Category Archives: Web Article Review

Philadelphia

As the protests, clashes between police and citizens, looting and arson continue in Philadelphia, I find myself thinking back to On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. A lot of the book is about the relationship between the police and citizens in Philadelphia neighborhoods, and specifically (although place names are thinly disguised in the book) one of the neighborhoods where the tear gas and rubber bullets were flying yesterday.

The story the book tells is one where young men grow up without much prospect of finding a job in the formal economy, and get involved in the informal drug economy as a way to earn an income. In the informal drug economy, there is no recourse to the authorities when someone is robbed or otherwise taken advantage of. There are robberies, assaults, and cycles of escalating revenge that wind up with the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods in jail, probation or parole. Once young men are in jail, they tend to come out harder than they went in, and they are even less likely to break out of the cycle.

To break this cycle, we should follow the evidence of what has been tried and worked, of course. But just using logic and system thinking, the most obvious and quick way to break this cycle would be to legalize drugs. Then there would be no driver for the violence. Legalize, tax, and use the proceeds to fuel substance abuse and mental health programs that have been proven to work. Or just set up a universal health care system that provides these things to all citizens.

Then there is the harder long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own. Childcare, education, health care, unemployment, disability, retirement. The process of building a stable, fair, and democratic society for the long haul would be a hard and long-term project, but other countries have figured out most of it and the United States could learn.

bodies stacked like cordwood

Here goes…I generally support police-court-prison reform and policies to reduce violence in all its forms. I support policies to help right past and present injustices, both race and class based.

I’m very concerned about thousands of people out on the streets just when we thought we were getting Covid-19 under control. This is a disease that has killed black people and poor people disproportionately. About 100,000 people dead in the last couple months vs. about 1,000 per year killed by police (which is certainly too much). Now is just not the time, in my view. If we wanted to devise an experiment to find out whether people gathering in the streets by the thousands, packed in like sardines but largely wearing masks, would reverse our progress on Covid-19 or not, this would be the experiment. It would not be an ethical experiment!

A history lesson: In 1918, Philadelphians took to the streets by the thousands in the midst of the flu epidemic that year, with devastating consequences. From Smithsonian:

When the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade stepped off on September 28, some 200,000 people jammed Broad Street, cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles. Floats showcased the latest addition to America’s arsenal – floating biplanes built in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. Brassy tunes filled the air along a route where spectators were crushed together like sardines in a can. Each time the music stopped, bond salesmen singled out war widows in the crowd, a move designed to evoke sympathy and ensure that Philadelphia met its Liberty Loan quota…

Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled. In the week ending October 5, some 2,600 people in Philadelphia had died from the flu or its complications. A week later, that number rose to more than 4,500. With many of the city’s health professionals pressed into military service, Philadelphia was unprepared for this deluge of death.

Attempting to slow the carnage, city leaders essentially closed down Philadelphia. On October 3, officials shuttered most public spaces – including schools, churches, theaters and pool halls. But the calamity was relentless. Understaffed hospitals were crippled. Morgues and undertakers could not keep pace with demand. Grieving families had to bury their own dead. Casket prices skyrocketed. The phrase “bodies stacked like cordwood” became a common refrain.

Smithsonian

Let’s hope this is a history lesson and not history repeating itself!

In another case of “let’s hope this is a history lesson”, Trump is calling for a military crack down almost exactly 50 years (May 1970) after the Ohio National Guard mowed down protestors with machine guns at Kent State.

are aircraft carriers obsolete?

Apparently, there is a fairly broad consensus that aircraft carriers are obsolete because they are too easy to attack with cheap missiles and eventually maybe space-based weapons. I know they are expensive, but I always thought the ability to get planes and soldiers anywhere in the world within a few days made sense as an alternative to maintaining large bases abroad. It’s always seemed to me that the navy is the most indispensible military service. After all, they have their own army (the Marines) and their own air force, and not only that but their army has its own air force. Plus, they have the submarines, which are the ultimate deterrent against nuclear attack, at least in theory.

Anyway, this article talks about getting rid of some carriers in favor of fleets of smaller, cheaper ships, possibly some crewed by robots. It also talks about a new class of carrier that is about one-third the size and one-third the cost, and meant to service helicopter and vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Not sure whether you can “buzz the tower” in any of those.

the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents”

Obama left INSTRUCTIONS for dealing with this exact situation. There almost have to be competent people in the federal government who were familiar with these instructions and did their best to implement them, but were stymied by incompetent managers or political cronies. There’s an alphabet soup of acronyms that is a little hard to decipher for the uninitiated, but a couple things stand out to me:

  • Early on in a significant outbreak outside the United States, the plan is to provide significant financial support, material support, expertise, and manpower support to both the World Health Organization and directly to the foreign country. This is a nice humanitarian thing to do, but is also the best defense against the outbreak reaching the U.S. and wreaking havoc.
  • Domestically, the federal government is responsible for figuring out how to screen, and quarantine if necessary, travelers arriving from foreign locations, whether those travelers are U.S. citizens or not (reminder: we are all the same species of semi-hairless virus-prone monkey).
  • The federal stockpile plays a key role, as does research and development on potential diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. These things are supposed to kick into high gear at the first sign of trouble. Again, sending materials and equipment abroad is supposed to be considered early on because that may be the best way to keep the outbreak from getting out of control.
  • The federal government is just generally supposed to provide crystal clear guidelines, communications, funding, materials and equipment and coordination to state and local governments and to the public throughout a crisis like this.

There was a plan, and at least some of these steps must already have been in motion and been shut down.

As you know, I try to avoid political statements on this blog, sticking closely to facts and consideration of potential implications of various policies and lessons learned for the future.

FAIL FAIL FAIL Trump you stupid asshole, you have the blood of 85,000 Americans on your hands as I write this and of course it’s not over. Obama for King 2020!

what’s new with “passive house”?

Well, by combining an “airtight envelope” with solar arrays, a passive house certified nursing home in Spain can actually generate more energy than it uses.

The new nursing home extension is topped with an 18 kW photovoltaic array along with 20 solar thermal panels and rooftop seating. When combined with the building’s airtight envelope, which was engineered to follow passive solar strategies, the renewable energy systems are capable of producing surplus energy, which is diverted to the old building. The Passivhaus-certified extension also includes triple glazed openings, radiant floors, rainwater harvesting and mechanical ventilation equipped with heat recovery. 

Inhabitat

So the technology exists to build like this, so why don’t we do it everywhere? Well, part of it is ignorance and resistance to adapting ideas from elsewhere to one’s own locale. A lot of it is legitimate concerns about cost. But new materials and skills can be expensive because they are in short supply locally. So, bring in a technology like this, set up local factories and training programs to build capacity, encourage entrepreneurs, provide successful examples and incentives and possibly regulations, and you can bring cost down. When the people doing it forget the old way of doing things, assume the new way is the way it has always been and the only way it can be, and are resistant to the next new idea that comes along, you have made progress.

how are people really getting coronavirus?

This blog post from a professor of epidemiology has some interesting logic. I don’t know this person, but they are a professor at a reputable university and I give their opinion some weight based on that. You can review their credentials and decide for yourself.

I took microbiology as a graduate student in environmental engineering, and I’ve done just a bit of microbial risk assessment since then. Which in no way qualifies me as an expert on covid-19. But this post did help me to think about some things harkening back to my classes, which are almost entirely absent from other media sources I am reading. In my classes and my professional work, there is a logic of dose response – you have to ingest a certain amount of material, and it has to contain a certain amount of a pathogen, for you to get sick. This usually has to do with small amounts of fecal matter present in the environment or water in my case, and the consequence typically is a bout of gastrointestinal distress curable with rest and fluids, although pretty much any disease is more dangerous to the very old, the very young, and the very sick.

That was a long preamble. You should read the blog post. But here is the brief summary:

  • If someone coughs or sneezes directly in your face, you are likely to get infected.
  • If you spend significant time indoors in a place where an infected person has recently coughed or sneezed, you are likely to get infected.
  • Other than that, you are not likely to get infected from someone breathing or even talking to you as you briefly pass on the street. You would need to talk to that person for at least 5-10 minutes to be likely to take in enough virus to get infected. That is just not very likely if you pass someone while walking, jogging, or biking. The advice of my local and state health departments is consistent with these facts. The behavior of people I observe in my neighborhood is not consistent with these facts. My behavior is consistent with these facts, even if other people in my neighborhood choose to have opinions that are not consistent with the known facts, and to try to impose those opinions on me.
  • Now, if you are indoors for awhile in a place where a lot of people are talking and breathing, and someone is infected, your odds of getting infected are high. This is why offices and schools are closed.
  • The bigger the crowd in the indoor space you are in, the more likely someone is infected. This is why conferences, religious services, sporting events, and Disney World are shut down.
  • So, people are getting infected when they have to be indoors around a lot of other people for a period of time, like in warehouses and meatpacking plants and unfortunately nursing homes. They are getting infected when they choose to attend large group events they don’t need to attend, like parades or worship services. And finally, they are getting infected when a family member goes out, gets infected, and brings it home.

native plant and pollinator gardening in Pennsylvania

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.

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.