Odograph.com

There’s a idea that intrigues me, even if I can’t neatly categorize it as true or false. It is the question of whether we are at “peak oil.” To give it a fuzzy definition, it is when we are about half way through global oil reserves, and when worldwide production peaks before starting its historic decline.

I think it needs a fuzzy definition, because the future of worldwide oil production and consumption cannot be any kind of straight line projection. There are endless feedback loops, operating at all levels. This shouldn’t be one of those nonsense statements, that “at current rates we will run out of oil in 2XXX.” Consumption has never been steady, and certainly will not be as availability starts to fall.

I started just being intrigued, but then I started seeing data that supported the general idea. One of the most striking was the news that Syria and Oman (countries at the opposite ends of Arabia) were both exhibiting strangely similar declines in oil production. [Syria and Oman]

So I read further, and learned about the Hubbert Peak. It certainly makes sense in general terms.

And more news continued to roll in. Countries that we think of as oil exporters are dropping out of OPEC, as their production falls and they become net importers [link]. I can’t find links now, but I thought I saw a few “oil producing” countries switching their cars and buses to natural gas.

To save the most amusing news for last, we have word that Saudi Arabia (of all places) wants to try growing oil. You have to wonder what they really think of their own supplies when they invest in plans like that. (A more serious story about the Saudi reserve is available here.)

A number of sites are focused on peak oil. Click here for [google search], or here for [latest news].

At this point I think I find “peak oil” to be “here” in a fuzzy sense.

[UPDATE 2005.03.02 - Mexico’s Largest Oil Field in Premature Decline]

This post tracks back to an article at sustainablog.

In older technologies, like bulletin boards, or USENET, there were “places” for discussion. One of the side-effects of blogging, is that every blog becomes a place, potentially unconnected from all the others.

I’ve been blogging less because I’ve been out reading and commenting on other blogs (via technorati). A zillion blogs, all with “Comments (0)” seems pretty silly. It is probably just a transitional phase in web evolution. Someone will surely figure a way to pool and combine threads of conversation. (I don’t think it is technically difficult, it is an organizational issue.)

Trackback might end up being the real answer. If everyone has a blog, there isn’t a real reason to “comment” rather than “tackback” and things should slowly become more connected.

Maybe, and that would mean that we should do a Technorati search on whatever we want to talk about, just to see if we should be making a connection.

An interesting post at The Volokh Conspiracy asks why the Bush administration is judged so harshly on environmental issues. I might not speak for “the environmentalists,” at least not in the way that post thinks of them … but let me come at it from another angle.

I have long considered myself a conservative, and am a lifelong Republican. I feel I’ve been shifted a bit toward an “environmental position,” but not so much through a change in my internal compass. Instead, it strikes me that values I’ve long held are coming to be less spoken, and less supported.

At a basic level, I think we need to preserve enough nature to provide a happy future, and I think that science provides our best measure of where we are, as well as the only available predictor of where we are going.

I have been genuinely turned off by this administration’s disrespect for science, but something worse has been growing out of it. This nation is developing an anti-science culture.

Returning to the Volokh post, I am more than happy to give the administration credit for any environmental advancements it has achieved (note the careful choice of words), but I’m going to score them a poor grade overall – for their contributions to the regression of science.

[Update 2005.02.24 - Scientists feel stifled by Bush administration]

We all know blogs are exploding, and there is news that USENET is dying. That would seem to lead to the question of where “discussion” is going. One theory I have is that blogs will somehow be linked in the future into shared discussion areas (at least as an option).

One way test that, is to go to Technorati, type in some words, and see how many people in the world are out there blogging it. “Global warming” is easy, and topical. As another test of my theory I tried “baking nine grain bread” because, at this moment, I am baking nine grain bread following my old recipe.

I got a few hits, something I can hang a trackback onto, so I guess it works. And for what it’s worth, I think my nine grain recipe is pretty bullet-proof.

[Update: I just now realized that I forgot my sunflower seeds! Aaarg.]

A good quote, from a Times of London article:

“The debate about whether there is a global warming signal now is over, at least for rational people,” said Tim Barnett, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. “The models got it right. If a politician stands up and says the uncertainty is too great to believe these models, that is no longer tenable.”

Of course, having dredged the political blogs for a week or two, I don’t doubt their ability to refuse the obvious for a while longer.

Two additional summaries of recent events are available at Wired News and Worldchanging.org.

Update: I should probably type a few words about what I found in those political blogs. My take-away was that a roadblock exists in the solutions phase. It is presented as “spend trillions” or “do nothing.” Given that choice, people divide along those lines and according to their fears. Some people fear the economic damage of a trillion dollar hit, and some fear the outcome if we do nothing. I really think the way to make progress is to define the middle ground, and the first steps.

• People continue to argue global warming as if it were a paralyzing cost issure. There are certainly expensive solutions, but to ignore the easy ones seems mad.
• I want a new bike that will take me through the dirt trails to the paved ones, and I’m thinking of either a Jake the Snake or a Marin Mill Vally. Of course, I could just keep putting miles on my old bike. For me, bikes are fun first, and green second. Or maybe fun first, healthy second, and green third. All those are pluses though, win-win-win. (Except when I crash.)
• LOL, I am not the only one to think of bike travel in terms of miles per bagel.
• It looks like Google is trying to mitigate comment spam in blogs like this one.
• I’ve been posting less because I’ve been out reading and commenting on other blogs (via technorati). A zillion blogs, all with “Comments (0)” seems pretty silly. It is probably just a transitional phase in web evolution. Someone will surely figure a way to pool and combine threads of conversation. (I don’t think it is technically difficult, it is an organizational issue.)
• I have been remiss in not giving credit to the inventor of the odograph (and the movie camera!). What a guy.

I’ve worried that the anti-science thing was breaking out of the old evolution battles, and becoming something more broad. The biggest evidence of it, for me, was that creationist types (and religious blogs) were taking time out of their busy schedules to fight the idea of global warming. [link1, link2, link3] I mean, what do religion and climate have to do with each other?

It makes sense though, if you think about the “religious” getting even with those “scientists” that they don’t like anymore.

In this interview Neal Stephenson picks up the same vibe:

For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War, when we had not just the Manhattan Project but also the Radiation Lab at MIT and a large cryptology industry all cooking along at the same time. The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. It’s no coincidence that this era is also when science fiction has flourished, and in which the whole idea of the Future became current. After all, if you’re living in a technocratic society, it seems perfectly reasonable to try to predict the future by extrapolating trends in science and engineering.

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

So I’m not the only one seeing this (good), but it might therefore be true (very bad indeed).

(I noticed a site that criticizes “left” and “right” for rejecting science. I’ll keep an open mind, but I think I’d like some examples)

I think copyright has been going off the rails for while, but when I’d say something like “copyright is getting out of hand” to my buddies, they’d get a look kinda like “this guy is starting to sound a little crazy.”

I suppose it does sound crazy at first. I mean, what could be simpler than copyright as we learned it in grade school? Don’t copy what you didn’t write. That’s easy. The software and music piracy thing is about as simple. Don’t copy things you didn’t buy. Even that is pretty good. It only misses some things that you don’t have to buy (public domain, free software, creative commons licenses, etc.).

Again, it still sounds pretty simple. Well this past week we’ve had some news that illustrates the “crazy talk” that copyright might be getting out of hand (from On The Commons):

I could hardly believe that Starbucks might actually stop people from taking photos in its coffee salons. But once Larry Lessig blogged about the topic in May 2004, coffee mavens from New York to Hong Kong and points in between chimed in with their own stories. The stories were remarkably similar: while taking snapshots of friends in a Starbucks, a manager or barista would tell them they were not allowed to take photos in the store. Starbucks never clarified its policy or non-policy on the issue (their PR rep never got back to me last year), but the speculation is that Starbucks was trying to prevent anyone from photographing their signature “trade dress” interiors. One of the more hilarious responses was a website, Starbucksphotos.com, now dormant, which invited people to post snapshots of themselves in Starbucks (Flickr has a large array of photos tagged with Starbucks, however).

Now comes word from the Chicago Reader (January 28; subscribers only) that the managers of Chicago’s Millennium Park require a permit and payment of a fee in order to take photos in a Chicago park. In a story by Ben Joravsky, “The Bean Police,” we learn that Warren Wimmer was trying to take a picture of Cloud Gate, a massive sclupture knoown known locally as “The Bean,” when two security guards on Segways cruised up to him and asked if he had a permit – “a permit that lets you take pictures of the park.”

I’ve actually seen something similar. A couple were about to take pictures of themselves before they entered a movie theater. The ticket-collector stepped out and informed them that it was “illegal” to take picture there, outside the theater on the front steps. I’m not sure of the technical legality – but it does seem crazy, as different bits of the world are shut down and “owned.”

I find it pretty funny, really. I had just seen some comment at another blog by “texas holdem” and referring to “online poker” (no reason to give them a link), and I find them here too – on every open comment section.

It will be a minute’s work to delete them all. If it happens again I’ll have to plug in one of the comment-spam filters.

I guess the interesting thing was that it didn’t jump out at me (with one message) that it was spam – just somebody with something weird to say. I think they were fairly clever with their text. Heck, if they hadn’t been greedy (and spammed all my comment sections) it wouldn’t have been so obvious.

(In my defense, I haven’t had all my morning coffee yet.)

Mind Hacks has an article about Frans de Waal’s work with chimps. I listened to one of his talks here at IT Conversations. Great stuff.

[update: one of the books I grabbed last year was Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees, by Lee Dugatkin. I've got to admit I didn't finish it - but it had good stuff, along the same lines as Dr. de Waal's talk.]