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more lists from 2018 – science, technology, risks

Here are a couple more lists from 2018.

“5 biggest scientific breakthroughs” from The Week:

  • cloning monkeys
  • new evidence for (past?) microbial life on Mars
  • ability to walk restored to paraplegics
  • gene therapy successes to treat muscular dystrophy (so far, in dogs)
  • witnessing the birth of a new planet

From Bill Gates:

  • “we are also going to be focusing more on improving the quality of life… For example, software will be able to notice when you’re feeling down, connect you with your friends, give you personalized tips for sleeping and eating better, and help you use your time more efficiently.”
  • research breakthroughs on Alzheimer’s disease
  • some setbacks on polio eradication, but also promising new vaccination approaches
  • He is a skeptic on battery storage for solar and wind power, and a proponent of nuclear, where he is concerned the U.S. has lost its leadership position. “TerraPower, the company I started 10 years ago, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and produces very little waste.”
  • He’s afraid of a big epidemic. Well, who isn’t if they’ve been paying attention?
  • breakthroughs and ethical concerns in gene editing
  • balance between privacy and innovation
  • technology in education

2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!

best books of 2018 (Project Syndicate)

Project Syndicate is one of my favorite sources of commentary on economics and geopolitics. In this post, their contributors each name some of their favorite books of 2018, which, perhaps not surprisingly, mostly cover economics and geopolitics. I would love to read almost everything on this list, but I’ll mention 10 just for brevity.

AI and socialism

AI and algorithms are being used to target social services more precisely in Denmark. This article finds the level of data being collected on individuals insidious. I think it could be in the wrong hands, but this sort of thing seems to work in the Scandinavian countries where people actually trust their governments and neighbors. In the U.S., we tend to take paranoia to extremes, for example refusing to have a national ID card when it could solve some of our voter registration issues.

The municipality of Gladsaxe in Copenhagen, for example, has quietly been experimenting with a system that would use algorithms to identify children at risk of abuse, allowing authorities to target the flagged families for early intervention that could ultimately result in forced removals.

The children would be targeted based on specially designed algorithms tasked with crunching the information already gathered by the Danish government and linked to the personal identification number that is assigned to all Danes at birth. This information includes health records, employment information, and much more.

From the Danish government’s perspective, the child-welfare algorithm proposal is merely an extension of the systems it already has in place to detect social fraud and abuse. Benefits and entitlements covering millions of Danes have long been handled by a centralized agency (Udbetaling Danmark), and based on the vast amounts of personal data gathered and processed by this agency, algorithms create so-called puzzlement lists identifying suspicious patterns that may suggest fraud or abuse. These lists can then be acted on by the “control units” operated by many municipalities to investigate those suspected of receiving benefits to which they are not entitled. The data may include information on spouses and children, as well as information from financial institutions.

emergy

There are still people working on emergy (embodied energy) as an accounting and system simulation system. This group is in Brazil.

Contribution of the Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic to emergy accounting and decision making

The process of decision-making is a complex task that can become more challenging if the information provided by indicators is contradictory. Emergy accounting is an environmental accounting methodology that has been used to guide environmental decision making. In this paper we propose a comprehensive tool to support decision-making in emergy accounting. Paraconsistent Logic is a non-classic logic, which can aid in decision-making when the investigator is confronted with contradictory results. Paraconsistent Tri-Annotated Logic (PL3v) is proposed as a decision tool to compare different systems and allow selection of those alternatives with the best performance from the standpoint of sustainability defined in emergy terms. The rationale behind our selection of a set of emergy indicators to assess sustainability included such factors as increased efficiency, setting a priority for local resource use and minimization of the use of non-renewable resources. Two actual examples from the literature that resulted in contradictory evidence of system sustainability were compared within the framework of PL3v. Emergy indicators that correspond to positive evidence of sustainability (i.e., those that show increased efficiency and greater local resource use) were assigned as two favorable logic measures of sustainability. The PL3v analysis is completed with the identification of evidence that is unfavorable to sustainability, which is given by a third indicator negatively correlated with sustainability (i.e., non-renewable resource use). Operationally, the methodology proposed the normalization of the indicator values between [0,1] to fit to the PL3v annotation framework. Comparison of the systems examined is presented through the Paraconsistent Logic approach with the aid of a graphical representation and the calculation of the degree of certainty related to the truthfulness of the sustainability proposition.

works entering the public domain on January 1, 2019

I’m having some trouble with the math on this one.

We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”

So is it 70 years or 95 years, or does it depend on the type of work? Why can’t I read novels from the 1940s right now? Anyway, the excerpt above is from Open Culture, and has links to many other lists. A couple that catch my eye are one of Agatha Christie’s first novels and some short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.

December 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply.
  • An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.
  • Air pollution is taking an average of two years of people’s lives worldwide, although progress is being made in some of the worst cases which tend to skew the average.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • The Solarpunk genre takes a somewhat optimistic view of technology and climate change adaptation.
  • Rich people are starting to think they may be able to cheat death.
  • New Zealand is trying to use gene drives to completely wipe out rats in short order. Google is trying to do something similar with mosquitoes, only for the entire earth.

George McGovern’s Green New Deal

George McGovern proposed something similar to the current idea of a Green New Deal in the 1960s. A Yale historian says it had some momentum but was derailed when the Vietnam War broke out.


In 1964, McGovern sponsored legislation for the creation of a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) to transfer jobs in defense to peacetime work, for example, civil engineering and commercial manufacturing. On the surface, the NECC’s purpose was rather simple: to help unemployed defense workers find jobs. But McGovern’s ulterior motive for the commission was to reallocate military spending to fight environmental problems, to give defense workers “green jobs,” to use an anachronistic term…

But then came Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Southeast Asia derailed McGovern’s vision. Whereas in 1963 the world seemed at the precipice of a new era in the Cold War, Vietnam revived ideological tensions between Democratic proponents and opponents of Cold War foreign policy. Hawkish Democrats became enemies to the NECC, afraid of diverting monies away from the war. The stiffest opposition to the plan came from the Johnson administration, which criticized McGovern’s idea for a 10 percent cut to a $300 billion-dollar defense budget as “radical.” Moreover, defense contractors failed to see the utility of McGovern’s commission as they were now awash in new, albeit temporary, defense contracts to fight the war. When the NECC would be revived over two decades later as the Cold War was finally coming to an end, it would be a smaller, private endeavor focused on public education about economic conversion and disarmament and stripped of its earlier environmentalist goals.

I’m sensing some urgency this time around over climate change, which is good, but military and national security spending seems to be largely unquestioned. For that to change, I suspect it would take some bold action in Congress like a war tax and/or an insistence that war must be declared before American troops or equipment are committed abroad. Ironically, I think maybe a compromise could be based on stepped-up border security in exchange for closing foreign military bases. That would seem to have something for everyone.

(U.S.) national security stories of 2018 (The Intercept)

The Intercept, which doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a left-leaning investigative news organization, has a round-up of national security stories from 2018. The biggest bombshell is a well-sourced claim that Saudi Arabia and UAE were on the verge of launching a military invasion of Qatar and were talked out of it by Rex Tillerson, who was then fired under pressure for Saudi and UAE lobbyists in Washington. Another interesting one claims that large AT&T buildings in major cities are hubs for NSA surveillance, including domestic surveillance. That’s just the tip of an iceberg consisting of allegations of lots of war crimes and torture, all backed up by a fair amount of evidence.