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27. August 2011 by admin.
I missed writing about the earthquake earlier this week: I was on a business trip in the middle of Pennsylvania, when the room vibrated for a bit, as if there were a subway train passing underneath. I suspected that it was an earthquake, but the power stayed on, nothing actually shook, and nothing further happened. It was only afterward, when I watched the evening news, that the dimensions of the event were clearer. My wife, in Brooklyn at the time, was unaware of it.
Anyhow, if the debt brouhaha and an earthquake were not enough, today we await the arrival of Hurricane Irene, which is now pounding North Carolina and headed north:
The latest reports suggest that the storm is weakening somewhat, and will probably hit the city as a tropical storm. I figure that we have about a 50% chance of losing cable TV, and 30% of losing power.
Well, we’ll see.
Posted in Weather, New York City, Fearmongering | No Comments »
21. July 2011 by admin.
It has been hot of late; today’s official high temperature in Central Park was 97 degrees.
And maybe ten years ago, that would have been it. The weatherman would report the temperature, and the humidity, and leave you to figure out how miserable it was.
Today, in addition to the temperature, the weather reporters tell us the ‘heat index;’ some calculation based on the temperature and the humidity, supposedly to give a sense of how hot it feels.
I think the real reason is to make the weather reports scarier: today is no hotter nor stickier than a 97-degree July day ten or fifteen years ago. But by telling us that ‘the heat index is 110,’ it turns an ordinary hot day (common enough in mid-July) into almost an emergency.
If all my meetings got cancelled because of the heat, then maybe I’d feel different about it, but other than being hot, it was a normal workday, with all of my meetings going on as scheduled. So it wasn’t an emergency, after all.
If one is more into conspiracy theories, one might believe that the use of the heat index is a scheme to make us believe that global warming is real. I don’t know if it is or isn’t, but new fake temperatures do not help to clarify the issue.
I wish weather reporters would report the real temperature and then shut up: we already know that it’s hot and sticky.
It’s July in New York City, after all. It’s supposed to be hot and sticky.
Posted in Weather, Media, Fearmongering | No Comments »
16. May 2011 by admin.
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a new scheme, called PLAN (Personal Localized Alerting Network) for alerting the populace to emergencies through cell phone messages. New phone will include programming to receive the messages, which will be broadcast from cell phone towers in the affected area.
Some have suggested that this is yet another way for the government to monitor one’s activities. From the information in hand, it doesn’t look like that. When you carry a cell phone and keep it turned on, the phone company knows where you are: it’s how you can receive calls. From the information in hand, PLAN actually seems a step backward: the messages are addressed through cell phone towers, to whatever phones have the programming to receive the messages. The receivers of the message are not localized, or even identified, by the transmission of a PLAN message.
Are we now so distrustful of the government that what is actually a public safety enhancement is viewed as a form of mind control? Perhaps, but:
So no, I’m not going to hang onto my old cell phone just to duck out of PLAN. Like anything else in our modern world, it can be used for good or for ill.
Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Fearmongering | No Comments »
17. March 2011 by admin.
It was terrible what happened about a week ago in Japan, far beyond what I might be able to write in these pages. But the awesome and terrible destruction of the earthquake and tsunami has been eclipsed by the events at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.
At this point, accounts vary as to the actual status there. Some reports suggest that the situation is very nearly under control. But most of the news reports are vague and ominous. We’re hearing from the US government how terrible things are: how would they know from 7000 miles away?
So I ask myself: what would I do if I lived in Tokyo?
At this point, from what I can tell, life in Tokyo has mostly returned to normal: the lights are on, the trains are running, and most people have managed to clean up their respective messes left by the earthquake. The only problem is that background radiation is several times normal, as a result of the problems at the nuclear plant.
Do I stay or do I go?
Maybe, as a foreigner there, I might have had a bellyful of the place and want to leave. I can’t blame the foreigners in Japan who decide to leave as a result of what happened, nor their respective governments for advising their citizens to leave. And if I were there as a visitor, unless I had a really compelling reason to stay, I might leave too.
But what if I were Japanese, having spent much of my life in Tokyo, as, in real life, I’ve spent most of my life in New York City?
Some conservative commentators have noted that small amounts of radiation are not as damaging as the regulations might suggest. For my part, I note that there are parts of the world where background radioactivity is 50-70 times higher than in most of the rest of the world. (Tokyo is still far below this level.) People live there, have children, and go about their lives, with no apparent ill effects.
So while I believe I’d be nervous, and following what was happening closely, I think I’d stay put.
Meanwhile, back on our side of the world, our new governor has called for the closing of the Indian Point nuclear power plant a short distance north of New York City. It’s a charming thought, except for one minor detail: we barely have enough power plants to carry the load, and Indian Point generates about 20% of the electricity used in New York State. If we close it, what will replace it?
And what would I do, as a New York City resident, if Indian Point experienced the same kinds of problems as Fukushima Dai-ichi?
Well, the city is far enough from Indian Point that there probably wouldn’t be a mandatory evacuation here. But, on further consideration, it isn’t the radiation that would really worry me.
The response of my fellow New Yorkers is far more frightening.
Posted in Japan, Nuclear Power, Fearmongering | No Comments »
6. March 2010 by admin.
I’ve wanted to write something about ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or whatever it is that we’re supposed to call it. Is it a threat to human existence, or a fraudulent scheme to separate us from our industrial civilization?
Parts of the issue are beyond doubt: we, as humans, are putting more carbon dioxide in the air than natural systems can remove, leading to rising levels in the atmosphere. And carbon dioxide functions to trap heat.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was thought that air pollution might cool the planet rather than heat it, chiefly through particulates and other specific forms of pollution that would reflect solar radiation back into space. But that view was in the minority back then, although a couple of examples made it to the popular press at the time, which are waved today about by the opponents of global warming. Moreover, the Clean Air Act and other similar law and regulation worldwide substantially limited particulates and other pollutants, although not carbon dioxide, substantially abating whatever cooling effects our industrial activities might have.
So now we have excess carbon dioxide, without particulates, and global warming. But how much? At this point, not very much: perhaps a fraction of a degree Celsius. It’s still small relative to variations in climate related to solar activity, which is why the opponents of global warming have been able to seize upon a drop in temperatures in recent years as evidence that the phenomenon is not real.
But the small magnitude of the change to date doesn’t mean that it can be ignored. As a simple example, consider a block of ice at the freezing point. It takes a certain amount of energy to melt the ice and turn it to water, still at the freezing point. If that same amount of energy is then applied to the liquid water, it will be heated most of the way to the boiling point. In other words, ice must absorb a considerable amount of energy before it melts. There are many elements in our world that work similarly to absorb the excess energy trapped in our atmosphere and limit actual warming. But if the excess energy continues, ultimately it will have to result in warming, and the ice will melt.
So global warming is real, although the effects of it aren’t clearly apparent yet. It is the sort of problem where government regulation is actually useful: when the effects of global warming are clearly apparent, it will be too late, so we need rules now to limit the future damage. But what should those rules consist of? Should we strangle our industrial civilization and go back to the 19th Century?
Probably not. Besides the obvious impracticality and popular resistance to such a plan, there are other, longer term, reasons why such drastic measures are not necessary:
In the meantime, we should do the obvious: take practical measures to limit our consumption of fossil fuels, and develop new sources of energy. I’d like to believe that this could be accomplished through the market, without need of government regulation, but I know that isn’t practical. Money, alas, is lazy.
But what the government regulations should consist of is a subject for another day.
Posted in Fearmongering, Environment | No Comments »
16. December 2008 by admin.
At this point, we’ve all seen the video of Our Fearless Leader’s recent press conference in Baghdad, an which an Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at President Bush. (The shoes missed; nobody was hurt.) The Iraqi government wants to throw him in jail for several years, but he’s a local hero in his neighborhood for standing up to power.
Does this mean that, much like travelers at US airports, reporters at Presidential press conferences will be henceforth required to remove their shoes?
Posted in Fearmongering, George Bush (43) | No Comments »
8. June 2008 by admin.
Last Thursday, they started painting the corridors in the apartment. While the building where I live is generally kept in good order, the corridors could use a paint job: they haven’t been painted since we moved here in 2003.
Aesthetically, I wish they hadn’t: the old paint was a light yellow, which was pleasantly warm originally, when lit by incandescent lights, and still decent when the lights were replaced with fluorescent bulbs. The new paint job is a blue-gray color, dismal and cold. Did they choose such a grim color so that we’d all know they had been painted?
And then, in the lobby, someone posted a notice that the apartment doors were being painted with (gasp!) oil-based paint. “Oil-based paint is a paint whose primary component is oil,” the notice reminds us. (As opposed to, say, peanut butter?)
“Do you want your children to breathe these fumes?”
At this point, my son is old enough that I can no longer control what he breathes. But if he were younger, while I wouldn’t take him to a paint factory, I can’t get upset about the paint on the apartment doors.
When I was a kid, oil-based paint was common enough as a wall paint, and the smell of a freshly-painted apartment was part of its charm. But I have to wonder if the people who are fear for their children from freshly-painted doors ever change their shower curtains: the funk from a new plastic curtain can make a bathroom uninhabitable for a week.
* * *
On my way home this afternoon, the trains were screwed up: a blackout in Brooklyn. I feared for the worst as I took an alternate route home. But the lights were still on when I got home. Whew: I had loaded up on groceries this morning.
I have to wonder, though: we never had to worry about blackouts in New York City until a few years ago. Electricity in the city was expensive, but reliable. Now, some part of the city loses power every year: a couple of years ago, part of Queens was in the dark for over a week.
Maybe if electricity got cheaper, one might consider it a fair trade. But it’s still expensive, and Con Ed has asked for yet another rate increase.
Posted in Things Falling Apart, Fearmongering | No Comments »
2. June 2008 by admin.
This weekend, I watched the remake of The Andromeda Strain on A&E. When the original came out in the early 1970s, I thought it was way cool: crack scientists in a secret underground lab, trying to understand an actual (if microbial) creature from outer space. I was curious how it got transformed for our time.
First, the story has been retuned to our current mania for death and destruction. In the original, Andromeda did almost all of its killing before the picture started: we drive around the town of Piedmont and wonder what how everyone died at once. But in the new version, Andromeda is the Energizer Bunny of microbes: we see it kill again and again. The odd thing is that its victims only die after they have passed it to someone else. Later, it kills plants, as well. We’re supposed to believe that Andromeda is intelligent, that it has been sent across billions of miles over at least some number of years with hostile intent. Mostly, I think the scriptwriters are just lazy.
In the original, the military may have had their sinister intentions, but they were secondary to the scientists. Now we see them blundering about throughout the picture (and getting killed): they’re not only evil, they’re stupid as well. The unspoken message: they will not protect you. Meanwhile, the handsome young journalist slips through their fingers. We’re rooting for him, of course, but it’s yet another dimension of military ineptitude.
Another change was to adapt the story to our mania for instant communication. Originally, the scientists were holed up in their top-secret lab, and part of the story turned on a lapse of communication due to a trivial failure of a Teletype machine. In the current version, the scientists are on the phone half the time, even talking to our handsome journalist. What part of ‘top-secret laboratory’ do these people not understand?
Finally, in the original, the key to disarm the atomic self-destruct device is turned over to one of the scientists because he’s a single male, and the Odd Man Hypothesis suggests that single males are most likely to make the correct decision in such matters. We never knew anything about his personal life beyond that, and didn’t think anything further about it. In the current version, it’s impressed on us that the Odd Man is gay.
When I was eleven, the original Andromeda Strain was a shining illustration in the power of reason and logic, although I didn’t put it in those terms back then: it was just really cool. Even though the scientists in the new version do manage to save the world, it’s a pale imitation of the original.
Posted in Television, Fearmongering | No Comments »
21. May 2008 by admin.
After all my hemming and hawing, I went out today and bought a new AT&T Tilt, realizing that it’s essentially the only game in town.
Now that I have it, I love it and I hate it.
The keyboard is small, but it’s functional, and it’s backlit, so that I can type in the dark. And my first operational test of the PDF reader–one of my Giant Spec Books from work–passed with flying colors. I’m typing this entry on the subway home from work, so I can now officially consider myself among the ranks of honest-to-God bloggers.
But there are annoyances, too:
But it does one good thing that none of the other PDAs in my life ever did: it synchronizes through the cell phone network, so it always displays the correct time.
I think I’ll keep it.
* * *
The afternoon’s e-mail brought me a missive from Personnel Concepts, purveyors of fine workplace posters.
By law, employers are required to post things like the minimum wage and one’s right to Worker’s Compensation for their employees. And it makes sense to post notices about how to work safely.
But a look at Personnel Concepts’ ‘Break Room Posters’ is instructive. There are posters for:
I have to wonder about a company where they would put all of these posters in their break room. I would have to believe that the employer’s real motive is to discourage people from taking breaks.
Or encouraging them to be very, very afraid.
Posted in Fearmongering, PDA | No Comments »