43 posts
Looks like it's going to be a tough one for Japan. The pictures of the tsunami and oil refinery fire were unbelievable! :o
Head to higher ground Dave! The tsunami's headed your way! ;)
What I can't believe is just how STUPID some of the reporting has been. First they show houses, cars, large ships and other debris heading inland at a high rate of speed then they say that they have reports of one dead. They will be VERY lucky if it's "only" 10,000 dead. ::)
Burning nuke plant never a good thing.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-me-crescent-city-california-20110311,0,3043382.story
Santa Cruz is my town... but so far it seems like just a bunch of boats smashed in the harbor. The waves weren't big enough to escape the ocean, but there was enough water to wreak havoc in the harbor.
I was wondering how you made out. I hear we had a few idiots who got dragged out to a watery death up here... Haven't heard from my friend on the coast yet.
The US Geological survey reports that the entire island of Japan moved 2.4 meters. THAT is a big quake.
Wow. This was a big move. They report earth axis was shifted 4 inches as well.
doc — Mar 12, 2011Wow. This was a big move. They report earth axis was shifted 4 inches as well.
Wow, that is powerful, shifting the Earths Axis.
those pictures are unbelievable!
Upgraded to 9.0.
Looks like cores are melting in 3 out of 4 reactors at the nuclear power plant, too. Shit.
Not a good thing if that is what is happening.
We'll see if the power reconnection does what it needs to do...I sure hope so.
Probably too late. Those 50 people at the plant have already sacrificed their lives. Wonder how many more it will take to solve this? And I wonder why we don't have the tech to drop water accurately... looks like the Japanese have been missing with all of their water drops. We need some good drone water bomb technology, fast.
The really shocking thing is why Japan of all nations doesn't have an automated response - i.e robotics.
Not talking stupid shit like Gort - just effective remote tools for engineers.
If there was one class of application for robotics - this was it and they are the world leaders.
I know it is a hugely complex to control and fix this situation -
But basic actions involved - like directing a substance gross - like water/boric acid into some "target" in nuclear facility
That should not be some ad hoc response with helicopters or require suicide from workers.
Basic stuff like that should clearly be an exercise that can be carried out under any circumstances using remote devices.
You know - compare this to BP/Gulf ??
It does seem odd they are not on it. The word a bit ago was that it had stabilized. I am not sure what that means. The response from some folks here has been that they had active technology and should have been working to upgrade to passive technology. Some NRC expert was saying that apparently this is current tech and is what works when everything (power, water, etc.) shuts down. It is not clear to me as yet what that is exactly though so ... Like the oil rig in the gulf, everything fails at some point.
I believe the passive system is a large ass tank held above the plant so gravity can feed water as a stopgap measure for around 72 hrs. It buys time and is the current tech (heh heh if you can call it that)...like the BP spill showed - we can start it up but stopping it is not so easy once things go awry.
So --- thoughts from you folks on this one. Assuming this goes as badly as it appears to be headed in this instance I would expect this to put a serious hurt on Japan's economy. As we are so interdependent as a world economy this seems to be a rather negative predictor. Combine this with Egypt, Libya, and other such fun - does it seem to anyone else like the "economic recovery" we are experiencing seems less likely to continue?
It's gonna smack this quarter hard. If economic recovery is really happening, and I believe it is, the recovery will pick back up. It's going to make it slower for sure but I don't see this as a recession-creating factor.
I think if things stabilize as they are now I would agree with you. However, if the reactors go into a more Chernobyl level disaster, the middle east escalates much more, or some combination of these two interact more negatively I think that would be a different story. The interaction of this and the middle east seems to me to make this less stable than we might like for the next several quarters.
It is another set of volatility laid on to an already volatile situation.
It is pretty amazing how many so called "black swan" events have hit since 2000.
The black swans freq hasn't changed - the globalised world with communication tech has connected them in my view and made everything and everywhere seem like everyone's back yard - economically, politically and environmentally.
I have little doubt that there is not a change in serious events. It does make me curious though. As a measurement person, how is "Black Swan" operationalized and who tracks it? I have a passing familiarity because of the web and Wiki ...
"The Black Swan Theory or Theory of Black Swan Events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that The event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight.
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology
2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs"
I have not read the book. My superficial reading did not really see how this more globally assessed, save one's own personal perception. Is it the number of events that seriously impacts more than 100,00 people (i.e., loss of acces to food, housing, life, etc.) for example?
I haven't read the book either , just using it as a metaphor.
This earthquake was supposed to be a 1 in 1000 year event,
The financial crisis was considered to be similar probability.
The point of black swan is that there are so many low probability events possible
most completely unknown that they will hit much more frequently.
Global interconnectedness - well if you live natively on the Andaman islands you would know nothing
of any of events mentioned above - you would know of the Indian ocean tsunami in 2004 as it hit the island.
If you are affected by events over whole planet then there will appear to be more of these outliers.
I understand. It just seems to me that most events are low probability depending on one's perspective. Even if you take the same route to work every day, for example, there is something about that you do differently in some way. When you reposition yourself in the seat, blink, etc. but they are not really so when taken in the wider context. The same appears true of the earthquakes to me. It is an interesting concept and works conversationally.
Taleb is talking about low probablity high impact events and his ideas come from financial markets and models of risk.
He made his fortune in the 1987 stock market crash based on the idea that the extreme movements happened more frequently than the models allowed for
The risk was priced too cheaply - he made money buying crash insurance and waiting (out of the money put options if you want the specifics)
Then applied it more generally in his theory.
Just read the wiki page and it quotes the Japanese earthquake as an example, I am not sure it is as it isn't entirely unexpected event, they have been waiting for te big one for years - perhaps it is unexpected in iwhere it occurred.
I think a lot of the underestimation is due to ignorance of the correlations involved, what seems random to us is really only ignorance of underlying processes,
processes that may be connected.
For example
The probablility of two huge 1 in a 1000yr earthquakes in Japan in the same year would be be considered really low - ~ 1 in a million.
But there are new theories of the underlying process of the plates that suggests they come in "storms", releasing pressure at one point
in a quake loads up stress further along, making another earthquake more likely - if that is the case the probabilities are very different.
Arab uprisings -if you had 10 Arab countries you might estimate that there was a 1 in 50 chance of a revolution in a given year in any given country,
but they are events with correlations closer to 1 than 0, Which changes the probabilities of outcomes dramatically - all you had estimated and could have been correct at it, is that there was a 1 in 50 chance in a particular country being first to go into revolt.
What makes it intractable is the correlations of normal events occurring can be very different to extreme events.
In many situations the Black Swan is the unexpected correlations.
fingers — Mar 19, 2011But there are new theories of the underlying process of the plates that suggests they come in "storms", releasing pressure at one point
in a quake loads up stress further along, making another earthquake more likely - if that is the case the probabilities are very different.
I remember seeing parts of this theory back when they were showing large earthquakes moving across Asia. They weren't able to predict when a big quake would hit, but they now could predict where the next one would most likely occur. They showed a big fault and outlined how the big quakes moved along the line in order. This was back around the time of the Turkey earthquake in 1999. After what I've seen, if I lived in the area that would be hit next, I'd want to move to an area that had already been hit!
So he basically was able to re-contextualize the situation based on data few were looking at. The premise he used there was that we (people) were not really looking and he knew better than we did about the risk. We thought we had a better plan (other models) if you will so we ignored him. I guess he proved us wrong there! There is a sense in which it plays the odds based on the premise one knows better. Here the idea that the earthquake was not an unexpected correlation (the event probability low by itself), but an event of some type was probable and this happened to be the one that occurred. It is interesting how we then use the odds to fortify this type of denial, not grasping the compounded probability that one of the millions of rare events are likely occur (though we do not know which one). Compartmentalization at its finest, if you will.
I think we as a species tend to overestimate our ability for adaption and control of the planet. "It will not (probably not) happen in my lifetime" being the phrase we use to pull social support for our denial. Most of the time it works our for us (or we perceive it as doing so). This allows us to build closer to the edge of the proverbial cliff as we have "taken things into account." In doing so have ourselves then built our high rise of cards near the cliff. In this case underestimating that "some" event is likely because any one event is unlikely. The more complex the building the more likely the collapse. So in that sense we have a high rise we are pushing closer to the edge of this cliff. Eventually the complexity ensuring that the high rise will become a pile. The compartmentalization allows us to view these events as impacting "only part A" so the rest will adapt not seeing the interdependence of the high rise elements. This is especially interesting as we are always hearing about our international interdependence while compartmentalizing these elements at the same time.
This perhaps more interesting when you think about political isolationist views. Although there would be other ways to deal with this phenomena as well.
Taleb didn't really say he knew better - as far as I can tell he doesn't claim he had a superior model,
It was more a belief that existing models were wrong and he disputed the basis of the model.
He didn't know what the correct model was or if it could even exist - he just knew the existing ones were wrong.
Remember that in the period around 1987 chaos theory had emerged - which questioned quite basic assuptions about what was predictable.
Also remember he was a trader at the time - he wasn't trying to persuade the financial world at large of their shortcomings as an academic goal.
His intent was to make money out it with a trading strategy.
He has since become academic (independently rich with a huge ego) and developed his theory - which is interesting but probably doesn't amount to much beyond it's use for negation and setting boundary cases - a challenge to theories that do attempt to model these outlier events.
I don't think his ideas are that big of a deal outside of the volatile world of politics/finance - i.e. human social constructs.
It is just an application of ideas from chaos theory which will be well known and applied in the physics of predicting quakes and tsunamis, Weather etc.
But minor point really - what you say in your post is essentially correct - there is a mistaken illusion of control over these things with human society,
due to our vanishingly small timeframes of reference - A mayfly understanding.
On globalisation and protectionist ideas - interesting
A hunter gather community/village would typically consist of say 100 people (like the Andaman Island people)
If you live in a country with 300 million people you are living in social construct 6 orders of magnitude greater.
That is globalised already.
The step from the US population to world population is only 1 order of magnitude.
If the world was hit by some extreme event like a major meteor strike.
The only people with any realistic chance of surviving it are those living self sufficiently in mag 2 groups -
mag 6 and mag 5 groups are history - i.e. every civilisation on earth.
Which is ironic
But make hay while the sun shine - it may never happen ;)
Another 6.5 + tsunami warning in effect right now. Ay yi yi... hope for minimal impact.
I have not had a chance to catch the news. I assume all is well?
Things are still fckd but this didn't seem to add to it from what I've seen.
BINGEWOOD — Mar 30, 2011http://www.cerntruth.com/?p=257
You will be assimilated!
That guy is a Strangelet :)
He wrote ther base material for the Terminators series, right?
8-)
"Phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range"
"Hey, just what you see, pal!"
We can laugh at this guy with 100% certainty,
If he is right he won't have time to reach for the keyboard. ;D
heh heh Unless "he's" really a computer in a bunker with a warning...