Pursuit of Science

Science is under attack by the ever masquerading, often lazy, sometimes malignant activity known as pseudo-science, but more often just called science. You don't just "do" science, you attainment it. Science is a goal. Just because you have charts and use data, does not mean you are using science. "The data don't lie" is the biggest lie of them all. The data could be wrong, not to mention being presented in a misleading fashion. Truly pursuing science means reaching to attain science. It is not cheap and it is not easy. . Pursue science, my friends. It is a worthy undertaking.

"Going to Mars with Peter"

Our brains have a propensity toward seeing patterns and making connections. We also have hardwired within us a desire not just to understand things, but to do so quickly (likely a useful trait when we needed to understand that a boulder rolling down the hill was probably going to keep on doing so, and we better get out of the way!). I think the combination of these two aspects of our physiology attribute a great deal toward our belief in the supernatural. Specifically, we see patterns in the events and world around us that we don't understand and the easiest explanation is that, of course, these patterns were made by someone, just like every car and every chair has a maker. Since we don't see the maker around us, we attribute the patterns to an unseen, "godly" maker. That doesn't mean that this is the correct explanation, but it is certainly one that has been satisfactory for most of us for most of our history.

I may not ascribe to that view of the origin of patterns around us, but that doesn't stop my brain from searching for them. And this week, circumstances aligned in such a way that I found a pleasant pattern in my own life.

I am embarking over the next few months on the final chapter in my System Engineering master's degree program at Johns Hopkins. The capstone project, which will consume my extracurricular hours until December, is the development of an aerial robot to survey the Valles Marineris on Mars. I find it fitting that 8 years ago, during the summer after my senior year in high school, it was a space settlement design competition that I participated in, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, that first got me interested in engineering. The goal then was to design a Martian outpost that could support hundreds or thousands of settlers. Our project leader was a devoted and enthusiastic classmate named Peter (the type of kid who wore a star trek outfit to school, though for his sake, it was during Halloween season). My friend, Robert Yao, and I, being somewhat more interested in going to Florida than staying up all night writing requirements for an imaginary extraterrestrial apartment complex, endearingly joked that we were "Going to Mars with Peter."

In preparation for that trip all those years ago, I read Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" and was at once fascinated at the idea of a manned mission to the Red Planet. Ever since, I've found the plans to return to the moon about as exciting as a road trip to Cleveland. As I bone up on Mars facts now, I'll be much more concerned with the impact of eroding dust and the low atmospheric pressure on a flying robot than on methods for terraforming the planet so that the 3014 World Cup could be played on the (no longer) red planet.

Something about coming full circle in my education fills me with a sense of completeness and pleasant, mild satisfaction. Now, if I wasn't human, I would probably say something more logical, like "well, really it would only be 'full circle' if the settlement competition had occurred during my first semester at school." But I am human and this seems a pretty innocuous occasion to indulge myself, so, yeah, I'll say it, isn't it amazing how so often life just happens to work out like this?!

Kinetic Productivity: Part I -- The Analogy

I learned today that my former co-worker has created a website called PickTheBrain.com. I was browsing some of the articles and came about one on productivity. He suggests utilizing "surges of mental activity" as opposed to forcing our mental activity into a continuous 8 hour block.

This reminded me of an interesting passage by tech whiz Aaron Swartz:

"With all the time you spend watching TV," he tells me, "you could have written a novel by now." It's hard to disagree with the sentiment -- writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV -- but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is "fungible" -- that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that's just not the case.

In addition to what these gentleman say, I believe I've discovered a little known productivity limiter; bear with me as I coin the phrase "kinetic productivity" with respect to working life. Think back to high school physics when you were working out how much work it would take to get a ball resting at the bottom of a hill up to the top. Once at the top, you can simply roll it down the other side; converting all its potential energy into kinetic energy.

Now think of the kinetic energy as productivity. As long as the ball has kinetic energy (productivty), it can move (get work done). As it rolls along, the forces of friction (work) eventually dissapate the kinetic energy and you are left at the bottom of another hill (low mental activity).

Stay tuned for Part II in which I decode analogy further--defining the hill and methods for climbing it.

21st Century Faith-Healing

By now, many of you may have heard that Airborne doesn't work... unless you believe.

This morning I found myself in a paradoxical situation. I had both "the first signs of a cold" namely, a mild sore throat, and half a container of the useless vitamin effervescent, Airborne. I say "useless" because I don't believe in it. I wish I did!

I don't believe because I read the article which exposes Airborne's "double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical study" as a shame 2-man operation by an Airborne subsidiary created for the sole purpose of conducting the study. Before I learned of its baseless science, I believed Airborne might just work based on some cloudy notion that things like high doses of Vitamin C and Zinc reduce the duration and severity of colds (probably a rumor started by the supplement companies themselves).

In any event, I had half a container of what might as well have been drink flavoring. So did I take it? Darn right I did. Why? Because I wanted to see if I could will myself to believe in the health benefits of a placebo.

Did it work?

Um... all I can say is I'm feeling pretty good. Of course that isn't saying much. Isn't it convenient that they say it is "most effective" if taken at the first signs of a cold. They are the "first signs" because you don't know if it will turn into a cold or not. If it was a false alarm, but you took Airborne, you may be inclined to believe the magic little pill made you all better. If you get sick, you might be inclined to ponder how sick YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN if you hadn't taken the little guys.

The Perfect Temperature for Disaster

I just realized how we drink from a mug (or cup) without looking at the liquid it contains. We use the temperature differential of the liquid and our mouth to feel when it has reached our mouth and thus, when we should cease tilting the mug upward.

This all came to me as I found myself with a nice splash of green tea on my pants after taking a sip while reading an e-mail. Having let the tea cool, it had reached the temperature of my mouth and thus I just kept tilting upward until... disaster.

FAQ: Didn't I feel the pressure of the liquid as it entered my mouth?
A: No, I was distracted.

Now do you believe? -Morpheus

He's the One. And by he, I mean 0.999...

When I first encountered the seeming paradox, in 9th grade, that 0.999...=1, my mind was "blown." I kept wanting to say, "Yeah, it is close to one... but it is not identical." I mean, if it were true, my whole world view would be shaken. On Judgement Day, I could justify zoning out during a looong Sunday School class on Isiah with the argument... "I really wanted to pay attention. Really really wanted to. So technically I was paying attention... 0.999...=1, as you well know Mr. God."

Of course, I really just didn't understand infinity... or Isiah for that matter. For lost souls, like me, Wikipedia comes to the rescue. I like the simplest definitions best:

An even easier version of the same proof is based on the following equations:

But, behold, Wikipedia lists many others as well that range from infinite series (something that I know something about) to Cauchy sequences (of which I know nothing).

Note: The Wikipedia article also has a good section on why students often reject the equality of 0.999... and 1. My favorite:

Some students interpret "0.999…" (or similar notation) as a large but finite string of 9s, possibly with a variable, unspecified length. If they accept an infinite string of nines, they may still expect a last 9 "at infinity".

Why it's so hard to be happy.

I just finished reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Despite the title, it isn't about how to be a happier person. Instead, Gilbert explores why so many things that we think will make us happy end up be rather disappointing. It is very well documented for a book intended for a popular audience (a la Blink by Malcom Gladwell).

When I read an author for the first time, I generally don't want to know anything about him or her. Nor do I want to read negative reviews about the book. If the author is some "nobody" or the negative reviews seem logical, I find it difficult to give the book an objective reading (I feel the same way about low budget movies and movie critics' reviews). I really enjoy being a few (or a few hundred) pages into the book and thinking, "Geez, this is really good, I wonder who wrote it!" and then looking at the about the author section. In fact, I enjoy this "fresh mind" so much that it is worth it to me to start reading a couple crummy books once in a while just to hold out for that refreshing "aaaaahhhhh" moment.

This book gave me one of those moments.

One small step for computer scientist

Growing up and hearing replays of Neil Armstrong's first words from the moon,

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

I was always kind of confused... like, wait, that doesn't make sense does it? It wasn't until a year or two ago when I read a book that specifically mentioned the utterance that my suspicions were authoritatively confirmed. Man is another word for Mankind. Armstrong was either an idiot or he slipped up. I was inclined to believe that it was a combination of a slip up and the fact that Armstrong swallows his A's.

Not so, according to computer scientist Peter Ford. Ford claims the recording has a digital signature of the 'a' as in "one small step for a man..." Listen to it again. Even if you really want to hear it, I doubt you'll be able too. There just isn't that much time between 'for' and 'man'.

The 10th dementia

I don't remember specifically when I first gained a good conception of what 3 dimensions meant, but I think soon thereafter I must have wondered how to make a fourth dimension. But how frustrating! No matter where I drew an additional line, it was already covered in the 3 dimensional space. How could I escape this prision! Well it turns out that even as I screamed this in my head I had escaped. I had travelled along the forth dimension as I sat thinking how to draw a line in the fourth dimension. Sooner or later I came to understand time as the fourth dimension. I had a vague idea that higher dimensions related to lower ones in much the same way, however I could not tell you how many dimensions exist or what any above the fourth were.

Enter this great flash animation. It goes a little quickly but if you can wrap your head around it, it is really cool to think about. Just think of the higher dimensions as the ability to fold the lower dimensions. Now I know why there can't be more than 10 dimensions!

Hat tip to AT at MR

And what about before THAAAAAT!?

I remember in eighth grade I gave my physical science teacher a hard time during the lesson on the size of the universe. I asked something like, "yeah but what is right beyond the edge of the universe?" She may not have been able to answer definitively because the answer depends on the theory of the universe that you ascribe to. While there may not be 100% consensus on this issue, I think most would agree that it is "knowable." I think.

What I don't think is knowable is the origin of matter, energy, etc. I'm not talking about the origin of the universe or the Earth or that. You might point to God or the Big Bang or another popular theory. But regardless of which theory you ascribe to you have to ask, what was the initial condition. And if you ascribe to that initial condition, what came BEFORE it? You might say that time did not exist before the universe and therefore neither did cause and effect. You might further point to quantum physics as some loop hole that can allow for the universe to come from nothing, caused by nothing. You may point to string theory, and other theories that nobody really understands.

But I find those "explanations" pretty lame. Maybe because I am not intelligent or initiated enough to understand them. Or maybe because they don't satisfy my 3/4ish-D understanding (meaning that even if super-intelligent entities explained it to me, I would not comprehend them). But I think I find them lame because the answer isn't knowable. I personally don't find the question very essential to daily life, because I don't think we'll be getting it any time soon (read: ever).

The hiccup cure I "invented"

I've passed this cure along to friends and family alike for quite some time. I'd say I came up with it about 5 or 6 years ago. Anyway, it was one of those things where no one told you about it and not a whole lot of people know it, so you begin to think to yourself that you invented it.

Perhaps it is one of those things that get invented many times over but don't have a lot of "staying power" and so they must be reinvented throughout time and across localities.

Anyway, in case I did actually invent this (doubtful), I thought I'd get my claim down in writting. Without further ado, my hiccup cure:

Breathe in deep. As deep as you can. Now try and suck in a little more air. Hold it until such time as you would have hiccuped. You should now be able to breathe out and be without hiccups.

The premise behind the cure is that hiccups involve the regular and involuntary contraction of the diaphram. By fully contracting the diaphram, you have sufficiently disrupted the regularity of the impulse that whatever finicky force gave you the hiccups in the first place has dissipated. I'll admit this is borderline on black magic/old wives tale medicine, but it works pretty well.

Guess your way to becoming a pilot???

How should the flight controls be held while taxiing a tailwheel airplane with left quartering tailwind?

A. Left aileron up, elevator neutral.
B. Left aileron down, elevator neutral.
C. Left aileron down, elvator down.

-From the FAA private pilot written test question database

In order to become a private pilot one step is to pass the FAA written test. The test claims to test essential knowledge an airman needs to conduct safe flight operations.

When I heard that the test was multiple choice I immediately thought of those old AP exams with 5 possible responses where they subtracted 1/4 point for wrong answers. The FAA test has only 3 choices per question. If it followed the AP style it would subtract something like 1/2 point for each incorrect response.

To pass the FAA test requires 70% correct responses. Assuming 100 questions, let's say you KNOW the answer to 58 questions and guess on the 42 remaining questions. If you get 1/3 of those right and 2/3 wrong you have a raw score of 70 and would be on your to getting your wings. AP style, your 7o raw score would end up being... 58, i.e., the number you KNEW and you'd fail. In fact, under the AP method, answering 79 questions correctly and missing 21 questions would result in failure, because you only knew 69 of the questions.

Of course you could get lucky and get more of your guesses right (say by eliminating a few obviously wronge choices). Is it worth getting lucky on the test only to be unlucky while taxiing your $150,000 Diamond DA20-C1 with a strong left quarting wind?

Check the comments for both answers.

Life Expectancy: Don't count on it

Life expectancy (LE) numbers have always confused me. My eyes glazed over at this description for calculating it. The term life expectancy is thrown out all over the place. The way I (naively) looked at it was it was the lower bound on my life if I didn't do anything stupid to get myself killed. So when some one tells me that male LE in the US is 77.5 years, I say to myself, "Great, I'll live at least 77 years!"

Except that is not what it means at all. The LE of a man born in 1900 was 47 years. Yet people born in 1900 that lived to 65 could expect to live 15 more year, or to the age of 80. Umm, so is it 47 or 80? Well, at 65 you've already gotten through a bunch of stuff that kills lesser men (chicken pox, military service, dueling for a woman). So obviously it is a conditional probability.

So if I live to 77, can I then expect to live until 90? Thinking about it in the conditional sheds new insight on how long you will live. If you are pretty sure you can get to 77, then be sure you have a large retirement fund because you could be kicking for a lot longer.

What got me thinking about LE is all the old people in the history books. Many of the people in the history books die relatively old compared to the 47 years figure. If we looked at a distribution of the age of death in 1790 for instance, I think we'd see a large portion in the early forties with a long, thin tail out to about 75 years of age.

If it wasn't for those darn kids!

Kids in school have started using high frequency ring tones that adults cannot hear. See if you can hear them here. I could hear the mosquito but not that kHz tone.

A new way to tell if kids are underage...? How about giving one set of differing instructions in the high tone and see who heeds them.

Final Paper of Greatness

I just submitted my last undergraduate paper. The essay question was,

To what extent are engineers responsible for the misuse of their innovations?

Here is my first paragraph:

Finding a Cozy Level of Causality in Engineering

Objective responsibility does not exist. Responsibility is a system of principles and judgments held by an individual or shared by a society, pertaining to whether actions are right or wrong. This system is applied to an objective measure, that is, the degree to which an individual’s actions cause another to occur, which I refer to as the degree of causation. The degree of causation sufficient to hold an individual responsible for an outcome differs among individuals or groups of like-minded individuals, rendering responsibility to the realm of subjectivity. So it does not make sense to speak of an engineer’s responsibility for the misuse of her innovations, only her degree of causation in a given misuse. Therefore, engineers are not at all responsible for the misuse of their innovations. Even so, engineers will attempt to find a comfortable degree of causation according to their individual preferences and pressures exerted by societies in which they interact. Furthermore, engineers will find it advantageous to understand the threshold degree of causation that other individuals and societies define as responsibility.

Update: To coincide with my submission, there is this (hat tip boing boing),

A farmer in Middlesex builds and exports gallows to African dictatorships, where they are used to execute dissidents and others who've been railroaded through corrupt judicial systems. He's been condemned by Amnesty International, but insists that "business is business," and some people deserve the death penalty. His business will be outlawed by a new EC regulation in July.

Shall my paper hang from the gallows?

Choosing Resource Consumption Consistent with the Purpose of Life

(My Team Ethics Essay with Ji Hee Song)

If we adhere to the natural ethic, or the use of methods, systems and materials that sustain the purpose of life, to which consumption strategy can we rightly adhere?

This essay assumes that the purpose of life in nature is to carry genetic material through time. Actions motivated by this purpose are defined as natural. Therefore, in many regards, human action is natural; it tends toward the security of the physical body and the (at least short-term) propagation –through reproduction– of human genetic material. However, not all human action is natural as defined here. Humans, in comparison to other organisms, have incredible command over their will. This command can lead to extreme reduction in present consumption that reduces the present generation’s ability to reproduce and care for its young. On the other hand, technology has allowed humans to increase their command of the environment. This command can lead to over-consumption of natural resources to the extent that future generations cannot adequately provide for themselves. Because strategies which exercise these commands to their extremes disregard the purpose of life, they are unnatural. Yet, even between these two extremes lay unnatural strategies. If we adhere to the natural ethic, we must discover and follow a sustainable consumption strategy.

Strict preservation denotes “human actions which reserve, protect, or safeguard the natural environment from natural disturbance” [Italics added] [1]. Natural in this definition is misapplied because strict preservation rejects the human role in nature. Because strict preservation subtracts human needs from the natural environment it compares the damages humans inflict on the environment to an insignificant benefit. This will always lead the preservationist to call for a reduction in human consumption. However, humans must consume resources from the environment to fulfill the purpose of life.

A major component in this fulfillment is energy consumption, whether to enhance food transportation and production, increase defense against nature and enemies, increase productivity and hence ability to purchase food, etc. Sources include fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas), renewable energy sources (solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal), as well as nuclear and hydrogen. If strict preservationists opt for any unnatural energy production, they will opt for renewable energy sources because they place the least load on the natural environment. They neglect or discount too heavily the cost that total conversion to these sources will require. This high cost is evidenced the low current usage of renewable resources (about 6% versus about 86% for fossil fuels in 2004) [2]. Strict reliance on these sources as a blanket solution is unnatural because it does not simultaneously leave many humans sufficient wealth to adequately address other aspects of life essential fulfilling the purpose of life (e.g., housing, transportation, medication, and productivity enhancing technologies).

An extreme consumption strategy is equally unnatural. It promotes the use of available resources to meet human needs and wants. Extreme consumption excludes future generations’ needs when calculating total social benefit which leads them to compare the benefits humans gain from resources to an insignificant cost (present costs of consumption). Therefore, as long as it is economically viable, the consumption strategy will call for an increase in human resource utilization. However, to fulfill the purpose of life, humans must ensure the availability of resources for future generations.

Extreme consumption, while improving human’s ability to reproduce and care for their young, leads to both a higher future population and reduced resource supply to sustain it. For example, extreme energy consumption and its related processes (fossil fuel extraction and combustion for the production of energy) reduce energy resource supplies and pollute other non-energy resources. Reducing the availability of these resources such that future generations cannot fulfill their needs is contrary to the purpose of life, violating the natural ethic.

The natural ethic requires a strategy with both preservation and consumption elements, yet at neither extreme. Sustainability is defined as "improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems” [3]. The obvious question is: where on the spectrum does sustainable consumption lie? Without perfect information about nature, we cannot pinpoint the most sustainable consumption level. However, we can begin to define unsustainable regions of the spectrum.

By definition, genetic extinction occurs when the human population reaches zero. However, risks to genetic material begin whenever the population decreases significantly. One risk is maintaining allele levels (genetic diversity) from generation to generation. As the purpose of life is to carry genetic material, it is desirable to avoid reductions in genetic diversity which may reduce adaptability to changing conditions [4]. This would suggest that sustainable consumption excludes any strategy along the spectrum that does not maintain a human population sufficient to ensure reasonable genetic diversity.

To narrow the range of strategies, we define reasonable genetic diversity as that level of diversity great enough to adapt to catastrophes that are likely to arise in the course of time relevant to the human species, perhaps 2 million years. We do not assume to know the exact severity of these catastrophes. However, their existence implies a threshold value, δ, such that sustainable genetic diversity must be at least δ above the reasonable genetic diversity level (figure 1). If not, a natural disturbance could bring the population to a level that would lead to genetic extinction in the long term. Therefore this region of the figure is labeled “unsustainable strategy” and δ is called the “safety margin.”

Figure 1. Genetic diversity versus consumption level (authors).

A likely objection is to assert that the natural ethic requires the maximization of genetic diversity and hence the likelihood of the material’s survival. In other words, only one strategy is in accordance with the natural ethic. While technically valid, figure 1 is misleading in that we do not know the exact functional relation between genetic diversity and consumption level (i.e., we do not know the shape of the curve). This uncertainty does not affect the required level of genetic diversity but it does reduce our ability to choose a precise consumption level.

As we further explore nature and the relationship between genetic diversity and consumption over a long period, we will reduce this ambiguity. The natural ethic requires genetically non-essential resources be diverted to this endeavor as it will allow for the optimization of resource utilization. Translated into practical terms, those most able (e.g., the rich, the intelligent, etc.) should reduce non-essential consumption (if it exists) to pursue this end, while those whose present needs remain unmet should increase consumption until these needs are met. A practical public policy in accordance with the natural ethic is to tax the rich’s surplus to support research into genetic diversity while concurrently reducing penalties on the poor for increasing utilization of resources that improve their ability to fulfill their purpose of life (including, if necessary, non-renewable, polluting resources).

References

1 Ministry of Forestry, British Columbia. Glossary, 2001. Accessed April 25, 2005.

2 Energy Information Administration. U. S. Energy Consumption by Energy Source, August, 2005. Accessed April 25, 2005. <http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1.html>

3 H. Odum. Energy in Ecosystems. Environmental Monographs and Symposia. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1986; C. Cleveland. Natural Resource Scarcity and Economic Growth Revisited: Economic and Biophysical Perspectives. Ecological Economics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 289; J. Gever et al. Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades. Cambridge, Mass.: Harper & Row, 1986; and R. Ayres and K. Martinas. Waste Potential Energy: The Ultimate Ecotoxic. Economic Applications. 43, no. 2, 1995.

4 Pearman, P.B. & Garner, T.W.J. Susceptibility of Italian agile frog populations to an emerging strain of Ranavirus parallels population genetic diversity. Ecology Letters. Vol. 8, no. 4, April 2005.





Too many M & M arguments

That's M for Motivation, as opposed to consequences. Arnold Kling distiguishes between the two is a critique of some Paul Krugman articles. Basically,

A hypothetical example of a Type C argument would be, "Well, Arnold, studies actually show that the minimum wage does not cost jobs. If you read the work of Krueger and Card, you would see that the minimum wage probably reduces poverty."

A hypothetical example of a Type M argument would be, "People who want to get rid of the minimum wage are just trying to help the corporate plutocrats."

Environmentalists also love Type M arguments.

More energy obsessions.

I've been slightly obsessed with this energy thing lately. A previous post questions the effects our waste has on future generations. This is the classic negative externality. We benefit from energy production and we pay for that benefit, yet we do not pay for the negative effects that will accrue on future generations, and thus we produce more than the socially optimal level of pollution/fuel depletion. (note: perhaps socially optimal excludes future generations, but that doesn't seem socially responsible!)

There is another way to look at this. Perhaps the benefits of our energy production is not entirely consumed by us. A toy factory that will employ future generations is only economical to build today because of affordable energy. The toy makers increase the demand for energy and elicit more supply. Producing this supply causes pollution. It also allows the toy makers to operate, creating jobs not only today but the possibility of jobs for future toy makers.

So the next generation incurs some costs, (additional pollution, viewing a huge factory where there once was a beautiful meadow, etc.) and is not paid any compensation for such. Yet they also gain benefits, the availability of additional employment opportunities for toy makers. That is a positive externality; toy makers are paid nothing for providing this benefit.

Perhaps it can be said that future generation pay for these positive benefits by enduring the negative ones. The problem is that they choose neither which benefits they receive nor the costs they incur. To me this is a suboptimal outcome. Hence the delema: how much energy should we produce, using which methods, and to what extent must we allocate money/effort to mitigate pollution thusly caused?

More on Nuclear Power

The co-founder of Greenpeace decides nuclear power is good after all. His view on proliferation:

· Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons. This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy and the most difficult to address, as the example of Iran shows. But just because nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use.

Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest tools -- the machete -- has been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.

Pretty much all the opinions I've looked at so far have said nuclear power operation is very safe. So the main issues are proliferation, terrorist attacks, and disposal of nuclear wastes. I think we can hand the last two, and even if the U.S. stops producing nuclear power, that doesn't affect the proliferation -- so diplomacy is necessary there.

Why we aren't greener

The major green movement is for the increased use of renewable energy and increasing efficiency of use. Why don't we use more renewable energy? Simply because it is not yet cost effective to do so. Energy companies, like all others, operator for profit. So long as other sources are readily available and governments do not artificially affect prices, current production means are cheaper. Why don't we increase efficiency? Largely for the same reasons. The alternatives are simply to costly. We could buy hybrid cars, but they just cost too much right now. We could turn down our thermostats, but we can afford to keep them high. The same applies for industry as for individuals.