Category Archives: Year in Review

2020 garden retrospective – now with more bug pictures!

Gardening and being around my small urban garden definitely brought me some comfort during the long Covid-impacted spring, summer, and fall. A silver lining of being forced to work from home was being able to work outside some. Anyway, below I’ll just tell my story in pictures.

Black Swallowtails are not rare but they are just fun to watch, and their big fat green caterpillars are fun for the young and young at heart. In addition to bicycle tires, they like the fennel and celery in the garden, neither of which I had to plant this year. The fennel is a hardy perennial with a deep taproot that also spreads aggressively by seed. In fact, I had to start pulling fennel aggressively this year except for a couple spots where I decided it was allowed. The celery (which I mistook for flat-leafed parsley at the farmer’s market years ago) seems to be self-seeding and coming back each spring. There was no parsley in evidence in the garden this year.

Black Swallowtail

We saw quite a few monarchs around. This one is on butterfly milkweed, which really started to take over parts of the garden this year. The monarch didn’t cooperate and spread its wings for a nice photo. This should be a host plant, but sadly we did not see any Monarch caterpillars in evidence. I feel good doing my small part in a small urban garden for this endangered species. We made a brief trip to Cape May, New Jersey in October during the fall bird and butterfly migration, and this is just an amazing thing to see – Monarchs just flitting by every few minutes, adding up to millions I would imagine over time!

Some other plants you can see here are purple hyssop (slightly past its prime) and the fennel just starting to bloom. In the background is the neighbor’s ornamental grass, which is interesting but getting completely out of hand. If I didn’t constantly hack at it my garden would be gone in a few years.

Monarch on Butterfly Milkweed

Here’s another (slightly more photogenic) Monarch on a sunchoke flower. The sunchoke, which I planted last year, started to get aggressive this year. I don’t really mind because they are shallow-rooted and easy to pull where I don’t want them. I did notice some squirrels digging them up in the fall and “squirreling them away” in neighbors’ gardens, lol. The sunchokes and hyssop in particular attracted lots of bumblebees which were fun to watch but did not cooperate for photos. Mountain mint was another plant that seemed to attract lots of bumblebees.

Monarch on Sunchoke

We had a bumper crop of milkweed bugs this year. They’re harmless and I think they are super cool, but I can appreciate they might be creepy to people who just don’t like bugs. This is what the butterfly milkweed looks like after it is done flowering and starts to grow seedpods. There was also a lot of common milkweed in the garden which I didn’t plant but leave alone whenever I see it. I notice that friendly neighbors and their gardeners tend to pull theirs, which I will not judge (in case any of you are reading this) but all the more reason for me to do my small part to support native plants and ecosystems.

Milkweed Bugs

Completing the butterfly milkweed life cycle, here the seed pods are bursting open and preparing to scatter their goodness to next year’s garden. The milkweed bugs are still around, but I noticed after about this point they just started to crawl away and scatter. I don’t know exactly where they go. The white flowers you can see here are garlic chives, which are super cool and attract lots of bees and harmless little wasps. They (the garlic chives, not the pollinators) are getting just a bit aggressive though.

Butterfly Milkweed Seed Pods

This giant pumpkin vine just volunteered, probably as a result of throwing last year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost. Either that or the squirrel’s who shredded other peoples’ Halloween pumpkins (we have learned not to put ours out too early) might have buried the seeds. It didn’t grow any pumpkins though, maybe missing some key nutrient?

Volunteer Pumpkin

The spotted lanternflies invaded Southeast Pennsylvania with a vengeance this year. This is an invasive species from Asia that is almost certainly here for good now. They didn’t do any obvious damage to my trees (including this Asian persimmon) but we will see what the future holds. They don’t bite, unlike the mosquitoes we had in abundance. We mostly worried about one particular species of virus this year, but others like west Nile, Lyme disease, and Zika are still around, and with climate change I will not be surprised if tropical diseases like Dengue are on the way. Can we apply the new vaccine development technologies to work on some of these, please?

Spotted Lanternfly on my Persimmon Tree

We had lots of stuff in pots. From left to right here, Thai “holy” basil, Asian long beans, Thai “sweet” basil, sunflowers (“Autumn beauty”, which lived up to their name and I recommend, Thai jasmine. Lots of bell peppers also volunteered this year, but no hot peppers – in past years lots Thai red peppers have been in evidence.

Pots

Maypop was my “try again” species this year. With the last few winters being so mild, I am hoping to see it again this spring. The new species I decided to add this year was a low, evergreen groundcover called bearberry. I didn’t take good pictures of it, and anyway it is not photogenic at this point, but I have high hopes for its future.

Maypop

And finally, the dwarf Asian persimmon turned a nice shade of orange to wrap up the year. It is 3 or 4 years old, and flowered but did not set any fruit this year. My other tree is a dwarf Asian pear. It had some kind of leaf spot and looked a bit sickly much of the year, but it did set a fair amount of fruit, of which the score was humans 2, squirrels the rest. They were good, and that is an all time high score for the humans!

Dwarf Asian Persimmon Fall Foliage

War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List

I have to be honest with myself – my reading pace has dropped way off during my intensive child-rearing (not to mention full time working) years. I just am not going to be reading long non-fiction books, and I will be chipping away at fiction very slowly, mostly as audiobooks. So that out of the way, there are some interesting books here that I will very likely not be able to read.

  • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. At first I thought what, is this about military strategy or business strategy or what? Turns out it cuts across many fields and that is why it sounds interesting to me.
  • The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. I probably won’t read this. In fact, I don’t even want high-tech warfare to arrive, but it will so we might at least want to know it when we see it.
  • George Orwell. I would rather read George Orwell than books about George Orwell, but this reminds that George Orwell wrote a variety of books other than Animal Farm and 1984 (or are you supposed to write out the letters?) I read and enjoyed Burmese Days a few years ago, for example. I would like to reread 1984 though. I don’t usually reread books, but this is a classic I read when I was just too young to appreciate it. The interesting thing to me is that it depicts future governments as mastering propaganda through technology, when in fact technology is causing governments to lose control of communications with their own people.
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan – I am always up for some near-future techno-dystopia!
  • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Recently I have been trying to stop worrying about the line between science fiction and fantasy and learn to enjoy the latter more. But now we have something called “science fantasy” that straddles the line. I guess we have always had it and now it just has a new (to me) name. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all that.
  • The Red Trilogy by Linda Nagata. Military science fiction. Not always my favorite genre but I am always on the lookout for something even close to the classics like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and The Forever War. Of course, in all of those war is a means to explore a variety of social and psychological topics.

NYT best books of 2020

I plan to boycott giving the New York Times any money from now until the end of time because of the weapons of mass destruction debacle. Unless I get a letter or phone call of apology from Judith Miller herself.

So I had a look at the NYT best books on 2020 on this website. I don’t see anything I am likely to read here. I think Obama’s memoir is an important work of history. I don’t need to read it because I listened to his interview with Terry Gross the other day.

Shakespeare in a Divided America and War: How Conflict Shaped Us sound marginally interesting. I may add them to my list of more-books-than-I-can-read-before-I-die.

The problem with arguing that war is just part of the human condition is that weapons keep getting more dangerous. Eventually we will get to weapons so dangerous that a decision to use them is a decision civilization can never recover from. That decision might be completely irrational, but there may come a day when it only takes one irrational decision to bring civilization or even life on Earth crashing down around us.

2020 words of the year

The Oxford English Dictionary has released its “word of the year” for 2020, which consists of many words. This is the first “best of” article I have come come across this year, so this is officially my “first of the best of the best of” post. Note, not all things in my “best of” series are good, I just like to stick with the name.

This is really a whole “year in review” post with some vocabulary words thrown in. Here are some of them:

  • bushfires
  • Covid-19. Interesting – “coronavirus” was the term in March and April, then “Covid-19” became more popular from May on. Not surprisingly, “pandemic” was also popular.
  • WFH (I was thinking “work for hire”, but no, that doesn’t make any sense. This is “work from home”. Come on, the acronym takes the same amount of time to say as the words, and nobody is paying for paper or ink any more. We don’t need this acronym!) Also “remote” and “remotely”, “mute” and “unmute”. They don’t mention “virtual” but that is popular where I am.
  • lockdown and shelter-in-place. Not mentioned in the article is “stay at home”, which turned out to be the official legal term where I lived. It makes sense, because “shelter in place” conjures up visions of incoming missiles, and lockdown implies people can’t go outside, which was never actually the case. We also had “curfews” but these were used in reference to civil unrest.
  • circuit-breaker (didn’t see this term much in the U.S., but I saw it in Singapore government communications about their lockdown, forwarded by the U.S. embassy there. 10 years ago right now, I had recently arrived in Singapore for what would turn out to be a 3-year stint living and working there. After 7 years back in the U.S., I still get the dispatches from the embassy and have never taken the time to figure out how to turn them off. Anyway, I think this is a good way to communicate the purpose of Covid-19 related restrictions – they cause significant short-term inconvenience, like a blackout, but they prevent long-term catastrophe, like your house burning down.)
  • support bubbles (haven’t heard this one actually, but I think I can guess)
  • keyworkers (must be what we are calling “essential workers” here in the U.S. I assume locksmiths are included). “Frontliners” and “front line workers” have also been used.
  • social distancing, face masks, PPE (PPE also annoys me, but at least the acronym rolls off the tongue easier than the full name. In my opinion though, using industry-specific jargon never makes anyone sound smarter, especially jargon you just learned and act like you have always known.) Also mask up, anti-mask, anti-masker and mask-shaming. For the record, I wear a mask to protect myself and others, and even just to make others feel more comfortable even in low-risk situations. I still feel annoyed by the masks though, because they should be the last layer in a many-layered defense provided by our government. Because our government has failed in every other layer of defense, mask shaming and “personal responsibility” are all they have left. Fuck you guys. Do your jobs next time.
  • Superspreader
  • Reopening
  • furlough
  • Black Lives Matter, BLM (Bureau of Livestock and Mines?), George Floyd, cancel culture. I might add “police brutality” and “police reform”. I also found myself trying to distinguish between a “protest”, a “riot”, “civil unrest”, and “looting”. This year might be the first time I heard the term “civil unrest” referring to the present day where I actually live, rather than referring to the 1960s. I’m also going to add “of color”. It seems everyone now has to be classified as either white or “of color”. I’m not sure this captures the diversity of people we have in our country.
  • moonshot (Covid-19 vaccine development will probably go down in history as an example of how you can throw an enormous amount of money at a scientific problem and get rapid progress – alongside nuclear weapons and going to the moon. But this seems like easily the most positive and humanitarian of the three.)
  • unprecedented – gets used in the title and throughout the article, but they never actually call it the word of the year
  • mail-in
  • conspiracy theory, QAnon
  • “Isn’t now exactly the moment when we should be using Brexit more than ever?” (My answer as an American: NO!!! I’m sick of hearing about it. But maybe if you are in the UK it is relevant even if you are sick of it. My personal opinion is Europe is a nice continent and anyone should consider themselves fortunate to be part of it.)
  • Workcation and staycation are apparently popular somewhere, but I haven’t heard these much.
  • Impeachment, acquittal (already forgot about this)
  • “anthropause” – I have never heard this, but apparently it refers to a temporary dip in carbon emissions and air pollution during the pandemic. They say media coverage of climate change actually decreased for the year.

BP Statistical Review of World Energy

BP has put out its Statistical Review of World Energy 2020. I’m a little short on time so I’m going to quote CNN’s coverage of it. (At least I think this is the report CNN is referring to. I have noticed a trend recently where journalists talk about a “recent report” without naming it or linking to it.) At least, I’m going to try to quote it. WordPress’s block editor is getting harder and harder to use.

In a “business-as-usual” scenario, in which government policies and social preferences evolve in the same way as in the recent past, oil demand picks up slightly following the coronavirus hit, but then plateaus around 2025 and starts to decline after 2030.

In two other scenarios, in which governments take more aggressive steps to curb carbon emissions and there are significant shifts in societal behavior, demand for oil never fully recovers from the decline caused by the pandemic. That would mean that oil demand peaked in 2019…

”As difficult steps go, BP’s pirouette from traditional oil company to green energy giant ranks among the more challenging,” Susannah Streeter, a senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown said in a note to clients.

CNN

What exactly is a “green energy giant”? Carbon capture might be a thing, eventually, but that seems like a risky bet as the only business strategy. If most things are going to electrify, it seems like the green energy giant will be the regulated electric utility business, at least in the United States, and it seems unlikely BP is trying to go there. They can try to supply that industry with things to burn, I suppose, like natural gas and liquid natural gas (coal and oil seem to be on their way out), but I am not sure that is a growth industry. Aviation might move toward hydrogen fuel cells eventually. There must be some tiny demand for rocket fuel. Chemicals, drugs, and plastics will continue to exist, of course, but I am not sure that would be a huge source of annual revenue growth for decades. They can manufacture solar panels, windmills, efficient transportation and electrical equipment of various sorts, get into the smart grid, smart buildings and materials, batteries, etc. But doing all sorts of little bits and pieces like this would seem to get them into industrial conglomerate territory, and there are plenty of companies already there. Maybe that is where they are headed – just make forays into lots of different markets and see if anything sticks.

the best scholarly books of the decade

This is a late entry on the best books of the 2010s, but it included a number of interesting nonfiction books I hadn’t heard of. I don’t have time to sit down and read long non-fiction books these days (or really think in depth about anything at all) so these reviews might be as close as I get. Here are a handful I might read if I actually could.

  • “Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes (Verso, 2018). It is a thrilling and formidable intervention into contemporary discussions of sex work, and settles the debate in favor of full and immediate global decriminalization.” Let’s just go ahead and legalize gambling, drugs, and prostitution, tax them, tamp down the violence and move on.
  • Andrew Friedman’s Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia. “Though the intelligence industry isn’t always visible, one constantly senses its presence. Its rapid growth since the 1950s also created a prosperous, high-tech region whose’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy belies its idyllic self-image.” This is the actual deep state, in its original sense of the military-industrial-intelligence complex that influences so much of our country’s laws and policies to produce wealth and power for itself.
  • The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Okay, I’ve heard of this one. Haven’t read it but think I get the idea. Wanted to be seen reading a copy while on jury duty but didn’t have the guts.
  • Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Because tolerance and understanding is good.
  • Every Twelve Seconds – this is about what really goes on in a slaughterhouse. I admit it, my “meatless Monday” aspirations have slipped during the coronavirus shutdown.
  • James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011) “did more than any single book to shake up how I thought about British imperial history.” What could this have to do with me? Well, I am American and have spent time in Singapore and Australia, among other places.

a “decade of liberal failure”?

According to Alex Pareene at The New Republic, the 2010s were a “decade of liberal failure”. He cites the escalation of the Afghanistan war, so carefully considered by Nobel prize-winning Obama, devolving into an quagmire with no obvious point and no obvious way out. He believes that the stimulus package and Affordable Care Act basically worked, but the Obama administration purposely designed them to work behind the scenes. They actually benefited people, but people don’t give the administration any credit for those benefits, and Republicans are able to successfully play on this misconception.

science trends to watch in 2020

Wired has a story on science trends to watch in 2020.

  • Stem cells are being used to grow mini-versions of all sorts of human organs, including hearts, kidneys and brains.
  • advances in trying to detect dark matter
  • the end of a key U.S tax credit for solar panels
  • gene editing going mainstream in medical treatments, and newer, safer techniques evolving (pun intended, ha ha!)
  • obvious bond villain Elon Musk launching satellites by the thousands. Also, private flights to the International Space Station.
  • use of massive data sets in “personalized medicine”

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown from LiveScience.com on the weird, wacky world of quantum physics. In a nutshell, these are recent, real-world experiments where matter, energy, and even time do things you wouldn’t think they are supposed to do.

the “best” health advice from 2019

The Week has cherry picked a few studies from 2019 as best. Although they did pick ones with large sample sizes, what would be “best” to me would be some kind of meta-analysis of all studies published and what they said on balance, with some kind of grading for quality and communication of the uncertainty involved. That would be awesome journalism, but I imagine it would be expensive. The great news is that if you add up all the percentages that doing this and that can reduce your chances of death, you can live forever! Anyway, here is my quick summary:

  • Exercise, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains just never go out of style. More whole foods (the thing, not the chain) and less processed foods in general seem to be a very good idea. Seriously, just orient your life style around these things and it is very unlikely the scientific consensus will change some day and tell you it was a bad idea.
  • Napping is good for you – this particular study says “five minutes to an hour once or twice a week”. I’m not surprised that rest is good for the heart, but I thought there was an emerging consensus that maintaining a consistent schedule on all days was good, and this seems to contradict that a bit.
  • Parents are stressed out while kids are young, then ultimately glad they had the kids later in life. This doesn’t surprise me since I am living through the stressed out part, but I do find it helpful to put myself in my future self’s shoes and ask if I would regret having children. In fact, my wife and I did that when we made the decision to have children, and the answer was and is no, we have no regrets. The distinction between happiness in the moment and overall life satisfaction also comes to mind.
  • Aspirin and ibuprofen seem to help your heart, but also raise your risk of internal bleeding. It’s probably best not to self-medicate.
  • Smoking and getting hit on the head, even gently, are not good for you.

Philadelphia in the twenteens

Inga Saffron, the architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, tries to use the cell phone to tie together trends in Philadelphia in the 2010s. I don’t know if I buy her argument 100%, and I don’t know how serious she is about it, but the list of trends is interesting, and it’s interesting to compare her assessment to my own experience living and working in the city for most of the decade.

  • young adults moving back to the city – this was a huge trend and hard to miss. Apps made it easier to get food and stuff to their homes without driving, and ride sharing made it easier to get around. Inga argues a lot of people “ditched their cars” – this may be true, I haven’t seen the data, but one thing I observed is that a lot of new homes featured garages, and larger developments featured big garages and even surface parking in some cases. This changed the walking experience in some neighborhoods quite a bit, and not for the better. Overall though, it is great for the city to have the people.
  • Tech jobs are one reason the young professionals came back. Tax policy and zoning code changes also had an effect. Inga doesn’t mention “councilmanic prerogative”, but in my neighborhood this means that the 2011 zoning code, considered a national model, still has not gone into effect at the end of the decade. The council person and developers he favors benefit from this by being able to negotiate every new development in their favor. This means that what should be the main street in a densely populated neighborhood underserved by shops and restaurants is mostly still a bunch of building supply warehouses. This also plays to anti-gentrification voters, which has an ugly racial element to it that is hard to talk about. In my view, Inga correctly diagnoses the problem of lower-income residents being pushed to more affordable housing farther from jobs in the city center, without corresponding improvements in public transportation.
  • People are giving up their cars, according to Inga, but traffic is worse and buses can’t run on time due to all the ride sharing and deliveries. Parking garages are disappearing because they are under-subscribed. I would like to examine the numbers on all these issues. Traffic does seem worse, but my instinct is that it is due to poor street design and maintenance, traffic and parking management/pricing, and an almost complete lack of law enforcement effort. Solutions to these problems exist, and all these things in the public realm need to be brought into the 21st century in concert with the new technologies coming from the private sector.