Energy

Replace concrete with petroleum waste?

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The Guardian suggests that concrete is to become such a big issue in terms of cost and environmental impact that petroleum waste will seem friendly and cheap by comparison. First you have to consider the problem:

Cement is one of the most environmentally hazardous materials in the world, adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than the entire weight of the global airline industry. According to the Sustainable Development Commission, 4% of Co2 is caused by aviation. Depending on how conservatively you do the sums, cement-based building materials, including concrete and asphalt, account for between 5% and 10% of all carbon dioxide emissions.

And then, here is a possible solution, proposed by UKM, a partner of Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil giant that holds the patent to the proposed material:

When crude oil is “cracked” into its components, the top of the refinement process produces petrol, followed by diesel, light fuel oil and then heavy fuel oil. At the bottom of the barrel lies a “fraction” of blackened waste material. It is hard and sticky and of scant economic worth.

“The standard way of dealing with this low-grade oil is to mix it with light fuel oil to make more heavy fuel oil,” says Robinson [director of UKM], sketching a diagram of the process on a notepad. “It gets burnt off and doesn’t have to be treated as a waste. But that burning causes further CO2 emissions that cause global warming. In our wildest dreams we don’t think we will replace concrete. But in certain applications where concrete isn’t as good, like in heavy industrial roads or in salt water environments, we can replace it. That would in itself be fantastic for the environment.”

Something tells me that even if this is a solution to today’s concrete problems (pun intended), it might introduce far greater problems to resolve tomorrow.

I’m no petroleum waste expert, and thus maybe I’m wrong about the future hazards. I guess if nothing else at least we can see Shell trying to solve some of the same issues as those mentioned by worldchanging.org.

History, Poetry

Letter to Laura Bush

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(From the poet Sharon Olds regarding an invitation to the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award in Washington, DC. This was released to the public and also ended hp here: Poets Against the War)

Laura Bush
First Lady
The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,

I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation at the National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House.

In one way, it’s a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents–all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers.

And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women’s prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children. Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students–long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.
When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit–and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person’s unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC. I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country–with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain–did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made “at the top” and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths. I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism–the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness–as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing–against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting “extraordinary rendition”: flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us.

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Sincerely,

SHARON OLDS

Her earlier anti-war writings were far less focused, but nonetheless an interesting look at how/why she is more likely to put herself at risk today, in order to ensure a better future for her children, than dine at the table with an authority she does not recognize as legitimate:

May 1968

When the Dean said we could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
we lay down, in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over us. Lying back on the cobbles,
I saw the buildings of New York City
from dirt level, they soared up
and stopped, chopped off–above them, the sky,
the night air over the island.
The mounted police moved, near us,
while we sang, and then I began to count,
12, 13, 14, 15,
I counted again, 15, 16, one
month since the day on that deserted beach,
17, 18, my mouth fell open,
my hair on the street,
if my period did not come tonight
I was pregnant. I could see the sole of a cop’s
shoe, the gelding’s belly, its genitals–
if they took me to Women’s Detention and did
the exam on me, the speculum,
the fingers–I gazed into the horse’s tail
like a comet-train. All week, I had
thought about getting arrested, half-longed
to give myself away. On the tar–
one brain in my head, another,
in the making, near the base of my tail–
I looked at the steel arc of the horse’s
shoe, the curve of its belly, the cop’s
nightstick, the buildings streaming up
away from the earth. I knew I should get up
and leave, but I lay there looking at the space
above us, until it turned deep blue and then
ashy, colorless, Give me this one
night, I thought, and I’ll give this child
the rest of my life, the horse’s heads,
this time, drooping, dipping, until
they slept in a circle around my body and my daughter

Energy, Security

Disease clusters, radiation and cell towers

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Many years ago I worked in a research building that was located above a giant plasma generator. Everyone who had worked there for more than five years and who sat fairly near the thing (the floor above, the office next door) were said to be suffering from cancer or other illness. One woman passed away suddenly in her 50s. The generator drew so much energy that on hot days the central organization would ask the operator to turn it off so they could run the air conditioners. Who knows how much the thing emitted. Don’t think it was ever measured. Some employees were smokers, most did not exercize regularly, and so forth, but a correllation seemed too strong to be coincidence.

There aren’t many plasma generators around but what if the same effects can be documented in people who work or live near cell-towers? And what if those people happen to be important enough that a sudden deterioration of their health could cause serious financial impact to a big organization? The latest news from Australia is rather shocking:

Australian Medical Association president Mukesh Haikerwal said there was no proof of a connection but “if you get clusters of disease it’s sensible to investigate.”

Dr John Gall, from private health company Southern Medical Services, which has been called in to assess the sick, said last night three of those affected had tumours showing symptoms consistent with radiation.

But he said there was no causal link with the building based on preliminary observations.

A spokesman for state Health Minister Bronwyn Pike said WorkCover would investigate the matter and the Department of Human Services would provide any expertise needed.

RMIT chief operating officer Steve Somogyi said testing was carried out on the building after the first two of the seven tumours were reported in 1999 and 2001. It found radiation and air quality levels within recommended guidelines.

Hmmm, who set those guidelines again and based on what evidence? Funny how experts can sometimes use a lack of data as proof of something that doesn’t exist, rather than proof of uncertainty. In network security, it can often be worse to have false negatives than false positives. And if you ever run a honeypot system you have to be careful to never assume that a lack of bears in the honeypot (it sounds better than attackers who like honey, if you know what i mean) proves that there is not threat of bears, let alone a bear already sleeping in your bed. And from that perspective, maybe it wasn’t radiation from the towers, but something in the food, furniture or decorations…

History, Security

Google succumbs

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I think the Google Co-op concept is a novel idea. It allows individuals to rank information on the web “by creating ‘subscribed links’ for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best”. Wait, did I just read that correctly? Has something failed at Google? What happened to their pigeon algorithm revolution? Wasn’t the original concept of their search technology based upon figuring out a clever way to interpret page ranking through links? (Incidentally, I didn’t see a way to label webpages as safe/trusted, which would be the most interesting feature from a security perspective and also useful in the traditional sense of PGP.)

I must be missing something, because the announcement seems to suggest to me that so many attackers have been able to riddle the Google page-ranking system with holes, that the search giant has maxed-out their pigeon power and is essentially trying to ask everyone to help by sticking their own thumb into the cracks…

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that the power of the internet is in the people who have localized and specialized knowledge. But this is so completely counter to the origins of this “our algorithm is smarter than you are” company, one has to wonder if Google will next start trying to actually work within (or to help build) social fabric/structure rather than just pop out intellectually challenging tools. A better plow is great, since people can make better use of available land, but what’s your role when the plows turn into swords? Do you keep making swords and fan the discord among people fighting for resources or do you look for a way to establish localized rights and try to preserve the real value of plows?

More insight available courtesy of the Reg:

The problem is, Google has created a commons that is designed to be exploited beyond its capacity. Each user of a commons has an incentive to defect from the common good, to seek individual advantage. But in the Google commons, SEOs have an incentive to DESTROY the common good, to try to prevent anyone else from having any individual advantage. How the hell do you create a sustainable business model when everyone is intent on fucking up yours?

Many people have waxed lyrical about how Google was “God’s Brain” and contained some sort of magical Gestalt of all of mankind’s knowledge. But now it’s like an autistic brain that can’t say anything except advertising jingles.

— Charles Eicher

The Reg also had another take on the problem here:

creating junk web pages is so cheap and easy to do, Google is engaged in an arms race with search engine optimizers. Each innovation designed to bring clarity to the web, such as tagging, is rapidly exploited by spammers or site owners wishing to harvest some classified advertising revenue.

Recently, we featured a software tool that can create 100 Blogger weblogs in 24 minutes, called Blog Mass Installer. A subterranean industry of sites providing “private label articles,” or PLAs exists to flesh out “content” for these freshly minted sites. And as a result, legitimate sites are often caught in the cross fire.