Category Archives: Web Article Review

why people don’t smile in old photos

I always wondered this. I think the first black and white photos I ever saw were from the Depression era, and I just assumed people were…depressed. But I noticed later that a frown is typical of most old photos. I’ve also noticed that this is not just an American thing, but true of other cultures. When people would show me pictures of their grandparents, they would have a stern expression, and pictures of their grandchildren at the same age would be all smiles. You even see pictures of families together where the grandparents look pretty fierce and everyone else is smiling.

This video says that early on people treated a photo as though it were a portrait being painted. It was a rare thing that might only happen once and was expensive. There would just be this one picture for people to remember you by. There was also the practical matter that early on, you had to sit still for 10-15 minutes and it was hard to hold a smile that long. The video also talks about the practice of taking pictures of the dead, including children, which I found sad but it makes a certain sense. In some cases that might have been the only photo taken of the person.

what’s new with longevity treatments

This article in The Week mentions a few things.

Humans grow fewer blood vessels in their muscles with age, which is believed to result in the gradual breakdown of vital organs. The same pattern exists in mice. In 2018, Harvard researchers fed mice a chemical to manipulate the gene associated with blood vessel growth and found that old mice subsequently were able to run on a treadmill 56 percent longer. While that work continues, biohackers are transfixed by nootropics — “smart drugs,” amino acids, and other supplements that purportedly boost cognitive abilities and prevent brain aging.

Mainstream scientists and doctors are still saying nay. I don’t know but exercising to keep the oxygen level up seems like a good idea.

Allan Savory

Here’s an interesting 2013 TED talk by Allan Savory, where he talks about his theory that intentionally grazing livestock at high densities, while keeping them bunched and moving as though they were a herd of wild herbivores pursued by predators, can reverse desertification and make a big dent in climate change. It all sounds very scientific and proven when he explains it. I also recall though that there are criticisms that he is resistant to sharing his research results with other scientists in a way that would allow them to reproduce his research and verify his findings, which a serious scientist would normally do.

measuring blood pressure through your @$$

This seems like a good idea actually – a toilet seat that measures your heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen level. It’s designed for hospitals, but it makes a lot of sense to me. It would happen automatically, built automatically into your daily routine and with no wasted time or extra effort. You could have it sent right to your doctor if you wanted to.

geoengineering and rice yields

Would injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to counteract global warming affect rice yields in the tropics? Yes, according to this paper, but not in the direction I guessed. Even though rice is a tropical crop, it is sensitive to temperature – higher temperatures decrease its yield, and the effect of lowering temperature would be greater than the effect of having less light, leading to increased yield. At least in this study which wired together a complicated climate model with a complicated rice yield model.

Costa Rica

Costa Rica is planning to go carbon free by 2050. The trick is that most of their electricity is already hydroelectric, so what is left is to electrify their transportation system and then use that electricity to run it. This exact recipe won’t work everywhere, but the lesson is that electrifying opens up options for how to generate that electricity down the road.

Philadelphia to Pittsburgh hyperloop

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission is apparently studying the idea of a hyperloop that could theoretically make the trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in half an hour. Initially they are looking just at freight. The larger context is that the Pennsylvania Turnpike has the right of way, is not doing well financially, charging trucks to carry freight is the core of their business, and they are worried about some killer app coming along. Good for somebody at a dinosaur organization like this to have a little bit of vision and actually get a real study funded.

Of course, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are not really connected in a socioeconomic sense other than being part of an anachronistic and mostly irrelevant political entity. Philadelphia is part of the Boston to DC metro corridor, and Pittsburgh is somewhat isolated but part of a loosely defined region that might include Cleveland, Cincinnati, even Chicago and Detroit if there were really good rail links in place. Put a really fast rail link in place between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and now you could buy a super cheap fixer up house in Pittsburgh and commute to your job in New York or Chicago.

climate, conflict, and migration

A new paper explores causal links between climate change effects (like drought, famine, and high food prices), violent conflict, and mass migration. And yes, the conclusion seems to be that climate change can be a big driver when the seeds of social and economic instability are already in place.

Climate, conflict and forced migration
Despite the lack of robust empirical evidence, a growing number of media reports attempt to link climate change to the ongoing violent conflicts in Syria and other parts of the world, as well as to the migration crisis in Europe. Exploiting bilateral data on asylum seeking applications for 157 countries over the period 2006–2015, we assess the determinants of refugee flows using a gravity model which accounts for endogenous selection in order to examine the causal link between climate, conflict and forced migration. Our results indicate that climatic conditions, by affecting drought severity and the likelihood of armed conflict, played a significant role as an explanatory factor for asylum seeking in the period 2011–2015. The effect of climate on conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period 2010–2012 during when many countries were undergoing political transformation. This finding suggests that the impact of climate on conflict and asylum seeking flows is limited to specific time period and contexts.

generating hydrogen from solar panels

It makes sense that you could use electricity from solar panels to split water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen, but why do that instead of just using the electricity? I guess if storing and using the hydrogen gas is more cost-efficient or reliable than charging a battery. Still, it seems like the days of storing and burning dangerous gases and liquids rather than electrifying might be numbered.

space based solar

The government is finally getting serious about space based solar. The government of China, that is. The U.S. government (Jimmy Carter, NASA) was serious about it back in the 1970s as I recall (actually, I don’t recall because I was an infant, but I have since read). Our cynical government stopped looking into shortly thereafter and the public imagination withered and died. The interesting thing is that the Earth is in the path of only an infinitessimal portion of the sun’s energy. However much energy we need and are able to harness with our technology, we should be able to intercept it and beam it back, without depriving anyone or any natural ecosystem of their fair share. Utlimately, the limit would probably be how to deal with waste heat rather than any upper limit on how much energy we could intercept and beam back to Earth.