Having a Frank Grimes Moment

Litebob Squarefinger. Boston was sent over the edge this week by the sudden, scattered appearance of strange electronic devices with these obscene little emoticons:

 

click for Wikipedia article

In this, the "Week of the Super Bowl" and it's advertizing "blitz", what could be appropriate than a terror attack from the Cartoon Network? The reaction of the blogosphere, and of many of my friends and assoicates, has sent me into Frank Grimes-like spasms of disbelief: Ahg! Aiwt! Emg! Ufpk!

Recall: Frank Grimes was a character from a Simpsons episode that went nuts cause everyone around him actually was nuts. Exposed to the insanity of Homer's careless and lazy behavior at the nuclear power plant, and compounded by the acceptance of this behavior by all others at the plant, he snaps. So follow me thru this, and see if I snap -- the blogosphere seems to think this whole thing hilariously funny. It seems to think that the folks in Boston over-reacted, sending in the Bomb Squad to explode some cartoon ad made of Lite Brites.

Boston got punkd. Boston got pwned. Boston got its panties all twisted. Boston is clueless. Laugh at Boston:
"And, uh, the real fake bombs?" on Blue Mass Group
"Attack of the Killer Cartoons ..." on Democratic Underground

Let's put this in context. If you work for some branch of emergency services, your Wednesday morning included a fake pipe bomb at a big hospital in central Boston and mysterious packages found on two busy bridges over the Charles; concurrent with a series of puzzling reports of electronic devices attached to bridge abutments and under highway overpasses. Connect these with other reports of security alerts in other cities (in Britain and Washington DC), and there is no way anyone should think that the reposnse professionals in Boston over-reacted. They responded just as they should.

By contrast consider that the two "performance artsits" were told by their advertising employers that they should keep quiet while chaos reigned around them. After their court appearance, they launched into a non-sequitor about 70s hair styles while claiming their seriousness and sincerity. Tell me you don't feel the pangs of Frank Grimes. Aiwt! Ufpk!

But almost worse than all this is the sense that a huge number of the "informed public" (Olbermann!) has gotten this completely wrong. In fact, they seem to be encouraging the perpetrators to not only continue dumping on Boston, but ot rub Boston's collective nose in it. That there is some "reason filter" that is not set quite right, or some "logic mechanism" is just not switching on.

There are other examples in recent headlines: the lady who wanted to win a Nintendo and drank so much water she died. The mental giants running the radio show explained to callers warning of the danger, "They signed releases so we're not responsible, okay?". So even after these mooks were told of the danger, they did not tell the contestants, or even consider having some medical consultant available for them. And still the comments to the news posts include many responses that basically blamed the dead woman for drinking the water. She was punkd. She was pwned. She was clueless.

Yes, and rape victims wear short skirts. I guess in a world where people eat bugs on TV to win money, this seem like acceptable behavior. If you're a rube, you deserve it.

Similarly, our national conscience is fixed to "American Idol" not just for the winners, but for the losers: we love those early episodes and the delusional wailers who think they have a shot. We even take some of the"best losers" and push them into the spot light, like William Hung. We've taken schadenfreude to a whole other level.

Further consider how lucky, really, the folks in Boston were that there was not some other "big thing": a big apartment building on fire, or even some ambulance headed to MGH stuck at Charles Circle with a life-threatening situation. What are the consequences of installing home-made, enigmatic, electronic ads in a City famous for its congestion? And for what? Ads? Contests? It's funny, huh? Ahg! Emg!

Finally, folks pay for billboards for a reason: you can't just paint big ads on the sides of skyscrapers. It's not your property. There are places for ads. "Artists" who spray paint graffitti on trains and buildings know they are committing a crime; defacing property is a crime. Over the summer, other city administrators in Philly were all upset over a Sony PSP ad campaign that paid graffitti artists to deface buildings with prescribed images -- but Sony actually paid for the wall spaces.

Or if ad tag lines are your language, let's use the one from Apple: Think Different. It seems that folks no longer have the ability to distinguish between "different" thinking and no thinking at all.

There are good places for ads and there are bad places; responsible behavior and irresponsible. There are art installations and there are crimes. When (when!?) did it become "okay" to attach a homemade electronic device to a column holding up a highway? I don't care what reason you have for doing it -- advertising, mooniniting, 70s hair styling, whatever -- when did that become a acceptable thing to do?

This accepance would reduce our basic economic relationships down to a giant network of confidence games: tricksters and marks. Anything goes as long as you're "in the know", and if you're not, it's your own fault for being a dope. The answers were right there on the internet, just search Google for "zebbler", d-uh. You were the idiot for not looking. Sucker.

Oxymorons: jumbo shrimp, reality-TV, marketing-genius.

Here's the litmus test -- ask yourself: what if the "artists" had not been hired by Turner? What if they had come up with a conceptual piece unrelated to cartoons, involving Lite Brites in public places? Would it be funny? Would they be prosecuted?

My inner Frank Grimes is especially appalled by those comments congratulating Turner and the advertisers on a "brilliant" move and for psyching the City into giving them a ton of free exposure. If we expect our style of democracy to work, then the market-place of ideas should not fail in this manner. It kinda makes me wonder if everyone shouldn't have to pass a test to vote. My trust is broken.

At least I still have the Simpsons.

Hottest Weather Ever

The NOAA has released it's summer report for weather in the US in 2006. It's conclusion? A very warm December pushed 2006 past 1998 as the hottest calendar year ever recorded. Check out this map -- no one near normal. In 112 years, almost every state is showing a triple-digit (one of the 13 hottest years). Hot.


"The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record and nearly identical to the record set in 1998. Based on preliminary data, the 2006 annual average temperature was 55°F, 2.2°F (1.2°C) above the 20th Century mean and 0.07°F (0.04°C) warmer than 1998."

And for the first time ever the US Historical Climatology Network calulation for average annual temperature broke the 55-degree (F) barrier. If the mean is just below 53-degrees, aren't we now officially two degrees into "global warming"?

The State of the Arctic

A stunning update to the arctic climate research going on at the NOAA reinforces all the recent news that climate change at the poles is accelerating.


Old Ice vs New Ice - 1988, 199, 2001, 2005
[ download the PDF here ]

This AP article summarizes the basic conclusions, adding to the drum beat that we are heating things up:

"Signs of warming continue in the Arctic with a decline in sea ice, an increase in shrubs growing on the tundra and rising worries about the Greenland ice sheet.

"There have been regional warming periods before. Now we're seeing Arctic-wide changes," James Overland, an oceanographer at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Washington state, said Thursday.

For each of the last five years it was at least 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F) above average over the entire Arctic over the entire year, he said.

The new "State of the Arctic" analysis, released by the U.S. government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also reports an increase in northward movement of warmer water through the Bering Strait in 2001-2004, which might be a factor in continuing reduction of sea ice."

But there is some interesting cross-currents in the data, from the LA Times article by Robert Lee Hotz:

"Yet the researchers also found new patterns of cooling ocean currents and prevailing winds that suggested the Arctic, long considered a bellwether of global warming, may be reverting in some ways to more normal conditions not seen since the 1970s.

Taken together, these findings may be evidence, the researchers said, of the region struggling to keep its balance, as rising temperatures slowly overturn the long-established order of seasonal variations.

'This is a region that is fighting back,' said lead author Jacqueline Richter-Menge, a civil engineer at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. 'There are things that showed signs of going back to norms, trying to right themselves under very dire circumstances.' "

The dude's name is Hotz.

The Tragedy of the Commons

I had suspected that there would be some way to reconcile our sense of justice (the meek shall inherit) with evolution (only the strong survive) -- that altruism and goodness are not just foils to some needed "survival behavior" (aggressiveness, greed) but true driving factors in the success of the breed.

A terrific re-cap of our situation from Julia Whitty under MoJo's current cover headline "Evolve or Die", with some insights as concerns global warming, and maybe some tools that would allow us to understand our behavior as a species...

"The Thirteenth Tipping Point"

I was particularly taken with her spin on the idea of the Tragedy of the Commons. My take: if we all live in a system wherein selfish behavior almost certainly guarantees success (comfort, wealth, power, however you want to measure it), but selfless behavior provides the greatest success for all -- people will continue to act selfishly. This is the refutation of the old "industrial" notion that what's good for business is good for the nation: the calculated acts of selfish entities will serve the selfish entities, not the general welfare of the nation or planet.

And thus the tragedy is truly Shakespearian in nature. We are driven to construct and then act out our own doom. But Whitty allows this hope:

"A recent study hints at the evolution of altruism. A team of Swiss and American mathematicians and population biologists ran a variant of game theory known as a public goods game, in which players contribute money to a common pot that an experimenter doubles, divides evenly, and returns to the players. In ordinary play, if all players contribute all their money, everyone wins big. If one player cheats, everyone wins small. If an altruist and a cheater go head-to-head, the cheater wins consistently. This paradox is known as the Tragedy of the Commons.

But in the new computer variant, population dynamics were introduced into the game. Players were divided into small groups that played among themselves. Each player eventually "reproduced" in proportion to the payoff received from play—thereby passing her cooperator or cheater strategy to her offspring. Mutations and dispersions were introduced, creating a shifting population of individuals divided into groups of changing sizes and allegiances.

After 100,000 generations, the results were surprising. Rather than succumbing to the cheaters, the cooperators overwhelmed them."

So we can see that in the short term, cheaters (the selfish) will win; but a view from the ages holds nearly certain victory for the selfless.

Then consider the corporation, built to compete, if possible dominate, in an environment of world-wide commercialism, often ruthlessly self-serving. It may take several human generations for the corporation to spawn and evolve; tho the span of that cycle appears to be shrinking with our post-industrial, "flat-world" globalism. Still, if it takes something on the order of 100,000 generations to see the successes of "the commons", we're in for quite a wait -- if we're holding out hope for cycle No. 100,000, how does it feel to be at cycle No. 42?

In addition, now that we've built this economy around a resource that, when consumed, is slowly destroying the planet -- can we affect the situation? Are we, like a Hamlet, destined to drive to a dark ending? If this is true, it's almost frightening to conclude: we need to accelerate the economy in order to see the true pay-off.

But, is there a way to cheat the system for the common good? Doesn't evolution require odd mutations and transformative breaks in the line? There are examples of large-scale human benefits of commercial ventures I can think of: Indian casinos, Saudi and Alaskan oil windfalls, charity branding (such as Product RED, etc). I'm sure there are more, but these examples seem to rely on our selfish natures to give a common-good payday (we like to gamble, drive SUVs, shop). Like a lottery system that pays for public schools -- how do we wean ourselves of the bad behavior once we introduce it to the system?

But if we don't capitalize on our selfishness, we are left with this puzzle: how do we commercialize and exploit our generous natures? Otherwise, what's the business model for altruism? And how do we ask our species to take responsibility for our actions without requiring frequent flier miles or the free prize in the box? What does a corporation built for the common good really look like?

I am always brought back to the Bolivian water protests. A harsh example, to be sure, but there was a time when developed countries would provide assistance to third-world nations through NGO's like CARE -- we would teach the people who were not benefiting from the knowledge how to pump their own clean water through sustainable systems that fit their economies. Now corporations like Bechtel will try to find ways to make a buck; they do not introduce sustainable systems, that is not in the interest of the corporation. But the people protested, and were able to, at least in part, take back some control; after all, unlike oil, water is truly required for life.

I dread hearing that without some incentive (money, titilation, fame), people are not driven (to work, build, create). Of course, the most efficient (and significant) economic entities in human history had access to free labor, and the best incentive is a whip and a spear -- our species has traveled some distance in 5,000 years. As in evolution, if you leave it in ocean waters long enough, a hippo will turn into a dolphin. The tragedy then, is if the hippo still thinks he's a hippo -- and that the change has taken so long, he just doesn't notice.

Eventually, we are getting better and better and the game is playing to the good. There is solace in that, but we don't have to be passive players. We can push the game to get better faster, and given the pace of global warming, we had better get on it. So I agree with Whitty in this: we do not lack incentives for this evolution. We lack leadership.

Massachusetts is the New South Carolina

A new comprehsvie climate survey from the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment that shows how the cliamte here in Massachusetts will soon (by the end of this century) be on par with the climate that we're familiar with in South Carolina (from Boston.com):


"The study also predicted less snow, more extreme storms and frequent droughts -– key events that could harm tourism, agriculture and the region's economy.

'The very notion of the Northeast as we know it is at stake,' said Cameron Wake, an author of the report and an associate professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Climate Change Research Center. 'The near-term emissions choices we make in the Northeast and throughout the world will help determine the climate and quality of life our children and grandchildren experience.' "

Global warming study: Boston temperatures could mirror highs in South

The report is available from the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment -- the report in PDF form:

Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast, a report of the NECIA

Herding the Security Cats

I flew out to the west coast last weekend. The security lines were not as bad as I thought they might be, but I flew out of Providence instead of Logan to avoid the real mess (and possibly loose concrete ceiling panels). Here's a quick report:

First, I saw perhaps a half dozen people on four flights with drinking bottles: water, gatorade, iced tea. Second, on two flights, there were passengers that insisted on talking on their cell phones long after the atttendants asked for them to be turned off. Third, I sat next to a lady doing needle point -- she had a pair of scissors.

Now, I'll admit that I find the security rules to be ridiculous. But to see these completely unnecessary violations of protocal really made me think: the US will never be safe because we are too spoiled to allow rules to govern our lives. Even rules that might save our lives.

One fellow with a cell phone (vulgar, annimated, and loud) was talking to a friend (?) about skateboarding and a skatepark he had recently seen. Dude, it was f-ing this and f-ing that. Totally!

I mentioned to one young lady with the bottle of water (which I'm quite sure was vodka): "Wow, you brought on a bottle of water." And she replied, "Yeah. Did I do something wrong?" I said, "No, I guess not if you're thirsty." Then she and her husband ordered tomoato juices and poured in some of the "water". Cheers!

Am I a wuss for thinking that I should follow rules I don't agree with -- for the safety and respect of my fellow passengers? It makes you feel like they'd deserve whatever they got. Except I'm on the same f-ing plane. Dude.

Peak Oil Is No Myth

A very interesting debate between progressive thinkers on Peak Oil going down -- Greg Palast and Richard Heinberg:

Why Palast Is Wrong

An Open Letter to Greg Palast on Peak Oil

I guess this is in anticipation of a new book from Palast -- the BBC reporter who did so much work to get at the facts of the Florida Election debacle (in his earlier book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy "). It sounds like Greg is splitting hairs on this, but it reminds me a lot of the spin-spin and counter-spin that added to the confusion around, for example, Global Warming (oh, it's not real, scientists disagree about it, it's effects are exaggerated for political reasons, etc.).

Cause it sounds like they agree on the big issues: conservation, alternative energy sources, environmental impact of a fossil fuel economy. Palast simply seems not to buy the fact that we are quickly running out of crude -- the rest appears to be a conspiracy (oil co's, govt, etc).

It's clear: the last barrel of oil is gonna be a whole lot harder to get than the first. Peak Oil is the point at which we have consumed as much as is left in the ground -- but we'll never get the total of the "second half". It seems important to understand this if we are to plan and manage a better scenario for the future. Even if we don't agree with an "oil crash" or other slightly more "apocalyptic" future-views, we can see the very serious implications of a country like China or India driving energy markets to price extremes that will make our economy strain.

While it's important to manage our fears, and check our businesses and government; it's more important to stay clear about the facts and focus on the truth. Eyes open folks; keep em open.