Big Government Environmentalism

 Crazy, critters, dumbassery, history, I'm from the government, politics, reshaping the world  No Responses »
Jul 192012
 

A bit of history I’d never heard of was Chinas “Four Pests” extermination program of 1958. It seems Chairman Mao got it into his head that what China needed to do was exterminate mosquitoes, flies, rats… and sparrows. Sparrows eat seeds, and lots of sparrows eat lots of seeds, which means less food for the teeming millions of slaves and serfs in Communist China. Can’t have that! So China went to war against the Eurasian Tree Sparrow. And were remarkably successful at it, virtually making the species extinct in China.

And leading, in part, to the deaths of 30,000,000 (that’s thirty MILLION) Chinese humans.

China’s Worst Self-Inflicted Environmental Disaster: The Campaign to Wipe Out the Common Sparrow

The level of FAIL was spectacular, and well worth the read.

 Posted by at 11:51 am

Solving Californias water problem

 blather, reshaping the world, science  30 Responses »
Jul 072012
 

Currently California (Los Angeles, the Imperial Valley, San Diego, etc.) sucks a whole lot of water out of the Colorado River and other inland sources. This is of course insane given that California has a fairly extensive border with the PACIFIC FRIGGEN’ OCEAN. A few terawatts of nuclear power and some desalination plants would have fixed that right up. But nooooo, California is loaded with luddites who oppose nukes, so they have little choice but to drain the whole west dry.

But it seems like the French may have the answer:

This New Wind Turbine Produces Clean Drinking Water Out Of Thin Air

Basically, the vaporators used by the moisture farmers of Tatooine.

Simply build a whole bunch of these along the coast and atop the major buildings in places like LA. With a capacity of at least 1,000 liters per day per turbine, California would need… I dunno, a billion of them? Lessee:

The Colorado River Aqueduct provides 1.5 cubic km of drinking water annually to SoCal = 47.5 cubic meters per second.

The San Diego Aqueduct provides 23.4 cubic meters per second of drinking water.

The All American Canal provides 740.6 cubic meters of irrigation water per second.

So, about 811.5 cubic meters per second, or 70,113,600,000 liters per day. The information provided suggests that the turbines can produce 1000 liters per day in a  humid climate… assume that the San Angeles coast is appropriately humid. This means that only 70,113,600 of these turbines would be needed. Easy! At a cost of about 700 grand a pop, the project would run a measly $49,079,520,000,000.

Hmmm. Forty nine trillion dollars seems a bit much. Maybe I made a math error, I dunno. Too lazy to double-check my work. But economies of scale would reduce the cost per turbine, and the system could very likely be made more efficient. If the turbines dropped to 1% of the current price, and they increased output by ten times, the project would drop in cost by a factor of a thousand making it a government-trivial $49 billion.

By doing this, California would not only become “water independent,” they would also generate a hell of a lot of electricity, and the water currently being drained out of the Colorado could be used elsewhere in the drought-stricken west or allowed to simply flow on down the river. The dying ecosystem of the Gulf of California would probably appreciate *that.*

 Posted by at 10:51 am

All the water on Earth

 awesomeness, blather, reshaping the world, science, science fiction  9 Responses »
May 192012
 

The USGS has produced a graphic that shows the Earth stripped of all water – salt, fresh, clouds, water vapor – with all the water rolled up into a  sphere:

How much water is there on, in, and above the Earth?

The ball of water is about 860 miles in diameter.

What the resultant illustration looks like is a dry unterraformed planet with a small ice moon from further out. The sci-fi implications should be obvious… if you find an Earth-sized world that doesn’t have enough water (like, say, Venus) and you want to make it a water world… you need to transport an iceball about that big. Of course, *crashing* an iceball that big into the planet would likely be a pretty bad thing; much of the ice would get slung back out into space. But putting it into a low orbit about the world and then chopping it apart and throwing chunks at the planet might be a good way to go about it.

I leave it to the student as an exercise to determine how to move a moon  of water 860 miles in diameter.

 Posted by at 10:02 pm

Movie review: “Cabin in The Woods”

 awesomeness, blather, reshaping the world, science fiction  2 Responses »
Apr 212012
 

Saw it today: My recommendation: go see it. It’s good. It’s *really* good. Sadly, I can’t say too much about it, or I’ll give away plot points that you really need to be surprised by. I read the basic plot of the movie in a review and decided it was worth seeing; in retrospect, I’d’ve been happier being surprised.

All that said: about half of it is a stock-standard “dumbass kids in the woods getting set upon by nasty killmonsters” plot. But as it turns out… there is a good reason why it sounds like such a cliche, and that reason makes this movie rather more than the run of the mill slasher/monster flick. Suffice it to say… this is the most HPL-ian movie I’ve seen in a  *looooooong* time.

Lots of violence, literally truckloads of gore, even *GASP* some girlie-nudie-bits. Mostly stars relative unknowns and some recognizable character actors… one *Star* makes an appearance, and Thor before he was Thor (the movie was shot in 2009 and then MGM went bankrupt). And the best stoner character you’ve ever seen.

And it presents a rather interesting major moral quandary.

 Posted by at 12:57 am

We Need To Dream Big Again

 blather, books, history, reshaping the world, science, science fiction, spacecraft  11 Responses »
Mar 162012
 

The April 2012 issue of Popular Mechanics has an article/editorial by Glenn Harlan Reynolds that is *disturbingly* familiar. I was flipping through the issue today while waiting for the Wal-Mart pharmacy to do their thing when I came across an article illustrated as if it were a mid-1950’s sci-fi “juvenile,” and starts off with the line:

THE FUTURE ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE.

SCIENCE FICTION USED TO BE ABOUT BOLD ENGINEERING. SO WAS AMERICA.

Mr. Reynolds makes much the same points I’ve been trying to make, and hopefully he’s done it better. The thrust of the article is that the pace of meaningful technological progress has slowed at the same time that science fiction has become far less inspiring. Some damned good points:

“We can’t Facebook our way out of the current economic status quo”

“There was some moment in the late ’60s and ’70s when people thought we had enough tech”

we’ve lost “speed of implementation”  – “you can roll out a new social media platform or an iPhone app in a hurry, but do Twitter and Angry Birds improve lives the way rural electrification did?”

“We’ve given people new ways to communicate but nothing worth saying.”

“Facebook probably won’t save us from economic stagnation; it certainly won’t save us from an asteroid.”

“The golden age approach is just more inspiring.”

——–

It may be a chicken-and-egg thing – which came first, the end of inspiring sci-fi, or the end of inspiring reality. But the fact remains they are both currently largely absent. Go into a the kids section of a book store and *try* to find some science fiction. You’ll find instead a boatload of fantasy: wizards and vampires and werewolves and whatnot. Entertaining, no doubt, but nothing that can be achieved, nothing to strive for… and nothing to truly inspire. There are no Big Projects in aerospace these days, and little to no modern science fiction that would inspire kids. So, with nothing to inspire kids into aerospace, why would the go into aerospace? There are buckets of fortunes to be made in social media and software; almost nobody gets rich off of aerospace – and some of us get dirt poor off of aerospace. So with a culture as basically shallow as our, it is not surprising that those who might have educated themselves so that they could conquer the spacelanes now educate themselves to create the next Twitter.

Mr. Reynolds encountered a whole lot of pessimism in interviewing people – Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge – for his article, but maintained a level of optimism. A list of “bold and optimistic” science fiction, from Golden Age to today, is included. A few things it seems I may need to look up.

 Posted by at 8:15 pm

We’ve seen this movie before…

 blather, Crazy, I'm from the government, news, politics, reshaping the world, science  7 Responses »
Mar 132012
 

… back when the Nazis killed political dissidents and called it eugenics.

How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change

Where we get suggestions such as:

1) Slipping people drugs that make them sick when they eat meat

2) Using genetic engineering to make people smaller

3) Using drugs to make people more “altruistic”

4) Using drugs to make people not want stuff

Yeah. Awesome.

 Posted by at 7:09 pm
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