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Chris Anderson’s Free is Gee Whiz economics

Chris Anderson’s follow up to his revolutionary The Long Tail (2006, Hyperion) has me reminded of Thomas Friedman for geeks. Stuff that people younger than 25 get naturally but that CEOs and VCs can read and say, “wow, that internets is so amazing!” Free (2009, Hyperion) sets out to cover new ground in describing [...]

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three albums I’ve been listening to in early January

As I vehemently discussed at the #FoJ lodge during the wee hours of 2010, if humanity ended this year the alien civilizations that discovered our legacy would rapidly conclude that  the best thing our species had done was music. After I said that I realized that I don’t talk about the music I listen to [...]

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entering the Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

As of September 2008 we’ve officially entered the end of the oil age. Our economic system based on infinite growth has run into the limits of the physical world. Now that our social systems must rapidly adapt to a new reality of energy scarcity, we must pay special attention to the humans within those [...]

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Renewable Energy Won’t Save Us

Renewable energy is often touted as the future because it has lower CO2 emissions or “can solve our energy scarcity problems because it will replace oil”. Unfortunately, renewable energy is far from solving those massive problems. Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, etc… all require tremendous amounts of oil to get their infrastructure up and running, emitting [...]

Collapse, coming to a theatre near you… hopefully before things fall apart

As independent journalist Michael Ruppert sits in a chair, in a dark room, smoking and saying alarming things my remote desire for business as usual went up in the smoke from the end of his cigarette. I’ve seen Chris Martenson’s Crash Course a few times. I’ve seen the 45 minute version of it too. I’ve [...]

Asides

• From Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd Feb 1835: "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation." (more...) #
• This video shows a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) chasing a staphylococcus aureus bacterium. The video was recorded by biochemistry professor David Rogers of Vanderbilt University in the 1950s. [via Neatorama] #
• Today I was listening to this great rundown of the global oil supply situation on the Financial Sense Newshour with guest Jeffrey Brown VP of Global Oil Supply Analysis for Logi Energy (featured on the first 48 mins of this audio track. Some key facts I learned from the podcast and elsewhere: 25% of the worlds oil comes from 25 oil fields the rate of field collapse is increasing Mexico's Cantarell field went from 2.2mbd in 2001 to 722,000bpd in 2009 (yikes!) Essentially the take away from this podcast was that the rate of depletion will be determined by how fast developing nations continue to grow. Seems straightforward enough but its just a way of saying that no one really knows how fast we'll run out of oil which can be supplied to developed nations. However, it seems that with current field collapse rates the optimistic date of 2020 for a peak will likely be moved closer to our current time if we haven't passed it by already. #
• ...is Jevons' Paradox. From a recent post on The Oil Drum, In his 1865 book “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-Mines,” English economist William Stanley Jevons made the observation “Of the Economy of Fuel” that when improvements in technology make it possible to use a fuel more efficiently, the consumption of the fuel tends to go up, not down. This is known as Jevons’ Paradox. It occurs because as the efficiency of a type of machinery is improved, it becomes profitable for many more customers and feasible to apply it to new applications. This results in rapid growth of the number of machines in use and consequently, an increase in fuel consumption overall. Should I devote the next half-decade of my life to obtaining a PhD in this field simply to attempt to drive the cycle further? When society doesn't provide incentives for low energy tech development, how can we make sustainable advances? #
• I don't post about science nearly enough, especially since I'm training to be a scientist. Art and physics meet in this awesome video of the space science laboratory in Berkley, (more...) #
• It was obvious the James Cameron's latest blockbuster lacked originality but a far more spectacular (but less 3D) story occurred in Papua New Guinea. The Coconut Revolution details the world's first eco-revolution where indigenous peoples successfully fought off the combined might of a giant multi-national mining corporation, paid mercenaries and two governments’ militaries. Awesome stuff. Here's a short 5 min. excerpt which I've watched, #
• I consider myself a highly optimistic person, so I like to temper my optimism by reading through economist Kenneth Boulding's three laws from time to time. Boulding once said, “Anyone who thinks that steady growth can continue indefinitely, is either a madman or an economist.” (more...) #