Frankenfolk

2009-07-03T23:39:00.002-04:00

Carnivorous Machines

Golem Update

2009-05-11T12:33:00.005-04:00

From today's New York Times

Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem

Milan Jaros for The New York Times

In signs of the current vogue for the Golem, a souvenir shop in Prague sells statuettes.

Published: May 10, 2009

By Dan Bilefsky

PRAGUE — They say the Golem, a Jewish giant with glowing eyes and supernatural powers, is lurking once again in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue here.

Milan Jaros for The New York Times

Small stones left by visitors at the tombstone of its supposed maker, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel.

The Golem, according to Czech legend, was fashioned from clay and brought to life by a rabbi to protect Prague’s 16th-century ghetto from persecution, and is said to be called forth in times of crisis. True to form, he is once again experiencing a revival and, in this commercial age, has spawned a one-monster industry.

There are Golem hotels; Golem door-making companies; Golem clay figurines (made in China); a recent musical starring a dancing Golem; and a Czech strongman called the Golem who bends iron bars with his teeth. The Golem has also infiltrated Czech cuisine: the menu at the non-kosher restaurant called the Golem features a “rabbi’s pocket of beef tenderloin” and a $7 “crisis special” of roast pork and potatoes that would surely have rattled the venerable Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Golem’s supposed maker.

Even the first lady, Michelle Obama, paid her respects, when she visited Rabbi Loew’s grave last month and, following Jewish tradition, placed a prayer on a piece of paper and put it near his tombstone.

Eva Bergerova, a theater director who is staging a play about the Golem, said it was no coincidence that this Central European story was ubiquitous at a time of swine flu and economic distress. “The Golem starts wandering the streets during times of crises, when people are worried,” Ms. Bergerova said. “He is a projection of society’s neuroses, a symbol of our fears and concerns. He is the ultimate crisis monster.”

Rabbi Manis Barash, who oversees an institute here devoted to Rabbi Loew’s work, said that “because of the financial crisis, people were increasingly turning to spirituality for meaning.”

Others, like Jakub Roth, a derivatives trader and a leader of the Jewish community, noted that the Golem had contemporary relevance because he protected sacred values from imminent dangers. “In the past this was anti-Semitism,” Mr. Roth said. “Today it is global recession, Islamic fundamentalism and Russian aggression.”

The surge in popularity of the Golem also anticipates the 400th anniversary in September of Rabbi Loew’s death in 1609, at nearly 100. A Jewish mystic and philosopher who a leading scholar of the Talmud and kabbalah and wrote at least 22 books, he was known widely as the Maharal, a great sage.

Few here dispute that the Golem, who is often depicted as either a menacing brown blob or an artificial humanoid, has become a lucrative global brand. But it is also a profound irritation to Prague’s Jewish leaders that Rabbi Loew’s legacy has been hijacked by a powerful dunce whom the Talmud characterizes as a “fool.”

“I am frustrated by the legend of the Golem in the same way I am frustrated that people buy Kafka souvenirs on every street in Prague but don’t bother to read his books,” Rabbi Karel Sidon, the chief rabbi of the Czech Republic, lamented. Alluding to the recent rise of neo-Nazis in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, however, he hastened to add, “We like the Golem because he protected the Jews.”

Rabbi Barash emphasized that in the Talmud, the Golem was considered a dumb klutz because he was literal-minded, could not speak and had no “sechel,” or intellect. “If in school,” he said, “you didn’t use your brains, the teacher would say, ‘Stop behaving like a golem.’ ”

According to one version of Prague’s Golem legend, the city’s Jews, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, were being attacked, falsely accused of using the blood of Christians to perform their rituals. To protect the community, Rabbi Loew built the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River.

He used his knowledge of kabbalah to make it come alive, inscribing the Hebrew word emet, or truth, on the creature’s forehead. The Golem, whom he called Josef and who was known as Yossele, patrolled the ghetto; it is said he could make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead.

Eventually, the Golem is said to have gone on a murderous rampage — out of unrequited love, some explain. Fearing that he could fall into the wrong hands, Rabbi Loew smeared clay on the Golem’s forehead, turning emet into met, the Hebrew word for death, and put him to rest in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue.

Though a quintessentially Jewish tale, the saga of the Golem, popularized here in a 1950s fairy tale film, has long been regarded as a Czech legend. Benjamin Kuras, a Czech playwright and the author of the book “As Golems Go,” said the fighting figure of the Golem had appeal in a nation traumatized by centuries of occupation and invasion.

“After living through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazism and decades of communism, the Czechs are drawn to a character with supernatural powers that will help liberate them from oppression,” Mr. Kuras said. “Many here don’t even realize he is a Jewish monster.”

Such is the pull of the Golem that Rabbi Sidon said he received dozens of requests each year for visits to the Golem’s attic lair — requests he politely declined. During World War II, it was rumored that Nazi soldiers broke into the synagogue, and Rabbi Loew’s Golem ripped them apart, limb by limb.

“We say the Golem is in the attic, up there,” Rabbi Sidon said. “But I have never gone there. I say that if the Golem was put there 400 years ago, then today he is dirt and dust and can’t do anything to disturb anyone.”

Asked if the Golem was fact or fiction, Rabbi Sidon shrugged and sighed. “It’s possible he is real,” the rabbi said. “I just don’t know.” But he noted that there had been several cases of sage rabbis who had supposedly created golems.

Rabbi Sidon recalled that in the late 1990s, an elderly Jewish woman asked him where the Golem was. “I told her he was in the attic,” Rabbi Sidon said. “ ‘Not that one, the real one,’ ” he said the woman replied, insisting that she had been at the synagogue a year earlier and had met Mr. Golem, a lanky figure with ruddy cheeks.

Recognizing the description, the rabbi said, he confronted the synagogue’s shamash, or attendant, a man called Josef, who shares the Golem’s first name. Josef eventually confessed that he had been telling visitors he was the Golem’s great-grandson.

Excerpts from THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE - by Guy Debord

2009-05-04T15:23:00.008-04:00

The Society of the Spectacle, like most post-modern Continental philosophy, is notoriously and intentionally difficult to summarize. On the one hand, it explicitly attempts, like The Communist Manifesto, to bring the lessons of abstruse philosophy to the masses in order to bring about actual revolution; on the other, it abounds in satirical references and in-jokes that render the text nearly incomprehensible to anyone but an academic intellectual versed in Hegel, Freud, the history of Marxism, and the Dada art movement.

The predominant theme that makes the work relevant for this course, however, is the characterization of the circulation of images through mass media as an historical development that fundamentally changes humans and society--as Marx says they were changed by industrial production and the rise of capitalism. On this theory, capitalism "alienated" the workers' labor, wrecking the real meaning of life and dividing society into two opposed classes.
But (like many others) Debord holds that capitalism further developed into a system ultimately more concerned with consumption than production: To maintain production, and thus the whole economic system, consumption requires constant stimulation and larger markets, created by mass media's stimulation of desire and by constantly expanding global markets (through a kind of cultural colonialism, spreading the capitalist world's desire for goods around the world).
In Marx's time, the evidence of the evils of capitalism was in the privation and misery of the lives of the proletariat; in Debord's (and our own) it is the "false consciousness" of the entirely imaginary, entirely inauthentic life imposed by the culture of consumption--another, even more complete form of alienation than the alienation of labor. Debord--and like-minded thinkers referred to as "Situationists" or "the Situationist International"--urge a revolutionary position against "the Society of the Spectacle" that fosters this illusion, but do not appear to propose specific changes in the system of production and consumption. Instead, they offer criticism of contemporary society very largely through artworks of one kind or another: Situationism began with artists in the 1950s in France, and stands in the background of many developments in art since then, including varieties of British and Continental punk music and fashion, conceptual and political art in the US, and the incorporation of mass art styles and references into the accredited art of galleries and museums. The Society of the Spectacle has influenced bands, visual artists, video games, YouTube videos, and perhaps most famously the film The Matrix, which derived its central idea of enslavement to an illusory alternate reality from Debord.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord imitated some of the philosophers he most admired (including Marx in the Communist Manifesto) by writing a series of provocative assertions rather than a connected argument, and by assuming a kind of universal moral stance rather than producing historical or other empirical evidence. This method is probably responsible for the impact the text has had, as well as the skepticism with which it has been treated; it is what makes the work seem so thoroughly a product of the French intellectual scene, which makes it so attractive to some and merely pretentious to others.
Conveniently, each section is short enough to treat as a kernel for contemplation of the production and consumption of images in contemporary life. Here is a selection from the early parts of the book:

1
In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

Q: What does “directly lived” mean?
Where does this idea come from that people used to live in a reality that no longer is experienced?

2
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. . . .

Q: There is a separate life apart from the actual life we live?

4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

Q: Does that mean that we don’t recognize how the whole system of images is affecting us because we treat is as just a bunch of images?

5
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective.

Q: Does that mean it’s not entertainment but ideology? That the totality of images created by mass media are a kind of contemporary holy scripture?

 6
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. . . .

Q: Does this mean that advertising is more than just advertising?--that it actually sustains the whole system of production as well as consumption? (That is, it maintains in the workforce both the need, the ability, and the willingness to work under existing conditions.)

 12
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” . . .

 15
As indispensable embellishment of currently produced objects, as general articulation of the system’s rationales, and as advanced economic sector that directly creates an ever-increasing mass of image-objects, the spectacle is the leading production of present-day society.

Q: To the extent that the spectacle creates and sustains the need for consumption, everything else feeds into, is part of, and is subordinate to the spectacle?
Therefore new forms of entertainment, new styles, attempts at subversion, can all be co-opted because they feed into the spectacle?

   20
. . . The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond” . . .

27
. . . what is referred to as a “liberation from work,” namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation of work itself nor a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what that work has produced.

Q: What is “leisure”? Is it different from “free time”? If all activities outside of work support the same system as work does, is there any real “free time"?

 28
The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” . . .

Q: Do new technologies and consumer products (cars, TV, cellphones, laptops, iPods) tend to encourage isolation? Is the tendency of new technologies to divide and conquer, while maintaining the appearance that everyone is “linked in”? Is the “freedom to consume” keeping people from a better life of more social connection and less use of resources by overemphasizing individual control in order to stimulate consumption?

34
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images. 

Q: Are images the real “money” of our time?

 40
. . . Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy. . . .

Q: As the general standard of living has risen, has it resulted in greater self-determination or autonomy?

44
The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. . . .

Q: Are we addicted to a system of consumption that depends on constantly keeping us in a state of (imagined) privation?

 45
Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.

Q: If automation revolutionized industrial production, providing the impetus for a new service economy, what happens when automation spreads to service industries? At what point do human workers become obsolete?

 47
. . . The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized illusion, and the spectacle is its general expression.

Situationist International - Part 1 of 3

2009-05-04T15:22:00.003-04:00

Situationist International - Part 2 of 3

2009-05-04T15:22:00.001-04:00

Situationist International - Part 3 of 3

2009-05-04T15:21:00.003-04:00

Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? excerpt 1

2009-05-04T15:21:00.001-04:00

Debord was interested in "detournement"--the appropriation of existing cultural documents, using them in collage or montage forms ironically to enrich irony. The practice seems to derive partly from Duchamp's alteration of the Mona Lisa.

Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? excerpt 2

2009-05-04T15:18:00.001-04:00

society of the spectacle

2009-05-04T15:17:00.001-04:00

One of many image-collages on YouTube that seem to critique YouTube as the ultimate incarnation of the Society of the Spectacle.

Real Robots

2009-04-20T12:27:00.003-04:00

Genghis

Rodney Brooks’ homepage at MIT

Cog is not quite sure what to think of you

Naveed Ahmad, “The Humanoid Robot Cog”

Cog has its own homepage

Cog on YouTube

Cog tries out for a garage band

Interesting Robotics/AI Information on the Web – a pretty exhaustive site

ASIMO wants to say hi

Asimo on YouTube running

More Asimo – Cool if you speak Japanese

Asimo climbs stairs, kind of

AIBO the Robot Dog

Kismet’s homepage, including plenty of video of Kismet displaying facial expressions

Say Hello to QRIO! (the “next generation” after ASIMO—both now discontinued

Robonova Ballet

Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley at Wikipedia

Charting the Uncanny Valley: Part 1 of 7

Karl F. McDorman presents a lecture on the Uncanny Valley – Part 1 of 7

Robots, Automata, Androids in 20th-century popular art

2009-04-20T12:26:00.005-04:00

The first robot? A scene from the original production of Karel Capek’s R.U.R.

R.U.R.

The Golem

Mickey Mouse: Mickey’s Mechanical Man

The Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz

Elektro and his robot dog Sparko

Pinocchio’s now a boy

Who wants to turn back into a toy . . .

-Rufus Wainwright

Talos, the living bronze statue of Greek mythology,
as imagined by Ray Harryhausen in his 1953 film,
Jason and the Argonauts

Forbidden Planet: Robby the Robot with his creator Morbius

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Gort, the robot from outer space,
sent to enforce worldwide peace with the threat of
total annihilation

Audio-animatronic Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland

Star Wars: C3PO and R2-D2

Blade Runner: Rachael, a replicant

RoboCop

RoboCop: The ED-209

The Terminator: A human face

The Terminator: The machine beneath the skin

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Data, a fully functional android with a positronic brain

Before Artificial Intelligence

2009-04-20T12:24:00.003-04:00

The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.
It is the living image of perpetual movement.

-Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Man a Machine

Vaucanson

Vaucanson’s duck

Vaucanson and his remarkable automata

Video of a contemporary replica of Vaucanson’s duck
(at the Museé des Automates de Grenoble)

When first presented to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 1928, the automaton was of unknown origin. Once restored to working order, the automaton itself provided the answer when it penned the words "written by the automaton of Maillardet". – Wikipedia

The Jaquet-Droz Automata - a very detailed webpage

Automotamania – For all Your Automaton-Restoration Needs
Maintains great images and videos

The Turk – not an automaton but a hoax: a man hidden inside played chess

The Turk at Wikipedia

Charles Babbage, the father of computing, at Wikipedia

Babbage’s Difference Engine was not constructed during his lifetime
but replicas were later made.
It's also the subject of a collaborative novel by
the cyberpunk pioneers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

Ada Lovelace, “the first programmer”

Alan Turing, who proposed the “Turing test”
for artificial intelligence, and the man behind the Enigma machine,
which is said to have won World War II.

The Making of Metropolis

2009-04-12T16:16:00.003-04:00

The Making of Metropolis

The documentary I mentioned here has been pulled from YouTube. But you can still find it on the Kino Video edition of Metropolis available in the college library.

Metropolis - Fritz Lang, 1927

2009-04-12T16:12:00.001-04:00

"The entire film is dominated by technology, with Lang using a mixture of both 1920s and futuristic devices. Much of the technology portrayed in the film is unexplained and appears bizarre—such as the enormous "M-Machine" and the "Heart Machine." The Heart Machine is implied to be the electrical power station of the city and appears to be a massive electric generator, but the purpose of the M-Machine or the other vast machinery around it is never revealed. The dial machine at which Freder works also has no explanation in the film, although the novel reveals that that it runs the massive system of Paternoster-lifts in the New Tower of Babel. Technology is also visible in Fredersen's office: he has a television-like device which allows him to contact the foreman in the factories, and built into his desk is an electronic console which allows him to remotely open doors. The office features two unfamiliar clocks: a 24-hour clock and a ten-hour clock, ten hours being the length of the workers' shifts. In the city itself, we see a mixture of futuristic monorails and airships combined with 1920s-style cars and aircraft. . . .
"The ultimate expression of technology in the entire film is the female robot built by Rotwang, referred to as the Maschinenmensch ("Machine Human" or "Machine Man"). In the original German version Rotwang's creation is a reconstruction of his dead lover, a woman called Hel (a reference to the Norse goddess Hel). Both Rotwang and Joh Fredersen were in love with her. She chose Fredersen and became Freder's mother, though she died in childbirth. Rotwang, insanely jealous and angry about her death, creates the Maschinenmensch Hel. In other versions, The Machine Man is merely a fully functioning automaton designed to replace human workers, whilst its appearance can be synthesised to resemble any human being - little or no connection is made between Hel and the robot, or Rotwang's motives in creating it. . . .

"Despite the film's later reputation, some contemporary critics panned it. New York Times critic Mourdant Hall called it a "technical marvel with feet of clay." The Times went on the next month to publish a lengthy review by H. G. Wells who accused it of "foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general." He faulted Metropolis for its premise that automation created drudgery rather than relieving it, wondered who was buying the machines' output if not the workers, and found parts of the story derivative of Shelley's Frankenstein, Karel Čapek's robot stories, and his own The Sleeper Awakes.
Joseph Goebbels was impressed however and clearly took the films message to heart. In a speech of 1928 he noted: 'The political bourgeoisie is about to leave the stage of history. In its place advance the oppressed producers of the head and hand, the forces of Labour, to begin their historical mission.’
"Fritz Lang himself expressed dissatisfaction with the film. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich (available in Who The Devil Made It...), he expressed his reservations.
'The main thesis was Mrs. Von Harbou's, but I am at least 50 percent responsible because I did it. I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that's a fairy tale--definitely. But I was very interested in machines. Anyway, I didn't like the picture--thought it was silly and stupid--then, when I saw the astronauts: what else are they but part of a machine? It's very hard to talk about pictures--should I say now that I like Metropolis because something I have seen in my imagination comes true, when I detested it after it was finished?'
"In his profile for Lang featured in the same book, which prefaces the interview, Bogdanovich suggested that Lang's distaste for his own film also stemmed from the Nazi party's fascination with the film."

-More at:
Metropolis on Wikipedia

Kino International’s Metropolis restoration site

Pretty good fan website

Jerry Roberts’ comments at www.jerrydroberts.com are typical of what you find on fan sites. (Jerry Roberts is a graphic designer currently looking for work, according to his website):

“The film is one of the pinnacles of German Expressionism, astonishing in its use of light and shadow. One of the best examples is the scene in which Rotwang pursues the real Maria through the caves using only a beam of light to strike terror as he closes in. Another brilliant moment comes with Maria’s erotic dance as the men gawk, the camera filled with their moist eyes. This scene was completely removed after the initial release and not restored until home video.
“Other moments have deeper resonance. There is something unsettling about the hundreds of workers toiling in the underground caves. Walking to work they march with their heads down, dressed in uniforms and caps. It reminded me of the Jews being led into the Nazi Death Camps. There is a buried foreshadowing of Hitler. More obvious are Lang’s biblical references. The rise of the city parallels Maria’s retelling of the story of the Tower of Babel. The giant pentagram in Rotwang’s lab as he plays God. The breathtaking image of the plague-bringer who comes wielding an obscene scythe. The very heaven and hell nature of Metropolis itself. There is even a Christ-like quality in Maria who gives her sermons and reinforces that indeed blessed are the peacemakers.
“These elements and images are brought to the film because of Lang’s insistence on no less then absolute perfection. He was known as a sometimes cruel taskmaster, working his cast and crew like a dictator. He cast some 20,000 extras (1500 of them for the Tower of Babel sequence alone) and worked them from morning till night. The water which covered the set for the climactic flood was ice cold. Many of the extras were soaked through from morning till night. Actress Brigette Helm was nearly killed several times, once by a fall and another by the fact that the bonfire scene was real! Helm was so rattled by her experience working with Lang that she thereafter refused to make another film with him.”

The Criminal Brain

2009-04-06T19:50:00.001-04:00

Here is an interesting article I found on the topic courtesy of BrainSource.com

On the topic of the horror genre...

2009-04-06T18:48:00.002-04:00

We've all seen plenty of horror movies, especially zombie movies, where we are compelled to yell/throw things at the screen when we do not agree with a character's seemingly foolish actions. It's finally our turn to call the shots.
Every decision you make directly affects your survival. Enjoy.
SurviveTheOutbreak.com

Monster

2009-04-01T10:52:00.001-04:00

Just for some fun

2009-03-30T22:24:00.001-04:00

Happened to find this and thought that most of you would be interested.
http://www.cracked.com/article_16539_8-everyday-words-with-x-rated-origins.html
Enjoy!

Climate Change Myths and Facts

2009-03-21T08:28:00.003-04:00

(The reason I reproduce this opinion piece is that I mentioned in class the George Will column to which it responds--which I thought was breath-takingly devious and arrogant. The author's point is that journalists should be held (in some way) to standards of responsibility in how they represent facts and information to the general public: they shouldn't get away with gross, self-serving distortions just because the information at issue is scientific, and beyond the expertise of the general reader, to say nothing of the average columnist. The specific focus is a good lesson in how data on climate change are routinely misrepresented by a certain style of pundit.)

By Chris Mooney

The Washington Post Saturday, March 21, 2009; Page A13

A recent controversy over claims about climate science by Post op-ed columnist George F. Will raises a critical question: Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities.

In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult. Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.

Consider a few of Will's claims from his Feb. 15 column, "Dark Green Doomsayers": In a long paragraph quoting press sources from the 1970s, Will suggested that widespread scientific agreement existed at the time that the world faced potentially catastrophic cooling. Today, most climate scientists and climate journalists consider this a timeworn myth. Just last year, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a peer-reviewed study examining media coverage at the time and the contemporary scientific literature. While some media accounts did hype a cooling scare, others suggested more reasons to be concerned about warming. As for the published science? Reviewing studies between 1965 and 1979, the authors found that "emphasis on greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature even then."

Yet there's a bigger issue: It's misleading to draw a parallel between "global cooling" concerns articulated in the 1970s and global warming concerns today. In the 1970s, the field of climate research was in a comparatively fledgling state, and scientific understanding of 20th-century temperature trends and their causes was far less settled. Today, in contrast, hundreds of scientists worldwide participate in assessments of the state of knowledge and have repeatedly ratified the conclusion that human activities are driving global warming -- through the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific academies of various nations (including our own), and leading scientific organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.

Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was "1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979." Again, though, there's a bigger issue: Will's focus on "global" sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it's not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists' expectations -- according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.

Will also wrote that "according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade." The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is one of many respected scientific institutions that support the consensus that humans are driving global warming. Will probably meant that since 1998 was the warmest year on record according to the WMO -- NASA, in contrast, believes that that honor goes to 2005 -- we haven't had any global warming since. Yet such sleight of hand would lead to the conclusion that "global cooling" sets in immediately after every new record temperature year, no matter how frequently those hot years arrive or the hotness of the years surrounding them. Climate scientists, knowing that any single year may trend warmer or cooler for a variety of reasons -- 1998, for instance, featured an extremely strong El Niño -- study globally averaged temperatures over time. To them, it's far more relevant that out of the 10 warmest years on record, at least seven have occurred in the 2000s -- again, according to the WMO.

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever.

Chris Mooney is the author of "The Republican War on Science" and co-author of the forthcoming "Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future."

Workers of the World, Buy Your Tickets Early!

2009-03-20T09:42:00.003-04:00

Marx Gets His Night at the Opera

Published: March 19, 2009in the New York Times

Workers of the world, unite and sing! A Chinese director is preparing an operatic adaptation of “Das Kapital,” Karl Marx’s treatise on economics, capitalism and the alienation of labor, The Telegraph reported. The production will borrow elements from Broadway and Las Vegas musicals, and will add a plot to Marx’s text, first published in 1867, about a business whose workers discover that they are being exploited. After embracing the theories of Marx, above, some of the workers rebel against their employer, while others turn to collective bargaining. According to The Telegraph, the opera’s director, He Nian, told the Chinese newspaper Wen Hui Bao, “The particular performance style we choose is not important, but Marx’s theories cannot be distorted.” The opera is planned to open in Shanghai next year.

Literally covering Earth

2009-03-09T23:28:00.002-04:00

Save Now

an artists rendition of all of the satellites surrounding the planet Earth. crazy

Marxism the Cartoon by Bertell Ollman

2009-03-09T14:22:00.002-04:00

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/humor4.htm

Also,

He created the first Marxist boardgame in 1978.

Buy it for your kids.

Urban Trees

2009-03-07T16:42:00.007-05:00

My '20/40/10' assignment which I did last semester -- I see these pictures relevant to the theme of "walking," as well as depicting the modern state of nature.

2009-03-05T18:20:00.002-05:00

http://www.solardecathlon.org/

Several teams from universities from around the world set up small houses on the national mall each year and compete. They are critiqued on how environmentally friendly their homes are, as well as comfort and over all design. They also include a full list of expenses for materials use in each project. They're overall pretty ingenious (and very expensive).

"Everything's amazing, nobody's happy."

2009-03-04T11:01:00.003-05:00

I thought this video was somewhat relevant. It's Louis CK's take on how technology has forced us to take alot of things for granted, especially not appreciating where we are and how convenient our lives have become.

Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

Ecoist

2009-03-04T10:08:00.003-05:00

Fashion can be environmental
Just because it is good for the environment does not mean it cant be High Fashion. My favorite part of and outfit is my hand bag and I am not the only women that feels this way. The compony Ecoist makes all types of hand bags made of paper, ten cans and plastic. “Our objective is to merge design with social and environmental consciousness to provide stylish, functional, and durable products that people will love to own. All our products are made from recycled, organic, or earth-friendly materials, and are manufactured through our network of fair trade partnerships around the world.” Ecoist hope to bring awareness to people trough stylish fashion. Ecoist do this by putting there product in high fashion magazines and by having celebes were them to gain there popularity.

democracy now covers powershift + me in a video

2009-03-03T18:42:00.003-05:00

http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2009/3/2

ya, i mean this powershift stuff is weird. i haven't been following it super closely but i understand one of the larger financiers was wal mart. huh? wal mart, you don't need to dump money into token actions for tax write offs, you're like the largest service sector employer in the US - create the green jobs. also, closing coal plants is fine (though it can be problematic for the workers) but what's up with having a major conference around climate change and not even mentioning the single largest polluter in the world - the us military. seriously, our military budget is about as much as the entire rest of the world's COMBINED. they have all kinds of environmental regulation exemptions - communities around military bases have higher rates of cancer and birth defects! seems like that out to be at least AN issue you'd mention at a major climate change conference.

http://soc.hfac.uh.edu/artman/publish/article_88.shtml

Street Art to Support March 2 Capitol Climate Action from Daniel Meltzer on Vimeo.

(i mostly did this cuz cezar is a guy who pays me to do his gruntwork once in a while.)

oops

2009-03-03T17:15:00.002-05:00

Just thought this was funny that it's a fake, because it's a photo everyones seen.

Capitol Climate Action

2009-03-03T11:52:00.002-05:00

Following up on Asheley's post about PowerShift, the gathering in DC this past weekend to lobby for change in environmental policies, here's the report on
Capitol Climate Action
This is the action Bill McKibben was coming to Washington for. Protesters effectively shut down the coal-fired power plant for the US Capitol. The leaders of the House and Senate have already requested that the plant switch to natural gas by the end of 2009.

Sustainable South Bronx

2009-03-01T21:05:00.002-05:00

http://www.ssbx.org/

I thought this website was interesting in relation to environmental issues because it is a collective group of people in a major city setting out to re-claim their environment. They're hoping to transform the south bronx into a 'green' sustainable community. It's interesting to see people taking matters like these into their own hands and forming smaller neighborhood groups, rather than waiting for their government or local institutions to set out and start making change happen. It's too bad they have poor webdesign though. A nicer website might attract more donors.

Power Shift 2009

2009-03-01T20:15:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure how many of you are aware of the Power Shift 2009 'green' conference being held this weekend in D.C. ? My good friend Jennifer is currently interning for Greenpeace up in D.C. and she is one of thousands working at this Power Shift conference. I would encourage all of you to take a look at their site and check out the amazing things these students are doing for energy reform and comprehensive climate legislation.

http://powershift09.org/About

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1wEmW6toSY

Primitivism.com : By Ashley Sauers

2009-02-25T07:12:00.002-05:00

The website Primitivitsm.Com is a wealth bank of information of writings pertinent to Primitiivsm, the philosophy that repudiates technology, industrialism, and capitalism and argues that they are complicit in the downward spiral of the general well being of the world today. The site is organized into 9 topics which illustrate the interdisciplinary philosophy as one that is applicable to everything from politics to the environment and mental health. The writings are diverse, ranging from Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents" to Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work" to Frederich Nietzsche's "The AnitChrist."

Two writers whose works are extensively published throughout the site are John Zerzan and Bob Black who both identify as anarchists and primitivists (anarcho-primitivism). Their views
In Bob Black's essay, "The Abolition of Work" he audaciously claims that "in order to stop suffering, we have to stop suffering, we have to stop working." His view is indicative of primitivism's harsh critique against civilization, specifically modern capitalism as a leading cause of despair. John Zerzan writes similarly and recognizes capitalism, specifically division of labor, as a life that demands servitude and disregards autonomy necessary to human happiness. Zerzan cites capitalism as responsible for the "the dullness, alienation, and disempowerment that characterizes the average daily experience, our culture exhibits high rates of depression, mental illness, suicide, drug addiction, and dysfunctional and abusive relationships, along with numerous vicarious modes of existence (e.g., through television, movies, pornography, video games, etc)."
--
"No one should ever work. Workers of the world... *relax*!" - Bob Black

"We absently delude ourselves when we think we know what time is because we know what time it is." - John Zerzan, Time and its Discontents

"..the mindlessness is doing dope and watching mtv- and then you go get a job..to me that's violence." -Zerzan --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlnAYeWWwt8

"What is the problem with modernity? Why do modern societies have such a hard time producing adults capable of intimacy, work, enjoyment, and ethical living? Why is it that signs of damaged life are so prevalent?" - Ted Sloan

"

2009-02-25T00:55:00.004-05:00

It wasn't long ago since people started to realize (includung me) global warming is no joke, and that houses produce lots of waste and consume incredulously large amount of energy. I have no idea when HGTV or simliar TV broadcasts featured eco-friendly architectures(maybe 2 or 3 years ago?), but it keeps nagging my mind knowing my own house is not as green as some of THEM are. True, the heaters and air conditioners are old fashioned, probably using up a lotta gas, the material used to build this old house is not recycled things, the toilet flushes too much water down the drain pipe, nor is it a machine which decomposes human feces for fertilizers, nor do I know if this house is actually spitting out harmful gases, and the list goes on. Problem is that these kinds of houses are built and keep building everywhere. But fortunately, there exsists the organizations dedicated to coming up with innovative ideas for enviromentally, economically and health friendly architectures and homes.
The Build it Green organization is dedicated to professional training in green building, broad package of governmental support, consumer education, green building guidlines and much more. It contains a vast amount of essential and professional articles and facts about construction, which is a whole lot of information, but they tried to put it simple and organized as they can.

i-dome houses are unique little units designed for best insulation, energy efficient and healthy alternative to regular homes.

http://www.builditgreen.org/

http://www.i-domehouse.com/

CAPTAIN PLANET!!!

2009-02-24T23:04:00.006-05:00

so... the great Captain Planet. Everyone watched Captain Planet as a kid. (if not your childhood was robbed) After I read End Of Nature I thought about how kids contribute to "going green" then I though of you know who. I always thought he knew the best ways to stay green and protect and save the earth. Did his website live up to the name of Captain Planet? Meh... Kinda... they give links to a lot of other websites about teach you about going green. There are also Captain Planet tips to saving the earth! Woot! I mean it isn't all that bad and corny. The Turner Broadcasting System just really tried to make television educational eco-friendly and fun for kids. So.. meh.. its kinda cool... but it's Captain Planet... and I'm sure by the time you've finished reading this Nic has yelled CAPTAIN PLANET! atleast three times...

http://www.turner.com/planet/

2009-02-24T12:19:00.004-05:00

City Farmer.info

http://www.cityfarmer.info

Cityfarmer.info is a website started in 1994 dedicated to teaching urban city dwellers how to grow food in the city, compost their waste and take care of their home landscape in an environmentally responsible way, as well as hosting collections of stories of people working on their own urban farms, and news in the press about urban farming and the development of going green. They have multiple pages of information on how to start your own garden from your small plot of yard, how to grow organic foods, create your own fertilizer, and go more green in helping out the urban environment. It promotes self sufficiency and helping out the community buy growing community gardens, as well as a host of many other gardening tips and facts.

Be Resourceful !

2009-02-24T01:25:00.002-05:00

www.cobcottage.com/whatwedo

Cob is a mixture of soil, sand, and straw mashed together usually by foot to create a moldable martial that is used by people all over the world to create houses. Cob Cottage Company is an active builder of cottages or houses using all organic materials. One of Cob Cottage Company's goals is to "conduct hands-on-research on natural building methods and materials, testing our own buildings by living in them." The company strives to empower people to create their own houses, using creative design.

god damn it cows stop farting

2009-02-23T17:41:00.002-05:00

http://ronbosoldier.blogspot.com/2007/06/global-warming-is-bullshit-says-nasa.html

A different view on global warming from a NASA personnel, who is speaking the truth? Who should we believe? Is global warming a bandwagon?

It's Getting Hot In Here

2009-02-23T17:22:00.004-05:00

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/

It’s getting hot in here is a blog and world wide community media project for climate movement issues. Young people such as youth leaders and students who are interested and focusing on world climate movement issue can join this blog as contributing editor and share their opinions, information and special events and this blog provides other links about climate movement including global warming and also provides some information about special trainings and action camps, organizing projects and climate-related events.

Global Water

2009-02-23T15:55:00.006-05:00

http://www.globalwater.org/index.htm

Founded in 1982 by the former U.S. Ambassador John McDonald and Dr. Peter Bourne, Global Water is an international volunteer based organization that is dedicated to providing clean water, sanitation facilities, and other health related programs to rural developing countries. The people of Global Water believe that clean water is the key to solving world issues such as hunger, poverty, and disease. They help provide funding for the projects as well as state-of-the-art water treatment equipment which is all possible through donations.

2009-02-23T15:55:00.005-05:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090121144059.htm

I stumbled upon this article, and couldn't help but see the irony in it. In The End of Nature, Bill McKibben says that termites "can break down 65 to 95 percent of the carbon in the wood they ingest... and they can excrete phenomenal amounts of methane- a single mound might give off five liters a minute." According to the article, the sulfuryl fluoride found in termite insecticide actually stays in the atmosphere a great deal longer than previously thought. This is ironic because it's a lose-lose situation. The termites themselves give off harmful gasses, and the product used to exterminate the termites has the same effect on the environment.

Surfrider Foundation

2009-02-23T15:36:00.002-05:00

http://www.surfrider.org/

The Surfrider Foundation is a non-profit grass root organization devoted to protecting the worlds oceans and beaches. The foundation started in 1984 in Malibu California and now has 60 chapters in the U.S.. The group has had many victories including winning the second biggest Clean Water Act suit in America (in 1991) against two pulp mills that had committed 40,000 violations.

The Sink is Clogged

2009-02-23T12:39:00.003-05:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/earth_climate/environmental_issues/

In this article Science Daily researches are talking about the effect of CO2 on the Southern Indian Ocean. In Mckibben’s End of Nature, the author speaks of the ocean as being a sink to wash down the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how scientists in his day thought that it would hold more than the atmosphere, however he goes on to tell that they were later proven wrong and finding out that the ocean will hold an equal amount as the atmosphere. In this article they use the same metaphor of the ocean as a “Carbon Sink” however they go further in telling us that the ocean is no longer absorbing as much CO2 as it did. Not only will the ocean no longer absorb CO2 but marine photosynthesis in phytoplankton is actually creating greater amounts of it in the depths of the ocean causing it to rise up eventually meeting the atmosphere.

Victoria Ashley Shaheen

Repower America

2009-02-23T12:34:00.005-05:00

http://www.repoweramerica.org/

Repower America is an energy plan focused on powering our country with 100% clean electricity in the next 10 years. Transitioning to this cleaner power source will create more jobs, stimulate the economy, and lower energy costs. Their goal is to upgrade our National Smart Grid, encourage the construction of energy efficient homes and buildings, generate 100% of the country's power from carbon free sources, and commercialize clean, plug-in fueled cars.

A Civil Movement in Action

2009-02-23T12:14:00.000-05:00

Chesapeake Climate Action Network

http://www. Chesapeakwclimate.org/

Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) is a nonprofit organization in Maryland, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C. areas. The CCAN focuses on educating public, introducing green jobs, protesting and lobbying for environment-friendly legislation. CCAN provides scientific facts and studies through its web site, as well as campaigns. Currently, CCAN has a campaign, “1SKY”, to pass national climate policy legislation, aiming a new energy economy. People in CCAN are concerned with not only their regional environment but also worldwide aspects of global warming. CCAN also suggests practical individual actions people can participate in everyday life.

Chul Beom Park

Can One Small Household Save the Planet From Global Warming?

2009-02-21T16:43:00.000-05:00

Discussion Questions: By Ashley Sauers

1. Mundy begins the article on a pillage to unplug electronics that are not in use. She confronts a few appliances with a reluctance to unplug, her slow laptop for one, but nevertheless submits. She emphasizes the biggest hassle to unplug is clocks that she says would need to be reset every morning. But aren't clocks already on our cell phones, ipods, wrists, and walls? Does Mundy's reluctance to unplug the clocks enlarge upon American's greater obession with constantly knowing the time? - What is time? - If we were to reduce the number of clocks in our household, how would it effect us mentally? - Could decreasing our mental power use ( our frivolous use I mean- constantly checking clocks is a drainage of brain power just like it is on a digital clock ) subsquently alter how we think about energy effiency?

2. To build on the former question, Mundy poses the question: "What about when common greening wisdow is wrong?" She cites a study performed by chemists showing that hundreds of paper cups could be produced for less energy than it takes to fire and wash a ceramic mug - Does this surprise you, come off as dubious, or seem true? - What is Sanjayan calling 'common greening sense?' - With the bombardment of global warming in news and culture, do you find contradictions? - How are we supposed to understand ways to genuinely reduce green house gases if our 'common greening sense' is supposedly wrong? Take into consideration the 'common greening sense' of others- for example, a raw veganist, adherents of Thoreau, or that of a mother in suburbia.

3. Throughout Mundy's anecdotal article, it is clearly seen she goes through a total greening breakdown. She becomes overwhelmed by the level of greening work but instead of checking in to the nearest mental hospital, she.. TAKES A BATH. "Possibly the least green thing I could have done, short of test driving a Hummer. These moments are why some greening websites have a comment section for confessions of self-indulgence and weakness."
- Why did Mundy go crazy? Is this a problem strictly among novice greeners or could it be the American climate to induce anxiety and fear? Is it her fault or ours? Explain the best you can.

4."And can we really address global warming without sacrificing too much comfort and leisure, not to mention family harmony?"

How often do you think this perspective is shared? Too often? Hardly ever? How do you think the varying mindsets of Americans on activism, specifically the notion that your efforts or lack of matter ultimately effect how global warming is to be dealt with?

Yale Environment 360

2009-02-21T00:28:00.006-05:00

Yale Environment 360

http://www.e360.yale.edu/

Yale Environment 360 is an online magazine which lives up to its name in providing opinion, analysis, reporting, and debate articles on a variety of topics – such as water, policy, energy, innovation, climate, oceans, and forest – for all regions of the world. The website is run by students of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

The magazine only accepts submissions from “qualified contributors,” who are required to include a short biography. Furthermore, Yale 360 requests all work to be written exclusively for the magazine -- even those with little exposure to environmental issues should have no difficulty in understanding the magazine's content.

Bill McKibben -- March 2nd Protest

2009-02-20T20:50:00.002-05:00

19 Feb 2009: Opinion

Why I’ll Get Arrested
To Stop the Burning of Coal

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2124

On March 2, environmentalist Bill McKibben will join demonstrators who plan to march on a coal-fired power plant in Washington D.C. In this article for Yale Environment 360, he explains why he’s ready to go to jail to protest the continued burning of coal.

by bill mckibben

It may seem odd timing that many of us are heading to the nation’s capital early next month for a major act of civil disobedience at a coal-fired power plant, the first big protest of its kind against global warming in this country.

After all, Barack Obama’s in power. He’s appointed scientific advisers who actually believe in… science, and he’s done more in a few weeks to deal with climate change than all the presidents of the last 20 years combined. Stalwarts like John Kerry, Henry Waxman, and Ed Markey are chairing the relevant congressional committees. The auto companies, humbled, are promising to build rational vehicles if only we give them some cash. What’s to protest? Why not just give the good guys a break?

If you think about it a little longer, though, you realize this is just the moment to up the ante. For one thing, it would have done no good in the past: you think Dick Cheney was going to pay attention?

More importantly, we need a powerful and active movement not to force the administration and the Democrats in Congress to do something they don’t want to, but to give them the political space they need to act on their convictions. Barack Obama was a community organizer — he understands that major change only comes when it’s demanded, when there’s some force noisy enough to drown out the eternal hum of business as usual, of vested interest, of inertia.

Consider what has to happen if we’re going to deal with global warming in a real way. NASA climate scientist James Hansen — who has announced he plans to join us and get arrested for trespassing in the action we’re

The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: Coal is bad.

planning for March 2 — has demonstrated two things in recent papers. One, that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with the “planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” And two, that the world as a whole must stop burning coal by 2030 — and the developed world well before that — if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number.

That should give you some sense of what Obama’s up against. Coal provides 50 percent of our electricity. That juice comes from hundreds of expensive, enormous plants, each one of them owned by rich and powerful companies. Shutting these plants down — or getting the companies to install expensive equipment that might be able to separate carbon from the exhaust stream and sequester it safely in some mine somewhere — will be incredibly hard. Investors are planning on running those plants another half-century to make back their money — the sunk costs involved are probably on the scale of those lousy mortgages now bankrupting our economy.

And if you think it’s tough for us, imagine the Chinese. They’ve been opening a coal-burning power plant a week. You want to tell them to start shutting them down when that coal-fired power represents the easiest way to pull people out of poverty across Asia?

The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: Coal is bad. It’s bad when you mine it, it’s bad for the city where you burn it, and it’s bad for the climate.

Happily, there’s no place that makes that point much more easily than the power plant Congress owns not far from the U.S. Capitol building. It’s antiquated (built today, it wouldn’t meet the standards of the Clean Air Act). It’s filthy — one study estimates that it and the other coal-fired power plants ringing the District of Columbia cause the deaths of at least 515 people a year. It’s among the largest point sources of CO2 in the capital. It helps support the mining industry that is scalping the summits of neighboring West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. Oh, and it would be easy enough to fix. In fact, the facility can already burn some natural gas instead, and a modest retrofit would let it convert away from coal entirely.

Not only that, but it’s owned by Congress. They don’t need to ask any utility executives. They could just have a vote and do it — as easy as you deciding to put a new, clean furnace in your basement. It would even stimulate the local economy.

All of which means it’s the perfect target. Not because shutting it down would do much, except for the people who live right nearby. But because

When civil disobedience works, it’s because it demonstrates a willingness to bear a certain amount of pain for a larger end.

it’s a way to get the conversation started. When civil disobedience works, it’s because it demonstrates some willingness to bear a certain amount of pain for some larger end — a way to say, "Coal is bad enough that I’m willing to get arrested." Which is not the biggest deal on earth, but if you’re going to be asking the Chinese, say, to start turning off their coal-fired plants, you can probably keep a straighter face if you’ve made at least a mild sacrifice yourself.

There are dangers in this kind of strategy too. It could turn people off, make them think that global warming protesters are crazy hippies harkening back to the '60s. I don’t mind hippies in the slightest, but when the writer Wendell Berry and I sent out the original invitation to this action, we asked that those who wanted to be arrested wear their dress clothes. And not just because it’s serious business — but also in hopes of discouraging the hardcore anarchists and troublemakers attracted to such events, sort of in the way that convenience stores play classical music to keep folks from loitering outside.

The other danger is that it might convince activists that this is the most important work to do, the main tool in the toolbox. That’s almost certainly not true, which is why it’s appropriate that Powershift, the huge gathering of young people the same weekend in D.C., will focus on lobbying on Capitol Hill that Monday morning of the protest. Lobbying first, sitting-in second. And third, and most important of all, the suddenly swelling movement toward symbolic action next fall on a global basis. 350.org, the campaign I helped found, is looking for new ways to make a point, with a global day of action on Oct. 24 that will link people up from high in the Himalayas to underwater on the Great Barrier Reef to… Your Town Here.

A little Facebook, a little Twitter, and a little sitting down in the street where the police don’t want you. We’ve got to see what works!

CNN article states that Men see bikini-clad women as objects

2009-02-19T14:21:00.005-05:00

This CNN article, which scientifically proves that men correlate images of scantily clad women with tools, reminded me of the final conversation in Dr. Strangelove about the survival of mankind and how women were necessary for their sexual characteristics. This also relates to the constant negative representation of females throughout the film, I.E, Ms. Scott in her bikini in the hotel room, the Playboy centerfold, and the pictures cut out and pasted on the inside of the Secret Missions vault in the B-52.

Bill McKibben, Big Environmental Activist

2009-02-18T19:11:00.001-05:00

Bill Mckibben on Climate Change

2009-02-18T19:06:00.001-05:00

Can One Household Save the Planet?

2009-02-15T18:12:00.003-05:00

Liza Mundy's article in today's Washington Post Magazine details what her family learned about household energy efficiency. (Hint: Unplug everything!)
It's too long to add in its entirety here but you can follow the link to find it here.

At our next class meeting, I'll be asking groups to summarize sections of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature and provide critical questions in response. I'd like to offer the opportunity for one group to read through Mundy's article and bring up questions about the practical considerations in everyday energy efficiency. If you have a look at the article and take an interest in choosing this option, please respond by commenting on this post.

Scientists: Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates

2009-02-15T11:52:00.004-05:00

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 15, 2009; Page A03

CHICAGO, Feb. 14 -- The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said.

Unexpectedly large amounts of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere as the result of "feedback loops" that are speeding up natural processes. Prominent among these, evidence indicates, is a cycle in which higher temperatures are beginning to melt the arctic permafrost, which could release hundreds of billions of tons of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, said several scientists on a panel at the meeting.

The permafrost holds 1 trillion tons of carbon, and as much as 10 percent of that could be released this century, Field said. Melting permafrost also releases methane, which is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

"It's a vicious cycle of feedback where warming causes the release of carbon from permafrost, which causes more warming, which causes more release from permafrost," Field said.

Evidence is also accumulating that terrestrial and marine ecosystems cannot remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as earlier estimates suggested, Field said.

In the oceans, warmer weather is driving stronger winds that are exposing deeper layers of water, which are already saturated with carbon and not as able to absorb as much from the atmosphere. The carbon is making the oceans more acidic, which also reduces their ability to absorb carbon.

On land, rising carbon dioxide levels had been expected to boost plant growth and result in greater sequestration of carbon dioxide. As plants undergo photosynthesis to draw energy from the sun, carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere and trapped in the plant matter. But especially in northern latitudes, this effect may be offset significantly by the fact that vegetation-covered land absorbs much more of the sun's heat than snow-covered terrain, said scientists on the panel.

Earlier snowmelt, the shrinking arctic ice cover and the northward spread of vegetation are causing the Northern Hemisphere to absorb, rather than reflect, more of the sun's energy and reinforce the warming trend.

While it takes a relatively long time for plants to take carbon out of the atmosphere, that carbon can be released rapidly by wildfires, which contribute about a third as much carbon to the atmosphere as burning fossil fuels, according to a paper Field co-authored.

Fires such as the recent deadly blazes in southern Australia have increased in recent years, and that trend is expected to continue, Field said. Warmer weather, earlier snowmelt, drought and beetle infestations facilitated by warmer climates are all contributing to the rising number of fires linked to climate change. Across large swaths of the United States and Canada, bark beetles have killed many mature trees, making forests more flammable. And tropical rain forests that were not susceptible to forest fires in the past are likely to become drier as temperatures rise, growing more vulnerable.

Preventing deforestation in the tropics is more important than in northern latitudes, the panel agreed, since lush tropical forests sequester more carbon than sparser northern forests. And deforestation in northern areas has benefits, since larger areas end up covered in exposed, heat-reflecting snow.

Many scientists and policymakers are advocating increased incentives for preserving tropical forests, especially in the face of demand for clearing forest to grow biofuel crops such as soy. Promoting biofuels without also creating forest-preservation incentives would be "like weatherizing your house and deliberately keeping your windows open," said Peter Frumhoff, chief of the Union of Concerned Scientists' climate program. "It's just not a smart policy."

Field said the U.N. panel's next assessment of Earth's climate trends, scheduled for release in 2014, will for the first time incorporate policy proposals. It will also include complicated models of interconnected ecosystem feedbacks.

The panel's last report noted that preliminary knowledge of such feedbacks suggested that an additional 100 billion to 500 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions would have to be prevented in the next century to avoid dangerous global warming. Currently, about 10 billion tons of carbon are emitted each year.

Bernard's comment:It's instructive to consider the reactons to an article like this in the blogosphere. As soon as it appeared, it was widely attcked global-warming-deniers, who were in turn attacked by their accustomed enemies. George F. Will presented an op-ed piece, "Dark Green Doomsayers," in the same edition of the Post, arguing as he has done before that global warming is just the latest in a long series of predicted calamities that never came to pass--a product of nothing more than a pessimistic outlook. This view should certainly not be dismissed.

Devolve Yourself

2009-02-12T16:56:00.003-05:00

Sure, the reign of human beings over the earth is about to end once and for all. But why dwell on negatives? Let's celebrate the beginnings!

In honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (yes, same day as Abraham Lincoln), the Open University offers you the opportunity to
Devolve Yourself
to Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, or my favorite, Homo heidelbergensis.

Sierra Club

2009-02-11T17:54:00.002-05:00

One of the most proactive organizations with a strong internet presence is Sierra Club.
Sierra Club lists their goals as: Curbing Carbon, Move Beyond Coal, Clean Energy Solutions, Green Transportation, Resilient Habitats, ans Safeguarding Communities. Each goal demonstrates an educational approach to the environmental issues on the national level, while including the need for implementing a climate treaty.

Sierra Club provides a good educational experience on the Basics of Global Warming, concise and in-depth questions like "What causes global warming? Is it part of a natural cycle?", "How can Global Warming affect our lives?", and other questions we might hear everyday regarding the effects of global warming. The answers are understandable, short, and reference several links to reports and solutions to how we can contribute to its reduction.

Military Robots and the Laws of War

2009-02-05T13:03:00.007-05:00

This is a long article but of great importance. P. W. Singer was mentioned here last week. Here's an excerpt from his new book, which gives just about the best summary available of what the movement toward robotics means for warfare. It's uncannily good reading material to accompany a viewing of Dr. Strangelove.
One of the challenges of our subject matter this semester is that it requires developing acquaintance with some technical issues--global warming, artificial intelligence, etc. But they've become basic to the world we live in, and the widening gap between those who understand the technical questions and those who don't is one of the scariest political issues of our time.
The full article may be found online here.

P. W. Singer

More than just conventional wisdom, it has become almost a cliché to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved “how technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine of future war,” as one security analyst told me in 2007. The American military efforts in those countries (or so the thinking goes) have dispelled the understanding of technology-dominated warfare that was prevalent just a few years ago—the notion that modern armed conflict would be fundamentally changed in the age of computers and networks.

It is true that Afghanistan and Iraq have done much to puncture that understanding of war. The vaunted theory, so beloved in the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon, of a “network-centric” revolution in military affairs can now be seen more clearly as a byproduct of the 1990s dotcom boom. The Internet has certainly affected how people shop, communicate, and date. Amid this ecstatic hype, it is not surprising that many security studies experts, both in and out of the defense establishment, latched onto the notion that linking up all our systems via electronic networks would “lift the fog of war,” allow war to be done on the cheap, and even allow the United States to “lock out” competition from the marketplace of war, much as they saw Microsoft doing to Apple at the time.

Nor is it surprising that now analysts are writing off high-tech warfare altogether in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq. Insurgents armed with crude conventional weapons have proven frequently able to flummox their well-equipped American foes. Many observers increasingly seem to believe that if irregular warfare is likely to be the future of armed conflict, advanced technologies have no great role.

These “all or nothing” attitudes are each incorrect. High technology is not a silver bullet solution to insurgencies, but that doesn’t mean that technology doesn’t matter in these fights. In fact, far from proving the uselessness of advanced technology in modern warfare, Afghanistan and Iraq have for the first time proved the value of a technology that will truly revolutionize warfare—robotics.

When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the original invasion had no robotic systems on the ground. By the end of 2004, there were 150 robots on the ground in Iraq; a year later there were 2,400; by the end of 2008, there were about 12,000 robots of nearly two dozen varieties operating on the ground in Iraq. As one retired Army officer put it, the “Army of the Grand Robotic” is taking shape.

It isn’t just on the ground: military robots have been taking to the skies—and the seas and space, too. And the field is rapidly advancing. The robotic systems now rolling out in prototype stage are far more capable, intelligent, and autonomous than ones already in service in Iraq and Afghanistan. But even they are just the start. As one robotics executive put it at a demonstration of new military prototypes a couple of years ago, “The robots you are seeing here today I like to think of as the Model T. These are not what you are going to see when they are actually deployed in the field. We are seeing the very first stages of this technology.” And just as the Model T exploded on the scene—selling only 239 cars in its first year and over one million a decade later—the demand for robotic warriors is growing very rapidly.

The truly revolutionary part, however, is not robots’ increasing numbers, or even their capabilities. It is the ripple effects that they will have in areas ranging from politics and war to business and ethics. For instance, the difficulties for the existing laws of war that this robotics revolution will provoke are barely beginning to be understood. Technology generally evolves much more quickly than the laws of war. During World War I, for example, all sorts of recent inventions, from airplanes dropping bombs to cannons shooting chemical weapons, were introduced before anyone agreed on the rules for their use—and, as to be expected, the warring sides sometimes took different interpretations on critical questions. While it is far too early to know with any certainty, we can at least start to establish the underlying frameworks as to how robots will reshape the practice and the ethics of warfare.

Rise of the Robots

Mechanization and mass production made possible early automatic weapons in the nineteenth century. Military experimentation with machines that were also mobile and unmanned began during World War I—including even radio-controlled airplanes, the very first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). World War II saw the operational use of several unmanned weapons by both the Allied and Axis forces, including remote-controlled bombs; it was also a period of rapid advancement in analog and electronic computing.

Military interest in robotics was spotty during the Cold War, with inventors repeatedly finding that what was technically possible mattered less than what was bureaucratically feasible. Robotic systems were getting better, but the interest, energy, and proven success stories necessary for them to take off just weren’t there. The only substantial contract during this long dry spell was one that the Ryan aeronautical firm received in 1962 for $1.1 million to make an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. The drone that came out of it, the Fire Fly, flew 3,435 missions in Southeast Asia. Overall, though, the Vietnam experience was as bad for robotics as it was for the broader U.S. military. Most of the uses of unmanned systems were classified and thus there was little public knowledge of their relative successes, as well as no field tests or data collection to solve the problems they incurred (16 percent of the Fire Flys crashed). As veteran robotics scientist Robert Finkelstein has pointed out, “It took decades for UAVs to recover from Vietnam misperceptions.”

The next big U.S. military spending on unmanned planes didn’t come until 1979, with the Army’s Aquila program. The Aquila was to be a small propeller-powered drone that could circle over the front lines and send back information on the enemy’s numbers and intentions. Soon, though, the Army began to load up the plane with all sorts of new requirements. It now had to carry night vision and laser designators, spot artillery fire, survive against enemy ground fire, and so on. Each new requirement came at a cost. The more you loaded up the drone, the bigger it had to be, meaning it was both heavier than planned and an easier target to shoot down. The more secure you wanted the communications, the lower the quality of the images it beamed back. The program originally planned to spend $560 million for 780 Aquila drones. By 1987, it had spent over $1 billion for just a few prototypes. The program was canceled and the cause of unmanned vehicles was set further back, again more by policy decisions than the technology itself.

Work continued, but mainly on testing various drones and ground vehicles, which were usually regular vehicles jury-rigged with remote controls. During this period, most of the ground systems were designed to be tele-operated—that is, using long fiber-optic wires to link the robot to the controller. Any enemy with a pair of scissors could take them out. One of the few to be built from the ground up to drive on its own was Martin Marietta’s eight-wheeled “Autonomous Land Vehicle.” Unfortunately, the weapon had a major image problem: It was shaped like an RV, what retirees would use to drive cross-country to see the Grand Canyon. This killed any chance of convincing the generals of its use for warfighting.

Another significant program that didn’t take off in this period was a 1980 Army plan for a robotic antitank vehicle. The idea was to take a commercial all-terrain vehicle, rig it for remote control, and load it with missiles. Congress thought that ATVs, while certainly fun for country kids to ride around behind trailer parks, were a bit too small to be taking on Soviet tanks. So the program was canceled. But the military mistakenly came to believe that Congress’s real objection was to the weaponization of unmanned systems. “So,” as Finkelstein says, “misinterpretation kept weapons off for almost a decade.”

Despite these setbacks, the American military robotics community didn’t waver in its belief in the usefulness of its work. It could point to other nations beginning to successfully deploy unmanned systems, like Israel’s successful experience with drones in the 1980s. By the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, unmanned systems were gradually making their way into the U.S. military, but in very small numbers. The Army had a handful of M-60 tanks converted into unmanned land-mine clearers, but they were left behind in the famous “left-hook” invasion force that drove across the desert into Iraq. The Air Force flew just one UAV drone. The only notable success story was the Navy’s use of the Pioneer drone, an unmanned plane (almost exactly like the planned Aquila) that the Navy had bought secondhand from the Israelis. It flew off of World War II-era U.S. battleships that had been taken out of mothballs in the 1980s and updated for use in pounding ground targets with their massive sixteen-inch guns. The guns fired shells that weighed 2,000 pounds and could leave a crater the size of a football field. The little drones, which the Iraqis took to calling “vultures,” would fly over targets and spot where the shells were landing. “The Iraqis came to learn that when they heard the buzz of a Pioneer overhead, all heck would break loose shortly thereafter because these sixteen-inch rounds would start landing all around them,” said Steve Reid, an executive at the Pioneer’s maker, AAI. In one case, a group of Iraqi soldiers saw a Pioneer flying overhead and, rather than wait to be blown up, waved white bed sheets and undershirts at the drone—the first time in history that human soldiers surrendered to an unmanned system.

Of course, the real stars of the Gulf War were not unmanned systems in the way we think of them now, but new “smart bombs”—that is, cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs. A massive PR campaign was built around the guided weapons as the “heroes” of the hundred-hour war. The only problem was that they weren’t. Only 7 percent of all the bombs dropped were guided; the rest were “dumb.” The most influential technology in the Gulf War was not the sexy smart bombs, but the humble desktop computer. By 1990, the U.S. military had bought into the idea of digitizing its forces and was spending some $30 billion a year on applying computers to all its various tasks. The Gulf War was the first war in history to involve widespread computers, used for everything from organizing the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops to sorting through reams of satellite photos looking for targets for missiles to hit. Calling it a “technology war,” the victorious commanding general, “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf, said, “I couldn’t have done it all without the computers.”

Over the rest of the 1990s, as sensors and computer processors improved, unmanned systems became ever more capable. But the “magic moment,” as retired Air Force Colonel Tom Erhard put it, occurred in 1995, when unmanned systems were integrated with the Global Positioning System (GPS). “That’s when it really came together.” Now widely accessible by devices in automobiles, the GPS is a constellation of military satellites that can provide the location, speed, and direction of a receiver, anywhere on the globe. It allowed unmanned systems (and their human operators) to automatically know where they were at any time. With GPS, as well as the advance of the video game industry (which the controllers began to mimic), the interfaces became accessible to a wider set of users. Drones began to be far more intuitive to fly, while the information they passed on to the generals and troops in the field became ever more detailed.

The programs also began to pass some key hurdles of acceptability. The various military services had long resisted buying any unmanned systems, but slowly they began to accept their use. In 1997, for example, the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Ronald R. Fogleman, instructed his planners that his service could “no longer...spend money the way we have been,” and mandated that they consider investing in new technologies such as UAVs. The military advantages of unmanned systems became increasingly clear to observers in the Pentagon. In many situations, robots have faster reaction times and better aim than human beings. They are often ideal for filling roles that people in the field call the “Three Ds”: dull, dirty, or dangerous. Unlike humans, who get tired and hungry and lose concentration and effectiveness, robots can perform boring tasks with unstinting accuracy for long periods of time. (As one advertisement for an unmanned plane put it, “Can you keep your eyes open for thirty hours without blinking?”) They can operate in dirty environments, such as battle zones filled with biological or chemical weapons, or under other dangerous conditions, such as in space, in rough seas, or in flights with very high gravitational pressures.

The rising interest in robots in the late 1990s coincided with changing political winds—a shrinking U.S. military as part of the post-Cold War so-called “peace dividend,” and an increasing belief that public tolerance for military risk and casualties had dropped dramatically after the relatively costless victory in the Gulf War. In 2000, this was the main factor that led Senator John Warner (R.-Va.), then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to mandate in the Pentagon’s budget that by 2010, one-third of all the aircraft designed to attack behind enemy lines be unmanned, and that by 2015, one-third of all ground combat vehicles be driverless.

And then came September 11, 2001. The annual national defense budget since 9/11 has risen to $515 billion (an increase of 74 percent between 2002 and 2008), not counting the cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been a massive increase in spending on research and development and on procurement, with a particular focus on anything unmanned. “Make ’em as fast as you can” is what one robotics executive recounts being told by his Pentagon buyers after 9/11. Enthusiasm has only grown thanks to successes on the battlefield.

With this change in military mentality, money, and use, the groundwork was finally laid for a real military robotics industry. As the Washington Post put it, “The undertaking has attracted not only the country’s top weapons makers but also dozens of small businesses...all pitching a science-fiction gallery of possible solutions.” Robert Finkelstein recalled a time when he personally knew most of the engineers working on military robotics. Today, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International has fourteen hundred member companies. Almost four thousand people showed up at its last annual meeting.

Cleaning Floors and Fighting Wars

During the war in Iraq, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the insurgents’ primary way of attacking U.S. forces. Often hidden along roadsides and disguised to look like trash or scrap metal, these cheap and easy-to-make bombs can do tremendous damage. At the peak of the Iraq insurgency in 2006, IED attacks were averaging nearly two thousand a month. They have been the leading cause of casualties among American personnel in Iraq, accounting for 40 percent of the troop deaths.

On the ground, the military bomb squad hunting for IEDs is called the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team. Before Iraq, EOD teams were not much valued by either the troops in the field or their senior leaders. They usually deployed to battlefields only after the fighting was done, to defuse any old weapons caches or unexploded ammunition that might be found. In Iraq, though, EOD teams went from an afterthought to a critical assignment. In a typical tour in Iraq when the insurgency was at its peak, each team would go on more than six hundred IED calls, defusing or safely exploding about two IEDs a day. Perhaps the best sign of how critical the EOD teams became is that the insurgents began offering a rumored $50,000 bounty for killing an EOD team member.

Working alongside many EOD teams have been robots—scouting ahead for IEDs and ambushes, saving soldiers’ lives many times over. Most of these unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have been made by two Boston-area robotics firms. One of these, iRobot, was founded in 1990 by three M.I.T. computer geeks; it is best known for the Roomba, the disc-shaped automatic vacuum cleaner that the company released in 2002. Roomba actually evolved from Fetch, a robot that the company designed in 1997 for the U.S. Air Force. Fetch cleaned up cluster bomblets from airfields; Roomba cleans up dust bunnies under sofas.

The company’s other breakout product was PackBot, which came out of a 1998 contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Weighing forty-two pounds and costing just under $150,000, PackBot is about the size of a lawn mower. It is typically operated via remote control, although it can drive itself, including even backtracking to wherever it started its mission. PackBot moves using four “flippers”—essentially tank treads that can rotate on one axis. These allow PackBot not only to roll forward and backward like regular tank tracks, but also to climb stairs, rumble over rocks, squeeze down twisting tunnels, and even swim in under six feet of water.

The designers at iRobot view their robots as “platforms.” PackBot has eight separate payload bays and hookups that allow its users to swap in whatever they need: mine detector, chemical and biological weapons sensor, or just extra power packs. The EOD version of the PackBots serving in Iraq comes with an extendable arm on top that mounts both a head, containing a high-powered zoom camera, and a claw-like gripper. Soldiers use these to drive up to IEDs, peer at them closely, and then, using the gripper, disassemble the bomb, all from a safe distance.

PackBot made its operational debut on 9/11 when engineers from iRobot drove down to New York City to help in the rescue and recovery efforts at Ground Zero. Soon after, PackBot went to war. As U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan, troops came across massive cave complexes that had to be scouted out, but were often booby-trapped. The only specialized tool the troops had were flashlights, and they often sent their local Afghan allies to crawl through the caves on hands and knees. “Then we began to run out of Afghans,” recounts a soldier. iRobot was then asked by the Pentagon to send help. Just six weeks later, PackBots were first used in a cave complex near the village of Nazaraht, in the heart of Taliban territory. Production and profits for Packbots boomed in the years that followed, culminating in a $286 million Pentagon contract in 2008 to supply as many as three thousand more machines.

Meanwhile, iRobot has new and improved versions of the PackBot as well as a host of plans to convert any type of vehicle into a robot, be it a car or ship, using a universal control unit that you plug into the engine and steering wheel. One new robot that iRobot’s designers are especially excited to show off is the Warrior. Weighing about 250 pounds, the Warrior is essentially a PackBot on steroids: it has the same basic design, but is about five times bigger. Warrior can drive at 15 miles per hour for five hours, while carrying one hundred pounds—yet it is agile enough to fit through a doorway and go up stairs. It is really just a mobile platform, with a USB port—a universal connector—on top that can be used to plug in sensors, a gun, and a TV camera for battle, or an iPod and loudspeakers for a mobile rave party. The long-term strategy is for other companies to focus on the plug-in market while iRobot corners the market for the robotic platforms. What Microsoft did for the software industry, iRobot hopes to do for the robotics industry.

Just a twenty-minute drive from iRobot’s offices are the headquarters of the Foster-Miller company. Founded in the 1950s—also by M.I.T. grads—Foster-Miller makes the PackBot’s primary competitor, the Talon. The Talon, which first hit the market in 2000, looks like a small tank, driven by two treads that run its length. Weighing just over a hundred pounds, it is a bit bigger than the PackBot. It too has a retractable arm with a gripper, but mounts its main sensors on a separate antenna-like “mast” sticking up from the body and carrying a zoom camera. Talon can go up to speeds of about 5.5 miles per hour, the equivalent of a decent jog on a treadmill, a pace it can maintain for five hours.

Like the PackBot, the Talon helped sift through the wreckage at Ground Zero and soon after deployed to Afghanistan. And like iRobot, Foster-Miller has boomed, doubling the number of robots it sells every year for the last four years. The company received an initial $65 million in orders for Talons in the first two years of the insurgency in Iraq. By 2008, there were close to two thousand Talons in the field and the firm had won a $400 million contract to supply another two thousand. Under an additional $20 million repair and spare-parts contract, the company also operates a “robot hospital” in Baghdad. Foster-Miller now makes some fifty to sixty Talons a month, and repairs another hundred damaged systems.

In technology circles, new products that change the rules of the game, such as what the iPod did to portable music players, are called “killer applications.” Foster-Miller’s new product gives this phrase a literal meaning. The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System (SWORDS) is the first armed robot designed to roam the battlefield. SWORDS is basically the Talon’s tougher big brother, with its gripping arm replaced by a gun mount that can carry pretty much any weapon that weighs under three hundred pounds, ranging from an M-16 rifle and .50-caliber machine gun to a 40mm grenade launcher or an antitank rocket launcher. In less than a minute, the human soldier flips two levers and locks his favorite weapon into the mount. The SWORDS can’t reload itself, but it can carry two hundred rounds of ammunition for the light machine guns, three hundred rounds for the heavy machine guns, six grenades, or four rockets.

Unlike the more-automated PackBot, SWORDS has very limited intelligence on its own; it is remote-controlled from afar by either radio or a spooled-out fiber optic wire. Thanks to the five cameras mounted on the robot, the operator can not only see as if he has eyes in the back of his head, but farther than had previously been possible when shooting a gun. As one soldier put it, “You can read people’s nametags at 300 to 400 meters, whereas the human eye can’t pick that up. You can see the expression on his face, what weapons he is carrying. You can even see if his [weapon’s] selector lever is on fire or on safe.” The cameras can also see in night vision, meaning the enemy can be fired on at any hour and in any climate. And the gun is impressively precise; it is locked in a stable platform, so its aim isn’t disrupted by the breathing or heartbeat that human snipers must compensate for, and it doesn’t get nervous in a sticky situation.

So far, SWORDS has been used for street patrols, reconnaissance, sniping, checkpoint security, and guarding observation posts. It bodes to be especially useful for urban warfare jobs, such as going first into buildings and alleyways where insurgents might hide. SWORDS’s inhuman capabilities could well result in even more intrepid missions. For example, the robot can drive through snow and sand, and can even drive underwater down to depths of one hundred feet, meaning it could pop up in quite unexpected places. Likewise, its battery allows it to be hidden somewhere in “sleep” mode for at least seven days and then wake up to shoot away at any foes.

Foster-Miller and iRobot feel a keen sense of competition with each other. At iRobot, researchers describe their rivals as thinking, “We hear that robots are trendy, so let’s do that.” At Foster-Miller, they retort, “We don’t just do robots and we don’t suck dirt.” (Indeed, thanks to its Roomba vacuum cleaner, iRobot may be the only company that sells at both Pentagon trade shows and Bed Bath & Beyond.) The two companies have even become locked in a bit of a marketing war. If robots were pickup trucks, Foster-Miller represents the Ford model, stressing how the Talon is “Built Tough.” Its promotional materials describe the Talon as “The Soldier’s Choice.” Foster-Miller executives love to recount tales of how the Talon has proven it “can take a punch and stay in the fight.” The iRobot team, meanwhile, bristles at the idea that its systems are “agile but fragile.” They insist that the PackBot is tough, too, citing various statistics on how it can survive a 400 g-force hit, what they describe as the equivalent of being tossed out of a hovering helicopter onto a concrete floor. They are most proud of the fact that their robots have a 95 percent out-of-the-box reliability rate, higher than any other in the marketplace, meaning that when the soldiers get them in the field, they can trust the robot will work as designed.

Beneath all the difference and rancor, the two companies are similar in one telling way. The hallways and cubicles of both of their offices are covered with pictures and thank-you letters from soldiers in the field. A typical note from an EOD soldier reads, “This little guy saved our butts on many occasions.”

Future Ground-Bots

Foster-Miller’s SWORDS was not the first ground robot to draw blood on the battlefield. That seems to have been the MARCBOT (Multi-Function Agile Remote-Controlled Robot), a commonly-used UGV that looks like a toy truck with a video camera mounted on a tiny antenna-like mast. Costing only $5,000, the tiny bot is used to scout out where the enemy might be and also to drive under cars and search for hidden explosives. One unit of soldiers put Claymore antipersonnel mines on their MARCBOTs. Whenever they thought insurgents were hiding in an alley, they would send a MARCBOT down first, not just to scout out the ambush, but to take them out with the Claymore. Of course, each discovered insurgent meant $5,000 worth of blown-up robot parts, but so far the Army hasn’t billed the soldiers.

Meanwhile, both iRobot and Foster-Miller are hard at work on the next generation of UGVs. For testing purposes, iRobot’s PackBot has been equipped with a shotgun that can fire a variety of ammunition, including non-lethal rubber bullets, rounds that can blow down a door, and even more powerful “elephant killer” bullets. Another version of PackBot is the Robotic Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers (REDOWL), which uses lasers and sound detection equipment to find any sniper who dares to shoot at the robot or accompanying troops, and instantly targets him with an infrared laser beam.

Foster-Miller has similar plans to upgrade its current generation of ground robots. For example, the first version of the armed SWORDS needed the remote human operator to be situated within a mile or two, which can still put the human in danger. The company plans to vastly extend the range of communications so as to get ground robot operators completely off the battlefield. And the SWORDS itself is being replaced by a new version named after the Roman god of war—the MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System), which carries a more powerful machine gun, 40mm grenade launchers, and, for non-lethal settings, a green laser “dazzler,” tear gas, and a loudspeaker, perfect for warning any insurgents that “Resistance is futile.”

We will also soon see entirely new armed UGVs hit the battlefield. One such prototype is the Gladiator. Described as the “world’s first multipurpose combat robot,” it came out of a partnership between the U.S. Marine Corps and Carnegie Mellon University. About the size of a golf cart, the first version of the vehicle was operated by a soldier wielding a PlayStation video game controller, but software plug-ins will allow it to be upgraded to semiautonomous and then fully autonomous modes. Fully loaded, it costs $400,000 and carries a machine gun with six hundred rounds of ammunition, antitank rockets, and non-lethal weapons.

Not all future UGVs, it should be noted, will take on combat roles. Some are being designed as “medbots,” to supplement the work of field medics. The Bloodhound, yet another version of the PackBot, will be able to search on its own for a hurt soldier; it can then be remotely controlled to provide rudimentary treatment. The next step will be specially designed medbots, such as REV and REX. REV, the Robotic Evacuation Vehicle (a robot version of an ambulance), carries REX, the Robotic Extraction Vehicle, a tiny stretcher-bearer that zips out to drag soldiers into the safety of the ambulance. REX has an arm with six joints to drag a soldier to safety, while REV has a life-support pod that even comes with a flat-screen TV facing the wounded soldier’s face so that operators can see and communicate with the human on the other end if he is conscious. Ultimately, REV will be configured so that complex surgeries can occur inside the medbot.

Coordinating many of the ground robots on the drawing boards is the U.S. Army’s $230 billion Future Combat Systems (FCS) program. It involves everything from replacing tens of thousands of armored vehicles with a new generation of manned and unmanned vehicles to writing the many millions of lines of software code for the new computers that will link them all together. Starting in 2011, the Army plans to start spiraling a few new technologies at a time into the force. By 2015, the Army believes it will be in a position to reorganize its units into new FCS brigades, which will represent a revolutionary new model of how military units are staffed and organized. Each brigade will actually have more unmanned vehicles than manned ones (a planned 330 unmanned to 300 manned). Each brigade will also have its own unmanned air force, with over a hundred drones controlled by the unit’s soldiers. They will range in size from a fifteen-pounder that will fit in soldiers’ backpacks to a twenty-three-foot-long robotic helicopter.

Up, Up, and Away

Military robots have also taken to the skies. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), like the now-well-known Predator and Global Hawk, made their debut in the Balkan wars in the 1990s, gathering information on Serb air defenses and refugee flows. These drones are an indispensable part of the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, but commanders’ attitudes toward them were very different just a few years ago. Lieutenant General Walter Buchanan, the U.S. Air Force commander in the Middle East, recalled the run-up to the Iraq war in an interview with Air Force Magazine:

In March of 2002, [during] the mission briefings over Southern Iraq at that time, the mission commander would get up and he’d say, “OK, we’re going to have the F-15Cs fly here, the F-16s are going to fly here, the A-6s are going to fly here, tankers are going to be here today.” Then they would say, “And oh by the way, way over here is going to be the Predator.” We don’t go over there, and he’s not going to come over here and bother us.... It was almost like nobody wanted to talk to them.

This is far from the case today. The Predator, perhaps the best known UAV, is a twenty-seven-foot-long plane that can spend some twenty-four hours in the air, flying at heights of up to 26,000 feet. Given its price tag—at just $4.5 million, it costs a fraction of what a manned fighter jet costs—the Predator can be used for missions where it might be shot down, such as traveling low and slow over enemy territory. It was originally designed for reconnaissance and surveillance, and about a quarter of the cost of each Predator actually goes into the “Ball,” a round mounting under the nose that carries two variable-aperture TV cameras, one for seeing during the day and an infrared one for night, as well as a synthetic-aperture radar that allows the Predator to peer through clouds, smoke, or dust. The exact capabilities of the system are classified, but soldiers say they can read a license plate from two miles up.

Predators don’t just watch from afar; they have also been armed to kill. The back-story of how this happened is one of the sad “what ifs?” of what could have been done to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Over the course of 2000 and 2001, Predators operated by the CIA spotted Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan many times, usually when he was driving in a convoy between his training camps. But the unmanned spy planes were toothless and could only watch as bin Laden disappeared. Proposals to arm the drone by mounting laser-guided Hellfire missiles on its wings were not pursued.

After 9/11, the gloves were taken off, and the CIA and Air Force armed their Predators. In the first year, armed Predators took out some 115 targets in Afghanistan on their own. (That’s in addition to the thousands of targets that were destroyed by other means after they were laser-designated by Predators.) With that precedent, the Predator also joined the fight in Iraq. Among its first missions was to help take down the Iraqi government’s television transmissions, which broadcast the infamous “Baghdad Bob” propaganda. In the days and weeks that followed, the Predator struck at everything from suspected insurgent safe houses to cars being prepped for suicide attacks. The little drone has quickly become perhaps the busiest U.S. asset in the air. From June 2005 to June 2006, Predators carried out 2,073 missions, flew 33,833 hours, surveyed 18,490 targets, and participated in 242 separate raids. Even with this massive effort, there is demand for more. Officers estimate that they get requests for some 300 hours of Predator imagery a day, but that there are only enough Predators in the air to supply a little over 100 hours a day. The result is that the Predator fleet has grown from less than 10 in 2001 to some 180 in 2007, with plans to add another 150 over the next few years.

Besides the Predator, there are many other drones that fill the air over Iraq and Afghanistan. At forty feet long, Global Hawk has been described as looking like “a flying albino whale.” Originally conceived as an unmanned replacement for the half-century-old U-2 spy plane, Global Hawk can stay aloft up to thirty-five hours. Powered by a turbofan engine that takes it to sixty-five thousand feet, the stealthy Global Hawk carries synthetic-aperture radar, infrared sensors, and electro-optical cameras. Working in combination, these sensors can do a wide-area search to look at an entire region, or focus in on a single target in high resolution. Like the Predator, the Global Hawk is linked back to humans on the ground, but it mainly operates autonomously rather than being remotely piloted. Using a computer mouse, the operator just clicks to tell it to taxi and take off, and the drone flies off on its own. The plane then carries out its mission, getting directions on where to fly from GPS coordinates downloaded off a satellite. Upon its return, “you basically hit the land button,” describes one retired Air Force officer.

With such capability, the Global Hawk is not cheap. The plane itself costs some $35 million, but the overall support system runs to over $123 million each. Even so, the U.S. Air Force plans to spend another $6 billion to build up the fleet to fifty-one drones by 2012.

The Predators and Global Hawks are mostly directed by personnel in Air Force bases back in the United States, but a veritable menagerie of UAVs now circling above Iraq are controlled by troops on the ground. Big Army units fly the Shadow, which looks like the radio-controlled planes flown by model plane hobbyists. Just over twelve feet long, it takes off and lands like a regular plane, and its propeller makes it sound like a weed-whacker flying overhead; it can stay in the air for five hours and fly seventy miles. Like its older sibling the Hunter, which is twice as big and can stay in the air twice as long, the Shadow is used on a variety of tactical missions in support of ground forces, including reconnaissance, target acquisition, and battlefield damage assessment.

The Raven, the most popular UAV, is just thirty-eight inches long and weighs four pounds; it is launched by tossing it into the air like a javelin. The Raven then buzzes off, able to fly for ninety minutes at about four hundred feet, carrying three cameras in its nose, including an infrared one. Soldiers love it because they can now peer over the next hill or city block, as well as get their own spy planes to control, rather than having to beg for support from the higher-ups. “You throw the bird up when you want to throw it. You land it when you want to land,” says Captain Matt Gill, a UAV company commander with the 82nd Airborne Division. The other part of the appeal is that the pilots of the Raven are just regular soldiers; one cook from the 1st Cavalry Division is actually considered among the best pilots in the entire force. In just the first two years of the Iraq war, the number of Ravens in service jumped from twenty-five to eight hundred.

The small UAVs, like the Raven or the even smaller Wasp, fly just above the rooftops, sending back video images of what’s on the other side of the street; Shadow and Hunter circle over entire neighborhoods; the larger Predators roam above entire cities, combining reconnaissance with the ability to shoot; and too high to see, the Global Hawk zooms across an entire country, capturing reams of detailed imagery for intelligence teams to sift through. Added together, by 2008, there were 5,331 drones in the U.S. military’s inventory, almost double the number of manned fighter planes. That same year, an Air Force lieutenant general forecast that “given the growth trends, it is not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands.”

Among the UAVs likely to see action in those future conflicts will be Predators reconfigured for electronic warfare, submarine hunting, and even air-to-air combat; the Reaper, a bigger, smarter, and more powerful successor to the Predator; a variety of planned micro-UAVs, some the size of insects; the Peregrine, a drone designed to find and shoot down other drones; and even an unmanned stealth bomber. And it’s not just intelligence and bomber pilots who will be replaced with machines; planning is proceeding on UCAVs, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, which will replace fighter jocks, too.

Meanwhile, DARPA is working on a VULTURE (Very-high-altitude, Ultra-endurance, Loitering Theater Unmanned Reconnaissance Element) drone, which the agency hopes will be able to stay aloft for as long as five years. We may even see the return of blimps to warfare. Lockheed Martin has been given $150 million to design and build a robotic “High Altitude Airship” twenty-five times larger than the Goodyear blimp. Such huge, long-endurance blimps open up a whole new range of roles not normally possible for planes. For example, airships could literally be “parked” in the air, as high as one hundred thousand feet up, for weeks, months, or years, serving as a communications relay, spy satellite, hub for a ballistic missile defense system, floating gas station, or even airstrip for other planes and drones.

The Pentagon has also started work on a number of unmanned systems for potential use in space, although most are still only on the drawing boards. And a broad new set of robots is being introduced for war at sea, too, where the main differentiation is whether they are designed to operate on the surface, like a boat, or underwater, like a submarine. The former are called USVs (unmanned surface vehicles or vessels). They actually have a great deal in common with the simpler land robots, as they both primarily operate in a two-dimensional world, and can be equipped with sensors and guns. The Spartan Scout, one such USV, got its first real-world use in the Iraq war in 2003, inspecting small civilian boats in the Persian Gulf without risking sailors’ lives. The boat also mounts a loudspeaker and microphone, so an Arab linguist back on the “mothership” could interrogate any suspicious boats that the Spartan Scout had stopped. As one report put it, “The civilian sailors were somewhat taken aback when they were interrogated by this Arab-speaking boat that had no one aboard.”

The other type of navybots are UUVs (unmanned underwater vehicles). These are designed for underwater roles such as searching for mines, the cause of most naval combat losses over the last two decades. Many UUVs are biologically inspired, like the “Robo-lobster,” which operates in the choppy waters close to shore. But others are mini-submarines or converted torpedoes—like the REMUS (Remote Environmental Monitoring Unit), which was used to clear Iraqi waterways of mines and explosives.
Impersonalizing War

The hope that technology will reduce the violence of war is a venerable one. The poet John Donne told in 1621 how the invention of better cannons would help limit the cruelty and crimes of war, “and the great expence of bloud is avoyed.” Richard Gatling hoped his new fast-firing gun would serve to reduce the bloodshed of war, while Alfred Nobel believed the explosives he invented would make war unthinkable. Now, some analysts believe that robot warriors can help reduce the flow of blood and perhaps make war more moral.

In some ways, this seems reasonable. Many wartime atrocities are not the result of deliberate policy, wanton cruelty, or fits of anger; they’re just mistakes. They are equivalent to the crime of manslaughter, as compared to murder, in civilian law. Unmanned systems seem to offer several ways of reducing the mistakes and unintended costs of war. They have far better sensors and processing power, which creates a precision superior to what humans could marshal on their own. Such exactness can lessen the number of mistakes made, as well as the number of civilians inadvertently killed. For example, even as recently as the 1999 Kosovo war, NATO pilots spotting for Serbian military targets on the ground had to fly over the suspected enemy position, then put their plane on autopilot while they wrote down the coordinates of the target on their lap with a grease pencil. They would then radio the coordinates back to base, where planners would try to figure out if there were too many civilians nearby. If not, the base would order an attack, usually made by another plane. That new plane, just arriving on the scene, would carry out the attack using the directions of the spotter plane, if it was still there, or the relayed coordinates. Each step was filled with potential for miscommunications and unintended errors. Plus, by the time a decision had been made, the situation on the ground might have changed—the military target might have moved or civilians might have entered the area.

Compare this with a UAV today that can fly over the target and send precise GPS coordinates and live video back to the operators; it is easy to see how collateral damage can be greatly reduced by robotic precision.

The unmanning of the operation also means that the robot can take risks that a human wouldn’t otherwise, risks that might mean fewer mistakes. During that Kosovo campaign, for example, such a premium was placed on not losing any NATO pilots that planes were restricted from flying below fifteen thousand feet so that enemy fire couldn’t hit them. In one case, NATO planes flying at this level bombed a convoy of vehicles, thinking they were Serbian tanks. It turned out to be a convoy of refugee buses. If the planes could have flown lower or had the high-powered video camera of a drone, this tragic mistake might have been avoided.

The removal of risk also allows decisions to be made in a more deliberate manner than normally possible. Soldiers describe how one of the toughest aspects of fighting in cities is how you have to burst into a building and, in a matter of milliseconds, figure out who is an enemy and who is a civilian and shoot the ones that are a threat before they shoot you, all the while avoiding hitting any civilians. You can practice again and again, but you can never fully avoid the risk of making a terrible mistake in that split second, in a dark room, in the midst of battle. By contrast, a robot can enter the room and only shoot at someone who shoots first, without endangering a soldier’s life.

Many also feel that unmanned systems can remove the anger and emotion from the humans behind them. A remote operator isn’t in the midst of combat and isn’t watching his buddies die around him as his adrenaline spikes; he can take his time and act deliberately in ways that can lessen the likelihood of civilians being killed. Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch told me how “the single most distinguishing weapons I have seen in my career were Israeli UAVs.” He described how, unlike jet fighters that had to swoop in fast and make decisions on what targets to bomb in a matter of seconds, the UAVs he observed during the 2006 Lebanon war could loiter over a potential target for minutes or even hours, and pick and choose what to strike or not. In Vietnam, an astounding fifty thousand rounds of ammunition were expended for every enemy killed. Robots, on the other hand, might live up to the sniper motto of “one shot, one kill.” As journalist Michael Fumento put it in describing SWORDS, the operator “can coolly pick out targets as if playing a video game.”

But as journalist Chuck Klosterman put it, a person playing video games is usually “not a benevolent God.” We do things in the virtual world, daring and violent things, that we would never do if we were there in person. Transferred to war, this could mean that the robotic technologies that make war less intimate and more mediated might well reduce the likelihood of anger-fueled rages, but also make some soldiers too calm, too unaffected by killing. Many studies, like Army psychologist Dave Grossman’s seminal book On Killing (1995), have shown how disconnecting a person, especially via distance, makes killing easier and abuses and atrocities more likely. D. Keith Shurtleff, an Army chaplain and the ethics instructor for the Soldier Support Institute at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, worries that “as war becomes safer and easier, as soldiers are removed from the horrors of war and see the enemy not as humans but as blips on a screen, there is a very real danger of losing the deterrent that such horrors provide.”

Participation via the virtual world also seems to affect not merely how people look at the target, but also how they look at themselves (which is why people in online communities, for example, take on identities and try out behaviors they never would in real life). Research shows that this sort of “externalization” allows something called “doubling.” Otherwise nice and normal people create psychic doubles that carry out sometimes terrible acts their normal identity never would. One Air Force lieutenant colonel who led a Predator operation noticed how the virtual setting could make it easy for the drone operators to forget that they were not gods from afar and that there are real humans on both ends. “You have guys running the UAV saying, ‛Kill that one, don’t kill that one.’” Each new military technology, from the bow and arrow to the bomber plane, has moved soldiers farther and farther from their foes. Yet unmanned systems have a more profound effect on “the impersonalization of battle,” as military historian John Keegan has called it. These weapons don’t just create greater physical distance, but also a different sort of psychological distance and disconnection. The bomber pilot isn’t just above his target, but seven thousand miles away. He doesn’t share with his foes even those brief minutes of danger that would give them a bond of mutual risk.

We, Robot

As military robots gain more and more autonomy, the ethical questions involved will become even more complex. The U.S. military bends over backwards to figure out when it is appropriate to engage the enemy and how to limit civilian casualties. Autonomous robots could, in theory, follow the rules of engagement; they could be programmed with a list of criteria for determining appropriate targets and when shooting is permissible. The robot might be programmed to require human input if any civilians were detected. An example of such a list at work might go as follows: “Is the target a Soviet-made T-80 tank? Identification confirmed. Is the target located in an authorized free-fire zone? Location confirmed. Are there any friendly units within a 200-meter radius? No friendlies detected. Are there any civilians within a 200-meter radius? No civilians detected. Weapons release authorized. No human command authority required.”

Such an “ethical” killing machine, though, may not prove so simple in the reality of war. Even if a robot has software that follows all the various rules of engagement, and even if it were somehow absolutely free of software bugs and hardware failures (a big assumption), the very question of figuring out who an enemy is in the first place—that is, whether a target should even be considered for the list of screening questions—is extremely complicated in modern war. It essentially is a judgment call. It becomes further complicated as the enemy adapts, changes his conduct, and even hides among civilians. If an enemy is hiding behind a child, is it okay to shoot or not? Or what if an enemy is plotting an attack but has not yet carried it out? Politicians, pundits, and lawyers can fill pages arguing these points. It is unreasonable to expect robots to find them any easier.

The legal questions related to autonomous systems are also extremely sticky. In 2002, for example, an Air National Guard pilot in an F-16 saw flashing lights underneath him while flying over Afghanistan at twenty-three thousand feet and thought he was under fire from insurgents. Without getting required permission from his commanders, he dropped a 500-pound bomb on the lights. They instead turned out to be troops from Canada on a night training mission. Four were killed and eight wounded. In the hearings that followed, the pilot blamed the ubiquitous “fog of war” for his mistake. It didn’t matter and he was found guilty of dereliction of duty.

Change this scenario to an unmanned system and military lawyers aren’t sure what to do. Asks a Navy officer, “If these same Canadian forces had been attacked by an autonomous UCAV, determining who is accountable proves difficult. Would accountability lie with the civilian software programmers who wrote the faulty target identification software, the UCAV squadron’s Commanding Officer, or the Combatant Commander who authorized the operational use of the UCAV? Or are they collectively held responsible and accountable?”

This is the main reason why military lawyers are so concerned about robots being armed and autonomous. As long as “man is in the loop,” traditional accountability can be ensured. Breaking this restriction opens up all sorts of new and seemingly irresolvable legal questions about accountability.

In time, the international community may well decide that armed, autonomous robots are simply too difficult, or even abhorrent, to deal with. Like chemical weapons, they could be banned in general, for no other reason than the world doesn’t want them around. Yet for now, our laws are simply silent on whether autonomous robots can be armed with lethal weapons. Even more worrisome, the concept of keeping human beings in the loop is already being eroded by policymakers and by the technology itself, both of which are rapidly moving toward pushing humans out. We therefore must either enact a ban on such systems soon or start to develop some legal answers for how to deal with them.

If we do stay on this path and decide to make and use autonomous robots in war, the systems must still conform with the existing laws of war. These laws suggest a few principles that should guide the development of such systems.

First, since it will be very difficult to guarantee that autonomous robots can, as required by the laws of war, discriminate between civilian and military targets and avoid unnecessary suffering, they should be allowed the autonomous use only of non-lethal weapons. That is, while the very same robot might also carry lethal weapons, it should be programmed such that only a human can authorize their use.

Second, just as any human’s right to self-defense is limited, so too should be a robot’s. This sounds simple enough, but oddly the Pentagon has already pushed the legal interpretation that our drones have an inherent right to self-defense, including even to preemptively fire on potential threats, such as an anti-aircraft radar system that lights them up. There is a logic to this argument, but it leads down a very dark pathway; self-defense must not be permitted to trump other relevant ethical concerns.

Third, the human creators and operators of autonomous robots must be held accountable for the machines’ actions. (Dr. Frankenstein shouldn’t get a free pass for his monster’s misdeeds.) If a programmer gets an entire village blown up by mistake, he should be criminally prosecuted, not get away scot-free or merely be punished with a monetary fine his employer’s insurance company will end up paying. Similarly, if some future commander deploys an autonomous robot and it turns out that the commands or programs he authorized the robot to operate under somehow contributed to a violation of the laws of war, or if his robot were deployed into a situation where a reasonable person could guess that harm would occur, even unintentionally, then it is proper to hold the commander responsible.

To ensure that responsibility falls where it should, there should be clear ways to track the authority in the chain of design, manufacture, ownership, and use of unmanned systems, all the way from the designer and maker to the commanders in the field. This principle of responsibility is not simply intended for us to be able to figure out whom to punish after the fact; by establishing at the start who is ultimately responsible for getting things right, it might add a dose of deterrence into the system before things go wrong.

Not merely scientists, but everyone from theologians (who helped create the first laws of war) to the human rights and arms control communities must start looking at where this technological revolution is taking both our weapons and laws. These discussions and debates also need to be global, as the issues of robotics cross national lines (forty-three countries now have military robotics programs). Over time, some sort of consensus might emerge—if not banning the use of all autonomous robots with lethal weapons, then perhaps banning just certain types of robots (such as ones not made of metal, which would be hard to detect and thus of most benefit to terrorist groups).

Some critics will argue against any international discussions or against creating new laws that act to restrict what can be done in war and research. As Steven Metz of the Army War College says, “You have to remember that many consider international law to be a form of asymmetric warfare, limiting our choices, tying us down.” Yet history tells us that, time and again, the society that builds an ethical rule of law and stands by its values is the one that ultimately prevails on the battlefield. There is a “bottom line” reason for why we should adhere to the laws of war, explains a U.S. Air Force major general. “The more society adheres to ethical norms, democratic values, and individual rights, the more successful a warfighter that society will be.”

So as we begin to wrestle with the problems that robots present for the laws of war, we might find instructive the wisdom from a past generation that grappled with a revolutionary and fearsome new technology (in that case, atomic weapons). As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.”

P. W. Singer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the director of the institution’s 21st Century Defense Initiative. This essay is adapted from his new book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, just published by Penguin.

Dr. Strangelove trailer

2009-01-27T12:08:00.005-05:00

Dr. Strangelove

2009-01-27T12:08:00.004-05:00

The famous phone call to Moscow sequence

Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove Depicted Classified Plans

2009-01-27T12:03:00.002-05:00

Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and LOVE the Bomb

2009-01-27T11:56:00.001-05:00

From the Wikipedia article on the film: Kubrick started with nothing but a vague idea to make a thriller about a nuclear accident, building on the widespread Cold War fear for survival. While doing in-depth research for the planned film, Kubrick gradually became aware of the subtle and unstable "Balance of terror" existing between nuclear powers and its intrinsically paradoxical character. At Kubrick's request, Alistair Buchan (the head of the Institute for Strategic Studies), recommended the thriller novel Red Alert (1958) by Peter George. Kubrick was impressed with the book, which had also been praised by game theorist and future Nobel Prize in Economics winner Thomas Schelling in an article written for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and reprinted in The Observer, and immediately bought the film rights. Kubrick, in collaboration with George, started work on writing a screenplay based on the book. While writing the screenplay, they benefited from some brief consultations with Schelling and, later, Herman Kahn. In following the tone of the book, Stanley Kubrick originally intended to film the story as a serious drama. However, as he later explained during interviews, the comedy inherent in the idea of mutual assured destruction became apparent as he was writing the first draft of the film's script. Kubrick stated: My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came in the early weeks of working on the screenplay. I found that in trying to put meat on the bones and to imagine the scenes fully, one had to keep leaving out of it things which were either absurd or paradoxical, in order to keep it from being funny; and these things seemed to be close to the heart of the scenes in question. After deciding to turn the film into a black comedy, Kubrick brought in Terry Southern as a co-writer. The choice was influenced by reading Southern's comic novel The Magic Christian (1959), which Kubrick had received as a gift from Peter Sellers. Sellers is also sometimes considered an uncredited co-writer, as he changed many lines by way of improvisation.

The end of the film shows Dr. Strangelove exclaiming "Mein Führer, I can walk!" before cutting to footage of nuclear explosions, but it was originally intended that the film would end with everyone in the War Room involved in a pie fight, and this scene was filmed.
Accounts vary as to why the pie fight was cut. In a 1969 interview, Kubrick said: "I decided it was farce and not consistent with the satiric tone of the rest of the film." Alexander Walker observed that "the cream pies were flying around so thickly that people lost definition, and you couldn't really say whom you were looking at." Nile Southern, son of screenwriter Terry Southern, suggests that the fight was intended to be less jovial. "Since they were laughing, it was unusable, because instead of having that totally black, which would have been amazing, like, this blizzard, which in a sense is metaphorical for all of the missiles that are coming, as well, you just have these guys having a good old time. So, as Kubrick later said, 'it was a disaster of Homeric proportions.'"
. . . .
Dr. Strangelove takes passing shots at numerous Cold War attitudes, such as the "missile gap", but it primarily focuses its satire on the theory of mutual assured destruction (MAD), in which each side is supposed to be deterred by the fact that a nuclear war would be a cataclysmic disaster for both sides, regardless of who "won". Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War used the concept of a doomsday machine in order to mock mutually assured destruction; in effect, Kahn argued, both sides already had a sort of doomsday machine. Kahn, a leading critic of American strategy during the 1950s, urged Americans to plan for a limited nuclear war, and later became one of the architects of the MAD doctrine in the 1960s. The prevailing thinking that a nuclear war was inherently unwinnable and suicide was illogical to the physicist turned strategist. Kahn came off as cold and calculating; for instance, in his works, he estimated how many human lives the United States could lose and still rebuild economically. This attitude is reflected in Turgidson's remark to the president about the outcome of a pre-emptive nuclear war: "Now I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I am saying no more than 10 to 20 million killed. Tops!" Turgidson also has a binder which is labeled "World Targets in Megadeaths".
Many have compared the portrayals of Ripper and Turgidson to the fiery Air Force general, Curtis LeMay, and many of his direct subordinates who openly lobbied for war with the Soviet Union.
. . . .

Also see:

A loooong analysis of Dr. Strangelove at filmsite.org

Dr. Strangelove fan site

2009-01-27T11:43:00.002-05:00

ON LA JETÉE: By Ashley Sauers

Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetee is an ethereal and enigmatical visual poem on the backlash of technology in a post-apocalyptic world. The film centers on an anonymous character simply referred to as “the man whose story we are telling.” Also like the man, the narrator is ensconced in anonymity; this is a story of but two names: Victors and Dr. Frankenstein. Marker borrows his character names from Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein but instead of “Dr. Victor Frankenstein,” he splits it into two identities, the Victors, a band of self-proclaimed important survivors who work for Dr. Frankenstein, a veritable tyrant with a calm, manipulative demeanor. Thus, hanging over Marker’s film is the implication of Shelley’s characters where Dr. Victor Frankenstein plays the role of creator as destructor while “the man” is the hapless Creature fallen to the status of a guinea pig. The covert motive of the intelligence, a detriment to the advancement of humankind, is to maintain homogeny and deliver themselves and to destroy the outlanders, or the man. Marker fully expresses this idea when the man and woman visit the museum and strangely ogle over the taxidermied animals. One would think the zoo, a place with living albeit imprisoned animals, would captivate them even more. But one must consider the rudimentary principle of taxidermy to clearly comprehend the significance, which is a mere preservation of the dead for display. The scene fuses a symbolic parallel between the dead animals and the man and woman who live in a world where they are patrolled by Victors and Dr. Frankenstein. To them, the man and woman are apart of an ‘empire of rats’ as the narrator refers to them as. To compare humans to rats is to denounce them as individuals, to write them off as mere invalids of existence. More importantly, the narrator, presumably biased, articulates the astronomical difference between the intelligence and the common people. Essentially, that they are God like in their supreme authority and everyone else is a rat, mindlessly wallowing
While La Jetee is a science fiction film it illustrates an important idea applicable to our present world and that is the question of authority and who really possesses. It asks the viewer to examine the constrictions on their own life set by our modern day equivalent of Victors and Dr. Frankenstein, the government. The man in La Jetee endures torture because he consents to it by the intelligence, assuming that their intentions are good and sincere; the end proves his own fatality.
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Argue! ..I'm probably off..
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Also, watching this movie reminded me to revisit ALPHAVILLE by Jean-Luc Godard
full length is streaming here! - http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/alphaville.php

New Study Shows Climate Change Largely Irreversible

2009-01-27T09:53:00.004-05:00

File this under Really, Really Bad News:

From the webpage of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:
January 26, 2009

A new scientific study led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reaches a powerful conclusion about the climate change caused by future increases of carbon dioxide: to a large extent, there’s no going back.

The pioneering study, led by NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon, shows how changes in surface temperature, rainfall, and sea level are largely irreversible for more than 1,000 years after carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are completely stopped. The findings appear during the week of January 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet,” said Solomon, who is based at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

“It has long been known that some of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years,” Solomon said. “But the new study advances the understanding of how this affects the climate system.”

The study examines the consequences of allowing CO2 to build up to several different peak levels beyond present-day concentrations of 385 parts per million and then completely halting the emissions after the peak. The authors found that the scientific evidence is strong enough to quantify some irreversible climate impacts, including rainfall changes in certain key regions, and global sea level rise.

If CO2 is allowed to peak at 450-600 parts per million, the results would include persistent decreases in dry-season rainfall that are comparable to the 1930s North American Dust Bowl in zones including southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern North America, southern Africa and western Australia.

The study notes that decreases in rainfall that last not just for a few decades but over centuries are expected to have a range of impacts that differ by region. Such regional impacts include decreasing human water supplies, increased fire frequency, ecosystem change and expanded deserts. Dry-season wheat and maize agriculture in regions of rain-fed farming, such as Africa, would also be affected.

Climate impacts were less severe at lower peak levels. But at all levels added carbon dioxide and its climate effects linger because of the ocean.

“In the long run, both carbon dioxide loss and heat transfer depend on the same physics of deep-ocean mixing. The two work against each other to keep temperatures almost constant for more than a thousand years, and that makes carbon dioxide unique among the major climate gases,” said Solomon.

The scientists emphasize that increases in CO2 that occur in this century “lock in” sea level rise that would slowly follow in the next 1,000 years. Considering just the expansion of warming ocean waters—without melting glaciers and polar ice sheets—the authors find that the irreversible global average sea level rise by the year 3000 would be at least 1.3–3.2 feet (0.4–1.0 meter) if CO2 peaks at 600 parts per million, and double that amount if CO2 peaks at 1,000 parts per million.

“Additional contributions to sea level rise from the melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets are too uncertain to quantify in the same way,” said Solomon. “They could be even larger but we just don’t have the same level of knowledge about those terms. We presented the minimum sea level rise that we can expect from well-understood physics, and we were surprised that it was so large.”

Rising sea levels would cause “…irreversible commitments to future changes in the geography of the Earth, since many coastal and island features would ultimately become submerged,” the authors write.

Geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was not considered in the study. “Ideas about taking the carbon dioxide away after the world puts it in have been proposed, but right now those are very speculative,” said Solomon.

The authors relied on measurements as well as many different models to support the understanding of their results. They focused on drying of particular regions and on thermal expansion of the ocean because observations suggest that humans are contributing to changes that have already been measured.

Besides Solomon, the study’s authors are Gian-Kasper Plattner and Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Pierre Friedlingstein of Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Gif-Sur-Yvette, France.

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth's environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

'Wired For War' Explores Robots On The Battlefield

2009-01-23T09:16:00.007-05:00

Occasionally, I'd like to use this blog to post articles, or links to online resources, that address our major subject area. Today's post is a good example.
Yesterday's Fresh Air, the NPR interview show, featured P. W. Singer, who's written a book on how robot technology is changing warfare. You can find it by following this link:

Wired For War Explores Robots On The Battlefield

The reason I call your attention to this story is that Singer goes beyond simply noting the technological advances in warfare. He considers probable effects of robot technology in our decisions about when and how to make war--he theorizes, for example, that civilian populations will be targeted more when they can be easily attacked from a distance rather than by direct assault of human-on-human; and that with the development of such technology, there'll be an obvious economic interest in cultivating inhumanity (as one might say there always has been in traditional arms sales).

La Jetée

2009-01-21T18:39:00.003-05:00

2009-01-21T18:26:00.002-05:00

OUR TOPIC this semester for the study of modern society is Children of Frankenstein: Technophobia, Technophilia, and the Redefinition of Human Being. The rapid development of new industrial and post-industrial technologies is the pre-eminent characteristic of the modern era. It has transformed our essential relation to nature, to work, and to society and the state—as we’ll discuss as we explore responses to technological change in the environmentalist writings of Bill McKibben and Henry David Thoreau, the social theories of Marx and Rousseau, and the apocalyptic visions of film directors such as Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick. As we now inhabit a technosphere—bounded by our relation to technology rather than to nature—new media of representation themselves come to define how we understand our humanity, and we have re-imagined ourselves as robots, androids, and cyborgs. Our central text, written by a young woman the age of most sophomore college students, embodies in a modern myth the crucial idea that new technologies may overwhelm humanity entirely. Frankenstein’s monster, which has long since escaped from the boundaries of Mary Shelley’s novel to haunt the imagery and ideologies of modern culture, has proved a lasting and focal means for society to express its love and fear of the power of new technologies.