Cahokia, according to BBC, was a Native American city near present day St. Louis. It reached its peak of about 30,000 people around 1,000 A.D., which may not sound impressive but was a larger city than Paris at the time. One interesting thing the article mentions is that there is no evidence of a market economy found, but instead the city appears to have been a “cultural center” renowned for feasts, parties, and…graveyards.
Saturn Run
I just finished Saturn Run by John Sandford and “Ctein”. John Sandford is an extremely prolific author of detective books including the Prey series. His Wikipedia entry lists 31 books in that series alone, and it is not his only series. I haven’t read any of those, but I am interested after enjoying Saturn Run, which is apparently his first/only science fiction book. And who “Ctein”? Well, his Wikipedia says that…wait, I typed that before checking and now it seems that he doesn’t have a Wikipedia article. That in itself is strange. From what I can gather, he is from California, he is a photographer, and he has quite a beard. Photography and California both play a role in the book.
Anyway, this is a book about a near-future space expedition using technology that is just a little ahead of our time but easy to imagine. I really enjoyed it. It is pretty similar in these plot aspects to Delta-V by Daniel Suarez, which I also really enjoyed. The plot and characters are really good, and you can tell it is written by a first-rate thriller and mystery writer. It’s a page turner, although I listened to the audiobook and I don’t know what the audiobook equivalent of a page turner is, a battery drainer?
Make/write/record music with R
Move over Garage Band, there is a new musical sheriff in town. For those of us who like to mess around in R – okay, realistically this gets added to my list of retirement projects a few decades down the road, assuming my body and brain manage to stick around for the next few decades.
gm: Generate Music Easily and Show Them Anywhere
Provides a simple and intuitive high-level language, with which you can create music easily. Takes care of all the dirty technical details in converting your music to musical scores and audio files. Works in ‘R Markdown’ documents <https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/>, R ‘Jupyter Notebooks’ <https://jupyter.org/>, and ‘RStudio’ <https://www.rstudio.com/>, so you can embed generated music anywhere. Internally, uses ‘MusicXML’ <https://www.musicxml.com/> to represent musical scores, and ‘MuseScore’ <https://musescore.org/> to convert ‘MusicXML’.
CRAN
“breakthrough malaria vaccine”
Forbes reports a promising malaria vaccine produced by “the Oxford University team behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 shot”. It doesn’t say whether the technology developed for the Covid shot did anything to hasten this vaccine along. It still has some testing and licensing to go through.
The article has some horrifying stats on malaria, which is a major killer of children.
229 million. This is roughly how many cases of malaria there were around the world in 2019, according to the WHO. Around 400,000 died from the disease, which consistently ranks as one of the top ten causes of death in low income countries, despite falling significantly in recent years. Africa is disproportionately affected by the disease, with over 90% of cases occurring there. Children account for almost 70% of deaths.
Forbes
Doing the math here (journalists, why can’t you do the math for me?), the death rate is about 0.2% of cases. If this is the death rate in Africa (but it could be higher if Africans receive less or lower quality treatment) and the other percentages hold, around 250,000 children in Africa die of malaria each year. From Our World in Data, the death toll in Africa from Covid-19 over the last year is around 120,000.
It occurs to me that countries where people deal with horrible diseases that mass murder children every year might be less horrified by Covid-19, which kills a fraction of older people. Of course I am not saying the lives of poor people have less value or the lives of older people have less value (although this is a perennial debate and people of all ages have a variety of reasonable opinions), but I think you can legitimately ask whether an available dollar should be invested in stopping Covid vs. other horrible diseases people have been dealing with for decades.
it slices, it dices, it 3-D prints famous sculptures in the comfort of your home!
Now you can 3-D print famous works of art in the comfort of your own living room. Or garage, or basement, maybe. I don’t know exactly how it works but I am intrigued.
This reminds me of one of my guaranteed-successful innovative startup business ideas, which is a chain of 3D printed frozen yogurt shops. Imagine you walk in and there is a securely bolted down Ipad where you can choose from thousands of famous works of art, cartoon characters (some of whom are famous works of art?), etc. Within minutes, your selection is delivered to your table with your choice of sprinkles. Drop me a line if you want to invest.
U.S. topsoil
A study published in Nature says the U.S. “corn belt” has lost something like 35% of its topsoil. Sounds concerning, and I have heard dramatic claims like “the world only has 50 years of topsoil left. I also just find it sad to think that the topsoil was built up by the prairies over the millennia, and we have mined much of it into oblivion in a few short industrial generations. But this article also puts the loss in terms of crop yields at around 6%, which doesn’t sound so dramatic. This makes me think we are relying largely on agricultural chemicals rather than nutrients in the soil itself. Maybe it would actually make more sense to intensify industrial agricultural in some areas or even indoors, contain the impacts, and restore some of those prairies.
April 2021 in Review
Most frightening and/or depressing story: One of the National Intelligence Council’s scenarios for 2040 involves “far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation”.
Most hopeful story: Giant tortoises reach a state of “negligible senescense” where they simply don’t age for a long time. Humans are distant relatives of giant tortoises, so maybe we can aspire to this some day. They are not invulnerable to injury and disease.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Hydrogen fuel cells may finally be arriving. Not so much in the U.S., where we can’t have nice things.
Colorado River headed for official shortage declaration
This has been a slow motion crisis a long time coming, but here is how the process apparently works:
- The Bureau of Reclamation has issued a 24-month forecast indicating that an official shortage declaration is coming. The forecast does not yet prompt any specific requirements or action.
- The shortage declaration would happen when Lake Mead falls below 1,075 feet (328 meters), projected to happen in June. “That’s the level that prompts a shortage declaration under agreements negotiated by seven states that rely on Colorado River water: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.”
- Actual changes to reservoir operations would happen in January 2022.
The article says Arizona could “lose one third of its water supply”. This is not a surprise however and there have been some preparations. Arizona and Nevada, along with Mexico, have already agreed to voluntary cuts and started looking into alternative sources and conservation measures.
So, it’s not a good idea to live near a coastline, in a desert, or in a fire prone region. Earthquakes and volcanoes are also best avoided. What is left? Maybe the Great Lakes region and parts of Canada?
UFOs getting harder to ignore
There are more videos coming from the military, and they are getting harder not to take seriously. Apparently, the military looks at these videos pretty closely and if they thought it was a drone or a balloon of some sort, they would call it that. If they can’t explain the technology that would produce the behavior observed, it becomes an “unidentified aerial phenomenon”.
biotech roundup
Here’s a quick roundup of mind-blowing biotech stories:
- Genetically modified mosquitoes to be released in Key West. This has been talked about, planned, and argued over for quite awhile. It sounds like it is probably going to happen in real life “this spring”.
- Remember the doctor/scientist in China who claimed he modified two twin babies’ DNA to make them HIV-resistant? He’s in jail now. One of the twins may actually be HIV-resistant, but the other one has a completely artificial gene never seen before in the human species due to an error. Which may do absolutely nothing and never cause any problems. But these genes may also be inheritable, meaning they could persist through the generations if these children grow up and decide to have their own children. I’m kind of hoping the media leaves these particular children and their future reproductive choices alone though.
- Scientists have created human-monkey chimera embryos. This is for medical experimentation. There could be benefits, but also profoundly disturbing questions about what kinds of lives these individuals (people?) could have and what their (human?) rights should be.