The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You

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Nice mini-essay by Jamais Cascio…

The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth.

It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.

That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central to the rhetoric, the memetics of environmentalism. Most environmental discussions focus on ecological dynamics, with references to human beings typically limited to enumerations of the various insults we’ve visited upon the planet. Given the degree of culpability we bear for the current state of the planet, this is entirely appropriate.

But the rhetorical focus of environmentalism on the planet obscures the fact that what human beings have done to the Earth pales in comparison to past disasters hitting our world, from massive asteroid strikes to super-volcano eruptions killing off 90 % of the Earth’s species. In fact, over the course of our planet’s lifespan it’s experienced every form of (non-human-engineered) apocalypse on the Eschatological Taxonomy up to Class IV — in comparison, humans have yet to unleash even a Class 0 Apocalypse. And in every case, the Earth has recovered, and life has once again flourished.

We sometimes make the conceptual mistake of thinking that the way the Earth’s ecosystem is today is the way it will forever be, that we’ve somehow reached an ecological end-state. But even in an eco-conscious world, or one devoid of humans entirely, natural processes from evolution to geophysical and solar cycles would continue. The Earth’s been at this for a long time, literally billions of years; from a planetary perspective, a quadrupling of atmospheric carbon lasting 10,000 years (for example) is little more than a passing blip. The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere or how many toxins we dump into the soil and oceans, given enough time the Earth will recover.

But human civilization is far more fragile.

Yep.

Trouble at OLPC?

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Walter Bender has left OLPC following some, er, restructuring. Here’s the PC World story…

Drastic internal restructuring at the One Laptop Per Child Project has led to the resignation of one of the nonprofit’s top executives from the effort.

Walter Bender, the former president of software and content at OLPC, has left the organization to pursue “new activities,” an OLPC spokesman, George Snell, said on Monday.

Bender’s original position as a president was eliminated during OLPC’s restructuring process, and he resigned as a director of deployment, Snell said. “There is no position remaining known as [president of] software and content, so Bender will not be replaced,” Snell said.

“OLPC recently restructured into four areas — development, technology, deployment and learning — and Walter’s responsibilities will be absorbed by those teams,” Snell said.

Bender, the former executive director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, played a key role in the development and deployment of open-source software for the organization’s low-cost XO laptop, aimed as a learning tool for children in developing countries.

“Walter Bender was the workhouse for OLPC. While [OLPC Founder Nicholas] Negroponte met with presidents, it was Bender’s day-to-day management that built the organization,” said Wayan Vota, who follows OLPC and originally reported the news on his Web site, OLPC News.

Bender promoted the use of open-source software for the XO laptop in the face of repeated efforts to load Windows XP, which has gained him a big following in the open-source community, Vota said. The loss of Bender and other key personnel over the past few months could be a sign that OLPC is focusing more on the technology than the educational aspects of its mission, Vota said.

Seminar thoughts

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Randal Picker, of the University of Chicago Law School, runs a Tech Policy Seminar in which he evidently encourages students to post to his Tech Policy blog. This semester the topic was Nick Carr’s book, The Big Switch. Many of the student comments are thoughtful, a few are original, but the best (and most detached IMHO) is this one by Max Schleusener. It’s nice when one has students as good as these.

The class has also discussed Jean-Noel Jeanneney’s critique of Google’s Library Project — Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge.

How to find John Kelly

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John Kelly has been studying the search engine queries that bring people to his (excellent) blog…

The majority of keyword searches involve some variation on “John Kelly blog”, but they’re not the ones that remind us how the fetishes, pathologies and strange obsessions of humankind are catalogued every day on the world wide web.

For example, after writing about my family’s trip to Prague – a trip that I feel moved to point out was 100% prostitute-free – someone from the United Arab Emirates found my blog by Googling “hooker sex apartments near wenceslas square”. I just love that construction: “hooker sex apartments”. It sounds like something an estate agent would put on a brochure: “The property is located in a desirable area, close to schools, shopping and hooker sex apartments.”

If you blog about the British tabloid press, as I sometimes do, you will have occasion to use the words “penis” and “breast”. And that will guarantee more than a few searches along the lines of “penis grab off” (some kind of martial arts move, evidently) and “how to grab a woman’s breast without getting in trouble”…

Testosterone and politics

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If you do nothing else this weekend, Read Catherine Bennett’s wicked essay on the gender gap in politics. She begins with the strange tendency of the mass media to examine the physical attributes of female politicians while remaining strangely uninterested in the legs, breasts, complexions and hair of their male counterparts. And ends with this lovely blast:

Even in Spain, however, discrimination does not fall mainly upon the plain. Female members of Zapatero’s cabinet have already been depicted, by one of many critics, as a ‘battalion of inexperienced seamstresses’. Experienced or not, the impact on Spain’s identity of so many seamstresses, one of whom is both pregnant and defence minister, is all the more fascinating in the light of a new report on the effect of testosterone on male behaviour. Researchers concluded that City traders are martyrs to their hormones, powered to take risks by testosterone spikes to which they then become addicted, creating yet more testosterone; then plunged, after the effects of too much recklessness, into the state of ‘learned helplessness’ that is brought on by a rush of cortisol.

Since women are less vulnerable to both testosterone and episodes of over-excitement than young men, the authors of this study proposed that banks may want to employ more women and older men on their trading floors.

Given that we still live with the consequences of the risks taken by the gang of hopeless testosterone addicts who constituted Blair’s sofa cabinet, it is plain that Gordon Brown, once he has recovered from his current cortisol high, must nip this problem in the bud. In the interests of their country, his more hormonally active male ministers, from Ed Balls to James Purnell and Andy Burnham, the much advertised ‘young ones’ of the last reshuffle, would surely respond to a request that they undergo castration, once they have completed their families. And if that seems a lot to ask, one can only point out that they would certainly find the only other option for cabinet testosterone control even more painful. Involving, as it inevitably would, the introduction of senior women.

The Steve and Jerri show

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From this morning’s Observer column…

Meanwhile, on the West Coast of the US, Microsoft’s hilarious pursuit of Yahoo! has already yielded a dizzying sequence of counter-moves, feints, bluffs and evasions to the point where it’s looking like an episode of Friends. So why not cast it as a soap-opera, with some minor gender changes? The synopsis goes …

Steve (Ballmer, Microsoft CEO) is having a mid-life crisis. Once irresistible to women, he now finds he’s regarded as passé. Just down the road, Jerri (Yang, CEO of Yahoo!) has also been having a bad time. She once had star quality, but is looking a bit faded. And she’s running out of dough. Deep down, though, she’s still alluring….

Later: I’m a bit miffed about the way the column was sub-edited (‘subbed’ in newspaper lingo). The last para, as filed by me, read:

In the latest episode, as ‘Good Morning Silicon Valley’ imagines it, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”‘

But in the paper, this appeared as:

In the latest episode, Jerri and Eric ‘are in the bedroom next to Steve’s, both fully dressed but banging the headboard against the wall and dramatically moaning, ‘Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’

In other words, the attribution to Good Morning Silicon Valley (one of my favourite blogs) has been dropped, making it seem as though I was lifting their joke without attribution. Bah!

AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010

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From ZDNet…

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. “We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,” he said.

He claimed that the “unprecedented new wave of broadband traffic” would increase 50-fold by 2015 and that AT&T is investing $19 billion to maintain its network and upgrade its backbone network.

Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,” he said…

How Obama Fell to Earth

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I noted on Twitter last night that I’d had some interesting conversations over dinner in college with American academics about the US election. The gist of the conversation was that McCain will win in November. Lorcan Dempsey saw the Tweet and passed me the link to this interesting New York Times column by David Brooks.

It was inevitable that the period of “Yes We Can!” deification would come to an end. It was not inevitable that Obama would now look so vulnerable. He’ll win the nomination, but in a matchup against John McCain, he is behind in Florida, Missouri and Ohio, and merely tied in must-win states like Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A generic Democrat now beats a generic Republican by 13 points, but Obama is trailing his own party. One in five Democrats say they would vote for McCain over Obama.

General election voters are different from primary voters. Among them, Obama is lagging among seniors and men. Instead of winning over white high school-educated voters who are tired of Bush and conventional politics, he does worse than previous nominees. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have estimated a Democrat has to win 45 percent of such voters to take the White House. I’ve asked several of the most skillful Democratic politicians over the past few weeks, and they all think that’s going to be hard.

A few months ago, Obama was riding his talents. Clinton has ground him down, and we are now facing an interesting phenomenon. Republicans have long assumed they would lose because of the economy and the sad state of their party. Now, Democrats are deeply worried their nominee will lose in November.

Welcome to 2008. Everybody’s miserable.

Wonder what the bookies are quoting for McCain.