[CAT] Cat vs. Maneki neko

Cat vs. Maneki neko a photo by yorksranter on Flickr.

I found an unusual followup to Wednesday's Maneki neko photo posting over on Flickr, with the Yorkshire Ranter's photograph of his neighbour's cat looking at the Maneki neko posting on the Ranter's own laptop. (The left part of the Tarantula Nebula picture I posted later that morning is just visible to the right of the screen.)

This was such a meta picture that I had to share it.

If you're curious, the picture that started off this spiral is below.

[DM] "Surely There Is Nothing “Funny” About What Is Going On In Japan?"

Over at Demography Matters (and also at A Fistful of Euros) co-blogger Edward Hugh takes a look at the ramifications for Japan and the world of this month's disaster, in the short and medium and long runs.

Serious as the short term impacts may well be, in the longer run the shadow which will be cast by what is currently happening in Japan could well be very long indeed, in a way which few today can even contemplate (although see this for a good first pass). The justification for this assertion is not only our increased awareness of our collective vulnerability to the impact of natural disasters, there is also Japan’s pioneer status in one very new and very global phenomenon - population ageing - to think about. As we will see below, the optimistic (I would say denial) prognosis is that Japan will soon valiantly overcome this latest bout of adversity in a similar way to which they overcame the post WWII devastation. The Japanese will surely be valiant in their efforts (one only has to think of the spirit of sacrificeof those poor workers who have been asked to handle directly the reactor problem), but their ability to overcome adversity will not be comparable to that registered in an earlier epoch when they had the wind behind them rather than gusting straight into their faces.

It is for this reason that I recently likened the earthquake and tsunami to another mindset-shaping natural disaster: the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. Both events, for their magnitude, and for the seeming arbitrariness with which they strike any given set of individuals, inevitably leave (and left) searing scars in our psyche, the latter being characterised for the way it opened up the path to what many have termed the modern era, while the latter potentially could draw it to a close.

What I have in mind is this, the Lisbon earthquake lead to a questioning of the "natural order of things" in a way which facilitated a more rational approach to the problems in hand. But the application of this rational approach gave rise to a "second degree" natural order of things, in which (thanks to good governance, an economic hidden hand, and technical expertise) the permanence and stability of the social and economic world around us was almost totally taken for granted.

One good example of this would be the idea of the birth of a "Modern Growth Era", whereby it was assumed that economies would simply grow and grow in perpetuity, driven possibly by the dynamising capacity of ongoing technical change. The curious thing about this kind of interpretation is that Robert Solow, founder of the modern neo-classical growth model, intentionally and explicitly left technology out of his model. From a general equilibrium perspective technology does not necessarily generate economy growth.

And now we are faced with a significant number of advanced economies which may well find themselves, far from growing, actually starting to shrink at some point during the next 50 years. The reason for this, of course, is that working-age populations will be declining and ageing at the same time as the elderly dependent population (and their health and pension needs) will be rising and rising. So it seems we are now about to become aware that the Modern Growth Era was simply that, one particular era in our history as a species and as a group of social and political animals. This era is now, in some countries, starting to draw to a close, and a new one will surely open up. My conjecture is that what is happening now in Japan may well mark a tipping point in our awareness of this process in just the same way as the surge in Sovereign Debt in some countries which occured during the financial crisis marked a turning point in how we think about demography and economics, and in how we see the sustainability of health and pension systems.

Of course, as with all issues, there are still those who remain in denial.

But there is another dimesnion to the Japan crisis and how we see it that ties in with the Lisbon earthquake parallel, and that is our need to change mindset. Basically the issue concerns complexity, and how useful old-mindset linear models are in helping us address the kinds of issue which arise in managing highly interconnected and interlocked economic, social and technological systems.

A new era?

Go, read.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the long, hot Japanese summer to come

Charlie Stross warned that the failing reactors of Japan will kill thousands of people. How? The mechanism's a bit unexpected, but obvious when pointed out.

Western Japan and Eastern Japan do not share an electricity grid; because of an historical accident, in the 1890s when they were first getting electric lighting, Osaka, in the west, chose to run at 60Hz and Tokyo, in the east, picked 50Hz. Consequently there's no grid interconnect between the two halves of the Japanese electricity supply system.

Eastern Japan has had 15 nuclear reactors scrammed by an an earthquake. Some of them may be checked out and approved to start delivering base load again over the coming months, but they all need a thorough inspection at this point — and we know for sure that at least three of them will never work again (not after they've had seawater pumped through their primary coolant circuit).

We are now heading into summer. And Tokyo doesn't have enough electricity to maintain power everywhere even in spring.

Summer in Tokyo is savage: temperatures routinely top 35 celsius with 100% humidity. In a heat wave, it can top 40 degrees for days on end. Back when I visited in late August of 2008, the heat wave had broken and daytime temperatures were down under 37 degrees again — the week before it had been over 42, and joggers had been dropping dead in the street.

Greater Tokyo also has 30-million-odd people, of whom a large proportion — maybe 20% — are 75 years or older.

The 2003 European heat wave responsible for the premature deaths of forty thousand people, largely the aged, has obvious parallels.

Meanwhile, at Spike Japan Richard Hendy's analysis ("After the earthquake: A long, hot summer")

TEPCO [Tokyo Electric Power] is one of the world’s largest utilities, with 28.6mn customers, and it serves a population of 44.6mn people, not only in Tokyo, but also in the greater Kanto plain area—specifically the prefectures of Tokyo, Chiba, Ibaraki, Gunma, Tochigi, Saitama, Yamanashi, Kanagawa, and Shizuoka. The area contains more than a third of Japan’s population and accounts for some 40% of its GDP.

On Thursday, March 10, TEPCO had theoretical total capacity of 74.9mn kW. How much actual capacity does it have now?

Not only is the Fukushima complex down for the time being, but many of TEPCO's other nuclear and conventional power generation facilities are also badly damaged, and long before this crisis low railfall hit hydroelectric generation capacities generally. "[T]he total loss of nuclear and thermal power, discounting Higashi Ogishima, [is] about 16mn kW, or 21% of TEPCO’s theoretical capacity."

That then is the hardly encouraging picture on the supply side. How do things look on the demand side? It’s callous, I know, to talk of good fortune in the timing of a disaster, but TEPCO—and by extension, Japan—can at least count itself lucky in that the events of 3/11 happened in March, which together with April, October, and November, is one of the months in which, for seasonal reasons, demand for electricity is lowest. Nonetheless, peak demand in the week beginning March 14 came in at around 41mn kW, which is why Tokyo and the wider Kanto region were subject to rolling power outages all week and a cold snap on March 17 led TEPCO to threaten large-scale blackouts without warning. Peak demand this coming July and August, in a normal year, would be around 55mn-60mn kW (it has peaked above 60mn in six of the ten years from 2000 to 2009, the all-time demand peak was registered on July 24, 2001, at 64.3mn kW, and TEPCO itself projects the three-day average summer peak at 57.55mn kW). With current capacity at least 40% short of that, something has to give, and in a very big way.

What options does TEPCO have to bridge the gap? At the time of the 2007 Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake, it bought in power from neighboring utility, Tohoku Electric, to the north. That is not going to be possible this time, because much of Tohoku has been laid waste to by the earthquake and tsunami. Tohoku Electric has seen one of its two nuclear plants, Onagawa, crippled by the catastrophe, is desperately short of power itself, and is going to be in no position to help. Hokkaido, further north, has spare capacity, but at an estimated 0.7 kW, it is barely a drop in a bucket, and there may be transmission and distribution issues, too—it’s not as though the electricity can be boxed up, put on a ferry, and carted across the Tsugaru Strait. Turning west, TEPCO is stymied by one of the quirks of Japan’s power distribution system: everywhere west of its operating range runs on a utility frequency of 60 Hz, whereas it, Tohoku, and Hokkaido operate on 50 Hz, a legacy of Tokyo’s 1895 decision to buy 50 Hz generation equipment from AEG of Germany and Osaka’s 1896 decision to buy 60 Hz equipment from General Electric of the US. There are a handful of frequency converter substations, but they can only handle 1mn kW and this is already included in TEPCO’s capacity.

Where else can TEPCO turn? It can—probably within months—fire up thermal plants undergoing routine maintenance (3.4mn kW), resume operation at long-idled, mainly oil-fired plants (2.8 kW), hike operating rates at still running thermal plants (3.3mn kW), and maybe buy in surplus electricity generated by companies (700,000 kW), taking supply capacity up around 43mn kW, still at best 20% shy of peak demand.

So adjustments will have to be made on the demand side to bridge the supply/demand gap. Already station escalators across Tokyo have been cordoned off as if they were strips of contaminated Fukushima soil, convenience stores are discovering that—who knew it—they had dimmer switches all along, and, as the neon fades, some are dusting off their copies of Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay in celebration of traditional aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows.

Air-conditioning is the sole reason that peak summer electricity demand is a third higher than off-peak spring and autumn demand. So turn off the air-conditioning, I hear you say. Easier said than done: life in a modern office building without air-conditioning when outside the mercury is climbing past 35°C would be about as inimical to humans as life on the surface of Venus. Factories producing silicon wafers and luxury cars cannot cope with wild fluctuations in temperature. It looks as though the long-suffering consumer will be asked yet again to endure the unendurable, to sweat for victory to keep the offices purring and factories humming, although blackouts are necessarily undiscriminating—while TEPCO will no doubt do its utmost to ring-fence central Tokyo from outages, there will inevitably be disruptions to production and consumption.

This, then, is the base-case scenario. It’s easy enough to come up with a best-case scenario, in which incantations for precipitation go answered by the gods (there are no gods in a base-case scenario) and the baiyu plum rains of June and July prove bountiful, at least some knocked-out thermal power is restored promptly and TEPCO scrapes through summer on a wing and a prayer, stretched to the very borders of capacity. And in the worst-case scenario, the rains fail, the government orders Kashiwazaki-Kariwa shut for safety inspections, summer is a scorcher, and massive unannounced blackouts engulf Honshu from Tokyo north to the tip of the Shimokita peninsula.

[LINK] Some Japan nuclear energy links

Doug Saunders' "Japan’s Nuclear-Energy Contest of Terrors: Nature vs Technology vs Climate" calls for calm. He, like Edward Hugh, also mentions the Lisbon earthquake.

The Japanese nuclear disaster is bad: Many people could be killed, and the area immediately surrounding the plant could become uninhabitable. But it could not become a Chernobyl-style disaster, with a carbon fire spreading radiation beyond the plant’s vicinity and injuring thousands. No reactors today are built that way.

On the other hand, it is a type of plant – the 1960s-era General Electric Mark 1 – that has been known since 1972 to be flawed and vulnerable to this type of disaster, and it has just been exposed to the fifth-largest earthquake in recorded history.

It shows us that nuclear plants must be better regulated and such cheap designs avoided or decommissioned, but it is hardly a condemnation of the technology. If the earthquake had burst a major dam – an event that would have killed thousands more people immediately – would the world have suddenly turned against hydroelectric generation?

More importantly, though, the Japanese moment represents a global choice, a fulcrum point in history.

We are being assaulted from three sides. First by nature, raw and unfettered, humanity’s oldest and most constant enemy.

Second by our technology, gone terribly wrong and used carelessly – second only to nature as a threat to our being, as the words Auschwitz and Hiroshima ought to remind us constantly.

And third, by nature again, this time altered and distorted by our presence – an atmosphere too dense with our particles and gasses, requiring action to render it less of a threat.

That great Lisbon earthquake in 1755 taught us all a crucial lesson: We are alone in the world, without a beneficent God to protect us. Nature is not our gift from heaven but both our source of sustenance and our most pressing antagonist, and we must use our guile and devices to make nature work with us, not against us.

Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton, after noting that oddly people are not horrified by collapsing hydroelectric dams, dislikes the impoverished public knowledge of nuclear energy.

Not that it's not built to withstand a magnitude 9 megathrust earthquake, hundreds of kilometers away from the fault line where this quake is most likely to occur. Not that its emergency diesel generators are vulnerable to ten-meter tsunamis of the sort that are the actual cause of the Fukushima crisis, which we all know are totally common on the Columbia River. That it uses the same "radioactive fuel rods." You know what? I guess that makes it - gasp - a nuclear reactor! I'm no nuclear engineer, but isn't it safe to say that the problem with Fukushima Daiichi was not that it uses radioactive fuel rods, but that it was designed in such a way that mechanical pumps were necessary to get coolant to the reactors, and not in such a way that gravity would do the pumps' work?

None of that matters to the media, it seems. Right now, people are keyed up and scared shitless about atoms and radiation. The other day I saw a news ticker about how people in British Columbia were stocking up on "iodine" pills - putting aside the question of whether this was a typo or people were actually stocking up on iodine instead of potassium iodide, which is what you want when you want to protect yourself from thyroid cancer - because of fears of a radioactive cloud blowing across the Pacific.

Keep in mind that the Pacific is big. It is, in fact, more than seven thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Vancouver. If radiation is such that iodide would become a good investment here, I very much doubt that any human would be able to survive on Honshu without glowing. But many people only have a surface understanding of it - for many people, it's a case of radiation coming, and radiation is bad.

Gerry Canavan, meanwhile, posted an interesting if essentializing excerpt from a text on the relative weakness of the Japanese anti-nuclear movement saying that--in true Toynbee fashion--after Hiroshima and Nagasaki confronting nuclear weapons was impossible. Yes, Toynbee.

Noel Maurer noted that with rising costs for nuclear plants, perhaps connected to the sorts of safety regulations other plants aren't put through, nuclear energy may not be economic any time soon.

[LINK] "Banning gay-straight alliances goes against equity grain, McGuinty warns"

Tamara Baluja at The Globe and Mail notes that the decision of Ontario's publicly funded Roman Catholic school system to ban gay-straight alliances is becoming more of a political issue. If the system accepts public funding, how can it go against the Education ministry's policies on equity?

A Mississauga Catholic high school’s decision to bar students from launching a gay-straight alliance doesn’t jibe with Ontario’s education policy on equity, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Monday.

“We are making it perfectly clear to all our school boards, all our schools, all our principals, all our teachers and all our students that it is unacceptable in Ontario to discriminate based on race, gender, religion or sexual orientation,” the Premier said in Question Period.

Mr. McGuinty stopped short of saying the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board was actually in violation of the ministry’s code on equity, saying that “boards can find different ways to ensure that they adhere to those policies.”

The Premier’s response comes after 16-year-old Leanne Iskander approached St. Joseph’s Catholic Secondary School principal Frances Jacques to start a gay-straight alliance recently and was flatly turned down.

The gay and lesbian newspaper Xtra! reported that Ms. Iskander was told, “There’s already supports in place at the school, such as guidance counsellors. Also, a GSA [gay-straight alliance] is premature for your age.”

NDP education critic Rosario Marchese said the Premier’s response was a non-answer.
[. . .]

The Premier and the Ministry of Education has been predominantly silent on the issue since the issue first made international headlines in January. In neighbouring Halton Catholic District School Board, chairwoman Alice LeMay came under fire when she told Xtra! the board “doesn’t allow Nazi groups either. Gay-straight alliances are banned because they are not within the teachings of the Catholic Church.” Public outrage forced the Halton Catholic board to lift the ban on gay-straigh alliances, but it still does not allow any student group with the word “gay” in its title.

[BRIEF NOTE] On nudge-nudge, wink-wink condemnations of the Libya no-fly zone

Siberian Light's Andy made the point with his post "Medvedev Rebukes Putin Over Libya".

After Putin’s comments that the UN Security Council resolution was “deficient and flawed… reminiscent of a medieval call for a crusade” I was all set to come back to my desk and write an angry post about how two-faced and cowardly the Russian Government’s response to the crisis in Libya has been.

But then Medvedev, the Russian President and technically Putin’s boss, intervened in spectacular style.

“It is absolutely inexcusable to use expressions that in effect lead to a clash of civilizations – such as ‘crusades,’ and so on – that is unacceptable,” Medvedev said.

“Russia did not exercise [the veto power] for one reason: I do not consider this resolution to be wrong. Moreover, I believe that this resolution generally reflects our understanding of what is going on in Libya.”

[. . .]

The US and European powers have always made clear that the first step in establishing any no-fly zone is to establish air superiority. It doesn’t mean just waiting until a Libyan airplane takes off and trying to shoot it down. It means destroying the Libyan air force’s command and control facility, allowing them to patrol freely over Libya.

And, more, Russia knew that “all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” meant bombing Libyan military on the ground, and again, their command and control centres, which would be located in cities.

You can argue all you want about whether the UN resolution is a good one or not. But the fact is, Russia knew that this is what the US, France and UK were going to do. They knew exactly what would happen once the resolution was passed, and they still didn’t vote against the resolution.

In other words, Russia was not opposed to what was about to happen.

The position of the Arab League and its member-states vis-a-vis the no-fly zone--first asking for it, then saying they didn't want that kind of no-fly zone--is somewhat similar, save that it seems understood that the mouthing of concern over the attack on Libya that these states had enabled is all politics and nothing that they've exceptional issues with.

[LINK] "Ports of call"

Grecophones in Libya? Al Majallah describes the descendants of post-Ottoman migrants from Crete to Cyrenaica.

Turn on the radio and Greek music will waft over the squat brick houses built by Italian colonizers in the 1920s in a bid to finally urbanize a Bedouin population of roamers and tie them down to the Cyrenaican coast’s fertile land.

“Star FM, the soundtrack of our lives,” a breathy announcer’s voice exhales in Greek from across the sea’s blue horizon.

Subconsciously, when these former nomads nod, it takes them 200 kilometers across the sea to Crete. It also takes them back to their past. For Jalal Bayram, a retired Libyan civil servant, the island over the horizon feels even closer: His family came from it.

“When my family arrived, the Arabs accepted us,” he told me one scorching March afternoon as we stood in the shade of his porch.

I had been touring the Appolonia archaeological site when a couple of locals asked me where I was from. They had never met a Greek but suddenly their faces lit up. “Go and see Jalal Bey,” they told me using the Ottoman honorific for older men. “He’s Kritli.”

Kritli, it turned out, was the term used for a very special tribe: a group of Cretan Muslims who arrived in Libya in the early 20 century when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire. It would be the last organized migration of people from the Greek mainland to Libya and it happened in the mid-nineteenth century as some 20 thousand Muslim Greeks fled the Greek War of Independence, the accompanying persecution of Muslims and the destruction of their holy places.

As Crete left the orbit of the Ottoman Empire and became part of the fledgling Greek state, they abandoned their mountain villages and fishing ports in a Great Exodus that lacked a convenient national narrative of loss and exile to adopt it.

The Ottoman Empire evacuated its own citizens to Muslim lands still under its control. Half were sent to the Syrian coastline where they built a new life for themselves. The village of Hammidiyeh still survives today and has been visited by several Greeks dumbfounded to find some of the older residents still speaking a fossilized Cretan dialect.

These people, the author notes, are victims of the nationbuilding in the former Ottoman Empire that defined ethnicity and nationality on confessional grounds, not linguistic ones.

For years, the Greek media has described the two Greek-speaking villages on the Muslim Mediterranean coastline—Sosa in Libya and Hamidiyyeh in Syria. The breathless reports relate with a latent pride how their older inhabitants still speak an archaic Cretan dialect. But what the reports don’t stress too strongly is that these people who were forced from their homes by the cruel processes of state formation are Muslims: For the Greek state to come into being, across-the-board homogenization had to be imposed to exorcise the amorphous, the ethnically diverse and the ambiguous. Indigenous Muslims need not apply.

“They call them Turkish Cretans but they’re not, they’re Greek Muslims,” said Kanakis Mandolios, president of the Greek community of Benghazi, the historic center of Libya’s Greek diaspora. “Either way, they’re headed towards extinction.”

[LINK] Two animal intelligence notes

Older elephants, it turns out, have accumulated the experience necessary to outsmart lions.

In natural history films, lionesses are usually portrayed as the hunters of the pride, while male lions mope around under shady trees. But males are no layabouts – they’re effective killers in their own right, particularly when they target larger prey like elephants and buffalo. Aside from humans, lions are the only predators powerful enough to kill an elephant. The males, being 50% heavier than the females, are especially suited to the task. It typically takes seven lionesses to kill an elephant, but just two males could do the same.

Even a single male can overpower a young elephant. Between 1994 and 1997, Dereck Joubert found that the lions of Botswana’s Chobe National Park were getting better and better at hunting elephants. He wrote: “In one notable case, a single male lion ran at nearly full speed into the side of a 6-year-old male calf with sufficient force to collapse the elephant on its side.”

Male lions clearly pose a great threat, and older elephants know it. Karen McComb from the University of Sussex has found that older matriarchs – the females who lead elephant herds – are more aware of the threat posed by male lions. If they hear recordings of male roars, they’re more likely to usher their herd into a defensive formation. Their experience and leadership could save their followers’ lives. “Family units led by older matriarchs are going to be in a position to make better decisions about predatory threats, which is likely to enhance the fitness of individuals within the group,” says McComb.

[. . .]

McComb studied 39 groups of elephants at Amboseli National Park, including hundreds of animals who are all individually known. Approaching the herds in vehicles, she played the recorded roars of lions – either one or three, and either all males or all females. She filmed their responses (and asked an independent colleague to confirm her interpretations).

McComb’s videos showed that, unsurprisingly, the elephants responded more strongly to the roars of three lions than the sound of a singleton. The matriarch was more likely to raise her head and ears, and the others were more likely to quickly draw towards her in a tight huddle. All of the herds reacted in the same way, but only those with older leaders (60 years or more) twigged to the greater danger posed by the fake male roars. They were more likely to draw together, they did so more quickly, and they were even more likely to aggressively mob the lions.

The older the matriarchs were, the more sensitive they and their group were to the sound of male lions. They didn’t react in the same way to lionesses, so it wasn’t that they were becoming generally more panicky in their dotage.. Instead, they had become better at discerning the most dangerous roars.

And Israeli ravens use vultures to crack open the eggs they can't break themselves.

Ostriches lay their eggs in a single nest. The dominant female goes first, laying around 15 to 20. Her subordinates follow with 3 to 4 of their own. However, the top pair of ostriches can only incubate around a dozen eggs effectively, and they roll the rest away from the nest. This creates a ring of nutritious treats for any bird skilful enough to break into the eggs.

The Egyptian vulture does so with a special technique – it uses a tool, and is one of the few birds to do so. It picks up rounded stones in its beak and uses them to hammer the egg shells until they crack. Even ostrich eggs eventually give way. But the vultures don’t always get to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Yosef found that on at least three occasions, a pair of ravens, watching nearby but hidden behind a bush, quickly flew in and drove the vultures away.

Yosef thinks that the ravens he saw are the same individuals – they behaved in virtually the same way from one robbery to the next. Their behaviour suggests a keen intelligence. Yosef writes, “Most apparent in the ravens is their innovative thinking and ability to predict the actions of the potential host or prey.”

He thinks that the ravens recognise that ostrich eggs are valuable food but that they cannot break through the shell. They seem to understand the vultures’ technique. They know they have to hide and “be patient”, waiting till the vulture has broken the egg before showing themselves. They know that by hunting together, they can effectively exploit a source of food that they would never be able to reach.

This is possibly overstating the case, at least without putting the birds through any experiments. Animal intelligence is a notoriously tricky thing to study and many previous claims have been overplayed. For example, are they biding their time for the vultures to finish, or are they simply attracted to the glisten of exposed egg whites?

Nonetheless, it’s hardly far-fetched to claim that the ravens are acting intelligently. They and their relatives – crows, rooks, jays and bowerbirds – have demonstrated impressive feats of behaviour time and again. In the same nature reserve, Yosef has found that brown-necked ravens cooperate to hunt a local lizard called a mastigure. When the lizard is away from its burrow, a pair of ravens circles in and blocks the entrance. With its escape route cut off, the lizard is attacked by the other ravens. Only when the lizard is dead do the burrow-blockers join the feast.

[H&F] "On information and speed and mind's problems"

I've a post up at History and Futility linking to some posts by Tim Maly at Quiet Babylon on the problems with human information processing at high speed. We don't manage it well, as the reaction to Japan's nuclear issues demonstrate.

Go, read.