Most Mexican crude oil exports halted due [sic] weather — Reuters

The bulk of Mexico’s crude oil exports were suspended on Monday as stormy weather in the Gulf of Mexico closed major oil ports along the southern Gulf coast and shut down a fifth of the country’s oil production.

Geez. I guess that’s bad.

Stormy weather in the Mexican Gulf last week killed at least 21 oil workers fleeing a damaged oil platform in life rafts and shut off oil exports for a couple of days.

21 people died? I don’t remember hearing about that.

It also left a 5.5 mile (9 km) streak of oil as 500 barrels of crude leaked from the damaged platform, environmental watchdog Profepa said. Officials in Tabasco state said the oil spill left sticky black stains along some 19 miles of coast.

Seriously? Was that last week too?

In yet more bleak news for the oil titan, residents of Veracruz state were raging at a pipeline spill last week of some 10,000 barrels of oil which by Monday was oozing down rivers and into the Gulf of Mexico.

10 000 barrels? Was that in the headlines? How did I miss that?

Pemex also suffered two crippling bomb attacks this year by leftist rebels on its crude oil and natural gas pipelines.

What? When?

So what other mass deaths, serial environmental catastrophes and rebel bomb attacks are going on in North America? I guess we won’t know unless they happen to slow US oil imports.

It’s been a long time since I checked xkdc. Half an hour of endorphin later, I am ready to pronounce xkdc the number one comic of my adult existence.

Relevant to my current courses, my past courses, my experience of my town, my experience of my current coarse load and zeppelins, other zeppelins, it generates perspective, reminds me of the the person I wanted to be in highschool (what was wrong with that guy?), and is just generally, you know, funny. All this in black and white line drawing, except sometimes in shaded colour. It also uniquely satisfies my odd, semi-geek craving for geek humour. Oh yeah, plenty of that.

(Orson Scott Card however can bite me.)

As much as I love the cross-genreness of James Randi, veteran debunker of paranormal claims, taking on overpriced speaker cable audiophile bullshit, I think he may have misjudged the scenario. Michael Fremer and Pear Cable are calling him on his challenge. The thing is, unlike spoon benders and aural viewers, some people really are redonkeykong good at hearing infinitesimal differences in the quality of sound reproduction. At least when they’re using ultra-high-end reference systems, under carefully calculated listening conditions, and after some practice. And Fremer doesn’t necessarily have to prove that the $7000 audio cables sound better than some cheapo throw-away $100 monster cables, just that he can tell which is which. As far as I know, there is no quantitative standard of “danceable”.

I’ll be sad if Fremer wins, and Randi has to pony up the million. I doubt if JREF will be able to raise another million to replace it, and the million dollar challenge is the main tent pole in the carnival of weirdo-baiting that he has conducted for so long. If he loses it will be more than usually satisfying, these audio snobs are really annoying, and clutter the music equipment reviews with so much black magic elitist nonsense as to make the signal-to-noise ratio worse than readable. (This is why I’m a fanboy of PSB/Paul Barton, who has spent a career applying gasp basic research to making cheap speakers sound pretty good. My desk is graced by a prized pair of LR1 speakers I got used for a fraction of the cost of the cables that will fill in as “offbrand” when Fremer tries to do his trick).

There is a third option, which is Randi setting the “win” conditions so tightly as it to make it debatable whether or not the contest was held in good faith. If that happens people will believe what they want to believe and JREF will keep it’s million and everybody will be suspicious of everybody. I hope that doesn’t happen, but given the ambiguity around “proving” something like this — how many times out of how many trials does Fremer have to spot the fancy cables? On whose system? Does he get to practice? Does he get to rest his ears in between trials? — I kind of expect it will.

A friend of mine was contracted by an anarchist bookstore to make some posters (yes, I have interesting friends and I’m proud of it). He came up with lots of great stuff but my favourite mostly just said “somewhere along the line we forgot that we made all of this stuff up.”

I think he’s right, and that’s why horse-race political coverage is depressing to me:

Painting the Suburbs Blue, Ed Dionne Jr., Washington Post

If you buy into the pan-universal cue break theory, then fine, all of existence is an ordered series of inevitable predeterminate cause-and-effect events, and all we have is the utterly convincing illusion that we have meaningful choice over ourselves and influence on the world around us. I don’t know many folk who take that perspective, but I sure seem to know some who think that politics and business are inevitable end-of-history monoliths that just are that way, and having opinions about how they should or could be is tragic naivety. But here’s the thing: we make all this stuff up. Not individually, and not always intentionally, so we can’t just decide how the world should be and it will become that. But we do have influence, we can participate in the ebb-and-flow that collectively emerges our social scenarios. Democrats aren’t winning in the former red states because of a wobbly orbit in the universe which can be observed and extrapolated out to predict the rest of the future, they are winning there because they are somehow convincing people to vote for them in elections. If the republicans change their behaviour they can swing that around. Income disparity isn’t growing because free markets are the nature of the world and that’s what happens in free markets, it’s growing because our choices have created a particular form of free-market-based society where disparity can grow. It’s also our choices which have prevented it from growing more. Collectively at least, this stuff is on us. Some people take that as precocious self-importance, but it doesn’t make it less true.

I’ve been watching the director’s cut of Das Boot, in shifts over the last four days. Next time I might leave the subtitles off so there will be no distractions from the visuals. Who knew one cramped, sweaty little iron tube could generate so many kick ass camera angles?

Don’t know if I’ll watch the end again though. That hurt.

The first time I saw Das Boot was also the director’s cut, but actually in a theatre, back in undergrad at Waterloo. That was the first and last time I’ve watched a movie with a honest to god intermission. There are references to a 5 or maybe 6 hour “TV version” of the movie. Maybe in another 10 years I’ll have a go at that. It would probably be worth it, it’s quite a film.

And here’s a link to a beta version of an .ogg format media player loaded with a chunk of a 1991 rave remix of the main theme from the movie.

It’s another video roundup.

Hipster Olympics:

This could have been a hollow concept but they flesh it out pretty well. From the scorn round: “If they only knew he was a 911 hero.” “They do.” From Poykpac, but don’t bother going to their website. It belongs to the increasingly common brand of website that has no content other than links to myspace profiles and youtube tag queries. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Outing the SQ at Montebello:

As if the Sûreté du Québec needed to build it’s profile as cynical any-means-necessary thugs, here’s some fun footage of disguised officers getting called out as agent provocateurs by union leaders at the Montebello protest. By fun I mean kind of depressing, in the same way that most aggressive cop:protester or peaceful protester:civil disobedience protester interactions are usually depressing. But it probably advances the cause, as most of these things eventually seem to do.

The SQ had a nasty rep pre Oka, and it hasn’t gotten much better since. I’m guessing the only thing they’ll learn from this is not to send their undercover types in wearing police boots (which they could have learned by watching Serpico anyway). Or perhaps the supreme court will insist they continue to wear their boots to protests as a clever scheme to balance the rights of protesters and security.

West/Galifianakis:

And if you haven’t seen the Zack Galifianakis/Will Oldham video for Kanye West’s Can’t Tell Me Nothin you best be watching that now son. You’re gonna wash out at the hipster olympics ifn you don’t and it truly ranks as one of the year’s sublime moments of hilarity. It’s also damn pretty, makes me nostalgic for grey county. I was impressed West would release it as an official video until I found out it was the alternate official video, but I’m still impressed. And if you like that, or if you don’t, Galifianakis has plenty of alternate comedy gold for youtubing. For instance:

Just listened to a fascinating talk by psychologist Philip Tetlock, who long ago initiated a multi-decadal programme to ask hundreds of experts to make hundreds of predictions each about future political events, and has ever since been measuring their observed success rates and analysing the implications. Among other things he finds that those who adhere tightly to a central philosophy or dogma and derive all their answers from that philosophy are likely to be more confident that the future can be predicted, more willing to attempt to predict it, and significantly less likely to successfully do so than those who don’t subscribe to any all-encompassing world view. Neoclassical economists and marxists alike bomb. He also makes the interesting point that the two camps may not be able to exist independently, but that they are in fact “mutually interdependent ecosystems” wherein the ideologues push big ideas as far as they can go (“or perhaps further”) and the non-ideologues are “scavengers” who pick up bits and pieces of the exploded big ideas and fruitfully reassemble them. He also points out that if it is the reconstituted frankensteins of larger ideas which is most successful in prediction, then there are implications for optimal diversity in team-building. Scott Page, paging Dr. Scott Page. He also also also makes the interesting observation that neither the ideologues nor the non-ideologues did much better in their predications than simple statistical null model predictors (‘nothing happens’, ‘change continues at the same speed and direction that it has been’).

All very interesting. Blog summary here, .mp3 recording here. As per usual, it’s a Long Now seminar.

Hey look, it’s my relationship to my society:

China is the 800 pound gorilla in every room in the house, but damned if you can see that gorilla clearly for looking at it. So it’s good there’s a trend towards China-centric media coverage in the west. Here’s some of my recent favourites:

1. Seed’s Mara Hvistendahl reports on the enormous environmental crises and solutions China is cooking up inThe China Experiment
   

   ‘”The Chinese advantage is that when they decide something, they can do very dramatic things,” says energy analyst Jim Brock. “In 2000, they took 26,000 heavily polluting minibuses off the road in a week [in Beijing]. They cut the pollution by 6 percent just by saying we don’t want these cars on the road. Try that in the United States—it wouldn’t work.”

   But the story here in Inner Mongolia is how the speed with which China implements projects can become a liability. In places like this, China in fact runs the risk of moving too quickly on the environment, with too little attention to the alliance-building and cooperation that are necessary to address an issue as gargantuan as climate change.

   Entire wind farms have been built so quickly that the infrastructure to connect them to the grid wasn’t integrated into the plan, and so they sit, huge aeolian props thumping into the constant breeze, powering nothing. In July 2005, turbines from an Inner Mongolian wind farm collapsed, killing six workers. A subsequent investigation revealed that the accident was caused by hasty deadlines and failure to observe construction standards.’

   In a world where degree is all nobody does bigandfast like China. I’m reminded (as usual) of William Gibson’s immortal novel opener:

   “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.”

2. Getting your head around matters of extreme degree often requires visual aids. Edward Burtynsky’s photos of industrial China do that for you. There’s a bunch of places to see Burtynsky’s photos on the interwebs (thankfully! lots of ‘serious’ photographers seem hell bent on consigning their efforts to arty obscurity by keeping their precious images off the tasteless plebian tubes), here’s a good one at Wired: Endless Assembly Lines and Giant Cafeterias; Inside China’s Vast Factories

   

   You bet I’m gonna see the accompanying documentary movie as soon as I can, and in the astronomically unlikely change I’ll actually be in the same vicinity as one of his gallery shows I’ll even go see it, because I saw the micro version on the internet.

3. Maybe the best of the three,China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?

   (scroll down, it’s in there)

   is Orville Schell giving a longnow seminar on the current social and political state of the Big One. Someone’s going to complain that I’m being colonial by pushing a white foreigner’s view of China as important, but hey I’m a white foreigner and when it comes to something as foreign (to me) as China, I need the on-ramp of a sympathetically contextualized point of view. Schell, a longtime resident and observer of the country, suggests that China is aggressively in-between revolutions, extremely neither this nor that, in an entirely liminal and furthermore practical state of national mind. From the “blog summary” of the talk:

   “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army.

   No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market.

   So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term.

   These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish.”

Here we go.

The media is bit by bit beginning to accept that the scientific consensus really is that serious human-induced global warming is a go. It has taken years for us to get to this point, and we’re not fully here yet anyway. One of my most grumpy moments this summer was on a day off in town, standing in a line up in a king sized grocery store, staring at a 3″ National Post headline claiming that global warming skeptics have been unfairly ignored.

Strangely enough, it hasn’t been very difficult to figure out what the scientific community has actually been thinking on this issue. Not for years. There is a single credible and comprehensive international body which coordinates global warming research and goes to great lengths to assemble and summarize findings on the topic. I can’t offhand think of any other major science-related issue that has been made as transparently easy to research.

But I guess that wasn’t enough for the press. They could hardly be expected to, you know, read the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change’s reports. They had stories to write and deadlines to meet. Poor buggers. It must be a real existential challenge, keeping a sense of reality when you are charged to make it up without reference to it on a daily basis.

I’m not complaining here about the editorial position of journalists or journalism outfits. People are free to dismiss the findings of the scientific enterprise if they have doubts about its integrity or value. The thing is, the media haven’t been casting doubt on the value of the science, they’ve just been routinely misstating that science, for years. For the most part it’s been to play up the uncertainty angle. Maybe it made for more exciting reading. You would think certain impending social and environmental disaster would be more interesting than uncertain impending social and environmental disaster. Guess not.

So the poor folks at the IPCC who have been writing these reports every few years have, I imagine, been getting more and more desperate each year at the lack of impact of their crucially important publications. The last one came out in 2001. The next one is due out in 2007.

Looks like the scientificos are trying some tactics this time round. In particular, individual scientists are giving interviews talking up the report as being wildly important and containing amazing information. Which it is and does, no doubt, it’s just not like an esteemed international scientific body to pimp it’s pubs with teasers and interviews.

There are, for example, some great lines in this newspaper article from CanWest:

”I can tell you for sure that the statements in that report will be far stronger than what existed in 2001. It will be flabbergastingly stronger.”

Holy crap, that’s a lot stronger. Let’s hope the brave new edition of the report will be enough to do it. And let’s hope that if it is action-jam-packed with unequivocal statements of flabbergasting strength, that they will be interpreted for what they are: the highly unusual result of the highly unusual situation in which the level of doubt around a scientific question has drained almost completely away; and not for what they aren’t: evidence that the scientists have lost objectivity and are making personally motivated overclaims.

I guess we’ll see. If anybody pays attention.