Category Archives: Web Article Review

UK solid waste framework

The UK is tackling the idea of making companies responsible for the packaging they produce. This makes perfect sense because it will raise revenue in the short term, but hopefully give them the incentive they need to design with “reduce, reuse, recycle” in mind in the longer term.

Businesses and manufacturers will pay the full cost of recycling or disposing of their packaging waste, under a major new government strategy unveiled by the Environment Secretary today (Tuesday 18 December 2018).
The move will overhaul England’s waste system, putting a legal onus on those responsible for producing damaging waste to take greater responsibility and foot the bill.
The announcement forms part of the government’s ambitious new Resources and Waste Strategy, the first comprehensive update in more than a decade. It will eliminate avoidable plastic waste and help leave the environment in a better state than we found it for future generations.

this is your year on drugs

Alternet has a wrap-up of the year in (U.S.) drug policy. To summarize:

  • The opioid overdose situation is still awful even compared to the height of the 1980s-90s crack epidemic, but does not seem to be getting any more awful. Deaths from heroine and prescription drugs have fallen, but fentanyl abuse has increased and kept the overall body count about the same as recent years.
  • Cities including my own are moving forward on safe injection sites under medical supervision, which are the norm in many other developed countries, but the federal government is still against them.
  • Sentencing disparities that used to disproportionately put people of color in prison are being reduced. Even the more blatantly racist of our two major political parties seems to be on board with this.
  • Marijuana legalization at the state level continues to march on, and the federal government continues to look the other way.
  • Industrial hemp became completely legal.
  • Predictably, legalization advocates are moving on to other drugs like pschedelics.

Trends in Ecology and Evolution 2018 Horizon Scan

Trends in Ecology and Evolution does an annual “horizon scan” of hot topics for the coming year. Below is their list for this year. The article is open access.

  • “Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines” – Thiamine is a form of vitamin B. Pollution and subtle changes in algae eaten by fish and birds may be causing its depletion. This is not fatal in and of itself but may be weakening animals so that they succumb to other things.
  • “Thiamine Deficiency as a Possible Driver of Wildlife Population Declines” – It’s affecting deer, moose, and elk in North America, and now reindeer in northern Europe.
  • “Breaks in the Dormancy of Pathogenic Bacteria and Viruses in Thawing Permafrost” – Some viruses and bacteria may be able to lie dormant in permafrost for thousands of years, long enough for populations of animals and humans to lose their immunity. Permafrost is melting.
  • “RNA-Based, Gene-Silencing Pesticides” – Messing with RNA can control pests such as the mites affecting honey bee colonies. The good thing about this form of genetic engineering is that it is not passed down from one generation to the next.
  • “Genetic Control of Mammal Populations” – Islands such as New Zealand are trying to use gene drives to wipe out pests such as rats. Not control them, but completely eliminate them once and for all. There are some obvious benefits, but this is also a little terrifying when you think that we now have the ability to engineer the complete extermination of a particular species in short order.
  • “Use of Lasers in Commercial Deep Water Fishing” – Sounds a little scary, but it’s an alternative to dragging heavy nets that destroy the bottom. 
  • “Use of Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) for Harvesting Atmospheric Water” – This is literally sucking humidity out of the air. Of course, we can all do this with our air conditioners and dehumidifiers, but that takes a lot of energy and this process apparently does not.
  • “Aquaporins Engineered to Increase Plant Salt Tolerance” – This is messing with plants so they can grow in saltier soil. Seems like a good idea, except there is potentially moral hazard here because good farming practices should stop good soil from becoming salty in the first place.
  • “Effect of Culturomics on Conservation Science, Policy, and Action” – This is just processing and analyzing large amounts of text.
  • “Changes in the Global Iron Cycle” – Iron can actually be a limiting nutrient in some ecosystems, particularly in the oceans. Melting glaciers and ice bergs have an effect on this – I won’t pretend to fully understand it.
  • “Underestimation of Soil Carbon Emissions” – Soils contain a lot of carbon, the decay of organic soils may give off more carbon than thought, and there could be an accelerating feedback loop as warmer temperatures accelerate the decay, which in turn cause warmer temperatures.
  • “Rapid Climatic Changes on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau” – This affects the Southeast Asian and Indian monsoons, among other things.
  • “International Collaborations to Encourage Marine Protected Area Expansion in the High Seas” – Okay, I guess they had to throw in something positive.
  • “Belt and Road Initiative in China” – Basically, China talks a good game on sustainability and the potential is there, but the on-the-ground reality is not very sustainable so far.
  • “Potential Effects on Wildlife of Increases in Electromagnetic Radiation” – This is about cell signals causing cancer. In wildlife, because this journal is about wildlife. But it’s a little concerning for us humans too.

best science and technology stories of 2018 (Longreads)

The first of the “best of” articles for 2018 are starting to come out. Here is the best of science and technology writing from Longreads. A couple topics caught my eye:

  • a review of a book on how computer algorithms are increasingly taking over our lives, called The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab
  • what’s new with transhumanism, also known as really rich people starting to hope against the odds that death may be optional (hey, they have already figured out how to stop paying taxes, so isn’t cheating death the next logical step?)
  • an article on farming practices specifically focused on maximizing carbon sequestration by building soil

want to know a price? go f— yourself!

Actually, on this site I am still allowed to say fuck, as far as I know. Why is it hard to type that in the title though? I would probably get more hits. Apologies to any parents out there whose children stumbled across this post. Then again, you should be sheltering them from mind-warping casual violence in entertainment, providing age-appropriate sex education, and teaching them the judicious, appropriate, and occasionally humorous uses of four letter words.

Anyway, this made me laugh. And while it is clearly satire, it is the least fake news I have read today.

Welcome to America General Hospital! Seems you have an oozing head injury there. Let’s check your insurance. Okay, quick “heads up” — ha! — that your plan may not cover everything today. What’s that? You want a reasonable price quote, upfront, for our services? Sorry, let me explain a hospital to you: we give you medical care, then we charge whatever the hell we want for it.

If you don’t like that, go fuck yourself and die…


Fun story: This one time we charged two parents $18,000 for some baby formula. LOL! We pull that shit all the time. Don’t like it? Don’t bring a baby, asshole.

Ha ha. It’s funny ’cause it’s true and it happens to all of us all the time, and we don’t do anything about it.

U.S. murder rate down a bit

In a bit of good news, the murder rate in the U.S. appears to be down this year compared to trends in the last several years, according to the New York Times.

In the cities in which data is available, murder has been down about 7 percent on average this year relative to the same point in 2017…

If murder falls about 4.5 percent nationally this year, the murder rate of about 5 per 100,000 will roughly be in line with 2009’s rate and half of what it was in 1980, the highest U.S. murder rate on record. The accompanying chart shows what the national murder rate since 1960 would look like with a 4.5 percent drop in 2018.

Tracking the change in murder nationally is far easier than explaining why it’s happening. There is still no consensus on why murder rose nationally in 2015 and 2016, though various theories have been proposed, including simple randomness. Similarly, a projected drop in murder in 2018 would not have an obvious cause. Employment of smarter technologies, expanded community intervention programs, and even colder weather could help explain year-to-year local changes.

If I had to speculate, it might be that the drugs in question in the current round of the war on drugs are simply not as lucrative, and therefore not as worth killing for, as the ones we saw in the 1990s. The real profits accrue to the people willing to take big risks to get the drugs across the border, and it could just be that the body count this time around has been shifted just outside the U.S. border. It may also be that the U.S. government at various levels has shifted toward a little more of a public health approach and a little less of a law enforcement approach. I could think positive and consider this progress, or I could be cynical and say it is partial because there is a wider range of ethnic and socioeconomic groups being affected this time around.

alzheimer’s disease and insulin resistance

This article in Psychology Today makes a case that there is a very strong link between insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease. The bad news, it says, is that the majority of the population is insulin resistant. The good news is that it is something an individual can really do something about. Basically, replace sugar and most processed foods with whole, unprocessed ones. It sounds mostly okay to me except I am really not ready to give up bread any time soon.

what experts worry about

Motherboard asked 105 experts what worries them most and what they are most hopeful about. 

Participants include (but are not limited to) 19 space scientists, 19 biologists and environmental scientists, 11 computer scientists, eight medical scientists, five lawyers, four historians, a musicologist, a paleontologist, an astronaut, and a digital artist who replied with emojis…

Unifying ideas emerged in the responses. By far the most frequently mentioned worry was climate change (29), followed by a spike in political extremism (21), with a subset of answers directly linking these problems. Artificial intelligence, especially its bias and unpredictability, represented another common concern (10). The proliferation of misinformation (8) and insufficient investment in science and STEM education (8) were often mentioned.

Citizens United caused John Paul Stevens to have a stroke

This article in Abovethelaw.com (quoting the New York Times) says that John Paul Stevens suffered a mini-stroke the day the Citizens United decision was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, legalizing unlimited campaign contributions and essentially legalizing corporate bribery of politicians.

I found this quote interesting:

his missteps that day led him to seek medical advice and after learning of the stroke, he made the decision to quit. Justice Stevens made the responsible move under the circumstances, because if Citizens United tested his health — and he tells Liptak that he views that opinion along with Heller and the whack-a-doodle reasoning of Bush v. Gore as the three worst mistakes for the Supreme Court in his tenure — one can imagine how he’d have reacted to some of the doozies to come out of the Court since 2010.

I looked up Heller and it was a gun control case.