Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Kernza

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Kernza is a perennial grain that is potentially much easier on the environment than wheat and other annual grains, at least on a per-acre basis. The problem, for now, is that yields are nowhere near wheat yields, so producing an amount of Kernza similar to today’s wheat yields would require around five times as much land. Researchers are working on the problem, but they have been working on it for decades and the progress doesn’t seem to be fast enough for this to be the magic bullet that saves the planet.

Noam Chomsky on Biden, Saudi Arabia, and Israel

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Noam Chomsky is 93 as I write this, so who knows how much longer we will hear his first-person commentary on current events? I’ll keep reading and reporting it as long as we do.

On Saudi Arabia:

In the case of Biden’s visit, first things presumably include renewed efforts to persuade MBS to increase production so as to reduce high gas prices in the U.S. There would be other ways, for example, a windfall tax on the fossil fuel industries that are drowning in profits, with the revenues distributed to those who have been gouged by the neoliberal class war of the past 40 years, which has transferred some $50 trillion to the pockets of the top 1%. That, however, is “politically impossible.”

Politically even more impossible in elite calculations would be the feasible measures to try to stave off catastrophe by moving rapidly to cut off the flow of these poisons. These need not, however, be the calculations of those who have some interest in leaving a decent world to their children and grandchildren. Time is short.

There are broader considerations in Biden’s Middle East tour. One goal surely is to firm up Trump’s one great geopolitical achievement: the Abraham Accords, which raised tacit relations among the most brutal and criminal states of the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region to formal alliance. The accords have been widely hailed as a contribution to peace and prosperity, though not all are delighted. Not, for example, Sahrawis, handed over to the Moroccan dictatorship to secure its agreement to join the accords — in violation of international law, but in conformity to the “rules-based international order” that the U.S. and its allies prefer to the archaic and unacceptable UN-based order.

Truthout

So there you have it. I have suspected for awhile that the UN is dead, with U.S. politicians mostly not even talking about it. Bernie Sanders talked about it, but he didn’t get elected as I recall. I am not sure how much longer we will have the benefit of Bernie Sanders’ commentary on current events…

And it is not obvious to me whether a next generation of leaders is emerging to replace these voices. The next generation of “liberal” leaders, it seems to me, is more focused on rhetoric and symbolic action around race and gender issues, rather than fundamental issues of social and economic fairness, equal opportunity, and peace. There is a risk that coming generations will be affected by a sort of shifting baseline syndrome where they will not even be aware that these issues even exist or how much the median conversation has shifted from meaningful to meaningless.

What was Abenomics

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Bloomberg has a long article on the economic policies of Shinzo Abe. Basically, the Japanese economy stopped growing after the 1990s economic crisis. Not just low growth, but no growth in GDP for about a decade followed by a sharp contraction during the 2000s financial crisis. Deflation or declining prices were a symptom of this. At the same time, Japan had very low unemployment throughout. Part of the story is that the economy is starved for workers due to an aging economy, political resistance to immigration, and low participation in the work force by women. Some “Abenomics” was basically a policy of massive government borrowing and spending aimed at shocking the system back into a growth mode. It sort of worked, but it seems to be reverting to the mean now.

I think there are a few lessons. This helps me understand why central banks want to have a low but positive inflation rate. You don’t want to money supply to constrain growth. You want to have rational immigration and guest worker policies that allow in the workers with the skills your economy needs that your native population is unable or unwilling to fulfill. This can be politically difficult, obviously, and you want to do it humanely for the people involved. Governments can borrow and spend with reckless abandon in times of crisis, and then they need to be able to ratchet back quickly when the economy picks up and the private sector is able to pick up the slack. Also politically very difficult. Rational child care and health care policies to remove barriers to working women would help.

But finally, it does not seem like life in Japan is all that bad. So another lesson might be that there is a path to a low-growth economy where life is not that bad, people have meaningful work and their basic needs are met.

lobsters are not immortal, or at least only sort of

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From McGill University:

So why do we stop growing, while lobsters don’t? The cells that make up our body are constantly making new cells by dividing. A biological technicality causes us to lose a bit of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes (structures made up of DNA and proteins) after each replication. DNA contains the blueprint for our lives, so in order to make sure we aren’t losing crucial information during these divisions, the long molecules of DNA are protected by shorter segments of DNA at their ends called “telomeres.” An analogy would be the plastic tips on a shoelace that prevent it from unraveling. When a cell multiplies, the only part of the chromosome that is lost is a piece of the telomeres. But as we age, our telomeres get shorter, until they reach a critical point where the cell can no longer replicate without damage to its essential DNA. When this occurs, the cell becomes inactive or dies. Shortening of telomeres is linked to senescence and increased risk of disease. Other contributors to aging include oxidative stress (hence the appeal of antioxidants).

Lobsters have a perpetual supply of telomerase – the enzyme that can restore telomeres, helping cells avoid that fateful end. Humans also have telomerase, just not enough to overcome the constant shortening of telomeres. In fact, telomerase is often found in cancer cells, giving tumours a survival advantage.

Unfortunately for our pal Larry, a large supply of telomerase can be a double-edged sword. Lobsters are still more likely to die with age because their hard-shell exoskeleton moults and has to be regrown. This requires reams of energy, eventually too much. As a result, common causes of death for lobsters are exhaustion, immobility, and shell disease, although the leading cause is still predation.

McGill

The article goes on to say that there are actually some jellyfish that are biologically immortal, meaning they do not age or ever die of old age, although they can be killed.

Given an infinite span of time, the odds of a “biologically immortal” organism being killed would seem to be 100%. So this does not sound like immortality to me in a colloquial sense, But figure out this mystery and come up with a drug to restore our telomeres without causing cancer, and we could live for a long, long time if we are careful. Would our brains hold up more than a century or so?

Interestingly, and this is a frequent point of conversation my son likes to bring up, the Norse gods are “biologically immortal” because they do not age but they can be killed (sorry, Thor fans). But the Greek/Roman gods are truly indestructible. I recall one story where Zeus was cut up into little pieces and put into a bag by another one of the gods. Eventually, somebody let him out and the pieces just assembled themselves together again and he continued being Zeus.

what is “heat lightning”?

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So-called heat lightning is a thunderstorm that is very tall and very far away. According to this article, sound from thunder will only travel about 15 miles, but if lightning is high enough you can see it 100-200 miles away. So this suggests to me that if you hear thunder, the storm is probably close enough you should go inside to be safe, but if you only see lightning and don’t hear thunder (assuming you are in a reasonably quiet location), it might be okay to stay outside.

Universal health care would have saved lives in the pandemic

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This article in PNAS estimates that a universal health care system in the United States could have prevented 212,000 deaths in 2020 alone. That is a big fraction of the total Covid deaths that year – I don’t have the number at my fingertips but total deaths over the whole pandemic (and caused by the pandemic) recently passed one million. I assume this does not count all the deaths from other causes that a health care system could have prevented. This sounds like a pro-life policy to me!

squirrels vs. rats

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This is an old and very important question – why do we generally like oen and not the other? I admit I enjoy squirrel antics. I respect rats but generally do not want them close to me. Both go through my urban garbage, so I disagree with this article that there is any difference there. Squirrels can shred a bag of garbage and strew it all over a street, and they do it with impunity in daylight. They also climb my fruit trees and steal all my fruit with impunity, again in broad daylight right in front of me. And they waste it – they like to take one bite of each of my pairs and then spew the rest of the debris on the ground. I think my biggest issue with rats and mice is finding them inside. Intuitively, it seems much more likely that I or my family members could come into contact with some disease or parasite they are carrying, even if squirrels also carry many of the same things. And they pee and poop a lot – which again, outside is just part of the circle of life but inside is smelly and gross. Mice also have an inconsiderate habit of dying in odd places in the house that you can’t even get too, and one dead mouse you can’t find can really stink up a house, while squirrels usually have the decency to die and go into rigor mortis outdoors where you can easily scoop them up with a snow shovel on trash day (the local animal control people will not come out for anything smaller than a coyote, which yes are occasionally spotted in downtown Philadelphia).

measuring inflation is hard

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Measuring inflation is hard for a variety of reasons, and it gets even harder when you try to compare across countries and regions. Some of the reasons include methodological choices in averaging, weighting, how housing and transportation are accounted for, how urban and rural consumers are included, and many others. There is a measure called the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) that is used to try to compare across countries and regions. This differs from the U.S. CPI in a variety of ways.

our acceptance of traffic violence is completely irrational

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I like this article making the (tired, obvious, to at least some of us) point that we hold motor vehicle safety to a much lower standard than public transportation.

For some types of transportation, an incident causing injury or death will trigger an immediate regulatory response, which targets the setting where the incident occurred and other factors. Airplanes and mass transit fall in this camp. The authorities’ job is to ensure the agency in question only offers services if it reaches specific standards of safety…

Apply that same logic to incidents caused by personal vehicles, and you quickly spot the difference. Traffic violence is one of the highest non-disease causes of death in the US; as noted above, the odds of dying in a car crash throughout your lifetime is around one in a hundred. The same analysis from the National Safety Council puts your chances of dying in a plane crash or transit in the same risk zone as being killed by lightning: literally too small to calculate.

Since I haven’t found anyone to tell me definitively why the focus for traffic is on individuals rather than systems that contribute to crashes, here are a few hypotheses. If the operator of the mode in question is an individual, such as the driver of a single-occupancy vehicle, the state assumes responsibility for risk only at its pleasure, and not as a matter of course. Or perhaps what’s at work is a pernicious and baseless idea that transit and aviation systems can be fixed, but vehicle traffic systems–which are also systems whether or not they’re treated that way–center on individuals instead of institutions, and therefore cannot be regulated in the same way a transit system can. Or maybe it’s down to a tendency for large catastrophic events like plane and train crashes to shock us and cause a fear response, while we’ve become desensitized to the regular occurrence of car crashes.

Greater Greater Washington

I think she gets it about right. It’s desensitization to everyday violence leading to assumed helplessness. It’s a century of auto-highway-oil industry propaganda linking cars to individual “freedom” and deemphasizing the massive investment in public infrastructure to support driving and parking. She leaves out the fact that this propaganda is also convenient for anti-city, nominally anti-tax (although they are fine with hidden taxes) politicians who represent mostly empty land but wield massively disproportionate political power, while taking payoffs from the companies that rake in profits from pollution and death. And finally I wouldn’t underestimate the power of inertia and shifting baseline syndrome – most of us have not experienced and can’t imagine a different or better system.

The author’s suggestions are the usual litany of government investment in safe public transportation infrastructure and walkable, bikable urban communities, congestion pricing, etc. This is awesome public policy but does not seem to be workable politics. Maybe a regular tally and pictures of dead and mangled children in the media would do the trick.

climate change and pollen

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It makes intuitive sense to me that heat would reduce crop yields, just by stressing many plants as they try to conserve water and limit evaporation. I hadn’t considered the way heat might affect pollen production and pollinators, but this is also an issue.

But one point is becoming alarmingly clear to scientists: heat is a pollen killer.

Even with adequate water, heat can damage pollen and prevent fertilisation in canola and many other crops, including corn, peanuts, and rice. For this reason, many farmers aim for crops to bloom before the temperature rises…

In fact, heat hinders not only tube growth but other stages of pollen development as well. The result: a pollen grain may never form, or may burst, fail to produce a tube, or produce a tube that explodes. 

BBC

It sounds like research is needed just to hold the line on the crop yields we have now, let alone achieve the increases we need to meet projected population and consumption growth. The more I think about climate change and the broad range of issues it is going to cause, the more I think food may be the most critical issue.