If I were the PAP…
If I were the PAP, I would have cut out a number of SMCs from the GRCs where PAP support is highest. I am listening to the people; it’s not my fault if the opposition sucks and cannot capture those SMCs (which I made for them). Plus point: I can safely send the lightweights there and prove they have mandate. The SMCs act as a trap/lure for the opposition, who would send their candidates there and continue to fail. I predict Potong Pasir will fall to me eventually, because Chiam’s percentage has been falling steadily (loss of older generation), so I must keep Sitoh there — too risky to change him now. There is little chance of winning Hougang, so I will put cannon fodder there.
Unfortunately, the WP countered this strategy by sending their lightweights to the SMCs, and all their heavyweights to one GRC, and publicly proclaiming that those heavyweights will not take up NMP if they lose. They are gambling on the sentiment that people do not want to see zero opposition in the Parliment. But while it’s risky, they are unlikely to win. And this is a conundrum on my side too. If I win every seat, it’s also bad for me…this is really a lose-lose situation for me. (NB Chiam will never win at Bishan-Toa Payoh.)
How?
If I WERE the PAP, I would sacrifice George Yeo and Zainul Abidin Rasheed, and provide an outlet for the huge discontent now (we can ‘fix’ this later). But PAP is not me, and from all outward appearances, they wanted to keep Aljunied and just bring some NMPs on board. It’s a moot question now.
WP won Aljunied anyway.
Filed under: Musings
No, not about methane, but carbon dioxide.
I was having a conversation with someone last weekend about carbon dioxide. One problem with carbon dioxide is that rich countries emit and poor countries face the brunt of the consequences. United States is the worst carbon dioxide emitter of all, I pointed out.
I thought it was China, she said.
The thing about carbon dioxide emissions and cutting down carbon dioxide emissions is that when you go by total emissions, China really does top the emission list. India is on the top 10 list as well. At which point people might point fingers at China and India and tell them to cut down their emissions.
On second thoughts, there are a lot of people in China and India. Looking at per capita emissions, China and India are not even on the top 10! The top per capita emitter is actually Australia. Fortunately there aren’t many Australians so they don’t actually emit much in total. Second up, by an extremely narrow margin, is the United States. Each person in the United States is emitting 4 times a person in China is, and 20 times a person in India is. Your average Canadian is just about as bad. Nations right on the top for total and per capita emissions are the United States, Canada, the European Union, Russia, Japan, South Korea…notice a pattern here?
The most guilty party of all, the United States, refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
I don’t know why I get asked the question about global warming so much, and why people keep trying to talk to me about “and they’re not even sure it’s really warming”. The way I see the whole issue is that it’s a political problem.
As far as I can tell, it’s almost certain human emissions is causing global warming. You can never be 100% sure. You will never be able to get agreement on exactly how much it’s going to warm by, and what is going to happen. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it won’t warm so much. But don’t want the entire problem in question in the first place? The simple recommendation is: stop emitting so much carbon dioxide (and methane).
That’s not how politics work. The questions of is it really warming? No, is it really really warming? How much harm can warming cause anyway? No there’s no harm. No there is harm. No there’s no harm. In short: what’s the balance between pollution and economic development? … that is political.
Filed under: Musings
Many environmental problems we face today are results are the human inability to deal with large-scale crises. Our minds are very good at dealing with “bangs”, and not very good at “whimpers”. Large-scale can mean temporal or spatial scale.
For example, people find it easier to respond to an attack of woodpeckers on a bridge, because they can capture the essence of a fast change — the bridge will collapse in a year if the woodpeckers are not stopped! They find it less easy to response to a slow mouldering rot on the bridge — in ten years, the bridge will collapse if the rot is not stopped. Until the bridge collapses from the rot, at which point the response will be dramatic and immediate. Yet collapse could have been stopped if the rot was treated any time during the ten years, at less cost to both money and life.
Another example is how people find it easy to agree that one guy shitting into the local pond is a bad idea, but difficult to agree that ten thousand guys shitting into the local lake ten thousand times the volume of the pond is a bad idea. The concentration of shit may be physically the same, but mentally it is diluted by the scale of the phenomena.
I am an inveterate web-surfer, and in the process of doing so often look at science-related articles and videos, as well as the comment sections of such. Very common are comments by people applying their “common sense” to the problems posed in the article/video, that go along the line of pointing out the common sensical answer. Since the answer is so obvious, they wonder why the guys with Phds can’t come up with it. Obviously, the Phds are idiots, and taxpayer money is wasted on scientific research.
[Digression: One wonders why they are so aggressive at attacking the "people with Phds". A Phd is just a paper certification after all, and you don't see people attacking "people with graduate diplomas", "people with MBAs"...]
[Digression over.] Two examples stick out in my mind have to do with Ocean pollution. The first example points out that the obvious way to deal with garbage in the ocean is to filter out the garbage. The second example points out that the obvious way to deal with oceanic dead zones is to pump oxygen into the oceans. After all it works for our aquariums, so it’s good enough for the oceans too.
I am not mocking these ideas. I have thought about them in the past too. But I also estimated the feasibility of that idea.
Here is a rough order of magnitude estimation. To do either, you will have to pump water with a pump. A quick, lazy google estimates the water volume in the oceans as 1020 gallons, the generic aquarium does about 1 gallon / hr at 1W. This means to pump the oceans like our aquariums, we need 1020W. The world consumption of energy is 1013W, so we would have to come up with 107 times current world consumption just to pump our oceans. There are of course adjustments to this number such that only pumping 0.1 gallon/hour is good enough, or we only have to consider certain oceanic basins such as 10% of the total volume, or the efficiency of a large pump, or the greater energy required to pump deep into the ocean… so the estimate is by a few orders of magnitude, but the conclusion would remain the same: You can do this kind of thing for small volumes of water (pond, lake, river, bays), but you cannot turn the ocean into a giant aquarium.
[Digression: Actually, people at Woods Hole tried to filter the plastic out of the Pacific Garbage Patch, but it ended up catching all of the ocean life too, because the plastic pieces were so small.]
Our brains are very well-suited to deal with issues our scale. Our brains are evolved that way. The problem is that in modern times we are not moving in human scales anymore, because there are now a few billion human beings. Personally, the entire exercise of doing science is to train my common sense and develop my physical intuition into the larger scale. Many times I have found my common sense which is quite applicable to my aquarium, to be nonsense once I apply some scale analysis. I am a very intuition-driven person, but the longer I do science, the more I find my intuition to be suspect. It has been difficult for me to free my scale-bound mind to deal with concepts as common as Fourier Analysis, so what more for people who don’t even know that they need to try?
(NB Fourier Analysis is not unlike Quantum Mechanics. The problem with both is the same — they are very contrary to normal intuition.)
