Lost In Me

I feel obligated to apologize for my binge blogging last night. I have had many entries planned out and bouncing around in my skull for the past couple of weeks, but have not had time to write them down due to classes and such. Some of them get typed out when I find the time, and others are lost in memory.

Also, Joephet's blog appears to be down. Where did you go, Joephet?

Cornell conservatives, though few in number, are an extremely vocal lot. Ubiquitous around campus are copies of the Cornell Review, a right-wing publication whose motto is "we do not apologize". Also, a number of conservative columnists have started writing this year for the Cornell Daily Sun, the most widely read student publication on campus.

The fact that the conservatives here are so vocal would be fine, if they did were not openly racist and generally offensive in doing so. Take for example the extremist right-wing columnist Sara Townsley. Tuesdays are my bad days, as that is when Townsley's weekly column appears in the Daily Sun. Between plasma physics and mathematical physics, I sit in the cafeteria in Kennedy hall, eating a light lunch and resisting the urge to immediately regurgitate it, as I read her overtly racist mixture of misleading propaganda and outright lies.

For a long time, I had wondered how writing of such a low factual quality could make it onto the Daily Sun, without an uproar of protest from its reader base. If right-wing extremists are so vocal on campus, I thought, then where are their progressive counterparts?

Recently, while wandering lost in the basement of the student union, I stumbled across a copy of Turn Left, a progressive student publication, which unfortunately is not distributed with the same determination as conservative publications. I was relieved to find that a more progressive voice does exist on campus, and that they too take umbrage at the provocative propaganda being promulgated by Townsley et al.

In particular, I found a gem of an article, written by a Muhammad Yasir Nawaz, in response to the anti-Muslim Townsley article that I linked to above. In the article, I even found this amusing allusion to Michelle Malkin, a Filipino-American writer who defends the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and proposes the same for Arab-Americans today:

"Unable to withstand the sane liberal environment of academia and incapable of doing original research and opening their minds to a factual discovery of history, the conservatives have long adopted the technique of exploiting the ignorance of a vastly uninformed public--their own kin. With a handful of new bootlicking non-whites, a breed of humans that has always been available to the imperialists and has always suited their power manipulation, these conservative radicals want to hijack elections by doing verbal and possible physical violence against Muslims--all the while pretending to remain racially unbiased."

This semester, I am doing some independent research in plasma physics, which gives me a chance to continue my plasma education, as well as interact with some of the plasma physicists here at Cornell. By and large, American plasma physicists are a morose, depressed lot... and this is understandable, given that funding for research in fusion energy has been curtailed over the past couple of decades to a mere third of what it was during the oil crisis of the 1970s. Back then, at the height of American research in plasma physics, American plasma physicists made optimistic predictions of demonstrating a commercially viable fusion reactor at the turn of the century. The turn of the century has come and gone, with no such demonstration reactor, and now, with their funding cut, the same plasma physicists make pessimistic predictions of commercially viable fusion power at around 2050.

However, underlying this gloomy outlook there seems to be the assumption that if controlled fusion is not achieved in America, it will not be achieved anywhere. In my opinion, this is not a reasonable assumption. Lack of funding for fusion reseach is an American phenomenon, and American plasma physicists overlook the political reasons for their lack of funding: American policy makers have committed to fossil fuels to meet the future energy needs of this nation. Even now, tens of billions of dollars are being invested in securing American control of the world's fossil fuel reserves, most of which is located in the Middle East. When so much "investment" is being devoted to securing fossil fuel resources, it makes sense that only a couple hundred million dollars are left over to pursue alternative energy sources such as fusion energy.

The situation is different for the rest of the world. In particular, the industrialized nations of Western Europe and East Asia have been standing on the sidelines for the past three years, as America consolidated its control of the lion's share of the world's oil supply. (According to the CIA world factbook, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait alone account for 46% of the world's known oil reserves. The American military is present in all three countries.) For an industrialized nation, energy is just as vital a lifeline as food, and control of Middle Eastern oil gives America much geopolitical leverage against the rest of the industrialized world. Policy makers in the rest of the world understand how precarious their energy futures are, without a viable alternative energy source to American oil.

The largest reserve of oil that is not under the influence of, or directly controlled by the Americans, is in Russia. If you have been following the news in Asia over the past month or two, you will have noticed that the leaders of Japan, China, and South Korea have all recently visited Russian President Putin. Do you really think they spent that time discussing an insignificant problem such as North Korea? Of course not... Koizumi, Hu and Roh all met Putin to negociate purchase of Russian oil, so that the East Asian nations they represented would not be entirely dependent on oil controlled by America.

Considering how tenuous the hold of Western European and East Asian nations on their energy supplies have become, it is not surprising that they are aggressively pursuing the development of fusion power as a viable energy source. France and Japan in particular have committed themselves to spending vastly more on fusion research than America, and it is my opinion that controlled fusion will be achieved by an international team of plasma physicists (ITER) led by these two nations. And considering how radically polarized the control of energy has become in today's world, I think that the pressure will be on for the Europeans and the Japanese plasma physicists to succeed much earlier than 2050.

The pessimistic outlook of the American plasma physicists that I work with, from my point of view, is overly America-centric.

In my archaeology class, we talked about an ancient Mayan city-state called Copan. Located in modern day Honduras, the kingdom of Copan flourished from circa 600AD to 783AD, during which the civilization built stately government compounds, elegant monuments, and even large athletic arenas. The abrupt decline of Copan after the 8th century, to a sparsely populated collection of farming communities, had been a mystery to Meso-American archaeologists ever since the discovery of the ruins of Copan in the early 20th century.

However, after many years of careful study, today's archaeologists believe that the collapse of the Copan civilization was the result of an ecological collapse in the Copan valley, brought about by centuries of slash and burn agriculture and environmental abuse by its human population. The degradation of the land from overexploitation led to agricultural failure, which inevitably resulted in a loss of population and the demise of the state. Today, all that remains of the Copan civilization are crumbling stone structures and stelae recording the achievements of the Copan kings.

The story of Copan reminds us that no matter how advanced or technological our human made civilizations may become, we remain critically dependent on the natural environment for our daily lives. A subtle change in the environment, as a result of nothing more than neglect, can suddenly bring about the decline or collapse of entire states and cultures.

This lesson may not seem relevant to our global industrialized culture today. After all, it seems to us that nothing so localized as crop failure or ecological change could disrupt our lives. However, industrialized civilization changes its environment on a much larger scale than the residents of Copan could ever have imagined, by changing the chemical makeup of the planet's atmosphere, and thereby modifying global climate. In America, this is especially troubling, considering the current administration's commitment to fossil fuels, and its refusal to adapt the Kyoto protocols controlling greenhouse emissions. At the same time, funding for research on alternative energy sources that do not change the environment remains miniscule.

It is my belief that the rise in global temperature due to unmitigated fossil fuel consumption, and the resulting thermal expansion of the oceans, represents a threat as great to modern world as local ecological change and agricultural collapse was to the Copan civilization. For more information, you can read about it here.

It seems that everybody around me is coming down with an illness, which is strange, since I am the most overworked person I know (having stayed up for the past 3 nights or so), and yet I remain as healthy as a horse. Even now, I can hear Lizzie coughing away in the living room as I type, though I think she is starting to recover from whatever it is that's going around.

Lizzie, by the way, is my housemate. I share a three room apartment with Lizzie and Mel, which is not as good as it sounds... the other day we realized that both girls have broader shoulders than I do, for example. In addition to the girls, there are the cats, which Phil turned out to be allergic to, when he came and visited last night. Phil was my roommate at math camp around four years ago, and although he was the most inconvenient roommate, he is perhaps the only roommate that I've had that I like. It seemed somewhat fitting that after four years, he remained a skinny, excitable, somewhat sickly sort of guy, who still could not take care of himself very well. Unlike at math camp, however, he brought along a girlfriend who took good care of him when he fell sick in my room. Although the original plan had been for Phil and his girlfriend to stay in the living room, they ended up taking over my room, safely away from the cats, while I spent the night working on physics homework in the living room.

But I guess I should get used to spending the night in the living room, as Motte seems determined to come visit this winter.

I've always thought that some of the most profound things I'd ever read were written on the walls inside public bathroom stalls. But I'd never thought about what might be written inside the bathroom stalls in the barracks of the American army.

But now, you can read about it here.

No news is good news

Riverbend sums up my attitude towards blogging pretty well, when she writes that "When the load gets too heavy, people turn to something to comfort them. Abroad, under normal circumstances, if you have a burden- you don't have to bear it alone... Here, everyone has their own set of problems- a death in the family, a detainee, a robbery, a kidnapping, an explosion, etc. So you have two choices- take a valium, or start a blog."

Of course you'll have to excuse my analogy, as my situation is not nearly as stressful or isolated as hers. But in any case, the rate at which I blog corresponds roughly to my level of stress, and since I have not been blogging very much lately, I guess I have been doing fine.

So I didn't get to get drunk last night, because I signed up to give blood this morning. And while it is amusing to think of a hospital patient waking up with a buzz after receiving my blood during surgery, I didn't think I could make it through the day both hung over and suffering from blood loss.

I also have a big bruise on my left arm, and I am still bleeding six hours later, as the American Red Cross nurse that jabbed me was clearly in the process of being trained. There was something comical about lying on a table waiting to be stuck in the arm, while one nurse scrutinized my veins and her trainer explained the procedure to her. After she had finished inserting the needle, I wanted to say "good job" to her, but afraid it might be taken as sarcasm, I held my tongue and dutifully started squeezing my little sponge ball.

Yes, I'm still alive. No, I'm not kicking. I've spent the past four days taking preliminary exams, and so have not had much time for blogging. I will update tomorrow after getting some sleep, unless I drink myself into a coma tonight.