Some (all?) Tesla 3’s, apparently, are designed to effectively navigate flood waters in a sort of boat mode. Don’t try this at home, i.e. on the road near your home. First of all, you don’t know if your Tesla 3 has this feature. Second of all, even if you know you have this feature, you might take more risk, enter flood waters you wouldn’t otherwise enter, and end up equally dead.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
a jumbo jet crashing every hour
Here are some disturbing statistics on child mortality worldwide.
Child mortality refers to the death of children before their fifth birthday. We live in a world in which 5.4 million children die every year. That’s ten dead children every minute.
Imagine what it means for a child to lose his or her life; imagine what it means for a family to see their child die. Ten families will experience that in the next minute. This will repeat every minute for the rest of the year. That is the horror of child mortality.
These daily tragedies do not receive the attention they deserve. Comparing it with those tragedies that do receive public attention makes this clear. A large jumbo jet can carry up to 600 passengers.3 The number of child deaths is equivalent to a crash of a jumbo jet with only children on board, every hour of every day of the year.
Max Roser, Our World in Data
It suggests a few points to me. One is that we are most scared and pay the most attention to new threats, like Covid or murder hornets. Meanwhile, old threats like car accidents, heart disease, and malaria cause suffering and death on a much larger scale. We are complacent and accepting of them either because they happen to other people far away (from the perspective of a prosperous country like the U.S.) or because they are so common we assume nothing can be done about them (traffic deaths).
Second, the enormous disparities between countries make it clear that something can be done about child mortality, and that it is a moral imperative to do so. It is not even high tech, it is just a failure of our civilization to recognize the problem, feel the responsibility, organize and act.
The plots of per capita income vs. child mortality are worth staring at. As the article drives home, there are no poor countries with low child mortality rates, suggesting that economic development is necessary in addition to direct interventions (nutrition, vaccination, sanitation, and health care are mentioned.) The U.S., of course, is in the group of richer nations with much lower child mortality rates than the poorer countries. But within its group, the U.S. is the clear laggard compared to the rest of the developed world. We are not applying our wealth and know-how effectively to keep our young children from dying.
what Europe and China are doing on carbon emissions
Well, the EU is apparently instituting a “carbon border tax”.
The EU plan is controversial because it contains an extra-territorial dimension – the much-foreshadowed and very controversial carbon border tax that would impose a carbon tax on imports from countries with lesser emissions reduction targets and carbon prices…
The EU already has arguably the world’s most ambitious response to climate change. It launched its emissions trading system in 2005 and has reduced its emissions, from 1990 levels, by nearly 25 per cent.
Sydney Morning Herald
Not all industries have been covered by the emissions trading scheme, but going forward the system would add steelmakers, power generators, shipping, transport, buildings, carmakers and eventually agriculture to some extent.
Meanwhile, China is starting a new emissions trading scheme, and the U.S. Congress is at least talking again about some kind of carbon pricing, trading, and/or border tax. If all this happens, it would cover a lot of the world’s people, economic production, and pollutant production. I suppose developing countries could be at a disadvantage initially if they can’t continue to grow by expanding dirty industries, but in theory the clean technologies and processes that will result should filter through to them. They certainly will not be well-served by a world of famines, fires, and floods that will result if nothing is done.
Breakthrough Energy Catalyst
Bill Gates has an idea for how to accelerate research, innovation, and adoption of new technologies.
Through BE Catalyst, the airline will be able to invest in a large refinery that produces a high volume of sustainable fuel. As the refinery gets going, the airline can start buying fuel there. Even better, once the plant’s design is proven to work, the cost of building subsequent plants will drop. With more refineries in operation, the volume of available fuel will go up and the price will come down, which will make it more attractive to buyers, which will draw more innovative companies into the market. The virtuous cycle will accelerate.
Gates Notes
So if I understand correctly, once you have a promising technology, this is a way to try to accelerate the learning curve. Often promising technologies don’t catch on because the initial unit cost is to be commercially viable. Bringing the technology to market at scale will drive down the price both because the up front investment is spread over a large number of units, and because manufacturers and users will learn by doing and the technology will improve. But there is a chicken and egg problem where somebody has to stick their neck out and make that up-front investment to get the process started, then be patient while it plays out possibly over many decades, and be willing to take at least some risk that it may not work out. So the idea behind this non-profit group seems to be to share enough of that risk so commercial entities are willing to invest.
Four specific technologies are mentioned for this process: long-duration energy storage, sustainable aviation fuels, direct air capture (of greenhouse gases), and green hydrogen.
This sounds good to me. Maybe a model like this could work in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, where technological progress is painfully slow and the payoff of technology is likely to be over multiple decades at least.
poverty, race, and math
Here’s some math on U.S. poverty.
- from Census.gov: estimated U.S. population on July 1, 2019: 328,240,000
- “Black or African American alone, percent”: 13.4% (this works out to 43,984,000, rounding all numbers to the nearest 1,000)
- “White alone, percent”: 76.3% (this works out to 250,447,000)
- from Urban Institute: U.S. poverty rate in 2021, all races: 13.7% (44,969,000)
- Black poverty rate: 18.1% (7,961,000)
- White poverty rate: 9.6% (24,043,000)
A few points/opinions, which I hope will not be too controversial.
- A long history of legal and institutional racism in the U.S. is an obvious fact, a moral outrage, and needs to be corrected, particularly in housing and education.
- A greater fraction of the black population is poor compared to the white population.
- There are more poor white people than poor black people in the country.
- You have to be careful comparing averages between groups of very different sizes.
- From a moral perspective, if you want to help the most people, you would not only help black people. You would try to help people who need help in both groups, while trying to even out the disparities.
- From a political perspective, an incessant focus on race, and rhetoric equating race and poverty, is going to turn off a lot of poor white voters. This ends up electing politicians who are not going to help poor people of either race.
- There are other races, there are many mixes of races, and there are many confusing census questions about whether people consider themselves hispanic instead of or in addition to the other races. I am not a professional demographer, and do not know the absolute best way to handle these issues.
Terminator 2
Terminator 2 was released 30 years ago this week (I’m writing this on Sunday, July 11, 2021). Here’s a TLDR article. I would have been 15 turning 16 at the time, so I was at just the right age to be awed by it, and I was. (and probably just barely old enough to be allowed to watch it, although I don’t remember.) I don’t recall if I saw it in the theater for the first time or by operating a VHS video disk player machine. Luckily the events in the movie have not actually come to pass in the last 30 years. Not that we need an evil computer to risk nuclear war. Fingers crossed.
Richard Branson
Richard Branson is going to space. Which doesn’t particularly interest me. But what I find interesting is how his spaceship works. First, it is strapped to the bottom of a normal (but big) plane which takes off from a normal runway.
Once Unity reaches an altitude approaching 50,000 feet (15,200 meters), it will detach from Eve and ignite its single rocket motor. It will go supersonic within eight seconds and power up to 2,600 miles per hour (4,200 kilometers per hour), or beyond Mach 3.
After 70 seconds the engine will cut out, with the spacecraft coasting to its peak altitude, which for Sunday’s mission will be a height of 55 miles or almost 300,000 feet, according to Virgin Galactic.
MSN
When it is ready to come down, it spreads its wings into a sort of “feather” which sounds like a parachute, drifts back into the atmosphere (which starts at 50 miles according to NASA, but closer to 60 miles according to some international standards), then folds its wings back into airplane mode and returns to the runway as an unpowered glider.
Jeff Bezos’s version takes off as a rocket, apparently. Like I said, I don’t particularly care about the egos of these men, but it does appear that the era of private space flight is upon us.
robot pollinators
Somehow, startup companies have heard about my idea for robotic bees. (This is a Wall Street Journal article, which I don’t subscribe to, but I can get the idea from the first couple paragraphs. Sorry guys, I can’t afford to subscribe to anything, and if I have to pick one thing it will probably be to support my local paper. Except, if I lived in New York, it would not be the New York Times because weapons of mass destruction.) More likely, it’s a fairly obvious idea. And probably a good idea, if the pollinators really are disappearing worldwide. Then again, it’s a partial technological solution to replace a lost ecosystem service. Trucking around hives of domesticated honeybees to replace or supplement natural pollinators in farm fields is already a technological solution, if you think about it. Important questions: Do they sting? (I hope the answer is an obvious no.) Are we going to release clouds of robot pollinators into natural ecosystems? Probably not, this seems focused on agriculture. Are they going to be solar powered? It seems like it would be safer to have them return to a charging station, or else drop dead if their batteries run out.
This also brings up all the usual questions about valuing ecosystem services. Pollination is absolutely essential to life on earth, so pollinators are incredibly valuable in an economic sense. If we replace them with technology, does their value drop? In an economic sense, yes. In a moral sense, I would say no, at least to me.
Why I’m not fully vaccinated (for Lyme disease)
I’m not fully vaccinated for Lyme disease because there is no vaccine available and I have no choice in the matter. I remember the vaccine being available, but recently I was discussing this with a friend who looked at me as though I had grown two heads when I mentioned it. Anyway, this Slate article explains what happened:
We had one, once. The Food and Drug Administration approved LYMErix, manufactured by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), for use in 1998. LYMErix worked by inducing antibodies into human blood, which would then go into any ticks that attached to your body. There, they would neutralize the bacteria that cause Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, before the bacteria could go from the tick into you. In clinical trials, the shot showed about 78 percent effectiveness after the required three doses (hey, I’d take it). But some patients who got the shot after it went on the market testified that they developed arthritis after vaccination. The FDA investigated, but decided the evidence that the vaccine was linked to patients’ arthritis wasn’t strong enough to withdraw its approval for LYMErix. Sales fell nonetheless, and the company pulled the vaccine in 2002.
Slate
So if the vaccine was approved, isn’t it still approved? This would lead me to believe there is a working, approved vaccine, but it is not commercially available because there is not enough of a market for it for companies to make a profit. But to have a market, wouldn’t it be helpful if the general public were aware of its existence?
The article reaches some ridiculous conclusions about a Lyme vaccine mostly benefitting the affluent, and this sounds like nonsense to me. They don’t offer any evidence for this claim. Which sounds ridiculous to me, because the hunting/hiking/camping crowd most at risk is going to be a decidedly working- to middle-class one. Maybe the working class is more familiar with and therefore less afraid of this disease than the more affluent? There could be a grain of truth here.
I think everyone knows someone who has had a brush with this disease. I can think of a work colleague who was incorrectly diagnosed with early-onset arthritis and lived in pain for some time before Lyme disease was correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated. Second, a cousin who was rushed to the hospital with a racing heart and difficulty breathing during the height of the Covid crisis in 2020 – in this case, it was correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated, and he is fine after going through a somewhat harrowing episode. So this is a serious disease. But beyond the pain and suffering it causes directly, it just really takes away a lot of peoples’ desire and excitement to be in the woods. And it keeps children of some risk-averse parents out of the woods, which is a shame but understandable. It’s also a shame if you’re a gardener in a tick infested area who wants to grow anything other than neatly-trimmed grass. Your neighbors can complain you are putting them at risk of Lyme disease, and they may have a point. So really, it would be nice to have a vaccine for this disease available so we can all weigh the evidence and make up our minds.
Incidentally, a Lyme disease vaccine for dogs is approved and commercially available. And the public charity and savior of humanity known as Pfizer is working on a new vaccine and hoping to have it on the market by 2025 (but really, if there is a 100% approved vaccine out there and Pfizer believes there is now a market, can’t somebody just buy the recipe and start making it right now?)
water recycling in the (U.S.) west
Wired has an article on water recycling, also known as “toilet to tap”. A stat I didn’t know is that about 10% of California’s wastewater is currently recycled. As they point out, getting new membrane plants up and running requires a lot of lead time, so if we want them up and running in a decade now is the time to start.
Singapore has invested heavily in membranes, although the water scarcity situation there has an added geopolitical dimension that makes it somewhat of a no-brainer. Their recycled water is pure enough to be used for industrial purposes such as semi-conductor plants. For drinking water, they just divert the recycled water back into a reservoir, suck it out again and put it through the normal treatment process, which somewhat ironically makes it a bit dirtier. But as this article points out, you don’t really want to drink nothing but distilled water.
Thinking about the west though, agricultural is a big issue, and for agriculture you don’t need membranes. Plain old wastewater treatment will work just fine.
Chemicals are a concern for me. The membranes won’t necessarily remove all those cleaning chemicals, personal care chemicals, lawn and garden chemicals, pesticides and pharmaceuticals we use on a daily basis. Nor will regular old water and wastewater treatment. If we are serious about doing something about those, we need to tackle them at the source and find safe, effective substitutes.