From Streetcars To Spaceships

What is a refrigerator, really?

I've got a few simple questions.

Why don't we use colder air from outside during winter and fall to keep our food cold? A computer controlled vent that routes cold air to the fridge would be cheap to make with modern technology. Any Pentium II would not only have enough computing power, the fan would be strong enough to power the airflow. Even in some of the hottest parts of the country, like Texas and Arizona, it gets pretty doggone chilly at night and a system that "harvested" that nightly cool air would cut energy usage no little bit, especially if it were designed with an evaporative cooler built-in.

Why do we put one of the hottest things in any house (the fridge compressor) right under the thing we're trying to keep coldest? A dozen or so feet of insulated tubing would do just fine at letting the compressor chill the fridge while that hot compressor motor is kept in a nearby enclosure. In most private homes or a well-designed apartment the compressor could even vent right to the outdoors and not heat up the inside of the house at all. This would definitely cut summer air conditioning costs. The rest of the year that heat can go right into the house air vents, where that heat is a feature, not a bug.

Why isn't a big mass built into the inside bottom of every fridge? Whenever there's a crisis we're told to do things like keep sealed gallons of water in the fridge so that their mass will keep the temperature more stable and cut energy use. So why don't we just build in a foot thick slab of cement into the inside base of every fridge in the first place?

Why are fridges built and sold as appliances? Technology has moved a long way in recent years and there's no reason that the fridge couldn't be built as just one more set of matching cabinets, but with a wipe-down finish and insulation built into the sides and door.

Seems to me that the food chilling area should just be included along with the cabinets and plumbing when a kitchen is built. Maybe line the inside with wainscotting (good insulating properties) with a few coats of soy-based sealer. Cover the top of that cement slab with an inch or two of marble or slate. Make the door a good, serious five inches thick to further insulate it. Maybe even build in a removable (and hence washable) version of those curtains of overlapping strips of clear vinyl for those of us who hold the door open and try to figure out what we're in the mood to eat.

And when you think about it, since the kind of system I'm talking about would use about a third of the energy of a conventional system in most of the country, our building codes should encourage this kind of approach. What would it do to energy bills in, say, Colorado, to switch to something like this? Let alone colder states like Vermont and Minnesota.

The "modern" refrigerator is an agglomeration of dozens of outdated and/or ill-considered decisions and it's long since time that it went the way of the shoe store x-ray machine. We can, and should, do far better.

Venezuela orders one million netbooks.

Link.

Well, hot diggity. I may not like the government of Venezuela much but if they follow through on this, especially running Linux, they will have done all of us a hell of a favor. I would be a hell of a lot happier if they had decided on OLPCs, especially given their rhetoric about getting away from large monolithic corporations, but even ordering a million of a non-optimal device will still shift the dynamics of the marketplace, if only by paying for capital costs of making such devices. I especially like the idea of this funding the shifting of manufacturing away from places like China to somewhere with actual worker's rights regulations and environmental laws.

Well, nothing to do now but wait and see if and how they follow through.

Re $700 Billion Buyout: JUST SAY NO.

[This post is an expansion of a response I made to a comment about the preceding post.]

So I see that all too many people out there are yet again falling for the toxic stew of disinformation, fear-soaked propaganda, and authoritarianism that has worked so well for the Bush Administration for so long. Because reason sure as shooting wouldn't justify supporting the supposed "bailout" that the Bush team is trying to get America to support.

Before I say anything else, let me strongly suggest that you read what Paul Krugman has said on the subject.

That having been said, make no mistake, I am well aware of how much danger we're in right now, but buying out entire portfolios of debt at luxury prices is not what I would call a rational solution.

I'm going to be very brief here, but please understand that I DO know that the situation is more complex than this. But, roughly speaking, what we're dealing with is the following: First of all, the estimated debt was only 600 billion. Assuming, that is, that we value it at one hundred cents on the dollar which obviously we shouldn't since these were mostly loans that should never have been made in the first place and would have been valued at a discount from the day that they were granted. But we'll start by ignoring that and pretend that this debt is worth full face value. So, assuming that these are all fifteen year mortgages, we're talking a maximum expected shortfall of one fifteenth of 600 billion that should be getting paid over the next year to keep everybody fully current. So that's 600/15. So, assuming that not a single person would pay anything at all for the next two years AND assuming that the government is planning to pay "full retail" for debt that we already know should be valued AND WAS ISSUED at a discount, even then, we're talking about 600 / 15 * 2, which adds up to only 80 billion. So if, instead of the Paulson plan, we declared a mortgage amnesty for one month on all affected debt (to give people a chance to "catch their breath" and file initial paperwork) and then allowed any holder of that debt to file to have the government pay all of every payment (which right there is absurd) for the next two years, well, even assuming an extra 20% for administrative costs, we would still only be looking at 80 * 120%, which would be 96 billion dollars total outlay. Two years, by the way, should be more than enough time to allow the debtors to refinance and/or sell their properties in an orderly fashion that lets them retain most of their equity, and generally prevent the kind of run on the markets that we're all trying to avoid. So, given that 96 billion would deal with this more effectively and that even that would be expecting the government to pay 100% of the cost of irresponsible behavior that we really shouldn't be rewarding in the first place, spending 700 billion to address what is, at most, a 96 billion dollar problem sounds like a pretty damn irresponsible bit of corporate welfare to me.

By the way, for what it's worth, I helped several people file financial paperwork with the LMDC after 9/11 for a plan not all that different from the one that I'm suggesting. This kind of government covering of payments is an established category of action that is used all the time as a part of disaster response in places like New York after 9/11 or areas that have been flooded. So keep in mind that this kind of things is already standardized, tested, and infrastructure already exists nationwide to implement it.

Dear Senator Obama: When will you start getting mad?

I just read a good piece in the NY Times. Aaron Sorkin imagines Josiah Bartlet giving a well-deserved dressing down to Barack Obama. I couldn't agree more. When the hell is the Obama campaign going to get mad? Do they think that they should be like the Adlai Stevenson campaign, but not as funny?

It's long past time for Obama to be openly angry. Americans sure are. How can he possibly think that distancing himself from the strongest reasons that people want to vote for him is doing his chances any favors.

Let's set the record straight. Bush and his buddies have been raping America for eight years now. They have just stolen another SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS from the American people for their friends. And they're proud of it. All that Obama's "even-handedness" says to me is that maybe he doesn't have the balls to take on the Bush establishment even if he somehow can get elected, a thing that looks less likely by the day.

Maybe I just don't understand politics. Maybe the best way to sell a reform president is for him to never give them impression that he's got the gumption to actually change things. I know that If I'm going to hire a plumber I look for the one whose tools look like they've never been used. I know that if I'm going to hire an artist, I look for one who doesn't like to draw. Don't we all?

Bullshit.

The campaign to elect a president of the United States is not a Lexus ad. And if the Obama campaign doesn't figure that out soon we're all so comprehensively doomed that we might as well prepare for life as boat people now.

-Rustin

Daily life, daily joys.

I just got back upstairs from one of my periodic post-midnight walks around the East Village. My body stays on west coast time so I do plenty of drifting about in the early hours whenever I’m back in New York.

After an hour or so of meandering, some time sitting on the Cooper Union steps, and a bit of a walk I drifted back to my friend’s place. Before heading up I stopped at the deli around the corner and picked up some toilet paper, a roll of paper towels, a Manhattan Special, and four jars of Kosciusko (to ship west, natch). I get to the counter and chat with the guy there and as he’s getting ready to ring me up he asks, “so, you need a sandwich?” With, I might add, a friendly, helpful little smile. And I realize that he recognizes me. Because when I go by there I almost always get a sandwich (or three). But keep in mind, I only go there about fifteen times a year. This is the first time I’ve set foot there in at least four months. But he recognizes me and I recognize him.

And ya know what? I really treasure these things. It means a lot to me that the deli guy knows what I tend to get. That he pauses to chat, puts aside what he’s doing to discuss the day and what he thinks of the crowds and if anybody is likely to start a fight out front tonight. In some ways, no matter how many cities I live in, I am still very much a New Yorker and I guard my right to pass through my day in complete anonymity with implacable conviction. But the very idea of a life stripped of those little relationships, the meeting of eyes, the exchange of opinions and maybe even a small favor or two, seems to me to be arid and dead beyond all reason.

I truly believe that I live a life more suffused with beauty and peppered with shared moments of alliance and friendship than most people in America. And I am very well aware that this is largely because of the choices that I’ve made and continue to make every day. Every time a moment like this touches me, I’m reminded why all of our work to support community farms and small businesses and locally run schools is so very, very crucial. It may well be that nothing in our lives we do so helps us fight the Walmarts and Halliburtons of the world as much as the occasional thirty seconds we spend now and again holding the door for a guy delivering vegetables or watching the door for a few minutes in a thrift shop so the counterperson can use the bathroom in less of a rush.

And, at the end of the day, that makes us all feel better.

So howsabout Peterson's trades their big shop downtown for some newsstands?

So it seems like half the politicians in Portland, not to mention the PBA and their allies, are in a tizzy about Peterson's, the big convenience store across from the oh-so-finicky new Brooks Brothers. I'm not going to rehash all the arguments here. For now I'll just offer a simple thought. What if, instead of treating Peterson's like a problem to be expunged, they're offered a trade. They give up their big ol' store on the MAX in downtown and, in exchange, they're given newstand concessions at each line terminus and a few other major stations along the MAX lines and along the new streetcar lines to southeast?

It's 2:00 a.m. here in NY, where I'm yet again visiting, so for now I'll just leave that as is.

But it's an interesting thought, isn't it?

-Rustin

No more waiting. Let's start sending supplies to Mars now.

So I see that NASA has just announced their newest Mars mission. If all goes well (yeah, right), five years from now the next exploratory robot (the "MAVEN") will launch to spend the next Earth year studying the atmosphere of Mars.

At this rate, by the time the universe reaches heat death we'll almost certainly be ready to choose and budget a committee to determine final mission parameters for the test reviews to articulate goals and concerns for evaluating factors to be analyzed that will be relevant to specifying a first manned mission to Mars.

If, that is, all goes well.

This is pathetic. Look, we can argue science all day and all night but out here in the real world, barring the discovery of sentient lifeforms who forbid our doing so, we've made the decision. We're going to Mars. And while more knowledge is nice and while science and technology will advance, we already know that we're going to need tons of materials, equipment, supplies, shelter, and so on, and I simply don't believe that none of it at all can be specified, built, and shipped yet. So let's start now.

I know that I've said variations on this before but the point remains valid.

Every year that we delay is another year that our society may fall further into depression, making funding shakier.

Every year that we wait is another year for storms to get worse and environmental regulations tighter, making launches more expensive, dangerous, and harder to schedule.

Every year that we wait is another in which some war or other crisis might cause the relevant organizations to say, as the U.S is doing right now about the ISS, "let's just pull back for a couple of years until things get more stable."

The longer we wait, the more we risk.

And even beyond that, the more materiel we get to Mars, the easier the other decisions get to make. Each payload delivered to Mars gets us closer to having a viable manned mission and to having a viable settlement. I'm not speaking just of what NASA can do but of what can be done by other countries, private corporations, or even universities.

It's time to start assembling payloads and launching them on trajectories to Mars. Okay, we don't know locations yet. Fine. Let the payloads reach Mars and wait in orbit until told where to land. I understand that landing location is part of what determines landing strategy and therefore the equipment provided to carry it out but it's not like each square meter of Mars would require a different approach to getting the payload down to the surface. Not to get all high tech or anything, but have we run out of bouncy balls?

As for orbiting, are we incapable of specifying a common communications standard and protocol so that orbiters can start to accumulate in parking orbits around Mars while we wait for humans on Mars to retrieve or call down those supplies? We know that the "space internet" is tested and that it worked. We've bloody well gotten IP v6 working up there, which is more than we can say for most of the internet down here. So we know that we have the means to handle, let's call it traffic control. We manage a far larger and less coherent population of objects in Earth orbit so this should be much simpler, speed-of-light delays notwithstanding. And, on top of everything else, each of those orbiters would become another node in the communications net around the planet. the more nodes in the network, the better communications gets for everybody.

Do we know that we'll need at least one robotic rover? We do. Somebody should send one.

Do we know that we'll need insulating panels? We do. So we should be getting a few hundred square meters of reflective mylar or equivalent out there. (Personally, I'm partial to a silverized kapton polyimide bubble wrap system but maybe that's just me.)

Do we know that we'll need at least one greenhouse? We do. Somebody should be working on sending robots to make clear panels from Martian materials. And dig tunnels. And make bricks. For crying out loud, can we at least send some goddamn food? It's utterly crucial. It's heavy, it's large. It's, to say the least, established technology. If well chosen and packed it can survive high G launches and years in orbit. Let's see if the University of Oregon will send five pounds of local salmon to wait in Mars orbit for retrieval. Betcha that if one farm state announced that they were launching a payload of their products, that around the world several dozen others would step up to the plate. And even if most of those missions never launched, they would end up funding research in storage and rocketry and all sorts of other things that we could stand to have more people taking their shot at.

Reading this, are you afraid of what happens if "that sort of people", people who "aren't real experts" were to take their clumsy steps into the world of launching rockets and sophisticated aerospace engineering? Yeah, whatever. I have a hell of a lot more confidence in a program run by a bunch of professors and students at, say, UW Madison than I do in what we already live with: programs run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch and the Saudi royal family. Go for it - tell me that Rupert Murdoch launching payloads the size of a truck, which he does on a regular basis, is less dangerous than a bunch of Research Triangle geeks getting the North Carolina government to fund a payload of twenty pounds of barbeque with some frozen blueberries and local corn. Or some pullovers made of some of that fine North Carolina cotton.

And, of course, all of the same arguments apply to a mission to the moon.

Every gram we send, every cubic centimeter of material we send, every item we can render "dealt with" makes it easier for the rest of the program to get done. So what the hell is everybody waiting for?

-Rustin

Interesting take on NY implications of Lehman's fall.

The New York Observer has a good piece of the sort they specialize in on the likely impact on the New York area real estate market of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill-Lynch crashes. Even if you have never been east of the Mississippi and/or have never owned anything more valuable than a signed Dead Kennedy's CD, you might want to read this. It's a good, earthy counterpoint to all the vague "the sky is falling" and equally vague "everything is just fine - really" pieces that are currently all over the internet. And it's a good take on how things are going in big money circles in general these days. To quote the piece:

About $13.8 billion in investment sales closed or went to contract in the first six months of 2008, compared to over $34 billion in the first six months of 2007…

What do ya think, folks? Are we in trouble yet?

-Rustin

What does Ike mean for implementation of off-grid tech?

I'm still reluctant to try to estimate damage. Last night I was predicting as many as 400 dead within a week and 200,000 people whose lives will be substantively damaged by something like their house being badly flooded or losing their job. I'm sticking with those numbers, though none of the reports I've seen have mentioned any fatalities at all. Note, btw, within a week. One of the things that 9/11 taught me is that many of the deaths and other casualties happen days or even weeks after a disaster looks to have passed. Not just from inability to reach medical attention but from folks like a client of mine who have strokes or were otherwise already vulnerable and don't make it through the resultant chaos of moving, bad access to medication, or simply infections, connective tissue damage, and other treatable problems that are left untreated for too long.

But I have a completely different question. What will sales of home renewable power technologies like solar panels do over the next couple of months in areas hit by the storm? I'm curious as to what correlation there will be between storm damage in an area and shifting of load to renewable power and other off the grid technologies relative to demographically similar places that haven't been through crises. We know that sales of things like generators and water purifiers went way up in California after several of their endless disasters. But how long does that increase last and how much of that equipment gets integrated into daily use versus how much gets put in a box for use only when the next disaster strikes?

And what does this do to reevaluation of off-grid technologies that people already own? How many households are now getting all of their light from solar-powered garden lights? How many people will be bringing those lights indoors at night for the next little while for use in the house? How many of those people will then take these technologies more seriously or, if this attempt is too onerous or ineffectual, now dismiss them? What will this do to theft rates for such systems (which I've found are already quite high).

I have no numbers on this. I don't even feel like I'm ready to give an educated guess. But I do know this much: if makers of off-the grid-technologies aren't doing massive marketing blasts in Ike country over the next couple of months they're out of their minds. And if governments are serious about reducing peak load, they should be out there handing out solar ovens and battery-charger solar cells and shake-and-use flashlights like nobody's business right about now. There'll never be a better time to get people to try alternatives.

Postscript: A few weeks after I wrote the piece above I found this article about hurricane fatalities and casualties by a woman who grew up on the Gulf Coast of Texas. It doesn't give numbers but I think that it's a good window into some of the less covered aspects of these kinds of disasters. And she also does a good job of articulating the thrill-hunting nature of so much media coverage and how that results in their leaving too soon to see much of the story. I think that Katrina has changed that for a good long time but we certainly still have quite a ways to go.

Wealth does not equal brains or virtue.

I never get used to how many people will insist that a company or individual must be right about something because they have a lot of money. That General Motors must be brilliant about cars because, well, they're really big. Or, most famously, that Microsoft in general and Bill Gates in specific must be great geniuses on everything because surely anybody with that much wealth and power must be a genius.

Now, for what it's worth, I've probably read about two thousand pages of information about Microsoft by now, dealt with not just their products but also their reps, including the ones who sell to big corporate accounts, several of my oldest friends have worked for Microsoft and I've had conversations with several people who have dealt with him personally. So I didn't reach my conclusions casually.

That all having been said, Bill Gates was NEVER particularly bright in most parts of life. He was born with a million dollar trust fund (in fifties dollars), had a fantastic memory, worked all the time, was a relentless and skilled negotiator at a time when very few people in his field were, and was good enough at a few dozen other things to stay afloat in debate and understand what others were doing. Not to mention having Paul Allen and others whose technical brilliance he could piggyback on. But a brilliant programmer? I doubt it very much. And even if he was that good thirty years ago, his judgement on technology has been third rate for a hell of a long time now.

Now, what's most annoying to me as I'm writing this is a particular logical flaw in the minds of most people who become relentless believers in anything. Which is that the most effective way to innoculate them against including a given factor in their analysis of something is to expose them to this factor, let them learn the details, and wait. And somehow, once time has passed, they will see anything they've already heard of as obviously irrelevant.

"Oh, but everybody knows about that" somehow equates in their minds to "therefore that isn't relevant".

"My preacher is a virtuous and selfless man."

"But what about the fourteen year old he was having sex with a few years ago?"

"Oh, that doesn't count; everybody knows about that already."

And that's relevant to determining your preacher's ethics how, exactly?

That having been said, I know that no matter how long a list of examples and quotes I give, from the famous "640K is enough for anybody" to his complete idiocy on the future of the internet relative to dedicated services, the fans out there will discount those examples. Because since they've already reached their conclusion that each of those was somehow an exception, it doesn't matter how many of those examples I can give, they'll never add up to relevant data.

Why am I writing about this tonight? Because I just watched the much-discussed Gates-Seinfeld ad. That ad is about as clear an indictment of the judgement of everybody involved as anybody should need to let go of any remaining unconditional worship of either Gates or Microsoft.

And for those of you who say "but plenty of geniuses in one field are clueless in another", well first of all, y'all have been putting forward Gates and Microsoft at geniuses at not the pure act of writing better code (as in code that runs faster, uses fewer lines to accomplish the same task, better takes advantage of the features of hardware, etc) but as geniuses at the computer business. You know, the dealing with humans part.

Seems to me that as their early rapacity and capital advantages and monopoly power recede from relevance, they're turning out to not be very good at this whole comparatively-level-playing-field thing, are they?

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks.

-Rustin