Here’s an ad for a book for children, say 4-to-7-year-olds, called “Computer Engineering for Babies.”
As a marketing guy, I have to mention that the name “for babies” is a terrible idea. What child wants to be demeaned? What parent wants to demean his child?
When I’m introduced to a kid who looks like he could be five, I might ask him, “How old are you? Six? Or seven?” The kid goes away with a big smile.
That smile is called “marketing.”
In his book on operant conditioning, Walden Two, B. F. Skinner writes (and I paraphrase), “We can agree that love is better than hate, that peace is better than war, and that productive energy is better than neurotic sloth.”
Now, this was offered at the time to justify the “engineering” of society, a concept that was popular among the mid-20th Century intellectuals. It was especially interesting to the dystopian novelists of the time, like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, who pointed out that such an operation could produce some really adverse effects.
That notwithstanding, having agreement of top-level concepts among the peoples of the Earth sounds like a good idea.
There is a problem, however, i.e., it ain’t happening.
A good example is murderous dictator, and now war criminal, Vladimir Putin. There was a day that honorable people did not support the world’s lawless thugs. That day is no more.
Now, Donald Trump leads an entire array of Republicans who regard Putin very highly. The Russian autocrat is revered by the “America first” folks who express their admiration; many grassroots conservatives agree with Trump that Putin is “savvy.”
I could say that God is better than Satan, but I’m sure that if I wait a few years, that will be controversial too.
I just got off the phone with a gentleman who is representing a solution in small vertical axis wind turbines (HAWTs). He claims that they produce 310 watts per square foot. Using this handy wind calculator, we find that this would require a steady breeze of 54.1 mph, which exists nowhere on this planet.
Another claim: 11 MW per acre (compared with the big horizontal axis wind turbines that represent virtually 100% of the wind power today, which he says require 15 – 20 acres apiece and produce perhaps 3- 4 MW).
OK, imagine wind blowing across an acre of land, 207 feet on each side, running into a row of 8 foot tall HAWTs, so the cross-section is 1659 square feet. Once again pulling up our wind calculator, we find that producing 11 MW requires a wind speed of 149.2 mph. That sounds like a real problem to me.
When I wrote this about the meme here, “Yes. Bring back the conman,” a reader asks: Have YOU ever conned someone or misrepresented your intentions?
All this grabs the attention, but will anything come of it?
A reader sent me a roster of each of the 46 U.S. presidents and said, “Here’s a list of the presidents who were not criminally charged, let alone convicted and incarcerated.”
True, but Trump is the only one who attempted to overthrow the federal government of the United States. We’ll see if that isn’t worth something.
What Nobel laureate Robert Reich suggests here makes sense. But sadly, rationality plays a very limited role in the minds of West Virginia voters.
Yes, too many of them are ill and poor, and they travel around on infrastructure that resembles something out of the mid-20th Century. But here, their defining characteristic is that they suffered through a low-quality education, which is the linchpin that makes the election of people like Joe Manchin possible.
Here’s a Jeopardy-style answer/question for you. In the category Geoengineering:
It’s the percentage of the incoming solar radiation that we must reflect back into space in order to stop global warming dead in its tracks.
Correct response: What is 1%?
That sounds doable, doesn’t it? And it’s urgent too. Neither the private sector nor our world governments are making anywhere near adequate progress towards decarbonizing our grid-mix, and thus, with each passing year, we continue to experience the slow but certain increase in the frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters: floods/hurricanes, wildfires, and desertification/droughts, not to mention the loss of our land masses due to sea-level rise.
OK, so let’s look at another Jeopardy answer/question. Same category (more money):
It’s the number of different major modalities of geoengineering currently being investigated and computer-simulated by the world’s top atmospheric scientists.
Correct response: What is 6?
OK, but what exactly does that mean? Due to the limited understanding of geoengineering that most of us possess, when we think about the subject we tend to conjure images of shooting reflective particles high up into the stratosphere, but we are (rightfully) concerned about the unintended consequences, and we shudder to think about additional dangers imposed by the frailties of human judgment in a highly political and less-than-rational world: even if everything goes according to plan, who should control our planet’s thermostat?
Fortunately, one of the other five modalities takes a fundamentally different approach and poses no threat whatsoever in terms of possible unwanted outcomes.
It’s called “Tropical Cloud Generation,” and it carries with it additional benefits, including the virtual elimination of hurricanes and the nourishing of our oceans. I hope you’ll take a few moments to learn about it here, from the website linked above.
If you’d like to take an active role in moving this forward, or even if you’d simply like to gather more information, please let me know by leaving a comment, or hitting the “contact” button.
I look forward to hearing from you, as always.
Most of America agrees that Madison Cawthorn is a human disaster, but this article of the 14th Amendment cannot apply to someone merely accused of having participated in an insurrection. In fact, that would violate the 5th Amendment’s presumption of innocence.
Like it or not, we need to let the process roll forward. Eventually, we will have charges brought against Cawthorn and the rest of the top-level traitors who attempted to overthrow the United States government, and we’ll have convictions in place.
At that time, they will have far greater problems than being banned from holding public office. We will have colonized Neptune before they get out of prison.
The top 1% has proven itself amazingly effective in convincing working class Americans that their woes are rooted in things like loose border control, political correctness, big government, and the other boogeymen associated with the Democrats.
Guess what the rich think about the slogan: Tax The Rich. And give them credit for arranging the belief system of those in the lower half economically, who currently would no more approve of tax hikes for billionaires than they would elect Vladimir Lenin to the White House.
Moreover, addressing this misunderstanding is no easier than correcting wrong ideas in epidemiology, climate science, or any of the other subjects in which massive ignorance is so strongly entrenched.
This started to go the wrong way under Reagan, who lowered the top marginal tax rates from 70% to 28%, and paid for it by taxing the social security benefits that the working class had toiled its entire adult life to earn. Yet when he left office in 1989, the common American considered him a hero.
Wish I had better news for these people, and for our nation as a whole.
This is certainly very solid news.
