A Few Things Ill Considered » coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered A layman's take on climate science and politics Thu, 23 May 2013 13:57:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2-alpha The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor – Chapter 41 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-41/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-41/#comments Thu, 23 May 2013 13:57:39 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1649 The Bottleneck Years

by H.E. Taylor

Chapter 40 Table of Contents Chapter 42

Chapter 41

Theft and Meditation, June 27, 2056


I was between classes in mid-afternoon when Edie phoned.



“Luc. There are men in the shed stealing things.”



“Call the police.”



“I did. There’s no answer.”



“What?”



“I tried to stop them, but…”



“Where are the police?”



“I don’t know.”



“Okay. Lock the door and stay in the house. I’ll be right there.” I knew she would probably be safe, because of the heavy metal door and frame.



“Good.”



I hung up and called the police while I checked my schedule. I was supposed to have a Question and Answer session in Genetics 101. My call to the police was shunted into voicemail. I hung up in disgust.



I put a note on the blackboard that G101 was cancelled due to a sudden family emergency and headed for home.



Edie met me at the door, somewhat calmer than she had been, but still upset. Her right cheek was red and swollen.



“What happened to you?”



“One of them hit me when I tried to stop them. He hit me hard. He knocked me down and yelled, ‘Piss off bitch!’ I told them the house was under surveillance by ConSec and they just laughed.”



“How many of them were there?”



“Five.”



“You stay here. I’m going to take a look.” I stopped and turned back to her. “You should put a cold compress on that cheek.” Anna was wailing down the hall.



The door to the shed was open. The hasp and lock had been pried off and were lying on the ground. Most of the garden tools and some of dad’s carpentry tools — saws, hand drill and bits, plane, an axe — were gone. I picked up the hasp and opened the lock.



While I stood there with the parts in my hand, planning how to reinforce and solidify the door, Edie came out with Anna in her arms.
“I just feel better being near you, if you don’t mind.”



“No, that’s alright.” I gave her a hug. Anna was dozing off to sleep.



“What are you doing?”



“I was planning how to repair the door.”



“Oh.”



She was looking more composed. Maybe in needing to be calm for Anna, she had inadvertently helped herself, I thought.



I had a 1 by 6 board that I decided I would use to build up both the door and the wall. Instead of using screws I would bolt through the boards, doing the same with the hasp. It would be marginally more secure, but would, in a way, just raise the ante.



“Well, some tools are in the basement and there’s no rush anyway seeing as everything is gone, so let’s go inside.”



“Okay.” Edie gave me a tentative smile. “We could have an early supper.”



I set the parts down on the workbench and put the door to. Edie took my hand as we walked the short distance to the back door.



“Just sit and talk to me. I feel like cooking,” Edie said. I took Anna and sat by the window while Edie bopped around the kitchen. Bouncing Anna on my knee and tickling her tummy with my nose, she was soon giggling and gurgling in delight. At one point, I looked up and caught Edie watching us play together. She had an odd look of fond resignation on her face.



Supper was noodles with cut vegetables, all under a mushroom sauce. It was delicious. I tried to distract Edie with a story about the students in my genetics lab, but she remained tense.



When we were just finishing, a black truck pulled into the lane right under the window. I could see some of the stolen tools in the back. I went outside.



“Are you Luc Fontaine?” demanded the driver.



“Yeah.”



“We have some property of yours.” At a signal from the him, two guys climbed out of the back seat and proceeded to unload the tools at my feet.



Edie came out of the house and stood on the back stairs.



“I just need your signature here,” the ConSec guy held a clipboard out to me. “And here.” He flipped a page.



“What happened to the men?” asked Edie.



“They resisted arrest,” said the ConSec guy.



“You mean they’re dead,” I said. Edie put her hand to her mouth.



“Yes, sir.” He nodded and got back into the truck.



When they were gone, I started moving the tools into the shed.



“I’ll help you,” said Edie.



We worked in silence, neither one of us knowing just what to say.



I nailed a board across the door to keep the kids out and went back to the house.
Edie was sitting on the back step. I could hear Anna wailing inside.
With a distraught look on her face, Edie whispered, “They killed those men.”



I nodded.



“No trial, no jury. They just killed them.”



She wrapped her arms around me shivering. I held her, then kissed her forehead. “I’d better see what’s the matter with Anna,” I said.



“Yes. Oh yes,” said Edie, letting go like it was the last thing on her mind.



As I lay in bed that night the incidents of the day replayed in my mind. I thought about the men ConSec had killed. Edie had been upset. That was a healthy emotional reaction. I had wanted to be strong for her, to take care of the practicalities — carry the tools, fix the door, protect my own.



I could just hear my father’s voice asking, “What kind of a society have we become that countenances such vigilante justice?” What kind of society indeed?



We are just hanging on. The planet is in triage and I am one of the voices deciding: save this; let that go. I have to choose the path forward. How many will die because of my decisions? Would you kill a million to save a billion?



What were five more bodies? Well, they were immediate. They were personal. Those poor bastards were probably refugees from down south somewhere just trying to scrape together the means of survival.



There was nothing I could have done about it. I could demand an inquiry, but ConSec would just say they were terrorists. And I had to think about the vulnerability of Anna and Edie alone in the house. If I raised a stink, they would never get emergency services here. Carman might know, might be able to help, but Matt was his primary interest, not me. I was just a means to Matt’s end.



I had never felt so completely alone and vulnerable before. If they could kill petty thieves with impunity, what was to stop them from turning on ordinary citizens?



The ancient Greeks used to differentiate between robbery by force and theft by stealth. This was robbery. It felt like an assault, a violation. And why? The shed and those tools do not constitute my body. What do you own? Do you possess it or does it possess you? Sometimes it seems hard to tell. We come into the world with nothing, and we leave with nothing, but in the interim, the thousand and one vagaries of circumstance apply.



I barely slept that night, drifting into a light dreamless state. I woke up feeling unrefreshed. All night long I was churning the ethics, the power relationships, the legalities in my mind.



Dawn was not a friend.



Excerpted from _The Bottleneck Years_ by H.E. Taylor



For further information see:
A Gentle Introduction.



Last modified May 21, 2013

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-41/feed/ 0 Another Week of Anthropocene Antics – May 19, 2013 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-19-2013/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-19-2013/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 13:41:20 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1647 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week’s Global Warming news roundup

skip to bottom

May 19, 2013

co2now gfx skeptisci app gfx

 

Here’s a wee chuckle for ye:

Low Key Plug

 

My first novel Water was published in Canada May, 2007. The American release was in October. An Introductionto the novel is available, along with the Unpublished Forewordand the Launch Talk(which includes some quotations), An overview of my writing is available here.

A Simple Plea

Webmasters, web coders and content providers have mercy on your low bandwidth brethren. Because I am on dial-up, I am a text surfer — no images, no javascript and no flash. When you post a graphic, will you please use the alt text field … and when you embed a youtube/vimeo/flash video, please add some minimal description. Thank you.

<regards>

-het

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.

I notice moyhu has set up a monster index to old AWoGWN on AFTIC.

“Remember the story of the man trapped in his house during a huge flood? A faithful man, he trusted God to save him. As the waters began to rise in his house, his neighbor came by and offered him a ride to safety and he said, I’m waiting for God to save me.

Well, eventually the floodwaters swept over the roof and the man was drowned.

When the man reached heaven, he had some questions for God — God, he asked, didn’t I trust in you to save me?

God answered: I sent you a pickup truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter, you refused my help.

Just as God sent the pickup truck, the boat, and the helicopter to the drowning man, he has sent us everything we need to solve this carbon pollution problem. We just refuse. We just refuse. Some of us even deny that the floodwaters are rising.”
-Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), May 8, 2013 speech

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-19-2013/feed/ 0 The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor – Chapter 40 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-40/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-40/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 13:58:39 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1643 The Bottleneck Years

by H.E. Taylor

Chapter 39 Table of Contents Chapter 41

Chapter 40

Learning To Stand, June 17, 2056

The weeks ground by. The meetings, the lack of progress really grated. I wasn’t doing well in my work. The damned membrane grew, but it kept wanting to curl up in tubes and I didn’t know why. It had something to do with humidity.

At UNGETF, Group 7 was monitoring corporate activities, but it was soul destroying. Fifty low energy ships were now sailing around the Arctic making clouds to no noticeable effect. One hundred more were planned. They were retrofitting them at a rate of three a week. The contingent for Antarctica would sail in another four months. Elsewhere in the Antarctic, another huge chunk of the Ronne Ice Sheet levered itself free and floated off, raising the sea level another couple of centimeters. Nobody even blinked at that.

I was beginning to feel like my head was in a vice. I actually spent time cataloguing things I enjoyed. I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t been for Edie and Anna. I took great pleasure in watching Anna grow.

The first time Anna stood up, she was hanging onto the window ledge to see outside. I touched Edie on the shoulder to silently direct her attention. Suddenly Anna let go and fell back right on her bum. She let out a little exclamation of surprise and then rolled over and crawled away.

She saw us watching her. “Gdah,” she held a stubby little arm out toward us.

I stepped over to pick her up.

“Did she say ‘da’?” asked Edie, as I lifted Anna up toward the ceiling.

“Gah,” laughed Anna as I rubbed noses with her.

“No. You’re imagining it.”

Anna was giggling uncontrollably now. I took her over to the window and stood her up beside it again, but she wouldn’t hang on and immediately fell back on her bum again. This time there were tears.

“Oh baby,” Edie picked her up and started crooning. In no time at all Anna had quieted and Edie handed her back to me. “Would you like to go for a walk again after supper?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I think we should make a habit of it.”

“Why’s that?” I put Anna back down on the floor.

“I need the exercise. Maybe you get yours walking back and forth to campus every day, but I’m stuck here.”

Just the way she said it gave me pause. “You’re not feeling trapped, are you?”

“No.”

I didn’t say anything, and a minute later she added, “Well, maybe a little bit.”

“Well what can we do about that?”

“It’s just that sometimes I have this sneaking feeling I’m missing something, something else, some part of the big picture.”

“I know what you mean. I often feel that way myself.”

“I don’t mean just intellectually. I mean in my heart, in my life. I have my friends, and my work. Anna is a blessing. But somehow…”

“Maybe you could get out more if you put Anna in daycare.”

Edie jumped like I had shocked her. “Oh no! She’s too young.”

“Maybe now, yes. But next year? It would do her good to meet other kids.”

“Look.” Edie lifted her head to indicate behind me.

Anna was standing by the window again, eager eyes peering over the ledge at the world outside.

Excerpted from _The Bottleneck Years_ by H.E. Taylor

For further information see:
A Gentle Introduction.

Last modified May 14, 2013

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-40/feed/ 0 Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, May 12, 2013 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-12-2013/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-12-2013/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 02:31:54 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1640 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week’s Global Warming news roundup

skip to bottom

Information is not Knowledge…Knowledge is not Wisdom

May 12, 2013

co2now gfx skeptisci app gfx

 

Laugh. I dare ya:

Low Key Plug

 

My first novel Water was published in Canada May, 2007. The American release was in October. An Introductionto the novel is available, along with the Unpublished Forewordand the Launch Talk(which includes some quotations), An overview of my writing is available here.

A Simple Plea

Webmasters, web coders and content providers have mercy on your low bandwidth brethren. Because I am on dial-up, I am a text surfer — no images, no javascript and no flash. When you post a graphic, will you please use the alt text field … and when you embed a youtube/vimeo/flash video, please add some minimal description. Thank you.

<regards>

-het

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.

I notice moyhu has set up a monster index to old AWoGWN on AFTIC.

“Whatever lies ahead, we know its main dimensions will emerge over the next two decades. The global economy is already so far above sustainable levels that there is very little time left for the fantasy of an infnite globe. We know that adjustment will be a huge task. It will entail a revolution as profound as the agricultural and industrial revolutions. We appreciate the difficulty of finding solutions to problems such as poverty and employment, for which growth has been, so far, the world’s only accepted hope. But we also know that reliance on growth involves a false hope, because such growth cannot be sustained. Blind pursuit of physical growth in a finite world ultimately makes most problems worse; better solutions to our real problems are possible.” -Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, page 12

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-12-2013/feed/ 0 The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor – Chapter 39 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-39/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-39/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 13:59:18 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1636 The Bottleneck Years

by H.E. Taylor

Chapter 38 Table of Contents Chapter 40

Chapter 39

A Walk in the Park, April 26, 2056

I got a bit of a surprise when I got home. Edie caught me just as I was entering and asked, “Do you think we are descending into a New Dark Age?”

My head was full of genomic patterns, molecular shapes and chemical cycles — walking home I had been going over the design of my synthetic carbon eater — and I was flummoxed. It was so out of the blue.

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

Edie wasn’t about to be put off. “Well think about it. I’d like to discuss the idea.”

“Can I go to the bathroom and wash up first?”

Edie laughed and pecked me on the cheek.

“What brought this on?” I asked as I headed for the bathroom.

“I was listening to an old Jane Jacobs talk.”

“Who?”

“Oh don’t worry. Go. Go.” She waved me away.

I was washing my face, my eyes closed, when it occurred to me. What is a Dark Age? How would you know you are in one? The first thing that occurred to me was widespread ignorance. Which would imply a lot of people wouldn’t realize.

Edie was at the stove cooking, when I walked back into the kitchen. “If it is a Dark Age, it’s not going to be anything like the fall of the Roman Empire. There are enough new factors that the analogy would be misleading. Population, climate disruption, the degradation of the natural world — these are problems the ancients didn’t have to face. And then there’s the difference in technology. The term ‘ecological collapse’ may be more useful than ‘dark age’.”

I stood at the top of the stairs. I still wanted to change out of my school clothes. Anna was underneath the table intently pushing a sparkly ball.

“Think of it in terms of the breakdown of society,” Edie said. “Consider the rates of autism, of fetal alcohol syndrome, of juvenile crime. Have you thought about how difficult it is to raise a healthy, wholesome child nowadays?”

“Are you talking about Anna or the fall of empires?”

“Yes.”

I laughed. “I’m going to get changed.”

“Supper will be half an hour,” Edie called after me as I went downstairs.

I changed, checked my mail on the house system, answered a couple and came back upstairs for supper.

Edie caught me as she was putting out the carrots and peas. “I don’t expect you to have a Dark Age thesis ready, but think about it. Okay? I’d like to consider it an open topic of conversation.”

“Okay, sure.” I kept it light. “How about if we go for a walk along the lake after supper. There’s an old stroller in the basement for Snookums here.” I leaned over and rubbed noses with Anna who giggled in delight.

“Sure.” She sounded more tentative than her word allowed.

“Right after I do the dishes,” I said.

That got a smile from her.

The sky was cloudy except for the far west, but it didn’t feel like rain. The Doppler radar was also clear, which gave me a little more confidence. And it was warm so Edie and I both went as we were.

When Edie started dressing Anna, she objected at first, but when I brought the stroller upstairs and plunked her down in it, she quieted quickly. This was something new. What were the giants doing now?

We crossed the road and made our way westward on the crushed rock path beside the lake. Joggers, young couples, old couples, the odd solitary passed. Anna was wide-eyed staring all around. Muskrats dove in the water as we approached. Blackbirds sang in the reeds and crows flew overhead. Anna gurgled, holding her hand out towards the fleeting black apparitions.

When we had gone far enough into the sunset and turned our footsteps back toward the house, a woman I had seen at the University, but didn’t know, approached with a male companion.

“Good evening, doctor. Isn’t it a lovely evening?”

The man stayed back, but the woman leaned over to make googoo eyes at Anna. “And how are you, young lady?”

Anna stayed perfectly still, just staring at the stranger.

The woman straightened up, looked at me, then looked back at Anna. “She has your eyes, doctor.”

I felt very strange. “I…uh…don’t know…uh…”

“Come along dear.” Edie took my hand and pulled me forward. “But she’s going to have my nose,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the woman as we passed. Then she giggled, leaving the woman perplexed.

I was just glad to be away from her. My feelings about Edie were becoming more complicated and difficult. She was Matt’s girlfriend. Anna was my niece. She had Matt’s eyes, but mine… were the same…

“Thank you for rescuing me.”

“Oh I know how hung up you are about sex.”

“I’m not hung up about sex.”

“Oh?”

“I’m hung up about you.”

“Oh.”

Excerpted from _The Bottleneck Years_ by H.E. Taylor

For further information see:
A Gentle Introduction.

Last modified May 7, 2013

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-39/feed/ 0 Breaking News – The Onion http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/breaking-news-the-onion/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/breaking-news-the-onion/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 00:11:04 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1632 Hilarious!

And, as always from The Onion, so true…

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/breaking-news-the-onion/feed/ 1 Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, May 5, 2013 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-5-2013/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-5-2013/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 13:59:47 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1629

Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week’s Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom

Information Overloadis Pattern Recognition

May 5, 2013

co2now gfxskeptisci app gfx

Low Key Plug

My first novel Water was published in Canada May, 2007. The American release was in October. An Introductionto the novel is available, along with the Unpublished Forewordand the Launch Talk(which includes some quotations), An overview of my writing is available here.

A Simple Plea

Webmasters, web coders and content providers have mercy on your low bandwidth brethren. Because I am on dial-up, I am a text surfer — no images, no javascript and no flash. When you post a graphic, will you please use the alt text field … and when you embed a youtube/vimeo/flash video, please add some minimal description. Thank you.

<regards>
-het

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.

I notice moyhu has set up a monster index to old AWoGWN on AFTIC.

“Things that normally happen in geologic time are happening during the span of a human lifetime. It’s like watching the Statue of Liberty melt.” -Daniel Fagre, referring to Glacier National Park

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/gw-news-may-5-2013/feed/ 3 The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor – Chapter 38 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-38/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-38/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 03:33:02 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1624 The Bottleneck Years

by H.E. Taylor

Chapter 37 Table of Contents Chapter 39

Artificial Biology, April 19, 2056

I was beginning to feel like things were slipping out of control. I don’t know that they had ever been in control, but before Edie started Neurolin, before the Group 2 disaster and before Rhamaposa started talking about conventions of idiots, I had felt I had a handle on what was going on. Now I realized I was at a loss. What effect would the drug have on Edie? What good would the Group 6 cloud makers do? The Group 5 sun shade project was at best speculative. On top of which the numbers coming in from greenhouse gas monitoring stations around the world were rising ominously. How were we going to fix this? Things were not looking good.

Once when dad was in a dark mood, he said, “It’s so unalterably simple. Thou shalt not destroy thy life support system. And yet we do it. Over and over. When will we learn?”

I was flailing about looking for direction. I needed a focus and it occurred to me that the most useful thing I could do was apply myself more forcefully in my research. I began to lean in that direction. Anna, Edie, UNGETF, Carman, the students and other aspects of my life, such as it was, clamoured for attention, but the research became my default activity. What I always fell back to when I was otherwise doing nothing.

And what was my research?

Studying the miracle of photosynthesis. Plants take light, carbon dioxide and water vapour and give us oxygen, while creating carbohydrates for themselves. They make all animal life possible.

One funny thing about photosynthesis is how little of the incident sunlight is actually used — less than 1%. That was the first aspect of the problem space I investigated.

There were some extremophiles, exotic plants that aborbed a slightly wider bandwidth of sunlight, but other aspects of the process moved at cellular speeds and that could not be easily accelerated. All in all, the process of photosynthesis was remarkably uniform among plants and single cell creatures.

That recognition led me to consider an artificial biology. What did I want? A non-propagating plant-like material that absorbed a lot of carbon dioxide and turned it into a hopefully useful solid. Wouldn’t it be cool to make a plant that grew diamonds. That would liven up UNGETF meetings. I began to design my first carbon capture membrane.

I envisioned a layer of leaf like material: a dark surface, possibly black, stretched over supports that supplied water and other nutrients. The membrane would use sunlight as in normal photsynthesis to generate a thin film of carbon fiber, perhaps a crystallite layer of graphite, that would peel away from the bottom of the membrane and accumulate below. I would keep the diamond idea in the back of my mind in case something turned up while I worked on the more practical graphite. The precise composition of the carbon film would vary according to what?

There were a lot of questions. How much CO2 would it capture? Would it be practical? How could I make the membrane? Could I design the life form?
Getting bacterial genes to produce food, fuel, drugs and so on was relatively straightforward; had been since the time of the Synthetic Biologists at the turn of the millennium.
Controlling patterns of growth in higher organisms was several orders of complexity more difficult.

I got to work.

As I envisioned it, there would be two stages, a growing stage and a carbon capture stage, with a distinct chemical switch between the two.

The carbon capture stage was the real problem, so I focused on it. It occurred to me that once cracked, the carbon capture stage could be propagated in any broad leaf plant. But it had to be under control which took me back to the membrane.

Photosynthesis could happen in all the cells, but if there was no mechanism to exude carbonaceous materials, it wouldn’t work. That was the nut of it. How to direct the photosynthesis of the carbon capture stage to deposit carbonaceous material in a film on the underside?

Maybe just the immediately adjacent layers of cells needed to switch into the second type of photosynthesis, P2. How could I control that? Most of the photosynthesis happened within the surface layer exposed to sunlight, not at the base where only higher frequency wavelengths penetrated. Maybe I could devise a frequency sensitive mechanism. P1 inhibits P2 as long as it is active, but when it is not, P2 dominates the chemical pathways.

I was talking myself in circles.

How to crack this nut?

Make the whole membrane grow upwards at the surface but change into a film as it is deprived of light? How could I arrange that? Have a lack of P2 chemical byproducts act as a trigger to flip the genes into a desiccation process? I began to look more closely at the candidate chemicals and consider the plant structure that would support the process. Then I needed to convert that into gene sequences. The layeredness was essential and not at all straightforward. It would have to arise from the cell geometry in the growing phase.

I pulled up the modelling software and started looking through gene libraries that were potentially useful.

I had a lot of work to do.

Excerpted from _The Bottleneck Years_ by H.E. Taylor

For further information see:
A Gentle Introduction.

Last modified April 30, 2013

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/05/the-bottleneck-years-by-h-e-taylor-chapter-38/feed/ 1 Ice animations http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/04/ice-animations/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/04/ice-animations/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:22:37 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1619 Here are a couple of great animations of the arctic sea ice volume over the satellite era.


(credit to Andy Lee Robinson, seen at Planet3)

While this is not news, I think the animations make two things very clear.  One, is that anyone even giving the time of day to the notion that there is “nothing going on here, folks” when it comes to the arctic is in full-on head-in-the-sand denial or is a cynical liar.  Two, is that contrary to the shrill shills who claim the IPCC et al are alarmists at best, exaggerating/misrepresenting the impacts of climate change at worst, the scientific consensus is is woefully conservative in its warnings about how much/quickly things are changing.

Summer sea ice in the arctic will not last the decade.

]]> http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/04/ice-animations/feed/ 1 Another Week of Anthropocene Antics, April 28, 2013 http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/04/gw-news-april-28-2013/ http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2013/04/gw-news-april-28-2013/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:55:28 +0000 coby http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/?p=1616 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week’s Global Warming news roundup

skip to bottom

Sipping from the Internet Firehose…

April 28, 2013

co2now gfx skeptisci app gfx

 

Live and direct from the black humour department:

Low Key Plug

 

My first novel Water was published in Canada May, 2007. The American release was in October. An Introductionto the novel is available, along with the Unpublished Forewordand the Launch Talk(which includes some quotations), An overview of my writing is available here.

A Simple Plea

Webmasters, web coders and content providers have mercy on your low bandwidth brethren. Because I am on dial-up, I am a text surfer — no images, no javascript and no flash. When you post a graphic, will you please use the alt text field … and when you embed a youtube/vimeo/flash video, please add some minimal description. Thank you.

<regards>

-het

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.

I notice moyhu has set up a monster index to old AWoGWN on AFTIC.

“Call it mother if you will — but Earth is not a doting parent.” -Isaac Asimov

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