Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

best science and technology stories of 2018 (Longreads)

The first of the “best of” articles for 2018 are starting to come out. Here is the best of science and technology writing from Longreads. A couple topics caught my eye:

  • a review of a book on how computer algorithms are increasingly taking over our lives, called The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab
  • what’s new with transhumanism, also known as really rich people starting to hope against the odds that death may be optional (hey, they have already figured out how to stop paying taxes, so isn’t cheating death the next logical step?)
  • an article on farming practices specifically focused on maximizing carbon sequestration by building soil

solarpunk

What is solar punk exactly? I’m not exactly sure, but this story in Longreads describes it like this:

A new type of science fiction, solarpunk takes as its premise the idea that climate change is unavoidable and probably will be severe, but demands optimism of its writers. A 2015 essay on the genre’s political ideals and inspirations by Andrew Dana Hudson refers to solarpunk as a “speculative movement, a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.” In practice, so far this has meant a bunch of short fiction and visual art, numerous explanatory essays, and a lot of enthusiastic conversation on social media and in online communities. But those associated with it tend to hold out hope that solarpunk could be a starting point for something bigger, something that could help propel a shift away from our contemporary sense of defeatism.

The article mentions a couple short story anthologies:

Bridging the Gap Between National and Ecosystem Accounting

This study estimated the value of a forest in Spain at more than five times what is estimated using standard national accounting methods (GDP, I assume). If this is the case, it suggests to me that the idea of just tweaking GDP to include ecosystem services isn’t going to work. The article is open access.

National accounting either ignores or fails to give due values to the ecosystem services, products, incomes and environmental assetsof a country. To overcome these shortcomings, we apply spatially-explicit extended accounts that incorporate a novel environmental income indicator, which we test in the forests of Andalusia (Spain). Extended accounts incorporate nine farmer activities (timber, cork, firewood, nuts, livestock grazing, conservation forestry, hunting, residential services and private amenity) and seven government activities (fire services, free access recreation, free access mushroom, carbon, landscape conservation, threatened biodiversity and water yield). To make sure the valuation remains consistent with standard accounts, we simulate exchange values for non-market final forest product consumption in order to measure individual ecosystem services and environmental income indicators. Manufactured capital and environmental assets are also integrated. When comparing extended to standard accounts, our results are 3.6 times higher for gross value added. These differences are explained primarily by the omission in the standard accounts of carbon activities and undervaluation of private amenity, free access recreation, landscape and threatened biodiversity ecosystem services. Extended accounts measure a value of Andalusian forest ecosystem services 5.4 times higher than that measured using the valuation criteria of standard accounts.

want to know a price? go f— yourself!

Actually, on this site I am still allowed to say fuck, as far as I know. Why is it hard to type that in the title though? I would probably get more hits. Apologies to any parents out there whose children stumbled across this post. Then again, you should be sheltering them from mind-warping casual violence in entertainment, providing age-appropriate sex education, and teaching them the judicious, appropriate, and occasionally humorous uses of four letter words.

Anyway, this made me laugh. And while it is clearly satire, it is the least fake news I have read today.

Welcome to America General Hospital! Seems you have an oozing head injury there. Let’s check your insurance. Okay, quick “heads up” — ha! — that your plan may not cover everything today. What’s that? You want a reasonable price quote, upfront, for our services? Sorry, let me explain a hospital to you: we give you medical care, then we charge whatever the hell we want for it.

If you don’t like that, go fuck yourself and die…


Fun story: This one time we charged two parents $18,000 for some baby formula. LOL! We pull that shit all the time. Don’t like it? Don’t bring a baby, asshole.

Ha ha. It’s funny ’cause it’s true and it happens to all of us all the time, and we don’t do anything about it.

Nature – global warming will happen faster than we think

The title of this article in Nature pretty much says it all. The authors make a case that the IPCC is underestimating the risk of a rapid deterioration in the climate situation. There are a couple counter-intuitive points here. First, there is good news about air pollution, particularly in China. This is good news for public health in the near term, but paradoxically the air pollution has actually been bad enough in recent years to measurably block sunlight. Second, there really is a non-manmade component to global warming, and it may be significant in the coming decades. This is not good news at all, because the manmade component is of course very real, and the two are additive.

U.S. murder rate down a bit

In a bit of good news, the murder rate in the U.S. appears to be down this year compared to trends in the last several years, according to the New York Times.

In the cities in which data is available, murder has been down about 7 percent on average this year relative to the same point in 2017…

If murder falls about 4.5 percent nationally this year, the murder rate of about 5 per 100,000 will roughly be in line with 2009’s rate and half of what it was in 1980, the highest U.S. murder rate on record. The accompanying chart shows what the national murder rate since 1960 would look like with a 4.5 percent drop in 2018.

Tracking the change in murder nationally is far easier than explaining why it’s happening. There is still no consensus on why murder rose nationally in 2015 and 2016, though various theories have been proposed, including simple randomness. Similarly, a projected drop in murder in 2018 would not have an obvious cause. Employment of smarter technologies, expanded community intervention programs, and even colder weather could help explain year-to-year local changes.

If I had to speculate, it might be that the drugs in question in the current round of the war on drugs are simply not as lucrative, and therefore not as worth killing for, as the ones we saw in the 1990s. The real profits accrue to the people willing to take big risks to get the drugs across the border, and it could just be that the body count this time around has been shifted just outside the U.S. border. It may also be that the U.S. government at various levels has shifted toward a little more of a public health approach and a little less of a law enforcement approach. I could think positive and consider this progress, or I could be cynical and say it is partial because there is a wider range of ethnic and socioeconomic groups being affected this time around.

alzheimer’s disease and insulin resistance

This article in Psychology Today makes a case that there is a very strong link between insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease. The bad news, it says, is that the majority of the population is insulin resistant. The good news is that it is something an individual can really do something about. Basically, replace sugar and most processed foods with whole, unprocessed ones. It sounds mostly okay to me except I am really not ready to give up bread any time soon.

what experts worry about

Motherboard asked 105 experts what worries them most and what they are most hopeful about. 

Participants include (but are not limited to) 19 space scientists, 19 biologists and environmental scientists, 11 computer scientists, eight medical scientists, five lawyers, four historians, a musicologist, a paleontologist, an astronaut, and a digital artist who replied with emojis…

Unifying ideas emerged in the responses. By far the most frequently mentioned worry was climate change (29), followed by a spike in political extremism (21), with a subset of answers directly linking these problems. Artificial intelligence, especially its bias and unpredictability, represented another common concern (10). The proliferation of misinformation (8) and insufficient investment in science and STEM education (8) were often mentioned.

November 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
  • The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
  • 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.

Most hopeful stories:

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

  • New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
  • A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
  • People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.