The Four Horemen Revisited

I don’t often repeat posts, but with the projection of the  world population passing 7 billion this week, I thought it was time to bring this one out again.

Domestication is a mutual process—the plants and animals domesticated historically have met us halfway.

We and our domesticates have entered a kind of symbiosis—both we and they benefit, at least in numbers.

Plant and animal domestication was the first step toward civilization.

There are only two ways of increasing agricultural yield: Increase the amount of food produced per acre, or increase the amount of land farmed.

Once domestication occurred, we were locked into a positive feedback loop between food production and population. But a positive feedback loop is inherently limited and unstable. Are we approaching a crash?

I’ve been taking a Teaching Company course on DVD for the last couple of weeks, and I have to say it’s one of the best I’ve taken so far. I’ve always been interested in the process of domestication, especially since it became clear that the early agriculturists were generally less healthy than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. How did wolves become dogs? Who first thought of riding a horse? Did riding come before or after driving? And are cats really domesticated, or did they domesticate us?

The course is “Understanding the Human Factor: Life and Its Impact” by Professor Gary A. Sojka, but it’s really about human impact. I can’t say it answered all of my questions, or even asked them, but it did a good job of summarizing our current state of understanding, and of steering a middle course between “domestication is a sin and all domesticated animals should be returned to the wild” (most would not survive, and we probably wouldn’t, either) and “animals have no feelings and were put on this world solely for our use.” There are fewer moral problems with domesticated plants and microbes, though even here there are quandaries. How dangerous are monocultures, for instance? Or reliance on a small number of closely related varieties? (Think the Irish potato famine.)

If I have an argument with Professor Sojka, it is that he is too optimistic about the future. This may be appropriate for a college course, but I don’t feel enough sense of urgency. Yes, some people—a small minority even in the West—are beginning to think about long-term sustainability. (The politicians aren’t, by and large.) But the major problem—a population that is rapidly outstripping the carrying capacity of our planet (if it hasn’t done so already)—has become a taboo subject for serious discussion.  “The demographic transition will take care of it.” But will that happen soon enough?

Historically, our population has been kept in check by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. War. Disease. Death by wild beasts—today, accidental death of all kinds. All of these are premature deaths—death by old age simply is not mentioned.

Today, we tend to regard such deaths—those of the young—as particularly tragic. We fight them in every way we can—and in many ways, we’ve succeeded. What we’ve forgotten is that every person born dies eventually, and to reach sustainability we have to reduce the number of people being born until it balances the number who die. Otherwise the four horsemen will eventually increase the death rate to match the birth rate—or more.

Food and energy both rely on sunlight—the sunlight that falls on the earth today and the sunlight that fell hundreds of million years ago, and is now stored in fossil fuels. I group food and energy for several reasons. Fertilizer. Biofuels. Pesticides. Transportation. Pumping water to where it is needed for crops, in some cases pumping down water that has been in storage since the ice age. All of the advances that have allowed us to hold back that horseman, Famine, ultimately rely on those fossil fuels and fossil water, or plan to replace them with agricultural products. And fossil fuels are becoming increasingly risky to exploit—look at the BP oil spill.

But an increase in agricultural output to match the increase in population means more efficiency—which we are obtaining today largely through fossil fuels—or more land in agricultural production. There is only so much land suitable for agriculture, especially if we want to keep the ecosystem services we depend on going. And one of the oldest causes for war is the desire for more land. Desire for more energy, often perceived as a need, is a rising cause of wars today.

Disease? In part that ties back to our methods of food production, as well. Certainly much antibiotic resistance can be linked to the widespread use of antibiotics in animals, and many diseases that started out in animals have crossed over to human beings. I find it interesting that all of the great world religions, many of them very pro-natalist, trace their origins to early city dwellers. Disease can spread rapidly among city-dwellers. In fact until the last century or two, urban areas were dependent on immigration from the countryside to maintain their populations. Having many children was important to these early city-dwellers—most of their children would die before having children themselves. That’s not true today, thanks largely to public health improvements—but the mindset and the religious imperative remain.

All living things—plants, animals, and human beings—are driven to reproduce. In our case, that deep-seated drive is reinforced by religious and social pressures. We claim we have a right, even a duty, to reproduce. But do we? Not in nature. Nature says the “right” to reproduce must be earned. It’s a lesson I hope we can learn before it is enforced by the Four Horsemen.

This is Post 486. Comment to join the drawing.

Lights, Batteries, Temperature?

I need to replace the bulbs in my outdoor lights—the porch light, the old dog run light, the lights over the garage door, and the light on the Arctic entry off the bedroom. And I find myself in a quandary.

Ordinary incandescent bulbs work at the outdoor temperatures we have up here in Alaska — below -40°F most winters, and not uncommonly below -50 or even -60°F. Their lives are probably shortened when they’re turned on at these temperatures, but they do turn on.

Incandescent bulbs, however, are being phased out. The idea is to replace them with fluorescents, and I’ve done that wherever possible indoors. I even replaced the hanging fixture over the kitchen table with a ceiling-mounted fluorescent.

Outdoors, however, is another story. Fluorescents (or rather their ballasts) simply will not work at the winter temperatures found in interior Alaska – or the northern tier of states, for that matter. Even low temperature ballasts only start working when it warms up to -20°F – and warms up is the way we think of it up here.

LED’s do work, and I’ve had outdoor LED Christmas lights for several years now. Over the last year, I’ve begun to see a few screw-in LED bulbs. But they are either very low light output (useful for replacing the bulbs in night lights) or highly directional – useful in some, but not all, of my outdoor fixtures. Yes, there are self-contained outdoor LED lights. They use batteries. See my earlier post on indoor-outdoor thermometers, and the problem with the outdoor sensor being battery-powered – even lithium batteries are questionable at temperatures below -40°F. And a size “C” lithium battery? Just try to find one! They’re available on line, but they are obviously a very expensive specialty item, and I’m not at all sure they’ll work at temperatures colder than -40°F.

It’s not the first time national policy has failed to take Alaskan temperatures into account.

I am reminded of my first new car – bought the year Congress mandated seat belt interlocks, which required that you have the seat belt buckled before the car would start, and which activated a blaring alarm if the seat belt was not buckled. 1973, I think. Fine, I thought. I put on my seat belt as a reflex. My father drilled holes in the frame of our old Woody so he could install seat belts. I’d never be bothered by failure to do something as automatic as that.

Turned out the car I got had two switches to implement the Federal requirement. One was in the seat, and turned on the seat belt safety mechanism if there was weight in the seat. The other was in the buckle, and told the car whether the seat belt was buckled.

The switch in the buckle did not work if the temperature of the buckle was below about 0°F.

I did not have a heated garage then.

I finally figured out that I could start the car at low temperatures by bracing myself between the back of the seat and the floor, so no weight was on the seat. Once the interior warmed up, the alarm would quit.

That worked until the temperatures got below -40°F, and the rather poor heater was unable to bring the interior temperature of the car above 0°F. At those temperatures, the alarm screamed constantly – a serious distraction while trying to drive in ice fog with frosted windows. I would never have heard a siren, for instance.

The dealer said sorry, federal law prohibited them from touching the interlock system, never mind that it wasn’t working properly and was a safety hazard rather than a safety feature.

Cars are not my thing. I lived with that alarm for the next couple of months, until the ban on interfering with the system was removed January 1.

It got disconnected January 2.

The Chimney Sweep

I haven’t had much experience with chimney sweeps.  In fact, until that week, my experiences had been entirely from literature.  Bert in Mary Poppins was probably the most memorable of these, with ”I chooses me bristles with pride, yes I do,” and the sweeps’ rooftop ballet across London.  But there was also the knowledge of Victorian sweeps who sent little boys, often later affected by black lung and scrotal cancer, down chimneys.  On the lighter side, Mr. Puffert and the vicar with his shotgun in Busman’s Honeymoon had me grinning as much as Lord Peter.

So when the furnace repairman pointed out on his annual check that the cap was gone from the furnace stack, and that consequently rain was getting into the firebox, I wasn’t sure what to do.  I am certainly well beyond climbing on a roof, even if I knew what to do once I was up there.

“Get a chimney sweep,” was the furnace repairman’s advice.

A chimney sweep?  Well, I’ve lived in Fairbanks long enough to know that lots of people up here heat with wood, and wood causes creosote buildup which has to be gotten rid of to avoid chimney fires.  So it stood to reason there’d be chimney sweeps, but how did I find one?

The Yellow Pages, of course.  Chimney sweeps weren’t listed as such, but chimney cleaning was, with three entries.  The Woodway was the one I was familiar with (and the only one with a live human being on the other end of the phone) but they no longer swept chimneys even though they are one of the largest suppliers of wood stoves.  I left messages at the other two, and eventually got an appointment for sometime after 2 pm Monday to get the cap replaced on the stack of my oil burner and the stack itself swept—it turns out that oil burners need that service occasionally.  It meant missing an afternoon of Festival, but I wanted to get that cap replaced before I went Outside for a week.

The young man who knocked at the door that afternoon was almost as lean as Bert, but a good deal cleaner.  I showed him the furnace, explained the problem, mentioned that my own previous knowledge of chimney seeps was gleaned from Mary Poppins, and did he mind if I took a few pictures?  He countered that sweeps went back to Roman times, and proceeded to clean up the outside of the chimney in the garage, and set his shop-vac to suck in any loosened soot.  Then he leaned his ladder against the door side of the garage, on the other side of the garage from the stack.  “Why carry stuff any further than I have to?” he asked.

Finally he was on the roof, studying the beheaded chimney pipe.  “It’s sound,” he called, a dark silhouette against the pale, drizzling sky, “though it could use some calking.   I’ll do that when I’ve swept and capped it.”

 He picked up the rods at his feet—that was what had made me think there was something wrong with the dark gray shingles—and screwed the first into his brush.  Then another and another, now with the brush in my chimney, until he became the iconic shape of a chimney sweep, working his brush up and down in the innards of the wide pipe.  When I moved so his background was trees, rather than sky, he became a surprisingly neat figure in a blue coverall.  Almost before I realized it he was pulling his brush up and strapping the rods back together.  “Now the cap,” he said.

 The old cap had resembled a hub cap—in fact when it showed up in the dog run, that’s what I’d thought it was.  The new one was double flanged: a shallow-crowned bowler on top, then a gap, then another rim below it.  He attached the new cap swiftly, and then ran a bead of calking around the base of the chimney.

“All done,” he called down, and vanished to the far side of the roof and his ladder.

“My kids love Mary Poppins,” he said as he left.  “They call me Bert sometimes.”  And he stuck out his clean hand to me, grinning.  “Lucky, you know.”

This was actually written during Summer Arts Festival in 2008.  I hope you’ll enjoy it — and get a feel for Alaska.

Thermometers in Fairbanks

I have a new thermometer.

Now there is nothing new about having a thermometer. As an atmospheric scientist, I have several. The big one out in the old dog pen seems fine in the winter, though it is useless when the summer sun is shining on its back. (I know it doesn’t get to 120° F up here, even in summer!) The one next to the front door reads suspiciously high in the winter, and I suspect it is influenced by heat leakage from the house wall.

I had an indoor outdoor pair, with one outdoor sensor, well located on an outside corner on the north side of the house, and two indoor stations, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom, but the two receivers did not agree on temperature. (I don’t mean a degree or two; I mean they could be off by 20°, reading the temperature from the same sensor.) They needed replacing, I thought. What’s more, the outdoor sensor was battery-operated, and batteries don’t work very well at sub-zero temperatures. Even when they worked, the indoor stations quit even trying to show outdoor temperature at -20°F, which could mean for weeks at a time.

Then about a week ago I was idly checking the thermometers at Fred Meyers. They’re generally good for a laugh — who in their right mind would buy an outdoor thermometer that only reads to 40 below (let alone to only 20 below) in Fairbanks? They had the battery-operated indoor-outdoor sets as well, and for the first time I noticed that while they had an alleged range from -40°F to 158°F, the alkaline batteries I’d been using were only good to -4F. Lithiums were supposedly good to -40°F. (There’s a lot of difference between -20°F and -40°F, or for that matter between -40°F and -60°F, but below -40°F I just stay indoors.)

Old and new outdoor temperature sensors. Outside NE corner, N side, under roof overhang.

The sets, indoor display unit and outdoor sensor, were on sale for under $10, and I decided to get two — at that price, I could just keep one sensor in reserve. Of course to use them, I had to get them out of their plastic bubble packaging.

When possible, I try to recycle. It’s not easy up here, and until recently about the only things you could recycle were aluminum cans, but it is now possible to recycle #1 and #2 plastics (soft drink bottles and milk bottles.)

Not the stuff they use to package electronics. At least it does not have a recycle symbol – I looked. After I had just about cut my fingers off trying to open the blasted thing. Why is it that you have to carry the equivalent of a box cutter and pliers to get anything open nowadays? Even airline snacks (if you can find an airline that still has them.) And then you have all that plastic cluttering up the landfill.

Well, I did finally get the new stations and sensor out of their hermetically sealed plastic coffins and talking to each other. I used lithium batteries in the sensor, and let the sensor and both stations sit side by side overnight, verifying that all four of the temperatures displayed were within a couple of degrees of each other. Then I hung the new sensor (which had a hanging loop) from the old sensor with a piece of string. Now I have base stations in the kitchen and bedroom again, and – surprise, the old stations are showing outdoor temperatures within a degree of the new ones. Guess they just needed the competition.

And lithium batteries come in AAA size, which is what the old sensor needs.  I could have base stations all over the house!

Musk Ox Art

Ever heard of musk oxen?

They’re more closely related to goats and sheep than to cattle (though larger) and they’re definitely an Arctic animal, with a luxurious underwool called qiviut under an outer shell of long hair. They have horns that make a helmet over the tops of their heads with wickedly forward-curved, sharp tips, and they’re a daunting sight head-on. Their defense against their traditional predators such as wolves was to gather in a circle, heads out, with the vulnerable calves in the center. However effective against wolves, such a defense was useless against human hunters, and musk oxen were close to extinction when restrictions on hunting, and transplantation, allowed them to bounce back.

Today musk oxen are being farmed for their qiviut, though it is probably going too far to call them domesticated. The best qiviut is allowed to loosen naturally and combed from the animal (with the aid of a holding chute!) and knit by village women—one of the few sources of cash income in remote Alaskan villages. It’s not overrated — I had a nachaq before the fire, and qiviut is an incredibly soft, warm, lightweight fiber.

The animals themselves have not gotten much attention in art – until recently. Our local PBS affiliate, which has a contest every winter for a poster design, had a semi-abstract muskox painting a couple of years ago. And this month there is an exhibit of musk oxen at the Bear Gallery in Fairbanks.

Have you heard of the Painted Ponies?

Lacie Stiewing decided that musk oxen would be just as good as horses for decorating. Better, in fact, and she designed a somewhat abstract musk ox form and decorated copies of the form with abandon. The result is a herd of musk oxen, a few shown here, in the Bear Gallery at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks, Alaska. It’s an exhibit to make you smile, even if small varieties of the critters are not available. Lacie, have you thought about that?

Jarn’s Journal: Day 10

There are times when I slap myself on the head and wonder how I could have been so stupid. Not often twice in the same day, as was the case today.

I have been worried about the local predators, with no warnoff. All the while, I have of course been recording this on the computer in the emergency capsule. Today it occurred to me to check out what else was in the computer programming.

There is a library. With detailed information on how a warnoff is made. My first reaction was “wonderful — if I could get the parts.” Then it occurred to me to check whether the library had an inventory of what was in the emergency capsule.

It does. Ant the supplies include a limited number of all-purpose chips that can be programmed in a variety of ways. Including those necessary to produce a warnoff.

It may take some tuning, but it seems I shall soon have some defense against being eaten.

You – whoever you are that may be reading this – have no idea what a relief it was to know that I would soon have the basic protection I have been accustomed to since infancy. More than just accustomed to – it had honestly never occurred to me that anything would want to eat me.

All afternoon I labored, thinking that now I could start exploring a little farther from the capsule. Not too far; the capsule still provides protection while I sleep. Then, shortly before I finished the first warnoff, I had another “duh” moment. I can teleport. Not to somewhere I have never been, of course, but as long as I am eating regularly, I can teleport back to the capsule. So I can travel a full day’s distance from the capsule and still have its safety at night. Furthermore, there is nothing to stop me from memorizing the last place I reach in the evening and teleporting to that place the following morning, to continue my exploration. Why, I could cover the whole continent!

It is growing dark, and while the surviving solar cells of the capsule keep the computer going, I do not wish to use them more than necessary. Tonight I shall try to remember all I can of what I saw of this landmass as I crashed. I think the ocean was to the west, and I should try first to find it. Then work along its shores, find a river, and follow it inland. Perhaps I can find the reason the local herbivores seem to regard me as a predator.

(Earlier Parts of Jarn’s story can be found by searching “Writing — Confederation History.”)

My New Toy — an iPad2

I finally decided to take another step into the digital revolution. I’ve bought an iPad. I’ve had it all (well, not quite all) of three days, so this is hardly a complete review, but I’ve already found some things it does very well, and some that are huge disappointments.

Photograph of the iPod (not a screen shot) with a page from National Geographic.

It’s great for magazine subscriptions. I’ve wanted New Scientist and National Geographic for some time, but I’m too much of a pack rat to throw them away, and I don’t have room to store them. They are beautiful on the iPad, and the subscriptions are far less than paper. I can enlarge or reduce the size as I need—not just the text, but the pictures as well.

Books are in some ways better than on my Nook, especially those with illustrations. I don’t think I am going to be able to enlarge charts, which is the main complaint I have with the Nook. No problem enlarging the reading text, but figures and maps? Forget them. (I should remark that I am one of those people who finds reading on a computer screen easier that reading on paper.)

The only games I have are Shanghai and Sudoku. The latter is actually easier for me to play on my iPhone, but the former is great on the iPad. It helped while away the time in the doctor’s office today quite nicely. (Normal reading with one’s eyes dilated is not easy.)

Disappointments? One major one at this point. One of the reasons I bought the iPad was so that I could use it to carry the Excel spreadsheet I use to track my blood sugars, insulin dosages and exercise to my doctor without having to lug along my laptop. I was assured that the Numbers app could read my Excel spreadsheet. It apparently can’t. I may try having Numbers on my main computer read the Excel file and turn it into Numbers before transferring it, but the heart of the spreadsheet are time graphs of blood sugar, for which I sum date and time of day for the horizontal axis. Numbers apparently can’t do this, so none of my graphs (except the histogram of frequency of various blood glucose levels) can be read in Numbers.

I haven’t had time yet to try adding the PDF of Homecoming (which I have on my main computer), or Word files. The word files are supposedly readable in Pages, though after my experience with Numbers I’m wary; PDF’s on my computer rather than in iTunes might be a problem.

Calendar and Address book seem to have transferred over just fine.

Finally, I’ve had a bit of fun with the Photo booth effects—as you can see.

Does Banking Software Work?

One would think that banks, given all the recent problems they have had (and produced) would at least try to get their software right. Apparently they don’t.

Yes, that's me on my tricycle--and the house I now own.

I had better start out by saying I am one of the lucky ones. I have (or rather had) a fixed-rate mortgage, with monthly payments less than the rent I was paying before I decided to buy the house, and an auto-pay arrangement where my checking account bank automatically sent my monthly payment to the mortgage bank. Once I found my IRA (don’t laugh — as a state educator I went off Social Security to IRA’s years ago, but I didn’t know where mine was) I found I was getting less interest on the IRA than I was paying on the mortgage so I started paying down the principal — especially as I’ll have to start distributions this year. So far, so good.

The beginning of this week I got a phone call from the bank that held my mortgage. I was in arrears. There would be a penalty. Did I want to pay at once? (I don’t think it was meant as a question.)

Needless to say, I have heard the horror stories about people who have actually paid off the mortgage being foreclosed on, of robo-signing, of families being turned out into the streets. “I can’t be in arrears,” I babbled. “It’s on auto-pay.”

“Well, we didn’t get your April payment. It’s 10 days overdue. There must be something wrong with your account. Maybe you’re overdrawn.  Now will you pay up?”

“I’ll check with my bank and call you back.”

Well, I checked with my bank. No, they had not sent funds to the mortgage bank in April. The mortgage bank normally billed them, but they had not received a billing in April. My account balance was fine.

I called the mortgage bank back, of course getting a different person. I explained that they had not received a check for April from my bank because the bank had not received a bill — the account was fine. “I’ll have to check on that.” After a long pause on hold, she came back. “No we did not send out a billing in April. We’ll have to set up the autopay all over. Now we’ll need your account number. But I don’t understand why … Let me check something else.

This time, she sounded apologetic. “We didn’t send the bill because your regular monthly payment was more than you owe.”

“On the whole loan?” I knew I’d paid down quite a bit, but the last statement I could find from the mortgage bank — for the first of this year — still had quite a bit of principal. Still, I had sent in a large check near the end of the year. “Did you post that payment before the end of the year?”

“No.”

In other words, that dunning phone call was because I had almost paid off the loan. Their auto-billing software was not set up to handle the case that the regular payment was more than the outstanding balance. This kind of programming error was frequent in the early days of computers, when it was not uncommon to get a dunning letter saying you owed $0.00 and you’d better pay up. But that was 40 years ago! Surely programmers have learned to cover all the possible outcomes of an if-then branch! I learned that when I was leaning to code FORTRAN, 45 years ago!

Apparently not.

Well, she told me exactly how much I needed to pay off the loan, and I got a cashier’s check and went down to the local offices of the mortgage bank and paid off the loan. (They did cancel the late fee, though they still charged interest between the date they should have sent out the bill and the date I paid.) Given the efficiency of their computer system, I’ll relax a little when I actually have the deed in my hands. But not completely, even then.

Ninth Day

On the ninth day of Christmas my true-love gave to me
Nine houses sinking
Eight cars polluting,
Seven blizzards raging
Six aurorae swirling
Five solar flares.
Four chickadees,
Three mammoths
Two ptarmigan
And a spruce hen in a spruce tree.

Momentum and Teleportation

Teleportation in Homecoming requires that energy, momentum, angular momentum and mass be conserved—all basic laws of physics. We’ll skip mass and angular momentum for right now, and just look at the situation where something is moving in a straight line.

Anything that is moving has both kinetic energy (energy of motion) and momentum, but the two are not the same. The difference is usually expressed mathematically: energy is half the mass times the square of the velocity and momentum is the mass times the vector velocity, but for many that just makes if more confusing. Let’s try this, instead. (If you don’t understand mass, think weight.)

Consider a car. Let it be a big, heavy car, say an SUV. Suppose it is coasting at a steady speed, say, 30 miles an hour to the west. Can a mosquito stop it by hitting the windshield? Not likely! The car’s resistance to having its steady motion changed is due to its momentum. This momentum has a direction—the direction the car is moving. Friction will slow it down, eventually, by transferring its momentum to the earth, but for the moment we’ll ignore that.

It also has kinetic energy. If the speed is doubled, the momentum will also double—but the kinetic energy will increase by a factor of four.

Remember momentum has a direction. Suppose we have another SUV moving 30 miles an hour to the east. Speed to the east and speed to the west cancel, so the momentum of the two-car system is zero. Their kinetic energy does not cancel, as can be seen if the two cars meet head-on—when the dust settles, they will be stationary at the point where they met. But the energy will have gone into crumpling metal (and whatever else makes up the cars) and ultimately into heat.

It is possible for two objects to bounce off of each other in such a way that energy, as well as momentum, is conserved. But if the momentum adds up to zero before the impact, it must also add up to zero after the impact. This is a common problem in billiards, though in this case the balls are most often moving at angles to each other so the vector sum of the momentum is not zero—but it will still be the same after the collision as it was before.

The conservation of momentum, in fact, nicely encapsulates Newton’s laws of motion.

Now consider Roi’s problem in teleporting to a very different location. He is moving with the planet under his feet. For illustration, let’s assume he is on the equator, at sea level, at sunrise, and wants to go to the opposite hemisphere, also on the equator at sea level, but at sunset.

Assuming he is on a planet like the Earth, he is moving toward the sun at around a thousand miles an hour, and the area he wants to teleport to is moving away from the sun at the same speed. No change in kinetic energy, but if he doesn’t do something about momentum, he’ll arrive moving about two thousand miles an hour relative to his surroundings—not a very survivable teleport!

My solution is strictly science fiction—I assume it is possible for a person (or a machine) to transfer or “swap” momentum from one mass to another. But they’d better remember to do it!