bicycles, airships, and things that go

I have read Cars, Trucks, and Things that Go to my 3 year old son at least 100 times. It is his favorite book in the world. I didn’t have a lot to do with this – I actually tried to steer him more toward animals and nature, but his fascination with wheels began shortly after birth and shows no signs of abating. It’s clearly baked in to his genetic makeup, which is interesting considering that almost all evolution of our genetic makeups happened before cars, trucks or other things that go (other than legs and muscles) ever existed. Perhaps humans, and the male of the species in general, just have an instinctive attraction to power, whether it comes from harnessing animals or burning things and then transferring that power through mechanical or electrical means. That would clearly give us an advantage and it makes total sense, but it is amazing that it emerges within months of birth.

I’m not going to censor Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. But there is a lot of pollution and unsafe road conditions in those books, plus head-scratching things like children driving cars, and enormous pileups where nobody gets hurt. So I think it’s great that some people are trying to update that classic winning formula with updated and more sustainable technology choices. Of course, kids don’t need to be brainwashed in the latest urban planning buzzwords, they need to be educated in how to think about systems so they can reach the right conclusions and make the right choices when they grow up. They also need to be entertained. We’ll see if this succeeds.

Swiss tunnel

It is actually possible to build major new infrastructure. At least, the Swiss can do it.

The Gotthard rail link has taken 20 years to build, and cost more than $12bn (£8.2bn). It will, the Swiss say, revolutionise Europe’s freight transport.

Plans for a better rail tunnel have been around since the 1940s, but it was not until 1992 that Swiss voters backed their government’s plan to build a new high-speed rail link through the Alps…

For 17 years, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, more than 2,000 people have worked on the tunnel. There have been accidents: nine tunnel miners have died.

Pretty amazing. What infrastructure projects will the U.S. public support starting today that will not be ready for a generation? Like I said, the Swiss can do it.

I think tunneling is a key technology for the future for everything from transportation to water management, and eventually space colonization. The technology has improved a lot since we dug the first subway systems with shovels in the late 1800s. Now we use massive tunnel boring machines like the one shown in this article. But it’s still hard and expensive enough with our current technology that it’s not often the first technology we go to.

Moore

Here is an interesting article about Moore, Oklahoma, which has been hit by four incredibly powerful tornadoes in sixteen years, which is statistically all but impossible. Beyond the sheer spectacle of it, and the fact that I’ve spent some time in central Oklahoma, the statistical side of it is interesting to me, as I sometimes find myself asked whether some system should be designed to withstand a storm that happens 10 times a year on average, 4 times a year on average, once every 10 years on average, once every 25 years on average, etc. We don’t have a million years of data to base these things on, and even if we did the climate seems to be changing, and even if it were not there is ultimately a judgment call involved about how much risk is too much given our finite resources we have to divide up among so many things.

…tornadoes are pretty rare. One thousand a year, scattered across the continent, does not produce many data points at the scale of an individual city. Most days, there aren’t tornadoes anywhere. That problem is exacerbated by the third issue: Scientists really only have about 50 years of really good tornado documentation. Essentially, Brooks told me, scientists can’t tell us whether what’s happened in Moore is abnormal because they don’t know what a “normal” amount of violent tornadoes is. With all of that, Brooks said, there’s not a good way to clearly tell the difference between patterns and pareidolia. After all, the human brain is primed to find significance in the random. In the creaky corners of our neural pathways, a jumble of rocks can become an old man, a coat hanger can become a drunk octopus, a bunch of craters on the moon give us a friendly smile. It’s so easy for a few random events to make one small town look like a tornado magnet. It would be harder not to see it.

May 2016 in Review

3 most frightening stories

  • There are scary and seemingly reckless confrontations going on between U.S. and Russian planes and ships in the Indian Ocean. And yet, it is bizarrely humorous when real life imitates Top Gun.
  • The situation in Venezuela may be a preview of what the collapse of a modern country looks like.
  • Obama went to Hiroshima, where he said we can “chart a course that leads to the destruction” of nuclear weapons, only not in his lifetime. Obama out.

3 most hopeful stories

3 most interesting stories

  • I try not to let this blog get too political, really I do. But in an election season I just can’t help myself. This is a blog about the future of civilization, and the behavior of U.S. political, bureaucratic, and military elites obviously has some bearing on that. In May I mused on whether the U.S. could possibly be suffering from “too much democracy“, Dick Cheney, equality and equal opportunity, and what’s wrong with Pennsylvania. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, TRUMP IS A FASCIST!
  • The world has about a billion dogs.
  • It turns out coffee grounds may not make good compost.

more on China’s “ecological civilization”

The United Nations has a new report on China’s “ecological civilization” plan. What seems notable is that it takes an urban and regional planning framework, then weaves in goals related to environmental quality and sustainable agriculture. There are also a few targets related to habitat and biodiversity conservation. It’s a good vision and contains all the right rhetoric.

urban vegetation design for heat

When you see completely mangled English in a paper that has supposedly passed peer review, you have to wonder about the quality of the peer review. Nonetheless, I was interested in the results of this study that looked at trees, shrubs, and lawn to see which had the most effect on urban heat.

Numerical simulation of the impact of different vegetation species on the outdoor thermal environment

For air temperature at 1.5 m and thermal comfort and safety (PET and WBGT), the sequence is trees> lawn> shrubs, but for surface temperature, the sequence is lawn> shrubs> trees

I’m always interested in the idea of designing urban areas to maximize hydrologic function, ecological function, and human comfort simultaneously. There is so much that could be done, and so much closed-mindedness and poor communication among the various professions and disciplines that could be doing it.

I’ve always assumed trees are the gold standard, because you get both the evapotranspiration function and the shading function, whereas with lawn and shrubs you only get the former. Also, you only need a small area of soil to plant the tree (although often more than we allow in urban areas), and then its leaves can cover a large area of concrete or asphalt, which would otherwise be generating a lot of heat and polluted runoff. Also, grass provides very little ecological function (unless you let it grow taller and/or take a lenient approach to what some of your neighbors choose to define as “weeds”, which can be socially unacceptable), where trees and bushes provide ecological function. Bushes take up a lot of space, either in a sidewalk context or a small urban yard – paradoxically, once trees mature a little bit they take up less space because there is space under them. On the other hand, I’ve argued with purists that if people really want lawn in urban areas, it is a lot better than concrete in terms of hydrology, heat, and aesthetics. Although if you’re in a water-stressed area, that adds another factor to the hydrology equation that those of us in wetter areas have the luxury of not worrying about too much.

What is the U.S. up to in Japan?

Well, Marines and sailors on Okinawa are raping and killing women, as usual. And President Obama is visiting Hiroshima and sort of mentioning but not really apologizing for dropping nuclear weapons on it.

I think it’s nice that Obama visited Hiroshima. I thought it would have been a nice place to announce a major nuclear stockpile reduction effort early in his second term. Here’s what he had to say about that:

among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

That’s a bit disappointing to me. We could drastically scale them back, creating good will around the world and giving us some moral high ground to work with other countries to scale them back. We could tackle the emerging and possibly far scarier biological weapons threat. We could scale back our footprints in Japan and Korea and leave those rich, modern, democratic nations to provide for their own defense while staying engaged with them through trade and diplomacy.

I am an Obama fan though. He is someone who chose to do as much good as he could within the constraints of the system. It is possible that if he had pushed the system harder he might have gotten more done, but it is also possible it would have been counterproductive. We will never know. I like his last minute attempts to begin the process of putting some thorny historical issues to bed with Cuba, Iran, Japan, and Vietnam. In Vietnam in particular I am struck by how little ill will the public seems to bear us, when they might have the most reason to of all those countries. These efforts build some good will internationally and provide a better starting point for future leaders to build on than the same old stale Cold War positions we’ve had for the last 50 years.

Whitewater

Politico says Trump plans to dredge up the Whitewater scandal that dogged the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. The Whitewater scandal is just tiresome – you can read about it here. Basically it was a failed deal to develop some vacation homes in the hills of Arkansas. The actual scandal had something to do with the Clintons maybe twisting some arms to get loans to the developers. It was investigated throughout the 90s, a few people actually went to jail for short periods of time related to the loans or obstruction of justice, but there really was nothing even close to a case made against either Clinton.

Compare this to the plots to murder Fidel Castro, the U.S.-backed military coups against elected governments in Central and South America and all over Asia, the secret and illegal wars in Laos and Cambodia, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the invasion of Iraq, and this little “scandal” looks really silly. I hope the 90s are not starting up again, but you can see the beginnings of that with the “email scandal” and the “Bengazi scandal”. It has been refreshing that there has really been no whiff of scandal in relation to Obama, unless you count “Obama is a Muslim” or the birth certificate thing, but those are beyond silly, just childish. The drone strikes and special forces activity around the world are questionable of course, but then political “scandals” don’t usually involve these matters of actual life and death, do they?