MEMOP, MOP, and SMOP

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These are some more decision-making frameworks I hadn’t heard of, at least by name. I am hopeful that AI can help techniques like this make the transition from gown to town.

Developing Robust Management Pathways for Nutrient Pollution in Watersheds Under Climate Uncertainty

Nutrient management represents an enduring effort toward sustainability. However, long-term management planning faces notable challenges, mainly due to substantial investments required under uncertainty of forthcoming climate. To address these challenges, this paper proposes and tests a Multi-climate-scenario (MCS) Multi-epoch Multi-objective Planning (MEMOP) framework (in combination MCS-MEMOP). This framework divides the long-term planning horizon into multiple epochs, allowing nutrient mitigation measures (e.g., fertilization management, filter strip) to be initiated at any epoch, each with its own water quality and investment constraints. To tackle climate uncertainty, it incorporates principles of Robust Decision-Making. MCS-MEMOP generates solution pathways outlining the timeline and progression of management measures, tested here for a case of a small, agriculture-dominated watershed. Considering a single climate scenario, the MEMOP method was compared with Multi-objective Planning (MOP) and Stepwise MOP (SMOP) for a 25-year nutrient management horizon, using the SWAT model to evaluate the test case water quality effects of solution pathways. Results show that MEMOP’s multi-epoch approach generates a larger and more diverse set of solutions than MOP and SMOP, offering greater flexibility to select optimal trade-offs among objectives. Additionally, MEMOP solutions exhibit superior cost-effectiveness compared to MOP and SMOP solutions. Applied separately to different climate scenarios, the MEMOP results show that changed climate conditions may significantly alter the Pareto front. In contrast, MCS-MEMOP yields robust solutions that can consistently satisfy 72%∼89% of epoch-specific constraints under new climate conditions in the test case, with a cost increase of 12% that reflects the price of addressing climate uncertainty in this case.

March 2026 in Review

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In fast-moving current events as I write on April 4, 2026…I have nothing left to say about the stoopid war in Iran and our stooopid war criminal “leaders” who chose this path. I tell my children “stupid” is a bad word that nice people don’t use, and I don’t use it lightly here. I just hope when I am reviewing April 2026 a month from now at least the part where human beings are dying daily from shooting and blowing up is over.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The idea of the lone psychopath developing a bioweapon in their garage with AI assistance is very scary. I outlined some proposals out there for how to deal with this issue, but none are really completely satisfying. Of course, nuclear proliferation is always a close runner-up.

Most hopeful story: I took my first Waymo rides in the Phoenix area in March, and I observed Waymo being tested in Philadelphia. I would like to live in a society where transportation is oriented around walking, cycling and other very light personal vehicles, and public transportation. But given that the U.S. is unequivocally not headed in that direction, I think autonomous vehicles are going to be a win for safety, mobility, and the environment in most U.S. cities.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I finally got around to reading The Singularity is Nearer. Kurzweil is very big on cultured meat, vertical farming, 3D printing, and generally using computer simulation to super-charge scientific and technical progress in many areas. Then there are his weird ideas about nanobots in our brains allowing us to upload our brains to the internet sometime in the 2030s – sounds crazy at first, but I could sit down and name a few things that sounded crazy a decade ago and are now commonplace. I mused about when the robots are coming now that we seemingly have their AI brains ready for transplant. I mused about the seeming paradox that AI is increasing demand for dirty fossil fuel energy and its attendant impacts while also representing some possibility of a longer-term solution to those problems. It seems like slowing down the deployment of AI is not on the table, so the important question becomes how long is “longer-term” – if measured in single digit years, we just may pull through, but if measured in multiple decades, we may be sunk. Anyway, I brainstormed a list of specific areas of research AI may be able to boost: incremental improvement and deployment of today’s solar, wind, battery, electrification, and electric grid technology; fusion power; safer, more cost-effective and scalable fission power; space-based solar technology; cutting edge materials science and energy storage technology; and fundamental research into the mysteries of the universe, which also comes with attendant risks.

more on augmented reality glasses

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In China, you can rent them to try out. Students are using them to cheat on tests (surely teachers will catch on to this soon?). They are still expensive and heavy at the moment.

The glasses scan the questions and display answers on the lens. “Any subject that I may fail at,” she said, requesting the use of a pseudonym so she could speak freely. Some schoolmates have rented her glasses to use in exams.

AI-powered smart glasses have become a multibillion-dollar industry. The glasses, priced from $270 to more than $1,000, are generally equipped with cameras and audio features, powered by large language models. Those with screens can display text or images with augmented reality effects…

Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recently connected Rokid glasses with ChatGPT 5.2. A tester wearing the glasses scored in the top five in a class of over 100 students. The research group is also developing systems that help teachers detect AI glasses, Zili Meng, an assistant professor at the university, told Rest of World. 

deflation and oil price shocks

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In fast-moving current events as I write on March 22, 2026, the insane, illegal war of aggression started by the US in Iran (okay, maybe started by Israel, but it was the choice of the US and our mad leader to enable it) continues to escalate. We have talk of ground troops. We have talk of intentionally targeting civilian water infrastructure, which is a massive and unambiguous violation of international law not to mention common morality. There has been idle speculation at least about the use of nuclear weapons. I hope there will not have been a nuclear exchange by the time you read this. If the world is going to get past this moment and move on to a path leading back toward eventual normalcy, this has to end and the people who caused it have to be held accountable. And now, back to regularly scheduled programming…

This article suggests that the oil price shock caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 played a role in snapping Japan out of decades of deflation, and that the current shock caused by the Iran war could do the same for China.

Recently I posted a contrarian analysis suggesting that China’s deflation is not a true recession, but rather evidence of a sudden acceleration in manufacturing productivity. This article presents the more conventional picture:

Since the country’s COVID-19 reopening in late 2022, a manufacturing glut and sluggish consumer demand have led to intense price wars that eroded company profits and slowed wage growth.

Where am I going with all this? I don’t know yet – it is something I am struggling to understand.

pedestrian level of service

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I had actually never heard of pedestrian level of service, but it appears to be just applying traffic flow modeling principles to pedestrian flow. It is intuitively appealing to me because you can just add pedestrians, cyclists, or whatever mode you want to a transportation model and specify which links in the network are open to which types of “traffic”. Theoretically, you could try to optimize the total flow of people from where they live to the places they need to get to, and not just maximize the flow of motor vehicles. Surely someone must have looked at this. A valid criticism, of course, is that these models can be short-term focused, even looking just at a single weekday peak hour and certainly missing longer-term dynamics like how infrastructure capacity and land use policy affect trip generation over time. Another criticism is that this engineering approach completely misses the quality of life aspects of urban design.

Pedestrian infrastructure assessment: Walkability vs. pedestrian level of service

This paper explores two of the most explored indicators for evaluating pedestrian infrastructure: walkability and Pedestrian Level of Service (PLOS). Walkability, typically used by urban planners, emphasises the qualitative aspects of the built environment, such as safety, comfort, accessibility and aesthetics, whereas PLOS, primarily employed by transport engineers, quantifies the operational performance of infrastructure based on pedestrian flow, density and speed. A systematic PRISMA-based literature review was conducted, covering 60 PLOS studies and 55 walkability studies were analysed in terms of definitions, contributory factors, data collection methods and modeling techniques. Despite sharing the goal of promoting pedestrian-friendly environments, these frameworks differ fundamentally in scope, purpose and methodology and are often applied independently. The findings indicate that walkability indicators vary in how factors are measured and allocated across dimensions. Moreover, walkability is treated as a “static” factor, both conceptually and methodologically. Relatively limited research examines how walkability changes over time (e.g., day vs. night) or varies across population groups. Conversely, PLOS generally excludes socio-spatial dimensions, a choice consistent with its original purpose rather than a methodological limitation. Some approaches attempt to incorporate subjective factors, but usually in ways resembling traditional walkability metrics. This study highlights the need for greater standardization in definitions and assessment frameworks, while also identifying challenges that complicate their practical applicability. Their complementary use can significantly enhance the design, evaluation and planning of pedestrian infrastructure, supporting more livable, sustainable and inclusive cities.

The Singularity is Really, Seriously Very Near You Guys

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Okay, so I got around to reading The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil. It is worth a read. It is not really a rewrite or update of The Singularity is Near, and I would still recommend reading that 2005 book first to anyone. I suppose reading it now would require a bit more of a historical lens since some events have already come to pass, and others may not be on the track he envisioned (although surprisingly close consider how much time has passed!) This new book feels a bit more thrown together, and yet it is very interesting. My bullets below are not a summary or review of the book – I’m sure you can find that elsewhere on the internet if you prefer that to reading (or don’t have time to read) the book yourself. These are just a few things I found interesting or surprising enough to bookmark as I was reading the book.

  • Okay, well actually this is a pretty good 4 sentence summary:

Eventually nanotechnology will enable these trends to culminate in directly expanding our brains with layers of virtual neurons in the cloud. In this way we will merge with AI and augment ourselves with millions of times the computational power that our biology gave us. This will expand our intelligence and consciousness so profoundly that it’s difficult to comprehend. This is what I mean by the Singularity.

In the past I’ve heard him say 1000x. Which is it Ray??? Well, it doesn’t matter does it because we can’t comprehend the difference between 1,000 and 1 million. I can’t comprehend being twice as smart as I am, in fact. Einstein supposedly had an IQ of about 160 so he was only 60% smarter than me if IQ were an adequate measure of anything.

  • A random factoid, quoting Stephen Pinker I believe: Violent death in hunter-gatherer societies has been estimated at around 500 per 100,000 people per year. War death rates in Germany, Japan and Russia during the 20th century were more on the order of 100. It’s not clear to me though if this was the annual rate during World War II or if this has been averaged over the entire 20th century, which would seem disingenuous. But his point is that even though violence may seem high to us, civilization has achieved massive reductions compared to historical times.
  • While the cost of solar panels has declined exponentially, the cost of permitting and installation has not fallen as fast, if it all. This seems to support some of my recent musings that human institutions and sociopolitics act as a brake on implementation of new technology.
  • He’s very bullish on democracy as promoting the spread of peace. This is a nice idea, but I can’t help noting that two of the world’s nominal democracies (the US and Israel) seem to be some of the most violent actors in the world at the moment, while many autocratic countries (thinking of Middle Eastern hereditary dictatorships in particular) seem to be the more restrained and logical parties at the moment. But of course, it may just be that a violent sociopath in charge of one of those autocracies would be much worse than the violent sociopaths being only partially restrained by the struggling democratic institutions in the US and Israel. This moment will eventually pass (barring a civilization-ending nuclear exchange) and the dictatorship in North Korea, to cite one example, seems likely to endure.
  • He argues that GDP growth statistics do not account for improved quality of life due to technology. The internet is a simple case – much of it is free to people (this has to do with the marginal cost of providing it) and therefore doesn’t add much to GDP, and yet we clearly value it highly, and in the past we could not even have conceived that there would be such a thing to value.
  • He has high hopes for two agricultural technologies, cultured meat and vertical farming, to eventually solve both our food supply problems and most of our environmental problems currently caused by agriculture. He sees AI accelerating advances in material science and clean energy that will “turn all technology into information technology” and make it very inexpensive. It’s a nice vision, and my instinct is that we are taking baby steps in that direction but it will be a long time when and if it happens. But this is Kurzweil, he sees massive acceleration in progress in the next decade while my instinct is based on my past experience of the linear part of the curve.
  • 3D printing is another technology he is bullish on. Basically, he sees the trend as being toward decentralized production of almost everything from energy, water, and food to manufactured goods.
  • He sees simulation as the key to massive acceleration in medicine. Basically, the idea is that if AI can develop very good digital models of human bodies and brains, then AI can do massive simulated drug trials in minutes or days that would take years or decades in human subjects. Here, you can certainly imagine the human regulatory framework slowing things down, and that is probably for the best, but over time it may be shown that the digital trials are as accurate as the in-real-life trials, and resistance will eventually break down.
  • Now for the weird existential stuff. First, everyone should reread Altered Carbon (my suggestion, not mentioned by Kurzweil). We have probably all had the thought that when we wake up from sleep, we feel a continuity in our consciousness from the day before, but how can we really be sure that we are the same person? A perfect copy of my mind downloaded into a perfect copy of my body, or downloaded into a perfect simulation of my body and its surrounding environment, would have the identical experience. So in a sense, I can live forever in this situation. Kurzweil says it is a philosophical question, not a scientific one, whether I would still be myself in this situation. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, including me. But there is another case where I connect my biological brain to the cloud and gradually extend my consciousness. I do not lose the biological part of my mind in this case, but gradually the biological part of my mind becomes a smaller and smaller part, until I might decide at some point to leave it behind. This is still an uncomfortable thought, but less uncomfortable than the previous one. There are many, many philosophical, moral, and practical socioeconomic thoughts to unpack here of course. More than I can even dip a toe into at the moment (inheritance? will anyone want to have or raise babies? what if someone kills the biological me but not the digital me, is that murder? most people would say yes to that last one – etc…)
  • He sees solutions to the idea of out-of-control biological (e.g., vaccines) and nanotechnological (e.g., controlling nanobots by “broadcasting” from a central location with a kill switch) threats. AI can play a role in all of this. But he sees AI as the biggest threat, with no sure-fire way to control it although there are promising ideas to mitigate the risks.

The 2030s and 2040s certainly sound like interesting times, barring any sort of tragic disaster between now and then. At the moment, we need to focus on not derailing our civilization and species to the point that we don’t get to find out.

Goodreads

Will autonomous vehicles increase congestion?

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Yes, autonomous vehicles will increase vehicle miles traveled by about 6% according to at least one set of serious researchers. They say this might not sound like much, but it will be enough to exceed capacity and cause massive traffic jams. Now, I’m sure these are serious transportation researchers who have thought about all the things I mention below, but I’ll mention them anyway:

  • Autonomous vehicles shouldn’t need to maintain the same “safe following distance” human drivers are supposed to maintain, which is based on slow human reaction times. So the autonomous vehicles should be able to travel closer together (from front to back) than human drivers at a given speed, and do this safely.
  • They also should be able to travel closer together from side to side. Our standard 12-foot travel lanes allow a lot of space for human drivers to weave wildly and unpredictably from side to side, which of course we do. Keep your arms, legs, heads, and pets inside the vehicle at all times, please!
  • Most vehicles are parked most of the time, so that much more space is required for vehicle storage than for moving vehicles. Not only this, but enormous amounts of empty space are required between parked vehicles for human drivers to maneuver the vehicles in and out of storage. Computers drivers will need much less space for maneuvering and will be infinitely patient.

So put all this together and I think that even if VMT increases, the amount of physical space required for vehicles could be massively reduced. This could be a big win for people, cities, and the environment. If VMT increases because people are able to get around more easily and cheaply, including the elderly, disabled, and parents pushing strollers, in all kinds of weather, this is a win for quality of life. I don’t see artificially restricting mobility as a win for people. I shouldn’t even have to say that reducing death and injury caused by vehicles by a factor of 10 or more is a moral and quality of life win.

Now, I am worried about urban and suburban sprawl getting even worse as it gets easier to get around. I am worried about air pollution and climate change. Add in augmented and virtual reality, and we might also come to care less and less over time what our cities look like to unaugmented eyes. I love compact, walking, cycling, and public transportation oriented urban form. One of the downsides of this form in the past has been a lack of green open space, but massively reduce the amount of space required for parking, and it will open up a lot of space in cities that we will then have choices of what to do with. So it really comes down to policy choices, and different places are going to make different choices, but I don’t see the technology itself as the root problem.

Are we forgetting about robots? (or Brute’, where are you when we need you?)

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In fast-moving current events as I write on March 15, 2026, the illegal, unauthorized by any legislative body international or domestic, unprovoked US sneak attack on Iran continues to rage. I’ll leave further commentary to others except to say that, in totally unrelated news here on this Ides of March, remember it was SENATORS who had the guts to stab Caesar and try to save the Republic (which didn’t work all that well in the end.)]

Here are a couple headlines we could classify as “things China is doing well”.

China’s Clean Energy Push Has Made It Less Vulnerable to Energy Shocks, Including the Iran War [Is this not obvious? The US could be focusing on ramping up proven technology like electrification of all buildings and transportation, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and battery technology while also funding “moon shot” R&D in areas like materials science and nuclear fusion. We could also be using fission energy and, I hate to say it, domestic fossil fuel production as a bridge to get us over the hump while we scale up in these other areas. If the whole world were doing this we wouldn’t be so dependent on boats moving liquefied dinosaur turds through one little war-torn (by choice of the fools claiming to lead the US government) inlet.]

How China’s AI-Powered Robots Could Reshape the Global Order [Now that disembodied AI has became mainstream, the next somewhat obvious step is to get the AI brains into robots.]

how did nuclear weapons proliferate to Israel?

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I always had a vague notion that “Israel got nuclear weapons from France”. That is sort of true but not the whole story, according to this article by Kevin Kirk in Naked Capitalism. Now, I have to state for the record that Mr. Kirk sounds knowledgeable and confident to me, but he does not give a lot of references or cite many sources of his information. I will note a few cases where he does. Here is the story he tells:

  • France wanted access to scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and later moved to Israel. These scientists were given access to French nuclear sites and data in return for their help in building the French nuclear program.
  • In 1956 France built a heavy water reactor for Israel at Dimona. They also supplied the uranium-separation technology needed to fuel the reactor. A heavy water reactor can be used for civilian power generation, but can also turn uranium into plutonium.
  • A heavy water reactor also needs a substance called…heavy water. In the mid-1960s, the French government got cold feet about supplying more nuclear materials to Israel. The UK took over and supplied the heavy water, uranium and plutonium. Argentina, South Africa, and Belgium ALSO supplied some nuclear material to Israel. In South Africa’s case, it was part of a civilian power agreement that included weapons inspections, however the weapons inspections part of the agreement was never fully implemented. In the Belgian case, Israeli operatives essentially hijacked the material in a Dr. Evil-style act of high seas piracy. The US is far from blameless – nuclear material was stolen from a classified site near Pittsburgh, FBI/CIA investigations pointed to Israel, and the administration chose to cover this up. Most of this is backed up by declassified documents.
  • At some point (no year given in the article), Israel conducted an atmospheric nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa.
  • Under Eisenhower, the US looked the other way or even actively covered up all this activity. However, JFK openly tried to impose weapons inspections on Israel. Mr. Kirk never uses words like “Israel killed JFK”, but he implies it. I can certainly see a point of view where losing a nuclear deterrent could be seen as an existential threat, and therefore worth killing to prevent. I would just note that several parties had motive, means, and opportunity to kill JFK. Under the Johnson administration, weapons inspections took place, but always on a schedule announced well in advance, and with negotiated agreement as to areas of the site weapons inspectors would not try to access. Later US administrations have maintained a doctrine of “strategic ambiguity” where they just don’t comment on Israel’s nuclear program. Much of this is based on recently declassified documents.
  • Israel today is believed to have 100+ nuclear warheads (different numbers from different sources; but this is still A LOT for a small country – the US and Russia have a few thousand each, while China has about 600 and the UK and France have 200-300 each). Israel has the “nuclear triad” consisting of nuclear bombers, German-supplied nuclear submarines, and long-range nuclear missiles capable of hitting pretty much anywhere in the world supplied by…the French.

The idea of “atoms for peace” (originally promoted by Eisenhower), in which countries would be given civilian nuclear energy technology in exchange for agreeing to a strict weapons inspection regime, is appealing to me. But you can see where it breaks down when geopolitical intrigue applies. It’s probably better to get renewable energy ramped up around the world (particularly water-scarce yet sunny countries) and keep pressing towards peaceful fusion technology. And keep pressing towards nuclear arms control before something happens that all of us humans are going to regret as long as our species is around.