It seems increasingly likely that some amount of hydraulic fracturing to liberate shale-bound natural gas reserves will be approved in New York state.  The specific rules around that, and in what areas it will be approved, are still being determined.  The EPA, who faces the reality that fracking is an issue in many states and that the environmental imacts of the technique are not necessarily bound by state lines, is increasingly looking to New York as a model for if and how fracking should be allowed.

There seems little doubt that the energy resources recovered through fracking would go a long way toward solving our short term energy problems.  Economically, it makes good sense.  Companies believe they can make money doing it, and the country can use the energy.  If it were as simple as all that, no one would really be against it.

Yet there is a niggling little concern that fracking compromises underground aquifers, causes earthquakes, and generates copious amounts of polluted wastewater that will be released into the environment.  And therein lies the rub.

The trick here is that the science is not remotely settled.  This has not stopped groups assuring us that it is 100% safe and they would gladly have their children frolic in fracking wastewater retention ponds, as well as their counterparts assuring us that permitting any fracking would result in having hot and cold running fire taps in every kitchen.

The trouble is, it’s complicated.  There are no generalized models for how fracking fluids or methane will migrate through the Earth’s crust when things are disturbed thousands of feet below ground.  Scientists are just beginning to study this, and the answers won’t be known for some time.

Even when and if the science community reaches consensus on an answer, it’s likely to be disputed by whichever group is proved wrong.  The global warming debate has taught us that the political and popular perception is that ultimately scientific conclusions are something that can be voted on.

The only sane way to proceed is an evaluation of the risks on each side.  If we don’t frack, we may face shortages of natural gas.  This might drive up energy prices, push for investment in alternative energy sources, increase global competition and tension over foreign oil supplies, or drive us to increasingly rely on dirty domestic coal for power.

If we do frack, we may face permanent pollution of potable water supplies.  Fresh water shortages are already predicted to be the next major natural resource crisis.  There may also be unpredictable damage to wildlife ecosystems that could ultimately threaten food supplies and human health as well.

In comparing these two risks, it seems clear that not fracking exacerbates risks we are already dealing with.  Meanwhile, fracking introduces lots of unknown risks—unknown risks with long term, widespread, dire, and potentially irrecoverable consequences.  In essence, we are choosing between the known and the unknown.

The conservative position here is clearly to favor known risks.

Besides, we’ve seen this play out too many times before.  We were assured the risks of industrial pollution were localized and minimal.  Then the Cuyahoga River caught fire, Los Angeles was lost in a haze of smog, and the northeast was drenched by acid rain.  These were not minor inconveniences or local hazards.  These were widespread ecological disasters with definitive and demonstrable negative effects on human health.  And the economic costs to recover from them have been, and continue to be, enormous.

Fracking may well be safe.  I don’t know.  You don’t know.  The politicians and energy companies don’t know.  And neither do the environmentalists or the EPA.  The critical point being, are we willing to risk being wrong?  Does it make sense that a society, currently with their hair on fire over the prospect of passing debt on to their grandchildren, is willing to casually risk passing land without potable water or farmable land on to those same kids… for the sake of lower heating bills?

Frack with caution. Do it for the children.

My morning coffee was interrupted by a gentle knocking on the front door.  On the other side was a delightful older woman and her apprentice proselytizer sporting bibles, Watchtower magazines, and other paraphernalia of the trade.

She opened by explaining they were there to make sure I understood what the bible had to say, because they’ve found many people don’t know.  I politely replied that I had a bible, had read it, and was pretty familiar with what was inside.  I finished by explaining that I really didn’t feel the need for any additional guidance today.

That should have been the end of it, save for a few pleasantries, and I could return to my cooling cup of Joe and my newspaper.  But no.

She reaches into her stack of pamphlets and pulls one out while saying that perhaps she might interest me in some information on God’s creation because science is constantly trying to disprove it, and I might need to know how to respond.

It was at that moment I wished I was a woman and could pull off that whole finger-wagging head-shaking “Oh no you did not” indignation move.  But alas, I’m just a gesture impaired male.  Either way, it was clear my coffee was going to get colder.

I responded, “I’m sorry, but you have to understand that science is not trying to disprove religious mythology.  That is neither its purpose nor its intent.  It exists to explain nature in a way that allows us to predict and manipulate it.  This is a role that religion does not fulfill, nor aspire to fill.  Science is dependent on a method of discovery and rigorous explanation that is completely indifferent to your beliefs.  Science is not a democracy, nor is it dependent on faith.  You don’t get to pick and choose where it leads.”

“You drove up here in a car whose existence is the product of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, and a dozen other scientific disciplines.  You have a cell phone in your purse, you’re wearing synthetic blend clothes, and you’re schlepping out brochures drafted on computers and produced on high-speed printing presses.”

“The world you live in is the product of science.  It’s unfortunate that you feel threatened by aspects of science, but unless you’re willing to go back to your cave and huddle around the fire you need to find a way your theology can coexist with it.  Anything less is a major act of hypocrisy on your part.”

Science doesn’t want to play in your sandbox.  Stop dragging it in.

The current bill in Congress known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or as it’s known in the Senate, PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) is just beginning to get coverage in the non-technical press.  In draft, this was called the E-PARASITE Act (Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act). Seriously, who names these things?

From the names, it all sounds like goodness right? Theft, exploitation, piracy, who wants that?  If only it were that simple.

The intent of the bill is to crack down on illegal online file sharing.  There’s ample room for debate about how damaging online piracy truly is, and whether or not it makes business sense for content providers to aggressively attack their customers, but that’s a topic for another day.  Even if we accept that online piracy threatens to destroy the music and movie industry (just like VHS tapes and writable CDs did), the proposed bill is absolutely not the way to go about preventing it.

There are lots of articles out there on why this is so.  You can read the bill yourself, or read others’ analyses here, here, or here.  However, let me try and boil down the basics for you.

The Great Firewall of the USA: Enforcement of SOPA will require the creation of a Internet filters by all domestic ISPs to control what sites you are allowed to visit. This may be well intentioned censorship, but it’s still censorship, and it puts the mechanisms in place for less benign intentions. Do we really want to head down that slippery slope?

Online Security: Let’s face it, once the firewall goes up, many of us will find ways around it. This will involve a combination of foreign or rogue DNS servers, proxies, or VPN services. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to believe that once you start getting your Internet delivered through black market servers that your online security will be at greater risk.

No More Safe Harbors:  The current law allows web site owners some protection under the “safe harbor” clause.  That means that if you were to post a comment on this article containing some illegal content, the owner of the content could demand I take it down, and I would be obliged to do so. But if the owner wanted to sue for damages, he couldn’t sue me as the website owner.  Rather, he’d have to come after you as the one who posted it.  Under SOPA, that protection is gone.  If you upload a funny Big Bang Theory clip to Facebook, CBS can sue Mark Zuckerberg for damages. SOPA will undoubtedly result in far fewer sites taking on the risk of letting you post things on them. The web will become a lot less participatory.

Loss of Due Process:  This is perhaps the most egregious implication. Under SOPA, website owners are guilty until proven innocent.  Based only on an accusation of having illegal content on your site, anyone can demand that the ISPs block access to your site, and may further demand that all banks stop doing business with you.  Sure, you can appeal to the court, but that could take months or years to settle. In the meantime, you’re out of business.

As the major backer of SOPA, the entertainment industry is making lots of assurances that the provisions of SOPA would never be used for anything but the most noble of causes.  They are full of it.  These same people have already collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stretch the In Rem Forfeiture clause (allowing for the immediate seizure of property used in the commission of a crime) to include domain name seizures of websites with no warning or due process.  They are wielding this with a broad brush and have repeatedly seized domains eventually found legal by the courts, but by then put out of business.  Oops.

This whole SOPA mess has also created some strange bedfellows.  The tech community and most high tech companies have come out against it.  Along side them are Michele Bachmann and her Tea Party Coalition.  Ironically, the Tea Party and the Techies were on staunchly opposite sides of the Net Neutrality debate, so this is a somewhat uneasy alliance.

On the other side we find the Hollywood studios, music companies, and the organizations like RIAA and the MPAA that lobby for them.  We also find VP Joe Biden and several key Democratic legislators who have historically been supportive of anything Hollywood wants.  To her credit, Hillary Clinton has expressed some concerns about SOPA, and Obama claims to be on the fence.

To that end, Obama is currently taking input on the issue.  If you want to oppose the bill, go to the White House website and sign the online petition.  As of this writing, we are still a few thousand signatures short of the “pay attention to me” threshold.  Yes, you have to create a White House account to sign the thing, but it only takes a minute.

On the other hand, if you think SOPA sounds like a great idea and want to know how to support it, please write a long letter and mail it to your local animal shelter. They are always looking for material to line the bird cages with.

Brad Plumer writes that the GOP party-wide rush to denounce climate change is being driven by a small minority of fervent Tea Party types.  While it’s an interesting read in its own right, there’s a larger subtext I find downright frightening.  There’s no reason to suppose these findings are limited to their climate fantasies.

Two points struck me:

Researchers on cognitive social networks at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently found that “when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.”

 

Tea Partiers are also by far the most confident in their beliefs — more likely to say they are “very well informed” and that they “do not need any more information about global warming.” Note that this dovetails with earlier research finding that when you give those dismissive of global warming more information, it only serves to harden their doubts.

Self-identified Tea Party types make up just 12 percent of the population.  But that’s apparently enough to give them and their warped reality sway over public opinion and policy.  And there’s apparently little the rest of us can do to induce any sanity on them either.  The more we dump rational arguments and data on them, the further convinced they are about their delusions.

Are we doomed to the anti-science Christian theocracy they envision?  A world where our money is tied to gold, the government is apathetic to your plight, education is relegated to kitchen tables and churches, corporations are free to pollute their way to profits, unions don’t exist, and medical care will only be available to those with enough chickens to trade for it?

I’m certainly not expecting the GOP debate tonight to dissuade my fears.

There is apparently no end to the amount of money people will spend to convince themselves they are doing something about their weight.  Witness, leggings with impregnated caffeine micro-capsules, designed to slim inches off your hips and thighs.

The marketing premise is that the micro-capsules are essentially made of Shea-butter with a metabolism boosting caffeine center.  As you walk around during the day, (Wait! you still have to walk?) your natural body heat melts the Shea butter which is absorbed into your skin along with the caffeine.  The result being that you’re then delightfully jittery with smooth supple legs.  Or maybe your cottage cheese riddled butt is now just sloshing around inside greasy skin tight pants all day.  I report, you decide.

These puppies will set you back $70, and according to the instructions should be worn 8 hours/day, 5 days/week , for a month to get the full benefit.  This means you’ll need several pair, or you’re gonna work up a funk by month’s end that will make your weight problems the least of your anti-social attributes.  P.T. Barnum was right.

Yet, don’t get me wrong, the notion of clothes with built in aerobic benefit is brilliant.  But rather than caffeine, they should have gone with “Ants in the Pants“.  Let’s be honest, you get a few dozen creepy-crawlies toolin’ around your tuckus and you will be out of your chair and dancing in no time.  Feel the burn.

Last week, Grammy award-winning singer Lady Gaga confessed that she is an avid fan of Ubuntu, the Linux-based operating system. Reports are that Ubuntu’s desktop market share has shot up from 1 percent to 7 percent in just two days. Furthermore, due to a huge rise in traffic, Ubuntu’s website suffered a downtime of about 8 hours on Tuesday.

While Ubuntu is a really slick OS, made slicker by its price tag (free), it’s hardly a new kid on the block.  The Linux distro has been around for years, struggling to make inroads against Microsoft and Apple.  It’s got a fair following among the geek crowd, but has yet to make big inroads into the mass consumer market… until now.

Many Ubuntu enthusiasts as well as developers and investors are overjoyed, and understandably so.  But what does this say about the sanity of the average person?  Lady Gaga’s advice might be worth following if she opined on music, popular culture, or fashion. But if we’ve intellectually regressed to a point where we will change our computer operating system based on an offhand remark from a celebrity, what else will we buy?

It’s hard enough to figure out which experts to trust in a sea of competing voices on a topic, but there has to be some ability to discern who should warrant consideration as a person to whom we should listen.  Or have we really reached the point where we are unable to discern that Lady Gaga shouldn’t even get a voice as a tech expert?  Alternatively, are we just so awestruck by celebrity that we’ll do anything a celebrity says?

Even sheep are smarter than that.

You realize it is April 1st, right?

An FDA advisory committee is evaluating the strength of the evidence surrounding a link between food dyes and behavior changes in children.  Scientists and academics are accusing the dyes of exacerbating hyperactivity in children and are advocating for a ban on the eight dyes they claim are dangerous.

Sarah Palin was quick to dismiss the finding saying:

Those ivory tower elites just think they know everything.  How dare they accuse our Froot Loops of exacerbating? There’s no call for that sort of language. I think maybe, you know, they’re the ones doing that, and if they don’t cut it out they’ll go blind.

Glenn Beck was also on the defensive as he accused the FDA of kowtowing to First Lady Michele Obama’s food Nazi agenda. He asserted that Skittles were the last line of defense against the rising tide of socialist Muslim oppressors intent on taking our freedoms away.  Beck then waxed poetical, paraphrasing Pastor Martin Niemoller.

First they came for the saccharine,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a coffee drinker.

Then they came for the trans-fats,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a McDonald’s customer.

Then they came for the red dye 40,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Pop-Tart eater.

Then they came for my high fructose corn syrup
and there was nothing left to eat.

Beck then went on to note that this country was founded on corn.  Our founding fathers recognized corn was God’s gift to them.  It was fuel, food, oil, sugar, and vegetable.  John Addams called corn “American manna.”  Beck reminded that the Indians didn’t want us to have corn and tried to confuse our ancestors by calling it maize.  He said, this is why we make corn mazes every fall, to honor the confusion and disorientation the pioneers suffered at the hands of the cruel Indians.  Beck concluded, “And you know who else hated corn?  Hitler!”

Politicians were also quick to rise up against the outrageous actions of the FDA.  Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) introduced yet another rider to the 2011 budget prohibiting the FDA from using federal funds to restrict food additives whose primary purpose was aesthetic.  Pence claimed America has the single greatest looking snack foods God ever gave man on this Earth, and he would not sit idly by and let our Twinkies take a back shelf to Chinese knock-offs.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office also released a statement that he was backing a no-bid contract with Haliburton to lease America’s Ritalin riddled children as part of the GOP’s green energy plan.  The press release said this is not the time to be thinking about reducing the hyperactivity of our youth. We cannot possibly cut our addiction to Middle Eastern oil on hamster power alone.  Experiments at powering wheels with seniors in exchange for Medicare coverage didn’t pan out.  It turns out, arthritic men with heart conditions simply can’t sustain the velocity needed for reliable electricity production.  Cantor emphasized, “Children are our future.”

Christine O’Donnell added, “It’s just food coloring people, not witchcraft.”

Growing up in my father’s auto repair business, I came to understand that a car’s firewall was that piece of the body that separated the engine compartment from the passengers.  Back in the day (as my teen son is wont to say despite sporting such a paltry number of days), this was pretty essential hardware as engine fires were not uncommon.  The advent of several safety systems as well as the demise of carburetors has made such fires comparatively rare.  But modern digital automotive systems now have different safety issues requiring a different sort of firewall.

Security experts from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Washington have successfully hacked into a car’s onboard control system using a variety of attack vectors. In one case, they used a car’s cellular connection (similar to OnStar) to access the vehicle’s computer.  In another, they took control using an Android phone connected to the car’s Bluetooth interface.  In the third case, an MP3 music file, loaded into the car’s sound system, was infected with a Trojan that successfully loaded itself into the vehicle’s firmware.

Now in your average car, there is a limited amount the hacker can do once he gains access to the firmware.  He could futz with the fuel mix and mess up your gas mileage, or change all the presets on your radio.  While this is annoying, it’s not terribly dangerous.  It’s also not interesting enough to warrant the efforts of would-be hackers unless this is their thesis project.

However, many higher-end cars may be unlocked, started, or in the case of vehicles with a self-parking features, even driven away under computer control.

While this is a scary prospect, it mostly reflects car designers not yet realizing the impact of networking the vehicle control systems.  Cars will simply need to employ the same sorts of firewalls and security software used by other computer systems.  Which also means the same sort of constant updating to address more recent exploits and attack vectors will also be required.

Ironically, I left the automotive field to pursue a career in computers.  I know my life will have come full circle when the first family member calls because their car has a virus.

The device is nearly invisible when worn.

Sometimes technology comes up with odd things that are way more useful than tools for hygienic espionage.  Case in point is the new SoundBite dental hearing system.

Bone conduction systems have been around for awhile now, and are effective at restoring hearing when there is damage to the auditory nerve of only one ear, but the other is working well. In such cases, conventional hearing aids are useless.  However, existing systems require an external device to be bolted on to the side of your head.

Okay, that probably is an overly dramatic description, but as someone who has complete loss of hearing on one side, when they explain they are going to attach something to your skull with a drill, that’s kind of how it sounds.  At least so far, that solution isn’t more appealing than suffering the loss of all spatial hearing ability.

However, this device requires no surgery or permanent attachment of any kind.  The receiver unit is molded to your teeth and just pops in when you use the device.  It wirelessly picks up signals transmitted by the small microphone clipped behind the decorative ear, and passes the sound into your jaw where it resonates into your head for the other ear to hear.

Apparently, with enough practice, a user can regain a good share of their spatial hearing.  It would certainly be nice to not have to spin around in circles looking for who’s talking any more, or have to turn my head ridiculously far around to hear a quiet comment from the person seated to my right.  Unless we’re eating I suppose.  Then the device would be in my pocket and I could still only hear half the table.  Then again, maybe I’d be so riveted by the conversations around me I’d eat less and listen more.  Yeah… probably not.

While you were off at work, your Roomba got freaky with your video camera and now Samsung is selling their unnatural hybrid love-child.  The TangoView is a robotic vacuum cleaner with built in web-based remote control, video surveillance camera, and external lighting.

The  mechanical chimera prowls your house looking for dust, Cheerios, pet hair, and prowlers.  In the event it encounters an intruder the unit is able to helpfully illuminate the area being looted and then clean up after the thief.

Perhaps the only practical use for this odd amalgamation of tech is that you can now terrorize the cat from the comfort of your office.  This should provide a nice diversion from an otherwise grueling day of checking Facebook and updating your Twitter feed.

Don’t hesitate. Order yours today. For only $711 you can say to the world, “I make more money than I know what to do with!”