Category Archives: Web Article Review

disaster kits

We all know we are supposed to have a disaster kit with 3 gallons of water per person, extra prescription drugs, a jar of peanut butter and whatnot. I admit, I have never really done that. I figure I can drink the water in the toilet tank if I am desperate, followed by the water in the toilet bowl, and then I don’t really have a good plan after that. This Wired article says there is not a whole lot of science or evidence behind the government recommendations.

Recommendations for what’s supposed to go in these kits vary, but basically it’s a gallon of water per person per day and food, too, plus medicines, blankets and sleeping bags, maybe a tent, extra eyeglasses, lots of batteries, something to make light with, something to make fire with, maybe a hand-cranked radio…

Here’s the worst part: Nobody knows if disaster preparedness kits actually help. They might! You should still have a kit, if you can do it…

Is there stuff you should probably definitely have access to in your home? Sure. Copies of personal identification documents. Prescription medications. A good whistle. Lightsticks. Water purification tech. A crowbar. (The time you need a crowbar is the time you really, really need a crowbar.)

the next financial crisis

There seems to be increasing concern among economists, journalists and politicians that another severe financial crisis could be looming in the next few years. Of course, the next recession, war or disaster is inevitable and to be expected at some point. The question is how resilient or panic-prone our financial system is when something inevitably happens.

Axios suggests that as advanced economies raise interest rates, they could force debt-laden emerging markets into situations where they can’t afford interest payments. Turkey is of particular concern, and owes large amounts of money to European countries. A trade war is also a concern.

Nouriel Roubini gives ten reasons why a severe financial crisis may be coming, starting with interest rates being too low to give countries any chance to react to a crisis by lowering them (which is probably why they are trying to gradually raise them in the first place.) He also mentions poor (or no) U.S. policies towards trade, immigration, and infrastructure, and high-speed trading algorithms.

Jeffrey Frankel, a professor at Harvard, argues that U.S. policy is unnecessarily pro-cyclical in in terms of expanded government spending, lowered taxes, reduced capital requirements for banks, and political criticism of the Federal Reserve.

Let’s hope a consensus among the experts is actually a contrarian indicator.

rating news

I have an idea that maybe others have already thought of, but I haven’t seen it proposed (or implemented) in exactly the form i am thinking of. With all the newfound concern over “fake news”, misinformation, and disinformation, alongside good-old-fashioned government and corporate propaganda (which to its consternation is having some trouble competing with the former), I don’t see why news stories couldn’t be rated or certified as reliable by independent third parties. That is, you could pull up a news story from any of a number of outlets and see that it has the stamp of approval of a particular organization, say the Associated Press or the United Nations. Sites like Politifact and Snopes sort of do this now, but they aren’t rating individual stories. Any organization could create its own rating system, but at least people could choose a rating system they trusted and then either filter their search results or simply have the ratings they are interested in displayed, perhaps in a browser plug-in. It wouldn’t be perfect because it would give people way of filtering so they only hear what they want to hear, but at least we would be doing this explicitly rather than having hidden, amoral, profit-seeking algorithms decide behind the scenes what we see or don’t see.

the body count from Fukushima

This article has some stats on casualties from the tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan following the 2011 tsunami. I don’t want to trivialize the tragic loss of life here, just highlight some stats that were surprising to me.

  • deaths from cancer linked to radiation: 1, a worker responding to the disaster on the Fukushima site as it was occurring
  • suicides: 1 (mentioned in this article)
  • radiation-related illnesses not resulting in death: 4
  • deaths while being evacuated from hospitals near the disaster: 40
  • deaths caused by the tsunami: 18,000
  • people displaces from their homes by the disaster: 160,000

Overall you have to say it is great that people did not die in large numbers from radiation poisoning or cancer. People probably contracted cancer from smoking and not wearing enough sunscreen in greater numbers during the disaster. But if you want a gloomy way to look at it, at least for me a nuclear meltdown is now a less scary thing and a “thinkable” event, and that might not be good.

the old sucking the blood of the young?

There is grisly research where a young mouse is sown together with an old mouse and their blood vessels are connected. This seems to benefit the old mouse. And no, I haven’t watched “human centipede” and I have no desire to, although I did find the South Park parody of it moderately funny.

Beyond the stupidity of human centipede, you can imagine a mad dictator or Bond villain somewhere forcing people to be blood donors against their will. A more benign version would have biotech firms trying to synthesize whatever it is that makes young blood good, or possibly using stem cells to make a young version of a person’s blood. What if a version of me could be created that was just a bag of meat with no nervous system, and pumped out blood that kept me alive? That seems creepy but not necessarily unethical. Add a brain and keep that person sedated or otherwise detained against their will, and that would clearly be unethical (not to mention basically the plot of The Island.)

smart drugs

This BBC article talks about how some people are using amphetamines like Adderall and Ritalin to stay focused and motivated in high pressure jobs. It clearly works, at least for short periods of time. It is not clear whether it can work longer term, because people may either need a significant recovery period to recover from use of the drugs, during which they are less focused and motivated than normal, or else they may become addicted to the drugs. But the article also points out that the new drugs are not qualitatively different from using coffee to stay focused and productive – it is just a matter of differences in degree and chemistry, and coffee has proven to be safe and even beneficial to most people.

half the world’s power from the Sahara

There’s a big idea to provide half the world’s energy from solar panels in the Sahara desert, using the actual desert sand as a raw material to manufacture the panels. An interesting article in Science says that wind and solar farms on such a large scale could actually change the local weather drastically by altering wind and surface temperatures, ultimately increasing rainfall and allowing more vegetation in the desert.

In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo–precipitation–vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms. This local enhancement is scale dependent and is particular to the Sahara, with small impacts in other deserts.

Could this work on Mars? I guess not, because you don’t have the water vapor in the atmosphere to begin with. Unless you get that alien ice breaker thing from Total Recall (the 1990 version, again, I don’t recognize the 2012 version’s right to exist) – why do I keep coming back to this movie?

Ford signals self-driving car’s “intent”

Ford is trying a set of blinking lights to help pedestrians understand whether a self-driving car is likely to stop or run them over. Somewhat interesting, but really I think the legal responsibility needs to be on the car’s owner/programmer and not the pedestrian. If this saves a few lives by preventing a few otherwise unavoidable crashes it is a good thing. If it creates an excuse to blame the victim, it is a bad thing. In recent U.S. history at least, the situation between driver and pedestrian has almost always been the latter.

A back-and-forth white light means the car is yielding. When the car is about to go, the white light quickly blinks. Ford said it’s trying to find a way to communicate that doesn’t use text.

Once cars are machine-driven, any pedestrian-driver communication gets a lot harder. So how does a woman walking or a kid biking check in with a car to know it’s safe to cross the street?