And continuing the “best books” theme, this year’s New York Times list is out. The only one that really catches my eye is When we Cease to Understand the World. This appears to be historical fiction somehow knitting together the 20th century’s great scientists and their ideas.
Other books mostly cover a variety of racial and multicultural topics that are interesting and good to know about, but I do not have time to learn about them in book form. There’s a new autobiography of Sylvia Plath, and I like and am saddened by Sylvia Plath, but I think I would rather spend time reading her original work rather than an autobiography about her. Just a random note since I was briefly talking about Margaret Attwood yesterday – when I think of The Handmaid’s Tale I often think of Sylvia Plath, and also Anne Frank, and also Frederick Douglas and other first-person slave narratives. All depressing, and all things everyone should read. The Handmaid’s Tale is at least a work of fiction although it seems quite real when you are in the middle of it, at least for me, and especially the audiobook version.
Planetizen has its list of top ten urban planning books out. Here are a couple that caught my eye. I don’t know that I’ll actually read these – It’s not like I know everything there is to know about these topics, but I may know enough and be just bored enough to want to spend my dwindling budget of mortal reading time on other things.
Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The case against car-dependence and for walkability. I’m 100% on board. It’s a long and exhausting fight. Also, the title is a bit insulting to engineers, who do not consider our profession an illness to be cured. I guess the point is to draw attention to the book. Well, engineers may not be the intended audience if you are going to insult us before we even open the cover.
Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention. I’m 100% on board with the idea that modern cities can be great places for human beings to live. It’s a long and exhausting fight (see above). This one looks interesting because it appears to be a comparative history of a number of famous cities in history.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is fiction, and definitely on my list. The reviewer feels that Mr. Robinson (he is neither female nor Korean, Kim being a fairly common British dude name at least in the past) “lacks the superlative writing chops of Margaret Attwood” and “some sentences are begging for an editor”. This surprises me, because this is certainly not Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel! Now I am even more curious to read it. I have always found Robinson a little challenging to read, but he has an astonishing imagination and is worth reading for this alone.
Here are a few random thoughts on this year’s growing season. We had our first below-freezing temperatures here in my Philadelphia neighborhood around November 20, which is 3 or so weeks later than “average” (although I’m not sure if what is reported is really the average, or something like a 30% probability to improve the odds a bit for farmers.)
I got my son a Venus fly trap for his birthday in May. They are native to the Carolinas, which is cool, although I bought this one from California Carnivores. We looked at it for awhile, then left it in our buggy backyard for the summer where it seemed to be very, very happy. It even flowered – now a Venus fly trap flower is not a particularly breathtaking flower, but I was excited nonetheless. Most of the time, there was plenty of rain to keep it wet, but I invested in a gallon of distilled water to top it up occasionally. As I write this in early December, I’ve brought it inside for the winter. I’ll continue to give it distilled water, and no matter how sad or even dead it starts to look, I’ll keep watering it and put it back out in the spring. I threw one away a few years ago thinking it was dead, and was horrified to read later that they naturally go dormant in the winter. They can also supposedly handle some light freezes (again, think Carolinas) but not an extended deep freeze, so it seemed safest to just bring it in. My research said to put it in an “unheated garage or entryway” for the winter, but my urban home has neither of these things.
a fuzzy photo of a Venus Fly Trap flower
The “dwarf” (advertised as 15-feet but 20+ feet tall and maybe still growing) Asian pear tree grew lots of pears this years, which the squirrels really enjoyed. I picked and ate one unripe one just to get something, but there were no ripe ones left when the squirrels were done with them. The annoying thing is that they don’t actually eat all that fruit, they take a bite or two out of each one and drop the rest on the ground to rot. Luckily, I find squirrel antics fairly amusing and my family is not starving as a result of the fruit they are depriving us of.
On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…a squirrel in an Asian pear tree
The Asian persimmon tree grew exactly one persimmon this year. This tree is a bit younger (4 years?) so hopefully there is more to come. The squirrels didn’t eat it – maybe they just don’t know what it is – and it was delicious. I thought I had a photo but can’t seem to find one. I believe persimmons are the most delicious fruit that most Americans have never tried. And I don’t know why – the trees are compact, prolific, pest and disease free (the flip side of this is they probably don’t have much ecological value locally), cold tolerant (there are several Japanese varieties), and the fruit is absolutely mouth watering and yet very tough on the outside which seems like it would make for easy shipping. There are native American varieties, but be warned these grow into very big trees which is why I chose the Asian variety. By the way, I am generally partial to native species, but I have not found the right native tree species that works in my small urban garden. I want trees that provide a little bit of shade for the front of the house but leave sunny areas to grow other things, and that I can easily get under or around. My basic principle is that a plant should have at least one other function, whether an ecological function or a food function, other than just looking good. Of course, plants that have all these things are awesome! But like I said, I haven’t identified the perfect tree yet that fits that bill.
Around July, my garden was clear cut (other than the trees) by a gardener hired by a neighbor. And not just mowed, but scraped absolutely to the ground. I was upset, but it was actually kind of interesting to watch how it responded. It’s a perennial garden, so it mostly grew back quickly. More aggressive and resilient plants outcompeted the less aggressive ones for the most part. Interestingly, some plants that are normally aggressive, like Black Eyed Susan, were probably about to flower when they were whacked and apparently decided they were done for the year. I assume their roots are fine and they will be back. Wild strawberries by contrast loved being mowed and took over an entire corner of the garden. There is way too much lemon balm now, even though I like lemon balm. A neighbor actually bought me some native plant seedlings after it happened, which I found really touching. So now I have an aromatic Aster and a Hubricht’s Blue Star in my garden.
After the garden was clear cut, I talked to the neighbor that (inadvertently) did it, and we agreed that I would just take over part of her garden from now on. To get things going quickly, I’ve picked a prairie seed mix (most “prairie” plants are native to the entire U.S. east of the Rockies). I’ve put down some cardboard to suppress weeds from growing back, put a mix of homemade and store-bought compost on top of that, and plan to sprinkle the seeds over the winter and see what happens in the spring. The only issue is that at least one cat has decided this bare soil makes a nice litter box. I intended to plant a fall cover crop but work, family, and life intervened to prevent that project.
Each year, I like to pick a “try again” species and a “new species”. The try again species is usually something I have tried to start from seed in a previous year without success, and still have seeds left over in my basement. This year, I finally got a sea kale seedling going. Squirrels dug it up multiple times for some reason, and it seemed to wilt during a fall heat wave, but now as we enter December it looks incredibly happy and has even flowered. We’ll see what happens. My “new species” was goldenrod variety “Golden Fleece”. I got it from a nursery out west somewhere, but the variety was originally bred at the Mount Cuba center in Delaware, which is nearby where I live and on my list of places to eventually go. It is advertised as a ground cover less than 18″ high. It is flowering and looks happy out there.
In pots, I did cherry tomatoes, Thai basil (both the “holy” variety as Indian people tend to refer to it, which Thai people insist is just “normal” Thai basil, and the “sweet” variety as Thai people refer to it, which seed companies in the U.S. consider normal Thai basil.) Both taste and smell awesome, and are much more heat and drought tolerant than Italian basil, which tends to wilt and die on me if I go away on a summer weekend. I also tried a mini-version of a polyculture mentioned in the book “Gaia’s garden”, which was fun although it didn’t really go as planned.
this year’s pots
We had a groundhog. Not exactly a rare species, but a rare siting around our urban neighborhood so fairly exciting.
a furry friend
And finally, I loved this enormous sunchoke. It was not in my garden, but was likely spread by an enterprising squirrel from my garden to a neighbor’s garden, and then forgotten. I read The Dark Tower this summer, in which God is at least sometimes embodied as a rose bush. But I am not a big rose fan. If I were any sort of deity, I might choose to be a sunchoke.
I always assumed that Second Life popped up in response to the novel Snow Crash, and I always thought that Second Life was a bit lame because the technology just wasn’t there yet. Second Life may still be limping along on fumes, but it has been seeming to me that the sequels to Second Life have been evolving through video games like World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc. Today I heard about a plot of virtual land being bought and sold for $2.43 million in a new (to me) one called Decentraland. This is clearly speculation at the moment, and you would expect booms and crashes. These platforms are slowly but surely creating their own marketplaces and even currencies behind the scenes. It may already be possible to create and run a business through these platforms. A big question is whether they will become interoperable at some point. I assume it is a given that they will take advantage of virtual reality technology as that continues to evolve. Another question is to what extent they will remain in the entertainment realm, as opposed to connecting to the real world economy and workplace at some point, which is where actual value would start to be created.
Pension funds should not rely on correlations between mean annual return and variance in annual return when deciding how much stocks and bonds to own, according to this article on which Nassim Nicholas Taleb (the Black Swan guy) is the second author. To paraphrase/oversimplify my understanding of the article greatly, the main arguments are that (1) data from the past is not a perfect predictor of the future, and (2) short term volatility is not a good measure of the risk of achieving a long term goal.
In engineering, I hear #1 all the time from people – why don’t we rely on data instead of “modeling” when trying to predict the future? Of course we do both – try to understand the underlying structure of the system we are dealing with, then use data from the past to try to confirm that we got it right, at least for the conditions that prevailed when the data were collected (and assuming the data themselves are reasonably accurate or at least any measurement error is not biased one way or the other), and then use the resulting model of the system to try to predict the future. Conditions in the future may be different than conditions in the past, and that is why we don’t “just rely on data”. If external conditions are different but the underlying structure of the system doesn’t change (much), we can come up with reasonable predictions of the future. The only true test of whether the prediction is right comes from data which will be collected in the future, but is not available today when a decision has to be made. A lot of decisions are really just playing the odds about what might work in the most likely future, or what might work across several different possible futures that collectively are very likely (a “robust” decision). The decision that is best for the single most likely condition and a group of very likely conditions may not be the same one – now you are a gambler trying to decide whether you go for the biggest possible payoff while accepting a larger chance of a loss, or whether you want to maximize your chances of a positive payoff while giving up your shot at a really big payoff. You would think the pension fund would go for the latter.
#2 makes sense to me. Variability in annual returns doesn’t matter much if you are 25 and investing money you plan to need at 65. A pension fund is a little different, because it is essentially immortal but has obligations it has to meet each year.
In the case of investment returns, the approach seems to be almost purely “data-driven” with no real understanding of the underlying system, and this leads to an existential crisis when people try to figure out what asset allocation advice to stake their future on. We understand the real economy to some extent, we think, but we don’t really seem to confidently understand how the real economy and the financial economy are related, especially over shorter time frames. So we are reduced to just describing the data, which might lead to some insights about the system but has limited predictive value. Still, examining the evidence before making a decision seems like a good idea to me. What is the alternative – guessing, wishing, praying?
The “landscape of fear” is a thing in ecology where predators control prey behavior just by making them afraid of predation. This article compares the cost of wolf predation of livestock to the money saved when wolves keep deer away from highways. The comparison is overwhelmingly in favor of leaving the wolves to keep deer from the highways, even if they eat a few sheep.
Recent studies uncover cascading ecological effects resulting from removing and reintroducing predators into a landscape, but little is known about effects on human lives and property. We quantify the effects of restoring wolf populations by evaluating their influence on deer–vehicle collisions (DVCs) in Wisconsin. We show that, for the average county, wolf entry reduced DVCs by 24%, yielding an economic benefit that is 63 times greater than the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock. Most of the reduction is due to a behavioral response of deer to wolves rather than through a deer population decline from wolf predation. This finding supports ecological research emphasizing the role of predators in creating a “landscape of fear.” It suggests wolves control economic damages from overabundant deer in ways that human deer hunters cannot.
So in a rational world you would maybe take a small fraction of gas tax or toll payments and use it to compensate the farmers for their sheep, in exchange for the farmers not going after the wolves. Or you could just make it illegal to go after the wolves and try to enforce that law. Or some combination. What makes this sort of thing tough in the real world is that a small group impacted by a policy can organize and get political attention, whereas some nebulous idea of “society as a whole” is not going to organize, understand the issue, and lobby the politicians. You could maybe imagine insurance companies representing car owners and truckers getting involved in this issue, if the savings are really so dramatic.
I am concerned that nuclear war is becoming more scary and thinkable all the time, and politicians are focused elsewhere. One thing the U.S. can do is just be less scary. We need to put ourselves in others’ shoes and realize that they find us threatening, don’t fully trust us, and feel they have to be prepared to defend themselves against us. Being less threatening does not have to make us appear weak – we can let people know we are strong and ready to defend ourselves and our allies if attacked, while reassuring others that they are in no danger if they don’t threaten us. This seems like a basic playground philosophy, but I don’t see our warmongering politicians talking this way.
War on the Rocks has a wonky article on what a modern arms control framework could look like. Let’s pull back a little bit and work on peace and risk reduction.
In my book, Winning and Losing the Nuclear Peace: The Rise, Demise, and Revival of Arms Control, I propose that we embrace an ambitious goal of extending the three norms of no use, no testing, and no new proliferation to the 100th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine, if you can, a world in which nuclear weapons have not been used on battlefields for 100 years, and a world in which nuclear weapons have not been tested by major and regional powers for almost five decades. Imagine, too, that North Korea remains the last nuclear-armed state. Now imagine the perceived utility of nuclear weapons in 2045. How many potential mushroom clouds would be required for deterrence? How high would the barriers be against use and testing? …
A seven-nation forum consisting of the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Britain, and France would be hard to steer, but the nuclear dangers we now face are interconnected and unwieldy. When the nature of a problem seems intractably complex, the wisest course might just be to expand the scope of the problem. Even as the four pairs compete, they have the most to lose if key norms are broken and the most to gain if they are extended. Existing bilateral conversations on nuclear risk reduction would, of course, continue, but there are no effective channels of communication and substantive exchanges between India and China and between India and Pakistan, where border clashes are becoming more intense. A non-hierarchical, seven-nation approach to norm building might just succeed. All seven have significant concerns about the intentions and capabilities of states with the most dynamic nuclear modernization programs. Each state has its own reasons to engage, as well as to be wary. If other states are willing to sit at the table, it becomes harder for anyone to hold out.
The article gets much more specific from there, and is worth a read. Joe Biden should read it. If his major legislative accomplishments are likely to be behind him by the end of 2022 as we expect, he could try to leave the world a legacy on nuclear arms control, climate change, pandemic preparedness and biological weapons control in his remaining 2-6 years in office. He wouldn’t need direct support from the U.S. Congress, although we have learned that without the executive and legislative branches moving in lockstep, international agreements are not always durable and other countries will conclude they can’t rely on us. Still, any forward progress on any of these issues would be a significant contribution to the future of our nation and our global civilization.
Max Roser has one of his nice data-based articles focused on air pollution. There are a variety of estimates, but they fall within a fairly narrow range (considering the population of the world) of about 7-9 million people per year. Something like 2-4 million of this is estimated to be due to indoor air pollution, which is a big problem in the developing world. The biggest source of the problem is…wait for it…particulates from burning fossil fuels.
He compares these numbers to around 75,000 deaths per year from terrorism and war combined, 500,000 from homicide (I’m rounding to the nearest 100,000, and he doesn’t provide numbers for suicide which I would guess could be similar or higher), 1.3 million for road accidents, and 2.8 million for obesity.
So if you were a politician (or emperor) who wanted to help the most people, you would make this a big priority, along with reducing deaths in and around motor vehicles and deaths from all the sitting around we do. What do these all have in common? We need to work toward electrification and clean energy, sure – but using 100% existing knowledge and technology, we can design safer streets and roads using the designs we (okay, a few Europeans, at least) already know work, and encourage people to live near work and shopping where they can mostly get around by their own muscle power, supplemented by good public transportation. Or to be much more crude, get those fat asses moving and those lungs out in the healthy, fresh air! Every dollar transferred from the defense/security budget to these things would pay off something like 8:1. And that is in the short term, if a thing called global warming caused by burning fossil fuels did not even exist.
Today’s topic is random thoughts on revolution. Seems fitting somehow as I write on Thanksgiving Eve 2021. Thanksgiving is a uniquely American (i.e. U.S.) holiday, although it has nothing to do with the American Revolution per se.
First, for Thanksgiving I have purchased a 12-pack of the Yard’s breweries “beers of the revolution”. Yards claims to have based these recipes on ones found in the actual papers of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. However literally or loosely they have interpreted whatever is in those papers, these beers are all yummy! I plan to drink “George Washington’s Porter” on Thanksgiving itself.
Second, I have purchased the novel Invisible Sun by Charles Stross, which is next in the Merchant Princes series and came out just recently. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the idea of revolution plays a role in this series. In fact, there is a book that serves as a sort of cheat sheet for how to avoid the mistakes of revolutions past and successfully mix politically revolution with catch-up technological progress. They seem to manage just this, although they do not avoid the ravages of global warming. A slight spoiler is that the American Revolution is not the primary model for their revolution, and neither is the British Revolution, the French Revolution, or any other European revolution a mostly ignorant American might have heard of. Nor is it based on communism, although they do seem to have decent public transportation, which we here in the U.S. know is a Commie plot!
Partly inspired by Charles Stross, I read a book called The Shortest History of Europe and another called Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West: 1560-1991. I learned that there was something called a Dutch revolution, which I had no idea of. My knowledge of the British and French revolutions was mostly based on being forced to read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, which is mostly about the French revolution. The other fictional account I thought was about the French Revolution was Les Miserables, which I looked up and it is not about the (1789) French Revolution, but takes place around the 1830s. Like I said, I’m ignorant. But it’s not really my fault – in the course of my grade school studies, I had no less than three full years of American history, plus a full year of Virginia history around fourth or fifth grade. Wouldn’t it make sense if we had at least a year of European history at some point, maybe around the same time we are forced to read A Tale of Two Cities? The history of classical Greece and Rome, followed by Europe, used to be called “western civilization”. That might not be politically correct these days – well, maybe a two-year course covering those topics in a larger context of world history would make equal sense.
Continuing my historical theme this fall, I also read (listed to) S.P.Q.R. by Mary Beard, a historian of ancient Rome. I enjoyed this much more than the European history. It all ties together in a few ways. First, the fall of the Roman Republic in the first century B.C. (we are supposed to say B.C.E. now), along with the instability in many European countries around the 1700s right through the 1900s, convinces me that long-term stable governments are definitely the exception and not the rule in human affairs. Stable forms of government, democratic or not, seem to often be measured in years to decades. Centuries definitely seem to be the except to the rule, and I am not aware of any form of government that persisted for a millennium or more. So you could say the U.S. is doing pretty well as it approaches to 250-year mark, but getting pretty long in the tooth. Changes in government are not always sudden or violent. The Roman emperors maintained many of the nominal institutions of the Republic on paper, such as the Senate, while gradually usurping their functions. In the end, the Roman empire did “fall” so much as fade away into regional enclaves mixed in with the quasi-international Catholic and Orthodox churches. The breakup of the British, French, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires mirror this in many ways, and there may be some parallels to U.S. retrenchment in parts of the world, although that history is far from settled. There are probably good examples in the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres too, but I will have to chip away on my ignorance of those another time!
One final thought – something that surprised me is that episodes of inflation are a common theme that often coincide with or trigger political instability in history. Maybe I will give this some more thought and attempt to say intelligent things about it another time.
If I share an article from The Onion, it is usually obviously a joke. But this one go me thinking:
WASHINGTON—In a unique and limited-time offer for residents of the United States only, Janet Yellen announced Tuesday that Americans could use the promo code “THANKS” for 10% off all U.S. goods and services. “This Thanksgiving, the Treasury Department is saying ‘thanks’ with an exclusive promotion just for taxpayers, whether you need a pack of gum or a new car,” said the Treasury Secretary, who urged Americans to redeem the incredible offer today, stating that she herself was a “huge fan” of U.S. goods and services, which she loved and used every day. “To activate the promo code, simply mention it to your Whataburger cashier, or visit treasury.gov/thanks. Remember, this amazing offer won’t last, so now’s the time to book that babysitter or finally get that Instant Pot! Again, that’s T-H-A-N-K-S, thanks.” At press time, Yellen added that the offer was for first-time U.S. consumers only.
So we’ve had this massive economic stimulus – both monetary (low interest rates and “quantitative easing”, which they tell us is printing money but without the paper or coins, just willing it into existence in our computers collective imaginations) and fiscal (the government borrowing money from itself, which is another way of willing it into existence, and giving it back to us as “tax credits”, sometimes by writing numbers in our bank statements each month). A problem with just passing out money is that the poor spend it, but the middle class only spend some of it and the rich just squirrel it away. So you end up with a ton of money sitting around, and then when demand picks up people suddenly start spending it, and the real economy cannot ramp up supply instantly, so prices have to go up to put the brakes on demand and bring it down to what is actually supplied. Gradually, we hope supply will catch up and the rate of price increases will stabilize to something normal. The danger is that people can keep demanding higher wages, companies can raise prices to cover the higher wages, and the system can spiral from there. There are time lags built into the system so while prices can change quickly, the underlying real economy can’t.
So at least part of the root of the problem is people saving rather than spending stimulus money, then spending it unexpectedly. So what if you did have a kind of money that was more like a coupon with an expiration date, and could only be spent in a limited time frame, but not saved long term. Businesses would have to be willing to accept it. This might be accomplished easily if they knew they could use it to pay their taxes. The federal government would have to agree to accept the temporary money as tax payments, and get state and local governments to fall in line. People will speculate on anything given the chance, so the government might have to outlaw complex trading arrangements or derivatives based on the temporary currency.
