Andy Gates

How to make decarbonizing sexy?

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:53:46 GMT

In discussion today, "why does everyone have to agree before cutting emissions? Why not just do it?"

As I see it, this is because they all view "it" as a painful thing, and so the whole Prisoner's Dilemma / competition thing kicks in. Untrustworthy actors are expected to welch; trustworthy actors don't want to be the schmuck.

The whole thing would be a metric ton easier if someone had the chutzpah to present decarbonizing as a short term economic and social good.

Any suggestions? despaer , economics is your bag. How'd you sell it? The current best sell, the Stern report, is about a 500% ROI but on a century timescale, which clearly means not you, not me and not the current governments (possibly not the current nations).

New Weather

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:52:58 GMT

Well Def Jeff over at Weather Underground has a detailed post on a new weather pattern that's been identified over the Arctic:

The old atmospheric patterns that controlled Arctic weather--the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and Arctic Oscillation (AO), which featured air flow that tended to circle the pole, now alternate with the new Arctic Dipole pattern. The Arctic Dipole pattern features anomalous high pressure on the North American side of the Arctic, and low pressure on the Eurasian side. This results in winds blowing more from south to north, increasing transport of heat into the central Arctic Ocean.

This is fascinating - we knew there would be these large-scale changes, but not really what they'd be until they happened. The heat transport possibly explains the excess melting that has occurred in recent years: it wasn't in the current crop of ice prediction models, so they've been conservative.

The Arctic is switching from swirling jetstreams around the pole to winds from the South slurping warm air, so "fascinating" should be accompanied with a generous side of "oh crap".

Feeling guilty about not feeling guilty

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:49:14 GMT

There's a new Tesco in town - a full-fat jobbie, no less, with frocks and pills and a 24-hour garage. I'm delighted, and I'm also impressed with the building, which uses lots of wood and glass instead of concrete and steel.

But we're supposed to be down on Tesco, aren't we? I mean, yes, they built on a greenfield flood plain site and that's evil, but they've got everything non-specialist I need under one roof with long opening hours. I can ride over with the trailer in the evening and not face silly little shops that close at five; the local catchment is up to fifteen miles for this store, because mid Devon is a retail desert.

The local lampposts are full of grumble about the eebil Tescopoly... but they and the Council have laid on two new looping bus services that go all over town, and there is no damn room for a bike lane (ptui!) on the A377, and there is a whole new no-through access road that's ideal for A-road-hating bike wusses.

One-line reviews: Ministry Of Space

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:41:24 GMT

Warren Ellis is a magnificent bastard. Ministry of Space is a delicously sly suckerpunch of a three-volume Future Shock.

This is the future

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:18:46 GMT

Have a drool over the VSS Enterprise, Virgin Galactic's first SpaceShipTwo. The mothership, Eve, was unveiled some time back; now it's Enterprise's turn. Yes, Enterprise. Don't worry, that tear of pure nerdy joy? I'm wiping away one just the same.

10:10 - 2009 Audit, 2010 Commitment

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:28:56 GMT

10:10 is a simple challenge: cut your emissions by 10% in 2010. It ain't a huge leap but it's big enough to matter and small enough not to hurt. Now, long-term, this sort of personal effort isn't going to do it: it's not going to effect the infrastructural changes, but it might highlight where those changes are really needed.

It's close enough to the end of the year for me to audit my emissions:

Transport: According to my training diary I had 200 drive days in 2009 (ouch!). I'm committing to no more than 180 in 2010. I actually want way more bike days, but running and weights both kill my legs and gumption - and if that's the case then I should look at the bus and carpooling as well.
Food: I'm reliably informed that if a vegan diet is a baseline carbon intensity, veggie is double that and meaty is triple. A shift from "plenty of meat" to "meat is a treat" should take the edge off that. I've already downloaded a couple of veggie ebooks.
Domestic power: Pretty green already here, but I'll try to run the heaters less. If any appliances explode, they'll be replaced with A+ energy savers.
Work: Okay, I'll turn my PC off on weekdays. Running BOINC really isn't an excuse for laziness, is it? ;)
Leisure: Hard to do triathlon without a vehicle, but sharing will help. Didn't fly in 2009, not planning to fly in 2010.

Adventures in epub

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:42:30 GMT

Been playing with the epub format that the current crop of readers - including my Cool-er, the Sony readerss and the iPhone Stanza app - use. Epub is a fairly new standard, and it's intended to be easily reflowable (in the way that PDF is not) so that different kit can present it well. It shares a lot of technical heritage with HTML at first glance (it's basically HTML + styles + images + provision for DRM all zipped into a container), and that's fine by me.

Epub is so much better than PDF that it's worth converting your PDFs into epubs. Sites like epub2go make that easy. Like any machine-driven PDF conversion you'll get occasional layout quirks; for regular books they're trivial (occasional line-breaks where some numpty used hard returns to control layout) but you'd want to proof-read the thing first. To edit epubs, I've been using the open-source Sigil editor and it's just dandy.

Vendors take note: offering only PDFs is lame. Adobe Digital Editions offers all the DRM you'll ever want for epub, so get with the programme. Kthxbai.

I had a crack at converting comic books for readers too. Technically it's easy: Extract the CBR/CBZ file into images (it's just a ZIP with a different name), resize to something sane (most readers' native res is 600x800), and then make an epub document that has the images in a row - since it's HTML you could easily build a toolchain to do the grunt work. Rich, colourful stuff like the modern DC and Marvel offerings turn into goopy grey even w. Must try on some line-art. Can anyone recommend a manga to rip?

The Wave

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:14:50 GMT

I was in London yesterday at the Wave climate march. Never have I seen so many grimly determined old ladies. There's a reason for this.

The Wave was organised by a huge coalition of charities and pressure groups, and high on the list are Christian Aid, CAFOD and Oxfam. The greenies come down the list, and at the protest, the greenies were down the list compared to this moral cohort, the WI Marching Army. And this is good, and this is as it should be: we're far closer to a humanitarian disaster than we are to an existential one -- especially you and me in the wealthy west.

I was reading the Copenhagen Diagnosis - the science update since the IPCC AR4 - while the throng gathered, and we're basically on the worst-case scenario curves for everything that was discussed back in 2007. This march was a reminder to the powers that be (and the powers that will be: Cameron, these little old ladies are your natural constituency) that a lot of people give a damn. It was ever so friendly, but if the powers that be are gutless at Copenhagen or they welch on their agreements, there's a lot of people who will be really hacked off.

Fudge Factor Code... or not?

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:13:14 GMT

I love Deltoid. Here's their beautiful takedown of one of the so-called climategate drama points: the "very artificial!" computer code: Quote Mining Code. In a nutshell: the code was ugly but so is my appendix. It's vestigial crap that was never published, disk cruft that's been dug up and paraded around by the usual wingnut buffoons.

Every point of science has been taken apart now, clearly and easily. It was never going to be any other way.

(There remains the procedural matter of the alleged FOI stuff, but that's still in the air especially as no FOI request may actually have been made and the data may not have been FOI-able at all: again, shooting the shit is not conspiracy even if it's dumb shit).

Of course someone was bound to try to use this rubbish as leverage at Copenhagen. Who would that be? Who has vested interests in selling scads of fossil fuel? Why, Saudi Arabia of course. Follow the money.

First Look: Cool-er Ebook Reader

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:44:33 GMT

I've been looking at readers for a few weeks, and today had a play in The Shoppe and succumbed to the Cool-er. Mostly because I think a reader should be fairly invisible, a portal not a gadget, and the competition (the Sony PRS-300 Pocket Reader) was much too cluttered with buttons around the page. I got both devices in my hand and it was a no-brainer.

The Cool-er fits my "magic size and shape" - a DVD case. It's a little narrower and slimmer, and weighs exactly the same as a DVD in its box - ie, bugger-all. The Sony was much more of a Quality Gadget - Sony don't make anything else - but it was heavier and thicker and just more gadgety. It's a thing of beauty and Sony fans will be righteous in their love, but I don't even want to see the reader, let alone squee over it.

The Cool-er also does HTML which the Sony doesn't, and quiet a bit of my stuff is HTML.

There's no software with it: you manage it all with file folders or you get Adobe Digital Editions for the DRM stuff (yeah, riiiight). That suits me just fine. Charging is handled through the USB cable, so it should charge fine from ad-hoc USB chargers like the FreeLoader if you need to.

It takes SD cards up to 4Gb, which is total overkill for books but not for PDFs which get hefty - if you're a PDF slut like me, this is ace. The crazy-toothed survivalist library can easily tuck in one corner of a big SD card without getting in the way, waiting the zombie apocalypse.

Graphics are okay - 8 greys, very rich PDFs look a bit arse (zines no, papers with graphs yes). Page turns are fast for its class.

Hey Switzerland

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:45:51 GMT

Cute vote. Here's your new flag.

Zerg Rush

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:07:51 GMT

The game is memetic warfare. The opponent has built a spawning pool (a PR industry) and is producing many zerglings (ideas with no real merit: one-hit monsters) in great quantity. The player has developed their tech tree (science) and has used it to build strong troops (verified, rational ideas).

Given enough time, the strong troopers will win (tobacco/cancer, CFCs/ozone, etc etc). Is the zerg-rush model useful in suggesting tactics to use to speed up their victory?

Worst Case Scenario

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:23:08 GMT

The Copenhagen Diagnosis is an update to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to cover research published since 2006.

The blue squiggly line is satellite observations. The grey cone is the range of IPCC predictions - in this case for sea level rise. The observations closely track the worst case scenario.

Oh. Shit.

The IPCC's worst cases are pretty damn 'worst'. They're things like a Greenland melt this century, so there's something for the kids to look forward to.

The false-flap around 'climategate'? It's trying to distract people from this.

The Price of Carbon

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:54:10 GMT

Rowson just had this cartoon in the Guardian. Harsh, bad taste, but on the money (enhanced European windstorms are on the climate-change track - the insurance industry were discussing this at Copenhagen last year - and these intense rain events are what they do).

Then someone pointed out that Rowson's cartoon is a riff on this classic Philip Zec cartoon of WW2. When you know that, it gets a whole lot more angry and a whole lot more bitter. And the faceless copper stops being a news story and becomes Everyman.

Kneesy does it

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:42:58 GMT

I spent the morning being bent and prodded by a sports physio. The answer: A combination of powerful driver muscles, feeble stabiliser muscles and poor flexibility is what done it. The iliotibial band pulled my patella just a sniff out of line, which irritated (but wasn't noticed) and that led to swelling which moved through the 'ole and put pressure on the tibial nerve - hence the sudden shooting pain, even though the joint had full range of movement. I would have gotten away with it if I hadn't done something as long as the Druid.

How tight was my ITB? So tight that when he said "I can do some acupuncture to ease the immediate pain" (and to my eternal shame I thought "Whee! I'm Mike Dixon!") one of the needles bent. Yes, I am made of leather.

Good news: nothing is structurally wrong with my knee!

Bad news: all my bad habits - not stretching, not working stabilisers, dire posture, generally blagging it - are responsible. My 'catwalk' foot placement is one of those big red "medial glutes! medial glutes!" indicators, for example.

Best news: I can continue weights around bodyweight stuff, which is what I was doing anyway. Walk until that is pain-free then jog and cycle a little, letting pain be the guide when to stop. Return to the ~~sea~~ pool. If I keep up the remedial exercises, I should expect to be mostly good in 4-6 weeks, and these exercises should form part of my regular carcass-maintenance routine. I must now be diligent and patient. Heh.

Shooting stars!

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:06:43 GMT

It's Leonids week so book some clear skys for Tuesday night. To quote New Scientist,

"Earth will cut across the first such stream around 0900 GMT on 17 November, an event that is expected to produce dozens of meteors an hour. But the spectacle will reach its peak between 2100 and 2200 GMT, as Earth passes through two debris trails left by Tempel-Tuttle in 1466 and 1533."

I think it's utterly great how we can say that these lights in the sky came from that snowball when it visited back in the Age of Princesses. That's awesome.

Druid Challenge - Muddy Funsters

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:29:11 GMT

Well, I made 20 miles before all the wheels fell off my wagon.

It opened in thick mist (and stoats hunting bunnies) and the first half was decent: everyone was walking the hills and saving their energy, so my strategy wasn't out of place. When the mist lifted it was only to allow proper rain.

Halfway through, around the White Horse, my right knee (o Judas knee) went sproing. After some pissing and moaning, and some experimenting, I was able to carry on to the next checkpoint with a mix of walking and some weird short-step running called the "Ironman shuffle".

After that, things froze up more and I was in walk-or-die mode. The next few miles were weird, a single file of knackered walkers in a stark hilltop-and-mist landscape: it looked like the pogrom scenes from Fiddler On The Roof. I was expecting Cossacks to come riding out of the mist.

...and that was followed by a few miles of wallow through churned mud, and after that - with the finish on the horizon, dammit, my other knee went and I was reduced to shuffling like an old lady who needs a poo. At under 1kph (and occasionally in tears) there was no way I'd reach the end before the end of the day, so I had to call my minions and get helicoptered out.

Gutted that I DNF'd.

Happy that I did my longest run ever, and did an epic bloodyminded carryon. Kit was perfect, etc etc.

This one is not 'unfinished business'

So what went wrong? Let's start with trying to scale from 10k to marathon in ten weeks. That was optimistic. It was based, if I'm honest, on my experience with cycling where you can do that. Of course, on a bike, you don't carry your own weight, and a bike that will do ten miles will do a hundred. On a run, you do. It's more important to do close to race distance. In addition I wasn't at race-weight, so I was carrying more - but that's secondary.

I'd trained offroad up at Woodbury, but not in the weird clingy chalk mud that the Ridgeway has. That stuff was like a rink and at times my shoes clogged and I was reduced to hilarious mincing. The knees didn't like that. Rain, cold - that was fine. But wallowy mud really hit.

What's with the knees? Flexibility! The old short hamstrings mare up when extending the leg, and the grumble spreads until any torsion (like correcting foot position in mud) is quite ouchy. With repetition, ouchy gets to "unable to bear weight" and it all goes wrong. Descents were brutal. That right knee's betrayed me before - time for some proper flexibility work, alas.

Photos are here!

Ask the Flist: Enterprise-scale printing?

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:43:46 GMT

We've got 5000 Windows desktops and a Windows 2003 Enterprise two-node print cluster. The print cluster carries 850 printers in 60 models from 10 manufacturors.

It's creaking. It's creaking particularly because HP (our main supplier) drivers share components and are crappy desktop-grade filth. Every so often a change to one printer's spec will cascade through the whole model line or worse, the whole brand. Joy is unfolding, from the heavens, like a lotus blossom of migraine flashes.

Do you do enterprise-scale printing? How the hell do you keep this ball of string tight?

The Economics of Climate Change

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:03:58 GMT

Here's an interesting article: American economists were polled on climate change, and came back strongly. I'd have expected more of a disconnect between the real world and the baffling handwaving of economics, but maybe I'm just not wise in economic theory.

The Wave - Climate Protest 5th Dec

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:08:20 GMT

http://www.co-operative.coop/ethicsinaction/takeaction/thewave/about-The-Wave/

The Wave, on Saturday 5 December, will be a carnival style procession through the streets of London to call for international action on climate change. It is being organised by the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, which has been organising peaceful climate change marches since 2006 to keep the pressure on government for definite action on climate change.
details of the day

* Meeting from 12pm, Grovesner Square, central London
* Starts at approximately 1pm
* The route will flow from Grosvenor Square, via Piccadilly and Whitehall, to finally encircle the Houses of Parliament on both sides of the Thames.
* A stunning finale will take place at 3pm as The Wave encircles the Houses of Parliament

And there's a local coach going up!

Greenies and activists, you have a few days to convince me that this will be more worthwhile and less soul-crushing than the Iraq protest. I can't face that level of cynical ignoring again. I'd rather just go do something direct.

School me on carb-loading

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:34:18 GMT

Next Sunday is the marathon run. I hear that one carb-loads for such things, and that carb-loading isn't just a big bowl of pasta the night before. Edumacate me!

(psst: www.justgiving.com/andygates)

Bang! And The Beaufort Multiyear Ice Is Gone!

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:19:02 GMT

David Barber, Manitoba Uni's big frosty boffin, went out looking for multiyear ice, and instead just found rotten, half-metre thick one-year stuff that an ice-capable ship can apparently crank through at thirteen knots. This is navigable. Forget the Northwest Passage, just ice-belt your boat and go for it, chew out a frasilicious sea-lane and make your millions.

1: Investment niche! It's the coming growth area for shipping. It'll take a while for ice-happy oil rigs to get ROI but shipping's faster. Go go gadget exploitation machine. Ah well, it'll be good for Iceland.

2: This is another pile of scary to add to the pile of scary. The exact pattern of melt each year is determined by weather - wind, for example, can pile ice up against land (slowing melt) or push it through straits into the open ocean (accelerating it). In a melty year, though, the single-year ice goes away almost entirely. In a non-warming Arctic some single-year ice persists and is built up; in the warming Arctic (3x global average, as both observed and modeled) it seems to have reached a critical tipping point. This observation correlates well with Pen Haddow's hike'o'hell. Massive Arctic summer melt now looks a lot like a dice-roll for weather each summer.

3: That single-year stuff is crap for polar bears. I has a sad.

I wonder what Northern Hemisphere weather is going to do with all that extra dark absorbing surface and all that extra humidity? Place bets now!

At least in Heaven I can ... surf?

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:25:35 GMT

Work/Life win: "Boss, can I have a half-day leave? The surf is epic and I won't get there before dark unless I leave at lunchtime."

Got to Croyde and the sets are marching slowly in, wide-spaced and stately. The big stuff is overhead; the little stuff is keeping the half-term kids in a happy foamy place. The wind's light and offshore, it's warm, there's broken low cloud: it's a perfect Autumn day.

There's a tradition chez munky of getting a good first ride then fighting for ages; in this case after a Zenly foamy run, my bad feet cramped up super-fast and I left the kids and the handful of gnarly dudes to play: the gnarlies were way out, where the waves were maxing out around eight feet, getting up, getting down and getting utterly obliterated.

While I was in, the sun came down and did that low metallic Highway to Heaven thing; the clouds were fringed with silver, the spray blowing off the tops of these huge waves curling and gleaming in the light. I half expected Michael Landon to paddle past, or Harry Secombe in the lifeguard's ute. As it was, of course, it made me think of Nick. If there is a good place to go after you die, well, I hope his was a bit like that.

Science Museum Climate Poll

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 07:43:10 GMT

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/proveit.aspx

"I've seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they're serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen."

...and if you haven't seen the evidence and aren't convinced, the Science Museum has a ton of good stuff to enlighten.

A moment of clarity

andyg@ravenfamily.org — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:44:20 GMT

Politics and religion start from a priori assumptions and go from there to their conclusions, methods and so on. Science starts with observations; this, I think, is why political and religious types often fail to grok science: they're starting on arbitrary foundations and they know that it's really all opinion. Thus, when they hit a scientific consensus that is unpalatable - such as climate change and the responsibilities and requirements that come from it - they have great difficulty in parsing what to do. An ecclesiastical-religion viewpoint would find accommodation; a political one would just shout it down or use rhetoric to get around it. It's only the fundamental, dogmatic, wild-eyes-and-beard religions that are as implacable.

And thus, this accusation of "global warming religion" -- it's nothing of the sort, but the accuser can't think of anything in their plastic worldview that's as immobile. They've likely never come across something as immovable that is also unpalatable (gravity, after all, never offended anyone). The only mental model that's available is religion.

Science always wins, because science is based on facts. No amount of wishful thinking would make Lysenko's comradely wheat grow. No amount of snark will stop CO2 absorbing heat.

it makes me wonder if the cognitive dissonance and plain dumb fury that the denialsphere are feeling is similar to what geocentrists felt when Copernicus presented, and Kepler and Galileo later confirmed, that the Earth goes around the Sun.