Category Archives: Web Article Review

Taiwan war early warning?

The belligerent rhetoric over Taiwan seems to have ramped up suddenly (I’m writing on Saturday morning, October 9). See for example this article in Eurasia Review (a publication I know nothing about this publication, couldn’t find out much about it online, and it raises some propaganda alarms as I read it. It credits “VOA” as the author of the piece, which would make it official propaganda assuming it is true.

U.S. officials have expressed growing alarm in recent days, describing China’s behavior toward Taiwan as increasingly aggressive and belligerent. The concern has been heightened by repeated aerial incursions, with Beijing sending more than 150 military jets into Taiwanese airspace over several days.

Eurasia Review

Here’s an article from something called “The Conversation” which also sets off my propaganda alarms. But Wikipedia describes it as “a network of not-for-profit media outlets that publish news stories on the Internet that are written by academic experts and researchers, under a free Creative Commons licence, allowing reuse but only without modification.”

Taiwan’s porcupine doctrine has three defensive layers. The outer layer is about intelligence and reconnaissance to ensure defence forces are fully prepared. Behind this come plans for guerrilla warfare at sea with aerial support from sophisticated aircraft provided by the US. The innermost layer relies on the geography and demography of the island. The ultimate objective of this doctrine is that of surviving and assimilating an aerial offensive well enough to organise a wall of fire that will prevent the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from successfully invading.

The Conversation

Sounds like a fun video game, or an unbelievably hellish reality. Let’s not let this happen.

cold hard cash

Axios has a short primer on the idea of giving out cash to alleviate poverty. Conceptually, I am more attracted to the idea that the government should provide services the private market is failing to provide, employ people at market/living wages to provide those services, and provide people with the education and lifelong training to succeed in the private marketplace. Along with that, it should provide generous unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits to those who have a good reason for not working. Also, child care and health care so people can work part time, start a business or study without one spouse being chained to a full time large employer to get those benefits for the family. Of course, we do have unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and these do amount to giving cash to people. We also have tax credits, which are mathematically indistinguishable from giving out cash but psychologically very different. Because we have a tax system that is intentionally designed to be hated so nobody will support it.

asteroids can sneak up on us

I have been putting asteroid strikes in the category of potentially catastrophic but so rare as to not worry about. I have also assumed we would see a really big one coming for decades if not centuries and would at least have a chance to get organized and do something about it (a big if, given the lack of coordinated international response to climate change and the pandemic.) But according to this Jerusalem Post article, a fairly sizable asteroid could sneak up on us by passing close to the sun on its way to us. This happened on September 16, 2021 with an asteroid somewhere in the 50-100 m diameter range. The article doesn’t do the math on what size conventional or nuclear weapon this would be the equivalent of if it hit. I thought that was pretty standard…

The article has an interesting (and chilling) photo of the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid streaking in, which was about 17 m wide. The article says that on April 13, 2029, a 340 m asteroid is supposed to “safely pass by” the earth at a distance of “under 32,000 km”. Assuming the article has the number right, that is only about one-tenth the distance from the Earth to the moon. This sounds like one to watch.

simulation games

This Wired article has a run-down of new(ish) simulation games. Before I entered the intensive child rearing years, I was one of those people like the author that was into this type of game (and also sports games, which are a simulation of sorts), and not so much into arcade-type games. So it is somewhat comforting that there are other people like me.

I keep hearing that the intensive child-rearing years do eventually wind down, and that you remember them fondly as you start to enjoy having some time to enjoy your own grownup life again. For my wife and I, there are just some slight twinkles of light at the end of the tunnel. It’s been a long dark tunnel, particularly with Covid, although of course there have been many joyful moments along the way and over time we will probably remember those and forget the hard parts.

Also appealing to me is the idea of writing my own simulations of real things that I can play something like games. For example, the stock market? climate change? the ecology of my neighborhood? geopolitics? Can I link these things together into one simulation of the universe as it actually plays out, Asimov Foundation-style? Of course not. Many smarter people than me have tried and failed. But the fun could be in the trying. Now, if you will excuse me I need to attend to the (beautiful, healthy, wonderful in every way) whining children and mountains of dirty laundry and dishes and unpaid bills and things in my house that are broken.

Covid-19 probably wasn’t made in a lab, but something like it could be at any time

This Atlantic article is about a grant proposal to artificially create something very close to Covid-19 in a laboratory. Not to worry, it was not funded and it does not prove or disprove the “lab leak hypothesis”. Wait a minute, regardless of the lab leak hypothesis, what is chilling here is that the technology exists to create a Covid-like bioweapon or something even worse in a laboratory right now. This does not particularly surprise me, but it is scary. Even if we assume scientists in leading countries like the U.S. and China are relatively well regulated and have relatively high ethical standards, somewhere in the world there will be experts who are not as ethical and people willing to fund them. And over time, the technology will become more accessible to more people. And garage biotechnology will be harder to monitor and control than nuclear technology.

If I were spinning conspiracy theories here, I would say isn’t it an interesting coincidence that U.S. laboratories are set up to genetically engineer a Covid-19 if they want to, and U.S. laboratories also happened to have the vaccine for Covid-19 pretty much developed and ready to commercialize when needed. Hmm…I have no evidence of this and am not saying it is likely, I am just saying it is a story that would not be inconsistent with reality.

twists and turns of mRNA research

This Science article (which seems to be discussing a Nature article) has an interesting discussion of how scientific and technological research has a lot of twists and turns and dead ends.

That Nature piece will also give non-scientists a realistic picture of what development of a new technology is like in this field. Everyone builds on everyone else’s work, and when a big discovery is finally clear to everyone, you’ll find that you can leaf back through the history, turning over page after page until you get to experiments from years (decades) before that in hindsight were the earliest signs of the Big Thing. You might wonder how come no one noticed these at the time, or put more resources behind them, but the truth is that at any given time there are a lot of experiments and ideas floating around that have the potential to turn into something big, some day. Looking back from the ones that finally worked out brings massive amounts of survivorship bias into your thinking. Most big things don’t work out – every experienced scientist can look back and wonder at all the time they spent on various things that (in retrospect) bore no fruit and were (in retrospect!) never going to. But you don’t see that at the time.

Science

So how could technological progress be accelerated? I suspect we will always need human brains to formulate experiments and make the final call on interpreting results. But it seems as though computers/robots should be able to perform experiments. If they can perform a lot more iterations/permutations of experiments in a fraction of the time that humans could, the cost of dead ends should be much lower. The humans won’t have to worry as much about which experiments they think are most promising, they can just tell the computer to perform them all. If we have really good computer models of how the physical world works, the need for physical experiments should be reduced. That seems like the model to me – first a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution.

Of course, for this to work, you have to do the basic research to build the accurate conceptual models followed by the computer models, and you have to design the experiments. And you have to be able to measure and accurately distinguish the more promising results from the less promising. There will still be false positives leading to dead ends after much effort, and false negatives where a game-changing breakthrough is left in the dustbin because it was not identified.

That is another idea though – commit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically, especially as computers continue to improve and conceptual breakthroughs continue to be made.

I doubt I am the first to think of anything above, and I bet much of it is being applied. To things like nuclear weapons, depressingly. But it seems like a framework for bumping up the pace of progress. The other half of the equation, of course, is throwing more brains and money into the mix. Then there is the long game of educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.

UK Ministry of Defence on Human Augmentation

This report on human augmentation from the UK Ministry of Defence does not represent the “official policy or strategy” of the UK Ministry of Defense. They also consulted with the Germans. So you heard it here first – the English and Germans are working together to breed drug-fueled, Ironman-suited super soldiers.

I’ve taken a screen shot of a key image below. Hopefully the authors would approve of my sharing it, since they made the report public. They rated each technology by familiarity of policy considerations (how risky or ethically fraught is the technology?), transformative potential, and technological maturity.

UK Ministry of Defense

We have drugs and computers right now, and I assume we are using them. They don’t seem all that excited about the Ironman exoskeletons. “Non-invasive brain interfaces” are maybe a little farther along than I would have thought. Monkeying with genetics and brains is the science fiction stuff. It is a little surprising that they think monkeying with the microbiome would be fairly transformative.

China and thorium reactors

China is moving ahead with thorium-based nuclear reactors, at least at the pilot scale. It is based on a design that the U.S. pioneered and then abandoned.

When China switches on its experimental reactor, it will be the first molten-salt reactor operating since 1969, when US researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee shut theirs down. And it will be the first molten-salt reactor to be fuelled by thorium. Researchers who have collaborated with SINAP say the Chinese design copies that of Oak Ridge, but improves on it by calling on decades of innovation in manufacturing, materials and instrumentation…

Molten-salt reactors are just one of many advanced nuclear technologies China is investing in. In 2002, an intergovernmental forum identified six promising reactor technologies to fast-track by 2030, including reactors cooled by lead or sodium liquids. China has programmes for all of them.

Some of these reactor types could replace coal-fuelled power plants, says David Fishman, a project manager at the Lantau Group energy consultancy in Hong Kong. “As China cruises towards carbon neutrality, it could pull out [power plant] boilers and retrofit them with nuclear reactors.”

Nature

I’ve come around to the idea that it was misguided for environmental activists in many countries to essentially shut down a shift toward nuclear power over the past 50 years or so. Whatever the short-term risks, they would have been smaller than the long-term risks of fossil fuels, many of which are now locked in. Maybe thorium and molten salt are technologies we should be making available to developing countries to ease nuclear weapons proliferation pressure. We still need to double down on progress toward true renewables at the same time.

golf carts

Why don’t we drive around in low-speed city traffic in something like golf carts? Bikes are great, but there are times you need to move heavy bulky items around, and I applaud people who bike around with small children but have not found that practical on a daily basis. Golf carts would save tons of space, and would eliminate a lot of noise and pollution if they were electric.

I can think of two reasons why we don’t use them. First is that we want highway vehicles so we can get on the highway and leave the city at at moment’s notice. But if we live, work, shop, and study in our cities, we only need to leave occasionally. In that case, it makes sense to rent that larger vehicle just when we need it. We would also be more likely to pick buses, trains, and planes for those weekend trips when it makes sense, because we wouldn’t have sunk all that money in private cars and feel like we need to make use of them. (I’ve heard this is 100% illogical and also 100% normal human behavior.)

The second reason is the perception that we need big, heavy, fast vehicles to protect us from other big, heavy, fast vehicles. Well, mutually assured destruction is no way to run our cities and lives. If everybody switches to golf carts, we won’t have this problem, but nobody wants to be the first and end up a stain on the pavement. And most cities won’t dedicate streets and lanes to smaller vehicles because the big vehicles need so much space for driving and especially parking. And no, I don’t think golf carts really belong in our protected bike lanes, where we are lucky enough to have those, because they are still big, heavy, and fast enough to run over bikes, I think.

Just reminder, though, that we still need to get off our butts and walk most places, most of the time. Riding around on quiet, clean, safe motorized vehicles isn’t going to help with things like diabetes or obesity.

How do you climate proof a city?

In the past couple days, I’ve read a couple articles on how to manage flood risk in cities (New York City, in particular). In my opinion, and to oversimplify, a lot of it is about managing elevations in building codes for private property and in design standards for public property, and avoiding or carefully managing development in floodplains.

From MIT Technology Review:

  • “more permeable architecture, like green roofs and rain gardens” – I think this is a great idea, and full disclosure, it is part of what I do for a living. But it doesn’t help that much in really enormous storms, or in flooding of major rivers and coastlines. It helps to manage small- to medium- storms, which cause a lot of inconvenience and damage over time, and it helps to manage water quality.
  • Also, “less concrete”. Amen to this, although one idea of a city is to build at a high density in one spot so you can leave a lot of other spots undeveloped. We don’t do this well in the U.S. because of political fragmentation and the car/highway/oil industry propaganda we are bombarded with on Monday Night Football.
  • “upgraded pumps and drainage pipes” – well, yes. Figure out what you think the peak flows are going to be 50-100 years from now, and then modify your building codes and design standards to move or temporarily store that amount of water. Then, as your long-lived infrastructure gradually wears out, upgrade to the new standards, always keeping an eye on changes in projections and changes in technology.
  • “sea barriers and coastal protections” – a no-brainer, but not much help in a storm like Ida which was a rainfall-runoff and river flooding event in the Northeast. If anything, you want to get the water to the ocean quicker so you don’t want anything in the way! Of course, sea level rise and storm surges can come from the ocean side at the same time, so you have to take all of this into account based on your risk tolerance and the value of property you are trying to protect.
  • “proposed solutions ranging from social strategies, like educating local city councils on flood risks” – because political fragmentation, you can only ask nicely and hope other jurisdictions do something. You would also like homeowners/businesses to minimize runoff where practical and have insurance to cover their losses.
  • “green infrastructure like floodable park walkways, as well as a basketball court designed to hold water during major flooding.” – good idea, this is like an engineered floodplain, which you can dry out, hose off, and use for something else most of the time when it is not raining. It’s hard for these measures to deal with truly enormous quantities of water, but they can help in more localized urban flash flooding events.
  • Legalize basement apartments, because people who live in illegal ones tend to be ineligible or afraid to get help.
  • The story also references a flood risk study done for NYC by the Danish. This is always a good idea – collect data, map vulnerable areas, have computer models up and running to assess future risks (again, full disclosure, you can pay me to do this…) The Danish are good at this. So are the Dutch, and yes, my fellow geographically challenged Americans, the Danish and Dutch are different (but either will do).

Another article in Slate lists a couple more ideas for NYC:

  • “expand upon the modeling completed for this effort and continue developing a citywide hydrologic and hydraulic (H&H) model to better estimate runoff flow for various climate scenarios to be included in the drainage planning process.” Slate calls this “policy gibberish”. Okay Slate author, just leave it to the experts if you don’t want to try to understand it.
  • “Plant more trees” – I love trees. Again, mostly helpful in smaller to medium size storms, and for water quality. Also great for cooling, habitat and biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and mental health among many other things. During big storms they will actually cause some damage and even deaths. But the benefits of trees far outweigh the costs. They need to be cared for.
  • “Pick up the trash”. There was a lot of talk in Philadelphia too about storm drains clogged with trash. This is absolutely an issue. I am not sure it is a decisive issue in a massive storm like Ida, when all the pipes are full whether storm drains are open or not. But it would help during the 99.99% of the time we are not experiencing the remnants of a major tropical storm. Source controls and modernizing trash collection are also a big deal for getting the plastic out of the ocean and for quality of life in cities. The only losers are the rats, so let’s get this one done!
  • “Protect the subway” – I saw this done well in Singapore. Every subway entrance, and every building with an underground parking garage (which is most there), has a “crest elevation”, which is basically a little ramp you have to walk or drive up before you go back down underground. This works. It actually pushes flash flooding onto streets, which the public and politicians don’t like very much, but it is a practical way to deal with very large events. In civil engineering we call the streets the “major drainage system”, acknowledging that every once in awhile they are a good place to park water temporarily.

The one major thing not listed here is managing (avoiding where possible) flood plain development. You might think major cities don’t have much space left to develop in floodplains. But in Philadelphia, a lot of the flooding that made national news during Ida was flooding of recently built developments in floodplains. You want to leave those as park land, natural land, or agricultural land when you can. When you do allow development in the flood plain or you are dealing with historical floodplain development, you need to think about the elevations of entrances as mentioned previously.

Even with all these measures, disaster planning and response will still be needed. We are going to be doing more of this so let’s have plans in place and get good at it.