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Thanks to a cheap promotional airfare and some friends willing to go on a weekend trip to the Arctic north, in the winter, on a lark, I now know what Iceland looks like in the dark.
Something like this…
…which reminded me of the agricultural bubbles at the Green in In the Shadow of Ares.
In fact, they’re a set of agricultural greenhouses in the town of Hveragerði, and despite their size are each about a tenth as wide and about 1/15th as long as their fictional counterparts.
CLARIFICATION: No, we did not actually go to Iceland on a lark. We used an airplane.
Did you get a Kindle or other e-reader-capable widget or gadget or whoosiwhatsit for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus? Boy, do I have the perfect book for you!
A 2012 Prometheus Award finalist, now only $2.99! What a steal.
And yes, we continue to work on the sequel. One of the downsides to changing jobs in December (along with the holidays, travel, etc.) is that the ensuing chaos disrupted the good progress we had been making. Another two weeks and things should be getting back to normal.
We do now have a working title for it: Ghosts of Tharsis. I’m not entirely happy with this title yet given the resemblance to the title of the bad John Carpenter movie Ghosts of Mars, but it suits the storyline very well (no, there are no literal ghosts in the book; it’s used in this case as a metaphor for secrets similar to but less passive than “skeletons in the closet” — these secrets want out).
Walter Russell Mead observes the latest solar power corruption fiasco and asks:
Is there anybody in the world of tax-funded green energy who isn’t a sleazy thief or an incompetent idealist?
(WaPo article here.)
Regardless of who is behind any “green energy” undertaking, my inclination nowadays is to suspect it is some sort of scam run by people connected to the Obama administration (or merely taking advantage of a golden opportunity for graft), or at best a utopian enterprise run by people with more dreams than good engineering or economic sense.
SolarCity at least responded to WaPo, and sounded sincere enough about their pricing being competitive with Treasury Department guidance. Maybe Elon is the one Mead is looking for? Dunno.
In the Shadow of Ares is now only $2.99. If you’re buying a Kindle, iPad, Nook, or other such device for someone (especially a young adult) this Christmas, it’d make a perfect gift.
Ann Althouse links to another in a long procession of “big idea houses” – what is zeroHouse?
The zeroHouse is a small, prefabricated house that can easily be shipped and quickly erected. It features a full kitchen, bath, and all elements necessary to comfortably support four adults. What sets the zeroHouse apart from other prefabricated structures on the market, however, is its ability to operate independently, without the need for any external utility or waste disposal connections.
The zeroHouse can be used in many applications, including residential uses in remote or ecologically sensitive locations, as ecotourism resort units, or as living or office modules for remote employment such as mining, construction, or relief agency uses.
Interesting. I’ll come back to the residential use part, but note here that if a relief agency has $350k to spend on a tiny temporary structure like this, there’s something seriously wrong with how it is managing its resources. My Google search on this was useless, but surely there’s some other alternative that, while perhaps less trendy and SWPLicious, could provide relief to more than 2-3 people for the expenditure of the average annual income of seven Americans.
zeroHouse can be located almost anywhere. Two flatbed trucks carry all the zeroHouse components to the site, and it can be erected in less than a day. It can be installed in places that would unsuitable for standard construction including water up to ten feet deep, or on slopes of up to thirty-five degrees.
zeroHouse employs a helical-anchor foundation system that touches the ground at only four points, requires no excavation, and only disturbs the ground to a minimal degree. It is especially suitable for use on environmentally-sensitive sites, or locations where no permanent structural elements are permitted.
The accompanying pictures include an installation on a rocky lot quite similar to those in my neighborhood, where you’d be lucky to find dirt a foot deep into which you could drive those fancy (and large) self-leveling stainless-steel augers without – as was the case with the four posts for my deck a couple years ago -disturbing the ground to a significant degree.
Having environmental consciousness as one of its prime motivations, the copy for “big idea house” naturally touts the house’s green attributes…with the typical myopia of green cheerleaders who ignore the non-green aspects of the technology they idolize. “With the zeroHouse, completely fossil-free living is a possibility.” Perhaps, in the sense of ongoing operation of the home. But those Kevlar-reinforced aerogel doors, durable color-impregnated foam-filled wall panels, powder-coated steel frame components, etc. got their plastics from somewhere, and while polyethylene for foam can be derived from sugar cane and the like, I’m guessing the rest didn’t come from hemp, recycled vegetable oil, or unicorn droppings. As for the rare-earths, heavy metals, solvents, etc. used in the production of the batteries, aerogels, and solar panels, they wisely avoid any similar product-life-cycle-ignoring claims of eco-virtue.
Setting aside criticisms of their marketing, however, I think there’s more to question in the actual utility of the house. The concept is billed for residential use – albeit with the caveat “in remote or ecologically sensitive locations”, which leaves enough ambiguity that it could mean that it’s only really meant for weekend or short-term use as a residence. But if like so many recent “big idea house” ideas it is meant to be an alternative to traditional homes with their “excessive” space and energy footprints, it fails on the same point as the others: it doesn’t take into account how people actually use their homes.
Take for instance my own house. It’s an average-sized house, which means it’s roughly three times the square footage of the zeroHouse. It was (near as I can tell) built as a weekend house, so there is no basement space and no extra space in the garage beyond what is needed for cars. I joke that it was designed by a submarine engineer rather than an architect, because every square foot of floorspace and every lineal foot of wall is accounted for in some way — there is no wasted space, each room has an intended use, etc.. Consequently, this means there is also very little storage space (why would you need storage in a weekend house?), and there is no “flex” space for ad hoc or hobby uses like one might find in a basement or larger garage.
Idea homes – whether from zeroHouse, Bucky Fuller, Futuro, etc. — all suffer from this same limitation when it comes to long-term or primary occupation. They aren’t designed to support flexible use, but instead replicate in a detached home the practical limitations of apartment living, or limit one to a leisure lifestyle that employs the space more as a hotel room than a home. Such limitations are to be expected with idea homes marketed (like the Futuro) as holiday cabins, but it becomes a problem with concepts like zeroHouse and its modern contemporaries whose eco-moralizing marketing carries the unsubtle suggestion that our principal residences should be built on the same principles of design: small size, hyperefficiency, green energy, minimal impact, etc. The “big idea” behind each “big idea house” ignores how people actually live and work in their homes in real life, seeing them less as residents of a home than as the operators of a domicile system. Or worse: human dolls in oversized dollhouses.
Which is, of course, a manifestation of the flaw inherent in all technocratic solutions to human problems (perceived or real): the notion that humans are malleable and interchangeable, and can be successfully plugged into efficient, planned, uniform systems.
Let me state up-front that I am NOT claiming that any of this is true, so don’t anyone accuse me of being a crackpot conspiracy theorist here. This is simply a thought experiment/thriller plot that I found entertaining to think through.
On the way home from the victory party funeral last night, it struck me that I hadn’t heard the left rant about “Diebold” and “Ken Blackwell” in a while. In a long time, in fact – at least since 2008, possibly since 2006. This seemed odd, given that it was once a frequent topic/hobby horse on lefty talk radio (esp. on Randi Rhodes’ show), but I guess if you’re winning elections you no longer need to contrive explanations for why you’re losing.
This observation intersected with the results from last night being so unexpected across the board (given polling, energy, etc.) to put me in a Dan Brown frame of mind. How might you write a technothriller around these observations? If one were to read these unexpected election results as the result of a conspiracy, how would you make the conspiracy work in a way plausible enough for fiction?
It’s outside my usual genre, but here’s what I came up with as a backstory:
- Premises:
- Democrats (and especially leftists/Progressives) have a habit of publicly accusing Republicans of corruption or dirty tricks or the like, accusations which are completely bogus and often verge on the paranoid. But in digging for proof these allegations, they sometimes figure out how to do exactly those things themselves and then proceed to do so (justifying it by claiming they’re just fighting back against what the Republicans are already doing). For example, the Democracy Alliance owing its origin to a delusional belief in a vast right-wing media/nonprofit/activism conspiracy – Rob Stein, et al, imagined such a conspiracy on the right, and then proceeded to create a real one one of their own to fight it.
- The once-common-as-air Democrat complaints about “Diebold” and “Blackwell delivering Ohio” have been utterly absent. Since around the time Democrats elected Obama, if not when they took over Congress in 2006. The obvious explanation there is that they stopped losing elections, and so no longer required a conspiracy theory to explain how they were being wrongfully denied the offices and power to which they were naturally entitled (if you’re winning elections, it sucks the energy out of fantasies that your enemies are rigging the vote against you). But what if there was another reason for their abruptly shutting up about voting machine fraud…?
- 2004: The obviously superior and demonstrably more-qualified war hero Democrat challenger loses a gimme election to the increasingly unpopular hayseed Republican incumbent. Dems in some quarters blame the loss on electronic voting machines in key swing states having been rigged for the incumbent. Angered by being denied their rightful victory, Progressives start looking for proof of this manipulation, and find that – yes indeed! – there is in fact an exploitable security hole in many e-voting machine software. Certain that Republicans left those back doors there so as to rig elections (when in fact they may simply have been poorly-secured diagnostic or debugging elements), the Democrats who discover them are outraged…but keep silent. Given that Republicans manipulated election results to unjustly deny their man the presidency, they bitterly ask themselves why shouldn’t we do the same to them? And after a micro-second of agonizing have little trouble finding self-serving rationalizations to support doing so.
- 2005: A small group of insiders (always keep your conspiracy small in number if you want a chance of keeping it secret!) share this information amongst themselves, and quietly exploit their connections in the tech sector to develop ways to exploit it, always keeping the knowledge compartmentalized to prevent discovery of what they’re up to. Additional security holes are discovered and exploited, providing extensive if not complete control over the most-common models of electronic voting machines. The group infiltrates trusted people into the companies who manufacture and program the machines in order to keep abreast of upcoming software revisions and, where possible, to insert their own subtle and harder-to-find back doors. The more obvious back doors are left in place, so that their occasional easy discovery in audits adds to public confidence that security holes are routinely and reliably plugged before election day.
- 2006: The group uses the mid-term election (where they were going to make substantial gains anyway given the shift in public attitude against the GOP President and Congress) as an experiment, tweaking totals in a few precincts here and there. They manipulate small numbers of votes, spread out geographically, via entirely remote means, all to keep the tampering small and unobtrusive: if it’s subtle enough to be invisible, no one will think to look for it. They see that they can both get away with the tampering, and that in a couple of the test races, tampering on the margins can be done in a way that doesn’t raise suspicions and swings an otherwise close race. Armed now with a tool they know works on the small scale, the group persuades left-aligned organizations and media personalities to tone down or avoid discussion of voting machine manipulation to avoid the tool’s exposure.
- To further help conceal their activities, the people behind the method help launch an organization much like the Secretary of State Project to get progressive Secretaries of State elected. The organization doesn’t need to know why they’re getting help, only that they need to assist candidates who approve of electronic voting and will if elected be responsible for auditing the security of the machines used in their state. The SoSs aren’t actually in on it, beyond getting a midnight phonecall with a helpful suggestion that they appoint the “right people” to do the auditing.
- In 2008, they widen the deployment and hone their skills. Its first large-scale deployment is in the primaries, where it is used to shift enough votes over to the more Progressive candidate to deny the anointed and “sure-thing” candidate the nomination. Microtargeting data used elsewhere in the nominee’s campaign is also used to pinpoint districts where usefully large quantities of votes can be shifted to him and other left-leaning candidates without appearing out of place with the demographics and ideological flavor of the place. The sleepwalking Republican nominee being a non-threat electorally means the tool can be applied to down-ticket races in the general election and not focused solely on the Presidential race.
- 2010: The group continues to hone its skills where possible, but refrains from a major intervention in the election due to an unexpected center-right grassroots uprising – given the sentiment of the country, maintaining Democrat control of Congress would require intervention on a scale the group still cannot pull off invisibly, which would risk exposure if it tried it. Instead, it focuses its efforts on a few strategic races, like the Senate Majority Leader’s reelection, and combines it with new frontiers in old-fashioned targeted character destruction to assure the retention or election of key political assets at the federal and state levels amid the generalized loss.
- 2011: Where the group can’t elect Progressive (read: controllable) Secretaries of State, it puts into place a tactic referred to (curiously) as “gesslerizing”, in which the opposition/non-cooperative Secretary of State in a swing state finds himself tied down (especially just before in-person early voting begins) with lawfare actions targeting him with ethics allegations and criminal investigations. “Gesslerized” SoSs will be either too distracted to look for or notice the remote-control tampering during early voting and on election day, or they will be too discredited via the allegations and similar bludgeoning over vote integrity (e.g.: the equation of voter ID efforts with racism) for any exposes they offer to be taken seriously.
- 2012: The tool has been fully debugged and integrated with microtargeting data, and is ready to deploy on a large scale with special focus on swing states. As the election approaches, polls all show the challenger gaining on the incumbent and then pulling into the lead amid a surge of voter enthusiasm for him, but a few left-leaning pollsters are fed results which predict the incumbent winning handily…exceptions which are greeted with derision as delusional outliers. After the votes are tallied, however, those polls are shown to be dead-on accurate. Uncannily so. Perfectly so. These polls allay any suspicion of the election results by giving an “independent” confirmation of the outcome, in which the status quo was unexpectedly maintained despite record discontent with the incumbent and Congress alike. In reality, for all its sophistication the tool isn’t perfect and can only do so much. Even with improved scale and finesse since 2010, the discontented national mood again placed limits on its invisible use – too much of its power had to be focused on protecting the President and the Senate majority for it to swing the House to the Democrats at the same time without being noticed…ergo, status quo.
- By now, the tool has become so refined that it can’t be discerned from its effects without complex statistical analysis. But, since no system is perfect, occasional machine glitches reveal the tool at work – for example, a number of widely-separated polling places reporting votes cast for the challenger being recorded as for the incumbent. Anticipating this (based on prior experience where it happened in 2008 or 2010 on small scale), Democrat operatives are unwittingly directed to wear campaign clothing, put up campaign posters, and engage in other blatantly illegal electioneering in the polling places, to distract public and media attention away from the vote tampering: “oh sure, there have been a few minor instances of unintentional ‘electioneering’ at the polls, but it’s just trivial stuff that GOPers are overreacting to as usual…nothing to see, move along!”
This backstory sets the stage for the actual plot of the thriller and inevitable big-budget Hollywood adaptation. Picture now a beautiful, young, vaguely (but non-threateningly) exotic do-gooder journalist, fresh out of J-school and looking to make a name for herself by investigating the inherent racism of Republicans and their racist “voter integrity” laws. She crosses paths one evening with an implausibly well-adjusted computer-scientist-turned-bartender with mysterious links to a voting machine manufacturer, intending to grill him for information supporting the (banal and cliched) thesis of her expose that Republicans are racists attempting to racistly deny the vote to minorities, because Republicans are (ipso facto) racists whose racist motivations require no further onscreen exploration. Of course.
Their ensuing night of passionate stenography takes an unexpected turn when the improbably-hunky computer scientist/bartender reveals to the iron-willed-yet-romantically-vulnerable journalist that he was blacklisted from programming work after discovering the back doors into the voting machine software. Certain that the real culprits are the racist Republicans who were rumored to have used such underhanded (not to mention racist) methods to steal the 2004 election, she enlists his aid to find the proof she needs to support her a priori conclusion…only to come face-to-face with the real conspirators after a completely unnecessary parkour chase through a vast warehouse of tampered-with voting machines, stolen yard signs, and slightly-used Greek columns fashioned from polystyrene.
Will she expose the truth, thereby undermining the sweep of victories over the racist Republicans in the just-concluded election, shattering her faith in (non-GOP) humanity, and discrediting the man she believes to be a messiah walking amongst us (the incumbent, not the nerd/bartender)? Or will the conspirators convince her to sell out her lofty journalistic principles and turn a blind eye to the massive ethical lapse of the people and party she thought represented everything good and non-racist in America?
[Spoiler alert: well duh, of course she covers up the truth about her party comrades at the end – she’s a journalist.]
A not particularly revelatory look at NASA’s ever-deferred humans-to-Mars efforts: The Deferred Dreams of Mars
Still worth a read, even if it is mostly a recitation of the conventional wisdom on the topic – not to be harsh on Brian Bergstein, it’s just that there’s nothing really new in what he has written. Apart from references to SpaceX as a synechdoche for the emerging private space industry, the substance of the article is little different from Bob Zubrin’s complaints about NASA’s lack of vision for Mars from 1996.
Funny, though, that there’s no mention of SLS in the article, but he does (in the SpaceX paragraph) repeat the conventional assumption that ginormous rockets would be required for manned missions to Mars. There is also no serious discussion of Mars settlement, only sortie missions, which I have to suspect comes from Bergstein interviewing mainly NASA employees.
Bruce Webster is making some: The coming liberal meltdown.
Interesting. Plausible. Maybe or maybe not likely — who knows?
What I liked about his post was the element of prognostication from current trends and social/political circumstances, and how it resembles what Carl and I have been doing for the backstory for In the Shadow of Ares and its in-work sequels (the first of whose outline I plan to finalize today, given the crappy weather here in Denver). Whether or not his predictions materialize, it’s fun to take them as a set of initial conditions for a fictional near-future history — for example, the future-history potential of the Obama-Clinton feud:
- Imagine it escalating from the low-intensity political warfare he describes into an all-out factional “civil war” as 2016 approaches.
- Blue collarists, liberal-leaning Jews and Latinos, and other center-left Democrat constituencies line up with Clinton loyalists and erstwhile PUMAs behind Hillary.
- Blacks along with Progressives, ivory towerists, callow youth, union extremists, and other hard-left Democrats follow Obama.
- Democratic women split between the two on similar lines, with Hillary not automatically winning the bulk of Democratic women due to Obama’s appeal to the more radical youth demographic.
- What happens next?
- Does the Democrat party then split into two, or see the smaller faction peel off and join an existing third party?
- If the party doesn’t split, does the internal divide render the Democrat Party nearly irrelevant for several election cycles, say through 2020, as they focus on factional infighting and sabotaging each other instead of running against Republicans?
- Does Andrew Cuomo (as Webster hints) emerge as a “neither-nor” figure who is able to glue the factions back together while (under the pressure of emerging fiscal/economic necessity) bringing the party back towards the reasonable center from where Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and the Progressives have shifted it?
- If not and the Democrats (as a single or split party) experience waning influence, what happens to Republicans, who experience show tend to drift from principles and platform quite rapidly in the absence of competition from an energized opposition?
- Under such circumstances, could the GOP itself experience a loss of factional cohesion, with a non-negligible contingent of center-left, center-right, socially-liberal, and Progressive Republicans defecting to join Hillary Clinton’s “less extreme” new party? Would this result in a major two-party reconfiguration along the lines of the Whig-Republican split in the 1850s, or would we end up with a new equilibrium state involving three stable medium-large parties in place of two very large ones? If the latter, would there be an evolution to more discrete special interest factions akin to (say) the small parties in the Israeli Knesset, with the three parties becoming more explicitly coalition-based and the new equilibrium maintained via coaxing these factions to jump parties (difficult under the current party system, but since this is all speculative anyway, why not assume changes to it)?
- If any of the outcomes above involving party splits emerge, would existing third parties (Libertarians, Greens, etc.) see greater influence? Presumably some not-insignificant portion of Democrats in the Obama/Clinton split scenario would be disgusted enough with both resulting parties to seek a third alternative. Same for libertarian Republicans in the diminished-competition scenario, with disgust with the squishiness and corruption of one-party GOP dominance motivating them to switch to the Libertarian Party. If the large parties get smaller and the small parties get larger, would the equilibrium necessarily stop at (say) three core parties? Why not four or five?
It’d be fun to tackle his other predictions in similar fashion (which I intended to do before spending too much time on the one above), but I’ve got too much to get done today.
Interesting – TSA Pulls Use Of Controversial Full Body Scanners At JFK, LaGuardia Airports
Opponents said the very detailed image of the human body provided by the machines is an invasion of privacy, while others argued the level of radiation emitted by the Backscatters could be dangerous over the long term.
The TSA said its decision to pull the machines is in an effort to speed up security lines at the two New York City airports, and insists the full body scanners are safe.
So, let’s see – we absolutely had to have these things installed without notice or hearings two years ago, the public squawk be damned (or patted down) if they don’t like it, the things were essential for airline security. Now…we’re removing them (from airports in New York City, no less) because they’re, umm, inconvenient and they slow things down.
I guess they weren’t quite as essential as TSA claimed, then.
This doesn’t actually surprise me, though, and I now wonder if it’s being done with little fanfare elsewhere. I went to KSC last week, and the Orlando airport had only the old-style metal detectors. Coming back from Bremen last month via Dulles, I ran into the same thing – metal detectors only, no scanners at all. If large and symbolically important airports such as these no longer need the rapeyscanners, how long will it be before they are removed entirely?
Rand Simberg thoroughly dismantles it: An Examiner Hit Piece on SpaceX
No quotes, because his response is wedded to excerpts from the original and is best read in full (i.e.: Read the Whole Thing™).
As I mentioned on Twitter (and then didn’t have time to follow up on myself), I heard some scuttlebutt about this at CPAC Colorado last week (along with the James O’Keefe voter registration expose and the Obama campaign’s questionable credit card donations). The implication was that Musk is getting new attention from watchdog and media organizations on the right because of his green energy businesses and his donations to and occasional chumminess with Barack Obama.
Which in itself is a reasonable thing – given the strange frequency of late for green energy businesses owned by Obama friends and fundraisers to get subsidies, lax oversight, stimulus funds, etc. (and to then go bankrupt, stiffing the taxpayers), a watchdog group would be remiss if it didn’t look into a campaign donor who might potentially fit that same pattern. As for the center-right media, there is obvious story potential in digging up and exposing “the next Solyndra” if they can find one, and when you see advertising like this (seen at the Home Depot near my house) it’s natural to wonder whether Musk’s Solar City might or might not be it:
In each case, these things are as they should be: the news media and watchdog organizations, however partisan their interests might be, can serve a useful role in keeping public figures, civic organizations, lobbyists, and the like (a little more) honest via transparency. I say “can”, because of course it doesn’t always work that way – obviously media and watchdogs alike will have less incentive to investigate people and organizations with whom they share a common political persuasion or worldview (which is why the overwhelming left bias seen in both institutions is unhealthy), and when they are so determined to find some dirt on their political enemies that they resort to incompetent hack pieces like this one by Richard Pollock in the Examiner, their efforts at transparency are easily dismissed as partisan BS without substance.
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