about what American foreign policy is all about, read Noam Chomsky. For the story behind how the American government has been gagging its own climate scientists, visit the sites of the Government Accountability Project and their joint report on this topic (PDF 2.5 MB).

And what has this to do with the Australian government? Well, today in parliament, Prime Minister John Howard said that the connection between human activity and global warming was ‘still unproven’.

Now why would the little weasel say that?

(PS The quotation in title of this piece is by Vladimir Lenin. The full quote is, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth. ")