Blessed by the Potato

Happy Potatomas to everyone!

I’m in the midst of packing up to spend a week with my parents. While I’m gone, the poor web server will have to chug along without me: odds are, it’ll sieze up around day 5. I’ll apologize for that in advance.

I had my CT scan today, it went fairly well (and boy is that contrast agent injection feelling rather strange). I stopped by futureshop on the way home (why do I bother?) to try to get a last-minute gift for my dad. I checked the in-store availability checker on the website, and it said that the item I wanted was in stock — but it was no where to be found in store. The clerk said not to put any faith in that tool, particularly around the holidays. Well, there goes another strike against futureshop in my book.

I’ve heard a bit about Peak Oil lately, and figured I would talk a bit about it.

First off, let’s put this discussion in context. A while ago, people were worried that we would run out of oil, and there would be a disastrous effect on the world (especially the economy), perhaps plunging us into a dark age. The fear had immediacy: in the 80’s, we were afraid we might run out of oil as soon as 2010. As technology developed, we found more reserves, and better ways of extracting the oil from difficult-to-work reserves (cf. Alberta Oil Sands).

Then the concern flipped around: one of our biggest fears was that we wouldn’t run out of oil. While it may sound paradoxical, you have to consider that the use of oil as a primary source of energy creates a lot of pollution: greenhouse gasses and waste heat from the burning of the fossil fuels, and toxic deposits from the extraction and refinement. If we weren’t going to run out of oil, then consumption would not slow, and alternative technologies would not develop.

Recently, another idea has been getting wider attention, that of “Peak Oil”. The concept here is that we extract the easiest to access sources of oil first, ramping up production with demand over the last century or so, and then eventually we reach a point where we have depleted the easy reserves, and have to resort to harder sources (such as the oil sands). For a number of reasons, the amount of oil extracted reaches a peak, and then begins to decline.

All the while, demand is constant and/or increasing.

So while we may still be 100 years or more away from extracting the last barrel of oil we’ll ever find in the planet, we’re actually getting very close to the peak of production. Soon production will slow down, and we’ll be unable to meet the current demand (or for some fossil fuels, such as natural gas, we’re at that point already). The interesting thing economically is how little production needs to slow down to lead to massive increases in price. Since oil is so necessary for many endeavors, businesses may be willing to pay much more money to keep their supply constant. For example, if energy costs are 5% of a company’s total finances, they’d easily be willing to pay double if it meant they would stay in business. And clearly, the SUV drivers of the world don’t care how expensive oil is — if the price were to double, it would be you who ended up having to conserve out of necessity, not them.

After all, since I started driving the price has already just about doubled (from a low of 45 cents/L when I would put $2 of gas in my car at the 7-11 at Sheppard and Willowdale and go out “cruising” for an hour, to $1.43/L during a road trip to the cottage when a hurricane struck New Orleans; gas today is 90 cents/L). Yet driving habits haven’t really changed much in the last few years (if anything, school kids have gotten lazier/parents have gotten more paranoid, and people are driving for short trips more often than before).

Exactly how soon is soon varies: it’s hard to predict exactly when it will happen, and there are various confounding factors. Pretty much anything that shuts down oil production (wars, hurricanes, recessions) slows the coming of the peak, both because you leave the oil in the ground, pushing back its eventual extraction, and because during those slow-downs fields that are still developing get to catch up in terms of their infrastructure development. Estimates place the peak as soon as 2010, or as far away as 2050. To me, both of those dates look pretty close though, as I’ve got a reasonable chance of living to see both of them.

I think I had more to say on that, but it’s getting pretty late. Anyway, something to think about.

I figured out how to lay the recipes section out more like how I wanted it. I’m in the process of reformatting and posting my recipes now.

Also note some new links on the right. First up is a Page for guest rants. I already have one submitted by Joce!

Now, note how I put page up there in bold and capitalized? That’s just to clarify that a WordPress Page is a very specific type of page (“page” of course referring to just about any document we pull off the www, including this post; but usually referring to HTML documents). A WordPress Page is a dynamically generated document that exists outside the usual blog chronology, and is thus typically static (but not actually static, since it’s not just raw HTML – the contents are stored in the MySQL database and rendered on the fly).

Confused? Yeah, that’s why it took me so long to work through the WordPress documentation to make the recipes page look (closer to) the way I wanted. If you’re just reading this site, the confusion means very little to you: simply know that there are my posts on the main page here, which you can also find using the search function, categories, or monthly archives, and also some other pages linked separately on the right there that you can only get to on the sidebar links. They tend to be more static.

If you’re using WordPress, you might need to figure a little bit of this out (I know Netbug expressed interest in the concept when the Recipes first started appearing on the sidebar there). I think they’re doing themselves a disservice by choosing to call them Pages (so much confusion with lower-case pages!). I’ve seen some suggested alternative nomenclature, such as calling them a “folio”, “leaf”, “pane”, or “panel”. Personally, I like the first two, and in my head and hand-written scribbles refer to them as folios to try to reduce confusion.

But that’s delving a little too much into the guts of the site.

Next up, I’d like you all to notice that I’ve put up some links relating to the upcoming Canadian Federal Election. I would urge you all to consider the ludicracy of our first-past-the-post system. It encourages “strategic voting” so that you vote for a candidate or party that you don’t think will do the best job, but one that you think has the best chance of defeating one that you really don’t like. It discourages independents & new parties from trying to join the race, allows majority governments to form with only a minority of the popular vote, and vote splitting concerns are the main reason the old, somewhat respectable Progressive Conservatives were forced to merge with the Reform party to give us the new Conservatives (which are a fair bit scarier). There is a petition being created at Fair Vote Canada to encourage the government, no matter which one wins this election, to consider another method of voting. I would encourage you to go sign, and if you come across any other respectable petitions (as I’m sure there has to be more than one group petitioning for this) feel free to send a link my way. Also, write your new MP as soon as this election is over and let them know that you want it to be a priority of the new government (or better yet, write all 4+ candidates in your district before the election and let them know it’s an important issue for you).

Finally, has anyone tried the RSS feed from this site? I decided to give it a whirl when I was visiting my parents (in theory, to give me a feed of your comments while I was away), but I got an error about not having a style sheet for the feed. No idea what that means, as I’m still learning here.

Penny Arcade had a great commentary today on the recent Wikipedia issues, with a particularly brilliant comic to go with it. They seem to have a slightly different view of Wikipedia than I do, and I must admit their points are valid. I still think that the project is worthwhile and important, but it certainly isn’t going to turn into some shining gem containing the sum of all human knowledge any time soon. A quote I just loved and had to repeat:

What you’ve proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.

I also have to agree with this point (and I think I already said something about peer review and expertise in my first article on the subject, below).

The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don’t know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.

Now, must write faster, thesis will eat me…

There’s been a bit of a scandal lately involving Wikipedia, one of my favourite sites on the Internet. Actually, I wouldn’t call it a scandal so much as a misunderstanding that the media has blown out of proportion.

You see, one of the great things about Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. That means when I find an annoying typo or innacurracy, I don’t have to lament about emailing the editor or just letting it slide for the next user, I can easily fix it myself. It provides a huge labour force to research, edit, and refine articles, since anyone interested can help out. This is also handy for removing bias, as progressive edits by different people can average it out. (Note that there is still a bias present, that Wikipedia acknowledges: it’s inherent due to the fact that only people with internet access and time go there, as well as interest, which means that the majority of editors are from North America and Europe, and moreover, are of middle class or higher income brackets).

However, it’s also a great source of trouble. Vandalism is a problem, as anyone who wants to defame someone or just break something for the sake of being an anarchist can edit a site. Worse yet are the people who think they know better but don’t, such as the conspiracy theorists who insist on changing things to fit their version of the truth, such as adding references to the illuminati in famous assasinations. It’s also hard to judge the accuracy of details, as people are donating their time to help, which makes them prone to laziness in terms of proper referencing. It also leads to stylistic problems, as you have different people writing different segments of long articles, with no unifying editor (let alone the dissonance between articles). Mistakes corrected in one part may not be corrected in another, leading to internal contradictions (I corrected one recently on someone’s biography. “At age X in year Y…” didn’t add up with the given birthdate, which turned out to have been corrected from the original author’s mistake…). This may lead to “descent towards mediocrity” as continual small changes “average out” what may have been a brilliant article — the sort of problem you get with group-think or committee reasoning.

I mention committee reasoning in particular since when two or more authors disagree on what an article says, there isn’t an expert’s panel or peer review board on Wikipedia to resolve the argument — that is, there’s no appeal to authority available. Often a discussion page will be created where users can argue the points being presented, and often arrive at a compromise. While it does work fairly well, there are cases where it might be preferable to have experts available to resolve these issues, which may eliminate some contradictory footnotes and what-not (though choosing experts, especially in an online only environment, is always a dangerous prospect).

Despite all that, it works for what it is. There is a vast amount of information there, and most of it serves as a decent introduction, often with some pointers for deeper reading. If you notice a page has been vandalised, you can use the “page history” to read an earlier version (and even repair the damage yourself that way, with minimal effort). And the random page function is a terrible, terrible way to encourage procrastination.

Yet with this recent scandal (I don’t have a single good link to refer you to, try google) has people (well, reporters) acting like the sky has fallen or something. Especially with the way they talk about memos being passed around newspapers telling journalists not to use it as a source for articles, and teachers telling students in classrooms not to use it for their papers. I find the whole thing a little silly, and want to pull out one of my favourite quotes from Douglas Adams (I have a lot of favourite quotes from that man).

Of course you can’t “trust” what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence “carved in stone.” What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can’t, it’s just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.

So yes, Wikipedia may have more flaws in that regard than other mediums, since you have a higher chance for someone setting out to intentionally misinform people. But I don’t think it’s fundamentally worse than other tools available: old newspaper articles may contain poor information, and corrections to those are very difficult to track down (I know I’ve seen a few articles in various papers publishing known urban legends, which indicates that at least some reporters do not do very good research on their stories), and regular encyclopedia entries are usually not as in-depth nor as useful in terms of providing “further reading” resources. Moreover, they can become dated very quickly.

In other news, I’ve learned the arcane secrets of how the URLkeeper works. It simply creates a full-screen frame for www.holypotato.com and then loads the webpage within. That’s why any links you click (including external ones) keep the holypotato domain in your address bar. Pointing to subpages does work within the schema, which is handy if I want to set up links that won’t change if/when I move the site, but they won’t refresh in your address bar (for example, www.holypotato.com/favicon.ico will take you straight to the bookmark icon I made). What this means is that I can make it so that external links aren’t affected by URLkeeper if I simply include a target=”_top” part in the code. I’m doing that for all the new links I add (if I remember them :), but I’m far too lazy to retroactively change the old link. I’m going to fool around with the sidebar to see if it will work for those, but I have my doubts.