Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

The Onion interviews Dr. Fauci

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The Onion has a fun (and obviously made up and satirical, people) “interview” with Dr. Fauci on how he is “planning for the next pandemic”. It turns out he is planning to intentionally create the next pandemic, as he has all pandemics for at least the last few decades. This is some laugh-out-loud, yet dark, humor people.

The Onion: What type of P.P.E. will be needed for this one?

Fauci: Everyone will need oven mitts and a chef’s hat to ward off infection…

The Onion: What are you most excited about the next pandemic?

Fauci: This one is gonna kill a shit ton of dogs.

The Onion

Now that crosses the line. We can let a million or so people die, especially poor people and babies once they are born and properly baptised, and poor people shouldn’t be having babies to begin with, but don’t mess with our dogs!

If there is any doubt in your mind, that was also satire. I like puppies, and babies, and babies playing with puppies. These are things I hope will continue for some time.

sirens on emergency vehicles: “more harm than good”?

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I knew it – all those sirens on ambulances and fire trucks tearing around town might not be improving outcomes. They are bad for our hearing (especially for the people working on the trucks) and might startle drivers into making mistakes or sudden unpredictable moves. Sure, the idea is that if you are having a heart attack or stroke the second count. But according to this article at least, the data just don’t support the idea that those sirens are getting the paramedics to you faster.

Americans love our sirens. When I lived in Singapore for a couple years, one thing I noticed was that police, fire trucks (which were often more like vans), and ambulances didn’t use sirens much. Now, Singapore tore down most of its historic buildings (which you could argue is sad), which means its buildings are mostly very modern standardized high rises. I think that is one reason they don’t need the big fire trucks. Their streets are wide and well maintained (this is not great for pedestrians or people on bicycles). They also do congestion pricing on a major scale so they just don’t have the traffic we have (I support this, but you could argue it is inequitable because the rich can afford to drive while everyone else takes public transportation. The public transportation is very good and reliable however.) Sirens aside, I found Singapore awful in terms of urban noise pollution and wore ear plugs much of the time I was there. The noise didn’t seem to bother most of the locals or people from nearby countries.

How much ecological function can urban green space provide?

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This is an important research question, I think, as the world becomes even more urbanized. Here’s a new study:

Vegetation Type and Age Matter: How to Optimize the Provision of Ecosystem Services in Urban Parks

As cities grow, urban greenspace assumes a more central role in the provision of ecosystem services (ESS). Many ecosystem services depend on the interactions of soil-plant systems, with the quantity and quality of services affected by plant type and age. The question, however, remains whether urban greenspace can be included in the same ecological framework as non-urban greenspace. Our previous studies have contributed towards filling this knowledge gap by investigating the effects of plant functional type (evergreen trees, deciduous trees and lawn) and plant age on soil characteristics and functionality in urban greenspace, offering also a comparison with non-urban greenspace. A total of 41 urban parks and five non-urban forest sites within and adjacent to the cities of Helsinki and Lahti (Finland) were included in this project. Path analyses presented in this contribution, combined with a synthesis of previous findings, offer strong evidence that urban greenspace functions similarly to non-urban greenspace. In particular, plant functional types lead to soil environmental modifications similar to those in non-urban ecosystems. Therefore, vegetation choice upon park construction/implementation can improve the quality and quantity of ESS provided by urban greenspace. However, although vegetation modifies urban greenspace soils with time in a fashion similar to non-urban greenspace, the vegetation type effect is greater in non-urban greenspaces. To conclude, our synthesis of previous studies provides science-based guidance for urban planners who aim to optimize ESS in urban greenspaces.

Urban Forestry and Urban Greening

Ecosystem services and ecological function are not exactly the same thing. Ecological function just is. Ecosystem services are what ecological functions do for people, and fit into the mainstream economic analysis framework. Part of the issue in studying this, I think, is scale. If you look only at one site, block, or park in a city, you might conclude that ecosystems services are negligible or un-measurable. If you look at the entire network and how it is connected, you might conclude that the effects are measurable and that there are policy and design choices that could make them better.

Biodiversity is something else again. More biodiversity is not always better, if it consists of more species of rats or coronaviruses, for example. But biodiversity may be a reasonable proxy measure for how the structure of a designed urban ecosystem translates to ecological function. This is useful if ecological function itself turns out to be difficult to measure. And I think the most useful measures might be biodiversity of animals such as insects (bees, butterflies) and birds. Because the plants in urban areas are mostly the ones that people put there. Biodiversity of plants can be improved through design choices, which is a good thing but in measuring that you are largely measuring inputs to the system rather than the resulting state of the system. Measure the animals, and you are measuring the resulting state of the system.

Measuring things that flit and flutter around might seem daunting. Well, you could try to do it with cameras and image processing of some sort. Or if you are interested in insects you can focus on larva, aka caterpillars. Tracking down bee and wasp nests seems a bit more risky, and you might also have a public relations problem trying to explain why more bee and wasp nests would be a good thing. But caterpillars don’t move fast, so trained people should be able to cordon off an area and find and identify them periodically. Let’s say you did this once a week for a year at several defined points in an urban area, especially if land use changes are occurring (or maybe some places they are occurring and some places they are not occurring.) Doing the same thing in nearby forests and/or farm fields might also add worthwhile data. Now you can do some data analysis and modeling, and maybe figure out design or policy choices that would help the little critters while also benefiting or at least not pissing off people or costing them any money. If you want to fund my half-baked research proposal, let me know.

October 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.

Most hopeful story: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?

tongue eating parasites

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In Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files books, there are horrifying demon parasites from alternate dimensions that can eat your tongue (and, um…other body parts – why spoil it?) and live in your mouth, while turning you into a sort of zombie. A horrifying idea, but these books are fun, tongue-in-cheek (oops…) highly entertaining and recommended (by me). Anyway, it looks like he got the idea from an IRL horrifying parasite that is about a third of an inch long and can indeed eat your tongue and live in your mouth – if you are a fish. Gross.

Did productivity triple during the pandemic?

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I’m hearing claims that “productivity tripled during the pandemic”, and maybe this is the computer and internet and mobile chickens finally coming home to roost and deliver on the promises made way back in the 1990s. Maybe there is some truth to this, but it seems much more likely that the denominator contracted suddenly (hours worked) than that the numerator suddenly expanded.

Here’s one graph I have seen referenced.

What could be going on here? Well I don’t know, you should consult the experts. But of course I can speculate:

  • Lower-productivity (economic output measured in dollars per hour worked, not in the worker’s sense of satisfaction, sanity, or self-worth) jobs suddenly disappeared, and higher-productivity ones (reverse caveats above) were left, so average productivity went up.
  • I’ve heard it suggested tat workers who still had jobs suddenly had no commuting time, so they worked some extra hours, and got more done but didn’t necessarily report the extra hours worked to their employers. I might buy this as a marginal, short-lived effect. Maybe a few young go-getters did this, but certainly not us middle-aged parents who suddenly had small children bouncing off the walls 24-7.
  • I will buy the idea that workers were more productivity with the new software (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.) than they would have been in the same situation with software and communication options available a few years ago. I’m not sure I buy into the idea that they were more productive at home with these tools than they would have been in the office.
  • Maybe there was a sort of mania of productivity for the work-from-home set at the start of the pandemic, for 2-3 months or so. Then it crashed back to earth, which you can sort of infer from the limited number of data points here.

So no, the data are interesting but I am going to say the singularity did not occur last year. I think there may have been a bump in average productivity per (remaining) worker when some workers just disappeared from the economy, which is not a net positive, and I think there may have been a short-term mania among work-from-home professionals that is now feeding into our widespread burnout situation a year and a half or so down the line, and that is not a long-term positive. I do think the rapid/non-voluntary adoption of new software and communication tools on a massive scale probably gave a bump to technological progress, which might pay longer-term dividends.

The pandemic also gave a sudden boost to biotechnology, which may ultimately end disease as we know it, create unimaginably horrible weapons that kill us all, or both.

more Peter Turchin

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Here’s a new journal article from Peter Turchin and his Seshat database to empirically test hypotheses about history.

Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution What have been the causes and consequences of technological evolution in world history?

In particular, what propels innovation and diffusion of military technologies, details of which are comparatively well preserved and which are often seen as drivers of broad socio-cultural processes? Here we analyze the evolution of key military technologies in a sample of pre-industrial societies world-wide covering almost 10,000 years of history using Seshat: Global History Databank. We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role. We discuss how our approach can be extended to explore technological change more generally, and how our results carry important ramifications for understanding major drivers of evolution of social complexity.

PLOS One

Glancing through the methods confirms my suspicion that big data or machine learning analyses pretty much start from old-school correlation and regression, then branch out (sometimes literally in things called “trees”) from there.

Drug violence and the Netherlands

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A lot of the violence in the U.S. and around the U.S. border if fueled by the drug trade. With drugs illegal, there is just so much money to be made that it is worthwhile for organized crime to form, heavily arm itself and take large risks to move those drugs and make that money. South of the border, organized crime is so heavily armed it is able to intimidate the authorities. North of the border, law enforcement has become militarized and heavily armed in response. This results in a balance of power but also one of the world’s most violent countries that is also prosperous and supposedly peaceful.

That’s my view of the U.S. But is it happening elsewhere. Yes, according to Der Spiegel, in the Netherlands. This might seem surprising, because the Netherlands is known for decriminalizing soft drugs (cannabis, hashish – wait, isn’t that just a kind of cannabis? – and now apparently synthetic drugs like ecstacy.) What is left though is hard drugs, specifically cocaine. Cocaine smuggling and trading is leading to similar violence to what we see in the U.S., although on a much smaller scale. If I read the article correctly, they have around 20 drug related murders per year. That is 20 too many, but it also happens in a month in any sizable U.S. city, so there is no comparison.

I think the U.S. should legalize, regulate, and tax soft drugs right away. We should get a health care system that provides physical and mental health care to people with drug problems. But what to do about the hard drugs? I don’t know, but I still think the violence may be more evil than the drug-related social problems. Just take the market away from the criminals first and then go from there.

gain-of-function research

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According to Vanity Fair, a lab in New York collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans”. I personally don’t care about the “lab leak hypothesis” at this point. It is clear that this type of research is common now and probably happening all over the world. It needs to be tightly monitored and controlled or we may be in for a bleak future.

what’s new with fish?

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Our World in Data has a sprawling and data-dense article on everything to do with fish, fisheries, and aquaculture. It’s well worth digging into if you have five or six hours, but I could stare at the pictures alone for an hour if I actually had that kind of time.

Here were a few highlights for me:

  • Some species are really in trouble, sharks in particular, but on balance the overfishing situation has improved significantly over the past decade or two. When looked at by weight, about 80% of fishing is sustainable, and when looked at by individual fisheries (which vary in size), about 2/3 is sustainable. Tuna, in particular, is pretty well managed these days.
  • They dug into a particular paper which the media summarized as “the oceans will be empty by 2048”, explain why that didn’t even make sense as a summary of what the authors intended at the time, and then explain why this conclusion no longer holds with better data on fish stocks as opposed to just fish catch.
  • Fish catch has largely stabilized over the past few decades while aquaculture has boomed. Aquaculture has become much more efficient – some wild fish are still used to feed animals, but this has declined and animal feed has become more plant-based. Also, environmentally-motivated not-quite-total vegetarians should feel pretty good about eating farmed mussels, clams, and oysters.
  • The most damaging forms of fishing, such as bottom trawling, have declined, although they are still in wide use in developing countries.

Fish are the classic example often used to teach stocks and flows – they illustrate how time lags and feedback loops can lead to counterintuitive results if you are just eyeballing the trend in one particular flow, rather than gaining an understanding of the underlying system structure and how that explains its behavior. This is one reason why the simplistic science communication we have had during the Covid crisis has been ineffective, in my view. Unfortunately, data (sometimes called “facts”, but that assumes we can accurately measure the state of the world, which we never can with 100% uncertainty) doesn’t just transform itself into good policy and good decisions. The media seems to create this expectation in people, and then I think they are disappointed and confused when the story seems to change and evolve from day to day. At some point, they conclude that a made-up opinion is as likely to be accurate as the garbled message coming from the scientists/or and policymakers. And then of course, some cynical people exploit this disillusionment for their own cynical purposes.