East vs West

From time to time, I write a bit about differences in outlooks and/or attitudes by people who live on the eastern side of the Great Plains versus those who live on the western side.  For those who don't know, I live on the west side, in one of Denver's suburbs.  I spent the past few days in far southeastern Kansas on the east side of the Plains to attend a family wedding.  One of the big factors shaping attitudes on opposite sides of the Plains is amount of precipitation and the resulting consequences.  Denver averages 15.8 inches per year; the town where the wedding was held averages 42.1 inches per year [1].

During the wedding reception, after it got dark, people sent up sky lanterns (representative illustration to the left).  These are a paper/fabric bag about four feet tall with a very simple framework at the bottom that holds a waxy block of fuel and keeps the bag open.  When the internal temperature of the bag is high enough, the whole thing is released and flies away like the small hot-air balloon that it is.  Fifteen or 20 in the air at once is an impressive sight (the world's record, set in Poland, is 15,000).  On the light breeze that was blowing in Kansas, the lanterns could travel a considerable distance.  Many became very small, very dim dots in the sky before they disappeared from view completely.  Some were clearly going to crash much sooner than that, quite possibly before the fuel burned out.

None of the SE Kansas locals seemed bothered by the release.  On the other hand, there was a small contingent of the bride's relatives who had lived in Colorado for many years, who were absolutely aghast.  To paraphrase what one of them asked the person in charge of the lanterns, "You're going to light something on fire and let it fly away?  With no idea where it will come down?  Are you insane?"  2012 has been a bad year for fires in Colorado.  At least in my mind, though, the lanterns would have drawn the same reaction from most Coloradans in July of any year.  And would have drawn the same reaction from the residents of large parts of the West.

With good reason.  When you consider the 11 states that lie west of the Great Plains (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming), wildfires are a part of life.  Various kinds of fire: while Colorado's forest fires made national and world-wide news this year, an 84-square-mile grass fire that killed at least one person and destroyed multiple homes was relegated to local coverage alone.  And Colorado is at the bottom of the list of western states when fire size is considered: over the past century, the other ten states have all had fires much larger than Colorado's largest.

Wildfires and debates about wildfire policy are front-page stuff in the West, particularly during fire season.  How should liability be assigned, and how much liability?  In the case of fires started by human activities, it is not uncommon to read about the delivery of the fire-fighting bill -- often running to millions of dollars -- to the individuals responsible for starting the fire.  How much of the budget should be spent on fire fighting versus mitigating fire danger in state and national forests?  How much should private landowners be required to spend on mitigation?  Should people who build houses in wildfire-prone forests be required to pay fees to cover the costs of eventually defending those homes against fire?

There are places east of the Great Plains where wildfires occur.  But the East in general lacks the broad fire consciousness that pervades so much of the West.

[1] Precipitation figures from http://www.usclimatedata.com/.

The PPACA Decision

The SCOTUS has issued its ruling (PDF) on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  A couple of months ago I attempted to guess at what the outcome would be.  I didn't get it spot on, but was reasonably close (at least in my own opinion).  The tax-and-spend powers of Congress were critical to upholding the individual mandate, there were end-of-the-world dissents, etc.  Kennedy's was the only vote I got wrong with respect to the mandate.  The surprising part was the decision on the expansion of Medicaid -- that the threat to withhold all Medicaid funding from a state that failed to expand its program per the PPACA is unconstitutional.  It seems to me that this opens a heck of a can of worms.

Congress has a long history of making funding for programs available to the states, and the funding almost always comes with strings attached.  When I worked as a legislative budget analyst looking at human services programs, knowing about the strings was one of the most important parts of my job.  It was one of the basic messages that I tried to communicate to new members of the General Assembly: federal money has strings; ignoring the strings can get you in trouble; please speak with the budget staff or the Department of Human Services staff when you propose shuffling money around.  The episode that made me look the least competent on the job occurred because there was a string I didn't know about.

A majority of the Court ruled that, in effect, the expansion of Medicaid included in the PPACA wasn't an expansion of an existing program, but a whole new program.  And that because federal Medicaid money was such a big part of state budgets, it was unconstitutional to threaten to take the old money away if a state didn't buy into the new program.  Historically, Medicaid is an all-or-nothing deal; states must meet certain minimum conditions or they get zero funding.  From time to time, Congress has raised the level of those minimums so that states must cover additional people, or provide more extensive services.  But according to the Court, there are limits to how much established requirements can be changed.

You have to wonder how far this goes.  If Congress had said, instead, that effective 1/1/2014, Medicaid is repealed and a new PPACA program commenced, which just happens to look exactly like Medicaid plus today's PPACA extensions, would that have passed muster?  Or if Congress wants to simply repeal Medicaid and replace it with nothing, is that okay?  Is the money now an entitlement for the states that Congress can't take away?  Rep. Ryan's budget proposes to convert today's Medicaid into a block grant program where there is a cap on the amount the states receive and far fewer strings on how the money can be spent; will those changes meet with the approval of the Court when liberal states sue because the block grant is less than they would have received under the old rules?

I've always thought that the purpose of the Court was to provide clarity.  In this case, they appear to have achieved exactly the opposite.  The decision looks to me like an invitation for states to sue any time Congress changes the Medicaid rules in ways those states dislike.  Or federal funding for roads.  I'm sort of a closet states' rights guy, in the sense that there are things the federal government should leave to the states, even if that list is shorter than it was in bygone days when 50% of the population was involved in agriculture, acquiring land was a matter of walking far enough west, and getting mail from the Ohio Valley to an East Coast city took weeks.  And while there's no question that this part of the Court's decision has made the states stronger relative to Congress, there will be considerable pain involved in figuring out how much more powerful.

The World's Most Sophisticated Whole-House Fan Controller™

One of the nice things about living in a high-altitude semi-arid climate is that, except for a small number of days per summer, it cools off nicely when the sun goes down.  So while it may be 95 at 2:00 in the afternoon, overnight it will drop down into the 60s.  As a result, it's possible to use a whole-house fan and opening and closing windows appropriately to maintain the internal temperature of the house within a relatively narrow range: say 66 to 76 °F for most of the summer.  For those not familiar with a whole-house fan, it's a large fan that sucks air from the house's living space into the attic (where it is vented to the outside), drawing relatively large volumes of outside air through open windows.

The usual control mechanism for a whole-house fan is an on-off timer and a high-low switch.  You set the speed to high or low, then twist the spring-driven timer to set the length of time the fan should run.  A certain amount of guesswork is involved in setting things before you go to bed.  Err to one side and you wake up with the house warmer than you would like: you ran the fan on low, but it should have been on high.  Err on the other and it can be a tad on the brisk side: a cold front went through and it's 56.  A year-and-a-half or so ago, my wife decided that she wanted more control over how the fan behaved.  It should be capable of switching speeds, shutting off if things got too cold, etc.  As no such controller appeared to exist commercially, I was charged with building one.

The result was The World's Most Sophisticated Whole-House Fan Controller™.  Yes, it appears crude, but with a touch screen, a temperature sensor, and everything controlled by software, it can do many different things: multiple operating modes, the ability to reconfigure the button layout if you're left-handed, and a wireless remote control to name some of them.  If you include my hours at a reasonable rate, it probably also qualifies as The World's Most Expensive Whole-House Fan Controller, but that's not the subject of this post.  So, if that's not the point, then what is?

First, I suppose, is that it works.  No more 56-degree mornings.  And in some modes, the software decides how long to run on high before shifting to low while still having a good probability of reaching the desired temperature.  Certainly I have a much better idea when I go to bed of what the temperature in the house will be in the morning than I did before.

Second is that the device is characteristic of the sea change that has happened with control applications over the last 15-20 years.  The device consists of a single-chip microcontroller, some sensors, and a few actuators.  Everything else is software.  While that provides a great deal of flexibility, it also means that the whole approach is dependent on the continued availability of large-scale integrated circuits.  In the near term, that's not a problem.  In the longer term, with constraints on energy availability, limits on the scope of trade, preserving the production capability may be more difficult.  Certainly if you believe in anything approaching the Mad Max scenarios, integrated circuit fabs will disappear quickly.  Are we building ourselves into a corner?

Third, and this is mostly whining, concerns the fact that it looks... tacky.  The problem of mounting the various parts in a good-looking enclosure is, in fact, one of the most challenging parts of hobbyist projects like this one.  What I would have liked to buy was the LCD panel and touch screen all mounted in a nice plastic box.  One where everything was properly centered and aligned, and with enough room behind the display for the small custom printed circuit board.  Granted that this type of hobbyist market is small — how many times was I told that I shouldn't be building a box to mount on the wall, I should be writing a smart-phone app to control the fan? — but it seems like it would be big enough to support such a widget.

Ed Quillen Died This Week

Ed Quillen died this past Sunday.  Long-time readers of the Denver Post will recognize Quillen as a regular columnist whom I always regarded as the local curmudgeon.  There were some recurring themes in Ed's columns that I always regarded fondly.

At the top of the list was his impatience with people who built houses in one of the Stupid Zones.  Colorado has several different types of Stupid Zone: "...flood plains, unstable soil, wildlife corridors, flash-point forests, avalanche runs, etc."  When you build a house in one of the heavily-wooded areas in Colorado's foothills or mountains, one where 100 years of fire suppression policy has allowed enormous fuel loads to build up on the ground, where you are one lightning strike in a dry year away from a catastrophic forest fire, and then demand that public officials provide you with fire protection, well, that's pretty standard for the Stupid Zone.

Another of my favorites concerned "exporting" Colorado natural resources to other states.  Historically, Colorado consumers enjoyed some of the lowest prices for natural gas in the country.  Over the last 20 years, it is possible to determine when new pipelines capable of carrying gas out of the state to other markets were opened or expanded: local prices took a significant step up.  Ed liked to point out that if lawmakers (and he accused members of both political parties) really cared about consumers to the degree they said they did, they would oppose such pipelines.  IIRC, in at least one case he suggested that the governor could best serve Colorado consumers by blowing up a couple of the newer, larger ones.

I will sorely miss his conversations with his favorite inside source, Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.  Ananias was fond of calling Ed to see how the latest piece of misdirection by the political classes would play with the common man.  I've always wondered if politicians and their handlers ever read Ed's columns, and if so, if they asked themselves, "Does what we're saying really sound that stupid?"

Occasionally Ed wrote about computers.  He started writing on PCs in 1984, he assembled some of his own machines, he held strong opinions about the overall (in his opinion) poor quality of Microsoft products, and was a Linux fan.  He had a possibly unique form of off-premises back-up storage: "old coffee cans filled with backups on optical disks."  Since Ed was able to, as circumstances required, access years-old files from his backups, it's hard to argue with the method.

Did I say "curmudgeon" in the opening paragraph?  Sadly, Ed was only 61 when he died.  Which is close enough to my own age to put me in the curmudgeon category.  I guess I need to complain about things more often when I'm writing here.

What Would Your "Manhattan Project" Be?

Suppose that you were responsible for choosing the target for a new "Manhattan Project" for the United States.  For those who don't remember, the Manhattan Project was the top-secret effort to build the first atomic bomb.  The effort cost, in 2012 dollars, about $25 billion.  Actual development and production of the weapons was surprisingly cheap; 90% of the money was spent to build and operate the factories that produced the necessary fissionable materials (highly-enriched uranium and plutonium).  Another way of measuring the size of the budget is that the total amounted to about 16 months worth of NASA's current budget.

In setting some parameters for the project, it is useful to ask why the Manhattan Project was successful.  My personal opinions on that matter are that the project avoided all of the principle reasons that tech projects often fail.  It wasn't vague: the goal was to produce a working atomic weapon small enough to be delivered by the bombers of the day.  There was a reasonable chance of success: soon after the project was organized, the until-then-hypothetical sustained nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated.  It had a challenging schedule: it was believed at the time that Germany had a well-developed nuclear weapons program, and that failure to be the first to have a working weapon could mean losing WWII.  And finally, it was publicly funded so the participants were focused on solving the problems: no one was distracted by thoughts of how the project would make them rich.

Let me take those as the parameters, then.  $25 billion total budget; specific "product" to be delivered (quantity one, or at most a handful);  and broadly useful in the sense that it's produced new knowledge about how to build something.  I'm mostly an energy guy these days, and a macro- and supply-side energy guy at that.  And I'm concerned with the electricity part of the problem.  I believe that it is straightforward (which is not to say easy or painless) to cope with the liquid-fuels issue, but I am much more concerned about keeping the lights on reliably.  I have three possibilities on my short list.  To cut off arguments, I'll point out that using the money to build out transmission capacity, or to put up 10,000 wind turbines, doesn't satisfy the criteria.

First possibility -- a 500 MW or larger generating station based on solid carbon fuel cells, operating at high efficiencies and reproducible at reasonable cost.  There are a number of possible fuel cell technologies that are at least laboratory toys, eg molten-tin-anode cells.  The US has massive coal reserves.  It seems probable that much of those reserves will eventually be oxidized.  Fuel cells operating at high efficiencies, relatively low temperatures, and producing a nearly-pure CO2 stream that could more easily be sequestered seems like a better alternative than what we currently have.  Ideally, such fuel cells should also be able to accept suitably dry biomass, high-carbon waste, or other sources of carbon.

Second possibility -- a modular factory-built high-burnup fission reactor.  Ship it to the site, hook it up the the steam (or gas) turbine system, let it generate electricity for 15 or so years and then ship it back to the factory for refueling, refurbishing, or whatever.  I know that fission is controversial, but it is my belief that at some point, the eastern US will once again embrace it.  A large majority of the US population lives in the states of the Eastern Interconnect, an area that is relatively low in renewable options.  As their existing generating capacity (almost 70% of which is coal and nuclear) ages and is retired, a significant fraction of it will have to be replaced.  It seems almost a sure thing to me that fission will continue to have a sizable piece of the pie.

Third and final possibility on my list -- high-capacity batteries for traction (and some fixed) applications that use non-exotic materials (given global supplies, lithium is becoming an exotic material).  The battery doesn't have to be perfect.  For example, I don't care if it can't be fully recharged in minutes.  People will learn to live with such limits.  Much of the money may be spent figuring out how to manufacture necessary materials.  There are several intriguing possibilities for battery/capacitor/combination tech using graphene and other carbon structures.  The problems with those are figuring out to produce the right nanostructures in volume and at a reasonable price.

Why can't computers "be" a paper and pen?

Caution: Wearing one of my old hard-core techie hats today...

Previously, I wrote about the possibilities of using real-time multimedia communications over the Internet as a substitute for oil-based liquid fuels, with "substitute" used in the sense economists do.  That is, Internet communications can be a replacement for some types of current face-to-face communications enabled by cheap oil.  As part of that, I mentioned prototype software for such communication that I wrote almost 20 years ago.  This post is really just whining, but here it is anyway: why isn't real-time multimedia communications between people using the Internet easier?  In particular, why isn't it trivial for me to connect with a colleague and share high-quality paper-and-pen imagery?  Why can't I hold office hours for my calculus class here at home, with digital paper that's good enough to write derivatives and integrals as easily (and relatively densely) as I do on a white board?  Why can't the class be held online one or two days per week, with coordinated audio so that students can hear each other ask questions when called on, mark things up as necessary, hold side conversations without interrupting the other students, record what happens for later review?

There are some network reasons why things aren't as far along as I would like, based on how access to the Internet works in the US:

• For consumers, static IP addresses are the exception rather than the rule.  The baby router attached to my cable modem requests the same DHCP-assigned address it currently holds each day, but there are no guarantees that my ISP won't force me to take a new one.  There are ways around this, but it makes "I'll just give Mike a ring" harder to implement.
• ISP and backbone providers have been reluctant to implement IP multicast.  There are reasonable reasons for that, I suppose.  Multicast isn't essential for a multi-party call, but without it, some entity other than network routers has to be responsible for the necessary packet replication.  Pushing that out to the end client is a hassle because of...
• Asymmetric bandwidth configurations for most Internet access.  Client software on my Mac may be able to push video upstream to one other user; to push multiple copies of it upstream for a multi-party call is more difficult because of the bandwidth limits.
• Even disregarding the asymmetric bandwidth issue, setting up a "meet me" bridge on one of our home computers is probably at least a technical violation of the terms of service against operating a server.

That's not to say there aren't IP-based conferencing services.  One reason for my disappointment in the services that are offered -- and the large majority do seem to be for-pay services -- is my long-standing infatuation with paper and pen.  I want the "shared" part of the communication to do the things that are done with paper or paper substitutes that fit a particular situation.  For example, teachers and students meeting during office hours write on and point to a piece of paper that sits between them.  In a classroom, overhead slides and the whiteboard are larger versions of that, with more restricted access as to who can write when.  My version of collaboration starts with something one person has written or drawn, and everyone can debate and discuss and scribble all over it, like Arlo Guthrie's description in Alice's Restaurant, "...with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one..."  I'm simply not interested in sharing an animated PowerPoint presentation or many of the other "push" products and services that are out there.

Lastly, I want to bitch about the absence of any affordable IO device that can do a good approximation of paper and pen.  I suppose the problem is that I'm a mathematician at heart, and always will be.  And there's nothing as good as paper and pen for rapidly and clearly writing equations, sketching graphs, adding lines and boxes and annotations as needed.  Simple touch tablets like those made by Wacom and others separate the point of the pen from where the marks appear -- you can write with them, but not quickly and not in my tidy but cramped style.  Monitors that incorporate high-resolution touch tablet technology cost more than many computers.

All the things that computers do well... but none of them are an affordable substitute for a simple pad of paper and a pen.  Bummer.

Indirect substitutes for oil

In discussions about Peak Oil, one of the criticisms often leveled at economists is their assertion that substitutes for oil will be available.  Some of the economists may mean that in a strict liquid-fuels sense, and most of the Peak Oil crowd interpret it in a strict liquid-fuels sense, but it's important to think about the statement in a more nuanced fashion.  That is, that there will be substitutes for goods and services that are currently oil-powered, but in an indirect fashion.

Almost 20 years ago now, I wrote various prototype applications that supported multimedia sharing over the Internet transport protocols (TCP/IP).  The emphasis was on the kinds of media that got used regularly in technical meetings and classes: audio, an overhead transparency projector, a whiteboard, page-by-page looks at documents, all with various mark-up and pointer capabilities.  There was even some of the world's worst live streaming video.  OTOH, in that sort of situation, the primary purpose of video turned out to be the ability to do out-of-band body-language signaling (I'm bored, I'm excited, I have something to say), and video can be remarkably bad and still convey those messages well.  The software used IP multicast where possible to reduce bandwidth needs.  There were a variety of control modes, since the needs of a small group of equals are different from the needs of a distributed classroom.

Such tools can provide a substitute for some kerosene-powered air travel.  They can provide a substitute for some gasoline-powered commuting.  They can provide a substitute for some gasoline-powered trips to school.  Extend the concept and deliver a million soft copies of my new national best seller (in your dreams, Mike!) and IP-based transport is a substitute for some diesel-powered paper distribution.  In terms of net energy, it's not clear whether e-books and e-readers are better or worse than paper books.  At the least, though, e-books offer one electricity-powered alternative to diesel-powered distribution.

The main point is that substitutes are not always obvious and direct.  A lot of oil is burned to enable some form of communication.  There are alternate forms of communication that don't need to use oil, or at least not nearly so much and not so directly.  And I'll be the first to say that multiple media over IP is not a substitute for all forms of personal communication; there are situations where face-to-face is much better.  There will be other situations where liquid fuels are being used to provide a service that can be implemented in some other fashion.  So "substitutes" for petroleum-based liquid fuels doesn't necessarily imply drop-in liquid fuel replacements.  That's an important point to keep in mind when considering how things might unfold in the future.

Technical notes on the video shown above:
240x184 pixels, one-bit color depth (real black-and-white), 15 frames per second.  At the time, many of the computers, even in an R&D setting, had one-bit monochrome displays and quite limited processing power.  This particular coding/compression scheme had the advantages that it could be displayed directly on such screens while putting very little load on the processor.  An individual image looks worse than the moving video; the human vision system does a lot of smoothing when there's motion going on.  Only "moving" parts of the image were immediately updated; the background filled in gradually.  It was somewhat surprising how much information was conveyed: body language, facial expressions, etc.  It was easy to tell if the audio was properly synchronized (it was, a claim that several very expensive conferencing systems that came through the building for evaluation a couple of years later couldn't make).