Zero to One-Eighty » pragmatism

The ‘One Degree War Plan’

Adrian Cooke — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 05:05:01 +0000

The “Thin Blue Line.” (Image: NASA.)

Paul Gilding on his weblog, introducing a co-authored report released earlier this month on how humanity might approach the problem of not annihilating itself:

We were actually surprised by the outcome of our work, which showed that not only is One Degree and 350ppm possible, it is surprisingly achievable and practical. It certainly requires that we act very soon and that we act with a level of determination and commitment not seen since WWII, but it can be achieved. In recognition of this comparison, we called our paper The One Degree War Plan. It is a plan that shows what humanity can achieve — and we believe will achieve — when it develops a rational response to the climate threat.

The authors are releasing this work “for general public reaction and comment.” They outline their take on the current status of climate change, and predict what the global public response will be between now and 2020. From the paper’s (PDF) introduction:

Given the physical momentum for change already in the climate system and the continuing lack of action on the scale and with the urgency required, it is now too late to prevent major disruption and damage in the decades ahead, as a result of inaction over the past several decades. We believe there will now be an ecological and economic crisis, of a scale that is significant in the history of human life on earth.

But we certainly do not believe it is too late to prevent the collapse of the global economy and civilisation.

One of Gilding’s main arguments is that the modern world remains steadfastly organised for industrial production, “endless” economic growth and increasing consumption, and that for humanity to take genuinely effective steps to avert runaway warming (that would likely destroy the civilisation) will require a coordinated reorganisation of social and economic systems around the world.

Randers and Gilding compare their survival strategy to the allied mobilisation during WWII, and military metaphors (“war plan”) are, well… we’ll see if that works, and if not I suspect they’ll adapt. Also, I don’t think that their invoking of governmental responses to the financial crisis as an example of reactive capacity will go over well in the U.S. But that’s a minor quibble, I suppose.

One degree and 350 are the new symbols, and what they will come to signify — hope, propaganda, doom, deliverance, fate, Armageddon — is yet to written, though whatever the answer I’m starting to think it will happen in my lifetime.

See also: The Great Disruption, Background Briefing, June 14, 2009.

Black carbon earth

The most important person with no job

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:45:46 +0000

George Clooney as Michael Clayton (Image: Warner Bros.)

I love The Fixer. It’s never really clear what they do 364 days a year, but while the camera is rolling they are known for one thing: they solve problems.

Michael Clayton in Michael Clayton (2007)
Madeleine White in Inside Man (2006)
Preston Lennox in Species (1995)
Winston Wolfe in Pulp Fiction (1994)

Who are the others?

Discipline and publish

Adrian Cooke — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:07:34 +0000

Sherri Davidoff on the U.S. security panopticon:

Not that I really want to be under anybody’s microscope. But if anyone’s going to be analyzing my phone calls, payment transactions, emails and IMs, I’d rather it be researchers who will publish their findings, instead of secretive intelligence agencies. If our communications aren’t going to be private, let’s at least use these capabilities for clear, transparent public benefit.

Here’s an e-affirmative action proposal: For every intelligence agent that has access to mass surveillance data, one academic researcher should have access to the same information. And report on it.

At least then we’d know what the heck was going on.

Not ideal, but certainly pragmatic.

Putting things off

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:49:12 +0000

When things are growing outside, Elena’s in charge of the usable plants like fruits and vegetables, and I’m in charge of curb appeal. I love red geraniums, so during the summer I bought some and stuck them in two big pots on either side of the front stoop and they grew and they bloomed and they brought happiness.

Months passed.

So those pots were still there, yesterday afternoon, when I got home from work. I had noticed, the day before, while shovelling appallingly heavy ice from the front path, that each vessel had developed both a magnificent, domed crust of hard ice, and some decisive splits running from top to bottom. They looked, on close inspection, like two large, cracked terracotta eggs.

You know as well as I do that I had been meaning to move them for some time. Mainly it was that I didn’t know where to put them. Every time I thought about moving them I had trouble visualising what to do. I was thinking of two different places, both unsatisfactory. They’re also really heavy.

A week ago, an article called “Motivating Minds:”

A team of researchers led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz, in Germany, reckon they have found a piece of the puzzle. People act in a timely way when given concrete tasks but dawdle when they view them in abstract terms.

I saw those cracks in the pots and immediately decided to deal with them. They were even heavier because of all the ice. But there was only one place to put them now (garage), so the decision was made. When they thaw out they are going to melt all over the concrete, the hard specifics of which seems to be exactly the kind of thing that getting things done requires.

For the time being

If you can’t drive the car you love

Adrian Cooke — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:00:05 +0000

Joel Berry on why it makes financial sense to buy a modest car, own it as soon as possible, and drive it into the ground.

Joel’s 1995 Geo, photographed by Jami Dwyer

Pretty simple insight: a car is a liability, so it’s best to act accordingly.

The most important person with no job

X and accessibility

Adrian Cooke — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:11:36 +0000

In April, 2007 David Andersson summarised the development of, and differences between, HTML5 and XHTML2 and concluded that the web’s future lies with HTML5. I think he’s generally right, though XHTML2 has never been a likely successor to HTML4/XHTML1. The real question is what will become of the X in XHTML given that most authors are doing it wrong?

HTML5 is looking so strong because it’s a pragmatically driven project that incorporates much of what people are already doing—stealing XHTML’s thunder by keeping the standards-based focus while decoupling the web’s primary language from XML. (HTML5 is homologous to XML—it can even be served as XML—but most browsers will never see it that way.) And because it’s well-grounded it’s already being implemented.

Despite the efforts of the W3C to absorb HTML under the XML project, it seems that the two vocabularies will remain on separate paths, running parallel for now. This threatens the W3C’s goal of a semantic (machine-readable) web in its idealist form. WHATWG’s efforts which, like those of the microformats community, are grounded in popular practice, will get us only part-way there, but unlike XHTML2 they promise us something we can use here and now.

So is HTML5 a fait accompli? Taking the contrary view in a recent article, James Edwards still favours the current XHMTL standard, served as XML where possible, over HTML5 for accessibility reasons. He doesn’t mention XHTML5 explicitly (i.e. HTML5 served with an XML MIME-type), but he does say he’d rather stick with XHTML1 than adopt HTML5′s markup spec, which drops support for several accessibility features, including the alt attribute for images and the summary and headers attributes for tables.

Edwards and Gez Lemon, linked above, are right that this is a problem, especially regarding the alt attribute (given the prevalence of images over correctly marked-up complex data tables). This needn’t be a practical quandry: Edwards is taking a stand on principle in sticking with XHTML1 because the spec recognises these accessibility features.

So what should an organisation that is concerned about accessibility do? This is a question I’m trying to answer. Two new sets of guidelines are particularly relevant: WCAG+Samurai released on February 26 (see commentary by Joe Clark and Roger Johansson), and the W3C’s much-revised WCAG 2 Candidate Recommendation released on April 30 (discussed in interviews with Patrick Lauke and Lachlan Hunt).

The two questions that need to be addressed:

Which set of normative rules, if any, should guide the organisation?
Which X/HTML syntax, if any, maximises access for both assistive technologies and mobile user agents?

“If any” is important: I don’t want to presume that a single choice must be adopted in either case. It may be true, for example, that more than one versions of HTML could be used without any significant detriment to accessibility, or that neither set of accessibility guidelines is completely appropriate or usable. (I doubt that, but let’s see.) Nevertheless, being able to specify one in each case is desirable, and so is testing and evaluating the results.

I’m planning to follow up on this post once I’ve read the two documents and done some testing, and I’m interested in hearing what people think.