Organizing Principles

The Sandy recovery & reflection period started one month ago. Four weeks ago today our power came back on, and like the flip of a switch, we changed from spooked, cagey, flinty survivors to 'what's on Bravo?'

The big take-away for me is how the storm is viewed in the context of global climate change, or as some prefer Global Weirding. It is shocking to me that climate change has been so frequently connected to discussions about this storm, when it wasn't so long ago when to do so was taboo and politically dangerous. So many New York Times stories have been written about basically proclaiming New York City doesn't have a chance in a the coming warmer world. Last week's Sunday Review literally prepared New Yorkers for the day when they will have to move their city to Rochester. Bloomberg's surprise endorsement of Obama the week of the storm was directly linked to climate change. And his rebuffing of plans to protect the city with sea walls stems from his long held view that we need to stop the climate from changing by changing our behaviors (he needs to devote his time out of office to figuring out how we have to change our economy to facilitate that goal). Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo supports the idea of building protections. Both men attribute storms like Sandy to climate change.

Even Obama makes the connection. He prefaces his statement by saying that "no single weather event can be attributed to climate change", but he goes on to talk about the importance of increasing our efforts to reduce human impact on climate change. This would have been impossible for a politician to say a few years ago.

[In a 4th season 2002 episode of The West Wing, there was a story line about a flash flood in Alaska that killed some people. The liberal writers had one of the liberal characters claim this was "the first death attributed to global warming." And in the episode this caused a backlash and mini-scandal. As usual it was the writer's way of representing politicians as they should be, not as they are.]

I remember the feeling the climate change acceptance shift as it was happening, between the 2004 and 2008 elections. We rapidly switched from the Dick Cheny "the American way of life is not negotiable" attitude to where we couldn't talk about these things except in the most left of liberal circles, to the broad understanding of the public that the American way of life is going to change whether we negotiate or not. It was a shocking, palpable shift in the public perception, and one that was already underway well before Obama and the democratic senate passed their cap and trade bill. Whether it will ever become law may depend on a few more years of droughts, fires and storms, and how much the American people really want to change their economy.
      
In eight years living here (and all the previous years of my life) I never had to prepare for a hurricane--until Irene last year and Sandy this year. There is an emotional acceptance among people that this may well happen every year from now on. And if it does happen in September or October of 2013, the modifier "new" will be lopped off of the oft-quoted expression, and we will just have "normal."

We are able to get gasoline without any wait, but the rationing is still in effect. Im told if you ask nicely or refuse to leave, they will let you buy gas even if it is not your day.

As of Friday I had kids without power. Hopefully Newark is back online for all the students. This is exam week.

Allright, the vast majority of NJ plates have 6 figures: 4 letters and 2 digits. The two digits form one number--76 or 15 or 03, etc.

Christie only has to change his EO to say that the number on the plate, being odd or even, determines the day the driver can gas up.

What to do about out of state plates that have more than 2 digits... that will take more subsections of the EO to figure out.

For those of you outside the region, there is def a need for rationing if only to keep people from flocking to the gas stations. We live three blocks from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, which is closed. All the gas stations along that road are closed--either because of power outage or more likely because police do not want people on that road.

I have a third of a tank of gas, and was thinking of gassing up. But there is a logistical problem. The rule is during even days of the week only people whose license plate ends in an even number can fill up. On odd days like today--Nov 3--only people whose license plate ends in an odd number can fill up.

Here is the problem. My license plate, and every NJ car that I studied as I walked Samson around the block, ends in a letter instead of a number. I probably checked over 100 cars. One website said that if your license ends in a letter, then you fill up on odd days. But many other websites are simply reporting the rule as if every plate ends in a number.

Sidebar: On thursday night I over heard a guy at a bar on his cell phone say the following: "I'm not going to go down there and commander the gas station. That's not my job."

The Hamilton Park area of Jersey City has power as of Thursday at 11:30am. The neighborhood is getting back to normal, but there is a tension in the air. Police, fire and ambulance sirens are heard almost every hour. At night blue and red police lights triwl up and down the street--I assume the police want their presence to be known. When the streets were dark there was a 6pm curfew. And I was glad to have it. There is a sense, even now, that there might be desperate people out there. There is talk of mobs of people going to town hall in Hoboken where there is still power out and standing water in buildings and streets.

Gasoline is another issue. I dont need to drive anywhere until next week, but there are long gas lines at the operational gas stations. The problem is that only half of the gas stations in New Jersey are operational due to power outages or other problems. The Obama administration has ordered the military to truck in gasoline, and they have removed restrictions on tankers.

One thought on the tankers: Ive sailed my little boat out in the New York harbor section known as the Parking Lot. They call it that because tankers have to park out there on moorings or anchors before comming in to off load their cargo. First of all, the tanker captains have to be replaced with a harbor captain because the skills that brought the tanker across an ocean are not the same as needed to navigate  the harbor. But gasoline and oil tankers are know to stay out there for months at a time waiting for gas prices to rise. The companies pay the tanker crew to sit out there for weeks and months because of the profits they will reap by an extra 10 or 20 cents on the gallon. Not sure if that is happening out there now. And if it is, not sure who would have the authority to make them move.  

Hello.

Engineers of complex technology should be studying the Fukushima nuclear disaster for many reasons, but one of the most important reasons has to do with belief. According to a New York Times article (6/25/11) the Japanese utilities, government and citizens all succumbed to the mass delusion that their nuclear plants were “absolutely safe”—this phrase is repeated so many times in the article that you get a strong sense of the propaganda that must have been disseminated in Japan for years.

The article traces the nuclear “safety myth” to Japan’s post-World War II restructuring. Japan did not have oil or other natural resources, a big part of why it was defeated. Despite being hit by two atom bombs, nuclear power must have looked like a free lunch card, assurance that they would not slip backwards into the old world development status of primitive Pacific island cultures. But if nuclear power was the only way Japan would survive as any kind of respectable world power, then, by god, nuclear power would just have to be safe. Too much national identity was at stake for it not to be. And once the island nation was peppered with 54 plants, to paraphrase Dick Cheney, nuclear safety was not up for negotiation.

This mindset led to a rash of irrational, if very familiar, bad decisions. The (Japanese!) utility did not invest in radiation-capable robots. At Fukushima, when workers needed to pump water to cool the reactor, the pump they used had to be imported from China. The plants have robots of course, but they are positioned in the visitor centers and on tours for the education and amusement of tourists. If you go on one of these tours you will also see many friendly anime cartoons extolling the virtue and safety of nuclear. You will be guided by an attractive, childbearing-age female tour guide, the likes of whom were hired at Japan plants after Chernobyl to specifically ally the fears of mothers and prospective mothers worried about radiation birth defects.

A misleading PR offensive is one thing, but to willfully neglect to amass safety technology and tools that will be needed in the event of an emergency strikes me as a new page in the history of engineering disasters.

The “Safety Myth”, like all myths, was accepted on pure faith. Therefore, any emergency contingency plan directly challenged that faith. Since the faith stood on a shaky foundation to being with, everyone who clung to it was overly defensive about it. Any thought of the nuclear plans not being “absolutely safe” needed to be ignored at all cost.

I can relate. I used to feel the same way about my old Subaru Legacy, especially after she passed the 225,000 mile mark. What’s that grinding sound? What’s that odd smell? Nothing, absolutely nothing!

The problem is that the accident always hits eventually. With complex interactions between components that are tightly coupled (see Figure 9.1, Normal Accidents, Charles Perrow, or below) you will have an accident within the system. It is mathematically guaranteed to happen. The accident might not blow the plant to kingdom kum, but there is no guarantee that it won’t either.

Engineers are familiar—or should be—with the idea that redundant safety measures don’t necessarily make the system safer. They add more layers of complexity, give something else an opportunity to break down, all while lulling the human operators into a false sense of security. The Japanese appeared to have skipped this step. They created their false security without paying for the safety systems. Belief is a powerful way to circumvent the laws of physics, until it’s not.

David Linden’s book The Compass of Pleasure describes the latest neuroscience research on the medial forebrain pleasure circuit (interesting, these computer metaphors for brain anatomy).

One fascinating entropy-related finding is that the pleasure circuit activates with less intensity after each subsequent stimulant dose. A thirsty Cro-Magnon man roaming through the Sahara comes upon a stream and takes a long drink. The sandy water is the best thing he has ever tasted. A thunderstorm of pleasure is flashing inside of his head. He takes another drink. The cold water runs down his throat and seems to spread its coolness throughout his entire body. He takes a third drink. The inside of his mouth is saturated, no longer parched. But after the fourth and fifth slurp, he begins to taste the imperfections. He feels the sand in his teeth and the back of his throat. The water doesn’t seem as cold and refreshing. It doesn’t taste quite so watery. He takes one last drink for good measure and moves on.

A modern corollary is the fancy New York restaurant that only serves small steaks (heresy most everywhere else in America) because, as the restaurateurs say—as if facts mattered when the size of a man’s steak is at question—after the twelfth bite the pallet is so deadened as to render the remaining bites useless. What we call pallet is nothing but the pleasure circuit’s sensors in the mouth.

What fascinates me is that the concept of entropy is imbedded deep in one of the most fundamental processes for how we interpret reality. This must account for the bedrock and universal human psychological/emotional concept of carpe diem, stopping to smell the roses, and the joys of simple pleasures. While the pleasure circuit itself ensured that our ancestors stopped to take that drink and was quenched by it, that they lusted for sex, that they relished the taste of fat and protein and sugar. But the diminishing pleasure return may have taught them to be self-reflective about those brief moments of heightened experience. The loss of pleasure may have started those early humans to think about their emotions, and—a small leap here—to think about their thoughts. This might have been one key to the evolution of human consciousness, the brain in all its self-aware glory.

A thermodynamics question: why did the pleasure circuit have to work this way? Why not have the fiftieth bite of chocolate butter cream cake taste as exquisite as the first? Apart from the answer that the Universe just doesn’t work that way, which we all feel intuitively (what would Heaven be for?), I hazard two interpretations. The pleasure circuit is beholden to the same laws of thermodynamics as anything else. It requires energy to produce that initial burst of pleasure, and it cannot be expected to maintain that any more than you can do an infinite amount of pushups.

A second idea: in order to function in the world, we have to be able to move on, especially from things that provide pleasure. We must learn to take in all substances and experiences in moderation. The fact that pleasure (happiness) doesn’t last, and that shoving that fiftieth forkful into our mouths actually leaves us unsatisfied and unhappy, teaches us not only the necessity of moderation, but the pleasure of moderation. And as has been catalogued on this blog already, moderation is what slows the degradation of energy in our bodies, our environments, or families, our societies.

To write this blog is to realize over and again this fundamental, universal, spookily pre-ancient truth.

Much of the book is also about addiction. Listen to a great interview with Linden on Fresh Air:

When I began this blog on energy depletion I knew that there would not be any topic that was off-topic, since there is not a single event, practice, belief or thing you can think of that does not epitomize the expenditure of energy, including he act of thought itself. But being an English Major I was especially excited to write about the different ways energy sources and usage is depicted in literature.

How is entropy—especially social entropy—handled by writers?

Let me kick off an Entropy Law summer-reading surfeit with the summer reading novel that inspired me with this idea several years ago. Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

What happened in Paris in the late 1780s and early 90s is a case study in misspent social energy. The hungering, oppressed masses in so much need of the basics for survival, witnessed the aristocratic few burning up all of France’s resources (milk for crème puffs, firewood to heat mansions, gold leaf wallpaper, in essence the entire economy) for their own needs and pleasures. This drove the commoners into the kind of sane madness that engulfs all societies when energy is likewise misspent. It is the trick of every government—democratic or dictatorship—to either balance the energy expenditure or disguise the imbalance (see Saudi Arabia). The Bastille became a symbol of the fools at the top stealing all the energy and oppressing the people who tried to take a little for themselves. Interesting that by the time the commoners stormed the prison, the government had already gotten smart to its symbolism and moved the convicts out (see Abu Ghraib). The place was mostly empty. But the act of breaking through a government-sanctioned wall also became a symbol, one that was repeated in greater, bloodier proportions (see Lybia, Syria).

The grisly image of the grindstone early in the third book is so horrific that I want to believe Dickens’ was exaggerating, but I secretly don’t want to know that he did, so I haven’t looked up the historical research. It is one of the most arresting images in the novel—perhaps second to the women knitting by the guillotine—but it is central when one is thinking about the social energies pulsing through the people committing the slaughter. The grindstone becomes a kind of engine on which the entire Revolution is run. For the commoners in Paris, the fact that it is spinning becomes reason to sharpen blades on it, and the fact that it is bloody becomes a reason to sharpen blades on it for one particular purpose. The energy that was being channeled into crème puffs and Versailles is being wrested back with each grinding turn.

The key passage for me (and the worldview of this blog) is Chapter VII of the second book, Monsignor in Town. It also happens to be a pair of beautifully constructed sentences:

“The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon the Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong.”

Does that ring any bells? From global warming denials to pension-budget chicanery, dealing with the effects of real energy depletion is hard work, requiring much cold-eyed sacrifice. It is far easier to cloak yourself in the “leprosy of unreality” and surround yourself with lepers. Until it’s not.

A recent David Brooks column declared that we are living in a progressive era, which he defined as a centralized government, alternately run by technocrats of both parties, spreading its centralizing tentacles into more and more decentralized systems. He suggests that this model has little public support and the public may eventually rebel French-Revolution style.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/opinion/20brooks.html?ref=davidbrooks

Assuming that happens, it is highly likely that whoever would take power in the aftermath would continue along the same centralizing path. America, and increasingly the world, is already fundamentally centralized in physical, social and psychological ways. The centralizing we see in government is a reaction to that reality, not its cause.

The problem is that decentralized institutions do not have decentralized effects—they impact the whole. Diverse financial services are not centrally controlled in this country but their complex interactions are tightly coupled, making financial catastrophes widely felt throughout the economy. Two skyscrapers are knocked down in Manhattan and people in Missouri become terrified.

In following columns Brooks wrote about the partisan theories to cope with this bipartisan reality. Liberals seem to be able to admit that more centralization is the solution, and that the only debate worth having is over how to make government more efficient and fair in the process. Conservatives seem to have a gut reaction against the fundamental centralization in our society and think that decentralizing government, dispersing power to local control, will somehow change the underlying reality. Put this way, I think the liberals are at least being intellectually realist, while the conservatives serve the purpose of putting the breaks on the centralizing apparatus. Not many republicans—there are a few—are recommending restructuring American society to pre-Civil War levels of centralization.

The fundamental truth of American connectivity remains. The result is that Washington becomes more centralized. The forces Democrats to become more activist to keep pace with the perceived needs of the system. It forces Republicans to become more uncomfortable with squaring their ideological position with the reality of governing. This is probably why partisanship has increased. If that is true, Washington may become truly broken and completely unable to function in the coming years no matter what white knight rides into town promising to change how Washington works.

My Dad likes to say that the Peter Principle has come to Washington: government has risen to its own level of incompetence. There is a sense that things have become too complex. And that a little entropy is not only in order, but inevitable.

One day, when I am my Dad’s age, the liberals and conservatives, out of sheer desperation, may come to a grand bargain: decentralizing the country form the bottom up, while sowing incentives that allow people living in the new decentralized America to have good quality of life. But if that happens there wouldn’t be a need for liberals and conservatives…

There are two lines of energy fueling the plot of Nolan’s second Batman film to its inevitable entropic unraveling. Interestingly, both these power sources (or power vents) are characters: Bruce Wayne and the Joker. This stands in contrasts to many movies, including Nolan’s Inception, in which the plot is driven primarily by plot.

Let’s start from Wayne. Nolan was able to dispense with the familiar origin story in Batman Begins, so by the sequel Wayne’s motivations have evolved. His need and use of Batman has detached from the seminal act of violence in his childhood and taken on a life of its own that perpetuates in the context of the real, present world of his adult life after the introduction of Batman into Gotham City. (Those of us that are adults, are our particular paths any different?) He is not so much avenging his parents, as he is adapting to the political and criminal realities that he has in fact instigated.

In The Dark Knight, Wayne is motivated by his ability to show his city a different way, that good people can stand up to the criminal corrosion that seems to touch everything. Before Batman, change was unthinkable. But by one person fighting for good—albeit in a very dramatic fashion—people start to think that it can be done. The few good cops, the few good lawyers, the few good politicians, and a few good Samaritans gravitate around the Batman example. They pull others into their orbit. Strength comes with numbers. Confidence comes with strength. The first result is that within a single year, all the once-fearless crime bosses are scared to go out at night. The second result is Harvey Dent, who ends up convincing the cops and the politicians to arrest all the crime bosses on RICO charges. This would have been unthinkable twelve months earlier, and the Mayor gives his nebbish reasons why it simply can’t be done—but Batman has shown that it can, and has cleared the way for Dent, his political and legal counterpoint, to take over his job and bring it into the light of day.

Truth be told, Batman may have only resulted in the arrest of a handful of criminals in that first year. But because of the demonstration that crime can be opposed, the rest of Gotham City stands up to do the rest.

This all happens—Batman wins, plans his retirement—before the Joker asserts himself to the people of Gotham. But because these things happened, the Joker then asserts himself with overwhelming force.

In the first act of the movie, Joker is a small-time bank robber with a little flair. The bosses and the cops don’t take him seriously, and the public doesn’t even know he exists. The character’s motivation has always been uncomplicated: sow chaos. In the film, this is his only desire. He does not want money, a fancy lair with an expensive car. We never see him eat, drink, sleep or satisfy sexual urges. He is chaos personified, which makes him a durable canvas to project generations of audience anxieties—in this case, terrorism.

Joker understands the major impediment to sowing chaos in Gotham City is Batman. His plan is simple: work with the crime bosses to kill Batman, so the city can return to its former chaotic state, in which he will play a large role.

At the end of act I, Joker is loosing. Dent has arrested all the bosses. The streets will be clean for a year and a half. Like he told the bosses, “Dent is only the beginning.” So in Act II, Joker dramatically increases his terrorism, adding a mega jolt of energy into the city that speeds up the flow of entropy toward chaos.

Next up in Mad World: rampaging elephants.

Frequently, evidence of the madness that our sped-up entropy unleashes on the world is most clearly seen in the animal kingdom. Animals are a collective canary in the coal mine. Their delicate ecologies are highly susceptible, and vulnerable, to the outputs of our high-energy societies. The costs and consequences (unintended or otherwise) of our energy consumption are typically passed down the food chain to the furthest reaches possible, to where the animals live. Most of us do not see the effects because we live in communities that have long ago been beaten back the wilds. Still, there are boarder lands. And in much of the developing world, the wilds are always close and constantly encroaching.

Case in point: have you heard all the reports about elephant rampages in India and Africa in the last couple years? In the northern state of Assam, where there are 5,500 wild elephants, 500 humans have been trampled to death in the 1990s; in all of India, between 150 and 200 humans were killed by elephants. In this decade, these stories are growing even more common. Scientists had to invent a statistical category to continue to monitor the problem: Human-Elephant-Conflict, or H.E.C. (http://future.iftf.org/2006/10/animal_attacks.html).

There are competing theories as to why there has been an increase in rogue packs of rampaging elephants. The ecologists say that a shrinking habitat, matched with a rise in elephant population has caused their deranged behavior. Local people in India claim that elephants have discovered a liking for rice beer called “laopani.” Indeed, last year a pack of elephants broke into a distillery, drank the beer and started a drunken rampage that tragically ended in an electricity plant, where all the animals were electrocuted.

Animal behaviorists have another theory. Elephants live in highly socialized, matriarchal societies. The females are the leaders and the teachers:

Poaching kills many of the elder mothers and matriarchs of the herds, leaving young elephant mothers without direction, help, or guidance. Many young elephants witness their mothers being shot, and this causes them much distress, just as it would a human. These young elephants must somehow mature without their mothers, and thus the male elephants, already prone to violent outbursts and general instability, grow uncontrollable and go on rampages. As the social structure of the elephants grows weaker and weaker, they will become more unstable and violent (http://www.helium.com/items/373699-elephants-and-their-complex-social-behaviors).

Here is a list of causes for annual elephant deaths in India:

120 poaching for ivory or meat
25 poisoned
20 cattle born disease
16 electrocution
10 hit by trains
10 miscellaneous

(http://www.elephantcare.org/humanele.htm)

Sped-up entropy, unsustainable energy use, passing the costs to others and other life forms instead of equalizing energy costs—all of these factors contribute to the rending of not just physical and ecological fabrics, but also the intricate social tapestries that rise out of them.

It is instructive to relate to the elephant’s plight on your own level. Imagine the most dire, chaotic disaster movie plot you’ve ever seen, where the order of society has completely collapsed, and the townspeople become crazed, insane, homicidal maniacs. That’s what it must feel like for these elephants—except there is now hero unaffected by the insanity. There is no hope.

It is a mad world out there.