Sloppy Wet in Carolina

It’s been raining for days, a beautiful finish to a long dry spell in the Carolina’s. Durham was down to 60 days of water, and so was considering restricting lawn watering. The homeowners associations in town were warning members to keep their yards up. Even three days of on-to-two inches a day won’t make up for a long drought. Today, at last, it stopped soaking into the parched ground and began running off.

On the other side, all the fall flowers that were not blooming because of the drought rushed to get a full season’s reproduction in. I woke up with puffy eyes and a swollen throat—I certainly didn’t feel like writing.

Flowers weren’t the only thing that was behind. Eight months of drought meant the gutters had not been rinsed out once. So today they were clogged up. The water sucking into the ground left the well murky.

But I don’t care. It’s wet again. The sound of water on the roof was odd, at first, something unremembered. But it came back. And with it came sound sleep. Even the dogs were quieter. The deer who have been coming out of the woods searching for watered shrubs stayed at home. That nagging worry about whether the well would make is relieved. I slept well.

And I plan to do it again.

Understanding the full costs of Corn Ethanol

Combining Sugar Protectionism with Corn subsidy created a product searching for a use. Corn syrup came out of nowhere to replace sucrose in thousands of products. Because it is metabolized differently than sucrose, its pervasive use is suspected by many to be a contributor to the diabetes epidemic.

Now this subsidized corn syrup is being priced out of the market amid huge distortions in productions of all crops, as farmers switch crops to take advantage of the subsidized corn bubble. Maybe it is time we just fixed the mess by ending sugar tariffs. Whatever benefits those domestic sugar producers were supposed to get from protectionism was lost when it priced corn syrup into the market in direct competition.

This would aid Caribbean and Central American foreign policy, reduce foreign aid requirements, and improve health (as producers switched away from corn syrup). It would also, of course, free up the crops dedicated to corn syrup for corn ethanol – without requiring subsidies. This might even change the economics of corn ethanol to make sense.

It still wouldn’t make Corn Ethanol useful as a Carbon / Fossil Fuel / Energy Independence policy. Corn production would still use a more fossil fuel than the energy produced. Ethanol would still generate more carbon dioxide per mile than the octane it replaces.

All of this leaves out the truly horrific effects of the spiral of corn and sugar subsidies.

Farmers across the country have switched crops to catch the corn subsidy wave. While the bad effects of Corn Ethanol policy on Mexican tortilla are prices are well known, the external costs of crop substitutions are less publicized. Among the crops that farmers have shifted from are Barley and Hops. There are now spot shortages in both of these markets

Barley and Hops. That’s right, the ingredients of Beer. Small brewers, especially microbreweries are expected to raise their prices across the board this winter to cover the increased costs for these basic supplies.

Bad economics and market interference are an American tradition. But they have gone too far when they mess with the price of beer.

Artificially Intelligent Grid?

I’ve been thinking for a while that most Artificial intelligence attempts get one big wrong. They design single purpose systems that do one thing well, but do not have other aspects to their behavior. Neuroscientists often do the same thing, carefully noodling out the mechanisms and structures that support a single purpose.

Neuroscience is often advanced by war, and by people who suffer some sort of brain injury. This may take out an entire cognitive function, but the personality, and consciousness, while deformed, remains. So when is it that a system exhibits intelligent behavior. It may not be when enough low level programs are written, but rather when enough service oriented systems are amalgamated.

Recently I have been reading some background economic theory from Lynne Kiesling ( www.knowledgeproblem.com ). In her introduction, she leads the reader through the definition of a standard markets as complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems have large numbers of diverse agents that interact. Each agent reacts to the actions of the other agents and to changes in environment. Agents are autonomous, using distributed control and decentralized decision making, Eventually, the dominant interaction becomes the agents interacting with the system environment that was itself created by the agents’ own independent decision making.

The market pattern results in emergent self organization, in which a large scale pattern emerges out of the smaller decisions and interactions. The emergent pattern is not imposed top-down, but rather arises decentralized agents interacting within bounds of distributed control (or self control if you will).

Another characteristic of such markets is resilience in the face of change, what the economists call adaptive capacity. This is of course a key element of intelligence.

For an old brain chemistry dude, this description of complex adaptive systems sounds a whole lot more like the proper model for intelligence and consciousness than do many of the reductive neuroscience models, let alone the AI approach. It clearly is closely aligned with the principles and language of embryology. Any number of gee-whiz articles since the sequencing of the human genome have explained that “it is really not a blue-print, but an organizing principle”. Emergent self organization is a pretty good description of how the body organizes itself, actually.

We’ve been talking about using building system-based agents as players in emerging energy markets. But now I’m wondering. Are we defining an ecosystem of agents that will be self-organizing, irrespective of the economics? Is it mandatory that we have a multiplicity of agents, to offer us resilience rather than stampedes during a crisis? Should we think of building services and efficient energy use as the tropisms these agents follow?

What if we’ve finally found the path to Artificial Intelligence…

Changes in State

It is a wistful Sunday morning. It is a cool 60 degrees on the porch, down from the punishing 90-100 degree days of late. Rusty the semi-Beagle has quieted down from the morning walk to get the paper. The roosters down the hill are performing their morning call and response. An orange glow, hinting that fall will come suffuses the yard.

This week will be a flurry of last minute activities, all unplanned. On Friday, we will leave early to drive north. On Sunday morning Katy, my youngest, will move into her dorm at NYU. The years of nurturing and cajoling, or hectoring and applauding are just about over – now I will sit back and watch what I have done.

This year a second transition begins. Josh is all seriousness and purpose. He tells me he can just squeeze an economics minor into his last semester at Case Western. He is wrestling with a few years as a practicing engineer in industry or continuing right on to another degree. We have already completed the personal transition, his graduation will be a mere formality, one that will consume me and that he will barely notice.

Margot, always in a rush, may graduate before him. She has always been a second child, always wanting to show up her older brother, always unhappy with the inequity of not being recognized as first. She has always worked the hardest, at everything from school to track to work. She has always accepted the least; our relationship has always been prickly. She seemed to have found peace during the week she was home this summer. In two weeks she is off to Vienna for a semester abroad from Chicago. She has always stood on her own, and I know she will do fine.

By Christmas, depending on how their appeals of various academic injustices go, I may be down to one kid still on the dole, and by the end of the week, none at home. And so opens the third act.

I plan to drive slowly from New York City to Cleveland next week, hiking, and visiting wine country, and simply talking with my Maggie. For the first time in decades, there will be no kids to roust, no fights to referee, but just two people resuming a journey together after some distraction. We will visit Josh in Cleveland for his birthday and then drive back to Carolina to resume something like normal life. It is a celebration of an inflexion point.

Where does the arc of my life go from here? In September, I will take some days off for a retreat at my brother’s ranch on Colorado’s western slope; there I will ponder what other changes to make, what opportunities lie ahead. What does the next act look like? What shall I do with more time, and fewer constraints?

I have some ideas I want to put into play. I love thinking about them, love writing about them. I think they are important, and can have a big effect on our future, and the future of how our civilization sits on the planet. I enjoy working with the people who share the vision as we develop paths to implementation.

But today it is a quiet, cool morning on the porch. I am enjoying the sweet melancholy of putting one phase to rest, even as I look forward what comes next. I recognize that I don’t know how I will engage the challenges ahead. But for now, I am enjoying the shade of the old oak and the orange glow of morning sun on the magnolia, as the roosters settle down and the crickets hum.