jan 2007 / greg goebel
* Entries include: power plant infrastructure, short history of life, digital graffiti, Randi challenge, money cards, green business bubble, modifying intestinal flora, future energy tech, online jihadism, Japanese balloon maker, alternative computing for the developing world, Russian population decline, my new Yaris, Airborne quackery, recycling airliners, emerging economies.
* DIGITAL GRAFFITI: Text messaging has become popular; according to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("The Writing On The Wall", 23 September 2006), it is starting to put on a bigger and gaudier face in urban areas. "Digital graffiti" displays are now popping up on the sides of buildings, in cafes, and at sporting events and various celebrations, to display text messages sent to them from mobile phones or computers. The displays can be used to capture the mood of the action, get discussions going, or push a sales message.
The idea began in Europe. In 2001, for example, the Arts Council England promoted a poetry contest, with the winners being circulated on a tickertape-like display on a building in Huddersfield. Text message and digital graffiti took a bit more time to catch on in the USA, but now American startups like LocaModa, of Somerville, Massachusetts, are on the leading edge of the wave.
LocaModa has set up a number of "Wiffiti" displays -- the name meaning "wireless graffiti" and cashing in on the "Wi-Fi" fad -- in cafes in a number of cities. Clients can send text messages to the big displays, with the messages also echoed to a website so anybody can check in from anywhere in the world. Clientele of a cafe who are on the road can check into "wiffiti.com" to see what's happening back home. LocaModa officials compare the idea to a "location-based blog", and are shooting to have 10,000 displays installed by 2009.
Killjoys may object to the Wiffiti displays by suggesting that people in a cafe might do better by just talking face to face, but the displays are a nice way to break the ice, with a visitor throwing out a cue to see if anyone bites. If not, no loss of face. Sometimes the displays have more outrageous uses -- a man proposed marriage over a Wiffiti display in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and got an answer back over the display a half hour later.
Paul Notzold, an arts designer from Brooklyn, uses digital graffiti as public artwork. His system involves a projection display that he uses to cast text "balloons", like those in cartoons, on the sides of buildings after sundown. He then passes out leaflets telling people how to post to the system. He's put on such displays in Brooklyn, Europe, and even Beijing -- where the cops came over to talk to him. Notzold thought they were going to shut him down, but no, they just wanted the phone number so they could send messages, too.
Notzold records the results of the sessions on his website, "TXTual Healing". Most are dumb, but he figures that if he casts out his net often enough, it will bring in some gems, and besides, it gets people involved in the society around them.
Fun and arts are all very well, but what about making money? Companies are in fact very interested in digital graffiti as an advertising medium. This last summer Britvic, a British soft-drinks firm, ran a "Court on Camera" promotion at Wimbleton, in which people standing in lines could send pix from their mobile phones to an outdoor color display that promoted Britvic's Robinson lines of soft drinks.
Nike, Proctor & Gamble, and Gillette have all run digital-graffiti promotions. The usual trick is to let people send messages and then send messages back with vectors to a website or information on the promotion. An evangelical group in Texas has even used the technology at religious group events. The technology is now poised to become commonplace.
* TAKE THE CHALLENGE? Ten years ago, well-known skeptic James Randi offered a one million USD prize to any psychic whose skills could survive a controlled examination. According to a WIRED Online article ("Skeptic Revamps $1M Psychic Prize" by Kevin Poulsen), administering the "Million Dollar Challenge" has proven troublesome, and the team that does the job has been forced to streamline their processes.
Randi originally offered a $1,000 USD prize in 1964, then boosted it to $10,000 USD. Even that wasn't all that tempting, but in 1996 an unnamed donor contributed a million bucks to the cause, and the office of the James Randi Education Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, then ended up dealing with a steady stream of applicants. The office is supported by member contributions, grants, and the interest off the million-dollar prize.
The initial process required that an applicant submit a notarized application form, negotiate a test protocol with the foundation, then pass a preliminary test administered by independent local investigators. Randi himself would then observe the psychic in operation, and if Randi couldn't provide specific details of any fakery, the said psychic would win the prize.
In ten years, nobody's passed the preliminaries. The last test was in Stockholm in October 2006, when a Swedish medium named Carina Landin claimed to be able to identify the authors of 20 diaries just by touching the covers. The negotiated threshold for passing was 16 right guesses, but she only got twelve -- about as well as might have worked for flipping a coin. (There were some problems with the trial and it will be repeated.) In July 2005, a Hawaiian psychic named Achau Nguyen claimed to be able to mentally project his thoughts performed a trial in which he "transmitted" the readings from 20 cards with a word written on each selected from a pile of 30 to a "receiver" in another room. The receiver got all 20 readings wrong.
It's actually rare to get to the preliminary stage. A Nevada man whose legal name was "The Prophet Yaweh" claimed he could summon two UFOs to Las Vegas, but the foundation cancelled the preliminary test when he told them that he would bring armed guards to protect him from "negative personalities". Jeff Wagg, who administers the challenge, says: "One a week gets as far as a protocol negotiation, and then drops off."
That's where the changes come in. Says Randi: "We can't waste the hundreds of hours that we spend every year on the nutcases out there -- people who say they can fly by flapping their arms." It's a more troublesome issue than it sounds, since paranormal phenomena are by definition "beyond the fringe", and those who claim paranormal powers are liable to be dismissed as nutcases, even if they actually have them. On the other side of the coin, the foundation has to worry about exploiting or feeding the delusions of the mentally unbalanced. A San Francisco woman who insisted to the foundation that she wasn't human wasn't able to give a coherent explanation of why she thought so, but it appeared that the Secret Service was involved. Says Wagg: "If we get them to go to a challenge and they lose, we're exposing someone who had serious mental illness. That doesn't do us any good, and it doesn't do them any good. It doesn't prove anything."
From the appropriate date of 1 April 2007, the foundation will only accept applications from those who can prove a "media profile" -- television reports, newspaper articles or a reference in a book that chronicles his or her extraordinary abilities, with the claim then backed up by an academic authority.
Says Wagg: "We're not going to deal with unknown people who have silly claims. "Let's say, somebody claims they can walk on water. We'll say, prove it to somebody else first. Get on the local news. Then bring it to us." Adds Randi: "They have to get some academic to endorse their claims, and that academic is not the local chiropractor or some such thing." The academic will be contacted by the foundation and asked to confirm the endorsement. On the positive side of the new protocol, the preliminary test will be dropped, the screening having been performed in an alternate fashion. The net effect will be to allow the foundation to pursue its real goal, the high-profile psychics who soak the gullible, and who so far won't touch the Million Dollar Challenge with a ten-foot dowsing rod.
The challenge is a carrot, but Randi is also interested in sticks, considering pressing cases of criminal fraud or civil suits against self-proclaimed psychics. The foundation plans to select a half-dozen or so high-profile targets each year, document their claims in detail, and then call them out. Says Wagg: "We're going to pick people every year and hammer on them. We're going to send certified mail, we're going to do advertising. We're going to pick a few people and say, we are actively challenging you. We may advertise in THE NEW YORK TIMES. This will make the challenge a better tool, to be what it is supposed to be."
The initial targets are author and talk-show darling Sylvia Browne, who claims to have precognition and see angels, and TV psychic John Edwards. In 2001, on an appearance on Larry King Live, Randi goaded Browne into taking the challenge, but she later reneged, publishing an open letter on her website: "As the saying goes, my self worth is completely unrelated to your opinion of me, and I've worked far too hard for far too many years, and have far too much left to do, to jump through hoops in the hope of proving something you've staked your reputations on mocking. I have no interest in your $1 million or any intention of pursuing it."
Foundation members were disappointed in Browne's refusal to take part in a scientific experiment that could change the basis of science as we know it. Edwards, at least, was consistent, simply dismissing the challenge. Neither Browne nor Edwards answered queries from the WIRED reporter.
Randi is annoyed at the clear complicity of the media in the psychic circus show: "People like Sylvia Browne have a very high profile, and she's always going to be on Montel Williams and she's going to be on Larry King. And they know what's going on, they're smart people. They know what's going on and they don't care."
ED: The unfortunate flaw of Randi's debunkery is that nobody with any sense needs it, and those who are taken in are too gullible to learn better. I've met such people, I like to call them "antiskeptical" for want of a better word -- the kind of folks who believe things because they are preposterous and not in spite of it. Randi seems to understand this and I am still sympathetic to what he's doing -- somebody needs to call BS and at least put a bound on the reach of frauds, though I'm not keen on his ideas about using the courts to harass them.
WIRED Online allows reader commentary for articles, and this one was littered with angry remarks by Bill Perron, a self-described psychic whose attempt to claim the challenge broke down in the negotiation phase. A search demonstrated that Mr. Perron makes use of every venue available on the Internet to denounce Randi. It's amusing, since even if all the claims Mr. Perron makes are true, very few people would fail to be turned off by the ranting way he makes them.
One of the interesting things is that some of these folk, such as Achau Nguyen, are obviously sincere in their belief in their abilities. It would be hard to understand why they would take the challenge if they weren't. As far the obvious nutcases are concerned, a survey of the lunatic fringe on the web suggests in hindsight that it shouldn't have been a big surprise that offering a million dollars would have brought them out of the woodwork. I suspect that one of the unmentioned reasons for wanting to get rid of them was out of concern that dealing with unstable people who might well be inclined to violence could be hazardous.
Incidentally, in a famous story James Randi was accused by a professor of being a fraud. Randi replied: "Yes indeed, I'm a trickster, I'm a cheat, I'm a charlatan, that's what I do for a living. Everything I've done here is by trickery." The professor replied: "That's not what I mean. You're a fraud because you're pretending to do these things through trickery, but you're actually using psychic powers and misleading us by not admitting it." I keep trying to visualize the look on Randi's face.
* A SHORT HISTORY OF LIFE (3): With the arrival of complicated eukaryotic cells, about 2 billion to 1.5 billion years ago, the options available to life-forms expanded widely. Although the bacteria and the archaea are diverse, the eukaryotic single-celled life-forms amounted to a great leap forward.
Single-celled eukaryotes form the third of the six kingdoms of life and are referred to as "protists" -- the other three eukaryotic kingdoms being the fungi, plants, and animals. (There's some very important fine print to the description of protists as "single-celled", but that will have to wait.) The earliest of the modern protists date back to about 1.2 billion years ago, and are now a bewilderingly diverse group, with many interesting features. Some that live in anaerobic environments, such as protists included in our intestinal fauna, don't have mitochondria, performing metabolism by methods unique to themselves. Some can form spores, a trick also practiced by some bacteria such as anthrax, becoming inactive but armored against environmental insults, allowing them to survive for long, sometimes very long, periods of time until conditions allow them to go active again.
The protists now include 27 distinct phyla, more or less, some of which are so different at the molecular biology level that there has been a push to designate them as separate families. If taxonomists tend to be quarrelsome, trying to make sense of all the protists demonstrates why. A number of protist phyla are plantlike, including the "diatoms" or "golden algae" and the "dinoflagellates". They contain "plastids", cellular organelles that can perform photosynthesis. The plastids come in different colors -- brown for brown algae, red for red algae, and green for green algae, which seem to be precursors of modern plants. There are funguslike protists as well, which like fungi digest food from their exterior environment and cannot photosynthesize.
The animal-like protists are known collectively as "protozoans", though overall the different phyla included under that label only share the fact that they ingest their food and don't photosynthesize, with massive differences between phyla. They include the "flagellates", "ciliates", and "amoeboids". The flagellates have long whiplike "tails" that they use to propel themselves through water, with the "dinoflagellates" actually being responsible for the deadly red tides. The ciliates are rimmed by tiny hairs or "cilia" to allow them to get around. The bloblike amoeboids are the most familiar of the protists, but that group also includes the marine "radiolaria", which have complicated internal skeletons. Their amoeboid cousins the "foraminifera", or "forams", take an alternate approach, forming shells. The radiolaria and the forams are distinctly recognizable in the fossil record, and indeed forams are used by oil companies to identify strata that could be associated with oil deposits.
It should be noted that fossil evidence for protists only goes back about 800 million years, and that not all the modern phyla are necessarily that old. Just like more elaborate life-forms, they have evolved in various directions, with new forms arising and old forms dying out. Popular science literature sometimes refers to modern life-forms that can be presumed to be similar to ancient ones as "living fossils", but that's a bit of a loaded term: all life-forms living today are descendants of ancient ancestors, and if some are very much different from their ancestors, that doesn't imply that others that haven't changed as much are simply carbon copies of their forebears.
While the bulk of protists reproduce asexually by division, some do reproduce sexually, and it is generally believed that the protists "invented" sexual reproduction. There has been a long debate among evolutionary biologists over the relative merits of asexual and sexual reproduction, but few dispute that by the evidence it was a major step forward in the evolution of life. Asexual production permits rapid and efficient replication, but sexual reproduction enhances genetic diversity, permitting more "throws of the dice" to drive natural selection. It buttresses the notion of natural selection, since if the survival of species was driven strictly by the ability to reproduce, asexual reproduction would win hands-down. The ability to support more variability turns out to be an effective counterbalance -- though not to the extent of driving asexual reproducers out of business.
There is a puzzle associated with sexual reproduction: how could trial-and-error evolutionary processes have created a male organism and a female organism simultaneously that worked together? That would seem impossible, and in fact it is: obviously, sexual reproduction emerged in phases. Bacteria have a limited ability to transfer genetic information, and it seems plausible that a scheme along this line could have been continued until microorganisms could reproduce sexually or asexually. The advantages of sexual reproduction would gradually push this process to ultimately result in organisms that only reproduced sexually.
Of course, at the outset such organisms would have been hermaphroditic -- that is, each being both male and female. That's nothing unusual among more advanced modern life-forms, snails being a well-known example. That still leaves the question of how two distinct sexes emerged, but one could imagine hermaphrodites that cycled between genders, ultimately ending up with the gender fixed at birth.
* As noted, the description of protists as "single-celled" is not quite the full truth. The evolution of the protists led to the rise of multicellular creatures, with amoebic protozoans leading to the funguslike "slime molds". Kelp -- seaweed -- is also a protist and can grow to tens of meters in length. The protists led to the appearance of multicellular organisms about 600 million years ago, very late in the Precambrian. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- POWER PLANTS (6): It is somewhat ironic that coal remains America's main electric power source in the 21st century, since 50 years ago the general belief was that nuclear power was the future. Worries about reactor safety and radioactive waste disposal derailed that gleaming dream of the future. but atomic power still produces about 14% of the USA's electricity.
The basic principle of a nuclear reactor involves a "reactor core" full of refined uranium involved in an atomic chain reaction: the breakdown of uranium atoms releases neutrons that cause other uranium atoms to break down, and so on. The fuel is in the form of cylindrical pellets of uranium oxide stored in zirconium alloy tubes, with these "fuel rods" inserted into the core to put it into operation. The rate of the chain reaction is controlled by "control rods" that contain materials such as cadmium to absorb neutrons and dampen the process. If the control rods are shoved all the way into the core, the chain reaction stops; they are pulled out partway until the reaction starts up again. Pulling them out all the way is generally asking for serious trouble. There is an emergency set of control rods set up so they are automatically released in case of an emergency to fall into the core under the influence of gravity.
There are two general classes of nuclear reactors used for power generation in the US, the "pressurized water reactor (PWR)" and the "boiling water reactor (BWR)". In the PWR, water is circulated through the core in a loop so highly pressurized that the water never boils; the heat from the water in the loop is passed through heat exchangers to a secondary steam loop, conceptually not all that different from that of a coal-burning plant, to drive a steam turbine. In the PWR, there's only one loop: water is circulated through the core to be turned into steam, which drives a turbine directly. In both cases, the water also acts as a core coolant system.
Both types of reactors required support facilities, of course including the turbine and switchyard systems, much like those of a coal-fired plant, but they also require a fuel-rod handling structure, with the rods stored in racks at the bottom of a big "swimming pool" of very pure water to keep them cool and provide shielding. The radiation from the rods makes the water glow with a faint blue light called "Cerenkov radiation". There is also a control room that is maintained at a positive pressure, in order to keep out radioactivity in case of an accident.
In a PWR, there is a containment vessel around the reactor itself, intended to seal it off in case of a catastrophic accident. Since a BWR includes the turbine system in the radioactive loop, much of a BWR site is inside a large containment building. A BWR containment building may have a very tall "chimney" with a tapering "hyperbolic" curve; it is intended to disperse trace releases of radioactive gases.
This chimney is not related to the plant's also cooling towers, which are intended to carry off waste heat. The stereotype of a nuclear power plant includes the squat, tapered "natural draft" cooling tower, with its ominous appearance, but a nuclear power plant may also use a much less prominent fan-driven cooling tower system, not much different from one that might be found at a liquid air plant. The natural draft tower is more expensive to build, but it doesn't require much power for operation, the tapered hyperbolic form promoting the natural flow of air upward. The fans for a fan-driven cooling tower system can eat up a great deal of electricity and so they have higher operating costs.
The natural draft cooling towers may look creepy, but as far a nuclear power plant being a threat goes, they have little to do with it. All they do is dump heat into the atmosphere. Thermal power generation, whether the power is from coal or uranium, requires that the generation system have a source of heat at the input and a "cold sink" at the output. The greater the difference in temperature between the source and the sink, the greater the efficiency of the generation system. That means that there must be some way to get rid of the heat efficiently at the output, and the cooling towers do that job. The alternative would be to dump hot water into local rivers -- which would likely cook the fish and not do the local environment much good. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: According to MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW Online, a group of researchers at Tokyo University (Tokyo Daigaku or "Todai") have come up with a new scheme for charging battery-operated devices by induction -- without an electrical plug-in connection. This is already being done with devices like electric toothbrushes, but an electric toothbrush has to be put into a stand that places it in a highly specific orientation relative to the induction head that transmits the power.
The Todai device looks like a simple sheet that a battery-operated device can be laid down on. The sheet has two layers: one to sense the position of the device, the other to deliver induction power, but only at the position of the device. The sheet can drive 30 watts of power.
The position-sensing sheet features a patterned array of copper coils about 10 millimeters in diameter, with organic transistors laid down by an inkjet printer switching power to the coils. Devices to be powered by the sheet will need a coil and associated charging circuitry. Placing a device on the sheet will affect the inductance of the copper coils, allowing the device position to be sensed. Power is then driven through an array of devices on the second sheet, which consists of an array of switches, made of silver and plastic, and copper coils, with the switches pulsing power to the coils beneath the device.
The scheme is regarded as interesting not merely for its functionality but for the use of potentially-low cost electronic manufacturing technologies. Reliability of the components still leave much to be desired, but the Todai researchers are confident that problems will be solved.
* WIRED NEWS Online had a short survey of the newest technology for personal computers in 2007 worth summarizing here. One of the big innovations is the "flash-aided hard drive". The idea is to use a flash-memory buffer associated with a hard disk drive as a buffer to store critical software, allowing the PC to boot faster and allow commonly-used applications to load faster. It will also improve battery life in portables.
Another major innovation will be the wide-scale production of "quad-core CPUs" now being built by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The big improvement will be that software is now available to permit parallel multiprocessing using the four processors in the chip, providing a massive improvement in performance. Still another "big thing" for 2007 will be the widespread introduction of high-speed wireless interfaces for PCs, including the new 802.11n Wi-Fi spec, capable of handling high-resolution video, and 3G broadband networks.
An interesting "little thing" that's now appearing is support for auxiliary displays and inputs for laptop computers, using the "SideShow" capability of the new Microsoft Vista OS. The auxiliary display and controls will be on the exterior of a laptop, giving the user some "pocket PC" style functionality while on the go. How useful that would be is hard to say, but at least it's cutesy.
* WIRED Online also described the solar power system that's been installed at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, in the California Bay Area. The power system consists of 9,000 photovoltaic panels that can produce 1.6 megawatts of electricity. There's nothing particularly innovative about the system -- except for the fact that a third of the panels are mounted on poles in the facility parking lot, with the rest mounted on rooftops.
The parking-lot panels were installed by Energy Innovations of California. They not only provide electric power, they provide shade to keep vehicles from overheating on hot sunny days. Parking-lot panels are actually catching on, with a number of similar installations having been set up by Energy Innovations. Company officials say the parking-lot panels are much easier and cheaper to set up than rooftop units; placing solar panels on rooftops means working around elevator shafts, air conditioning units, and the like. Another company, Envision Solar of San Diego, is now planned to move into the residential market, selling "solar carports" that can be set up by homeowners. Prices were not discussed in the article.
* According to MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW Online, a group of Swiss researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) has come up with a solar panel power system to produce hydrogen by electrolysis of water. The critical item in the panels is iron oxide -- just plain old rust.
Iron oxide has been considered for such applications for some time, but although it will generate charge carriers to electroylze water when exposed to sunlight, the charge carriers tended to be quickly reabsorbed. The EPFL researchers doped the iron oxide with silicon, which created cauliflower-like nanostructures with high surface area, to increase the acceptance of electrons from the surrounding water. The silicon also improved conductivity of the material. The EPFL further improved the scheme by adding cobalt, which catalyzed the electrolysis reaction.
The panels have a conversion efficiency of about 4% -- not very good. Further tinkering with dopants and nanostructures might well get the efficiency up to 10% or better. The technology in principle could be very cheap and easy to mass produce.
* MONEY CARDS: Previous articles in these pages on the use of "near-field communications (NFC)", related to RFID, for use in financial transactions, have shown how the idea is starting to catch on overseas, with NFC cards used for ticketing and small transactions, and some new cellphones also incorporating NFC technology for use as a smart wallet.
According to THE ECONOMIST ("Panhandlers Beware", 18 November 2006), the idea is starting to catch on stateside as well. MasterCard, Visa, and others have now introduced "contactless cards" for purchases under $25 USD, with the card simply waved a transceiver system at a checkout counter or on a vending machine to perform the transaction. The exchange of funds only takes a few seconds, meaning less time stuck in a queue. It is of course harder to steal such electronic money, and businesses don't have to deal with the hassle in tallying up the bills and coins, then taking them to the bank. Also, making transactions easier means consumers buy more on impulse.
Right now, there's only about 21 million contactless cards in circulation in the USA, compared to 1.5 billion credit cards. It's still early for the technology, but already contactless cards are being accepted at fast-food joints, movie houses, and sports arenas. The technology is likely to spread quickly, with work already underway to incorporate NFC technology into US cellphones for small transactions.
MasterCard and Visa are also now promoting "prepaid card" lines. There's nothing new about prepaid cards, or "gift cards" as they are often called, but traditionally they have been associated with a particular company. Now they're available from the big credit-card companies, and can be used at any business that accepts normal MasterCard or Visa charge cards. These are handy for consumers who don't have bank accounts; Visa estimates the number of "unbanked" consumers in the USA at a surprising 80 million, and they pay $1.5 billion in check-cashing fees each year.
Some employers are now paying employees without bank accounts using prepaid cards, and dozens of US state governments are using MasterCard and Visa prepaid cards for handing out government benefits. The state of Ohio uses Visa prepaid cards to give out unemployment benefits and claims the scheme saves the state a tidy $2 million USD a year. The days of cash are clearly on the decline, though it may take some time for coins and bills to disappear completely.
ED: 1.5 billion credit cards in the USA? Five per every man, woman, child? Boggles the mind.
* GREEN BOOM GREEN BUST? It comes as no news that there's an enormous amount of activity going on over alternative energy sources these days. It's all very exciting, but anyone who remembers the similar fad of the 1970s still takes it with a grain of salt. An article in THE ECONOMIST ("Tilting At Windmills", 18 November 2006) gives the current burst of enthusiasm a careful looking-over and recommends a bit of caution.
Some die-hards who stayed with alternative energy after the 70s boom went bust are now feeling like they've gone to heaven, with venture capitalists in a mad rush to give them money. Driven by high oil prices, plus worries about energy independence and greenhouse warming, the level of investment has doubled or even quadrupled since 2004, with tens of billions of dollars being invested in green schemes. Everyone's infatuated with solar and wind, biofuels, and the ultimate hydrogen economy lurking over the horizon. Analysts say that growth in the field stands to run at 10% to 30% for another decade at least.
Jeffries, a British investment bank, ran a conference in which participants were asked when solar power would become competitive with traditional power sources: 2010? 2015? 2020? Later dates were not even mentioned. A similar event in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, was standing room only, with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger visiting to announce: "I feel the energy! I feel the electricity! Clean energy is the future!"
Silicon Valley of all places ought to be suspicious of hype, having been hit the worst from the collapse of the dotcom bubble a few years back, but renewable energy advocates think they've found true love this time. They see it in the earnest efforts of government figures, Governor Schwarzenegger being the leader of the pack in greenery, with his highly successful reelection campaign banking on his dedication to a green future to overcome the doubts the public had accumulated over his earlier years in office. He has pushed CO2 emissions legislation. The state has also set up a very ambitious solar-power program named "One Million Solar Roofs", which involves $2.9 billion USD in rebates over the next decade to Californians who install solar systems in their homes and businesses -- with the Federal government adding in a tax credit of 30% of the cost of installation. California businesses, particularly wineries, have been installing solar panels at a fast clip.
By 2010, California plans to obtain 20% of its power from renewables. California isn't alone in such schemes: another 20 of the 50 US states also have "renewable portfolio standards". Maine has the most ambitious, set at 30%, though there's plenty of hydropower there and meeting such a spec shouldn't be troublesome. New Jersey wants 22.5% of its power to come from renewables by 2021, and in fact that state surprisingly is number-two in solar power usage, after sunny California.
The Federal and state governments have been enthusiastic about support for corn-based ethanol production as well, even though it's an unimpressive fuel source when the bottom line is examined. No matter: farmers get subsidies for growing the corn, refineries get subsidies for adding it into fuel blends, filling stations get subsidies for installing pumps for it, and consumers get subsidies for tanking up on it. Several states mandate gasoline-ethanol mixes to a specified level of ethanol, ensuring a market. It is a libertarian truism that the government can't give away anything without obtaining it from the taxpayers first, and one group has estimated all the giveaways came to $5 billion USD in 2006.
The European Union is even more determined to promote alternative energy, with EU standards specifying that 5.75% of transport fuels come from non-fossil sources by 2010, which means that European biodiesel producers have a potential market to justify expansion of production capability to the maximum extent possible. In addition, the EU wants to obtain 18% of its power from renewable sources by 2010. Some member states have even more ambitious plans.
Other government alternative-energy programs are being floated around the world. Advocates of alternative energy say, with some plausibility, that the massive subsidies being pumped into the field are just "pump priming", paying in advance for a resource that will pay itself back many times over in the near future: alternative energy will become cost-competitive and the subsidies will no longer be needed. Proponents of solar power, for example, point out that the historical record shows that the cost of solar power has decreased by 18% with every doubling of yearly production capacity. In Japan, they add, solar power is now competitive without any government subsidy.
The critics are skeptical: cost-reduction curves can level out, and Japanese electric-power pricing is very high, meaning it's not any real feat to beat it with solar power systems. For now, the alternative-energy business is floating on subsidies, and it is likely to do so for years to come. The argument that this is just an advance payment on something we need to do does carry weight, but the problem is that investors pumping their money into alternative energy aren't concerned with such a consideration of principle -- they're after a return on their investment.
As the bust of the 1970s alternative-energy fad in the 1980s showed, what the governments give they can take away just as easily, and investors pumping money into heavily subsidized businesses may find themselves stranded if the political wind shifts again. Some analysts have noted the alternative-energy business would be in deep trouble if oil went below $50 USD a barrel again. To be sure, oil producers are trying to keep it above $60 USD a barrel, but expanded production and competition could undercut their attempts to hold up prices.
In the meantime, the alternative-energy business is booming. Wind turbine manufacturers can't ship product fast enough, and even the most aggressive forecasts for expansion of European biodiesel production don't see it as keeping up with the EU targets. Production of silicon solar cells is so intense these days that production of silicon itself is a bottleneck, with new investment in silicon production facilities to keep pace.
Few analysts think the push for green energy is a fraud, instead simply warning that investors keep their eyes on the road instead of the roadmap. Production bottlenecks, technological difficulties, and political changes may make the highway bumpier than expected, and optimism has to be tempered by considerations of cold reality. Says an analyst of the solar power industry in a comment that could just as well apply to the entire alternative-energy business: "There's too much money chasing too few opportunities. How is it possible that his many solar companies are going to succeed? They're not." When the shakeout comes, dreams of riches from alternative energy may well end in an unpleasant wakeup in bankruptcy court.
ED: It appears that spot oil prices have dropped below $55 USD a barrel. I was certainly astonished to see that prices at the pump have actually nudged below $2 USD a gallon -- I thought I'd never see it happen again in my lifetime. I wouldn't bet it will drop much lower, though, or even that it stays there long. We will see.
* A SHORT HISTORY OF LIFE (2): The first life-forms to arise on the planet were the bacteria, the simplest known organisms capable of self-replication. Viruses are simpler, but they can't reproduce on their own -- they are strictly parasites that propagate by infecting cells of proper life-forms, and that means there's really no way viruses could have come first.
A bacterium seems deceptively simple, no more than a bag of biomolecules and some simple organelles. They reproduce asexually, though it's possible for bacteria to transfer some sets of their genes. However, there is considerable diversity among bacteria. For example, some bacteria are "anaerobic", meaning they don't require oxygen to live, in fact find it toxic, unlike oxygen-using "aerobic" bacteria. It is clear that anaerobic bacteria came first, for the simple reason that the Earth's atmosphere didn't originally contain free oxygen. The anaerobic bacteria seem to have mostly obtained their energy from hot springs, volcanic vents, and the like, which no doubt somewhat limited their distribution over the Earth. (The Sun was actually substantially dimmer in those days and wasn't as good a source of energy as it is now anyway.)
The oxygen atmosphere didn't start to appear until about two billion years ago, and wouldn't resemble the modern atmosphere for another half-billion years. The original agents of this change were the "cyanobacteria", sometimes called "blue-green algae" -- though this is not such a helpful description since many unrelated life-forms are referred to as "algae", making it about as useful a term as "pond scum". In any case, they were the first organisms to perform "photosynthesis", or the conversion of sunlight into energy, with the accompanying conversion of carbon dioxide into biomass and oxygen. The oxygen atmosphere made aerobic bacteria possible.
Whatever the details, life, if an unspectacular form of it, became commonplace on the planet. Fossil evidence for bacteria goes back over 3 billion years, particularly in the form of "stromatolites", which are basically just big layered heaps of different kinds of bacteria. They still persist in various odd parts of the Earth, such as some bays in western Australia, but they are rare, only surviving in locales where there isn't much else around to gobble up such a convenient food source. In the Precambrian they were not rare, and they left behind highly distinctive layered fossil formations, some in the form of cones tens of meters high.
* The evolution of the bacteria was paralleled by the evolution of the "archaea", which were once thought to be simply strange sorts of bacteria, called "archeabacteria", but which have become generally recognized through the identification of their unique molecular biology as having split off from the bacteria early on, to follow their own distinct tree of evolutionary development. In fact, the bacteria and archaea are regarded as two of three domains of life, and some even split the archaea down into two separate families, at an organizational level making them as distinct as plants and animals -- though in this series they're regarded as one, if just for the sake of simplicity. The archaea persist today; they have been generally been thought of as marginal, associated with extreme environments -- extreme heat, extreme salinity, extreme acidity, and so on -- but further investigation shows they are more common than was once thought, just having been overlooked because biologists weren't on the lookout for them.
It's the third domain of life, the "eukaryotes", where the story starts to become of more general interest. The bacteria and archaea are both "prokaryotes" -- bags of biomolecules with fairly undeveloped internal structures. The eukaryotes, in contrast, are an order or two of magnitude bigger and have a central nucleus that contains their genetic material.
They also have a much more sophisticated set of cellular "organelles". Some of these organelles are very interesting. The "mitochondrion" of most eukaryotic cells is used in energy processing, and has its own little distinct genetic code, separate from the main cellular code in the eukaryotic nucleus. Plants also add an organelle called a "plastid" or "chloroplast", which performs photosynthesis, and also has its own little genome.
The general belief among biologists is that the eukaryotic cell arose as a symbiotic relationship between various prokaryotes. In fact, such symbiotic associations clearly occurred more than once, since plant cells have both mitochondria and chloroplasts, and such events may in fact have occurred many times. In modern times, there are parasitic bacteria, the "rickettsia", that infect other bacteria, like viruses being unable to reproduce on their own. Symbiosis often starts from parasitism, the parasite then finding it advantageous to help a host instead of harm it, and the mitochondrion and chloroplast may have started out in such a way. It seems very clear that chloroplasts began life as cyanobacteria. Eukaryotic cells have some features that are associated with bacteria and some features that are associated with the archaea, suggesting that both families of the prokaryotes contributed to the creation of the eukaryotes.
In any case, the eukaryotes would lead to multicellular life-forms and the plants and animals we see around us. It is of course somewhat parochial to see multicellular life forms as "more interesting", just because we happen to be such a thing ourselves, but few would want to go to a zoo if it just meant looking at different samples of bacteria under a microscope. Still, there is a vast range of diversity among the prokaryotes and we're still learning about the tricks they can pull off. Much of the Earth's biomass is prokaryotic, and in fact there are ten times more prokaryotic cells in our bodies -- in the form of intestinal flora -- than eukaryotic cells. Even if the eukaryotic cells are about a thousand times more massive, that's still a revelation. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- POWER PLANTS (5): The bus bars from the generator of a power plant lead to an electric "switchyard", a fenced-off area full of heavy-duty electrical equipment where the electricity is routed out to the power grid.
The voltage produced by the turbines is on the order of a few tens of thousands of volts in amplitude; that sounds like a lot more than anyone would want to grab on to, and it is, but it's still not high enough for transmission over long-distance power lines. For reasons that will be explained in a later installment, it's most efficient to transmit power over long distances by raising it to as high a voltage as possible, and so a transformer in the switchyard raises the voltage to hundreds of thousands of volts. The switchyard also contains switches to route the power and circuit breakers to deal with electrical faults.
A typical power plant uses from 4% to 7% of its own power to keep its pumps, fans, and other systems running. Many of these systems have to be running before the plant can be brought online, so the switchyard will provide power for startup obtained over the far-flung power grid. This leads to the problem of what might happen if the entire grid went down, but for decades nobody thought that was possible. It happened to the US Northeast on the night of 9 November 1965 and the entire power grid of the region was out for at least 12 hours. These days plants generally have their own local backup systems to get restarted.
* While conventional coal-fired power plants use turbines driven by external steam source, there are also power plants used for peak power generation that use combustion turbines, with the turbine containing a combustion chamber, just as does an aircraft turbojet, and burning natural gas. They tend to be smaller and less efficient than steam turbines, but unlike steam turbines they can be turned on and off at will. Such combustion turbine plants have really impressive intake and exhaust systems, not only to handle the airflow but to suppress noise.
Experimental coal-fired power plants have also been built that use combustion turbines, with the coal converted into coal gas for burning. The advantage is that pollutants can be filtered out of the coal gas stream before it is burned, which is easier than doing after it is burned. Such plants also use various schemes to provide greater efficiency than a conventional coal-fired power plant, but they're more expensive and so the idea hasn't caught on yet. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* SILENT PARTNERS: Back in August 2006, an article in these pages discussed the bacteria that live in our guts, which outnumber the cells in our body by an order of magnitude. I added a speculation that someday, probably not soon, we might be able to modify our intestinal bacterial ecology to give us new capabilities.
According to an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ("Digestive Decoys" by Christine Soares, October 2006), I was being pessimistic. A research team under James C. Paton at the University of Adelaide in Australia has developed strains of the common human colon bacterium, Escherichia coli, to neutralize the toxins produced by intestinal bacterial infections, such as those acquired by visitors to foreign lands where the water isn't safe for outsiders to drink.
The research team engineered an E. coli bacterium that featured surface receptors to lock onto toxins released by cholera bacteria, with each modified E. coli bacterium able to bind up 5% of its own weight in toxin. In test-tube experiments, the bacteria neutralized all but a fraction of percent of cholera toxin in a solution. In a test on a dozen mice infected with cholera, eight mice with the modified bacteria survived, while all the dozen mice in the control group died. The treatment was effective even if it was administered hours after the infection.
E. coli is easy to grow and so a treatment based on it is likely to be cheap. It can be easily administered in a flavored solution. It also doesn't attack the cholera bacteria itself, instead protecting the host, so the cholera won't build a resistance to the treatment through selection pressure.
There are still concerns about Paton's modified E. coli bacteria and human trials are not being conducted just yet. They could trigger a dangerous immune reaction, and there's also the possibility of political backlash against a treatment based on a genetically modified organism. Paton believes that such an obstacle could be overcome by administering killed bacteria: "It works when it's dead, not quite as well, but once it's dead it's no longer a 'genetically modified organism'."
* ENERGY FUTURE: The September 2006 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN was devoted to "Energy's Future Beyond Carbon" and was worth a survey. It mostly arrested the usual subjects -- carbon emissions versus global warming, the Kyoto treaty and US noncompliance, more efficient cars and buildings, carbon sequestration at power plants, hydrogen as a fuel, and renewables in general. However, it did present a number of interesting factoids and ideas along the way:
* A more or less related recent article in BUSINESS WEEK provided a closeup on US farmers investing in biofuels and wind power, and though it also was mostly familiar stuff, it had some interesting details. Farmers who have invested in ethanol facilities are finding it highly profitable these days, though recent soft oil prices are cutting into their margins. Wind seems like an even bigger plus: farmers who lease sites for wind turbines get a few thousand dollars a year per turbine, and when they own the turbines themselves, they can make some really good money. Green power has reversed the decline of farming in some regions out on the prairies, and more profits to corn farmers means the government can cut farm subsidies.
Seems like a win all around. The article did say another thing that got my eye. It cited the ratio of energy in to energy out for corn ethanol as 1.5, which seemed about the median estimate from what else I've read -- and then added that the ratio is 3 for biodiesel. If so, that's surprising, two-thirds the ratio of gasoline, which is like about 4.5 -- and biodiesel also has the advantage that it acts pretty much like ordinary diesel, not requiring that engines burning it be corrosion-resistant, as is the case for engines that burn high-proof ethanol or methanol fuel mixes.
Then the article went on to say that cellulosic ethanol could ultimately have a ratio of up to 36 -- and I just laughed, wondering how anyone could come up with such a value since at the present time it's twice as expensive to get energy out of cellulosic materials than corn.
Along this line, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN had a short article about cellulosic ethanol feedstocks. A team of economists and ecologists at the University of Minnesota have suggested that nitrogen-poor, degraded land planted with a mixture of perennial prairie grasses-- including goldenrod, Indian grass, big blue stem and switchgrass -- can actually provide up to 238% more bioenergy than the same land planted with only one species. A plot planted only with switchgrass, the great hope so far of cellulosic ethanol, only yields a third as much bioenergy. Compared to cultivated corn grown on good land, the mix of prairie grasses can provide 51% more energy per hectare.
The really nice thing of the prairie grass mix is not just that it can grow easily on land worthless for growing crops, but that the grasses have extensive root systems, meaning that they sequester more carbon than will be extracted by converting their stems and stalks into biofuels. Of course, right now this is of little practical use, since it's so much more expensive to produce cellulosic ethanol as corn-based ethanol. Critics also point out that if cellulosic ethanol processes become more cost-effective, then corn stover -- stalks and other plant waste -- will be convertible to fuel, making the economics of corn look better.
* I was daydreaming once and thought that if I could have three wishes, I would ask for much better and cheaper technologies to convert sunlight to electricity, convert sunlight to fuel, and store electricity. The interesting part was to consider if we could actually obtain all three such things if we threw billions of dollars at them. It would certainly improve the odds, but then again the laws of physics do not always accept bribes.
* JIHAD ONLINE: A BBC WORLD Online article ("The Growth Of Online Jihadism" by Frank Gardner) took a peek at how "jihadis" -- Islamic militants -- make use of the Internet in their war against the infidels. The tour started at the Norwegian Defense Research Institute (NDRI) near Oslo, where a group of academics engage in research on terrorism in an interactive fashion.
The team members are fluent in Arabic and surf the web to sites run by jihadis, infiltrating under assumed Arabic names. One of the team, Brynjar Lia, who has written a popular book on Islamic militancy and the Internet, describes the virtual environment they visit:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Propaganda, calling people to jihad, is the primary purpose. It has always been like that from the beginning, but secondly it is to communicate to the internal community of jihadis with the message to continue to fight and build up the spirit of combat, and also internal communication with cell members and so on. This can be via e-mail or encrypted messages. Usually they don't use much encryption, they only use easy codes, simple codes that can be read by people but interpreted as something that doesn't have anything to do with terrorism.
Then there is also the external audience, those enemies who they want to frighten and terrorise. The idea is to produce videos that are very scary, like decapitations and other similar movies. Then there is also the electronic jihad part of it, which is to destroy enemy websites which are critical of the jihadi movement.
The last area is training. That could be anything from providing security instructions, how to withstand interrogations, how to evade surveillance but it could also be how to produce explosives, how to put together a mine, how to place the mine and so on.
END QUOTE
Over the last year, the Norwegian analysts say, the websites have been shifting their message to reach audiences in Europe, particularly Britain, which is seen as a high-priority and relatively soft target. Online videos of speeches, for example those by al-Qaeda chief strategist Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, are now subtitled in English, German, Spanish, Swedish, and other European languages.
The sophistication of the material is also improving, with front-line combat videos from Iraq and Afghanistan, along with well-made training videos on bomb-making and weapons handling. The jihadis have become very slick at reaching the youth market, setting up chat rooms to discuss jihadism, creating online games where players can blow away American soldiers, and providing flashy jihadi rap videos. According to Thomas Hegghammer of the NDRI, some forums are used to obtain the latest news from the jihadi community:
BEGIN QUOTE:
These forums are like the sort of town square of online jihadism, it's where people meet to collect information and discuss topics. If you look at the address it's quite anonymous, it's just numbers and this is because they move around all the time to avoid hackers and government agencies that try and take them down, so some of these sites more around on a weekly basis or even daily basis and the way you find these addresses is from other forums. So there is always a redundancy. So if one forum is shut down then you go to the other one to get the new address.
END QUOTE
Western governments have been slow to react to the phenomenon of online jihadism, but British intelligence now believes the Internet has become the main conduit for recruiting new troops to the cause. However, a London-based Arab journalist named Camille Tawil who keeps track of online jihadi activities believes the British are content to just monitor the web traffic for now, while the US has tried to infiltrate the sites and get data on users in hopes of foiling attacks and capturing jihadis: "The Americans are well ahead of the British in this."
Comments an official at the British Home Office, responsible for the UK's internal security: "We are doing a number of things, some overt and some covert. But we admit some of them are not working".
* A SHORT HISTORY OF LIFE (1): We share this planet with an astonishing array of other life-forms. Even cataloguing all of them is a monster job. The cataloguing scheme that we use today was basically invented by the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th century, and hierarchically broke life down into "kingdoms", such as the plant and animal kingdoms; broken down into "phyla", such as the phylum of vertebrates, including the fish, reptiles, mammals, and other creatures with backbones; then "classes", such as the warm-blooded furry mammals; "orders", such as the carnivores, including cats, wolves, bears, and so on; "genus", such as the cats; and finally the "species", though there could also be races (breeds or variants) of a species.
Ever since Linnaeus there has been debate over how particular life-forms should fit into this cataloguing system. This series will assume that there are six kingdoms of life, as well as three "superkingdoms" or "domains" to organize that diversity. This is just to simplify the discussion, since taxonomists -- the genus, so to speak, of biologists who worry about the classifications of life forms -- are notoriously argumentative and not in agreement on the matter. However, even the taxonomists do not debate the idea that this enormous array of life-forms evolved over time, branching out in ever-increasing elaboration from the origins of life billions of years ago.
Pinning down the exact history of how this happened is not easy. The main evidence is from fossilized life-forms dug up from the earth. The problem is that fossilization is an unusual circumstance: after most life-forms die, they are consumed or decay and little trace of them is left. Fossilization requires that life-forms be neatly buried in sediments, ash, or the like, and left undisturbed while their environment turns into stone. Finding fossils is another problem -- it's not like they can be discovered simply by digging into any arbitrary plot of earth. Worse, stone is impermanent, with geological processes tending to disturb or destroy fossil beds over time -- in fact, it's almost impossible to find undisturbed rocks over about 3.5 billion years old. Still, there have been vast numbers of life-forms on this planet, and even if only one in millions survives as a fossil, that still gives plenty of clues as to the evolution of life on Earth.
* It is known from radioactive dating that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The first billion years were unsettled, with a hot, geologically active Earth pounded by impacts of enormous asteroids.
The earliest traces of life are about 3.5 billion years old. Geologists have
long divided the history of the Earth into a set of "eras", which are
subdivided down into "periods" and in some cases "epochs". The different
subdivisions of geological time were originally determined by the fact that
they features distinct sets of fossils. In some cases, the boundaries
between the subdivisions are fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary, but in others the
boundaries are clear-cut, indicating some relatively abrupt change in the
state of the world. The following table gives the subdivisions, with their
beginning dates:
date era period epoch
__________________________________________________________________________
570,000,000 Paleozoic Cambrian
500,000,000 Ordovician
435,000,000 Silurian
410,000,000 Devonian
360,000,000 Carboniferous Mississippian
330,000,000 Pennsylvanian
290,000,000 Permian
__________________________________________________________________________
240,000,000 Mesozoic Triassic
205,000,000 Jurassic
138,000,000 Cretaceous
__________________________________________________________________________
65,000,000 Cenozoic Tertiary Paleocene
54,000,000 Eocene
38,000,000 Oligocene
24,000,000 Miocene
5,000,000 Pliocene
1,500,000 Quaternary Pleistocene
10,000 Holocene
__________________________________________________________________________
There were actually eras before the Paleozoic, but here they are simply
lumped into the general subdivision of the "Archeozoic" era or "Precambrian"
period, stretching back to 3.5 billion years ago, the time of the origin of
life on Earth, and beyond through the "Hadean" era when the planet was
molten, back to its creation. Some sources subdivide the Precambrian into
multiple periods -- after all, it was much longer than all the later periods
put together -- but for the sake of simplicity, it's given as a single period
here.
How life began in the Precambrian remains a mystery, no more than the subject of informed speculations. During the Precambrian, for almost three billion years the Earth was the exclusive property of single-celled life-forms. Large multicellular life-forms are comparatively a recent invention. However, it should not be thought that nothing much interesting was going on before multicellular life-forms made their entrance. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- POWER PLANTS (4): Once the steam goes through the power plant turbine system, it is cooled in a condenser to be returned back through the boiler loop. Since the flow density in the condenser is at its lowest for the entire loop, simple mass-flow considerations mean the condensers are necessarily big.
The cooling actually helps flow through the turbine system, since the condensation of water results in a partial vacuum inside the condenser. The water has to be purified or "polished" before it's sent back through the loop again. If it wasn't purified, it would deposit minerals inside the linings of the boiler tubes, which would act as an insulating layer and cause the tubes to overheat, with the threat of a disastrous rupture.
The polishing takes place in a number of steps, which are somewhat reminiscent of those that take place at a municipal water-treatment plant:
Since some water is lost through the loop, a bit of "makeup water" is added before the flow is pumped back into the boiler. Since the water is going from low to much higher pressure, the "feedwater pumps" to do the job are hefty, the biggest in the plant. They are either electrically driven or are driven by steam turbines of their own. They soak up 2% to 3% of the entire power output of the plant.
* All this manipulation of steam is of course to spin an electric generator. An electric generator consists of a "rotor", a spinning coil of wire that produces a continuously changing magnetic field. The spinning magnetic field "induces" an electric field in the surrounding fixed coils or "stator" to produce electricity. In the case of generators for North America, the rate of rotation is 60 times a second, which generates alternating current at 60 hertz (Hz), or 3,600 revolutions per minute (RPM). The rate of rotation has to be precisely controlled or the AC going out over the network from different power plants will be out of phase, causing unacceptably irregular power distribution over the power lines. Outside of North America, the AC rate is 50 hertz, or 3,000 RPM.
The rotor of the main generator is electromagnetic, meaning that electricity is used to create the magnetic field. That leads to the question of where the electricity needed by the main rotor comes from. It is in fact produced by a smaller generator, the "exciter", on the same driveshaft. However, the exciter rotor is also electromagnetic, making the source of its current another puzzle. The answer's simple: there's a third and still smaller generator, the "pilot exciter", on the driveshaft -- and it has a permanent-magnet rotor.
The generator system is very efficient, converting about 98% or 99% of the mechanical power coming in to electricity going out. However, one or two percent of hundreds of megawatts of power is still megawatts, and that means getting rid of a lot of heat. The main stator windings are made of copper tubing, with water pumped through them as a coolant. The rest of the generator is cooled by gaseous hydrogen. It's an effective coolant, though the explosive nature of hydrogen means the generator casing has to be sealed to prevent oxygen from getting in. The electric power is carried off by thick aluminum or copper "bus bars" as thick as tree limbs, capable of handling tens of thousands of amperes of current. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* BALLOON MAN: The Japanese are stereotyped as buttoned-down and unimaginative, but on closer inspection this generally ends up seeming an illusion. For example, as considered in THE ECONOMIST ("Flying High", 30 September 2006), consider Naoki Nishi of Show Corporation.
Mr. Nishi used to work in a firm connected with the Japanese auto industry. In the 1990s, the company hit hard times, and he was assigned to restructure the operation. Much to the surprise of his superiors, part of his proposal was that they fire him as excess, suggesting that Mr. Nishi is a brutally honest man. They did as he recommended.
Mr. Nishi was a hot-air balloon enthusiast and decided in 1993 to go into that line of business, cashing in his insurance and pension for funding. His initial strategy foundered, but he adapted, focusing on character balloons and expendable "flyaway balloons". Show Corporation now dominates the Japanese market for character balloons and even sells them to Disney Corporation for use worldwide, but the flyaway balloons are the company's big money-maker.
Flyaway balloons were nothing new when Mr. Nishi got into the business, but they were declining in popularity since they left plastic litter over the countryside. He developed flyaway balloons from Japanese washi paper, made from mulberry bushes and a biodegradable material. They proved popular, with the company establishing a high public profile with events such as the release of flocks of flyaway balloons in the form of white doves at the beginning of the 1998 winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
Show Corporation now has 16 employees in Japan and 71 in China, where the balloons are produced. These days they're made of a cheap rubber that degrades quickly in sunlight; up to a half million a month are sold in Japan alone, and the export business is picking up. The company is also diversifying, producing such items as a cushion to protect workers cleaning high ceilings from falls, and a life-vest for tsunami-prone areas that will protect the wearer when dashed against obstructions by a tidal wave.
* ALTERNATIVE COMPUTING FOR THE DEVELOPING WORLD: Much fuss has been made about the project to build a "hundred dollar laptop" for the developing world, discussed previously in these pages, but according to an article in THE ECONOMIST ("Splitting The Digital Difference", 23 September 2006), it's not the only game in town for developing-world tech.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a researcher at Cambridge University in the UK and formerly of AT&T, believes that the route to cheap computing for the masses in the undeveloped world lies in multiuser processing. Once upon a time, before the age of PCs, computer users shared a mainframe through dumb terminals. A modern PC is at least as powerful as some of these old mainframes, and in fact PC operating systems like Linux can support multiuser operation. The Cambridge group has developed an interface box named "Ndiya", Swahili for "Yes", that allows five to ten sets of keyboards, mice, and displays to be hooked up to one PC. The scheme is already in use in internet cafes in Bangladesh and South Africa, with access to the internet over mobile phones.
Researchers at software giant Microsoft, on their part, think that innovative financing may be a key to helping sell PCs to the undeveloped world. Taking a cue from the way people in poor countries support their mobile-phone habit by buying prepaid phone cards, Microsoft is pushing a scheme named "FlexGo" in which a PC buyer pays an initial installment up-front to obtain the machine, and then buys cards to allow its use for a certain limited time, with the machine disabling itself when the card runs out. Eventually, the user will pay off the machine and then it will work full time; a user could broker time on the machine to others to help pay it off, in much the same way that mobile phones are rented out for small sums in undeveloped countries.
Microsoft actually thinks mobile phones are a better model for computing in undeveloped countries than the hundred dollar laptop. The company has now developed a system in which a mobile phone can be plugged into a keyboard and a TV to create a network-enabled micro-PC. Microsoft is also considering the software element, creating a cheap, streamlined operating system named "XP Starter Edition". The idea is to cut the cost so low that piracy becomes uneconomical, and to challenge the efforts of open-source advocates to push Linux as the default operating system for the developing world.
Of course, PCs are not trivial to use, which means training is required. Cisco, the well-known maker of internet servers, supports free "networking academies" run by local techies in 63 developing nations. There's also the issue of software. Mark Shuttleworth, a South African software entrepreneur who took a ride to the International Space Station in 2002, is tackling the job of distributing applications software to poor countries. His "Shuttleworth Foundation" has come up with the "Freedom Toaster", which is a kiosk where people can obtain open-source software and burn them onto free CDs. There are now about 30 such kiosks in South Africa.
The question remains of whether any of these schemes will prove workable. PCs for the masses may be an illusion, but those backing the schemes can draw some confidence from the way mobile phones have caught on in the developing world. Not all these ideas are going to work, but if enough ideas are generated a few may well be winners.
* POPULATION IMPLOSION: Several articles in these pages in the last year discussed the emergence of a Western-oriented consumer class in Russia. The articles did point out that this phenomenon is mostly found in the big western cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, with the smaller cities and rural areas still tending towards the impoverished. This was emphasized by an article in THE ECONOMIST ("A Sickness Of The Soul", 9 September 2006), which pointed out that the population of Russia has declined by 6 million since the fall of the Soviet Union, to 143 million. To put this in perspective, that's less than half the population of the USA in a country about 1.75 times bigger in terms of land area.
Although widespread poverty is partly to blame for a low birth rate, Westernization and the associated inclination towards small families also contributes. However, the low birth rate is not so much the root cause of the shrinking population, the actual rate not being so different from that of Western Europe, as is a wretchedly high death rate. General life expectancy for a Russian male is 59, and in some locales it's pushing down closer towards 50. 40 years ago, a Russian male could look forward to an average lifespan of about 64 years.
Russian heart-disease rates are among the highest in the world. The suicide rate is five times that of the UK, and the number of traffic fatalities is four times greater. Murder is 20 times more common than in Western Europe. However, Russian women have an average life expectancy of 72 -- which leads to the question of what critical variables make the male life expectancies so low.
There is little argument over the main cause: alcohol, which is linked to heart disease, traffic accidents, and acts of violence. Some estimates place the number of alcoholics among adult Russians at one in six. In some villages, children become alcoholics before they reach puberty. Women are less prone to becoming alcoholics and so they do not suffer from these afflictions at the same level. Compounding the problem is that much of the stuff that Russians drink, the bootleg brews they call "samogon", are pretty nasty: in 2005, 36,000 Russians died of alcohol poisoning, compared to a few hundred in the more populous USA. A particular recent problem was samogon made with a medical disinfectant that destroyed the livers of its victims, resulting in what has been called the "yellow death".
There are other factors as well. Russians tend to be heavy smokers; the country has serious environmental problems, including radioactive contamination; and the public health system is decrepit and corrupt. There is also a general problem of sheer hopelessness. The alcoholism and destructiveness are partly a symptom of a system where people feel trapped.
As bad as things are, they are likely to get worse soon. The issue is AIDS. It's taken time for it to catch on in Russia, but it is starting to spread, with the estimates of the number of Russians infected running to a million. Death rates are hard to estimate, partly because they are masked by Russia's shocking levels of tuberculosis deaths. Although the government should have been able to take advantage of the delay in the arrival of the disease to prepare, officials were complacent; even now the government's HIV-AIDS budget is tiny. Citizens are often just as complacent: anti-AIDS activists find that trying to encourage young folk to use condoms is like talking to a brick wall.
The workforce is shrinking and the military is straining to find healthy recruits. Russians have not been particularly welcoming to immigrants even though they are needed to keep things going, with incidents of violence against foreigners on the rise. In the Russian Far East, ethnic Russians are concerned that they will be gradually displaced by Chinese moving across the border. That is an old and probably exaggerated worry. However, the current downward trajectory of Russian society does give a long list of perfectly realistic things to worry about.
* YARIS BACK TO THE FUTURE: I finally got rid of my 1983 Toyota Tercel 2-door hatchback, obtaining a Toyota Yaris 2-door hatchback in its place. The Tercel had been so reliable that I could hardly have bought a car from anyone but Toyota. In fact, when the finance guy at the dealership -- an engaging Russian with the looks and personality of a middleweight boxer -- tried to sell me on an extended warranty, I basically replied: "What for? Toyota makes such a good car!" It was the perfect rejoinder, not merely blunting his push but leaving him beaming with pleasure.
In any case, the abrupt jump from a 1980s car to a 21st-century car turned out to be something like "back to the future", illuminating the progress in automotive design in over two decades. To be sure, the Yaris is a budget machine and not an exotic vehicle by any means, but even Toyota's bottom of the line vehicle represents plenty of evolution.
* First off is the streamlining, the Yaris featuring the smooth rounded contours and sharply raked windscreen often seen on modern cars. Sexy? Not really, but it is kind of cutesy. It reminds me a bit of the little toy cars that are wound up by rolling them backwards over a tabletop. I keep having a vague idea of putting a big windup key to put on the rear.
The headlights were interesting, consisting of one large lamp and one small lamp behind a curved transparent plastic fairing. The small lamp is "always on"; this appears to be common in new cars these days -- there's probably some regulation someplace requiring it, I would bet California, but I know not the details.
On the inside, the swept windscreen gives a surprising impression of spaciousness for such a small car. One of the few negative reviews of the Yaris that I read said it lacked headroom, but I'm six foot three (190 centimeters) tall and had plenty of leg and headroom. The back seats are cramped, but that's what I would expect for a subcompact.
The biggest change in the interior is that the instrument panel is not in front of the steering wheel, but is in front of the stick shift in the center. This gives a clearer view to the front and more space for storage -- it has a very nice and convenient set of storage compartments and niches. The critical review didn't like the centerline dashboard either, but it's a wash: instead of glancing down to get my speed, I glance to the side; the swept windscreen allows the dashboard to be set well forward, and it's not like I take my eyes off the road. I do wish it had a digital speedometer instead of an analog readout; since I suspect one's just about as cheap as the other, I would bet I'm a minority in that preference. It has a dual mileage counter along with the odometer. I was hoping it might have a "mileage reader" that gives current gas consumption, but no such luck.
Some of the surprises a new car can provide can be amusing. The first time I took the Yaris out in the dark and turned on the headlights, the dashboard went black. Huh? Oh, there's a dimmer control somewhere ... where's the dimmer?! I had to check the manual when I came to a stop and found out it was next to the driver's door, not exactly an intuitive spot when the dashboard is in the center.
The "fasten seat belts" alarm is persistent, rising to a frantic throb if I don't fasten my belt after a minute; it will go off eventually, but an alarm light on the dash keeps blinking at me. The alarm would also go off if I put something halfway heavy on the passenger seat, so I finally just put the seat belt in place there. One very peculiar feature is that I can't start the machine unless the clutch pedal is all the way down. Apparently it's a dodge to keep people from firing the thing up when it's still in gear, but I still stall the vehicle at stop lights by mishandling the clutch every rare now and then and if I get a bit flustered I can have trouble starting it again.
There were a number of features that everyone is familiar with these days but which were basically new to me, such as airbags and a rear-window wiper. As primitive as it might sound, this is the first car I've had with air conditioning; I'm at the age where I tire more quickly and drastically when it's hot and so that turns out almost to be a necessity now. During the first long-range trip I took in it, when I started to get woozy I'd turn up the air conditioning until I literally chilled out, and it made a big difference. When I got to my destination, I didn't feel like I'd been run through a wringer. Now I can take long-range trips in the heat of summer no problem.
The stereo system is state of the art, however, built around an MP3 CD player. It's fun to put a dozen or more CDs, or at least the high points of each, on a single disc and then play for hours. Trying to figure out how to navigate through the CD menus can be confusing at first, however; people talk about "hang up and drive", but in my case I had to remember a few times to "stop fiddling with the fancy stereo system and drive". There's also an input jack for using a music pod or the like, but I haven't tried it out yet.
The only really annoying feature of the Yaris was the spare tire. It has a temporary spare and I detest such things, so the first thing I did was buy a real spare. I tried measuring the spare tire bay before I did it, but I still didn't get the full spare to fit. That annoyed me -- I can't stow a spare tire that fits the car? There's plenty of space for it in the rear and I would have got rid of the despicable temporary spare in any case, but it's still klunky and annoying.
Incidentally, trying to dispose of a temporary spare was a nuisance. I even asked the dealership if they wanted it, and they said NO. It's so useless I can't even give it away. Trying to break the thing down for disposal proved another nuisance -- the tire was snugged up to the wheel with thick cable loops, a scheme which makes sense considering nobody ever thinks to change the tire on a temporary spare but which makes getting the tire off a real pain.
* Becoming cosy with a new car turns out to be something of a Zen experience. Driving a familiar vehicle is something done in a Zen way, without much conscious thought, and it requires a learning curve to get to the point where a new vehicle becomes so familiar. To be sure, I've driven plenty of other vehicles on occasion, but it's not possible to drive a strange vehicle for a short period of time and feel knowledgeable of its quirks or fully comfortable in driving it.
One of the issues is just the "situational awareness" of where the car is: how wide is it? I'm backing up, where's the back end? One of the funny things about driving the Yaris was when I would park it in a normal parking stall, I would leave the nose far from the head of the stall. It took me a little time to figure out it was because the nose of the Yaris was so much shorter than the nose of the Tercel.
The big adjustment comes in handling the rear view, tweaking the positioning of the mirrors and figuring out where the blind spots are. My situational awareness has got the point where I can synthesize the rear view upstairs and not have to think about it much, though I'm still leery of spacing out and getting nicked on a lane change.
* I'm very satisfied with the car and found my dealings with John Elway Toyota very pleasant, at least in comparison with the sheer ripoff sales jobs more local dealerships tried to pull on me. I once observed that the only thing worse than a big stupid bureaucracy is a little stupid bureaucracy: at least the big bureaucracy has some standards. John Elway is part of the Autonation group and they have some rules. They didn't dicker with me too much, but then again their profit margin on the Yaris was so low that it didn't pay to try to drag things out. I gave them a reasonable deal, and it wasn't worth their time to do more than go through the motions of talking me down.
In fact, I had a lot more trouble with the Colorado motor vehicles department. Before I bought the car I called up to get an outline of what I needed to do to make my car legal, and the woman on the end of the line glibly fabricated a list of things where only half the entries had anything to do with reality. I ended up being worse off than if I hadn't called at all. If I'd just asked her one question, any question, I would have probably seen through her, but she had been conned.
Then I tried to order custom plates -- "RYO OKI", I wonder how many readers will know what that means, do a search on "cabbit" -- and they approved it as "RYO OK", even though I had listed three alternatives spellings that all had an "I" on the end. They misspelled my name, too; I'm used to having my last name mangled, but not my first name. I sent back a correction. After a few weeks, I got a letter in the mail telling me to go down to the motor vehicles department and pick up the plates. I did so immediately and put on the plates on the spot. Enough messing with this thing.
* Incidentally, I read an article in a car magazine on the Yaris and it pointed out that the old VW Rabbit, my first car, only weighed 860 kilos (1,900 pounds), while the Yaris weighs 1,090 kilos (2,400 pounds). In terms of weight, subcompacts have become heavier, up into the range of compacts. It appears to be due to regulations on crash-worthiness and the like.
My little green Rabbit was not the best car I ever owned. The worst experience I had was when I was driving down the road one sunny day and smoke started pouring out from under the hood. I pulled off on a side street, parked, yanked open the hood, and all the insulation on the electrical system was sizzling away and burning. I snatched a sprinkler that was conveniently on the lawn of the house where I had parked to put out the flames, then grabbed a tool and pried off one of the cables to the battery to stop the sizzling.
The fiasco did have its little bit of black humor. All my frantic activity was witnessed by a young guy who was walking down the sidewalk when I parked. The fact that he wasn't very helpful was neither here nor there, it all happened so fast -- but then he had to tell me that he would have handled removal of the battery cable more effectively: "I would have just reached in and pulled it off!"
I was too distracted to pay him much mind or reply: "You'd put your bare hand on a cable that was so hot it had melted its insulation off?!" I was often clueless in those days but at least I wasn't that clueless. I've always remembered that incident, and have to be somewhat glad I didn't think of the reply -- since I probably would have added a few unfortunate comments to it. By the way, I do now carry a fire extinguisher in the car where I can get at it quickly.
And then there was the time the muffler got a hole in it and the thing sounded like a farm tractor. I do not remember the Rabbit with any particular fondness, but when I do think of it I at least have one pleasant memory associated with it: the report of a person on a humor newsgroup about seeing a white Rabbit with the plates "IML8".
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- POWER PLANTS (3): The next item on the tour of a coal-fired powerplant is the stack, the big chimney that can be seen from far away. The stack was once used to generate a draft to pull air into the furnace, but with the convoluted pathway now present between input and output, the stack has to be driven by blowers. The height of the stack is simply to ensure dispersal of the exhaust. There may be a separate stack for each furnace at a plant, or the flues may be consolidated into a single stack. There may also be short stacks around the plant to support small auxiliary boilers.
Old-fashioned furnaces had boilers involving tubes run through the middle of a firebrick-lined firebox. Fireboxes now run hot enough to destroy firebrick, and the water is run through the walls of the firebox, with the walls divided up internally into tubes called "risers". Incidentally, as hot as the firebox is, it's so heavily insulated that it's not uncomfortable to be right up next to it. The insulation is not just for comfort but to prevent heat energy from leaking away and being wasted.
The tubes in the firebox walls are called risers because the water and steam rise in them, to be fed to a "steam drum" above that separates water from the steam in the flow using centrifugal principles, and pipes the steam off to the power turbine. The steam uses up its energy going through the turbine and heat exchangers, with the liquid water returned to the firebox through a set of "downcomer" tubes. The downcomers feed the risers through junction over a "mud box", a sump that collects rust and scale for disposal when the furnace is shut down for maintenance. The entire boiler assembly is suspended from the ceiling, to allow it to change its dimensions as it heats up and cools down.
A modern boiler system will have automated valves and computer control, but it will also have a spring-loaded relief valve on the steam drum that will pop open when a maximum pressure level is reached. Such relief valves go back to the age of steam, when boiler explosions were common and often disastrous.
* The steam plant's turbine is not so different at the core to the turbine of a jet engine, though instead of generating its own gas flow in a combustion chamber it is driven by the steam from the boiler. The turbine may be mounted on its own foundation to ensure a tight alignment; the spinning turbine contains an enormous amount of rotational momentum and kinetic energy, and if it's not kept on axis it could shake itself to pieces disastrously in short order.
A typical turbine has a "spool" with stages of "rotor" vanes rotating around the driveshaft, with the moving rotor stages spaced by fixed "stator" vanes connected to the casing. The vanes are designed with their aerodynamics carefully considered, and they are built of the most exacting materials, capable of tolerate high pressure, forces, and heat. A broken vane would lead to disaster.
There are usually three units in the turbine: a "high pressure" turbine that accepts the raw steam, which is then driven through a reheater to kick its heat (if not pressure) back and then fed to an "intermediate pressure" turbine. The cooled output of the intermediate pressure turbine is finally driven through a "low pressure" turbine. Since the steam expands as the pressure drops, the casings for the three turbines go from relatively small for the high pressure turbine to relatively big for the low pressure turbine, just to maintain mass flow. The sizes are deceptive, since the high pressure turbine generates 60% of the power while the bigger low pressure turbine only provides 15% of the power.
The lubricating system for the turbine is large and complicated, with big pumps and motors to keep the oil flowing. A computer-controlled governor system keeps the turbine from spinning too fast and destroying itself. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* READ THE FINE PRINT: Well-known debunker Michael Shermer had to admit in a recent essay in his SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN column that he'd been had himself recently. He was traveling on a tour in crowded airports and airliners over the winter holidays, and had regretted not packing his "Airborne" tablets -- which, dropped into a glass of water, create a fizzy orange-flavored potion of herbs, vitamins, electrolytes, and whatnot that supposedly wards off colds.
By coincidence, while on the tour Shermer ran into a fellow who had actually
investigated Airborne, and discovered some interesting things. Most notably,
the product says in bold letters:
Take at the FIRST sign of a cold symptom
or before entering crowded environments ...
repeat every three hours as necessary.
However, the labelling also says, in tiny print:
These statements have not been evaluated by
the Food and Drug Administration. This product
is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or
prevent any disease.
Further investigation showed that the makers of Airborne, Knight-McDowell
Laboratories, have interesting qualifications for development of a cold
remedy: Victoria Knight-McDowell is a schoolteacher and her husband, Rider
McDowell, is a scriptwriter, which explains something about the verbiage on
the product packaging. Indeed, their Web page actually boasts about their
home-grown credentials, claiming that the product was CREATED BY A
SECOND-GRADE SCHOOL TEACHER!
The website had originally featured a link to results of a clinical trial, but that was dropped, the explanation being that it "confused consumers". ABC News looked into the matter and found the clinical trial was conducted by GNG Pharmaceutical Services, "a two-man operation started up just to do the Airborne study. There was no clinic, no scientists and no doctors."
Shermer dipped into his network of knowledgeable contacts and was informed there was no component of Airborne that was known to have any effect on colds, except for vitamin C, which some evidence suggests may be able to reduce the duration of a cold. The herbs and vitamins in the concoction will tend to provide a bit of a lift, but Airborne also has high levels of vitamin A, in fact high enough to violate safety guidelines if the nostrum is taken several times a day. Shermer's contact told him: "There's more evidence for chicken soup than for Airborne."
* ED: Shermer's misadventure with Airborne proves the truth that even a very sharp professional skeptic will be conned every now and then. Nobody has the time or energy to investigate every possible course of action in detail, and so we often have to do things on a degree of trust. Sometimes, of course, that trust is misplaced. As for Knight-McDowell Labs, it appears they have been doing a good business with Airborne, their website saying they have made hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. With the bad publicity piling up, that may not be for much longer -- alas, though this fad will run its course, its authors will still walk off with the money.
* SKY JUNK: Jetliners, like any other machines, eventually wear out and have to be disposed of, preferably before they do so on their own. Given how big they can get, obviously this can become an elaborate process. A BBC WORLD Online article ("Where Old Aeroplanes Go To Die" by Chris Legard) took a closer look at the details.
There was a big buildup of jetliners, including the then-new jumbo jets like the Boeing 747, in the early 1970s. Jetliners have a working life of roughly 30 years, and now these aircraft are being junked. When some operators simply dumped their junkers in the ocean, officials at Boeing became alarmed. In response, Boeing helped set up the "Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association (AFRA)", a consortium of recycling companies operating at two airports -- Chateauroux in France and Evergreen Air Center in Arizona.
The Beeb reporter paid a visit to Chateauroux and spoke with Martin Fraissignes, who operates the facility and is also the executive director of AFRA. The airport is littered with jetliners being dismantled; Fraissignes jokes that it's good that only freightliners operate out of Chateauroux, since some airline passengers might find the sight of piles of broken-up aircraft unsettling.
The jetliners are broken down, with some components refurbished for resale and metals separated for sale as scrap. However, new jetliners are increasingly made of lightweight, strong carbon-epoxy composites; they will make half the weight of Boeing's new 787 jetliner, now in development. Not to worry, however; the Milled Carbon factory in West Bromwich in the UK, another node in the AFRA network, has implemented processes that can quickly render down composite materials for re-use, with the end product good enough to be used in new aircraft.
The factory's boss, John Davidson, is a founding member and director of AFRA. According to Davidson, the consortium was set up as an exercise in "best processes", with an eye to the concern that somewhere down the road jetliners would be covered by "End Of Life Vehicle Regulations" that forced manufacturers like Boeing to cover the cost of ultimate disposal of their products. The general sense at Boeing and elsewhere was that it would be far preferable to take control of the issue before governments did and imposed solutions on industry that would be more painful than necessary.
Says Jim Toomey of the AFRA Evergreen Air Center in Arizona: "Why is AFRA going to be great? Number one, it's going to get the best practices established. Number two, it's going to keep us at the cutting edge of recycling technology. And number three, it's going to do it without government regulation and interference. We're going to do it before they tell us to do it, and we're going to come up with practices we can live with and which are better than maybe they can enforce because this is our business."
Boeing's arch-competitor Airbus is also working on the disposal issue through a program named the "Process for Advanced Management of End of Life Aircraft (PAMELA)". It's a research program right now, backed by 3.2 million Euros, some of that coming from the European Union. In recycling, it seems, the sky is not the limit.
* EMERGING ECONOMIES: THE ECONOMIST ran an extended survey on emerging economies in the 16 September issue ("The New Titans" by Pam Woodall). The discussion was mostly in macroeconomic terms and a bit dry for anyone not into monetary exchange rates or labor balances, but there were interesting tidbits to report.
In 2005, the emerging economies finally caught up with the cumulative GDP of the rich-world economies, meaning that the balance of economic power is beginning to shift in a major way. It should be pointed out that the accounting was in terms of purchasing power, and once the greater purchasing power of money in poor countries is factored in, the actual contribution to global GDP by emerging economies is only 30%. However, no matter how it's figured, the times are changing. In 1970, the share of world exports by the emerging economies was only 20%; now it is 43%. They consume over half the world's energy, accounting for most of the growth in fuel demand, and hold 70% of the world's foreign-exchange reserves.
The four biggest emerging economies are Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- "BRIC" in the jargon -- with Mexico beginning to catch up with the pack. Ironically, three or four hundred years ago, countries like India and China were the world's economic powerhouses, but the industrial revolution left them behind. Now they are making a comeback. Over the past five years, the economies of India and China have grown by 7% a year, an unprecedented rate and far above the 2.3% growth average of rich countries over the same period. Forecasts envision the growth rates of emerging economies and rich countries to follow this track for the next five years. The first decade of the 21st century is experiencing the most rapid growth in wealth in history. If the emerging economies continue on the track of free-market economics and social reform, the boom is likely to continue.
The boom is being driven by international commerce, with the Internet providing a nervous system for communications and coordination. Growth should make almost everyone happy, with more of the world's citizens enjoying more prosperous lives and so providing new markets for those who want to sell them goods and services.
* However, in the nature of things not everyone is turning out to be a winner. One of the biggest advantages of emerging economies is a low-cost, highly motivated workforce. That means a tendency to transfer production from rich countries to emerging economies. The fact that this implies layoffs for workers in rich countries is arguably less important than the fact that it gives management a powerful lever against labor, and one that management ends up being forced to wield even if they don't want to: high-priced labor means trouble from competitors and the danger of bankruptcy.
The end result is that in rich countries like the US, the real wages of unskilled workers have been gradually declining, if at a slow rate. However, in the new global economy, skilled labor and management are in demand. With global business booming, profits are running high, and in the US there has been a tendency to soften regressive tax systems -- so the rich are getting richer. America's top 1% of earners now pull in 16% of all US income; they were pulling in 8% in 1980. The same thing has been happening in Europe and Japan, though not to such an exaggerated level. Emerging economies are now starting to compete more in skilled and managerial jobs, though nobody expects them to make the same inroads as they have in unskilled jobs.
Protectionism isn't the solution: nations need to engage in the world economy to stay competitive, and overall wealth is increasing for all. Even unskilled workers whose pay is falling get some compensation from cheap goods imported from emerging economies. However, there is still a case for careful government intervention, tweaking the tax and benefits system, improving education, and helping workers change jobs. If real wages at the bottom continue to decline, the pressure for protectionism may well become politically irresistible, no matter what its drawbacks are.
* Another important aspect of a world increasingly dominated by emerging economies is the scramble for resources. Demand for materials is climbing rapidly in emerging economies, and they are still low on the curve. Some estimates indicate that China will import about 20 times more oil in 2020 than it does now, and over six times more copper. Right now, there's only two cars for every 100 Chinese, compared with 50 cars for every 100 Americans. By 2040, it is estimated there will be 29 cars for every 100 Chinese.
The result of the race for resources is pressure on commodities prices. The pressure is not absolutely consistent. There has been an increasing shift towards services in emerging economies like India, and services are based on human resources more than material resources. The demand and rising prices have also led to discovery of more resources and new ways to make use of existing resources, as well as more recycling and investigation of alternatives.
The race to increased production has also strained the environment. China has 16 of the world's most air-polluted cities. Many think that there is no way for the emerging economies to ever reach the levels of consumerism found in the rich countries; it seems more likely that the levels of consumerism in rich countries will be forced to decline as competition for resources increases. The interesting question will be as to how this affects the quality of life overall: a humming world economy means legions of inventors and manufacturers coming up with new ideas that can change our fundamental ways of doing things. The future has its promises as well as its threats.
* THE LONG ARM OF THE LAW: According to that gold mine of the true hard facts, THE ONION News, the legislature of the state of Kansas has now banned the practice of evolution within its borders. The sweeping new law prohibits all living beings in the state from being born with random genetic mutations that could make them better suited to evade predators, attract a mate, or adapt to environmental changes. In addition, it bars any sexual reproduction or battles for survival that might lead, after several generations, to a more well-adapted species or subspecies.
Violators of the new law may face punishments that include jail time, stiff fines, and rehabilitative education to help organisms suspected of evolutionary tendencies change their ways. Repeat offenders could face sterilization. To enforce the law, Kansas state police will be trained to investigate and apprehend organisms who exhibit suspected signs of evolutionary behavior. Roadside spot checks with DNA monitors will be performed to ensure compliance.
Says Dr. Robert Hellenbaum, a chemist from Indiana University who helped draft the new law: "Barn swallows that develop lighter, more streamlined builds to enable faster migration, for example, could live out the rest of their brief lives in prison. And butterflies who try to mimic the wing patterns and colors of other butterflies for an adaptive advantage -- well, they better think twice about trying to pull con games like that from now on."
Enforcement will strongly focus on single-cell microorganisms, since they are notorious for their rapid evolutionary adaptation. Says Dr. Hellenbaum: "These repeat offenders are at the root of the problem." However, enforcement of the law will be even-handed, a state police spokesman saying: "No species is exempt. Whether you're a human being or a fruit fly, any practice of natural selection will result in prosecution to the full extent of the law."
* ANOTHER MONTH: This last month I released an upgrade to my oversized American Civil War history, now up to 93 chapters. Recent updates have focused on issues raised by the "Confederate apologist" crowd, who among other things like to insist that the Civil War had absolutely nothing to do with slavery, it was over tariffs instead, and that lots of black men fought for the Confederacy. (The South did have issues with tariffs, but the matter was nothing new and not hot enough at the time to make people fly off the handle over it, and there does seem to have been many black men in the Confederate States Army -- holding the rank of "slave".)
I can appreciate that some folks, usually Southerners, sympathize with the Confederacy -- no problem there. It is certainly possible to make a reasonable if by no means unarguable case that the South had a right to secede from the Union and that Abraham Lincoln's war against the South was an act of aggression. It is also understandable that Southerners find the popular notion that the Union wore the white hat and the Confederacy the black hat insulting, and such a simple-minded vision isn't supported by the facts anyway.
However, the apologists have gone off the deep end. Just before I released
the new version of the history, I had an apologist contact me to say the war
wasn't about slavery, it was about taxes. I gave him a one-word reply:
Bullshit.
He took it better than I thought he would:
Thanks for the reply. [OUT]
That was likely the most gracious possible answer under the circumstances,
and I have to admit that I felt a bit guilty for shooting him between the
eyes -- but it was as much as he had coming to him for throwing a bogus
assertion into the face of someone who had more than enough background to
call his bluff on it. Incidentally, there's another, smaller set of Civil
War contrarians -- libertarians who are not happy with the massive expansion
of the powers of the US Federal government during the war. I suppose the
creation of the Internal Revenue Service gives them some good cause.
However, these folk are more anti-Lincoln than pro-Confederate and are not
inclined to claim, for example, that black men fought for the Confederacy as
willing and active combatants.
I have to admit that though I find the lunatic fringers a persistent annoyance -- no matter what I write about, there's someone out there who has cracked ideas about it and is muddying the waters, complicating my job -- I also find them amusing and a part of me looks forward to contacts with them. I do realize that provoking people who may well be unbalanced to a lesser or greater degree may not be safe, but there's a certain Zen flattery in dealing with people who are doing more poorly for themselves as normal practice than I do on my worst days.
As far as the Civil War history goes, I have some satisfaction in the knowledge I've acquired on the subject, but that satisfaction is greatly dampened by the fact that the document gets very little readership. It's not just a question of it being long and intimidating; it's way down the list in Google search rankings. I hardly even get criticism over it, it's just ignored. What's particularly frustrating is that the high ranking documents tend to be those which I never thought would have much appeal, which suggests that simple freak chance plays a major role in what documents become popular. I still retain some hope that one of these days the Civil War history will catch on. I figure it's got nowhere to go but up.