Category Archives: Web Article Review

sperm counts and clean chemistry

Yes, according to one study from 2017, sperm counts are crashing and if you just extrapolate out in time it leads to disaster for the human race. Now, I had heard that sperm counts have dropped steadily over the decades, and we still have plenty of sperm for now, but we don’t know where the trend is headed next. I know about the concerns with endocrine disrupters. We also know that fertility is down for a variety of reasons, beginning with women around the world having more choices in terms of education and career.

This comprehensive meta-regression analysis reports a significant decline in sperm counts (as measured by SC and TSC) between 1973 and 2011, driven by a 50-60% decline among men unselected by fertility from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Because of the significant public health implications of these results, research on the causes of this continuing decline is urgently needed.

Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and meta-regression analysis

I assume we are probably headed for a world of more technologically-assisted reproduction for a variety of reasons, beginning with just wanting to have more control over our fertility at various stages of our lives. But endocrine disrupters are potentially bad news for humans and for ecosystems. We don’t really try very hard to look for safer and equally functional chemicals before we put lots of them in the environment and in our bodies. I believe better living through chemistry does make our lives better on balance. For example, get rid of food preservatives or water disinfectants and we would instantly cause massive amounts of suffering and death. But get rid of most of the weird stuff in my shampoo, and I would still be able to wash my hair just fine. Building materials are a tough one. The tar on my roof and siding on my house are highly functional and beneficial, but they both cause pollution in production, manufacturing, and most likely cause water and air pollution. We can say similar things for materials used to build our streets and highways. We should look for clean but equally functional substitutes for all of these. And in the meantime, we should probably impose taxes to offset the impact these materials cause. This could both fund research into alternatives and provide some incentive to adopt alternatives as they become available.

advertising shits in your head

Some books just have good titles. And this one is called Advertising Shits in Your Head: Strategies for Resistance. From the publisher:

Advertising Shits in Your Head calls adverts what they are—a powerful means of control through manipulation—and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. It diagnoses the problem and offers practical tips for a DIY remedy. Faced with an ad-saturated world, activists are fighting back, equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools. Their aim is to subvert the adverts that control us.

“PM Press is an independent, radical publisher of books and media to educate, entertain, and inspire.”

Really, they had me at the title. But it seems to me that the main way to counter the shit is to teach children from a young age to evaluate the source and quality of information they are taking in, expose themselves to multiple sources of information, think critically, draw their own conclusions, discuss their conclusions with other informed people, and be open minded.

Somewhat related is this new browser plug-in Newsguard, which provides “Trust ratings for all the news sites that account for 95% of engagement” and is “Written by journalists, not secret algorithms.” Sounds okay, although I think I have too many browser plug-ins already.

attribution science, and some thoughts on computer modeling

This Slate article explains how attribution science works. It depends on modeling. Basically, scientists model an event (like a storm, flood, fire, whatever) using a hypothetical condition where the event did not occur, and compare that to the data from our actual universe where it did occur.

I do a fair amount of modeling in my job, and there are always skeptics (some more informed than others). Why would anyone trust a computer model? Isn’t empirical measurement always better? Well, we model things we can’t measure, often things that could or would have occurred if things were different, or things that might happen in the future. To trust a model, first, somewhat obviously, you need to say what the model is for, clearly. Second, you need to be confident that it is adequately representing the real-world processes underlying the system you are interested in. Whether this is true requires expert judgment, and the expert needs to really understand the system. If the expert is confident in this, and the expert knows what they are doing, the model has some usefulness even if there is no data. (Purely empirical models like regression equations don’t represent processes, and therefore have limited predictive value if conditions change significantly.) But we always want data. Third, the modeler will compare what the model predicts to some real data. The modeler needs to be aware that there is always uncertainty in how well measurements represent the real condition of the actual physical universe, and that this uncertainty will propagate through the model (the uninformed often think of this as “model error”.) If the prediction is reasonably accurate without tweaking, you may have a pretty good model. Often the modeler will do a little tweaking to improve the fit, but the more tweaking the more you are moving toward an empirical model with less predictive value. In a somewhat old-fashioned (according to me) but common approach in the engineering field, the modeler will set a portion of the data aside while doing the tweaking, then compare the tweaked model to the portion they set aside. I don’t usually do this, because there is never enough data. I tend to use it all, then check the model again when more data becomes available in the future.

Finally, we have a model that we are confident represents underlying processes, matches real-world measurements reasonably well, and is suitable for its stated purpose. We can use the model for that purpose, be clear about the known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and draw some conclusions that might be useful in the real world. We have some information that can inform decisions better than guesses alone could have, and that we couldn’t have learned from data alone.

China and Taiwan

What would a China-Taiwan military conflict look like, and could it happen in 2021 or in the relatively near future? Would the U.S. necessarily get dragged in?

I don’t really trust what I read in the media about China. It’s not that I assume everything I read is outright lies, but I assume there are layers of misunderstanding and intentional bias along with facts. For one thing, we know the U.S. military-industrial complex needs enemies to continue sucking in a quarter or so of our tax payments and our government’s spending. Then there is just the general American lack of ability to see things from other peoples’ and countries’ points of view. It can help to read accounts from international sources, although they will also have biases. Anyway, this particular account is from The Diplomat, which seems to be a reputable news source from what I can tell, and the author is a Taiwanese academic. So exercise your own judgment in evaluating the source, but here is my summary:

  • China’s official stated goal is “peaceful unification”.
  • China is engaged in propaganda, disinformation, and putting pressure on other countries in the region. (I would imagine this is true of both sides, and in fact most countries in any kind of conflict.)
  • China’s goal in a military conflict would be for any conflict to be over quickly, before other countries have much chance to react.
  • China is currently engaged in what the author calls a “gray zone strategy”, in which it uses ships and aircraft to harass and threaten Taiwan without actually attacking. It might also be doing things underwater in “blind spots that Taiwan’s surveillance and reconnaissance systems fail to cover.”
  • Further escalation could be to blockade offshore islands claimed by Taiwan, and possibly occupy them.
  • The next major escalation could be stopping ship traffic to and from Taiwan, which would cut off energy supplies and trade.
  • China would likely amass a large number of troops nearby, whether or not it had immediate plans to use them. The initial goal would be to intimidate politicians in Taiwan in hopes they would agree to negotiate.
  • The Taiwan military and leadership would have to decide at this point whether to defend itself militarily, which could launch an all-out war.

This article doesn’t quite hold together for me. A protracted blockade seems like exactly the thing that would give Taiwan time to appeal internationally for help, and other countries time to decide what to do.

24 million people live on Taiwan, and they have many more people who care about them all over the world. The human cost of any military conflict would be horrific. Let’s hope none of this ever comes to pass!

study skills and note taking

I find theories on study skills interesting. Even if you are not a student anymore, they can be generalized to try to be more efficient at work and outside of work, and try to learn something every day. I’m the type of personality that concentrating and learning is the most fun thing I can do every day, but only if I can really concentrate without distractions and interruptions (especially noise and people rushing around) and only if the thing I am learning is something I want to learn at my own pace, not something I have to learn at someone else’s pace. And of course, this is not how real work or life work most of the time.

Anyway, this article and lecture on study skills is interesting. The main premise is that people can concentrate for about 25-30 minutes, after which they need a short break. And after several of these short bursts of focus, they need a long break to do something else in another location. I’ve experimented with the Pomodoro technique, which is based on this idea. I think something in the neighborhood of 40 minutes works okay for me. A 5-10 minute break is long enough to take a mental break without losing focus. For those of us chained to our desks by billable hours, this is about the longest break we can take without raising eyebrows with the boss and/or our own consciences.

Anyway, beyond that, the article also mentions Richard Feynman’s “notebook technique” (fill a notebook with notes on a particular subject, then plan out a class where you teach the subject to other people, even if it is only pretend) and some note-taking techniques. Drill down into the links a little and you come to the Cornell note taking system, which I find interesting. I have actually seen real people from Cornell use it.

My teachers really emphasized note taking around 7th-8th grade, and I think what I learned then has served me well throughout school and life. They also focused on how to research a topic and how to write an essay. They taught a preview-read-take notes-review technique that I still think works well. I used to assume other people had learned similar skills around middle or high school, but I have found since then that most otherwise intelligent, educated people actually do not have this skill. The main thing, beyond taking notes, is reviewing them regularly. I actually try to review mine daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly, the last two being more of a heavy skim. I used to use loose leaf paper and a clipboard, after which I would move the notes to binders. The binders would have tabs and occasionally indexes. These days, I use mostly Microsoft OneNote for note taking, with lots of tabs and some hyperlinks. I don’t do a lot of sketches and pictures, I think mostly through lists and writing although I will draw diagrams where my words and lists are in boxes and connected by arrows. I know pictures are more important for a lot of people.

2020…in space commercialization

One thing that happened in 2020 is some long-term trends in space commercialization started to come to fruition in an obvious way. Axios has a roundup:

  • record (unmanned) “commercial launches”
  • U.S. astronauts traveled to the International Space Station on a privately-owned-but-publicly-funded rocket.
  • A bunch of space-related companies sold public stock

A “trend to watch” for 2021 is “megaconstellations of internet-beaming satellites like Starlink”. Wait, “like Starlink”? So there are others? How much space is really out there? This article says the business model is still unproven, but I say the real reason is that Elon Musk is a Bond villain.

This article is about near-Earth space commercialization, not space exploration or travel. Not covered are the wrinkle-resistant flag that China planted on the moon, a variety of un-manned missions to Mars and other planets/objects in the solar system, and the usual array of stories about physics and possible alien signals/contact.

game-changing technologies from 2020

Here are a few from various places around the web:

Nabeel S. Qureshi: From what I gather, this guy works at the RAND corporation, and is not related to the author with a similar name who passed away a couple years ago. Anyway, he has a list on Twitter:

  • mRNA vaccine
  • Apple M1 chip – it’s a computer chip, I guess a bit faster or more efficient or whatever than others
  • SpaceX rocket launch
  • GPT-3 – this is a machine learning thing that has to do with computers generating text that sounds very realistic to humans. Or to put it another way, computers can write now? But they still can’t think, that we know of. This seems concerning.
  • various initial public offerings
  • “V-shaped recovery” – optimistic, I hope it turns out to be true in retrospect
  • electric cars
  • “Crypto going mainstream” – cryptocurrency? I’m not sure how/if this affected me directly in 2020, but I do know that for the first time I used almost no cash at all from March-December.

scrolling through the comments, some of which have additional suggestions from nice people, interspersed with some nasty and stupid ones of course.

  • Bt eggplant – this is a crop with a relatively harmless insecticide built in. It basically targets a particular type of caterpillar. Okay I guess as long as it doesn’t escape into the wild and kill beneficial insects or outcompete unmodified plants. I sprinkle Bt for mosquitoes on my garden and in my storm drains.
  • technology and widespread adoption of remote working – some of this will fade after Covid, I assume, but I also assume it will settle at a level significantly higher than before Covid.
  • Neuralink, Starlink – these are micro-satellites
  • Cerebras – this is another computer chip
  • “BCI” – brain-computer interfaces? There is also a company called Buckeye Corrugated Inc. that makes cardboard. come on people, enough with the undefined acronyms
  • “6dof video capture” – “six degrees of freedom”, which has something to do with more realistic virtual reality
  • mixed reality – is this different from “augmented reality”?
  • GAN – this might be a “generative adversarial network”, which sounds like two AIs duking it out and coming up with something new
  • disinformation

Tyler Cowan, an economist who wrote “The Great Stagnation”, says the Great Stagnation is not over but it might be getting close to over. He says “the vaccine-driven recovery will measure as a rise in labor inputs, but in reality it will be pure TFP.  In 2021 (but which quarter?), true TFP will be remarkably high, maybe the highest ever?” Ooh ooh, I know this one! TFP is total factor productivity, which is the rise in productivity that can’t be attributed to capital and labor inputs. So it can represent some combination of innovations, or intangibles, errors and unknowns.

New technologies can take some time to come to fruition, even decades. So maybe we are starting to see an AI/biotech/renewable energy acceleration that we got excited about a long time ago and then forgot about? There are also some dangers and unintended consequences lurking on this list, as always.

The map of doom!

This is a nice piece of risk communication from Dominic Walliman at Domain of Science (which I discovered on Open Culture.com). The “map” is actually a log-log plot of severity (number of deaths) and likelihood (average return period), but this guy manages to convey all that in a digestible way without dumbing it down. You can just stare at the chart, but in this case it really is worth watching the video.

Domain of Science

So what should we be paying more attention to? Well, we might actually pay more attention to pandemics now, and we should. The AIDS pandemic has actually been really bad, and is a good example of how we can just get used to and accept a hugely terrible event that unfolds over a long time. Also antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues. This last he explains pretty well and succinctly between about minutes 12 and 13, so that is worth watching if you have only one minute.

If I were a politician, I would want a chart like this on my wall, prepared by experts in risk management and system theory, and tapping into experts on each of the major risks. I would also want to add more mundane risks that are certain to happen and killing a lot of people, like air pollution, motor vehicle crashes (and pedestrian and cyclist deaths), and diabetes. Then I would tackle some of the worst ones and try to align my policies and budget allocations with them. Not glamorous stuff, but I would hire this guy to try to help explain it to the public. If he wasn’t available, I would pick another photogenic person with a soft and pleasing British (Australian?) accent to help.

vertical farming

Forbes has an article on vertical farming under lights, claiming that a 2-acre vertical farm can replace a 750 acre outdoor farm and use 95% less water. It doesn’t talk about pollution, but in theory it should be relatively easy to collect and recycle/compost/digest/burn solid waste, and collect and treat wastewater, from a farm like this. I know LED lights are efficient, but you do have to produce enough energy to replace the sunlight that would have fallen on 750 acres of the Earth, plus some extra because the system is not perfectly efficient, and you have to produce fertilizer of some sort. These things will have an ecological footprint. On the other hand, if this is in an urban population center, you potentially have a lot of waste streams you might be able to recover energy and nutrients from. Then you also have 748 acres of land somewhere that you can theoretically reforest or re-wetland. Then you might have a healthy fishery somewhere downstream that is no longer choked by sediment and nutrients from farm waste.