Terraforming Today
"Terraforming," for readers who avoid the science fiction shelves in their local bookstores and libraries, is the word coined to describe changing another planet's characteristics wholesale, obviously with the goal of making that planet more habitable for humans.* The photo to the right might be considered experimental terraforming of our own planet.

As the photograph's NASA link explains, the image depicts a patch of sea off the Alaskan coast with strikingly different chlorophyll concentrations than the surrounding ocean:

By “seeding” the seawater with trace amounts of iron—the equivalent of one geritol tablet per hundred tons of sea water—scientists stimulated a fairly large phytoplankton bloom. In this patch, the chlorophyll levels are elevated from mid-ocean values of near 0.3 milligrams per cubic meter (blue pixels in this image) to more than 3 milligrams per cubic meter (yellow and red pixels)...

Similar experiments have occurred in the South Pacific; taken together, they largely validate the so-called "iron hypothesis" advanced by Dr. John Martin, which asserted that the "desolate zones" of the open ocean where next to no phytoplankton (microscopic chlorophyll-based life) is found can be explained by these regions' near-complete lack of dissolved iron, rather than by predation or the lack of other trace elements.

How does this relate to terraforming? Because, as Dr. Martin put it, "Give me a half tanker of iron, and I will give you an ice age.” Inevitably, the surge of biomass produced by iron fertilization of a desolate zone will first remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and surface water, and then, upon death, settle into the deep ocean. This net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would contribute to global cooling, just as net additions of carbon dioxide contribute to global warming.

Personally, this seemed like a pretty cool (no pun intended) idea to me: if global warming ever gets too far out of hand, we may have an ace in the hole with Dr. Martin's suggestion. As the linked biography suggests, though, the idea was quickly controversial; it is also clear that Dr. Martin himself was not advocating the immediate start-up of an iron fertilization program. Rather, he just wanted more research done, and the photo above is a tribute to his success on that score.

What are the possible drawbacks? Some of the experiments have shown less than expected carbon flow to the deep sea, so that the method's efficacy is not always high; it would take more iron to work, with whatever drawbacks (beyond sheer cost) there are to iron level "spikes" in the upper ocean. Perhaps more importantly, the deep sea environment could change drastically; removing enough carbon dioxide to reverse historical industrial carbon dioxide additions to the atmosphere might well raise deep sea pH (acidity) levels by 0.1 pH,** and deep sea organisms are very sensitive to such changes. As Richard Monastersky of Science News writes in his 1995 account of the "IRONEX" experiment off the Galapagos, the decay of plant matter would rob the upper ocean of oxygen, and might release significant amounts of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Even good friends of John Martin like Sally Chisholm of MIT are among the leading skeptics of the "geritol tablet" option to fighting global warming.

So now I'm not sure about it, except as an emergency measure. I suppose the controversy may someday be, is the emergency already severe enough to warrant trying mass iron fertilization as a last-ditch way out, and who pays for it, and who approves doing it. It was interesting to read about, though. For me at least.


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* Among the foremost science fiction novels dealing with the possibility are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). Robinson attempts to make the prospect seem legitimately controversial even for sterile Mars, and largely succeeds; as the titles indicate, that controversy is won by the terraformers.
**It's been a while, but I believe this equates to about a 25% increase in acidity; not a gargantuan increase, but not as negligible as "0.1" looks at first glance. As the link indicates, "reverse" means to return atmospheric carbon dioxide to twice the pre-industrial level, and not the attempt to return all the way to that level.

UPDATE, 3/24/06: broken link at "occurred" edited to point to "SOIREE: A Phytoplankton Party in the South Pacific." SOIREE stands for "Southern Ocean Iron Enrichment Experiment."
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:44:00 PM -- |  

 

Renewed shot in original direction: periodic ballistic registration
It turns out that fellow DC area blogger Doug Turnbull ("Beauty of Gray") has been addressing some of the same gun-related issues I have, and originally adopted many of the positions I independently developed over the last week or so. But in a post titled "Final shot, in the other direction," he drops support for ballistic fingerprinting, having been convinced of some practical difficulties:

Gun barrel dimensions are accurate to at best 0.001 inches and most are far less precise. The markings are caused by flaws that are 20-100x smaller.

So, one could easily remove 2-5x as much material as would be required to change the markings without even taking a very good gun out of "as good as new" condition.

This is true, and appears to clinch the case against "ballistic fingerprinting." Indeed, I'll concede that "fingerprinting" has always been too strong a word for the idea; let's rechristen it "ballistic registration." Still, I think Mr. Turnbull gave up a little too soon on the concept. Here's why:

The problem of defaced guns would be reduced, or at least substantively reframed, by requiring periodic (say quarterly or semiannual) re-registration of gun ballistics. (I mentioned this in my first post on the subject.) Missing guns or ones with substantially different ballistics would be red flags for law enforcement, at least providing additional probable cause for further investigation. Thus even cold-blooded killers like the sniper stalking the DC area would be confronted with the certainty of coming to the attention of authorities, regardless of the defacement or disposal of their weapons. Less cold-blooded killers would face an important threshold in carrying out a murder: the provable decision to conceal their deed.

Many (my guess is most) crimes committed with guns will continue to be unpremeditated, “heat of the moment” crimes; the guns will not be defaced, and the proposed system will help.

The ballistics registration program can improve technologically, e.g., with required manufacturer-side measures (i.e., distinctive “dare you to remove this” measures) or with improved methods of overcoming defacement.

For the remaining gun-related crimes committed with successfully defaced and/or discarded guns, we’d simply be no worse off than we are now in terms of solving the crime.

And with this, I'll likely move on to other topics for a while myself.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:04:00 PM -- |  

 

Gun control, back doors, and a powdered wig
Keeping up with UO and Instapundit (Jim Henley and Glenn Reynolds) on gun control and ballistic fingerprinting is like playing a kind of "Go" where the other guy puts down five markers a turn, and you just get one. Some points are valid (Maryland's failure to conduct full criminal background checks for gun buyers since March), some are patently diversionary (gun ownership as international human right; suddenly my favorite hard-nosed realists are for empty gestures?). But one thing at a time. I'll just bring up a couple of posts, one each by Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Henley. Yesterday, Reynolds wrote:

In fact, gun registration has consistently led to confiscation; car registration has not. It's not "paranoid" to fear real dangers.

I don't think that the Second Amendment bars registration. But only an idiot would fail to notice this pattern, and I think that "ballistic fingerprinting" is, in fact, being pushed as a backdoor way of getting gun registration, by people who would favor confiscation if they thought they had the votes.

First, observe those last two sentences. Reynolds concedes that registration is permissible under the Second Amendment, but then considers ballistic fingerprinting a "back door" to -- registration. It's not the registration itself that bothers him, apparently, it's the supporters of the measure, who he divines will confiscate Americans' guns if given half a chance.

Now either registration is permissible under the Second Amendment or it is not. I'm relieved that Mr. Reynolds says it is, because that saves me a major argument with a lawyer about the law and the Constitution. If it is permissible, what bearing do the (presumably impermissible) goals of gun-confiscators have on the question, whether they support registration or not? That's right: none. What some supporters of gun registration may secretly or even not so secretly wish for has no bearing whatsoever on the merits of ballistic fingerprinting and gun registration. I feel like I've wasted time even pointing this out, but the argument seems to come up over and over again.

As for those patterns Reynolds mentions, they appear to be based on observations by his colleague Mr. Kopel.* I'll dutifully plow through them and report back to you, my loyal readers, but the title itself indicates they're based on the experience of merry olde no-Second-Amendment England, and are thus fairly irrelevant to a discussion of gun registration in the United States. So yes, it is a bit paranoid to fear dangers to our constitutional rights based on the experience of a country without our constitution.

It's as if we can't make progress towards a constitutionally permitted state of affairs -- gun ballistic fingerprinting and registration -- unless we all have adopted doubleplusrightthink about the basic right to own a gun. This brings me to some comments ("Spree Graphs") Jim Henley made last week. Scroll past the (well done) sniper news and commentary, and you reach the following gun-control section of the post, where Henley takes issue with "Talking Dog"s claim (and Reynolds' later claim) that the Second Amendment permits registration:

First, in the absence of a formal acknowledgement that the Second Amendment enshrines an individual right, the NRA is only sensible in opposing anything that smacks of universal registration
...
Moreover, the purpose of the arms-bearing right is to enable the people to defend themselves against an overweening government. (viz Federalist 46.) Any registration scheme the government runs seems to fall foul of a conflict of interest. (This kind of talk upsets a lot of liberals, but it says what it says.)

First, the Federalist Papers are interesting historical documents, but they are to the Constitution as our real estate agent's praise of our house was to the mortgage agreement we signed to buy it: it's interesting, it helps explain our state of mind ... but it's nowhere near as important as the contract itself.

Be that as it may. I'm no constitutional scholar, so I thought I'd better have a look, lest James Madison had prescient comments on ballistic fingerprinting 214 years ago. Follow the link yourself: you'll find that the bulk of the article is about how the States need not fear the federal entity, because citizens will have deeper loyalties to the local than to the federal government. Finally comes the apparent Ur-source for gun ownership rights. Madison discusses the resistance federal usurpers would face from the sturdy armed citizens of the States:

To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

Now the fairest way to read this is as an elaborate backgrounder for the full Second Amendment, "well regulated militia" and all:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed

What it is not is some kind of brief against regulating guns; the passage above takes pains to ground the hypothetical resistance in the institutions of the given State and its militia; this in turn implies -- one might argue it even requires -- that guns whose true purpose is the defense of the State should be inventoried by that State and prevented from becoming the tools of criminal or hostile misuse against that State or its citizens.

For what it's worth, I wouldn't mind a national ballistic fingerprinting program statute that had an article 2 stating "This statute does not imply the right to confiscate guns," or words to that effect. If that's formal enough acknowledgment for Jim and Glenn, great. If not ... they'll need to spell out what kind of formal acknowledgment they have in mind.
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* Kopel, Olson 1999: "All the way down the slippery slope: gun prohibition in England and some lessons for civil liberties in America" posted by Thomas Nephew at 4:05:00 AM -- |  

 
Ansprache, gehalten bei der Einweihung des Friedhofs zu Gettysburg
A while back I brought up the topic of translation, mentioning the Gettysburg Address. The Library of Congress' Roy P. Basler organized a number of translations of the famous speech in 1972:

The thought occurred: Why not extend an invitation, or challenge, to one or more authors in each of the major languages of the world and collect the results in a booklet? More than a curiosity, such a booklet might serve foreign visitors to the several Lincoln shrines with an opportunity to come to grips with Lincoln's expression of the essence of American democracy rendered beautifully into their mother tongues. To multilinguists, it might afford an insight into the complexity of human communication. And to students of history or of literature, it might give pause to reflect.

Thus, we can read the Gettysburg Address in German, in Arabic, and many other languages from Portuguese to Hebrew to Urdu.

I tried to retranslate the Gettysburg Address in German (comments and corrections appreciated). The Library of Congress translation, by Erich Heller, seemed inadequate to me. I opted to translate fairly literally, with fewer additional words smuggled in, and fewer of the (to my mind) pedestrian-sounding rewrites that Heller used, e.g."thus far" becoming "to this point", the triplet "we cannot hallow ...-- consecrate -- ... dedicate" is unaccountably shortened to "consecrate or hallow," the "last full measure of devotion" becoming almost unrecognizable. I got the feeling Heller didn't see the speech as particularly worth the effort of a careful translation.

My earlier post about translation was in response to one by Mr. Aziz Poonawalla ("translate this"), in which he wrote that the Qur'an simply couldn't be accurately translated to English. As I wrote, the poetry and rhythms of major works like the Gettysburg Address may be all but impossible to reproduce. In some sense, this is Poonawalla's point as well: for such works, significant meaning is tied up in the poetry itself. In English, the Gettysburg Address has -- for me at least -- the feeling of something out of a latter day Bible, the words of a prophet or a Job. Some of this is in the King James phrasings -- "we are met," "four score and seven" -- some is in the "Ecclesiastan" imagery of birth and death that echoes through the speech, and some is just in using those words "last full measure of devotion," which never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

I doubt my edits brought the German much closer to those feelings, but they at least shortened the result to nearer Lincoln's own economy of words. The trick, I think, if there is one, is to care about what you're translating, and keep going back to it. Reconsidering, I'll grant that "perfect" translations aren't possible -- not that my failures prove it -- but they are worth the attempt.

If you speak a language besides English, I hope that you'll have a look at the corresponding Gettysburg Address translation, and leave your comments here for the rest of us. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:14:00 AM -- |  

 

Bali, October 12, 2002
I posted an abbreviated version of the following to the Australian Embassy here in Washington, D.C.:

My condolences to the surviving victims of the Bali atrocity, to all victims' families, and to all Australians, Indonesians, and others affected by the attack.

I'm shocked, saddened, and deeply angered by what happened. I support any help the United States can provide to find and punish the perpetrators and their accomplices. Australians have been steadfast friends to Americans and the United States; I know we should and will be the same for you, in any way that is asked for.

I see that October 20 will be a national day of mourning in Australia; I'll be thinking of you. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:06:00 AM -- |