Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

December 2022 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful story: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Liver King, obviously. What is it about the Liver King I just can’t get enough of. Is it the abs? The huge pectoral muscles?

The Liver King

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I’m not sure what to say about The Liver King except that this GQ profile of him is worth a read. It’s slightly mocking, but he may be of the “any attention is good attention” school of marketing, which appears to be serving him well. Along with subsisting mostly on raw liver and testicles, at least when reporters are around. Why? Because “Vegetables don’t have the raw material required to produce a healthy set of testicles,” he explained. His wife, who is a dentist, and their two apparently teenage boys (who sadly, are not named Walker and Texas Ranger) appear to be okay with all this. I will admit that if the photos in the story are not doctored, this family does in fact appear to have outstanding skin. You see a lot of their skin. Unfortunately, one thing that does not produce a healthy set of testicles is steroids, which the liver king himself did admit recently to be taking.

538 – best charts of 2022

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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

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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:

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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

Trump withdrew U.S. troops from Somalia

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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.