Category Archives: Web Article Review

more on the deteriorating nuclear war risk situation

This article is on a site called Declassified Australia.

The accelerating arms race in hypersonic missiles and anti-hypersonic defensive technology was unleashed upon the world following the US unilateral decision in 2002 under George W. Bush to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the Soviet Union and US. 

The ensuing weapons competition has pushed aside risk-mitigation measures, such as expanding the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, negotiating new multilateral arms control agreements, undertaking transparency and confidence-building measures, and puts in jeopardy a cornerstone of world peace, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty…

Unlike the USA’s most recent Nuclear Posture Review which asserted its right to a ‘first nuclear strike’ in “extreme circumstances”, China has a ‘no first strike’ nuclear weapon policy.

An objective outside observer, let’s say an alien since how could any resident of Earth be objective on this, might conclude that China is the more rational, less paranoid, and less belligerent party here. Does the leadership of China actually think there is a case where the leadership of the U.S. would launch a first strike? Hopefully not, but a little strategic empathy would seem like a good idea for the U.S. here – other countries are legitimately afraid of the United States. We have invaded sovereign states, interfered with elections, and broken treaties repeatedly, so we should be able to step into someone else’s shoes for a moment and begin to understand why they might not trust us and might fear us. Reducing fear and building trust could be some pretty good concepts to build a risk-reducing foreign policy around.

terrible news on nuclear risk

The New York Times makes a very scary claim here.

The second big change arises from China’s nuclear ambitions. The country’s nuclear expansion is running at an even faster pace than American intelligence officials anticipated two years ago, driven by President Xi Jinping’s determination to scrap the decades-long strategy of maintaining a “minimum deterrent” to reach or exceed the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s arsenals. China’s nuclear complex is now the fastest growing in the world.

This is awful news. The U.S. and Russia certainly have no moral high ground here. They could have proposed to reduce their arsenals to a minimum credible deterrent in exchange for China not expanding theirs. I am not a person of vast intelligence, but I can see that this would benefit the world. You would have to “trust but verify” with a heavy international inspection regime of course, but there is plenty of Cold War precedence and experience with that.

I don’t trust the New York Times (or rather, the spies on their staff masquerading as professional journalists and thereby undermining all credibility of their actual professional journalists), and the paragraph above is not even the main point of the story. The main point of the story is supposedly the U.S. preparing for the possibility of a coordinated attack by both China and Russia. The way this was leaked to the press has a whiff of propaganda to me, but the possibility of three planet-ending nuclear arsenals rather than two is terrible news for the world’s overall nuclear risk whatever the sneaky intentions of this particular article.

Jeff Masters on U.S. Climate Havens

Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections has an article with a massive list of articles, books and tools on climate risks in various geographic areas of the U.S. You could really spend a lot of time drilling down through all these sources, even to research just one location. He does make the point, however, that moving away from extended family and other social ties can be bad for a person/family’s resilience in general, so you should consider that tradeoff before deciding whether to move.

AI-controlled stop lights

Boston and other cities have piloted tested AI-controlled stop lights and found that they can reduce “stop and go traffic”. This seems encouraging to me, but not very imaginative and I hope this is not the end of the story. Stop lights are such an old technology, and it seems to me that with modern LED lights and screens we should be able to do much better. Each traffic lane, including lanes dedicated to light and un-motorized vehicles, need their own signals. Let’s get rid of the colored circles and make every single traffic light a series of arrows, so that we can control who is allowed to go forward entirely separately from who is allowed to make a turn from each lane. Pedestrians also need their own signals, and the heavy/highway vehicles, light/unmotorized vehicles, and pedestrians must never, ever have signals that put them in the same space at the same time. I won’t buy the idea that this would be “too expensive” – I happen to be traveling in a middle income country at the moment and I see a lot more arrows and countdown timers on traffic lights compared to what we have in the U.S. (although the jurisdiction I am in is no traffic safety utopia for sure.) If this sounds like it would be too inefficient with today’s system, this is where AI should come in and make it efficient and safe, at each individual intersection and for the system as a whole.

Another level of science fiction would dispense with the lights and screens, and embed them in our vehicle windshields, augmented reality glasses, headphones, etc. Vehicles that are entirely computer controlled, of course, can just get their signals from cellular or wireless networks. We are not there yet at least when it comes to widespread access/adoption of these technologies, but the technologies themselves either exist or are on the horizon.

September 1 U.S. election check-in

Here’s my “official” take on the U.S. election for September 1. Sure, I admit I look at the polls almost every day. But I figure writing down the numbers and puzzling over them a bit once a month helps me to filter out some of the noise. So here goes. I still lean on the “Silver” numbers as probably reflecting the most well-thought-out adjustments of poll numbers to something close to reality. The 538 numbers are interesting to give a sense of how much small decisions about these adjustments matter, and the RCP numbers show what unadjusted (i.e., heavily biased) numbers would look like.

STATE2020 RESULTSilver Bulletin (August 1)Silver Bulletin (September 1)538 (September 1)RCP (September 1)
ArizonaBiden +0.4%Trump +2.7%Trump +0.6%Harris +0.3%Trump +0.5%
GeorgiaBiden +0.3%Trump +2.2%Harris +0.9%Harris +0.5%Trump +0.2%
WisconsinBiden +0.6%Harris +0.4%Harris +3.2%Harris +3.2%Harris +1.4%
North CarolinaTrump +1.3%Trump +2.2%Trump +0.4%Trump +0.3%Trump +0.6%
PennsylvaniaBiden +1.2%Trump +0.2%Harris +1.3%Harris +1.2%Harris +0.5%
MichiganBiden +2.8%Harris +2.6%Harris +1.9%Harris +2.4%Harris +1.1%
NevadaBiden +2.4%Trump +2.2%Harris +0.9%Harris +0.7%TIE

So going with the Silver numbers, the electoral college would be Harris 292, Trump 246.

270towin.com

Both Arizona and North Carolina have been in the Harris column during the month of August and flipped back over, while the numbers in Pennsylvania (>:-() seem like they might have tightened over the past two weeks. On the other hand, Georgia and Nevada are huge wins for the Harris campaign if they come through. Move Nevada and Georgia back into the Trump column and Harris still wins 270-268, with recount hilarity likely to ensue of course. This happens to match the RCP polling results above, if you give the Nevada tie to Trump. Surprisingly, she could lose Pennsylvania and still win the electoral college if everything else in the map above were to hold. But these things tend to be correlated and any event that moved Pennsylvania a whole point toward Trump would tend to move other states too. Unless we are talking some serious voter suppression or outright cheating by people in Harrisburg with pointy white hats in the back of their closets.

In the betting markets, PredictIt has Harris at a 56% chance of winning (the electoral college) vs. 47% for Trump (well actually $0.56 to $0.47 with about $0.08 given to other candidates, so apparently they don’t intend for these to add up close to 100%). Polymarket however has Trump at 51% to 48% for Harris. So whoever is betting on that site thinks they know something the rest of us do not.

So, my overall verdict is things look pretty good for Harris at the moment with two months to go. I think this election is hers to lose.

the staffing crisis

This article in Longreads blames the degradation of hotels and restaurants in Yosemite National Park on the Aramark corporation. I think it is part of a larger trend of absolute bare-bones staffing in the U.S. service industry which has been going on at least since the pandemic. Something just seems out of whack when workers are barely getting by, prices seem so high, and service seems so poor. Like it or not, a drop in migrant workers during and since the pandemic is part of the story, whether those pre-pandemic restaurant and hotel workers were undocumented or not. In the U.S. childcare industry, where minimum staffing levels are highly regulated, prices are out of reach of even the upper middle class. In more competitive and less regulated hospitality industries, staffing levels are just cut to the bone. In Asia where I happen to be at the moment, staffing levels at tourist attractions are much higher. This works because tourists are willing or able to pay higher prices than what the local economy alone would otherwise support, and because higher-income countries bring in workers from lower-income countries. Since this will probably never be palatable in the United States, and rents and overhead costs are not going anywhere but up, we are probably stuck with shitty service and miserably overworked restaurant and hotel staff for the foreseeable future.

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.