The Offline Report

Greetings virtual friends. We made it to this website's final March 2018 episode of the DrawDown bookclub, meeting #4. Should we keep going? I. Review II. Microgrids, page 5 III. Industrial Recycling, page 160 IV. Next Week: Spring Break Should we bother? Meeting #1 began with reading the essay on page 52 of the DrawDown book, an essay also available at this no-paywall link: " Why Bother? "  And really, why bother hosting a club to discuss a textbook that talks about drawing carbon down - it's hopeless, right? Climate change, assault weapons, war, widening inequality, housing shortages, disruption, disaster capitalism, the dark web, corruption, the Panama Papers, ID thieves, cynicism, shouldn't we put down the textbook and party? Dinosaurs roamed the earth for so much longer than we've walked upright. And yet we could wrap this life on earth gig right quick. Foresters and geologists tell us we were due for another ice age beginning around 1960. Bu

March 31, 2018 The Apple engineer who died in Tesla crash had complained about Autopilot:    abc7news.com Tesla says driver's hands were not on wheel at time of crash.    bloomberg.com Irish Pubs Open on Good Friday for 1st Time in 90 Years:     apnews.com March 30, 2018 Despite tensions over a border wall and immigration, AP reports the U.S., Mexico and Columbia are teaming up to fight smugglers at sea.    sfchronicle.com Recently fired director of Veterans Affairs says pro-privatization interests created political storm that led to his ouster.    stripes.com Fifty companies are testing driverless cars. A second editorial ran today urging caution when granting permits beginning April 2 in State must tap breaks:     sfchronicle.com offline Saba Mahmood - UC Berkeley scholar traced intersection of femnism and Islam.    sfchronicle.com March 29, 2018 An editorial urges state motor vehicle authorities be "cautious and judicious" in awarding permits Mond

Continuing from yesterday's post excerpting a podcast interview with " Paper " author Mark Kurlansky. There it was revealed Kurlansky, while researching this book, changed his original view that "paper is dying." Kurlansky calls it a "technological fallacy" that the disrupting tech always replaces entirely the disrupted. "It's my 20th book. I don't think I've ever written a book where I've so changed my thinking as I did on this book." The conversation wanders the continents as literacy surfaces then falls in the Far East, Southeast Asia, Middle East, before paper finds its way to Europe through Italy. Its predecessor, parchment, is made from animal skin. Papyrus is made from the plant and another strain is made from North African grass. Later paper is made from cloth fiber, what is still today called "rag paper." Literacy was expanding, someone finally mechanizes paper making with a conveyor belt machi

New technologies open new gray areas. Etiquette creep: requiring  you to remain all times on "facebook-standby." DEAR ABBY: The world is changing quickly thanks to the digital technology available to us. We all understand the importance of an RSVP, attendance at a celebration and a gift to the host on a mailed-out invitation. What do you think about Facebook invitations to wedding receptions, graduation parties, etc.? Most are sent out to masses of friends on the person's friends list. Do you consider those to be official invitations, requiring an RSVP, attendance and gift? -- WAITING FOR MY SNAIL MAIL DEAR WAITING: Regardless of how the invitation is delivered, the polite response is to accept or refuse and not keep the sender hanging. If you choose to attend, a gift would be in order if the occasion requires one. Nobody should have to live their lives on facebook-standby. It was nice of your friend to throw a party and she owed you an email invite at the leas

Mark Kurlansky has authored several bestselling deep-dive books such as one on salt . Recently, since he thought paper was a heading for obsolescence, it's the topic he chronicled in "Paper: Paging Through History." Kurlansky described the journeys of paper and its predecessors, papyrus and animal-skin parchment, and what he describes as the "technological fallacy" on the Lapham's Quarterly podcast The World in Time . Partial transcript selections: LL: Today I'm talking to Mark Kurlansky about his new book, "Paper". Mark, you've written best-selling books about history of the codfish and the oyster. Why now write about paper and printing? And why do you begin in the prologue talking about what you call the "technological fallacy"? MK: That's because I kind of went through kind of an evolution working on this book. It's my 20th book. I don't think I've ever written a book where I've so changed my thi

Wednesday March 28, 2018 Tesla Plunges Again as Questions Swirl Around Fatal Accident:     bloomberg.com Tuesday March 27, 2018 To verify where an original image came from, you can do a reverse Google image search by clicking the camera logo on Google images and uploading the photo.    university.byu.edu AP reports what didn't happen this week in the not real news roundup. apnews.com Amid a housing shortage "crisis" in cities, New York's "unoccupied city has ballooned by 65,406 apartments since 2014, an astonishing 35% jump in size in the three years since the last survey."    nydailynews.com Monday March 26, 2018 A state assembly bill that pushes to override local zoning to allow eight-story buildings in every California transit town faces resistance from planners who say it's a WIMBY Wall Street in My Backyard bill.    planningreport.com Dear Abby says we have to stay logged into facebook to avoid being impolite.    uexpress.com Appl

Greetings friends, dust yourself off grab a virtual seat and point your browser to meeting #3 of the DrawDown bookclub. Stuck in a hurricane? Waist-deep in debris flow mud? Dodging wayward driverless cars? All the more reason you should read the next two chapters and join this week's discussion! I. Review II. Reading #1: Energy Storage Utilities, page 32 III. Reading #2: Energy Storage (Distributed), page 34 IV. Next Readings How boring does energy storage sound? It just sits there. It's a backup player. It holds stuff. What we found in this week's chapters on "Energy Storage (Utilities)" page 32 and "Energy Storage (Distributed)" page 34 was more elegant, attractive, and mobile than we ever imagined. But since we see some new members this week, let's review where we've been. I. Review In our first two meetings of DrawDown bookclub, we read about diet, the virtues of vegetables and the CO2 emissions of red meat production. It

Judgement, experience and evolving AI. LTE : The rush to driverless cars must pause and be reconsidered carefully. Yes, there are too many car-related deaths, but what we need are more mindful drivers, not mindless machines that cannot assess even busy parking lots, let alone children darting between cars. Courtesy, patience and full attention from human beings can never be replaced with machines. - Helen Sears, Mendocino

(** Denotes a second bliki appendage added 8/17/2018, below .) In blogs we linked to each other's ideas. In facebook people link to other people, not their ideas. A facebook user links to another facebook user by typing their name with a prepended '@' sign. Blogs = ideas. Facebook = people. Facebook discourages linking to a user's post (idea) in these ways: a) facebook frequently changes their interface and policies, and b) no link to a specific facebook post is human-readable. You'll find no embedded dates or human-readable names in a hyperlink pointing to a facebook blog post. Daisychaining On a blog you very quickly can get up to speed on an idea from blog A, post A1 and add onto it in your own blog B, post B1. Blogger A won't notice your citation right away but if they do, they can daisy-chain your idea in with theirs on post A2. Or they can reject your idea and daisy-chain their own ideas post A1 and post A2 into post A3. Daisy-chaining of id

Saturday March 24, 2018 A seasoned tech investor and early facebook investor pulled out, saying there's a legitimate case the company is 'parasitic'.   promarket.org Friday March 23, 2018 American woman sets up in Syria a "slackline" ropes course so war-worn kids could have one day of childhood.    popularmechanics.com What's behind the very peculiar, very sudden jump in this Bay Area county: they rose 27.8% in just one year.    sfchronicle.com Design cities for people, not cars (interactive.)    nytimes.com Paper is biodegradable. Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now nearly 4 times the size of California:     sfchronicle.com Planet safe is a very dangerous place indeed: Court puts onus on California colleges to protect students from 'forseeable violence'     sfchronicle.com Elon Musk appears to have quit facebook.    popularmechanics.com Thursday March 22, 2018 The biggest bank in the Nordic region will no longer let its "susta

A British journalist said this on Twitter the other day (amid news facebook has been eagerly handing our personal data, including private messages, to app developers): "I don't want to think this. But maybe blogs were better than social media. Please help me not think this. " Slow up there. Blogs were better than myspace. Blogs were better than friendster. And most are better than facebook. How funny when we're ashamed to think our own thoughts. Get your thoughts back with a *paper interrupt*. Really popular technologies were designed to be extensions of ourselves. Jotting an idea for a post even in illegible shorthand, onto a paper journal, severs the limb that is facebook. Don't jot the whole idea - making contact with the paper to scratch a hashmark revives awareness. Blogs are more individualized than facebook. Do people fear saying something bad about blogs on their own blog? Nope. Do people fear saying something bad about facebook on facebook? Very

Standing up to tech -- voicing skepticism towards driverless cars -- means taking a risk that you'll be smeared as neurotic, as a nervous nellie, as old and out of touch, as someone who just doesn't understand technology or mechanics. As too girlie to know what you're talking about. Which is why we really need men to speak up. Their voices in this debate sound more authoritative and are less quickly dismissed. Where is the product comparison - are Uber driverless cars more or less responsive than Tesla driverless cars? What tests did they have to pass to get a "license" to drive? What if Uber Automatic Vehicles (AVs) were 10% as responsive as Teslas? What if Uber AVs are 10% as responsive as humans?

Wednesday March 21, 2018 "It wasn't the first time Zuckerberg stretched the truth, and it wouldn't be the last."   sfchronicle.com Tuesday March 20, 2018 A mobile library in Afghanistan is very popular with war-weary kids whose parents did not grow up with libraries.   (sfchronicle/associated press) pressreader.com Monday March 19, 2018 "Dark advertising" is a type of online advertising visible only to the ad's publisher and the intended target group.    wikipedia.org An Uber driverless car with a backup driver killed a pedestrian in Arizona, just two weeks before the California opens public roads to cars with no driver on board.    kqed.org

Compartmentalize, folks, shove any upsetting headlines of floods, melting icebergs or presidential firings to the denial part of your brain, grab a gnosh plate and pull up a chair for the second meeting of the DrawDown bookclub! This is a bookclub that doesn't push members to read too many pages per week - for DrawDown is mainly a textbook. But we want to make like John Muir, who, facing boulders tumbling his way in a frightening Yosemite rockfall, jumped on to surf one to its new resting place. We're jumping on climate change in attempt to surf it, even steer it, with the DrawDown book club. We're going to walk through fires, slide down debris flows, string up solar panels. We're not running away from climate change. We're going to endure it and plant saplings along the way. If you're joining us late, minutes from meeting #1 describe our reactions to Michael Pollan's essay "Why Bother?"  (DrawDown page 52.) Pollan neutralized our doubt

Yale historian and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder says in one lecture that variegated news displaces fake news. Do you hear people say your home city is more "bleached out" compared to five or ten years ago? Maybe it's less "variegated." Or maybe it's variegated but we have to re-discover what regional news is available to us. Here's a transcript from part of his lecture, beginning at 3:00 mark (video below): ...The Russian attack on the US took place primarily through the media. And it gives us a chance to ask what has actually happened to our media in the last decade. In fact even the fact that I’m using the word media, and you’re all nodding your head media media we’re thinking we use the word media … that itself reveals the basic problem. Because what has happened we’ve shifted from being a country where there were lots of regional and local newspapers which provided you know an imperfect but nevertheless a shaded a variegated a specific v

In an age of option overload it's hard to believe there is something you can't find, but it happens: I want a friendlier, more up-beat alternative to the NPR morning radio signal we receive now. NPR is very high quality radio, but if I and others can start the day being entertained ... the economy will tick up and we'll all be better off. I don't want podcasts because ... there's something about starting the day and needing to hear the local weather and needing to tune in together . In the morning, especially, you need to feel present and really alive as you shower and dress for work. Ronn Owens , a San Francisco Bay Area radio host who once was the only local broadcaster to outperform Rush Limbaugh in the same timeslot, is "back on iTunes" in this household. By "back on iTunes" I mean  for the last month we can hear Owens' shows more clearly in our podcast-downloading system because his terrestrial radio show -- now shortened to jus

Thursday March 15 2018 Immutable trends suddenly change direction - Linux Journal lays out a plan to cure its addiction to readers' personal data.    linuxjournal.com "But no law can address the absence of meaning and purpose that many white men appear to feel, which they might be able to gain through social connection to people who never expected to have the economic security and social power that white men once enjoyed."    scientificamerican.com We can get the web back - how to add back RSS auto-discovery to your website: add a link tag inside the head tag of your website.    dri.es "Sites that publish an over abundance of duplicate content without indicating a canonical link may be penalized in search engine rankings."    help.medium.com

(First let's truncate the now overused acronym so common it's starting to sound dull, from "PTSD" to "PTS" meaning "post traumatic stress." PTS without the trailing 'D' is not a permanent-sounding disorder. PTS is temporary, curable, something we can recover from through post-traumatic growth.) Two shooters in the last month were not only alerted to authorities by others - they'd called authorities on themselves months before firing on and killing innocent targets. Four stories worth looking at as a group: 1. The 19-year-old Florida shooter from February had no parents and one younger sibling at the time he committed his crimes. No excuse for what he did, but. He called authorities just after Thanksgiving, saying his mother had just died and he was struggling to control his temper. 2. The 36-year-old shooter at Yountville's Pathway House, a Northern California mental health treatment facility, had lost his only parent the

No blogging today. Maybe a little. No, none. Commit.

Wednesday March 14 2018 Just as we're getting a handle on fake news, video editing software spreads and "deepfake" videos proliferate on social media.    sfchronicle.com A widower's pension in Brazil, roughly $200 per month, which rewarded even people who killed their spouses, was suspended last November ending a financial incentive to kill a spouse.    sfchronicle.com Monday March 12 2018 Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (HBO): "A bitcoin conference in Florida had to stop accepting payment in bitcoin" as its value was too volatile.    youtube.com Sunday March 11 2018 Scripps Howard Awards in journalism offers some intriguing titles but offers no links or details: Kansas City Star won for "Why So Secret, Kansas?" San Francisco Chronicle won for "Leah Millis Portfolio" and Reuters won for "The Body Trade."    shawards.org In The Shadow of Wind Farms:     gatehousenews.com Anil Dash penned for

I'll post price differentials next week. Case One: Two: Three:

Until we come up with a pill to cure extroversion let the afflicted have their facebook. There are those who 1) love facebook and have no desire to quit;  2) feel like they have to be on there but really don't enjoy it; 3) feel like they have to be on there because that's who they are. Find tips below for group two. Unfollow-then-unfriend. It can be scary to just unfriend. Try unfollowing first. Unfriend a batch at a time. Just 10 or so friends, unfriend them. Reach out to your closest friends just after unfriending them. They may not answer, some are so tunnel-visioned they only respond if you message them from within the blue 'f' silo. Grant yourself permission to perform some light stalking. ---Beware the backlash. Quite possible you'll notice a physiological energy surge when interacting with those you no longer see on facebook. "You're really intense" they may say. No it's not you, you're not a person-repellent. You're