Taking a break - no post this week

I am taking a break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, October 20.

Single point of failure: Hurricane Helene and high-tech's low-tech vulnerability

Among the horrific reports about the damage Hurricane Helene unleashed on the southeastern United States was one about Spruce Pine, North Carolina, population 2,194 (as of the 2020 census). The town was hard hit. One resident reported that the water treatment plant "washed away." Many of the town's old brick riverfront buildings are gone, and the mud is everywhere.

Just to the north of Spruce Pine is what could easily be considered a single point of failure in the supply chain that makes the modern high-tech world possible. It's there that two companies mine quartz so pure that it is suitable (after some refining) for the high-temperature crucibles that are used to melt silicon—melting point 1414 degrees C or 2577 degrees F. I'm referring to the silicon destined to be made into silicon wafers, the basis for modern electronics and photovoltaic solar cells. The crucibles have to be made from ultra-pure quartz so that they don't contain impurities that could ruin the silicon. Top-of-the-line ultra-pure quartz has no more than 80 molecules of impurities for every one billion molecules of silicon dioxide, the chemical formula of sand which turns into quartz in the Earth's crust under great pressures and high temperatures.

It turns out that Spruce Pine produces most of the ultra-pure quartz in the world. Exactly what percentage is a secret held within a small and secretive industry. The largest producer, Sibelco, announced that operations have ceased at its Spruce Pine mines as of September 26. The Quartz Corp. also announced a shutdown as of the same day. How long the two companies' operations will be down is unknown.

Memory in the age of the utterly now: The precarious state of the Internet Archive

"Information wants to be free" has been the watchword of the so-called free culture movement which has manifested itself in such phenomena as the free and open source software community and as Creative Commons. (For those who don't know, Creative Commons is a way to establish rights and authorship of creative works while also specifying how those works can be distributed and used by others in ways that are far less restrictive than traditional copyright—for instance, by allowing for varying levels of sharing, editing and incorporation in the works of others.)

It is in this tradition that following the sale of his web crawling company to Amazon for $250 million in 1999, Brewster Kahle increasingly devoted himself to his nonprofit startup, the Internet Archive, a project which became his full-time pursuit as of 2002 and remains so today. But today, the future of the Internet Archive is highly uncertain.

It is very likely that almost everyone reading this sentence has used the Internet Archive at some point to retrieve internet pages no longer available, to do research, or to archive internet pages for future reference.

Just the clash of opinions or different facts? Facing the epistemological divide

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late U.S. senator from New York, was famous for saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." It turns out that not everyone today agrees with Moynihan. It might seem that the rancor in political life that we are witnessing across the globe is merely the result of a clash of opinions. But, this upheaval is actually the product of a vast epistemological divide. (Epistemology is, of course, the study of how we know what we know.) There is no longer a consensus about how to determine what is, in fact, a fact.

I know this because those on each side look at the other and say, "How can they believe that that's true?" What they mean is not the other side's opinions; they mean what the other side believes are facts. In the realm of politics, the ledger on "mistaken" facts may seem lopsided. But politics is the realm of exaggeration and so no side is immune from mistakes.

But I'm more interested in the broader cultural and scientific battle over how to construct facts. Out of habit we think of facts as something freestanding. Facts are true whether we acknowledge them or not. Water boils at 212 degrees F. That's a fact one can't dispute. But, of course, even that fact is context-dependent. The statement is true for water containing no impurities under one atmosphere of pressure. If you add salt, it will raise the boiling point. Even simple statements of fact, it turns out, are more complicated that we think.

Going bananas: Why the approach to the latest banana blight misses the point

You may not know it. But your bananas have been under attack for more than a decade by a small fungus, Fusarium oxysporum. Half of the global production of bananas is in a variety called Cavendish which has become susceptible to a new strain of the fungus. A previous strain of Fusarium wiped out the Gros Michel variety of bananas which used to dominate world markets until the 1950s.

The Cavendish seemed immune to the previous strain and could therefore be planted on the same land—Fusarium lives in the soil—that the Gros Michel occupied. The Cavendish is what is mostly exported to countries that do not grow bananas and therefore what most people see in modern supermarkets and greengrocers. It is named after William Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who received a shipment from a friend who had gotten them from Mauritius. Cavendish's gardener proceeded to cultivate them in the duke's greenhouses.

If you are a banana eater, you may have noticed that the Cavendish you peel and eat every morning has no seeds. It turns out that the Cavendish is propagated by cloning—which means that Cavendish banana trees around the world are genetically identical. And so, every one of them will likely eventually succumb to the new strain of Fusarium as it spreads worldwide.

From Plato to AI: Are we losing our minds?

Plato, through the words of the central character in his famous dialogues, the philosopher Socrates, tells us that the invention of writing severely impaired human memory. The impairment resulted in part from disuse. We humans no longer had to commit to memory important information that could now be rendered on the page. Socrates insists that living memory is far better and far more responsive to inquiry than the written word.

Human learning has not, however, disappeared or even diminished in the age of the written word, but rather prospered as the wisdom of the ages can be readily passed down to each generation. The invention of moveable type in the 15th century spread the written word across world, making it accessible as never before. Plato must have realized the irony that he was preserving Socrates' argument against writing for future generations by writing it down. Plato could not have guessed, however, that 2500 years later his writings would be part of the canon of Western philosophy and that moveable type and modern transportation and communications would make his writings available practically anywhere.

Modern communications devices and adjuncts to learning and investigation such as artificial intelligence (AI) programs bid us to remember how writing itself was once critiqued and how that critique in large part was dispelled by subsequent events. But ought we be so sanguine about our reliance on such devices as cellphones, computers, and the emerging AI programs? Do these aid us or dull our abilities? Do they allow us to inquire deeper into the human world or become more divorced from it?

I suppose the general answer is: It all depends on how we use these tools.

Taking a holiday break - no post this week

I am taking a holiday break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, September 8.

Not if, but when: The coming North Atlantic deep freeze

In recent years scientists have been watching and measuring the flow of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, (AMOC), what Americans often refer to as the Gulf Stream though that flow is only part of this vast ocean current. For a long time the belief was that the AMOC—which transports heat from the tropics to Greenland, Iceland and northern Europe and makes them much warmer than they would otherwise be—would continue to flow with no discernible end date.

But two recent studies suggest that the current could not just slow, but stop altogether sometime around mid-century thereby lowering temperatures dramatically in northern Europe. The earlier study from 2023 suggests a collapse could occur sometime between 2025 and 2095, a wide interval, but actually the blink of an eye in geologic time. The more recent study released this year used a more sophisticated model and narrowed the window from 2037 to 2064. Both studies put the most likely date of collapse at mid-century (either 2050 or 2057).

Rising temperatures due to climate change are resulting in vastly increased meltwater coming from the the Greenland ice sheet—which on average is over one mile thick. This meltwater is being dumped into the North Atlantic where it reduces the salinity of the ocean water, thus making the water less dense. This reduced density appears to be slowing the current where it dives deep into the ocean, a dive that is essential for the current to continue to flow.

Taking a short break - no post this week

I am taking a short break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, August 25.

Dark oxygen: We don't know what we don't know

Last month some very clever scientists published their findings on oxygen production on the seafloor. What is astonishing is that previously we've believed that free oxygen in the atmosphere and dissolved in the oceans had come almost exclusively from plants performing photosynthesis. But here at the lightless abysmal depths these scientists found levels of oxygen consistent with production of what they call "dark oxygen." The discovery is yet another example of that eternal verity that we don't know what we don't know.

The findings—which were partly funded by deep sea mining interests—are now instantly under attack by those same interests. The reason can be found in the mechanism by which the oxygen is being produced. The scientists believe that the very minerals which the deep sea miners want to hoover up off the ocean floor are the ones facilitating what they call "seawater electrolysis." Electrolysis is the process of freeing the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up water from each other using an electric current. The hypothesis is that electrolysis is taking place spontaneously as a result of the presence of copper and manganese nodules lying on the seabed.

The implications are profound if it turns out that this is a significant contributor to free oxygen on the planet. No one knows for sure, and the mechanism producing the oxygen has not yet been verified by other researchers. And that verification is precisely what the scientists say needs to happen. But that, of course, might delay any deep sea mining until the implications of that mining for dark oxygen are clarified.