This post has a ton of information on gardening with native plants and gardening for pollinators in Pennsylvania – sources of plants and seeds, recommended species and combinations of species for various conditions, and links to a variety of government and non-profit organizations that can provide even more information.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
UFOs
Fact: pilots and astronauts see weird, unexplained flying objects in the sky from time to time. The U.S. military has released some unclassified videos of real footage from real airplanes, it says because these same videos are already floating around on the web and people aren’t sure they are real. Of course, there are plenty of fake videos on the web, but now as long as you accept the U.S. military as a source of factual information, you can accept these as facts. And how many classified videos exist for each unclassified one?
I find these facts inconvenient. I don’t really want to take this seriously, but I feel like I have to at least give it some thought. These things aren’t necessarily aliens. They are simply what they are called – unidentified. But it seems clear that somebody is testing something. Or playing with something. Or intentionally messing with our minds. Who and why? Well, at least some serious people (see May 17, 2011 Fresh Air: “Area 51 ‘Uncensored’: Was It UFOs Or The USSR?”) have claimed that the Soviet Union used UFO rumors and possibly even actual UFO-like aircraft to sew confusion. So maybe some government or mad billionaire is testing a drone, either to sew confusion or just for fun.
If it is super-technologically advanced aliens playing with toys, with the technology to hide in plain site and the technology to crush us like bugs anytime they want, I guess we should just say thank you for not doing that so far.
technologies we don’t have
I’ve been thinking about the technologies we have and don’t have during this coronavirus situation, and which ones we don’t have that could make our lives easier if we had them. Also, which ones we were “supposed” to have by now if we are really living in the fabulous science fiction future.
In short, farming and manufacturing are relatively automated at this point, but transportation and many other industries closer to our daily lives are not. Computer technology is pretty far along, but it is not yet all that tied to the physical world. Take autonomous vehicles and drones. The food delivery situation during this shut down has not been all that great. Computers keep track of what goods are where and who is ordering what, but the actual deliveries are mostly done by people in diesel powered vehicles. Some of those people are sick, all are scared, and they have children home from school and are worried about family members just like the rest of us. We worry in normal times about robots taking our jobs, but this is a time when if we had reliable robot delivery, whether on the ground or through the air, it would help.
Biotechnology is just not as far along as we might have thought. The virus genome was sequenced quickly, but developing treatments and vaccines is still a painstaking process, and then making and administering them on a large scale is daunting. If we had really good computer models of human bodies, computers would be able to do trillions of drug and vaccine trials in the blink of an eye and figure out the combinations that work. We just don’t understand the physical body enough to represent it that well in a computer. So again, the computing is farther along than the physical world.
Teleconferencing and remote work has come a long way over the past decade or so. When I lived abroad between 2010-2013 and worked remotely with a team spread across three continents, the technology was expensive, unreliable, and really held us back. Now talking and screen sharing are pretty seamless, thanks to the cheap ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and speakers on our many devices. Data compression and internet connections have also made a big difference. We have some cheesy background images, but what we don’t have yet are the immersive virtual reality and augmented reality that we assume are eventually coming.
what E.O. Wilson is up to
What, you haven’t received this month’s issue of The Bitter Southerner yet? An interview with E.O. Wilson finds him 90 years old and only semi-retired, living in Massachussetts.
In 2016, Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, in which he claims that if every nation sets aside half its landmass and waters for nature, then we can ensure the continuing existence of 85% of all species on the planet — including ourselves. The book garnered acclaim and criticism, but, like much of Wilson’s work, its central tenets have become more mainstream over time.
is this the great depression?
The words “great” and “depression” are being used in close proximity these days. Joseph Stiglitz says a depression is when people only spend money on food, and by that definition we are kind of there. Noah Smith at Bloomberg says the U.S. unemployment rate currently stands around 11% and could be headed for 20% or 30%. The Great Depression topped out at 25% so by this definition too, we are headed there. The article points out that it is not just the depth of the recession that is important but its duration. At this point, there has not been a spike in interest rates or widespread bank failures, and the stock market has stabilized (i.e., it’s fluctuating around a lower level than its recent peak, but not wildly fluctuating). As people are legally allowed to resume normal activities, we will see if they do or if they choose not to out of fear. That is when banks and investors could get even more nervous about lending to businesses without good prospects of success, interest rates could spike, and a long-lasting wave of bankruptcies, defaults, and job losses could ensue.
why pay for office space?
I figured cheap-ass companies would try to keep people working from home to avoid paying for office space. This confirms it:
- “A Gartner, Inc. survey of 317 CFOs and finance leaders on March 30, 2020, revealed that 74% will move at least 5% of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID 19.”
- “In fact, nearly a quarter of respondents said they will move at least 20% of their on-site employees to permanent remote.”
one more covid tracker
I thought I was over covid trackers, but I just can’t help it. I know this isn’t my first “one more”, and it might not be my last. This one plots new cases over the past week on the vertical axis vs. total confirmed cases on the horizontal, the animates over time. You can add any country or U.S. state. The simulation starts whenever 10 cases were reported in that location, and you can see them grow at first exponentially and then deviate from the line when they start to get it under control. You can pick a log or arithmetic axis – log is good for the math, but it kind of lets you forget that there is a difference between 10 people dying and 10,000 people dying. Anyway, it’s nice and thanks to this person for posting it for free.
ferrets and coronavirus
Ferrets are highly susceptible to coronavirus. Apparently, ferrets are susceptible to similar respiratory diseases as humans in general and are used in research for that reason. Cats are also susceptible, but dogs and farm animals generally aren’t.
If this were a movie, humans would eradicate the virus but it would persist in a small community of feral cats somewhere, mutate into something even more horrible, and jump back to humans.
New Start expires February 2021
With the coronavirus crisis raging, it is easy to forget that nuclear weapons are still out there. One thing coronavirus should be teaching us all is that the unthinkable can happen. Trump, aka the angel of death, has already made us all less safe by withdrawing from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, the nuclear deal with Iran, ratcheting up tensions with China. Now the New Start treaty, through which the U.S. and Russia have achieved further arms reductions over the past decade, is set to expire on February 5, 2021. The current administration and/or the current Congress could do the right thing just this one time and extend the treaty. Then the next President and Congress could start working on extending the gains.
why schools are shut down
In this video, a researcher puts a harmless but glow-in-the-dark powder on a 3rd-grade teacher’s hands and on one random third grader. By the end of the day, the entire classroom and everybody’s faces all glow in the dark.