Category Archives: Web Article Review

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.

checking in on the “nuclear rennaissance”

This article focuses on one particular failed nuclear power project in the U.S. but it checks in on the idea of a stalled “nuclear rennaissance” overall.

The South Carolina legislature conducted hearings about the project’s collapse. But it has fallen to the United States Attorney for South Carolina to outline internal decisions that led to project abandonment—via court filings, plea agreements, and indictments. These filings are proving to be the best documentation so far of criminal behavior related to projects that were part of a much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” that began in the early-2000s but has since petered out in the United States…

The fault for the shocking AP1000 misadventure falls squarely on the shoulders of Westinghouse and the involved utilities. They all fell victim to their own reactor-promotion propaganda but lacked the technical and management competence to pull off the projects as envisaged. With pursuit of large light-water reactors in the United States all but dead, the nuclear industry is now endlessly touting an array of “small modular reactors” and a dizzying menu of so-called “advanced reactors,” all of which exist only on paper. It’s unclear if there’s a path forward for this nuclear renaissance redux, and if there is, whether taxpayers will be put on the hook for financing some of it.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

I can imagine an alternate history without Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and where climate change was understood and taken seriously by the public and governments much earlier. Nuclear energy was embraced on a vast scale, homes, buildings, and transportation were mostly electrified, and the world economy grew for 50 years without the devastating carbon emissions that are now starting to wreck our planet’s ecology and threaten our food supply. No doubt, there are some accidents and waste storage/disposal problems in this world, but with an honest accounting of the cost of carbon pollution would this world be worse off? Maybe nuclear weapons proliferation would be worse in this world, but then again, maybe a world where civilian nuclear technology was more shared but controlled by international safeguards would feel less pressure for proliferation.

The other issue with nuclear power plants is they have incredibly high up front costs and are incredibly long-lived. As technology progresses, a nuclear power plant is going to be obsolete (i.e., not based on the latest technology) by the time you design it and get it in the ground, and then you are stuck operating it for the next 50 years. So you have to take a really long range view, governments have to shoulder a good portion of the risk, and you have to keep the R&D going in parallel even though you know it takes decades to pay off. All this is doable, it just takes leadership and discipline, which our species and civilization mostly lacks.

Elon Musk and space-based solar

Charlie Stross says Elon Musk is trying to corner the market for space-based solar power.

Musk owns Tesla Energy. And I think he’s going to turn a profit on Starship by using it to launch Space based solar power satellites. By my back of the envelope calculation, a Starship can put roughly 5-10MW of space-rate photovoltaic cells into orbit in one shot. ROSA—Roll Out Solar Arrays now installed on the ISS are ridiculously light by historic standards, and flexible: they can be rolled up for launch, then unrolled on orbit. Current ROSA panels have a mass of 325kg and three pairs provide 120kW of power to the ISS: 2 tonnes for 120KW suggests that a 100 tonne Starship payload could produce 6MW using current generation panels, and I suspect a lot of that weight is structural overhead. The PV material used in ROSA reportedly weighs a mere 50 grams per square metre, comparable to lightweight laser printer paper, so a payload of pure PV material could have an area of up to 20 million square metres. At 100 watts of usable sunlight per square metre at Earth’s orbit, that translates to 2GW. So Starship is definitely getting into the payload ball-park we’d need to make orbital SBSP stations practical. 1970s proposals foundered on the costs of the Space Shuttle, which was billed as offering $300/lb launch costs (a sad and pathetic joke), but Musk is selling Starship as a $2M/launch system, which works out at $20/kg.

antipope.org

It just makes sense that you could intercept enormous amounts of solar energy in space and beam it down somehow. The sun is so unimaginably vast that only a miniscule fraction of its energy ever strikes the Earth. If you can position solar panels in orbit so they are not shading the Earth, it seems like there would be no practical limit to how much energy you could gather. Then you have the problem of beaming it down. The engineers who look into this assure us that it can be done at a low enough intensity that we would experience only a pleasantly warm sensation if you happened to walk through the beam, and they can do it in the middle of nowhere so that doesn’t even happen. Of course, members of the public are likely to be very skeptical of this if and when it does happen. Still, if most people are skeptical, a small country or multi-national corporation or two could create a nice carbon-free heavy industry setup and either out-compete or charge everybody else to use it.

Saying something smart about Afghanistan?

As I write on Monday, August 16, it appears the government of Afghanistan has surrendered to the Taliban with no or few shots fired. I am sure there will be an enormous number of words written about this in the coming decades, and many of them will be smarter than anything I could say now. Nonetheless, here are a few thoughts:

  1. Invading the Graveyard of Empires is not a good idea. Check on the current status of the British and Russian empires. Maybe we will look back on this moment in retrospect as the symbolic end of the U.S. empire (long live the republic!)
  2. I am not sure there is any such thing as humanitarian war. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions were sold on humanitarian objectives, but both almost certainly caused more death and suffering among civilians than they prevented. Diplomacy, economic and trade pressure, humanitarian and peace-keeping missions may be the better way to go, even when they seem frustrating and relatively ineffective.
  3. I still think the Powell doctrine of limited objectives, overwelming force, may be right after all. That was unsatisfying in the case of the first Gulf War, but it was a quick, relatively successful conflict. What would that have looked like in Afghanistan? Well, if we had captured bin Laden early on, there might have been an excuse to leave. When that didn’t happen, we got bogged down with no way out that would not cause chaos. In the end, we just got out and let the chaos unfold. This looks bad for Biden, but it took some guts to make the call and carry it through.
  4. The U.S. just really doesn’t understand other countries. We seem to have trouble putting ourselves in other peoples’ shoes. I don’t fully trust what I see on the news, not because I necessarily think it is lies, but because I don’t trust our government and media to appropriately interpret events and present them to me. I don’t know what to do about this other than seek out a lot of different types of information and try to piece it together. Study history, travel and interact with people from other places when practical. Give expert opinion some weight, while also evaluating the evidence independently using tools like logic and system thinking. By the way, I don’t think censoring the internet is a way out of this. I want access to information and freedom to interpret it, even if there is some danger in everyone having these freedoms at the same time.
  5. What other lessons do we need to heed from past conflicts? Should we maybe invade Russia from Eastern Europe, or engage in some Pacific island hopping, hoping it will put pressure on a large, powerful, proud opponent to give in short of nuclear war? NO!!! Let’s not do this.

What do I think the U.S. should do? Unwind the empire, close foreign bases while providing training and equipment (not necessarily for free) to allies who really want that. Focus on diplomacy and trade. Reinvigorate the UN, or replace it with something better. Make sure we can defend our physical shores, and up our intelligence, cybersecurity and biosecurity games. Dial back and eventually eliminate the nuclear weapons worldwide, and figure out a plan to deal with bioweapons long-term. A war tax is an idea – fund all emergency appropriations with a clear tax that Americans see every day, for example a sales tax that is printed on our receipts, credit card statements, and pay checks. If we don’t deal with short-term geopolitical instability, it will occupy all our attention and leave us no capacity to deal with the longer term threats like food security and inundation of coastal population centers.

why the development gap persists

The world’s technology, for the most part, is available to less developed, lower income countries. So why don’t they just reach out, grab it, and catch up? Well, a few have, particularly the so-called “Asian tigers”. Others have caught up on life expectancy and education, but not on income. This article by Ricardo Hausmann suggests a few reasons why it is not so easy.

  • Restrictions on trade, competition, and/or property rights. (But the point of this article is that these are the traditional answers economists give, and they are not the only reasons.)
  • University scientists are more interested in teaching, basic research, and scientific publications than in applied research that could help profit-seeking commercial firms.
  • Businesses do not invest much in R&D, either internally or with university partners.

He uses patent filings as a proxy for technological innovation, and I am not so sure about that. For one thing, he makes this statement:

Countries like Austria, Germany, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Norway, New Zealand, and Singapore patent at a rate at least one-quarter that of the US. And other countries, such as Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Iran, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia, come in at just above one-seventh the US rate.

Project Syndicate

The countries in the list above are doing quite well I believe compared to the U.S., and I know some of them have per-capita incomes greater than the U.S. Certainly, our per-capita U.S. GDP is not 7 times Norway’s and 4 times Singapore’s! (It’s lower in both cases per the CIA world fact book.)

Also, being healthy and well educated in a middle income country might not be all that terrible a life.

Those are my criticisms. But I do sometimes fantasize about how I would jump-start progress in a developing country. Certainly, I want to believe that big investments in research and education would pay off in the long term. Building universities, attracting talented professors, and then connecting them to private sector needs would seem to be important. I would want to bring in direct investment from private firms with high-tech know-how, and also seek expertise from development agencies like the World Bank, USAID and its equivalents in other countries. In all these cases though, you have to drive a hard bargain or you are likely to be exploited. I might hire Norway or Singapore to help me do that. Get the economy moving, then use the proceeds to build the infrastructure and keep the education and R&D thing going. At some point, you have to invest in health care, environmental protection, and labor standards if you want to provide a decent quality of life for people. I would probably follow Costa Rica’s lead and not bother with much of an army, but then I would probably be invaded by my neighbors or murdered by my own body guards.

Philip K. Dick, Prophet of the Happy Ending

My “summer of parallel universes” reading theme is about to come to an end. Which doesn’t mean I have to stop reading about parallel universes, it just means the meteorological, astronomical, and social season known as summer is coming to an end. I have made a significant dent on the last Dark Tower book, which is known as…The Dark Tower. I might actually finish it by Labor Day, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, this speech reminded me that Philip K. Dick had a lot to say on the subject. Not only does he have a lot to say, he at least claims to believe it or at least consider it more than just a fictional plot line. Finally, he has gathered it into something almost approaching a coherent religion, and not only that but a unifying theory of religions, complete with a (quite rosy) end times scenario.

It’s very hard to pick an excerpt that captures the essence of the speech. The whole thing really is worth a read. But here is one unsatisfactory choice:

“We in the field [of science fiction writers], of course, know this idea as the ‘alternate universe’ theme. …Let us say, just for fun, that [such alternate universes] DO exist. Then, if they do, how are they linked to each other, if in fact they are (or would be) linked? If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, what would the map look like? For instance (and I think this is a very important question), are they absolutely separate one from another, or do they overlap? Because if they overlap, then such problems as ‘Where do they exist?’ and ‘How do you get from one to the next’ admit to a possible solution. I am saying, simply, if they do indeed exist, and if they do indeed overlap, then we may in some literal, very real sense inhabit several of them to various degrees at any given time. And although we all see one another as living humans walking about and talking and acting, some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of, say, Universe One than the other people do; and some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of Universe Two, Track Two, instead, and so on. It may not merely be that our subjective impressions of the world differ, but there may be an overlapping, a superimposition, of a number of worlds so that objectively, not subjectively, our worlds may differ. Our perceptions differ as a result of this… It may be that some of these superimposed worlds are passing out of existence, along the lateral time line I spoke of, and some are in the process of moving toward greater, rather than lesser, actualization. These processes would occur simultaneously and not at all in linear time. The kind of process we are talking about here is a transformation, a kind of metamorphosis, invisibly achieved. But very real. And very important…

Christ was saying over and over again that there really are many objective realms, somehow related, and somehow bridgeable by living – not dead- men, and that the most wondrous of these worlds was a just kingdom in which either He himself or God himself or both of them ruled. And he did not merely speak of a variety of ways of subjectively viewing one world; the Kingdom was and is an actual different place, at the opposite end of continua starting with slavery and utter pain. It was his mission to teach his disciples the secret of crossing along the orthogonal path. He did not merely report what lay there; he taught the method of getting there. But, the secret was lost, the Roman authority crushed it. And so we do not have it. But perhaps we can refind it, since we know that such a secret exists…

“This problem-solving by means of reprogramming variables along the linear time axis of our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds – I have the impression that the metaphor of the chessboard is especially useful in evaluating how this all can be – in fact must be. Across from the Programmer-Reprogrammer sits a counterentity, whom Joseph Campbell calls the Dark Counterplayer. …The Programmer-Reprogrammer is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter; he is dealing with a cunning opponent. Let us say that on the game board – our universe in space-time – the Dark Counterplayer makes a move; he sets up a reality situation. Being the Dark player, the outcome of his desires constitutes what we experience as evil: nongrowth, the power of the lie, death and the decay of forms, the prison of immutable cause and effect. …The printout which we undergo as historic events, passes through stages of a dialectical interaction, thesis and antithesis, as the forces of the two players mingle. Evidently some syntheses fall to the dark counterplayer.

Philip K. Dick, 1977

To me, this religion actually seems logically coherent with the world I am experiencing right now. Which doesn’t mean I believe it, but I would rate it as more probable than a number of others, and if I were currently shopping for a religion I might add it to my cart but not hit the check out button just yet.