Author Archives: BobMoowattin

Colorado could vote to limit fracking on November ballot

by BobMoowattin Posted on August 9, 2016

Fracktions

Colorado could vote to limit fracking on November ballot

By on Aug 9, 2016Share

Colorado is one step closer to ditching fracking.

Anti-fracking activists have collected 100,000 signatures, more than the 98,500 needed, to secure two measures on the November ballot. One measure would bring oil and gas drilling operations under local oversight while the other would add a no-fracking buffer zone 2,500 feet around any occupied buildings. Together these would, in essence, prevent drilling on 95 percent of the state’s most oil-rich land, according to the New York Times.

The state has 30 days to review the signatures and submit any challenges.

The industry, however, is already fighting back. Pro-fracking groups have raised $13 million to oppose the initiatives, and Yes for Health and Safety Over Fracking, the group that collected the signatures, reported that volunteer and contractor canvassers were “yelled at, and physically threatened” by people suspiciously spouting oil and gas industry’s favorite lines.

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Colorado could vote to limit fracking on November ballot

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We Asked a "Game of Thrones" Language Guru to Translate Trump into Dothraki

by BobMoowattin Posted on September 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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David J. Peterson might just have the brainiest job in Hollywood. He’s a conlanger, a guy who constructs languages. You may have heard some of his work on fantasy TV shows like Defiance, Star-Crossed, and Game of Thrones—Dothrakis and Valyrians both spew his handiwork. And no, these languages aren’t just well-organized jibberish. A true conlang (constructed language) behaves like a natural language, with its own logic and structure, as Peterson explains in his new book, The Art of Language Invention, out this week.

Drawing on his academic background in linguistics, Peterson began creating new tongues in 2000. He penned “The Conlang Manifesto” and in 2007 co-founded the Language Creation Society, a network and website with online resources for people who want to get serious about conlanging.

The Art of Language Invention, part technical manual and part linguistics lesson, is chock full of funny pop-culture references—Prince, Back to the Future, the Miami Heat. Even if you’re not a conlanger wannabe, it’s a worthwhile read on the origins of language and the way words reflect and shape our behavior. Down below, we highlight some of Peterson’s advice for language constructors, but first, we asked him to translate a handful of 2016 presidential campaign slogans into his own tongues. Behold…

The Conlanguage of Politics

Dothraki for “Make America great again!” Gage Skidmore

Kinuk’aaz (from Defiance) for “Jeb!” Gage Skidmore

Castithan (from Defiance) for “A political revolution is coming.” AFGE

Trigedasleng (from The 100) for “It’s your time.” Brett Weinstein

High Valyrian (from Game of Thrones) for “Reform. Growth. Safety.” (Guess that one didn’t work out for Scott Walker, who fled the GOP race like a wildling escaping a white walker.) Gage Skidmore

And now here are six things you’ll want to know before you set out to construct a tongue of your own:

1. Never confuse a conlang with a fictional language. In a famous scene from Return of the Jedi, Princess Leia repeats the Ubese word “yotó” to say several very different things. Though Ubese supposedly existed in the Star Wars universe, it was haphazard and never fully fleshed out—hence, a fictional language. Same with Simcity’s Simlish and the gibberish spoken by the minions in Despicable Me. Mischaracterizing a fake language as a conlang will make you look foolish, Peterson warns.

2. Be clear about your intent. Otherwise, you could end up with a “malformed mutant” that doesn’t serve any purpose, such as Peterson’s first language, Megdevi—a moniker that combined his own name with his then-girlfriend’s. (“The rest of the language follows from there…”) One sect of conlanging society seeks to create naturalistic languages, “pretty much exactly like those spoken here on earth.” Another branch hopes to solve philosophical puzzles. In Ithquil, a tongue created by philosopher John Quijada, it takes just two words to say: “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point.” Unfortunately, it can take hours to construct a single Ithquili sentence, so it’s “not something you’d pick up and speak with your friends.”

3. Know your history. Be intimately familiar with the people meant to speak your language. Otherwise, you risk polluting your new tongue with remnants of your own culture. Game of Thrones‘ Dothrakis are a violent nomadic people who live, breathe, and die on the saddle. They don’t need an equivalent of the word “please.”

4. Determine your acoustic economy. It’s up to the conlanger to choose the right sounds for the language. Unless, of course, a producer asks you to create a foreign and “harsh” sounding language, as Peterson was asked to do with Dothraki. In which case, you better hope for actors who take your language as seriously as did Jason Momoa, who played Game of Thrones‘ Dothraki king, Drogo—”the hulkiest, beefiest, dreamiest mountain of a human being to ever speak a crafted language,” Peterson says.

5. Give your language staying power. Always be looking for opportunities to promote your conlang via some other medium. Many sci-fi and fantasy novelists are looking for languages to use in their stories—”see if you can work on one of those,” Peterson says. “If those books get optioned, the language creators will go along with it.”

6. Don’t quit your day job. The best conlangers are unfailingly curious, “the type of person who would enjoy taking apart a stereo just to see how it works,” Peterson says. But you’re not likely to get rich doing this. For most people, the payoff is the satisfaction and possibilities the hobby affords. Ask yourself: “What do I want to say with this new language that I can’t say in my native language?”

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We Asked a "Game of Thrones" Language Guru to Translate Trump into Dothraki

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Thomas Piketty Has a Grim View of Our Plutocratic Future

by BobMoowattin Posted on January 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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A while back I mentioned Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the 21st Century, which hasn’t yet made a big splash in the United States because the English translation won’t be out until March. But Thomas Edsall takes a look at reaction so far to Piketty’s thesis about the roots of rising income inequality and summarizes it this way:

Piketty proposes [] that the rise in inequality reflects markets working precisely as they should: “This has nothing to do with a market imperfection: the more perfect the capital market, the higher” the rate of return on capital is in comparison to the rate of growth of the economy. The higher this ratio is, the greater inequality is.

….There are a number of key arguments in Piketty’s book. One is that the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations — starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s — was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.

The chart on the right shows this graphically. For most of history, returns to capital were higher than the growth rate of the global economy, and this meant higher returns to owners of capital than to workers at large. And this means rising inequality. As a reviewer writes, “if capital incomes are more concentrated than incomes from labor (a rather uncontroversial fact), personal income distribution will also get more unequal — which indeed is what we have witnessed in the past 30 years.” The mid-20th century reversal of this trend was temporary and unlikely to be repeated.

One thing to be clear about, however, is that the right side of Piketty’s chart is a forecast. I’ve redrawn it with dashed red lines to make that clear. Piketty is predicting that returns to capital will exceed growth modestly over the next half century, and will gap out wildly in the half century after that. Edsall doesn’t really explain why Piketty believes this, so I guess we’ll have to wait for further reviews on that score. Speaking for myself, I’ll need some convincing. My view is that the second half of the 21st century—assuming we manage not to blow each other up or fry the planet to a cinder—is likely to be an era of fantastically high growth thanks to robotics and artificial intelligence. That also produces problems related to the distribution of income, but they’re rather different from Piketty’s.

But in one sense it doesn’t matter. Piketty’s solution to the problem of this mismatch between growth and capital returns—which he considers an inevitable consequence of capitalism—is redistribution and plenty of it: “The only way to halt this process, he argues, is to impose a global progressive tax on wealth….an annual graduated tax on stocks and bonds, property and other assets that are customarily not taxed until they are sold.” That’s probably the eventual answer to the robotics revolution too. So regardless of which fork we take in the future, higher taxes on the rich seem pretty likely.

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Thomas Piketty Has a Grim View of Our Plutocratic Future

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Which Way Should Solar Panels Point?

by BobMoowattin Posted on January 8, 2014

Solar panels are becoming more affordable and therefore more popular for homeowners. Photo: morgueFile/Seemann

For years, experts have believed that south-facing solar panels are most effective in gathering sun in the northern hemisphere. But a new study based on homes in Austin, Texas, has raised questions about which way our solar panels need to be facing.

The Pecan Street Research Institute released results of a study that indicated homeowners could find significant benefits by pointing their solar panels to the west. The study concluded that the west-facing panels were better at reducing peak loads in areas such as Austin, where air-conditioning use is a strong driving factor in energy use during peak times, typically 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The study showed south-facing panels provided a 54 percent peak-reduction in usage, while the panels facing west produced a more impressive 65 percent reduction.

But that doesn’t mean it’s time to tear down those south-oriented solar panels and put them on west-facing roofs just yet. While the study results immediately led to reports that homeowners could get greater results by pointing their solar panels to the west, there was more to the story than many reported.

While the study found that west-facing configurations did have their benefits, they produced less total energy over the course of the year than their south-facing counterparts. The value, it appears, is that they are able to help reduce the electricity load during peak times, which of course puts less stress on electricity distribution systems. That means the power they produce may be more valuable, particularly in hot climates where air-conditioning use can cause problems such as rolling blackouts during peak hours.

The new study raises the question of whether using west-facing solar panels may help offset some of the power usage during peak hours and provide some relief for the energy grid. More research is planned that will include broadening the region being studied and examining how the pitch of the roof affects solar collection.

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Which Way Should Solar Panels Point?

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Silicon Valley Takes On the NSA

by BobMoowattin Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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The titans of Silicon Valley have finally banded together to tell Washington they’re tired of the NSA ruining public trust in the internet by hoovering up every gigabit of data ever created. It’s all very polite, and naturally they’ve made their views public via a website that promotes the following five principles:

  1. Governments should codify sensible limitations on their ability to compel service providers to disclose user data that balance their need for the data in limited circumstances, users’ reasonable privacy interests, and the impact on trust in the Internet. In addition, governments should limit surveillance to specific, known users for lawful purposes, and should not undertake bulk data collection of Internet communications.
  2. Intelligence agencies seeking to collect or compel the production of information should do so under a clear legal framework in which executive powers are subject to strong checks and balances. Reviewing courts should be independent and include an adversarial process, and governments should allow important rulings of law to be made public in a timely manner so that the courts are accountable to an informed citizenry.
  3. Transparency is essential to a debate over governments’ surveillance powers and the scope of programs that are administered under those powers. Governments should allow companies to publish the number and nature of government demands for user information. In addition, governments should also promptly disclose this data publicly.
  4. The ability of data to flow or be accessed across borders is essential to a robust 21st century global economy. Governments should permit the transfer of data and should not inhibit access by companies or individuals to lawfully available information that is stored outside of the country. Governments should not require service providers to locate infrastructure within a country’s borders or operate locally.
  5. In order to avoid conflicting laws, there should be a robust, principled, and transparent framework to govern lawful requests for data across jurisdictions, such as improved mutual legal assistance treaty — or “MLAT” — processes. Where the laws of one jurisdiction conflict with the laws of another, it is incumbent upon governments to work together to resolve the conflict.

This is a good start. Next up: whether these guys are really serious, or whether they’re going to call it a day after creating a website and not really try very hard to harness public opinion to fight for these principles. Stay tuned.

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Silicon Valley Takes On the NSA

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Is the CIA Taking Cues from Hollywood?

by BobMoowattin Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Call it the Jason Bourne strategy.

Think of it as the CIA’s plunge into Hollywood—or into the absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world’s most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an orange jumpsuit in the world’s most infamous jail.

The first group of undercover agents were recruited by private companies from the Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs and then repurposed to the CIA at handsome salaries averaging around $140,000 a year; the second crew was recruited from the prison cells at Guantanamo Bay and paid out of a secret multimillion dollar slush fund called “the Pledge.”

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Is the CIA Taking Cues from Hollywood?

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The Amazing Green Cleaner You Probably Don’t Use

by BobMoowattin Posted on November 24, 2013

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The Amazing Green Cleaner You Probably Don’t Use

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