Rhinocrisy

Over at UFO Breakfast, Cmdr. J. Alva Scruggs is complaining about leechers on BitTorrent downloads. This is a pretty classic kind of example of people defecting from a mutual aid scenario.

My own morning was beclouded by the discovery that my spam filter has been a mite too strict. Leaving aside the possibility of spam poetry and the fact that it led to my favorite post ever, we should consider spam a serious problem. A large study by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group concluded that something like 80-85% of incoming e-mails are spam messages. This is an alarmingly high number.

But spam isn’t a tragedy of the commons scenario like the above; leechers damage the efficacy of torrents roughly proportionately - if there are few leechers, the system survives and isn’t really bothered. On the other hand, according to Spamhaus, a mere 176 spammers are responsible for 80% of the spam generated worldwide. Your pardon for doing this, but the best analagous situation I can think of is terrorism in an open society - open structures demanded by a free society allow the possibility of massive harm by a few malicious individuals.^*

At present a grand debate over how to properly treat such malicious individuals is being played out on the world stage, with on the one side those advocating “draining the swamp” and weakening the pins that hold up the philosophical edifice that drives many terrorists; and on the other those who advocate a muscular militarism as the appropriate response: kill them all and show others what will happen to terrorists.

This is extremely bad policy with regards to terrorism, but I’m not certain the same is true for spam. It’s certainly impossible to drain the swamp - the simple motivating factor is profit, and there will always be enough gullible idiots who are interested in purchasing bulk quantities of Cialis that profit is irremovable. Technical solutions seem to be mostly ineffective. However, the judicious application of punitive measures (not necessarily catching one of them in a public restroom and administering a severe caning) might prove efficacious. Imagine the class action lawsuit that could be brought to bear, for example. That would certainly be intimidating to future spammers.

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^* This isn’t quite appropriate, since spammers actually do cause widespread harm, as opposed to the mostly hypothetical harm caused by terrorists, who on average kill only a few thousand people a year.

An old girlfriend of mine is interning at a company that is looking for found materials to make their products out of - in this case, durable cloth-like materials.

This morning I removed some old keys from my keychain - some of them I can’t even remember what they’re for. I didn’t know what to do with the old keys afterwards. They can’t really be recut and they’re more or less useless in other contexts. Hallowe’en costume, maybe - the Keymaker from The Matrix Reloaded.

A few weeks back I was reading an article in the Boston Globe about pollution in Morocco resulting from their prolific olive oil industry. Apparently they have tremendous problems from the remainder, the pulp produced in the olive oil production process, being dumped into waterways, where it produces an oily olive-oil slick and all sorts of other nasty problems.

One of my utopian schemes has been as follows: after the Revolution, garbage collectors ought to actually play the role of “sanitation engineer”. That is, after they’ve picked up the trash, they go back and figure out what to do with it - categorize the kinds of trash received, which ones are problematic, which ones can be easily recycled and have amazingly useful second lives. This seems like it would actually be a fantastically entertaining and profitable line of work. I’m not entirely sure why it doesn’t happen already…

Egad! All this talk of exploding Dell laptops raises some fears in me: is my plan to make an Electric Mini actually a plan to create a 1200-pound death-box that might burst into flames at any moment? You see, it turns out that the lithium electrolyte solution in lithium-ion batteries is highly flammable. Some people allege that the acrylonitrile polymer solution in lithium-polymer batteries is less flammable, but this is not necessarily comforting.

What’s a mad scientist to do? There’s other possibilities; this guy claims to have invented a flywheel for use in electric cars. That’s at least more intriguing - instead of exploding, you could send a spinning disk, hurtling through the air at several times the speed of sound, into a nearby crowd, decapitating dozens before it lodges itself in the “B” of a nearby Baskin Robbins sign.

aside from everyone?

Prize quote: “Although countries have talked about encrypting data that’s stored on passport chips, this would require that a complicated infrastructure be built first, so currently the data is not encrypted.” Good thing the countries of the world don’t want their borders to have any complicated infrastructure. That would have made it much harder for me to sell my passport next time I needed money while traveling. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about constructing for myself an electric Mini Cooper. It’s actually quite plausible; a number of hobbyist organisations facilitate the process, and financially it’s not out of reach. A brand-new 2-door Mini convertible retails for a scant $24,000, and the conversion process, depending on the batteries you employ, comes to somewhere around $6,000. The sort of performance you get is highly variable, depending on weight of the car, aerodynamics, etc., and batteries.

These last are the critical component in electric vehicles and for alternative energy in general - fossil fuels can be burned to produce power on demand, but the same is not true of many renewable energy sources. Appropriate vectors are thus a critical technology (so you can store power for when you need it), and right now the focus seems to be on batteries, as the most easily achievable in the near-term.^*

For cars, these range from simple lead-acid batteries, which might give you something like 50 mi of driving range, adequate for most people, to cutting-edge lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries, which have incredibly long lifetimes, almost no “memory” (that is, the battery does not degrade much over time, in contrast to say, NiCad batteries), and a much higher capacity than other types of batteries. Electric vehicles equipped with such batteries get ~300 mi of travel time before they must be recharged.

This is fine and wonderfully geeky, but it’s not necessarily clear that an electric car is a good idea yet for the ideological purist. For one thing, this is not a zero-emission vehicle. It has the potential to be, certainly; if it’s charged entirely by non-polluting, renewable energy sources, then it indeed can be considered as such. But most of the power in the grid comes from fossil fuels, and dirty ones at that (such as coal), especially on the Eastern seaboard, where I live. And the greater efficiency of electric motors relative to internal combustion engines means, if the power is oil-fueled, you’re only reducing your pollution output by about half. This is good, but not great.

What it DOES do is push the problem back to a single point: non-polluting power generation is the only thing we need develop if we have an electric car fleet. This is appealing because it makes the task of regulation much easier, if only a single industry, especially a large-scale, extremely centralized one, is responsible. On the other hand, it pushes the problem out of sight, where it might actually be free to grow worse. There seems to be little action in the area of moving away from coal-burning power plants - except possibly retrograde action.

Thorny. Anyway, new poll on the right.^†

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^* Fuel cells, like the hydrogen-based ones much touted by George Bush, probably won’t be feasible for another ten or twenty years, which some suspect is why Bush latched onto them - pie in the sky.

^† As an unfortunate coda to our last poll, you might read this story about polar bears resorting to cannibalism because of thin food supplies.^‡ Depressing. For further depression, read this review by Jim Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, probably the best-known climate change researcher in the world (link courtesy of my Bong doppleganger).

^‡ I have to wonder if they know they’re not supposed to eat polar bear liver.