Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

Wired on the technology of 2021

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The Wired Gadget Lab podcast asked what the important (consumer) technologies of 2021 were, and came up with cloud gaming, e-scooters, Peloton, and “unplugging from the internet”. Someone also mentioned the Covid-19 vaccine, which I would tend to agree with.

On cloud gaming, I am looking forward to getting back into video games (I’m middle aged and still call them that) when and if my intensive child rearing years start to slowly and gradually wind down. I used to be a fan of “real time strategy” games, and just assumed I had missed a lot of awesome ones over the last decade or so. But according to another Wired article that is not the case, as the genre has been overshadowed by other, more profitable types of games. Hopefully they will come back, because I think lots of people like them. I can also imagine hybrid games where you take direct a large-scale, long-term strategy but get to zoom in and take part in a battle or other short-term simulation when you want. Sure, this would take a lot of programming and computing power, but the technology is getting there right?

I’ve hit the Wired paywall. I like Wired, but I just can’t subscribe to everything piecemeal and have 99 little charges on my credit card each month that add up to all my money. Can somebody come up with some sort of clever cross-platform discounted bundling service for magazines, newspapers, apps, games and other subscriptions?

Okay, on e-scooters, my position is they are a menace on the sidewalk and have no place on the street. I don’t think I am turning into a grumpy old man – what I mean is our streets and sidewalks are designed with no safe place for them, except where we have safe, well-designed “bike lanes” and signals, which is almost nowhere in the United States. They’re a menace to themselves in the main travel lanes, and people zipping around on fast battery-powered devices have become pretty threatening to pedestrians on our narrow sidewalks. I am not particularly excited about getting an e-scooter, but if their proliferation means we get more safe protected lanes for bikes and scooters, I am all for them. If we get to a place where maybe one in ten people traveling from point A to point B in a city is inside a one-ton steel killing machine, but they are still taking up 90% of the space and killing our children, will our ignorant, cynical politicians and bureaucrats give us safe streets? I will try to be optimistic.

On Peloton, it looks fairly neat. I’d still prefer to exercise outside, but maybe one day I’ll give it a try, or if someone else in the house were to express an interest that might tip the scales in its favor.

I’m trying to think of a technology that changed my life in 2021. When the Apple podcast app glitched out on me after an update, I switched to Overcast and haven’t looked back. I wouldn’t call that life changing. I love my Audible audiobooks and my Kindle from 2013 that is still working just fine. I am still totally addicted to RSS feeds – Feedly is still my go-to app and I hope it and the feeds never go away (they are, though, one by one). I’m been using Microsoft OneNote for years at work. In 2021 I figured out there is a magic button that generates a meeting note template for any Microsoft Outlook meeting, with the date, subject, attendees, etc. all pre-populated. I started using OneNote for personal notes before 2021, but in 2021 I found myself using it more and more and using it across platforms. It all syncs pretty well, and being a helplessly compulsive list maker all my life I love being able to jot down a note anywhere, anytime. I use Philadelphia’s public bike share system, Indego, which works pretty well except a month or so ago I misplaced by bike helmet and haven’t gotten around to replacing it (I’ve dropped a hint with family members I hope have a line to Santa). I use a number of fitness and health tracking apps – including but not necessarily limited to Apple Health (for tracking steps and weight), Virgin Pulse (required by my employer, not necessarily recommended), LoseIt (for calorie counting), MyLimit (for blood alcohol, which to be clear is 0 most of the time but it’s interesting and useful to understand how alcohol affects the mind and body), and MyChart (for medical records). Each of these has a reason behind it, but taken together they are too much. For the month of December, I have decided to just try to maintain healthy habits but not actually track anything. I’d like to find more automated ways of collecting data on these things and reviewing it occasionally so I can consider some healthy adjustments, without opening half a dozen apps and typing things into them every day. And finally, I bought something dumb, expensive and fun called Twinkly, which is an app-controlled string of LED lights.

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.

how to measure access to parks

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Two simple measures of park access are the total area of parks in a city and the average distance of residences from a park. You can divide the former by population to get a normalized stat that can be compared across cities or tracked over time, and you can look at various stats on the latter such as the percent of households within 10 minutes of a park. Here are a few more ideas from a guy in Singapore.

  • length of walking and/or cycling trails
  • length of waterfronts (not sure exactly how this was defined, if it included Singapore’s concrete drainage channels in addition to oceanfront, lakes and ponds)
  • area of dense vegetation within parks
  • “supply of of park area to residential buildings” based on a decay factor (some sort of weighted average I suppose based on how much people of willing to travel – paper here)

This all makes some sense to me. I might add some measure of tree canopy. None of this does anything about the weather in Singapore. If you want to enjoy parks there, I recommend getting up very very early. Then take a nice long afternoon nap, stop by the pool if you have access to one (but if you are light skinned realize you are at the equator and you still need sunscreen late in the afternoon), and go enjoy the more urban amenities (like food, very large bottles of beer which are meant to be shared, and a variety of less family friendly entertainments I have only heard about) after dark, which is around 7 p.m. year round. One thing about Singapore is it is safe to be out at any time of night, and street food is available all night.

poverty, race, and math

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Here’s some math on U.S. poverty.

  • from Census.gov: estimated U.S. population on July 1, 2019: 328,240,000
    • “Black or African American alone, percent”: 13.4% (this works out to 43,984,000, rounding all numbers to the nearest 1,000)
    • “White alone, percent”: 76.3% (this works out to 250,447,000)
  • from Urban Institute: U.S. poverty rate in 2021, all races: 13.7% (44,969,000)
    • Black poverty rate: 18.1% (7,961,000)
    • White poverty rate: 9.6% (24,043,000)

A few points/opinions, which I hope will not be too controversial.

  • A long history of legal and institutional racism in the U.S. is an obvious fact, a moral outrage, and needs to be corrected, particularly in housing and education.
  • A greater fraction of the black population is poor compared to the white population.
  • There are more poor white people than poor black people in the country.
  • You have to be careful comparing averages between groups of very different sizes.
  • From a moral perspective, if you want to help the most people, you would not only help black people. You would try to help people who need help in both groups, while trying to even out the disparities.
  • From a political perspective, an incessant focus on race, and rhetoric equating race and poverty, is going to turn off a lot of poor white voters. This ends up electing politicians who are not going to help poor people of either race.
  • There are other races, there are many mixes of races, and there are many confusing census questions about whether people consider themselves hispanic instead of or in addition to the other races. I am not a professional demographer, and do not know the absolute best way to handle these issues.

sleep apps and gadgets

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Here’s a roundup of some sleep apps and gadgets from Wired. They sought an independent doctor’s opinion on each. And just a reminder there is nothing for sale on this blog, at least at the moment.

  • Withings Sleep Tracking Mat – technically more of a medical monitoring device, it “goes under your mattress and tracks your sleep cycles, heart rate, and snoring through the night to give you a detailed breakdown of how well you slept, all summed up with an overall sleep score.”
  • Bose Sleepbuds II – ear buds that block external sound and play noises to help you sleep. I can attest this works because I use my $10 Sony earbuds this way. Sometimes I just use them to block external sound, with no sound playing. Occasionally I use the Mynoise app (not mentioned in this article). Other times I play the Audible app or podcasts (I’m currently trying Overcast because Apple podcasts seems to be f—ed up). This makes insomnia entertaining and informative whether it actually helps me fall asleep or not. But I think it does, because 15 minutes of listening to a book quiets my mind from whatever was troubling it, unless the book itself is troubling. Doctor endorsed: yes
  • Calm meditation app (doctor recommended: no)
  • Somtryst, Sleepio, Headspace apps (doctor recommended: yes, and the article says the first is FDA approved as a medical treatment for chronic insomnia)
  • Somnox – a pillow that you “spoon” as it breathes. Weird, but no sex dolls were reviewed in the article. If you are lonely and want to try a sex doll, I say go for it. Think of all those jokes about guys rolling over and snoring within seconds of completing their objective. (Ladies, not so much if the jokes are medically accurate.) Doctor endorsed: neutral
  • Muse S – a headband that “tracks electrical activity in your brain” and translates it into “something like weather”, so you listen and try to make the weather calm down. Doctor endorsed: yes, at least for meditation if not necessarily for sleep. The author of the article didn’t like it however.
  • Moona – a chilled pillow and Chilipad, which cools your whole body. Doctor endorsed: yes, at least the Chilipad. I find this interesting having sweated out some hot nights in the tropics. Could you set the air conditioning warmer or forego it entirely? This could allow different people with different temperature preferences (not husbands and wives though, because they never disagree on this one…) get a good night’s sleep in the same room. This could also be nice on long-haul flights. Or if this really works, why not build it into clothes so people can be comfortable wherever they are. Maybe this could actually be a big energy saver compared to mechanical heating and air conditioning. Maybe you could incorporate more outside air in buildings and focus more on air flow rather than just temperature.

What’s new with “cliodynamics”?

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Cliodynamics is an attempt to collect and organize data on human history in a structured way that can be subjected to scientific testing. The link I just posted is to Peter Turchin’s blog, and the actual data set(s?) are available here.

There’s also a recently published book on comparative history called Figuring out the Past, which sounds interesting. My formal education in history, which did not extend past grade school, often focused on the history of individual countries (most obviously, the U.S.). Other offerings, which I didn’t have time to take in the course of my oh-so-practical engineering education, often seemed to focus on specific topics. I often wonder if it would be possible to teach kids world history more or less chronologically over the course of several years, and really delve into what was happening simultaneously in different parts of the world at various times. The other way I learn about history informally as an adult is to read or hear about a current event, then dig deeper into the history of a particular geographic area or human group to try to understand the context for the current event. I’m almost always surprised at how little context I actually had to understand the current event before I started digging, and I never have time to do as much digging as I might like.

Data is another way to look at/teach/learn about history. I’m often interested in how many people were alive at a given time, how much energy they used and what their energy sources were, and (somewhat morbidly) what they died of. But I don’t really know where to begin to look for most of that data.

learning curve for lithium ion batteries

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Our World in Data has some numbers on the decline in price for lithium ion batteries.

Since 1991, prices have fallen by around 97%. Prices fall by an average of 19% for every doubling of capacity. Even more promising is that this rate of reduction does not yet appear to be slowing down.

Our World in Data

one more Covid-19 dashboard

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In the U.S., it feels like we are done with Covid. At least, for those of us who are vaccinated adults. For those of us with children, life is still not back to normal because even as we are being told we can return to the office, we can’t actually do that because the children are still home. And the world is clearly not done with Covid-19, as vaccination is proceeding slowly in many countries outside North America and Europe.

Anyway, here is one more simulation dashboard that shows an ensemble of simulations going forward up to four weeks. This might be useful to see if there are blips on the horizon when (if?) the kids really are allowed to go back to school in the fall. Here’s an article describing the site in MIT technology review.