Year: 2017

Do Me a Frackin’ Favour!

Attended a presentation last night by John “Mr Compost” Cossham – entitled in his own slides, as well as the organiser’s pre-publicity as – “What is Fracking?” Less than 1% of it had anything to do with fracking.

It’s against my better nature that I have been egged-on to write anything about it at all, my adage being public praise / private criticism, if you can’t say anything positive, keep schtum. But here goes:

Despite his early caveats about lack of expert knowledge and his wider “green” agenda, he entirely fulfilled the archetype of campaigner seemingly against one catchy attention-seeking meme, but who is really campaigning against all conflated bad stuff, and the “fracking” meme is just the hook. “Down with this sort of thing“. On that score he did not disappoint. This kind of mis-represented “protest” is a pet-hate of mine. It stinks. And it was a very frustrating experience.

So, what follows is pretty negative, so please treat it as a diatribe against the archetype, not ad hominem against the person.

I engaged him in conversation at the break – dialogue beats public criticism as I say. Having suggested he was “on the fence” regarding nuclear power, I assumed we might have a great deal in common in terms of actual “decarbonisation” strategy. And in fact we did! Sadly the Q&A continued the same “anti” campaigning rhetoric. No hope of constructive progress that way.

Firstly less than 1% of the talk (inc Q&A) was about fracking.

Most of it was a confused mass of anti-industrial / anti-capitalist as well as anti-hydrocarbon rhetoric with few if any facts or arguments. (I could say a lot more on hydrocarbon recovery, it’s a messy business I’ve been around for several decades. People have died for the life we lead today. They made a film: There Will be Blood, or if you prefer Piper Alpha or Deepwater Horizon.)

Sure, he walks his own talk as a pioneering low-carbon-footprint citizen, and tending one’s own garden / seeking change in oneself is as old as Buddhism, but it is hypocritical to then go out and spread misinformed and unhelpful nonsense. Better stick to the garden. Actually a Buddhist would go out and spread the meta-learning process, not the pseudo-knowledge content. “The way you can name is not the way.” Far from the fashionable ageist meme of “it’s a legacy problem for the younger generation”, the responsibility of us ageing “hippies” is to apply all our wisdom and experience to achieving the best future for us all. Many unborn generations. We all have skin in this game. This is not a virtue signalling “who cares the most” competition.

So it might seem wise to have some strategy on how we navigate our way through? I think so.

Our break-time chat seemed to suggest we both did. A strategy to maintain “civilisation” whilst guiding ourselves through a mass of massively complex actions and solutions to problems, to some brave new world. Anyone who suggests the best strategy is we “all” just down tools hasn’t thought this through. All is an awful lot of people – billions – with many different views of their world, not all friendly, especially if key resources like water get scarce, and they will. And whilst gardening is great mental health therapy in a rat-race world, a life comprised entirely of shitting and gardening, exactly the same as all our neighbours with no “industrial” divisions of labour, would be massively stifling of human creativity. Humans without civilisation. We’d die of boredom.

But the most glaring hypocrisy is the espousal of the “best thing for the cosmos is human extinction, the sooner the better”.

We humans are special in the true sense of the word. As a species we are custodians of the most advanced pattern of intelligence in the known cosmos. That pattern involves the whole biosphere, whether we believe (literally) in Gaia or not. We represent a very special – unique – set of influences and responsibilities on how AGW and the rest pans out. We owe it to the cosmos for our good fortune to be who we are, young or old.

That’s kinda it as far as the main point I want to make. Our responsibility as humans to seek the best outcome for the cosmos. We owe each other clarity on that.

These are a couple(!) of additional technical points (only one of them about fracking, naturally).

Fossil Hydrocarbons extraction and upstream processing. (Messy business, let’s ensure where we do need to do it we do it the best way possible, and where we are most in control of how it’s done. Nothing is totally free of risk. Much more to to be said. See also “Fee & Dividend” keep-it-in-the-ground and other carbon / trading tax incentives.)

Fossil Hydrocarbons usage as “Fuel” – Energy, yes, with energy into electricity generation, and electric power into practically every human activity and industry, not least the web itself, and energy into portable motive power. Hydrocarbon for electricity generation (coal, oil or gas) is pretty much already on it’s way out, and a good job too. Hydrocarbon for portable motive power is getting towards massive reductions as rechargeable electric vehicles grow, though some sectors will demand high-energy-density liquid fuel for some time I’d guess.

BUT Fossil Hydrocarbons also drive chemical and materials technologies into every other aspect of life, pharmaceuticals, polymers, coatings, films, textiles, computer components, you name it. Even electric cars are made substantially of hydrocarbon. Despite ongoing battery technology evolution, batteries have a massive embodied-carbon footprint. There’s some ways to go to switch to zero dependency, however much we – individually and strategically – embrace reduction and efficiency.

Basic economics of trade says that some efficient and clean hydrocarbon exploitation in one context may be a relatively eco-nomical way of reducing or displacing our overall carbon footprint. Life’s complicated. The cosmos is THE most complex system.

Fugitive Emissions : and leaks and spoils generally. Yes, general problem that always needs to be addressed. Ground and water pollution. Economic losses too. And HC’s and CO2 have different greenhouse potentials and half-lives. Natural routes to surface as well as man-made (see “keep-it-in-the-ground” and CCS, etc). I’ve worked in parts of the world where hydrocarbons visibly leak out of the ground entirely naturally into the land, watercourses and the atmosphere, and much more does so invisibly, long before any ideas of losses from “extraction”. His example: leaky, ageing, Victorian gas distribution piping. Sure those nations leading the industrial revolution need to take responsibility for our own particular legacies, but gradually such piping is being replaced or lined with modern plastic piping, higher pressure permits smaller bore for greater distribution too. (NORM’s too … alarmist.)

Shale Depth : Good understanding of the geology is key to any safe extraction of natural resources. Reservoirs exist at many different depths in different relations to areas of population. We need to get cause and effect the right way round in the UK fracking examples. The deeper examples proposed are precisely to keep the risks furthest from land, water and populations. Any many similar reservoir depletion geological effects from mineral and hydrocarbon extraction have nothing to do with fracking – ask Dutch State Mines in Holland.

Nuclear : (I’m for modern intrinsically-safe, smaller-scale modular, nuclear options. Economically and politically, the existing industry is crippled by the massive investments and timescales involved IMHO – drawn out and compounded by the ill-informed protest politics. Much more to be said.)

Industry and Capitalism : Tremendous confusion and conflation of industry with capitalism. The globalisation of massively capitalist businesses is a problem (many problems) for us all, but that is not a case against industry in general, nor in favour of zero capitalism. As one questioner pointed out, we all have capital or various kinds, the question is really about how we manage its concentration vs localisation. But G20 protests? Eat the tories? Get a grip! See eg Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism and any non-autistic modern economics. [Post Note – Autism is a long-standing problem in economics long before Greta Thunberg came along.]

Hypocrisy : Hypocrisy, far from being an evil, is actually an essential part of human affairs. Its very important we can hold conflicting ideas across multiple contexts. It’s very important we can change our minds with time across levels and contexts. Anything other is ideology. When dealing with massively complex and interconnected issues – fracking? do me a favour – we owe it to ourselves to keep each of the considerations carefully distinguished in our decision-making dialogue. Lazy conflation of bad stuff is a disservice to us all.

Objectivity : Objectivity is a myth. Making careful distinctions is not the same as being objectively well defined – but that’s an even longer metaphysical story.

Humanity : Most of our problems are human – how we humans behave, change our behaviour and make our decisions together. All technical problems have (eventual) solutions, even if proven technology cannot yet exist as a solution for every problem. Where there’s a will there’s a way or a way round.

Optimism : I’m not an optimist. I can see plenty of failures on the horizon – even near term. But prediction, especially about the future, is very difficult. I’m a positivist (socially, not logically). That is we should aim to do the best we can. Putting people in optimist / pessimist boxes is unhelpful. How we handle uncertainties – upsides and downsides – is a specialist technical topic.

AGW Denial : no way. It’s real, It’s common sense. All I deny is the masses of rhetoric dressed as pseudo-science (for or against). Polarisation is the most unhelpful contribution to solving any problem.

Presentation  & Argument : For a contentious topic – particularly a broad multi-connected topic that cannot possibly be covered in a single time slot – presentation with Q&A can sometimes be entertaining, but it’s the worst form of event for either increasing knowledge or progressing arguments. Dialogue is essential.

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[Post Note :

I could pepper the whole diatribe above with links to many more considered posts I’ve made on each and every topic mentioned, so if anyone is serious about debate and dialogue I’m all ears.

On humans being “special”. Obviously we inhabit an immensely interconnected cosmos, and all inter-dependent species in the biosphere have abilities for population and innovation and population of their niches, but it is irresponsible and helps no-one, least of all the cosmos and our fellow inhabitants, to deny the special position and scale of human influence and purpose.

I will have to obtain Kevin Laland’s “Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony”. Given his subtitle “How Culture Made the Human Mind” it seems mean not to include Dennett in his index of references?

There’s probably more in this from David Baddiel too.

And how could I forget this “God of Compost” from 2010?]

The Connectivist

I’ve been interacting with Jaap van Till for the last year or two, mainly on Twitter. His blog is The Connectivist.

He recently made a reference to, and separately blogged about, Ann-Marie Slaughter’s “The Chess Board and the Web“ in a comment to me. And my response was to liken the sound of her “Chessboard” metaphor to Doug Hofstadter’s “Tabletop” – the “theatre of operations for any future move”. (Aside – in fact it was this post that sparked the conversation, but that remains unacknowledged.)

Before I say any more about Chessboards and/or Tabletops, we are connected because “connectivism” seems to be a common agenda item, whatever our current policy agendas. Interestingly, we also both have fundamental physical interests – even metaphysical in my case – that treat information as the most fundamental “stuff” of the universe. (Cf most recently Carlo Rovelli and Erik Verlinde). Whether at the scale of nation-states or the fundaments of physical reality, relations – common connections & significant differences – ARE information, what’s worth knowing. Epistemology (what is knowable semantically) precedes Ontology (what can be deemed to exist objectively) I would say.

Connectivism – seeing the (human scale) world in terms of relations rather than objects – feels like a no-brainer for the last two or three decades, ever since the rise of speed-of-light connectivity of all entities and individuals made the relations most obvious in the connectivity itself. In fact I associate the concept of “Connectivism” as a thing with Stephen Downes, early in the digital age, but the semantic-web is older than Foucault, much older than the internet enabled web. So, the idea of a Harvard & White-House guru writing a book in 2017 recommending that organisations focus on connections rather than the objects and states seems like band-wagon jumping or maybe even bolting the stable door. No shit, Sherlock! Better late than never?

I’ve not yet read “The Chess Board and the Web” but it occurs to me that the fundamental difference between Slaughter’s Chess Board and Hofstatder’s Tabletop is that whilst they both rely on relations between potential positions on the stage, a chess board has constrained positions and moves, within which imagination must operate. The tabletop is limited only by the creativity of the imagination – conceptual-slipping – even though every individual move can be analysed as relations between binary states (now and next) and objects (this and/or that, me and/or you). The web adds an infinitely flexible, multi-dimensional and fluid layer of connectivity to the constrained grid of a chess board. That unlimited creativity was always there, simply limited by the pre-defined conventions of the game. And remember, after Wittgenstein, we may see words as signifying real-world objects, but in fact all language is a game, a game where we evolve the rules as we play.

Action Research Reloaded

Been reading a fascinating 2015 paper co-authored by @DrSarahEaton and shared recently on Twitter.

PROFESSIONAL COLLABORATION AS RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY

Fascinating for me on two levels.

Firstly in seeing that the Argyris “double-loop” learning process (aka Action Research), which I explored in my late-1980’s Master’s, has been taken up and evolved in many creative learning contexts since then, and forms part of collected textbooks like Keith Sawyer’s “The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences”. Even back then, “double-loop” was recognised as short-hand for the many meta-loops and considerations beyond learning from the explicit “procedural” process. Learning more by learning about learning, etc. Seems second nature now. Sure, there’s always the question of balance, avoiding analysis-paralysis whilst getting on with the planned task, but the process, not just the outcomes, is always a source of learning to improve the process and its outcomes.

Secondly, in this specifically educational context, as opposed to organisational learning generally, the need to recommend or even seek permission for the practitioners to engage collaboratively in the double / meta-loop processes of continuous quality improvement. In education the primary procedure (the single-loop) is the pedagogy. Fashions come and go in management practice, and “public service” practices like education suffer particularly from exposure to external management consulting fads, but stripped back to the underlying principles (*), quality will out.

“Findings reveal responsive pedagogy through reflection and collaboration that provided professional learning, especially in the areas identified as challenges [in Action Research]”

Almost by definition, once considerations apply to the many meta-loops, collaboration is the name of the game. Everyone’s loop is someone else’s meta-loop, the points of management contact between the different operational (pedagogical) procedures. Operational processes are about minimising deviation from those pedagogical procedures, with deviations seen as errors to be corrected. Once the meta-gloves are off, problems really do become opportunities to think out of the box, to step outside the daily operational loop into the meta-loops that bump up against fellow practitioners each operating in their own loops. It’s no longer about fixing and defending, questioning as the Socratic means of undermining the other guy, but about creative collaboration on better answers.

[Post Note: The key learning from my own research was to be careful not to turn these double and meta-loop processes into just another procedure – a box ticking exercise – they must be genuinely collaborative and freely creative between the people with skin in the game. Quite a few other lessons in Chapter 4 and as I noted back in 2002 shortly after I started this blog, this research project carries on where Chapter 4 left off.

(*) Ha! Even back then I referred to MOC / TQM / CQI as “A rose by any other name”. Nothing new under the sun.]

The Evolving Library Problem

Mary Beard’s short musing on how to tidy up and organise a sprawling library, ends with the fear that physical print libraries may be a thing of the past anyway. I think she’s wrong there.

Libraries are an infrequent but recurring theme of mine, and my own library is at that sad state of being so disorganised, following a couple of years of not-quite-complete house “remodelling”, that I actually have the same problem. I need to do something.

ISBN ordering seems arcane but, as with all good information management, meaningless index numbers are better than any other coding of what is meaningful or significant about the objects. Books that fall outside ISBN numbering can add a dummy “My-ISBN” prefix and follow the same conventions.

Extensible tagging can be used to add your own significance to the indexed database. After all, as well as having enough space to organise and evolve, such significance will evolve as our agendas develop over time,. And, there will be physical constraints like “oversize” shelves for individual books that disrupt efficient average shelf sizes. Having an indexed database ensure these kind of exceptions can also be handled with additional tags. The bonus is that using ISBN’s can also link you to other global library meta-data about the books you own. ISBN is the right way.

I’m not quite at Karl Lagerfeld’s “sideways library” state, but a good 40% of my books are currently in random stacks for assorted long-forgotten temporary reasons, and mostly not on or anywhere near the actually library shelves..

Two “Mind” Conferences Storified

Last week & weekend I followed two conferences via Twitter. HumanMind2017 and BreakingConvention.

#HumanMind2017 I had originally intended to attend in Cambridge (partly because I have a nostalgic soft-spot for The Møller Centre where it was held), but diary log-jam meant I overlooked doing anything about it until they started Tweeting. I ended up following them very closely and interacting via Twitter. Excellent multi-discipline event bringing international neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers together around two existing Cambridge and London based research projects. Felt very constructive and important. I shall be looking out for their next get-together, and for any published proceedings or other outputs.

Active Handles: Chris Meyns – Human Mind Project – New Directions Project – And my own in responses mainly to these.
HashTags: #HumanMind2017 – #GC17 – June 27 to 29 +/- days.
Fixed Sources: Tim Crane’s “New Directions” Cambridge Uni project –  Colin Blakemore’s  “Human Mind“, London Uni School of Advance Study project – The Human Mind Conference 2017

#BreakingConvention (#4) I had not even noticed until it was happening and I simply watched out if the corner of my eye, but its focus was alternative (non-mainstream science) views of consciousness and altered-states thereof. Always fascinating. Noticed one contributor was Rupert Sheldrake of Morphic Resonance infamy, but many on Psychedelics too. Didn’t notice Steven Reid? (Ha, he was there, ironically he is the conference press-officer.)  Will share with others.

Active Handles: @BreakingCon – Jules Evans
HashTags: – #BreakingConvention – #BC4 – #BC17 – June 30 to July 2 +/- days
Fixed Sources: Breaking Convention

[Ha, and coinciding with 50th anniversary of the “Summer of Love”, which I mentioned a week or so ago. Not sure what the ’09 means on the poster?]

[Storify – tried out but couldn’t secure more than 50 items per story, so left very disjointed still. Will have to hope Twitter and other links do not rot in the meantime. Help anyone?]

MMT – Magic (Modern Money) Tree “Theory”

This is just a quick (unedited) reaction post. “Modern Money Theory” deserves more, but I have too many topics on the go right now, and I can’t claim to be expert enough anyway.

Big fan of @PaulMasonNews economic proposals in PostCapitalism, but can’t stand his partisan politics. (See Labour Populism). Long time correspondent David Morey has a banking background as well as deep philosophical interests, and has been posting on Modern Money regularly over the years. Chris @contronline posted “The Magic Money Tree is Real” in response to the recent political chatterings over government spending priorities. The popular reaction to the whole meme is the degeneration of partisan politics into tyrannical populism. However, as Chris says, Magic Money Tree (Modern Money) Theory is not partisan, it’s neutral theory. Same as the explicitly Marxist ideas in PostCapitalism, the mechanisms of how things could work can still be managed by our social priorities.

Things I get:

Debt or a promise to pay being a Government promise, the same monetary value linked to tax repaid in return. (But it’s also linked to bonds used to raise debt finance within the economy.)

Traditional relative competitiveness: with two sides of a trade one is always better off than the other, BUT the other is still better off than it would be in the absence of the trade. Implies not just between individuals, but between states or fiscal constituencies, there need to be trade boundaries with exchange value in the currency itself. The point of MMT is that even without this inter-state trade, the value in the money can still be maintained by the government promise in the state economy, and an isolated or even a single global economy is still possible. However big the state “debt”, the two-way trust is that ongoing liabilities will always be paid.

My remaining doubts and differences (on both MMT and PostCapitalism) are entirely about how things might actually work in practice:

These are still “just theory” and IMHO, the biggest problem with economics in general is that it is “autistic” to believe the economy runs predictively on any objective theory, capitalist / traditional money or otherwise. Goods and services as objects. Value as numbers. Decisions as arithmetic. (This is the root of my main agenda.)

In fact real economics is almost entirely about trust and psychology and gaming of these, and experience and wisdom and fault-tolerance and irreversibility and much more. There will always be unintended incentives to game the system and hence unintended consequences.

If there is only one economy (or each economy is monetarily independent) everything depends on trust in that money supplier.

Trust is the one thing the world is really short of right now. Apparently every statement must be backed by objective evidence. The default position is that everyone who makes a mistake, or makes a statement we disagree with, must be part of some evil conspiracy. Our job is to label them as evil or ridicule them as idiots apparently. Opposition politics has been replaced with populist tyranny – the free-democratic opposition concepts of criticism and holding to account have been totally lost.

And the real question – even if we “trust” in the new model for a brave new world – is the Irish question. How do we get there from here? We can’t start anywhere but where we are now. So, revolution or evolution? And whilst we don’t need to predict all the what-ifs, we have to know how we would handle classes of problem, plan B’s, escape-routes and off-ramps. There are the billions of people’s lives at stake.

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[Post Note : Book review link from David.]

#Grenfell Cladding – Let’s Get a Grip!

There’s a lot of bollox being reported about Grenfell cladding, its spec changes and “100%” failures on every other tower block cladding sample tested.

Purely anecdotal quickie – my opinions as an engineer – I have no inside knowledge on these tower block refurbishments

Pretty sure the “zinc” will have been some galvanised or zinc-coated steel. Heavier than aluminium, and less flexible in terms of possible finish appearance coatings. And, the claddings in question are entirely about aesthetic finish. Freshening-up the look of the ageing blocks.

Secondly I’d bet the saving here is in the “cassette” approach to modular fixing. Simpler and lighter weight fixings for lighter panels. Anecdotally in various media news film of cladding removal and inspection work, there has been enormous variation in the cladding SYSTEMS. Those like Grenfell seemed to have been as crude as (vertical) timber battens nailed into the old concrete with the cladding sandwich pinned onto these battens with a chimney airspace behind. No insulation, no convection-breaks. Others had both insulation and pre-formed (horizontal and vertical) metal supports. I’m sure there are many other system variations.

The cladding itself is a sandwich, pretty sure the price-per-sheet variation of the material (skin and core) has little to do with the material cost, more to do with the manufacturing and supply chain.

Nothing in these (strongly encouraged, always) value-engineering bid proposals – NOTHING – will have relaxed the actual regulations and specification required to be met.

Much of the testing appears to have been on the sandwich core material (as reported on @BBCR4Today today). There are several levels of SYSTEM being ignored here. The sandwich itself is more than the core, and the skins are variable too. The installation varies in terms of insulation, fixings, convection-breaks, geometric arrangements and more …

Pretty sure the BRE testing of just the core has simply been a conservative agreement to compare apples with apples, removing all the other variables for simpler testing interpretation. PE core is flammable, even with retardant fillers – no surprise, same result everywhere. True, but close to useless, like most simplistications.

Let’s stop rushing to judgement and let’s stop publishing half-baked stories to confuse a wider public.

I am not alone:

Quantum Weirdness Ain’t So Weird

Had this Aeon piece by Philip Ball on my desktop for a day or two, and had it brought to my attention today by Robin.

Firstly I’m already a believer that the wave-particle duality and collapse of the wave function driven by the observer are fudges, as is the idea that many superpositioned states represent any kind of many-worlds model of reality. Quantum weirdness is only weird because we struggle to make it fit our classical common-sense world. A classical common-sense world already conditioned by generations of shared and evolved models of physics.

I don’t buy the full decoherence explanation (yet), but there are several good aspects to this Philip Ball explanation of Zurek’s work.

Each act of observation consumes (captures, processes and changes) information, and the environment between any event and our observation supports that communication. Photons (or some more fundamental info-ons) carry the information in patterns, imprints of the event. This is good. I go further and suggest the information field is the more fundamental aspect of reality than any “objects” we rationalise out of it at either particle or everyday levels. (See also Rovelli and also IIT.) Waves and particles are two different abstractions from the same underlying information patterns. The information is more fundamental than any physical embodiment, even though there must always be one or more manifestation in the natural (physical) world. (What is particularly exciting about recognising an information field underlying “apparent” wave-particle duality in physics itself, is that the same “trick” dissolves any mind-matter duality limiting our explanations of consciousness and will.)

Aside re “fundamental” particles of physics. In the same way as the word “atom” has evolved in the physics it represents, since Democritus original grasping for the most fundamental indivisible objects, “photon” may simply be redefined to be the most fundamental physical information object. Either way, if it really is both indivisible and fundamental (by definition) it may as well be Boscovich’s points in space. Everything observable is patterns of relationships between these; there’s no intrinsic nature or property of these fundamental “particles”. One corollary is that indivisible and fundamental are two different things. There are higher level indivisible (or basic) objects that are integrations (systematic historical outcomes that are more than the sum of their parts, that can never be resolved into their more fundamental parts, even though the more fundamental parts must have existed and interacted to evolve the higher objects.)

The real myth limiting scientific progress is objective reductionism. The above suggests routes out of this fly-bottle.

[Important Boscovich > Mach > Einstein thread behind this that was on the right track before “Copenhagen”.]