Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

July 2014 in Review

I’m going to do a “month in review” post where I sort selected posts that talk about positive trends and ideas vs. negative trends, predictions, and risks. Just for fun, I’ll keep a score card and pretend my posts are some kind of indicator of whether things are getting better or worse. I’ll give posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-6):

  • The “trophic theory of money”, which to oversimplify just says that economic growth will always add to humanity’s ecological footprint. I don’t buy this 100% but our footprint is certainly continuing to grow with no obvious signs that we are about to turn the corner. (-1)
  • New dams on the Mekong, a hotspot of aquatic biodiversity, may block fish passage although some mitigation measures are being tried. (-1)
  • A new book by Edan Lepucki describes a future where people “traverse a cross-section of mid-collapse landscape, framed by the gradual decline of civilization”. (-1)
  • 100 years ago, exactly now, Europe was dissolving into the mostly unexpected chaos of World War I. Which led later to the extraordinary pain of the Great Depression. (-3)
  • Artificial intelligence and robots are finally turning into a commercial reality, with positive and negative implications like crushing labor unrest. Also, they can identify dog breeds with some accuracy. (-0)

Positive trends and predictions (+4):

  • Urban trees can mitigate a small, but not insignificant (around 2%), amount of a city’s carbon emissions. And that’s with business-as-usual practices – I speculate that this could be boosted to 5-10% with a concerted effort, which combined with emissions reductions could make an actual difference. (+1)
  • “Blue Urbanism” gives some examples of how cities could be more aware of their impacts on the oceans (but clearly, those impacts are still huge so I’m not giving this any points). (+0)
  • On the green infrastructure front, Biophilic Cities lays out a hopeful vision of how urban areas can be more integrated into the natural world. A new website, Falling Fruit, is trying to combine information on worldwide urban green infrastructure with a focus on edibles. (+2)
  • Some EU cities are considering a complete ban on the internal combustion engine…by 2050. Stockholm however is envisioning a “single, supple mesh of mobility” by 2025. (+1)
  • Autonomous vehicles are not quite a commercial reality, but they will be and there are both positive and negative implications of that. (+0)
  • Dubai is building a gigantic, climate-controlled city-like mall under a dome. Children who grow up in places like this will be able to adapt readily to gigantic, climate-controlled mall-like cities in outer space. (+0)

So my Hope for the Future Index stands at -2.

do airplanes spread horrible plagues?

Are you more likely to be exposed to germs on an airplane because of the recirculation of air? No, according to Wired, because the air is very well filtered and constantly exchanged with outside air. Now, I too have gotten that cold right after traveling. So I probably got that cold from something I touched at the airport T.G.I. Fridays. So the moral of the story, I think, is always remember to wash your hands at the airport before you pick your nose. Other theories I have come up with, without trying to collect a shred of scientific evidence, is that the dry air on planes dries out your mucous membranes so there is less of a barrier to germs, and/or that the general stress and lack of rest when you travel just wears down your body’s defenses to the ordinary garden-variety germs you encounter every day.

making chemotherapy “a thing of the past”

From the BBC, this caught my eye:

Prime Minister David Cameron has said it “will see the UK lead the world in genetic research within years”.

The first genetic codes of people with cancer or rare diseases, out of a target of 100,000, have been sequenced.

Experts believe it will lead to targeted therapies and could make chemotherapy “a thing of the past”…

The project has now passed the 100 genome mark, with the aim of reaching 1,000 by the end of the year and 10,000 by the end of 2015

Ronald Reagan, peacemaker

I didn’t know this about Ronald Reagan (from the New York Times review):

Reagan had already spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of “the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.” In Reykjavik, with Gorbachev, “he was pretty much on his own,” Adelman writes, “which suited Ronald Reagan just fine.” But much of what the president said on his own — that he wanted to share missile-defense technology, eliminate offensive nuclear weapons in 10 years and plan a “tremendous party” in 1996, to which he and Gorbachev would tote “the last nuclear missile” from their countries’ arsenals — “scared everyone,” one assistant said. Reagan’s own national security adviser was so dismayed that he restricted distribution of the meeting notes. “After Reykjavik,” a staff member told the journalist James Mann, “Reagan was watched by someone all during the rest of his term in office.”

I see – so it wasn’t nuclear weapons that “scared everyone”, but having a leader with a vision to get rid of them. We have reached a new height of cynicism today, when abolition of nuclear weapons is barely even being talked about. And if we can’t deal with nuclear weapons, which are in only a few hands, how will we deal with potentially even worse weapons, in potentially many more hands, in the future?

U.S. Drought Monitor

20140729_CA_trd

According to the United States Drought Monitor, the drought in California is getting pretty alarming.

mounting evidence from reservoir levels, river gauges, ground water observations, and socio-economic impacts warrant a further expansion of exceptional drought (D4) into northern California. For California’s 154 intrastate reservoirs, storage at the end of June stood at 60% of the historical average. Although this is not a record for this time of year—the standard remains 41% of average on June 30, 1977—storage has fallen to 17.3 million acre-feet. As a result, California is short more than one year’s worth of reservoir water, or 11.6 million acre-feet, for this time of year. The historical average warm-season drawdown of California’s 154 reservoirs totals 8.2 million acre-feet, but usage during the first 2 years of the drought, in 2012 and 2013, averaged 11.5 million acre-feet.

Given the 3-year duration of the drought, California’s topsoil moisture (80% very short to short) and subsoil moisture (85%) reserves are nearly depleted. The state’s rangeland and pastures were rated 70% very poor to poor on July 27. USDA reported that “range and non-irrigated pasture conditions continued to deteriorate” and that “supplemental feeding of hay and nutrients continued as range quality declined.” In recent days, new wildfires have collectively charred several thousand acres of vegetation in northern and central California. The destructive Sand fire, north of Plymouth, California—now largely contained—burned more than 4,000 acres and consumed 66 structures, including 19 residences.

 

 

Subirdia

Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife

NPR reviews an upcoming book called Subirdia, which says that in temperate areas, there are more bird species in the suburbs than in cities or even forests:

So what have suburbs got that forests don’t? Suburbs, he says, offer a wide range of artificially designed garden habitats, providing a smorgasbord of nuts, fruits, seeds, insects and ponds, in dense concentrations. Because they are rich with different kinds of bird food, suburbs are rich with different kinds of birds…

But let’s not get crazy about this: suburbs are not the birdiest zones on earth. Any patch of tropical forest, with its dazzling populations of plant and animal life, will trump a garden-rich suburb. But if you are comparing suburban bird diversity to temperate wild spaces — say the Cascades, the Smokies or the Adirondacks — the suburbs, shockingly, win.

So maybe our goal in denser cities should be to create a landscape with more of this variety of garden habitats. That is doable, and a much more attainable goal than trying to create forest-like habitat in cities. There are some shy species that won’t come to the city, but the city can be pleasant for a wide variety of species, even humans, if we work at it.

please remind me, what are patents for again?

Okay, maybe so-called intellectual property rights encourage innovation in some industries sometimes. But the evidence shows that they sometimes do the exact opposite, especially if taken to the extreme. This is the abstract of a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research:

Cumulative innovation is central to economic growth. Do patent rights facilitate or impede follow-on innovation? We study the causal effect of removing patent rights by court invalidation on subsequent research related to the focal patent, as measured by later citations. We exploit random allocation of judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to control for endogeneity of patent invalidation. Patent invalidation leads to a 50 percent increase in citations to the focal patent, on average, but the impact is heterogeneous and depends on characteristics of the bargaining environment. Patent rights block downstream innovation in computers, electronics and medical instruments, but not in drugs, chemicals or mechanical technologies. Moreover, the effect is entirely driven by invalidation of patents owned by large patentees that triggers more follow-on innovation by small firms.

microbial life on Mars

Here is some more evidence from the journal Geology that microbial life may exist or once have existed on Mars.

Depletion of phosphorus, vesicular structure, and replacive gypsic horizons of these Martian paleosols are features of habitable microbial earth soils on Earth, and encourage further search for definitive evidence of early life on Mars.

I’m interested in the question of whether life on Earth is truly alone in the universe. If we find just one bacterial cell on another planet, and as long as we don’t think that cell came from Earth or is an ancestor of life on Earth, the question will have been answered. If we can find life just one other place, then it will be likely that there is life all over the place.

the zombie cat virus

If there’s one thing I don’t put a whole lot of stock in, it’s scientific and medical information provided by random websites. Like this one, Corante, which claims that toxoplasma, a virus that incubates in cats, affects rats’ brains so that they are less afraid of cats. Then it goes on to suggest that half of all people are infected with this virus, and that it has unknown, subtle but possibly harmful effects on people. It just makes me think about how little we really know about most of the vast community of microorganisms inhabiting our bodies. The scariest thing would be something that is harmful, but has a long incubation period so it can infect a large fraction of the population before we are even aware of it.