Rant, Science

Al Gore?!??!

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I just can’t believe that Al Gore just won the Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t understand why he is so deserving of the award. I understand that he has brought a lot of attention to the problem of global warming. And, I personally believe this is a huge problem, one that is, before all is said and done, going to require huge changes in how we live. As a result, I do think that Gore is doing something useful and necessary. But, I don’t believe he deserves the Nobel Prize.

To me, it seems that Gore is like many celebrities. He has found a cause he can champion and is doing a great job at that. Just like all the celebrities that champion a free Tibet, ending the war in Iraq, and so on. But, really, what has Gore done? It is said he has brought great awareness to the plight of global warming. I admit that he has increased awareness in the US somewhat. Not to the extent needed, really, for real change, but ok, more people are aware it is an issue. But has he done this on a global scale? It is my understanding that people in Europe are familiar with his movie, but did that make them aware of the problem? It seems to me that Europe was already aware of global warming and already taking steps to deal with it (like the congestion toll in London, for example). And has he reached anyone in countries like China and India, where it will be most crucial (just think of what happens if the people in those two countries reach consumption levels we have in the US)? It doesn’t seem so to me.

And even in the US, is our increased awareness really attributable to Gore?  Isn’t it the better science underpinning our understanding of climate change that is making the difference in how people perceive global warming?  Don’t the lists of respected scientists that support the view of human activity causing some measure of global warming carry orders of magnitude more weight than Gore’s movie?  And who did his movie convince anyways?  Did any Republicans watch his movie?  Did he change the mind of anyone who wasn’t already on his side?  It seems to me that Gore’s impact has really not been so great as people say.  Clearly, he is part of our greater awareness of the issue, but is he really that central of a piece?  I personally don’t think so.

Gore hasn’t done anything to understand climate change and global warming. That is the work of the scientists dedicating their lives to the cause. It is because of them and their computer models and measurements of the environment that Gore even has data to present (somewhat mistakenly, it seems at times). So, he isn’t doing anything to understand the problem. Is he doing anything to fix it? Not in his personal life, unless you count his carbon offsets, which amount to planting trees in some far-off land. And probably cost him less in a lifetime than he gets via revenue from his movie or the money associated with the Nobel. And I haven’t seen any real serious proposals on his part on how to fix it. So, I just don’t understand why he deserves the Prize. Why aren’t the people who are working to understand and fix the problem getting the recognition? (Though, admittedly, that might be the role of the UN Panel on Climate Change that was also recognized, I’m not too sure (though, see below).)

Part of my problem with Gore is that, while I believe he is sincere about his concern about global warming, it almost seems secondary to me. It seems that his primary focus is himself. That the publicity for himself is more important than the actual cause. I don’t get this feeling, for example, from Jimmy Carter, another ex-national politician who has also dedicated himself to personal causes. With Carter, I get the feeling that the cause is first and all the attention is second. With Gore, it seems the other way around.

The only thing I can figure is that the Nobel committee wants to keep global warming front and center, and they can only recognize individuals in any significant way, and Gore is as good a figure head as any for the cause of global warming. Probably better than most. And so this is the committee’s way of weighing in on global warming, pointing out how they also see it as a huge and important problem. In the end, from the perspective of trying to fix global warming, this is the best the Nobel committee could do.  And, in that light, maybe it is worth giving the prize to a figurehead, a celebrity who has taken up the cause.  But does that mean Gore as a person deserves the Peace Prize? It sure doesn’t feel that way to me.

I just heard on NPR a report on the UN Panel that was the co-winner of the Prize.  Now these seem like the people who deserve it, to me.  While not the scientists who are necessarily conducting the actual research, these 2000-odd people are scientists who collate and distill of the science on climate change going on in the world and parse it so politicians can understand.  These are the guys that write the reports that define our understanding of our role in global warming and try to get politicians to do something about it.  These are the people who deserve this kind of recognition, in my opinion. 

Life

It’s a Girl!

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The most exciting news for quite some time is that Lisa, my wife, is pregnant! We are expecting our first child, due in late February/early March! We just had the 20-week ultrasound and found out that the baby is a girl! Everything is going well, all tests are good, and Lisa is doing very well as well. So, all is great! The photos are of us when Lisa’s parents visited a couple of weeks ago and of the baby in the ultrasound (you can see the profile of the face in the left side of the picture).

Science

New Paper: Direct Transformation of Vacancy Voids to Stacking Fault Tetrahedra

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Direct Transformation of Vacancy Voids to Stacking Fault Tetrahedra

B. P. Uberuaga, R. G. Hoagland, A. F. Voter, and S. M. Valone
Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 135501 (2007)

Defect accumulation is the principal factor leading to the swelling and embrittlement of materials during irradiation. It is commonly assumed that, once defect clusters nucleate, their structure remains essentially constant while they grow in size. Here, we describe a new mechanism, discovered during accelerated molecular dynamics simulations of vacancy clusters in fcc metals, that involves the direct transformation of a vacancy void to a stacking fault tetrahedron (SFT) through a series of 3D structures. This mechanism is in contrast with the collapse to a 2D Frank loop which then transforms to an SFT. The kinetics of this mechanism are characterized by an extremely large rate prefactor, tens of orders of magnitude larger than is typical of atomic processes in fcc metals.

Books

Selected Stories of Philip K Dick

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Warning! Possible spoilers follow (though I will try to keep them to a minimum).

Philip K Dick is one of the more influential science fiction writers, probably ever. His stories have been the inspiration for a number of popular movies, including the Minority Report and Total Recall. They envision a technologically advanced world where what it means to be human is blurred. Many of his stories explore a post-apocolyptic world in which humans are struggling to survive.

The collection Selected Stories of Philip K Dick presents some of his best short stories, including the ones the two movies above were based on. All of his stories cause one to think. Dick lived during the height of the cold war, when the possibility of human self-destruction was at its highest and on the minds of nearly everyone. That, combined with some drug use, led Dick’s imagination to places that are incredible and mind-blowing. Some of his stories are just plain weird. This was epitomized for me by “The Days of Perky Pat”, a story of adults after a nuclear war who spend their times reliving their pre-war lives through the board-game adventures of a doll. The story is just so odd that I could not imagine thinking of such a premise. I mean, some stories, both by Dick and by others, involve a simple premise which the author then explores. The premise isn’t always too radical, it might be something that anyone could dream up. But “Perky Pat” isn’t one of those, at least to me. This story is the product of a mind that just plain sees the world differently.

Not only have Dick’s stories directly inspired mainstream movies, but there are obvious influences his stories have had in a lot of science fiction. The human-looking Cylons of Battlestar Galactica bear an uncanny resemblance to the machines of “Second Variety”, in which a human soldier, at the end, muses that the end of his race might be ok because the robots are already killing one another, already becoming human-like. Some of his stories, such as “Paycheck” (which also inspired a movie), are interesting adventure romps.  All of Dick’s stories, though, convey a unique view of the world, human’s place in it, and the ultimate fate of humanity.

That Dick’s stories provide such an incredible perspective on the human condition begs the question:  how instrumental was his drug use in his ability to devise these stories? It seems to me that many of the great artists, not just authors but painters, musicians, and so on, throughout history used drugs to some extent.  Does this allow a normal human mind to access thoughts and regions of the brain otherwise unaccessible?  Does it allow a person to make connections between otherwise seemingly random ideas to create something new?  If all drug use were completely eliminated, would art suffer?  I personally don’t advocate the use of drugs, but it seems to me that the connections between mind-altering substances and art are pretty strong.

I really enjoyed all of Dick’s stories, even those that start exploring more religious themes.  At least a couple of his stories involve direct interaction between humans and God, with less than predictable results.  But, I was more interested in his commentary on technology and the future of human kind.  I tend not to be a science fiction type of person.  I prefer fantasy.  But, I do enjoy what is termed “cyberpunk” (such as William Gibson and Max Barry) and Dick is a precursor to the cyberpunk genre.   He explores a more immediate future than a Star Wars or Star Trek universe does, though, unlike Gibson and Barry, he does allow aliens in his world.  And the role that aliens play in his world tends to be very disturbing.

I’ll close by saying that a lot of the stories in this collection deal with identity:  what it means to be you, what it means to be human, what separates humans from machines, etc.  These will be important questions as our machines become smarter and smarter and start getting aspects of personality, intelligence and identity.  He also addresses the issues of the individual in society and what role each of us plays in an increasingly technological world.  Again, these questions will become only more important with time.  It thus seems that Dick and his work will continue to reverberate for quite some time.

Blah, blah, blah… I've got the blahs.