Cererean Scratchpad

Everyone knows about the Monofuture , even if they do not know it by that name. It is The Future (tm)! Flying cars! Monorails! Shiny glass and steel towers! Spaceships and spandex, all in the wondrous future of the year 2000AD! And everyone knows that it's not the future we got by the year 2000AD. This has made a few people very disappointed, and many people flustered, because it was the only somewhat-positive vision of the future they have been given. It's Star Trek or Mad Max, and if you look around you you will not see Star Trek, therefore we must be in the Mad Max timeline. But look around more. Just, look around you. Have you worked out what we're looking for? In 50 years of progress, what has fundamentally changed? The cars look a bit different, yes, but they are still cars. Even if autonomous and electric they will still be cars. The railways that carry much of the worlds freight would be instantly recognisable to Brunel. Airlines hit their top speed and took their...

With winter on its way, I've been thinking a lot about heating and insulation -- specifically, about what the minimum level of power required is given the need to heat up outside air in a properly ventilated home. This led me to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, who provide guidance as to what the outside airflow rate should be to ensure acceptable air quality. Unfortunately, having done the maths regarding CO2 production, their recommendations are far too low. Healthy individuals take 12-20 breaths per minute. Each breath exhales 0.5 litres of air , so each person will exhale 6-10 litres every minute, which at a CO2 level of 4%, contains 100 times the CO2 of ambient air. In order to dilute this to a doubling of CO2 over ambient, around 800ppm, 600-1000 L (10-17 L/s) of outside air would be required, assuming the inhabitants are not engaged in physical activity that would raise their CO2 production significantly. The recommendations f...

It is generally understood that two tier local government, of a county council with district councils beneath it, is on its way out. The division of responsibilities makes little sense and causes great confusion, especially since many of them need to work together -- waste collection, for example, is a district responsibility, whilst managing the waste collected is a county responsibility. The proposed solution is almost always to replace two tier governance with single tier unitaries. The trouble with unitaries, however, is size. A unitary has responsibility for things like parks, which function best under smaller authorities, but also has responsibility for highways, which are best served by a large authority. Instead of unitaries, consideration should be given to reshuffling responsibilities. Consider this list of what councils do (from NewLocal.org) :   Elections are handled at the district level, and yet responsibility for registering births and deaths and marriages is a count...

The race for the next Prime Minister is getting started. But judging by the focus of the candidates (culture war and tax cuts), none of them are serious about the crises gripping this country. It looks like whoever wins, we lose. This country will continue to go downhill, with the next PM promising to get into the driving seat and put his or her foot on the accelerator. If we're to thrive through this, we need to rediscover the pre-war English model of not relying on central government to get anything done. Unfortunately, local government is a mess, and doing anything on a large scale invites the meddling of both them and Westminster. Anything requiring a competent government just isn't going to happen. Realistically, we need to be focused on the upper left of this grid -- solutions that require relatively small amounts of resources and which can be done without buy in from The Powers That Be (co-ordination difficult as I use it here comprises both the number of stakeholders yo...

Britain needs housing, and we all know who is to blame for our lack of supply: those dastardly NIMBYs and their unenlightened self interest in keeping property prices high. Or maybe that's not really what's going on. Most people agree that we need more homes. When you look at most opposition to new housing, a pattern emerges -- most opposition to housebuilding is opposition to concreting fields with deanoboxes, not to adding new homes. In fact, the only organised and large scale opposition tends to be over greenfield development. There's no Council for the Protection of Urban England pushing to keep brownfield land as brownfield. Brits like their green and pleasant land and wish to keep it; they aren't usually so bothered by a couple of houses being built on a garden. And who can blame them? The costs of greenfield development, both aesthetically (loss of visual appeal replaced by boxes on concrete) and logistically (increased demand on infrastructure) fall on existing ...

Slack: not tight or taut (Merriam-Webster). Slack: something that you must have, the more of it the better (SubGenius). Or as I see it, Slack: the ability to absorb shocks and strains without immediately failing. A bridge built to handle twice its expected load has slack. A submarine built to handle a significantly greater depth than its operating depth has slack. If the normal conditions are exceeded, there is time to recover; mistakes do not carry an automatic death penalty. It is essential for life to exist on a world where conditions are not constant. The fat your body stores up is slack, allowing you to survive for days and weeks should you fail to eat. And grace is a form of slack applied to people. People are difficult. Even when the person we have a relationship with is ourselves, or especially when, relationships are hard work. We mess up. Even when we aren't trying to be mean, we mess up and hurt each other. And without the slack afforded by grace, those mess ups would br...