Here are some different ways of looking at the US Presidential election:
Correlating the election results with the lighting of the night sky.
Drawing the US by scaling the size of each county not by its land-mass but by its population.
Another population analysis where the brightness of each county is determined by population.
Correlating the election results in the South with cotton output in 1860.
More later as I find them.
Yesterday, while riding to work, I heard the NPR story on the testing of the Large Hadron Collider. The purpose of this massive machine (though still about 3 times smaller than the Superconducting Super Collider would have been…) is to probe the basic building blocks of the universe. The subatomic world made up of bosons, quarks, and so on. The particles that carry mass, for instance, that give the bigger particles (protons, electrons, neutrons) their mass.
I’ll be honest, this sort of physics isn’t exactly my cup of tea. I’m not much into the string theory part of physics. I personally find the self-organization and collective phenomena that occur in materials much more interesting. But, I also think this stuff is important and is the most successful example of the predictive power of physics.
So, it was a bit unexpected, but I was very proud, as a physicist, to hear about this story. And excited. It was very nice to hear such a prominent story about science. Both on NPR and on Google, the two places I get most of my news, this was a feature story. And, for just a moment, politics was pushed aside for something bigger and grander than any political story. It was very cool.
Then, I also read about the people who are scared that the LHC will create black holes that will then swallow the Earth. They think the experiments should stop, just in case. I’m glad they aren’t getting their way, since science shouldn’t be controlled or determined by people who are afraid of things they don’t understand. I don’t think science should necessarily go unchecked, but I do think that the vast majority of scientists are very responsible people who aren’t going to do something they think has significant danger associated with it. I also wouldn’t be surprised if these people are the same that think Global Warming is a hoax perpetuated by elitist scientists and that we don’t have to do anything about it, even just in case.
I recently posted about a talk I saw about meeting our global energy needs in the future. To me, one of the frustrating things about the whole conversation is that there aren’t hard numbers comparing one scenario to another. For example, I’ve heard that if we cover all of New Mexico in solar cells, we could meet the energy demands of the entire nation. However, I’ve not heard how much that would cost and how that compares to say building new nuclear power plants.
Clearly, I’m not the only one with this frustration. And someone has done something about it. David J.C. MacKay, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at University of Cambridge, is working on a book to answer precisely these questions. As he says, we need “numbers, not adjectives” in trying to decide how to both meet our energy needs and to reduce our green house emissions. On his website, Without the Hot Air, he presents a draft of a book in which he compares the possible energy sources available to Great Britain with the energy consumption they are currently using. I’ll admit I haven’t read his book, yet, but I went through some of his slides and his executive summary, also available on his website. The upshot: Britain cannot generate the power it currently uses from renewable sources available only within Britain. And that is if, for example, all land in GB was used for power generation of one sort or another, which, as he points out in his slides, would make a lot of people unhappy (he shows protests against off-shore wind farms, where the protestors bemoan the destruction of scenary).
And, as opposed to a lot of people who bemoan our current situation (i.e. Al Gore), Dr. MacKay gives concrete plans that embody different policies (such as a Green plan which uses no coal or nuclear to an Economic plan that relies heavily on nuclear) to solve Britain’s energy problem. These rely upon two things: increasing energy production, which in the case of Britain seems to involve getting power from other countries that can produce more renewable energy, and decreasing energy consumption. Both are key to a solution to the problem.
One interesting side tidbit I saw in his slides: I guess one reason people don’t like windmills is that they kill birds. He compares the number of birds killed in Denmark, which has a much higher number of windmills than GB, by windmills and cars and the number killed in GB by cats. The number killed by cars dwarfs those killed by windmills, and the numbers killed by cats are many orders of magnitude greater than either. Just an interesting tidbit.
Anyways, without hard analysis like Dr. MacKay’s and the corresponding realistic look at possible solutions, we will never solve the energy problem. A prime example is biofuels. Biofuels are touted as a great advance in addressing the problem. However, everything I’ve read suggests biofuels are, at best, a distraction and will not help in any significant way. That they are so highly touted by politicians and the like just distracts us from real solutions.
Some other links I found on Dr. MacKay’s site: his blog, where he discusses energy claims in the media and other aspects of energy consumption and Sandy Polak’s site, which discusses ways to reduce your carbon footprint that are realistic.
(The figure is from Dr. MacKay’s website.)
Earlier this month, there was a report on NPR about how much we (Americans) have driven this year compared to last year. The result: due to increased gas prices, we have driven 30 billion miles less than last year so far. And use of public transportation is on the rise, maxing out in a lot of places. It took prices at $4 per gallon to force us to change our habits. And now, our public transportation system is at the edge of what it can handle.
It is unfortunate that we have little to no foresight. If, in the 90s, when the economy was booming and everyone was just a bit better off, we had just taxed gas a bit higher and invested all that money in public transportation development, we would be in very good shape today. Or, going back to the energy crisis of the 70s, if, after gas prices spiked and started to fall, if we had taxed gas somewhere between the high and the low, it wouldn’t have felt so hard and we would have 40 years of money to develop public transport.
But we never have any foresight. It is always about the here and now; our immediate future, not the long-term consequences of our actions; our personal self-interests rather than the interests of the “greater good”. I wonder if this is a consequence of our democratic system: politicians have to focus on 2, 4 or 6 year cycles, so they have to do things that have results on that kind of time scale. They can’t plan so easily for longer term results as that will have little impact on the next election cycle. Or maybe that is a consequence of us, the electorate. Maybe we can’t see past today, can’t see what we will need tomorrow and elect people who plan longer term. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that, with some foresight, we would be in a much better place today than we are.
One of the biggest challenges for our planet is energy. As more countries become industrialized and the people of those countries become more wealthy, they will need more energy. The problem is compounded by things like global warming, where we have to be careful how we get our energy. We can’t just burn fossil fuels indefinitely, we have to think of other ways of supplying our energy needs.
About a month ago, a colleague gave a talk at work on an energy workshop he attended. All of the talks from that workshop can be found at http://rael.berkeley.edu/files/apsenergy/ but my colleague gave a nice overview of the workshop and I thought I’d share some of the highlights here, as I think that both they were very interesting but also because I think this is such an important topic.
