LifeItself

 I have been thinking about how to capture current craziness that is unbearable, way up from the usual level of having been insufferable for the last five years.  The problem with intelligent people, a saying goes, is that they think people think.  This is demonstrably false for at least one half of the global population, venting their grievances, tribalism and anger in real blood baths or on virtual monsters called Facebook and many other names. Other media platforms, such as Fox Lies & Entertainment and the Russian TV 1 News are dedicated to the repetitive stoking of anger and hatred by all means possible. The incurious and lazy, make it 50 milion Americans and Russians - each - find comfort in this onslaught of familiar propaganda that reminds them of church sermons, drug highs and drunken stupor. In this atmosphere of sweeping hatred and ignorance, the crazed, slighted vor (the Russian slang for a mafia thief), murderer and war criminal, President Vladimir Vladimi...

Using the approach introduced in the previous post , I will now investigate how electricity is produced and imported in Texas and California.  I choose these two states because I have strong ties to both of them, and they also enjoy very different public images.  Texas is generally viewed as pro-oil, gas, coal and nuclear power, while Californians appear to oppose all of these sources of electricity in their outlets, while touting the green and renewable sources.  It is therefore instructive to look at the main sources of your electricity when you live in Texas or California. For the record, last year, Texas produced twice the amount of electricity imported and produced in California. Most of the difference was caused by air-conditioning everything in Texas, but also by Texas' large base of heavy industry, which is already gone from California, perhaps forever. I start with my home state,Texas, because it is very simple to describe its electricity sources.  ...

Here is the best reflection I could find of how humans thought about science, technology and complexity in the year 2011.  On March 19th, Mr. Jeff Sommer wrote his masterful piece, A Crisis That Markets Can’t Grasp , which was published by NYT on the front page of the Sunday Business Section.  Here are the salient quotations: The details of this catastrophe [of the Tokyo Electric Power Company's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant] were unforeseeable, leading some to conclude this was a black swan event — something so wildly unexpected, so enormous in its impact, that it seems to defy our understanding and expose the fragility of our knowledge of the world. How could anyone have predicted this ? ... So perhaps a bigger question is whether the markets — in which we have come to place so much trust — can put a true price on outsize risks like this. Many have compared the events unfolding in Japan with 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, t...