Solar energy and the knowledge problem

Is it a key problem of the modern age that nobody can even have a reliable surface knowledge of more than a couple important issues, yet must have opinions on hundreds? This thought occurred to me as I attended a solar energy congress in Germany last week, then read a few columns from mainstream media pundits giving the usual talking points stating that solar is a hilarious boondoggle and always will be. People pick up a few points like these which serve to discredit an entire field of human endeavor. In the case of solar power, the main brickbat thrown is the true and obvious fact that the sun does not shine all the time, has variable input when it does shine, and is occasionally obscured by clouds. This fact is extrapolated to the conclusion that solar is useless. Similarly the cost argument is given--solar at this point is not as cheap as coal or natural gas in terms of providing a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Solar still relies on subsidies and feed-in tariffs.

But the op-ed column level of knowledge and dismissal is extremely superficial. You go to one of these big meetings devoted to a single field like solar energy and you'll see 1000 very bright people, who have devoted their working lives to this subject, discussing all areas of the field. The discussions will be at a level of detail you can't possibly evaluate at more than a surface level unless you've got a lengthy background in that area too. A person with any level of humility might take that opportunity to assess the reliability of his assumptions about a lot of things, and the confidence with which those assumptions should be held.

I've often had that thought about climate science too of course. Would an average person, placed in the audience for a few days of technical talks at a scientific conference, realize that he probably shouldn't actually dismiss an entire field of study with a few choice quotes from a Mark Steyn column? That these many, many very smart people, doing the work in which they've invested thousands of hours of work, might collectively know something? I don't know, maybe not. Political tribalism is so engrained that it encompasses many things that are far afield of political ideology per se. It's very hard to see past those cultural markers of one's tribe.

Many people at the solar conference showed a Moore's Law-like reduction in the cost of solar photovoltaic panels over the years, showing an approach to cost parity with coal/gas-fired electricity. I don't know if or when that's actually coming, and I don't understand the ins and outs of the electrical grid and how it can accept intermittent power inputs. There were also some interesting reports on Concentrated Solar Power plants, a completely different process than photovoltaics. These plants focus large amounts of direct sunlight onto a small area, to boil water and drive a conventional steam turbine. This also presents the opportunity to smooth out the intermittancy of the solar input, by storing the energy in a high heat capacity/low volatility working fluid, such as molten salt. This scheme works best in dry tropical areas, since it requires direct (unshaded, unscattered) sunlight.

Anyway, I am very far from having the level of knowledge where I'd feel comfortable evaluating the place of solar in the world's future growing energy needs. Germany subsidizes it and is as a result by far the world leader in installed capacity. You travel around Germany and you see wind and solar installations all about. My hunch is that this will all pay off in the next fifty years. No magic bullet, but renewables can probably play a growing part in the future. The problem is that I must know more than 90% of the general population on this subject, I don't know enough to intelligently support or oppose a given policy option, and yet options will be chosen. If it's impossible for the general public to be well enough informed on this and many other issues, then the basis on which things will be decided will not be accurate knowledge. It will be something else.

Ways of thinking about history

I started doing some Civil War reading this year, before I even thought about the whole 150 year anniversary business, currently being well-chronicled by the New York Times Disunion blog and The American Interest's Long Recall. I listened to the Yale history course on the subject by David Blight. This isn't a new thought by any stretch of the imagination, but it's just amazing how the South won the narrative of Civil War and Reconstruction memory for over a century. I think about reading JFK's (ghost-written, but still) Profiles In Courage in high school. One of the profiles is of Edmund Ross, the Kansas Republican Senator whose vote was decisive in the acquittal of Andrew Johnson after his impeachment trial. The whole tone of the profile is how the Radical Republicans in Congress were overreachers, pushing the South too hard, and attempting to make an unconstitutional power grab for Congressional supremacy over the Presidency. There's certainly a strong case to be made for Johnson's acquittal: the Tenure Of Office Act which he unquestionably violated was an awful law, correctly ruled unconstitutional later. But elided in Kennedy/Sorenson's profile was the simple fact that Johnson was a terrible, terrible president (Lincoln's greatest mistake), attempting to block the Radicals' efforts to achieve some measure of justice and equality for four million former slaves. The South left to its own devices would do everything in its power to grind those people back into servitude, and remove their newly won suffrage. As Northern Republican will faded through the 1870s in the face of Southern political terrorism and an economic panic, that's exactly what happened. The Redeemer governments replaced Republican rule in the former Confederacy, and they were all permitted to utterly ignore the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments for nearly another one hundred years.

Yet in the face of all that, the dominant narrative as late as my own schooling in the 70s and 80s was that the bad guys of Reconstruction were the Republicans, the black Southern officeholders of the time, and the carpetbaggers. I also recall the attitude we all have when we're first coming into a more adult way of thinking about the world: we want the enjoyment of a sophisticated attitude, eschewing the simplistic narrative told to us as children. So we were taught and embraced the idea that the "Civil War was about slavery" narrative was childish and mostly false. There's plenty of complexity in why the war happened, but the childish explanation is really the correct one. Lincoln was elected, the South feared that having lost control of the federal government, abolition was in the cards, not immediately but inevitably in the decades to come. So they left. They didn't leave because of tariffs, and they didn't leave because of any nebulous states rights. They couldn't have been any clearer about it. They proclaimed it for all to see in their secession announcements. (One of the great ironies of the secessionists is what a colossal blunder they made. They feared the eventual loss of slavery many years hence, but their choice meant the near immediate end of slavery, beginning less than two years later, completed in five.)

But having lost the war, they immediately set about rewriting it, with the greatest of success. The victors lost interest and mostly capitulated, settling in to the enjoyable reunionism of mutual valor and Blue-Gray soldier's gatherings. The essential, one sentence truth about the war, that a monstrous ideology was defeated, was turned by the Lost Causers into a simplistic lie, believed only by the infantile.

Clearly a final decision about gay marriage can only be properly made by

the wisest, most powerful man in the world.

This is the craziest thing ever

If you were of a certain temperament as a child, you spent a lot of time looking for loopholes in various rule systems. You'd think of things like: what if the presidential election was a tie? What would happen if a baseball team just couldn't record any outs? Unlike youth leagues and such, Major League Baseball has no mercy rule. If it's 39-0 with still nobody out in the top of the first, you play on. (OK this one has an obvious answer: the team that's way ahead would just purposefully strike out all the time to get the game over with.)

One of the most tantalizing loopholes was always to figure out how a game could stay tied forever. How long would the powers that be let it go on if a baseball game got to 47 innings or a basketball game got to its 15th overtime?

Well we're finding out how tennis handles it: they play on. And on. John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, two players unknown to the world outside hardcore tennis fans, had their first round match at Wimbledon suspended by darkness last night after four sets. That's perfectly ordinary, and unworthy of attention. They'd play the fifth set today, the winner would lose soon after in a later round, and that would be that. The fact that the match was played on Court 18, which looks pretty much like a high school court with a few more seats, exemplifies how mundane this match should have been. Except that the fifth set could not be completed in one day, because they're tied at 59 games each. Fifty-nine! The score of the match is 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 59-59. To say that's a record is to understate it. I can't find the record for most games in a set, but it looks like it might be something like 46, and these guys are at 118. The fifth set by itself would have shattered match length records, both on number of games and elapsed time.

That's the kind of loophole you pester your dad about: what if two tennis players can't break each other's serves, at all? Do they just play until somebody passes out? Irritated dad eventually responds that somebody always wins eventually, and don't you have some homework to do? But what if they don't win, you ask yourself silently, and you wonder if you'll ever find out.

Slovenia math

Let X be the number of times an American has said the word Slovenia today.

Let Y be the total number of times an American has said the word Slovenia in all history except today.

I bet X/Y > 10.

National Motto of Slovenia: We Are Not Slovakia, Even Though The Slovenian Name For Slovenia Is Slovenija And The Slovakian Name For Slovakia is Slovenska. We Are Sorry This Is So Confusing For Everyone, But Not As Sorry As Those Poor Bastards In Slovakia Who Can Only Dream Of Being Slovenians.

The brain is not a computer

The other day, for some reason my mind wandered to a birthday party my daughter had attended. I was trying to remember when it was, eventually deciding (correctly, it turned out) that it was about three months ago. The way I decided was by analyzing how old the memory felt. I knew it wasn't a day old memory, and yet I also sensed that it wasn't a year old memory. How did I know that? Computers certainly don't work that way. A piece of information is either stored in a specific place or it isn't. It doesn't get hazier with time.

Anyway, isn't that kind of wild, that the brain somehow works like that? Eventually when we figure out how it works, we'll probably laugh at the late 20th/early 21st century view of the brain as a computer. Same way we kind of laugh now at the early 20th century view of the brain as a telephone switchboard.

Great screwups of American history

Big picture, you'd have to say things have gone very well for the US since its founding. From a few million people clinging to the East Coast, praying that Britain and France remained occupied with each other to continent-spanning hyperpower, that's about as good a couple of centuries as a country's going to have, geopolitically.

Much credit, frequently bordering on hagiography, is generally given to the revolutionary generation, for winning independence, then framing a sturdy constitution. But there have been some glaring missteps here and there. Mostly little things--I'm not talking about slavery here, which was basically baked in to the early USA and wasn't going anywhere without eventual bloodshed. Some notable screwups:

1. Electing the President and Vice President. That was just a mess in the Constitution. It relied on electors managing to conspire to give one vote less to the desired VP. That worked sort of OK for the two Washington-Adams coronations, but was a serious trainwreck in the next two elections. In 1796, Jefferson ended up VP to his bitter opponent Adams. 1800 was even worse, with Alexander Hamilton working against Adams for the more reliable Federalist Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and a miscommunication leading to a tie between Jefferson and Burr, despite everyone knowing that Burr was supposed to be the VP. Multiple rounds of voting in the House failed to resolve the issue, with the Federalists supporting Burr to deny Jefferson, their bitter enemy, the presidency. Finally Hamilton signaled support for Jefferson as the less dangerous man, and the vote went to Jefferson in the 36th ballot.

Soon thereafter the 12th amendment was passed, clearing the situation up by making the electors cast specific votes for President and VP. That explicitly prevented the 1800 scenario from occurring again, and effectively prevented the 1796 scenario (President and VP being opponents). However...

2. It still left the vice presidency vacant if the VP ascended to the presidency. Which turned out to be a common enough occurrence--John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson were all to serve without a VP (until/unless they were re-elected in a later election with a new running mate). Only in 1967 did this finally get resolved with the ratification of the 25th amendment, allowing the nomination of a VP by the president, to be approved by Congress. Within a few years this was useful twice. First when Spiro Agnew resigned for being the 97th most corrupt member of the Nixon Administration, to be replaced by Gerald Ford. Second when Nixon resigned, Ford replaced him, and then nominated Nelson Rockefeller to replace himself as VP.

Overall, you've got to give the framers a little crap for not foreseeing any of these issues.

3. The House of Representatives is supposed to be volatile, with lots of turnover every two years in response to changing public opinion. Instead with gerrymandering, safe districts, and fundraising advantages, incumbents tend to be very difficult to defeat. House turnover is generally rather low (though this year is probably going to show a big move).

4. Political parties--the founders totally missed out on them. The system they designed is almost guaranteed to produce two strong parties, but they Madison, Hamilton et al. were all idealistic about how legislators would decide each issue on its merits, then fall back into neutrality. By 1796 the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were all but official. With minor interruptions (the Federalists faded, leaving the D-R's alone on the field for awhile, until they split into the Whigs and Democrats, then the Whigs faded to be sort of replaced by the Republicans) we have had two strong parties ever since.

5. States. The first thirteen were existing entities in 1787, so it's entirely understandable that they were admitted intact despite their disparate sizes. But as the continent was conquered and purchased, the new states should have been more judiciously drawn. Most egregious was the decision to make California a single state, which now has about one ninth of the entire US population, yet as many senators as Wyoming. California has sixty times as many people as Wyoming. That is ridiculous. Also, did we really need a North and a South Dakota? That's a lot of senators to hand to fairly empty farmland. Surely one Dakota would have been OK.

6. Federalism. The idea was that local government is closest to you, state government next, federal government the farthest away. Closer would mean more responsive. But really, doesn't it seem like moxg people don't even know the names of their city council and state representatives? Everyone knows who's president, most people know who their senators are, same for governor. How responsive can local government be if 85% of the voters don't even know who they are? I don't have the slightest idea what my city is doing most of the time. State government has seemed inept and corrupt every place I've ever lived.