The official Raspberry Pi magazine has a nice “getting started” article. And starting on page 58, they tell you how to simulate the solar system. This is how kids should learn about how real systems work, rather than just memorizing the arbitrary names of their bits and pieces. I’m counting down my 25 years to retirement when I might actually have some leisure time to play with this sort of thing.
Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com
Canada’s Eco-Fiscal Commission
Canada has something called an eco-fiscal commission, and it has a blog.
Technological change has transformed the quality of our lives. It has removed terrible diseases that maimed, crippled, and killed — plague, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, smallpox, and leprosy, to mention only the most common. In 1900, death from botulism and ptomaine poisoning from contaminated food was common. Chemical additives virtually eliminated these killers and allow us to live long enough to worry about the long run cancer causing effects of some of these additives. Now they are being replaced by safer preservatives.
Technological change has also transformed how we make both existing and new commodities. Most new technologies useless of all inputs per unit of output than do the older technologies that they replace thus moving us towards an increasingly economical use of the world’s resources. Furthermore, many newer technologies are much less polluting than many older technologies.
In summary, economic growth driven by new technologies not only increases our incomes; it transforms our lives through the invention of new, hitherto undreamed of products that are made in new, hitherto undreamed of and more economical ways. We can indeed be thankful that no anti-growth advocate persuaded governments in 1950, let alone in 1900, to stop all growth on the grounds that resources were limited and that we did not need more of what we already had too much of, thereby denying us of all the products and processes just mentioned and the new resource saving and less polluting production methods ̶ and others too many to list here.
This thinking is logical on its face. But of course, the logical flaw is when it is not paired with the idea that the absolute physical footprint can’t grow forever. Put another way, you can’t just keep producing each unit of output more efficiently, and producing ever more output, unless the growth in efficiency is faster than the growth in output. It could theoretically be done, but we’re not close to turning that corner.
AI Weapons
Stephen Hawking and others have signed a letter urging the world not to start a new artificial intelligence arms race, arguing that these weapons will be…
…feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.
street congestion ideas
Here is a nice compendium from Plan Philly on dealing with urban street congestion. Although, the term congestion to most people implies high traffic volumes and low speeds, which you could argue are acceptable in cities. I will admit though that here in Philadelphia we need solutions to temporary delivery, loading and contractor parking. These legitimate business activities block bike lanes, sidewalks, and travel lanes because they often have no choice. I’ve done it myself. Pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers can curse at each other all day – but the same person can be all three at various times, so we are cursing at ourselves. We need solutions and compromises that work for everyone. There are some good, pretty obvious ideas in this article that really shouldn’t encounter bureaucratic or political resistance: larger loading zones, metering loading zones, letting people reserve them in advance, congestion pricing, and off-hours delivery, to name a few.
ET still has not phoned home
Here’s a Stephen Hawking-endorsed approach to looking for extraterrestrial life. It’s a pretty profound thought that if we humans here on Earth are the only life in the universe, then destroying ourselves would be not only stupid but profoundly immoral.
“Uber for kids”
What’s the busy, car-free urban soccer mom (or dad) to do when they occasionally need to pack the kid off to a remote inaccessible (except by car) suburban area? Here’s an idea for an Uber-like service where the drivers are certified in childcare.
Parents schedule a ride with a ‘CareDriver’ and are sent a short bio for that driver, a picture, and are required to enter in a code word for the ride. The parent then relays that information to the child, and then to the school or daycare organization from which the kid is getting picked up. That way, little Tommy or Patty knows how to identify their ‘CareDriver’ through both the photo and the code word.
Parents can track the ride in real time through the app and have multiple methods of contacting the driver at any time…
All of the drivers on the platform go through a rigorous, 15-point certification process. They must have at least five years of child care service experience, alongside passing a number of background checks, criminal background checks, as well as getting fingerprinted. HopSkipDrive also ensures that their drivers are TrustLine certified, which cofounder Joanna McFarland describes as the gold standard of childcare certification in the state of California.
suburban office parks
The Washington Post covers the deflating market for suburban office parks in the D.C. area.
The building was built in 1989, and it shows: a mountain of tinted glass and beige concrete in commercial dullsville. Over the past decade, its value dropped by 64 percent. The largest tenant, the National Institutes of Health and its contractors, started packing up two years ago as leases expired. By 2014, the owner reported cash-flow problems, foreclosure arrived this past January, and that was it for 6116 Executive Blvd…
“I think, as with many other things, our younger folks are more inclined to be Metro-accessible and more urban,” Marriott chief executive Arne Sorensontold The Washington Post in March, after announcing the plans to move.
If tastes keep trending away from office parks, buildings like 6116 Executive Blvd. and 10400 Fernwood Rd. may soon be hollow, oversize memorials to the Way We Worked.
chemicals and cancer
I’ve tended not to obsess over chemicals and cancer, because I think there are other risks that are much higher and much more clearly proven (like the high odds of death every time you set foot in or anywhere near a motor vehicle, to give one example.) I also tend to accept some chemicals, like water disinfectants, food preservatives, drugs, even pesticides, as somewhat necessary evils – we actually know they have a downside, but they do more good than harm on balance. In a sense, it is a “luxury” that many of us avoid violence and infectious diseases long enough to get old and die of cancer. Cancer is at least to some extent a random phenomenon. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking for safer alternatives to these chemicals that do the same good. If we don’t look we won’t find them. And then, there are chemicals that are known to be harmful, and have no positive effects. Triclosan comes to mind. The companies using cynical fear-based marketing to force these on people should be punished.
All that aside, our food, water, air, and consumer products are full of chemicals, with the result that our bodies are full of chemicals. We don’t have good information on what most of them are doing to us, and especially what combinations of them may be doing to us. Here’s an interesting article that estimates what fraction of cancers are caused by chemicals in the environment, as opposed to lifestyle choices, genetics, and plain old bad luck.
Lifestyle factors are responsible for a considerable portion of cancer incidence worldwide, but credible estimates from the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) suggest that the fraction of cancers attributable to toxic environmental exposures is between 7% and 19%. To explore the hypothesis that low-dose exposures to mixtures of chemicals in the environment may be combining to contribute to environmental carcinogenesis, we reviewed 11 hallmark phenotypes of cancer, multiple priority target sites for disruption in each area and prototypical chemical disruptors for all targets, this included dose-response characterizations, evidence of low-dose effects and cross-hallmark effects for all targets and chemicals. In total, 85 examples of chemicals were reviewed for actions on key pathways/mechanisms related to carcinogenesis. Only 15% (13/85) were found to have evidence of a dose-response threshold, whereas 59% (50/85) exerted low-dose effects. No dose-response information was found for the remaining 26% (22/85). Our analysis suggests that the cumulative effects of individual (non-carcinogenic) chemicals acting on different pathways, and a variety of related systems, organs, tissues and cells could plausibly conspire to produce carcinogenic synergies. Additional basic research on carcinogenesis and research focused on low-dose effects of chemical mixtures needs to be rigorously pursued before the merits of this hypothesis can be further advanced. However, the structure of the World Health Organization International Programme on Chemical Safety ‘Mode of Action’ framework should be revisited as it has inherent weaknesses that are not fully aligned with our current understanding of cancer biology.
CRISPR
Here’s some more info on CRISPR, a genetic engineering technique some people are saying will be revolutionary.
The Bacterial Origins of the CRISPR Genome-Editing Revolution
Sontheimer Erik J. and Barrangou Rodolphe. Human Gene Therapy. July 2015, 26(7): 413-424. doi:10.1089/hum.2015.091.Like most of the tools that enable modern life science research, the recent genome-editing revolution has its biological roots in the world of bacteria and archaea. Clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) loci are found in the genomes of many bacteria and most archaea, and underlie an adaptive immune system that protects the host cell against invasive nucleic acids such as viral genomes. In recent years, engineered versions of these systems have enabled efficient DNA targeting in living cells from dozens of species (including humans and other eukaryotes), and the exploitation of the resulting endogenous DNA repair pathways has provided a route to fast, easy, and affordable genome editing. In only three years after RNA-guided DNA cleavage was first harnessed, the ability to edit genomes via simple, user-defined RNA sequences has already revolutionized nearly all areas of biological science. CRISPR-based technologies are now poised to similarly revolutionize many facets of clinical medicine, and even promise to advance the long-term goal of directly editing genomic sequences of patients with inherited disease. In this review, we describe the biological and mechanistic basis for these remarkable immune systems, and how their engineered derivatives are revolutionizing basic and clinical research.
condensation
Here’s an article on using condensation as a water supply. It’s a somewhat obvious idea – first, collect all that air conditioner condensate and use it for something. Second, use solar energy to condense some more.
The machine is based on Spanish technology. Local developers John Vollmer and Moses West are testing it out and allowing it to be evaluated by numerous entities, including the military.
The machine takes water from the air in the form of humidity and converts it into drinking water. It’s not a new process, but the machine does it on a large scale and much more economically than before.
“As long as you have 30 percent humidity or greater, there’s no such thing as a drought,” West said.