Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

the role of drought in migration from Central America

The Guardian has an article on the role that drought and climate change play in migration of people from Central American countries such as Guatemala to the U.S.

Central America remains one of the world’s most dangerous regions outside a warzone, where a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption has forced millions to flee their homes and head north in search of security.

But amid a deepening global climate crisis, drought, famine and the battle for dwindling natural resources are increasingly being recognized as major factors in the exodus.

hydrogen as a jet fuel

I was curious if aircraft could be fueled feasibly by hydrogen in the future. Okay, I know this has been tried in the past – “Oh, the humanity!” – but, there must be advances in technology since then. 10 minutes of research reveals that battery-powered aircraft are now a going concern, although they tend to be unmanned or at least small. Current fuel cell technology sounds like it has pretty similar limits to batteries. On a larger scale, there is serious research on the potential of liquid hydrogen as a commercial aviation fuel. It sounds feasible but would require major changes in long-lived infrastructure systems around the world. But let’s say you happened to have lots of electricity and water in abundance. Maybe you are in a coastal location and have invested in nuclear power, or you just happen to have lots of geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever kind of power. You have also invested in desalination and you have created a major transportation hub. You might then be in a position to create liquid hydrogen and/or fuel cells at a cost-effective price. This could be climate friendly as burning hydrogen, in theory at least, creates only water vapor as a product, and fusing hydrogen with atmospheric oxygen creates the same – liquid water or water vapor. Hydrogen is dangerous, but so is jet fuel and so are the materials in modern batteries, so hopefully technology will eventually come to our aid and get the risk and environmental impact down to a similar or lower level than these other options.

July 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

the singularity is…boring?

I’ve read a couple near- to mid-term future books this summer that you could describe as being about the singularity. 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson takes place in…well, that’s not too hard to figure out. Humanity has populated most of the solar system, and people are still people but they have various augmentations to their bodies. Artificial intelligence is around although it is not clear just how intelligent it really is. The last book I read by Robinson was Red Mars, and like that book, I find that the world (really, the entire solar system) of his imagination is breathtaking and he describes it very vividly. The passages where he describes what the world is like and how it got that way are fascinating. His actual characters and plots…less fascinating. I just couldn’t get into them or care about them.

Accelerando by Charles Stross is kind of similar. He is pretty explicit that events in his story take place in the near future, say 2030-2100. Things are far more advanced and weird in Stross’s 2050 than Robinson’s 2312. Humanity spreads out to most of the solar system during the course of the book. People have radical augmentations to their minds, and artificial intelligence is a major factor. The world building is fascinating, the passages that describe how the world is changing are fascinating, and…the characters are forgettable, and the actual plot all but incomprehensible. It’s just beyond weird. I think his purpose was just to show what it could be like if things get really weird. Don’t get me wrong, I love Charles Stross. He is an excellent story teller when he wants to be, and I think he has just purposely written a very different kind of book here. Maybe he is just showing off his imagination, which is astonishing. Actually, he writes several different kinds of books, and if I had to randomly read passages from them without prior knowledge of Charles Stross, I would never guess they could be the same author. I’m not sorry I’ve read Accelerando but I’m not sure I would recommend it as light reading.

Let’s digress briefly and talk about dudes named Kim. According to Wikipedia, Kim was a popular boys’ name in the U.S. as recently as the 1960s. I don’t know any men named Kim and I had no idea. And no less a journalistic powerhouse than the Omaha World-Herald has published an exhaustive article on the subject.

One strange common thread between 2012 and Accelerando is the idea of dismantling entire planets and using them as raw materials for enormous computers.

I also read Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan this summer. I didn’t love this book either. And I love Richard K. Morgan. He’s another author that likes to experiment with completely different writing styles and even genres.

One strange common thread between Accelerando and Market Forces is the idea of bringing back some form of dueling or trial by combat to settle disputes between corporations. It’s a strange coincidence – then again, it’s entirely possible these authors talk and occasionally bounce bizarre ideas off each other. Corporations are not people, they exist to compete with each other and only the strong and nimble survive. They don’t need to be treated the same as people.

Strangely enough, after not thinking about dueling for more than five seconds for several decades, I just listened to a Stuff You Should Know podcast on dueling. It occurred to me that maybe dueling did serve one purpose in societies where people do not trust the authorities to administer justice fairly – perhaps it breaks the cycle of revenge. Normally in human societies, if someone wrongs you, a close family member or friend, and there are no civil authorities you trust to administer justice, you are honor bound to seek vengeance. The people you seek vengeance upon will then seek vengeance in return, in an escalating cycle of violence that leads to a lot of suffering and death. Maybe dueling, violent as it was, served a purpose because if your friend or family member was killed fair and square in the duel, justice was served and you were not duty bound to do anything more about it. I’m not saying this is good – the trustworthy civil authorities are the way to go. But one dead body is better than many.

I’m also reading some Agatha Christie, just because I never have. I am liking it but not loving it.

So…hooray for podcasts and boo for books I have picked so far this summer. Oh well, some summer reading binges are more fun than others.

I am actually half-seriously trying to write a novel this year. It’s hard. I just want to get my 80,000 words written down to prove to myself that I can do it. More likely, it will renew my appreciation for the people who do it all the time and are actually good at it.

automatic fiscal stabilizers

This doesn’t sound like an exciting topic, but I have been thinking, if the federal government decided to match metro-scale infrastructure projects say, between 25 cents and 75 cents on the dollar, and vary that amount based on economic conditions, what kind of trigger would you use for the economic conditions. My initial thought is to base it on unemployment – maybe 25 cents on the dollar if unemployment is below 5%, 50 cents if it is 5-7%, and 75 cents if it goes over 7%. But I just made that up based on no data other than a vaguely remembered undergraduate economics class in the 1990s. Here is a serious idea called the Sahm indicator:

The “Sahm indicator” measures the difference between the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate and its minimum over the prior 12 months (see chart). The use of the unemployment rate avoids the long lags (and frequent large revisions) associated with other indicators (like GDP). Since 1970, whenever the Sahm indicator crossed the threshold of 0.5%, a recession was underway―there were essentially no false signals. Moreover, the trigger occurred early in these downturns (on average within 4 months of the start). Sahm also proposes using an unemployment rate test to turn the stabilizers off. To avoid a premature return to fiscal austerity, she suggests deactivating programs when the unemployment rate falls to a level that is less than 2 percentage points above the initial trigger.

The infrastructure projects have to be ready to go, and part of plans, not just projects. Maybe you could set aside some of the money in a maintenance trust fund, which gets released to local metropolitan area governments to give them some relief in tough times. Maybe federal or state workers could be trained to do basic maintenance tasks. This is really the issue we saw after the 2007-2008 recession – how do you get people hired and trained and contracts and construction plans all in place fast enough to make a difference economically. It’s hard to do that and still build smart, thoughtful, future-ready infrastructure. But catching up on unglamourous deferred maintenance – think fixing potholes, lining leaky pipes, etc. could make sense.

UAE and AI

A couple interesting facts I learned in this article: (1) The United Arab Emirates has a “Minister of AI” and (2) 89% of workers in the country are foreign-born. The author makes a case that the citizens of the country value their leisure time more than westerners and are willing to embrace state ownership of the means of production with as much automation as possible.

The Poor People’s Moral Budget

This report tries to quantify the costs of inaction on a lot of America’s social and environmental problems, and makes the case that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. I tend to buy this, although they don’t give references in their summary and I bet if you dig deeper they may have cherry picked studies that produce the largest savings. Still, it illustrates how easily politicians can trick people by comparing the cost of action to an assumed zero cost of inaction, which is never the case. I don’t how you would go about educating the public about that, other than starting in kindergarten and teaching people how to look at evidence, think and draw conclusions.

the Amazon

No, not Amazon.com. As I was explaining to my six year old son recently, before it was a tech company, it was a river and a river basin. Anyway, if you want to be depressed, you can read this Intercept article stating that the current Brazilian government is systematically and intentionally trying to destroy the rain forest as fast as possible.

In the last half-century, about one-fifth of this forest, or some 300,000 square miles, has been cut and burned in Brazil, whose borders contain almost two-thirds of the Amazon basin. This is an area larger than Texas, the U.S. state that Brazil’s denuded lands most resemble, with their post-forest landscapes of silent sunbaked pasture, bean fields, and evangelical churches. This epochal deforestation — matched by harder to quantify but similar levels of forest degradation and fragmentation — has caused measurable disruptions to regional climates and rainfall. It has set loose so much stored carbon that it has negated the forest’s benefit as a carbon sink, the world’s largest after the oceans. Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky…

Imazon, a Brazilian research center, reports deforestation in the first months of 2019 jumped more than 50 percent compared to the amount during the same period in 2018. Half of this deforestation has occurred illegally in protected areas, including hundreds of Indigenous lands that cover a quarter of Brazil’s Amazon and provide a crucial buffer for much of the rest. (In the rainforest bastion state of Amazonas, Indigenous lands account for close to a third of the standing forest.) The Indigenous groups of the region have seen this before. During the runaway deforestation of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, they witnessed and were devastated by an “arc of fire” that blazed along the routes of the first penetration roads into the western Amazon. By the late 1980s, a burning crescent swept down from the northern Amazonian city of Belém, through the states of Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Acre. It burned brightest in Rondônia, where the smoke and ash from hundreds of raging fires were visible to the naked eyes of astronauts in high orbit.

a Google Maps trick

Wired has a trick for downloading Google Maps to use offline. I haven’t tried this.

TO ACCESS ONE of Google Maps’ best hidden features, you have to know the magic word. Well, it’s a phrase, really, and that phrase is: “OK Maps.” Enter this phrase into the Google Maps app and the portion of the map that’s currently visible on your screen will be saved directly to your device. Once saved, you can access that map even without a data connection.