Category Archives: Web Article Review

Obama’s favorite books of 2018

In a Facebook post, Barrack Obama claims to have read 29 books this year. That’s impressive, even if there is some skimming involved. I guess the dude is basically retired and he probably also has some help with childcare. Good for him. No word on whether Donald Trump reread his copy of the collected speeches of Adolf Hitler even once this year.

the Nipah virus

One of the public services I provide is to bring you new diseases to worry about. Just in case Ebola is not horrifying enough (and with apologies to anyone who has been personally touched by it), there is concern about a new disease originating from human-wildlife contact as tropical forests are encroached on, in this case in Bangladesh.


Nipah virus encephalitis is one of eight diseases that the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified as epidemic threats in need of prioritization. The list includes Ebola, SARS, Zika, and an as-yet unknown affliction referred to as “Disease X.” All eight have been prioritized because of their inherent epidemic potential, and also the fact that there are currently insufficient measures in place to prevent them…

Because bats typically live in large colonies and roost in close proximity to one another, microbes are easily passed among members of the group. While virus numbers are typically kept in check by each bat’s immune system, when an animal is stressed, its defenses can become compromised. Much as a cold might make us cough and sneeze, a bat’s weakened immune system can cause the animal to shed viruses into its surroundings through saliva, urine, and feces…

The symptoms of the disease are now well documented, although they vary considerably from patient to patient and strain to strain. While some infected humans are completely asymptomatic, most initially develop symptoms including fever, headaches, vomiting, and sore throat. Some develop acute respiratory infections in the early stages of the disease; others never do. After a few days to a couple of weeks, many patients start to exhibit more serious signs of encephalitis—dizziness, drowsiness, altered consciousness, and other neurological changes. Within another day or two, the disease often progresses to coma, then death.

Asimov’s predictions for 2019

In 1984, Isaac Asimov made a series of predictions about the year 2019.

  • Assumption: No nuclear wars will occur before 2019, which would render all the predictions below moot.
  • Verdict: So far, so good!
  • Prediction: Industry will become increasingly automated, and computers will “penetrate the home”.
  • Verdict: Check!
  • Prediction: Automation will cause some jobs to disappear while others will appear, with a net gain overall. ” The jobs that will appear will, inevitably, involve the design, the manufacture, the installation, the maintenance and repair of computers and robots, and an understanding of whole new industries that these “intelligent” machines will make possible. “
  • Verdict: Some jobs are disappearing and others appearing almost exactly as he predicted, but the jury is still out on the net gain.
  • Prediction: “Schools will undoubtedly still exist, but a good schoolteacher can do no better than to inspire curiosity which an interested student can then satisfy at home at the console of his computer outlet. There will be an opportunity finally for every youngster, and indeed, every person, to learn what he or she wants to learn. in his or her own time, at his or her own speed, in his or her own way. Education will become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.
  • Verdict: This is almost certainly as it should be, but the education system has been slow to adapt.
  • Prediction: “it may well be that the nations will be getting along well enough to allow the planet to live under the faint semblance of a world government by co-operation, even though no one may admit its existence.”
  • Verdict: Again, this is as it should be but not as it is. There are episodes of cooperation, but at the moment this seems to be rowing upstream against a strong current of nationalism and isolationism.
  • Prediction: “more and more human beings will find themselves living a life rich in leisure. This does not mean leisure to do nothing, but leisure to do something one wants to do; to be free to engage in scientific research. in literature and the arts, to pursue out-of-the-way interests and fascinating hobbies of all kinds.”
  • Verdict: This may be true for some, but certainly not for the majority. It could happen if we chose to share the wealth more and/or to live more simply. But again, this is not the direction things are going.
  • Prediction: an international space station
  • Verdict: Check
  • Prediction: moon mining and orbital factories
  • Verdict: This still seems pretty far away, although there are advances in new types of rockets and satellites that could be baby steps in this direction.

more lists from 2018 – science, technology, risks

Here are a couple more lists from 2018.

“5 biggest scientific breakthroughs” from The Week:

  • cloning monkeys
  • new evidence for (past?) microbial life on Mars
  • ability to walk restored to paraplegics
  • gene therapy successes to treat muscular dystrophy (so far, in dogs)
  • witnessing the birth of a new planet

From Bill Gates:

  • “we are also going to be focusing more on improving the quality of life… For example, software will be able to notice when you’re feeling down, connect you with your friends, give you personalized tips for sleeping and eating better, and help you use your time more efficiently.”
  • research breakthroughs on Alzheimer’s disease
  • some setbacks on polio eradication, but also promising new vaccination approaches
  • He is a skeptic on battery storage for solar and wind power, and a proponent of nuclear, where he is concerned the U.S. has lost its leadership position. “TerraPower, the company I started 10 years ago, uses an approach called a traveling wave reactor that is safe, prevents proliferation, and produces very little waste.”
  • He’s afraid of a big epidemic. Well, who isn’t if they’ve been paying attention?
  • breakthroughs and ethical concerns in gene editing
  • balance between privacy and innovation
  • technology in education

best books of 2018 (Project Syndicate)

Project Syndicate is one of my favorite sources of commentary on economics and geopolitics. In this post, their contributors each name some of their favorite books of 2018, which, perhaps not surprisingly, mostly cover economics and geopolitics. I would love to read almost everything on this list, but I’ll mention 10 just for brevity.

AI and socialism

AI and algorithms are being used to target social services more precisely in Denmark. This article finds the level of data being collected on individuals insidious. I think it could be in the wrong hands, but this sort of thing seems to work in the Scandinavian countries where people actually trust their governments and neighbors. In the U.S., we tend to take paranoia to extremes, for example refusing to have a national ID card when it could solve some of our voter registration issues.

The municipality of Gladsaxe in Copenhagen, for example, has quietly been experimenting with a system that would use algorithms to identify children at risk of abuse, allowing authorities to target the flagged families for early intervention that could ultimately result in forced removals.

The children would be targeted based on specially designed algorithms tasked with crunching the information already gathered by the Danish government and linked to the personal identification number that is assigned to all Danes at birth. This information includes health records, employment information, and much more.

From the Danish government’s perspective, the child-welfare algorithm proposal is merely an extension of the systems it already has in place to detect social fraud and abuse. Benefits and entitlements covering millions of Danes have long been handled by a centralized agency (Udbetaling Danmark), and based on the vast amounts of personal data gathered and processed by this agency, algorithms create so-called puzzlement lists identifying suspicious patterns that may suggest fraud or abuse. These lists can then be acted on by the “control units” operated by many municipalities to investigate those suspected of receiving benefits to which they are not entitled. The data may include information on spouses and children, as well as information from financial institutions.

works entering the public domain on January 1, 2019

I’m having some trouble with the math on this one.

We will all, as of January 1, 2019, have free, unfettered access to Williams’ metafictional shake-up of the formulaic status quo, when “hundreds of thousands of… books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923” enter the public domain, as Glenn Fleishman writes at The Atlantic. Because of the complicated history of U.S. copyright law—especially the 1998 “Sonny Bono Act” that successfully extended a copyright law from 50 to 70 years (for the sake, it’s said, of Mickey Mouse)—it has been twenty years since such a massive trove of material has become available all at once. But now, and “for several decades from 2019 onward,” Fleishman points out, “each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.”

So is it 70 years or 95 years, or does it depend on the type of work? Why can’t I read novels from the 1940s right now? Anyway, the excerpt above is from Open Culture, and has links to many other lists. A couple that catch my eye are one of Agatha Christie’s first novels and some short stories by H.P. Lovecraft.

December 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply.
  • An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.
  • Air pollution is taking an average of two years of people’s lives worldwide, although progress is being made in some of the worst cases which tend to skew the average.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • The Solarpunk genre takes a somewhat optimistic view of technology and climate change adaptation.
  • Rich people are starting to think they may be able to cheat death.
  • New Zealand is trying to use gene drives to completely wipe out rats in short order. Google is trying to do something similar with mosquitoes, only for the entire earth.

George McGovern’s Green New Deal

George McGovern proposed something similar to the current idea of a Green New Deal in the 1960s. A Yale historian says it had some momentum but was derailed when the Vietnam War broke out.


In 1964, McGovern sponsored legislation for the creation of a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) to transfer jobs in defense to peacetime work, for example, civil engineering and commercial manufacturing. On the surface, the NECC’s purpose was rather simple: to help unemployed defense workers find jobs. But McGovern’s ulterior motive for the commission was to reallocate military spending to fight environmental problems, to give defense workers “green jobs,” to use an anachronistic term…

But then came Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Southeast Asia derailed McGovern’s vision. Whereas in 1963 the world seemed at the precipice of a new era in the Cold War, Vietnam revived ideological tensions between Democratic proponents and opponents of Cold War foreign policy. Hawkish Democrats became enemies to the NECC, afraid of diverting monies away from the war. The stiffest opposition to the plan came from the Johnson administration, which criticized McGovern’s idea for a 10 percent cut to a $300 billion-dollar defense budget as “radical.” Moreover, defense contractors failed to see the utility of McGovern’s commission as they were now awash in new, albeit temporary, defense contracts to fight the war. When the NECC would be revived over two decades later as the Cold War was finally coming to an end, it would be a smaller, private endeavor focused on public education about economic conversion and disarmament and stripped of its earlier environmentalist goals.

I’m sensing some urgency this time around over climate change, which is good, but military and national security spending seems to be largely unquestioned. For that to change, I suspect it would take some bold action in Congress like a war tax and/or an insistence that war must be declared before American troops or equipment are committed abroad. Ironically, I think maybe a compromise could be based on stepped-up border security in exchange for closing foreign military bases. That would seem to have something for everyone.