Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Puerto Rico

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Another serious hurricane has hit Puerto Rico, and the response is inadequate. I continue to see this as an indicator of U.S. decline as a competent modern nation. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the response was incompetent, and we were horrified. Our collective reaction to the inadequate response (can we say incompetent when there wasn’t even much effort) in Puerto Rico last time around was more of a shrug. This time, it gets maybe half a day of national media coverage and we barely notice. (Or maybe it was because I was listening to BBC World to find out about the world, and they were somewhat understandably focused on their queen’s passing? A significant historical figure to be sure, but Mikhail Gorbachev just passed away for crying out loud and even THAT only got a couple days of coverage.) We are coming to just accept mediocrity and incompetence as disasters keep hitting us, and our complacency will lead to decline as we do not demand anything better.

Speaking of horrific hurricane disasters, I was perusing this article about Myanmar, where things are pretty awful, and was then struck by the figure (nice tree map!) near the bottom showing the number of displaced people in the Philippines. That seems like a really bad situation, and it has gotten very little media coverage in the U.S., at least that I noticed.

bathroom cleaning robots

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Just a quick note on my business plan to invent bathroom cleaning robots. As soon as I invent a truly effective and inexpensive bathroom cleaning robot, everybody in the world will buy one and I will be the richest person in the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had a recent article called Why household robot servants are a lot harder to build than robotic vacuums and automated warehouse workers. Granted, cleaning a bathroom is really hard on a human body, especially one that is getting older. But why would you assume a robot that looks or acts like a human would be the way to do this. I picture something more like a swarm of ants that can pick up individual pieces of yuck, drop them in a pile somewhere, and then go back to their charger pad. Or maybe spiders. Too creepy? Well, just make them look like little seashells or something not creepy. Why is this so hard?

You could also approach the problem from the other end – designing bathrooms and kitchens that are more appropriate and accessible for robots. Come to think of it, bathrooms and kitchens are not all that appropriate and accessible for humans as it is. This whole thing could use a rethink. All surfaces should be completely impermeable and able to be hosed down. Instead of moving dishes from dishwashers, to sinks, to cabinets, and back again five times a day, all these things should just be one thing. You put dirty dishes in a cabinet, shut the door, open the door next morning, and you have clean dry dishes. Every dish would go in the same spot every time, and robots could handle this. Robots could also reorder peanut butter when the jar is half full, and eggs when they are half gone. For that matter, packaging could be completed redesigned to make more sense for robots as well as humans. Packaging is a big part of our environmental and waste problems in our so-called modern world.

Paraphrasing a cartoon I saw making fun of Elon Musk (but can’t seem to find again), “I come up with the brilliant ideas, and all I ask you idiots to do is make them happen!”

September 2022 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: If humans are subject to the same natural laws as all other species on Earth, we are doomed to certain extinction by our limited genetic variety, declining fertility, and overexploitation of our habitat. So, how different are we? I can spin up a hopeful story where are evolving and overcoming our limitations through intelligence and technology, but time will tell if this is right or wrong.

Most hopeful story: Metformin, a diabetes drug, might be able to preemptively treat a variety of diseases colloquially referred to as “old age”.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Biotechnology might be on the cusp of producing plants that can make more efficient use of the sun’s energy. This could be good for the food supply, and bad if the damn things escape into the woods. And in tangentially related news, yields of salad vegetables can actually be higher in urban areas than on conventional farms. Those coastal elites and their fancy salads, why can’t they just live on simple basic grains like Doritos the way the rest of us do?

Audubon native garden designs

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For people like me with limited artistic sense (visual anyway, and you don’t want me to dance in public, although I was once upon a time a well-trained and active musician), these visual garden designs from Audubon are helpful. Basically, you put the tall plants and flowers in the middle and shorter ones more toward the edges, I think, and then you can consider colors and timing of the flowers. Easy to think about, harder to do.

identifying birds by their songs

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This is pretty cool – basically, something called “Haikubox” is a microphone that records bird songs around your house and sends them to a computer at Cornell, which identifies them and sends them back to an app on your phone that tells you what is going on. My immediate reaction was do I really need to buy this high tech microphone? Couldn’t I just make recordings with whatever I have lying around and send those to the computer? And yes, there is an app for that too called “Merlin Bird ID”. I guess the advantage of buying the hardware is that it is always on and processing and transmitting the recordings without extra effort from you.

retrofitting retiring coal plants with advanced nuclear reactors

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I find this idea of retrofitting old coal plants with nuclear reactors appealing. We are told the new generation of nuclear reactors is safe, and that our fears of nuclear accidents are based on half-century-old obsolete designs. These fears have held back the entire industry for decades, and you can imagine an alternate world where intensive use of nuclear power for all those decades has staved off the climate crisis the world now finds itself in.

The risk of nuclear accidents is objectively much lower than the risk of climate disaster we face. And yet…I have to ask myself if I would want a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. There is in fact a very old fossil fuel (oil and gas in this case) power plant a few blocks from my house. There have been accidents both at that plant, at the very old (and now closed) oil refinery nearby, and with the trains that carry oil past our neighborhood. Then there is whatever the air pollution from the plant is doing to my family’s lungs and cancer risk. All these things tell me that rationally I should welcome a nuclear reactor a few blocks from my house. And yet…it is so hard to separate emotions and be purely rational. And I tend to think I am more coldly rational than most people in the neighborhood would likely be if this were proposed. So this would be a tough road. But our power plant is also in a very densely populated urban area, and there would probably be much more out-of-the-way places where it could be tried (and hopefully the handful of people who lived there would be treated fairly).

What climate tipping points are imminent?

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According to a new Nature article (which this AP story does not link to directly), at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming,

An international team of scientists looked at 16 climate tipping points — when a warming side effect is irreversible, self-perpetuating and major — and calculated rough temperature thresholds at which they are triggered. None of them are considered likely at current temperatures, though a few are possible. But with only a few more tenths of a degree of warming from now, at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming since pre-industrial times, four move into the likely range, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.

AP

The coral reefs will affect fishermen around the world in the very near future. The others, even though they are irreversible, may play out slowly even over centuries, according to the article.

how much food can we grow in cities?

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Well, lots of salad apparently.

How Much Food Can We Grow in Urban Areas? Food Production and Crop Yields of Urban Agriculture: A Meta-Analysis

Urban agriculture can contribute to food security, food system resilience and sustainability at the city level. While studies have examined urban agricultural productivity, we lack systemic knowledge of how agricultural productivity of urban systems compares to conventional agriculture and how productivity varies for different urban spaces (e.g., allotments vs. rooftops vs. indoor farming) and growing systems (e.g., hydroponics vs. soil-based agriculture). Here, we present a global meta-analysis that seeks to quantify crop yields of urban agriculture for a broad range of crops and explore differences in yields for distinct urban spaces and growing systems. We found 200 studies reporting urban crop yields, from which 2,062 observations were extracted. Lettuces and chicories were the most studied urban grown crops. We observed high agronomic suitability of urban areas, with urban agricultural yields on par with or greater than global average conventional agricultural yields. “Cucumbers and gherkins” was the category of crops for which differences in yields between urban and conventional agriculture were the greatest (17 kg m−2 cycle−1 vs. 3.8 kg m−2 cycle−1). Some urban spaces and growing systems also had a significant effect on specific crop yields (e.g., tomato yields in hydroponic systems were significantly greater than tomato yields in soil-based systems). This analysis provides a more robust, globally relevant evidence base on the productivity of urban agriculture that can be used in future research and practice relating to urban agriculture, especially in scaling-up studies aiming to estimate the self-sufficiency of cities and towns and their potential to meet local food demand.

Earth’s Future

Water, energy, and fertilizer-efficient urban agriculture for some fresh produce in cities seems like a pretty good idea. Urban aquaculture seems practical to me. Growing enormous amounts of grain and protein does not at the moment, unless we are going to do it in high-rises under lights. That might be technological doable but farm fields out in the countryside are probably going to be more cost-effective for a long time to come, especially when the environmental costs are mostly not counted.

Even growing a few percent of our calories in cities might help to buffer any future food shocks by giving us extra time to react to them, and by reducing panic and economic disruption it could cause.

eeney miney mini max

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This article talks about using “mini max regret” in climate planning. Basically this sounds like a form of cost-benefit analysis incorporating uncertainty of key inputs including the discount rate. They conclude that 2% is a reasonable intergenerational discount rate.

Note that discounting is one way of handling that issue of the needs of the present population vs. all the teeming trillions who might exist in the future. It doesn’t quite work for existential risks though, because if no humans are around there are by definition no costs or benefits until the cockroaches develop economics.