Rants & Raves
As fiction goes, Ed Regis's article on antienvironmental crusader Julian L. Simon ("The Doomslayer," Wired 5.02, page 136) was a work of art. As journalism goes, it was sloppy at best and dangerous at worst. Regis fell straight into Simon's trap: using overwhelming amounts of irrelevant data to obscure the fact that our global environment is in trouble and that we need to take responsibility for cleaning it up.
Yes, it is true that rivers are no longer burning and that we are, in general, taking better care of the earth than we were, say, 20 or 30 years ago. It is even true that in their early years, environmental organizations - including Greenpeace - spent too much time telling people the sky was falling and not enough time telling them what to do about it.
However, to imply that everything on Earth is rosy and that resources are limitless is unconscionable. That thinking has given us such modern delights as the Chernobyl disaster, the Exxon Valdez spill, clear-cut old-growth forests, climate change, and five-legged frogs.
Had Regis done a modicum of homework and fact checking, he would have discovered that Simon is beholden to some of the most polluting and dangerous industries. While Regis mentions that Simon is with "the conservative Cato Institute," he fails to mention that the Cato Institute is funded by such environmental menaces as Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute, Arco, and Philip Morris.
Simon has a vested interest in downplaying the dangers of fossil fuel and nuclear energy. And though it must be lovely to get paid by Exxon and Arco to do "research and writing out on the deck ... in the shade of the mulberry tree," Simon might sing a different tune if he were to leave the sanctity of his beloved facts and figures and, for starters, take a trip to Cancer Alley around Louisiana and Texas. He would see skies illuminated by belching gas flares, rivers polluted by waste from petrochemical plants, and town after town riddled with cancer cases.
This one stark example of a severely degraded planet demonstrates why more Americans than ever are concerned about the environment. It also explains what Simon finds "peculiar" - the fact that nothing he "did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large." Despite Simon's stated reverence for "facts," the facts most people care about are the ones that stare them in the face every day.
Tim Andrews
Media Director, Greenpeace
Washington, DC
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I read "The Doomslayer" with what can only be described as horrified fascination. The problem with Julian Simon's "logic" is that his statistics do not tell the entire story. For example, statistics showing that food production has risen over time do not take into consideration that food, especially in America, is processed, chemically altered, and lacking in essential vitamins and nutrients due to depleted soils and premature harvesting (to allow for shipping time). So, production of tasteless and nutritionally deficient food is up - yippee!
Oh, did I forget to mention the pesticides and fertilizers that poison the populace through food and by-products left in the environment? Sorry, my error.
Another example: Simon argues that although the forests in tropical regions are imperiled, those in temperate regions are expanding. This assumes that an acre for an acre is an acceptable trade-off. Not so: the tropical forests have untapped potential, supporting plants and animals with, among other things, potentially valuable medicinal properties. Also, tropical forests are more likely to contain a fully functioning ecosystem undamaged by human expansion.
It's no fun being a "doomsayer," but if more people listened to us, we might all be better off.
Michael Macchi
West Roxbury, Massachusetts
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When Ed Regis interviewed me, I told him his facts about my debate with Julian Simon were wrong. I did not show a chart of air pollution in London! Yet he persisted in his erroneous account in the Wired article.
For a correct transcript of the debate between me and Julian Simon, see the March 1997 issue of The Futurist.
Hazel Henderson
Saint Augustine, Florida
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Thanks for the interesting article about Julian Simon. Perhaps more interesting was its instant condemnation by a friend of mine: she looked at the pictures, scanned the text, and quickly decided that the story was utterly worthless. With no data to support her position, she argued that he was a businessman and therefore was hiding an evil, conservative, Republican, resource-exploiting agenda. It was a classic example of how quickly we rush to protect our preconceived ideas of how things are. This is exactly the kind of thinking Simon is trying to expose.
Then again, anyone who has watched a television commercial knows how easy it is to use data to support a desired result. Are there people who refute Simon with equally "objective" facts?
It's wonderful to read the good news that things are getting better, and I hope society as a whole continues to increase its concern for the environment. Yet the belief that "the world is going downhill" is the best means to that end.
Jim McCabe
jmccabe@pobox.com
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It was a great relief to read "The Doomslayer." Now I can sleep comfortably again. May I suggest that Julian Simon lecture to the roughly 40,000 unemployed fishermen in Newfoundland, where the cod are nearly extinct and the fishing industry has collapsed. I'm sure they'll be likewise reassured. They certainly have the time to listen.
Patrick Corbett
pc.mms@mindlink.bc.ca
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Julian Simon's critics portray him as believing, as Tim Andrews puts it, "that everything on Earth is rosy." They then "refute" him by pointing in shocked outrage to one or more aspects of life on Earth that are less than swell and dandy. Yet Simon has never said, and does not believe, that "everything" on our planet is "rosy" or otherwise perfect. He asserts - and the empirical record supports him - that in many specific and precisely defined areas, we are doing better than the groupthinking doomsters would have us believe. As for the charge that the oil companies have funded Simon's research, the strength of Simon's claims is that they're based on factual information available in a variety of standard reference texts. Oil companies do not manufacture the data tabulated in such works as Historical Statistics of the United States (published by the US Bureau of the Census) or the FAO Production Yearbook (published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization). For all his vituperation, Andrews does not challenge a single one of Simon's facts. I witnessed the debate between Julian Simon and Hazel Henderson at the Washington Hilton on July 17, 1996, and Henderson did indeed show a chart of declining air pollution levels. In researching the article, I called Henderson on October 12, 1996. On that date, according to my notes, she said that the chart was based on carbon dioxide emissions in London between 1940 and 1970. She called me back later that day and said that this was not the chart she had shown. On October 14, she called me back again, reporting that she could not locate the chart in question. The March 1997 issue of The Futurist contains an edited digest of the debate, not a "transcript," and does not reproduce any of the charts used by the participants.- Ed Regis
Hazel Henderson ("Win-Win World," Wired 5.02, page 152) is typical of many academic and government lifers. She envisions some utopian one world government making sure that everyone gets along.
Yes, Hazel, technology creates abundance. No, Hazel, the United Nations is not our best hope for setting standards and protocols.
In slapping the invisible hand and trashing the notion of competition, Henderson says, "We haven't seen the utility of the cooperation side, the standard-setting side." Yes, we have. It was called the Soviet model. It failed. It's dead.
The single greatest economic force is and has always been individual competitive drive. If Henderson thinks that a worldwide, centralized standard-setting body can inspire the innovators and wealth creators of the world, she is mistaken.
Mark Peterson
mpeterson@seanet.com
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It is hard to know where to begin to discuss the errors in Hazel Henderson's odd diatribe. The article's subtitle recommends that we "abolish economics and make way for the economy of abundance." That's like saying we should abolish chemistry and make way for more chemistry. Economics, like chemistry, describes only how processes function. No one "overhauls" economics. As with any science, economics evolves over time. Economic tenets are only solid until proven otherwise.
As for Kevin Kelly's statement that economics "missed the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution," that's absurd. What, exactly, has it missed? The important role of new technology in bringing goods to market has long been appreciated. Better technologies - faster Pentium processors or steam engines - increase the wealth of society. Technology has helped create abundance, but where has economics failed in this process? We have more bread, books, and fill-in-your-favorite-item-here because of technology. It sounds like economics is working quite well to me.
Kent Wosepka
mkwosepk@gsbpop.uchicago.edu
When I finished Charles Platt's "The Great HDTV Swindle" (Wired 5.02, page 57), I sat back with a big shit-eating grin. I revel in the hypocrisy that Wired flaunts as it sucks up to the wannabe anarcho syndicalist digerati who were made rich by using technology created by and for the government while it chants its libertarian abolish government-and-we-can-all-live-in-a-Neal Stephenson-novel mantra. Whew.
This article takes the cake. Could it be a plea for good old-fashioned government regulation in the public interest, a public interest distinct from the vector sum of our individualist grasping?
Marc Danziger
marcd@charmed.com
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In "The Great HDTV Swindle," Platt presents some facts that are more or less correct and a lot of conjecture that often misses the mark, such as his vilification of FCC chair Reed Hundt, who - Platt fails to recognize - attempted to open the ATV process to film and computer interests. Perhaps Platt is attacking Hundt for even trying to reform the FCC, which hurts the cause of those who want to dismantle it altogether.
There is no perfect market-driven environment. Platt praises Polaroid for its progressive-scan HDTV camera but neglects to mention that the project was initiated by MIT, which receives federal funding. Polaroid didn't develop the camera on its own. When Hundt heard about the project, he came to Cambridge, where he spent considerable time discussing its importance. He then went out on a limb to host a demonstration of the camera at the FCC, followed by a demonstration before Congress.
As for the industry's November agreement, which does have problems, those unhappy with the outcome have two choices: they can mount a formal challenge to the FCC through the courts or through Congress, or they can get their act together to invest in and develop a credible alternative.
David Carver
dcc@mit.edu
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I went through Charles Platt's piece thinking, Yeah, but it's worse than that.
Platt is right about interlace. When you shop for an HDTV set, don't buy any BS that "it receives the progressive formats" - make sure that the display is progressive. Ask to see a sample of high-contrast text. Look for edge flicker.
Though it's not properly part of the standard, overscan is another National Television Systems Committee (NTSC) holdover that I've seen on all the HDTV sets. Back in the analog vacuum tube days, they just couldn't get clean, stable edges on the raster, and they couldn't regulate voltage well enough to keep the scan a constant size, so they made the image a little bigger than the face of the tube. About 10 percent of each dimension is lost to overscan.
A computer monitor doesn't do that. It underscans a little, which is what you need if you want to use your HDTV set on the Net. Icons and scrollbars sliding off the edge? Just say no. Tell them you want to see the SMPTE Clean Aperture (1888 by 1062 pixels). The Production Aperture (1920 by 1080) leaves a little slop for edge erosion. If the FCC had done its job right, I wouldn't have had to tell you that.
But it gets worse. There's another NTSC holdover called "3-2 pulldown." Films and the vast majority of prime-time TV shows originate on film at 24 frames per second. (We have to shoot at 24 because the international market won't buy 30, the NTSC rate.) The 60-field-per-second HDTV system shows one frame three times, and the next one twice, and so forth. It's like an old car with a bad clutch. If the standard had gone to 72 frames per second, each film frame would be shown three times, and there'd be no motion artifact. But they kept the NTSC rates to make it easier to simulcast.
When you look to buy a set, make sure it multisyncs and gives you 72-Hz display refresh for the film mode. You'll also want 60 Hz for news, sports, soaps, and Sesame Street.
The consumer needs to know the facts.
John Sprung
john_sprung@smtpgw1.paramount.com
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Charles Platt does an admirable job of covering the twisted history of HDTV development, but he misses one crucial detail: why should anyone care? "Consumers will suffer," he proclaims. Maybe it's just me, but the fact that I am unable to spend US$1,000 to $1,500 for something as irrelevant as better TV reception does not distress me in any way. Does Platt really believe that I'm suffering because evening sitcoms suffer from less-than-perfect picture quality?
Just as FM radio didn't enable skilled musicians to compose good music and didn't make unskilled musicians any more talented, better picture quality won't magically transform television into something that doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence.
Tom Harrington
tph@rmii.com
An addendum to "Scouting the Supremes" (Wired 5.02, page 46): "The Supremes" - except for Justice Stevens, perhaps - do not write their opinions. In all but a few key cases, most of the justices let their law clerks grind out the legal nuts and bolts, and just sign their names. (You might say that ghostwriting reigns supreme.) The crucial decisions actually made by the justices are which cases to accept for review, how they will vote, and final editing of the drafted opinions.
Given that ACLU v*. Reno* is a major case - because of its precedent-setting value as the first Supreme Court decision involving the Internet - one could argue that the justice assigned to write the opinion will actually write it. However, if Wired's report on judicial ignorance of the Internet is accurate, even a justice wanting to write a good opinion (i.e., one that displays knowledge of the Net and passes constitutional muster) will lean on the more computer-literate clerks for guidance.
The skinny here is that the lower-court decision was L-O-N-G. Translation: there's no way any supreme is going to read that tome. Which means the clerks will do the grunt work of reading it and then parsing out its essential doctrines.
Lucas E. Morel, PhD
lmorel@acc.jbu.edu
I read the article on David Gelernter's new interface ("Lifestreams," Wired 5.02, page 148). There have already been a number of similar products (and not just experimental systems) that organize all data as a linear stream, with new material accreted at one end as it comes in or is created. SwyftWare for the Apple II and the Canon Cat operated on exactly these principles. Both allowed searching by content or linear browsing. Since the 1980s articles on these systems have appeared in obscure magazines such as . In fact, another obscure magazine called Wired published "Down with GUIs!" (Wired 1.6, page 122), an article that made similar points on the problems with file-based organization and the advantages of linear systems.
"Lifestreams" claims that "few" academics study interface design. This was true 15 years ago, and the subject was "way out there" when I was a student, but if you attend a human interface confer-ence today you can see thousands of academic researchers in the field all at the same time. Not a pretty sight, perhaps, but thousands is not "few."
Gelernter's work, although it is heading in one of the right directions IMHO, is not nearly as new or startling as Wired made it out to be.
Jef Raskin
jefraskin@aol.com
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Lifestreams may be a good way to find a lost needle in a haystack of data. But it's not a way to organize data. Fundamentally, Lifestreams isn't new at all. It's merely an extension of the desktop metaphor. We can simply look on top of the pile for the most recently arrived file. And Gelernter wants to organize the world's hard drives the same way he "organizes" his physical desktop? Please keep your stream off my desk.
Al Cambronne
acambronne@aol.com
I am a student, and, as such, I "have to" attend more than a few booooring lectures ... and I love Wired. The only bad thing about all this is that the colors of Wired make it easy for the teacher to spot. So, I was wondering - though perhaps this goes against the very nature of Wired - if you could possibly print a few copies in a special camouflage edition.
Ricardo Tur Salamanca
psdifv4@emducms1.sis.ucm.es
Not being much of a racing fan, I did not expect to enjoy "Hard Drive" (Wired 5.02, page 144). I always thought of NASCAR as a bunch of rednecks with Skoal hats and bad dispositions. Man, was I wrong! Rob Riddell translated the exhilaration of the wannabe Cale Yarboroughs so well that I wanted to go out and buy a racing game immediately. Beyond this sudden desire for speed, I was amazed by the accomplishments of the gaming industry.
Now if only this technology could be translated into something for the common good.
Chris Logan
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Donna Haraway's supposition that because we rely on cell phones and laptops we are cyborgs is tantamount to saying the Plains Indians were centaurs because they relied on horses ("You are Borg," Wired 5.02, page 154). The primary difference between a cyborg and a human using a tool is that a human can put the tool down. If Haraway wishes to suggest that I'm cyborg because of my reliance on contacts and eyeglasses, I might consider the point (although I do remove them each evening, much to the detriment of my bedroom furniture). Until the cell phone is imbedded into my skull, it is merely a tool.
I agree with Haraway that our perceptions shape our tools, and our tools shape our perceptions. But we still control our perceptions of ourselves and our world. We can still choose to not be assimilated. And as long as I have that choice, I am not cyborg, I am merely geek.
Carolyn Cooper
guerrilla@earthlink.net
I enjoyed the article about Michael Hart, the man behind Project Gutenberg ("Hart of the Gutenberg Galaxy," Wired 5.02, page 108). However, Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press, as the article implies. His contribution to printing was movable type, allowing pages to be composed quickly and economically.
Dan Berger
dberger@qnet.com
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