subway construction cost

A New York Times article has some stats on the cost of subway construction in New York City compared to elsewhere:

  • NYC: $2.5-3.5 billion per mile
  • Paris: $0.45 billion per mile
  • Madrid: $100 million per mile
  • San Francisco: $1 billion per mile
  • Seattle: $0.5 billion per mile

This particular article doesn’t cover costs in Asia. From my personal experience in Singapore, I know that low-cost “guest labor” is part of the equation there. And while environmental, health and safety regulations were relatively stringent there, that is certainly not the case everywhere. Still, nothing like that is going on in France or Spain to the best of my knowledge.

Seek

This is pretty cool – a phone app to help you identify backyard plants and animals.

Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly-recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Use our maps and charts to determine what you want to look for and snap a photo when you think you’ve found it. Our image recognition software lets you know if you got it right and, if it’s a match, adds it to your collection. The more your collection grows, the more badges you’ll earn!

See something that’s not on the list? You can still take a photo of it and Seek will add it to your collection if it’s recognized!

brain uploading

Good news – instead of killing you, slicing up your brain, freezing it and keeping it on ice so they can revive your consciousness centuries in the future, scientists might now be able to scan your brain and just store the pattern for later use. The bad news – they still have to kill you, slice up your brain, and freeze it first before they do the scanning. And of course there is still the old Star Trek transporter problem – when they save your pattern, disintegrate your matter, and recreate the pattern somewhere else using new matter, is it really still the same you, or is it a different you with the same memories as the original you? The new you won’t know the difference, and you won’t know the difference either because you won’t exist, so does it matter? Well, the technology still has a ways to go before we really have to worry about any of this. If they can ever find a way to save a detailed copy of your brain without killing you first, there would be very little downside to trying it. And before you ask, yes, I have read the book Altered Carbon, and no, I have not seen the new show Altered Carbon.

more on Richard Muller

BREAKING NEWS: According to Richard Muller from UC Berkeley, global warming is caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Not changes in the Earth’s orbit, not changes in volcanic activity. Either changes in carbon dioxide or something else that happens to exactly match changes in carbon dioxide. But in all seriousness, this guy is a serious physicist who set out to challenge the findings of the IPCC using hard data, and says he ended up confirming them beyond a shadow of a doubt.

a new option for nuclear waste?

Can nuclear waste be stored safely in horizontally drilled fracking tunnels? Well, maybe…

Nuclear waste experts have contemplated deep-drilling for half a century, mostly by proposing to bore straight down into granite and crystalline rock. But tests of these techniques haven’t gotten very far, being blocked, on occasion, by the public. These approaches have been deemed costly and possibly unsafe, because stacking containers on top of one another puts so much weight on the bottom drums. The Mullers say it’s much cheaper and safer to drill horizontal tunnels, and to do so in shale. They can fit the typical waste canisters (each 1 foot in diameter and 14 feet long) quickly and safely into shale tunnels, they say, given advances in fracking equipment. “Drilling the holes takes a couple weeks at most,” says Elizabeth…

The elder Muller first made his name dealing with radiation much farther away. As a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Richard did that pioneering research on dark energy and cosmic radiation, including work on projects that eventually earned Nobel Prizes. After he and Elizabeth co-founded Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit that measures global temperature and climate change, he went from being one of the most prominent global warming doubters to one of the loudest voices confirming that climate change is real and caused by humans.

The idea for Deep Isolation grew out of the climate change work. Richard and Elizabeth are convinced that shifting China from coal to natural gas should be a priority, and when their effort to form a gas fracking venture in that country bogged down, they applied their newfound knowledge of drilling techniques to nuclear energy. The Mullers argue that the world must increase its use of nuclear energy to slow climate change and say solving the waste problem would encourage adoption.

food crises

Food crises in the world got worse last year, according to a network of researchers (somehow, loosely?) affiliated with the UN. According to Bloomberg:

Food crises are increasingly determined by complex causes such as conflict, extreme climatic shocks and high prices of staple foods, often happening at the same time, the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and EU said in a report Thursday.

Conflict will remain a major driver of food insecurity in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, while drought is likely to worsen crop and livestock output, increasing food insecurity in countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, they said…

Extreme climate events –- mainly drought — were the main triggers of food crises in 23 countries, while conflict continued to be the main driver of acute food insecurity in 18 nations. The report defines acute food insecurity as hunger so severe that it poses an immediate threat to lives or livelihoods.

Dig a little deeper and it sounds like El Nino played a role in intense droughts in many parts of the world. I know El Nino happens with or without climate change, but climate change may arguably be making it worse. War may or may not be caused by climate change, but societies devastated by war are going to have a lot more trouble adapting to extreme weather and changes in water supplies than ones that are not. Food is the nexus of water, energy, and ecosystem services, so if we are exceeding the world’s carrying capacity this is where the signal is likely to show up, both in a long, steady climb in prices and in decreased capacity to recover from extreme events. The poor are always going to feel these effects first and most acutely.

Firstenergy close to bankruptcy

Firstenergy, a major coal and nuclear utility in Ohio and Pennsylvania, is asking those state governments for subsidies to help it avoid bankruptcy. It’s biggest critics? Groups like the Sierra Club, which you might expect, but also the oil and gas industry.

Natural gas and renewable energy have been making up a larger amount of the country’s electric grid, eating into coal and nuclear power on wholesale markets. With that backdrop, FirstEnergy is also asking the Department of Energy to issue an immediate emergency order to PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for mid-Atlantic states, to provide “just and reasonable” compensation to its fleet of aging coal and nuclear power plants in order to keep them open…

“The Nation’s security is jeopardized if DOE does not act now to preserve fuel-secure generation and the diversity of supply…”

“FirstEnergy needs to stop misleading the public and government officials about the status of its power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania,” said Todd Snitchler, Market Development Group Director for the American Petroleum Institute, in a statement. ”For FirstEnergy to cry wolf on the issue of grid reliability is irresponsible and is the company’s latest attempt to force consumers to pay for a bailout.

The collapse of the coal industry isn’t all that surprising, and anyone who has children or lungs should be glad. The possibility of nuclear going down with it is a little surprising. The idea of nuclear appeals to me at least a little bit, but it seems like the economics and keeping the plants up and running just isn’t working out. I wonder if this is just because most of our nuclear plants consist of obsolete, 50-year-old technology, or if nuclear really just will never be able to compete.

Boeing Wannacry

Boeing was hit by Wannacry, the ransomware originating in the NSA, then unleashed supposedly by North Korea. Still, is it really as simple as Boeing having Windows computers without the patch installed? That would seem pretty careless for a major industrial company manufacturing critical systems for domestic use, export and defense.

I’m starting my virus scan right now.

self-parking cars

Wired explains why cars that can park themselves are going to be so awesome, whether or not they are allowed to cruise the public streets and highways just yet.

Parking is a problem that engineers reckon self-driving cars can solve. Send the robot to find a space, after it drops you off at your destination. Summon it back later when you’re ready to leave.

The fatal accident in Arizona this week, in which an Uber autonomous test vehicle killed a pedestrian pushing a bike across the street, highlights some of the dangers of robo-driving at regular speeds. But low-speed movement, with scanners running on full, in a fixed area, is a much safer way to apply the tech. Building owners could have high resolution maps made of their parking lots, geo-fence them, and designate them as no-human zones, so cars can do their thing. It’ll be just like dropping your car at a valet stand, except you don’t have to dig around for singles. More cars will fit into each lot: Because doors don’t need to be opened, the vehicles can squeeze tightly together.

Being a tech magazine and not an urban planning magazine, they don’t realize the significance of the short phrase “More cars will fit into each lot”. Because most cars are parked most of the time, and they take up such enormous amounts of space, this could fundamentally change the land use in cities over time by opening up enormous amounts of space to other uses. And that is assuming people own the same number of cars they do now. As the incentive to own a private vehicle decreases, more of the fleet will be in motion at any given time and less will be parked, accelerating the virtuous cycle of reduced car demand even more. What kind of uses could be better than parking? Well, any – such as housing, commercial space, parks (the kind with soil and plants), natural areas, solar panels. Now might be a good time for cities and suburbs to start thinking about what they want to do with all this public real estate other than just letting it sit there generating heat, stormwater and pollution. As a start, installing separated bike lanes might not seem such a daunting problem, and just opening up some existing parking as temporary loading zones for deliveries, contractors, the elderly and disabled would be an enormous help in many cities.