Category Archives: Web Article Review

keep an eye on Iran…

I always say I don’t want to comment on fast-moving current events, and I always say I don’t want to comment on other countries’ politics, especially ones I have never been to and have no connection to, and most especially Israeli politics. But I have thoughts, you don’t have to read them and here they are:

  1. My heart goes out to all the human beings suffering in this conflict.
  2. What could be the motive of the Hamas leadership and fighters responsible for this attack. One story could be that they are angry about the expanding settlements and other perceived losses of human rights and dignity, and that they feel they have exhausted all political recourse and only violence is left to make their point. Maybe this is all there is to it.
  3. But…assuming Hamas has some rational political aims, it is hard to imagine this furthering those aims. It seems more likely to embolden the most conservative parties in the Israeli government, and to rally to Israeli public and international governments to support them even more than they already do.
  4. I have heard suggestions that the political aim could be to stop the Israel-Saudi Arabia diplomatic normalization process. Iran would gain from this. But if there is even a hint that Iran was involved in planning this attack, if anything it seems more likely to accelerate that process after an initial pause.
  5. Which brings me to Iran. This just seems extremely risky for them. Reports are that their leadership has “publicly praised” the attacks. Maybe they have to do that for domestic political reasons. But again, if there is even a whiff… the Israeli right wing could use this as their excuse to attack Iran.
  6. The Israeli government has repeatedly said “they will not allow” Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. How close are they to obtaining a nuclear weapon? Very close, it would seem. If the Israeli government can find some evidence that Iran was behind this attack, it would seem to give them the justification they need for a military attack. And it might just bring enough international opinion to their side, or at least keep it on the sidelines, to allow them to do it.
  7. If someone were to want to fabricate evidence that Iran was involved…well, before 2003 I might have said that was far fetched, but it is hard to imagine more flimsy see-through evidence than the W. Bush administration came up with against Iraq in 2003. And that was adequate to justify a mostly unprovoked invasion of a sovereign UN member nation at the time.
  8. Am I saying this was a false flag attack? No, as much as I enjoy a good conspiracy theory, I won’t say that without evidence. I’m just saying that false flag or not, partisans are smart enough to take advantage of something like this to justify their preferred course of action.
  9. So…it would not surprise me if Israel attacks Iran in the coming weeks or months. And it would not surprise me if the U.S. supports that or at least remains silent. It would surprise me if they joined in, but in the end that seems unnecessary. An the major players in the region of Egypt to Saudi Arabia to the UAE will probably be just fine with it too, whatever they say in public.

salt intrusion in New Orleans

As a water professional, I of course have access to cutting edge sources of news in my sector not available to the general public. I first heard about the saltwater intrusion situation in New Orleans from a random drunk guy in a bar the other day.

Because of the drought across the Mississippi River Valley, salt water is creeping upriver, where many communities, including New Orleans, draw their drinking water.

Axios

So not enough water coming from upstream to keep the saltwater from the ocean at bay. I wonder how much effect sea level rise has on this right now. In the future, it certainly will, and climate change may cause more and frequent droughts, although I don’t know what the forecast is for the U.S. Gulf region specifically.

This appears to be a short-term phenomenon. The salt will come and go. Cities will figure out how to get safe drinking water to people, they will keep the taps on so people can take showers and wash their clothes and fire fighters can fight fires, and they will assess any damage from corrosion after it passes. If it happens more frequently though, it seems like we need more of a plan than this. And groundwater salt intrusion is a longer-term, slower-onset issue but once it is there it is going to stay there in many cases.

So both flooding and drought are going to impact our coastal cities, like a one-two punch, over and over again. We might be able to deal with it for awhile, but if the recovery is not quite complete each time there is an episode, the impacts will accumulate over time until finally, there is some big event that is the one a city can’t recover from.

small-scale desalination

MIT makes some bold claims for a cheap, small scale desalination system.

The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.

MIT

If it works for salt water, I wonder if it could work for any type of water. Decentralized treatment is a worthy goal – if we could easily and safely reuse water from our rooftops, showers, dishwashers, etc., that would be a lot less water to be sucking out of the environment and moving around in pipes, and a lot less energy and chemicals than we use to run our water systems now. Toilets? People don’t like to hear this, but if we get desperate enough we might be open to it. For the water industry, it could be a “killer app” akin to the digital camera or cellular phone. Don’t expect the water industry to go quietly though.

MIT News

synthetic cocaine?

This article says waves of drug abuse tend to alternate between sedatives, like heroin and the current opioid wave, and stimulants, like cocaine and methamphetamine. Like opioids, people are hard at work in labs trying to create synthetic stimulants. One candidate, which according to this article is already popular in “the Middle East party scene”, is Captagon, which has effects similar to cocaine and can be as cheap as $3 per pill.

Mark Milley

This upcoming (? – the link is to the Wayback Machine) article in the Atlantic is about how Mark Milley made sure Trump was not able to subvert the 2020 election. Laudable I suppose, but heed this paragraph:

Milley and other military officers deserve praise for protecting democracy, but their actions should also cause deep unease. In the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals. Civilians provide direction, funding, and oversight; the military then follows lawful orders.

The Atlantic, via the Wayback Machine

It’s not hard to imagine an alternate scenario where Trump’s scheme to subvert the election succeeds, and the military announces it is temporarily suspending the Constitution to protect the Constitution. A general takes over as president in a “caretaker” role until such time as a free and fair election can be organized and held, and the Constitution restored. Maybe this could even work out, but if it happens one time it is likely to happen again, and the more times in happens the more of a joke the Constitution becomes. Tweaks could be made to the Constitution to stabilize whatever it was that we think caused it to become unstable, and over time we would deviate more and more from democracy and the rule of law, even if the military governors were benevolent. And of course, there is not guarantee there would be – you could get somebody bad emerge as a leader, factions could emerge, and things could get ugly.

Please note: Hyperlinks have been intentionally removed from this page due to the page they are referring to being flagged as potential malware. I am including the link below. Please use your own best judgment before reviewing this site. https://web.archive.org/web/20230922052040/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/general-mark-milley-trump-coup/675375/

napping

I think I’ve talked about napping before. It’s supposed to be good for your heart and brain. But anyway, here is what a (paywalled) Philadelphia Inquirer article says are best practices.

  • 20-30 minutes in length
  • end 4-6 hours before bedtime (this would be 4-6 pm for me)
  • “create the right environment by napping in a quiet, comfortable, and dimly lit space”

The article actually suggests it is okay to use caffeine to fight off grogginess when waking up from an afternoon nap. But I don’t think a cup of coffee late in the afternoon would work for me. I think that is actually a great time for exercise. And we know that is good for our hearts and brains.

generative AI in the workplace?

Microsoft is unleashing generative AI on the workplace imminently, according to Slate.

At Microsoft’s New York release event on Thursday, I watched as it revealed products that simplify and automate some of the worst parts of office life. The company demoed a text generator that can read long Word documents and write blog posts highlighting the most relevant points. It showed another feature that allows you to prompt Copilot to summarize a slew of unread messages from an email-happy co-worker. The technology can also read transcripts of meetings you miss and note the most relevant parts, or allow you to query the full discussions. Even simple updates like prompting Copilot to create a header image for a slide deck seem quite useful.

Slate

So maybe this can partially automate some useless tasks that are taking up our time. But if they are useless, do they need to be done at all? Are they adding value at all to begin with?

Here is some advice I would give young people new to the workplace:

  1. When people give you assignments, repeat them back to confirm you understand them. If they are still not clear, put them in writing and ask the person assigning the task to confirm. In most cases, they will like this.
  2. Keep a running list of things you have been asked to do, when they are due, what their status is, and any problems/obstacles/questions you are encountering to getting them done. Look at and update this list every day.
  3. Give updates on your tasks without being asked. When you have a question, encounter an issue, or realize you may not be able to meet a deadline, talk to the person assigning the work early and often about it. They will like this. Often deadlines can be moved or you can get help, but this gets harder as a deadline approaches.
  4. Keep a calendar. Look at it and update it every day.
  5. Make it a habit to take notes in all meetings and phone conversations. You don’t have to be a court reporter. Try to capture assignments and decisions. At the end of the day and again at the end of the week, look through all your notes, list new assignments, and move them to your assignment list.
  6. Basically, you want to be a rock solid and reliable “set it and forget it” employee. This doesn’t mean you do everything perfectly all the time with no help. It means that when someone assigns you a task, they know you will either do it perfectly and on time, or much more likely, you will come to them with updates and issues that need to be resolved to get the work done. Once they assign it to you, they don’t have to think about it again until you walk through the door.
  7. #1-6 are kind of it for maybe your first year. Once you are a master note taker, list and calendar keeper, at some point you will find yourself helping others to get organized. One day, you will find yourself tracking and communicating the work of a small team of people. Which brings me to communication…
  8. Reading, writing, and speaking are all important, of course. But what is really valuable as you start moving up the business ladder is starting to get a sense of how to communicate a message to an audience. I try to ask myself three questions before preparing a document or presentation: (1) Who specifically is my audience? (2) What is the take home message I would like my audience to hear and understand? and (3) What decisions or actions would I like my audience to take after hearing and understanding my message? Get this down, and at some point you will not just be the back office “getting things done” person (although you can make a perfectly good career of that if you want to), but you will find yourself in front of customers and senior management explaining things and adding value for your organization.
  9. Maybe it doesn’t need to be said, but take some time for humanity. A little small talk and banter is how humans connect, and as long as it doesn’t get out of hand it is positive for productivity. When you work in an office, get in the habit of saying hello when you get there and good-bye before you leave. It is annoying when someone just evaporates at 5 pm and you had an important question for them. If you need to vanish at exactly 5 pm, stick your head in at 4 pm and ask if there is anything critical people need from you during the last hour of the day. This is really helpful. If you don’t need to vanish at 5 pm, stick around for a little while and review the happenings of the day with co-workers. Every once in awhile, move the banter to a local eating or drinking establishment. This is how productive, creative, innovative teams are built and I see this culture vanishing.
  10. Notice I didn’t talk much about working from home. I just don’t think it works well. Try to be there in person as much as possible.

Now, do any of the things “generative AI” can do in the short term address anything above? I’m skeptical but willing to give it a chance. A big reason for all that note taking, list and calendar keeping/reviewing/updating I do is to form a big picture in my brain of what is going on in my organization and how I can add value to it. Even if a computer can form that big picture, that is not going to put it in my brain. Maybe a computer can go through a transcript of a meeting or phone call and pull out decisions and action items. It certainly should be able to keep a calendar and do scheduling. It might be valuable if first thing in the morning the computer would say to me “consider doing this thing next” or “consider doing one these two (or three) things next”, and this would always fit into some bigger picture goal of getting everything done on time, on budget and to a high standard. Maybe virtual reality will solve some of the problems with working from home eventually. I doubt we will be there any time soon, but I also don’t doubt the computers will get better at this over time.

what, exactly, is momentum?

This is a physics topic – maybe not of interest to many, but of interest to me as I happen to be taking (suffering through?) a hydraulics course at the moment. Like energy, we kind of intuitively know what momentum is, but we have a hard time describing it satisfactorily in words. Apparently, there are philosophers of science that spend entire careers examining words used by others (like Isaac Newton) to try to describe it. Once upon a time, a philosopher and a scientist were the same thing, in fact.

Momentum is about force. It is a thing that does not change unless “external forces” are imposed on a system. In fluid mechanics, there is an imaginary thing called a “control volume” which obeys this law. You can do calculations on this, and then you can go into a laboratory where you have a pump and a glass channel (picture a long aquarium) with very low friction, and show that your math matches what happens in the real world. There can be “internal forces” in the fluid which allow energy to change (well, change from energy embodied in pressure – potential energy – and/or velocity – kinetic energy – to heat, which then just drifts off into the air. But the momentum does not change because there are no external forces (ignoring the friction of that slippery, slippery glass.

Momentum is a function of mass and velocity, we learn in high school. Force, we learn in high school, is the product of mass and acceleration, and acceleration is a change in velocity over time. So there – did I explain it to myself? Not quite, but that at least helped me to think it through.

Even if ChatGPT could produce a more coherent version of what I wrote above (which is possible), that would not have helped me think this through and incorporate more of the real world into my mental model of how the real world works. Because thinking and writing go together. So I am not going to give up writing any time soon. Even if nobody read my writing here (and if you did, I apologize), it helped me to write this down. I will skim over this later at some point using some rough version of “spaced repetition”, and that will also help my feeble human brain to incorporate this knowledge into my mental model.

Talking can also sometimes help upgrade our mental models, although most talking is useless. For example, I was discussing momentum with my professor recently in the mens room. So ladies, if you were wondering what men talk about in the mens room, now you know, or at least now you know what two random men were discussing in one random mens room on one random day. And yes, we know you complain about us in the ladies’ room, and that complaining about men is an important part of female bonding that really doesn’t have much to do with us. And this is okay.

RFK Jr.? Michelle Obama?

There’s talk of a viable RFK Jr. candidacy and even a Trump-RFK Jr. ticket. I first became aware of him many years ago when he was talking about mercury poisoning in Rolling Stone. I am concerned about mercury, and lead, and possibly even floride, but his grasp of science turned out to be bogus. Unless you believe there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the fact that we are all being poisoned. I don’t think so. We are being exposed to a vast variety of chemicals in modern industrialized countries and we should do more to understand and control their effects.

I haven’t looked into his Covid vaccine denialism much. If the point is that no vaccine is risk-free, sure, but this vaccine clearly saved tens of millions of lives worldwide. And the technology holds great promise to cure a wide range of diseases including many types of cancer. It also holds perils from (more?) lab leaks to bioterrorism to biological warfare.

Happy topics. The problem with RFK Jr. even if you read things he has written or things written about him and are tempted to nod your head, is…it is impossible to listen to him talk. Seriously – give it a try. It’s just too awkward to even contemplate. He makes W. Bush or even Trump look like a slick public speaker.

Michelle Obama? I don’t know. People might vote for her but (1) she is not a professional politician and (2) she has said a million times she is not interested. She is basically a celebrity with some name recognition.

In a country of 332 million, there have to be some people with (1) charisma, (2) leadership and public speaking ability, and (3) ideas. These three things do not preclude corruption and evil of course, but they are a starting point. Will the real potential leaders please stand up?