Live from Austin!

British Airways gave us the option of paying extra for carbon credits to make up for our air travel. We didn’t take them up on the offer.

There are a number of reasons why I feel carbon offsetting is a bad thing. The first is that by removing the guilt, it encourages people to continue a profligate lifestyle, rather than actually changing their behavior.

For example, if Al Gore genuinely gave a crap about the environment, he would stop flying by private jet so much. But no, he’s rich and can simply buy carbon credits to salve his conscience. Similarly, John Edwards will happily lecture to ordinary people that they should give up their SUVs, then get into his own SUV secure in the knowledge that he’s bought carbon credits to make up for his own indulgence.

(In fact, Edwards owns 3 SUVs — a Ford Escape, a Cadillac SRX, and a Chrysler Pacifica — plus a pickup.)

The second reason why I dislike carbon credits is that there are much more effective ways to reduce emissions. For instance, if British Airways really cared, they would stop painting their aircraft. A fully painted 747 weighs 443kg extra, compared to around 100kg for me plus my luggage. That’s before you factor in the increased wind resistance from cracked and peeling paint, the chemicals needed for stripping and repainting aircraft, and the disposal problem of the dissolved paint and chemicals. [Update: BA could also stop flying empty planes across the Atlantic.]

The third reason why carbon credits are a dubious idea is pointed out by spiked online. When you buy carbon credits for your flight from Climate Care, what you’re actually doing is paying a bunch of Indian families to dig in the dirt via back-breaking manual labor, and pump water manually, rather than using modern farm equipment. Now, it might not be a bad idea if I personally spent some time stomping on pedals to pump water, but I don’t see why Indians should be bribed to do it so I can feel less guilty about air travel.

But my favorite argument against carbon credits is the parody site cheatneutral. If the logic behind carbon credits is really valid, why not buy some infidelity credits and cheat on your partner with a clean conscience?

After the weekend, we go to stay with Käthe and Herbert for a few days. They live in an old farmhouse in the Altes Land, south of the Elbe. It’s a fruit farm, growing apples, pears, plums, and probably a few other kinds of fruit in small quantities. Like many small European farms it’s 100% organic, with three modern windmills providing some of its electrical power needs.

Herbert speaks some English, but is self-taught, and a little hard of hearing. Käthe’s English is better. Still, I can’t help thinking that if I’d known that one day I’d be spending time in a farmhouse in Germany, I’d have paid more attention in German lessons. Not that it would have helped that much—when they’re talking to each other, Herbert and Käthe speak Plat Deutsch, modern Low German. It sounds like a mix of German and Middle English.

So I find myself surrounded by German and dialects of German, and for a while it makes my brain hurt. By late afternoon my language processing regions have spent hours trying to decode the strange noises around me and are tired out.

Continue reading »

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is trying to ban the sale of various chemicals to people who don’t have an explosives manufacturing license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).

Fair enough, you might think—unless you know enough chemistry to recognize some of the substances on the list.

Aluminium powder, for example. Am I wrong to think that a terrorist will be smart enough to work out that given the softness of aluminium, you can use a bar of aluminium metal and a grinding wheel?

Sodium benzoate requiring an explosives license might be a bit of a problem for the food industry, where it’s used as a preservative.

And best of all, they want to make salicylate compounds outright illegal. That would presumably include acetyl salicylic acid, better known as aspirin.

Of course, I’m assuming you can’t cook up explosives using a box of aspirin, a bottle of sparking wine and a ground up aluminium ruler. If I’m wrong, I’m sure I’ll be corrected.

In which a skeptical modernist learns to appreciate 19th Century technology.

Shaving has always been an unpleasant experience for me. My skin is sensitive, dries out easily, and I get allergic reactions to a lot of chemicals. At the same time, the bristle of my ever-nascent beard is incredibly rough and wirey. I tried electric razors, I tried disposables, I tried twin blades. I even considered giving up entirely and growing a beard, but that just itched even worse.

The least-bad option had turned out to be the Gillette Mach 2, and later the Mach 3. The M3Power helped a little, but not much—the vibro action helped get through the bristles without tugging on them, but that was all. The main plus of the Mach 2/3 was that at least it didn’t immediately clog up the way a Schick (Wilkinson-Sword) twin blade did; there was a good clean gap between the blades, without too much plastic in the way.

Then one day I found myself reading an article about old-style shaving. And by “old style”, I mean over a century old.

Continue reading »

I just rinsed, washed, dried and waxed the car, lovingly, by hand.

Of course, there are three reasons to wax a car:

1. To make it easier to clean later.
2. To help protect it from acid rain, chemicals in puddles, and other hazards of fall driving.
3. To make it really, really shiny.

At least two of these seem to be legitimate reasons to spend time waxing a big metal toy, if one is about to drive several thousand miles in it.

On an unrelated note, one of the things I hate most about moving is having to throw things away. Not junk things; those are good to get rid of. I mean perfectly good things, like the bottle of peanut sauce I bought a couple of months ago.

I keep having to remind myself that in the grand scheme of relocation, $40 of assorted groceries and household cleaning materials is not that big of a deal. However, my parents were apparently successful beyond their wildest dreams at programming me to hate waste.

Well, I’m mostly packed. So far I’m reasonably calm. I think the nervousness about travelling is getting burnt out of me, now that I end up flying somewhere at least twice a year, rather than once every four or five years.

The new suitcases are definitely less capacious. Hopefully they’ll survive better and be impervious to jet fuel. I wish it wasn’t necessary to go with hard sided, but when sara’s case got doused in chemicals it was a bit of a wake-up call. That and the corners of the fabric cases were torn, so they needed replacing anyway.

No snow in Minnesota yet, I’m told. According to the forecast, it’s not going to be much colder than Boston has already been, which suits me fine.

I notice the following:

Now, why would I want to buy the “low fat” peanut butter packed full of chemicals?

Scientific American recently published a special edition titled The Hidden Mind. While a few of the articles were disappointing, the magazine finished with a true gem written by David J. Chalmers. It attempts to address the difficult problem of consciousness; not the problem of how to achieve it on a Monday morning, but the even tougher problem of how to explain it. It’s titled The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and I recommend that you go read it.

One of the things I’ve often wondered about is why we are conscious and self-aware. I say “we” because I assume other people are conscious too, based on their observed behavior. Cats also behave as if they have consciousness and self-awareness; it’s pretty clear that they have pride, which to me requires that they have some concept of self-image.

Looking at living creatures, it seems pretty clear to me that there’s a spectrum of consciousness. At one end, you have organisms like yeast and ants, which basically behave like blobs of chemicals or little automata. Further along the scale you find birds, mice, and other animals that rely largely on instinct. Then you reach the otters, cats, dogs, and other creatures that appear to experience emotions, solve complex problems, play with things for fun, and communicate with each other.

The most likely hypothesis to my mind is that consciousness is some kind of emergent property of brains of sufficient complexity, which are structured in an appropriate way. Could a machine become conscious? I see no reason why not, though it might require a machine very unlike a regular computer.

All this gets me no closer to being able to say what consciousness is, though. I can’t explain it in terms of electric fields in a network, or quantum patterns of electrons in the brain, and nobody else seems to be able to either.

Chalmers proposes a radical hypothesis: What if consciousness is actually a fundamental feature of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism? What if it isn’t reducible to other things?

I’ve been pondering this idea, and I think it makes a lot of sense. For starters, it offers a neat way to sidestep the awkward question of what an observer is in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Perhaps an observer is simply a sufficient quantity or density of consciousness that has become entangled with the quantum events in question. Maybe physicists will one day be able to come up with equations specifying exactly how much consciousness it takes to collapse the wave function.

To go back to consciousness-as-emergent-property, perhaps consciousness is a kind of stuff that arises when certain kinds of information processing neural networks get sufficiently complex—just like gravitational fields arise when enough particles with mass group together in physical space.

Chalmers points out that the idea of consciousness as a fundamental property is very compatible with some of the recent theories from people like John A. Wheeler and Stephen Wolfram, who have suggested that perhaps information is fundamental to the physics of the universe.

There’s still another reason why I like Wheeler’s proposal, and it’s even less politically correct (from a scientific point of view) than Stephen Wolfram’s ego. See, it seems to me that consciousness being a fundamental property of the universe is remarkably compatible with Buddhist (and, for that matter, Hindu) cosmology.

Buddhism and Hinduism talk of a universal‘field’ of consciousness which pervades all things. Our individual consciousnesses are described as being like waves on an ocean. When we die, the waves collapse, and new waves are formed. (A common misconception is that Buddhism believes in reincarnation of the Shirley McLaine sort, where the intact soul travels from body to body.) I thought about waves of consciousness coalescing around complex neural networks, and it suddenly struck me how much the whole thing sounded like the Higgs field, and gravitational forces arising near massive objects.

Can I prove any of this? Of course not. But it’s the best working hypothesis I’ve got so far.

Human beings eat and drink a lot of strange things. The discharged unfertilized ova of fowl, for example. The eyeballs of sheep. The yellow sticky secretions of small insects. Coffee beans extracted from the droppings of animals. The chemicals excreted by yeast. Fungus dug out of the ground by pigs. And so on.

I thought, suppose there were aliens out there. Suppose they came to earth, seeking not friendship, but gourmet delicacies. Being aliens, they’d probably have even more bizarre feeding habits than us; and things which we find disgusting or inedible, they might find delicious.

So I thought, just suppose the aliens landed. And suppose what they really loved, their favourite food, their nectar of the gods, suppose it was dog shit. The excretions of canines.

I mean, why not? It smells funny, but so does caviare. It’s full of bacteria, but so is yoghurt. We find it inedible, but then, we find eucalyptus leaves inedible, and koalas love them.

So, the aliens land, and they want to gorge themselves on dogshit.

I thought: How would the world’s press handle this one? Would President Clinton invite the aliens to a state banquet? Would it be shown on CNN?

Imagine: Every single pavement would be cleared overnight. Children would be able to play in the park or on the beach. Dog owners would be scouring the ground behind their pets, pooper scoopers and jam jars in hand. People would get involved in the extraterrestrial trade, as middlemen.

Perhaps there’d be a black market. People would walk up to you on street corners and ask you if you wanted to buy any shit. If something was really valuable, you’d say “This is shit”. If it was a priceless antique, you’d say “This is some old shit”, as the well-matured stuff would doubtless be popular with the aliens too, simply because of its scarcity.

People would learn to recognize different varieties of shit. Maybe the aliens would be crazy about labrador, but not at all keen on poodle. People would sniff at pavement scrapings knowledgably before deciding whether to make a bid for them. There’d be magazines like “What Shit” to cater to the specialist collector as well as the volume trader.

So I thought about all this, and I concluded: This’d be a great idea for a low-budget movie. I should at least write a short story about it.

And then later that day I thought again: Mmmmmaybe not.

And the next day I thought: That was the most stupid and puerile idea for a short story you have ever come up with.

And a few weeks later I thought: You should post it anyway.

And then today, I thought: I’ve a nasty feeling this is something I’ve inadvertently half-remembered from an article by Roger Carasso.