Category Archives: Web Article Review

what is “heat lightning”?

So-called heat lightning is a thunderstorm that is very tall and very far away. According to this article, sound from thunder will only travel about 15 miles, but if lightning is high enough you can see it 100-200 miles away. So this suggests to me that if you hear thunder, the storm is probably close enough you should go inside to be safe, but if you only see lightning and don’t hear thunder (assuming you are in a reasonably quiet location), it might be okay to stay outside.

squirrels vs. rats

This is an old and very important question – why do we generally like oen and not the other? I admit I enjoy squirrel antics. I respect rats but generally do not want them close to me. Both go through my urban garbage, so I disagree with this article that there is any difference there. Squirrels can shred a bag of garbage and strew it all over a street, and they do it with impunity in daylight. They also climb my fruit trees and steal all my fruit with impunity, again in broad daylight right in front of me. And they waste it – they like to take one bite of each of my pairs and then spew the rest of the debris on the ground. I think my biggest issue with rats and mice is finding them inside. Intuitively, it seems much more likely that I or my family members could come into contact with some disease or parasite they are carrying, even if squirrels also carry many of the same things. And they pee and poop a lot – which again, outside is just part of the circle of life but inside is smelly and gross. Mice also have an inconsiderate habit of dying in odd places in the house that you can’t even get too, and one dead mouse you can’t find can really stink up a house, while squirrels usually have the decency to die and go into rigor mortis outdoors where you can easily scoop them up with a snow shovel on trash day (the local animal control people will not come out for anything smaller than a coyote, which yes are occasionally spotted in downtown Philadelphia).

measuring inflation is hard

Measuring inflation is hard for a variety of reasons, and it gets even harder when you try to compare across countries and regions. Some of the reasons include methodological choices in averaging, weighting, how housing and transportation are accounted for, how urban and rural consumers are included, and many others. There is a measure called the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) that is used to try to compare across countries and regions. This differs from the U.S. CPI in a variety of ways.

our acceptance of traffic violence is completely irrational

I like this article making the (tired, obvious, to at least some of us) point that we hold motor vehicle safety to a much lower standard than public transportation.

For some types of transportation, an incident causing injury or death will trigger an immediate regulatory response, which targets the setting where the incident occurred and other factors. Airplanes and mass transit fall in this camp. The authorities’ job is to ensure the agency in question only offers services if it reaches specific standards of safety…

Apply that same logic to incidents caused by personal vehicles, and you quickly spot the difference. Traffic violence is one of the highest non-disease causes of death in the US; as noted above, the odds of dying in a car crash throughout your lifetime is around one in a hundred. The same analysis from the National Safety Council puts your chances of dying in a plane crash or transit in the same risk zone as being killed by lightning: literally too small to calculate.

Since I haven’t found anyone to tell me definitively why the focus for traffic is on individuals rather than systems that contribute to crashes, here are a few hypotheses. If the operator of the mode in question is an individual, such as the driver of a single-occupancy vehicle, the state assumes responsibility for risk only at its pleasure, and not as a matter of course. Or perhaps what’s at work is a pernicious and baseless idea that transit and aviation systems can be fixed, but vehicle traffic systems–which are also systems whether or not they’re treated that way–center on individuals instead of institutions, and therefore cannot be regulated in the same way a transit system can. Or maybe it’s down to a tendency for large catastrophic events like plane and train crashes to shock us and cause a fear response, while we’ve become desensitized to the regular occurrence of car crashes.

Greater Greater Washington

I think she gets it about right. It’s desensitization to everyday violence leading to assumed helplessness. It’s a century of auto-highway-oil industry propaganda linking cars to individual “freedom” and deemphasizing the massive investment in public infrastructure to support driving and parking. She leaves out the fact that this propaganda is also convenient for anti-city, nominally anti-tax (although they are fine with hidden taxes) politicians who represent mostly empty land but wield massively disproportionate political power, while taking payoffs from the companies that rake in profits from pollution and death. And finally I wouldn’t underestimate the power of inertia and shifting baseline syndrome – most of us have not experienced and can’t imagine a different or better system.

The author’s suggestions are the usual litany of government investment in safe public transportation infrastructure and walkable, bikable urban communities, congestion pricing, etc. This is awesome public policy but does not seem to be workable politics. Maybe a regular tally and pictures of dead and mangled children in the media would do the trick.

climate change and pollen

It makes intuitive sense to me that heat would reduce crop yields, just by stressing many plants as they try to conserve water and limit evaporation. I hadn’t considered the way heat might affect pollen production and pollinators, but this is also an issue.

But one point is becoming alarmingly clear to scientists: heat is a pollen killer.

Even with adequate water, heat can damage pollen and prevent fertilisation in canola and many other crops, including corn, peanuts, and rice. For this reason, many farmers aim for crops to bloom before the temperature rises…

In fact, heat hinders not only tube growth but other stages of pollen development as well. The result: a pollen grain may never form, or may burst, fail to produce a tube, or produce a tube that explodes. 

BBC

It sounds like research is needed just to hold the line on the crop yields we have now, let alone achieve the increases we need to meet projected population and consumption growth. The more I think about climate change and the broad range of issues it is going to cause, the more I think food may be the most critical issue.

abortion

This is the time on the show where I say I am not going to comment on divisive social issues on this blog, and then I do anyway. I have just a few things to say: (1) I support the right to choose. (2) I can empathize with the point of view of people who have strong moral or religious objections to abortion. There can never be a true consensus on this issue. (3) Abortion is much less common than it used to be because we have effective birth control technology and by and large people have access to it and use it. We need even more technology, especially for men. It’s one of those research areas that has been neglected by the private sector, and governments need to step in. We need much better access and information and much less stigma to access the birth control technology we have, starting with teenagers whether we like it or not. (4) We should be able to reach a consensus that the goal is for all children who are brought into the world to be wanted and loved. Abortion is a small part of this answer, for now, but family planning and birth control are most of the answer. (5) If the Supreme Court takes family planning and birth control away from us, I want to say I will be out in the streets protesting, but I may also look into Canadian naturalization options. I like to hedge my bets when things are going downhill that are outside my direct control. (6) Clarence Thomas, you are corrupt, you stink and you should be impeached. (7) Read The Handmaid’s Tale if you haven’t. I didn’t believe this work of fiction could become a reality but we have started down the slippery slope.

what we think about paying for transportation

Is this hypocrisy or ignorance?

Bettina Jarasch, a Green party politician who also serves as the city’s deputy mayor, suggested the implementation of the measure after the apparent success of a recent summer scheme that saw Germans charged only €9 per month for public transport in order to help curb the impact of inflation during the summer months.

According to a report by Bild, Jarasch believes that a mandatory charge of between €15 and €20 ($16-$21) for public transport will further to bump revenue for public transport services while keeping prices low for individual users.

“I’m increasingly thinking about a solidarity levy of 15 to 20 euros a month for all Berliners,” the politician remarked, while also noting that the reduction in the price of public transport has seen a significant uptick in usage across the country.

Breitbart

Meanwhile, here in the USA, we are all forced to pay a fortune for driving and parking infrastructure, whether we use it or not. We accept this partly because it has been the status quo for so long we don’t remember anything different, and partly because of the endless propaganda hurled at us by the auto-highway-oil industrial complex.

Meanwhile, we have a double standard for transit for some reason where we expect it to be paid for 100% by user fees. Then we disincentivize people from actually using it by providing heavily subsidized car infrastructure.

There may be a few corporate executives and marketing types that understand the hypocrisy of this arrangement, but overall I’m going to go with ignorance.

Has Top Gun lost that loving feeling?

So I saw Top Gun: Maverick. MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. I’ve read a few snarky reviews of it – it’s a recruiting poster for the military, an indication of the dying gasp of an empire, a throwback to the glory days that will never return, maybe even anti-Chinese. I thought it was a fun movie, though. Could we just not overthink it and let it be a fun movie? As a boy of the 1980s (when Top Gun came out) and 1990s (when it was on TV a lot), I do consider it a cultural icon that should not be messed with. So I was worried, but I heard the movie was good and decided to see it. And I thought it succeeded in not ruining the original for a couple reasons – first, Tom Cruise just doing his Tom Cruise thing in his Tom Cruise way. It wouldn’t have worked without him. Second, the eye-popping airplane action and the soundtrack, which were both in the spirit of the original. It just all worked.

Sure, it is a recruiting poster for the U.S. Navy. But this is a movie that is very clear and honest that it is a movie made by the U.S. Navy and glorifying the U.S. Navy. I am much more bothered by movies like the Transformers and Godzilla series that subtly target a younger audience with a pro-military message.

Sure, the plot makes no sense. The enemy is a “rogue regime” building a uranium enrichment plant in a coastal, cold, and mountainous location. So in the real world, it can’t be China, North Korea, or Pakistan because they have had nuclear weapons for decades. And yet they have cutting edge advanced aircraft and air defenses. So maybe a mountainous area of Iran with military hardware supplied by China? Or some fictional island dictator or sultan, except that these tend to be in warm locations. Maybe Iceland – I’m going to go with a mad Bond villain taking over Iceland and seizing some kind of secret NATO R&D facility. There apparently is a purely military solution to the problem, and there apparently are no geopolitical implications of any kind that the moviegoer has to worry about. (In the original, the suggestion is that it was sort of an accidental United States and Soviet Union confrontation that both decide it is in their best interests to cover up. If the U.S. actually launched an unprovoked attack on China, I’m pretty sure China would publicize it.

But Hollywood doesn’t even try to develop characters or make plots that make sense any more. That seems to be a job for TV series these days. So let’s just let it be fun.

Two things did bother me though. One was the absence of Kelly McGillis’s character Charlie. As a boy of the 1980s and 1990s, 1986 Kelly McGillis is important to me. I looked her up – she is a handsome 64-year-old woman. I guess she just wouldn’t have worked as Tom Cruise’s love interest – Cruise is 59 but whatever they do to him through surgery, makeup, and/or computer graphics he looks about 35 in the movie. They should have at least given Kelly McGillis a cameo though – well, maybe they offered and she said no thanks. I was mildly disturbed by the actual love interest in the movie – they never explain anything about her and pretend we are supposed to know her from the first movie. I had to look this up – apparently her character is mentioned in passing in the original movie. They should have at least mentioned Charlie in this new movie or explained what happened to her. I will always love you, Charlie! (Oops, wrong song – I was supposed to say you take my breath away. Well, at least they had the good sense not to mess with that song in the new movie because that song was all about Charlie. And I’m not much of a romantic by the way, but like I say it’s a culture icon. By the way, they avoid having to pay Meg Ryan for a cameo by just telling us her character is dead, which is kind of cheap.)

And finally, I just want to make a pitch for motorcycle helmets. I get that the brash young balls-forward Maverick didn’t wear a helmet. The grownup, more responsible Maverick should have put one on. I suppose his character is marginally suicidal so maybe he gets a pass. He certainly should have put one on his love interest if he actually cared about her life and safety. So shame on Hollywood for this and I hope nobody imitates the movie and gets hurt. Incidentally, I looked up one other thing: you can go online and find a motorcycle helmet in the style of Maverick’s flight helmet. And that is pretty cool. Although remember motorcycles are not safe to begin with. I see some Top Gun-inspired bike helmets for children.

And finally, there are just certain iconic songs associated with certain iconic movies. Top Gun: Maverick goes to the danger zone (a lot), but it has lost that loving feeling.

linking climate change to inflation?

This book review in the Guardian tries to link climate change to inflation. It talks about the costs of storms, fires, and insurance, and impacts of heat on worker productivity. I’m not convinced it is exactly on the mark. Cleaning up from storms can actually stimulate the economy, if they have only local impacts and don’t happen too often. One area’s cost of cleanup creates business and jobs for another area of the economy. The larger economy should be able to absorb these costs if it is healthy. Maybe this is the issue – are the impacts of storms, fires, and floods become geographically widespread and frequent enough that they are taking up a significant amount of our economy’s productive capacity that could be better spent elsewhere? Maybe that is the case, but this article doesn’t address it. I can certainly imagine this being the case if and when major population centers (and economic drivers of our economy) start to be impacted on a regular basis by a combination of severe storms and sea level rise. A major earthquake or volcano could have similar impacts, and while it would have nothing to do with climate change directly, it would happen on top of climate change and we need to be ready for the known risks let alone the unknown ones.

The article doesn’t talk much about food, but along with impacts on coastal cities, a tightening of the food supply relative to population seems like the most obvious and immediate impact of climate change on people. While climate change didn’t cause the Russia-Ukraine war, removing food exports from those two countries from the system has taught us something about how tight the food supply is. Climate change could add up to a similar tightening over a period of time, and remove that slack that we currently have in the system. And then shocks can and will happen on top of the long term trend. It really does not seem like the world is ready.