Bill Gates’s potty project

Bill Gates has a lot to say about toilets, so much in fact that his foundation has a “reinvent the toilet” initiative.

If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries. So a few years ago our foundation put out a call for new solution.

One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I’ve written about before.

In developed countries, what we do is build energy- and chemical-intensive factories to purify surface or groundwater into clean drinkable water, use more energy to transport it a short distance in pipes, defecate in it, transport it a short distance again (usually by gravity but sometimes with more energy-intensive pumping), then build another energy- and chemical-intensive factory to remove most of the fecal matter from it, before we dump it back into a river and the process begins again with the next town downstream. This system was not designed all at once, but evolved piece by piece over the course of a hundred years or so. If we were starting from scratch, it is highly likely we could come up with a better system. We don’t try because of all the money and effort we have sunk into the existing system. If somebody develops a truly better way of dealing with waste, turning it into useful energy, water, and fertilizer, without violating powerful social taboos about how to deal with waste, that will be a game changer. The concept is that developing countries using such a technology could “leapfrog” developed countries and never have to build the centralized infrastructure, much as they have with cell phones.

Gorbachev

Here is Mikhail Gorbachev‘s list of key global problems:

Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily. And, as different as they are, they share one key feature: none has a military solution. Yet political mechanisms to solve these problems are lacking or dysfunctional, even as the continuing global crisis should persuade us to seek – without delay – a new model that can ensure political, economic, and environmental sustainability.
What is his suggestion for a new model?
Years ago, former German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher, former US National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and other policymakers proposed creating a Security Council, or Directorate, for Europe. I agreed with their approach. Along the same lines, during Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency, he called for the creation of a mechanism for European preventive diplomacy and mandatory consultations in the event of a threat to any state’s security. Had such a mechanism been established, the worst events in Ukraine could have been averted.

MIT invents thermodynamics

A professor at MIT has just discovered the second law of thermodynamics! Wait, maybe a few people knew about that before. But he also has discovered that various systems, including organisms and ecosystems, evolve to find ways of taking in energy, using some of it to do useful work, then dissipating the rest as heat! Wait, I just remembered that a guy named Howard T. Odum at the University of Florida thought of that before. Okay, I am just teasing my friends from MIT, who are very very smart, just not the only smart people in the world. All teasing aside, the MIT guy does have a novel angle – suggesting that because living systems do a better job of this than non-living systems, the formation of life was more or less inevitable. I like how this article talks about entropy in simple, understandable terms:

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

So we are selfishly concentrating energy to create orderly, useful systems  – Odum’s core concept of “embodied energy” – here on Earth at the expense of the rest of the universe. Even if Earth is not the only planet with life, there is still a lot of universe out there so I don’t think we need to feel too guilty. The real question is, just how open a system is Earth as a practical matter – as we keep using more energy to create more sophisticated systems here, can we continually improve our ability to keep exporting the consequences (heat being the most obvious)?

One of my few regrets in life is that I studied in close proximity to Odum in the late 1990s, but didn’t actually study with him or even meet him. I just didn’t know who he was at the time, because in the late 1990s I was just a dumb kid. One of my New Years Resolutions is to read more things written by him, and to do more blog posts about him.

robots learning to use tools

This article from KurzweilAI is about robots learning to use tools by watching videos on the internet.

This paper presents a system that learns manipulation
action plans by processing unconstrained videos from
the World Wide Web. Its goal is to robustly generate the sequence
of atomic actions of seen longer actions in video in
order to acquire knowledge for robots. The lower level of the
system consists of two convolutional neural network (CNN)
based recognition modules, one for classifying the hand grasp
type and the other for object recognition. The higher level
is a probabilistic manipulation action grammar based parsing
module that aims at generating visual sentences for robot
manipulation. Experiments conducted on a publicly available
unconstrained video dataset show that the system is able
to learn manipulation actions by “watching” unconstrained
videos with high accuracy

Robots, pay attention – I just Googled videos on “how to clean a bathroom” and got over 33 million results, so get to work!

Bitcoin and “trustless trust”

This article from Beautiful Data-R talks about how Bitcoin’s algorithms are supposed to generate trust:

The crypto-currency Bitcoin and the way it generates “trustless trust” is one of the hottest topics when it comes to technological innovations right now. The way Bitcoin transactions always backtrace the whole transaction list since the first discovered block (the Genesis block) does not only work for finance. The first startups such as Blockstream already work on ways how to use this mechanism of “trustless trust” (i.e. you can trust the system without having to trust the participants) on related fields such as corporate equity.

It’s an interesting idea – can we design better markets such that participation in the market pushes people toward more trustworthy or ethical behavior? Could you build carbon credits or “embodied energy” values into such a market, for example? This sounds a lot like Adam Smith’s invisible hand – markets themselves were supposed to do this, but the problem today is that there are too many people (living and future) and plants and animals being harmed by markets without participating in them.

financial regulation

According to Simon Johnson, political momentum may be building in the U.S. for stronger regulation aimed at financial stability:

From the perspective of anyone seeking the nomination of either of America’s political parties, here is an issue that cuts across partisan lines. “Break up Citigroup” is a concrete and powerful idea that would move the financial system in the right direction. It is not a panacea, but the coalition that can break up Citi can also put in place other measures to make the financial system safer – including more effective consumer protection, greater transparency in markets, and higher capital requirements for major banks.

From the left, the emphasis has been on the megabanks’ abuse of power and the great rip-off of the middle class. From the right, the stress is on the hazards of crony capitalism, owing to the massive implicit government subsidies that these banks receive. But both left and right agree on the fundamental asymmetry that the recent “Citigroup Amendment” implies: Bankers get rich whether they win or lose, because the US taxpayer foots the bill when their risky bets fail.

supply and demand

Mohamed El-Erian says that Saudi Arabia won’t cut its pumping to counteract falling oil prices, for fear of losing market share. He says the normal textbook rules of supply and demand will apply:

Low prices will lead to the gradual shutdown of what are now unprofitable oil fields and alternative energy supplies, and they will discourage investment in new capacity.  At the same time, they will encourage higher demand for oil.

This will all happen, but it will take a while. In the meantime, as oil prices settle at significantly lower levels, economic behavior will change beyond the “one-off” impact.

As costs fall for manufacturing and a wide range of other activities affected by energy costs, and as consumers spend less on gas and more on other things, many oil-importing nations will see a rise in gross domestic product. And this higher economic activity is likely to boost investment in new plants, equipment and labor, financed by corporate cash sitting on the sidelines.

This is where I should say something smart about natural capital or climate change or innovation. Well, maybe I’m just tired tonight.

robot-assisted surgery

Robot-assisted surgery is here, and this BBC video has some real footage of it. Warning, it’s a little graphic. It looks like the surgeon operating the robot is in the same room, and I assume he could jump in with an old-fashioned scalpel if he needed to. But in the future, I suppose there is no reason why surgery couldn’t be done by a surgeon far away, or even without direct human assistance at all.

video camera coverage

The police are making increasing use of video cameras – and not just public ones, but cameras on private property pointed in a public direction. When they want private footage, they just ask and most people are happy to turn it over. Some stats on Philadelphia from Philly.com:

This year, police have released more than 500 videos in crimes ranging from Halloween-decoration theft to shootings, throughout all six detective divisions – Northeast, Northwest, East, Central, South and Southwest.

As a result of those videos, police have made more than 100 arrests and have solved more than 200 crimes, Stanford said.

Police have access to about 4,000 video cameras across the city – in addition to city-owned cameras, SEPTA and Amtrak cameras and those at Philadelphia International and Northeast airports, Stanford said.

That adds up to more than 30 cameras per square mile in the city, from which police can readily obtain video – so it’s pretty tough to commit a crime anywhere and flee without being caught on video at some point…

Video is recovered in about 50 to 60 percent of homicide cases, he said. Based on a five-year average of 297 homicides a year in the city, detectives are obtaining video in roughly 150 to 180 homicide cases per year.

As a city dweller, it’s kind of hard to have a problem with this. City streets, and even underground walkways, aren’t nearly as dangerous as suburbanites think they are from sitting home watching CSI. But still, the more people feel that violent crime is being deterred, the more they will want to be out, and the safer we will all be. You wouldn’t want the police using video footage to get overzealous about minor infractions like jaywalking or open containers, or against political expression, but at least in Philadelphia there are no signs of that happening.

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, has a new book about six inventions that “got us to now”. The list he has come up with is “glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light“. I’ll put it on my short to medium term reading list, because it doesn’t sound extremely exciting to me, but I did like his first book and its focus on the “adjacent possible”. His point there was that every once in a while you might have an Einstein with major breakthroughs that seem far ahead of their time, but for the most part progress is incremental, and what seems like a breakthrough in retrospect is made possible by a series of earlier incremental steps. Digital computers are a good example – Charles Babbage and others came up with all the necessary theory to build them in the 18th century, but they would have to have been built out of gears and powered by steam. The invention of electricity, transistors, silicon chips, etc., and the building of all the infrastructure systems to support them, eventually paved the way for our laptops, smartphones, and supercomputers today.

This also reminded me of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” novel in which the British and French governments actually build the enormous computers envisioned by Babbage, and put them to various bureaucratic and nefarious purposes.