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In-vitro meat x-prize

One more post on this topic and then I'll let it drop. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) just announced an "X-Prize," in which they will give a million dollars to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

Like the Asnari X-Prize for human spaceflight, the prize is meant to stimulate competition and encourage research. The New York Times article claims the prize is a million dollars for fake meat, but the object is actually to grow real meat in nutrient vats from in vitro cell cultures, then grind that meat up and use it in hamburgers or fast food or whatever. It sounds disgusting at first but bear with me here - there are so many great things about this technology that I think we're going to need to start using it in the very near future whether we want to or not.

First, growing a whole cow, pig, chicken or sheep, and then slaughtering that animal and sending the pieces of it to the market, is incredibly wasteful of water & grain, and while the animal is growing it is vulnerable to diseases and needs to be pumped full of hormones and antibiotics. We can get much more yield from the same amount of resources using a process where usable meat - and only the meat - is grown under controlled conditions and then harvested.

By getting rid of the huge herds of cows in Brazil that are used to make McDonalds hamburgers, we can save the Brazilian rain forest, or at least reduce the rate of its destruction. Animal and chicken farms are big polluters as well, so by reducing the resources used in animal husbandry, we can reduce the pollution. And if you're into karma, we can still eat high-protein meats without having to grow and kill all those animals under horrific conditions. Wouldn't it be nice to have a good pastrami sandwich on rye without having to feel guilty for eating it?

And real meat won't go away. Just as cheap steel from Asia forced European steelmakers to focus on high-quality steel products, competition from cheap in-vitro meat producers will encourage organic farming and a focus on high-quality meat for specialty markets.

There are a lot of unpleasant things we're going to have to contemplate in order to deal with what's coming our way in the next fifty years. In-vitro meat is probably one of the more logical and less unpleasant things among them.

Food Crisis, II

Following on the food crisis post I made last week, here's an excellent article on the topic in The Economist called "The New Face of Hunger." (Suggest you read it quickly while the article is still free of charge.)

The Economist article is more optimistic than some of the projections I've been hearing, suggesting that the higher grain prices are already providing economic incentive for farmers to plant more crops. But it also says that we're not likely to see a dramatic increase in food production because R&D investment into new seed strains has lagged behind population growth in the last couple of decades, and it will take a few years for investment to catch up.

This is one area where the world can't afford to be complacent. The food crisis, the energy crisis and the environmental crisis all stem from one fact: there are already too many people in the world and the population continues to expand geometrically. And unfortunately no one seems to be talking seriously about population policy except maybe the Chinese government.

It's not a politically popular subject to bring up, (or even a fun one to talk about, I'm well aware). But it seems like we'll just be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic unless we start tackling the root causes of all these crises. The stakes are very high.

Brain Damage

Okay, here's how bad it's gotten... In a conversation I had last night I could remember that Monrovia was the capitol city of Liberia, but I couldn't remember the word "supermarket."

Worst Case Scenario

This never-ending boxing match between Clinton and Obama - now doomed to continue all the way to the DNC Convention after Clinton's Pennsylvania win last night - is the absolute worst-case nightmare scenario for the Democrats and an early Christmas gift for the Republicans.

With this victory Clinton seems to have succeeded in punching a hole in Obama's campaign, destroying his momentum, and infecting Democrats and independents with doubts about his message and his ability to win the general election in November. This wouldn't be so bad (it's what politicians are supposed to do to each other in a campaign), except that in the process of damaging the front-running Democratic candidate she drove her own negatives even higher than they were before, and she still doesn't have any clear path to get the nomination for herself. All that's resulted is a loss of the moderate center and a surge for the Republicans.

And where the hell is Howard Dean, or Al Gore, or somebody who could have stepped in and brokered some kind of compromise before the damage was done?

I am so fed up with the Democratic party right now I want to just surrender in disgust and shout 'a pox on both your houses'... The Clinton and Obama campaigns are successfully engineering a win for the Republicans in a year where the Republicans should have had no chance at all. If we can't win after eight years of the worst president in history, a disastrous war with no end in sight and an imploding economy shattered by mismanagement, I think I'm going to just give up hope completely. Seriously, I'm stunned at how, when faced with a no-lose situation, the Democrats are somehow managing to invent a way to lose this election.

I'm done. I'm going to move back to Denmark and vote Social Democratic. Oh wait, they don't let me vote in Denmark.

Return of the Bubble

Holy heaven, it was bad enough I had to get screwed by the first one. Here we go again...

MiG drone kill tape

A few days ago the Georgian government complained that a Russian fighter tore through Georgian airspace, shot down one of their spy drones, and darted back across the border before anyone could respond to it. The drone was patrolling over Abkhazia, a province of Georgia with a majority Russian population, which has rebelled against the central government and wants to join the Russian Federation. The Russians have been supporting the rebels with weapons, money and - the Georgians say - occasional direct military action by Russian forces.

Both the Russian government and the Abkhaz rebels say it was Abkhazia, not the Russians, which shot down the drone. But, oops, in this dramatic footage (especially dramatic since it's taken from the doomed drone) you can see what is clearly a MiG-29 fighter approach from below and wipe the thing out with a short-range missile. The Abkhaz rebels don't have anything like the technological capacity to field fighter jets, so the MiG must have been Russian.

There's been a peace agreement between Abkhazia and Georgia since 1994 but this isn't likely to help the very tenuous truce between the two sides.

Leading indicator

Buried in the news the last few weeks have been a series of stories about the rising price of food. It's not just the inflationary spiral that seems to be gripping the US right now - we're not talking about purple gourmet tomatoes down at the local Whole Foods or Fotex. The price increases are hitting basic grains & cereals like rice and wheat, which are now getting too expensive for the world's very poor to afford to eat.

The result is more widespread hunger across the developing world and less ability for US-based NGOs to deliver aid to these people (the falling dollar and rising costs of food and fuel means that a finite foreign aid budget can deliver less and less to the people who need it).

More hunger around the world is bad enough, but I think this price spike is a leading indicator of something much worse. Price indicates scarcity. So if the most basic foodstuffs are rising sharply in price, it means the world as a whole is having a harder time meeting the needs of the planet's exploding population. Very scary indeed.

There are a few mitigating factors. The world's farms are still not yet producing at full capacity, though the spare capacity is much less than it used to be in the 90s. Even more importantly, rising living standards in parts of the developing world (such as China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia) mean that more people can afford a meat diet than ever before, and raising livestock for meat is incredibly wasteful of grain, compared to feeding that grain directly to people. And growing demand for ethanol and biodiesel is - insanely - pulling corn and other grains out of the global food pool in order to burn it as fuel. Finally, part of the increase of food cost is caused by the rising price of oil, which increases the price of fertilizer and transport.

We can keep going for a while yet. We can farm more intensively, using genetically modified crops to increase yield. We can dramatically reduce the amount of meat consumed in the global diet (some of us in the developed West are already pretty far along this path), and eventually, we can drop ethanol for some real energy alternatives like hydrogen power.

We do have some options to buy us a little more time. But the disaster is still there, waiting for us. If agricultural efficiency had remained at 1950 levels, we'd have had global starvation a long time ago. How much longer can we continue to increase production and delay the inevitable? Quite a while, maybe. If we're smart.

But not forever. You'll remember this. This is how it begins.

Hard curve

Just got through a mellow weekend - good night out downtown Friday with the expat crowd, starting at the Triple Door and ending at this proto-yuppie red-lit place in Belltown whose name I forget. My friend Stephanie from Boston flew in to meet some friends in Seattle and we got a chance to hang out. I met her in J-school in Denmark in 01 and she's working at the Boston Globe now, just got a Fulbright scholarship for another J-school program in Germany in the summer. I'm still loving the novelty of having time to out on the town and social, and there are a few more good shows coming up in the next few weeks before I have to fly out again.

The rest of the weekend has been pleasantly slow - I've been sleeping 9-10 hours a night and I'm still exhausted. Studied for work on the laptop in bed most of the day, and caught Eat Drink Man Woman with Cecilie in the afternoon (made me nostalgic for 1994 and desperate for some elaborate Chinese cooking.) Trying to gear up for work tomorrow but it's hard.

I'm really enjoying the new job but the level of complexity involved is pretty amazing and the learning curve has been brutal. It's been working so far but I need to take a more active role now than I have in the past in order to solve some structural and process issues I've been seeing. Need to get this to continue to work while gathering more of the context that will help me understand how all the pieces fit together.

When I was prowling around a used bookstore a couple of weeks ago I found two issues of the "Astounding Science Fiction" pocket books from 1958, and I've been poring through these before going to sleep (or last night, sitting in the bath with a glass of whisky). Sad thing is, the optimism and escapism of that (generally pretty awful) writing style is making me long for the days when life was a little simpler.

But I guess that's a natural instinct when you're on a hard-vertical learning curve. Must go on.

Good nights out in Seattle

Coming off the buzz of that trip to Vegas, we had another great weekend over here in Seattle. On Friday I saw My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. The last time I saw them was in San Francisco ten years ago, and this show blew the doors off that last one - it was so much fun. Rather than just a concert, it turned into this six-hour cabaret event with burlesque shows, industrial belly dancers, and a very pleasant, um, "physically expressive" crowd.

Then on Saturday we had a bunch of the expat crowd over our place for dinner (I made a Thai curry), and then went to a drag queen show in Cap Hill afterwards. They had one entertainer dressed as Mary Poppins doing the "spoonfull of sugar" gag - then spooning out lines of "sugar" on a mirror, snorting them through a huge candy-cane straw, and then doing a sped-up version of "supercalifragisisticexpialidocious"... I'll never look at Julie Andrews the same way again!

Feels like we're slowly getting up to flying speed here, like it's all starting to come together. It's good to be social.

Landing

I landed back from Vegas last night, woke up this morning and spent 14 hours straight trying to hammer my schedule and work plans together through the summer. So far this year they've sent me to Copenhagen, Orlando, London, Portland, now Vegas.

I've been meeting so many people and putting so much in motion that this was the first chance I've had to sit down and try to assemble all the pieces into a machine that just might work. I'm not complaining, mind you. It's just been very intense. And I really need to catch up on sleep.

But Vegas was great. Besides the 12-hour conference days, my boss Jennifer & I managed to cruise up & down the strip, sample some pretty good restaurants, hit a show, and I blew a few beans on the roulette tables at Caesar's Palace.

What the hell, it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it much more than I expected to - parts of the place reminded me of Moscow, and other parts reminded me of Dubai. Different permutations of glitz and dodginess.

Some pics up here.

Cecilie's flying back in from Copenhagen tomorrow. Feels like a year since we saw each other last - I'm so tired that everything seems abstract.

Vegas

The intensity hasn't tailed off at all since Orlando & London - I was in Portland last week and am off to Las Vegas tomorrow for another week of meetings. Then Boston and New York in May (like I should complain).

At least Vegas will be a wash with Cecilie - she's over in Copenhagen right now so it's less of a drag if both of us are on the road at the same time.

I guess I'm curious about the sheer spectacle of Vegas but I never had a strong desire to go. The conference will be good, but since I'm not really into gambling, ladies of the night (ahem), or Neil Diamond, I honestly can't imagine what I'll do with myself over there.