It’s interesting that as the U.S. has made the switch to more natural gas and less coal, the carbon emissions of electricity generation and transportation have drawn essentially even, where power plants were the much larger emitter in the past. But you can imagine that if transportation begins to electrify on a significant scale, this distinction will be harder to make.
Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com
U.S. military spending
With at least one politician talking about vastly increasing military spending, it is instructive to see that the U.S. still out-spends the next seven largest spenders combined (China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, UK, India, France, and Japan). We out-spend China alone by almost 3 to 1.
where the money goes
I am somewhat familiar with how the U.S. federal government spends its money, but it is still instructive to see it broken down occasionally. Once social security, medicare, and interest are taken care of, the discretionary spending that is left is less than a third of the total. Of that, more than half is military. Veterans’ benefits make up another sizable chunk, nuclear weapons are partially funded under the energy budget, and it is not clear (to me at least) where intelligence and homeland security funding fall, so the real total for military and security is even larger than it appears.
cars vs. meat
This study attempts to find a hypothetical case where a person who bikes to work has a higher carbon footprint than a person who drives to work. I’m drastically oversimplifying, I’m sure, but what I gather is that if a vegetarian with a very fuel efficient car lived the same distance from work as a person who eats a huge amount of meat but bikes to work, the person who bikes to work could have a slightly higher carbon footprint. It is surprising, but I don’t think the right way to spin it is to say biking is bad. For one thing, people who bike to work are going to live much, much closer to work on average than people who drive to work. I also bet people who drive a lot eat more meat, on average, than people who don’t. Because steak and SUVs just go together. But I think the right take home message is that driving and meat are both pretty bad, environmentally speaking. If you want to help the environment, these are probably the two things you can limit or give up that will do the most good.
Philadelphia soda tax
Taxes on sugary drinks have been tried and failed in a few cities, partly because the soda industry has mounted big ad campaigns against them. Now a tax has passed in Philadelphia, partly because Michael Bloomberg funded a pro-tax ad campaign. I watched this unfold in Philadelphia in real time and never heard about the Bloomberg thing until I read it in the national media just now. I guess it’s a victory over special interests, of sorts. I generally support the idea of taxing things that hurt people and using he revenue to help people. That should be what taxation is all about. It should replace less productive taxes on good things like work, saving and investment. That’s not the case in Philadelphia. They just keep raising and raising and raising, and it can’t go on forever.
gene circuits
Here’s another article on the idea of designed biological circuits.
Synthetic mixed-signal computation in living cells
Living cells implement complex computations on the continuous environmental signals that they encounter. These computations involve both analogue- and digital-like processing of signals to give rise to complex developmental programs, context-dependent behaviours and homeostatic activities. In contrast to natural biological systems, synthetic biological systems have largely focused on either digital or analogue computation separately. Here we integrate analogue and digital computation to implement complex hybrid synthetic genetic programs in living cells. We present a framework for building comparator gene circuits to digitize analogue inputs based on different thresholds. We then demonstrate that comparators can be predictably composed together to build band-pass filters, ternary logic systems and multi-level analogue-to-digital converters. In addition, we interface these analogue-to-digital circuits with other digital gene circuits to enable concentration-dependent logic. We expect that this hybrid computational paradigm will enable new industrial, diagnostic and therapeutic applications with engineered cells.
street lighting and crime
Conventional wisdom says street lighting has some deterrent effect on crime. In this study, at least, there was no evidence to support that.
the Phillips machine
Here’s a 2009 New York Times column about a hydraulic model of the economy.
In the front right corner, in a structure that resembles a large cupboard with a transparent front, stands a Rube Goldberg collection of tubes, tanks, valves, pumps and sluices. You could think of it as a hydraulic computer. Water flows through a series of clear pipes, mimicking the way that money flows through the economy. It lets you see (literally) what would happen if you lower tax rates or increase the money supply or whatever; just open a valve here or pull a lever there and the machine sloshes away, showing in real time how the water levels rise and fall in various tanks representing the growth in personal savings, tax revenue, and so on. This device was state of the art in the 1950s, but it looks hilarious now, with all its plumbing and noisy pumps.
When it debuted back in November 1949, the leading thinkers at the London School of Economics crammed into the seminar room, some having come just to laugh, others gaping in amazement at the thing in the middle of the room, which had been cobbled together in a garage, with a pump cannibalized from an old Lancaster bomber.
Maybe it shouldn’t be quite so surprising. Before there were digital computers, there were “analog computers”, essentially circuits that could simulate various types of systems at equilibrium. Different types of systems have analogous building blocks and processes, like storages, flows, and resistances. As Howard T. Odum showed us, you can use these basic building blocks to model all types of systems, from physical to biological to socioeconomic.
more Donald Shoup!
Like I keep saying, you can never get too much Donald Shoup. Urban policy can get so complicated, but getting rid of minimum parking requirements would just be such a simple and easy thing to do, and have so many benefits.
Minimum parking requirements create especially severe problems. In The High Cost of Free Parking, I argued that parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, degrade urban design, reduce walkability, damage the economy, and exclude poor people. To my knowledge, no city planner has argued that parking requirements do not have these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do have these effects. We are poisoning our cities with too much parking…
Parking requirements reduce the cost of owning a car but raise the cost of everything else. Recently, I estimated that the parking spaces required for shopping centers in Los Angeles increase the cost of building a shopping center by 67 percent if the parking is in an aboveground structure and by 93 percent if the parking is underground.
Developers would provide some parking even if cities did not require it, but parking requirements would be superfluous if they did not increase the parking supply. This increased cost is then passed on to all shoppers. For example, parking requirements raise the price of food at a grocery store for everyone, regardless of how they travel. People who are too poor to own a car pay more for their groceries to ensure that richer people can park free when they drive to the store.
It’s one of those issues where the evidence is clear, but it may take a generation for professionals, bureaucrats, and politicians to pay attention to the evidence, reach the right conclusions, and act on them. Why is this so hard?
the “amorality” of self driving cars
This article talks about how a self-driving car might be programmed to make a hard decision in a split second.
Philosopher Jason Millar claims to have originated the idea of the ethically challenged self-driving car in a 2014 paper on robotics. As a grad student he proposed “The Tunnel Problem”—a formulation that has done well online thanks to its simple name (supposedly an analog to the Philosophy 101 “Trolley Problem”).
In the “The Tunnel Problem,” Millar’s driverless car (let’s call her Porsche again) is fast approaching a narrow tunnel, the entrance of which is blocked by a child who has fallen in the roadway. The car can either kill the kid or hit the wall of the tunnel, killing the driver (who is really just a passenger).
The trolley problem is fun – here is a run-down on Wikipedia. You can adapt it to a lot of real-life problems. Is it okay to hurt the few to help the many? Is it okay to hurt bad people who do bad things? Is it wrong to damage natural ecosystems, even if people are not directly hurt or they may even be helped? What if you aren’t sure whether people will be hurt, and the people who might be hurt aren’t even alive yet? Is it enough to not directly cause harm, or are you a bad person if you are not actively trying to reduce harm caused by others? What if you are doing something to reduce harm, but not everything you could be?
As fun as these ethical puzzles are to think about, with predictions that self-driving vehicles could reduce the death toll on our highways and streets by 80%, there is no moral ambiguity in choosing to make that happen as quickly as possible. I think it would be unethical not to.
Back where the rubber meets the road, I think you would just program the computer to always have a plan for how it would stop if it had to stop. Human drivers are supposed to do this, and a computer should be much, much better at it. I suppose there are cases where swerving is the better option – if something jumps out unexpectedly from the side, like a deer, or drops from above, like a tree branch, I suppose swerving could be the right response. But with almost anything unexpected that happens with another vehicle ahead or to the side, it seems like the best option would usually be for all vehicles to stop as quickly as possible. And if all vehicles are computer controlled, it seems like unexpected things shouldn’t happen that often.