Facebook wants to get in on the currency business. They are creating a new form of digital payment called Libra and calling it a cryptocurrency. It isn’t really, but it relies on the same technology, the blockchain. A blockchain is a software product—a bunch of computer code that enables a task. In this case the creation and maintenance of a ledger, or record-keeping system.

Blockchains are appealing because they rely on a distributed network of nodes and users. They are decentralized and thus theoretically more secure and more robust than any one particular data location. At least that’s what the computer geniuses say, and I’m not here to argue with them.

The Libra blockchain will be run by a non-profit composed of a lot of fancy folks. Here’s a nice graphic about it:

The wiggly-wavey thing is the symbol for Libra currency. Users of Libra will get a sort of PayPal on steroids. They will have a digital wallet and they can pay for things (and/or receive payment) wherever they have access to the wallet, be it on a computer or smartphone. If you have an internet connection you have a payment system. Libra’s goal is to be worldwide. You buy Libra with your local currency and get an equivalent amount of digital money, and since it is digital it can be moved around and transacted more readily than ordinary currency. And you avoid the payment of transaction fees like with credit cards (there are fees, just vanishingly small to the ordinary user).

You can’t make money with Libra. It is just a platform, and you can’t earn interest on your deposits in your digital wallet. But the whole thing is a money-making strategy for its investors. You got an extra ten million bucks? You can be one, too. People who invest ten million US dollars expect a return. And the Libra Investment Token will give them that. The more people who use Libra the more these investors will make, kind of like the old-fashioned pyramid schemes.

Libra is not a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin because Bitcoin derives its value from the underlying blockchain technology itself. People crunch numbers with computers to support the blockchain cryptography and they get paid in Bitcoin. Libra is more like a traditional investment. The Libra Association will invest in fiat currencies, government bonds, and other securities to guarantee a stable value for Libra. In that sense it is more like an ETF than a cryptocurrency. Due to the volatility of things like Bitcoin a market has emerged for what are known as stablecoins which are tied to real-world assets like commodities. Libra is closer to that.

Users of Libra coin gain access and convenience. For people who don’t use banks, this could be a real boon. Libra Investment Token holders will get rich, very rich, even if only a small percentage of Facebook’s user base of over two billion people participate.

And what does Facebook get out of all this? You won’t need a Facebook account to use Libra, and Facebook’s digital wallet, called Calibra, won’t require one either. Mark Zuckerberg will tell you it is about serving the under-served in the world financial marketplace, which is all very nice, but ultimately this is a for-profit company.

A digital platform is a digital platform. If people use it, you can use that platform to sell other products and services. I assume Facebook’s leap into new forms of currency is another version of their current business model.

Software is famous for bugs. And also for being marketed well before it is bug-free. Just look at the Boeing 737-MAX tragedies to see the consequences of that. I’m not going to put my money in a Libra coin/Calibra wallet just yet, but I won’t be surprised if we all have something like that in the very near future.

When you think about the amount of energy it takes to produce our food you could say we are actually just eating petroleum. Intensive agriculture requires a lot of fossil fuels especially when you include the packaging and shipping. I know that we actually eat the corn, wheat, apples, or blueberries, or stuff made from them, but you can’t have any of that without oil and gas.

The gas is methane. It is the cheapest and most abundant fuel source. And it burns the cleanest. The US, because of fracking, has so much natural gas (methane) that it just burns it (flaring) instead of processing and shipping it.

Now a company wants to make food from methane. They are called Calysta and they have backing from no less than BP, one of the world’s energy giants. This food is not for human consumption, at least not directly. The stuff, called FeedKind, is for aquaculture (fish farms) and other livestock. They even imagine it going to pets! These days pets get top-of-the-line stuff, no more Alpo and table scraps, so I’m not sure that will fly. Maybe pet owners on a budget.

These guys use bacteria to ferment a mixture of gases—the methane of course, along with oxygen and nitrogen—which produces a goop that they dry and make into pellets. Most people find that repulsive, but I think it is fascinating. Think of the benefit: production of edible protein without using farmland!

This is from the company website:

It takes a lot of energy to do this, but it takes a lot of energy to produce your morning cup of coffee. Some time in the future, when only rich people will be able to eat wild-caught salmon, the rest of us will be grubbing down on fat fillets from tank-raised gas-fed GMO beasts.

Yummy!

China is the largest producer of pork in the world. They slaughter over 600 million hogs annually and currently have a herd of over 400 million. Add those two together and you get a billion.

So it is a big deal that there have been outbreaks of African Swine Fever:

The disease has spread to neighboring countries like Vietnam and Laos. Herd culls are taking place all over Southeast Asia.

In the US we market over 100 million hogs per year and about one-fourth of that is exported. That’s a lot of food. You’d think a big agricultural disaster like losing tons of meat in a nation’s food supply would make a bigger impact. Maybe it is. After all, this is China, and we can’t be too sure about the information coming out of there.

Back in the States the only talk I see is about US producers perhaps taking advantage of the pork shortage. No one talks about all this lost energy—all this sad, preventable waste. Or about whether people will suffer because of it.

It is nice to have surpluses. You can’t have a civilization unless you over-produce basic commodities. In olden times, famine, plague, and pestilence could destroy a civilization. In today’s world a virus ravages millions of pounds of nutritionally-dense food and we get nothing more than a “market correction.”

At least I hope so. African Swine Fever makes for a great doomsday scenario. It spreads across the globe, mutates, and wipes out all of our livestock! Veganism conquers the world overnight.  I watched a lot of dystopian sci-fi flicks in the 70s: Silent Running, Rollerball, Soylent Green, Omega Man, Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, Westworld, The Andromeda Strain, etc.

Perhaps that wasn’t healthy for a growing boy.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!

I’m goin’ out on the highway

listen to them big trucks whi-ine

White Freightliner

Won’t you steal away my mind

–Townes Van Zandt (“White Freightliner Blues”)

Freightliner is an Oregon company now owned by Daimler Trucks. You’ve seen the tractors out there alongside the Kenworths, Macks, Peterbilts, and such, hauling trailers up and down the interstates. This is big business: $700 billion in 2017, almost 80% of the nation’s freight value. In physical terms that’s almost 11 billion tons of cargo or 70% of the domestic market.

We are all dependent on these machines. The industry likes to say if you got it, a trucker brought it. And they are right.

But that “big truck whine” might sound quite a bit different these days. Freightliner has a line of natural gas-powered haulers, for example, and they are also introducing two all-electric models, the eCascadia and the eM2 106. That guy with the space company gets all the hype, but he’s not, by any means, the only player in the market.

Obviously there are significant limitations. Electric heavy-duty rigs can only do short hauls of a few hundred miles. But according to the Bureau of Transportation Studies:

Approximately 50 percent of the weight and 37 percent of the value of goods were moved less than 100 miles between origin and destination in 2015. 

So there is a need for this kind of vehicle. In an increasingly urbanized society, reducing noise and pollution in densely-populated areas will improve the quality of life for the citizenry. The exciting thing is it that this isn’t some wannabe technology, there are actual deliveries happening. Costs will have to come down, of course, but I expect we’ll see electric semis operating in an around cities within the next few years.

The diesel engine is a marvelous invention and one that dominates our transportation sector, and for good reason. Diesels can be twice as efficient as ordinary gasoline automotive motors and are unsurpassed in torque, pulling power, and longevity. And they are becoming increasingly cleaner while maintaining a fuel flexibility that gas engines can’t match.

But EVs are here to stay and demand for them will continue to increase. Done right, the shifting of some of our transport needs to electricity can result in a net overall reduction of chemical pollutants. A natural gas-fired power plant can produce electrical energy for consumption with great efficiency and with significantly reduced emissions. Add in solar, hydro, and even nuclear and the percentage of “clean” power in the grid can continue to increase. We all benefit from that.

I wonder if Townes Van Zandt would still stand out on the highway, though. That Freightliner e-whine is probably more like music to my ears than to his!

The latest thing in telecomm these days is 5G. This is the new standard in digital cellular networks and the 2019 roll-out is here. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile are all either deploying 5G technology already or planning to by the end of the year.

“Faster” and “better” are the two words broadband users care most about, although I suspect “cheaper” still plays well. The techies tell us 5G will be faster and better, so who can argue with that?

These folks, it seems. There is resistance to this particularly technology and it is part of a larger concern over electrosmog, that is, excessive and harmful electromagnetic radiation.

Each day we are bathed in sunlight. Sunlight includes invisible waves like infrared (which we feel as heat) and ultraviolet (which cause sunburns and suntans) as well as the familiar rainbow spectrum of colors. All this stuff is electromagnetic (EM) radiation.

High-frequency electromagnetic waves include things like X-rays and gamma-rays which cause cell damage. These are known as “ionizing radiation” because the photons are energetic enough to remove electrons from atoms and molecules, creating ions. Extreme ultraviolet rays are also ionizing, but these have frequencies an order of magnitude higher than the UV in sunlight.

At frequencies lower than that of visible light (and infrared) we have the familiar radio waves and microwaves. Radio waves are very handy because they penetrate walls, thus we can receive radio and TV broadcasts indoors. That also means these waves pass through our bodies! So we are not only bathed in sunlight each day, we are bathed in radio waves as well, and while we can shade ourselves from sunlight we can’t from radio waves.

Radio waves can be enormous: signals from KNBR (680 kHz AM) are over 400 meters high! Microwaves are much smaller, between 1 millimeter and 1 meter. And microwaves can transmit information, just like radio waves, but they are limited by line-of-sight. Radio waves can diffract around barriers, hug the earth as ground waves, or even be bounced off the ionosphere for long-distance communication. Microwaves can’t, and are thus best used in things like wireless networks, garage door openers, radar, and other situations where distances are short.

Some people believe that we are saturating our world with electromagnetic radiation and that this causes health problems. We’ve all seen in our lifetime the spectacular increase in devices that send and receive EM, most particularly in the explosive growth of the mobile phone industry. Add in wi-fi and bluetooth and the huge variety of satellite broadcasts (everything from porn to GPS) and you’ve got a lot more EM radiation than in the good old days of just radio. Thus, electrosmog.

So, is this stuff bad for us? Probably not. After all, we have a living laboratory in front of us every day. By that I mean the human race. We are swimming in a sea of electromagnetism. The earth itself is an electromagnet with north and south poles! We’ve spent our entire lives with all sorts of EM radiation bouncing off us and passing through us. Even people who live near power lines, which create detectable (even with crude devices) EM fields, are no different than people who live further away. They don’t get sicker or have more cancers or anything like that.

So, why all the fuss? Other than the usual skepticism about new-fangled things, I think it is just the nature of the age. We are experiencing a lot of change and that change is happening fast. The rate of change is increasing—we are pressing on the accelerator rather than just maintaining our speed. So we get dizzy and we have to blame it on something, and it can be anything from GMOs to gangsta rap. People, I think, like to be beleaguered victims of a world gone mad, and the 5G phenomenon is tailor-made for that. Our big, evil corporate masters are dictating what goes in our neighborhoods and by golly we are going to fight back!

5G will require a greater number of antennae because of the low power and shorter range but they will be much smaller and more dispersed. Like smart meters, these things will be everywhere, and that ubiquity will only remind us of our helplessness. I suspect, however, that once users get the benefits of an improved service they’ll forget all about them. There was a time when power lines and telephone poles caused fear and alarm. People new to home wiring and electricity often would not stand near outlets for fear that the current would leak out and hurt them.

There are lots of things we encounter every day that present risk. I like to walk, and I have to tell you that many drivers are not very responsive to pedestrians. They often don’t notice them, and when they do they seem inconvenienced by their presence. And don’t get me started on parking lots! Walking is risky business. Driving is, too. Lots of people die or get hurt in vehicle accidents. I like to ski and to ride a mountain bike, and both have caused me significant injuries, yet I continue to take those risks.

There’s been a lot of hollering about vaccines and risk, yet vaccines are tens, hundreds, even thousands of times safer than routine surgeries and other everyday medical procedures. Vaccines are among the most tested substances in human history and the complication rates are vanishingly small, yet we have a vocal minority who insist they are too risky.

All of us on the earth right now have been exposed to ionizing radiation from nuclear tests and other sources of fallout (like Chernobyl). This is all new, our cavemen forbears did not face this risk. Yet, here we are, living and thriving. There’s an old adage worth repeating: it’s the dose that makes the poison. EM radiation, even the low-power non-ionizing stuff from our cellphones, just might be bad for us. In fact, too much of it probably is bad for us, just like too much of most things.

But on the list of risks electrosmog is way down there. I mean waaaaaayyyyyy down there! If the modern world fills you with worry, just remember all those things your mom told you. You know, like eat your vegetables and don’t drink too much and look both ways before crossing. Those will help get you through.

The forty-niners with their pickaxes and burros may be long gone from the California landscape, but folks still pull gold out of the ground here in the Golden State. There’s a mining company from Vancouver, B.C. called Kore that has two potential California projects on their website. One is on the east slope of the Sierras in Long Valley, Mono County. The other is in the Sonoran desert of Imperial County, not far from the Arizona line.

A million tons of earth contains ten pounds of gold. At least, that’s roughly the frequency at which gold is distributed in the crust. It’s not uniform, of course. Gold occurs in concentrated deposits of which the famous Mother Lode is an example.

These days gold mining is done on the surface in giant pits. Much safer for the miners and much more profitable for the companies. Here’s the interesting thing: they only need one gram of gold per ton of ore to make it work.

Here’s a gram of gold, the smallest investment you can make in bullion:

A ton of ore is about 13 cubic feet or roughly 100 gallons of rock. Can you picture that? Two of those big 55-gallon oil drums. Twenty 5-gallon paint buckets. That’s how much rock you have to process in order to get the amount of gold you see in the picture.

It doesn’t seem like a lot of rock, but the Imperial project mentioned above is supposed to produce around a million troy ounces which is thirty million grams! So that’s thirty million tons of ore to process. Three thousand million gallons of rock—that’s three billion—has to be crushed and treated on-site. Mostly the stuff is piled up on top of a clay layer and some plastic and sprinkled with a cyanide solution. That reacts with the gold and the effluent is collected and the gold bits extracted via some process like carbon adsorption. Cyanide heap leaching, as the process is called, also works for silver. Copper, nickel, and uranium are also extracted using heap leaching but with sulfuric acid instead of cyanide.

They have mining trucks that can carry 200-400 tons of ore in one load. I saw haulers like that when I toured the McLaughlin Mine, the tires alone are mind-boggling. That mine, located at the intersection of Napa, Yolo, and Lake Counties produced 3.5 million troy ounces (that’s over 100 million grams) from 1985-2002. There are 38 million tons of mill tailings from that project and that does not include the overburden and material that was moved but not processed. You can’t make low-grade ores work financially unless you can deal with massive quantities of them.

Speaking of massive quantities, one of the biggest open-pit mines in the world is just outside Salt Lake City. The Rio Tinto/Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine is two-and-a-half miles wide and half a mile deep. That is a really big hole in the ground! It has been operating for 100 years.

If you can’t grow it then you have to mine it. Californians are lucky that much of the (non-fuel) mineral wealth of their state is located in remote places like deserts and high mountains. The extraction of minerals from the earth is usually not pretty. But if we want to stay golden we have to keep digging.

California oil production is half of what it was thirty years ago. In 1985 the Golden State produced about a million barrels of crude oil per day. In 2018 that number dropped below 500,000. California is the largest consumer of gasoline and jet fuel in the nation as well as the second-largest consumer of all petroleum products. The state ranks third in refining capacity and accounts for one-tenth of all crude oil refining in the country.

Domestic production is declining but the population continues to grow. In 1985 there were 27 million of us and now there are almost 40 million and we have about 15 million cars. That means we have to import more oil. In fact, about half of the oil refined in California comes from foreign sources. Here’s a chart:

Those are some charming places. Angola? Really? And do we have to get in bed with the Saudi Arabians? At least we are buying oil from Colombia instead of just cocaine. This chart does not include oil from Alaska, of course. Here’s another chart:

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline starting flowing in 1977, the year I graduated from high school. There is a large shipping and refining infrastructure in the Bay Area and Alaskan crude was a big part of that. Many of the refineries near where I grew up relied on regular deliveries via tanker from Alaska. We also get a lot of oil by rail, particularly from North Dakota, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

California sees itself as a leader in fighting climate change. We are a very green place, man. We lead the nation in solar energy, for example. That’s good. We need action on global carbon emissions. The problem is that we consume a lot of fossil fuels. Still. And we will continue to do that. Natural gas is an important fuel for home heating and cooking and gas turbines supply about one-third of our electricity. We use a lot of hydrocarbon products, just like all Americans and those of us lucky enough to live in wealthy, developed countries.

There’s a movement afoot that wants to keep fossil fuels “in the ground.” The assumption is that will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions. In other words if you don’t drill for it then you can’t burn it, and if you can’t burn it you won’t pollute.

The problem is that crude oil resources are ubiquitous. They are located all over the world in all kinds of places like the North Sea, Nigeria, Malaysia, Canada, Guyana, Qatar, the Arctic, you name it. What happens is that if the supply is reduced or curtailed in one locale another will pick up the slack. Oil demand is robust because people need the stuff. If Californians don’t like oil exploration and development in their back yard that’s OK because they can buy it from somewhere else.

And as you can see that is exactly what is happening. We have a stable society in California. We have laws and a functioning legal system. We have a representative democracy. This means that citizens can actually impact policy decisions and can counter-balance, somewhat, the enormous political power of corporations. Much is made of the influence of the oil and gas industry on the Office of the Governor and the State Legislature. That may be so, but it is also clear that the “voice of the people” is having an impact. There’s substantial political momentum in the state for new restrictions on the fossil fuel folks, reducing or even eliminating new oil wells, pipelines, and other such infrastructure.

If we don’t dig it up, we won’t use it, right?

Wrong. We will just buy it from other places. You can see those other places—do you think they do as much as California does to regulate their oil industry? Do you think they do a better job with environmental laws, public health monitoring, and employee workplace protections? I don’t.

Californians have already indicated their hostility to one power source that could help us with our energy transition to cleaner fuels: nuclear. There aren’t going to be any new nuke plants in the state anytime soon, in fact, the whole country has mostly soured on atomic energy (with the exception of the US Navy, of course). We are blessed with a well-developed hydro-power network but that source can’t really grow. We are going “all-in” on solar and the mild, sunny climate helps with that, but that source can’t help the transportation and manufacturing sectors. Those need oil, and will continue to need oil.

So, we can drill our own or we can buy it from Mexico, Iraq, Ecuador and other places.

You decide.

Elon Musk used to be an interesting character. Certainly all the SpaceX stuff is very dramatic and exciting, not to mention even somewhat useful, if only to serve as a model for possible modes of space exploration. Tesla looks like an interesting venture but the business woes seem to keep piling up for the company. The mainstreaming of EVs is bound to happen at some point and I’ll give Tesla credit for giving it a shot regardless of the outcome.

But now we are on to Boring. Yes, The Boring Company, one of Musk’s other ventures. It digs holes. Tunnels, actually. There’s not much you can do with tunnels, but Musk is convinced that this sort of thing requires his particular brand of “disruption” and “innovation” which are the Silicon Valley Cult’s two favorite words.

Neither SpaceX nor Tesla invents anything new. Rocket technology has not changed much since the 1950s and electric vehicles have well-known, well-established engineering constraints. Musk’s gift seems to be to find more efficient and economical ways to do these things. Though it should be noted that SpaceX is privately-held and thus little is really known about its financial health. And Tesla’s stock is volatile in the extreme and appears to this market amateur to be insanely over-priced.

I want Tesla to succeed. We need EVs and other such solutions. But I’m wary. I’m tired of the hoopla. After all, the first four letters of Hyperloop spell “hype.” And there’s too much hype with Musk.

Case in point: Boring. They claim they can build tunnels cheaper than anyone else and then fill them with electric vehicles (Teslas!) and “revolutionize” transportation. I neglected to mention “revolutionize” in my list of the Silicon Valley Cult’s favorite words.

The problem, if you look at this stuff with a critical eye, is that it is mostly crap. I know it is exciting to ride the coattails of a billionaire while he “re-imagines” (there’s another for the list) our future. But my goodness does anyone really believe he can dig tunnels ten times better than the next guy? And even if he could, would stuffing them with Teslas actually do a better job of moving people than existing transit systems? If you look at the numbers the answer is unequivocally “no.”

And let’s not get started on Hyperloop. There are existing maglev trains that go 200 mph! Do we really think maglev trains in a vacuum tube is that significant of an innovation even if it were possible? It certainly is not practical, but practical doesn’t play well in the Silicon Valley Cult culture, where the pronouncements of futurists and other bullshit artists are treated like sacred scripture.

These days Elon Musk sounds a lot less like his hero Nikola Tesla and more like P.T. Barnum. That’s too bad because the world needs creative, intelligent people to tackle our many problems. But some of those problems don’t need bored billionaires bullshitting local governments into buying their goofy schemes. Public transit systems actually work. They move people around. They could be better, but that is mostly due to a lack of commitment. We don’t have the political stamina to invest in these things. The wealthy decision-makers in our country don’t ride BART or Amtrak or the MTA or any of those things. They wouldn’t be caught dead on a public bus system. But the rest of us need our governments to believe in public transit systems and do the mostly dull work of revitalizing them and keeping them healthy and effective for today and tomorrow.

Silicon Valley’s response is to give us Uber and Lyft which did a great job of destroying the taxicab industry and adding thousands of additional private vehicles to already traffic-choked streets. Neither of these companies makes money! When drivers for Uber and Lyft start charging fees that actually cover expenses for the company and deliver proper wages to the employees (er, I mean “contractors”) then fewer people will use them. Revenues will decline and stock values will plummet. But don’t tell that to the IPO-obsessed public! They can’t wait to get in on the ground floor and become full-fledged Silicon Valley Cult members.

I’m not a Luddite or techno-phobe. Just the opposite. I have faith in human ingenuity. I just think people should not be afraid to yell “bullshit” when bullshit is coming at them, even if it is coming from rich guys and other celebrities.

A former coal-fired power plant in the Canadian Province of Ontario was decommissioned a few years ago and has been mostly dismantled. The site, called Nanticoke, is now home to a solar facility. The new power plant consists of 192,431 solar panels and produces 44 megawatts (MW) of electricity. The old coal plant, at full capacity, produced 4000 megawatts (MW).

Using coal to produce energy has a myriad of drawbacks of course, from the massive air pollution to the degradation of the soils and waterways in places where coal is mined. So replacing coal-burning power with cleaner sources is a good thing.

But 4000 MW is a hell of a lot more than 44 MW! How did Ontario deal with this rather significant shortfall? For one thing technological improvements in the transmission of electricity and the devices that heat, light, and cool our homes have resulted in greater efficiency. Even with growing populations we can do more with less. But that’s not enough.

It turns out that Ontario is heavily invested in nuclear energy. Over half of the electricity generated in the province comes from the Pickering and Darlington Nuclear Power Stations. Their combined capacity is about 6600 MW.

The Green New Deal seems mostly agnostic on the subject of nuclear power. Or maybe that’s not the right word—perhaps “confused” would be better. Right now the world gets about 10% of its electricity from the atom, and in the States the figure is about 20%. How much do we get from solar? About 2% overall.

The transition to “clean” and “carbon-free” or “carbon-neutral” sources of energy will require enormous investments in our existing energy sources. Manufacturing solar panels, building wind turbines, improving efficiency in our buildings, and all the other things we need to do take energy. LOTS of energy. The terrible dilemma we face is that we are going to have to drill for lots more oil and gas and burn lots more fossil fuels in order to wean ourselves off these sources!

Cheap energy is our primary source of wealth. Without abundant, available energy, our economy cannot create the foodstuffs, manufactured goods, and other things like a transportation infrastructure that we must have in order to live. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are dependent on access, by everyone, to adequate sources of energy. And that’s not just for Americans. Hundreds of millions of people in the developing world want a better life, one that they see Americans enjoying. And we enjoy those things because of our energy system which supplies us with inexpensive electricity as well as affordable fuels.

Humans use about 20,000 terawatts (TW) of electricity per year. That’s 20,000,000 gigawatts (GW) or 20,000,000,000 megawatts (MW). Note that this is just ELECTRICITY consumption, not total energy use! (That 6600 MW from the Ontario nuclear plants would be 6.6 GW and 0.0066 TW.) Combustible fuels (coal, oil, natural gas, biofuels, etc.) account for 2/3 of the world’s electrical generation.

The most optimistic estimates for solar energy project to a possible 2700 TW by 2030. That’s 13.5% of current consumption. Where’s the rest supposed to come from?

There are no simple solutions to the energy problem.

There’s a current course at the University of Washington (INFO 270/BIO 270): “Calling Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World.” The two instructors, one an information scientist and the other a biologist, are entirely serious:

The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.

There was a time when the idea of a “liberal education” was attractive. That is, you learned a wide range of scholarly subjects in order not only to be informed but to understand how people, over the centuries, have thought about things and expressed themselves. Seeing the world from a variety of perspectives was meant to open the mind and give it a certain flexibility. These days “liberal education” makes certain folks froth at the mouth about left-wing indoctrination. Plus the cost of college has become prohibitive and people who can barely afford to go tend to pick professional majors (business, engineering, health care, etc.) so they can be employed straight away. It is considered frivolous to go to college “just to learn.”

This is unfortunate. Not that I have anything against professional majors—we need geologists and accountants and architects and whatnot. But learning is good, not bad. Good thinking can come out of any course. You don’t have to take Linear Algebra to learn some logic and analytical skills, a good teacher can make any subject rich with intellectual challenges. By that I mean things like guided inquiry, Socratic dialogue, rhetoric and argumentation, and other so-called “critical thinking” activities. There’s no reason why every course on campus can’t be that way.

But schooling is limited in time and space. And students are constrained by money and they have to get the most bang for their buck. So teachers lecture (mostly a waste of time when it comes to retention) and cram as much information into the semester as they can. We think that information is the same as knowledge, but it is not. Knowledge only comes about when we process that information and try to understand it, make sense of it, give it context, and evaluate it. That’s the important part: evaluation.

The Latin verb valere means “to be well, to be strong.” The Romans greeted each other with vale, the imperative form. In English to evaluate means to decide the worth of something, to find the value (health, strength) within it. (The e- prefix in Latin means “out from.”)

But we don’t spend enough time and intellectual energy on evaluation. We usually decide in advance what is bullshit and what isn’t. If you are an engineering major you probably think Art History is pointless. It’s not! It’s about how people see the world and how they decide what is important and how they’ve expressed their feelings and ideas. We all need that sort of thing. If we had more of that we wouldn’t need a course on bullshit because we would know something about truth and authenticity which are fundamental to art.

Scientific types think they are immune to bullshit. They think the scientific method protects them from falling into intellectual holes. That’s crap, of course. Scientists are people, and people are biased. We can’t help it, it’s the way we are made. Social and cognitive biases are present in every human activity. Not to mention that most science is damned expensive and thus scientists are answerable not to the truth but to those footing the bill.

Here’s more from the UW BS guys:

What do we mean, exactly, by bullshit and calling bullshit? As a first approximation:

Bullshit involves language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.

Calling bullshit is a performative utterance, a speech act in which one publicly repudiates something objectionable. The scope of targets is broader than bullshit alone. You can call bullshit on bullshit, but you can also call bullshit on lies, treachery, trickery, or injustice.

In this course we will teach you how to spot the former and effectively perform the latter.

All I can say is “bravo” and let’s have more of this sort of thing!