what’s up with solar roadways

This article from “The Conversation” surveys a number of solar road installations around the world. It is pretty down on them, saying they are less efficient and less cost-effective than solar panels on solar farms or rooftops. Okay, but it never says they make bad roads. So where this has been tried, you have functioning roads that didn’t generate electricity before and now do. Most technologies have a tendency to improve and come down in cost over time, so the fact that these pilot projects are up and running and generating power without major mishap doesn’t seem to me like a reason to give up on the idea.

The exponential climate action roadmap

This report from the “Global Climate Action Summit” outlines a plan to actually meet the Paris agreement.

The Paris Agreement’s goal to reduce the risk of dangerous
climate change can be achieved if greenhouse gas emissions
peak by 2020, halve by 2030 and then halve again by 2040
and 2050. This is now technologically feasible and economically
attractive but the world is not on this path.

They identify actions in energy, industry, buildings, transport, food, agricultural, and forestry, as well as carbon capture and storage technology.

Here’s one more paragraph that caught my eye:

If current diffusion rates of renewable energy technology continue into the 2020s, the sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels before 2030 will create “stranded assets” – worthless pipelines, coal mines and oil wells – which could lead to losses on the scale of trillions of dollars by 2035. China and parts of Europe importing fossil fuels stand to benefit most from the bursting carbon bubble, while the US, Canada, Russia and others stand to lose an estimated $4 trillion if climate action falters now and so requiring stronger policies later to avoid catastrophes

The Economist on the next financial crisis

The Economist joins the chorus warning that another financial crisis could be in the cards. They offer three reasons:

  1. There is too much lending against real estate and not enough to businesses that generate real value.
  2. The U.S. dollar is still the world’s reserve currency, but political pressure may prevent the Federal Reserve from flooding the world with dollars in a future crisis like it has in the past.
  3. The Euro is still dangerously unstable.

the Cascadia subduction zone

A major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be really ugly, according to the New Yorker.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater… The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable…

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

…we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten.

disaster kits

We all know we are supposed to have a disaster kit with 3 gallons of water per person, extra prescription drugs, a jar of peanut butter and whatnot. I admit, I have never really done that. I figure I can drink the water in the toilet tank if I am desperate, followed by the water in the toilet bowl, and then I don’t really have a good plan after that. This Wired article says there is not a whole lot of science or evidence behind the government recommendations.

Recommendations for what’s supposed to go in these kits vary, but basically it’s a gallon of water per person per day and food, too, plus medicines, blankets and sleeping bags, maybe a tent, extra eyeglasses, lots of batteries, something to make light with, something to make fire with, maybe a hand-cranked radio…

Here’s the worst part: Nobody knows if disaster preparedness kits actually help. They might! You should still have a kit, if you can do it…

Is there stuff you should probably definitely have access to in your home? Sure. Copies of personal identification documents. Prescription medications. A good whistle. Lightsticks. Water purification tech. A crowbar. (The time you need a crowbar is the time you really, really need a crowbar.)

the next financial crisis

There seems to be increasing concern among economists, journalists and politicians that another severe financial crisis could be looming in the next few years. Of course, the next recession, war or disaster is inevitable and to be expected at some point. The question is how resilient or panic-prone our financial system is when something inevitably happens.

Axios suggests that as advanced economies raise interest rates, they could force debt-laden emerging markets into situations where they can’t afford interest payments. Turkey is of particular concern, and owes large amounts of money to European countries. A trade war is also a concern.

Nouriel Roubini gives ten reasons why a severe financial crisis may be coming, starting with interest rates being too low to give countries any chance to react to a crisis by lowering them (which is probably why they are trying to gradually raise them in the first place.) He also mentions poor (or no) U.S. policies towards trade, immigration, and infrastructure, and high-speed trading algorithms.

Jeffrey Frankel, a professor at Harvard, argues that U.S. policy is unnecessarily pro-cyclical in in terms of expanded government spending, lowered taxes, reduced capital requirements for banks, and political criticism of the Federal Reserve.

Let’s hope a consensus among the experts is actually a contrarian indicator.

virtual reality and philosophy

That’s right, this article is about virtual reality and philosophy.

Why Is Virtual Reality Interesting for Philosophers?

This article explores promising points of contact between philosophy and the expanding field of virtual reality research. Aiming at an interdisciplinary audience, it proposes a series of new research targets by presenting a range of concrete examples characterized by high theoretical relevance and heuristic fecundity. Among these examples are conscious experience itself, “Bayesian” and social VR, amnestic re-embodiment, merging human-controlled avatars and virtual agents, virtual ego-dissolution, controlling the reality/virtuality continuum, the confluence of VR and artificial intelligence (AI) as well as of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), VR-based social hallucinations and the emergence of a virtual Lebenswelt, religious faith and practical phenomenology. Hopefully, these examples can serve as first proposals for intensified future interaction and mark out some potential new directions for research.

The main thing I got from this article is that it is really…long. It starts with a glossary of terms you need to learn before you read the rest of the paper, then gets longer from there.

rating news

I have an idea that maybe others have already thought of, but I haven’t seen it proposed (or implemented) in exactly the form i am thinking of. With all the newfound concern over “fake news”, misinformation, and disinformation, alongside good-old-fashioned government and corporate propaganda (which to its consternation is having some trouble competing with the former), I don’t see why news stories couldn’t be rated or certified as reliable by independent third parties. That is, you could pull up a news story from any of a number of outlets and see that it has the stamp of approval of a particular organization, say the Associated Press or the United Nations. Sites like Politifact and Snopes sort of do this now, but they aren’t rating individual stories. Any organization could create its own rating system, but at least people could choose a rating system they trusted and then either filter their search results or simply have the ratings they are interested in displayed, perhaps in a browser plug-in. It wouldn’t be perfect because it would give people way of filtering so they only hear what they want to hear, but at least we would be doing this explicitly rather than having hidden, amoral, profit-seeking algorithms decide behind the scenes what we see or don’t see.