I learned a few things from this Scientific American article. First, fungi can be very useful in space because they break down hydrocarbons, which are abundant but not hospitable to life, and turn them into sugars, which are not abundant in space and do support life. Second, they create hard carbonaceous materials which can provide protection, insulation, and even conduct electricity. Third, at least some scientists think fungi will be discovered in space. Fourth, the character Paul Stamets on Star Trek Discovery is named after a real scientist named Paul Stamets, who wrote the book Mycelium Running, which I have heard of an haven’t read. And finally, something I knew but for the record have no personal experience with to date, psychoactive mushrooms can treat depression, loneliness, and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are going to occur anywhere in our universe humans choose to go.
Limits to Growth Re-revisited
Someone revisits Limits to Growth every now and then. This author says the world is tracking the most pessimistic scenarios examined in the original model, and that stagnation or collapse in the next decade is a real possibility. The attempt at a silver lining – there is a chance that it might not be too late to do something.
but we’re ready to fight a war, right?
Yesterday I concluded the U.S. is not ready for a significant disaster. But one thing we commit plenty of resources to and are good at is fighting wars, right? In fact, we are so good nobody will even mess with us, right? Not so fast. There is buzz at the moment over a war game that supposedly showed the U.S. catastrophically losing a conflict over Taiwan. Communications were disrupted immediately by missiles, drones, and attacks on infrastructure like undersea cables, and without communications the U.S. forces couldn’t fight effectively.
I’m a little skeptical. Why would the U.S. military intentionally publicize something like this? I suppose scaring a domestic audience into committing even more resources is always one reason. A cold war with China is a good reason for our military-industrial complex to keep sucking up 5% or so of our economy, and Taiwan is the most obvious flashpoint that could go from cold to hot. If brinksmanship or bluffing to sustain military funding is the game here, the risks are too great to play the game. Seriously, let’s not let this happen.
U.S. not prepared for megadisasters
The description for this 2006 book Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do is eerily prophetic. Then again, I can’t rule out the possibility that it was updated in the last year or so to appear eerily prophetic in hindsight.
Five years after 9/11 and one year after Hurricane Katrina, it is painfully clear that the government’s emergency response capacity is plagued by incompetence and a paralyzing bureaucracy. Irwin Redlener, who founded and directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, brings his years of experience with disasters and health care crises, national and international, to an incisive analysis of why our health care system, our infrastructure, and our overall approach to disaster readiness have left the nation vulnerable, virtually unable to respond effectively to catastrophic events…
As a doctor, Redlener is especially concerned about America’s increasingly dysfunctional and expensive health care system, incapable of handling a large-scale public health emergency, such as pandemic flu or widespread bioterrorism. And he also looks at the serious problem of a disengaged, uninformed citizenry—one of the most important obstacles to assuring optimal readiness for any major crisis.
Amazon
I thought we responded okay to 9/11 in terms of the actual local area where it happened. Obviously we didn’t prevent it or prepare for it, and starting two wars with countries that were mostly uninvolved can’t really be considered a response at all. Katrina is another story. When I look back, that failure on a regional scale was a harbinger of our coronavirus failure on a national scale. And coronavirus, awful as it has been, is marginal in terms of what a megadisaster could really unleash – think a disease that kills 99% instead or 1% of people infected, even a limited nuclear war, an earthquake or volcano large enough to devastate an entire densely populated region, sudden ice sheet collapse, or a catastrophic collapse of the food and/or energy systems.
It seems to me that surviving the medium-term future as a nation and civilization requires us to address both the slow and steady long-term trends like global warming, and to be prepared for the sudden catastrophic events we are going to have to deal with. The two are clearly related – dealing with the long term trends can lessen the frequency and severity of some of the short-term events, but not eliminate them.
the Nordic welfare model
This article explains that the Nordic welfare model succeeds by targeting the middle class, not just the poor. They provide services of high enough quality (child care, health care, education, unemployment, disability, retirement) that the private sector can’t compete. Then the middle class voters support the politicians who support the policies, and are willing to pay the taxes necessary to receive the benefits.
Seems simple, but it’s easy for anti-tax corporate and wealthy interests in the United States to prevent this feedback loop from getting established. They just spew propaganda and buy off politicians who are anti-tax and anti-deficit spending, so the government only has resources for limited programs targeting the poor, the middle class resents paying taxes and receiving little in return while having to pay for sub-par private benefits at the same time, and they continue to vote against policies to expand benefits. Breaking this loop would require a gamble on massive deficit spending (kinda sorta being tried now, legitimately during a crisis in my view) and/or constitutional changes/reinterpretation that stop the legalized propaganda and bribery (which would have to be enacted by the politicians who are being bribed, unless judges were to take the lead which seems unlikely).
in today’s fake robot news…
Thank you, Onion, for the laugh out loud moment caused me by the following sentence:
Boston Dynamics representatives also announced the creation of a robot capable of using artificial intelligence to build a robot army without any of the researchers noticing.
Tesla on the water
Some (all?) Tesla 3’s, apparently, are designed to effectively navigate flood waters in a sort of boat mode. Don’t try this at home, i.e. on the road near your home. First of all, you don’t know if your Tesla 3 has this feature. Second of all, even if you know you have this feature, you might take more risk, enter flood waters you wouldn’t otherwise enter, and end up equally dead.
Audubon native plant database
I’m not sure if I’ve linked to this before, but you can type in your zip code and get a list of native plants and the birds they support. It’s a long list, but there are various filters like the type of plant and type of bird you are interested in.
a jumbo jet crashing every hour
Here are some disturbing statistics on child mortality worldwide.
Child mortality refers to the death of children before their fifth birthday. We live in a world in which 5.4 million children die every year. That’s ten dead children every minute.
Imagine what it means for a child to lose his or her life; imagine what it means for a family to see their child die. Ten families will experience that in the next minute. This will repeat every minute for the rest of the year. That is the horror of child mortality.
These daily tragedies do not receive the attention they deserve. Comparing it with those tragedies that do receive public attention makes this clear. A large jumbo jet can carry up to 600 passengers.3 The number of child deaths is equivalent to a crash of a jumbo jet with only children on board, every hour of every day of the year.
Max Roser, Our World in Data
It suggests a few points to me. One is that we are most scared and pay the most attention to new threats, like Covid or murder hornets. Meanwhile, old threats like car accidents, heart disease, and malaria cause suffering and death on a much larger scale. We are complacent and accepting of them either because they happen to other people far away (from the perspective of a prosperous country like the U.S.) or because they are so common we assume nothing can be done about them (traffic deaths).
Second, the enormous disparities between countries make it clear that something can be done about child mortality, and that it is a moral imperative to do so. It is not even high tech, it is just a failure of our civilization to recognize the problem, feel the responsibility, organize and act.
The plots of per capita income vs. child mortality are worth staring at. As the article drives home, there are no poor countries with low child mortality rates, suggesting that economic development is necessary in addition to direct interventions (nutrition, vaccination, sanitation, and health care are mentioned.) The U.S., of course, is in the group of richer nations with much lower child mortality rates than the poorer countries. But within its group, the U.S. is the clear laggard compared to the rest of the developed world. We are not applying our wealth and know-how effectively to keep our young children from dying.
how to measure access to parks
Two simple measures of park access are the total area of parks in a city and the average distance of residences from a park. You can divide the former by population to get a normalized stat that can be compared across cities or tracked over time, and you can look at various stats on the latter such as the percent of households within 10 minutes of a park. Here are a few more ideas from a guy in Singapore.
- length of walking and/or cycling trails
- length of waterfronts (not sure exactly how this was defined, if it included Singapore’s concrete drainage channels in addition to oceanfront, lakes and ponds)
- area of dense vegetation within parks
- “supply of of park area to residential buildings” based on a decay factor (some sort of weighted average I suppose based on how much people of willing to travel – paper here)
This all makes some sense to me. I might add some measure of tree canopy. None of this does anything about the weather in Singapore. If you want to enjoy parks there, I recommend getting up very very early. Then take a nice long afternoon nap, stop by the pool if you have access to one (but if you are light skinned realize you are at the equator and you still need sunscreen late in the afternoon), and go enjoy the more urban amenities (like food, very large bottles of beer which are meant to be shared, and a variety of less family friendly entertainments I have only heard about) after dark, which is around 7 p.m. year round. One thing about Singapore is it is safe to be out at any time of night, and street food is available all night.