Retrospective

2011 Predictions: A Savage Place

sastyk — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:29:30 +0000

2011 Predictions: A Savage Place

This year I have a jump on my predictions - as part of my comparatively new role as Editor of the Peak Oil Review Commentary section, I had the fun of asking a whole lot of smart people what they think is going to happen, and thinking about their predictions first.

If you haven't seen them already, you should definitely check them out! Everyone from Ilargi to Jeff Rubin, The Peak Oil Hausfrau to Richard Heinberg to Tad Patzek kicked in, and realistically, you'll probably get a lot clearer view of the future through a lot of eyes than just one.

Which leads me to my annual official caveat, which I repeat every year: "I don't think everything that comes out of my ass is the high truth, and neither should you. Remember what you are paying for this wisdom, and value it accordingly."

So how did I do with my predictions last year? In 2007 and 2008 I had an extraordinarily good record of predictions, a winning streak broken last year when I jumped the gun. So how were the 2010 predictions? Let's take a look:

2010 will mark a (probably dramatic) resumption of the economic crisis, which will not be short or pleasant. I keep pointing out that the two most recent deep economic downturns (1971-1982, 1929-1941) both lasted more than a decade, and I think this is most likely a fair translation of the current hype of "jobless recovery" and "low growth rates." The reality is that we're not going to experience a major economic recovery anytime soon, and I'd be somewhat surprised if we didn't see a substantial further downturn.

Called it, although it wasn't quite as dramatic as all that - the stock markets remain fairly high and there are still some people saying it is over, but the general emerging consensus is that it isn't over. The fact that it never was doesn't keep people from talking about W shaped recessions, but that's not what happened - there are blips in any downturn.

.We will face deflation, probably simultaneously with fluctuating and sometimes extremely high (at least in relationship to people's ability to pay) prices for food and energy, which will confuse people who think that "inflation" means "higher prices." This will not change the fact that we are having deflation.

Called it. Oil prices rose to $90 barrel and remained high throughout the year, and food prices began to spike again. At the same time, the general economic trend was solidly deflationary.

The trend towards growing your own, small home livestock, and home food preservation will continue to grow and expand - people who never thought they would know the word "compost" or touch a chicken will do so - and love it. Local food producers, on the other hand, may find that people are starting to cut back on organic, more sustainable food due to budgetary cconstraints as the "jobless recovery" turns out to be "long term joblessness."

I'm giving myself 50% on this one, although I may well have gotten it right, but the data simply isn't in yet. I don't think anyone can deny that the local food movement is still expanding fast and furiously, but there are also some indications that local markets that serve low income people may be seeing a decline. Among the jobless middle class, however, it seems that you cut a lot of things before you cut your child's organic milk. I'm just not sure how I did on this one yet, and I probably won't be until spring when the numbers come out. I do think pretty strongly that there's going to be a lot of pressure on small local producers that offer high cost value-added products as the recession goes on.

A basic conflict between generations will begin to emerge and simmer as younger people realize that the concentration of wealth in the baby boomer generation isn't going anytime soon, and youth joblessness rises, and people realize that their expectations are less than their parents'. I doubt that this conflict will emerge in any dramatic way in 2010, but I think its groundwork is being sown right now and this will shape the politics of the next decade.

Again, this is a tough one to evaluate, but I think there's increasing evidence in its favor. Two places to look at the fault lines would be on the far right and left - to the right, the age demographics of the Tea Party movement, often commented upon underscore a narrative that essentially runs "we don't want anyone else to get the kind of benefits we had, because we are pretty sure we can't afford them. On the left, Susan Faludi wrote an interesting article this fall in Harpers about why the generational division between younger and older feminists was so vast - and so vicious. In both cases, the explanation is held to be something other than a pie that isn't big enough and an emerging battle between age groups, but i think that is emerging. Time will tell whether this was a critical year or not, but I'm taking this one.

There will be a fragmentation of mostly fairly unified fronts among climate change activists and scientists as we are forced to deal with the revelations of last year - that we're not going to stay below 2 degrees. It will become increasingly uncertain how to respond and what to advocate for, and people will begin dividing up into camps much more dramatically than in the past.

I think this is definitely happening - consider the degree of upset that Judith Curry's rather weird dissent generated, and the degree to which demoralized climate activists seem uncertain about how to respond given the unlikelihood of any success emergent from Mexico.

Either the economic crisis or some other crisis (swine flu mutates, new climate change related disaster, military conflict somewhere that most Americans can't find on a map whatever) will give the US an excuse to take climate change mostly off the table as a subject. We're too busy! This is too important! Monies promised to poor nations will not be delivered.

Ummm....yeah.

Surging in Afghanistan won't help. (Ok, I needed one gimmee ;-)).

And again.

As I've been predicting for years, most of our energy and ecological crisis will show up as further economic blows. That is, it won't be a question of whether the grid fails or we run out of gas, but whether you can buy gas. The most likely reason you will lose power is because your utility company disconnects you. The need to respond to and clean up the next natural disaster will push everyone's resources just that much further. Peak oil and climate change will hit us hard in the next year and the coming year, but they will look like money worries and tight budgets and cut services and growing poverty, not like being underwater - at least mostly.

I think this is most evident at the state level - 2010 turned out to be the year that state budgets couldn't fake it anymore. The stimulus money is over and gone, the states can't carry deficits and the crisis is becoming daily more acute. Services for the poor and low income are where this is playing out, unsurprisingly. At the moment this is true mostly of the poor, but more of us are joining that club every day. At the same time, it wasn't as dramatic as I predicted for most people, so I'll call it 50%.

At least one very dramatic, totally unexpected game changer will come up, and change the terms of the discussion entirely. (Hey, I needed one risky one that makes me look good if it comes true ;-))

I'd say that the Gulf Oil Spill really did change the game - and probably for years to come. The biggest impact will arise from the drilling moratorium, which will take some years to shake off and further depress production, but the economic impact on the Gulf area, following Katrina by only 5 years I think puts another nail in the coffin of one region of the US economically, and there's a psychological consequence as well of disaster after disaster hitting the same general region.

Most people won't look at 2010 as the year it all went to hell. But looking back from 2015 to 2005, they will know that somewhere in there, it all went to hell, and well, this was right there in the middle.

I can't tell you if this one was right or not, yet - give me five years.

We'll call it an 8, then - seems like I may have gotten my doomer gal mojo back, which is a mixed blessing at best, I fear. Ok, on to 2011. 2010 I called "the Year of Losing Faster" from Elizabeth Bishop's poem. This year, I'm stealing from Coleridge, whose vision of the magical (and wholly imaginary) Kubla Khan is disrupted by the emergence from a savage space, a chasm beneath the paradise, "ancestral voices prophesying war." I'm not precisely prophesying war myself at the moment, but I do think that 2011 lays the ground for potential conflicts and battles that will be played out unless we get much wiser much faster.

1. First and foremost, I'm going to repeat my prediction in Peak Oil Review - I think 2011 is the year the food crisis comes back. We're already seeing signs of it, and I think that the number of world hungry will spike again to over a billion. Energy and food prices will remain tightly intertwined, and whether we see major price spikes, demand destruction and a collapse of energy prices, or whatever else, food and energy will be increasingly hard to afford for a large portion of the world population, from the very poorest to the American and European middle class. Food will be an important site of the emergence of our energy and ecological crisis.

2. 2011 will also be the year in which some mainstream segment of the US public or government starts taking peak oil seriously. This seems like it could be a good thing, but that depends heavily on *what* subset of the public or branches of government take it seriously and for what political purpose. I make no promises that peak oil activists won't go back to wishing they were being ignored.

3. Russia's wheat export restrictions and China's muscle flexing over rare earth minerals, along with the international landgrab going on for farmland are all part of an overall trend towards the recognition of limited world resources and the awareness that ensuring that there's something for your kids probably involves screwing someone else. The screwings will accellerate until morale improves - that being unlikely, I predict more and more international conflict over the limited store of goodies, and that some of that will become more acute and evident in 2011.

4. The emergence of a new "khaki market" (Khaki's the color you get when you combine green markets and black or grey markets ;-)) economy for food, used goods and other materials will accelerate. These markets will respond to the increasing legislation of small scale production by ignoring it entirely. Small food producers will decline to be legislated out of existence and simply violate existing laws. Informal economies will develop and expand, either around or sometimes in opposition to regulation designed to discourage them. Crackdowns will ensue, but overwhelmingly be unsuccessful at either containing the growth of informal markets or approval of them in the general public. The battles will get nastier as more people depend for their basic needs on these informal khaki markets.

5. The ongoing trend towards housing consolidation among family and friends, sparked by a combination of populations aging, rising unemployment especially among the young and a destigmatization of extended family life will continue and expand. More of us will be moving in with other people in 2011. This will be good for a host of personal economies, but only make the housing market worse.

6. In the interest of having one wholly self-interested prediction, chickens, the gateway drug to goats, will open the gateway and little cute milk and dairy-fiber goats will be the new backyard trend, making chickens look old fashioned and uncool. ;-)

7. The reports of the death of climate change as an issue at the national and international level will turn out to have been at least slightly exaggerated, but the terms of the debate will change to what we are going to do about how we're going to mitigate, rather than hold off emissions. Our new awareness of resource limits will also change the terms of the debate, as the peak oil and climate change communities finally really get to know one another.

8. Someone from the peak oil community (almost certainly not me) will go mainstream in a way they have not so far. Generally speaking, movements tend to get one major public figure that catches the general imagination over everyone else - consider Michael Pollan for the food movement, for example. I'm going to take a wild risk and argue that our Michael Pollan will emerge in 2011.

9. Something will blow up big, much as the Gulf Oil rig did, revealing just how vulnerable we are in a complex society so heavily dependent on fossil fuels. The general public will be shocked and horrified to learn how contingent their lives and situations are. They won't, however, learn anything lasting from it.

10. The emerging attention to our collective crisis will give some of the movement a jolt of new energy, time and investment in 2011. This will be the positive consequence of all the tough stuff we're facing.

Happy New Year anyway, folks!

Sharon

sastyk Thu, 12/30/2010 - 06:29

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Retrospective

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2. 2011 will also be the year in which some mainstream segment of the US public or government starts taking peak oil seriously.

If the U.S. military counts as "mainstream", you're late on this one. They have immense incentives to stop relying on fossil fuels, and have been working in that direction for years. (Momentum is maintained in the short-term by the fact that moving diesel out to forwards bases in Afghanistan results in about $400/gal fuel.) The civilian applications of their research are still likely to be too little, too late, but the effort can't be denied.

Of course, if you want to argue that military, with its own strong culture and traditions, is not part of the mainstream.. I wouldn't have any points with which to say otherwise.

I'm with you on prediction #4. It's been my plan since NAIS first reared it's ugly head, and now I'll treat SB510 the same way.

I agree with you and Sherri on #4. The level of micro management that government is shooting for regarding small the scale production of so many cottage industry types of things, not just agriculture, just isn't going to effectively cover and control as much of the affected industries as the wanna-be regulators think. We're going to start resembling so many third world, ultra-corrupt countries where people do what they have to do, behind the overworked regulators' backs, to survive. That is, while there's lots of regulation in place at many levels, there's even more ignoring of the regulation and the regulators (and perhaps lots of pay offs directed at inspectors and regulators) via informal economy transactions.

One thing that I really just haven't predicted in any accurate sense, is just how arrogant and obnoxious the government, especially the US federal government, and the Federal Reserve, has been during these first several years of Peak Oil. What with the financial bailouts, then the GM bailout, and the quantitative easing, (the latter of which largely explains why the stock market hasn't absolutely crashed anew yet), it's somewhat hard to see exactly when the CRASH is coming, because government so far has really warped the financial world's attempt at crash, adapt, and recovery. (Whatever "recovery" means in this context, I'm not sure myself.) Of course at some point, the government WILL fail at this propping up of the un-proppable, and then the public will see the world energy, food, and economic situation for what it really is. Then maybe, Sharon, you'll get your #8, #9, and/or #10 coming true as well.

I think in the next year or two we're going to see intercity transport suffer so badly due to the airline industry crashing, that contractors are going to start pulling older passenger coaches and sleepers out of mothballs and out of the tourist railroads, and start running limited passenger runs on the major freight railroads again. I'm not sure whether the RRs run these trains themselves, or allow contractors to do it. Service won't be so good or fast as the mainlines have been single tracked in many places. But it will be a start and it will be far cheaper than mega-billion $$ rail projects that just won't ever make it out of Congress.

Stephen B.'s prediction on intercity transport is fascinating to me. However it happens, I'd love to see the passenger rails rolling again.

One flag that I would like to raise for 2011 concerns the crumbling infrastructure of many East coast urban areas. It seems to me that most people take water and the grid for granted--except when a main breaks or there is brown out/black out. Many municipalities and states cannot afford large scale replacement projects of the status quo. Could this in itself lead to innovation and the greening of America?

Regarding #4, I wonder where the government is going to get the funds to hire the necessary personnel to enforce the micro-regulations that are being proposed. After all, the federal government is functionally bankrupt (in more than the financial sense of the term, yes, but certainly in that sense as well), and the newly elected RepubliTea Party members are for the most part ideologically opposed to regulation of any kind. So I don't see them willing or able to fund this kind of regulation any time soon.

Regarding intercity transport, it's not just the airlines that are going to suffer. (Air travel has become increasingly dysfunctional anyway, even without the draconian security measures now in place at airports. Just ask anyone who's flown in the past dozen years or so.)

But I wonder how long the glut of new highway construction will continue. We cannot maintain the highways that we have. People have been driving less, and higher fuel prices will only accelerate that trend. We've always depended on fuel taxes to fund highway maintenance, but with fuel consumption down and costs of maintenance going up, it's going to be harder and harder to keep the highways in usable condition. The most logical answer, of course, would be to raise fuel taxes and/or to impose some kind of user fee like tolls. But does anyone expect such ideas to be proposed or taken seriously by our politicians?

I also predict a continuing erosion of Americans' Constitutional liberties, especially privacy. First we had the USA Patriot Act and the Department of "Homeland Security," we have the aforementioned draconian airport security systems, and we have the government spying on its citizens. Given that, although terrorism is still a serious threat, the national security state is afraid of its own shadow and prone to overreact, and given the Weimar-like consciousness of the Tea Party (complete with Glenn Beck's echoing of historic anti-Semitic themes in his rants against George Soros), I'm wondering how long our liberties will hold out.

Stephen, I hope you're right about the freight railroads getting back into the passenger business. Here in Ohio, we just lost a federal grant for developing passenger rail service linking Ohio's major cities because the incoming governor is ideologically opposed to the state's getting into the rail business. We need that kind of service now, and we'll be needing it much more in the near future.

Andrea, I think the US military has actually been aware of peak oil and written about it for many years - I think the issue is that the JOE report wasn't something most of the military was even aware of, so I don't see it as a mainstreaming. To me, mainstream means a substantive portion of the population knows about it. I think the JOE report was extremely important, but not enough to make it mainstream even among military populations - the references to peak oil were pretty buried, and while it got media attention, quite a lot of military higher ups don't even know it is there.

Sharon

"chickens, the gateway drug to goats, will open the gateway and little cute milk and dairy-fiber goats will be the new backyard trend, making chickens look old fashioned and uncool. ;-)"

Ack! My kids think they've talked me into getting chickens in the spring if they build a chicken tractor this winter. Now you're telling we're uncool and we need goats? You're worse than the kids. :-D

Governments usually manage to find some way to fund whatever they consider important to regulate or control. It wouldn't surprise me to see goverments of various sizes become an employer of last resort. TSA has grown greatly since airline security has become so draconian. The workers aren't paid much, but at least it's a job. Might be we see some creative arrangements, like hiring folks to harass khaki-market practitioners by forgiving their mortgage debt, or credit card debt, or providing free housing in former school or military barracks buildings. They could provide meals too, as miserable and inadequate as they would be, courtesy of their friends the big ag folks. If I can think of it, so can they.

I mean forgiving the debts of those hired, not of those being regulated. Should have read that more carefully before posting. ;-)

When times begin to get seriously tough for the plurality, do you really think that government is going to really care about the backyard egg suppliers, smokin' dope sellers, herbalists, unregistered midwives, providers of bread, preserves, cookies.. from home kitchens? The mechanics who fix stuff in exchange for other stuff rather than cash? The ladies who offer sex in exchange for home maintenance services? The people who take fish & deer without licenses? Etc..? I realize that you specify "goverments (sic) of various sizes," including petty functionaries on the local or county level. Still, I'd think they'd have more pressing concerns to be worrying about, such as providing for their own selves or avoiding being lynched. One thing the US has going for it, for better or worse, is that the people for the most part are armed. Is threatened confiscation of one's poultry flock worth a gunfight with the "authorities"? Probably not, at this point, for most people. Priorities shift, however, as people get desperate. Take my egg makers and then how do I provide high quality protein for my kids? Being constrained to have to answer such a question brings things down to a very fundamental level. Witness the example of Joe Stack.

I worry that the micro-managers will start confiscating property, a la the inquisition. What if they take not only your chickens, your seeds, but also your tools, any cash they can find (I'm assuming you're not keeping it in a bank account), and siphon the fuel from your truck so they can get to the next place?

They will, of course, leave you the address of the nearest shelter/food center Claire referred to. Those centers will also be one of the final places to have electricity, crucial to power their mind-numbing televisions.

(Have I been reading too much doomer fiction? [wry grin])

On the climate change and natural disaster front, the St. Louis area was hit today by an F3 tornado - with the temperature in the mid-60s - on December 31. (Hope you're okay, Claire!) And my wingnut family continue to insist that climate change can only be a librul commie plot. Denial, it's not just a river in Egypt.

I would predict that the trend towards increasingly open and virulent Muslim-bashing will continue to intensify as the PTB prepare to distract attention from their failures by pogroms against a scapegoat group.

" The most likely reason you will lose power is because your utility company disconnects you."

One of the things that happened in 2010 was that utility companies started moving more quickly to shut people off. They've gotten especially quick in areas where there are winter restrictions on shutting of utilities needed for heating. I predict a lot more house fires an carbon monoxide poisonings as people start using kerosene heaters and the like to replace their shut off utilities.

Dewey, yes, we're likely to see more Muslim-bashing in the coming year. But the biggest potential scapegoat here in the USA, I think, will be immigrants, especially those who are or who are thought to be undocumented immigrants. Despite the fact that better border security and the recession have combined to slow illegal migration to a trickle, and despite the fact that the recession has prompted a significant number of undocumented immigrants to go back home, the amount of political noise heard against "illegals" has increased. It seems clear to me that this increase is for the purpose of inflaming, propagandizing, and demagoguery, not for encouraging reasonable debate. The reasons some Senators gave for their recent votes against the DREAM act (a no-brainer from my point of view) are certainly not based on logic or reason.

Don, I agree - of course, it's always handy to have more than one scapegoat group, since if you only had one, some regions wouldn't have any of those people handy to persecute. The extreme right has stepped up rhetoric against all of their favorite targets, though the antigay schtick thankfully seems not to be working very well. And then there is always the risk that some of the inchoate rage stirred up will be directed against traditional targets that the right wing didn't intend to target (reportedly, anti-Jewish hate crimes are up).

In your opinion, will the housing consolidation be the spark to the conflict you predicted between generations? I have read some rather snarky pieces about boomers by younger bloggers, but have not seen much other evidence myself.

The housing consolidation you predict is indeed happening. People are doubling up in families and with what I call "former strangers." Not only will this be good for personal economies, it will be good for the heart and soul. People do need people. The isolation of individual made possible by cars and prosperity has created huge alienation and loneliness. (See "Loneliness in America: Drifting Apart in the 21st Century.") In sharing housing individuals find companionship, help with mundane tasks, and comfort.

For anyone who is interested, James Howard Kunstler just posted his set of predictions over at http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/01/forecast-2011---gird-your-loins-for-lo…. They're written in his usual, inimitable style.

I'm fine, dewey, was offline for awhile but that had to do with my computer having problems. The DH and I did hide out in the basement for awhile when the storms were coming through but the nearest tornado was several miles away. You may have been closer to one of the twisters than I was. I can tell you're OK from your note, glad for that.

Actually, now that I've read The Resilient Gardener, I'd modify your prediction about chickens, Sharon. I'm predicting that 2011 will be The Year of the Home Ancona Duck Flock. I know I'm looking into having a few Ancona ducks on the homestead. Darn that Carol Deppe and her engaging writing style ... ;-)

April,

Chickens are an interesting proposition. They consume feed - and produce droppings that enrich the garden or compost heap. (Please, please don't tell me that you considered scraping the droppings into the trash can!)

The difference the first livestock makes on your lifestyle is immense. Whether puppy or chickens - or goats - in an eyeblink you never look at time away from home the same way again.

Adding goats to chickens increases chores, raises issues like procuring feed, providing shelter, providing water, fencing to contain the escape artists, and managing the herd as the little young ones grow older. And maybe procreate.

But adding goat food planning to chicken food planning is just an increment of planning. Adding water assurance for goats to watering chickens is an increment in managing waterers. Etc. Each addition of livestock, whether goats or sheep, pigeons or guinea pigs, ducks, geese, horses, llamas, alpaca, or guinea hens will add time and resource demands, maybe a bit of effort daily and seasonally (or maybe a lot more!). But the real impact, the more significant lifestyle change, comes from the first livestock.

Besides, you don't have to do goats. I understand some places have a growing market for geese. Not only that, I seem to recall that goose grease has a long history of lubricating cork and leather moving parts, from early autos and planes to modern clarinet and other instrument gasket-type moving parts. And duck eggs are finding a wider market.

If Sharon's concern about stability of organic and sustainable foods is accurate, there are still Kosher and other specialty markets (including Mexican demands for goat and sheep for funeral and other family gatherings).

I predict that enough people will have to face the end of the era of cheap energy, to agree that electricity is not, and will not be for decades to come, sustainable, carbon neutral, renewable, or cheap. That is right - electricity will be banned from the Green banner.

Talk to me about green electricity after 50% of the electricity generated in the US comes from sustainable and renewable energy sources, instead of government subsidies and oil, coal, and natural gas. At this point, building wind farms using oil energy to construct, transport, erect, and maintain the turbines makes about as much sense as spending oil to make lower-energy ethanol from food.

I would like to see the government subsidies for recycling ended. The existence of recycling programs - turning government handout dollars into recycled stuff - just encourages the production of more throw-away stuff.

Roads. I predict that some genius will investigate how to turn asphalt from roadways into municipal vehicle fuel. Perhaps even for home heating. Raids on neighboring county roads will begin to impact the ability to communicate, and move freely about the country. Perhaps even tarpaper and asphalt shingles will find their way into fuel production, rather than remaining as roof protection or clogging landfills.

I am not sure why the current building practice, of throwing 'used' lumber and boards into landfills and holes in the ground, but in the past such buildings and walls were carefully disassembled and nearly all the materials re-used. Perhaps that could get us away from dry wall, and into something that lasts for generations and can be reused numerous times.

Bees. Native solitary bees, bumble bees, and honeybees. Or else.

"..chickens, the gateway drug to goats.."

I spit out my tea and laughed out loud when I read that. I am getting chickens in the spring, but I am already dreaming about dairy goats too. Even got the magazines... maybe my problem is genetic?

2010 Predictions: Practice Losing Farther, Losing Faster

sastyk — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 09:40:58 +0000

2010 Predictions: Practice Losing Farther, Losing Faster

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster - Elizabeth Bishop

I suddenly realized that my sense that I had time to do my end of year wrap up was rapidly becoming incorrect - New Years is tomorrow, of course, but somehow it snuck up on me. I tried to enlist my family in helping me with this project, but Eric flatly refused to have anything to do with it (his comment was "I can't decide whether it would be more unpleasant to be wrong or right, and in that case, the only good choice is to shut up."), and the boys' predictions ranged from the purely personal and highly unlikely (Four year old Asher's "I'm going to turn into a butterfly!") to the bizarre ( Eight year old Simon's "Humans will encounter snortlepigs.") to the perhaps a little too mundane (Six year old Isaiah's "I'm going to take my pants off and run around the room.") So no help there.

So let's get down to brass tacks, but before I do, let me post my standard, official New Years Predictions disclaimer which goes like this: "I don't think everything that comes out of my ass is the high truth, and neither should you." Remember what you are paying for this wisdom, and value it accordingly.

And if you were valuing my last year's predictions about that much, well, you got your money's worth. After an astonishing degree of correctness in 2008, I got cocky and predicted a much faster decline than we've actually seen. I was way wrong.

So how did I do this past year? Let's take a look (note, I've edited these a bit for length, you can see the originals at the above link, as well as how I did in 2008):

1. Some measure of normalcy will hold out until late spring or early summer, mostly based on hopes for the Obama Presidency. But by late summer 2009, the aggregate loss of jobs, credit and wealth will cause an economic crisis that makes our current situation look pretty mild.

This would be my big old screw up - I figured that even the huge cash infusions of the bail out couldn't hold out against the massive loss of assets, and I was wrong. I'm still a little bit impressed (in a horrified sort of way) the way crazy accounting tricks, the mortgaging of our future for short term gains and crazy lies have been deployed. Back in December, I really wouldn't have guessed that the Obama administration would go as far as it has in selling us out to the corporations. I still don't think the problem is at all fixed, but I was definitely wrong about the pace of things, because I overestimated the ethical considerations of the new administration. I shoulda known better - mea culpa.

2. Many plans for infrastructure investments currently being proposed will never be completed, and many may never be started, because the US may be unable to borrow the money to fund them. The price of globalization will be high in terms of reduced availability of funds and resources - despite all the people who think that we'll keep building things during a collapse, we won't. We will have some variation on a Green New Deal in the US and some nations will continue to work on renewable infrastructure, but a lot of us are going to be getting along with the fraying infrastructure, designed for a people able to afford a lot of cheap energy, that we have now.

I think I called this one. Back last winter much was being made of the potential of national health care, of our investments in Green Jobs and major programs designed to benefit the little guy. What did we actually get - the crappiest possible national health care, largely to the benefit of the insurers, a lot of roadwork to nowhere, and cash for clunkers.

3. 2009 will be the year that most of the most passionate climate activists (and I don't exclude myself) have to admit that there is simply not a snowball's chance in hell (and hell is getting toastier quickly) that we are going to prevent a 2C+ warming of the planet. We are simply too little, too late.

I got this one too, sadly. Oxford held its 4 degree conference and Copenhagen put the nail in the coffin of real climate activism. Multiple studies released revealed that even with the most ambitious plans (and no country is enacting the most ambitious plans) we'd fail to keep below 2 degrees. We now know that we're going to pass the critical point. And it doesn't suck any less than I thought it would.

4. 2008 will probably be the world's global oil peak, but we won't know this for a while. When we do realize it, it will be anticlimactic, because we'll be mired in the consequences of our economic, energy and climate crisis. Lack of investment in the coming years will mean that in the end, more oil stays in the ground, which is good for the climate, but tough for our ambitions for a renewable energy economy. Over the long term, however, peak oil is very much going to come back and bite us all in the collective ass.

This one we can't answer yet. There are still people I trust making the case for 2010 and still people calling out 2005. The difference between them, however, is pretty small. Certainly, though, the IEA confirms that a. we will be seeing peak oil again and b. lack of investment is a biggie. We'll call this one undetermined as of yet.

5. Decreased access to goods, services and food will be a reality this year. Some of this will be due to stores going out of business - we may all have to travel further to meet needs. Some will be due to suppliers going under, following the wave of merchant bankruptcies. Some may be due to disruptions in shipping and transport of supplies. Some will be due to increased demand for some items that have, up until now, been niche items, produced in small numbers for the small number of sustainability freaks, but that now seem to have widespread application. And some may be due to deflation

I jumped the gun again. We've seen some of this, but not enough to be significant. I was wrong.

6. Most Americans will see radical cut backs in local services and safety nets. Funding will simply dry up for many state and local programs.

Yes, but not as acutely as I expected. The enormous federal bailout put money into state coffers that allowed them to defer their problems - so far, California while effectively bankrupt, for example, hasn't actually defaulted, and New York is still holding on. My prediction that state unemployment coffers would be overwhelmed was right, but the federal government did step in, as I also predicted. Some service disruptions have occurred, particularly among the poor and disabled, but they haven't been as widespread as expected.

7. Nations will overwhelmingly fail to pony up promised commitments to the world's poor, and worldwide, the people who did the least harm to the environment will die increasingly rapidly of starvation. This will not be inevitable, but people in the rich world will claim it is.

Called it. This is precisely what happened.

8. We will finally attempt to deal with foreclosures, but the falling value of housing will make it a losing proposition. Every time we bring the housing values down to meet the reality, the reality will shift under our feet. Many of those who are helped will end up foreclosed upon anyway

Yup. The much-vaunted foreclosure program failed to work for a whole host of reasons and most people who were helped ended up in foreclosure. Got this one.

9. By the end of the year, whether or not we will collapse or have collapsed will continue to be hotly debated by everyone who can still afford their internet service. No one will agree on what the definition of collapse actually is, plenty of people will simply be living their old lives, only with a bit less, while others will be having truly apocalyptic and deeply tragic losses. Some will see the victims as lazy, stupid, alien and worthless, no matter how many there are. Others will look around them and ask "how did I not see that this was inevitable?"

Yes and no. I think most people would agree we haven't collapsed, although a minority looking at our situation would argue that we have, we just haven't noticed yet. But I do think that the mainstreaming of a language of collapse is occurring - I see more and more ordinary people asking "how bad can it get?" That said, however, I think that the bailouts have done a great deal to (falsely) convince people that things are better than they are and that we can continue on as we are. And yes, there's a lot of hostility towards the poor - and a lot of sudden realizations that we're one of them.

10. Despite how awful this is, the reality is that not everything will fall apart. In the US, we will find life hard and stressful, but we will also go forward. People will suck a lot up and retrench. It will turn out that ordinary people were always better than commentators at figuring out what to do - that's why they stopped shopping even while people were begging them to keep buying. So they'll move in with their siblings and grow gardens and walk away from their overpriced houses, or fight to keep them. Some of them will suffer badly for it, but a surprising number of people will simply be ok in situations that until now, they would have imagined were impossible to survive. We will endure, sometimes even find ways of loving our new lives. There will be acts of remarkable courage and heroism, and acts of the most profound evil and selfishness. There will be enormous losses - but we will also discover that most of us are more than we think we are - can tolerate more and have more courage and compassion than we believe of ourselves.

I think I got this one right, maybe more right than most of the others. In the good news we saw 8 million new gardeners last year. We saw more people cutting back and saving more. We saw a new shame about conspicuous consumption. Trusting people to mostly be people turns out to be the best bet of all.

Not an official numbered prediction, but I claimed that 2009 would be the year that we officially "collapsed" - not into Mad Max or cannibalism, but in which things we expect to work, we assume will always remain the same stopped working. I was wrong about that. I think we came very close to having that happen, but deferred the collapse. How long did we defer it? That's the big question. I don't think it is possible to put it off inevitably - at some point the bills come due. I made the mistake of thinking that most people in power might prefer to pay the price sooner, and have the price be smaller. In retrospect, I have no idea why I thought that. We've decided, as usual, to put off until later what is unpleasant to deal with today.

In 2008, I got about 8 1/2 out of 10 right. This past year I'd say 5 1/2 out of 9, with one (the year of the oil peak) still up for grabs. We will reconvene come next December to figure out how I did this year. But here's my list for the coming year:

I've decided to call this year "The Year of Losing Faster" - because I think the theme of this year and the coming decade will be loss - loss of economic stability, loss of dreams and expectations, loss of the ability to predict how much food and energy will cost you, loss of normalcy in every respect. We put off our troubles - but they are coming back, and are not lighter for being put off.

1. 2010 will mark a (probably dramatic) resumption of the economic crisis, which will not be short or pleasant. I keep pointing out that the two most recent deep economic downturns (1971-1982, 1929-1941) both lasted more than a decade, and I think this is most likely a fair translation of the current hype of "jobless recovery" and "low growth rates." The reality is that we're not going to experience a major economic recovery anytime soon, and I'd be somewhat surprised if we didn't see a substantial further downturn.

2. We will face deflation, probably simultaneously with fluctuating and sometimes extremely high (at least in relationship to people's ability to pay) prices for food and energy, which will confuse people who think that "inflation" means "higher prices." This will not change the fact that we are having deflation.

3. The trend towards growing your own, small home livestock, and home food preservation will continue to grow and expand - people who never thought they would know the word "compost" or touch a chicken will do so - and love it. Local food producers, on the other hand, may find that people are starting to cut back on organic, more sustainable food due to budgetary cconstraints as the "jobless recovery" turns out to be "long term joblessness."

4. A basic conflict between generations will begin to emerge and simmer as younger people realize that the concentration of wealth in the baby boomer generation isn't going anytime soon, and youth joblessness rises, and people realize that their expectations are less than their parents'. I doubt that this conflict will emerge in any dramatic way in 2010, but I think its groundwork is being sown right now and this will shape the politics of the next decade.

5. There will be a fragmentation of mostly fairly unified fronts among climate change activists and scientists as we are forced to deal with the revelations of last year - that we're not going to stay below 2 degrees. It will become increasingly uncertain how to respond and what to advocate for, and people will begin dividing up into camps much more dramatically than in the past.

6. Either the economic crisis or some other crisis (swine flu mutates, new climate change related disaster, military conflict with somewhere that most Americans can't find on a map whatever) will give the US an excuse to take climate change mostly off the table as a subject. We're too busy! This is too important! Monies promised to poor nations will not be delivered.

7. Surging in Afghanistan won't help. (Ok, I needed one gimmee ;-)).

8. As I've been predicting for years, most of our energy and ecological crisis will show up as further economic blows. That is, it won't be a question of whether the grid fails or we run out of gas, but whether you can buy gas. The most likely reason you will lose power is because your utility company disconnects you. The need to respond to and clean up the next natural disaster will push everyone's resources just that much further. Peak oil and climate change will hit us hard in the next year and the coming year, but they will look like money worries and tight budgets and cut services and growing poverty, not like being underwater - at least mostly.

9. At least one very dramatic, totally unexpected game changer will come up, and change the terms of the discussion entirely. (Hey, I needed one risky one that makes me look good if it comes true ;-))

10. Most people won't look at 2010 as the year it all went to hell. But looking back from 2015 to 2005, they will know that somewhere in there, it all went to hell, and well, this was right there in the middle.

Happy New Year, everyone - I wish for all of you that all my bad predictions are wrong!

Sharon

sastyk Wed, 12/30/2009 - 04:40

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All I have to say is, Love Elizabeth Bishop, one of my all time faves. Thanks!

I think Asher may be the closest to the truth...Evolve or die.

I believe Simon's prediction could be slotted into #9 without controversy. Nothing changes a game like a snortlepig.

We've received twenty Xmas letters. Twelve reference furlough days, and my brother has been furloughed one week per month since May.

There's a lot of doom and gloom out there. There are a few who think differently: Jeff Rubin, author of "Why your world is about to get a whole lot smaller", Bart Anderson ,former editor of the Energy Bulletin (put out by the Post Carbon Institute). Neither deny massive change is coming, but they seem to think that it won't be as bad as many people think. Love to see some discussion on this.

The #9 game changer - I wonder if that will be Igor Panarin's prediction for June - that the US will fragment into civil disunion.

Please let us know, if Isaiah's prediction comes to . . pass. Will the weather be cold, or hot, will the sun be shining - will there be guests to witness the denouement? Such suspense over the New Year!

Blessed be!

I love reading everyone's predictions and I have one myself, 2010 will be the year the economic train comes off the track. There will be no more pretending about a recovery with interest rates going through the roof.

It struck me during 2004 that it was likely to be the last so-called *normal* year I was likely to experience in my lifetime, if *normal* were defined as the unquestioned expectation of continued economic growth and the continuance of the socio-cultural matrix that depends on it. Maybe because that's when I read The Party's Over and a few other books, maybe it was just my increased awareness in general. You may remember that 2004 was the year Florida was struck by four major hurricanes, something that Katrina's hit in 2005 tended to overshadow. Anyway, I'll suggest that 2004-2014, or even 2003-2013, might be more like it as far as looking back on when the big change occurred. Otherwise, your predictions seem reasonable to me - much as I hate to say it, being a baby boomer myself. Hopefully some of us can ally with younger folks to do what we can, together, to make the best life possible.

I will also point out, however, that baby boomers may not actually have the wealth their parents do/did. Looking around, I think most of us feel that we aren't doing as well as our parents did economically at the same age. My friends are dealing with layoffs and job loss; they aren't finding full-time work, or in some cases any work, because of the bias against hiring people over 50. College costs are hitting my friends much harder than they hit my parents' generation. On the other hand, my friends' children are much closer to them than we were to our parents when we were in our teens and twenties (closer in the sense of better friends, at least).

It seems to me that it was the baby boomers' parents, and those between the boomers' parents and the boomers, who determined much of the course we are on, from the 1950s through the 1980s, when the boomers were still young enough to not be voting or were still outnumbered and out-powered among the working and voting population by those older than us. Reagan was voted in by the generations older than the boomers, and kept in office by them. I don't excuse the boomers from the 1990s and this decade, when we did have the power of numbers and were old enough to be in powerful positions, but we inherited a structure that has proven to be very difficult to turn in a better direction. Our work was made more difficult by being the first generation that was televised to from birth, making it easier to be programmed into the consumption paradigm and more difficult to deprogram ourselves. Unfortunately, we repeated the TV error with our children. But we have tried pretty hard to change things, and we did some good. Obama wouldn't be president now if it hadn't been for the boomers, and our older allies, changing the cultural climate enough to make his election possible. It's easier for me to see how much attitudes have changed from the 1960s, simply because I was alive then, than for someone in their thirties as you are. The attitude change was the boomers' work. The work now is different, and unfortunately harder, because we weren't able to, or didn't see, how to change the more intractable power structures of our society - and, sadly, in many cases benefited from those structures ourselves.

Sharon, the reason for disparate dates regarding the world oil peak is driven by the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA). Beginning in January 2008, the EIA decided that the prior category of crude + condensate would include tar sands. This is very misleading, and I suspect intentionally so. C+C peaked in 2005, but the new and improved C+C (i.e., C+C+tar sands) peaked in 2008. Will the EIA extend and pretend further in 2010? Stay tuned.

Great stuff, Sharon.
First, you shouldn't beat yourself up over jumping the gun on economics. As most people do the same thing: they think that the state of the economy is about money. It is about perception. The mindset of the country is what sets the rate of decline (until resources fail), and by simply telling everyone over and over that we are in 'recovery', they don't pull their savings and they keep driving and overproducing for the salesmen to keep overselling. When the bankers and oil men decide to stop buying advertising, the rest will follow.
Second: great predictions for 2010, especially the generational gap.
Afghanistan can improve with more people, but we won't know until all of the soldiers are accounted for and how they decide to behave. Personally, I think we should just airdrop farm tools and seeds and get the hell out and the same thing would be accomplished, but the oil men want to feel their pipelines are 'protected American Interests'.

Had such a hard time processing everything after picturing "Everything that comes out of my ass..." I started thinking of humanure and became distracted. I have ADD.

Carrying the fire.

12 Months Meme

sastyk — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:54:19 +0000

12 Months Meme

Today is "Year in Review" day in which I post my predictions and my evaluation of last year's, but first, here's a meme I stole from the fabulous Dr. Isis in which I list the first blog post of 12 months, plus the first sentence of each blog post. I figure they'll make something really strange, which is always good. BTW, all of these are from ye olde blogge which is still alive and kicking, so if you'd like to read more of me (as though this weren't enough ;-)), you can go there.

January:
My New Year's Resolutions came 'round (and were kept about as well as all new year's resolutions)

One of the best things about the blog is that if I write something down here, there's a good chance someone will remember and bring it up again, and thus, my forgettery, which works extremely well, especially for things I'm not that enthused about, cannot take over.

February:
"Slugs and Floods in Paradise: The first Thing You Need to Know about Gardening"

It was the only time in my life I can remember thinking that "I can't look" wasn't just an expression.

March: "A Seussian Paradigm Shift" In which climate change, the economic crisis and Dr. Seuss's birthday all come together in my mind.

I once read an incredibly entertaining literary critical analysis of _The Cat in the Hat_ which began from the premise that all the action in TCITH is an attempt to fill up the overwhelming absence of the mother from the scene.

April: Some Seriously Good Sh...Er Manure: My Meditations on the Value of Poop and Cleaning out the Barn.

My last post was rapturous about springtime, and it is a time of rapture and delight, especially in cold places.

May:My First Independence Day Update of the Year

This was not my best week - I was in the North Country in the Adirondacks last weekend, got back late on Sunday, and left town again for Maine on Wednesday afternoon, and, of course, it is a tough time to be away from the garden.

June: "On a Tightrope Without a Net" I explored the continuing destruction of safety nets for those who are struggling with the economic crisis.

The sum total of today's news adds up to "the continuing story of the destruction of our protective safety nets."

July: I talk about Housewifely Virtues, and why we should value them (because we should value women and the work they have traditionally done), although we also note that Shameless Hussies should be accompanied by Shameless Hubbies doing their full share. We then move on to why it is extremely useful to be able to do some kind of handwork in low light conditions.

"When I was a girl, my grandmother once tried to explain to me why she kept trying to teach me to knit and crochet."

August: Another Independence Day Update, at the height of the garden - in the worst gardening year in 20 years.

We've had a definite improvement from earlier in the season, when it rained every day. Now, it rains every other day.

September: "Waiting for the Next Wave of Farm Bankruptcies" I respond to the USDA projection that net farm income will drop 38% in 2009 and 15% over 10 years. None of the implications are good.

Here's something we definitely can't afford - more farmers driven out of business. And we're about to get it.

October: I explore the urgent need for Urban Right-To-Farm Laws and suggest a national standard for basics like front yard gardens and backyard chickens.

One of the things I've been saying for a long time is that we're going to need to address zoning questions early in the process of adaptation

November: In "Why Not Change" I look at a World Bank Study on why people don't make lifestyle changes and offer some different explanations than the ones they give.

Interesting paper from the World Bank about why people aren't making more life changes in relationship to climate change.

December: Variety recommendations for seeds that we love - fun stuff!

Because I am on the mail and email list of every seed company in creation, I am spending a lot of time trying not to read plant variety descriptions. You see, I have other things to do. But it is hard.

Re-read 'em and weep - or whatever ;-).

sastyk Wed, 12/30/2009 - 03:54

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Retrospective

meme

You have so many good blogs - it was interesting to see what came up first each month. I think the July one on housewifely virtues is a classic though and one you should reprint from time to time.

Thanks for all the hard work this year in challenging us, sharing your life, and just being there for us.

I love this meme. It's really fascinating to watch your blog evolve over a year.

the debate over "health nutrition" will always be raging - my wife recently has her first baby, she eats a very contriolled diet and excercises about an hour a day and yet still struggles to lose the extra weight. http://www.mortgagelasvegasnevada.com her diet is fine - really healthy and exercise is huge but the weight wont shift for some reason - hormonal it would see?

Nice archive of posts! have always been a fan of your blog, but im not seeing the memes? annuities

Being "Good at the Bench"

apalazzo — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:05:08 +0000

Being "Good at the Bench"

I'm on the last bit of my protracted vacation. I'll be back on Monday. To commemorate work (got to get back into that mind-set) here's a little rant I posted last year.

Here's a tale from the lab.

Today we had an interesting discussion. It started off with PBS and ended up on the topic of understanding the principles behind much of the protocols used in a lab.

It all started when a rotation student asked if there was a lab stock of PBS (phosphate buffered saline), a common buffer used in the lab. Another postdoc informed the student that there wasn't a lab stock and she did not have any at the moment. The student had to either get some from another lab member or make the solution from scratch. Five minutes latter he showed up with a small packet of powder, one of these "add water, stir, and presto your solution is made" things. These packets are quite expensive in relation to the cost of making the solution from reagents off the shelf. I can understand that adjusting the pH manually is time consuming, however when I was a gradstudent (not so long ago) making these solutions wasn't so hard. We had calculated the proper amount of dibasic to monbasic sodium phosphate, so that if you added the right ratio of the two components you would end up with PBS with the right pH. We also had TRIS tables (they're at the end of the Molecular Clonning, a book we would simply call Maniatis after Tom Maniatis, the famed scientist and "senior author" of the book) to make TRIS buffers at various pH levels.

We then discussed another event. About two weeks ago, I was helping another student synthesize RNA in vitro. After purifying the newly made transcripts over a column, we had to exchange buffers. I told her to precipitate the RNA, "just like you would precipitate DNA" and resolubilize it in our preferred buffer. She then asked me whether she should precipitate it with TCA (trichloroacetic acid - a reagent that precipitates protein). I thought to myself, she had never precipitated DNA, could this be? And why should she? The only time she's touched DNA is when she prepares it with a kit. Why would she know how to precipitate DNA?

So my point? I don't want to rant about kits or premade, ready to use PBS packs (I've already commented on kits and subsequently got attacked by a couple of kit lovers). My point is that kits are black boxes. The more we scientists use these kits, the less we understand how basic lab techniques actually work. And the less we know how lab techniques work, the less we are able to trouble shoot. Now kits do have their advantages. Although homemade preparations often yield better results, kits are more reproduceable and reliable. I remember on many occasions when the pH of a single solution was off and all of my DNA preps failed, now that never happens. But if we want to get mRNA into cells, knowing the intricacies of RNA precipitations including which salts to include and what buffers to resuspend the RNAs in can make a huge differences.

Here's another example. Some individuals in the department have tried on several occasions to microinject tissue culture nuclei. They purchase prepulled microinjection needles and use automated microinjectors .. but in the end just can't do it. I pull my own needles and write my own programs for our needle puller, I constructed my own microinjection setup (with no electronics components) I even use a syringe instead of a pico-spritzer that automates the pressure flow into the injection needle. Consequently I am able to microinject nuclei reliably month after month. The difference is the dept of understanding. I can adjust my needles, regulate pressure and adjust many parameters of the microinjection procedure. Those that automate the whole process simply don't have the same capacity to adapt. Why do you need to adapt? Well not every cell type is the same. Different microinjected substances require different needle etc. I also have plenty of little tricks. It's all this knowledge that allows me to reliably perform this technique. Am I just good at it? Not really. I've already trained three others and they are much more capable of microinjecting than the other people who used the automated setup.

My point is that it is fine to use kits or automated microinjectors or premade PBS packs ... yes, it's fine to take the easy way, but try to at least understand how your kits work. Such information can help you troubleshoot, or adapt, and in the end that is the difference between average and "being good at the bench".

apalazzo Fri, 10/12/2007 - 04:05

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Retrospective

trichloroacetic acid - a reagent that precipitates protein

TCA also precipitates nucleic acids. I wasn't sure about RNA, which is why I looked that protocol up -- but I've been doing thymidine incorporation assays, in which TCA is used to precipitate DNA and allow removal of unincorporated labelled thymidine.

For minipreps I use home-made alkaline lysis most times, and a kit everytime I need clean stuff for sequencing or just high quality DNA.. so I tend to compromise. I can't believe how many people don't know how to make chemically competent cells by themselves, and buy them although they use them often. It takes basically no time at all and is much cheaper!! I do think there's a big difference in the level of understanding of "kit" scientists, and those that are comfortable with both.. In the end though I think it really comes down to who trained you.

Kits are great for some things; e.g Roche's High Pure Maxiprep kit with the columns means maybe I get a little less DNA, BUT I never lose the pellet during the final precipitation step. On the other hand, for some things I want to be able to adjust single parameters, which kits don't allow. I like to know which steps are critical and which steps are expendable ... you know, sometimes "5 minutes" means really, seriously, 5 minutes and other times it means "enough time to go to the bathroom or check email once". Or, sometimes pH 7.0 means really, seriously, pH between 6.9 and 7.1 and other times it means anywhere from 6-8. This I like to know for both scietific troubleshooting reasons and also for reasons of laziness.
Finally, (my six cents) a lot of cell biology is voodoo magic (sorry, but it is) which requires getting a feel for. Live cell microinjection is one of these things. Maybe a robot could do it more reproducibly but it would not be as successful as a human agent with a lot of practice and good hands. When I used to do a procedure similar to microinjecting (lifting single cells from culture by squirting them with trypsin and sucking them up) I liked to 1) pull my own needles and select the best needles for the job and 2) pipet by hand, not with the microinjector which I felt was too bulky. The downside was that the procedure was never exactly the same day to day - the upside was that it was almost always successful!

Entropy Driven Entry

apalazzo — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:01:32 +0000

Entropy Driven Entry

By now I should be flying in to Paris to meetup with some old friends. Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at the Universite Pierre & Marie Curie entitled: The Signal Sequence Coding Region: promoting nuclear export of mRNA, and ER targeting of translated protein. Here is a post from a year ago. At the time I was visiting Edgar who was then living in New York ...

After the death of my computer I decided to take the Chinatown express (15$ buys you a ticket from Boston to Chinatown NYC) and visit some old friends. Last night, what we call the Portuguese Mafia (aka the Federation of Portuguese Scientists living in New York) came over for drinks (and it's was Claudia's 30th).

With my veins acquiring the right level of Alcohol I asked several individuals the question. "WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"

Here is what Edgar told me:
Reproducibility. "When I wake tomorrow morning and jump, I will fall back towards the ground." We take the laws of Nature for granted and yet we cannot prove that they will not change. We assume that the mechanisms that dictate events are static, as far as we can tell they have always been and we assume that they always will be. But you can't really know for sure.

And I think I have come up my answer too:

I believe that there are certain principles that are fundamental truths. These principles transcend any possible universe and are thus independent of any material or energy. One of these principles is the rules of logic. No matter how you construct a universe, the rules of logic will always hold. A second principle, or universal truth, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLOTD). This principle is trickier. At the basic quantum level it is true that many features of the SLOTD do not hold, but as one scales up to macromolecular level the SLOTD becomes inevitable. SLOTD informs the directionality of time and in a certain sense is the default setting for events in the absence of an organizing force.

To reverse the direction of time (or operate in reverse SLOTD mode), order would have to be injected into the universe at every point in time. But who or what would decide what the structure or design of this new order? Are all the molecules in the universe to come together in a perfect line, a giant intergalactic gnat, or an orchestra with each member having seven arms? And what would they play? Would the order generating entity be subjected to the SLOTD, if not then the orderer would have to be the subject of an even greater ordering force and then this higher ordering force, is it subject to the SLOTD?

Another problem with reversing SLOTD is that the universe then becomes unpredictable and not in the sense of Heisenberg, but as a whole (will the universe converge into a line, gnat or orchestra? or perhaps all three? - no way to objectively tell). This in fact would nullify Edgar's belief.

Nullifying Edgar's belief would compromise our ability to believe in anything. To reverse the SLOTD would create the ultimate uncertainty - a progressive increase in order would obliterate our ability to predict the future. And with this paradox I'll end the post.

apalazzo Thu, 10/11/2007 - 04:01

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Retrospective

The Transient Nature of Academia

apalazzo — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 07:56:51 +0000

The Transient Nature of Academia

I'm in Italy. Until I get back I've set up my blog to repost some old entries. Here's a post from last year.

Yesterday, while driving up to Ipswich to spend the day at Crane beach and watch the see the annual July 3rd Fireworks, a group of us gabbed about the transient nature of being an academic.

Living from place to place, moving until you are in your late 30s, an academic is expected to travel and see the world. You live in various places; experience the day to day hustle of different cities, towns and often countries. You absorb the local customs, the ideas, the history. You attempt to form relationships with coworkers ... but in the end it's all very transient.

I've made many good friends throughout the years in Montreal, New York and now Boston ... but as I moved on, so did they, to Princeton, Seattle, Pasadena, and Tokyo. Soon others will be heading off to Berkeley, Boulder, and Paris.

And why all this restless movement?

We've been told that this is good for us. And it's not only in academia, but it is currently the dominant ideology. Workers must travel. Workers must move to where they have a comparative advantage. Academics can't settle down or else they may become sedentary. They must be challenged and they must learn. Go out and explore.

And so, my wife and I are bound to travel the world, never being able to settle down in one spot, never being able to become members of a long lasting community. We've made many great friends, only to see them move away.

And what humans' need, acording to some, is the very thing we don't have, stability. People thrive when they can form long lasting bonds. Sure things are not so difficult in the age of information, where communication is simple and easy and accessible to all. But will I ever again be able to spend an afternoon sitting on the beach, under an incredible blue sky, sipping wine, playing a game of beach soccer, and just shooting the breeze with these same dozen individuals?

Of all my encounters, I have to say that academics are always the most open welcoming, unpretentious and fun-loving people. I use to think that it was because as academics, we love life; so much so that we have sacrificed much in order to immerse ourselves in its intricate details. In some ways our devotion to studying the world is more holy, than any religious ritual. We are interested in everything and our dedication to the natural world is a reflection of our reverence towards it.

I still believe that this attitude plays a great part in forming the easy going and open attitude that exists in many academic circles. But I do believe that the transient nature of our profession has also shaped us; we are the lonely career, cursed to travel the world as hard working mercenaries ... and as our paths meet we academics feel a sense of solidarity towards each other.

We are alone together.

apalazzo Wed, 10/10/2007 - 03:56

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Retrospective

That's a beautiful sentiment. I'm only a research associate, having decided early in graduate school that a PhD was for me, but the work itself is transient, when you're in a relatively narrow field. I've lived in Newfoundland, Alabama, and three cities in British Columbia and I'll likely move again when this current surge of grant money dries up. Like you, some of my best friends are working in far-flung places; Florida State, Washington Department of the Environment, National Research Council of Canada, Washington DC, and as far away as faculty positions in Australia. I COULD settle down, but it would mean taking 'any' job in science, rather than a career doing what I've grown to love. Thanks for summing this up so well!

Explorers & Crusaders

apalazzo — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 08:32:36 +0000

Explorers & Crusaders

I'm in Italia. Here's one of my favorite entries. It first appeared last year.

You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality.

As you can guess, I do not have a high regard for the latter group. Unfortunately there are a lot of crusaders around. In some way we all are part of this second group to some extent, but inevitably it's always the first group, the explorers, who win in the end.

The problem is everyone denies being a crusader. So how to tell ...

a) Explorers are usually playing Russian roulette with their models. If the idea survives the toughest test, then it lives until the next day. If the idea dies, it dies. And then hopefully another superior model is born so that the explorers can torture it.

b) Explorers tends to be younger and less invested in the current dogmas. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes it's the "impressionable youths" that are indoctrinated while those with some experience understand the problems with existing dogma. It must be noted that crusaders do not always defend the majority view (see below).

c) Explorers are willing to perform "crazy" experiments and frame the problem in novel ways.

d) Crusaders are known as the exponent of an idea. If you call yourself the flat-earth society, and everyone calls you the flat-earth society, you're an crusader (albeit defending a minority stand point). Many enforcers are actually in the minority ... in fact in most cases. As a result crusaders sometimes suffer from inferiority complex and must get their point across at all costs.

f) If after reading this post you are insulted and feel attacked, then you are a crusader. Why? Crusaders defend their models as if a whole conspiracy of enemies is out to get them. Any whiff of the enemy and they morph into a werewolf.

Now even if you weren't insulted by my post and think that I was writing about the ID movement, I wasn't (although it certainly applies). This pathology is everywhere, and unfortunately it's spreading - into public debate on various issues, into our politics. It's always existed in science (if you're a scientist, I'm sure you know what I'm saying). Fortunately science rewards advances, and advances are always generated by explorers. So if you're still in doubt as to where you stand ask yourself, are you ready to kill your favorite idea in order to gain insight? Or are you obsessed with your enemies ideas (or think that your "enemies" are obsessed with your ideas)?

apalazzo Mon, 10/08/2007 - 04:32

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"Explorers tends to be younger and less invested in the current dogmas."

I did "explorer" type work as a post-doc that ended up challenging current dogma. When I did the work, I wasn't just "less invested in the current dogma", I was completely unaware of it. This is because I developed a new technique and chose to apply it in the context of a biological system that I was clueless about.

Erasing an Invention

apalazzo — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 20:07:54 +0000

Erasing an Invention

I'm in Italy. Over the past two weeks I've been reposting my entries on technology. Here is a related post on Le Corbusier and his conception of the modern city.

Seed is disseminating questions to its bloggers (I guess a la www.edge.org) so this week the question is:

If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?

The invention I would choose to uninvent? I spent the weekend asking some friends. Some answers were machine guns, the atomic bomb, spam, cars ...

Cars did strike something deep in me. Along the lines of Heathcote Williams' Autogeddon:

If an Alien Visitor were to hover a few hundred yards above the planet
It could be forgiven for thinking
That cars were the dominant life form,
And that human beings were a kind of ambulatory fuel cell:
Injected when the car wished to move off,
And ejected when they were spent.

The oil driven economy is a major force driving all our current global problems, be it war or global warming. Over the past hundred years, no other invention has so profoundly changed the way society was structured and how it operates. But even the most ardent anti-automobilists would admit, cars have also provided many benefits. Transportation is now cheep, efficient and democratic. Cars provide freedom to travel like no other form of transportation. No if I were to choose an "invention" to eradicate it would be Le Corbusier's concept of a city.

What is Le Corbusier's city?

Well to find out we need to find out about Le Corbusier. He grew up in a small but dense urban center in Switzerland where little Charles and his friends owned the streets. But the introduction of the car changed what the street was used for. Cars were fast and dangerous and forced kids and pedestrians off the streets. Roads now belonged to the car, not the neighborhood. Instead of fighting the car, Le Corbusier preached that we must accept it and all its tyranny. Urban centers were no longer fit for families and little kids and hence residential communities must be exported beyond the urban centers.

The result was the creation of suburbia, the abandonment of the urban centers and the destruction of cities. Urban centers were for work, suburbs (and ex-brubs) are for living. To better facilitate transport, huge swaths of the city were leveled to make way for highways, freeways and expressways. So not only were urban centers deserteted by the middle and upper classes, but were destroyed by Le Corbusier's followers. One example is the destruction of the South Bronx by Robert Moses to make room fro the Cross Bronx Expressway.

Newer cities like Houston or Los Angeles were built with these ideas in mind. In ither words they were built around cars and not people. These cities inspired Jean Baudrillard's philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation, which in turn inspired the Wachowski brothers to write The Matrix. Fake cities where no one communicates, where people live in isolated non-communities, where individuals are out of touch with the reality of others ... where self interest rules, and the community vanished. Affluent (and mostly white) citizens are exported (or "escape") to the suburbs, and minority communities in urban centers are neglected and starved of resources.

Unlike Marxist politics that have been reversed in the past couple of decades, Le Corbusier's cities are here to stay. Urban centers and the funding of public institutions that benefit huge swaths of urban citizens such as public transportation, schools, and community events, all suffered. Attempts to reverse these policies, such as Boston's Big Dig, are expensive and not feasible for most American cities. Although cities such as New York have somewhat rebounded, certain aspects such as repairing the educational system is almost impossible as urban dwellers with money are usually childless and less willing to fund public education, or are supper rich and thus send their kids to private school. Neighborhoods such as Bedsty and Roxbury are trapped in several vicious cycles (the first being poor uneducated citizens => broken homes => bad environment for kids =>poor uneducated citizens; the second being crime => flight of local business => zero job opportunities for kids => crime) that cannot be rejuvenated by the quick-fix schemes that many politicians prescribe to them.

A very bad situation, and it's of our own doing.

The funny aspect of this situation, is that despite the fact that Americans are ardent "free market" supporters, the modern American city is based less on the free market, than on central planning philosophies that come from Le Corbusier's ideologies. Robert Mosses destroyed the South Bronx, not through market forces, but more on the belief that highways are good and urban centers are relics of the past. But the cities (or the sections of cities) that escaped Le Corbusier's theories are where all the new ideas and inventions come from. These cities are dynamic and they produce all our cultural icons and intellectuals. In addition they are the centers that drive American capitalism and are the most efficient in terms of energy consumption. But as most American cities belong to Le Corbusier, America have to live with his ideas for a long time to come.

apalazzo Fri, 10/05/2007 - 16:07

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Retrospective

Does technology make you happy?

apalazzo — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 08:01:36 +0000

Does technology make you happy?

Still in Italy. Here is a post from last year that was a follow-up to the entry that was reposted yesterday.

Lets think about technology for a moment. Here I am typing on this laptop. Ideas flow (misspelled and grammatically incorrect) from my brain to my fingers to the keyboard ... over a wireless network ... into the vast ethereal space (known as the internet) ... to your home/workplace/cafÃ©.

So what good is any of it?

You exclaim ... that's preposterous. Technology is good.

You would then continue ... All these gadgets and gizmos, they're good on many fronts. They make us live longer, they help us to fulfill our true inner potential, they make life easier and BTW I just got this really cool game on my x-box.

But lets step back for one second. I can see the part about living longer. Fulfillment ... I'll let you have that argument too. Games? Sure I won't argue with that (for now). But making life easier. I fully and utterly DISAGREE WITH YOU.

You see we all think that technology is helpful. If only I had X, Y and Z, I could finnish this boring job and go off and enjoy life.

But it didn't work out that way.

What ended up happening is that instead of getting you job done sooner, MORE IS EXPECTED OF YOU. How could you ever tell your boss, I had a tough day, it's hard work doing X, Y and Z? Now with your laptop, your microarrays and all other technological gadgets your expected to perform X, Y, Z ... the rest of the alphabet AND a couple of greek letters. Anything less and you're not performing your duties (or as a scientist, you'll get scooped). Why did it all turn out this way? Why aren't we living in the Star Trek Universe where there's no money and everyone plays in their own holodeck?

Advances in technology allows us to collectively produce more goods (or more research for you scientists), however our security has not increased. So we don't work anymore to buy the TV set, the new pair of jeans, or that x-box, but to maintain services and goods that our parents took for granted. These include healthcare, education, buying a home, retirement. We are told to move from job to job, but this lack of long-term job stability causes more stress. We are the stressed out generation. Technology is what brought us here.

So what to do?

Well just like armed warfare, people can't expect to unilaterally disarm. In other words getting rid of our technology is NOT the solution. Rather we need to re-evaluate how our society operates. Why are we so focused on GDP? Should economists, social scientists figure out what would make us happiest? You may think that the way to go is just drug everyone up. That'll make them all happy. But this idea is false. Long term happiness comes from people who are challenged, BUT CHALENGED IN A POSITIVE LIGHT.

Think of it this way ... there are two types of stressful situations. Ones where the outcomes are beyond a person's control, and others where the outcomes are dependent on an individual's performance. To expand on the second situation, it's a position where if you work hard and make the right choices, you're guaranteed a favorable outcome. According to Richard Layard, from the London School of economics, humans are happiest when placed in the second situation. So perhaps this is what we should strive for. And many individuals in our society are in this position; work hard and you can get into the best schools ... be diligent and you'll get that great job ... choose wise and you can retire and not worry about your health. The irony is that with all our technology and gadgets, fewer and fewer of us live in this ideal happy world.

(For more on this topic check out Layard's Happiness: Lessons from a New Science.)

apalazzo Wed, 10/03/2007 - 04:01

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Retrospective

Rant on Technology

apalazzo — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 08:25:40 +0000

Rant on Technology

I should be walking around the family olive grove by now. Here is yet another old post from last year.

OK here is a myth that I'd like to explode (or at least be provocative about). Technology is NOT inevitable.

Say what?

We humans think that technology increases steadily. With every space shuttle and iPod, humanity advances by one small step. Sort of like that image of the ape walking more and more upright

... yeah that one. But the steady progress of technology is a myth.

Then how does it advance? Punctuated equilibrium? Not really. Humans are adept at finding tricks and shortcuts. We're natural-born cheaters.

There I've said it.

All of our technologies are exactly that. Tricks. Brute force never works. Instead, scientists, developers and inventors stumble upon a random phenomenon ... and then it hits them. "Hey guys, we can use this to solve x, y and z." Other times we apply a pre-existing technology to a different problem. We are masters of exploiting what we have, but terrible in coming up with technology from scratch. And we exploit these tricks and shortcuts over and over again to solve as many problems as possible.

Here's an example. Structural biology. Want to figure out how a protein is shaped? Well we can't look at it with a microscope. We can't easily model its folding on a computer. No, one day some guy realized that you can apply a magnet to a sample and see how the nuclei get excited, resonate with the magnetic pulse, then relax.

Say what? NMR (as in nuclear magnetic resonance).

Some other bloke figured that if you can line up proteins into a regular array and bounce X-rays off of the proteins, lined up nuclei can amplify the signal.

Say what? X-ray crystallography.

We've been using these two tricks for a while now, but they have many problems. NMR produces low resolution images, and as for crystallography ... not every protein can be easily crystallized. And we're lucky if we can get the structure of an enzyme in all catalytic states. We're trying hard, and recently we've had cryo-EM (yes microscopy) ... but WE HAVEN'T STUMBLED ONTO ANY OTHER SHORTCUTS THAT WOULD ALLOW FOR BETTER PROTEIN STRUCTURE DETERMINATIONS. We're stuck.

You may still think that we humans are so smart. Then how come we haven't harnessed fusion energy yet? Sure we can build H-bombs, but a fusion power plant? The answer is that we just don't have all the necessary cheat sheets required to make it happen. We need serendipitous findings A, B and C. And it's possible that we've already made some of these findings. Maybe if the US government poured money into fusion power, some federally funded engineer will reread some neat paper on nanotubes ... and bingo we're no longer drilling for oil.

There are two implications from this concept of technological advance:

1) Basic research is damn important. If you want to stumble onto tricks, the best line of attack is to study all sorts of stuff. By looking at all sorts of crazy phenomena found in nature, we increase our repertoire of random knowledge. Don't forget, it's the guys that look at the moldy old petridishes who discovered penicillin.

2) Although scientists, developers, and engineers may solve some of our problems, they will not be able to solve all of them. We need to drill this idea in our head. Too many times I read the rantings of market worshiping thinkers or "futurists" who declare that science will eventually solve all of society's ills ... so don't worry. Yeah right. We humans can solve certain problems, but not other problems. We will never have ALL the answers. It all depends on our bag of tricks.

So that's why all those folks from the 1950s were wrong about our flying cars or our regularly scheduled trips to Mars. Instead, some guy fiddling around with thistle balls stumbled on a clever way of reversibly fastening two items together - Velcro! Another adapted a phone call into a computer-to-computer communications device. But we're not the Jetsons.

apalazzo Tue, 10/02/2007 - 04:25

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Retrospective