the Doomsday Clock

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have moved their doomsday clock from “3 minutes to midnight” to “2.5 minutes to midnight”. It appears to me to be the first time they have used a fraction. A couple quotes:

Last year, and the year before, we warned that world leaders were failing to act with the speed and on the scale required to protect citizens from the extreme danger posed by climate change and nuclear war. During the past year, the need for leadership only intensified—yet inaction and brinksmanship have continued, endangering every person, everywhere on Earth…

Technological innovation is occurring at a speed that challenges society’s ability to keep pace. While limited at the current time, potentially existential threats posed by a host of emerging technologies need to be monitored, and to the extent possible anticipated, as the 21st century unfolds…

For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon.” In 2017, we find the danger to be even greater, the need for action more urgent. It is two and a half minutes to midnight, the Clock is ticking, global danger looms. Wise public officials should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink. If they do not, wise citizens must step forward and lead the way.

They offer some recommendations, including the U.S. and Russia returning to the arms reduction negotiating table, reducing nuclear weapons alert status and maintaining communication and crisis de-escalation channels, meeting obligations under the Paris climate accord, multilateral engagement with North Korea, nuclear power safety and risk management, and new institutions to manage “potentially malign or catastrophic misuses of new technologies”.

Trump’s infrastructure priority list

Here is a list of priority infrastructure projects the Trump administration has supposedly released. I guess these is the equivalent of Obama’s much-derided “shovel ready” projects, but they are smart enough not to revive that term. Here’s my very low tech data analysis:

  • transportation (39)
    • passenger rail/subway/stations (10)
    • freight rail (1)
    • highway/bridge (11)
    • R&D (1)
    • water transport, locks and dams, harbors/ports (12)
    • airport/air traffic control (4)
  • energy (7)
    • electric grid (3)
    • hydroelectric (2)
    • wind (1)
    • pipelines (1)
  • water (4)
    • wastewater (1)
    • reservoir (2)
    • desalination (1)

It’s an interesting list. Political discussion of infrastructure has a tendency to focus on highways and bridges, and this list is transportation heavy. But mass transit has almost equal representation. And looking at the projects, there is no sign that the administration is favoring red states or trying to punish Democrat-leaning coastal cities. There are more renewable energy projects than fossil fuel pipelines. There are a lot of dam, lock, and port projects presumably because the Army Corps of Engineers has a tendency to study and design these projects to death for decades, just waiting for a funding source to finally materialize. There are many cities that need billions in dollars in wastewater infrastructure (full disclosure: I am sitting in one of them and work in the industry), and Cleveland is the lucky winner in the list above. Cleveland is certainly a poor city and the wastewater rate payers there deserve some relief, but there are plenty of other cities (like Detroit, Newark, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia where I happen to be sitting) need help too. There must be 10,000 academics pitching research projects of various sorts, and Ohio State is the lucky winner. Ohio must have some savvy politicians who know something politicians in other states don’t know, or else they just care about their cities and infrastructure a little bit more. People sitting in Cincinnati and Akron could argue with me, I suppose.

optimal city block length

This article in Harvard Gazette is about the optimal block length for walkability. The basic conclusion is that small is generally better, but there is some minimum below which pedestrians are spending too much time crossing streets. If I were laying out a city though, I would want to err on the side of smaller because it is much easier to close streets to vehicle traffic than to create new streets where there previously weren’t any.

Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to the people of 2088

In 1988 Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short letter of advice to the people of 2088. The full letter, which is short, is here. An excerpt:

Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn’t do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

If I can summarize the sentiment, what he found depressing is that we have the knowledge and ability to understand what is going on and do something about it, and yet as a civilization and species we are failing to do anything.

World Order 2.0

Richard Haas has a vision for what a new international order could look like.

Today’s realities call for an updated operating system—World Order 2.0 – based on “sovereign obligation,” the notion that sovereign states have not just rights but also obligations to others.

A new international order will also require an expanded set of norms and arrangements, beginning with an agreed-upon basis for statehood. Existing governments would agree to consider bids for statehood only in cases where there was a historical justification, a compelling rationale, and popular support, and where the proposed new entity is viable.

World Order 2.0 must also include prohibitions on carrying out or in any way supporting terrorism. More controversially, it must include strengthened norms proscribing the spread or use of weapons of mass destruction.

He goes on to talk about climate change, trade, health, cyberspace, and refugees. It all sounds good but there aren’t a lot of specifics here.

Obama’s word clouds

Obama read 10 letters a day while in office. He received about 10,000 pieces of mail and email a day, and his staff had to pick the 10. Also interesting, the staff made a word cloud out of all emails received and posted them in the White House. I find that kind of nice, the idea that words you write were received and might have had an influence in some form even if they weren’t all read.

I’ve always liked the idea of elected officials setting up some kind of voting site where constituents could weigh in on issues or even specific bills. The official could get a daily “report card” of where his or her constituents stand, and this could help to influence his or her decisions. If there were a concern that people logging on to the website were not representative, some form of demographic weighting could be used.

how the ATF traces guns

This is one of those in-depth articles that GQ puts out every now and then.

Anytime a cop in any jurisdiction in America wants to connect a gun to its owner, the request for help ends up here, at the National Tracing Center, in a low, flat, boring building that belies its past as an IRS facility, just off state highway 9 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eastern panhandle of the state, a town of some 17,000 people, a Walmart, a JCPenney, and various dollar stores sucking the life out of a quaint redbrick downtown. On any given day, agents here are running about 1,500 traces; they do about 370,000 a year…

The National Tracing Center is not allowed to have centralized computer data… That’s been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America’s gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It’s kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name…

All the out-of-business records that come in here—2 million last month—are eventually imaged and organized according to the store that sent them. It might be 50,000 Form 4473s from one Dick’s Sporting Goods in some suburb of Cleveland. So, say you need to find one particular 4473 from that store. “We go through them,” Charlie tells me. “Just like photographs from your Christmas party, and we look through every one. Until we find it.”

the Twenty-Fifth Amendment

the text of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment Section 4, via Wikipedia:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.