Okay, so now I can predict earthquakes, maybe.

I freak myself out. Three days ago, I was lying in bed and then felt something that made me think earthquake. To the point that I actually thought about how the cat outside was lazing about in the middle of the driveway earlier that afternoon and didn't seem to be sensing any earthquakes, since some people say their pets can sense earthquakes coming. So I thought funny me and forgot about it, until we actually did have an earthquake yesterday. Okay, that's a little freaky instead of funny.

Hard to describe the funny feeling, but it was sort of like feeling a stillness surrounded by tension appear in the earth. Stillness and tension seem like they shouldn't coexist together, but maybe they do. Kind of like pulling something taut. And an eye of a tornado. An uneasy stillness coming from the removal of natural vibrations.


Check out Google Hot Trends for 10/30/2007.

Ice Cap Melting, Plastic Patch Growing

A Swiftly Melting Planet

You know those articles that you vaguely recall reading since the third grade about global warming with graphs of predicted temperature, carbon dioxide levels, sea levels rising, and arctic ice melting... usually with three models- the less bad and seemingly likely scenario, a worse scenario, and the extremely bad hypothetical worst case scenario that nobody thinks will actually happen, and even then not something that would become apparent until maybe around the year 2100.

Apparently, the arctic ice has already melted way beyond that worst case scenario that was never going to happen. That's a very large predictive error and it's only 2007. Scientists are scrambling to revise their models. The negative feedback loop was probably extremely underestimated.

Come See Our Giant Toxic Stew! 1,500 miles wide, floating in the Pacific, made of all your plastic crap. Bring the kids!

Mark Morford seems to have done a good job of publicizing this unknown phenomenon.

Some pictures.


Some unrelated articles I'm bookmarking here:

What Google, Whole Foods Do Best

An interesting look at new management practices, and some discussion about how what we know as corporate management today was developed during the industrial era and haven't changed much since. Interesting approaches such as workers deciding who gets to be a leader, a flattened hierarchy due to having managers have fifty people reporting to them (Of course Google engineering would implement its management hierarchy like a B-tree, maximizing the number of child nodes for efficiency.), and workers deciding what to do with their time. Kind of like a spontaneously self-running amoeba of an organization for the Internet era.

Stay Globally Competitive

This article suggests that creativity can be taught and developed in the right environment.

Sleep Deprivation and Psychiatric Disorders

This is an interesting article about a study that shows that sleep deprivation causes increased activity in parts of the brain linked to various psychiatric disorders:

Lack of sleep linked to emotional imbalance, imaging study suggests

It brought to mind when I read about author Iris Chang's suicide a few years ago and how it struck me that the stories suggested to me that sleep deprivation, three days without sleep while overworking, had triggered her psychosis and depression. I had bookmarked this article. It might not be a conclusion that other people would have come to or consider much, since it seems that both the medical and lay understanding of depression is mainly focused on its relationship to emotional or mental stress instead of physical stress, even as it's now accepted that depression is a disorder with a biological basis. But from the related timeline of events and history, it seems quite apparent to me that those three days of sleep deprivation were really the immediate cause.

Anyone who has pulled all-nighters while studying knows how it feels. It's actually kind of hard to describe. Dazed, muddled, kind of crazy altered state of mind. If you actually think about it, something physical is going on in your brain to cause that and it's not something good. We probably assume that it doesn't cause lasting damage. But maybe it's like how you can revive a slightly wilted plant but if you don't water it for too long, it becomes unsalvageable.

Sunny Bookmarks

I need something like a cross between bookmarks, a blog, and Google Reader shared items.

Green power: How California's PG&E is transforming itself into the very model of a modern utility company

This article was sort of surreal in that it's describing things like PG&E planning to produce electricity from ocean waves among other things, which five years ago seemed to be about fifty years away.

Perhaps just as important as where PG&E gets its power - where the wind blows, where the waves crash, where the sun shines, where the cows poop - is how it plans to share it. Instead of generating electricity in colossal centralized power plants and pushing electrons into homes and businesses, energy distribution in the future may be more a matter of give and take, of energy managed over a web that draws electricity from wherever it's abundant and sends it wherever it's needed.

I first read about the idea of an energy Web like the Internet in The Hydrogen Economy. This book seems to have gotten not-so-great reviews, but I think the guy is a genius. He describes how the communications, energy, and transportation industries evolved together in history. Now that would be the Internet, the coming electricity-net, and future smart transportation. And how the evolution of these industries also evolved corporate structure. And before we invaded Iraq, he pointed out that the oil reserve-to-production ratio (the number of years that reserves will last at current production rates) in Iraq was 526, while other Middle Eastern countries were far behind at about 50-100, and the United States at 10. (Thanks to Amazon book search.) However, I don't think hydrogen as fuel is going to happen anytime soon, although an interesting concept as a carbon-less hydrocarbon.


Chatroom: SunPower Co-Founder Swanson

Okay, so what industry has been growing at a 40% rate consistently for quite a few years? That's doubling every two years. This reminds me of a story in a childhood math book, where a king thought a servant was a fool for asking to be paid 1 gold coin on the 1st day, doubling every day for I forget how many days. 1, 2, 4, 8... sounds little! But then the illustrations showed that pretty soon he had to wheelbarrow the gold coins.

So solar as a percentage of U.S. electricity generation is something like 0.015% of the total right now (based on this EIA data), but hey, if it actually doubled every two years, it would be at 100% in 25 years....


Solar's Day In The Sun: The big hurdle has been finding a technology that can match the low cost of fossil fuel. John O'Donnell thinks he has that licked

For O'Donnell, the journey began in the summer of 2005, when he heard a talk by Nobel laureate Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Chu said that everything you've heard about climate change is wrong. It is much worse than people know--and every engineer should be working on it."

"John sounds a bit like a crazy scientist," says Lane. "His brain is so sharp and his IQ is so high, he just doesn't know what is coming out of his mouth. But all the stuff he was talking about a year ago, we now are all saying. We need him to keep pushing it forward."

For solar power, the future looks bright: Solar energy is now very real. And at hot companies like SunPower, the 'green' that matters is money - by the billions

For Swanson, who has spent his adult life working on solar power, more is at stake than the company's future. He's looked at the science of climate change and has visions of diasporas, conflicts, and starvation. "Given the huge downside risk," he says, "I can't understand how one cannot be worried."

Could the excitement over solar power turn into another bubble? Credit Suisse's Cavalier, who's been in the energy business for 24 years, doesn't think so. "The reason I do not believe it is a bubble is that I honestly believe that climate change and greenhouse gases are not going away," he says. "And there are a lot of cars yet to be driven and a lot of lights still to be lit all around the world."

Great Presidents, Little Women, Little Houses, and Christianity

This is an interesting post, Our Forefathers and Our Spiritual Roots, that I came across on a blog that I bookmarked for its beautiful pictures of Appalachia as well as ugly pictures of and a call to action against mountaintop removal. (We really need to build those solar thermal power plants that can supply 99% of our electricity needs soon.)

The interesting part was the proclamation by one of our great American Presidents, which shows how much more Christianity was a part of life, and government, a century ago. Yet even at that time, the author reminds us that "we have forgotten God." Here is a PDF version of the proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, published by the New York Times in 1863: The National Fast, Proclamation by the President of the United States.

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation.

And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th. day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.

All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this thirtieth day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty seventh.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward, Secretary of State.

Thinking back on some of my favorite classic children's books, Little House on the Prairie, and Little Women, Christianity played a large role in those stories, although it wasn't so apparent while reading them as a kid. Interestingly, both of the authors, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott, lived at the same time as Abraham Lincoln. Also interestingly, both stories are to some degree autobiographical and both families have four sisters with the second oldest being the protagonist and author.

The girls in Little Women each receive a "guidebook" as a Christmas gift, shown in some of the film adaptations as Pilgrim's Progress, but only mentioned as a "guidebook" in the novel. According to the collective knowledge of Wikipedia, there are many allusions to Pilgrim's Progress in Little Women. I had no idea until looking it up recently that Pilgrim's Progress is a Christian allegory.

Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace, and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was crammed so full of goodies. Then she remembered her mother's promise and, slipping her hand under her pillow, drew out a little crimson-covered book. She knew it very well, for it was that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived, and Jo felt that it was a true guidebook for any pilgrim going on a long journey. She woke Meg with a Merry Christmas, and bade her see what was under her pillow. A green-covered book appeared, with the same picture inside, and a few words written by their mother, which made their one present very precious in their eyes. Presently Beth and Amy woke to rummage and find their little books also, one dove-colored, the other blue, and all sat looking at and talking about them, while the east grew rosy with the coming day.

(Little Women)

Another blog I've been visiting has some interesting posts about observing the Sabbath, a forgotten practice. Here is a description of observing the Sabbath in Little House in the Big Woods:

When Grandpa was a little boy, Laura, Sunday did not begin on Sunday morning, as it does now. It began at sundown on Saturday night. Then everyone stopped every kind of work or play.

Supper was solemn. After supper, Grandpa’s father read aloud a chapter of the Bible, while everyone sat straight and still in his chair. Then they all knelt down, and their father said a long prayer. When he said, ‘Amen.’ They got up from their knees and each took a candle and went to bed. They must go straight to bed, with no playing, laughing or even talking.

Sunday morning they ate a cold breakfast, because nothing could be cooked on Sunday. Then they all dressed in their best clothes and walked to church. They walked, because hitching up the horses was work, and no work could be done on Sunday.

They must walk slowly and solemnly looking straight ahead. They must not joke or laugh, or even smile. Grandpa and his two brothers walked ahead, and their father and mother walked behind them.

In church, Grandpa and his brothers must sit perfectly still for two long hours and listen to the sermon. They dared not fidget on the hard bench. They dared not swing their feet. They dared not even turn their heads to look at the windows or the walls or the ceiling of the church. They must sit perfectly motionless and never for one instant take their eyes from the preacher.

When church was over, they walked slowly home. They might talk on the way, but they must not talk loudly and they must never laugh or smile. At home they ate a cold dinner, which had been cooked the day before. Then all the long afternoon they must sit in a row on a bench and study their catechism, until at last the sun went down and Sunday was over.

(Little House in the Big Woods)

As time passes and we get farther and father away from the events recorded in the Bible, is it inevitable that we forget more and more, and society loses its religion?