Major hurricanes, fires and floods set a new record for the cost of damage in the U.S. in 2017. Setting aside the human misery caused, natural disasters tend to provide a short-term economic stimulus, because it is rare time that politicians tend to set aside their differences and borrow or print money as necessary to solve the problem. In the longer term though, I can’t help thinking that this is one way climate change can make us poorer, because we will be spending money and effort dealing with a higher rate of disasters that we could otherwise be spending on more productive work, investment or innovation. The other way climate change can make us poorer is just the long, slow grind of rising energy, food and water prices. I can imagine these two trends working together, where we are adapting to that long, slow grind, but when the disasters hit we no longer have the ability to recover completely like we used to. This is not unlike a stressed ecosystem that manages to hang on until that fire or flood hits, but then does not have the soil conditions or the seed bank or whatever to rejuvenate itself in the same spot after it gets wiped out.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
Cape Town water crisis
Apparently Cape Town, South Africa will run out of water if it doesn’t rain before April. If that happens, the plan is to make people line up and ration out drinking water.
household-scale biogas
It makes a lot of sense to combine sewage, yard waste and food waste in an anaerobic reactor to produce methane, which can be used for heat, to fuel vehicles, to generate electricity, or even to power fuel cells. This is done sometimes at a city or utility scale, but people haven’t really tried to do it in their basements. This article is about an attempt to do that in Yemen.
cancer screening from DNA
According to Wired, a number of startups are trying to detect cancer from the results of blood tests alone, in other words without biopsy of any tissue. Sounds good, but the article says this could be a long-term endeavor and there is always the cautionary tale of the Theranos scam.
reading and the brain
There is a fair amount of evidence that reading is good for the brain. One of the reasons is that reading narratives and having to get into the characters’ heads helps to build empathy in real life.
Improved theory of mind comes primarily from reading narratives, research suggests. One meta-analysis published by Raymond A. Mar of Toronto’s York University reviews many of the studies demonstrating the effect of story comprehension on theory of mind, and concludes that the better we understand the events in a narrative, the better we are able to understand the actions and intentions of those around us. The kinds of narratives we read, moreover, might also make a difference. One study, conducted by psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research, tested the effect of differences in writing quality on empathy responses, randomly assigning 1,000 participants excerpts from both popular bestsellers and literary fiction.
The type of writing appears to matter, with more literary fiction helping more than best-sellers or non-fiction. A piece of good news is that audiobooks seem to be fine. The article doesn’t get into electronic vs. paper forms of reading, or reading vs. television or video games. It does quote one neuroscientist who questions whether reading is really special compared to other forms of experience.
One hypothesis I have, based on my own experience with people who can’t read in two different corners of the world, is that reading could change the nature of a person’s verbal skills, and not necessarily for the better. People who can’t read sometimes have the “gift of gab”, are good storytellers, and are good at teaching children to speak their native language. And similar to teaching small children, they can be incredibly patient with illiterate foreigners like myself, where an educated person would not have the patience, or somehow, maybe not have the empathy, to do that. So while I think reading and writing and certainly very important to our species, they also may have changed us along the way.
experimental quad-copter at Boeing
Boeing has an experimental quad-copter that can lift 500 pounds. The way they describe it, this could fill a niche between shipping of huge containers and delivery of tiny parcels to your door.
This kind of vehicle may not fit into your drone delivery fantasy, but it has practicality on its side. “This starts to sound like the kind of thing that can do things in real life,” says Drew McElroy, CEO of Transfix, a trucking brokerage firm. As home deliveries have grown in popularity over the past 15 years or so, he says, shipments have gotten smaller, and more targeted. The old model—trucks haul supplies to Walmart, people drive to Walmart and bring home their shopping—is evaporating. Any vehicle that can fill in the gaps between the huge bulk shipments that move by sea and the shoebox-sized packages that come to our doors can play a role.
The other interesting thing about the article is a brief description of the R&D unit that developed this thing.
In fact, Boeing isn’t quite sure where it’s going. “It’s a concurrent exploration of a nascent market and nascent technology,” says Pete Kunz, the chief technologist for HorizonX, the Boeing skunk works-venture capital arm hybrid division ///something like that/// that built this thing (the marketing team hasn’t given it a catchy moniker yet)…
Exactly what it will carry and where it will take it remains an open question. Boeing doesn’t have any concrete plans or timelines for commercialization yet, but Logan Jones, HorizonX’s senior director, says it could tote supplies to offshore oil rigs, or any other “dull, dirty, and dangerous” work now done by helicopters, which require expensive human pilots. It could take pallets from a port to a distribution center, or from a distribution center to a store. “This won’t show up at your door,” Jones says. (This is a commercial project, but it’s easy to see potential military applications, like moving supplies around combat areas.)
the unraveling of complex systems
This account of 96 terrible hours at JFK airport caused by terrible, but not unusually terrible, winter weather reminds us how unresilient our modern infrastructure systems can be, and how unresilient our under-maintained and investment-starved U.S. infrastructure is in particular.
By Sunday, after half a foot of snow, gale force winds, and three days of single-digit temperatures, JFK had set a new standard for air travel horrors: Travelers waited for hours or days for their flights, sitting on scavenged sheets of cardboard in their socks, fuming to nearby reporters and farflung Twitter followers. Outside, the scene was more apocalyptic. Aircraft crowded the tarmac, too many of them for the gates. Passengers were left in planes for as long as seven hours after landing. And that was a full day and a half after the cyclone bomb had dissipated.
Emperor Deterrence Has No Clothes
This long Aeon article argues that the idea of nuclear deterrence has never been shown to work, is illogical and immoral.
What we can say is that, as of this morning, those with the power to exterminate life have not done so. But this is not altogether comforting, and history is no more reassuring. The duration of ‘nuclear peace’, from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War, lasted less than five decades. More than 20 years separated the First and Second World Wars; before that, there had been more than 40 years of relative peace between the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and the First World War (1914), and 55 years between the Franco-Prussian War and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo (1815). Even in war-prone Europe, decades of peace have not been so rare. Each time, when peace ended and the next war began, the war involved weapons available at the time – which, for the next big one, would likely include nuclear weapons. The only way to make sure that nuclear weapons are not used is to make sure that there are no such weapons. There is certainly no reason to think that the presence of nuclear weapons will prevent their use. The first step to ensuring that humans do not unleash nuclear holocaust might be to show that the Emperor Deterrence has no clothes – which would then open the possibility of replacing the illusion with something more suitable…
Even when possessed by just one side, nuclear weapons have not deterred other forms of war. The Chinese, Cuban, Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions all took place even though a nuclear-armed US backed the overthrown governments. Similarly, the US lost the Vietnam War, just as the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan, despite both countries not only possessing nuclear weapons, but also more and better conventional arms than their adversaries. Nor did nuclear weapons aid Russia in its unsuccessful war against Chechen rebels in 1994-96, or in 1999-2000, when Russia’s conventional weapons devastated the suffering Chechen Republic. Nuclear weapons did not help the US achieve its goals in Iraq or Afghanistan, which have become expensive catastrophic failures for the country with the world’s most advanced nuclear weapons. Moreover, despite its nuclear arsenal, the US remains fearful of domestic terrorist attacks, which are more likely to be made with nuclear weapons than be deterred by them.
In short, it is not legitimate to argue that nuclear weapons have deterred anysort of war, or that they will do so in the future. During the Cold War, each side engaged in conventional warfare: the Soviets, for example, in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979-89); the Russians in Chechnya (1994-96; 1999-2009), Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014-present), as well as Syria (2015-present); and the US in Korea (1950-53), Vietnam (1955-75), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989-90), the Persian Gulf (1990-91), the former Yugoslavia (1991-99), Afghanistan (2001-present), and Iraq (2003-present), to mention just a few cases.
It goes on like that. I find the arguments compelling. Still, if you are Iran, you can’t help noticing that the U.S. invaded Iraq and Libya after they were convinced to give up their nuclear weapons programs. If you are North Korea, you can’t help but notice that the U.S. has invaded several countries in Asia but is very hesitant to consider military options against you.
Norwegian immigration
Snopes.com reminds us why Norwegians are not lining up to emigrate to the United States, and in fact there is a small net flow the other way.
Emigration from Norway to the U.S. hit its peak in 1882 when almost 29,000 mostly poor Norwegians crossed the Atlantic. In 2016, however, only 1,114 Norwegians moved to the U.S., while 1,603 Americans moved to Norway…
Oil-rich Norway ranks fourth in the world for GDP per person, according to the World Bank, compared with the U.S., which was eighth. Norway also boasts a universal health care system, low unemployment and $1 trillion “rainy day” fund fueled by its offshore oil and gas resources that helps pay for generous pensions and other social welfare programs.
Norwegians also have a life expectancy of 81.8 years on average, making them the 15th longest-living people in the world, according to the World Health Organization. The U.S. is in 31st place, with a life expectancy of 79.3 years.
My experience in Norway consists of two days in Oslo. It struck me as a fairly ethically diverse place actually. It seemed gloomy, but that might have been the weather. We could definitely study and learn from the way they bank their natural resource-derived wealth for the future, and from the way they blend a thriving capitalist economy with a robust social safety net. But we won’t, because…America.
where gene therapy is heading
The “J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference” provided some clues on where biotechnology may be going next.
After decades of setbacks, gene therapy—a loosely defined umbrella term for any technique that uses genes to treat or prevent disease—is finally here. In December, the field got its very first FDA approval with Luxturna, which corrects a defective gene in a rare, inherited retinal disease. With a half dozen more treatments in late-stage trials and an unusually open-minded FDA commissioner in Washington, the industry is expecting a flurry of new approvals this year…
Lambert’s lobbying roadmap for 2018 includes helping insurance companies understand what to do with a new gene therapy like Luxturna, which cures blindness with a single, $850,000 injection into the eye. Ranked by sticker price, it’s the most expensive medicine in America. Spark Therapeutics, the company that makes Luxturna, argues that the six-figure price tag isn’t actually that unreasonable, if you factor in all the costs that patients with the inherited retinal disease would have racked up in a lifetime of seeking better care.
But because their clinical trial patients haven’t been followed long enough to determine if the treatment benefits are actually durable for a whole lifetime, Spark has received significant pushback from insurers. As a result, the company is already exploring a some creative new pricing models. It announced last week that it’s offering a rebate program based on the treatment’s effectiveness at 30 to 90 days and again at 30 months with one East Coast provider, and is in talks about expanding it to other insurers, Spark CEO Jeffrey Marrazzo said at JPM. He said Spark is also in discussions with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on a multi-year installment plan option. Either of these could soon serve as a model for how gene therapies might be made available to patients without cutting the legs out from under the healthcare system.
The article also mentions one study that has some potentially bad news about the effectiveness of CRISPR in humans, but it sounds like the jury is still out on that.