the 1877 Super El Nino

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A Super El Nino in 1877 led to a famine that killed an estimated 50 million people, between 3 and 4 percent of the world’s population at the time. Deaths were concentrated in developing countries including China, India, and Brazil, which I am assuming would have had large populations of rural subsistence farmers at the time.

The article talks about how the impending 2026-2027 El Nino may be comparable in terms of heat and drought, but we have much better forecasting of what to expect and technology to deal with it. The article stops short of discussing how to actually deal with it, but I would assume some combination of stockpiling food in advance, international trade, international coordination and assistance, and (temporarily boosted, long-term unsustainable) irrigation. Also not discussed in the article are the self-inflicted geopolitical events (both the Middle East and Ukraine, which is an important grain exporter) that are making growing and trading food more challenging, right when this is most harmful. You can provide subsidies for farmers and consumers if prices spike, but at some point that will not help if there are really absolute shortages – if that happens, let’s hope it’s shortages of preferred foods rather than a shortage of absolute calories.

Yougov poll of support for bike lanes in US

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A yougov poll of about 1100 Americans shows that people support bike lanes in their communities by a pretty wide margin. Now, you could say this is a small sample size and people who ride bikes might be more likely to have answered. But, it is weighted for demographics and respondents were asked whether they own a car, own a bike, and how often they use these modes of transportation. There are plenty of respondents who do not own or ride bikes. And by a large margin, people support bike lanes. Not only that, they support separated, protected bike lanes, they are willing to give up some parking (but not car travel lanes) to add bike lanes, and they support (the only morally correct view in my opinion) that it should be legal to ride bikes on sidewalks when there are no bike lanes.

Respondents are grudgingly in favor of allowing e-bikes in bike lanes, but majorities oppose scooters, rollerbladers, skateboarders, robots, and people in wheelchairs. Sidewalks ideally should be designed and maintained to support some of these uses, but we all know that does not always happen when responsibility for sidewalks is often pinned on the individual property owner.

So my verdict is that, as is so often the case in our cities, the loudest, angriest voices opposing change create a disproportionate perception that people in general oppose change. And in the case of our streets and sidewalks, choices made by a few cynical public officials and reckless drivers can ruin it for all the rest of us.

mRNA flu vaccine approved

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Amidst the pseudo-science and headlines about vaccines, the FDA has quietly approved an mRNA flu vaccine. Maybe we are not being thrust into a new dark age after all. Maybe it will turn out that science and technology are slowly proceeding below the political radar, and when the political winds shift some new breakthroughs will be there for us.

The approval of mFLUSIVA “demonstrates the continued strength and versatility of our mRNA platform,” Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said in a release. The vaccine was shown to be almost 27% more effective against the flu than the standard flu shot. The FDA has authorized mFLUSIVA for adults over the age of 50 after “documented superiority in effectiveness to normal dose flu vaccines,” particularly “for those with underlying diseases,” Jesse Goodman, the FDA’s former top vaccine regulator, said to The Washington Post.

A move toward mRNA vaccines can create a more effective and faster flu shot. Traditional vaccines are “typically generated in chicken eggs” and are “what we call an inactivated flu vaccine,” Hanover Matz, an immunologist at WashU Medicine in St. Louis and the coauthor of a June study comparing the mRNA vaccine to the traditional flu vaccine, said to Science News. Pieces of the virus “are used to teach your immune system how to fight flu,” and “because the virus is raised in chicken eggs, it takes a long time to generate that vaccine.” This method also requires policymakers to “determine what the most likely strains of the flu virus are going to be for the fall season in the Northern Hemisphere,” and they “need to start that production well before the fall to get the vaccine doses ready.” If “there’s a mismatch in strains, there’s really no way they can go back and update the vaccine and change it.”

Besides saving lives that would otherwise be lost to the seasonal flu, this would seem to have potential as a rapid response to a deadly pandemic flu outbreak, which we are always cautioned will inevitably, eventually happen. Like a massive earthquake, it is unlikely to happen in any given year but certain to happen given enough time. The technology fast-tracked by Covid-19 also seems to have clear applications to other viruses. So maybe we can hope for long-awaited vaccines against other dread diseases such as HIV and dengue fever, and maybe progress on bacteriophages to combat antibiotic resistance (where a deadly engineered virus is intentionally unleashed – on deadly bacteria).

the Antichrist!!!

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Some people believe in a literal Antichrist, while some believe “there is a little Antichrist in all of us”, apparently. I would tend to argue for the latter in the sense that the concept of right and wrong are uniquely human and we have certainly shown ourselves capable of both.

However large he looms in modern Christian storytelling, he’s referenced in only four passages of the Bible. The word Antichrist appears nowhere but in one of John’s epistles, which also warns that “even now many antichrists have come,” indicating, as Trelawny puts it, those who reject “that Jesus is the Christ, or Messiah…”

The apostle Paul or one of his disciples, in a letter to the Thessalonians, foresees the rise of “a mysterious figure known only as ‘the lawless one,’ who will gain power by deceiving people through false miracles, and once in power, he will commit his greatest crime of all: ‘He will oppose and exalt himself over everything that is called God or worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.” For its part, the Book of Revelation adds “the arrival of a monstrous seven-headed beast,” and later, a companion with “the horns of a lamb but the voice of a dragon.” Thereafter comes the “mark of the beast,” 666 — or perhaps 616, Trelawny adds, given that either could be seen as code for Neron Kaisar in Greek or Nero Caesar in Latin, better known as the ancient Roman Emperor Nero.

My favorite literary Antichrist is of course Stephen King’s “Walking Man” from The Stand.

Chinese EVs in Thailand

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This article says the “top 5 brands” for EVs in Thailand are Chinese. BYD is the only one I am familiar with, but I confirm I saw with my own two eyes that there are BYD dealerships and cars on the road in Thailand. They don’t make up a large proportion of cars you see because there are a lot of older vehicles on the road, but if you pay attention to other cars on the road for a couple minutes you can almost always spot one. One thing that surprised me is e-bikes have not caught on. The spike in gas (“petrol”) prices has not made any visible dent in the motorcycle culture. I did however see electric “tuk-tuks”, which are the rough equivalent of golf carts that used to run on filthy lawn mower engines. This is a big win for air and noise pollution levels. In general, Japanese car brands are dominant in Thailand, with the only American brands you see being Ford pickup trucks.

I was also in Singapore (an entirely unplanned, thanks to the self-proclaimed “world’s best airline”) for 24 hours. I did not see any Chinese brands there. The taxis I was in seemed exceptionally quiet and I suspect they were hybrids.

I did not see any autonomous vehicles in either country. This surprised me a bit since Singapore in particular would seem an ideal candidate given the perfect state of the roads, signs, markings, and well-tamed drivers. But even in Thailand, I would say road markings and driver behavior are at least as good as the US, and traffic signals are actually more advanced (generally arrows and count-down timers for all lanes, even in relatively rural areas – seriously, this is not that hard to do.) They must not be allowed as a matter of policy.

will AI end management?

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When you work in an “efficient” modern corporation, you can get the sense that it spend an awful lot of time and money doing things other than whatever the corporation is in business to actually do. This is brilliantly satirized in The Office, where people working in “Corporate” enjoy a higher social status than the people actually handling and selling the office supplies. Anyway, this article first surveys the work of James Burnham, Ronald Coase, and Peter Drucker who all argued that as industries and businesses became more complex, the transaction costs associated with informal operations expanded to the point where professional management coordinating all those moving parts became cheaper. Another way to look at it is that managers gather information centrally and then disseminate it to all the parts of an organization that need to operate in a decentralized manner (which I am referring to “doing what the corporation actually does”, as opposed to “business” being the function of a business.) Now, enter AI:

AI is beginning to automate the very coordination function that justified management in the first place.

Research, writing, software development, legal drafting, customer support, scheduling, project management, and marketing increasingly become services that can be summoned on demand rather than coordinated through multiple managerial layers.

I more or less agree with this, but I think there is a lot of friction and it will take a lot of time. All the things above involve a…lot…of…talking between human beings within the organization and between humans beings in the organization and their customers and contractors. Because language is just not that good a way for us to communicate what we really mean with each other, and a lot of times we don’t even know what we mean until we spend a lot of time thinking and talking and writing it out, bouncing it off each other, and refining it over and over again. AI can speed up all the parts of loop in between these parts, and it can put more information at our fingertips as we are going through this process, but it won’t be able to break this bottleneck in a lot of industries. AI may eventually get this and learn to work with us in a more human – less logical, less literal – but we are not there yet.

our distant ancestors had a third eye

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IMPORTANT PUBLIC SAFETY UPDATE: In my original post below, I suggest you stay at least 30 feet away from an American alligator on land. Experts actually recommend staying 60 feet away. Experts (and I) also recommend taking advice from reputable sources, not random blogs!

Sometimes science is bizarrely interesting. For example:

Deep inside the human brain, a small gland in the middle of the forehead helps keep time. As darkness arrives, the pineal gland helps set the body’s nightly rhythm. But some creatures use the pineal gland as a sort of “third eye”, helping them detect light and shadow, though the organ doesn’t form pictures. Our human lineage lost this ancestral ability millions of years ago.

But a new evolutionary hypothesis suggests that this unassuming organ is the surviving central remnant of the eye from which our two image-forming eyes ultimately arose.

In a review published in Current Biology, researchers from Lund University and the University of Sussex argue that the lineage leading to vertebrates passed through a cyclops-like stage roughly 560 million years ago. The animal was not a one-eyed giant, but probably a tiny, wormlike marine filter feeder with a light-sensitive organ on top of its head. As its descendants returned to active swimming, parts of that central organ expanded sideways and were repurposed into paired retinas.

From my somewhat morbid dissecting experiences in high school, I always found it fascinating that an animal like a frog has basically the same organs I have, and even a worm has many of them. But animal eyes might be the most fascinating of all. I’ve spent plenty of time staring into animals’ eyes – my pet fish for example (is he awake or asleep? hard to tell), the squirrels and birds in front of my house. All these animals are looking me right back in the eyes. The connection between our eyes and insect eyes is even weirder to think about. I’ve looked into crocodile and snake eyes too, at the zoo with a nice thick piece of glass between them and me. I suppose I’ve looked into alligator eyes without that glass, from a safe distance. I’m not sure what the minimum safe distance is to keep from an alligator, and this is not a safe experiment to run. But I would say an alligator 30 feet or so away is not going to bother chasing you down on land, and if it does try you can run faster than it and it will tire quickly. If you are staring an alligator in the face in the water, that is probably the last thing you are going to see.

saving for, and spending in, retirement

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As I move deeper into my 50s, the idea of retirement starts to feel less theoretical and more real. Now, I can’t picture myself going “cold turkey”, at a desk full time one day and on a golf course full time the next day. For one thing, I have never golfed. I could take it up, but I’m not sure it is the first thing I would take up if I had more leisure time. I picture myself more fading out of the full time work force, working part time or taking on work-like projects and hobbies whether paid or unpaid, and gradually exploring different ways I could be spending my dwindling mortal time until I figure out how I actually want to spend it. (You would think I might know that, but I don’t, and people who do are lucky. Then again, maybe it is more of a journey than a destination for most people, and the best I can do is mindfully be on that journey rather than die at a desk.)

Anyway, enough philosophy. One study that gets mentioned a lot is the Trinity Study, which is where the idea of a “safe withdawal rate” of about 4% of your savings each year comes from. It’s a starting point, but a few issues as I understand them are that (1) the study assumed you drop dead 30 years after retiring, which most people don’t actually want to do, (2) it didn’t consider inflation, and (3) it didn’t consider that you might want to leave money to a spouse or heirs. So it’s better to project your savings and spending out to the end of your life (which you might want to take an optimistic view of, because that is the conservative choice in this particular context, because technology is improving, and because it is the only life you have), set objectives (like no more than 10% chance of running out of money and leaving $XYZ to a spouse), project it out probabilistically (using DIY methods if you really know what you are doing, a professional if you don’t, or my favorite, DIY without really knowing what I am doing and an independent opinion from an expert), and make decisions from there. The good thing is that if you make decisions and/or the external world changes, and you don’t like how that changes the projection, you can adjust your decisions any time. Anyway, here is one blogger who goes into extreme detail on all this. I am sure he is one of many professionals and amateurs out there and I can’t vouch for him, but he appears to have credentials, cites evidence, and the articles are interesting.

facts and figures on homeless in Philadelphia

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Axios has some facts and figures on homeless in Philadelphia. This represents a snapshot in time (summer 2026).

  • 5,163 total
  • 4,676 using shelters (711 sleeping outdoors)
  • The average number of homeless between 2019 and 2026 was about 5,100, with a peak just before the pandemic and slight decrease in 2026 compared to 2025.

I have compassion for any homeless individual, particularly one sleeping outdoors. Looking at the cold hard numbers, it strikes me that around 90% of people experiencing homeless are making use of shelters. So when you see those 10% people on the street it does not mean that nothing is being done. It means those people fell through the cracks. I don’t know if adding 10% more shelter capacity would solve that problem, or if those are people unwilling or unable to make the decision to enter a shelter. The other thing that strikes me is 5,000 people is not an overwhelming number in a city of 1.6 million (about half a percent). 700 people sleeping on the street are visible enough that it can give an impression of an overwhelming problem. Poverty in general can seem like an overwhelming problem at the local level, but helping 5,000 people is a manageable, solvable problem.

food shortages and system thinking

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Some are still predicting dramatic food shortages on the horizon due to the U.S. war of aggression on Iran. I don’t doubt that this is possible. When headlines were suggesting this was imminent shortly after the war started in the spring (of 2026, in case you are reading this in the far future), I was asking myself if it made sense that fertilizer and pesticides coming out of the Middle East at that point would be used for planting this year. (Environmental advisability of a population and food system that depend on fossil fuels would be topics for another day.) And from further analysis, it sounds like I was right and there are significant lags built in. Then again, I should remember that the entire world does not experience the same four seasons that I do here in temperate eastern North America, and growing seasons in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere will be on a different schedule than here, where the next big planting cycle will be spring 2027.

I am a huge proponent of system thinking. However, I am always a little skeptical of authors who talk about system thinking as if only they out of all people in the world have heard of it. I get a whiff of narcissism when I hear that. I tend to think there are plenty of intelligent people and organizations out there who are capable of system thinking, and the cynical/amoral among them would be exploiting their knowledge in financial markets if nothing else. I think the same thing when people claim that only they can spot a financial bubble. There absolutely is something going on in our world where our top political decision makers are relying on short-term linear extrapolation of facts and logic at best, and irrational disregard for facts and logic at worst. I see a severe lack of moral thinking among our political leadership, although that may be nothing new in human history. It would be great to see some form of politics able to select the intelligent, moral system thinkers to lead us. Somehow the opposite seems to be happening, where political systems are not selecting leaders of even above average rationality or moral fiber. This is a severe issue and I at least have the sense that it is getting worse. Nonetheless, I don’t see financial markets going crazy in response to the obviously crazy geopolitical events going on, and this gives me some small comfort.