Slowly growing things will one day get ridiculously big

"the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"

So says Dr. Albert Bartlett, a professor of physics at the University of Colorado. I stumbled upon a transcript of his well-honed lecture on Arithmetic, Population and Energy. It is a polished lecture, replete with wisdom and well worth reading. If his statement above is true, then by reading you are getting insight in to the greatest shortcoming of the human race. So, really, it is worth 10 minutes out of your day (or out of your facebook time). In his lecture he looks at the oxymoron "sustainable growth". Think about it business people. He offers a very simple trick to understand growth rates and what they mean in terms of doubling time.

You just take the number 70, divide it by the percent growth per unit time and that gives you the doubling time. So our example of 5% per year, you divide the 5 into 70, you find that growing quantity will double in size every 14 years.

He goes on to use this to make us look at population growth, space and the use of natural resources. Using the simple maths, he shows how intelligent people can be rather dumb. It reminds me of an intelligent friend who's mother was involved in a pyramid scheme. He just couldn't see that after several levels, there simply wouldn't be enough gullible (or otherwise) people left in the universe to join the scam. Anyhow, his main thrust comes back to population. Its worth re-quoting a quote he quotes by Isaac Asimov:

“What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues?” and Asimov says, “It’ll be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then they both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, then no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there’s no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, ‘Aren't you through yet?’ and so on.” And Asimov concluded with one of the most profound observations I've seen in years. He said, “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters.”

And from this he summarises.

"And so, central to the things that we must do, is to recognise that population growth is the immediate cause of all our resource and environmental crises."

So, there you have it. If you don't decide to read the article, at least try to work out right now what the doubling time is from a 1.3% growth rate is. Then you'll know, theoretically at least, when you'll be sharing the planet with 13 billion others. http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/645

"You have a good life"

There are many levels to occupation in Palestine from the obvious to the extremely subtle. A subtle example would be some of the more interesting laws that people must abide by.

Like when you loose your ID document, you must first place an advert in Al Kuds newspaper, apply and go to the court to swear and oath that you are not committing fraud, pay a couple of hundred dollars and finally wait during which time your movement is pretty heavily restricted.

Or the fact that if you have a bank account, you can't have funds transferred in from overseas beyond a certain amount. Otherwise those monitoring the funding of terrorist cells may pay you a visit.

Nor can people ride motorbikes – and it is odd to realize that you haven’t noticed this before – it would make it too easy for people to bypass the hundreds of roadblocks.

Chemical Engineering cannot be taught at university lest it be educating bomb-makers.

The more obvious of course is the ubiquitous checkpoint. Huwwara is one of the checkpoints that affects many people; everyone who passes out of Nablus to the south must go through this checkpoint. Depending on the time of day and the mood of the soldiers operating the checkpoint, it can be closed or take a couple of hours to get through. And if you are special, and your name appears (correctly or incorrectly) on a list, you can be arrested and go straight to jail without passing go.

This was the case with Amer, who is sitting in front of me trying to study psychology whilst watching TV at the same time. This gentle guy was on the way to Lebanon to his father's funeral (his father died over twenty years ago in the war in Lebanon and new DNA analysis was starting to allow identification of remains). His name was on a list and he went to prison for 2 years and remained in administrative detention without a specific charge being brought.

If you are an older man, a woman or traveling with children, you can use the 'Humanitarian line' that avoids the body checks, the x-ray machines and a lot of the shouting. As I am an old woman with some childish behaviors (and carry a British passport) I can use this line too.

Anyhow this is aside. I got to the front of the line and handed over my visa stamp on paper and my driving license, in lieu of my lost passport.

"Where are you from?"

- from the UK.

"Ah, you have a good life."

I gave no response. His voice was almost neutral or numb sounding but there was a hint of melancholy. Was he yearning to get away from this mess? Was he trying to pre-empt any possible judgment of him and his actions in the name of the occupation, by making me reflect on the fact that I could (and would) escape at anytime and therefore had no right to judge?

I don’t know. Either way, as so many things do in Palestine, it made me ponderous and it made me sad.

Being shot at with live ammunition: Ni'lin demonstration 2008.07.17

A plume of white tear gas drifted above the olive groves. Arriving late in Ni’lin it was difficult to locate the head of the demonstration against the wall. But there it must be. Ni’lin has had a history of land dispossession beginning in 1948 with land being acquired for the building of several Jewish settlements. In 2002 Israel began building the separation barrier which will result in about 20 percent of the land that remains in the residents' possession being seized. The objective of these demonstrations, for some, is to temporarily stop the construction of the separation barrier by reaching the earth moving equipment. For others it is about freedom of speech, carrying out their right to protest and letting their voice be heard. Either way, the demonstrations don't get very far with either before they are dispersed with good quantities of tear gas. Once dispersed, it is like small herds of sheep shepherded one way or another by rude placing of CS gas canisters and later, rubber (-coated steel) bullets. The protest is disintegrated and the majority of protesters are eventually persuaded up the hill, back to the village. A group remains at the front line - males from the village throwing, quite professionally, stones. I hung around under the merciless sun for more than two hours with this group of about 40, half curious what would happen, half as a non-Palestinian to witness whatever might happen. With an international presence it is thought that 'less' might happen, that restraint might be shown, but stone throwers are fair game: just having a stone in your hand is enough grounds for arrest. The theatre continues like this on an almost daily basis. The soldiers try to chemically push people backwards into the village away from the construction area, the peaceful part of the protest ends and the youth respond by throwing stones in their direction. Suddenly a shot is heard from an unexpected direction and a helmeted body clad in olive-green clothing is spotted amongst the olive-green olive trees. Everyone runs for cover and then relocates to new stone launching positions. And repeat. I felt sorry for the teenage Rukab ice-cream salesboy who had to run with his coolbox over his shoulder. Many stones were launched with sling-shots and catapults. In return came rubber bullets by which several boys we hit. It looked painful - a bleeding sore on a back, on a shin and on the soft part of the arm where you measure body fat. In return, more stones were thrown and more rubber bullets came back and so on. And so on until the sound changed. Sharper cracking sounds indicated live ammunition was being used. As much as the fear of being hit by a rubber bullet is real, real bullets are simply something else. I asked a soldier once what being hit by a rubber bullet was like. "Just like being hit by a stone" he informed me with a smile. It is possible but pointless to make a comparison between stones and rubber-coated steel. Either can be deadly and certainly injurious but the soldier has range and accuracy with which he can safely fire without risk of being hit by incoming stones. With live ammunition all need to compare evaporates. At a certain point it becomes more serious and the army cross over from containment and dispersion, to what could be called an urban combat training exercise, or punishment, or even revenge. Today soldiers came right the edge of the village. In a narrow street, bullets severed a water pipe who's spray then pleasantly cooled the air, the hydraulic pipes of a digger, a window was shot through, the outer walls of a clinic had several fresh shot wounds, bullet casings were collected and displayed with anger. It is hard to know if anything in particular was in the sights the rifle owners or if the shooting was just random to create panic and put a nail in the coffin of the day's protest. The bullets hit between 10 centimeters and 4 meters from the ground. It was quite surreal, this situation, the panicked run for cover, the call from the lunatic with the megaphone to move forward again, the sharp crack and immediate fizz as a bullet ricocheted, the woman screaming for us to move away as one of her window's had already been expensively shot through, the kids watching from windows and roof-tops who would ask "what's your name?" if you so much as looked at them as if oblivious to the seriousness of the situation, the ambulance co-driver patiently waiting having already stretched his rubber gloves over his fat hands and further sterilizing his fingers with cigarette smoke. I couldn't get hit of course as I was from elsewhere, I didn't throw any stones, I was just observing and anyhow a coward. A bullet hit a wall and a small piece of the wall hit my trouser leg. Time to move away. Today, according to Sayid, a pleasant young guy who repeatedly told me with a smile to "be careful", 3 solders were 'shot' with stones: a military ambulance was seen taking one of them away apparently. One international volunteer expressed his 'happiness', for want of a better word, at this news. I felt otherwise. Violence is violence whatever the flavor: the tear gassing, firing rubber bullets at or beating of innocent civilians, throwing stones back at soldiers or firing live ammunition at stone throwers - even though you could perhaps call them (geologically or prehistorically) armed combatants. This routine open-air theatre will stop once the separation barrier is completed or once the route is changed through the courts. Sadly it seems the former will be the case.

Earth hour: Vote Earth - your light switch is your vote. Ballot box rigged by Nepal Electricity Authority

http://www.earthhour.org/home/ What to say? Just heard this on the FM4, an Austrian internet radio station, about Earth Hour. "We're encouraged to switch off all non-essential lighting for one hour". "VOTE EARTH: your light switch is your vote." Welcome to Kathmandu, where Earth Hour has been going on for many years. Currently the zealously green government has been giving the citizens of Nepal an enforced buy-one-get-16-free option on these votes and stuffing them in the ballot box for on their behalf. Every day, for 16 hours the government turns all of your switches off - both inessential lighting and everything else with it. Additionally they topped up the Earth Hour manifesto with turning off non-essential street lighting, traffic lights, mobile phone company power supplies, all industrial machinery, my local bakery's ovens, power supply for kidney dialysis machines, ECG machines and anything else you can think of that has a cable with a plug at the end somewhere. Long after the world switches its non-essential lighting back on and starts wasting energy again like there is no tomorrow (and that is looking increasingly more likely), we here will be sitting in the dark. Either that or burning Olympic-size swimming pools of imported diesel in generators to keep normal life going. The irony is that the power we are missing would be hydro-power. But due to years of incompetence, rampant theft of power and some dry weather, the system is more than a little creaky. Here's a tip for all Earth Hour participants: at 8.30pm, go the whole hog (not the half hog), flick that big red switch on your fuse box. Enjoy!

Hello moto

You may be familiar with the term 'Hello Moto' from the soothing default ring tone on Motorola mobile phones a year or two back. A friend here in Kathmandu has such a phone and I used to greet him, Hello Moto. Moto means fat in Nepali so it was minor, oft repeated joke to greet him with 'hello fatty'. Oh how we used to laugh. One time went to get drunk with food with an Australian friend. As we got drunk and the level of humour waned, Hello Moto was mentioned a few times. She asked part of the table, does Helomoto mean hello in Nepali? Oh how we laughed. This is not so funny but I was reminded recently of a quote of Mark Twain's which this kind of illustrates:

"Better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

I am not sure I wholly agree with this though it comes from the pen of a genius observer of humanness. I think it is meant to be reserved for those who broadcast, who are overly present, who have appear to have an abundance of earwax preventing them from listening. For the rest of us (I'm a ranter, though it might sound like broadcasting - and I would love to have my ears de-waxed one day) it is good practice to keep asking dumb questions and learning. Curiosity is an essential and very healthy part of enjoying life (could it be taught in school?). Its always good to ask why, even if you might appear dumb asking. Its foolish to be afraid to ask, though sometimes difficult. Dumbness is (mostly) in the ear of the beholder. Can you behold sound? I just looked that up. I am a fool. Related and unrelated at the same time, I read recently that over half the world's population now have mobile phones. Quite amazing. They've made huge differences to peoples lives. And no doubt caused a large amount of pointless traffic accidents. I see people here just applying the brakes and parking in the road at the slightest feel of a vibration in the pocket. Motorcyclists stuff their phone between head and helmet, blah blah blah. Young girls in tight jeans wander across the road smsing. Anyway - environmental time now - enjoy them while you can. To cut a huge and tough story short, we're living in the 'Century of declines'. Take the time to brood over the content of that link on Richard Heinberg's website. Basically, the earth's resources are depleting like booze at a cheap wedding. Yes trees are being lost at an amazing rate (and thanks for washing rather than wiping - stick that on the bottom of your email!), yes oil supply is peaking any time after lunch, yes clean water (or any water) is in short supply in certain places, uranium has 50 years based on current reserves, rhino noses and tiger balls (natural resources? To some people, yes...) - the list goes on. And it goes on to some surprising places. Peak Helium anyone? Peak natural gas? Peak Phosphorus? Peak the-metals-that-make-mobile-phones-work? Peak Everything?

Researchers studying supplies of copper, zinc and other metals have determined that these finite resources, even if recycled, may not meet the needs of the global population forever, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If they, our ancestors, live like westerners do, it goes on to say. But they're certainly taking a refreshingly, wonderfully long, long view, even if the outcome is pretty final. How long is forever and for who, I wonder? So. Peak natural gas = tricky to make nitrate fertiliser without natural gas, which enables such a massive population to be fed. Peak Phosphorus = similar to above except phosphate cannot be 'made' naturally (e.g. nitrogen fixing plants) and at the moment we're flushing most phosphate down the toilet to be lost in the sea, rivers, landfill etc. See http://www.thehalfhog.com/2009/03/we-need-to-talk-about-toilets.html. Peak Helium - Yes, no more party balloons! And many more things besides. Look it up! "Don't worry, the scientists will come up with something!" For some things, they just can't. Anyway, on a more positive note, 50 years from now, the world will be even more interesting than it is now! Hurrah! Hello Moto!