Blessed by the Potato

I had some time today to run out and do a bit of shopping in Japan, and also see the famous Kanazawa Geisha district.

I tell you, there aren’t a lot of typical tourist trap stores here. There are plenty to cater to tourists, but they’re filled with expensive gold-plated, or intricate and delicate things that don’t make very good cheap gifts to bring back. I couldn’t even find a simple post-card with a picture of the city, all I saw were Japanese LOLcats.

Almost nobody takes Visa here, and the one place we did find that took it obviously didn’t use it much, because it took two staff members a long time to figure it out.

Interesting read (registration probably required) by Jim Baen, from the Robert J Sawyer mailing list.

We’ve long had the arguments that evolution does not really act on anything that happens after child-bearing age. By that point, whether an organism would survive to reproduce had been determined, and no matter how severe the problems (or how impressive the survival), the genes would have already been passed on. Huntington’s disease, for example, is one of the few diseases that’s controlled by a dominant allele. That is, you only need one copy of the disease allele to get the disease, and there are no carrier. Generally, dominant genetic diseases are very rare because there’s a lot of evolutionary selection against them; but since Huntington’s doesn’t strike until after the person has had a chance to have children and pass it on, that selection pressure isn’t there. Likewise, there isn’t a lot of benefit to living for 200 years if you can only have children into your 40’s, or if you get eaten or sick so long before your parts wear out.

Of course, that’s all in the past, some say, and the future may hold nothing but longer lifespans for humans. After all, with technology we can live much longer, achieve much more, build more wealth. With our society we can improve the lives of our children and their children, or even use frozen tissue or other fertility treatments to extend our reproductive years… if only we could keep our minds intact long enough for it to matter.

The interesting question is: maybe dying has some evolutionary advantage?

Extreme polygamy = bad (essentially reducing your gene pool since only a few males mate, increasing recessive traits). Older successful males are more likely to be polygamous in culture, so it’s possibly that death acts as a mechanism to stop the unbounded accumulation of wealth and mates by any one person — and the accumulation of recessive desease genes in their offspring. Violence may also be an issue in this hypothetical model: once you get one person with such a monopoly on mates, there will be a lot of pressure for others to try to take that (whether challenging to take it wholly, or sneaking a few mates away here and there).

Also, what about the higher order effects? Shorter generation times lead to more responsive evolution (that is, better genomic response to change). Of course, for that to work really well generally requires large “litters” with a large number of acceptable losses in each generation. As mammals, we tend to follow a different strategy where we have a small number of children and nuture them to maximum fitness. Plus, as humans we use culture and technology to adapt, and genes that help us accrue more knowledge and design better tools for a longer period of our life seem like they would be beneficial. Very beneficial. On the other side of the coin though, is the saying that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” If we don’t have people getting old and dying off to change our customs and beliefs, then that sort of toolmaking culture fails us as a mechanism of adaptation.

There was an interesting idea presented in Permanence (Karl Schroeder): technological/cultural adaptation is a very expensive way for a species to live. It allows for adaptation to a lot of environments, but always sub-optimally. A crocodile in a swamp, for instance, lives its life swimming and eating. A human attempting to live in the same environment would need a spear gun or net of some kind to catch food, a boat, and to get to the bottom some scuba gear, a few swim fins, and a wetsuit to keep warm. That’s a costly way to live, and while it may perform better than the crocodile in the short term, and work great if most of your existence is spent away from the swamp and you only really vacation there, it’s not really a way to live in a swamp on the scale of thousands or millions of years. All it would take is for some of that knowledge to be lost (how to fill an air tank, or how to sharpen a spear) and the survival ability goes way down.

Look at crocodiles. Humans might move into their environment—underwater in swamps. We might devise all kinds of sophisticated devices to help us live there, or artificially keep the swamp drained. But do you really think that, over thousands or millions of years, there won’t be political uprisings? System failures? Religious wars? Mad bombers? The instant something perturbs the social systems that’s needed to support the technology, the crocodiles will take over again, because all they have to do to survive
is swim and eat.

Permanence considers the decline of the million-year civilization. The thing about civilization, mass production and technology is that we can rely on the brilliance of a few to carry the rest of us, so we lose all selection pressure for brains. Eventually, no one can repair techological devices, or improve or alter a use to meet the needs of a new situation. In a society of users, when something eventually breaks, we all go extinct. This sort of idea is also present in Idiocracy as well, where a technological society, which cushions us from the realities of natural selection, no longer selects for the intelligent people that can maintain that society. Evolution by natural selection is based on a tautology:
“that which survives, survives”, as Douglas Adams put it. But it’s a profound tautology nonetheless. If, as in Idiocracy, people who are less intelligent breed more (much more) than others, then the human race will be brought towards that, the subtype which most sucessfully takes advantage of its environment.

What we found instead was that even though a species might remain starfaring for millions of years, consciousness does not seem to be required for toolmaking. In fact, consciousness appears to be a phase… We know now that [consiousness] evolves to enable a species to deal with unforeseen situations. By definition, anything we’ve mastered becomes instinctive. Walking is not something we have to consciously think about, right? Well, what about physics, chemistry, social engineering? If we have to think about them, we haven’t mastered them—they are still troublesome to us. A species that succeeds in really mastering something like physics has no more need to be conscious of it. Quantum mechanics becomes an instinct, the way ballistics already is for us. Originally, we must have had to put a lot of thought into throwing things like rocks or spears. We eventually evolved to be able to throw without thinking—and that is a sign of things to come. Some day, we’ll become… able to maintain a technological infrastructure without needing to
think about it. Without need to think, at all…

With a longer-lived species, despite the problems discussed earlier, we might be able to avert these sorts of problems. However, we would need to be immortal to continually look after our progeny through the eons. But eventually, of course, death in one of her many guises will find you. So the answer may be picking up and moving for greener pastures, no matter how long lived the species. As long as this happened often enough, we would likely not fall towards “direct adaptation” mechanisms, but maintain a technological adaptation. It’s only through constant challenges to survive, succeed, and breed that intelligence, consciousness and cultural adaption will be preserved in the species.

In fact, we may find that selection for a longer-lived species goes hand-in-hand with selection for intelligence in a technological society: it takes so long to learn what you need to survive and thrive (I’m 27 and still in school for years to come yet!), that only long-lived (and late-breeding) members are sucessful.

On the other hand, there may be another case where shorter generations may have a (meta)evolutionary advantage. It’s only as long as we’re willing to take risks and go to test the limits of our intelligence and ability to survive that we feel any kind of selection pressure, and when the phrase “you’ve got your whole life ahead of you” means so much more, risk aversion may become the norm. Also, with intelligence and consciousness comes senescence, dementia, and insanity. It’s possible that the chances of falling prey to these increase with age (unless a stable brain is selected for and has a chance to evolve).

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,
in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”

I just got one of those chain letters about boycotting Petro-Canada* to force gas companies to lower prices.

* – by the way, who gets to pick which station to boycott? When will chain letters start coming with a “this letter was started by [Person X] at [website/email], see [website] for any updates that may be relevant to this chain letter (such as the drug in question being off the market for a whole decade, the basic premise of the boycott being unsound, a change in the company’s policies, an apology was received, or the stupid kid died of cancer anyway, and every card you send drives his mother into hysterical fits of tears) as well as a statement of bias.” Of course, until that time I guess there’s always Snopes.

Unfortunately, these ideas never work. Primarily because:

[…] teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace . . . . . not sellers. […] Since we all rely on our cars, we can’t just stop buying gas.

is a contradiction. Buyers can’t control the marketplace as long as they’re not prepared to stop buying gas (or at least reduce usage enough that gas stations are left with excess product). There’s no leverage in that position.

Beyond that, the idea would require extreme organization by consumers to work at all. If Petro-Canada did start having some drop-off in sales, all they would have to do is lower the price a fraction of a cent to get the customers who aren’t participating in the boycott to switch to them. Because of the boycott, the other stations would still have enough support to keep prices high (that is, not everyone would be buying on price alone), and so the price would stay high. If the boycott was perfectly successful and nobody bought gas at Petro-Canada, then gas prices would likely go _up_ at all the other stations because there would be a run on gas — if Petro-Canada is say 1/5 of all gas stations in Canada, then boycotting them would remove 1/5 of our gas supply. Only a ~6% reduction in supply lead to a ~20% increase in price this winter when a refinery in Sarnia had to temporarily shut down. Ignoring all that, there’s also the part where gas is a very “liquid” commodity: the different companies generally have agreements to sell their gas to each other for logistics reasons. If Petro-Canada isn’t selling gas at Petro-Canada branded stations, they can still unload their product in Shell, Sunoco, Canadian Tire, Esso, and Irving stations, and the only ones really hurting are the franchisees.

Wish I had read Snopes before typing that, it would have saved me some time, since they make many of the same arguments :) Snopes on Gas Out.

Also, the old standby of getting the government to drop taxes on gas might have worked in the not-so-distant past, when gas prices were set based basically on the cost of the gas (affected of course by the perceived future cost), a modest profit margin, and the taxes. Back then, the prices changed daily as stations engaged in price wars, and the cost of a barrel of oil fluctuated. Now, however, prices are driven way up by the high demand and low supply — if taxes were lowered, the pump price would stay the same, because that’s how high it has to be to keep people from exhausting the supply. The only difference would be that the oil companies would get more of our money, instead of the government.

There is still the very real possibility that prices have been driven even higher by nefarious means. Whether stations are colluding (and oddly enough it seems that they are even moreso now when the price doesn’t move at all for a whole week than when they flew up and down several times a day in near-synchrony) or whether refineries are purposefully reducing their output is tough to say. Some commentators have pointed out that in addition to the spate of minor refinery fires we’ve had this year, the other refineries have taken their sweet time doing their spring maintenance and fuel mix changeover. This could be a deliberate tightening of supply, or it could be simple prudence: if two of your buddies had fires at their houses, you’d probably take the time to check the batteries in your smoke detector and the readiness of your fire extinguisher.

So, to reduce the price of gas, there’s really only a few things we can do. The first, and most effective, is to stop using it, or use less. That’s also the hardest for us to do; biking is great, but I only know one guy crazy enough to bike Toronto to London, and he only does it once a year. I’m a fan of walking, but also recognize that it’s really only pleasant for about 4-6 months a year. Public transit isn’t always an option, and is sometimes retarded. The next method involves government intervention, and would only work if gas companies really are driving the price up artificially. In that case, we simply have to buy back Petro-Canada and run it as a Crown corporation. Have it buy oil, refine gas, and sell at a modest profit — controlled by the government, it shouldn’t be engaging in collusion, so they’ll sell gas at about what it costs, and the other brands will have to follow suite (though demand issues could still affect that, unless they were wililng to have shortages). Finally, one idea I have is to only buy regular gas. I have no idea if this would work, but it seems as though the refineries can churn out (nearly) whatever grade of gas they want (and it’s not really due to the content of the crude oil). When we had the recent gas shortage, a lot of stations were selling regular only because they needed to streamline the supply chain to meet demand. Even with the immediate crisis behind us, there’s no real reason we can’t take advantage of that streamlining still. Most cars on the road today run just fine on regular gas (87): even the ones that say they need premium (largely) have the technology to change the valve timing/compression ratio to run on regular (at a slight power loss, but most engines that need premium can afford it anyway; if the engine can’t handle 87 then you’ll find out real quick. I’d recommend trying a few liters after letting the tank go nearly bone dry: if the engine pings, you’ll have a problem, turn around, and fill the rest of the way with premium; if you can drive on those few liters just fine, try a few more until you’re satisfied and then put a whole tank in). Either way, we could still eliminate mid-grade, since AFAIK there aren’t any cars sold today that require 89 — they either go for regular, or all-out to premium (though I may be wrong and there may not be a midgrade refining step, it may simply be a mixture of premium and regular done at the pump).

One of the “low hanging fruit” benefits of hybrid cars that improves their fuel efficiency and emissions is that they turn the engine off when it’s not needed, such as at stop lights. In fact, with a little bit of key-turning, this can be achieved in most other cars, even if not quite as often. Many cities (including London and Toronto) have anti-idling bylaws that hand out tickets for idling more than 3 minutes, though enforcement is weak to say the least and the laws don’t apply when the weather is very cold or very hot — which makes sense from a comfort point of view, but is also unfortunate because it’s on the very hot days that cars need to be shutting down for air quality purposes. The startup period in a car does cause more wear, but there’s obviously a point where it’s more beneficial to turn the car off: I’ve heard many rules of thumb regarding how short a period of idling makes turning the car off worthwhile, from 10 seconds to a minute. Personally, I try to go by about a 30-second period: if I know I’ll be idling for that long, I shut the car off, except at lights (but I do for trains crossing by me). So when I was at the carwash this week, I shut the car off, but felt a little weird doing it (except for train crossings, I don’t usually get into idling situations). I was talking to Wayfare about it at the time, and debated whether we’d be waiting long enough to make it worthwhile — it turns out it really was, as we were waiting at least 4 minutes for the infernal machine to be ready for us. Now thinking about it in hindsight, I feel strange for feeling weird at the time. Turning the car off should have been my natural reaction, I shouldn’t have had to think about it for so long…

The thing that bugs me most about idling is the cabbies. They’ll idle for hours in front of the hospital on some days, if business is slow. There are a few who are pretty good about opening their windows and turning the car off. If the weather’s really hot, there’s at least one that will simply get out of the car and sit on the grass, or lean against the car, or one time, pull out a folding chair.

A CityNews spot recently talked about the short enforcement blitz last week to remind drivers of the bylaw, and mentioned that delivery trucks idle a lot (they do), partly because refrigerated trucks have to keep the engine on to run the compressor. First off, I don’t want my ice cream to come all melty, so they do have something of a point that strikes close to my heart. I have a few problems with that, though. Most of the refrigerated delivery trucks have a coolant pod on the transport trailer — that means that the coolant system for the trailer must be electrically driven (the AC system on most cars is belt-driven directly from the engine, which is why you can run your fan but not your AC in engine-off accessories mode). If it’s electrically driven, then the truck’s battery should be able to keep it going for a while (at least 10 minutes I would estimate, and a battery upgrade to run the cooler for an hour should be extremely easy to install right on the trailer). Also, most refrigeration systems run in cycles (or are capable of doing so, unless they are taxed to their maximum capacity), so the truck drivers should be able to cut the engines for at least as long as the system usually cycles off for (my fridge, for instance, runs for about 5 minutes every half hour — I could have a 25-minute blackout at my house and the food in the fridge would never know anything out of the ordinary was happening).

Also, this tiny news snippet was a little disappointing.

…the premier says Ontario won’t implement regulations as strict as those of California…. Ontario will stop short of California’s tough new tailpipe emission standards because they could hurt the province’s auto sector.

I think it’s pretty backwards to resist emission standards because auto manufacturing takes place in the province — stricter emissions standards don’t, as far as I know, actually hurt the car industry in general. People still buy cars. They just buy cleaner cars. Perhaps that impacts the bottom line of the automakers, or perhaps it’s an indication that the domestic manufacturers (or the particular models manufactured in Ontario) have trouble getting any cleaner and more efficient. If that’s the case, then the province should still go ahead with the tighter emissions standards — after all, there are still plenty of “emissions equipment optional” states to sell Ontario-manufactured cars to, and I’m sure most cars driven in Ontario aren’t made in Ontario, so stricter emissions standards would help our quality of life. And, if say California enforces stricter emissions standards, but cars are built in Michigan and Ontario, then the car companies are pretty much SOL. If Ontario and Michigan implemented stricter standards (even stricter than California, say), then the province (and state) could directly help the auto manufacturers with various tax incentives and research programs, and would have the justification for doing so. If the province helped make sure all the cars built here had superior emissions controls and fuel efficiency, then that would also help the auto sector become more competitive elsewhere (California, Europe, as well as with anyone who valued efficiency and low emissions in the other states and provinces), and in the future as well. After all, California emissions may seem strict and tough to meet now, but they’re not revolutionary, not by a long shot (the revolutionary parts were killed over the years by lawsuits and lobbyists). The other states, provinces, and countries globally are catching up. Do the car companies want to be seen as the ones fumbling to meet minimum requirements at the last minute, or the ones that have been successfully meeting California emissions standards all along? (wouldn’t it be great to say “Ontario efficiency standards” in the same breath? :)

I just spent my long weekend Sunday writing a stupidly long article on hybrid cars, and it’s not even as helpful as I was hoping it would be. Ah, well, it’s up as a permanent link on the right there. Have a look (if you dare), and I welcome any other questions that it may have left unanswered! To give a quick reason for doing this, Wayfare suggested I take some of the insane amount of research I’ve been doing on cars and write an article, perhaps try to sell it freelance to the London Free Press or another paper that would have it. I don’t think either of us expected something like that to result.

I haven’t included many references, but I don’t really think too many are necessary for an article like this (plus, there was a long link list in one of the previous posts on the issue, which is linked in the article). There are probably mistakes, both factual and grammatical lurking in there: it’s why something like that can be churned out in one afternoon, but a scientific review paper of the same length languishes for years unwritten :)