Straw Bale Model House

Embodied vs Sequestered Carbon in a Model Conventional House

It is Very Likely that Increases in NPP have slowed

Ups and Downs of NPP

US Prison Population

Climate Alarmism at Science Magazine?

Patent Stats Chart

Building with Twigs and Birdsnests

Scott Adams in hilarious form on his experiences trying to build a green home:

Let's say you love the Earth. You see an article in a magazine about a guy who built a "green" house using mostly twigs, pinecones and abandoned bird nests. You want to build a green home, too. So you find an architect, show him the magazine and say, "Give me one just like this."

Good luck with that.

Your architect only knows how to design homes using materials that his local planning commission is likely to approve. But he wants the job, so he tries hard to talk you out of using twigs, pinecones and abandoned bird nests. He tells you that no builder will build it. He tells you it won't get approved by the city. He tells you it won't stand up to earthquakes, hurricanes or termites. But you persist. You're saving the Earth, damn it. No one said it would be easy.

So the architect—and later your building engineer, too—each asks you to sign a document saying you won't sue them when beavers eat a load-bearing wall and your entire family is crushed by forest debris. You make the mistake of mentioning this arrangement to your family, and they leave you. But you are not deterred because you're saving the planet, damn it. You'll get a new family. A greener one.

Male Labor Force Composition

City Crippler Car Worms

Tracking Progress on Deleveraging

A Little More on Disaster Loss Statistics

A little more on yesterday's discussion.  First, as I suspected, there does seem to be a statistically significant trend to this graph:

Disaster Losses Over Time

OPEC Concurs on July Oil Supply Increase

Global Market Shares

Two Corollaries to Stein's Law

I see in the paper today that the US trade deficit increased.  A couple of days ago we learned that China's trade surplus "surged last month to its highest level in a year and a half".  Then, this morning, I read Michael Pettis's very thoughtful post on analogies between Chinese and Japanese growth, and the difficulty in rebalancing China's economy.  I was particularly struck by this observation:

But for a long time the problem of misallocated investment, which was whispered about in Japan but not taken too seriously, didn’t seem to matter. After all, as nearly everyone knew, Japan’s leaders were extremely smart, with a deep knowledge of the very special circumstances that made Japan different from other countries and not subject to “western” economic laws, with real control over the economy, with a strong grasp of history and penchant for long-term thinking, and most of all with a clear understanding of what was needed to fix Japan’s problems.

And look what a great job they had already done: by the early 1990s Japan had generated so much investment-driven growth that it had grown from 7% of global GDP in 1970 to 10% in 1980, and then surged to nearly 18% at its peak in the early 1990s. In about twenty years Japan’s share of global GDP was two-and-a-half times its initial share. That is an extraordinary growth story and one that can only be explained as a function of a new kind of economic thinking, right?

But less than twenty years later, after a terribly long struggle to adjust to high debt levels and massive overinvestment, Japan is about to be overtaken by China with only 8% of global GDP. Japan, in other words, has given back in less than two decades almost the entire GDP share it had taken in the two astonishing decades that preceded it (while during the same period the US has maintained its share). What’s worse, it is hard to pick up a newspaper today and read about Japanese policymakers without getting the idea that they are a totally dysfunctional, narrowly ambitious, and not especially savvy lot, much like their US and European peers. As Mortimer Snerd used to say, who woulda thunk it?

Stein's law, famously, says that "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  I would like to propose two corollaries that I've observed empirically in human affairs:

• It will go on a lot longer than we think
• It will end badly when it does stop.

IEA Reports Big Increase in July Oil Supply

The Embodied Carbon In a Concrete Foundation

Is highly uncertain...

Matt Simmons, RIP

A reader emails to alert me to this news:

Matthew Simmons, an international oil expert who most recently focused on developing renewable energy from the waters off Maine, died Sunday night of an apparent heart attack, his office is reporting. He was 67.

Simmons founded the Ocean Energy Institute in 2007, hosting a grand opening of its new office last month in Rockland. The goal of the think tank and venture capital fund was to attract investment in research to make Maine a global leader in offshore wind and other ocean energy sources.

According to police reports, Simmons suffered a heart attack while in a hot tub at his home on North Haven. An autopsy is planned for today in Augusta, according to the Knox County Sheriff's Office.

Simmons was a leading energy investment banker, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush, and author. He wrote the 2005 book “Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,” which laid out an argument that the world was approaching peak oil production.

Notwithstanding this, I am deeply shocked and saddened by Matt's untimely end.  He made a difference,  and in particular was an enormous influence on me, even where I ended up differing with his view.  Here's an interview I did with him back in 2005.

Labor Force Loses Half a Million Women in last 3 Months

Carbon Neutrality with PVs

Photo credit: Dow Chemical

Carbon Offset Value of Straw Bale Houses

Image credit

Components of Inflation

Trends in Initial Public Offerings

OECD Unemployment

Latest Saudi Arabian Oil Production Statistics

Global Trade Statistics

Latest Iraq Stability Trends

Global Oil Supply Now Contracting?

Update 8/13/10: global oil supply increased in July.  Original text follows:

Did the Great Recession Slow Moore's Law?

Almost certainly not:

Krugman, Output Gaps, and Oil Prices

Robert Rapier on Matt Simmons

Robert Rapier has a post up: Is Matt Simmons Credible? discussing in particular some of his recent claims about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, as well as some past claims he has made.

I am uncomfortable having to deal with this kind of thing: I have talked with Matt on several occasions, and emailed with him more often.  He is a decent and well-intended man, has been helpful to me personally, and he has in the past had a track-record of good calls in the oil and gas industry, back before he got so famous.  However, I'm afraid that Robert is now right: there is a history of sensationalistic overstatement in recent years, and since Matt is the premier peak oil spokesperson that can actually get attention from the mass media, that is a real problem.  Robert shouldn't be the only voice to say so.

I think the most salient issue to me is the famous Tierney-Simmons bet, where Matt intentionally set the terms of the bet far out of the money.  2010 oil futures were $59/barrel back in 2005, so setting the terms at $200 was very disadvantageous to his chances of winning.  It now looks extremely unlikely that oil will break the $200 level before the end of this year and so Matt will lose, and this does no good at all for the cause of getting people to do what is required to reduce their dependence on oil.  It didn't have to be that way if Matt were a little less certain of his own rightness.

Latest Declines in Employment Population Ratio

Oil Production During Deleveraging

Robots in Farm Future

The blog this morning is coming to you from Atomic Coffee in Fargo, North Dakota.  As near as I can tell from the I-94, North Dakota is best thought of as a single continuous industrial farming operation, and so it was of interest to see this story in the local paper on a cafe table:

RIVER FALLS, Wis. – Agriculture of the future will be “Star Trek” meets “Green Acres.”

Experts predict that within 25 years, little robots will roam fields zapping weeds, testing soil and turning plant genes on and off to fit the conditions, a bit like mechanical helpers on the starship Enterprise.

At the same time, some Americans will continue to feel a need to work the land and smell the soil while bouncing up and down on a tractor seat, as Oliver Wendell Douglas did on the farm comedy.

Farmers in recent years have embraced global positioning systems to better grow crops. They use computers and satellites better than many of the country’s biggest corporations. Dairy farmers are beginning to use robotic milking machines.

There is little argument about the future: Technology will continue to drive changes.

Progress Report on Iraqi Oil Expansion

Back in January, I began to track the al-Shahristani plan, in which the Iraqi oil ministry auctioned off a series of production development agreements for various Iraqi oilfields.  This seemed like it might lead to a very large increase in Iraqi oil production from about 2.5mbd recently, to nearly 12mbd if you just add the target plateaus of all the contracts together:

Record Global Temperatures in June

Updated Iraqi Oil Production Graph

Further Reduction in Oil Supply in June

Rogoff as Singulatarian

A reader emailed me with this fascinating column in the Guardian by well known economist Kenneth Rogoff:

What will be the big driver of global growth in the next 10 years? Here's betting that this decade will be one in which artificial intelligence hits escape velocity and starts to have an economic impact on a par with the emergence of India and China.

Admittedly, my perspective is heavily coloured by events in the world of chess, a game I once played at a professional level and still follow from a distance. Though special, computer chess nevertheless offers both a window into silicon evolution and a barometer of how people might adapt to it.

Anemic and Deflationary Recovery

Should You Believe the IMF's Optimism?

How Long and How Fast Will We Deleverage?

College Sports Affects Election Outcomes

An Interesting Ratio

Not Passing the Turing Test Yet

There's another pair of great articles in the NYT series "Smarter than You Think" exploring the state of simulation of emotion and personality in artificial intelligence.

One is Making Friends With a Robot Named Bina48, in which a New York Times interviewer basically conducted an informal Turing Test with a particular robot head.  The intelligence is not there yet:

Ten minutes into my interview with the robot known as Bina48, I longed to shut her down.

She was evasive, for one thing. When I asked what it was like being a robot, she said she wanted a playmate — but declined to elaborate.

“Are you lonely?” I pressed.

“What do you want to talk about?” she replied.

Other times, she wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise. A simple question about her origins prompted a seemingly endless stream-of-consciousness reply. Something about robotic world domination and gardening; I couldn’t follow.

Eroding a Mountain Range of Debt

China as Japan/Korea?

State of the Blog, Q2 2010

US Productivity Turning Points

Euro Area Unemployment

Relative Price Levels in the Euro Area 1995-2009

Approach to Singularity

Michael Pettis on Europe and China

There are a couple of very smart thoughtful posts by Michael Pettis that are worth reading on the European sovereign debt crisis and global trade flows.  The first from yesterday is here.  A sample:

3. The European crisis will be accompanied by a trade shock.

In the early 1980s Latin America countries were suddenly cut off from funding during what was subsequently called the LDC Debt Crisis, or the Lost Decade. These countries had been running large current account deficits, and of course current account deficits require capital account surpluses. These surpluses were financed by the the huge petrodollar recycling of the 1970s, when commercial banks around the world made staggeringly large loans to many developing countries.

Of course after 1981-82 it became clear that the loans exceeded the repayment capacity of the borrowing countries, and suddenly financing dried up – almost overnight. What’s worse, the debt crisis had already been preceded by flight capital, so that when financing dried up, a capital account surplus quickly became a capital account deficit. Of course once Latin America began to experience capital outflows, its trade deficit necessarily had to become a trade surplus. This is exactly what happened.

The deficit countries of Europe, whose combined trade deficits are nearly two-thirds the size of the US trade deficit, will also be forced into a rapid contraction in their trade deficits for the very same reasons – they are going to find it hard enough simply to refinance themselves, let alone receive net capital inflows. Without a capital account surplus, however, they simply cannot run current account deficits. This contraction must, one way or another, be absorbed by the very unwilling rest of the world.

Computers Make Strides in Recognizing Speech

There's another good installment in the NYT's Smarter Than You Think series. This one concerns progress in computer speech recognition and human-computer interaction in general.

The number of American doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years to 150,000. The progress is striking. A few years ago, supraspinatus (a rotator cuff muscle) got translated as “fish banana.” Today, the software transcribes all kinds of medical terminology letter perfect, doctors say. It has more trouble with other words and grammar, requiring wording changes in about one of every four sentences, doctors say.

“It’s unbelievably better than it was five years ago,” said Dr. Michael A. Lee, a pediatrician in Norwood, Mass., who now routinely uses transcription software. “But it struggles with ‘she’ and ‘he,’ for some reason. When I say ‘she,’ it writes ‘he.’ The technology is sexist. It likes to write ‘he.’ ”

Energy Generation in Zero Carbon Britain 2030

Zero Carbon Britain 2030

Comparing US and European Fossil Fuel Use

Comparing US and European Wind Penetration

Technology Adoption in Hard Times

European Wind vs Fossil Fuel use

Computers Now Competitive at Jeopardy?

Interesting piece in the NYT:

‘Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge” ), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter.

Any of you AI sceptics feeling at least a little chill of obsolescence here?