| Monday,
February 14, 2011
Happy Valentines Day
Larry Niven and Steve Barnes came over just after my morning walk and we
had a conference on a notion for a new book in the Avalon (Beowulf's
Children) series. We used Skype to call Dr. Jack Cohen who has agreed to
help us construct a new ecological creature to be part of a short novel
involving some of the characters from Beowulf's Children.
For those who don't know, Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf's Children were
stories of a slower than light ship (frozen sleep) interstellar colony on a
relatively nearby planet. The colony was on an island. The first book
dealt with interactions with creatures on the island of Avalon, the second
moves to the mainland. They were pretty good yarns.
I am looking into getting them into Kindle and other eBook formats; at
the moment they are not available as eBooks you can buy and I don't really
encourage my readers to go looking for pirate editions. We're dancing
as fast as we can on getting them into legal format. Anyway, Barnes has a
notion for a short novel to be set in that universe. Larry and I like it.
Steve will do most of the work once the book is planned out. Of course
talking about books gives us a good excuse to have lunch.
=================
Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, and
Points East and West
The change of government in Egypt is complete. The Constitution is
suspended, the parliament dissolved, the Cabinet dismisses, and the courts
put under restriction; the Supreme Military Council is now in charge. The
press seems to believe this is quite different from the more usual coup
d'etat (golpe de estado in Spanish) that results in the rule of a military
council (junta in Spanish) that generally ends up with a new President who
generally turns out to be a Colonel or General as opposed to the Party
Leader (Caudillo in Spanish) who was previously in charge. This time there
will be free elections in six months, after which the Army will get out of
the way.
That has happened in other times and places. although I recall none in
the Arab world (Turkey is not an Arabic nation). The difference is the
Internet and the ability to generate flash crowds. In the past a March on
Rome by blackshirts, or some similar street insurrection, required
considerable organizational talent and effort. Now a charismatic figure can
call one out of thin air, or, as in the Egyptian and Tunisian cases, the
crowds can be summoned by incidents without a charismatic leader at all.
Barricades in the capital city (or threats of them as in the case of the
1922 March on Rome by Mussolini) have long been a revolutionary tactic. They
sometimes work, as with the Mussolini in 1922, and sometimes succeed for a
short time then are suppressed as with most of the Revolutions of 1847. Of
course the 1847 Paris insurrections ended the Second Monarchy of Louis
Philippe and ushered in the short-lived Second Republic (which succumbed to
Napoleon III and his Second Empire).
The point being that the story isn't over, and while we can all speculate
on the future, none of us know. Some facts remain: a large crowd in the
capital city isn't producing anything to bring it income, but it must be
fed, it must have water, and the waste must be disposed of. Without food and
water the crowd disperses or dies, no matter how much the ardor for freedom
and the will of the people. Without some kind of sanitation system, cholera
and plague take over, perhaps not in the first weeks, but when the sewer
system fails plague is inevitable.
Most of the crowd in the Cairo square has dispersed. What the rest will
do is not clear.
Meanwhile the people assemble in other cities across the Arab world, and
there are mutterings in China.
We live in interesting times. We can all speculate on what happens next,
but I am not convinced that anyone knows.
==============
Magnetic Pole Shift
The web is full of stories about the magnetic pole shift. There are
horror stories and debunking stories. We've pointed to a few here. We've all
known for a long time that the magnetic poles of the Earth are wandering: I
believe I was first exposed to that story in 5th grade. Our compasses don't
point to the North Pole (unless you live in certain areas) and worse don't
over decades point to the same place. The poles wander a bit.
Some see impending disaster. Most don't. Some see climactic effects. Most
don't. In another conference, mostly made up of hard science writers
including several physicists, I idly wondered how much attention the subject
was worth, either as a phenomenon or as a story idea.
I said
Can we correlate any
climatic observations to pole shifting? I still have no idea of how much
energy is involved. We have an enormous magnet spinning about in the solar
wind. This would appear to have many of the characteristics of a dynamo.
How much energy does that generate? What happens to that energy? Does it
add to the interior heat of the Earth, and if so how much? Enough to
affect volcanism?
All this may be
trivial, but it sure looks big enough to be worth investigating. We are
spending trillions because of a one degree in a century temperature rise;
surely we can spare a couple of man-years worth of research on what we
might expect from this polar shift?
I just don't see how
a magnet that big spinning and moving through space would have no energy
effects at all.
Jerry Pournelle
Chaos Manor
I had forgotten how ardently some believe:
> Can we correlate any climatic observations to
pole shifting? I still have no idea of how much energy is involved. >
... > All this may be trivial, but it sure looks big enough to be worth
investigating.
If you "have no idea of how much energy is
involved," then how can you say "it sure looks big enough to be worth
investigating"?
It's not science until you are willing to do roll up
your sleeves and do numbers.
Saying "I have this idea, I have no idea whether it
works or if it is off by thirteen orders of magnitude, but why doesn't
somebody else do the work for free and figure it out" is about as welcome
to a scientist as saying "I have an idea for a science fiction story, I
haven't really thought it out, why don't you write it and we'll split the
money" is welcome to a science fiction writer.
Propose a mechanism and do a back of the envelope
calculation to suggest it's worth looking at further.
Oh, and by the way: you wrote:
>We are spending trillions because of a one
degree ...
We are?????
Who is spending these "trillions"? What trillions?
Being spent on what?
Ah well. I had hoped to save myself some time, on the theory that among
the members of that conference there would be one or another who had
actually done the back of the envelope calculations, or might be induced to
do them: I don't work with this subject very often, and while it's easy
enough to do, we are talking about a couple of hours of work. I admit I had
hoped to save myself the time, and that still may happen.
I include this here as an illustration of how difficult it is to get a
rational discussion on certain subjects. I suppose what prompted such horror
and disdain was my suggestion that we could spare a man year or two (like
one graduate master's thesis?) on looking into the possibilities out of the
enormous sums that go into AGW research. As to the trillions, I meant the
money spent on remedies like cap and trade, adding alcohol to gasoline, and
the like. Trillions is of course a bit of exaggeration, but the exact
amounts aren't really known. I should I suppose have said billions. I don't
think that's too big a stretch. And the science budgets, while quite
possibly not large enough -- finding out just what is going on and thus
reducing the uncertainties in what we have to prepare for is worth a lot --
certainly are not so small.
I still wonder about the energies involved in a big spinning magnet. The
Earth rotates, and moves in an orbital path. It certainly interacts with the
solar wind. The composition of that wind seems to change rather often: not
that the wind changes so much, but our understanding of it does.
As I say, I include this snippet of conversation as an illustration of
the kind of debate one seems to get when bringing up such subjects among
professional physicists devoted to the AGW hypothesis.
Meanwhile, I have yet to find much discussion of the methods used to
determine planetary temperatures to an accuracy of a tenth of a degree. The
various data collection models seem to be contradictory, and certainly do
not correspond to any distribution curve assumptions I know of: that is. we
have a collection of numbers for temperatures. We have them largely because
we can get them: they are certainly not chosen as a result of random
processes. We want to use the numbers we have to determine the temperature
of the entire Earth to a tenth of a degree. We have temperatures from the
bottom of the sea and various other sea levels. We have temperatures from
the surface of the Earth and at various altitudes. We have lots of data from
some places on Earth, and very little from others (poles, interiors of some
continents where settlement is sparse and communications are sporadic). I do
not know how the representative temperatures are chosen, and with what
weights they are combined to come up with averages. I am sure there must be
some sort of explanation of how what is done is done, and how those
procedures were chosen, and why we should therefore have confidence that we
know the temperature of the Earth as an average over days, months, and
years, and thus can compare temperatures over time, thus knowing that the
Earth is warming or cooling. Sure as I am that such explanations exist, I
haven't been able to find them. I am referred to really complex reports, and
I am certain that the methods of data refinement are complicated; but surely
there is a less complicated explanation of how those methods were selected
and how they are applied? But I haven't found them.
Anyway I hadn't intended to offend a busy scientist by silly questions,
but does anyone have a good idea of just how much energy is involved when a
large mass of whirling magnetized metal shifts poles? The naive view is that
it's a lot. If the question offends anyone, please feel free to ignore it.
But if you think about such things all the time, are we talking about
kilotons or megatons of energy here?
As to mechanisms, if you heat the interior of the Earth then some
equilibrium has to be established. The excess energy has to go somewhere. If
we don't know where, we ought to be looking for it. If there isn't any
excess energy, then of course it can be ignored. I admit to what may be no
more than a superstition: I keep wondering if the interior heat of the Earth
is adequately accounted for in the climate models, or is there the
possibility that undersea volcanic activity -- now known to be larger than
anyone thought it was back when I was in school -- might be heating water
way down in the deeps, causing warm currents to rise and changing sea
temperature conditions? It's probably a silly notion, and I wouldn't want to
waste anyone's time. On the other hand I am old enough to remember when the
official view of Science was that plate tectonics was silly and Wegener was
off his head to suggest that continents drifted. Science fiction writers
were the only people who took the notion seriously. They did so largely
because it made a good story, of course. Pole shift might make for a good
story too.
=================
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