My thesis in Up Goer Five speak!

In the air there are little tiny drops of stuff, and we don't understand how all the drops get there. Breathing in the drops is bad and we're not sure if the drops make the world hotter or colder, which is important. So for my big final college paper I tried to find out how some of the drops are made.

We know some of the drops are made when stuff from trees and stuff from cars come together in the air and make new stuff that sticks together into drops. We have a pretty good idea of the first part of what happens, so I made the first part happen in a cup to make three middle things that could come from three kinds of tree stuff. Then I looked to see what they did. Two of the middle things broke down by themselves but the third one didn't do much. This is the one that came from the kind of tree stuff that doesn't make a lot of drops with car stuff. This makes sense because we think the middle things are too small to stick together and make drops, but if they break down they could make bigger stuff that does stick together.

Then we want to know why the third kind of tree stuff makes a middle thing that doesn't break down. There wasn't enough time to be really sure, but we think it might have to do with where the different parts of the middle thing point, so some parts can touch each other and make it break down, and it's not as easy with the third kind. Other people should do stuff to try to find out if that idea is right!

Bright winter spice cookies

I came up with these cookies today when J said he wanted cookies, but we didn't have any of the usual centerpiece ingredients - ginger, peanut butter, chocolate chips. I like them because they rely on just a few spices to really stand out, without the medley of standard "winter flavors" like cinnamon and nutmeg.

Cream together:
1/2 cup butter
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup coconut oil

Add:
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2 tsp vanilla x
Zest of 2 small oranges

Blend separately:
2 cups whole-wheat flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt (double if butter unsalted)
1/2 tsp ground cloves

Work dry mix into wet mix. Chill until workable without sticking to hands, ideally 30 minutes in fridge. Form into balls, roll in sugar, and place on cookie sheet. Bake at 350 F for 8-12 minutes, checking for tops to just start cracking. Makes about 30.

Ultra ginger zinger cookies

Adapted from: http://www.food.com/recipe/soft-ginger-cookies-137042

Ingredients:

2.5 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cloves
2 tsp ground ginger
approximately cell-phone-sized piece of ginger root
3/4 cup butter (room temperature)
3/4 + 1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
2-4 tsp water

Mix flour, baking soda, salt, and dry spices - set aside. Peel ginger root, mince, and set aside in saucepan. Mash butter until soft in another bowl; add 3/4 cup sugar and cream together. Beat in egg and molasses, and leave aside.

Pour 1/2 cup sugar over minced ginger and put on high heat. Stir while adding 2-4 tsp water - a minimal amount to prevent burning. Boil 2-5 minutes, or until most of the water is evaporated and the syrup is thick, but adjust heat as necessary to prevent caramelization. Cool in fridge or freezer briefly - you want to pour the syrup before it crystallizes extensively, but you need it cool enough not to curdle the egg.

When ginger syrup is sufficiently cool, pour and quickly stir into wet ingredients. Add dry ingredients and mix well. Set oven to 350 F. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls onto baking sheets (if the dough is too soft and sticks to spoon, chill in the fridge and try again). Bake 8-11 minutes, until tops are just beginning to congeal. Cool 3-5 minutes before sampling. Makes about 50 2-inch cookies.

Sandy Hook and Pakistan

Yesterday was a pretty sucky day.

I woke up late, quickly got into an obnoxious argument, and then at the end of breakfast... J told me that 18 kids got shot in Connecticut.

I went to campus because I needed to sell back books and decided to walk through the canyon.  It was a sunny morning and the beauty of the trees made me think, look at this, look at all the people out enjoying it. For each of the 27 victims of the school shooting yesterday there are thousands of people whose life goes on as usual. For a moment I felt like the world was more okay - and then my perspective went another layer larger. I thought about how for every thousand people in the U.S. whose lives are mostly unchanged - except for the trauma of hearing that such a thing happened, which ripples in various degrees out to all of us - there are ten thousand throughout the world whose lives are constantly racked with poverty, hunger, and other horrors.

Like in Pakistan, or in Gaza. Someone on my Facebook feed said "who the fuck kills kids?" I didn't have the heart to respond "world leaders." Because they do. They don't take a gun to a school and shoot six-year-olds while looking at them, but they sign off on orders that they know will result in children just as dead. And today, by coincidence (or maybe someone else was thinking of a similar connection) I see this fairly old article posted today. The U.S. kills not just possible civilian bystanders, but obviously non-threatening first responders and investigators.

We decry terrorism and express outrage at its barbarism, when young men of another color, nationality, and religion perpetrate it. We are shocked and horrified and search for evidence of mental illness when a white boy from a nice community goes on a shooting spree in a school. But this is the normal mode of operations in international politics. That person who asked who kills kids, said they normally can understand why people do horrible things, if only from the perspective of studying psychology. Well, it's easy to see why Obama can sign the drone orders. He doesn't have to see who dies, he don't even have to press the button, he just makes a "tactical decision" from the comfort of his office. And it's easy to see why socially, he doesn't get called out. Authority is powerful. Even if a lot of people got pissed, money is powerful too and people with a lot of money are people who see everything as a game and profit even off of misery - they won't do anything. That's not hard to psychologically understand. But we need to be trying harder, because it's not all that different than shooting up a school. The fact that they're doing it to accomplish something, that it's all part of a plan, that those people live in a wartorn country anyway and "can expect it" rather than the shock after expecting your kid to be safe at school... doesn't make it okay to kill innocent people.

Oscar Wilde said the only thing we know for sure about human nature is that it changes. Just because psychologists have found explanations for why people do awful things - especially collectively - doesn't mean we can't do our best to provide a cultural overlay that counteracts that potentiality. We can't expect the senseless killing to stop until we refuse to justify senseless killing - by anyone.

Potato broccoli feta casserole

Ingredients:

2 large potatoes
2 broccoli stalks
6-8 oz feta cheese
Salt & pepper
Olive oil

Peel broccoli stalks, slice thinly, and lightly steam. Meanwhile, slice potatoes into thin rounds. Layer 1 potato on the bottom of an 8x8 or 9-inch round baking dish. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Layer about half of the broccoli, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil. Scatter about half the feta cheese on top, then repeat layers. Cover with foil and bake at 350 F for 40 minutes or until a fork test indicates potatoes are done. Remove foil and bake 10 more minutes to brown top layer of cheese. Serves 2-4.

Carbon dioxide, nuclear energy, and hurricanes: a long-term climate strategy proposal

So between reading Stewart Brand's book Whole Earth Discipline (a very mixed bag, you can get some good points out of it but also take it with a grain of salt) and hurricane Sandy, combined with the fact that climate change has up to the point of this disaster gone totally unmentioned this election - I've been thinking about what, practically, we really need to do to maximize our chances of surviving the carbon dioxide we have, and will at least for some time yet continue to put in the atmosphere.

In the very shortest term, anything we can do to convert coal use to oil use is good. Still in the short term, anything we can do to convert oil use to natural gas use is good. Natural gas carries the largest amount of extractable energy per carbon atom, and coal the least, so even before we escape the fossil fuel paradigm there are ways to minimize damage. "Clean coal" is not one of them and should be considered an embarrassment to Obama's administration.

In the medium-longer term, anything we can do to trap natural gas that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, such as from livestock waste, and burn it for fuel, is good. Fossil fuels that are stable in the ground and/or non-gaseous should be left where they are, but methane has more greenhouse impact than carbon dioxide per molecule even over a 500 year timeframe, and the conversion ratio is 1:1. Carbon dioxide is the biggest problem right now because we produce the most of it, but if we have a choice between greenhouse gases, it is usually the lesser of evils.

As the immediate arm of long-term strategy, we need to ramp up nuclear energy. Hydro, wind, and solar are all great to the extent they can be utilized, but hydro and wind have inherent capacity/infrastructure limitations, as well as non-carbon environmental impacts that scale with increased implementation, and solar is hindered by materials scarcity and conversion efficiency. We already have the ability to use nuclear fuel for fission reactors, and insofar as we improve solar technology, we are merely harnessing our favorite extraterrestrial fusion reactor. The fact is that nuclear reactions have the capability to produce orders of magnitude more power than chemical or mechanical energy generation.

The elephant in the room when it comes to nuclear is the radioactive waste. What the hell do you do with waste that is dangerous for 10,000 years? The intuitive, but perhaps somewhat blockheaded, way to look at it is that we need to seal it up so well that it can't leak and nobody will stumble across it in the next 10 kYr. But whatever else I may have thought of Stewart Brand's book, he did do a nice job of reframing that issue: if society collapses so badly that we lose the knowledge of what the waste is and how to deal with it for-the-moment, then we'll have other problems killing us quicker than trace radioactivity. So what we really need is flexible planning that allows each generation to monitor and relocate or re-protect, if necessary, the waste. In the meantime, it will decay fastest at the beginning, becoming less dangerous over time; we may come up with better storage strategies that do meet the 10 kYr dream; and even now there is research into ways to use the "waste" for another cycle of fission, all the way down to stable products - which, if sufficiently developed, could remove the problem entirely.

High energy density situations, however, lend themselves to runaway failure. Brand argues that we learned from Windscale, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl and reactor safety is "solved." He was writing in 2009; in 2011, Fukushima seriously challenged that point. Hurricane Sandy did not cause any meltdowns, but there was some concern before landfall about nuclear plants in the way. The earthquake causing the Fukushima tsunami is as much a fluke as it would have been 50 years ago, but crazy storms like Sandy are only going to increase in the near future, and we will need our infrastructure, especially higher risk operations, to routinely withstand disaster conditions.

Therefore, in the shorter-medium term, we need to seriously hash out nuclear operating standards and risk management so that we can safely maintain reactors and begin replacing carbon-derived electricity. In the medium-longer term, we need to continually improve the state of nuclear waste management, with an ideal goal of recycling all the way down to stable isotopes, or even down to Fe-56.

In the long term, we need to develop carbon sequestration. We are already at 387 ppm of CO2, well above the 350 hypothesized to be "climate-safe," which is in turn well above the preindustrial 280 or so. Extreme measures would be necessary to level off as low as 450 ppm, and more realistic scenarios project 550 or even 650. In other words, we are likely to end up with way more carbon than we can afford in our atmosphere, and we desperately need a way to pull it back out, or better yet, sequester it in non-gaseous form after creating but before releasing it.

Another long-term project should be optimizing solar energy conversion. There isn't unlimited uranium any more than there's unlimited oil, and if we developed fusion reactors, we would need hydrogen fuel, which would likely come from water, a resource we do not want to irreversibly deplete (though I suppose space technology could eventually support hydrogen harvesting from Jupiter or something). Solar powered electrolysis of water to give combustible hydrogen fuel, however, would result in a closed-loop process, regenerating water upon use. In theory, we could use photoelectricity to power any fuel-generating reaction we wish. It could even be coupled to the carbon sequestration issue, if a reasonably efficient mechanism were found to reduce CO2 back to organics.

Finally, we need short-term shims besides energy. Fossil to nuclear isn't going to happen overnight, and neither are solar-generated transportation  fuels or carbon sequestration - so we need to give the climate OTHER negative feedbacks. We can boost albedo simply by painting all our roofs white, and that has pretty much no consequences, so we should do it. Light-colored aerosols are another way to boost albedo, and although I'm wary of sulfates causing as many problems as they solve, I like the idea of boats that churn and increase sea spray. Sea salt and water make one of the lowest potential impact types of aerosol, and the method is quickly and easily reversible if unintended negative effects were to be observed.

And of course, as a matter of sustainability not just on the energy front, but also in terms of materials and the rates of natural recycling processes, we need to create a culture of conservation, reuse, repurposement, and durability. We need to do away with planned obsolescence and ever-changing fashion. We need to make shoes that will last 10 years and then wear them for 10 years and then when they're really and truly done use the material to make a patchwork handbag. We need appliances that can be repaired over and over again instead of just getting a new one full of freshly extracted metal and plastic. This is itself a complex issue, but to end this post I must at least raise the point that non-carbon energy will not solve our problems forever, and carbon dioxide is not the only problem created by "business as usual."

Libertarians, property rights, and why bodies are irrelevant to the whole issue

Recently I've seen some libertarian rhetoric on Facebook that has made me think. The thing about libertarian rhetoric is that it's centered on a limited number of pretty steadfast concepts, unlike the tangled web of shifting D/R positions. Liberty or freedom is obviously one. Property is another. Property is taken as a fundamental right to be protected, along with life and the ever-cherished liberty - to the point where systems that do not acknowledge property are characterized as taking away property and infringing on that right. I think the way libertarians see it, protection of property is necessary so that each person can be a free individual. But that's not the only way to see it.

All individual rights constitute a limitation on the freedoms of others. This is expressed in the trope "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." But who is swinging fists and who is protecting their nose when it comes to property? Property is the right to exclude others from use of resources. It's the right to say "this is mine, you're not allowed to use it even if it's sitting idle, and if you try I'll call the fucking cops on you." If you think this is a fundamental right, then trespassers, squatters, P2P hosts, etc. are swinging fists and hitting the noses of property owners. But there is a reciprocal right: the right to use available resources to meet one's needs. These two are mutually exclusive. If you believe right-to-use is more fundamental than right-to-exclude-from-use, then property owners and enforcers are the ones who are swinging fists. (Thieves are in the wrong either way, as they seek to sequester property for themselves without consent.)

Where do we get the idea that property is so fundamental? Locke argued, and others have followed after him in accepting, that the right of property derives from bodies. That is to say, every person has property rights to their own body, and by mixing the labor of the body with other resources you acquire property rights to things outside yourself. It is hard to argue that one doesn't have the right to exclude others from one's body. To do so would be to turn an indifferent eye to rape, among other things, and undermine the basis for rights to life and liberty. But does a property-like right in the body necessitate property rights to other things?

Setting aside the whole "mixing" aspect of the argument, is it possible that you can have the same kind of rights with respect to other objects as you have for your body? I think not, and Rousseau makes an argument that illustrates why:

"Pufendorf says that just as one transfers his property to another by agreements and contracts, he can also divest himself of his liberty in someone else's favor. This, it seems to me, is a very bad argument, for in the first place, the property I alienate becomes something entirely foreign to me, and its abuse is unimportant to me, but it does matter to me that my liberty should not be abused, and without making myself guilty of the evil I shall be forced to do, I cannot leave myself open to becoming the instrument of crime." - Discourse on Inequality, second part, emphasis mine

In other words, since life, liberty, and any other right we might suppose to inhere in the body cannot be transferred away from us, cannot be treated such that we no longer have a vital interest in it - and as my own observation, is of a fundamentally different type of utility to whomever we might contract it to - these rights are meaningfully different than rights to control over transferable items. If you believe that property rights in objects are analogous to property rights in your body, then you ought to also believe that you can legitimately sell yourself into slavery - and while I'm sure there are some who do believe that, I suspect most libertarians would consider them the wacko wing.

So I think the traditional body-as-property argument is a red herring. The kind of rights you have over your body can't be the same as the rights you have over legal property, for the reasons discussed above. For similar reasons, they can't be the same as use rights over resources in a non-property system: one person's use of a resource has no bearing on anyone else unless they spoil or use up the resource, or use it for a harmful activity - but use of a person's body is ALWAYS relevant to that person, regardless of physical impact or intended consequence, and cannot be made otherwise. Bodies are a special case and thus irrelevant to the decision between use-rights and property-rights as the basis for individual liberty.