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I’ve been living with this nagging issue for a few years now. After a long period of many intercontinental business trips and working assigments as well as foreign vacation travel from a UK home, I’ve had a self-inflicted period of choosing to live and work abroad in Australia, USA & Norway. I have thereby been travelling by air more often (and paradoxically with ever cheaper airlines) for domestic or vacation reasons, and family members as well as myself.

I still firmly believe that everyone who wants to hold an international opinion, needs to get out more and see the world – I’ve been very “lucky” in that respect.

But of course the carbon-footprint and oil-dependency of air-travel is inescapable in both global-warming and energy sustainability terms. (Funny just typing that I can just see my Dad saying, some oooh 35/40 years ago, whilst looking up a high-altitude vapour trails criss-crossing the skies , that the scale of aircraft environmental damage was obvious.)

I also firmly believe that even with increasingly sophisticated remote-team-working possibilities, that if international working is part of our economy, then there is still a need for person-to-person working in the flesh to achieve shared understanding and concensus in decision-making. But that brings economic globalization itself into the sustainability equation too.

Anyway, the relative significance of air-travel to other carbon-footprint contributions is plain to see. It was Sue Blackmore that I first saw pledge to give-up air travel – I wonder how close to completely giving-up she actually achieved.

So as well as pledging not to contribute further to the primary problem of global population 😉 I intend that my next move, will be “home” and to a working pattern that can be conducted satisfactorily close to home with less remote team-working needed within one year. Minimal if not zero air-travel. (And I’ll consider voting for anyone that pledges to tax air travel generally – and penalize the cheap carriers disproportionately – and specifically subsidize educational exchange travel with 20% of the take.)

Interesting new WordPress RSS Cloud capability and plug-in by Joseph Scott. Allows RSS subscription for a feed cloud – supposed to reduce feed spam. Don’t fully understand yet, but I do know I have stopped most of my subscriptions through FeedReader & FeedBurner because of the notification overload.

Having (mostly) read Diamond’s Collapse recently, and noticing the various G8 stories (Japan today, China, India, etc ongoing as well as US, Russia and the rest of us in the same boat) about climate change controls, carbon emissions targets, agreements, and the like, I can’t help feeling the No.1 global sustainability issue is population – pure and simple. (But, see the comment about simplicity in the previous post).

Every other effect is multiplied by this number – population times consumption times every other effective governance, efficiency and diversity issue. And where are the margins for error, the plan B’s, the escape routes, the insurance policies, those rainy day resources ? It’s warm and cuddly to talk about each doing our bit for global warming, for the environment, peak-oil, etc – and important to do it for real of course. However, it seems it’s very non-PC to suggest (human) population control is the real issue – now there is a political minefield.

Or are world leaders banking on widespread war, famine and pestilence to sort that one out for us ? Not on their watch, of course. Predictably, hypocrisy rather than evil will be our downfall.

Few of us would defend Hitler as virtuous, in fact few would see him as anything other than “evil”.

Adolf Hitler loved dogs and brushed his teeth, but that doesn’t mean we should hate dogs and stop brushing our teeth.

Says Jared Diamond quoting a friend in “Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” [my emphasis]. The quote follows two long sections on pretty evil events of recent history. Rwandan and Burundian genocides, and the colonialism, slavery and evil dictatorships of Dominica (Trujillo et al) and Haiti (Papa Doc Duvalier et al).

Despite obvious evils, – in the former case, the Malthusian food vs population imbalance rather than the Tutsi vs Hutu ethnic differences, in the latter, the contrast between climate and productive areas vs “enlightened” environmental management at the two sides of the same island, Hispaniola – the full scope of both bottom-up and top-down mismanagements includes pretty much all complex inter-related aspects of social-environmental balance and sustainability.

Fascinating case-studies, and Diamond concludes:

Part of our problem in understanding [Balaguer, a paradoxical Dominican leader] may be our own unrealistc expectations. We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously “good” or “bad”, as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of their behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by diffrent sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.

[…] The struggle to understand [him] reminds me that history, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency. [my emphasis]

Too true. Life is (just) complicated enough, I often say. In fact I take a slighly different view on the consistency angle.  My take [my emphasis] is that consistency and coherence are in the complexity spread across multiple levels physio-bio-socio-cultural-intellectual processes. It’s the simplicity and consistency in simplicity that is the fools errand.

[Refer back also to MacIntyre on the story beyond virtue after multiple virtues.]

A variation on an old adage “Writing is easy, but editing is harder.” (It will take me half an hour to prepare a one hour presentation, but a couple of days to prepare a 15 minute talk, etc … ).

A condescending thought maybe (relevant to wisdom), but it is interesting in the blogosphere, particular development blogs, for the (relatively) young and inexperienced, learning their own lessons. Nothing new under the sun, but learning beats teaching nevertheless.

Already got the latest security patch, but a useful tip in this post about running SQL queries direct from “phpMyAdmin”.

As well as those books stacked-up for upcoming vacation reading … must add these two to my list.

“In Defense of Rhetoric” by Brian Victers (recommended by Matt & Marsha)

“A Different Drum” by M.Scott-Peck (recommended by John Carl)

As a lay person trying to get to grips with any meaningful sense in the world of quantum physics, specifically because of its apparent relevance to cosmic creation and the development of the “life, the universe and everything” – I took a recommendation from Marsha (over on MoQ-Discuss) for David Lindley’s “Uncertainty – Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science”. Glad I did.

A lot has been written about “Copenhagen” one way or another, so there are few new “facts” in a book like this, and it is therefore particularly satisfying to find it written simply, wittily and with just sufficient scepticism for the expressed thoughts and motives of the main players. (As well as Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr, those players inlcuded Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton, Kepler, Maxwell, the Curies, Becquerel, Bolzmann, Eddington, Brown, Darwin, Gouy, Laplace, Clausius, Poincare, Rutherford, JJ Thomson, Sommerfeld, Millikan, Planck, Pauli, Born, DeBroglie, Schroedinger and Dirac, to name a few, without even naming the philosophers and writers involved.)

In fact the only hint of being unsatisfactory is in the real-life plot itself. Of all the players, Heisenberg – and the armies of quantum mechanics that followed him – seem to be the only ones not to care about the philosophical and metaphysical implications of “uncertainty” – for want of any better label. Bohr and Einstein clearly both cared deeply, even if they could not agree on a satisfactory interpretation.

I say “for want of a better label” because Bohr himself is at least partly responsible for raising public consciousness of the underlying issues in their metaphorical relevance to so many other areas of science and rational studies in this post-modern era. In becoming cemented in wider consciousness, any hope of delineating between Correspondence, Complementarity and Uncertainty is probably lost, as is any distinction between the metaphorical application and any real physical sense of these terms. Thought experiments – of the kind Einstein favoured – clearly helped thinking and argument, but leave stubborn memes in the public mind; “Schroedinger’s Cat” (formerly “Einstein’s Bomb”) being simply the most infamous.

“Bohr was willing to write and speak about the larger meaning of probability and uncertainty, and to speculate on how these might come to influence other sciences. (When Einstein wrote and spoke on these broad topics, it was of course with the hope of reigning in their pernicious influence, not enlarging it.)”

Other writings come close to satisfying lay accounts of these issues – favourites of mine are (one third of) David Deutsch’s “Fabric of Reality”, Shimon Malin’s “Nature Loves to Hide” and John Gribbin’s “Schroedinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality” and “The Cartoon History of Time”- the latter, illustrated by Kate Charlesworth, being my all time favourite. David Lindley however, by laying out the narrative drama, leaves us with that real sense that we are in a stalemate, a limbo, since the failure to achieve any real agreement.

“Between determinism and spontaneity.”

“A no-man’s-land between logic and physics.”

Must look out for other writing by Lindley.

After finishing and blogging posts about Hilary Lawson’s “Closure” and Jared Diamond’s “Collapse”, I realized I’d read a few other books recently that I hadn’t mentioned yet.

After reading and enjoying the Booker-of-Bookers, Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” a few years ago, I also tried but struggled with his “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”.  Recently I read “The Enchantress of Florence” and “The Satanic Verses”, both excellent, literally fabulous – the times blurb on the latter says it.

“A novel of metamorphosis, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles and jokes. Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb.”

Well I did, and it sure is no accident that it is “blasphemous” when it comes to the revealed word of God. I have a hard-back of Rushdies’s “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” lined-up for holiday reading starting in a week’s time. Can’t wait – one of my earliest blog posts was a quote from that – and I can’t recall why, something to do with being “in the frame” – a la Pirsig ? [Back in 2003]

Also recently read William James “Essays in Radical Empiricism” – very dry, and important parts of which I have read in other collections already, but essential to the subject.

And also just finished the wonderful David Lindley “Uncertainty – Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science” – I’ll blog more on this soon.

And finally, as well as Rushdie I have two Terry Eagleton hard-back’s also awaiting holiday reading; “The Meaning of Life” (2007) and “Reason, Faith and Revolution – Reflections of the God Debate” (2009).

One biological, the other physical.

Several Arctic Jellyfish and a Single Nanotubule.