Engineering Overtakes Politics

While Republican operatives fume about the president's "War on Coal Country" and Congressmen cross daggers over the Keystone Pipeline, technological advances are rendering the whole argument moot. Prices for oil and natural gas may be falling, but prices for wind and solar power are falling faster, so much faster that in a decade there may simply be no market for electricity generated from fossil fuels:

The cost of providing electricity from wind and solar power plants has plummeted over the last five years, so much so that in some markets renewable generation is now cheaper than coal or natural gas.

Utility executives say the trend has accelerated this year, with several companies signing contracts, known as power purchase agreements, for solar or wind at prices below that of natural gas, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, where wind and sunlight are abundant.

Right now this still depends on tax subsidies that will expire in a a few years, but that probably won't matter. The price of solar and wind power is not only continuing to fall, but the rate at which it is falling is not slowing and may even be speeding up. The price of solar power in some American markets has fallen by 70 percent since 2007, and solar promoters think it will fall by 70 percent again by 2020. Meanwhile, when the wind is blowing wind power is available for 1.4 cents/kilowatt hour in Oklahoma and 2.1 cents in Texas, vs. about 6 cents for coal and 6 to 8 for natural gas. Because of supply fluctuations utility companies are still contracting for fossil fuel-based power, but at those prices it will soon be cheaper to build power storage facilities rather than to keep using fossil fuels.

Rape, Witchcraft, and Civil Liberties

Fredrik deBoer:

Is “should there be less rape” a question of particular moral difficulty? Are people walking around saying “we probably shouldn’t try to reduce the amount of rapes happening”? No. Nobody is saying that. What some of us are saying is that in a country of hideous over-incarceration, with a ravenous police state and prison industrial complex, where we know the laws are never enforced equally, but are instead deeply unequal along lines of race and class, and where many police departments and prosecutors offices have routinely shown themselves to be racist, corrupt, or incompetent, attacking due process and contributing to the rush to prosecute and imprison is a terrible idea. That’s a debate we can have. That’s a debate with stakes. It’s an active moral question. “Should we reduce rape? Circle ‘Yes’ or ‘No'” is not. So which one do you want to spend your effort on?

I cannot understand smart liberal people who are so enamored with their own good intentions that they seem not to care at all about the potential for unforeseen negative consequences. I cannot understand adults who think that meaningful moral questions have black-and-white, simplistic, right-or-wrong answers. I just will never understand that.

This, to me, is the troubling thing about cries for tougher laws on sexual assault. I gather that many universities have a history of not taking accusations of rape seriously enough; that is a problem that should be fixed. But every time somebody argues that this or that crime is so terrible that we need to relax our standards of evidence and throw out protections for the accused or deny offenders any sort of second chance I think about witchcraft. In the 1400s European judges crafted the doctrine that witchcraft was a crimen exceptum, an exceptional crime, so diabolical and so difficult to prove by normal methods that ordinary rules of evidence had to be suspended to fight it. Many courts accepted much harsher rules for accused witches than others, allowing them to be jailed on the basis on anonymous accusations, held indefinitely without any evidence, tortured without limit, and so on -- for how else could Satan's assault on Christendom be repelled? Before it was over, at least 150,000 innocent people had been judicially murdered, most of them poor women.

To me the lesson is clear: we can never allow any more "exceptional" crimes. Not terrorism; not treason; not child abuse; not rape. Every person accused of anything is entitled to a fair trial; every thug no matter how vicious is innocent until proven guilty. For nothing a criminal can do compares to the horror that can be unleashed by the uncontrolled power of the state.

Today's Cathedral: Seville

The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See, better known as Seville Cathedral, is by one reckoning the largest of all the Gothic cathedrals.

Seville did not fall under Christian rule until 1248, and the residents made do with a converted mosque for the next 150 years. By 1400, though, the city was wealthy enough that its leaders wanted to build a great new Christian monument.

According to local tradition, one of the cathedral canons said, "Let us build a church so beautiful and so grand that those who see it finished will think we are mad".

Construction began in 1402 and the Cathedral was essentially complete in 1506. The main entrance.

Details of the decoration.

The vault.

The bell tower, La Giralda, was simply the mosque minaret, with a Renaissance cap on top.

Only five years after the cathedral's completion had been celebrated, in 1511, the dome collapsed and had to be rebuilt. The dome again collapsed in 1888, after an earthquake (above), and it was not reopened until 1903.

Among the famous people buried in the cathedral is Christopher Columbus.

The choir.

The cathedral's most famous feature is the gold altarpiece or retablo, the work of Pierre Dancart. Built between 1481 and 1565, it is made of gilt wood.

The carvings depict scenes from the life of Jesus. Dancart worked on his masterpiece for 44 years, completing more than half of it himself. After his death the altarpiece was completed according to his design.

A wonder.

Biblioburro

Travelling library created by Colombian schoolteacher Luis Soriano to distribute books in a poor, rural district. Documentary on Soriano here.

UKIP and the Future of Europe

The big news out of Britain was that the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe UK Indepenence Party won a Parliamentary by-election in what had been a safe Conservative seat, routing the mainstream parties. Interesting analysis by Charles Moore, who thinks that the follies of the Tories and Labour have driven conservative populists to UKIP:

In any old, stable, free country, there are many losses which deserve to be mourned. It is not irrational or unpleasant to wish you could still leave your house unlocked, expect your children to share school classes with pupils who can all speak English, or not find your wages, at the lower end of the income scale, threatened by foreigners who will work for less. In such a civilisation, of which Britain is a prime example, change is welcomed only if the best of the good, old things are secured in the process. . . .

In Britain today, many people feel that the good, old things have not been secured and that the changes are not helping them. If they are indigenous, and from the poorer half of society, they are probably right. . . .

Those who berate the Ukip nostalgists the most are those who most uncritically believe that the European Union is the future. Isn’t there more and more evidence that they are wrong? We have now lived beside the eurozone long enough to realise that it truly, madly, deeply does not work. It cannot correct its original flaw: most of its members cannot be like Germany, and so the single currency has become a machine for joblessness, recession and political alienation across half the Continent. Far from being modern, the eurozone is the product of a mid-20th-century, top-down, bureaucratic Utopianism. It cannot deal with the connected, competitive, global character of the 21st century.

Two things here: first, the great challenge of contemporary government is how to make the system work better for ordinary working folks. People can only be made to accept the changes that all progressives want if they feel that the world is getting better for them, and how is the world getting better for the white working class? If they feel that the established parties are not working for them, they will rebel. In the US this has taken the form of the Tea Party assault on mainstream Republicanism; in Europe it has led to a surge for nativist, right-wing parties like UKIP. But in whatever form it will go on until the incomes of ordinary white people start to rise again.

Second the Eurozone has been and remains a disaster, and I am staggered that so many Europeans still support it. Are they blind, or are they seeing farther than I am, past a generation of economic turmoil toward some greater prize?

The New Bigotry

Americans have come so far since, let's say, the era of Joe McCarthy. I mean, think about it. We're less racist. We're less sexist. We're less homophobic than we used to be. We only have one remaining bigotry. We don't want to be around anybody who disagrees with us.

--Bill Clinton

A four-line philosophy of life

Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube is part of a trilogy describing a journey he made in 1933 to 1934. While Leigh Fermor was in Vienna, he was told a story about emperor Maximilian I (r. 1508-1519), who liked to flee court life to hunt boar in the mountain forests. During one of these hunting trips he is said to have composed a little poem, which goes like this:

Leb, waiss nit wie lang,
Und stürb, waiss nit wann
Muess fahren, waiss nit wohin
Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin.

Leigh Fermor’s translation:

Live, don’t know how long,
And die, don’t know when;
Must go, don’t know where;
I am astonished I am so cheerful.

Via Michael Leddy.

De Ceuvel: Creativity in Amsterdam

De Ceuvel is a new neighborhood in Amsterdam that is getting a lot of attention despite its tiny size.

This little neighborhood of houseboat offices and a cafe was once a shipyard and the soil is heavily contaminated. So what to do with it?

In 2012‚ the City of Amsterdam offered a challenging call for development proposals for a 4‚470 m2 piece of waterfront land. The plot was offered for free‚ but with a series of caveats: it was only available for ten years and had to be a clear site at the end of that time‚ it could not include housing‚ it must attract the endlessly desirable “creative” crowd‚ and its polluted soil needed to be cleaned. This meant the winning pitch had to be innovative on environmental‚ economical, and construction fronts simultaneously.

A design shop called space&matter came up with a clever plan for a temporary neighborhood: houseboats moored on land, connected by raised walkways. The site clean-up would be achieved by carefully selected plants such as fireweed and willows. The project would also generate its own power via solar panels and process its own waste using composting toilets and biofilters. This green approach made the project irresistible to that sort of person:

The original tenants were found through an advertisement on Marktplaats, a Dutch ad site, which asked potential tenants to chose one of the houseboats on sale that week, pretend that they could buy it for one euro and explain what they would do with it. And, in fact, most of the houseboats were acquired for that nominal sum. As Amsterdam’s canals gentrify, and moorings are being leased by wealthier and more demanding residents, old boats are being scrapped to make way for new.

To achieve the project within their limited budget, the designers came up with all sorts of clever dodges:

Many time-consuming‚ red tape permit issues were avoided by refurbishing the boats on the water (no permit necessary to do so) and then hauling them on site afterwards. To both formally and functionally bind these diverse boats moored on dry land‚ a 450 m2 raised wooden walkway was added. It allows for pedestrian access without disturbing the cleansing plants or the provision of water and power to the units. 

Of course many urban experiments are cool for a while but then fade back into slums, but in this case that wouldn't matter because the site is supposed to be cleared again in ten years anyway.

This sort of project makes me feel optimistic about our species, and it makes me even less tolerant of the sort of "civilization is going to end" rhetoric that permeates our zombie apocalypse culture. There are millions of people who are energized by the challenge of creating something new from scraps, and the worse things get, the more they will come to the fore to fix them.

Britain's Silliest Place Names

For the ten-year-old in all of us, I give you some excerpts from a new map of Britain's silliest place names. Many more here.

Winter in the Field

After two nights of temperatures well below freezing there isn't much color left in the fields along the Potomac.

But this burning bush was still hanging on.

And there were lots of these berries -- bittersweet, I think they are called.

Heron over the marsh. Just one more day of this project before I move on to less lovely surroundings.

Siddi Sayed Mosque, Ahmedabad, India

Constructed in 1572 by an African retainer of the last sultan of Gujarat.

Locust Swarm, Madagascar

By Michelle Martinelli. From National Geographic.

Governing

History clearly demonstrates that governing is a task that exceeds man’s ability.

 --Nicolás Gómez Dávila (“Don Colacho”)

Guns and Crime

Is there any relationship between the prevalence of guns in a community and the rate of violent crime? It's a hard problem, made harder because both liberals and conservatives are sure they know the truth without bothering to ask. I doubt there is a single sociologist in America who doesn't have a strong opinion about what the relationship ought to be, and that makes it hard to trust their research.

Gun advocates like to cite a 1997 paper by John Lott and David Mustard that argued,

Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, we find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths.

But others have extended the study into recent years and they find the opposite:

Now, Stanford law professor John Donohue and his colleagues have added another full decade to the analysis, extending it through 2010, and have concluded that the opposite of Lott and Mustard's original conclusion is true: more guns equal more crime.

"The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates" of aggravated assault, robbery, rape and murder, Donohue said in an interview with the Stanford Report. The evidence suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with an 8 percent increase in the incidence of aggravated assault, according to Donohue.

I have already shared my basic analysis of all such disputes, which is that if it takes complex statistical techniques to tease a relationship out of the data, then the effect can't be very big. Of course an 8 percent increase in violent crime is a pretty big deal in real world terms, but it is probably too small for our techniques to separate it out of the data incontrovertibly. I think we can say with high confidence that no set of gun laws will either double the crime rate or cut it in half.

Unless, that is, you consider acceptable of carrying weaponry around as a proxy for the overall strength of a community and its attitude toward violence. Criminals, after all, are members of society. The group of Americans most likely to agree that we live in a violent world where a gun is your only defense is men in prison. The American gun lobby, it seems to me, is all about spreading the criminals' view of the country as an "every armed man for himself" sort of place, and I think that in the long run that can only contribute to violence. Of course it may be that the criminals and the gun lobby are right, so in the short term it is in your personal interest to carry a gun. But the way to move toward a less violent society, like those of Japan and Finland and so on, is to discourage the sort of thinking that underlies concealed carry laws.

Republicans Block NSA Reform

Consider this a warning to the libertarian-minded that the new Republican congress will lean toward authority as Republicans usually do:

Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a sweeping overhaul of the once-secret National Security Agency program that collects records of Americans’ phone calls in bulk.

Democrats and a handful of Republicans who supported the measure failed to secure the 60 votes they needed to take up the legislation. The vote was 58 to 42 for consideration.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who drafted the bill, blamed what he said was fear-mongering by the bill’s opponents for its defeat. “Fomenting fear stifles serious debate and constructive solutions,” he said. “This nation deserves more than that.”

Since this bill was supported by Obama,  it can hardly have been very radical. But for most Republicans fear of terrorism still trumps our rights:

“This is the worst possible time to be tying our hands behind our backs,” Senator McConnell said before the vote, expressing the concerns of those who argued that the program was a vital tool in the fight against terrorism.

Republicans have had a lot of success trading on dislike of Obama and fears about the state of the country, but they are still the party of W and Romney and have nothing new to offer.

Tebarantauti

Here's a word I bet you didn't know: a tebarantauti was a war helmet made by people of the Gilbert Islands from porcupine fish. This one is from Kiribati and dates to the 19th century. Now in the British Museum.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609-1664) was an Italian artist as well known for his hot temper and repeated brushes with the law as for his paintings, drawings, and etchings. His career began in Genoa but thanks to his repeated flights from arrest and revenge he also worked in Rome, Venice, Mantua, and other places. (Head of an Oriental, one of a series of drawings and etchings Castiglione made of exotic heads.)

His biographies are full of stories like this one:

On hearing that the Doge of the Republic, Giovanni Battista Lomellini, had been advised to turn down a painting commissioned from him, Castiglione drew his sword and slashed the work to shreds in front of the Doge's court, swearing that the Lomellini would never again have a work from his hand. Having insulted Genoa's most powerful family he then had to flee the city in disguise.

(The Adoration of the Shepherds)

Dueling and grandstanding were not unusual among Italian artists, but Castiglione was such an iconoclast that he actually admitted to being influenced by non-Italian artists. He worked for a while in the Genoa studio of Anthony van Dyck, and he was a great admirer of Rubens. He was much taken with Rembrandt's etchings, and you can perhaps see some northern influence in this possible (but much disputed) self-portrait of about 1645.

His best known works these days are drawings made with oil paint on paper, like Sacred and Profane Love, 1630s.

Here's the Adoration of the Shepherds as a sketch.

Shepherd with Urn and Flock, c. 1645, and detail.

An etching: Circe after Changing Ulysses' Men into Animals. This has been called "one of the most exciting drawings of the Baroque period," which seems a bit excessive to me, but it is quite nice.

Allegory in Honor of the Duke and Duchess of Mantua.

Detail from Crossing the Red Sea.

The Return from Egypt.

Vanitas.

Virgin and Child.

More heads.

David with the Head of Goliath, a very late work -- in fact so late that some sources date it to 1665, the year after Castiglione's death. The perfect subject for a man who loved drawing disembodied heads.

Quite wonderful.