While on the topic of water, it strikes me that it is another issue which is generally lacking in all the current media disputes and recent political debates on energy.

While we debate the merits of offshore drilling, clean coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, we seem to ignore the fact that all four of these require incredible amounts of water to sustain. This during the most severe world-wide water shortage in recorded history. According to the World Health Organization, 35% of the world’s population live in highly water stressed areas, and while we might arrogantly believe that this only effects those in the third world, we find not only Australia, but our southwestern U.S. of A. in the tally of critical drought sufferers (with many other states soon to enter the ranks). What allows us to seem so much better off in the global demand for water are the great luxuries of cheap energy and the extant infrastructure of the country, on which our society depends to alleviate the problem. However, these can only do so for a finite time period, one which is rapidly coming to an end. The triple-threat of rising energy prices, increasing populations, and dwindling supplies of water will very soon come to a head.

For one example: Las Vegas exists in the precarious situation of a desert city using drastic amounts of water to feed it’s opulence in greenery and fountains, drawing water from nearby Lake Mead. Meanwhile the lake is approaching water levels so low that it could soon lead the city to drastic water rationing, as well as a cease in operations at Hoover Dam, the primary source of electricity for the city. The situation is so dire that current projections of climate change and drought tell us the lake could be dry as soon as 2021. Even if the lake weren’t running out of water (and by extension, it’s electricity producing potential), the 123 megawatt-hours of energy required to get city it’s water for a single day is only going to get more expensive. And in a way, they’re lucky, because delivering water from a lake or groundwater is on the energy cheap side, currently about half as expensive as reclaiming waste water, and an 8th as expensive as our present methods of desalination from seawater.

On the energy side of the equation, realize that most of us in the U.S. of A depend not upon the hydro-electric power of a nearby dam for our energy, but instead on one of the 1,600 coal-fired plants in the country, the 900 natural gas plants, or the 300 nuclear power plants, all of which in turn depend heavily on water to make that electricity happen. To create 5 megawatt-hour of electricity (approximately enough to power 40 average U.S. homes for a year), the average coal or gas power plant must use 142,000 gallons of water. That is roughly equal to the yearly water use of 1.5 of those same average U.S. homes.

To take that math a little further (with a lot of averaging), we find that a typical coal power plant produces roughly 1,216,552 megawatt-hours of electricity in a year. To put it another way, and accounting for the variations from plant to plant in water use, those 1,600 coal-fired plants in the country have an annual water use approximately equal to that of 2.4 billion people. No, that is not a typo. U.S coal fired electricity plants alone use more water than one third the world’s current population. That is, based on average U.S. of A water usage. To give a little perspective, UK water use per person is one third of ours, and people living in sub-Saharan Africa use as little as one sixth what we use (this disparity is just as much a result of our indulgence as it is their relative lack of access to water, potable or not, in this part of Africa).

Again, this is just coal plants, this doesn’t count the natural gas plants, which use 10-20 percent more water than coal plants, or nuclear power plants, which tend to use the most water, at about 2 times as much as coal plants. If these numbers are worrying, remember that China builds around 100 coal-fired electrical plants a year, adding to the more than 50,000 power plants worldwide.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey report on water usage from the year 2000, 30% of the water so used is saline, meaning it would have needed treatment (and energy) to be drinkable. It also shows, however, that of the total water withdrawals in the united states for that year, less than 1% was for domestic use. 11% was for public use, and 48% was for “thermoelectric power,” or cooling down the reactions in these power plants.

By contrast, Hydroelectric plants use 1% of the total U.S. of A water withdrawals, and naturally: solar and wind power use no water at all.

So, in addition to the clouds of sulfur and mercury giving us acid rain, the decapitated mountains, the greenhouse gas emissions of “dirty coal,” which scientists now agree are the leading cause of climate change, and worldwide breathing problems, add ‘drastic strain on water supplies’ to the list of cons against coal power.

[ . . . ] what happens when you turn loose the raw materials of law [and government] and let people combine, remix, and analyze them [?].

James Grimmelmann, associate professor at New York Law School is working in collaboration with students on a project called “Open Access Law.” The project aims at getting an understanding of the law into the hands of the public by not only allowing free access to it, but giving users the ability to easily cross reference the information, and see the connections between laws and court cases, and similar cases in any other state.

The project is part of the Do Tank at NYLS, a group of students and faculty which “strives to strengthen the ability of groups to solve problems, make decisions, resolve conflict and govern themselves by designing software and legal code to promote collaboration.”

Other projects of the Do Tank include “Peer to Patent,” which serves as one model of “open governance” cited in a recent open letter featured in Popular Science: “Dear Mr. President,” by Daniel Engber, editor of online magazine Slate. In the letter, Engber directs himself at whomever might be elected president, advising in ways that technology can be used to improve democracy, he cites the Peer to Patent ides in a section of the letter called “The Distributed Brain:”

Here’s how it works: Government employees now spend much of their time checking that the ideas contained in a patent application are sufficiently novel and interesting. Peer to Patent allows them to recruit unpaid specialists from around the world by posting the applications online. Users migrate toward the technologies they find most interesting; for example, a patent for a novel way to network turbines on a wind farm might attract computer scientists and environmental engineers. They can also rate one another’s work or invite colleagues to participate. Then the Group hashed out their thoughts over the Web—not unlike creating a Wikipedia entry and passes the best ideas back to the [U.S.] Patent Office. That saves work for the clerks, and improves the quality of their research. It might also cut the costs of patent litigation down the road.

he continues:

Last year, [ . . . ] the Food and Drug Administration proposed a set of rules that would make sunscreen labels more comprehensive and accurate. But the agency has been swamped by several thousand comments in response, and is bound by law to review each one. In June, the FDA conceded that the final rules would be delayed indefinitely.

Now imagine if there were a system for the interested parties to manage themselves.

and proposes:

A Webby White House could go much further than this “ask a question, get an answer” approach. Your administration can become the first to post it’s data and documents online in a way that truly encourages transparency and accountability. [ this could be a ] wholesale shift of public documents into a searchable and structured database.

Among the many benefits of this approach is the possibility that government agencies could set up automatic feeds for specific information. [ . . . ] In other words, a citizen would be able to combine information from different offices to offer a clearer picture of how the government is working. He might merge cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office with actual spending data, to see how often the government is shelling out more than it had planned.

[ . . . ]

Sure, that level of transparency might cause some inconvenience for even a well intentioned administration that’s relatively free of corruption. But in the long run, a push toward open government will build faith and support among your voters. And it will promote better decisions and more effective policies.

Wouldn’t it be exciting if democracy could be democratized to this extent?

also, i tend to cite (as many do) wikipedia pretty frequently, here’s an interesting video about that in particular:

Copyright law is a complex issue, with a long and convoluted history involving creators, law-makers, and not least: corporations and money, for a much truncated history, read below:

the law:

Copyright history traces back to the invention of the printing press, soon after which a process of common law licensing came into effect whereby writers licensed work to printers in exclusive manners to protect one another from any unregulated copying of their work. In the late 17th and early 18th centuries two laws were created in England to codify this process, and included the provision of a registration process. This process created a repository for publicly available copies of “registered works,” and the duration of the protection granted by that registration process: 21 years, with no option for renewal.

The second session of Congress and George Washington himself gave the U.S of A roughly the same terms in the Copyright Act of 1790: copies of books and maps would be protected for 14 years, at which time one renewal could be granted, for another 14 years, if the copyright holder was alive. Licensing of that work could be sold to printers for distribution of the work. Distributing your work took advantage of the new mobility of goods in an effort to reach more people with your work as a writer or map-maker, and to make a better profit from the work. The Law now protected you from losing money to any copies being made. The Constitution itself has a Copyright Clause, the pithy bit here:

[ . . .] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The focus generally being patents of inventions, so central as they were to the current industrial revolution, but applying also to copyrights, and soon to trademarks.

Over the intervening centuries to our modern day, provisions were made in copyright law for printed sheet music, paintings, drawings, and then for film, recordings of music (publishing rights for musical compositions being a whole other confusing animal), television, video, and every other creation under the sun.

Extensions were also made, to the duration of protection, from a simple total of 28 years in 1790 to a slightly more complex system by 1976: copyright of a work would last for the lifespan of it’s creator, plus 50 years, for individual work, or an additional 75 years, for work owned by a corporation. This was done to make simple the ad hoc practice that had developed over those two centuries of requesting (and granting) extensions to copyright, for various circumstances, and many nominal extensions on the part of the law.

(The law had also changed with regard to registartion. It was no longer required to register or publish a work for it’s copyright to to exist; from the moment something is “fixed,” made manifest, or otherwise completed, it is protected by a copyright, owned by you: the creator. For the full support of the law, however, registration certainly helps a lot in disputes.)
Read more »

I often speak negatively about the national and international intellectual property rights laws, generally my complaints are with copyrights and their [potentially] deleterious effects on creative capacity and depth of culture, but patents have their own problems:

Enforcement of patent laws, or attempts to do so nationally and internationally effect world health and world hunger in only negative ways. Only negative, unless you count the money they make a few select corporations that profit from that enforcement.

Patents and innovation in India:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8lkLco2VUM

Medicinal drugs in India:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyvojf0YnrI

don’t forget that our farming and eating habits have led us here: