But no matter who matter who wins the game, the bookies win their money. The bookie’s odds always include a built-in percentage for the house. In 2009 I calculated the Las Vegas Final Four edge at 9.8%; in 2010, the edge was larger (14.3%). This year the edge, if you can actually get these published odds, is unbelievably small…only 2.2%!

First a repeat of my tutorial on how the house gets its take:

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

As a result of advances in computer technology, these eternal questions will soon (long before this century is over, IMO) be explored in ways that go further and deeper than religion, philosophy, and literature have done before.

I am reading Hans Moravec‘s 1999 book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. In a field like computer science, where an 11-year-old book should be completely irrelevant, Moravec’s prescience and predictions are still remarkable. I was struck by two paragraphs that sum up my views on artificial intelligence. Moravec, an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, asks whether a robot driven by what he refers to as “fourth-generation” technology (think very powerful super-computers and highly advanced software) could have “an internal mental life anything like ours. Is it conscious of its existence? Does it have emotions?”

Moravec writes (p. 111):

The key insight is that the “animating principle is not a substance” or a spirit…or a soul. It is “a very particular, very complex organization.”

There should be no despair in this insight. To be animated by complex organization is no less miraculous.

Rejoice in that miracle…and watch for the next one.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Elizabeth Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer who is aware and knowledgeable about the discussions and unwarranted controversy about whether man has contributed to changes in and to the earth, has written an article for Yale’s Environment 360 website that addresses the naming of the geological epoch we are current in. She asks:

Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.

An-THROP-o-cene. What’s in a name is not a trivial concern. The human act of giving a name to something both legitimizes and limns what may have previous been unrecognized and ill-defined.

Gordon Moore

Ray Kurzweil

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.

photo: Working Group on the Anthropocene website

Technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.

Jan Zalasiewicz

The Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other.

In terms of change over time, this will be the most vertiginous ride this Earth has ever taken.

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Below is Kolbert’s article, The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact, reprinted in its entirety.

The Holocene — or “wholly recent” epoch — is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch — informally dubbed the Anthropocene — has begun.

In a recent paper titled “The New World of the Anthropocene,” which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet — lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion.

Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet “on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.”

Prompted by the group’s paper, the Independent of London last month conducted a straw poll of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the official keeper of the geological time scale. Half the commission members surveyed said they thought the case for a new epoch was already strong enough to consider a formal designation.

“Human activities, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, are clearly having a major impact on the Earth,” Barry Richards of the Geological Survey of Canada told the newspaper. “We are leaving a clear and unique record.”

Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen

The Anthropocene, Crutzen wrote, “could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”

Soon, the term soon began popping up in other scientific publications. “Riverine quality of the Anthropocene,” was the title of a 2002 paper in the journal Aquatic Sciences.

“Soils and sediments in the anthropocene,” read the title of a 2004 editorial in the Journal of Soils and Sediments.

Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the Britain’s University of Leicester, found the spread of the concept intriguing. “I noticed that Paul Crutzen’s term was appearing in the serious literature, in papers in Science and such like, without inverted commas and without a sense of irony,” he recalled in a recent interview. At the time, Zalasiewicz was the head of the stratigraphic commission of the Geological Society of London. At a luncheon meeting of the commission, he asked his fellow stratigraphers what they thought of the idea.

“We simply discussed it,” he said. “And to my surprise, because these are technical geologists, a majority of us thought that there was something to this term.”

In 2008, Zalasiewicz and 20 other British geologists published an article in GSA Today, the magazine of the Geological Society of America, that asked: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” The answer, the group concluded, was probably yes: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene… as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization.” (An epoch, in geological terms, is a relatively short span of time; a period, like the Cretaceous, can last for tens of millions of years, and an era, like the Mesozoic, for hundreds of millions.) The group pointed to changes in sedimentation rates, in ocean chemistry, in the climate, and in the global distribution of plants and animals as phenomena that would all leave lasting traces. Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, the group wrote, are predicted to lead to “global temperatures not encountered since the Tertiary,” the period that ended 2.6 million years ago.

Zalasiewicz now heads of the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is looking into whether a new epoch should be officially designated, and if so, how. Traditionally, the boundaries between geological time periods have been established on the basis of changes in the fossil record — by, for example, the appearance of one type of commonly preserved organism or the disappearance of another. The process of naming the various periods and their various subsets is often quite contentious; for years, geologists have debated whether the Quaternary — the geological period that includes both the Holocene and its predecessor, the Pleistocene — ought to exist, or if  the term ought to be abolished, in which case the Holocene and Pleistocene would become epochs of the Neogene, which began some 23 million years ago. (Just last year, the International Commission on Stratigraphy decided to keep the Quaternary, but to push back its boundary by almost a million years.)

In recent decades, the ICS has been trying to standardize the geological time scale by choosing a rock sequence in a particular place to serve as a marker. Thus, for example, the marker for the Calabrian stage of the Pleistocene can be found at 39.0385°N 17.1348°E, which is in the toe of the boot of Italy.

Since there is no rock record yet of the Anthropocene, its boundary would obviously have to be marked in a different way. The epoch could be said simply to have begun at a certain date, say 1800. Or its onset could be correlated to the first atomic tests, in the 1940s, which left behind a permanent record in the form of radioactive isotopes.

One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists — most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia — have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now.

“We’re still now debating whether we’ve actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what’s going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant,” observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester.

In general, Williams said, the reaction that the working group had received to its efforts so far has been positive. “Most of the geologists and stratigraphers that we’ve spoken with think it’s a very good idea in that they agree that the degree of change is very significant.”

Zalasiewicz said that even if new epoch is not formally designated, the exercise of considering it was still useful. “Really it’s a piece of science,” he said. “We’re trying to get some handle on the scale of contemporary change in its very largest context.”

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The largest earthquake ever recorded was the 9.5 magnitude 1960 Valdivia earthquake, also in Chile.

Just to put the Great Chilean Earthquake (an alternate name for the Valdivia quake) in its perspective, scientists estimate that the Yucatán Peninsula bolide (meteor) impact that created the Chicxulub crater 65 million years ago and led to mass extinction of the dinosaurs and other species had the energy of almost 600 Valdivia earthquakes.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Commonly—and erroneously.

The internet offers near-instant access to information. It is ironic that in some cases this easy of access decreases accuracy.

Wikipedia explains the term clearly and correctly:

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a “blue moon.” Different definitions place the “extra” moon at different times.

• In calculating the dates for Lent and Easter, the Clergy identify the Lent Moon. It is thought that historically when the moon’s timing was too early, they named an earlier moon as a “betrayer moon” (belewe moon), thus the Lent moon came at its expected time.

• Folklore gave each moon a name according to its time of year. A moon which came too early had no folk name – and was called a blue moon – bringing the correct seasonal timings for future moons.

• The Farmers’ Almanac defined blue moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season; one season was normally three full moons. If a season had four full moons, then the third full moon was named a blue moon.

But in its March 1946 issue, Sky & Telescope magazine unintentionally set the record wrong, misinterpreting previous definitions and stating that a blue moon was the term given to the second full moon in a single calendar month. The new-and-wrong definition caught on, and even thought the magazine eventually corrected its error (in its May 1999 issue and again in a good-hearted, self-effacing press release two days ago), over that half-century, the new, easier-to explain definition had almost completely supplanted the old.

That’s the way of language; it changes.

It’s me replaces It’s I.

I’m  like… replaces I said…

Blue moon gets a new definition.

So on New Year’s Eve, this wrong new definition shone around the world.

Singapore’s Straits Times got it right: “The original meaning of ‘blue moon’ was the third full moon in a season with four instead of the usual three.”

The Jerusalem Post wrote: “But a real blue moon – not a reference to the moon’s tint but designating its appearance a second time in a single calendar month – was visible Thursday night where there were no clouds – along with a partial lunar eclipse that could be sighted throughout the Middle East.”

The Times of India noted correctly, “It is basically a calendar event and has no astronomical importance as such.”

Some of this New Year’s references to blue moon were benign, even charming:

A segment on Omaha’s WOWT-TV included, “It happens once roughly every two and a half years. Thirteen moons in a twelve month period—when two fall in the same calendar month, it’s called a blue moon. And the saying “once in a blue moon” refers to a rarity—something that doesn’t happen very often….And just before midnight a wedding.”

Some were educative.

Richard Brill, writing in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, noted correctly that “A full moon on New Year’s Eve is rare, but when it happens it is always a ‘blue moon.’”

Others were simply inaccurate, misleading, or both.

The Christian Science Monitor mis-cited the initial Sky & Telescope article: “But in 1943 [sic], Sky and Telescope Magazine erroneously wrote that the second full moon in any calendar month was called a blue moon. The label stuck and is still used today.”

China View got the definition entirely wrong. In a caption to this photo, it wrote: “The sunset is reflected on the wing of a commercial airliner as the full moon rises over clouds in the horizon over Athens December 31, 2009. For only the second time in nearly two decades [sic], Earth is illuminated by a “Blue Moon,” the name given to the second full moon appearing in a single month.”

NASA, as should be expected, referenced the Sky & Telescope error-and-restatement correctly, but blundered when it stepped down from its ethereal bailiwick into song lyrics: “In music, [blue moon is] often a symbol of melancholy. According to one Elvis tune, it means “without a love of my own.” On the bright side, he croons in another song, a simple kiss can turn a Blue Moon pure gold.”

A quick search will show that those two musical interpretations occur in the same immensely popular Rodgers & Hart song (Blue Moon), recorded variously by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and scores of others, but made most popular by the Marcels’ in their #1 do-wop version (1961).

Do the research. More frequently than once in a blue moon, the internet will be wrong.

But if the tune is good…sing along!

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Photo credits: Blue moon---canyonhiker (who admits to PhotoShopping it blue); Jetliner---Xinhua/Reuters Photo

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

A week ago, New York Times reporter James Glanz wrote that Altarock Energy “has removed its drill rig and informed federal officials that the government project will be abandoned.” Only one day before this report, the controversial Basel, Switzerland, project that was supposed to lead the EGS technology parade was also abandoned.

Obama’s Department of Energy was a financial sponsor of the AltaRock venture. Google and others had invested. Yet AltaRock’s website makes no mention of this major corporate setback.

There will be more news, I suspect.

My earlier posts are:

Enhanced Geothermal Energy and Man-Made Earthquakes—7/2/09
Enhanced Geothermal Energy and Man-Made Earthquakes (Part 2)—7/16/09
Enhanced Geothermal Energy Project Halted in The Geysers—9/3/09
Is the Production of Geothermal Energy in The Geysers a “Public Nuisance”?—9/27/09

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The waves in Saturn’s A ring are formed by the gravitational pull of tiny moon Daphnis, the bright dot (only 5 miles in diameter) in the ring gap just to the left of center.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

In a formal complaint and petition addressed to the Board of Supervisors of Lake and Sonoma Counties for “Remedy of Ongoing Public Nuisance from Geothermal Earthquakes Caused by Operations of Calpine Corp./Geysers Power Company, LLC at The Geysers,” ASCA specifically cited a September 5 magnitude 2.8 earthquake as the latest of more than a thousand magnitude 2.0 or higher temblors epicentered within five miles of Anderson Springs since 2000. These, ASCA contends, constitute an ongoing public nuisance. [A link to the complaint will be posted here when it goes online.]

According to the complaint, “Most residents of Anderson Springs were awakened by the jolt and noise of this earthquake; many were frightened and had difficulty going back to sleep.  Over the following 10 minutes, residents were disturbed by the rumblings & noise of numerous smaller earthquakes, most of which did not register on the USGS seismic network.” The September 5 earthquake was “epicentered next to Calpine’s MLM Wellpad by Castle Rock Springs, 1 mile from Anderson Springs (1,300 feet from the closest residence), and at a shallow depth of 1.6 miles (consistent with man-made, geothermal earthquakes).”

ASCA’s cover letter states:

There is now a significant body of qualified, independent scientific evidence about induced seismicity, along with extensive public comments, documentation, and media coverage, demonstrating the extent of problems for residents and their property.  It has become clear that most of these earthquakes are caused by geothermal development activities, and the instrumentation is now adequate to pinpoint their exact location and quantify resulting ground-shaking in Anderson Springs.

Although the impacted communities are primarily in Lake County, Calpine’s operations causing geothermal earthquakes occur both within Lake and Sonoma Counties and are permitted by their respective County planning/community development departments.  We recognize the importance of geothermal power production; we are not against geothermal energy, nor are we seeking to halt geothermal operations.  However, the wastewater disposal needs of Lake and Sonoma Counties, along with the business interests and profit motivations of Calpine Corporation, are being served at the expense of our small community and its residents.

California Civil Code Section 3480 defines a public nuisance as “one which affects at the same time an entire community or neighborhood, or any considerable number of persons, although the extent of the annoyance or damage inflicted upon individuals may be unequal.” Complaints of public nuisance most often reference local concerns such as excessive noise, overflowing trash, or neighborhood blights such as drug selling. To file such a complaint against a major corporation involved in an activity as important as energy generation pits a gnat (ASCA) against an elephant (Calpine).

Calpine could try to defend itself by:

•  casting the temblors as insignificant annoyances that cause little or no damage
•  contending that residents knew about the problem when they moved in
•  demonstrating that the earthquakes had been ongoing for a many years without complaint

Since Calpine supplies a huge amount of energy to Northern California and ASCA has not documented any earthquake-related injuries and no incidents of dramatic property damage, the public nuisance complaint could get treated as a minor attack on an important corporate presence. And if Calpine pays significant taxes to the county governments (undetermined as of this writing), officials may be under tremendous financial pressure to find for the revenue producer over the NIMBY complainants.

ASCA has been researching induced earthquakes for a long time. Its chart of the number of earthquakes with magnitude greater than 2.0 shows a dramatic increase over the last several decades.

In addition, ASCA’s three-year survey (2002-04) indicates annoyances that may add up to a public nuisance:

•  85% of Anderson Springs residents reported that they or members of their family had been “woken up in the middle of the night by earthquakes.”

•  66% reported that smaller household objects (e.g., pictures, clocks, planted pots, knickknacks, etc.) had been moved or disturbed.

•  56% reported problems with doors/windows not closing properly due to earthquakes.

•  54% reported that “the earthquakes affect[ed] me or members of my family emotionally.”

Jeffrey Gospe, president of the ASCA, emailed me on September 24, “We are confident that the California Civil Code and its case history support our community’s rights to abatement of this public nuisance, and we hope that Lake/Sonoma Counties and Calpine will be proactive about remedying the situation without the necessity of court proceedings.”

Two previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) described the EGS project that AltaRock had undertaken in The Geysers, a geologically active formation in California’s Mayacamas Mountains of Lake and Sonoma Counties. The Geysers is the world’s most productive geothermal field. A third post noted the halting of that project.

With energy such a prominent public and governmental concern, it is surprising that local news coverage of AltaRock, ASCA, Calpine, etc., has been almost non-existent. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat is MIA. Only the weekly Lake County News and the New York Times (which owns the Press Democrat) track this story with any consistency.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

From an AltaRock Energy press release dated September 2, 2009:

AltaRock Energy Inc. has encountered a number of physical difficulties in the drilling of well E-7, the first well planned as part of its engineered geothermal systems (EGS) demonstration project in the Geysers, resulting from geologic anomalies particular to the formation underlying this well location.

Two previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) described the EGS project that AltaRock had undertaken in The Geysers, a geologically active formation in the Mayacamas Mountains of Lake County, CA.

Problems with the drilling, executed by Nabors Industries under contract from AltaRock, were made public on August 19 in the New York Times:

[T]he project has been delayed because the bit on a giant rig, meant to drill more than two miles underground, has struggled to pierce surface rock formations, [anonymous federal] scientists said. The bit has snapped off at least once and become repeatedly fouled in a shallow formation called cap rock, and the drillers have twice been forced to pull it out and essentially start the hole over again.

The Times and Reuters also noted that AltaRock, in addition to the DOE commitment, has raised $30 million in venture capital from investors  such as Google and the investment firms Khosla Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, Vulcan Capital, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Further review of AltaRock’s drilling had been requested by Anderson Springs Community Alliance (ASCA), a group of citizens concerned about the increase in local earthquakes since large-scale water injection began in the late 90’s. Anderson Springs is just a few miles from AltaRock’s drill site. ASCA president Jeffrey Gospe, a resident of Santa Rosa and Anderson Springs, said that federal regulators disclosed that once the AltaRock/Nabors rig got stuck for a third time after only 800 feet of new drilling, AltaRock halted the project and released the rig. He guessed that AltaRock had been spending about $100,000 per day, and had already gone through $12-14 million of their capital. “I think there’s now a 50% chance that AltaRock will pull out of the Geysers completely and move to Nevada or elsewhere, someplace that doesn’t have such a high level of seismicity.”

In July, in response to such concerns about engendering large earthquakes, the Department of Energy and the Bureau of Land Management forbade AltaRock to fracture rock until completion of a study comparing the potential for engendering large earthquakes in The Geysers with the experience of a similar EGS project near Basel, Switzerland, that did create a 3.2 quake in 2006. After that event, the Basel project was shut down. The DOE/BLM report, according to Gospe, is expected to support AltaRock’s claim that mitigation of earthquakes is practicable., but with AltaRock’s cessation of drilling, the study may now be less important. The real question, Gospe said, is, “Can you really believe that AltaRock can do this with no seismic effect, if they can’t do the easiest part of the project? They could not even complete the drilling phase in an area where wells 8,000 feet deep are routine.”

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Note: EGS is a acronym for “Enhanced Geothermal Systems” and “Engineered Geothermal Systems,” both of which refer to the same technology.

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Addendum 9/10/09:

Prompted by John Stewart’s comment below, I changed the opening to this post. It used to read (incorrectly):

Late in 2008, Barack Obama’s Department of Energy, led by Nobel laureate Steven Chu, committed $6.25…

Here is the relevant information from DOE:

AltaRock Energy Inc. and Northern California Power Agency, University of Utah, Texas A&M University, Science Applications International Corporation, Temple University (Seattle, WA): to use an innovative stimulation process to create an EGS reservoir that will drill below the permeable zone, stimulate in the contained zone with infrastructure in place, and increase power production (up to $6,014,351)

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.