Category Archives: Science And Society

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Perfect Energy Source

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I have commenters who refuse to start their own blogs, so I’ll have to create my own guest-blog posts for them. Here’s Carl Pham:

I wouldn’t say I’m enthusiastic about sequestration, aside from the aesthetic pleasure I get from acres of active sequesterers, particular those in genus Sequoia, but it sure beats the hell out of (1) deindustrialization and refeudalization (I know who wants to be my feudal lord), or (2) flinging irrecoverable resources down the rabbit hole of “alternative energy” sources.

I mean, it amazes me that people think because it’s possible to formulate a sentence like we must search for alternative energy sources that they must exist, whereas a few moments informed thought would tell you this is a sentence like we must search for Atlantis or we must search for a new element with stable isotopes, and coming perilously close to we must search for a perpetual motion machine.

The way I see it, there are four forces. Gravity gives us waterfalls and windpower, tech known since the 8th century, thoroughly exploited. The strong force gives us fission and fusion, also well understood. Fission has been ruled out because we’re stupid. Fusion is tough because of that staggering activation barrier, the size of the match you need to light the fire. The weak force gives us radioactivity, but if you’re going to use that you might as well use fission, so that’s that.

What’s left? The EM force, which gives us solar energy and chemistry. Direct solar power is futile, because the power density at the Earth’s surface is too low, so you’ve got to have some collection and storage system, which inevitably brings us to chemistry, that being the way you store electromagnetic energy (barring the invention of stupendous capacitors).

Problem is, the Earth is a closed system, and it’s had 4 billion years to come to equilibrium. There aren’t many chemical reactions left that (1) have plentiful fuel lying around, but (2) magically enough, have failed to already run sometime over the past million millenia.

Except for one. That would be combustion. And the reason is simple, because we live in a giant photosynthesizing hothouse, a mad biosphere that soaks up gigartons of CO2, reduces it to carbohydrates for storage and transport, and then oxidizes it again for energy and movement. It’s a nice, neat, closed cycle, and has been running stably for millions of years. Humble logic suggests the obvious thing to do is tap into this cycle for our own needs, peel off 0.1% of the carbon for our own purposes.

Which we do — but only on the oxidation side. So logic suggests, once again, that we enlist our chlorophylled neighbors to help us out there by reducing the carbon we so merrily oxidize, balancing the books. And, amazingly enough, just as we’re aware of the problem, we discover the tools necessary: our ability to directly manipulate the genome, so that we can tailor plants and bugs to reduce CO2 just the way we want.

I mean, heck, if only combustion and the carbon cycle had just been discovered, it would be the coolest, most clever, greenest tech, and Obama would be wanting to pour billions into it. But, you know, since the tech is as old as pencils, we sit around thinking No, that can’t make sense. Make marks with a piece of charcoal encased in wood? They did that in the 16th century, back when people were stupid and uneducated. There MUST be a better way.

Philosophy, Science And Society

A Canine Turing Test

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Jonah Goldberg writes about one of his favorite subjects today (no, not that one) — dogs:

Charles Darwin, a true secular saint of the modern age if ever there was one, loved dogs unreservedly. And, in The Descent of Man, he marveled at the ability of dogs to love back. He noted how even “in the agony of death, a dog has been known to caress his master.”

But even Darwin was a sucker, apparently. Eric Zorn, a writer for the Chicago Tribune, recently mocked a local woman, Jess Craigie, who dove into near-freezing waters to save her dog from drowning. Zorn wrote, “Note to Jess Craigie: Your dog still doesn’t love you.”

Zorn’s source for this dog slander is Jon Katz, who despite his name has written mostly wonderful stuff about dogs. Zorn uses an unfortunate quote from Katz to peddle the fashionable notion that dogs are, in the words of science writer Stephen Budiansky and others, “social parasites.” According to this theory, canines are evolutionary grifters that have fooled humans into believing they are our friends. “Dogs develop very strong, instinctive attachments to the people who feed and care for them,” Katz told Zorn. “Over 15,000 years of domestication, they’ve learned to trick us into thinking that they love us.” (In his book Soul of a Dog, Katz is far more nuanced about the nature of canine affection, suggesting a quid pro quo of food for love. Here, Katz is out of the bag.)

Emphasis mine.

It seems like the age-old hubris that man is so unique that other animals can’t think, or have emotions, or even feel pain (Descartes believed that the obvious distress of the animals that he was vivisecting was just reflexes, and had nothing to do with actual sensation). Of course, some take this to the absurd length of believing that human infants are insensate as well, and used this to justify surgery without anesthesia on them even in in recent decades.

But ultimately, we can’t know with any certainty what’s going on in another creature’s head, be it a dog, a baby, or even our closest loved ones. We have to make assumptions based on external behavior. The brilliant computer programming pioneer Alan Turing understood this, and decided to assume that if someone, or something, acted as though it was intelligent, and self aware, that it probably was. Thus he came up with the famous Turing test to judge whether or not a machine entity had achieved sentience and even sapience. Unless we’re sociopaths or extreme autists, we make this assumption every day with people with whom we interact.

I would say that the old saying about ducks contains multitudes of wisdom, and if it walks and quacks like a loving dog, Occam would suggest that we assume that Fido (or in his case, Cosmo) loves us, in his own dog-like way. And while I’m sure that Jonah would be appalled at the notion, I’m sure it applies to cats as well (again, in their own way). Jessica sleeps on us, she nuzzles us, she gently taps my cheek when she wants to be fed, she never deliberately scratches me, even when I’m doing something she doesn’t like (like giving her a bath). While she spends much of the day ignoring us and doing other things, and doesn’t need the constant reassurance and attention that a dog does, she is the most affectionate and adoring cat I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that she has a sense of comfort and completeness when we’re around, and if it’s not love, what is it? I don’t think she’s faking it.

I think that where Katz and his fellow deniers get off track is that the animals didn’t evolve to pretend to love us. That would be a lot of work, evolutionarily speaking, it seems to me. It would require the ability to deliberately deceive, which is a higher cognitive function, and one that apes have but that I’ve never seen cats or dogs exhibit (unless Katz’ theory is true, of course). It makes a lot more sense to think that we have simply bred them over the millennia to love us, selecting the friendlier ones for breeding, and discarding those without affection for us. Just as telling the truth is easier than telling a lie, because you don’t have to keep your stories straight, the easiest way for something with less intelligence to appear to love is to actually love — no act required.

So when someone says that animals don’t love us, they only pretend to, I don’t know what that even means. It sort of reminds me of the old joke that the Iliad wasn’t written by Homer, but another ancient Greek poet of the same name. They have evolved to love us, and we have co-evolved to love them, and why question it any further?