Fivethirtyeight.com has a roundup of interesting visualizations they did in 2020. There’s a lot here, but one theme I think I would like to try to make use of is is pretty simple. When you are counting something, put the count in context by first showing a bunch of empty squares that represent the potential or total number of something (voters, or citizens stopped by police, or human beings with potential Covid exposure). Then put dots in some of the boxes, or color in some of the boxes, to illustrate the count. If you want to introduce some additional categories, you can use colors or put boxes around the boxes, or to get really fancy, put groups of boxes on a map. This technique undoubtedly has a name, but the article doesn’t tell me what the name is.
2020…in space commercialization
One thing that happened in 2020 is some long-term trends in space commercialization started to come to fruition in an obvious way. Axios has a roundup:
- record (unmanned) “commercial launches”
- U.S. astronauts traveled to the International Space Station on a privately-owned-but-publicly-funded rocket.
- A bunch of space-related companies sold public stock
A “trend to watch” for 2021 is “megaconstellations of internet-beaming satellites like Starlink”. Wait, “like Starlink”? So there are others? How much space is really out there? This article says the business model is still unproven, but I say the real reason is that Elon Musk is a Bond villain.
This article is about near-Earth space commercialization, not space exploration or travel. Not covered are the wrinkle-resistant flag that China planted on the moon, a variety of un-manned missions to Mars and other planets/objects in the solar system, and the usual array of stories about physics and possible alien signals/contact.
non-coronavirus, non-election stuff that happened in 2020
A pandemic and a U.S. election happened in 2020, but did anything else happen? The Week has a list of things that happened that might have seemed more important in a more ordinary year.
- The U.S. assassinated a high-ranking official in Iran. This is clearly an act of war. Well, our countries have been involved in a low-intensity war for half a century and it grinds on. Hopefully we can de-escalate in the coming years and make sure nuclear weapons are not involved.
- There was a record-breaking hurricane season, plus some fires and floods. Also, I hadn’t heard this, but parts of the U.S. mid-Atlantic including New York City were classified as humid sub-tropical. Central and north Florida are humid subtropical, but it turns out the criteria are a summer average above 72 degrees F and a winter average above 27 degrees F. A Florida summer vs. a New York or Philadelphia or D.C. summer aren’t really that drastically different, but there is still a drastic difference in winters and just one cold snap can still kill off sensitive vegetation (and hopefully some nasty critters we don’t need.)
- We didn’t discover incontrovertible proof that aliens exist let alone actually talk to any aliens. But the U.S. military admitted it has, and publicly released, videos of unidentified flying objects. Also, some gas was discovered around Venus that some scientists think could be created by life forms. I’ve seen other articles casting significant doubt on this though.
- Astronauts went to space on a private rocket for the first time.
- Some stuff happened in physics with stars and subatomic particles and wormholes. I’m sure it’s important and profound for some reason.
- The article lists the following things that I DO NOT consider news. I guess they didn’t want to be just another “top 10” list, so they padded their list to 17. Planters discontinued their Mr. Peanut mascot (not mentioned is the retirement of the Aunt Jemima brand, which seems slightly more interesting to me. I learned in 2020 that Aunt Jemima was a real person and her descendants have some mixed feelings about the issue.) Kanye West and other third party candidates ran for U.S. President, and nobody noticed. (Thank you Bernie, for not running as a third party candidate. It was the right thing to do. It would be nice to have ranked-choice voting but obviously the parties are going to fight that tooth and nail. I did see yesterday that Pennsylvania is considering open primaries, which would be a small step in the right direction.) Bob Dylan wrote a song (doesn’t interest me personally, but congrats to Bob Dylan for going strong at 79.) Murder hornets. Murder hornets are big scary hornets from Asia that kill a couple people a year, on average. Mosquitoes and ticks kill millions of people every year. Elon Musk had a baby and gave it a weird name (don’t care, doesn’t deserve attention.) Some people got seeds in the mail from China that they didn’t order, and planted them. They were vegetables of some sort and nothing in particular happened beyond that. Kellyanne Conway’s teenage daughter did something or other that attracted attention. Monoliths (just dumb).
top urban planning books of 2020
Planetizen has an annual roundup of urban planning books. Certainly urban planners should care about urban planning, but urban planning is not just for urban planners. It touches on topics of interest to engineers, economists, social scientists (separate from economists? discuss amongst yourselves), and generally people who are concerned/interested in people or the environment. Because cities and their suburbs are the environment where the vast majority of people live.
Some animals and plants also live there, and this particular list is notable devoid of any books on parks, trees, urban ecology, or even environmental quality issues like air pollution or water pollution. It has a number of interesting books on housing. Some urban problems like transportation and land use and air quality have a range of solutions that experts loosely agree on, even if politicians and bureaucrats fail to implement them and special interests actively obstruct and spread disinformation about them. Adequate and affordable housing for everyone is the big urban problem that has never been solved and really has no clear cut consensus on what should be done. The basic puzzle is that as a particular city or neighborhood becomes a nice place to live, prices get bid up, and then over time only the relatively affluent can afford to live there. Once the snowball starts rolling, the people who live there will use their political power to try to limit increases in housing supply (for example, resisting greater heights or apartment buildings or smaller lot sizes). Government can try to intervene by allowing/requiring greater density, or it can go the other way and allow automobile-dependent low-density sprawl to develop. The latter chews up land that could be put to better use (or left wild), pollutes our air and water, cooks our planet, and contributes to everything from diabetes to mass pedestrian death to drunk driving. Governments should stop essentially paying people to live in the suburbs, and let people who make this choice experience the true cost to themselves and everyone else on the planet. But that’s just my view and lifestyle choice and I try to be tolerant of others, up to a point. And actually, I occasionally consider retreating to a quiet, cheap suburban life somewhere in the middle states from time to time. But if I did that I would be aware that it was cheap because the government was subsidizing me at others’ expense.
- Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing
- Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
- Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis
- Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (mortgages and lending, both on the public policy side and private sector side, are part of the puzzle)
- The Affordable City: Strategies for Putting Housing Within Reach
There are a few books more about urban and regional planning proper:
- City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (sounds like a U.S.-centric version of Cities of Tomorrow, a classic and awesome introduction to urban planning history. Even the cover is similar to the version of that book that I have.)
- The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs
- Designing for the Mega-region: Meeting Urban Challenges at a New Scale (could we please have high speed rail to connect our mega-regions? Oh, I forgot, this is the United States and we just can’t have nice things.)
Finally, the book that caught my eye most is specifically about pedestrian deaths (Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America), and if you didn’t already notice this is an issue near and dear to my heart. Pedestrian deaths, and motor vehicle-related deaths more broadly, are going to cause coronavirus-level death and carnage each and every year into the foreseeable future, long after the coronavirus shock is in the rear-view mirror. Solutions are known, and would have all kinds of virtuous spillover effects on our urban areas. And yet we fail to understand or act, decade after decade after decade.
Wouldn’t it be fun to just disappear to a mountaintop hermit cabin for a week and read a stack of books on a topic? Well, my idea of fun is not everybody’s idea of fun. Also, I’m not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, and can’t just leave my family or my day job for a week.
game-changing technologies from 2020
Here are a few from various places around the web:
Nabeel S. Qureshi: From what I gather, this guy works at the RAND corporation, and is not related to the author with a similar name who passed away a couple years ago. Anyway, he has a list on Twitter:
- mRNA vaccine
- Apple M1 chip – it’s a computer chip, I guess a bit faster or more efficient or whatever than others
- SpaceX rocket launch
- GPT-3 – this is a machine learning thing that has to do with computers generating text that sounds very realistic to humans. Or to put it another way, computers can write now? But they still can’t think, that we know of. This seems concerning.
- various initial public offerings
- “V-shaped recovery” – optimistic, I hope it turns out to be true in retrospect
- electric cars
- “Crypto going mainstream” – cryptocurrency? I’m not sure how/if this affected me directly in 2020, but I do know that for the first time I used almost no cash at all from March-December.
scrolling through the comments, some of which have additional suggestions from nice people, interspersed with some nasty and stupid ones of course.
- Bt eggplant – this is a crop with a relatively harmless insecticide built in. It basically targets a particular type of caterpillar. Okay I guess as long as it doesn’t escape into the wild and kill beneficial insects or outcompete unmodified plants. I sprinkle Bt for mosquitoes on my garden and in my storm drains.
- technology and widespread adoption of remote working – some of this will fade after Covid, I assume, but I also assume it will settle at a level significantly higher than before Covid.
- Neuralink, Starlink – these are micro-satellites
- Cerebras – this is another computer chip
- “BCI” – brain-computer interfaces? There is also a company called Buckeye Corrugated Inc. that makes cardboard. come on people, enough with the undefined acronyms
- “6dof video capture” – “six degrees of freedom”, which has something to do with more realistic virtual reality
- mixed reality – is this different from “augmented reality”?
- GAN – this might be a “generative adversarial network”, which sounds like two AIs duking it out and coming up with something new
- disinformation
Tyler Cowan, an economist who wrote “The Great Stagnation”, says the Great Stagnation is not over but it might be getting close to over. He says “the vaccine-driven recovery will measure as a rise in labor inputs, but in reality it will be pure TFP. In 2021 (but which quarter?), true TFP will be remarkably high, maybe the highest ever?” Ooh ooh, I know this one! TFP is total factor productivity, which is the rise in productivity that can’t be attributed to capital and labor inputs. So it can represent some combination of innovations, or intangibles, errors and unknowns.
New technologies can take some time to come to fruition, even decades. So maybe we are starting to see an AI/biotech/renewable energy acceleration that we got excited about a long time ago and then forgot about? There are also some dangers and unintended consequences lurking on this list, as always.
The map of doom!
This is a nice piece of risk communication from Dominic Walliman at Domain of Science (which I discovered on Open Culture.com). The “map” is actually a log-log plot of severity (number of deaths) and likelihood (average return period), but this guy manages to convey all that in a digestible way without dumbing it down. You can just stare at the chart, but in this case it really is worth watching the video.
So what should we be paying more attention to? Well, we might actually pay more attention to pandemics now, and we should. The AIDS pandemic has actually been really bad, and is a good example of how we can just get used to and accept a hugely terrible event that unfolds over a long time. Also antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, and some complex of climate change/ecosystem collapse/food supply issues. This last he explains pretty well and succinctly between about minutes 12 and 13, so that is worth watching if you have only one minute.
If I were a politician, I would want a chart like this on my wall, prepared by experts in risk management and system theory, and tapping into experts on each of the major risks. I would also want to add more mundane risks that are certain to happen and killing a lot of people, like air pollution, motor vehicle crashes (and pedestrian and cyclist deaths), and diabetes. Then I would tackle some of the worst ones and try to align my policies and budget allocations with them. Not glamorous stuff, but I would hire this guy to try to help explain it to the public. If he wasn’t available, I would pick another photogenic person with a soft and pleasing British (Australian?) accent to help.
the bloody head fairy
Happy holidays from the 1990s!
more top Longreads of 2020
Here Longreads.com collects their top story from each week of 2020, adding up to…I don’t know…counting on my fingers…50 stories or so. How many stories do they publish per week anyway? Here are a handful that caught my I (TLDRJS – too long didn’t read every word, just skimmed):
- “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus” – published in February. An accurate story, I would say. The headline is all we need to read now.
- “Shell is Looking Forward” – I’ve been puzzling over this for awhile. How does an oil and gas company “evolve” into a green energy company, when getting into the regulated electricity utility business, the nuclear business, or the largely decentralized renewable energy/energy storage business means basically shedding their entire business model and becoming a completely different kind of company, and there are already companies operating in those spaces that are going to better at it than some new entry from the outside? This article gave me some clues – modern corporations are somewhat agnostic about what they “do”. They are more like private equity investors. So they will just horde cash for awhile and use it to buy some other companies, including smaller companies and startups they hope will expand. Then they will hang on to the winners and shed the losers. So a company really becomes nothing but a brand name for an operation that can be doing absolutely anything, and the mix of what it is doing will change over time. I just question whether a big established company like an oil giant is nimble enough to pull something like this off. It seems more likely tech or finance companies would be successful at this game.
- a pair of articles on mass migration driven by climate change – one international and one U.S. focused. These were really TLDR, but the long-term situation is just depressing. Coastlines are going to be inundated, the southern U.S. is going to get too hot, the western U.S. is going to get too dry, and places we grow a lot of food now are going to get too hot and too dry to continue yielding the amount of food we need. The article seems to point to the northeast and midwest. The big northeastern cities are coastal though, so that is going to require some serious commitment to coastal engineering and flood control if it is really going to work. The midwest might be the place to be. Internationally, I just don’t know. Beyond the obviously horrifying humanitarian implications, we’ve already seen migration trigger political instability in Europe and the U.S., and that process seems set to get worse.
- “Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup” – It seems there was some denial and censorship. It’s a little easy to judge in hindsight. Would earlier action or more open communication by China and/or WHO have prevented the virus from spreading to Italy? Hard to say. It spread to Korea, and they dealt with it effectively. Thailand, which has extensive travel to Wuhan, contained it through airport screening, contact tracing, and quarantining people in public hospitals. So western countries can point the finger if they want, but their response was just too slow and ineffective early on to contain the situation, and in the case of the U.S. just a completely incompetent non-response.
a best of best of 2020 roundup
The “best of” articles are starting to roll in now! Here are a handful.
- Best of Frontline. They have a 2-minute Rocky training montage of all their episodes in 2020. As you might excpect, they covered the pandemic, the protests, the Supreme Court, and the election. They don’t seem to have covered international events much other than the pandemic to some extent. Frontline is a great documentary series, probably the best. If I had nothing else to do and really wanted to understand the year, I might take a weekend and binge watch Frontline. Perhaps there are some childless, retired or independently wealthy people out there who can do this, but alas…
- 25 most popular Longreads exclusives. A few interesting ones look at “Britishness”, the “MasterClass” series, ancient canals in modern-day Phoenix, and the possibility that the Olympics may not be back. I like Longreads in principle but sorry, TLDR!
- Top 25 Censored Stories from Project Censored. A couple interesting ones look at education/incarceration links and a comprehensive proposal for criminal justice reform.
- Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections reviews the 2020 hurricane season, which broke many long-standing records and would seem to bode ill for the near future.
vertical farming
Forbes has an article on vertical farming under lights, claiming that a 2-acre vertical farm can replace a 750 acre outdoor farm and use 95% less water. It doesn’t talk about pollution, but in theory it should be relatively easy to collect and recycle/compost/digest/burn solid waste, and collect and treat wastewater, from a farm like this. I know LED lights are efficient, but you do have to produce enough energy to replace the sunlight that would have fallen on 750 acres of the Earth, plus some extra because the system is not perfectly efficient, and you have to produce fertilizer of some sort. These things will have an ecological footprint. On the other hand, if this is in an urban population center, you potentially have a lot of waste streams you might be able to recover energy and nutrients from. Then you also have 748 acres of land somewhere that you can theoretically reforest or re-wetland. Then you might have a healthy fishery somewhere downstream that is no longer choked by sediment and nutrients from farm waste.