Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

electric indoor compost bin

I’m upset, because I was going to invent this.

Oh well, I suppose I didn’t really have time to invent it, or know how to do it. If it really works as well as advertised, it’s potentially a big advance in closing the loop.

I have to point out that aerobic compost won’t actually reduce carbon emissions compared to landfilling the same waste or putting it down the garbage disposal. But the carbon is the same carbon absorbed when the plants were grown, and in this case you haven’t produced waste at all, but instead turned the carbon and nutrients in your groceries into healthy soil and plants on your own property. You’ve saved a few trips to the Home Depot, which means you saved energy and reduced pollution from the gasoline you would have put in your car, reduced your risk of injury or death in a car crash, reduced the amount of chemical fertilizer produced in natural gas refineries and phosphate mining operations, reduced energy required to truck bags of topsoil and fertilizer around, reduced the risk of death and injury that entails, diverted nutrients from surface water or groundwater (where they are pollution) to your soil (where they are a resource), maybe grown some food, gotten some exercise and squeezed in some precious leisure time out in the garden. Or maybe you gave some compost away, made a friend or even sold the stuff. If there are enough people like you, Home Depot may not need to have such a big parking lot, which would reduce stormwater runoff, urban heat, demand for pavement (which really will reduce carbon emissions), and open up land for more economically or ecologically productive or leisurely uses.

antibiotics on the farm

Here’s a journal article about antibiotic use on farms worldwide. Pigs get the highest doses relative to their body size, followed closely by chickens, then cows as a distant third. Developing countries are expected to increase their use by a lot as their populations grow and demand more meat.

Demand for animal protein for human consumption is rising globally at an unprecedented rate. Modern animal production practices are associated with regular use of antimicrobials, potentially increasing selection pressure on bacteria to become resistant. Despite the significant potential consequences for antimicrobial resistance, there has been no quantitative measurement of global antimicrobial consumption by livestock. We address this gap by using Bayesian statistical models combining maps of livestock densities, economic projections of demand for meat products, and current estimates of antimicrobial consumption in high-income countries to map antimicrobial use in food animals for 2010 and 2030. We estimate that the global average annual consumption of antimicrobials per kilogram of animal produced was 45 mg⋅kg−1, 148 mg⋅kg−1, and 172 mg⋅kg−1 for cattle, chicken, and pigs, respectively. Starting from this baseline, we estimate that between 2010 and 2030, the global consumption of antimicrobials will increase by 67%, from 63,151 ± 1,560 tons to 105,596 ± 3,605 tons. Up to a third of the increase in consumption in livestock between 2010 and 2030 is imputable to shifting production practices in middle-income countries where extensive farming systems will be replaced by large-scale intensive farming operations that routinely use antimicrobials in subtherapeutic doses. For Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the increase in antimicrobial consumption will be 99%, up to seven times the projected population growth in this group of countries. Better understanding of the consequences of the uninhibited growth in veterinary antimicrobial consumption is needed to assess its potential effects on animal and human health.

gene editing

Here is a long article in MIT Technology Review about gene editing.

“Germ line” is biologists’ jargon for the egg and sperm, which combine to form an embryo. By editing the DNA of these cells or the embryo itself, it could be possible to correct disease genes and to pass those genetic fixes on to future generations. Such a technology could be used to rid families of scourges like cystic fibrosis. It might also be possible to install genes that offer lifelong protection against infection, Alzheimer’s, and, Yang told me, maybe the effects of aging. These would be history-making medical advances that could be as important to this century as vaccines were to the last.

That’s the promise. The fear is that germ-line engineering is a path toward a dystopia of superpeople and designer babies for those who can afford it. Want a child with blue eyes and blond hair? Why not design a highly intelligent group of people who could be tomorrow’s leaders and scientists?…

All this means that germ-line engineering is much farther along than anyone imagined. “What you are talking about is a major issue for all humanity,” says Merle Berger, one of the founders of Boston IVF, a network of fertility clinics that is among the largest in the world and helps more than a thousand women get pregnant each year. “It would be the biggest thing that ever happened in our field,” he says. Berger predicts that repairing genes for serious inherited disease will win wide public acceptance, but beyond that, the technology would cause a public uproar because “everyone would want the perfect child” and it could lead to picking and choosing eye color and eventually intelligence. “These are things we talk about all the time,” he says. “But we have never had the opportunity to do it.”

How far out are practical applications in humans? Reading farther down, some are saying 10-20 years.

more Uber than taxis in NYC

According to BBC, there are now more Uber cars than traditional taxis in New York City. That happened fast. For now, there are still more trips taken by taxi. The article uncritically quotes traditional taxi advocates (without quoting Uber advocates) who think it is unfair that they are no longer allowed to jack up prices by limiting the supply of transportation available to people. They’re right, it’s no longer unfair in their favor.

The Setup

I like this blog The Setup, even though it is obviously trying to sell me stuff. This particular post caught my eye because I have fantasies very similar to this, and I thought I was the only one:

I have a dream home all built in my mind. I want to buy a big square warehouse with 4 floors, each wide open from wall to wall. If it was a city block that would be fine. I would open the first floor to the public and have a bar/lounge/music venue. It would be a labyrinthine layout and the decor would be all hacked and repurposed, upcycled and somewhat robotic – a mad scientist bar! This would help to fund the second floor, which would be a wood/metal shop and a stop motion studio. We would have plenty of room to develop inventions and churn out animation as well as concoct fun and entertaining technological novelties for the bar downstairs.

The third floor would be a sweet pad for artists in residency. I would pick and choose different people from all walks of life to come and offer their creativity to the entire process. If I want to make some crazy scifi dream come to life, I could invite several experts from a variety of fields and have them all working together on that idea. That would be absolutely incredible – better than a superpower! I think the third floor would also probably have airhockey and skiiball as well.

The fourth floor would be my sort of living quarters. I would have a big kitchen and movie theater and dining room and all that stuff. It would be totally sweet and only a select few would get to come up there.

The roof, though, is the really special part. The roof would be my bedroom. I would have a man-made hill, with soft grass, under a geodesic dome like the biodome. I would have fruit trees and a vegetable garden. My bed would be dug right into the side of the hill so I could sleep under the stars. But also at the top of the hill, I would have a platform on a pneumatic lift that would raise my super high-tech telescope up into the bombardier’s bubble at the top of the dome. It would be so cool! I could sit down at the desk and hit a button and ascend to the highest point in the building to stargaze.

Sounds pretty good. My fantasy actually involves a chocolate factory. Seriously, there is an actual abandoned chocolate factory a few blocks from my house in Philadelphia that has been sitting vacant for decades, and is now up for auction.

Now, people are saying it’s going to go for about $10 million, so I need to raise that. There might be some asbestos in there that will need to come out. Then the renovations can begin. On the first floor, I’m going to recreate Philadelphia neighborhood bars and diners that have gone defunct over the years, using actual materials from them if they exist, otherwise just recreated from photos. So you can wander through the different rooms and each one will be a different recreated diner or bar. At least one will be a coffee shop open during the day. Then on the second floor will be offices of my foundation, the mission of which has not been established yet, but of course will have something to do with sustainability and doing something good for the world. Dogs will be allowed. The third floor will be apartments for visiting scholars and other interesting people. But as I will be fabulously wealthy, I will also just buy a bunch of nearby houses that interesting people can hang out in, including one for myself of course. Hey, it’s my fantasy.

maternal mortality

I’ve talked recently about the happy statistics on child mortality globally – not only did it drop dramatically worldwide in the 20th century, but the progress has continued to be dramatic this century. Now, NPR has another happy statistic – moms are doing well too.

Since 1995 the rate of women worldwide who die in childbirth has dropped by more than 40 percent.

When you look deeper into that statistic, there’s even more reason to celebrate. Sometimes a rosy global health statistic can overstate the extent of change. A few large countries that improve their situation pull up the average, masking the fact that everyone else has stagnated or worse. But the maternal mortality rate has plunged by 40 percent or more in at least 76 countries — that’s close to half of the world’s nations…

Improving maternal health worldwide will require a heavy focus on sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 62 percent of annual deaths. Southern Asia is the other hotspot — a fourth of maternal deaths occur there.

kids and risk

I like the way Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, talks about risk:

I think that we are thinking like lawyers a lot now because our society is so litigious, especially in America. For instance, one kid fell off a swing, maybe 20 years ago, broke her arm, sued the park district, and suddenly park districts across America started taking out high swings, they started taking out teeter-totters – see-saws – they started taking out merry-go-rounds. And so they started thinking like lawyers and then we started internalising the idea that, like, “Oh my God! It must be very dangerous for our children to do these things if they’re being removed from regular life.” And everything started seeming so dangerous that we sort of forgot, like, yes, some things are a little dangerous – you go on a merry-go-round, there’s a chance you’ll fall off, there’s a chance you might, your kid might break an arm. There’s also a chance they’ll have a fantastic time, they’ll lose weight, they’ll be fit, they’ll have something fun to do after school instead of just turning on the TV or going to the computer. But we always think in terms of the what if? worst case scenario, and that’s thinking like a lawyer. Because a lawyer could go to court and say, “We knew that these merry-go-rounds are dangerous! And why did they have one there? I’m asking you!” And we think ahead to that point and get rid of anything fun, even if the risk is tiny, because we think a tiny risk even is not worth it.

…in the same day that I’m saying children should go to the park, 769 children will be diagnosed with diabetes,” – that’s in the United States. That’s twice as many as 10 years ago. Nobody says, “How dare you let your child stay inside! What if they get diabetes?” Nobody says that. “How dare you let your kids stay at home just watching TV – they’re gonna get depressed, they’re gonna get fat, they’re not gonna have any friends, they’re not gonna have memories of their childhood.” Nobody thinks about the trade-off. Everything is straight to: you let your child have one iota of freedom, what if something terrible happens. They see the iota[?], they see the rape, murder and dismemberment and they try to put them together and of course it doesn’t work. What I’m suggesting is let your kids have the kind of well-thought-out freedom with you training them. Train them to cross the street, train them, “Don’t go off with strangers”, train them to swim. You know, I do think our job is to keep our children safe, but I don’t think that the outside is so unsafe that we have to regard it as Predators’ Ball every time you open the door.

I agree with most of this, except that the outside really is unsafe, not because of predatory humans but because of motor vehicles – you really can’t “train them to cross the street” safely because the streets are not designed safely. In reasonably developed countries that are not at war, I am positive that cars are the biggest source of violence against children. Of course at the present time we need to train our children to cross our unsafe streets as safely as possible. We also have to accept the risk that they can cross the street exactly the way we train them and still never come home. If we don’t want to accept this risk, then we can’t continue to accept unsafe street designs. Politicians and planners and engineers who perpetuate unsafe street designs, and all the rest of us who complacently accept them, are the real murderers and dismemberers of children. The solutions are known. This is a risk to children we really can do something about. Let’s do it!