I was recently sent this article comparing skylines of San Francisco in two of this summers science fiction blockbusters: Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation.

These two matte paintings pretty much sum up the perspectives these two franchises have on the the future of human race. In one world, the human race overcomes its petty differences and silly things like armed conflict and joins together into a planetary federation posited with the task of maintaining peace and diplomacy throughout the universe; a heady and high-minded ideal indeed. In the other, not only does humanity destroy itself by it’s own inventions, it’s fall is inevitable.

The theme of being destroyed by ones own creation is not a new one (dating back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or even the Golems of Jewish folklore) but is definitely very much the view of the future from a modern perspective. Even the production design of Star Trek evokes a “Retro” feeling, an update of the clean, geometric shape of things to come envisioned in the sixties and seventies.

I’ve just finished reading a memoir by David Beers entitled Blue Sky Dream about growing up in post war california, the son of an aerospace engineer at Lockheed when the future (as my eloquent co-worker Sean puts it) “was shiny and new.” And that’s the thing, if you look at when these two series’ were conceived, you will notice a marked shift in attitude towards the future. The 1960’s brought us not only Star Trek but also The Jetsons and Lost in Space with images of the future as a generally happy place where technology makes our lives better.

But, as Beers points out in his book, as government money for aerospace programs began to dry up, disillusionment set in. I don’t think it a coincidence that it is around this time (the 1980’s) we got movies like the Mad Max’s, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, and a whole host of other dystopias, not to Mention The first two Terminator movies. That’s not to say there weren’t optimistic visions of the future in the 80’s (that is when most of the Star Trek films were released) but I’d say that it is fair to argue that the 80’s are when that kind of view of the future really took hold of mainstream consciousness. A view that, I believe, still defines our attitudes today.

Take for example this talk by Bruce McCall: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bruce_mccall_s_faux_nostalgia.html

We laugh at these images but I think in that we’ve also lost something of the wide eyed gleam the future used to inspire.

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while but back in January I read an article in the SF Weekly (which I Ironically picked up off the street) about San Francisco’s recent ordinance banning plastic bags.

San Francisco is a city that enjoys being scratched behind the ears by an adoring world. And the city was certainly purring a little more than a year ago when it banned plastic shopping bags, which triggered adoring headlines around the globe. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, the ban’s primary author, was fêted in publications from The Economist to People (which gave the photogenic supe a full-page spread). Locally, the ban was a hit: San Francisco was a national trendsetter and a world leader in the green movement.

For locals, this was change we could believe in — after all, it asked us to do nothing. The ban didn’t even ask us to think. The infinitesimal decision-making of “Paper or plastic?” was simply replaced by waddling off with armfuls of default paper bags. This, according to the ban’s backers, was progress. San Francisco had slain the plastic dragon, doing away with a detested petroleum product that littered our streets, endangered wildlife, and symbolized everything wrong with America’s consumerist, throwaway society. That the ban — which applies only to chains or large stores grossing more than $2 million yearly — did next to nothing to alter consumers’ throwaway behavior was largely left unsaid. One year later, it still is.

In that time, it has become apparent that many of the rationales used to justify the ban — such as its benefiting the environment and alleviating the city’s litter problems — are not playing out in the real world. Plastic bags induce a highly visceral reaction; they have been likened to “synthetic vermin,” and Mirkarimi described them to SF Weekly as “unearthly things.” But visceral hatred is generally not the best motivation for public policy — especially when scientific studies indicate that policy to be counterproductive.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund’s “paper calculator” — and factoring in the city’s requirement that bags be composed of at least 40 percent recycled material — the ecological consequences are staggering. That many paper bags weigh about 5,250 tons, which results in the felling of 72,000 trees, sulfur dioxide emissions of 91,200 pounds, the release of 21.5 million pounds of greenhouse gases, and the generation of 40 million gallons of wastewater.

In the past two decades, a number of “Life-Cycle Analyses” (LCAs) have measured the “cradle to grave” environmental impact of plastic and paper shopping bags. SF Weekly was unable to track down any that rated paper as being more environmentally beneficial overall. Again and again, paper bags were found to require more energy to create and transport, emit more greenhouse gases, generate more water and air pollution, consume far more fresh water, produce much more solid waste, and produce markedly more eutrophication of water bodies (a condition in which an excess of nutrients, often nitrogen, leads to choking algae infestations).

Several of these LCAs were commissioned by the plastics industry — yet Charles Lardner, a spokesman for the American Forest and Paper Association, said the paper industry does not dispute the studies’ findings. And a number of the studies were not connected to the plastics industry. A 2004 analysis by the French retail giant Carrefour found the most environmentally friendly bag to be a heavy-duty reusable plastic sack; paper bags were found to be the worst of all. Regarding so-called “biodegradable plastic,” while LCAs differ, several found it to require far more energy to produce and distribute than regular plastic. What’s more, it requires the cultivation of vast amounts of corn or potatoes, which are farmed unsustainably using powerful chemicals. The West German, Australian, and Scottish governments weighed the scientific evidence to deduce that a simple elimination of plastic bags in favor of paper ones would be an ecological step backward. This conclusion was duplicated last year in Seattle.

These findings do not much impress Jack Macy and Robert Haley of the San Francisco Department of the Environment, two of the longtime movers and shakers behind the city’s quest to quit plastic. Haley notes that “you can always get an LCA to support your view,” and brushes it off as “bogus science” irreparably tainted by its connection to industry. The two then touted a 2000 study in Sweden that showed paper bags to be more environmentally friendly than plastic ones. This LCA, performed by the firm CIT Ekologik, is something of a security blanket for municipalities hoping to justify a plastic bag ban; officials in Manhattan Beach and Massachusetts have cited it as well. It warrants mentioning, however, that this was not a study of small grocery bags but hulking, 55-pound animal feed sacks. What’s more, it too was commissioned by industry: a consortium of European paper bag companies.

In 2002, Ireland mandated a fee of 21 euro cents on plastic shopping bags; within a year, its residents were using 90 percent fewer of them. This was the kind of measure the Department of the Environment and Mirkarimi originally pushed for San Francisco. It wasn’t what they got. During a one-year voluntary bag-reduction program adopted by the city’s largest grocery stores, the supermarkets’ lobbying arm, the California Grocers Association (CGA), turned around and engineered a 2006 state law forbidding municipalities from forcing stores to charge a fee on bags. This galvanized the Board of Supervisors behind Mirkarimi — “I told the mayor, ‘No more talking. We’re going for the ban,’” he recalls. Mark Westlund, a spokesman for the Department of the Environment, told the media that San Francisco had no option other than the one it took. But that isn’t true.

Thoughtful and innovative methods of skirting the 2006 state law are being developed in the Bay Area — but not in San Francisco. While the state forbids municipalities from imposing a bag fee on stores, leaders in Santa Clara County will vote this year on whether to place a fee directly on consumers, to be collected by stores. If that idea fails to gain support — or doesn’t survive the inevitable lawsuit from the plastics industry — the county could simply ban plastic bags and then charge a fee of around 25 cents on paper ones. These methods don’t have the San Francisco ban’s righteous simplicity, and — in a possible anathema to city liberals — they target mom-and-pop shops as well as chains. But the South Bay plans would actually reduce consumption and help the environment.

While Mirkarimi likes to tout bag fees, he doesn’t seem thrilled with the idea of San Franciscans paying them. The fee he proposed in 2005 would have been footed by stores, not by shoppers — a model that has never created significant reductions. He gushed about programs at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s in which shoppers who bring their own bags receive tiny rewards. While this approach makes people feel good about themselves, it doesn’t produce real results. Yet when IKEA began charging for bags, consumption dropped 92 percent in the first year alone. Finally, shoppers who go the extra mile to bring reusable bags are missing the big picture — an Australian study noted that driving two kilometers (1.25 miles) roundtrip to the store burns the fuel energy it would take to create 17.5 plastic bags.

“Paper bags have a greater environmental impact than plastic bags, and therefore you would not create a policy that banned plastic and forced everyone to use paper only,” said Dick Lilly, the manager of the waste prevention program for Seattle Public Utilities. After much analysis, that city spurned the San Francisco model in favor of a fee on all bags, meant to spur shoppers to bring their own — a goal San Francisco officials embrace, but do virtually nothing to promote. Key elements of the S.F. model, in Lilly’s estimation, “could be a catastrophic mistake.”

Now it would be easy to come away from this article cursing overzealous activists or politicians that pander to said bleeding hearted constituencies. But I think that there is a deeper lesson in all this.

With commodities, the rationale for free market capitalism is that the price that is paid for a good will reflect what goes into it. So you pay for concrete, or pipes or computer chips, roughly the total value of all the materials and labor hours put into making it. One of the problems with this system arises in what are called hidden costs, that is things like pollution that the manufacturer doesn’t have to put on his or her balance sheet but still end up using some of societies resources.; eventually someone has to clean up the pollution and that usually ends up being taxpayers.

But in the case of plastic bags, we have the unique situation where the commodity that does use less resources actually costs less; that’s why most stores use them. Tacking on an additional 5 cents for each plastic bag used only furthers this philosophy. Users are paying the cost of the resources they’re using; a cost they are going to have to pay one way or another, whether in the form of tax dollars for pollution cleanup programs, or at the checkout counter. The difference is, at the counter, that cost is associated with the good whereas in taxes the relationship to consumption habits is much less direct.

I once heard that you should pay for the things you love. Otherwise they go away.

I believe that

I don’t do this much but OMG!

The notes on the flickr page really take the whole thing to the next level.

If you’re a fan of non-fiction film you are probably familiar with the name Errol Morris, director of The Fog of War and Thin Blue Line. I’ve also mentioned that he writes a blog for the New York Times in a previous post.

What most of you famliar with his work probably don’t know is that Morris actually makes most of his living in directing While perusing his work I stumbled across this commercial he did for Miller Highlife; it is simply amazing.

I could go on ad nauseam about this commercial but it is really so perfect. It’s witty but also ironic precisely because this is the rhetoric of bike activists but coming from a beer company (who presumably falls on the other side of the political spectrum).

But this commercial highlights a popular fallacy that seems to be gaining traction of late, the idea that if we stopped using gasoline (or switched from gasoline to ethanol ) the energy crisis would be solved; this is simply not true.

Before we get into this though let me roll things back for a moment to an article from Harper’s Magazine published in 2004 I recently found. I highly suggest you read it (it’s quite interesting) but, assuming you’re lazy, I will summarize the salient points.

As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

The implications of the law of conservation of energy for oil is that the energy stored is not new. We call petroleum based energy “fossil fuel” because that’s exactly where it comes from: fossilized plant and animal matter. Oil is the energy stored in living things condensed and highly concentrated over millions of years. This is what we are doing when we create biofuel, simply accelerated to a time line that is useful to us; oil is quite literally food energy stored in extremely dense packages.

If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere…
more than two thirds of humanity’s cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet.

But plants do not produce energy from nothing, and as with any energy conversion process there is a net loss. Plants spend some of the sun energy they collect in making flowers and roots and stems which pass back into the soil when they die.

When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. …The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted…

I’ve already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe’s primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.

Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That is not to say there is anything wrong with eating cereal. The point is that the argument that vegetarianism his less of an impact on the environment because eating lower on the food chain wastes less energy loses traction once you factor in processed foods. Furthermore, animals are able to process foods that we can’t, sourcing energy stores that would otherwise be unavailable to us.

Still, these livestock do something we can’t. They convert grain’s carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

So how does this all come back to High Life as an alternative fuel? Well energy independence, stopping global warming, and whatever other problems you may point to as caused by oil are not going to be solved by making a switch to ethanol. We have to be smarter about our uses of energy, waste less of it; a change in lifestyle. It means riding your bike and putting some of that energy stored in your beer belly back into the system. It’s not just about using less oil, it’s about using less period.

One of the interesting things about modern art is the development of “Experimental” art. I think alot of people are turned off by the term and I’ll admit, there’s a great deal of bad lazy art that is passed off as “Experimental”. Recently though, I’ve re-examined the semantics of this term, and I think that there is an interesting idea in the concept of art as an experiment.

If we look at what the word means, an experiment is a test, doing something to see what happens. Science does it all the time and there is no reason that it should have sole command over this realm, albeit, it does have a much more formalized and rigorous process in place. It should be argued, however, that while art does not have the same quantifiable measures as science - and therefore cannot be as readily adapted to the scientific process - is no reason we should not use it as a tool to explore our world. I would argue it is especially valuable for exploring the realms science cannot. Aristotle said “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” in a sense, what is poetry but a thought experiment manifested? The same goes for any work of art for that matter.

With that in mind, I think technology, and specifically the internet, facilitates a bey interesting cross section of science and art. By combining technology that allows us to connect (and collect data on) people from across the world, with an artist sensibility towards meaning making, we approach some interesting things.

Here are a few such experiments I find interesting:

http://learningtoloveyoumore.com/

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

http://www.bumplist.net/

http://publicwhitecube.com/pwc/

I’m addicted to a number of things on the internet, some pleasures being guiltier than others, but one particularly guiltless pleasure of the world wide web is my access the videos of the TED conference.

A friend of mine recently directed me to a very interesting video from this conference by Paula Scher which, I not only found enlightening, but also reminded me of a book from my senior seminar by Daniel Pink entitled A Whole New Mind. The book is postured as a sort of career guide / business management text but don’t let that turn you off from its message.

The thesis of Pink’s book iss that the successful people in the coming “Conceptual Age” will need to be able to think in highly abstract forms and have a high capacity for human interaction, something computers have a great deal of difficulty with. Pink dedicates several chapters to outlining how right brain functions can be utilized to make a more significant impact; he outlines the importance of Design, Story, Symphony -being able to see the big picture and make connections- Empathy, and Play - drawing people in by making things attractive as well as embracing our innate curiosity. These things are products of right brain functions, and therefore uniquely human, that make a person more valuable.

One of the points Pink makes in his book is that humans are the only species to “play with” or tinker with their environment. Being able to “play with” new ideas and new things is a very big part of human satisfaction. It is this “curious nature” if you will, that has driven the progress of the human race. That curiosity is a distinctly human trait and the fact that we find it pleasurable is intrinsically linked to the concept of play.

Being able to innovate requires that you think creatively and understand that, in the end, people are what is important so design ability is much more valuable than manufacturing ability. Pink offers the definition of design as utility enhanced by significance; it leverages the pre-existing conditions. A device that is intuitive is far more effective than one that requires training,; feedback is immediately relevant to the user. Good design can enhance meaning beyond the straight content of the message and, because it is targeted at the emotional part of people, makes a deeper and more lasting impact. Better design makes something more useful, but in order to do this understanding the context and positioning yourself in that context is very important and that context, the history and interrelation of things, exists on such a deeper level than numbers can convey.

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I know I’ve been pretty quiet on here but I’ve been pretty pre-occupied with work and my work lately. One thing that has been occupying my time I felt like sharing though, or I guess going on in the background of all this busyness, is my new favorite radio station Dublab.

I remember hearing about the site a while back when they were more dub / roots focused but they’re since expanded their programming to quite a wide variety of genres ranging from downtempo, to post punk, to funk, to soul, to weird ambient spacey stuff, suffice it to say, the sound is more in line with what you’d expect from a college radio station than the name suggests.

But here’s the thing, the thing that really piqued my interest in Dublab’s business (err funding?) model; they’re a non-profit. Right out the gate this is a different approach than most so-called internet radio stations. Twice a year, they have a fund drive the way most public radio stations do to raise funds. But here’s the interesting thing about this when you make a pledge of support, one of the premiums they offer, and arguably the main premium offered, is access to their online archives to download. Now this is an interesting hybrid of models if you ask me. On one had, it’s taking the community oriented sensibilities of your typical public radio model and moving them to the web. But on the other, one could view the way they’re offering downloadable content as a premium as something akin to rhapsody.

Just a little food for thought as an alternative to the advertising based funding model that makes up most of the internet.

Those familiar with the Los Angeles based luminaries at Stones Throw probably recognize the name Egon from his work as an A&R and compilation producer for the label and the affiliated Now-Again and Soul-Cal imprints. Most definitely a music history scholar in his own right, Egon has done a series of articles for NPR music outlining selections of obscured musical-sub genres. Choice selections as usual, as difficult to find as they are good.

• Funk From Way South Of The Border
• Fast Rap: Tongue-Twisting Bangers
• The Sould of James Brown
• The Godfather of South Korean Rock
• Lost Funk Masterpieces Of Ethiopia
• Brazilian Psych-Rock For A Night On The Porch

With all the news we’ve been hearing about the economy recently, I thought I’d pass these two episodes along of my favorite show along. I think alot of people are turned off at the mere mention of economics or financial markets because these sciences are not intuitive or readily observable in people’s everyday life.



These two episodes do an awesome job of explaining, in very concrete and understandable terms, what is going on.

355: The Giant Pool of Money

365: Another Frightening Show About the Economy

The article in my previous post What’s A Business For? is talking about exactly the kind of culture that we are now realizing has gotten us into this mess. Wall street has lost sight of what the primary function of a business is for, creating phantom wealth through a system that ends up leaving a hapless public feeling swindled and dumbstruck. The economists are right when it’s a problem of consumer confidence, but not just in banks but in the system as a whole.

One summer during college, I took a music history course on the elusive and esoteric art form of Jazz, “the only truly American art form” according to my professor. He (Mr. P.) was what one would expect in a music history teacher at a local community college: a white middle class male, an MFA in music at a small liberal arts college, dogged in his classifications. “Jazz” he said “is the greatest American art form for two reasons. It’s founded in improvisation, Jazz music is always alive, no two performances are the same. Without that element of improvisation, it’s not Jazz. Secondly, Jazz is the only music that was born entirely within the United States.”

Now whether or not you share Mr. P’s opinion on Jazz music, one must concede that Jazz’ tradition is a largely an American one; an African American one. A brief history for the un-initiated, what we call jazz music today has its roots in the funeral march music of New Orleans where the procession would march to the graveyard led by the band playing a slow, melancholy, number (the first line) and dance back to town to what became Dixieland and Swing music (the second line). As Ken Burns and others will tell you, this music came from places like the infamous “Congo Square” where African slaves would come and play, fusing their musical sensibilities with Instruments and sounds from European music. And so Jazz became the popular music of the day, thoroughly upsetting the fragile sensibilities of much of America.

But the question stands, why, how for that matter, did it move out of the Black communities of the south and into mainstream consciousness? When looking at what made Jazz, both the music and the culture that formed around it, so sensational, and ultimately so popular, the newness of it cannot be denied, but I think that its roots in African American culture are often downplayed. Jazz started out as party music rooted in the cultural traditions of the south. One can only imagine how new and exciting it seemed to the generation grown up around this time, namely the white mainstream of America. Here was music un-encumbered by the traditions, conventions, and expectations of their parents generation; music that wasn’t stuck trying to imitate the classical traditions of Europe. It was able to achieve this precisely because of its roots in African culture. Until then most white Americans were steeped in the ideas and musical traditions of Europe and it took the radically different paradigm that rose out of the culture of the south to foster this new sound.

This is not intended to disparage classical music or white musicians in general. I think what must be understood when thinking about this is that whiteness at the time (and really throughout the U.S.’s history) meant the wealthier, privileged status quo. If we look at the larger cultural history of the United States, I think it can be argued that much of the cultural movements here have their roots in African American communities (Blues, R&B , Rock and Roll, Hip-Hop, et al.) I would argue however, that this owes more to the fact that African Americans are also the largest group that has categorically suffered the most repression in social, political, economic, and cultural terms. If you buy the maxim that great art comes out of great suffering then this would seem to make a lot of sense.