Burn Coal – release arsenic, mercury, radioactive particles, and carbon – lots of carbon.  Here’s how the National Resources Defense Council, NRDC, describes it:  Coal is Dirty and Dangerous

Coal is America’s dirtiest energy source — and the country’s leading source of global warming pollution.

Coal mining destroys land, pollutes thousands of miles of streams and brings massive environmental damage to mountain communities.

… produces dirty air, acid rain and contaminated land and water … childhood asthma, birth defects and respiratory diseases that take nearly 25,000 lives each year.

“Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” – James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientistThere are far cleaner and cheaper ways to meet America’s energy needs. Yet industry apologists are spending millions of dollars to block clean energy solutions and persuade Americans that they can keep using coal without the consequences.

…

Green technologies and renewable fuels will create millions of good-paying jobs, … reduce dangerous pollution and help fight global warming.

Our friend Bill Campbell – our resident guru on Skype and other comms technologies, and always ahead of the curve – sent me this link to a PBS video about the new TouchTable

It’s part of the PBS/Wired Wired Science series, which is new to me.

At current prices – in excess of $90K – it’s going to take some time and/or big orders to drive prices down – but it’s one impressive tool.

TouchTable.

Chicken labeled “Natural” can contain salt, and lots of it: 200 to 400 mg sodium per four-ounce serving – almost as much as in French Fries. One third of all fresh chicken sold in the US is “plumped” with salt-water. Real natural chicken contains 45 to 60 mg sodium per serving. According to Melinda Beck at the Wall St. Journal, (click here) and the Truthful Labeling Coalition, chicken producers can inject up to 15% of saltwater and seaweed into the birds and call them “natural” because saltwater and seaweed are natural, even tho they don’t naturally appear in chickens.  $2 Billion worth of Salt Water in $40 Billion worth of Chicken.

The industry says “People like salty chicken.” Well, we like cigarettes, French Fries, and soda, but that doesn’t make them healthy or natural.

PARIS — A French official said Wednesday that search teams had located the beacon of a flight recorder from a Yemeni airliner that crashed Tuesday in the Indian Ocean, apparently killing all but one of the 153 people on board.

via Black Box From Yemeni Jet Is Found – NYTimes.com.

Popular Logistics is about Policy, not Politics. However, it takes success at politics in order to implement policy. In terms of Policy, Popular Logistics thinks that the United States could, and should, move to 100% clean energy in 10 years (click here, here, here, or here).  However, in a democracy, important policy is made by compromise, and while will, as Al Gore once said, is a renewable resource, the public doesn’t seem to have the will to embrace wind, solar, geothermal, marine current, and negawatts. Thus Waxman-Markey. While we agree with those who say that the bill doesn’t go far enough, fast enough we view Waxman Markey as a good start.

While it allows 2 Billion Tons of offsets each year and while the goal for 2020 is 17% below 2005, while it mandates a minimum of 12% clean energy by 2020, the law is comprehensive and as noted, it is a start.

To those who say it is expensive, the costs of doing nothing are the cost of destroying Appalachia, the costs of more coal ash disasters like the 12/22/08 flood in Tennessee, and the costs of adding more arsenic, mercury, and radioactive particles and carbon from coal. These costs are higher, much higher than the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of 18 cents per day (Cited Paul Krugman, NY Times – Click here for PDF).

The law says a) we must move forward, b) we may move forward at a glacial pace, and c) we may move faster. We hope that America will move faster than the law mandates.  After all, the only thing that should move at a glacial pace are glaciers.

For a detailed summary of Waxman Markey, click here. For a high level overview, click here.

The hand is quicker than the eye – especially when the hand is invisible and the eye is closed or blind. The heavy hands of wisdom and authority must guide the invisible hand of desire without limits, just as a parent stops a child from grabbing too many cookies before dinner and a shop-keeper stops a thief from grabbing cookies it is neither entitled to nor willing to pay for.

Some call this Regulation. I call it Common Sense. (Click Here for “Why Economists Failed to Predict the Financial Crisis from “Knowledge @ Wharton.”)

9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal. By  Jason Kincaid at  TechCrunch.

Last night I got word that my parents had witnessed a tragic accident while driving in Northern California. I won’t get into the details, but suffice to say one person was killed and others were left bleeding, in various states of unconsciousness. Thank God my parents were not hurt in the accident, but they witnessed it first hand, as well as the disturbing aftermath.

Immediately after the accident, my parents and other witnesses began trying to dial 9-1-1. Attempt after attempt resulted in a busy signal. This isn’t unusual in the event of an emergency, as multiple dialers often tie up the lines to report the same incident. Except it seems that nobody managed to get through for far too long: emergency personal didn’t arrive for 20 minutes. The first officer to arrive at the scene said it took him two minutes to get there from the time he got the call. Which means that it took approximately 18 minutes for the news to reach him in the first place.

During a conversation with my father following the accident, he said one of the most profound things I’ve heard since I arrived in Silicon Valley: “Why is it that I can pull out my cell phone and call France or browse the Internet whenever I want, but I got a busy signal for 9-1-1 for 20 minutes?” I wish I had an answer for him.

In the United States, we’re taught from a very young age to call 9-1-1 whenever there’s an emergency. Something bad happens, you call that number, and someone on the other line will be there to help you. Getting a busy signal after dialing 9-1-1 is the closest thing you can have to a mental null set. It doesn’t compute.

But it’s apparently happening more often than most people would believe. A recent report in the Sacramento Bee says that more than 26% of all wireless calls to 911 in California are “abandoned” — in other words, more than a quarter of the people calling 911 hang up in frustration before they even get to talk to someone. In a world where we can interact with people across the world at a moment’s notice, I just don’t understand how one of the things we’ve always taken for granted can fail so miserably.

Now, I’ll be totally upfront and admit that I know relatively little about the way 911 dispatchers work. I am sure that the incident can be fully explained by a lack of staffing at the CHP center that routed the call, or maybe the fact that the accident occurred near a county line caused some jurisdiction issues. I don’t know what the reason was. But as far as I’m concerned, the discussion shouldn’t get that far. This is the kind of problem that we shouldn’t have allowed to form in the first place. It’s as if we’ve forgotten the fundamental reason why most of us keep cell phones with us at all times: to keep each other safe.

At its core, this is more a political issue than a purely technological problem: more money needs to be routed to the right places. But at the same time, there’s no denying that technology plays an important role here — the call routing systems could probably be made more efficient. Calling filters could be improved. Perhaps the system could detect when multiple phones were calling from the same area and inform callers that an accident had already been reported. Whatever the answer, things need to change. And given how upset we get over homepage redesigns and SMS fees, why not exhibit a bit of outrage when technology fails us in a matter of life or death?

In other words – the 9-1-1 system(s) in question are failing a basic test of network robustness: insufficient capacity/redundancy. Here’s a brief refresher on networks:

Several chapters of Paul Baran’s work at the RAND corporation, “On Distributed Communications,” which I understand to be the earliest articulation of the notion that redundant networks could be self-repairing and therefore highly resistant to attack, are available on the RAND website as Acrobat documents. Link to a list of available publications; and here’s a short bio from RAND:

An electrical engineer by training, Paul Baran worked for Hughes Aircraft Company’s systems group before joining RAND in 1959. While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet’s underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964.

Since the early 1970s as an entrepreneur and private investor, Baran has founded or co-founded several high-tech telecommunications firms. He is currently chairman and co-founder of Com21, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of cable TV modems for high-speed, high-bandwidth Internet access. He is also a co-founder of the Institute for the Future. Baran holds several patents and has received numerous professional honors including an honorary doctorate from his alma mater Drexel University (BS ‘49). He has a master’s degree in engineering from UCLA.

An excellent article – really a “must-read” for people who care about these issues – and to make sense of what Irwin Redlener has called “the immense mass of interlocking details” is “Expecting the Unexpected: The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy,” by W. David Stephenson and Eric Bonabeau, in the on-line journal Homeland Security Affairs.

The Sun Table – which has no moving parts, adjustable stainless-steel legs – and whose wooden frame is made of teak – comes with an inverter and internal battery. Four hours of direct sunlight, according to Sudia, will yield enough energy to use a laptop for hours via the battery. (Use the laptop at/on the table on a sunny day, and the the useful life will be more than four hours, of course).

Sudia Designs' Sun Table

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The current price is $2,200 and ships within 4 – 6 weeks of order.Our quick calculations suggest that – deductibility aside – this would knock about $30 per month from a New York City residential electric bill.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations based on data from the Public Policy Institute of New York State and Michael BlueJay, aka Mr. Electricity

Sun Table from Sudia Labs (Cross-posted at Caton Avenue). Via Solar Today (March 2008 issue).

To paraphrase John Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Keynesian.”

Jude Wanniski coined the term “Supply Side Economics” in 1976 as a reaction to  Keynesian and monetarist thought.

In his book, The Way The World Works, Wanniski argues against taxes. “Working together three men can build three houses in three months. Working separately, they can build three houses in six months…. If the tax rate on home building is 49% they will work together … if the tax goes to 51% they will suffer a net loss because of their teamwork and so will work separately in the barter economy and pay no taxes. … the government loses all the revenue and the economy loses the production…”

Here are Wanniski’s assumptions:

1. Working alone three men can build a total of six houses in one year. Working together they can build 12 houses in the same year.
2. A 4% change in the tax rate, from 49% to 51%, is significant enough to cause someone to “drop out.”
3. The government taxes people when they work together but not when they work separately.

These assumptions are flawed.

Working alone each gets 100% of the profits on two houses. Working together each gets one third of the profits on 12 houses. If the profit of each house is $100,000, then working alone each gets $200,000 per year. Working together each gets one third of $1,200,000, or $400,000.

The tax rate does not effect the decision. All things being equal, any intelligent person would rather pay 49% than 51%. But if the choice is 49% on $200,000 versus 51% of $400,000, every sane and intelligent person would choose to be taxed at a rate of 51% on earnings of $400,000 as opposed to a tax of 49% on $200,000.  In the first case he or she takes home $101,000. In the second case he or she takes home $198,000.

If the government will take a chunk of the profits of the houses the men build working together it will also take a chunk of the profits of the houses of the men working separately. Wanniski postulates that men can choose to work in the underground economy. Last I checked the mafia didn’t advertise jobs for wiseguys.

If you want a real economics book, check out Economics Explained, by Heilbroner & Thurow, or The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith.

Unfortunately, Wanniski was not just another crackpot with a web-site and publishing contract.  Wanniski is credited with teaching economics to Jack Kemp and, as an adviser to Ronald Reagan from 1978 to 1981, with designing the Reagan tax cuts. (click here for wikipedia).

While Wanniski wrote the book – literally – on neo-conservative supply side economics, he was critical of American policy toward Iraq. Wanniski wrote that UNSCOM inspectors found and destroyed all of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, with the help of Saddam’s regime in the months following the first Gulf War, and never found  WMD’s in Iraq after November 1991 . Wanniski not only recognized the prospective importance of the Iraqi WMD question before other journalists, he argued correctly that Iraq didn’t have any WMD and stated that the U.S. would never allow UNSCOM to end the inspections regime no matter what Iraq did.

He vocally opposed the impending US War with Iraq at the beginning of 2003. On October 27, 2004, he publicly denounced George W. Bush, saying that “Mr. Bush has become an imperialist — one whose decisions as commander-in-chief have made the world a more dangerous place”. Eventually Wanniski endorsed John Kerry.

Two six-year-old children caused emergency services to be called out in Oelde, Germany, yesterday. They had taken an old computer case, with a radioactivity symbol and warning notice that they had printed, affixed to the side, to create a “nuclear reactor”.

via Six-year-olds trigger emergency response with toy nuclear reactor in Germany – Wikinews, the free news source.

The boys abandoned their plaything in the street to take a break at home. It was encountered by a passer-by, who called out the emergency services. The children later returned to their play to find the street cordoned off by police and fire services, who were warning surrounding residents to stay in their homes via local radio.

It was not until later, when the children’s parents read news reports on the Internet of the incident, that it was realized that the children’s play “nuclear reactor” had been the cause of the incident.