Evilsoft.org

I don’t normally go political on this site, but this images of the prophet Muhammed thing is just insane. Fist Comedy Central capitulates to censorship, and Flickr follows suit, and now the entirety of facebook and youtube has been banned in Pakistan because of cartoons.

Well, I’m picking my side, standing with free speech and joining Everyone Draw Mohammed Day. Pakistan, I’m calling your government out. Ban me.

It’s becoming a Friday tradition. Judy He, the front end engineer at my office appears to have started a weekly tradition of photoshopping Knewton employees into movie posters. This week I got put in in place of Anthony Hopkins in the poster for Legends of the Fall (which I might add was a truly wretched film. In Brad Pitt’s place is Sven Northcott and for Adian Quinn it’s Dave Cascino.

Here’s the original for comparison.

Lets all thank the Onion for saying what truly needs to be said. The Christian fundies in this country are crazy, irrational, and have such a wildly different point of view from say, rational humanism (ala science and morality driven by rational thought) that attempting to compare the two schools of thought (may get you killed, or at the very least fired) is like comparing Seinfeld to the WWF.

And this whole war on Christmas thing is just the high of asinity. I can not stand the pseudo oppressed Christians whining that their dominance of my culture is not complete. It pisses me off, and more so because people believe it. Fucking christocentric asshats.

Christmas time (see I can say it too) always gets me down, I think its all the attention placed on bullshit consumerism. If people would actually pay attention and shop ethically and wisely I don’t think I would get so angsty. Or we could all becomes Viridians, I would be fine with that too.

I’m so tired of the partisan bickering over global warming. The left is convinced that humans are the cause of global warming, and the right refuses to even consider humans as a reason. But, pretty much everyone who actually looks at the data agrees that no matter what the cause is, the surface temperature of the planet is on the rise. We are storing more energy on the surface then we have in the past, and it is a likely cause of the heavy weather we have recently been experiencing. When the insurance industry (Who are not prone to worry about things that don’t cost money) is nervous about something, I think we all have reason to take notice.

Ignoring the impact of climate change on other species, there is still a substantial and real argument for dealing with global warming (human caused or not) based purely on it’s impact on us. The total or partial loss of coastal cities to raising ocean levels, combined with destructive weather and other, less predictable problems all add up to a huge economic problem.

I suspect the reluctance of the right to consider humans as a cause has it’s root in a desire to not change human habits. While I personally consider this to be like an ostrich sticking its head into the sand, it does lead one to an inevitable conclusion: No matter how bad the consequences, a large number of people will stubbornly stick to doing things how they have always done things. If this is the case, we have to consider new solutions. Solutions that don’t involve people having to change how they live. Any solution that relies on everyone agreeing to not do something, even if it is to prevent armageddon, will inevitably convince a large block of people to *do* that thing (or at the very least, it won’t convince them to stop). Because of this aspect of human nature, I have a new proposal to deal with global warming.

Instead of asking people to change how they live, we need to look to engineering solutions that lower the amount of retained heat on the planet’s surface. An engineering solution has a number of requirements, among which (but not limited to) are:

1. Cost effective: The cost of saving coastal cities from innudation needs to at the very minimum be lower the cost of rebuilding all of our coastal infrastructure. This does give us a lot of play room on cost, but one needs to keep in mind, even if it’s cheaper then rebuilding all of our coastal cities, a 3 trillion dollar plan will never fly. The cheaper the better.
2. Adjustable: Any solution needs to account for the possibility of future changes, and thus needs to be able to accept a larger or smaller heat load. We don’t want to cause human engineered global cooling after all.
3. Low impact: Any plan that involves a megascale engineering project that as a side effect kills all the fish on the planet will likely not fly. Beyond that, the further economic impacts of something that destabilizes whole chunks of the ecosystem could affect requirement #1.

I’m sure there are more, but those are the first ones that come to mind. I have at least one proposal that I believe meets all of these requirements, and has some side benefits as well.

The Devon Jones Proposal to mitigate the impact of global warming:
I propose we build a solar sail. A large, thin, reflective sheet about the size of Texas that we put in space. This sail needs to be able to alter it’s size to accommodate heat load changes on the planet (thus blocking out a larger or smaller percentage of the sun’s energy). This large reflective sheet should focus the sun’s rays on a central point, where we place a generator. Tailing down towards the earth’s surface from the generator we would place an electromagnetic tether that can be used to control the orbit of the solar sail, and keep it from crashing back down into the planet (because we not only have to deal with orbital decay, but also the pressure from the photons that cause the sail to be pushed into the planet). There is a lot of space junk in orbit, which would tear holes in the sail, so I suggest that we build the sail with panels of a size that are convenient to replace after they have lost 50% of their reflective capacity.

This has a lot of benefits:

1. Low Cost: This can probably be constructed and put into orbit for less then the new proposed moon missions.
2. Easy to Engineer: All of these are technologies we have now. Nothing new needs to be created.
3. Power in Orbit: This gives us an orbital power station. The power needed to keep this in orbit should be low enough that there is a net production of power from the sail. Orbital power generation has all sorts of nifty benefits.

So, tell me, what are the holes?

So I just read Doctorow’s first installment of his new serialized novella. It is very good. Once again I have to thank Cory for brightening my day and making me think there is hope for the future. On a related note – the future. Talking with a friend of mine the other day he said something I knew, but I think is worth mentioning again. The only way anything gets value is through human attention.

I love sarcasm.

By the way check out the new YM, damn they just keep adding shit, its like nuclear powered with lasers…

Now that is scary.

Credit to Mr. Williams for pointing this little gem out.

Gotta love MIT. Apparently you only need one time traveler convention.