jeffmcbride.net

I’ve been on a bit of a Swedish mystery kick recently. Just finished “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”, after waiting months for its (English) release since finishing the second book. I got completely sucked into all three of these books. They’re very good! There’s also a movie just released in the US of the first.

While I was waiting for the final in the Stieg Larsson series, I figured I would try some other Swedish fiction – since I’m in kind of a “Scandinavia (and Greenland!) is cool phase – and read a couple of the Inspector Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. I had previously read Depths by the same author quite by coincidence, but I didn’t find it at all interesting and never finished it. However, The Wallander books seemed highly recommended on the interwebs, so I thought I’d give them a chance. I’ve read the first two, and they’re OK; certainly interesting enough to finish (and maybe even buy the next in the series). But not great. They don’t keep me up nights, by any means.

I stopped by a Barnes and Nobles on a recent trip to Orlando, looking for something to read on the plane ride back home. I ended up walking out with “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments”, by George Johnson (Amazon). Although I could have saved $10 getting it on Amazon (why does anybody buy books at a place like B&N if they aren’t in a hurry?), I don’t regret it. It proved to be a short and enjoyable trip (the former perhaps being a requirement for the latter) through MORE than ten groundbreaking science experiments over the last four centuries, describing how many of the basic facts we now take for granted about our world were tweaked out by clever and persistent experimentation. He tells a great story, without overwhelming it with too much tedium to put you to sleep, but enough that I felt like I knew what was going on.

Although physics dominated, Johnson’s list covered everything from Galileo rolling balls down tracks and his clever mechanisms for timing them in order to discovere basic laws of acceleration, to William Harvey opening up the mysteries of the heart, to Millikan measuring the charge of an electron (and showing that charge was in fact carried by discrete particulars in discrete amounts), and even Pavlov and his salivating dogs made the list. It was an enjoyable, enlightening, and inspiring read. It makes me wish for the chance to discover some hitherto unknown fact about the universe that no human had ever before seen. It also made me appreciate some of the things that seem obvious now but weren’t always so obvious.

I’ve long thought that gasoline (and petroleum products in general) should be taxed a lot more than they are. People love to talk about the need to ween America off oil. You know, CO2 emissions, dependence on less than stable, not always friendly, developing nations, and all that. Every presidential candidate says it. But you can’t just say it and make it so! If you want to make alternatives more attractive, or if you think there are costs and risks embedded in the use of gasoline not accounted for in the price, the cost has to be increased! Yet, in the last Virginia Gubernatorial race, both candidates were promising explicitly NOT to raise gasoline taxes (I for one would have gladly voted for anyone willing to come out in favor, but the truth I’m afraid, is that most would not).

I was pleasantly surprised to hear Alan Greenspan, in his book, “The Age of Turbulence”, advocating a gas tax of $3/gallon or more.

I come very reluctantly to taxes as an alternative way to accomplish what competitive markets could do. But while oil markets are high competitive in the developed world, the market approach is clearly vulnerable in a world where a single act of terrorism can shut down massive chunks of oil production and cripple the global economy. There is no insurance, or hedging strategy, that can defend against that. We often forget that to function effectively, a competitive market must be voluntary and free of significant threats of violence, and that trade must be unencumbered. Remember, markets are not ends in themselves. They are constructs to assist populations in achieving the optimum allocation of resources.

And I really liked this:

I consider the argument that gasoline tax hikes are politically infeasible irrelevant. Sometimes the duty of political leadership is to convince constituencies that they are just plain wrong. Leaders who do not do that are followers.

He also advocated an increase in nuclear generation, which I think is great. The fear of nuclear power is significantly overstated.

There is, certainly, a short term economic cost to any increase in fuel pricing, just like there are losers for every economic shift (“Creative destruction”, to borrow Greenspan’s term). But, the fact is, it is going to have to happen, sooner is better than later, and talking about it won’t do it. America burns one out of every seven barrels of petroleum produced worldwide on its highways! That is a big chunk that could be significantly decreased fairly quickly.

On a related note: Greenspan is a really smart man, with a lot of experience, and his book is definitely worth a read. He covers everything from history, to current events, even looking a bit towards the future. It is a bit long, and has taken me a while to get through, but it has been more interesting than the couple other books I set aside in favor of it.

“The Age of Turbulence” at Amazon.com