I posted this as a thread on Mastodon (I’m trying to practice threads, like climbing a mountain, because it’s there). I kind of like it and want it somewhere where I can find it as well 😛

First, an example of what AI thinks might be a bird from Emily Oliver.

The non-maven non-geek tends to think of Artificial Intelligence like this:

• get powerful computer
• furnish with amazing software
• Presto! AI.

In reality it works like this: 1) get powerful computer. Check. 2) get software. Check. Then the missing step — missing because most people are only dimly aware of it — train the AI on a dataset.

The dataset is selected by the geeks making the AI. (It doesn’t have to be, but that’s how it currently is.) If their dataset is current US physics grads, it’ll be +/- 3/4 white men. If they’re making an resume reading AI for employers, it’ll favor white men because that’s what its training told it is a common trait of physics experts.

It’s obvious if you think about it for a second, but an AI is only as good as its training. It’s almost human that way.

A visual example makes clear how very small differences, mistakes a human would never make, are enough to make nonsense of AI results. Something to remember when AI makes the first cuts on college and job and mortgage and parole applications. From Daniel Solis.

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These are from datasets of bird illustrations, after which the AI is told to draw a bird. It doesn’t always draw nonfunctional edge cases. But rather often. So, clearly, it is ESSENTIAL to have public access to the training dataset and methods. (See also Emily Bender.)

Commercial AI, the ones making those resume-reading decisions, all — without exception as far as I know — hide everything under “proprietary.” Think about that as you look at the “birds.”

That too many people are even bigger idiots than I thought.

Really. That’s not just the frustration talking. Consider the whole “Okay. it’s over. We’re done” mentality.

Hello? Would anyone dream of saying, “I’m tired of all this gravity shit. I’m jumping off this here cliff and you try to stop me.” And then, half way down, saying, “See? I’m doing fine.”

Nor did people and their governments get to that point after implementing sensible public health measures.

There’s no 100% vaccine mandate (with exceptions for the medically exempt).

There’s no mandate for building ventilation good enough to prevent viral spread.

[Edited to add, forgot a major one, :redface: ] Germicidal UVC lighting everywhere it can reduce viral loads.

There’s no mandate to mask up everywhere that people are within two meters of each other, and triply so when indoors.

No. Instead vaccine and mask mandates are being ditched everywhere by everyone all together. As if there’s some kind of global airborne miasma that destroys the neurons needed to understand anything. As for building ventilation, that never became important enough to mandate so there’s nothing in progress that could be ditched.

Accurate testing of prevalence and genotypes has gone right out. We’re supposed to do our own risk assessments and carry the entire load of infectious disease prevention individually (even though this is a social issue of transmission from person to person). But the tools to understand the risk are removed.

Note: none of those things are life-changing lockdowns. They’re just public health measures that improve our chances if we have to live with this particular virus. Instead of dying with it.

And also note, I’m not arguing any of this because I’m concerned only about vulnerable people. This affects everybody, including us immortals who’ve come through the last two years with minimal losses.

I’m boggled that we can stampede into spreading disease far and wide when we know so little about it.

One thing we do know is that the more sick humans there are to incubate new variants, the more variants we’ll have. The more variants, the more reinfections and the more new and worse forms of the disease. (Until a universal vaccine exists and is mandated for everyone not medically exempt.)

We have no idea, yet, of the long term burden of downstream disease. We’ve only had two years. There’s no way to know the number of excess dementias, heart attacks, strokes, and sudden diabetes ten years from now or twenty years from now. We don’t know whether the chance of long covid goes up with each reinfection. Now that we’ve decided to have millions of human petri dishes, instead of as few as possible, it’s guaranteed that new variants will make reinfections happen.

We’ve taken on a thousand unknown risks of mass disabling events because, the hell with it, masks are icky.

It’s insane.

In the high and far off times, people figured out that cholera and typhoid are spread by open sewers. If they had thought then like we apparently do now they would have said, “Ahh, screw it. Closed sewers cost too much. We’ll just live with it.”

By which, of course, they mean they hope they will live. And somebody else does the dying.

People have lost their fear of disease. It only took about two generations without major deadly infections. That comes as a surprise to me. I thought people understood cause and effect. But, no. Apparently, if you’re not in immediate and personal danger of dying, it’s Somebody Else’s Problem. And a SEP field, as Douglas Adams astutely pointed out, is the only proven way to make anything invisible.

Years ago, 1990s?, I read an article about attitudes to vaccination. In places like Bangladesh, where they actually had to contend with actual disease, people were overwhelmingly in favor of it. More than 85% of the respondents were incredulous you could have any other attitude. (This was before extremists started spreading paranoia about Western contamination.) It was only in well-to-do parts of the wealthier countries that people had the luxury of fantasizing about what vaccines would do to their precious bodily fluids.

The loss of healthy fear towards something that can kill you has made too many people incapable of understanding where a lethal threat fits into the scheme of things. You see sentences like, “But the extent of the European lurch toward mandatory measures has also prompted unease and questioning over loss of freedom.”

The mind reels. Do they not understand that your freedom ends where your threat to my life begins?

(Rights, unlike people, are not all equal. Some depend on others. Some are a precondition for everything else. There is not one single freedom that can be enjoyed if you’re dead. Of course it’s more complicated than one right always being first. The link goes on about the intricacies.)

Public health measures to prevent the spread of disease take precedence over people’s convenience every single time.

Mask wearing, social distancing, and temporary lockdowns are all merely inconvenient. There is no, absolutely no, rights-based argument to make against them.

Contact tracing does raise privacy issues. But there again: you can’t enjoy privacy when you’re dead. Privacy is a secondary consideration. It must be respected to the extent possible while the primary public health priorities are achieved. For instance, we’re horrified the government could be using our cell phones for location data to track covid contacts, as they did in South Korea. That is nonsense. Location tracking to save your life is a Good Thing. It should be done from the start to the end of a pandemic. After that the data should be expunged.

What should not be done is using that data to sell us fast food, or to store it forever to target political ads at us, or to deny us jobs based on some AI bullshit model of who we are based on where we’ve been. And yet, we put up calmly with the latter while throwing fits about lifesaving temporary public health tracking. Commercial tracking, which should be illegal, has made us allergic to lifesaving tracking. It’s insane. And I suspect it’s all because we feel powerless against corporations but not the government.

Vaccination is the third major public health measure, and it does intersect with the basic right to control your own body. When two foundational rights conflict — the right not to be harmed and the right to control your own body — then the scale of the harm on each side is important.

Vaccines can cause nanoscale harm. Things like sore arms, a day of lethargy, or even super-rare blood clots which can be effectively dealt with if doctors know they should look for that. Compared to the megascale harm from disease — death, long term disability, sickness for millions — there is no contest at all . The greatest good of the greatest number is the right criterion to apply when the difference is so stark. Vaccine mandates are justified to bring the cost of non-vaccination home to anti-vaxxers. As are mandates that limit them from any place where they could potentially spread the disease they’ve refused to prevent.

There is zero place for any “unease and questioning over the loss of freedom.” [Ed. note: idiots.]

There’s a long piece I’ve been procrastinating on / working on for weeks (WokeBros™ Are Pushing Us Into A Republican Trap) , and now all this blows up. Maya Forstater’s judge with no judgement. JKRowling deciding enough is enough. By the time I push the “publish” button, this will be hours out of date and suitable for the Stone Ages.

Anyway, just some minor commentary which everyone else has already said too.

Mammalian sexes are not a spectrum. They are binary. There is the large gamete sex, female, and the small gamete sex, male. That’s it. There ain’t no more. Spergs and speggs don’t exist.

Denying this biological reality is more la-la than being a Flat Earther. At least a Flat Earth *looks* plausible if you’re completely ignorant. Denying biological sex is denying how babies get made and that is something all of humanity is rather clear on. (Well, except for WokeBros™, male or female.) It’s much much much stupider than denying evolution or climate science since those require a minimal understanding of not-always-immediately-obvious evidence.

The usual refrain, including from some biologists, is “but, but clownfish!” Yes, there are clownfish. Yes, there’s sea lettuce (Ulva sp.) with identical sized gametes. Yes, some fungi have dozens of mating strains with very complex ways of producing the next generation. Invertebrate animals have all sorts of gametic flexibility. Even alligators and some birds have temperature-dependent sex ratios in their offspring.

Notice one thing about all of those? They are not mammals. Humans are mammals. We have none of that sexual diversity. In humans sex is binary. End of story.

Intersex individuals do not change that. They have chromosomal or developmental variants superimposed on the basic binary. Their secondary sexual characteristics can vary from the usual. Since everything except the production of egg or sperm is a secondary sexual characteristic, including organs like penis, vagina, or breasts, looks can be unrelated to genetics. That means without scientific tools, like karyotyping or DNA sequencing, the genetics is unknown.

The existence of variants does not turn sex into a spectrum any more than the existence of babies born without limbs means that there’s a spectrum of leg formation. Chimeric inheritance is a condition where two zygotes (fused egg and sperm) fuse together and develop as one individual. The cells derived from one of the two can be interspersed or more or less separate in different organ systems or even sides of the person. That can result in a very rare Difference of Sex Development (DSD) where there’s one ovary and one testicle in one body. (The two hormone systems interfere with each other during development, so there have been no documented cases of both systems being fertile.) In another situation, separation of one embryo into two may stop before completion and conjoined twins result. But the existence of developmental variants like chimerism or conjoined twins does not imply we’re all on a spectrum from one to multiple people.

Intersex individuals are uncommon. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is the commonest, at about 1.4% of live births. All the other forms combined come to 0.1%, one in a thousand, live births. CAH causes overproduction of hormones. Since a number of sex organs are developed from homologous embryonic tissues (clitoris – penis, outer labia – scrotum) overproduction during development can — does not always — alter external morphology to superficially resemble the opposite sex.

Chromosomal abnormalities, like XXY, or XYY, or XO, also change nothing about the sex binary. They either result in individuals indistinguishable from XX / XY without genetic testing, or in individuals who don’t reproduce but look and are treated as female or male. They have nothing to do with the desire to transition to some other social role.

To me, an interesting side note is XO, also known as 45X, aka Turner syndrome. Just one X chromosome results in a female-looking individual who is sterile. The second X has a role only in the formation of the female reproductive tract. One of the two Xs is eventually inactivated in each cell during development. The only function of the Y chromosome is to develop the variants on the female pattern that result in male reproduction. In other words, human society has been wrong about this for millenia. Male is not the default. Female is the default.

None of the above has anything to do with gender, which is the main concern of trans people. Gender is defined as the collection of character traits society decides belong to people based on their sex. Social constructs can be anything society decides — there’s no limit on alphabets, for instance. So if trans people want to invert or subvert or multiply genders, that’s up to them.

Which brings me to the other thing that made my jaw drop about this massive kerfuffle. When JKRowling made her extraordinarily obvious tweet:

the bad feelings engendered in some of the trans community were explained in a thread on Twitter.

JKRowling’s points are “not actual support.”

Well, DUH. Of course they’re not. You’re not supporting me, you know. Nor do you have to. Neither do I have to support you. In a free society we all have equal rights and nobody gets to demand service from others. We just leave each other alone to live our lives as we want and as best we can.

It’s called equal rights. Not equal support. Who died and made you king of deciding who has to stand ready with support?

That attitude of expecting others to forget their own needs and support transwomen is so blitheringly smug and entitled, it’s mindboggling.

It also reminds me a lot of something I see out in the world all the time. Something like a class of people who seem to think women should always hover about fulfilling their needs…. It’s on the tip of my tongue…. But that can’t be right because the transwomen who have that attitude are quite sure they’re women.

This is a public service announcement? I don’t know. An announcement, anyway.

Start with the flatteningly obvious. Discrimination on the basis of sex, race, creed, national origin, age, weight, or sexual orientation is Not Okay. It’s not okay because it has no basis in fact. None of those characteristics is correlated in any way with anything that matters. (Yes, there is a boatload of excellent research supporting that point.) They are irrelevant. Discriminating on that basis does not work, in the sense of improving human life in any way.

Now continue with the equally obvious. Being transgender is also irrelevant to intelligence, kindness, or competence. Discriminating against transgender people in work, housing, education, or who can get married will also not improve anyone’s life in any way.

Let’s end with the one blindingly obvious difference. Sex does affect anything to do with biology, including medicine. Sex is a fact. Facts don’t care how you feel. Pretending otherwise changes exactly nothing. Hounding people for “transphobia” if they research the consequences of hormone therapy might get them fired, hounded, no platformed, or piled on [the Times article is behind a paywall], but it won’t change the resulting sterility, loss of orgasm, osteoporosis, stroke, and so on (pdf) through a list of side effects as long as your arm.

Sex also makes a difference in a world organized on a sexual caste system to exploit women’s labor and reproductive ability. Unlike biology, we can change society, and it would be great if we entered a new age of humankind where none of the gendered bullshit operated anymore.

We do not live in that world. Pretending otherwise does nothing but enable willful blindness to the injustice, and the people who suffer from that most immediately are women. Women can’t identify out of being raped or being underpaid. When those with a male developmental trajectory identify into women’s athletics and take the scholarships or money prizes, women can’t identify into a lifetime of enough testosterone to take the prizes back. Nor can female fetuses identify out of being aborted on the basis of their sex.

In this world it’s a fact that almost all (around 98%) of sexual violence is done by males. (Are we all sufficently tired of Not All Men? I hope so. The link is to an article about violent crime, but the same pattern holds for mere harassment. Very few perps can make a majority suffer.) Putting women in the bind of having to mindread male intentions in places where they undress or can’t escape is not a hallmark of tolerance. It’s a hallmark of assuming women don’t count. We all have a right to be, as the law puts it, secure in our persons. We get to do that without mindreading. The fact that men also target transpeople doesn’t make it women’s responsibility to compensate for the violence.

And that is the difference with other liberation movements. They struggled for their own civil rights. None of them tried to deprive others of what they wanted for themselves. Calling people who point these things out “transphobic” does not indicate virtuous tolerance for transpeople. It indicates a denial of facts on the order of flat earthers or creationists. It indicates a complete disregard for the human rights of women.

Via Krugman, I hear there’s a movement to establish a Common Core Curriculum in schools. There’s also growing resistance to it from the usual suspects who fear that if children learn anything this may hinder their subsequent participation in fact-free politics.

I’ve been on another planet the past couple of months (a very nice one, thank you for asking) and this is the first I’ve heard of it. Well, teaching biology is what I’ve done for a living, so things like Common Cores are fascinating to me. I followed the link to see what’s in this one.

First glance shows that there’s no heading for science at all. English and Math. That’s it. (Also no arts. No history. No geography. No life skills such as physical fitness, good nutrition, birth control. But I guess that’s our brave new world by now.)

Second glance is to see what they have under English. That’s where I see a Science heading. Odd. But perhaps I haven’t grasped the organization of the web site.

No, it turns out that this is the section of English class where the students learn how to comprehend and critically evaluate scientific information.

About now I’m starting to boggle. The students are supposed to magically make sense of scientific information without a single fact that could actually enable them to do so. Not one class is required in that Core to teach them anything about any of the sciences they’re supposed to know enough about to evaluate. I think these people are serious.

To really picture just how useless it is to evaluate, critically or otherwise, subjects one knows nothing about, consider a small thought exercise. “Tscherganskaya in the capitol building at Ulan Bator has received payment from Karganvili of Consolidated Cement Industries.” You may not even know where that is on the planet (with apologies to any Mongolians who may be reading). Who is Tscherganskaya? The President taking a bribe? The head of the environmental agency taking payment for carbon trading credits after a lawsuit? The accountant at a mining operation that’s delivered limestone? Is it good, bad, indifferent? You can think about the sentence all you want. Without facts you have no way to make sense of it. Similarly, without facts about herd immunity you can’t evaluate certain arguments about vaccination, knowing nothing about peat bogs handicaps evaluation of climate change, ignorance of DNA functions makes it impossible to understand genetically modified food.

I’m sure it’ll turn out that science and history and all that good stuff is supposed to fill in from somewhere, as extra courses taught at the discretion of local school districts.

Testing, testing, testing … 1…, 2…, 3….

Library of Congress

In recent decades, any subject gets shortchanged if it doesn’t contribute directly to raising a school’s ranking based on some multiple choice test or other. In poor districts it gets shortchanged to oblivion. The tests for the Core Curriculum will test — I know you’re surprised — English and math.

All this is stupid, but we’re not done yet. Teaching nothing but English and Math, unsupported by any subject that English or Math might be about, will have all the fascination of learning the alphabet but not using it for anything. Just admiring the alphabet itself, over and over. English and math are tools, like hammers. Hammers do nothing if there are no nails. Learning about the parts of the hammer is just boring.

So having a Core Curriculum, without an accompanying actual Curriculum, is not going to lead to smart graduates who know how to think without all that time and money wasted learning stuff nobody ever needs. On the contrary, the tyranny of the test will deepen, and the thing students hate worst of all, doing exercises whose point they don’t see, will become the only thing they do.

Once that bears fruit, the pundits will again moan about the inexplicable lack of “critical thinking” skills among today’s youth. Some new bright wit, looking to secure tenure in their Education Department, will start the next round of “improvements” that require even less money and promise even greater results. And some new fools, of whom there will be an increasing proportion, will gladly hand over their money for the newest magic beans.

I know that in the popular view the last people who know anything about teaching are teachers. But in case anyone wants to hear it, let me tell you a secret about education. You sort of get what you pay for. You can spend more than you have to, but you can’t spend less.

And businesses. And everything else. That is the inescapable implication of the following findings from:

The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance, Nauts et al. 2012.

Recent research suggests that heterosexual men’s but not heterosexual women’s cognitive performance is impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex Karremans et al., 2009. These findings have been interpreted in terms of the cognitive costs of trying to make a good impression during the interaction. In everyday life, people frequently engage in pseudo-interactions with women e.g., through the phone or the internet or anticipate interacting with a woman later on. The goal of the present research was to investigate if men’s cognitive performance decreased in these types of situations, in which men have little to no opportunity to impress her and, moreover, have little to no information about the mate value of their interaction partner. Two studies demonstrated that men’s but not women’s cognitive performance declined if they were led to believe that they interacted with a woman via a computer Study 1 or even if they merely anticipated an interaction with a woman Study 2. Together, these results suggest that an actual interaction is not a necessary prerequisite for the cognitive impairment effect to occur. Moreover, these effects occur even if men do not get information about the woman’s attractiveness. This latter finding is discussed in terms of error management theory.[Emphasis added.]

Men need to start hoping that biology is not destiny at least as much as feminists have always insisted it isn’t.

Nonfunctional yet self-destructive constructs

(Rube Goldberg)

(The article by psychologists was critiqued by a computational scientist for its terminology. (No link due to complete paywall.) The authors’ response is here.)

It’s true of the pill. If that’s not obvious to you, you’re not paying attention. Or you have an agenda. One that does not include making the lives of girls healthier and easier. That’s been made clear by loads of people. Just one example, Violet at Reclusive Leftist in several posts.

What I want to add is: REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER!

Do not vote for the Current Occupant. Do not vote for him, no matter what. Do not enable your own abuse.

Seriously.

Obama does the classic abuse crap. Slam! Oh, quit yer snivelling. Where ya gonna go? (A bit of time goes by.) Gee, honey, I’ll do better, just give me one more vote. Slam! (Rinse and repeat.)

For those of us favored enough to be safe from direct hits, the line is “The other guy will beat the kids up even worse.”

Do you know what that’s called? Extortion.

When it happens to someone else, we’re all super-clear that the victim should leave. Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

But when it happens to us, suddenly we’re the ones on the floor with a broken jaw saying to ourselves, “God help me, if I leave, what’ll happen to us? What’ll I do? Somebody else’ll beat us up even worse.”

Never again pretend you don’t know how abuse victims feel.

And for yourselves: Get the hell out. Stop putting up with it. GO!

Do not vote for Obama in November. It doesn’t matter who the Republicans run. It doesn’t matter if one of them becomes President for four years. The only thing that matters right now is not being part of your own destruction.

Get it through your heads that you will not be bullied, and you will not be held hostage, and you will not knuckle under to extortion.

Do not buy the story that you have no choice. Vote for somebody else, anybody else. Or nobody. Follow Plan B and get rid of the lying, two-faced, pandering toady.

Update: I wrote a post pointing it out back when, but BAR puts it more clearly: Obama: the lesser evil or the more effective evil?

But the most lucid summary of all is Vastleft’s:

People discuss obesity as an epidemic, but the solution somehow remains individual action. That doesn’t work for real epidemics. You can’t, for instance, not catch smallpox all by yourself. (You can be lucky and have natural resistance, but that’s different.)

It’s turning out that people spoke more truth than they realized. Evidence is accumulating that obesity is a real epidemic, i.e. a public health issue with social and environmental causes. It’s something I’ve suspected for years.

Obesity has become more prevalent over the last thirty to forty years. That means — at the population level — it can’t be caused by the human tendency to eat too much. People have always been primed to eat too much, but large numbers of very overweight people relative to the whole population is a phenomenon of the last few decades.

And note that this isn’t just a matter of changing measurements or statistics. When coffin makers have to upsize coffins because the ones they’ve used for decades no longer work, there’s a real change. It’s not just PR.

So the cause(s) of the problem have to be something that’s changed in the last few decades. I’ll list all the changed factors I can think of, but the one I want to talk about is the last. Some of them are most developed in the US, but if and when they manifest elsewhere, they can be expected to promote obesity likewise.

• The baby boom generation, which is large relative to the whole population, has aged, and older people are often heavier. (A factor beyond anyone’s control.)
• Advertising for high-calorie fast food has grown very sophisticated and ubiquitous, and fast food is much more available. (A social environment factor that requires changes to industries.) (A side note: advertising is not something that can be simply ignored. It functions to steer choices whether you’re paying attention or not. The only way to avoid its effect is to avoid the advertising itself, which involves avoiding almost all modern media. Individuals may do that, but it’s not going to happen at a population level, and that’s where public health issues operate.)
• Related to that is the increase in drinking sweetened sodas. That’s upped average calorie intake by a couple of hundred calories per day. (Again, advertising and availability combine to make this a social environment factor.)
• Related to both of the above is the use of refined sugar, which has never before been used on the huge scale of the last few decades. It promotes obesity by the simple mechanism of making it too easy to get too many calories. There’s also a potential added wrinkle involving high fructose sweeteners. Scientists argue about its effect. Fructose is processed differently than glucose, and given the way it’s regulated, it could be a contributing factor to the problem. (A social environment factor due to industry practices and agricultural subsidies.)
• Urban factors contribute as well. Urban sprawl makes distances too big for walking. Use of mass transit, which requires walking to and from stops, has declined versus personal cars. And many urban areas don’t have adequate parks or play spaces where adults and children can be physically active. Epidemiology indicates that (lack of) urban planning is a measurable factor in increasing obesity. (NYTimes 2003 article) (Another social environment issue.)
• Last, there’s my pet peeve: endocrine disruptors. These are pollutants that are byproducts of some plastics, some agricultural chemicals, some hormone therapies, and the like. Bisphenol A (BPA) is a well known example. Once they’re in the environment they can break down into related compounds, they get into the food chain, and once they’re ingested, they latch on to some of the same receptors as the body’s own hormones. Once they’ve latched on, they can rev up or shut down the normal function, or they can cause strange results not in the body’s normal repertoire. Widespread endocrine disruptor pollution has happened only in the last few decades. (An environmental factor involving dozens of industries.)

Recent research (press release, article summary in Cell Metabolism) has shown that estrogen receptors in the brains of female mice regulate hunger and energy expenditure. (Male brains likewise have various androgen and estrogen receptors and are expected to have similar regulatory pathways. However, that wasn’t the topic of this research. The recent increase in the phenomenon of “man-boobs” on young and not-obese men shows rather plainly that endocrine disruptors have no less effect on fat deposition in men.)

Interestingly, one implication the researchers draw is that estrogen replacement therapy for postmenopausal women may have an overlooked benefit by keeping weight down and therefore keeping the complications of obesity down.

However, they don’t draw the far more significant implication for the entire population. If sex hormone receptors regulate energy balance, and if we’ve flooded the environment with bad substitutes for sex hormones, is it any wonder that people are having trouble regulating energy balance?

It’s one more instance where the flood of chemicals released by modern industry is affecting the environment, in this case the environment of the human body.

Like all public health issues, nothing less than a population-level approach will work. Dysentery, cholera, and typhoid are never wiped out by drinking boiled water. They’re wiped out by building municipal sewers. Smallpox wasn’t eradicated by avoiding smallpox patients. It was eradicated by universal vaccination. The individual actions aren’t useless. They just don’t change the widespread causes of the widespread problem.

Modern health problems like cancer and obesity aren’t going to be wiped out by eating fresh vegetables. Eating veggies is good, but it doesn’t address the basic problem. That’s going to take nothing less than a change to clean sustainable industry.

It’s almost enough to make you wish a mere diet really was all that’s needed.

It’s insanity to try the same failed thing and expect a different outcome. So the pro-nuclear crowd seems to be trying a variant. They’re not crazy, calling nukes a success, because Fukushima’s reactors aren’t failures.

I’m seeing stuff like: “Oh, but it’s only in earthquake zones that nuclear can be a bit of a problem — and then only a teeny tiny one!” “Oh, stop bellyaching about radiation. There’s less of it than flying cross-country.” “Oh, yes, some of the fuel melted, but it was only a teeny tiny bit. And look! It didn’t turn into the worst disaster imaginable! Nuclear energy is a success!”

Um, how should I put this politely? If nuclear energy is so disaster-prone that an absence of catastrophic failure can be construed as success, then we really, really, really don’t want to use nuclear energy.

Anti-nuclear as I am, I would set the bar for success higher than that. If everything goes right, nukes can produce energy for a few decades without blowing up. It’s also true that if everything goes right, little radiation escapes.

If everything goes right.

Reactors are hugely complex technology with hundreds of potential failure points. Whether it’s an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, rust, power failure, human error, terrorist smuggling, or poor interface design — there are hundreds of different cascades of events that can destroy multiply redundant backup systems and end in disaster. What will fail in any given case will be different.

The important issue is not whether there could be an earthquake here or an erroring human being there. The important issue is that such a hugely complex system has hundreds of ways to fail. It can never be safe.

Sometimes, when there’s no other way to do something vital or fascinating, it’s worth doing despite the risk. The space program is one example.

Nuclear energy, on the other hand, is an expensive way to run vast risks that are totally unnecessary.

There’s an expanded list of the points below, but here’s the summary. ■ Useful uranium stocks will run out about the same time as or shortly after oil. ■ The plants take so long to build, it’s physically impossible for them to be an actual solution to energy shortages. ■ They will, however, provide a waste problem forever.

These things are all facts of the simple, do-the-math variety. Uranium is finite. Plants take ±five years to build. Half-lives of radioactive elements are known to the femtosecond.

And then comes the biggest fact of all: NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT OUR ONLY CHOICE.

For 2% of global GDP (pdf) we could switch over, by 2050 (pdf), to efficiency, solar, wind, and other sustainable, renewable, and clean energies. And that’s for ALL our energy needs. (Nuclear, in contrast, has no realistic chance of even maintaining it’s current contribution, as you can see in the details below.)

Two percent of your income, if you make a median per capita US income of about $24,000, is $480. That’s less than many people in the US spend on phone bills.

For less than the yearly cost of a phone, we could have a world that’s not going to hell in a handbasket. So the choice is obvious, right?

Let’s all pile into the handbasket.

If you’re like me, you boggle that anyone supports a total loser proposition like nuclear power. What is wrong with these people? Are they nuts?

Well, yes and no. Remember that it costs some $10 billion to build a reactor. That gets paid to somebody. That somebody is getting that huge pile of money, risk-free, courtesy of taxpayers. What’s not to like?

The radioactivity? The waste? The unnecessary risks? The small amount of actual power produced? Somebody else’s problem. The billionaires pushing the boondoggle don’t plan to live downwind.

For the sake of raking in megabucks now, everybody else in time and space can be damned.

Is that insane?

Yes.

Ecological disaster bad enough to destroy people has happened before. The only difference was the limited technology of the times, and therefore the limited scope of the dying.

Sean Gallagher has a striking report, a series of pictures each worth thousands of words.

That was then. Two thousand years ago, Yinpan in Central Asia was a major stop on the Silk Road. The water table changed. People couldn’t or didn’t adapt, until the water –and the people — disappeared over a thousand years ago. Soil erosion still uncovers traces of them, but the water never came back.

This is now.

A dust storm raised from the desertified former farm land in China. Life stops. If you have to go outside, you wear a dust mask and choke. The dust is fine as talc and gets everywhere. It’s in your toothbrush, your clothes, your dishes. It clogs your car, it ruins machinery, it gums up your mp3 player. It costs money. It shortens lifespans. The dust travels for hundreds of miles, blanketing Beijing during dry seasons, and sometimes even making murk in the skies of the Western U.S.

The earliest signature of anthropogenic global warming was polar and nighttime warming. We got that, but we’re not polar bears so it wasn’t important. One of the next symptoms is higher temperatures in the middle of large continents. That’s where most of the world’s grain grows. Places like Kansas won’t just be hot in the summer. They’ll be hot enough for old people and babies to die. Plants will wither in the heat no matter how much they’re watered. And it won’t take long before there’s nothing to water them with. If people can’t or won’t adapt, the water table will sink lower and lower. The surface will get drier and drier. There will be dust storms.

Then there’s the future. Photo #1 will describe the future as well as the past.

And you know what’s the worst of it? It doesn’t have to be that way. It Does Not Have To Be That Way. This isn’t the sun going nova on us and frying all life on earth no matter what we do. This isn’t beyond our control. Yet. All we’d have to do is little things, lots and lots of little things, all together, all the time. Nothing heroic, unfortunately. Just wimpy stuff like cooperation and keeping promises.

Sometimes, when the alternative is photo #1, people can do the most amazing things. Even work together.

Here’s just one example of a small unheroic thing that could be part of the solution. I saw this in the news recently.

1) A new, small-scale way of making electricity from wave power. It’s more or less a buoy that bobs up and down, has some gizmos to harvest the energy of the bobbing, and some failsafes in case of storms. It’s easier to maintain and less sinkable than huge megawatt projects, and units can be chained together to yield more power.

2) When a weak electric current is applied to metal scaffolding in seawater, limestone precipitates out of the water onto the metal where it builds up for a while, until the encrustation is thick enough to insulate the current. But — there are two important buts — some limestone forms and the scaffold is colonized by corals if it’s an area where they can grow. It’s not clear yet whether the current helps the corals to grow, but since something to grow on is their limiting factor, some scaffolds mean more corals than no scaffolds. (More here and here.)

Why does that matter, aside from the fact that corals are gorgeous? They’re basically blocks of limestone with a film of life on the surface. And that matters because limestone is calcium carbonate. CaCO₃. A molecule of carbon dioxide (CO₂) goes into every molecule of calcium carbonate.

Imagine fleets of those pontoon wave power things, towing their webs of scaffolding. Besides generating some energy and helping corals to grow, carbon dioxide would be taken out of circulation, one tiny invisible bit at a time. Imagine millions of wave power pontoons, doing this. And when the weight of all those corals and barnacles and whatnot made the thing sink, we’d float out another one. And another one, and another one.

Same as with all the other things we have to do to reverse global warming, it would cost some money and we’d have to keep doing it, all together, all the time. That’s all.

He’s lucky he’s got tenure. With his track record, he’d be drummed out of economics otherwise. I mean, this is the field which, in all seriousness, avers that we’ll never run out of oil. And they’re right. If oil costs $10,000 a gallon, people will go to any lengths to extract or make another few drops of the stuff. It’s the law of supply and demand. The fact that it has zero practical application at those levels doesn’t enter into it. For economists. So I’m sure a group that believes in fairy stories — the Rational Economic Man is another good one — would get rid of Krugman in a second if they could, him and his big flat feet clumping around insisting on reality.

What brought this on? Another brilliant op-ed An Affordable Salvation and the earlier post on his blog: Anti-green economics.

Clearly, opposition to doing something about climate change has fallen back to a new position: claims that attempting to limit greenhouse gas emissions would be incredibly costly. Yet the most careful studies, like the big MIT study of Congressional proposals, find only modest costs.

I have to jump in to boggle a bit. Let’s even pretend to grant that measures against global warming are “incredibly costly.” That only matters if the alternative is less costly. However, any study that looks at the price of doing nothing concludes that the expense is enormous, bigger than doing something by an order of magnitude. Case in point is the Stern 2006 review of the economics of climate change. (Wikipedia has a simple summary.) His estimate is that 1% of global GDP is the cost of averting “the worst effects” of climate change. The cost of doing nothing is likely to be around 20% of GDP. As time goes by, both estimates grow bigger, and the probable cost of doing nothing grows bigger faster. So, the obvious choice is to . . . do nothing? Hello?

Krugman goes on to demolish the economic argument against government regulations to help save the planet, but my favorite part is this:

Opponents of a policy change generally believe that market economies are wonderful things, able to adapt to just about anything — anything, that is, except a government policy that puts a price on greenhouse gas emissions. Limits on the world supply of oil, land, water — no problem. Limits on the amount of CO2 we can emit — total disaster.

Funny how that is.

The evidence suggests an awful lot of people need it. A recent study by Harris Interactive for the California Academy of Sciences found the following:

• Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
• Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
• Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water.
• Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

Especially the first one strikes me as a real “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?” kind of question. Sad, really.

But not sad enough. Tucked away underneath the outrage over AIG’s criminal greed and use of taxpayer money to sue for bigger tax refunds, tucked away underneath all that has been some talk about education. Obama has said he’s for it. He feels it should be high quality. He feels all children should get the same high standard. He feels good teachers should be rewarded.

How, exactly, will these desirable goals be brought to pass? By means of national standards, apparently, and national tests, and merit pay for teachers with students who do well on the tests. It’s amazing, when you think about it, how the Republicans had it right and some of us just refused to see it. I mean, that’s No Child Left Behind. And, of course, unlike boring and expensive methods such as small class sizes, this system is bound to be successful. What other outcome is possible when success is measured by scores that are assigned by the people to be rewarded based on those scores?

Now comes the part that’s not in the news. This is just rumblings on the grapevine. There was a molecular biology workshop for high school and middle school teachers near here recently. The middlle school teachers were saying that their school districts are talking about the new testing environment. At the middle school level everybody’s concerned about The Basics, Kids will be tested on The Basics. In these days of starvation budgets, there’s no room for luxuries. Luxuries are anything not on the tests, because that won’t be reflected in the schools’ bottom line. So. at least at many districts here in Southern California, the plan is to cancel science classes at middle schools.

Dateline: 2030. A new Harris Interactive study found that 70% of adults know the sun circles the earth. 80% are sure that prayers are directly answered. 67% favor the new trials for witchcraft. Under the circumstances, it is vitally important to stop people from praying for the wrong thing and causing earthquakes.

Obama, education, NCLB, No Child Left Behind

The global warming news is grim. Just two recent headlines: Acid oceans need urgent action and Irreversible climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. If you follow anybody’s writing on the topic (e.g. mine 2005 and 2007) you know all too much about the grimness. But where we make our mistake, you and me, is assuming that once the slower people finally recognize the facts, they’ll want to stop poisoning the planet.

Ha.

Now that they’re finally noticing that we’re headed to a hot place in a handbasket, they have a better answer. Geoengineering! We’re so good at controlling planetary processes, the best thing to do is mess with them!

Here, just for kicks, are some of the bright ideas, ranging in light level from black hole to guttering-candle-in-the-darkness. (To be fair to some of the scientists involved, they’re perfectly aware that the best of these are stopgaps, not solutions.) Read more »

My issue of the Royal Horticultural Society Garden magazine arrived today, and the first thing I saw was:

Competitive gooseberry growing in northwest England has a long and distinguished history.

With a blurb like that, how could I not read the article? (Web version, which differs from the print one.) So I learned that growing the gooseberry supreme requires “pens” where the bushes can be protected from birds, shaded from excessive sun (In northwest England? You’re kidding me, right?), as well as excess rain which can burst the fruit. In the old days, a rhubarb leaf was inverted over the bush. I’ll dream tonight of shy gooseberry plants, peering out from under their peaked rhubarb leaf hats.

But I jest. Competitive gooseberrying is serious business. Follow me closely here.

The bushes must be carefully pruned like rose trees, and the crown of branches trained flat, like an umbrella, so that the berries hang down. Otherwise wind might blow the prize heavy berry onto the thickly thorn-covered branches of the bush. The berry would burst, and there you’d be at the next meeting of the gooseberry club with nothing to show for all your trouble.

Once a year, in late July or early August, everything must be in readiness for the “getter,” who witnesses the picking of the competition berries, their careful placement in boxes padded with cotton wool, and who seals the box so that no cheating with some kind of ersatz substituted berry can occur. (I think Ohio needs to get a gooseberry club to come and oversee the vote in November.)

Keeping the few prize berries in perfect condition on the tree until the getter arrives is one of the difficult tasks in a devoted gooseberry grower’s life. Months of concentration, watering, shading, and timing go to produce the perfect berry at exactly the week and the day when the judging takes place. That’s why, like migrating swifts who miss the one day the mayflies hatch, the growers are upset about this:

Kelvin [the current prize-holder] feels the gooseberry season is becoming earlier: “You can get them huge a week or so before — the challenge is to keep them intact on the tree until the getting.”

The trees are feeling the heat, and so are the gooseberry societies. They’re talking of moving their shows forward. Gooseberry judging dates: the new measure of global warming. And you thought I was joking when I said it was a serious business.

Technorati Tags: gooseberries, global warming

This is another story in the category of “We’re from the government. We’re here to help.” The reporting makes me want to bang my head against the desk, but I can’t because I’m writing this from a lawn chair in my back garden. All the stories stress how safe the process is. That is not the point. Not . . . the . . . point.

FDA to allow radiation of spinach and lettuce

Health regulators have approved the use of ionizing radiation for fresh spinach and lettuce, saying the technique already approved for other foods [ can help control harmful bacteria and other pathogens.

The Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday the radiation treatment also would make the leafy greens last longer and give them greater “shelf-life” for retailers and consumers.

The problem is not –not!– that radiation turns the lettuce into a Green Monster or that is leaves horrible radiation cooties all over the leaves.

The problem is that irradiating food is the equivalent of leaving it out in the sun for a few days. It destroys vitamins and lowers the nutritional value generally.

That is not good. I mean, you’re eating spinach because it’s good for you, for chrissakes. You’re not just trying to ingest a water-based form of greenish tissue paper.

The other problem is that by more or less sterilizing the surface, a host of bad farming practices can be covered up. Some of those bad practices, such as poor harvesting methods or taking longer to get the product to market, also lower nutritional value.

At least they are talking about labelling treated products.

Spinach and lettuce that have been irradiated will have to carry a special “radura” logo and state the product has been “treated with radiation” or “treated by irradiation,” FDA’s Kwisnek said.

I guess farmers have less clout than Monsanto and their ilk who have successfully kept everyone in the dark about which foods have genetically engineered traits, and what those are. I was, am, and always will be livid that I can’t boycott Round-Up resistant junk — or “Round-Up Ready” as they like to call it.

Technorati Tags: food, radiation, bacteria, FDA