Violence

Judging by the canonization of Cormac McCarthy, who writes about scalpings and coin-flipping symbols of death and babies roasted on spits and the Apocalypse Blooming From Every Man's Evil Heart, nihilism is now so universally confused with profundity that even the serious literary establishment can't see that Cormac McCarthy is really just Stephen King without the entertainment value.

That is a quote from My History of Violence: A Rumination on Art, Death, Truth, Hubris and the Call for Media Accountability. It was in a Paste Magazine article by John H. Richardson. I can't say whether or not Cormac McCarthy's work is so much pulp fiction - I've never read any of it. But I will say this article is the most interesting piece on violence I've ever read.

It examines the questions of whether the media is to blame for Americans' extremely violent tendencies from a personal level, and wisely gives no hard and fast answers. It does go as far as to argue that there are two things the media is not: completely innocent or completely guilty. Thus its members bear a frightening responsibility to decide how much is too much and where the line is - which of course is impossible to know.

It also touches on other profound elements, like how violence is exposed to children, how the truth is violent, and how at the center of every church there is a man being tortured to death.

Give it a read if you're interested.

Image: Grey Villet, Time

Energy Crisis? Global Warming? Dependence on Foreign Oil? Nuclear Power is the Answer!

This video is from TerrestrialEnergy.org, which argues that nuclear power is the green solution to the energy crisis.

As I continue my lifelong study of engineering, I keep coming to the conclusion that nuclear energy is the answer to so many of our current energy problems. No other energy technology can compete with nuclear technology for efficiency - a nuclear power plant produces 93 times as much energy as it consumes. A family of four consuming nuclear power for 20 years will produce a cylinder of nuclear waste the size of a cigarette lighter. Nuclear plants also produce zero CO2 (Al Gore's favorite green house gas), while coal plants in the US produce 1.8 million tons a year.

Of course the big concerns about nuclear, and the reasons so few plants have been built over the last 30+ years, are safety and waste. I'm not going to give an exhaustive explanation of how nuclear power safety has increased since 1970, but this information is readily available. I will say that thirty years (a millenia in terms of technological advancement) of power plant design has produced the ability to create plants for which a disaster like Chernobyl is impossible.

It's also important to remember that the alternatives aren't really all that safe either. Air pollution from coal dust kills roughly 10,000 people per year, and some analysts calculate we would have to have 25 reactor meltdowns per year for nuclear power to match that (keep in mind there have only ever been two). Then there's all the dangers of actually generating power. From 1970 to 1992, Coal killed 6400 people (remember all those mining accidents?), Natural Gas killed 1200, Hyrdo killed 4000, and Nuclear killed 31.

Nuclear waste is a tricky thing. You can't transport it very far because there's always the risk of it leaking somehow - imagine a space shuttle carrying nuclear waste exploding on the launch pad. The best idea seems to be burying it, but no one wants it buried near them. Again, I won't give a detailed analysis (you can get that at the links below), but I will say the following. First, it's possible to recycle and reuse nuclear waste to make plants even more efficient and reduce the radiation levels of the waste. Second, we're not talking about a lot of waste here - the United States only produces enough waste in 40 years to cover a football field to a height of 10 meters. Third, President Bush already approved a site for a long-term storage facility in the Nevada desert, but the political climate surrounding nuclear power has pushed construction back many times. Fourth, keep in mind the alternative - coal ash is actually more radioactive than nuclear waste.

I think there is a general agreement that the future of energy is the elimination of fossil fuels. I think wind, solar, biofuels, and other renewable energy sources are fantastic, but from what I've read I don't believe we can get the quantity of energy we need from them without significant technological advancements. Nuclear power can immediately provide massive amounts of power with less damage to our environment and less loss of human life and quality of life. At the very least we could become more reliant on nuclear power while we continue to strive for more efficient renewables.

Of course, the biggest deterrant to the use of nuclear power is a political climate of fear surrounding it (it's illegal to even build a plant in California, if you can believe it). I hope by writing this post I can help to dispel this fear in a small way.

Terrestrial Energy
The Oil Drum
The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management

Risk of Nuclear Power by Bernard L. Cohen, Sc.D.

World Nuclear Association - Economics of Nuclear Power

World Nuclear Association - Safety of Nuclear Power

Wikipedia - Yucca Mountain

Nuclear Energy Institute

Scientific American

The Morality of Frugality

Riding to work this morning, I heard an editor from Vogue being interviewed on NPR about the upcoming Michelle Obama cover. I was immediately awoken from my typical 7:55am stupor when I heard her make this statement:

Fashion is an enormously important industry, not just in New York City but across the country, and there are a lot of people in America who make clothes, who sell clothes, and we want to keep those people working. Not shopping is not a moral act at this time. So many people think that their frugality is somehow a new moral front. Now that might be true if they were kindof excessive and bizarre in the years before, but when people don't shop other people lose their jobs - that's a fact.

Sally Singer, ed. Vogue

This an awful argument, and unfortunately it's also one I hear repeated over and over in the media in light of our current economic situation.

Really, Sally? There's no morality in buying less? In living with less? In saving money for more important things like a house, retirement, or education? In consuming less of our natural resources? In being financially independent? In living simply?

Did we get into this economic mess because Americans saved too much? Because we put too much in the bank and not enough on our credit cards? Or was it because we bought more house than we could afford, spent more than we saved, took on too much risk, and built our houses on the sand of "mortgage-backed securities" and other "toxic assets?"

Do people lose their jobs when we don't spend? Yes, but spending money we don't have hurts everyone! The one exception Singer made describes the average American well: bizarrely excessive. The savings rate in America was negative last year. The average household credit card debt was $8,299. If we need an economic meltdown to help our society learn the value of financial health, then so be it.

"Save money, live better" is not just a good slogan (shopping integrity arguments aside), it's the truth. Mark my words, nobody is going to rescue the economy by going out tomorrow and blowing their paycheck. The idea that it is our righteous responsibility to spend so people can go to work is a bunch of propaganda invented by people who are selling something and a government which profits from it. What makes our country strong and our economy healthy is a culture of financial health made up of informed, conscientious consumers with good habits.

And besides, as argued by financial giants like Clark Howard and Dave Ramsey, it is not your or my responsibility to save the economy. Our responsibility is to provide for our families, save for retirement, spend wisely, and give to the less fortunate. Millions of people doing these things will not just make our economy healthy, but our country great.

So get out there and save. Your country needs you.

Image: kenteegardin

Revenge of the Nerds

The thoughtful Nathan Elmore sent me this quote (as well as the quip in the title of this post) from the NY Times.  I thought it summed up the latest Facebook privacy debacle well.

Every Facebook account comes with knobs and levers that let you tune how gregarious or how hermitic you want your online self to be. This apparent control makes it even easier to feel comfortable, and to brush aside the fact that the site is tracking your every keystroke. On Sunday the veil slipped a little bit, and a number of people who hadn’t given it much thought suddenly realized just how much they were exposing to what is essentially a buildingful of nerds in Palo Alto. These nerds are pleasant people, but they would all like to one day get very, very rich by selling their company, and the only thing their company has of value is your private data.

This is just getting scarier and scarier - how much power Facebook has and how poorly they use it. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's response - trust us, "we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want" - doesn't exactly make me feel better.

User beware.

Quotes: More on the Advancement of Society

"Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day." Bill Vaughan

"Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress." John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957 

(I would add, "but it helps!")

"In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires." Benjamin Franklin

"Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences." Lewis Mumford

(I think Dr. Ian Malcolm said it better.)

Quotes: Conservatism, Government, and the Advancement of Our Society

"A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits." Woodrow Wilson

"If living conditions don't stop improving in this country, we're going to run out of humble beginnings for our great men."  Russell P. Askue

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you." Will Rogers

I think that last one should be painted over the door to the Daily Show studio. I often wonder how much of Jon Stewart's humor is brilliance and how much is shooting fish in a barrel.

Life in Pickens

These pictures were taken in the county where I live and work:

Some 25 Things I Happen To Have Decided To Write About Myself

Completely of my own accord and with no outside influence or prompting I decided to write down twenty five things about myself last week. I can't imagine what gave me the idea to do something like this, as it smells of internet survey chain letters which I hate with a passion.

1. There are few things in this world I love more than Ocean Spray 100% Cranberry Juice. In college I drank cranberry juice with pretty much every meal I ate in the dining hall.

2. One day, my senior year of high school, I had to fill out a survey saying what my college major was going to be. I had it limited down to professional acting and electrical/computer engineering. In the course of maybe 30 seconds I decided I would be more content with never having acted professionaly than I would with never having learned how a stereo works. This decision changed the course of my life.

3. I often wear the same pair of pants 5 days a week. I view this as one of the perks of being an engineer - low dress expectations. Convenient since I also despise shopping for clothes. Oh, and haircuts.

4. I once stole a canoe under direct adult supervision.

5. I have performed in around 20 different plays in my life, which gets less and less impressive the older I get. I miss performing more than anything. I think this feeds my tendency towards melodrama.

6. I often don't understand my own ideas until after I've said them - to the point where I am sometimes surprised by the truth or fallacy of something I just said. This is often, or even mostly a bad thing, but I've come to think it's also part of who I am. I feel a compelling need to communicate always. I don't feel resolution until after adequate conversation. I don't feel I'm contributing to a conversation unless I've said something (working on this). I am an unwavering advocate of straight talk.

7. One of my proudest accomplishments was a paper I wrote my senior year of high school arguing for Hamlet's sanity. I love Shakespeare and I will never forgive myself for not making a 5 on the AP English exam.

8. In the 8th grade I accidentally blew up (literally - sounds, sparks, smoke, etc) my best friend's family computer. I still have the hard drive, hoping one day I will be able to return their data.

9. I think blogging, at its core, is lame and worthless. But it's also incredibly fun and addicting (see #6).

10. I play the piano better when I'm tired or tipsy. I think it's because I think less.

11. Speaking of which, the jury is out on whether I've actually ever been drunk. It's on the bucket list.

12. Stealing from my sister Jessica's list, I love my family very much, and I think they're uncannily unique. In particular I have a great deal of respect for my father. Overwhelming respect for your father is something I find to be a sadly rare among most people I meet.

13. I am intimidated by children. I am scared of becoming a father.

14. I am fascinated by vacuum tube audio. This includes the Hammond B3 organ.

15. Paul is my favorite Beatle, hands down. I make no apologies for this.

16. I have an embarrassingly terrible memory. I forget names of people I've known for years, Erin tells me stories from our relationship I don't remember, I pretend to remember things constantly at home and at work. It's tragic sometimes. I hate it.

17. Feeling underproductive makes me ornery.

18. I easily get caught up daydreaming about really dramatic events happening to me - like someone close to me dying tragically. Surely most people do this.

19. People (usually at businesses) call me "ma'm" on the phone all the time. It took a little while to be ok with this. I have decided that I don't necessarily sound like a woman, but I use more inflection than the average male when talking to someone I don't know. If I consciously attempt to sound bored people get my gender right. This is the worst at drive-thru's, but I've learned to laugh at it. You order, drive around, and surprise! I'm a dude. Some employees look shocked or embarrassed, others just pretend like nothing happened.

20. I have been to England three times. I hate England. Scotland is the promised land.

21. Please don't stereotype engineers. Or men who enjoy theatre, poetry, or dance. This is a big thing for me.

22. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama. I like to think of Alabama as a continuing story of redemption.

23. God profoundly changed me through the dcf community.

24. I created and ran an online satirical newspaper at Clemson University.

25. I married my high school sweetheart. She is a lot funnier, a lot more loving, a lot less selfish, a lot more merciful, and a lot more fun than me.

The Case for the Single

In an article laughably titled "iTunes under threat as bands take their business elsewhere," the Telegraph editors explain how record companies are seeing revenue drop due to consumers' ability to download inexpensive single tracks instead of lucrative full albums. In an effort to increase album sales, some companies have refused to put albums on iTunes at all.

Some artists have also shunned iTunes but for different reasons. Rockers AC/DC and Kid Rock have brought up the age-old argument that they write albums, not songs, and selling songs instead of albums hurts the artistic integrity of their work.

Which is just a bunch of bull - but I'm getting ahead of myself. The article states:

Katy Perry has sold 2.2 million downloads of "I Kissed a Girl" on iTunes, but only 282,000 copies of her album. That sort of singles-to-album sales ratio simply never happened pre-iTunes.

Oh how quickly they forget. These guys need to head to their parents' attic and uncover a small black disc called the 45.

In the 60's and 70's singles had a much bigger share of the market than they did five years ago. "Hey Jude" was a single. So were "Yakkety Yak" and "I Can See Clearly Now." The old pack-a-bunch-of-crappy-songs-around-a-single-and-make-more-money-selling-albums trick really came into its own in the eighties, with the advent of casettes.

So how did artists sell albums in the day of the single? They wrote less filler! Bands like the Beatles broke album sales records by creating LPs chocked full of incredible music. You don't convince a consumer that an album is a cohesive piece of art by not allowing him/her to buy singles - you do it by creating an amazing album that consumers will want to buy anyway. That's the free-market approach to selling music.

Thus I have little sympathy for artists and companies whining about iTunes destroying their album sales. The era of filler is over. It had a nice run, but it's time for artists and record companies to realize that the days of selling plastic discs have passed, and talent is becoming important again. Sure you can still combine a catchy tune, a lip-synching underwear model, a conglomerate-controlled radio station, and a "music television" channel to create a money-making machine. But that machine won't sell albums anymore, it will sell singles - so why not take a chance on an artist who might sell a whole album - or even four or five?

The way I see it, iTunes isn't destroying the art of the album, it's driving album quality up. Long live the single.

Image: Mark Sardella

The Dirt and the Flood - "Welcome Home"

In the past I have used this website to sing the elegy of Clemson culture. I have said that Clemson is a place where art goes to die, where good music is suffocated.

Well, I take it back. Somehow, despite the overwhelming odds, four lads with exceptional talent and an ear for a common sound managed to find each other here. They managed to form a band. And two years later they managed to release one hell of an album.

I am a latecomer to the Dirt and the Flood following, but I'm here to stay. Last night's CD release party was only my second TDATF show, but it was an amazing one. These kids' obvious love of each other, love of playing together, love of the Gospel, distaste for straight beats, love of new sounds, incredible vocal blend... well, it's intoxicating.

I also have the distinct pleasure of being friends with TDATF member J. Knox Overstreet Burnett. Knox's instinctual, out-of-the-box drum fills have made me laugh so many Sunday mornings over the last year and a half we've played together at dcf. Besides this he's one of the most kind, humble, gracious guys I know. He has an air of goodness about him. I like him a lot.

This song is my favorite from the new album, entitled The Garden. I first heard it sitting in the cold of Knox's warming car, overwhelmed by how beautiful, simple, and new it is. Enjoy.

China-friendly link

Update: Click here to buy The Garden on iTunes