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If you hold my blog up to your ear, you can hear a great fat snowstorm pacing up and down outside my house. Things are quiet right now, but she’s going to get mad again real soon, and then there’ll be nothing to do but shovel, shovel, shovel. So on this Groundhog Day I’m thinking about warmer places. Maybe our favorite prognosticating marmot is too.

In honor of this special occasion, I encourage you to indulge in the grand groundhoggian tradition of pulling down the Christmas decorations that your neighbors still have in their yard. If a surfeit of snow prevents this, you can amuse yourself with this old story by Paracelsus from our first year of operation: At the Sign of the Scarf and Bolt. It was inspired by the bar and restaurant where the Star Chamber first convened. Also from the same week, don’t miss the Treatise on the Natural Limits of Self Publishing in a Web-based Medium. It’s worth slogging through just to read the Errata page.

The standard joke about clean power from nuclear fusion is that it’s about 30 years away and it always will be. Given this state of affairs, I had pretty much given up on the fusion story happening this century. This made the gloomy prognostication about our ravenous energy future and its attendant carbon burden all the more depressing. Then Matt turned me on to this Long Now talk on fusion research at Lawrence Livermore. In it, Ed Moses of the National Ignition Facility talks about the remarkable progress being made toward a net positive fusion burn: Clean Fusion Power This Decade. Give it a listen. I found it very encouraging.

One decade… Maybe at last we’ve gone from fusion energy being forever 30 years away to the exciting prospect that fusion energy is instead forever 10 years away. Still, that’s progress!

As we emerge from our post-holiday hangovers, here’s a nice green gift idea to keep in mind: the Anti-Gift Certificate. For that special someone who could use a little more less.

I first saw this on BlogLESS. The artist who designed it is Christopher Gideon, and he’s happy to let you download a copy for free. It’s a nifty turnabout: a positive gift of a negative thing.

It’s always surprising to me how much it can shift your thinking when you flip around a mental model. Here’s an example of what I mean: we mentally assign an active power to vacuums. They suck things towards them. But that’s not what’s happening. Physically what vacuums are really doing is nothing. They’re not pushing back while something over there (say, atmospheric pressure) pushes harder. But it’s practically impossible to avoid the feeling that vacuums pull you in the way a magnet does.

There are all kinds of everyday concepts that seem intuitive but are actually strangely non-physical. Osmosis sucks water into a cell. Cities suck people from the countryside. These visualizations can be helpful as long as you keep in mind what’s really going on.

Once you get the hang of it, you can do these mental gymnastics on purpose. For instance, suppose I’m trying to keep myself from eating some greasy tasty treat (mmm… doughnuts). If I dwell on not being able to eat it, I’ll suffer and whine. But instead of not eating anything, I can think of myself as eating nothing. That is, I’m making a positive choice to eat the thing called nothing. It’s a small hack, but it helps.

One of my favorite mental flipflops comes from the noted conservationist Amory Lovins. In his talk Winning the Oil Endgame, he observes that whenever we save a barrel of oil, we’re actually creating what he calls a “nega-barrel”. By improving the efficiency of cars alone, we’d uncover a huge reservoir of nega-barrels – the Detroit Formation. In fact, we’re the freakin’ Saudi Arabia of nega-barrels! As he says, “we can use less oil faster than they can conveniently sell less oil.” That’s putting a good spin on it, eh?

It’s a small hack, but it really does help.

In honor of Wikipedia’s tenth birthday, Clay Shirky has written a nice note for the Guardian about that now venerable internet institution: Wikipedia – an unplanned miracle.

Wikipedia is so very good and its appearance and continued existence is so surprising that I sometimes think that, like a self-creating god, it plucked itself out of nonexistence.

Shirky’s article has a little historical background and some perspective on what it all means. I like this quote:

Wikipedia is best understood not as a product with an organisation behind it, but as an activity that happens to leave an encyclopedia in its wake.

That’s a nice systems-oriented way of thinking. Many things are best viewed this way. Or perhaps I should instead say, most of the best and most durable things work this way.

And I’d like to point out that this year will bring in the tenth anniversary of the first mention of Wikipedia on these pages. That’s right, this blog has been on the scene for more than ten years, scooping the big stories for you. Keep on reading and I’ll tell you what’s going to be big ten years from now…

Here’s another TED talk, this time from Australia, on the topic of consumption.

The speaker, Rachel Botsman, talks about a new form of consumption that might help us deal with the Ponzi scheme of an “economy built on hyper-consumption.” It’s an odd thing that growth is always considered good in the business pages, and yet we also know that growth must eventually hit hard limits and stop. The fish can’t get bigger than the fish tank. Both of these things are true, and yet fitting them into a single historical trajectory is a painful thought exercise. What does a steady state economy look like? How would we get there? How do we transition from, in the words of Kenneth Boulding, a cowboy economy to a spaceman economy?

Plenty of people have been wrong in the past about exactly where we would hit the limits of growth. Have we hit peak oil or not? It’s hard to tell. But the fact that we may not have hit peak oil yet doesn’t mean that peak oil is a meaningless concept. Limits exist. The fish can’t get bigger than the fish tank, full stop. So it’s worth thinking about how to limit consumption while still having a pleasant life.

Rachel Botsman calls this collaborative consumption, which I think is a dandy phrase, but it’s really the thing we used to call “sharing.” And admittedly, in comparison to the big problems we face these days, this is pretty small potatoes. But it’s a step in the right direction, and crucially, I noticed that I was doing some of these things. I’m using Freecycle and eBay to at least stretch the economic value of things I might otherwise have thrown out. It feels good, and having dipped my toes in the water, I hope to do more.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Language scholar Alan Kennedy has written here many times, and I’m honored to host his Color/Language Project on this site. Alan is fascinated with the ways color crops up in languages, and during his investigations of the subject, he learned that there really isn’t any complete collection of color idioms in all languages. So he decided to make one.

I helped out with the technical part because I was interested in trying out the forms interface for Google Spreadsheets. And I’m happy to say it works extremely well. Anybody can fill out the form and add a new idiom. For a long time there wasn’t much activity on the site, but then we started getting lots of new contributions all at once. Why? A little poking around revealed that Marc Abrahams was kind enough to add a link on the Improbable Research Blog. Improbable Research is, by the way, the same outfit that brings us the Ig Nobel prizes. So we are in august company.

Take a look back at Alan’s original article on colors and language, then browse the ever growing Idiom List (more than 300 so far!).

And if you can, please add a new phrase or forward this to someone who can add something colorful in a language we don’t have yet. I know some Telugu speakers out there with very colorful imaginations…

This is a cartoon that my daughter did last year when she was six.

Question: “And what do you want for Christmas, little girl?”

Merry Christmas!

Hal Varian, the chief economist at Google, likes to say that “the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.” I’ve seen this quote in a few different places, and he always follows up by saying something like “I’m not kidding.” And he’s not. I’m inclined to believe him. The stat stars are aligning: reams of valuable data, expansive visualization tools, and genuinely meaningful results.

In fact, I already know of at least one statistician rock star: Hans Rosling. He’s been working for years in health and economic development in poor countries. Trained as both a doctor and a statistician, he now runs something called the Gapminder Foundation in Sweden. In recent years, he has come to fame because of his dynamic charts and his dynamic speaking style at various TED talks. This is a man who is vibrating with energy and enthusiasm for his message. Take a look. Here’s a video that was forwarded to me (thanks Mom!).

Two happy facts: today is my birthday, and this evening the sun set at 4:13 PM. Depending on your latitude, 4:13 may sound pretty dismal, but consider this. Last week the sun was setting at 4:12 PM. I call that progress.

For years I’ve been talking about the happy fact that in December the earliest sunset happens well in advance of the solstice. This little known and little noticed boon helps me get through the dark days of December, because I know that, starting on December 9th, the afternoons are going to be getting a little longer. This year I decided to spend a little more time explaining why this should be.

How Long is the Day? Apparent Solar Time

Even if you have no clock, you can still tell when it’s noon. Noon is defined as the instant at which a straight stick leaves the shortest shadow. At that moment, the sun is as high in the sky as it’s going to get. This is the principle of the sundial, and it’s how the ancients told time. But suppose you now have a stopwatch, and you can accurately measure how much time passes between two noons. You’ll notice something strange about your measurements: the length of the day varies up to half a minute.

This is the length of the day, as measured from noon to noon.

It might not seem like a big deal, and in fact nobody cared at all until the first accurate clocks were invented starting in the 1600s. But this discrepency ends up being a big inconvenience for the sorts of people who make schedules. Think about it this way: if a day is 24 hours long, then what we’re saying is that the length of an hour depends on what day of the year it is.

What to do? To smooth things over, astronomers created a mean solar day that is the average length of all the days in one year. So the time from noon to noon is declared by fiat to be 24 standard unvarying hours. But now you have a different problem. Instead of the hour misbehaving because of the sun, we now have the sun misbehaving because of the hour. That is, we modern folks simply decree that it is noon even when the sun isn’t close to being overhead. These variations of the day’s length pile up at different times of the year, leading the sun to be out of step with the clock by as much as 16 minutes.

It’s a little ironic that the sun gave us our very definition of time, and then we turn around and call it out for its flaws in timing. But there you go.

Fudge Factor: The Equation of Time

The degree to which the sun is out of step with the clock is called the Equation of Time. That’s a grand name, but this equation solved a problem that people had in the days before you could call up official time on your phone or a website. To set your clock accurately, you just figure out when it’s noon (using a sundial or a sextant), and then add or subtract the Equation of Time factor.

Here’s what the Equation of Time looks like. I’m not going to bother explaining why it wiggles around other than to say that it results from two factors: the elliptical nature of the earth’s orbit and the tilt of the earth on its axis.

The Earliest Sunset

Now we are ready to tackle the problem of the earliest sunset. We’ve done the hard part. In the ancient sundial world, there were always as many hours between sunrise and noon as there were hours between noon and sunset. That’s the old definition of noon: it splits the day into equal parts forenoon and afternoon.

Here’s what the length of the day might look like in the mid-northern latitudes as we pass through the winter solstice. Each blue line represents the length of a single day. Calendar days are going from the top to the bottom. The sun rises on the left, passes through noon in the middle, and sets on the right.

The red circles show the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise happening as expected on the shortest day, the winter solstice. The symmetry of the diagram is very satisfying.

But we don’t live in the ancient world. The modern world has the sun shifted away from overhead when our clocks tell us it’s noon. That’s the Equation of Time. That means that extra minutes are being added to the morning and removed from the afternoon, or vice versa. So imagine we’re taking these days, which are like stacked plates in this visualization, and skewing them as shown by the leaning black line. Now the day length is shown in light blue (the dark blue lines from the previous plot are left in place for comparison).

Behold! The earliest sunset now arrives a few days in advance of the solstice. Similarly, the latest sunrise has been shifted to a few days later than the solstice. As for the timing of the solstice itself, no amount of shifting noon this way or that will change the length of the day, so we experience solstice on the same day as the Romans and the Babylonians.

There’s something mesmerizing about watching animated text and graphics that exactly match what’s being said. It’s not exactly a new medium, since hand-drawn animation has been around for ages. But editing tools have made the process a lot easier, and the results are striking.

Here are two examples I came across recently. From Steve Crandall’s blog, I found this rendition of Jonathan Coulton‘s song “Shop Vac”. See how many corporate logos you can spot being adapted for this video.

Shop Vac from Jarrett Heather on Vimeo.

The other example that I saw recently is very different in composition. The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in the UK has been recording talks and then adding hand-drawn animations to provide visual stimulus. Definitely better than PowerPoint! Here’s a riveting talk on a topic you might not expect to be riveting: Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms.