Whats the deal with energy?
Its clear that our civilization needs energy, and it needs it fast. Thomas Homer-Dixon has called energy the ‘Master resource” in his new book “The Upside of Down” , meaning that it is the keystone to all other resources and functions. A high energy cost, as we have seen so clearly in 2008, leads inevitably to higher costs for EVERYTHING. The good thing about higher energy costs, for those of us who accept basic science at least, is that higher costs for traditional oil leads inevitably to more money flowing into alternative energy research and exploration.
Energy is essentially ‘fungible’ which means essentially that one source is as good as another. Once reduced to electricity, coal power is as good as hydropower is as good as zero point energy (if it were viable). The only difference in standard economics is how much it costs to produce.
This is an example of the “Invisible hand” of economics, leading us inexorably to the promised land. High energy prices give people an incentive to create energy. If they believe that, with capital investment, they can create a technology or process that will produce energy marginally more effectively or cheaper than others, they will invest. Global capital, despite the insistence of Marxists everywhere, does not have a plan or an agenda. It merely seeks to use wealth to create more wealth. If money can be made selling ice-cream to Eskimos, they will invest. If money can be made selling rebellion, they will be more than happy to fund it.
Figuring this out is essential to changing the direction of this massive ship called western civilization. Whatever is to be done, it MUST be made to pay. No amount of moralizing or anxious hand-wringing will change that.
With this in mind, its clear that any reimagining of the future must include a balance sheet. Society will gladly stop using oil if a way to produce energy is found that is markedly cheaper.
Part of the answer is merely education. In truth, we are paying much more for oil than the price that appears at the pump or on your electrical bill. The Institute for Analysis for Global Security has analysed the real cost of oil. The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is well aware of the hidden costs. In the preceeding analysis, the authors focus largely on security concerns, including the massive cost of the gulf war ($3 trillion) needed to secure future oil deliveries. Economists call these bills ‘externalities‘, but in any sane public policy debate they need to be brought forward and put front and center.
There are other externalities though, not figured into those estimates. Things its very difficult to put a price tag on. The mass of carbon dumped into the atmosphere is one such cost. How much DOES a 1 degree rise in global temperatures cost? As difficult as it is, putting a price tag on the damage done goes a long way to changing activities done by individuals and corporations. Even if the price tag is somewhat arbitrary, anything that moves the equilibrium price is something that is changing consumer behavior.
The Kyoto Protocol, specifically the carbon trading market it seeks to set up, is one example of putting a price on the externalities associated with carbon heavy activity. Unfortunately there seems to be some signs that the market is being exploited by unscrupulous developers, as detailed in the Mother Jones article “Turning Carbon into Gold“. (*Surprise! People try to take advantage of shit. Who would have thought? -ed)
In fact, the reality that people are ‘turning carbon into gold’ as Mother Jones alleges, is a positive sign. What it indicates is that there IS money to be made in carbon reduction. The strength and health of the economy is measured by the flow of wealth. If viable business can operate trading carbon reduction, and if this puts substantial downward pressure on carbon emissions, then it is a success. Many have stated the futility of the protocol, that its net effect will be minor at best. This might be true. It is also commonly heard that without the U.S. on board with Kyoto, its a useless piece of paper. However, as the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies correctly points out, it doesn’t matter. The countries that have ratified it include some big economic players, and its true purpose is to set up the market. The United States is eventually going to have to come on board, and when they do they will be taking advantage of a system with the bugs worked out in this round of the UN Framework on Climate change, of which Kyoto is just a part.
These markets though, are just beginning to take effect.
Overall, the cost of energy is still rising, and Kyoto will in the short term put upwards pressure on energy prices (pdf). Upwards pressure on energy prices, as discussed above, makes the logic of capital look for alternative energy sources.
Oilsands, mining an energy future.
Unfortunately, ‘alternative’ does not necessarily spell ‘better’. The strongest argument to that effect is the Alberta Oilsands development.
Alberta Tarsands
All across northern Alberta are hydrocarbon laden sands - oil sands or tar sands – also called bitumen in the industry. They sit just below the surface, and so, the cheapest and easiest way to extract them is to just roll off the topsoil (overburden) and dig out the greasy compacted sand. According to some estimates, the development of the oil sands could take away up to a quarter of the SURFACE AREA of Alberta, were they fully exploited.
One reason estimates of the remaining oil reserves vary so widely, is the disagreement over which oils to include in the ‘census’. Non-traditional reserves like that of the oilsands pushes the proven reserves up drastically. Oilsands became commercially viable at around $40 a barrel, everything over that is gravy. Including a lot of other sources, like oil-shales and coal in the u.s., pushes the available oil up even higher. When energy is priced at over $100 a barrel, there are a lot of sources that start looking attractive.
After the bitumen is dug up, it must be cooked, in a process that is very ‘dirty’, both figuratively and literally. Processing the oilsands into usable oil is very carbon intensive, and it despoils the land on a scale that industrial civilization has only heretofore imagined in our apocalyptic nightmares.
Post apocalyptic nightmare or the new face of Alberta? Both?
Newly discovered coal and oil bearing shales in the United States will require much the same activity to wrench out their black gold.
Methyl hydrates
Around every continental shelf, far out to sea, past even the quickly growing forests of drill rigs, is a frozen slushy-mud buried under the seabed. In this mud is the reason we have a climate and Venus has an opaque oven. Frozen methane, mixed in with water and assorted other hydrocarbons. Methyl Hydrates frozen on the shelves constitute an enormous amount of energy, and an enormous store of carbon. At $140 oil, with the fungible nature of energy, they are an almost irresistible treasure. If we begin tapping these sources, the sky is the limit as to how much carbon we can release.
Of course, someone is already trying.
“Japan will begin test drilling and extracting methyl hydrates — natural gas trapped in frozen water — in March. If the technology to harvest and utilize natural gas is successful, it could transform the face of the energy industry by making a globally abundant form of natural gas available to countries currently dependent on imports.” -Offnews.info
Energy Future
As mentioned above, there are many estimates of the amount of oil remaining. The evidence available seems to indicate that there is in fact a staggering amount. The problem it, it is all VERY DIRTY. It is not an oil collapse which is most dangerous in the long run, it is an unlimited supply. It makes the search for “REAL alternative energy sources all the more pressing. In the next decade or so, we will be building a new infrastructure to transition away from the standard oil economy into something new. It is vitally important then, that renewable green energy sources are found and developed.
Here is a researched presentation I gave detailing one possible alternative energy source:
http://apoptotic.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/whats-the-deal-with-biofuels/
Whats the deal With Biofuels II
It seems I got a lot of response on Algae as a Biofuel crop.
http://apoptotic.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/whats-the-deal-with-biofuels/
I have gathered togeather a number of videos on the subject, culled from youtube and google video.
A history channel video:
Here is a long feature length lecture, from scripps, explaining Algae in general from the series on “Perspectives in Oceanography” Very Informative.
“Power of green” on algae:
Here is a decent enough article, intervioewing Craig Harting of Global Green Solutions.
Another Interview, this time with the VP of Global Green Solutions:
Making hydrogen from sunlight:
May 21, 2008: David James explains how to process algae, into three different types of green fuels, using a gasification process. Green gasoline, green diesel and biodiesel can all be produced from the same algae feedstock.
Here is an EXTREMELY interesting lecture by Craig Venter on creating custom made life. This is one of the TED talks. I drew on this article heavily for my previous article.
Here is an interesting, in depth look at algae as a fuel:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
See my previous article for a more in depth look at biofuels and algae:
http://apoptotic.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/whats-the-deal-with-biofuels/
Whats the deal with traffic?
I was stuck in traffic the other day, and It put me in mind of an article I wrote, back in 2001, talking a little bit about traffic. Its a little simplistic, but I blame my editor.
You’re cruising on your way to school, making good time, when suddenly *bam,* you’re in the middle of a traffic jam.
Transportation problems are as old as mankind, and we see more and more problems as our cities become increasingly crowded. But as long as we drive cars, we’ll have traffic.
“People should be prepared for longer and longer delays, whether or not we have a working transit system,” said University of Calgary Civic Engineering professor Dr. J.F. Morrall. “If we all lived in 20-storey apartments, we could probably make transportation more efficient.”
But he doesn’t think this will happen, because of lifestyle preferences and willingness.
“This is a very spread-out city… you can’t replace the automobile very easily,” he said.
So, do we need to build bigger roads to handle more traffic?
“This city designs its road systems right at capacity… this doesn’t give us any cushion,” said Morrall. But road capacity isn’t everything, and looking at it straight-on isn’t best: building a road from A to B, and making it big enough to fit the right number of cars may not be that effective. Despite this, a study on traffic congestion funded by nine State departments in the U.S. concluded tactics used include “add road space” and “lower the number of vehicles.”
According to Dan Bolger, who is responsible for Coordinated Systems Planning of the City of Calgary, the city takes demographic and land-use patterns and tries to make a model of what roads are needed and where, and tries to encourage people to use other forms of transportation. He admitted, however, that as a part of their stated policy, “[there] may be situations where we can’t handle the demand.” He suggested commuters “just try and live with it.”
New ways of looking at traffic behaviour and road use may explain what causes many problems. The visualization of traffic as a flowing gas has proved to be useful. It explains many situations and events in real-world traffic; phenomena not accounted for in the strictly linear classical techniques.
According to Morrall, “the saturation flow of a traffic lane is about 1,600-1,800 vehicles per hour of green.” When more vehicles are added to this mix, they develop queues, and these queues form a shockwave and ripple-back effect. When a flowing gas enters a bottleneck, it becomes compressed as the molecules begin to crowd together. Each molecule can be viewed as a car, except molecules are never late for an appointment. The shock wave travels upstream.
These bottlenecks aren’t necessarily traffic lights or burning wrecks. Systems engineers describe “ghosts,” which can cause breakdowns in the flow for hours after the initial problem is gone.
Imagine driving down the highway and Bozo the clown steps in front of you. You swerve and manage to only nick his big red shoe. This is termed an “incident.” However, when you swerve, you cut off someone beside you and they come to a stop. The person behind them also comes to a stop, and the one behind them jams on his brakes. The flurry of cars stopping and starting travels back up the highway. The effects of this can linger in the right traffic conditions, and hours later, cars are still slowing down, even though the cars at the front are free to speed up again once they have cleared the “ghost” of Bozo.
Other times, there is no clown to blame. In any system that contains many parts, each part affects the others. Tiny fluctuations can grow in huge and unpredictable ways.
One way to see this is to imagine some dogs on a log in the middle of the river. If one dog moves, it sets up a disturbance, forcing the other dogs to move to keep their balance. Pretty soon the log is rocking violently and many of the dogs may get wet. The expanding network of roads and lights designed to try and keep up with demand may not always be helpful, since drivers aren’t making rational decisions and add to problems. Increased capacity in a limited area often works only to pile more dogs onto the log.
Strangely, it is often when the traffic is densest that it flows smoothest. There are often fewer starts and stops backlogging the road, and less jostling for position, which adds less chaos to the flow.
Whats the deal with Carnivore?
I wrote this back in March of 2001, and as such its information is EXTREMELY DATED.
*NOTE: THIS IS NOT CURRENT INFORMATION*
I put it up more in the spirit of supplying a counterpoint to what we know/where we are now. It is often difficult to remember what the future looked like from the past, if that makes any sense. So, what follows is a trip into the wayback machine, as it were….
Everybody has heard of the threat “hackers” and “crackers” pose to people using the Internet. Those who use the Internet to conduct business are aware their credit card numbers or personal e-mail may be intercepted by net-savvy crooks bent on disrupting trade or stealing from bank accounts. Security companies spend millions of dollars broadcasting this message and the media has been quick to pick up the hype. Other security concerns receive little attention, and no one is spending any money to make you aware of them. It’s not just crooks, you see, who are interested in what happens online. Governments around the world understand the power of communication harnessed via the Internet, and want the opportunity to see that data.
Carnivore: Gnawing at civil liberties.
The FBI maintains a project originally dubbed “Carnivore” because of its ability to get the “meat” of interesting or suspicious communications. As of August 2000 Carnivore had 20 black boxes (independent computers) that could be hooked up to networks and copy all data of interest. The boxes are portable and can be quickly transferred from place to place. The FBI insists the system only targets individuals it has a court order to watch, and “its bark is worse than its bite.” However, nothing technical stands in the way of the FBI monitoring data from any Internet Service Provider–especially after the FBI successfully lobbied the US Congress in 1994 to require telephone companies to make their digital networks readily snoopable. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecommunications carriers to modify their existing networks and to deploy new generations of equipment. This makes it easier to “hear” what a target is doing, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. If you’ve ever interacted on the Internet with someone using an American ISP (virtually everyone who uses the Internet has), your communications during this interaction could have been monitored and stored.
In 2000 the ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center requested documents under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act regarding Carnivore. According to the ACLU, the documents clearly indicate that “Carnivore can intercept virtually every type of Internet transmission. This ranges from Internet telephone conversations to e-mail to Web activity… The report confirms this capability. Carnivore is in fact capable of collecting all communication over the segment of network being surveilled.”
The ACLU also denies that the legal obligation to get a court order is a suffient barrier. “Despite repeated assertions to the contrary from the FBI, the report concludes that Carnivore has no effective auditing function that would expose and prevent abuses.” The FBI maintains it needs a system like this to stop terrorism and domestic lawbreakers. However, according to the Security Focus Web site (a security company with a Calgary branch), “The scary part is whoever is running the box can simply punch in another name and start grabbing someone else’s e-mail. Due process is effectively gone.” Carnivore has been upgraded since then, and now goes under the less threatening DSC1000, which the FBI admits stands for nothing.
The National Security Agency and project Echelon:
The American government, according to the ACLU and several other liberty watch organizations, conducts extensive eavesdropping overseas under the banner of project Echelon. This happens outside of the normal confines of the American Constitution, as Constitutional protections are not granted to non-Americans. It is part of a global surveillence system run by the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, and is now over 50 years old, according to ZDNet news service. The system includes stations run in the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As communications moved onto the Internet, capturing technology also neccessarily migrated.
Echelon Watch, a group run by the ACLU and Free Congress Foundation, says “Echelon attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite, microwave, cellular and fibre-optic traffic, including communications to and from North America. This vast quantity of voice and data communications are then processed through sophisticated filtering technologies.” This includes Internet traffic.
Recently, French companies and nationals accused the NSA of using Echelon to unfairly win business deals for American corporations, essentially by spying on their telecommunications. In March 2000, former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey admitted that America steals secrets. As far back as the 1960s, two NSA defectors claimed at a press conference: “We know from working at NSA [that] the United States reads the secret communications of more than 40 nations, including its own allies… Both enciphered and plain-text communications are monitored from almost every nation in the world, including the nations on whose soil the intercept bases are located.”
U.S. Senator Frank Church and an NSA investigtion committee member in post-Watergate U.S. warned: “I know the capacity is there to make tyranny total… we must see to it that this agency… operate[s] within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss.” If the U.S. is willing to risk the wrath of its allies by stealing secrets for its own companies, how far will they go to ferret out “potentially subversive” activities of private citizens?
U.S. Encryption Policy
The U.S. Government officially considers encryption (scrambling electronic records and messages so thoroughly that even spy agencies cannot crack them) to be a form of munitions. Some useful encryption methods cannot be legally exported out of North America. Various groups, including the FBI, have long lobbied for special keys giving them access to certain kinds of encrypted data. This makes protected e-mail as easy to read as a postcard in the mail. Projects such as Carnivore and Echelon show that complex relationships exist between U.S. Government departments and U.S. telecommunications companies. A good deal of well-founded paranoia exists regarding how law enforcement agencies monitor computer-based activities.
*ONCE AGAIN, THIS BLOG POST WAS WRITTEN IN MARCH 2001. I PRESENT IT AS A VIEW OF THE PAST AND HOW THEN WE VIEWED THE FUTURE*
Whats the deal with the Trojan War, anyways?
(The walls of Troy, Present day, unearthed and partially reconstructed)
In the English speaking world, Homer is probably second only to Shakespeare for pure gravitas in any mention. Homer has become a part of our culture, a shared language of poetic allusion to inform any discussion. But was there actually a Trojan War? Did the Heroes really stand and fight and die at Ilium? WTF is Ilium anyhow?
When one begins to look into this absolute mess of literary tradition, one discovers that a lot has been written on it, much of it contradictory, most of it apocryphal. For example, it is claimed that ‘Homer’ did not in fact exist, and that the entire thing was written by a completely different guy who happened to be named Homer. A great deal of ink is spilled arguing such minutia, which I will not bother to repeat here.
(A bust of Homer. His name means “blind” in Greek)
Here it is merely my intention to cut through the overgrowth and get to the basics, which will mostly involve my choosing between various strands of long traditions.
The Power of Oral Tradition
There is a great tradition in preliterate societies of people being able to carry a massive amount of information in their heads. The recitation of huge passages of epic tales is common, in fact de rigeur in almost every society in the world that does not possess a strong written tradition. . An interesting feature of these Oral Traditions is that the entire passage can in fact be memorized without error. This has now been proven substantially in widely surveyed surviving traditions such as the Irish Celtictradition in which their ‘bards’ can still recite long passages of old epics. They use various tricks and mnemonics to achieve these feats of memory. Oral poems, or passages based on oral tradition, tend to be highly repetitive, rhythmic and highly patterned. Poetry, it turns out, has a special place in human tradition in that it was our trick to remember long strands of data. The poetic form is usually the earliest form available because it is the form in which people were able to memorize the work.
(Oral Tradition was strong all over the world in pre-literate societies)
It is due to this long Oral Tradition, which was very strongly present in the Greek society, that we owe such a long preservation of the Homeric Epics. It is in part due to this preservation ability of poetry that we are able to be reasonably certain that at least part of the Epics legacy dates back to roughly the time they claim to speak of.
Homer was faithfully repeating what he heard, and what the hearer heard, down through the ages.
Can we trust Homer?
There are other techniques too, which scholars use to date material. One of these is word choice. In the Homeric Epics, there is much talk of Bronze Age technology, whereas the Greeks were well into the Iron Age when the poems were finally written down (and frozen forever). Archaeology then not being nearly what it is today, any authors creating new passages would have unconsciously included mostly iron age references.
Likewise, cities and lands are mentioned in the Bronze Age epics which had long since ceased to be inhabited by the Iron Age. In fact, MOST of the information in the Iliad (Homers work on the Trojan War) should have been lost because after the Trojan war (as we shall see) the Greeks lost a great deal of their culture and aspects of civilization.
So, we can be reasonably certain that at very least the story itself dates back in its kernel form to the events it purports to describe.
A dirty little trade war
Much of the information scholars can glean about the Trojan war places the actual event at around the 12th Century B.C.E., or perhaps in 1250 B.C.E. if we believe Herodotus (there are worse mistakes one could make than believing Herodotus, The father of History). And it was probably fought not as a battle to save a petulant princess as Homer describes (every good story needs a princess in distress?) but rather as a trade war against a power that was blocking the expansion of a Greek Empire. The City of Ilium sat near the modern day Bosporus in Asia Minor, the passage between the Aegean sea (that of the Greeks) and the Black Sea. The areas to the north of the Black Sea held a lot of trade value that the Greeks would have wanted access too. In fact we find records of their actively trading with the northern Black Sea area.
Ilium, called Troy, was a Hittite outpost that guarded the passage way and probably either extracted a large toll, or prevented Greek seafaring traders from going there altogether.
(A map showing the relative locations of Troy, the Hittites, and Greece (or Mycenae)
The primary Greek Kingdom at this time was known as Mycenae. They had, some time previously, cast off the shackles of another Kingdom (based in Crete) and were expanding in power and trade all along the coasts of the Aegean Sea. As the above map demonstrates, the only trade route through the narrow passage in the north of modern day Turkey was directly past Troy (also known as Ilias or Ilium). It becomes necessary then, for further expansion, for the Mycenaeansto get through to the rich trade lands in what is now the Crimea of Russia.
There are other echoes of this Greek desire to trade in the north, recorded in mythical form in the Epic of Jason and the Argonauts, who go searching for the golden fleece (rich wool trade) in the same area.
The Trojan War was probably fought for economic purposes, not for the dramatic one used by Homer to build a story.
Hienrich Schliemanns Destructive Search for Troy
When Heinrich Schliemann, a man recognized widely as the Father of modern Archaeology, went looking for the historic Troy, he used Homers Epic as his guide. He was looking for a massive, well defended city situated at or close to the narrows. Schliemann could not have found his city, however, were it not for the (again oral) traditions of the people in the area.
When asked where Troy was, they pointed him towards a giant hill that was somewhat further inland than one would expect. It turns out that the coastline had gone out quite a bit since the time of the Trojan war, mostly due to deposition of soil over the centuries. Nevertheless it was there, right where tradition said it would be. Schliemann, who was basically making up archaeology as he went along, managed to slice right THROUGH most of the layers of Troy including the one we now suspect as being contemporary to the Trojan War story. In finding Troy, he managed to destroy much of it.
(Several layers of Troy, superimposed)
It turns out that there had been and continued to be continuous occupation of the site for quite a long time. Sites dated from before Homeric Troy, straight through the Greek period and into the Romans. The last occupation of the site was a Roman town, also named Ilium.
The site seems to have been routinely sacked, at various points in its history. A fate not uncommon for a rich city.
Schliemann discovered not one, but many Troys built on top of each other. In discovering them, he managed to wreck much of the city he was looking for.
After the Trojan War
The aftermath of the Trojan war was not kind to the people of Mycenae, or to Greeks in general. It would seem from records (Homer himself records huge tallies of the number of ships and supplies each Greek Kingdom sent to aid the cause) that the Greeks over extended themselves. Immediately after the fall of Troy (a war that took many years to completely, the Greek kingdoms begin to fall into disrepair. A vast dark age begins to settle over the once prosperous Greeks.
A dark age so deep that they actually forget how to write, ceased living in cities, and almost (except for homer) forget that the whole thing happened at all. A blackness fell on western civilization (at the time, the Greeks were pretty much it).There are Egyptian, and some Greek, records of raider sea barbarians ravishing the Mediterranean at this time. Some scholars have suggested that these “sea people” are the dispossessed Greeks, seeking treasure as their home cities collapse under the economic strain of a long and unproductive war.
Luckily for them, and for the west in general, many centuries later the Greeks managed to pull themselves out of this collapse and ignite a new torch for civilization. The period before the Greek Dark Age is usually referred to as Archaic Greece, the period after is the Classical when much of what we now think of as Greece became fruitful. In the later, Classical period, was Periclean Athens, the works of the great philosophers, and the eventual writing down of the surviving Homeric Epics. It is interesting to note that what we have of the Homeric Epics is not the complete ’set’. Much was lost and either not written down, or did not survive.
As far as ‘written down’ goes, the Greeks were the only known people to have invented a written language twice. The second time at the beginning of the classical period.
The Mycenaeans, for their efforts, were eventually conquered and enslaved by the Spartans. The Spartans being a tribe of Doric Greeks who had survived during the dark ages in the hinterlands of Greece and finally invaded the now crumbled remains of an ancient Mycenaean Kingdom, whose Oral Epics they then began to venerate and call their own.
Sparta then, centuries later, itself fell to an even more backwater cities inspired by the Greeks to Empire, the Romans. And so it goes.
(Sparta in ruins)
Although they eventually sacked the city, the War with Troy proved to be too much for the fledgling Greek Kingdoms, and they fell into catastrophic decline.
Whats the deal with swastikas anyhow?
One of the most ubiquitous symbols in the world, I am told, is the swastika. I already knew this at the time that I went to India, however I was not prepared for the full onslaught of the images popularity.
The Holy Cow
Stepping off the airplane at Delhi ‘International’ (the state of this airport being a whole different question), I was immediatly greeted by a cow standing in the parking-lot festooned in fantastically gaudy decorations of every description. Its important to note that this cow JUST HAPPENED to be there. It wasnt a gimmicky government tourist promotion, it just happened to be there, munching on some random debris at the Delhi airport. Thatshow India is. I was surprised and fascinated by this creature. However it was almost impossible to actually look at, because other than being categorized in my mind as “decorated cow”, I had almost no mental tags to hang on anything I was seeing. The result, as anybody who has ever experienced culture shock knows, is sort of a polymorphic entity of very little discernible quality. The overall effect is something akin to that achieved by the special suit worn in the PKD inspired movie “A Scanner Darkly”. A ever changing panoply of uncertain design.
One thing that did stand out for me, however, was the bright swastika, emblazoned on the holy cows forhead. Since then, I have seen little swastikas hiding all over the place, mostly incidental occurrences that make very little lasting impression. Well, these are some of the answers to my question “What’s up with the swastika, anyhow?”
The swastika is everywhere (!)
The symbol can be found almost everywhere in the world, from neolithic times. It was used by groups as divergent as the Indo-Aryans, the Persians, North American Indians, and the Greeks. The swastika symbol was discovered by that most dubiously motivated of treasure hunters, Heinrich Schliemann when he was digged at (or rather straight through) the site of ancient Troy. Swastika symbols are also present in Bronze and Iron Age designs of the northern Koban culture, and Azerbaijan, as well as of Scythians and Sarmatians among many others. In many of these cultures, the swastika doesnt seem to have any really special significance, merely being one among many of various common geometric designs.
The symbol still survives today in many cultures including the above mentioned Indian, as well as the Basque and the Latvians (see upper right mitten, from this weaving book on traditional mitten patterns) as well as many others. In most cultures, the swastika is, and has been seen as, a symbol of good luck. Some argue that there is a difference between the left facing good luck swastika (often call a sauvastika, pronounced like swastika but with a thick ‘count dracula’ accent) and the right facing “evil” swastika. However, it seems less than clear that this distinction holds up across space and time.
Swastika origins – Basket weaving?
The origins of the swastika are a lot harder to pin down than its ubiquitous nature. One theory that seems to have a lotof sense to it is the “basket weaving culture” theory. According to this school of thought, the swastika pattern will arise independently in every culture that weaves baskets, due to the nature of the weave. “The swastika is a repeating design, created by the edges of the reeds in a square basket-weave.” Beginning at the bottom of the basket, each arm must turn in conjunction with its partners at 90 degrees. Looking around for various baskets in my house, I notice that most of them have employed some method to obscure this obvious physical necessity at the bottom center of the weave. Whether this is unconscious, or fully conscious on the designers part, I could only hazard a speculative guess. However it is telling to note the degree to which the swastika pattern hits the modern western mind with ill-ominous (omens) overtones. Its unfortunate association with the Nazi Party occurs much to the chagrin of many Hindus, buddhists, and suchlike peoples worldwide.
Swastika origins – a Heavenly Sign?
Another theory, put forward in part by Carl Sagan, advances the idea that the swastika may have been first identified as a comet, streaming past. (Sagan, Carl; Ann Druyan (1985). Comet. Ballantine Books, 496. ISBN 0-345-41222-2.)
Each of the arms may have been jetting gas as it streamed towards the sun. A silk from the Han Dynasty which appears to depict various comets in ages past shows a very distinct swastika pattern on one particular comet. Sagan hypothesizes that the jets, seen from an axial view, would easily resemble a comet. Presumably then, a common comet seen by many peoples in the neolithic period could be an origin for the swastika pattern. Or perhaps the same or several comets seen in various epochs. The exact identity of these is probably best left to those who professionally identify heavenly bodies.
Swastika Origins – Owls?
Finally, it seems that various bird tracks (especially that of the owl) form a swastika pattern, which neolithic people seem to have payed a lotof attention to. Their renditions of various bird tracks appear in clay and on paintings back into the neolithic period, and sometimes appear to merge into swastika symbols. Owls are said to have ”zygodactylous” or “semizygodactylous” (outer toe reversible) feet that can leave swastika like foot-prints in loose dirt or sand. An ancient chinese legend tells of the inventer of writing Ts’ang Chieh, who used animal and bird tracks to invent the original symbols, including one that looks much like a swastika. 
Joseph campbell directly links the swastika with bird tracks, giving an instances where the two are directly correlated on a single item.
Cultural “Cross”-contamination
Probably, some combination of the above theories is the truth of the matter. At any rate, reinjection of meaning from other formerly unrelated symbols seems pretty common. For example, the ‘bird feet’ symbol could impregnate the ‘comet’ symbol with its own meanings when the former had lost most of its meaning of reference. Likewise, a culture coming across a similiar symbol to its own in a second culture it had contacted or subsumed might easily assume the foreign symbol as having the same referant as its own. We know this happened quite often. The Greeks for example assumed every foreign god was actually one of their own in disguise, and every foreign nation was born of one of their own heroes. Thus the Persians, a name etymologically unrelated to anything in Greek, become the sons of Perseus. Likewise, the Romans seeking to emulate everything Greek, reinvented their pantheon in perfect Greek form.
It seems possible to me that the Christian cross is a minimalist echo of the ancient form, a subset of the overall swastika group. In fact, crosses like St. Brigid’s cross seem to intimatly link the two. This cross is used in ireland, and may represent a cultural fusion of the swastika and cross traditions. It is often woven in Ireland to celebrate the coming of spring. No surprise there, as weaving is a traditional symbol of coming harvest, and thus fertility. As you can see,
the cross nicely illustrates the weaving culture theory of swastika origin, while at the same time claiming to be a Christian symbol.
In the memeslush world in which we live, its notsurprising to see other groups happily grabbing on to the swastika. One example is the “Church of the Process” which uses a “Process cross” as its symbol. 
Skinny puppy, of course, uses a variant of the process cross on their album “The Process”.
There is a new book out on the swastika, which I have not read. A review is available here http://marketoutthere.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/b000ot7xu2/
It is, of course, always necessary to review the source of such material. Anything academic, especially if it is in any way connected to the Nazis, 9/11, or aliens, requires one to keep a close eye on the authors motive.
Hello, world.
I like the idea of blogging, but i dislike the idea of actually blogging. I might just use this blog as a convenient place to store projects, passing each project off as a blog entry.
Otherwise, most of the material will probably be of little or no interest to anybody other than myself, and I will be whistling in the dark.
Apoptosis is programmed cell death, I have been told. When the body ‘decides’ that a cell must die, it sends chemical ‘die’ signals to that cell, instructing it to turn off and submit to the will of the body. When cancer occurs, the cells in question are basically disobeying the apoptotic signals. They are refusing to die as they should, and are instead continuing to live and proliferate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis
