Robert Skidelski

Robert Skidelski reminds us that, if a critical mass of people is ever going to enjoy the good life, at least two things have to happen. First, the wealth we are creating has to be shared and not just horded by an elite few. And second, we have to learn to distinguish what we need from what we want, and put some limits on the latter rather than let advertisers and other brainwashers always convince us that we want more and more.

There is little echo in this narrative of the older view that machines offer emancipation from work, opening up a vista of active leisure – a theme going back to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle envisaged a future in which “mechanical slaves” did the work of actual slaves, leaving citizens free for higher pursuits. John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes comforted their readers with the thought that capitalism, by generating the income and wealth needed to abolish poverty, would abolish itself, freeing mankind, as Keynes put it, to live “wisely and agreeably and well.”

Likewise, in his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde claimed that with machinery doing all the “ugly, horrible, uninteresting work,” humans will have “delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvelous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else.” And Bertrand Russell extolled the benefitsof extending leisure from an aristocracy to the whole population…

But the concept of growing abundance, articulated by Keynes and others, has been over-ridden by economists’ commitment to inherent scarcity. People’s wants, they say, are insatiable, so they will never have enough. Supply will always lag behind demand, mandating continuous improvements in efficiency and technology. This will be true even if there is enough to feed, clothe, and house the whole world. Poised between the profusion of their wants and the paucity of their means, humans have no option but to continue to “work for hire” in whatever jobs the market provides. So the day of abundance, when they can choose between work and leisure, will never arrive. They must “race with the machines” forever and ever.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Kurzgesast – In a Nutshell is a site with short videos on all sorts of futuristic topics. Here is one on the Dyson Sphere. It talks about a seemingly-plausible approach to a Dyson swarm where small, cheap solar satellites are used to beam solar energy to factories on Mercury, which is used along with materials on Mercury itself to make more satellites and more factories to make satellites in an exponential manner. Sounds good except for the possibility of a runaway exponential system redirecting increasing amounts of solar generation in new directions, and the ethics of possibly disassembling an entire planet into construction materials.

Oliver Stone on Recent U.S. History

Oliver Stone is adding a chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States covering 2012-2019. He basically argues that in 2012 things were not great but getting better, while in 2019 “the unthinkable has become thinkable”. The litany includes continued threats of NATO expansion, wars in the greater Middle East, backing out of the Iran deal and historic Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaties, expanding the nuclear arsenal, threatening behavior against North Korea and China, and continuing to deny and ignore climate change.

In my view, while the U.S. adversaries are not blameless, we need to understand that their governments feel legitimately threatened by our government. The U.S. government has the world’s largest military, the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and has used its military frequently and unilaterally against weaker countries. A path to real peace would have to include some credible means of convincing other countries that we will not attack except in self defense, and we don’t have the track record to convince anyone of this. And in a world where the food supply and coastal population centers are going to start coming under threat from nature, humanity needs to be unified and undistracted to have a chance to deal with other threats.

March 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

Most hopeful story:

  • The Green New Deal, if fleshed out into a serious plan, has potential to slow or reverse the decline of the United States.

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

  • China is looking into space-based solar arrays. Also, injecting sulfate dust into the atmosphere could actually boost rice yields because rice is more sensitive to temperature than light, at least within the ranges studied. This all suggests that solutions to climate change that do not necessarily involve an end to fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions are possible with existing or very near future technology.


rain measurement using cameras

This article is about estimating rainfall using ordinary surveillance camera footage and computer algorithms to process the videos. Measuring rainfall with physical rain gauges is subject to a lot of error, and so far the only real way to reduce the uncertainty is to add more gauges, which of course costs money. Radar can be used to improve our knowledge of what is going on in the spaces between rain gauges, but ultimately the radar-based estimates still end up being calibrated to the gauges. New methods to improve accuracy for a given gauge coverage, and/or reduce cost and gauge coverage while maintaining accuracy, would be welcome.

Advancing opportunistic sensing in hydrology: a novel approach to measuring rainfall with ordinary surveillance cameras

“Opportunistic sensing” represents an appealing idea for collecting unconventional data with broad spatial coverage and high resolution, but few studies have explored its feasibility in hydrology. This study develops a novel approach to measuring rainfall intensity in real‐world conditions based on videos acquired by ordinary surveillance cameras. The proposed approach employs a convex optimization algorithm to effectively decompose a rainy image into two layers: a pure rain‐streak layer and a rain‐free background layer, where the rain streaks represent the motion blur of falling raindrops. Then, it estimates the instantaneous rainfall intensity via geometrical optics and photographic analyses. We investigated the effectiveness and robustness of our approach through synthetic numerical experiments and field tests. The major findings are as follows. First, the decomposition‐based identification algorithm can effectively recognize rain streaks from complex backgrounds with many disturbances. Compared to existing algorithms that consider only the temporal changes in grayscale between frames, the new algorithm successfully prevents false identifications by considering the intrinsic visual properties of rain streaks. Second, the proposed approach demonstrates satisfactory estimation accuracy and is robust across a wide range of rainfall intensities. The proposed approach has a mean absolute percentage error of 21.8%, which is significantly lower than those of existing approaches reported in the literature even though our approach was applied to a more complicated scene acquired using a lower‐quality device. Overall, the proposed low‐cost, high‐accuracy approach to vision‐based rain gauging significantly enhances the possibility of using existing surveillance camera networks to perform opportunistic hydrology sensing.

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.