Afghanistan and the return of the “Great Game”

This BBC article talks about the post-occupation (the most recent U.S. occupation, that is) geopolitical intrigue, or Cold War II as I think of it, that is developing in Afghanistan.

In December 2015, a senior Russian diplomat declared that “the Taliban interest objectively coincides with ours” in the fight against IS and that his country and the Taliban “have channels for exchanging information”.

Taliban sources also confirmed that the group’s representatives met Russians inside Russia and “other” countries several times over the past two years.

But Moscow’s current assertiveness in Afghanistan can also be seen as a tactic to put pressure on the US and to enhance its role and regional influence.

Taliban contacts with Russia and Iran might also help Pakistan to distribute and dilute the international pressure it is under for hosting the Afghan Taliban leadership.

10-Minute Neighborhood Analysis

This article from Kirkland, Washington describes in detail an interesting scoring scheme they applied to all of their neighborhoods. They have a good run-down on why walkable neighborhoods are good.

The ability to retain, create, and enhance 10 minute neighborhoods has benefits for users of the neighborhood and benefits for the community as a whole.

  • Health. Residents who walk or bike regularly are healthier and therefore walkable communities make it easier to live healthy lifestyles.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people living in walkable neighborhoods get about 35 to 45 more minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week and are substantially less likely to be overweight or obese than people of similar socioeconomic status living in neighborhoods that are not walkable

  • Traffic. Residents with convenient access to local goods and services are less likely to drive.  If they do drive, they have a shorter travel distance.  The 10 minute neighborhood acknowledges the value to Kirkland’s transportation system of every trip not taken and every mile not driven.

  • Transit.  Better access to transit equates to more transit users.  Regional data show that people who live within a half mile of a transit node commute less often by single-occupant vehicle (SOV) with a higher percentage using transit, carpooling, and walking or bicycling to work .

  • Demographics.  21 percent of the population aged 65 and older does not drive – and that segment of the population is projected to grow significantly .  Older non drivers need options so they remain engaged with their communities.

  • Clean Air.  Less traffic means cleaner air and less greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Social Connectivity.  Pedestrian activity and local gathering places help build social cohesion and eyes on the street help people feel safer in their communities.

  • Market Forces.  Recent surveys indicate that a majority of Americans want to live in walkable neighborhoods served by good transit .  Those numbers are significantly stronger for younger Americans and those who plan to move in the future, a strong representation of the future real estate market.

  • Stronger Retail.  A local customer base is good for local businesses.

social interaction in cities

Here’s an interesting article from the University of Bern, Switzerland, on social interaction in cities. The engineer in me likes to see some hard data and theory applied in the social sciences.

Cities and the Structure of Social Interactions: Evidence from Mobile Phone Data

Social interactions are considered pivotal to urban agglomeration forces. This study employs a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how social interactions differ across cities and peripheral areas. We first show that geographical distance is highly detrimental to interpersonal exchange. We then reveal that individuals residing in high-density locations do not benefit from larger social networks, but from a more efficient structure in terms of higher matching quality and lower clustering. These results are derived from two complementary approaches: Based on a link formation model, we examine how geographical distance, network overlap, and sociodemographic (dis)similarities impact the likelihood that two agents interact. We further decompose the effects from individual, location, and time specific determinants on micro-level network measures by exploiting information on mobile phone users who change their place of residence.

And here’s a more touchy-feely article in Vox on how the U.S. suburban development pattern discourages social interaction.

the key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact. That’s why we make friends in school — because we are forced into regular contact with the same people. It is the natural soil out of which friendship grows…

This kind of spontaneous social mixing doesn’t disappear in post-collegiate life. We bond with co-workers, especially in those scrappy early jobs, and the people who share our rented homes and apartments.

But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. Many if not most neighborhoods these days are not safe for unsupervised kid frolicking. In lower-income areas there are no sidewalks; in higher-income areas there are wide streets abutted by large garages. In both cases, the neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don’t leave except to drive somewhere.

I buy this about 75%. I am lucky to live and work in a highly walkable urban neighborhood, and I do have a lot of friendly spontaneous interactions with people around the neighborhood. I have a “scrappy” job where I bond with my co-workers, like soldiers in the trenches. I am also a middle-aged family person and somewhat of an introvert. Part of the reason I don’t have a lot of close adult friendships outside of work and family is that between work and family, I have all the human interaction I can really handle. If I have 15 minutes free on a given day, I would rather spend it alone than interacting with yet another person. I suppose this could change when the kids get a little older and/or when I don’t have to work so much, assuming I live long enough for these things to happen. So I’m just saying there are family pressures, financial and career pressures, and personality differences that influence these things alongside urban form.

Back to the first article, it suggests that high school, college, band camp, and even most workplaces might not be the best model of the most fulfilling and productive social interactions that can develop among adults in the best cities. In high school and college we tend to form small, tight-knit groups where most people in the group network only within the group. The first article above, if I am interpreting it correctly, describes a case where not only are individuals interacting frequently within a social network, but relatively open social networks themselves are interacting with each other as individuals within them interact in random and freewheeling ways. It’s wonderful. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to sit on my couch for a little while, watch some TV, unwind and recharge so I can handle the social interaction that will be thrown at me tomorrow.

The Great Equalizer

The Great Equalizer by David Smick book is #8 on the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. Here’s the Amazon description:

The experts say that America’s best days are behind us, that mediocre long-term economic growth is baked in the cake, and that politically, socially, and racially, the United States will continue to tear itself apart. But David Smick—hedge fund strategist and author of the 2008 bestseller The World Is Curved—argues that the experts are wrong.

In recent decades, a Corporate Capitalism of top down mismanagement and backroom deal-making has smothered America’s innovative spirit. Policy now favors the big, the corporate, and the status quo at the expense of the small, the inventive, and the entrepreneurial. The result is that working and middle class Americans have seen their incomes flat-lining and their American Dreams slipping away. In response, Smick calls for the great equalizer, a Main Street Capitalism of mass small-business startups and bottom-up innovation, all unfolding on a level playing field. Introducing a fourteen-point plan of bipartisan reforms for unleashing America’s creativity and confidence, his forward-thinking book describes a new climate of dynamism where every man and woman is a potential entrepreneur—especially those at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Ultimately, Smick argues, economies are more than statistical measurements of supply and demand, economic output, and rates of return. Economies are people—their hopes, fears, dreams, and expectations. The Great Equalizer is a call for a set of new paradigms that inspire and empower average American people to reimagine and reboot their economy. It is a manifesto asserting that, with a new kind of economic policy, America’s best days lie ahead.

 

IBM’s Smarter Cities

What exactly has IBM been up to all this time with its Smarter Cities program? It’s been hard to figure out. The marketing hype and media coverage have seemed to die down a bit. But here is an article in Cities with some research on it.

An investigation of IBM’s Smarter Cites Challenge: What do participating cities want?

In 2010, IBM created the Smarter Cites Challenge to address critical issues of the 21st century through its digital expertise, in collaboration with city governments. Despite questions about the origin and intentions of IBM’s involvement, 130 cities from all around the world took up the challenge in the first five years. There is limited case study research available on a number of participating cities which has not been able to unpack cities’ rationale for working with IBM. This paper provides an index of all participating cities in the Smarter Cities Challenge, to understand the areas of interest in which urban governments have been seeking IBM’s consulting service. Findings present the state of smart city thinking in urban governments, and raise questions about the multidimensional integration, if any, across the areas of focus in which digital technologies are shaping contemporary cities.

making your own biodiesel

Do you want to make your own biodiesel? Here’s an article. Basically, biodiesel is vegetable oil either mixed with regular diesel or processed to change its properties so it can fuel a diesel engine or generator. If you try this please don’t poison, burn or blow yourself up. If you poison, burn or blow yourself up don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This is interesting on a small scale but I don’t think it’s the answer to civilization’s energy problems for a few reasons. The obvious one is that it takes a lot of vegetable oil, vegetable oil crops/trees take a lot of land to grow, and if you do it on a huge scale you will not have that land available for anything else, like growing food. We should be diversifying our economy away from our reliance on oil specifically, and liquid fuels more generally. Still, there are applications like air travel where liquid fuels seem to be the best technical solution, and it might make sense to reserve biofuels for those. If you need an emergency generator for some reason, like at a hospital, and battery or fuel cell technology are not up to the job or cost-effective enough yet, a tank of biodiesel certainly seems like a safer and less toxic alternative to a tank of regular old diesel.

your very own doomsday bunker

Do you want a doomsday bunker but you are not sure how or where to build one? Now you can buy one (er, lease for 99 years…) already fitted out in South Dakota. The only question I have is, how will I get to South Dakota quickly when the missiles are incoming? I guess I could just move out there and live nearby. But if I am going to do that, I might as well just go ahead and move into the bunker. Once I am in the bunker, what will I do all day? I suppose I can count my guns and gold bars. But that might get old. Do they have cable? Come to think of it, I have a few more questions. Is there a water well? Is there a wastewater treatment plant? Is there a power plant? Is there a Walmart? After thinking this through, I think I’ll just take my chances here in civilization and hope the end is quick.

self-healing teeth

Teeth – I have always thought they are one of the weakest links in our evolution, and an example of how nature does not always come up with an optimal design. They just don’t make any sense. Why make them out of substances that dissolve in acid when most of our food is made of acid? They just don’t last as long as most of our other body parts, and they cause us tremendous pain and suffering. Maybe in the future we will just have them all pulled out at some point and replaced with titanium or something else durable. Something I didn’t know, though, is that teeth actually have the ability to heal themselves at a slow rate, and this ability could maybe be accelerated using drugs.

It’s 1984 in Russia

I like these explainer type articles in The Week. This one makes two interesting claims about Russia and Putin, the first of which I had kind of arrive at myself and the second of which I don’t recall ever hearing before, although it seems important.

First, Russia is a desperately poor country and Putin is diverting its extremely limited resources to military adventures in an attempt to look strong to the domestic population.

Putin has sought to bolster Russia’s power against the encroachment of the West, picking fights with nearby Georgia and Ukraine and intervening in Syria as a show of strength. His proud nationalism has made him very popular among Russians, although the international sanctions brought on by his seizure of Crimea — combined with a sharp downturn in oil prices — have badly damaged Russia’s fragile economy. Russia’s gross domestic product tumbled from $2.2 trillion in 2013 to $1.3 trillion in 2015 — lower than that of Italy, Brazil, or Canada. Only 27 percent of Russians have any savings at all, and the average Russian now spends half his or her money on food. Few Russians, however, complain.

Second, Putin, who is a KGB agent trained in East Germany, came to power through a KGB-orchestrated false flag operation that killed hundreds of Russian citizens and was used to justify a war.

How did he come to power?
Through the work of the FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB. Putin was an unknown FSB operative when the agency strong-armed an ailing President Boris Yeltsin into picking him as prime minister in August 1999. Putin had spent five years as a spy in East Germany. Just a month after he took office, a series of apartment bombings shattered Moscow, killing about 300 people. The FSB blamed Chechen extremists, although there is strong evidence the spy agency planted the bombs itself; the carnage served as pretext for a second ruthless war to put down the restive Muslim province of Chechnya. Putin became the face of the battle, vowing in his characteristically crude language to eliminate all the terrorists, “wherever they hide, even on the crapper.” By the end of the year, Chechnya had been laid waste, thousands of Chechen civilians were dead, and Yeltsin had named the now popular Putin as his successor as president…

Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB whistleblower who described how the agency staged the Moscow bombings to bring Putin to power, was poisoned with polonium in London; a British inquiry found that Putin likely personally ordered the hit.

are you smarter than Einstein?

It seems to me that spending your life trying to disprove Einstein is a path to likely disappointment and failure. Nonetheless there are brave souls who dare to challenge (well, tweak maybe…) his theories.

FOR 80 YEARS, scientists have puzzled over the way galaxies and other cosmic structures appear to gravitate toward something they cannot see. This hypothetical “dark matter” seems to outweigh all visible matter by a startling ratio of five to one, suggesting that we barely know our own universe. Thousands of physicists are doggedly searching for these invisible particles.

But the dark matter hypothesis assumes scientists know how matter in the sky ought to move in the first place. At the end of 2016, a series of developments has revived a long-disfavored argument that dark matter doesn’t exist after all. In this view, no missing matter is needed to explain the errant motions of the heavenly bodies; rather, on cosmic scales, gravity itself works in a different way than either Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein predicted.

The latest attempt to explain away dark matter is a much-discussed proposal by Erik Verlinde, a theoretical physicist at the University of Amsterdam who is known for bold and prescient, if sometimes imperfect, ideas. In a dense 51-page paper posted online on Nov. 7, Verlinde casts gravity as a byproduct of quantum interactions and suggests that the extra gravity attributed to dark matter is an effect of “dark energy”—the background energy woven into the space-time fabric of the universe.