Category Archives: Web Article Review

western U.S. mega-drought

blog.weather.us has a nice three-part article on the hydrometeorology behind the severe and likely long-term drought affecting the western U.S. I’ll admit I haven’t had time to read every word, but it looks to be well worth the read. It’s complicated if you want to get into the details, but it pretty much boils down to less rain and more evaporation.

I remember going to an American Water Resources Association specialty conference on climate change around 2011 or 2012, and listening to a speaker from Australia. The person showed data clearly showing that annual rainfall had slowly declined over the course of a decade or more and settled at a new normal. It took the political system there about a decade to accept the situation and begin to address it. The U.S. may be about where Australia was 10-15 years ago, but that is in a context of global trends that have been going downhill during that time.

I figure the west will turn to conservation and, if necessary, desalination to supply drinking water to large urban populations. Fires will just have to be accepted and dealt with. It seems to me that the long-term viability of agriculture in California and maybe across the Great Plains is in doubt, as the loss of rainfall and increased evaporation happen alongside loss of mountain ice and snowpack, and alongside a century of groundwater mining. Maybe we can move more agricultural indoors, maybe to coastal areas served by desalination plants, but we’ll have to harden those coastlines against sea level rise and increasingly severe storms. If all this comes to pass, it will cost a lot more than growing food outside in the sun, soil, and water and nature has provided mostly for free up until now. There is the question of where the energy required will come from. Food prices will go up, and unless our incomes go up along with them we will have less resources to spend on other things, making us poorer. Preservation of natural habitats will not be a priority if such a world comes to pass. And of course, in the United States and many other countries, we do not share the wealth we do have, so the poor and working class will suffer the most. Eventually this will lead to migration pressure and further strain our political system.

how to tape an air filter to a box fan

Yes, you can tape a furnace air filter to a box fan and use it as an air purifier. Here’s a long article with many links and videos on the options. You have to be careful – my own family has burned out fan motors trying to put seemingly light weight nets over them to keep childrens’ fingers out (no smoke, no fire, they just quit working, but still a good idea to switch fans off when you are away from home as a general principle). You can in fact just tape the filter to the back of the fan and be done. More elaborate setups build a cube out of the filters with the fan inside, increasing the surface area and putting less stress on the motor. Some approaches use cardboard cutouts to channel the air flow (which seems harder on the motor to me). People are Covid-focused these days, but seasonal allergies will be around long after Covid is gone. This seems like it could be a particularly cheap and effective intervention in offices and schools.

Modern, cheap plastic fan blades won’t cut off or even break your fingers by the way, in my experience, and I do have experience. As a relatively tall man, I also have experience being whacked in the head by a ceiling fan blade a time or two. Both these things cause significant pain, but I am still here with all my body parts and no long-term damage.

What’s new with “cliodynamics”?

Cliodynamics is an attempt to collect and organize data on human history in a structured way that can be subjected to scientific testing. The link I just posted is to Peter Turchin’s blog, and the actual data set(s?) are available here.

There’s also a recently published book on comparative history called Figuring out the Past, which sounds interesting. My formal education in history, which did not extend past grade school, often focused on the history of individual countries (most obviously, the U.S.). Other offerings, which I didn’t have time to take in the course of my oh-so-practical engineering education, often seemed to focus on specific topics. I often wonder if it would be possible to teach kids world history more or less chronologically over the course of several years, and really delve into what was happening simultaneously in different parts of the world at various times. The other way I learn about history informally as an adult is to read or hear about a current event, then dig deeper into the history of a particular geographic area or human group to try to understand the context for the current event. I’m almost always surprised at how little context I actually had to understand the current event before I started digging, and I never have time to do as much digging as I might like.

Data is another way to look at/teach/learn about history. I’m often interested in how many people were alive at a given time, how much energy they used and what their energy sources were, and (somewhat morbidly) what they died of. But I don’t really know where to begin to look for most of that data.

the UFO report

Here is one place to access the official UFO report. It says next to nothing, and is almost not worth the time. It was clearly typed out in a few hours by a summer intern. Like any good research report that concludes nothing, the authors would like to collect more data, they would like to do further studies, and they would like someone to pay for that.

Anyway, here are the possible explanations they give for UFOs:

  • airborne clutter: birds, balloons, “recreational unmanned vehicles”, and plastic bags
  • natural atmospheric phenomena: ice crystals, moisture, thermal fluctuations (because these things can show up on sensors)
  • “USG or Industry Development Programs”: they don’t bother to define USG, but I am thinking United States Government. “We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.”
  • Foreign Adversary Systems: “China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity”, such as a Bond villain. Okay, I added that last one.

Conspicuously missing from the list is aliens, a previously undiscovered deep-sea civilization exploring our atmosphere (see Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series), or entities operating in parallel universes (see Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series). I have no evidence for any of these theories, which is to say I have exactly the same amount of evidence presented in this report in support of the theories above. My recommendation is to spend your time reading science fiction/fantasy series by Charles Stross rather than this report. You will be much more entertained, and no less informed.

yes, the Dutch are good at water…

It’s actually true that the Dutch are good water engineers. It’s just slightly annoying that the Dutch themselves are fond of telling us that, and then like to remind us frequently of that fact. Nonetheless, here’s a roundup of Dutch water engineering stuff. A lot of it is just using data analysis and computer simulations to predict what is going to happen and then designing clever interventions to nudge it one way or another. That is good basic engineering using modern tools, and not always done in other countries where political priorities lie elsewhere. Some of it is just a willingness and ability to pay for the aesthetic side of design, even if it costs a lot and takes a long time. The Dutch are patient, science- and logic-driven, and rational. I suppose they have earned the right to be just a tiny bit smug about it.

ARPA-H

ARPA-H is an idea for a new U.S. agency (probably within the existing National Institutes of Health) focused on leading edge medical and biotech research. It seems like a bit of a gimmick to me, but if this is what it takes to fund research and development (as opposed to just funding more research and development) I am all for it. The U.S. should have a competitive advantage here, and this should benefit out citizens.

checking in with Noam Chomsky

In this Alternet article, Noam Chomsky describes the business class as Marxists waging a class struggle. They never give up and working class is always on the defensive. So if the working class is less aggressive, which he says they have been since the “centrist Carter administration”, big business will get the upper hand as it has in the U.S. He sees some hope in the movement started by Bernie Sanders.

Will oil companies be forced to cut emissions?

This article from Guardian talks about court cases and shareholder activism that may finally force oil companies to take climate change seriously. Even Exxon which, in my opinion, through its manipulation of the U.S. political system bears significant responsibility for the fact that we have a climate crisis in the first place, or at least for the fact that we have not made a significant attempt to deal with it.

A couple points. When we talk about an oil company “cutting emissions”, I don’t think we are talking about the emissions caused by people and businesses using the product. I think we are talking about emissions used in exploration, production, and transportation of the oil itself. Which is all good, but not the root of the fossil fuel emissions problem which is burning the stuff to liberate energy to do work. The fact that the amoral, possibly psychopathic financial industry is turning on the oil industry means they think we are going to be burning less of it going forward. An oil company that invests in “sustainable investments” other than oil is no longer an oil company. The electric utility industry and nuclear industries are completely different animals with existing players, so Exxon is not just going to take them over. So maybe Exxon will just evolve into some sort of venture capital fund looking for profitable investments for its dollars. And there are already plenty of other companies doing that for it to compete with, so I don’t see why Exxon would be particularly adept at it. If they don’t make it long term, good riddance. See you in hell, guys!

gargoyles of Philadelphia

This post is probably only on local interest, but Billy Penn has an article on all the carvings on Philadelphia’s City Hall, which is also the world’s largest free-standing masonry structure. That is, this is about as big as you could build a building out of stone, before concrete and steel are invented. Like most things in Philadelphia, it is poorly maintained, underperforming and underwhelming. This may have something to do with the gargoyles inside the building.