Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

ocean on Jupiter’s moon

Here is an article called Vast underground ocean discovered on Jupiter’s largest moon. Somehow they can tell by the way the planet bulges out that there is water underneath the surface.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has the best evidence yet for an underground saltwater ocean on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. The subterranean ocean is thought to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface.

This reminded me of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. About half that book is verbal description of an ocean on an alien planet. It doesn’t sound exciting, but I found it fascinating. This is a case where a picture is not worth a thousand words, because he describes these fantastical geometric shapes that you can picture in your mind’s eye, and yet they could never actually be drawn. It’s even more amazing that the book was written in Polish, and the version available in English is supposedly an English translation of a French translation of the original. Or maybe that has something to do with why the language is so fascinating. I wish I had a copy to pull out a good quote but I don’t have one at the moment.

Chinese “Crackup”

The Wall Street Journal is predicting the “crackup” of the Chinese government.

We cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase. The CCP is the world’s second-longest ruling regime (behind only North Korea), and no party can rule forever.

Looking ahead, China-watchers should keep their eyes on the regime’s instruments of control and on those assigned to use those instruments. Large numbers of citizens and party members alike are already voting with their feet and leaving the country or displaying their insincerity by pretending to comply with party dictates.

I don’t find any of the evidence the author gives all that convincing. For example, part of his evidence is that people are traveling, investing, and studying abroad, while I wouldn’t consider any of those things unpatriotic. He interprets facial expressions at a party meeting to mean people are bored and insincere, but my own experiences trying to interpret facial expressions in cultures other than my own have been humbling. Finally, he suggests that restrictions on political speech are incompatible with a modern, innovation-driven economy. I think that may be true if “innovation” means truly creative system-based problem solving. But if it just means inventing new patentable objects that can be profitably sold, then I think narrow, highly specialized thinking may suffice, and the education system may be able to produce that without sparking a high level of political engagement.

the suburbs are dying

To my good friends still thinking about buying property in the suburbs – I don’t recommend it! According to Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of Retrofitting Suburbia; Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs:

of the 1,100 shopping malls, one third are dead or dying. The 50,000 strip malls have a 11% vacancy rate. Within the 350,000 big box stores, 300 million square feet are vacant. However, you point out these dynamics have been around awhile, with the newest marker being the suburban office vacancy rates of 16-24%. What has changed to make these suburban offices less attractive?

There are several converging factors here. The one most frequently cited by CEOs is the need to relocate to the cities that are attracting the educated 25-34 year-olds that they most want to hire and who, for the most part, find the idea of working in a Dilbert-like suburban cubicle un-creative and toxic. Additional factors include the fact that computers have automated many of the clerical jobs that used to be done in the suburban back-offices at the same time that space/employee standards have significantly reduced. The wave of ’80′s office parks and corporate campuses are aging and increasingly out of date, while the cities have become immensely more livable than they were in the ’70s. So, we’re seeing the tide reverse itself as a wave of corporate relocate out of suburbs and back into cities and newly named “innovation districts.”

solar will be dominant

Deutsche Bank is the latest financial corporation to conclude that solar power is ascendant and fossil fuels are doomed. The research doesn’t seem to be free so we have to rely on press articles like this one. Perversely, it can be exciting when an amoral profit-seeking corporation tells you something you want to hear about the environment, because you know there is no agenda behind it.

 

homework

Surprisingly, serious studies of homework can almost never prove that it has any benefit at all.

And the result of this fine-tuned investigation?  There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”

This result clearly caught the researchers off-guard.  Frankly, it surprised me, too.  When you measure “achievement” in terms of grades, you expect to see a positive result — not because homework is academically beneficial but because the same teacher who gives the assignments evaluates the students who complete them, and the final grade is often based at least partly on whether, and to what extent, students did the homework.  Even if homework were a complete waste of time, how could it not be positively related to course grades?

And yet it wasn’t.  Again.  Even in high school.  Even in math.  The study zeroed in on specific course grades, which represents a methodological improvement, and the moral may be: The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.  (That’s not a surprising proposition for a careful reader of reports in this field.  We got a hint of that from Timothy Keith’s reanalysis and also from the fact that longer homework studies tend to find less of an effect.[5])

This is hard to swallow. Obviously, from our adult life experience, most of us know there is such a thing as learning by doing. To really master a concept or come up with a new idea, you have to struggle with it on your own over a period of time. Homework seems like it could prepare children to do that as adults, so if it is not, either the kind of homework given is the wrong kind, or it’s given at the wrong age where kids are not yet ready to benefit from it.

water and social unrest

This interview with “British-born novelist and author Rana Dasgupta” talks briefly about economic growth, inequality, and water in India:

There is the potential for immense wealth creation in India in the next 40 or 50 years, so there will be money and resources to redistribute and resources and as long as the tides of poverty and violence are not too catastrophic, then I think probably the system can readjust itself. Right now, within India, without anything else happening outside, there’s enough prospects for growth. In 40 to 50 years, economies of the West are going to be in dramatic decline, and in the longer term, I think the global system as a whole will face some sort of crisis and that will affect India, too. But in the medium term, India has pretty good growth prospects and hopefully there’s the quality of leadership and ideas that can redistribute some of that wealth and find livable solutions to some of these problems.

But inequality and the environment are going to be massive in Indian politics. Really, no one is talking about water, but giving 1.3 billion people clean water to drink is becoming very difficult. And you can’t survive for very long without it, so if a city of 25 million people — and there are at least two Indian cities that have that kind of number — has no water, the effects are immediate. When there’s no housing the effects could be years away, but when there’s no water, there are water riots immediately. People who don’t have it will steal it because they have to.

So water could be one of the triggering events in Indian cities for how a sort of mini-political revolution might happen and realization on the part of the middle classes that there is actually a wider world that is up against its limits.

what’s new with drugs

Drugs are not immune from the current wave of seemingly accelerating innovation (from Pacific Standard Magazine):

New psychoactive substances are coming out so quickly that it’s not possible to ban them fast enough to keep up, let alone police or scientifically understand them. When one substance is outlawed, another is born, just chemically distinct enough from the last one to evade its ban…

Not since the 19th century—when an earlier wave of globalization rapidly accelerated the spread of opium, cocaine, marijuana, and hazily defined “patent medicines”—has there been such a burgeoning and unregulated pharmacopeia. And by all indications, the future promises only more acceleration. Last year, a research lab at Stanford demonstrated that it’s possible to produce opioid drugs like morphine using a genetically modified form of baker’s yeast. Soon, even the production of traditional illegal drugs or illicit versions of pharmaceuticals could become a highly decentralized cottage industry, posing the same kind of regulatory challenge that the specter of 3-D printed firearms poses to the project of gun control.

In 2013, the U.N.’s World Drug Report summed up the global situation this way: “The international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon known as new psychoactive substances.” Testifying before Congress that same year, the DEA’s Joseph Rannazzisi said that his agency could not keep up with “the clandestine chemists and traffickers who quickly and easily replace newly controlled substances with new, non-controlled substances.”

New Zealand is starting to regulate recreational drugs more like food: with labeling, consumer notices, and so on. Sometimes I wonder how long this will stay a mom and pop business – once it’s legal, won’t big drug and chemical companies try to get in on the game? It’s a brave new world.

El Nino

El Nino has officially arrived, according to Slate, and might be a particularly long and strong one.

El Niño transfers huge amounts of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere, and there are hints that this El Niño, combined with the already very warm global oceans, could bring about a new phase in global warming. An associated slow-moving indicator of Pacific Ocean temperatures, called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, reached record levels in December and January. A persistently strong PDO is associated with cold winters in the East and drought in California—we’ve had both in abundance this year. Should the PDO stay strong, it’ll essentially join forces with El Niño and increase the odds that 2015 will rank as the warmest year on record globally. Last fall I wrote that a PDO signal like we’re currently seeing could kick off a surge of global warming over the next five to 10 years.

I don’t have the expertise to say whether this article is sensationalized or not, but it is interesting reading.

By the way, Slate, “The Slatest” is okay, but some of us are still waiting for you to bring back “Today’s Papers”, which was the greatest news summary ever because it would compare and contrast how different media outlets were covering the same story, way back before the Internet was even a thing. I haven’t seen anything like it since. It was “fair and balanced” indeed, and the world got a bit dumber the day it went away. So bring it back, please!

democracy and development

I don’t like to get too much into politics in this blog, and especially not the politics of countries other than my own, but this article about Thailand and Myanmar annoyed me a little bit. I suspect it was written by someone who doesn’t travel much, but is just trying to piece together a story based on things they read in the newspaper. The premise of the story is that there is a clear connection between a western parliamentary system and foreign investment in developing countries. I don’t think this is true – companies in the developed world love investing in developing countries they view as stable and predictable, whether they have representative government or not.

Thailand has made several attempts at a Western-style majority-rule parliamentary model but it simply hasn’t worked – it hasn’t resulted in consensus policies that are acceptable to enough of the various factions of society that they would let the country move forward. So what you see on TV is a somewhat unique way of having that long-term political struggle and trying to come up with something workable. There has been some sporadic violence and loss of life regrettably, but it is nothing remotely close to a “civil war” as some columnists would have us believe. Arguably, this is a democratic process although it is playing out over a long time frame and in a very odd, uniquely Thai way. By the way, there are very real human rights abuses, military violence against civilian protestors, and political repression that have occurred under Thai governments past and present, and I am not condoning any of that in this post.

You can understand why foreign multinational corporations, which have no loyalty or ideology other than profit seeking, might prefer a nearby country like Malaysia or Vietnam, which also offer infrastructure and cheap labor with less chance of the messy political process that is creating some uncertainty in Thailand. Indonesia is another example of a country that has been developing quickly under decades of conservative governments, but is now scaring international companies a little bit with its local brand of democracy. The Phillippines has an American-style constitution, but has never quite gotten its economy in gear.

Burma/Myanmar is interesting because it is somewhat of a blank slate. It could be a laboratory where truly sustainable economic, social, and ecological development policies could be tested and refined if the political leadership really understood and wanted to do that. I think it will more likely just be the next Thailand, with its people richer, healthier, and better educated a decade from now, but missing a portion of the rich culture and natural wonder it used to have. I wish the people of both countries all the best.

climate disinformation?

The New York Times has an article about fossil fuel industry funding of a prominent critic of mainstream climate change science:

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests…

Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

How much of what we believe is really our own conclusions, and how much of it is manufactured and manipulated without us even suspecting?