There is nothing in 538’s best charts of 2002 that truly bowled me over. I mean, there are some graphics and maps that are effective at telling a story about their underlying data. There just aren’t any types of charts or applications of old types of charts that were a big surprise to me and that I thought I would want to copy if I could. Just purely for personal interest in the subject matter, the one I found most interesting was the map showing how college football conferences are losing all geographic meaning. I find myself slowly being less interested in college football with each passing year, and this is one reason why. My team’s losing campaign, loss to the NFL or “transfer portal” of many of their best players, blowout of the junior varsity squad in the mid-December bowl game they were lucky to even be selected for, and lackluster recruiting class are other reasons.
Top Urban Planning Books of 2022
Planetizen has a list of top urban planning (and related fields) books from 2022, or to be more accurate, fall 2021 through fall 2022. Lots of fields are related to urban planning, like engineering, architecture, parks and recreation, housing, transportation, infrastructure, utilities, ecology, economics, and public health to name just a handful.
First, they have an interesting list that they call “The Canon”:
- To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Reform by Ebenezer Howard
- The Death and the [sic] Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs [yes, they got the title wrong – ouch!]
- Design With Nature by Ian McHarg
- The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
- The Urban General Plan, by T.J. Kent, Jr.
- Local Planning: Contemporary Principles and Practices, edited by Gary Hack et al.
Anyway, here are a few from the new list that caught my eye:
- American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life by Richard K. Rein [but if you haven’t read City: Rediscovering the Center, seriously, I would stop what you are doing and read that before reading this book, or in fact before reading most of the “canon”]
- Fixer-Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing System by Jenny Schuetz [Some day I will take time to really delve into the problems and proposed solutions on housing. And then I will probably despair if the solutions are clear but politically impossible, like many of our problems in the U.S.]
- Dream States: Smart Cities, Technology, and the Pursuit of Urban Utopias, by John Lorinc
- Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, by Paris Marx
- The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy by Sharon Zukin
- The Comprehensive Plan: Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Communities for the 21st Century by David Rouse and Rocky Piro [a textbook, for people who want or need to know about this. Engineers involved in environmental and water resources planning, for example, would benefit from knowing more about planning and planners.]
I have reached middle age as defined by having a reading list of more books than I can read in my remaining lifespan (a long list for what I hope will still be a long life). So I am not sure how many of these I will get too. But knowing they are out there is useful in case I need to brush up on a particular topic at some point.
sexiest man alive vs. (hu)man of the year
People magazine still does their sexiest man alive bit, and the 2022 sexiest man alive is… Chris Evans. Who I never heard of. He appears to be your typical early middle age Caucasian actor/model type. So good for him. Meanwhile Volodymyr Zelensky is Time magazine’s person of the year. He appears to be your typical early middle age Caucasian actor/model/leader of the resistance type.
Trends in Ecology and Evolution horizon scan
This journal does an annual “horizon scan” of of emerging topics and issues. Here are a few that caught my eye:
- “bio-batteries” – “DNA-enabled biobattery technology uses a set of enzymes coupled to DNA to degrade organic compounds, releasing electrons and generating electricity…Such batteries could theoretically supply power densities in orders of magnitude greater than widely used lithium-ion batteries”. There are also new processes for extracting lithium more sustainably from waste materials. So there is some hope that the resource and waste limitations to scaling up renewable energy can be solved. Thermophotovoltaic cells are a third energy storage technology mentioned.
- more practical methods of converting human urine to fertilizer – This might not sound like a big deal, but our coastal waters are being choked by nutrients both from treated wastewater and from farm runoff, while the nutrients in the farm runoff are derived from fossil fuels in the case of nitrogen or a mined from finite geological resources in the case of phosphate. Reprocessing urine into fertilizer is almost a no-brainer. And the technology has been known for awhile. The problem has been waste taboos which seem to be extremely ingrained in our psyches. I really want this one to be overcome, but as a wastewater industry insider I have become more cynical about this one over time. Genetic engineering of crops to help them take up nitrogen directly from the atmosphere (which peas and beans can do naturally, but most crops can’t) is also mentioned.
- A particular pathogen that infects amphibians may be spreading to new areas.
- European countries are considering new policy/legal frameworks for biodiversity reporting and conservation. This might sound boring, but we have gotten there with conventional pollution and we are getting there with greenhouse gases and renewable energy, while land use and conversation have mostly been left out to date.
- Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to try to accelerate drug, chemical, and pesticide research.
- trash reefs – New ecosystems may actually develop and adapt around ocean garbage patches.
word of the year 2022
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2022 is gaslighting. I appreciate this, because despite considering myself a literate person, I have not been able to figure out what people mean when they use this word. And I am not alone apparently. But basically, it is just lying, or intentionally misleading someone, or what we used to call propaganda. I concluded from the article that people say it to sound smart, but they don’t really know what it means, and it can mean a variety of different things. So now I feel less dumb when I hear smart people say this word.
Runners up were “oligarch”, “omicron”, and “codify”.
LGBT is now LGBTQIA. The Q can stand for either “queer” or “questioning”. The I is “intersex” – I don’t know what this means. And A can stand for “asexual”, “aromantic”, and “agender”. When I first read that I read “aromatic”. Well, people of any gender or sexual preference can be aromatic, sometimes more or less pleasingly so.
Sentient is an interesting word. To me, it is the ability to feel. It comes up in the context of artificial intelligence, but also applies to animals and babies, among other entities. Plants? I don’t know, they have the ability to sense light, moisture, salt, and nutrients among other things. Is that sentience? Sentience and self-awareness are not the same, which is interesting.
Loamy – farmers and soil scientists are aware of this word, if other people are just discovering it good for you.
Raid? It’s a poison you spray out of can to kill bugs, which aren’t sentient so you don’t have to feel bad.
Consort? This is a gray area between “spouse” and “hooker” as far as I know.
top 25 “most censored” posts of 2022
Project Censored has posted its annual list of most censored news stories. Well, sort of. These popped up in my RSS feed and are posted publicly on their website, but there don’t seem to be any links to them on the landing page. So, by all means support them by donating or buying their book if you feel guilty, or if these links are no longer active by the time you click on them.
Anyway, as usual I would classify some of these as “important but under-reported” rather than intentionally censored, but you can be the judge. Here are a couple that caught my eye:
- #22 US Transportation System “Fuels” Inequality – Well, I think many of us involved in planning and infrastructure are well aware of this. But it has certainly not been covered in a way that has seeped into the public consciousness.
- #18 The Human Mind as “New Domain of War”: NATO Plans for Cognitive Warfare – This used to be called propaganda or disinformation. Then it became “communications”. Now it is “cognitive warfare”. In a stroke of brilliant cognitive warfare, NATO is trying to convince us that it has just now discovered cognitive warfare. Everybody else is doing it, so even though we are the good guys we have to do it too.
- #14 Repression of Palestinian Media – I leave Israel/Palestine politics alone for the most part, because I consider myself too ignorant to express an opinion. But read and judge for yourself.
- #13 “Smart Ocean” Technology Endangers Whales and Intensifies Climate Change – The idea here seems to be to use sonar as a sort of wireless network on the ocean.
- #11 Wealthy Nations Continue to Drive Climate Change with Devastating Impacts on Poorer Countries – Come on! Not news! We know, we just don’t care, or if we care we assume we are helpless.
- #9 New Laws Preventing Dark Money Disclosures Sweep the Nation and #5 Dark Money Interference in US Politics Undermines Democracy– Because we need to make legalized political corruption even more legalized.
- #6 Corporate Consolidation Causing Record Inflation in Food Prices and #1 Fossil Fuel Industry Subsidized at Rate of $11 Million per Minute – Because one thing legalized political corruption buys is the right to monopoly profits and taxpayer subsidies. These things are best combined with cognitive warfare to convince people that the opposite is happening. This combination provides a fantastic investment return compared to competition and innovation!
back to the Philippines
After my last story was “back to Somalia”, this story the U.S. moving back into bases in the Philippines. If we want China to feel surrounded and threatened, this seems like a pretty good move.
Trump withdrew U.S. troops from Somalia
One thing I am willing to give Donald Trump some credit for is trying to end U.S. involvement in foreign wars. He tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from Syria, and he set the Afghanistan withdrawal in motion although it later became a debacle. Add to that an actual successful withdrawal from Somalia. This is from Middle East Eye, a publication I was previously unfamiliar with.
President Donald Trump’s administration moved to withdraw all 700 American troops from Somalia in 2020, after a three-decade presence in the country.
Middle East Eye
This does not mean drone strikes on targets in Somalia ended. They continued, and they are continuing now. And the Biden administration is sending a small number of troops back to Somalia. Apparently this is legal (ish?) – the U.S. is there at the invitation of the Somali government to please by all means attack its enemies. And the domestic justification supposedly goes all the way back to Congress’s approval of the global war on terror after 9/11.
bouncing between layers of limits
This Asia Times article is dramatically titled The Renewable Energy Transition is Failing. This seems overly dramatic to me, but the point to me is that if we overcome one limit, in this case the atmospheric sink for carbon dioxide, we will encounter other limits. In this article, the author focuses on availability of raw materials like metals. If we overcome that limit, we may have an issue of sinks for these metals and other waste products produced. So we bounce back and forth between sources and sinks being the limiting factor.
cigarettes with 95% less nicotine
According to this (paywalled) Philadelphia Inquirer article, commercially produced cigarettes sold in Pennsylvania may soon be modified to be very low in nicotine. Now, who at this point is going to inhale cancer-causing smoke for no reason? I imagine a lot of people will quit, which is the point, and others will turn to the black market or other substances. There will be some irony if former cannabis dealers turn to black market cigarettes as the more profitable option.
I think cigarettes are dumb and I am against the health impacts, annoyance they cause for everyone around, and especially the disgusting trash they produce. But are we sure it is a good idea to criminalize a drug that has been legal and popular for centuries? What’s the enforcement plan for this?