Benjamin Dancer's Blog, page 7
June 7, 2016
Reflections on Coming of Age and Parenting
Patriarch Run can be seen as a story about fatherhood, about motherhood,about coming of age. In other words, it's about the stuff we deal with as human beings. I get a lot of question about those aspects of the story.
I am a sucker for a father story. I think a lot of us are. Maybe that's because we want to get it right with our own children. Or we want to get it right with our own parents. As a teacher, I am all too aware of how common it is for kids to have to father themselves.One of the mo...
June 6, 2016
Is Jack the Good Guy or the Bad Guy?
Readers of Patriarch Run tend to struggle with Jack. It's hard to know what to make of him. Is he the good guy or the bad guy? Intelligent people can disagree on the answer to that question.
I'm writing this post as a bit of a thought experiment. Think of it as a piece to provide some conversation about the strong feelings Jack evokes, which means that there are plenty of spoilersbelow.
Because Jack is motivated by the consequences of population, let's start the conversation there.
Any populatio...
June 5, 2016
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is a walk down memory lane–that is, if you’re the planet. She takes the reader all over the globe, from Iceland to the Great Barrier Reef. Kolbert presents each chapter, in this journalist’s account of life departed, as a multi-facetted story, at the center of which is usually the profile of a quirky scientist. Kolbert gives us a sense of what it is like for these insatiable truth-seekers to be in the f...
June 3, 2016
Renewable Energy to Solve Climate Change and Protect the Grid from EMP
The article below was written by Sandy MacDonald, whom I've been interviewing over the last couple weeks for a long-form piece I'm writing on how the referenced study was put together. It's a fascinating story. Sandy was the former director of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, and his team came up with an idea that he believes can solve climate change, and, at the same time, harden our grid against sabotage. The piece was published online yesterday by the Washington Post.
The Old Man...May 31, 2016
Probability Of Civilization Ending Coronal Mass Ejection This Decade is 12%
What follows is the abstract of Pete Riley's, 23 February 2012, paper On The Probability Of Occurrence Of Extreme Space Weather Events.
By virtue of their rarity, extreme space weather events, such as the Carrington event of 1859, are difficult to study, their rates of occurrence are difficult to estimate, and prediction of a specific future event is virtually impossible. Additionally, events may be extreme relative to one parameter but normal relative to others. In this study, we analyze seve...
May 26, 2016
Renewable Energy for National Security
Below is a piece I published in Truthout in 2015.
It covers our critical infrastructure vulnerability to EMP, space weather and cyberattackSumamrizes the EMP Commission ReportOffers other credible resources to learn more about these issuesIncludes interviews with Dr. Peter Pry and Dr. George BakerExplains how our civilization now depends absolutely on the power gridIntroduces the surreal politics of energy policyOffers a bipartisan,renewable energy solutionThe Old Man RSSWhat would happen if t...
May 25, 2016
Obstacles to Securing Our Critical Infrastructure - Part 2
On 22 May 2016, I ran a guest post from Bill Harris of the Foundation for Resilient SocietiesBoard of Directors, which criticized the NERC regulatory process. The post below is Frank Koza's response.
Mr. Koza is the Executive Director of Infrastructure Planning at PJM Interconnection.I heard Mr. Koza's talk, Space Weather Power System Impacts and PJM Response,at the Space Weather Workshop I've been blogging about since April. That talk was also criticized in Mr. Harris' piece.Mr.Harris' origin...
May 22, 2016
Obstacles to Securing Our Critical Infrastructure - Part 1
This post is for those who enjoy getting into the weeds. It's not a casual read, but it is quite significant. It was contributed to the blog by Bill Harris of the Foundation for Resilient Societies Board of Directors, whom I met at the Space Weather Workshop I've been blogging about since April.
The gist of Mr. Harris' piece is that the power companies are manipulating the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)in order to produce regulations that protect the power companies fro...
Space Weather: An Existential Threat
Could space weather threaten our civilization? It’s not a question most people think about. I started thinking about it for the first time in 2010 when I did the research for my novel Patriarch Run. That research introduced me to a lot of interesting people, and it brought me inside a pretty eclectic community: the small group of experts who understand just how close it is our civilization has chosen to dance to the apocalypse.
The Old Man RSSIt was that community of experts who invited me in...
May 18, 2016
NOAA Study Concludes Rapid, Affordable Energy Transformation Possible
The following post is from a 25 January 2016 press release from NOAA. The original copy can be found here. I'll be interviewing Sandy MacDonald, one of the authors of the referenced study, in the coming days, and I'll post excerpts of the interview. That follow up will also show how the proposal below resolves some of today's most pressing national security concerns by protecting the new grid from EMP-like threats. What's so attractive about it is the bipartisan appeal of the two solutions: s...
