Month: November 2011

Steve Fishman suspects that Giffords' husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, may take her place:

Giffords is being reintroduced to the world this week, with an hourlong Diane Sawyer special and a 575,000-copy first printing of Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope, a co-memoir with her husband, along with a co-author, Jeffrey Zaslow. Soon, though not immediately, Giffords will have to decide if she plans to seek another term in the House. And if she can’t, or won’t, things may evolve within Giffords’s entourage. Because Giffords and her people really are a team—that’s a legacy of the tragedy. And there has been speculation that if Giffords decides that she’s not yet ready to run for office, her husband could fill the role, given the practice he’s had at channeling his wife. Many Democrats, both in Arizona and Washington, would welcome that.

An elephant is painted in decorative colours during the Sonepur Mela on November 15, 2011 in Sonepur near Patna, India. The cattle fair, held in the Indian state of Bihar, has its origins during ancient times, when people traded elephants and horses across the river Ganges. By Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.

A reader writes:

Friedman's optimistic reading is baseless. First of all, the small quakes we're talking about here are mostly around magnitude-2 events (see Oklahoma Geophysical Survey's catalog). The amount of energy released by an earthquake jumps by a factor of ~32 for each successive magnitude. In order to release the same amount of energy as a magnitude-7 earthquake, you'd need about 30 million magnitude-2 earthquakes. So 1047 small earthquakes make hardly a dent in terms of energy release, and an increased frequency of small earthquakes is not something we can tout as a feature.

Energy gets stored up around a fault because the blocks on either side want to move in different directions, but are prevented from doing so by friction on the fault surface. The force due to friction along any surface is proportional to the force applied perpendicular to that surface (called the "normal force"). Imagine pressing your hands together lightly — it's quite easy to rub your hands, right? If you press your hands together firmly, you have raised the normal force and thus increased the force of friction — it's now more difficult to rub your hands together.

Fracking centers around the injection of highly pressurized fluids into rock. These fluids don't like being compressed, and they want to expand. In addition to propagating fractures in rock and increasing access to fossil fuels, the pressurized fluid reduces normal stresses along a fracture surface by "pushing out" against both sides of the fault. In turn, the friction along a fault surfaces drops, promoting fault rupture. There's no way of knowing whether a fault with a lot of stored energy vs. little stored energy will be affected. That's why the increased frequency of small earthquakes is worrisome – magnitude aside, it indicates that the injection of pressurized fluids is actually enough to promote fault rupture. If you're going to talk about net benefits vs. risks, I think the risks outweigh the benefit (?) of releasing an absurdly small amount of energy.

I'll note that I'm a geochemist, not a seismologist, but you know who had a job in Harvard's seismology group in the '80s? Jonathan Franzen. He worked on some highly-cited earthquake catalogs while writing (I believe) his first novel – his total citation count is higher than most Earth science faculty. 

Another reader:

Regarding David Friedman’s optimistic take on fracking, the idea of pumping water into faults to relieve the built up force by triggering lots of small ones is an old idea that has been studied and considered by geologists who specialize in seismology. I think it best these questions be answered by scientists, not economists. This is from the website of the USGS:

Q: Can you prevent large earthquakes by making lots of small ones, or by "lubricating" the fault with water or another material?

A: Seismologists have observed that for every magnitude 6 earthquake there are 10 of magnitude 5, 100 of magnitude 4, 1,000 of magnitude 3, and so forth as the events get smaller and smaller. This sounds like a lot of small earthquakes, but there are never enough small ones to eliminate the occasional large event. It would take 32 magnitude 5's, 1000 magnitude 4's, 32,000 magnitude 3's to equal the energy of one magnitude 6 event. So, even though we always record many more small events than large ones, there are never enough to eliminate the need for the occasional large earthquake.

As for "lubricating" faults with water or some other substance, injecting high pressure fluids deep into the ground is known to be able to trigger earthquakes to occur sooner than would have been the case without the injection. However this would be a dangerous pursuit in any populated area, as one might trigger a damaging earthquake.

Alyssa Rosenberg flags a new study [NYT] that gives strong evidence against Hitch's famous contention. Her explanation as to why the "men are funnier" myth persists:

Different people find different things funny, but larger industry trends mean that men are given a wider range of opportunities to be funny in different ways — I can’t really imagine a woman getting a chance to do a true equivalent of Louis C.K.’s routine about how ridiculous men look during sex and not encountering a wave of body criticism, or being treated like she’s pathetic rather than hilariously honest. 

"This is about more than money, it's about whether the president and the Congress can competently govern … We now have Republicans who have put revenues on the table [and] Democrats on the supercommittee who have put entitlements on the table. Both need to put more on the table and get a result, and we're here to support them," – Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.

David Greenberg delves into the right's resurgent fascination with the 30th president: 

Like Reagan, Coolidge believed in small government, cutting taxes, deregulation, public piety, and the principle that for government to assist business would benefit the economy as a whole. Like Reagan, he held that government should regulate lightly, trusting in the civic-mindedness of business leaders and expecting that productivity and prosperity would shower their bounty on everyone. Even Reagan’s firing of the air-traffic controllers in 1981—an assertion that the executive could decide when the public interest did or didn’t need to take precedence workers’ rights—drew inspiration from Coolidge’s decision as governor of Massachusetts in 1919 to fire striking police officers. Reagan’s admiration for Coolidge trickled down to the G.O.P. establishment.

In an interview with Isaac Stone Fish, dissident Ai Weiwei insists that expected political reforms are just not happening in China:

Ai believes the world shares responsibility for what’s happening in China, and he wants to force the international community to pay attention. “Today, the West feels very shy about human rights and the political situation. They’re in need of money. But every penny they borrowed or made from China has really come as a result of how this nation sacrificed everybody’s rights,” he says. “With globalization and the Internet, we all know it. Don’t pretend you don’t know it. The Western politicians—shame on them if they say they’re not responsible for this. It’s getting worse, and it will keep getting worse.”

As Beijing runs "rough-shod" over its WTO pledges, Bill Bishop argues that "it's time to admit that China is not becoming more democratic."

(Photo: Yuan notes which were thrown over the wall of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's home are displayed at his studio in Beijing on November 9, 2011. Thousands of people have so far donated 5.29 million yuan (830,000 USD) to help Ai pay a huge tax fine, with some throwing money wrapped in paper planes into his garden, the Chinese artist said. By Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images.)

Simon Lazarus and Dahlia Lithwick parse one of the most obscure, but possibly consequential, parts of the pending health care litigation:

[T]he real surprise [was that] the court also agreed to hear a fourth issue, also for an hour: the claim of the 26 Republican state officials that the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid coverage should be struck down, on the ground that it unconstitutionally “coerces” state governments. Potentially, the court’s disposition of this issue could cripple the federal government’s capacity to promote national policy goals more gravely than even a decision to overturn the ACA individual mandate, and thereby limit congressional authority to regulate interstate commerce.

Are on par with Romney's. Douthat explains why Newt's tea party supporters don't care:

[F]or conservative primary voters who don’t want to nominate a mere technocrat for what they consider an era-defining election, Gingrich’s willingness to go “up a couple of levels” and frame 2012 in Manichaean terms is a selling point, not a liability. And after the implosion of so many alternatives, his Churchillian posturing might be all the reason they need to embrace him as the anti-Romney, even if doing so requires overlooking his various ideological deviations.

Reflecting on Gingrich's chances, Chait questions whether GOP elites still control.

A while back, Farhad Manjoo suggested an alternative to anti-texting while driving laws:

A better system wouldn’t make distinctions about what we do on our gadgets, but would instead look at the effects of our actions. The best rule would simply say, Don’t do anything in your car that could be unsafe. In 2009, Maine adopted just such a policy. Its law doesn’t make any particular technology illegal in the car. Instead, it bans “distracted driving”—driving while you’re engaged in any task that could impair you.

Balko rejects this idea:

[Y]ou’ve just taken the problem of too many jurisdictions having varying definitions of distracted and made it exponentially worse. Now whether or a motorist has violated the law is at the individual discretion of every police officer in the country. You now have about 600,000 different definitions of distraction. Some studies have shown that having kids in the back seat is actually more distracting then a .08 BAC or talking on a cell phone. That in theory could now be illegal.