LifeItself

We live in the Big Country Ranch neighborhood, south of the Austin City boundary, and five miles from a major road. It is safe to say that we live in the middle of nowhere.  The southwest side of our 15-acre property touches at least 500 acres of undamaged ("undeveloped") land that is one of the last refuges of wild life in this part of Texas.  We can hear coyotes, many coyotes, howling in the evening next to our home, and we get visits from the numerous wild turkeys, quails, armadillos, racoons, deer, lizards, tarantulas, scorpions, and snakes.  In fact, an armadillo family lives in a small cave next to our house, and a family of six or so racoons lives in the attic of a small utility house nearby. The smart racoons scoured a 7 inch round hole in the siding under the roof and adopted the attic as their family residence. We hear about sightings of mountain lions.

I own three guns: a handgun, a hunting rifle, and a pump shotgun.  I bought the handgun after my house was burgla…

My wife and I are in Australia, in Brisbane, a beautiful thriving city on the east coast, with roughly 3 million people in the metropolitan area that includes the paved-over beaches along tens of kilometers of a formerly pristine habitat in places that used to be the surfer's paradise and sunshine coast.  It is highly impressive what developers can do to a fragile coastal area by pouring millions of tons of concrete onto it and making a financial killing.  The biggest concrete enclave is called the Gold Coast for good reason.
Please do not get me wrong.  Brisbane is a splendid city with wonderful public transportation, universities, and restaurants.  In the 39-floor condo building, where we have stayed, all elevators are globally optimized to minimize electricity use, and all lights along the corridors are on motion sensors.  The windows are deeply tinted and open widely enough to provide a strong breeze through the rooms.  There is only one small air conditioner in the bedroom.   …

My wife and I are finishing a two week vacation in California and Washington State.  We reconnected with a bunch of friends in the Bay Area.  And on Friday, July 13th (not the full moon), my oldest son, Lucas, defended with gusto his Ph.D. thesis in agriculture at the Washington State University, and became Director of Thurston County Extension and Small Farms Faculty.  We are so proud of him!

People of all walks of life really like Lucas.  This is clear from the comments we overheard and a recent article about him.  The young Dr. Lucas will need all the good will of many to introduce agriculture to the legislators and public in the fast-growing Thurston County, and get funding for the numerous projects he wants to carry out.  Helping young farmers to grow organic crops and open new markets to them by creating necessary infrastructure will not be easy. Public funding for agriculture is very scarce these days, unless you are a 67 years old corn grower in Iowa, making millions regardle…

I want to write about many things that deeply disturb me. But if I did, most readers would not bother to read my sermons and others would be shaken and annoyed by their implications. So I'll limit myself to commenting briefly on the growing chasm between complexity of a modern society and inability of most everyone living in this society to grasp and follow its complexity. Converse is also true: Since we do not understand the complicated world around us, we resort to the simplistic, narrow, and random snippets we call "our opinions". Most of these snippets have little to do with reality, thus the gap between what is and how we perceive it keeps on widening.

Let's start from something light and uplifting. I keep on hearing good news about the various new sources of energy that will totally displace the existing fuel mix: "Genetically modified bacteria or viruses that produce enough liquid fuels to make crude oil production obsolete." Or "North Dakota is…

When I share with people my assessments of where the Earthlings are stumbling rather blindly, my listeners often say: "Oh, you are such a pessimist! What would you do differently?" My short answer is: "Stop, face reality, and think. Facing reality is not pessimism. Do not try to be a better, more obedient sheep, whose sheephood is certified by a Harvard et al. at a huge expense.

For those who have read and understood "Animal Farm" by George Orwell, let me remind you the fate of Boxer, a powerful horse, who dedicated his life to hard labor for the good of others, and was greatly admired by all animals. With his strong muscles and persistence, Boxer created the prosperous Animal Farm, but when his lungs gave out he was immediately sold by the ruling-class pigs to Alfred Simmons, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler.  The semi-literate animals were told that Boxer was being transferred to a hospital and later to a retirement house, where he would be able to rest and …

...As sheep, that step from forth their fold, by one,
Or pairs, or three at once; meanwhile the rest
Stand fearfully, bending the eye and nose
To ground, and what the foremost does, that do
The others, gath'ring round her, if she stops...

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto 14

Most economists make it all too easy to bash them. When I think of how eerily detached from reality the main stream of economics is, I also recall the situation with corn ethanol in 2005.  Only two U.S. faculty, Dr. David Pimentel and I, went public against the nonsense that was being propagated throughout the society by the ill-informed greens, scientists, lobbyists, economists, venture-capitalists, lawmakers, and almost everyone in the media.  We were both savaged at the time and for a few more years.  Now everybody shrugs their arms and says pretty much what we were saying all along. 

Today, Chapter 2 of the same nonsense, or the "second generation biofuels," is being closed at a great cost to …

Who would you rather believe, a renowned professor at BI Norwegian School of Management and consultant to IMF, The World Bank, the governments of Denmark, Norway, Canada and the U.S., etc., or your own lying eyes? If you follow the April 2012 issue of the World Oil, the good professor wins.

After having read the convincing "Peak Oil? - Not in Norway" piece in the World Oil, you may want to recalibrate your senses by looking carefully at the four graphs below. Click on each one of them if you want to see a high-resolution image.
Oil production rates from the North Sea and Norwegian Sea oilfields on the Norwegian continental shelf are a set of 65 approximately independent random variables. The total production from these 65 fields is then a random-sum process that yields a Gaussian distribution, in this context known as a "Hubbert curve" or "Hubbert peak." The thick blue line is the rate of oil production from Ekofisk. The Ekofisk production curve has two …