Guilt is exhausting

Yet again the media is full of how women are being abused and oppressed. This has led to another round of "why aren't there more women in IT?" and the usual response that it must be because IT is full of misogynists. After decades of being beat on and told that I'm a bad person and that I'm to blame for all the troubles that women have in society, I've had it. I'm no longer able to feel guilty about it. In fact, I'm tired of being used as a scapegoat. I've been in the business for a long time and I've never seen women treated in the discriminatory way that I keep hearing about. These days when somebody starts spouting off that particular line of Politically Correct bullshit, I no longer am willing to give them a lot of credence on anything else they may have to say.

Yeah, there has been a decrease in the number of women in IT and I don't think it is a good thing. There are a lot of factors leading to the change. There was an interesting article publish by the Association of Computing Machinery about a year ago that went into a lot of the social reasons. It was very un-PC. At this point the IT business is no longer a level playing ground for women, instead they have a lot of advantages and they still want more. This sort of behaviour is starting to lead to a strong backlash, which is also going to be a bit unpleasant.

I'm happy to treat women as equals, it just seems that's not what they actually want and they probably aren't wired for. Too bad, it's their loss.

A nice fantasy versus the harsh reality

On one of the mailing lists I'm on (yeah, antique technology, but I've been on it since the mid-1990's) someone commented that if anyone understood how the female brain actually worked, they should write a book on the subject. So I recommended Athol Kay's "Married Mand Sex Life Primer". Wow, I wound up receiving an incredibly vitriolic response about how abusive whole idea was.

So I guess there are still a lot of people out there who don't want to know the truth even though they say they do. They still think gender is merely a social construct. The reality is that men's and women's brains really are wired differently. Understanding how the female mind works can be used to do some very abusive things. It can also be used to provide a very comfortable and happy environment for a woman. Not understanding it is a major contributor to the sky high divorce rate we see today. Being an asshole is currently very effective, being a nice guy is typically a losing strategy in the mating game. However, I think and Mr. Kay has certainly demonstrated that there is a middle ground between being an abusive asshole and a unattractive milktoast, that's what I strive for and I hope others do the same. Just because I know how to do terrible things doesn't mean that I'm going to them, knowledge itself is neither good nor evil, it's how we apply that makes the difference.

Forward into the past...

Yet again there is more and more press about the plight of women in Afghanistan. There is the unspoken assumption that they deserve special treatment just because they are women. That's a very 19th century attitude, which I don't really have a problem with, at least as long as that attitude applies across the board. If we are going to insist on some of the older gender roles, like that of men protecting women, I'm going to insist on the other roles, like women being wives and mothers.

Is this likely to happen? Not a chance. Besides the feminist opposition, there's also that massive drop in consumption that would result in there being fewer total households. I don't think the Powers That Be would ever accept that happening. Politicians and economists would scream about the loss of GDP, even when the average quality of life is improving. Even worse, if we managed to go back to the 19th century values of having extended families, consumption would drop even more. In addition, this sort of return to older values would reduce te need for government assistance. Given that government agencies areloathe to give up any funding or power, there is another opponent to older social structures.

Individual rights versus the survival of a society

I am having a great deal of trouble reconciling my deeply held beliefs about individual rights versus the survival of our society. I am not going to go into a lot of details at this point because they could easily make it very difficult for some people to think rationally about the overall subject.

I see our society based very strongly on individual rights. I grew up during the Cold War and I remember the American view of the Soviet Union.

Yet I am looking at a number of things that are happening and I do not think our society will survive them. Lots of changes, some of which I think will lead to the death of our society.

I am troubled and conflicted.

But what about Global Cooling?

Ok, I am really fed up with the fearmongering and the constant reinforcement of the "humans are evil" meme that goes along with the topic of Global Warming. A bit of analysis shows that there is a lot of money in pushing the whole Global Warming idea. From a media standpoint, Americans are real suckers for being made to feel guilty. From a scientific standpoint, most folks in the weather and climate research arena are just as scared by the current economic problems as anyone else. There's major research money to be had by siding with the doomsayers and very little funding for standing up and saying "wait, the problem may not be that bad". In fact, the (formerly) respected scientists who have done that have also been villified.

So, here's a fact. The actual amount of warming is small and really isn't visible in temperature graphs until a fair amount of data smoothing is done. Then it is visible. If there wasn't a lot of press about it, the vast majority of people wouldn't know it is happening.

Here's another fact. The majority of greenhouse gas emissions are not anthropogenic. This means that humans will need to make major changes in the amounts that we generate to make even a minor change in the overall emissions. Even then, a volcanic eruption in someplace unlikely such as Finland can vastly overshadow all the reductions in emissions that humans are accomplishing.

Here is a big question: Why is no one standing up on the subject of Global Cooling? We know it can be done.

How? Here are the three basic ways:

1. Reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the ground
2. Increase the amount of solar energy reflected from the ground
3. Increase the amount of radiative cooling at night.

I'm going to go over these in reverse order, because it's my blog and that's what I want to do.

Increase the amount of radiative cooling at night

Sounds pretty silly, huh? Well, the ancient Egyptians knew how to make ice in the desert and this is just more of the same. Take a pan of water, insulate it from the ground and let it face a clear, cloudless sky. By morning, ice. Basically it is just a matter of radiating heat into a very cold sky.

So, what would happen if there was a much larger temperature differential? Well, if you take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body_radiation the amount of energy radiated increases to the 4th power of the temperature differential. So, pumping a really hot working fluid through what is effectively a solar thermal collector can cause global cooling. Do I think it would be practical? Not really, but there has been at least one science fiction story written with the exact mechanism as a key part. Of course, the amount of cooling needed isn't all that great either.

Here's another idea. Clouds at night reflect the majority of heat being radiatied from the ground right back at the ground. This is why cloudy nights are often much warmer than cloudless nights. We already know how to do cloud seeding, so how about scheduling seeding operations for the early evenings? Technically, it could make a very measurable difference. Politically, the wars over water rights would start up again. Still, it is an idea.

Increase the amount of solar energy reflected from the ground

A number of years ago I made a motorcycle trip across part of the southern US in July. Yeah, not my brightest moment, but I was headed to a Mensa Annual Gathering in Alabama. Interstate the whole way. Asphalt paved Interstate for most of it. The heat really hurt me. It wasn't until a few years later that I read about the temperatures on that kind of road can easily exceed 140F.

So, maybe concrete is a much better idea than asphalt. In addition, maybe we could promote lighter covered ground cover. Kudzu is pretty dark green and probably soaks up a lot of energy. Maybe choosing more reflective roofing materials could help. None of these will make a big difference, but remember that the amount of warming to offset is also small.

Realistically, I don't think there's much that can be done here, but I felt it was important to include it as one of the places that a change could be made.

Reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the ground

Here's a place where I think a big difference could be made. Humans have already made some huge unintentional changes in the amount of energy being prevented from heating the ground. Just take a look at temperature graphs starting on September 12th, 2001. Remember what wasn't happening then? No air traffic.

So, what if a deliberate effort was made to create high altitude clouds? Most of the airline traffic tends to be below 40,000 feet. What's the optimal altitude for clouds to reflect solar energy? I don't know, that's a good question for folks a whole lot smarter than I am, but I do know that planes capable of flying above 60,000 feet have been designed and built for over 50 years. And instead of just the exhaust from jet engines, I suggest dumping tons of water vapor.

Here are some ideas and numbers to go with them:

• Build a UAV with a fairly good autopilot. Being unmanned means. that there is no pressure vessel to worry about and the certification is going to be much simpler. People's lives aren't at stake, so cost reducing them to the point of losing 1% of the fleet per year is perfectly reasonable.
• Go talk to Burt Rutan (or even his brother, Dick). I'll bet he could deliver a working prototype for under $2M.
• Tool up for mass production of 1,000 to 10,000 aircraft and I'll bet the price will be between $100K & $250K. Compare that cost to the cost of other climate protection approaches.
  
• The planes don't have to be designed for travel. They don't need to fly around Mach .8. Something designed to fly around 80 knots indicated (I'm not going to try to convert that to a Mach number at FL600) would be just fine. In fact, if they have to be launched the evening before just to get up to altitude by sunrise, that's just fine.
• Jet engines are most efficient at high speeds and high altitudes. For something like this a propellor driven plane would be a better idea. Possibly even one with a piston engine instead of a turbine.
  
• These planes can operate out of the middle of nowhere, it doesn't take a big airport near an urban center, so operational costs can be low.
  

So, in summary, maybe some of these ideas would work and maybe they wouldn't. But unlike the masses out there, I am saying "Wait a minute! Maybe we can do something to counter Global Warming". Not only that, we can do it starting now and on a tiny (in government terms) budget. Forget running around saying the sky is falling, go buy an umbrella.

It will be interesting to see if anyone comments on these ideas.

Thinking about thoughts

Life is change. I am writing here what I currently think and believe. Some day I may think somethings totally different.

I hope that I will not lie to myself, so I hold the right to change my mind. I have been wrong in the past. I expect I will be wrong in the future. I am more interested in the truth than I am in being right.

It's late. I'm stone cold sober. This is a place where I express uncomfortable truths and harsh opinions. I do not exempt myself from them.

Where are we going?

There is a fairly well known speech by Martin Niemoller

THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

I bring this up because I am a rather staunch Constitutionalist and I continue to be appalled at the American publics acceptance of the decision that it was okay to make people disappear. This is like a nightmare out of the Soviet Union of the 1960s. Yet people think it is just fine. The idea of a writ of habeus corpus dates back to the Magna Carta and is a cornerstone of the US Constitution. To decide that it doesn't apply to some people is unacceptable.

Why do I bring this up? Well, I was talking to a very upper middle class Black woman in her late 50s. Very nice lady, very intelligent (Mensa member), quite well educated and extremely liberal in her political leanings. She seemed to think it was just fine, because it would never apply to her. She was also quite happy with the idea of denying political dissidents the right to travel (it has happened, look it up) because it obviously would not affect her. Since she grew up in the days of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., I am amazed that she now thinks that it is just fine for people just like the ones who fought for her equal rights to be denied the right to travel.

To build upon that, I wonder if she is familiar with the Supreme Court decision of the early 1960s that affirmed that people have the right of association. This case was based upon a lower court order for the NAACP to turn over their membership roles to law enforcement. The Supreme Court decided that it would have a chilling efffect on freedom of speech. From a modern standpoint the NAACP looks rather noncontroversial, but I lived through those years. I lived in the South and I can assure you that they were, at the very least, seriously rocking the political boat.

I still believe in those rights. For everyone. I believe that people and groups who I dislike intensely still have the right to exist, to meet and to express their opinions. Just because someone is named "Mohammed" doesn't give anyone else the right to prevent them from speaking and living and travelling freely.

There are bad people in the world, but I am more afraid of those who would take away my rights in the name of protecting me than I am of those who would attack me and my country.