Category Archives: Web Article Review

the fastest trains in the world

Pop quiz: How many of the world’s 10 fastest trains are in the United States? I hope you didn’t answer anything other than 0. Our most impressive feat of transportation engineering of course has been to build a highway system so massive it sucks up all the money, attention, and imagination we could otherwise devote to any other type of transportation.

Wikipedia

Anyway, this link has a Youtube video of each of the world’s 10 fastest trains, which is cool. And yes, there is something slightly pornographic about these videos – basically nature has a plan for long skinny things slipping through fluids with minimal friction, and we’ll leave it at that. Of the 10, 4 are in Europe (Italy, Spain, France, Germany), 5 are in Asia (Korea, Japan, China x3) and 1 is in Africa (Morocco). One of the ones in China is a mag-lev train, which would be fun to ride. But if I had to pick just one, I would take the ride from Paris to Milan through the Alps. I would see two famous cities and countries I haven’t seen before, one of the world’s fastest train, a tunnel which literally took a generation to build, and hopefully a bit of the Alps themselves.

the latest miracle drugs

I remember when we were all supposed to take a baby aspiring to avoid inflammation, and at least some doctors were advocating preventive statins. Maybe some are still advocating those things, but the latest miracle drug seems to be Ozempic.

GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction.

www.astralcodexten.com

So maybe everyone over 40 should start popping this stuff? I’m sure that’s what the drug companies want to hear.

Meanwhile, a proposal for the FDA to approve MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder was just rejected. It sounds like this may have been due to issues with the experimental trial, so somebody may try again eventually. There is also a “synthetic psilosybin” that it is rumored will be submitted for FDA approval soon. As I understand it, once a drug is FDA approved, any doctor can prescribe it for any symptom they want. So all you have to do is convince your doctor, if you can’t convince your doctor, find a doctor who is willing to be convinced.

I learned from this article that MDMA is technically an amphetamine and may affect blood pressure, so I would be hesitant to try it, or at least get used to it, for that reason. I have no such inhibitions about psilocybin, or legal cannabis for that matter. I won’t take any drug though, particularly in pill form, without knowing that it is from a regulated, quality-controlled source. The risk of contamination with fentanyl is just not worth the risk.

The time is now!!! (err…2016)

Bernie Sanders 2016

We’re not going to get Bernie Sanders as President of the United States. If we are lucky, we are going to get the next-in-line representative of the pro-big-business, pro-war center-right consensus, rather than the nuclear war and climate change treaty breaking, science denying, bigoted serial rapist. We are not going to get health care, child care, and education for the vast majority of hard working citizens any time soon.

Who is the next Bernie Sanders? It is not Kamala Harris. I don’t think it’s a member of the “squad”, who seem mostly caught up in rhetoric and symbolic action around race and gender, not benefits for working people. Bernie is not the most articulate or charismatic politician out there, he is just extraordinarily authentic and straightforward. He showed us the formula, now some talented leaders should be able to emerge and follow his example.

the universe is quite obviously a simulation

The universe is probably not a simulation on a silicone-based digital computer of the type humans have been able to conceive of and invent so far. But it seems useful to think of the universe, with its crystal clear gravitational, thermodynamic, and quantum operating rules (are these different things or one thing – they almost certainly are one thing, but don’t ask me to explain this, and don’t even ask Hawking or Einstein because they made some progress but weren’t able to fully explain these things), as some sort of operating system. Then all the events and information flows that take place within this operating system, including your and my consciousness and our seeming free choices, are enabled by and constrained by these rules. So that sounds like a simulation to me.

This is author Claire Evans describing a similar concept:

While writing about technology, I developed an interest in biotechnology, and in biology more generally. Right now there’s this intersection between computing and biology emerging simultaneously across disciplines. There are people creating artificial intelligence from the top-down, using traditional machine-learning methods, but there are also people working towards generating life from code from the bottom-up, using evolutionary methods. There are synthetic biologists programming cells like code, roboticists working with living matter, and researchers drawing inspiration from living systems—swarms of fish, flocks of birds, slime molds, or seedling roots—to imagine new computing architectures. Even traditional biologists are increasingly using terms like “computation” and “information processing” to talk about phenomena they observe in nature… 

I think we can learn a lot from trying to model natural systems. It’s only by attempting it that we realize how staggeringly complex even the simplest life forms are, and how completely bonkers it is that a single process could have brought us from a single cell to all the diversity of life on Earth. We’ll never be smart enough to create an algorithm with that kind of open-ended generative power, although it’s precisely its evolutionary creativity that brought us intelligence to begin with. For me, the ongoing life force that resists entropy—whatever it is that organizes living systems and makes them capable of complex emergent behaviors—is the most mystical thing. Thinking about it is as close as I get to religious feeling. It’s at the center of everything. 

I’m fascinated by the fact that every living thing processes information, or computes, in a sense. Living things are each perfect computers that only do one thing—run themselves—and even the simplest ones are so complex they’re impossible to model fully. There’s a really interesting open-source project going on right now to create a computational model of a microscopic roundworm with only a thousand cells. Even that is considered an ambitious, long-term goal. Like, maybe someday we can build a faithful model of a worm in the computer. And that’s just one organism! And life is about relationships, the dynamic interactions between organisms. So the best we can do is sample here and there. Because ecologies are so complex, and because they operate at different scales simultaneously, and across time, the only way to get any understanding is to create a number of different models and see where they might overlap. That’s where the truth is, if it exists. 

I’m trying to model a fairly simple one-dimensional system of soil, water, plants (really just one plant) and the atmosphere at the moment. Even this is a significant feat for my Windows 11 “gaming laptop”, and it’s a pretty simplified representation of the complexity that really exists even in a flower pot (worms, for example, are not represented but in real life they can make a big difference in how water flows through soil. You don’t need Einstein or Hawking to explain these particular wormholes, although Einstein’s son Hans Albert actually made some discoveries in the area of soil and sediment – you could even say he was “ground breaking” – sorry). Ultimately though, it is governed by energy potentials, which comes back to gravity and thermodynamics. And I have come to understand the universe just a little bit better as I play with this model and look at model output and some data together.

the last days of World War II

There is a new book about the U.S. fire bombing and nuclear attacks on Japan, leading to Japan’s ultimate surrender in 1945. I haven’t read the book, just listened to the FreshAir interviewed with the author linked to here. A book I have read, and which influenced me profoundly, was Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. This new book (based on the interview confirms a few things I understood from that earlier book.

  1. In terms of suffering and loss of life in a short time, the U.S. fire bombings of Tokyo are one of history’s greatest war crimes. This new book says however that the U.S. was aiming for military targets and the bombing technology of the time was not that precise. On the other hand, the military apparently realized pretty quickly how awful it was and kept doing it anyway. For those who don’t know, a hundred thousand people or more were basically cooked.
  2. The Japanese military was just not going to surrender. Their plan was civilians to fight to the death to the last man, woman, and child, with sticks and stones if necessary.
  3. Japanese civilians were largely on board with this plan. The U.S. island hopping campaign and invasion of Okinawa were horrible, and any invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been another level of horror, human death and suffering beyond that. You could argue that the lives of U.S. soldiers, who had just been through hell in Europe (although U.S. casualties of course paled in comparison to British, European, and Russian casualties, and there were virtually no U.S. civilian casualties) were valued more than the lives of Japanese civilians.
  4. The emperor was in favor of surrender for months leading up to the bombing, but the military was largely in control of the emperor. Even after the atomic bombing, the military was still split and the emperor basically went against them to publicly surrender.
  5. Truman was kind of a bastard. I stand by this. Had FDR lived, I of course can’t say whether anything would have turned out differently, but I like to think it might have.
  6. One argument I hadn’t heard was that the Japanese occupation of China and Southeast Asia was killing as many as 250,000 civilians a month (!), and by cutting that short the American atomic bombing saved more civilians than it killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe, but I still think there is a moral difference between deciding to kill directly and indecision which allows others to continue killing.

Are there lessons for today’s urban warfare and civilians who are willing to fight (real or perceived) enemies to the death. I won’t go there at the moment, but at least the number of zeros on today’s death and suffering is far fewer than the 1940s. Of course, one nuclear detonation could change that in mere moments.

Breaking news: a self-driving car “nearly crashes”

On the day this computer-driven car “nearly crashed”, how many cars driven by human beings actually crashed? How many human beings were killed or horribly injured? How many of these people killed or horribly injured were children? I am not asking the media to suppress news of the imperfection of computer-controlled vehicles, just to provide some context. And I think the context will show that even today’s imperfect technology is able to drastically reduce human lives lost and suffering compared to the status quo. And the technology will continue to improve.

existential threats and Trump

Some experts say (Toby Ord is one) that the odds of human extinction or at least the end of civilization as we know it is about 1 in 6 over the next hundred years. No recent administration has really done anything to address these risks, although Obama made some rhetorical flourishes in that direction. Trump actively increased the risk of human extinction by withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, and the Iran nuclear treaty. This is another realm of immorality beyond being a mere serial rapist and tax cheat, and plenty of reason that electing him again is morally unfathomable.

The rhetoric we hear often paints a contrast between international cooperation and “pursuing national interests”. But what could be more in an individual nation’s interest than trying to ensure that the civilization it is a part of will continue to exist?

Is QAnon still a thing?

QAnon is still a thing, according to this Slate article.

Honestly, these days, QAnon has really just blended into the mainstream. I wouldn’t even think of it as a specific movement, or as just people who identify as QAnon followers. It’s a broader populace that subscribes to these views, even without using the label. The QAnon fixation on pedophilia and child trafficking is a serious and very real issue: We’ve seen it distorted and weaponized into something where calling someone a pedophile has become a go-to political attack for some of our elected leaders.

And with the election around the corner, and especially with all the unprecedented events that have occurred in the past month, disinformation is just blowing up, out of control. Q may be gone for now. And while QAnon, officially, as a movement, has gone underground, the damage is done. We see it every single day. I mean, even just on Twitter last night, I opened the app, and one of the main curated stories by the platform was about how Biden was on his deathbed. There was one suggesting that he had been cloned, or Kamala had killed him. It’s no wonder this stuff has become so widely embraced. It’s so normalized…

The data that exists suggests millions, even tens of millions, of people believe that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. You can only imagine how many kids have heard this stuff at home—especially over the pandemic, when we were all locked down inside and kids were home all the time. We don’t have a good figure of how many children believe in conspiracy theories, so it’s hard to grasp the scope of this. But BuzzFeed News put out a survey a few years ago asking teachers how often they were hearing conspiracy theories in the classroom. And the response was really devastating—just teachers from all over the country saying they were overwhelmed by the stuff they were hearing at school.

I don’t move in any circles where I would be exposed to this stuff, so it is surprising to me to hear this. Saying Biden is dead is not like saying Dick Cheney is a robot – which is obviously true because how else could the dude still be around?

electric vehicle charging in Philadelphia

Here’s an article on the woes of electric vehicle charging in my home city of Philadelphia. On the plus side, electric vehicles are becoming more common.

As of January, there were 6,615 all-electric vehicles and 3,149 plug-in hybrids registered in Philadelphia, according to data from the state Department of Transportation (PennDOT). Combined, those represent 1.3% of the city’s nearly 767,000 registered vehicles. That doesn’t include cars used by the many commuters and visitors who drive into Philly every day.

To fully charge a typical EV on a standard Level 2 charger, the owner may have to leave their car parked there eight hours, which means there need to be more chargers per EV than gas pumps per gas car. 

Yet Philly has only 145 publicly accessible charging stations with 378 charging ports, according to U.S. Department of Energy data. Most of the stations have Level 2 chargers, but 13 of them have Level 3 or DC Fast chargers, which typically charge a car in an hour or less, depending on the vehicle’s battery capacity and other factors. Pennsylvania as a whole has 1,785 public stations with 4,598 ports.

Philadelphia is a large city with many neighborhoods, some quite car-dependent. That is where chargers belong, not in the walkable urban core. What we need there are safe, separated, protected lanes for bicycles and light electric vehicles, like e-bikes and scooters and even light-weight golf carts. These need their own signals and they need to never, ever, ever be in conflict with highway vehicles, whether those are electric or not. So I wouldn’t prioritize chargers there, but on the other hand we should be thinking about air pollution. Replacing fossil-fueled vehicles with electric ones is certainly a win for all the lungs of all the people walking and using those light-weight electric vehicles, so that is one argument in their favor, even in urban cores.

I still autonomous vehicles will eventually solve the charging problem, even in urban cores. Because your vehicle will be able to drop you off at your home or another walkable location, then go park itself somewhere it will not be in the way, then come pick you up again when you need it. So ideally we will be able to have walkable urban cores not ruined by private vehicles, and the ability to take trips to car-dependent locations when we need to. I want to believe this is a decade or less in the future, but it seems to be coming along very slowly.

problems with electric buses

Electric cars might have arrived, technologically speaking, but electric buses are having some problems. The Austin metro area recently committed to going to an all-electric bus fleet, but the early results are that the buses are breaking down and just generally not as reliable as the proven diesel technology. Suppliers are limited, having supply chain issues, and financial problems.

This just sounds like a technology having growing pains in the early implementation stage. Implementation of an emerging technology is a chicken-and-egg problem, where issues need to be solved through “learning by doing”, but if nobody is willing to take the risk to work through those issues the technology never gets scaled up. If you really want it to happen, the federal government might need to share some of the risk in the early stages. Or here’s an idea: pilot the technology with school buses?