shoddy Chicago bike lanes

I have gone through a number of emotional stages with Philadelphia’s bike lanes, from denial to anger to apathy. They are poorly designed, maintained, and almost completely unenforced. This article talks about the state of Chicago’s bike lanes, which sound and look about the same. No, this doesn’t make me feel better about Philadelphia. Two times as much poor design and children dying is twice as bad. But this article at least does have some ideas, some of which Chicago is at least trying on a limited time frame and in a limited area.

  • “install cameras on city vehicles and street poles in two pilot areas Downtown to identify parking violators and mail them a ticket” [If people knew there were cameras on every police car, bus, and other fleet vehicle, they would clean up their act in a hurry. You could forgive a first ticket for people who agree to put a camera on their cars. Citizens should be able to snap a picture and upload it too. And this seems like a great use of AI. Computers could process all the imagery, flag ones that look like likely violations, and then a police officer could review and issue the tickets.]
  • do something about “dangerous construction zones and poor maintenance of city streets” [Amen. These are not just bike issues, they are driver and pedestrian and human issues absolutely everybody should be able to get behind.]
  • Communication. [Yes, signage can be poor and sometimes drivers and delivery people legitimately do not understand they are doing something wrong.]
  • “Improve shoddy bike lanes.” [um, yes, it shouldn’t need to be said but this is the #1 thing. Just adopt the Dutch Street Design Manual now and be done with it. U.S. cities really need some kind of loading zone, delivery, and contractor parking solution though. The way streets are designed now, these 100% necessary activities are illegal and that doesn’t make any sense. My brightest idea is to have a 15-minute parking space (or whatever time frame makes sense) at the four corners of each intersection, have these be reservable through an app, consider charging for them, and strictly and/or automatically enforce time violations.]
  • “first-time violators and anyone ticketed within 30 days of a camera being installed will be given a 30-day warning”
  • Fines that scale with income. [I’m not sure about this, but charging commercial vehicles more could definitely make sense. Charging less for a first offense, or forgiving a first offense if someone takes a refresher course or agrees to become a snitch (i.e. install a camera on their car or house) could all make sense. Community service as an alternative to paying fines could make sense. Fines shouldn’t add up to the point where anybody goes to jail unless they have hurt someone. Penalties for drivers who hurt someone should be severe in my view though, and this should apply regardless of what the pedestrian or cyclist was doing. The moral weight has to fall on the operator of the larger, heavier vehicle.]

Adding an anecdote about a crushed toddler is a nice touch in this article. We are all against that right? Or do some of us only care about babies before they are born?

Go Birds!

It’s the morning of Super Bowl Sunday as I write this, and I don’t know if the Philadelphia Eagles will win tonight. If you are reading this, you will probably know or you can look it up. In the meantime, if you want to watch eagles on TV there are at least two live streams of bald eagle nests in Pennsylvania. When I checked just now, one had an eagle in it and one was empty. Even an empty bald eagle nest is an impressive structure worth a look.

bird flu

A strain of bird flu has spread from “intensive poultry farms in Asia” to wild birds in Britain. This is unquestionably bad for birds, and…

At present, it is thought H5N1 only rarely infects people and few cases have been recorded of it being passed from one human to another. However, scientists warn there is a possibility that bird flu viruses could change and gain the ability to spread easily between people. Monitoring for human infection is extremely important, they warn.

Guardian

Was Covid-19 a dress rehearsal for the day a really dangerous flu gets out of hand? I think we learned some things, but did we learn enough?

the stats on war and peace

I seem to be on a peace rant this morning.

In the U.S. we have half a million people unhoused and at risk of freezing to death this winter. We have 1 in 5 children growing up impoverished and hungry, and the federal government tells us there is no money for universal health care, student loan forgiveness, or to house and feed the people. Yet, at $858 billion for 2023, the military budget is at it highest point ever, and ominously increasing every year.

Popular Resistance.org

That $858 billion sounds low to me. That is probably the Pentagon’s budget for the year. Don’t forget the weapons programs under the Department of Energy, the CIA and the rest of the “intelligence community” spread across various agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and elements within the FBI and other agencies involved in national security. Then there’s the Veterans Administration, which pretty much everyone supports but is a legacy of many decades of past military spending. Active and retired military personnel do in fact have universal health care, and there is a slight irony there. No, we should not take it away from them, we should extend it to everyone else.

Is the U.S. encircling China?

Caitlin Johnstone is not an unbiased source, but I tend to agree with her statement here.

The US empire has been surrounding China with military bases and war machinery for many years, in ways Washington would never tolerate China doing in the nations and waters surrounding the United States. There is no question that the US is the aggressor in this increasingly hostile standoff between major powers. Yet we’re all meant to be freaking out about a balloon.

Ask me to show you how the US has been aggressing against China I can show you all the well-documented ways in which the US is encircling China with weapons of war. Ask an empire apologist to show you how China is aggressing against the US and they’ll start babbling about TikTok and balloons.

These things are not equal. Maybe Americans should stop watching out for hostile foreign threats and start looking a little closer to home.

Caitlin Johnstone

Well, actually I don’t agree that we should “stop watching out for hostile foreign threats”. That is exactly what our military and intelligence agencies should be doing. Our politicians and diplomats need to be thinking about how hostile and threatening we appear to others, whether their seemingly hostile actions are in reaction to a perceived threat from us, and whether trying to be less threatening would be in the entire world’s interest.

Jupiter and the Sun orbit each other

This is just a random science tidbit. Two bodies with mass will always interact just a little bit, but in the case of the Earth our effect on the Sun is so small as to be negligible. In the case of Jupiter, it is not. Jupiter is so massive that it moves the Sun just a little bit, so they are actually technically orbiting each other. As for exactly what gravity is and where it came from, I can’t tell you, but I am grateful for it.

January 2023 in Review

We’re now 1/12th of the way through 2023. Is this really the fabulous science fiction future we were promised? Well, at least the Earth is not a smoking ruin, at least most parts of it.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: How about a roundup of awful things, like the corrupt illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court, ongoing grisly wars, the CIA killed JFK after all (?), nuclear proliferation, ethnic cleansing, mass incarceration, Guantanamo Bay, and all talk no walk on climate change? And let’s hope there is a special circle of hell waiting for propaganda artists who worked for Exxon.

Most hopeful story: Bill Gates says a gene therapy-based cure for HIV could be 10-15 years away.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Genetically engineered beating pig hearts have been sown into dead human bodies. More than once.

what’s a good U.S. strategy?

Here are some ideas:

  • Rearm Germany and Japan. Why not throw in some nuclear proliferation while we are at it. Maybe South Korea or Taiwan would like to host some nuclear weapons, if they are not already?
  • Get involved in a land invasion of Russia, preferably in winter. (A convenient way to do this is to start your campaign in the fall or even late summer, and just assume it will be short.)
  • Also plan some Pacific island-hopping warfare.
  • Just assume this will not end with the deployment of weapons of mass destruction by any of the parties involved, especially not the world’s guiding light for peace and democracy.

Pfizer and “gain of function” research

This Pfizer press release just confirms that the technology to make genetically engineered viruses is widespread:

we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern. This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern…

In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus.  It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world.

Pfizer

So they aren’t creating genetically engineered bioweapons of mass destruction, but they could if they wanted to. Somebody somewhere probably is. Not the U.S. government, which has no track record of lying or trying to dominate the world, and doesn’t collude with big business entities with the technology to do so.

ChatGPT

I set up a ChatGPT account and asked it to solve the lily pond problem. If the lilies double every day and will cover the pond in 30 days, on what day do the cover the half the pond. The answer, of course, should be day 29. ChatGPT correctly told me in words that this as an exponential growth problem, then gave me a numerical answer of 15 days (the linear growth answer!). Then it gave me some completely wrong math involving logarithms, after which it gave me two additional different answers that were not 29 or 15, and didn’t seem to acknowledge that it had even given multiple answers.

What scared me most was not the wrong answer(s), but the extremely confident manner in which it gave the wrong answer(s). This could fool people on problems where they don’t know the answer in advance, and the correct answer is not intuitive or obvious.

ChatGPT does tell much better knock-knock jokes that Siri…

As of today, we do not want this thing designing bridges or airplanes or anything else! I do not want it advising my doctor on my course of treatment, mixing my prescriptions at the pharmacy, or managing my retirement account, although these seem like plausible near-future applications once some kinks get worked out. It’s easy to be dismissive of the current state of this technology. But at the same time, it may not be that far off. Right now, it could argue you to a standstill in a barroom political or philosophical debate (you know, where a drunk guy makes a lengthy argument that is as illogical as it is confidently delivered, and since there are no consequences you just give up). In the medium-term future, I could imagine it being a conversational companion for a child or a person with dementia (although, there are some obvious ethical concerns here.) Could it be a best friend or significant other? This is a bit disturbing, because it might be able to always tell you exactly what you want to hear and be 100% impervious to your own annoying quirks, and then you might forget how to deal with actual people who are not going to be so forgiving. It could inhabit a sex doll – now there is a truly disturbing thought, but it will happen soon if it has not already.