Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy

Here is Exxon’s 2015 Outlook for Energy report. They talk about the importance of fossil fuels in the progress in living standards over the past couple centuries. They talk about the rise of the middle class in developing Asia, and how that is going to lead to rising living standards and health, but also big increases in demand for energy, food and materials. Now, you can’t begrudge people rising living standards and health, which are wonderful things. However, I wouldn’t equate progress just with more traffic, concrete and shopping malls full of designer hand bags. I would equate it more with things like safe drinking water, affordable food and health care. And air conditioning – I would never begrudge any human being in the tropics air conditioning.

They make a crucial logical error – using the rate of carbon emissions, rather than accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere, as a proxy for ecological footprint. They say the rate of global emissions is expected to peak around 2030.

While every country faces a unique set of priorities and resource
constraints, we expect that most every nation, regardless of circumstance, will seek solutions that help curb emissions without harming the prospects of greater prosperity for its own citizens.
Toward this objective, two of the most effective solutions are improving energy efficiency across the economy (also referred to as reducing energy intensity) and reducing the CO2 content across the energy mix. Through 2040, each will play a powerful role in slowing emissions growth, and ultimately reversing what had been a decades-long rise in global CO2 emissions. In fact, we expect global energy-related CO2 emissions will rise
by about 25 percent from 2010 to 2030 and then decline approximately 5 percent to 2040.

In absolute terms, global CO2 emissions are expected to be about 6 billion tonnes higher in 2040 than they were in 2010. While that increase is significant, it is only about half the level of emissions growth seen from 1980 to 2010. This is all the more remarkable considering the growth in economic output from 2010 to 2040 will be about 150 percent more than the prior 30-year period.

Stabilizing the rate of emissions will not do the trick, unless the rate of emissions is below the rate the atmosphere can absorb without permanent harm to the environment or economy. That’s like saying the amount of credit card debt you add each month is the same each month. You are still spending more than your income, and one day this is going to “harm your prospects of greater prosperity”.

We will have really turned the corner if our rate of emissions is reduced to the point where the concentration in the atmosphere is stable or declining. And even if we manage to do that, we need to think about other impacts – nutrient pollution, soil depletion, groundwater and glacier loss, biodiversity and habitat loss, ocean acidification, and the list goes on.

open source street noise model

Here’s an open-source code for modeling street noise propagation. It’s written in R and open source database and GIS tools.

This paper describes the development of a model for assessing TRAffic Noise EXposure (TRANEX) in an open-source geographic information system. Instead of using proprietary software we developed our own model for two main reasons: 1) so that the treatment of source geometry, traffic information (flows/speeds/spatially varying diurnal traffic profiles) and receptors matched as closely as possible to that of the air pollution modelling being undertaken in the TRAFFIC project, and 2) to optimize model performance for practical reasons of needing to implement a noise model with detailed source geometry, over a large geographical area, to produce noise estimates at up to several million address locations, with limited computing resources. To evaluate TRANEX, noise estimates were compared with noise measurements made in the British cities of Leicester and Norwich. High correlation was seen between modelled and measured LAeq,1hr (Norwich: r = 0.85, p = .000; Leicester: r = 0.95, p = .000) with average model errors of 3.1 dB. TRANEX was used to estimate noise exposures (LAeq,1hr, LAeq,16hr, Lnight) for the resident population of London (2003–2010). Results suggest that 1.03 million (12%) people are exposed to daytime road traffic noise levels ≥ 65 dB(A) and 1.63 million (19%) people are exposed to night-time road traffic noise levels ≥ 55 dB(A). Differences in noise levels between 2010 and 2003 were on average relatively small: 0.25 dB (standard deviation: 0.89) and 0.26 dB (standard deviation: 0.87) for LAeq,16hr and Lnight.

 

green infrastructure, happiness, and the ginkgo-stinkgo tree

Do trees make people happy? Well yes, I think most people subjectively just have a sense this is true. But for the cynics out there, there is also hard scientific evidence. People have tried all sorts of economic approaches – correlations with real estate markets and willingness-to-pay surveys – for example, to try to estimate the value people place on trees. (Can you measure happiness in dollars? The average man on the street might say no, but the average economist might say it’s the best of many imperfect options for measuring value.) Medical researchers have tried having people walk around cities with brain scanners on their heads. This is a new one to me though – correlating tree coverage with antidepressant prescriptions. And the correlation is there.

Growing evidence suggests an association between access to urban greenspace and mental health and wellbeing. Street trees may be an important facet of everyday exposure to nature in urban environments, but there is little evidence regarding their role in influencing population mental health. In this brief report, we raise the issue of street trees in the nature-health nexus, and use secondary data sources to examine the association between the density of street trees (trees/km street) in London boroughs and rates of antidepressant prescribing. After adjustment for potential confounders, and allowing for unmeasured area-effects using Bayesian mixed effects models, we find an inverse association, with a decrease of 1.18 prescriptions per thousand population per unit increase in trees per km of street (95% credible interval 0.00, 2.45). This study suggests that street trees may be a positive urban asset to decrease the risk of negative mental health outcomes.

And in other urban tree news, you can collect ginkgo berries, take out the nuts, roast them and eat them. The only problem being that they stink to high heaven and are mildly poisonous. Ginkgos are very interesting trees though, sort of an ancient cross between trees and ferns if you believe this article.

Believed to be truly indigenous to only a single province in China , this 270 million year old species belongs to an ancient lineage of species that have since disappeared for one reason or another over the past few millennia, making Ginkgo biloba (known as a ‘living fossil’) the sole extant representative of what was once a vast and diverse group of organisms. In fact, the ginkgo tree is so unlike any other living plant species that this tree has it’s own genus, family, order, class and division. To put this into terms that may be easier to conceptualize: the only thing that ginkgo trees have in common with other plants is they are also plants. This means that pretty much everything about their genetic make-up, physiology, general behavior, reproductive strategies (including their mobile sperm; a trait particular to ferns, cycads and algae) and even their ability to photosynthesize is anywhere between slightly-off to fundamentally different from any other living plant. Oh, and you can eat it’s seeds…

It’s a bit of a messy operation collecting the seeds which are often produced profusely by female trees and lie unmolested by fungi, insects or most pests of any kind save for some adventurous squirrels which occasionally eat the seeds. I find some rubber or latex gloves and a plastic bag are your best bet for collecting the seeds in addition to some grubby clothes that you don’t mind smelling cheesy for a little while. The scent from the fruit tends to linger when it gets on fabric or clothing and so you might want to try extra hard to remember not to wear anything that you are particularly fond of when engaging in the participatory act of ginkgo seed collecting.

I think it’s cool that some people do this, but I personally am not going to take up this hobby right now.

poker bots

It never occurred to me before that there might be computers playing in online poker games, but it makes sense.

Bowling says the program isn’t much of a threat to online gamblers. Heads-up, Limit Hold’em is not the variety of poker most people play. But he does believe that “poker bots” are trying to win in online game rooms. “My guess is there are probably quite strong poker bots out there,” he says. “But you’re not going to hear a lot of talk about them.”

What to Eat After the Apocalypse

This post is a must read. I did not expect anything in it. It’s hard to pick a quote because the whole thing is quotable. Anyway:

There are two main sources of bacteria that we looked at. There is a methane-digesting bacteria that you basically grow on natural gas. And then we can either eat that directly or process it or say, feed it to rats and then eat the rats. Then there’s the bacteria that we can grow directly on wood. Or on leftover mushroom waste. And so this would be taking down a tree, pulverizing it, turning it into a slurry, and then letting the bacteria go at it.

So for instance, there are bacteria that secrete sugars they then use to feed themselves. You can pull out the sugars, and eat those ourselves and leave the bacteria and the partially decaying wood pulp. And we can feed that stuff to other things. So for instance, rats digest wood to some degree, particularly after it is partially broken down that way. This makes a fairly good solution. We could feed something similar to chickens. And chicken is something maybe people would maybe be happier to eat than bacteria milkshakes.

So – we’re going to cut down all the trees, which is going to be hard because they will be frozen. Then we pulp them, feed the pulp to bacteria, then to rats, then eat the rats. Please people, let’s not let it get to this point.

It also reminded me of the yeast vats in The Caves of Steel. Also how certain yeast strains can make wheat beer taste like bananas, even though there are no bananas in there. It has occurred to me before that fungi could be a key to feeding people in a world that was photosynthetically limited for one reason or another.

Bill Gates’s potty project

Bill Gates has a lot to say about toilets, so much in fact that his foundation has a “reinvent the toilet” initiative.

If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries. So a few years ago our foundation put out a call for new solution.

One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I’ve written about before.

In developed countries, what we do is build energy- and chemical-intensive factories to purify surface or groundwater into clean drinkable water, use more energy to transport it a short distance in pipes, defecate in it, transport it a short distance again (usually by gravity but sometimes with more energy-intensive pumping), then build another energy- and chemical-intensive factory to remove most of the fecal matter from it, before we dump it back into a river and the process begins again with the next town downstream. This system was not designed all at once, but evolved piece by piece over the course of a hundred years or so. If we were starting from scratch, it is highly likely we could come up with a better system. We don’t try because of all the money and effort we have sunk into the existing system. If somebody develops a truly better way of dealing with waste, turning it into useful energy, water, and fertilizer, without violating powerful social taboos about how to deal with waste, that will be a game changer. The concept is that developing countries using such a technology could “leapfrog” developed countries and never have to build the centralized infrastructure, much as they have with cell phones.

Gorbachev

Here is Mikhail Gorbachev‘s list of key global problems:

Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily. And, as different as they are, they share one key feature: none has a military solution. Yet political mechanisms to solve these problems are lacking or dysfunctional, even as the continuing global crisis should persuade us to seek – without delay – a new model that can ensure political, economic, and environmental sustainability.
What is his suggestion for a new model?
Years ago, former German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, former US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and other policymakers proposed creating a Security Council, or Directorate, for Europe. I agreed with their approach. Along the same lines, during Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, he called for the creation of a mechanism for European preventive diplomacy and mandatory consultations in the event of a threat to any state’s security. Had such a mechanism been established, the worst events in Ukraine could have been averted.

MIT invents thermodynamics

A professor at MIT has just discovered the second law of thermodynamics! Wait, maybe a few people knew about that before. But he also has discovered that various systems, including organisms and ecosystems, evolve to find ways of taking in energy, using some of it to do useful work, then dissipating the rest as heat! Wait, I just remembered that a guy named Howard T. Odum at the University of Florida thought of that before. Okay, I am just teasing my friends from MIT, who are very very smart, just not the only smart people in the world. All teasing aside, the MIT guy does have a novel angle – suggesting that because living systems do a better job of this than non-living systems, the formation of life was more or less inevitable. I like how this article talks about entropy in simple, understandable terms:

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

So we are selfishly concentrating energy to create orderly, useful systems  – Odum’s core concept of “embodied energy” – here on Earth at the expense of the rest of the universe. Even if Earth is not the only planet with life, there is still a lot of universe out there so I don’t think we need to feel too guilty. The real question is, just how open a system is Earth as a practical matter – as we keep using more energy to create more sophisticated systems here, can we continually improve our ability to keep exporting the consequences (heat being the most obvious)?

One of my few regrets in life is that I studied in close proximity to Odum in the late 1990s, but didn’t actually study with him or even meet him. I just didn’t know who he was at the time, because in the late 1990s I was just a dumb kid. One of my New Years Resolutions is to read more things written by him, and to do more blog posts about him.

robots learning to use tools

This article from KurzweilAI is about robots learning to use tools by watching videos on the internet.

This paper presents a system that learns manipulation
action plans by processing unconstrained videos from
the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence
of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in
order to acquire knowledge for robots. The lower level of the
system consists of two convolutional neural network (CNN)
based recognition modules, one for classifying the hand grasp
type and the other for object recognition. The higher level
is a probabilistic manipulation action grammar based parsing
module that aims at generating visual sentences for robot
manipulation. Experiments conducted on a publicly available
unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able
to learn manipulation actions by “watching” unconstrained
videos with high accuracy

Robots, pay attention – I just Googled videos on “how to clean a bathroom” and got over 33 million results, so get to work!

Bitcoin and “trustless trust”

This article from Beautiful Data-R talks about how Bitcoin’s algorithms are supposed to generate trust:

The crypto-currency Bitcoin and the way it generates “trustless trust” is one of the hottest topics when it comes to technological innovations right now. The way Bitcoin transactions always backtrace the whole transaction list since the first discovered block (the Genesis block) does not only work for finance. The first startups such as Blockstream already work on ways how to use this mechanism of “trustless trust” (i.e. you can trust the system without having to trust the participants) on related fields such as corporate equity.

It’s an interesting idea – can we design better markets such that participation in the market pushes people toward more trustworthy or ethical behavior? Could you build carbon credits or “embodied energy” values into such a market, for example? This sounds a lot like Adam Smith’s invisible hand – markets themselves were supposed to do this, but the problem today is that there are too many people (living and future) and plants and animals being harmed by markets without participating in them.