Big Bertha

The problems for Seattle’s “Bertha” tunnel boring project are continuing according to the Seattle Times.

Tunnel-machine Bertha’s two-year breakdown will further delay the Highway 99 tunnel’s grand opening until 2019 and saddle Washington state with an estimated $223 million in cost overruns, lawmakers were told Thursday…

A 2019 opening would mark a full decade since former Gov. Chris Gregoire chose the deep-bore tunnel option and lawmakers approved the tunnel bill sponsored by then-Sen. Ed Murray, now Seattle mayor. Gregoire dismissed critics such as then-Mayor Mike McGinn, who warned that a clause in the bill put Seattle taxpayers at particular risk for paying for overruns…

The extra costs almost certainly would be paid by the state’s drivers in gas taxes, more transportation-fund debt, or by tolls and fees.

Tunneling is a key technology for the future of urban infrastructure. But the experience in Seattle illustrates the risk that the technology entails. It is one thing for state and federal governments to undertake this risk under the oversight of elected officials, and another for state and federal governments to put pressure on local governments and utilities to undertake these types of massive projects, as is common in the water quality and flooding arena. A tunneling project that goes well can indeed often reduce pollutant discharges or flooding at an attractive unit cost, but the costs can mount quickly when a project does not go well. Luckily, that happens only when we do not know in advance precisely what we are going to find underground every step of the way under a city that has been around for a couple hundred years (in other words, always). Tunneling is an alternative that should almost always be looked at. Green infrastructure should be looked at too and considered seriously on its merits as an engineering infrastructure technology that can have multiple benefits for the citizens, taxpayers and ratepayers of urban areas.

U.S. Muslims: Facts and Figures

This article from The Week has some interesting facts and figures on U.S. Muslims.

The Pew Research Center estimates that 3.3 million Muslims live in the U.S., which makes Islam the nation’s third-largest faith, behind Christianity and Judaism. It’s a diverse population primarily divided among African-Americans, South Asians, and Arabs, and a well-educated one: About 40 percent of U.S. Muslims hold college degrees, as opposed to 29 percent of Americans overall. Though Muslims represent 1 percent of the population, they account for 10 percent of the nation’s physicians…

As many as 30 percent of Africans enslaved in the U.S. were Muslim. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Muslim immigrants arrived from Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, largely settling in the Midwest; later waves came from Bosnia, Albania, and other parts of Europe. In the 1960s, the Muslim population began to swell as the government lifted immigration quotas and many African-Americans began converting to Islam. Muslim immigration surged at century’s end — 45 percent of today’s Muslim-Americans arrived after 1990; between 1994 and 2011 the number of U.S. mosques more than doubled, from 962 to 2,106…

More than 80 percent of U.S. Muslims expressed satisfaction with life in America, and 63 percent said they felt no conflict “between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” About 70 percent of Muslim immigrants go on to become U.S. citizens, compared with 50 percent of other groups, and almost 6,000 Muslims serve in the U.S. armed forces. Most of the tips about radicalized Muslims in the U.S. come from the Muslim community itself, the FBI says…

Time Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

Yes, Time Magazine has a list of what it thinks are the 100 best all-time nonfiction books. There is a fair amount here that documents the history of the 20th century as it was unfolding, which would be interesting to read. It is a fairly politically left-leaning (e.g., Howard Zinn), pro-science (E.O. Wilson) list, although they do throw in Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater for good measure. It appeals to that small part of me that wants to retire, abandon my family, and just read from now on.

debating Trump

I don’t make a point of reading the National Review, but sometimes I do so I know what they are saying. Most of this is ridiculous, like a suggestion that Trump will get the minority vote because minorities are on welfare and they are afraid illegal immigrants will get their welfare. That’s just lies, racism, and nonsense. But I did think the article made some points about how and why it is hard to debate someone like Trump.

it is suicidal to descend into the muck to battle Trump. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz all tried and failed, despite the fact that they had every moral justification in hitting back in like kind. Elizabeth Warren is trying to be an anti-Trump street-fighter; but her incoherent venom suggests that Harvard Law professors should stick to academic jousting in the faculty lounge. Brawlers know the rules of the street far better than establishmentarians. The Senate is not The Apprentice, and politics is not New York real estate. Ask the trash-talking Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg if she came out on top in dueling with Trump — or whether she virtually destroyed a quarter-century’s reputation in minutes and ended up no better than an elderly version of Rosie O’Donnell in a Supreme Court Justice costume. Hillary is stepping up her crude attacks on Trump. But as in the past, such hits are more likely to make the Trump mode suddenly seem normal, and to make Trump a target of those who claim they are more sober and judicious but in extremis prove no more measured than Trump himself.

Stoop to Trump’s level and you are trying to beat him at his own game, and he will shred you. Refuse to engage him and you might look weak or scared. That leaves trying to challenge his facts and logic and lack of coherence from one speech to the next. Clearly his supporters don’t care about any of these things, but maybe some swing voters are capable of logic. We will find out.

weather forecasting history

I recently wrote about earthquake forecasting and how many scientists think it is essentially impossible. But it is interesting to compare that with the state of weather forecasting in the 1800s:

Before the Royal Charter storm, FitzRoy had been agitating in London for government funding for collection of weather data. He and other Victorian men of meteorology knew that the more they could parse what the weather had done in the past, the better they could warn what it might do in the future. FitzRoy called the concept “forecasting.” To show just how ludicrous that idea seemed at the time, Moore unearths a telling 1854 Commons debate. When a scientifically enthusiastic member of Parliament suggested that amassing weather observations from sea and land could someday mean “we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand,” laughter broke out raucously enough to stop the proceeding.

Trump’s Banana Republic

Here’s what Fareed Zakariah had to say about the Republican Convention.

Over the years, I have watched campaigns in third world countries in which one candidate accuses the other of being a criminal, sometimes even threatening to jail his opponent once elected. But I cannot recall this happening in any Western democracy until this week. The Republican convention has been colorful and chaotic, but above all, it has been consumed by a vigilante rage, complete with mock prosecutors, show trials and chanting mobs. The picture presented to the world has been of America as a banana republic.

We have descended so far so fast that it is sometimes difficult to remember that this is not normal. It was only eight years ago that the Republican nominee, John McCain, interrupted one of his supporters who claimed that Barack Obama was an Arab and thus suspicious to explain that his opponent was in fact “a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues.”

Contrast that with the tenor of this campaign, which has been set from the top by Donald Trump, who has repeatedly insisted that Hillary Clinton deserves to be in jail. He even promised that were he elected, his attorney general would reopen the books and “take a very good look” at possibly indicting her, himself having concluded that she is “guilty as hell.” That might have happened in a Latin American country — 30 years ago.

earthquake prediction

Here’s an interesting article on earthquake prediction. Basically, it has eluded scientists so far and will probably continue to do so.

Since the early 20th century, scientists have known that large quakes often cluster in time and space: 99 percent of them occur along well-mapped boundaries between plates in Earth’s crust and, in geological time, repeat almost like clockwork. But after decades of failed experiments, most seismologists came to believe that forecasting earthquakes in human time—on the scale of dropping the kids off at school or planning a vacation—was about as scientific as astrology. By the early 1990s, prediction research had disappeared as a line item in the USGS’s budget. “We got burned enough back in the 70s and 80s that nobody wants to be too optimistic about the possibility now,” says Terry Tullis, a career seismologist and chair of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council (NEPEC), which advises the USGS.

Defying the skeptics, however, a small cadre of researchers have held onto the faith that, with the right detectors and computational tools, it will be possible to predict earthquakes with the same precision and confidence we do just about any other extreme natural event, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The USGS may have simply given up too soon. After all, the believers point out, advances in sensor design and data analysis could allow for the detection of subtle precursors that seismologists working a few decades ago might have missed.

And the stakes couldn’t be higher. The three biggest natural disasters in human history, measured in dollars and cents, have all been earthquakes, and there’s a good chance the next one will be too. According to the USGS, a magnitude 7.8 quake along Southern California’s volatile San Andreas fault would result in 1,800 deaths and a clean-up bill of more than $210 billion—tens of billions of dollars more than the cost of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill combined.

 

The Art of the Deal

It turns out Donald Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal all by himself. Here’s what the guy who actually wrote it has to say in The New Yorker:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”