how bad would a “small” nuclear war between India and Pakistan be?

It would be really, really, really, really really bad, and not just for the region but for the whole world.

Simply put, soot would block about 20% to 30% of the Sun’s light, globally. That’s a decrease of about 30W to 60W per square meter of the Earth’s surface. For comparison, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo caused a decrease of 4W per square meter. The result would be a 2°C to 5°C (about 4°F to 9°F) global cooling. Temperatures would reach their lowest after about three years and maintain that level for another four years. Getting back to previous temperatures would take over a decade.

The cooling would slow the hydrologic cycle and decrease rainfall by 15% to 30% percent globally, with impacts varying in different regions. In India and Central China, for example, precipitation would drop to nearly zero. The Northeastern and Midwestern United States would see a decline of 50%.

The temperature, precipitation, and sunlight change would obviously impact photosynthesis on land and in the ocean. The model estimated a 15% to 30% drop in growth on land—known as Net Primary Productivity—and a 5% to 15% drop in the ocean.

If global warming gets really bad, maybe we can just blow up a nuke or two on some out of the way continent. Antarctica won’t work because there isn’t much combustible material there. So no, never mind, I never said that.

Bannon propaganda techniques

From Fresh Air, here’s some insight into how Steve Bannon manipulates people:

Conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who later worked in President Trump’s White House, became involved with the SCL subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Wylie, who served as Cambridge Analytica’s research director for a year and a half, watched as his group began to use of data from Facebook and other online sources to target users for disinformation campaigns.

“They targeted people who were more prone to conspiratorial thinking,” Wylie says. “They used that data, and they used social media more broadly, to first identify those people, and then engage those people, and really begin to craft what, in my view, was an insurgency in the United States.”

The interview describes how they would identify people prone to conspiratorial thinking, target them with online ads, then convince them to attend real world events with other people who had been targeted by the same ads. They would choose small gathering places to give people a sense of crowding and that there were a lot of people attending the events. Then at the events, they would talk to other people with similar views and reinforce each other. Then they would get the sense that a lot of people believed whatever the conspiracy was and that it was a conspiracy that they didn’t see it in the mainstream media.

Maybe if more people understand how they are being manipulated, fewer will be manipulated. One can hope.

Koch propaganda techniques

It’s human nature to adjust your beliefs to justify actions that benefit you. That’s why the Koch brothers probably don’t (didn’t, since one passed away recently) think they are evil. But here is how they conspired to murder your grandchildren, and my grandchildren, and possibly their own great-grandchildren, although of course the ultra-rich will tend to fare better in a world of storms, fires, floods and food shortages than the rest of us.

So when you look at this equation of what would happen if we put a price on carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, the real threat is that that might reduce demand for fossil fuels going out five, 10, 20 years. If that happens, the sunk value of this massive, industrial, globe-spanning infrastructure, the value of it, declines dramatically. And I interviewed a Koch Industries attorney who worked in the lobbying shop back in 2009 who told me, you know, Koch saw the efforts to put a price on carbon emissions as an existential threat to the company.

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So here’s what they did. They created a fake non-profit group to organize fake grass-roots protests that lawmakers considering voting for the cap and trade bill would see. They basically paid people to attend.

They also created a fake research organization to do fake studies about cap and trade. Then they paid for political ads that cited the fake research done by their fake organization, and again targeted lawmakers who supported cap and trade.

And it worked. There was bipartisan support for cap and trade based on a real understanding of the science and risk represented by climate change. A concerted campaign of lies masquerading as a citizen movement was able to derail it, all in support of cynically maximizing profits for evil, mega-rich people at the expense of everyone else on the planet for generations to come.

Snowden on Snowden

Fresh Air called up Edward Snowden in his Moscow apartment and had an hour-long conversation with him. Among the interesting things he talked about is the idea that the combination of surveillance technology and cheap data storage means the NSA is essentially trying to collect all the world’s electronic communications, store them forever, and have them available both to search algorithms and human searchers. In other words, the idea is that an NSA staffer can just type in anyone’s name in the world and pull up any and all of the communications they have ever been involved in.

September 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story:
  • I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.

youcubed

This site is all about fresh ideas for teaching high school math. Apparently a lot of people agree that the traditional U.S. approach of algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, and calculus is not working. A lot of people seem to think data science is the answer. It sounds okay to me to start with interesting data and then work backward to math theory and systems concepts. I do use geometry pretty much daily in my work, at least concepts like areas and volumes. Are those geometry? I think I originally learned them in high school chemistry class. I almost never use calculus symbols, but I use calculus concepts like rate of change and accumulating and depleting stocks daily. I solve those numerically rather than symbolically. So maybe this is what we should be teaching in high school, then working our way to the symbols for people who really need it, for example the ones who are going to be programming the computers that the rest of us use to solve various problems. A little statistics and probability is a good idea, but even that can be more experiment based and less symbolic at first.

Cognizant Jobs of the Future Index

What kind of education and job skills should you recommend to young people today (assuming career/economic success is the goal. Yes, the world needs philosophers and musicians but sadly that is not a path to material success for many)? I figure biotech, materials science, robotics and computer science (deep theoretical understanding and/or engineering, not just code writing). Again, if material/economic success is the goal, I think you need knowledge and skills that are attractive to the private sector. (My own are mostly of interest to the public sector. I don’t regret my choices but this does put a ceiling on the potential size of my bank account.) There should be plenty of jobs in education and health care services, but not necessarily well paying ones at least in the U.S. I think there will always be plumbers and electricians.

Okay, now let’s see if I’m right. Here is the Cognizant Jobs of the Future Index. There are way too many jobs to list here, but their categories are:

  • algorithms, automation, and AI (okay, this is the computer science route, although someone could also try the math/statistics or even actuarial science path)
  • customer experience (this appears to cover what might be traditionally known as sales and marketing)
  • environmental (includes energy-related fields and environmental engineering – well, what do you know, maybe my choices aren’t so bad after all…)
  • fitness and wellness (home health care, physical therapy, etc. – things an aging population will need and hard to automate at least in the near term)
  • health care (includes the obvious, but also data science, genetic related, and medical device engineering related jobs)
  • legal and financial services (yes, lawyers will still be a necessary evil)
  • transportation (more on the engineering and planning side, not so much taxi and truck drivers…)
  • work culture (your human resources department will also continue to be a necessary evil)

So, I think a kid could do worse than a degree in chemical, mechanical or electrical engineering, then specialize from there. (Civil/environmental is nice…but again…the public sector thing). If you want to be a doctor or lawyer, go for it. The world will still need artists, philosophers, and in general people who can think, understand systems and solve problems, but it is still unclear when we will start valuing these things.

porous paving for all new commercial parking lots in New Orleans

The headline pretty much says it – New Orleans is requiring porous pavement for all new commercial parking lots. This is a pretty old technology that U.S. construction companies are still not very familiar with, so they think it is new, expensive, difficult, and unproven. Well, it is expensive and difficult when done only on a very small scale, so requiring it across the board will solve that problem. And it is proven to work when installed by contractors and construction managers that know what they are doing, and proven not to work when they don’t. So requiring it across the board will solve that too. Notice there is nothing here about requiring it on streets or highways. Well, one step at a time.