more news from the yeast vats

This article in Scientific American is about using fungus to generate everything from building materials to human organs to meat to substitutes to plastics.

Mycelium’s fast-growing fibers produce materials used for packaging, clothing, food and construction—everything from leather to plant-based steak to scaffolding for growing organs. Mycelium, when harnessed as a technology, helps replace plastics that are rapidly accumulating in the environment.

Mycelium also provides a cruelty-free way to create meatlike structures with a much smaller environmental footprint than traditional livestock, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the use of food crops for feed and land use conversion. All these benefits come with little environmental cost: the process of growing mycelium results in limited waste (mostly compostable) and requires minimal energy consumption.

beware the powerful house cat lobby

House cats have hired a major lobbying firm to promote their interests, as the song bird special interest attacks continue to escalate.

Okay, that’s my onion-like joke headline. But apparently, there is a vicious academic debate about just how much of a risk domestic cats pose to biodiversity when they are allowed to range outdoors. There is also a values conflict between people who feel very strongly about the welfare of individual animals, both wild and domestic, and people who feel very strongly about ecosystem functions and services. And obviously, there are lots of people who have strong feelings about all these things, and may have some internal conflicts to resolve.

There was one turn of phrase in this article I particularly liked: describing cats as “sentient, sapient, and social individuals”. I looked up sapient in the Websters 1913 dictionary:

Sapient
Sa”pi*ent
 (?), a.
 [L. sapiens, -entis, p. pr. of sapere to taste, to have sense, to know. See Sage
, a.
] Wise; sage; discerning; — often in irony or contempt.

Where the sapient king
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse.
Milton.
Syn. — Sage; sagacious; knowing; wise; discerning.

deliberate practice

Open Culture has a post with lots of links to ideas on the best ways to practice something new. Hint: just repeating bad habits doesn’t do the trick.

Psychologist Anders Ericsson, the single figure most closely associated with deliberate practice, draws a distinction with what he calls naive practice: “Naive practice is people who just play games,” and in so doing “just accumulate more experience.” But in deliberate practice, “you actually pinpoint something you want to change. And once you have that specific goal of changing it, you will now engage in a practice activity that has a purpose of changing that.”

So it turns out that experience and wisdom aren’t the same thing after all. I would say you can’t have wisdom without experience, but you can have experience without wisdom.

Universal Basic Income, VAT, and baby bonds

A few 2020 Presidential contender highlights:

  • Andrew Yang (polling at about 1%) is promoting a Universal Basic Income of $1000/month for all U.S. citizens 18 and older regardless of income. He would pay for it by scaling back some other assistance programs and instituting…a VAT.
  • Cory Booker (polling at about 2%) is promoting “baby bonds”, where every baby gets a $1000 bond annually, and low-income children get up to an additional $2000 per year.

These are all ideas that (any) Democratic President and Congress could explore together, if they were to get a chance and managed to keep the corporate lobbyists at bay. I am 1000% in favor of VAT. It is just one of those things that all other modern countries do and the U.S. does not. It works and we just need to do it. Other taxes people hate can be reduced.

Both the UBI and baby bond ideas are supposed to address inequality quickly. The baby bond idea is supposed to particularly help racial disparities in wealth very quickly, but there is no reason the UBI could not do that with some fine-tuning. I like the idea of setting kids up with assets in principal, but in practice I am afraid unscrupulous relatives, Wall Street and payday lenders will find a way to take advantage of them. The UBI would essentially just be a “Social Security for All” scheme. We have the bureaucracy for that all set up and ready to go, so it seems practical to me. The only other difference I see between the two is that the government can more easily go back on a promise to pay you in the future than it can take money away from you that it has already paid. But of course it can do either, let’s not be naive.

My verdict – I’d like to see a VAT and a carbon tax used to fund education, infrastructure, and research. All of these things should help keep people busy if technology really does lead to unemployment. People can study to upgrade their knowledge and skills, design and build infrastructure and other types of capital goods, or go into research and teaching. Unemployment and disability insurance could also be beefed up to cover the gaps.

hydrogen fuel cell buses

The transportation agency serving the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is using fuel cell-powered buses and planning to produce and store its own hydrogen supply.

The cost of acquiring the two new buses, a fueling station and fuel storage equipment will be about $3.5 million, of which $1.5 million will be covered by federal grants…

MTD plans to produce the hydrogen for its fuel-cell buses itself. It could use solar power, wind turbines or, if need be, gas from the local landfill to separate the hydrogen from oxygen in water molecules for the buses.
The transit agency will soon be accepting bids for the equipment it will use for that conversion. It plans to add a total of 12 hydrogen fuel-cell buses by 2023, or about one-tenth of its fleet. By that time, the rest of its buses will be diesel-electric hybrids.

I’ve always thought that nuclear power, fuel cells, and membranes for water treatment would go together pretty well for a coastal city. You could size the nuclear reactor for peak demand, then use the excess energy to desalinate and electrolyze sea water whenever you are not at peak demand, storing the hydrogen to use in transportation vehicles and any other applications where you need decentralized or off-the-grid energy. You can use the membrane technology to produce drinking water and water for industry, either from seawater or treated sewage. I think you could substitute LNG for the hydrogen in this system if you need to for some reason, for example if the nuclear reactor were down for maintenance. You would have that occasional pesky problem of nuclear waste to deal with, but I am gradually coming around to the idea that managing the risks of nuclear reactors and nuclear waste may be preferable to the certainty of destroying the planet’s ecosystems and oceans. Inventing fusion power would be nice.

heavy water

This article in TreeHugger suggests that one simple solution is not to ship so much water around as part of consumer products. It makes sense. Even if the water were added locally, say at the Amazon neighborhood distribution center, it could save a lot of weight and expense. Maybe local water utilities could get in on the game somehow, and at a minimum you would be using local water rather than transferring large amounts of water from one place to another without realizing it.

my campaign platform

I always fantasize in election years about what my campaign platform would be, in a fantasy world where I had political skills and was running. It’s not a useless fantasy, because it gives me a benchmark to measure candidates against when I’m thinking of who to vote for. So here goes:

  • Education – “free college” and trade school yes, but also universal preschool, lifelong education, and strong incentives for private sector skills training and retraining.
  • Infrastructure – I’ve talked a lot about this. Plan at the metropolitan area scale, take a broad view of infrastructure to include housing and green infrastructure. Include strong incentives for private sector capital investment.
  • Innovation – Flood universities with funding for basic research across the board. Make some bets on a few “moon shot” technologies like quantum computing, nanotechnology, fusion power, and advanced biotechnology. Include strong incentives for private sector R&D.
  • Corruption – also known as “campaign finance”, but that sounds boring. This is really about having voters rather than dollars decide elections, and having elected officials write laws that benefit a critical mass of citizens rather than a few large campaign donors. It’s really a prerequisite to achieving anything else in the long term. Hammer the fuckers relentlessly and voters might respond.
  • Nuclear Weapons – Sure I want world peace, but the public is incredibly cynical about that and this is a place to start. Remind people how horrifying and dangerous they are, and that we have way more than we could ever rationally need for any purpose. If we want others to give them up or stop pursuing them, we can easily lead by example. Just put them away as they wear out and don’t make new ones.

Maybe I’ll elaborate on these in future posts, if I get a chance.

Now, which politician do I think is the best match? I have a lot of research and paying attention to do. I think Bernie Sanders would be the strongest on campaign finance, and just making progress on that issue in an 8-year administration might be worth putting him in office. I also think he might be strong on peace. I think his instinct is to expand the welfare state without taking the first three steps to accelerate income growth over time. I’m not sure who I think would be strongest here. Possibly a rational, moderate Republican actually, if such an animal still exists. But I will never support any politician from that party as long as it continues to stand for bigotry, science denial, and war.

June 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!

Most hopeful story:

  • There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.

 

the emerging science of aquatic system connectivity

JAWRA has a nice literature review on this topic, particularly the science of how wetlands function hydrologically based on their placement in the watershed. I can see a lot of useful applications in both urban and rural hydrology. In my experience, and particularly on the urban end, there is very little hard science built into our legal and policy frameworks on this topic, for example in municipal drainage codes and stormwater management requirements.