Gorbachev’s 1992 Speech at Westminster College

From the New York Times archives, May 7, 1992:

Mr. Gorbachev spoke to an outdoor gathering and offered a range of proposals for strengthening the United Nations. These included the enlargement of the Security Council and the application of stronger sanctions and military force against wayward members…

In particular, he called for creation of a “special body” to use economic and military means to prevent regional conflicts and for a greatly enlarged Security Council, with nations like India, Japan, Poland, Mexico, Germany, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia and Egypt as members, even if without veto power…

Today, Mr. Gorbachev stood at the same lectern as Churchill to symbolize the Soviet Union’s peaceful demise and to look no less uncertainly into the future, hoping this time that nations “made wise by bitter experience” might cast aside “egoistic considerations in order to arrive at the exalted goal that is man’s destiny on earth.”

A nice vision, and good advice. The world has not taken his advice and has not lived up to his vision.

utility-scale solar cost dropped 30% in one year

According to Inhabitat:

In a recently published report, the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratories documented that the cost of utility-scale solar, generated from large plants rather than residential rooftops, has decreased by 30 percent within the past year…

Although China has frequently been cited by the US President as a dangerous competitor, the solar renaissance in the United States has been made possible because of the pioneering work in solar energy being done in the People’s Republic. More solar modules are being produced in China than there is demand, which has enabled US importers to purchase this technology at low prices. As a result, the average price per watt is now only $1.03 for fixed-tilt systems and $1.11 for those that move to track the sun’s movement.

rapid intensification

The 2017 hurricane season has set new records for rapid intensification, according to the Washington Post.

“It’s not a common event. Typically, that occurs in maybe 5 percent of our forecasts,” said Mark DeMaria, acting deputy director of the National Hurricane Center…

“Looking back through the records, Maria went from a tropical depression to a Category 5 hurricane in just two and a half days,” he said. “I couldn’t find any other tropical cyclones in our historical record that went that quickly from a depression to a Category 5 hurricane…”

The National Hurricane Center technically defines rapid intensification as a wind speed increase of at least 35 miles per hour in 24 hours. All four of the most intense Atlantic storms in 2017 beat that easily.

We can’t say any individual event is caused by climate change, say the experts, but some weird shit is going to happen and it is going to happen more often.

“Cities Swimming in Raw Sewage as Hurricanes Overwhelm Systems”

That headline sounds bad, but it’s actually bad journalism. Sewers and wastewater treatment plants are not designed to function correctly during a hurricane the size of Harey or Irma. In that situation, the concern is protecting life and property. Sewage treatment can take a temporary back seat, and generally be brought back online pretty quickly after the extreme event is over.

Millions of gallons of poorly treated wastewater and raw sewage flowed into the bays, canals and city streets of Florida from facilities serving some of the nation’s fastest-growing counties. More than 9 million gallons of releases tied to Irma have been reported as of late Tuesday as inundated plants were submerged, forced to bypass treatment or lost power.

The article goes on to suggest that the sewage released during a hurricane has something to do with aging, poorly maintained infrastructure that is not doing what it is supposed to do in normal weather.

Such overflows, which can spread disease-causing pathogens, are happening more often, as population shifts and increasingly strong storms strain the capacity of plants and decades-old infrastructure. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated last year that $271 billion is needed to maintain and improve the nation’s wastewater pipes, treatment plants and associated infrastructure…

Wastewater treatment facilities are especially vulnerable to flooding because they are traditionally built in low-lying areas, near whatever river or waterway they discharge into.  That approach works in normal conditions, but coastal treatment plants increasingly are outmatched during intense downpours and fierce storms, especially amid rising sea levels.

“Any time there is a large event — any kind of flood — they get overwhelmed and you have these raw sewage discharges,” said Ken Kopocis, who served as the top official in the EPA’s water office under President Barack Obama.

This is all true. We do need to spend money on our water quality infrastructure, and states and the federal government need to help fix problems that were caused long before anyone alive today was born. And we need to consider climate change and sea level rise when we do all that. But we also need to demand a bit more from our science reporters.

the “Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st Century”

From Bloomberg BNA,

A federal judge said he wanted to avoid having “the Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st Century,” and ordered an environmental organization to remove claims based on climate change in its lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp.

Judge Mark Wolf said he did not want the lawsuit to turn into a trial about whether climate change exists, the way the 1925 trial about whether evolution could be taught in Tennessee public schools took up the debate about human origin…

Wolf said he would not dismiss the suit. But he told the environmental organization to amend its 14-count complaint and strip out major references to harm caused by climate change that would take place in 2050 and later.

I hadn’t thought of it before but I think the comparison is perfect! Almost 100 hundred years on from the Scopes trial, a large majority of rational, educated people correctly see that debate as a silly footnote to an ignorant, bygone era. Climate change is similar, except we were never seriously worried about the apes rising up and swamping us (you maniacs!)

But on a more serious note, why is a judge qualified to identify the best planning horizon when considering risk of failure of an industrial facility? That should depend on the expected life of the facility, external threats that might occur (like climate change), likelihood and consequence of failure during that period. If an oil and gas tank farm would tend to be retired or rebuilt every 30 years or so (and I suspect it might), it would make sense to take into account only the risks expected to take place over that time period, so 2050 might actually be a reasonable decision.

alternatives to word clouds

I like this post on R bloggers proposing several alternatives to word clouds. I’ll list them below but really, you should look at the pictures because hey, this is about pictures.

  1. circle packing (basically this replaces the words with circles, dealing with the problem of bigger/longer words appearing to be more important in standard word clouds); there is a variation on this called the “horn of plenty” where the circles are arranged in order rather than randomly
  2. cartogram (in my ignorance, I have been calling this a “bubble map”. I have used these frequently to show engineering model results and find they work well for many people)
  3. chloropleth (these shade in geographic areas to convey data. I find these work well if the size of the geographic area is important information. If it is not, these tend to draw the viewer’s eye to larger areas, and in that case the bubbles are better. For example, per-person income of Luxembourg vs. China.)
  4. treemap (I’ve been calling these “packed rectangles” and I generally find them good for anything where conveying relative magnitudes of things to people is important)
  5. donuts (surpringly, the author concludes a donut is the best option for the data he is trying to show and I kind of agree, it gets the point across and leaves lots of room for labels)

The article has links to the specific packages and code used to create the graphics.

facts about the Vietnam War

A series on warontherocks.com recounts the facts and figures on U.S. firepower during the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War the United States dropped approximately twice as many tons of bombs in Southeast Asia as the Allied forces combined used against both Germany and Japan in World War II. Between 1964 and 1973, U.S. aircraft expended over seven million tons of bombs in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, compared to 3.4 million tons dropped by the United States and its allies in all of World War II. There were restrictions on some targets, particularly in areas of North Vietnam that were close to China and where U.S. leaders were concerned that American airstrikes might provoke a Chinese response. But those do not change the fact that the American air campaign in the Vietnam war was the heaviest in the history of war, by a very large margin…

For most of the period of U.S. involvement, the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies used air and ground munitions at a rate several hundred times higher than the Communist side. Pentagon records for 1969, for example, show that U.S. forces expended nearly 130,000 tons of ammunition a month. About three-fifths of that was delivered by air and the rest in ground fire. By comparison, the highest Communist firepower expenditure of the war, not reached until 1972, was about 1,000 tons a month.

the Sanders single payer plan

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and others have introduced a “Medicare for All” bill. Introducing a bill doesn’t mean it will become law any time soon, but it may be a good sign that something seen as politically unviable in the past is now at least being seriously discussed by mainstream politicians.

The universal Medicare proposal released this week extends health insurance coverage to every single American free of copays, premiums, and deductibles — and has long been viewed as a direct threat to highly profitable health-related industries and providers.

The bill calls for gradually expanding Medicare coverage, starting with the young and phasing in other segments of the population. The plan would cover all essential services, including routine doctor visits, emergency room care, mental health, dental, outpatient care, and forms of treatment.

Sanders’s office also released a statement this week laying out various financing methods for the bill, including an employer tax, closing tax loopholes, and a variety of progressive income-based taxes.

Taxes are unpopular of course, but we have to remember that workers and employers are all paying enormous health insurance premiums, much of which either gets eaten up by the enormous inefficiencies of the health care industrial complex, or goes into the pockets of insurance and drug companies as profits.

universal basic income

This post on BillMoyers.com runs some of the numbers on the idea of a universal basic income.

The UBI would be for those who truly needed it — those who could not endure traditional full-time employment, either because of age, illness, disability, caretaking or student status. As baby boomers grow old and need care, as students struggle to earn an education without becoming hideously indebted, and as parents yearn to stay home with infants and very young children, a UBI would truly revolutionize society.

Proposals vary, with costs depending on whether or not UBI would be paired with other social programs, like universal health care. Karl Widerquist, a Georgetown professor of political philosophy, estimated that at $6,000 per child and $12,000 per adult, the net cost of UBI would be $539 billion per year.

This number may sound astronomical, but to put it into perspective, Widerquist writes, a UBI would cost “less than 25 percent of the cost of current US entitlement spending, less than 15 percent of overall federal spending, and about 2.95 percent of Gross Domestic Product.”

Wealthy and powerful people don’t like ideas to share the wealth, of course. But they should recognize that if we get to a point where there is enough wealth to go around, but not enough jobs to go around, there has to be some way to share the wealth or else there will be no possibility of a stable society.

Will robots take my job?

If you want to know if robots will take your job, you can go to willrobotstakemyjob.com. It turns out my job (“environmental engineer” is the closest match) is particularly hard to automate at just a 1.8% chance robots will take my job, so I’ve got that going for me. I typed in ten other other career choices to see what I would get, then ranked them from most to least at risk.

  • auto mechanic: 59%
  • electrician: 15%
  • electrical engineer: 10%
  • mathematician: 4.7%
  • biochemist/biophysicist: 2.7%
  • materials scientist: 2.1%
  • chemical engineer: 1.7%
  • computer scientist: 1.5%
  • mechanical engineer: 1.1%
  • nurse: 0.9%

I won’t bother typing in the obvious ones like taxi driver (89%) or court reporter (50%). Okay, I did and that last one surprised me a little. The ten I picked weren’t random, they were ones I thought would be safe, and it turns out I was right except for auto mechanic. I’m a little surprised at that. Vehicles are merging with computers and getting more complex all the time, which means they are going to require more troubleshooting, updating, and will become obsolete faster than the past. I would also think a car mechanic could cross-train as a robot mechanic pretty easily. So the mechanics of the future will have to be equal parts grease monkey and tech support. Maybe they won’t be called mechanics, but the complicated systems we are creating are going to break in unpredictable ways and skilled troubleshooters are going to be in demand.

Anyway, the bottom line is that most types of engineering, and research positions related to genetics and/or materials, are pretty safe. Nursing is a field where supply just never seems to catch up to demand, and medical technology (and spending) just keep marching forward as the population ages and lives longer. You can still make a living as an electrician or a plumber.

I also learned something about the Standard Occupational Classification system used by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The 2010 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system is used by Federal statistical agencies to classify workers into occupational categories for the purpose of collecting, calculating, or disseminating data. All workers are classified into one of 840 detailed occupations according to their occupational definition. To facilitate classification, detailed occupations are combined to form 461 broad occupations, 97 minor groups, and 23 major groups. Detailed occupations in the SOC with similar job duties, and in some cases skills, education, and/or training, are grouped together.