Tag Archives: 2020

2020 visualizations from FiveThirtyEight

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Fivethirtyeight.com has a roundup of interesting visualizations they did in 2020. There’s a lot here, but one theme I think I would like to try to make use of is is pretty simple. When you are counting something, put the count in context by first showing a bunch of empty squares that represent the potential or total number of something (voters, or citizens stopped by police, or human beings with potential Covid exposure). Then put dots in some of the boxes, or color in some of the boxes, to illustrate the count. If you want to introduce some additional categories, you can use colors or put boxes around the boxes, or to get really fancy, put groups of boxes on a map. This technique undoubtedly has a name, but the article doesn’t tell me what the name is.

game-changing technologies from 2020

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Here are a few from various places around the web:

Nabeel S. Qureshi: From what I gather, this guy works at the RAND corporation, and is not related to the author with a similar name who passed away a couple years ago. Anyway, he has a list on Twitter:

  • mRNA vaccine
  • Apple M1 chip – it’s a computer chip, I guess a bit faster or more efficient or whatever than others
  • SpaceX rocket launch
  • GPT-3 – this is a machine learning thing that has to do with computers generating text that sounds very realistic to humans. Or to put it another way, computers can write now? But they still can’t think, that we know of. This seems concerning.
  • various initial public offerings
  • “V-shaped recovery” – optimistic, I hope it turns out to be true in retrospect
  • electric cars
  • “Crypto going mainstream” – cryptocurrency? I’m not sure how/if this affected me directly in 2020, but I do know that for the first time I used almost no cash at all from March-December.

scrolling through the comments, some of which have additional suggestions from nice people, interspersed with some nasty and stupid ones of course.

  • Bt eggplant – this is a crop with a relatively harmless insecticide built in. It basically targets a particular type of caterpillar. Okay I guess as long as it doesn’t escape into the wild and kill beneficial insects or outcompete unmodified plants. I sprinkle Bt for mosquitoes on my garden and in my storm drains.
  • technology and widespread adoption of remote working – some of this will fade after Covid, I assume, but I also assume it will settle at a level significantly higher than before Covid.
  • Neuralink, Starlink – these are micro-satellites
  • Cerebras – this is another computer chip
  • “BCI” – brain-computer interfaces? There is also a company called Buckeye Corrugated Inc. that makes cardboard. come on people, enough with the undefined acronyms
  • “6dof video capture” – “six degrees of freedom”, which has something to do with more realistic virtual reality
  • mixed reality – is this different from “augmented reality”?
  • GAN – this might be a “generative adversarial network”, which sounds like two AIs duking it out and coming up with something new
  • disinformation

Tyler Cowan, an economist who wrote “The Great Stagnation”, says the Great Stagnation is not over but it might be getting close to over. He says “the vaccine-driven recovery will measure as a rise in labor inputs, but in reality it will be pure TFP.  In 2021 (but which quarter?), true TFP will be remarkably high, maybe the highest ever?” Ooh ooh, I know this one! TFP is total factor productivity, which is the rise in productivity that can’t be attributed to capital and labor inputs. So it can represent some combination of innovations, or intangibles, errors and unknowns.

New technologies can take some time to come to fruition, even decades. So maybe we are starting to see an AI/biotech/renewable energy acceleration that we got excited about a long time ago and then forgot about? There are also some dangers and unintended consequences lurking on this list, as always.

more top Longreads of 2020

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Here Longreads.com collects their top story from each week of 2020, adding up to…I don’t know…counting on my fingers…50 stories or so. How many stories do they publish per week anyway? Here are a handful that caught my I (TLDRJS – too long didn’t read every word, just skimmed):

  • “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus” – published in February. An accurate story, I would say. The headline is all we need to read now.
  • “Shell is Looking Forward” – I’ve been puzzling over this for awhile. How does an oil and gas company “evolve” into a green energy company, when getting into the regulated electricity utility business, the nuclear business, or the largely decentralized renewable energy/energy storage business means basically shedding their entire business model and becoming a completely different kind of company, and there are already companies operating in those spaces that are going to better at it than some new entry from the outside? This article gave me some clues – modern corporations are somewhat agnostic about what they “do”. They are more like private equity investors. So they will just horde cash for awhile and use it to buy some other companies, including smaller companies and startups they hope will expand. Then they will hang on to the winners and shed the losers. So a company really becomes nothing but a brand name for an operation that can be doing absolutely anything, and the mix of what it is doing will change over time. I just question whether a big established company like an oil giant is nimble enough to pull something like this off. It seems more likely tech or finance companies would be successful at this game.
  • a pair of articles on mass migration driven by climate change – one international and one U.S. focused. These were really TLDR, but the long-term situation is just depressing. Coastlines are going to be inundated, the southern U.S. is going to get too hot, the western U.S. is going to get too dry, and places we grow a lot of food now are going to get too hot and too dry to continue yielding the amount of food we need. The article seems to point to the northeast and midwest. The big northeastern cities are coastal though, so that is going to require some serious commitment to coastal engineering and flood control if it is really going to work. The midwest might be the place to be. Internationally, I just don’t know. Beyond the obviously horrifying humanitarian implications, we’ve already seen migration trigger political instability in Europe and the U.S., and that process seems set to get worse.
  • “Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup” – It seems there was some denial and censorship. It’s a little easy to judge in hindsight. Would earlier action or more open communication by China and/or WHO have prevented the virus from spreading to Italy? Hard to say. It spread to Korea, and they dealt with it effectively. Thailand, which has extensive travel to Wuhan, contained it through airport screening, contact tracing, and quarantining people in public hospitals. So western countries can point the finger if they want, but their response was just too slow and ineffective early on to contain the situation, and in the case of the U.S. just a completely incompetent non-response.

a best of best of 2020 roundup

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The “best of” articles are starting to roll in now! Here are a handful.

  • Best of Frontline. They have a 2-minute Rocky training montage of all their episodes in 2020. As you might excpect, they covered the pandemic, the protests, the Supreme Court, and the election. They don’t seem to have covered international events much other than the pandemic to some extent. Frontline is a great documentary series, probably the best. If I had nothing else to do and really wanted to understand the year, I might take a weekend and binge watch Frontline. Perhaps there are some childless, retired or independently wealthy people out there who can do this, but alas…
  • 25 most popular Longreads exclusives. A few interesting ones look at “Britishness”, the “MasterClass” series, ancient canals in modern-day Phoenix, and the possibility that the Olympics may not be back. I like Longreads in principle but sorry, TLDR!
  • Top 25 Censored Stories from Project Censored. A couple interesting ones look at education/incarceration links and a comprehensive proposal for criminal justice reform.
  • Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections reviews the 2020 hurricane season, which broke many long-standing records and would seem to bode ill for the near future.

War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List

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I have to be honest with myself – my reading pace has dropped way off during my intensive child-rearing (not to mention full time working) years. I just am not going to be reading long non-fiction books, and I will be chipping away at fiction very slowly, mostly as audiobooks. So that out of the way, there are some interesting books here that I will very likely not be able to read.

  • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. At first I thought what, is this about military strategy or business strategy or what? Turns out it cuts across many fields and that is why it sounds interesting to me.
  • The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. I probably won’t read this. In fact, I don’t even want high-tech warfare to arrive, but it will so we might at least want to know it when we see it.
  • George Orwell. I would rather read George Orwell than books about George Orwell, but this reminds that George Orwell wrote a variety of books other than Animal Farm and 1984 (or are you supposed to write out the letters?) I read and enjoyed Burmese Days a few years ago, for example. I would like to reread 1984 though. I don’t usually reread books, but this is a classic I read when I was just too young to appreciate it. The interesting thing to me is that it depicts future governments as mastering propaganda through technology, when in fact technology is causing governments to lose control of communications with their own people.
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan – I am always up for some near-future techno-dystopia!
  • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Recently I have been trying to stop worrying about the line between science fiction and fantasy and learn to enjoy the latter more. But now we have something called “science fantasy” that straddles the line. I guess we have always had it and now it just has a new (to me) name. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all that.
  • The Red Trilogy by Linda Nagata. Military science fiction. Not always my favorite genre but I am always on the lookout for something even close to the classics like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and The Forever War. Of course, in all of those war is a means to explore a variety of social and psychological topics.

NYT best books of 2020

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I plan to boycott giving the New York Times any money from now until the end of time because of the weapons of mass destruction debacle. Unless I get a letter or phone call of apology from Judith Miller herself.

So I had a look at the NYT best books on 2020 on this website. I don’t see anything I am likely to read here. I think Obama’s memoir is an important work of history. I don’t need to read it because I listened to his interview with Terry Gross the other day.

Shakespeare in a Divided America and War: How Conflict Shaped Us sound marginally interesting. I may add them to my list of more-books-than-I-can-read-before-I-die.

The problem with arguing that war is just part of the human condition is that weapons keep getting more dangerous. Eventually we will get to weapons so dangerous that a decision to use them is a decision civilization can never recover from. That decision might be completely irrational, but there may come a day when it only takes one irrational decision to bring civilization or even life on Earth crashing down around us.

2020 words of the year

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The Oxford English Dictionary has released its “word of the year” for 2020, which consists of many words. This is the first “best of” article I have come come across this year, so this is officially my “first of the best of the best of” post. Note, not all things in my “best of” series are good, I just like to stick with the name.

This is really a whole “year in review” post with some vocabulary words thrown in. Here are some of them:

  • bushfires
  • Covid-19. Interesting – “coronavirus” was the term in March and April, then “Covid-19” became more popular from May on. Not surprisingly, “pandemic” was also popular.
  • WFH (I was thinking “work for hire”, but no, that doesn’t make any sense. This is “work from home”. Come on, the acronym takes the same amount of time to say as the words, and nobody is paying for paper or ink any more. We don’t need this acronym!) Also “remote” and “remotely”, “mute” and “unmute”. They don’t mention “virtual” but that is popular where I am.
  • lockdown and shelter-in-place. Not mentioned in the article is “stay at home”, which turned out to be the official legal term where I lived. It makes sense, because “shelter in place” conjures up visions of incoming missiles, and lockdown implies people can’t go outside, which was never actually the case. We also had “curfews” but these were used in reference to civil unrest.
  • circuit-breaker (didn’t see this term much in the U.S., but I saw it in Singapore government communications about their lockdown, forwarded by the U.S. embassy there. 10 years ago right now, I had recently arrived in Singapore for what would turn out to be a 3-year stint living and working there. After 7 years back in the U.S., I still get the dispatches from the embassy and have never taken the time to figure out how to turn them off. Anyway, I think this is a good way to communicate the purpose of Covid-19 related restrictions – they cause significant short-term inconvenience, like a blackout, but they prevent long-term catastrophe, like your house burning down.)
  • support bubbles (haven’t heard this one actually, but I think I can guess)
  • keyworkers (must be what we are calling “essential workers” here in the U.S. I assume locksmiths are included). “Frontliners” and “front line workers” have also been used.
  • social distancing, face masks, PPE (PPE also annoys me, but at least the acronym rolls off the tongue easier than the full name. In my opinion though, using industry-specific jargon never makes anyone sound smarter, especially jargon you just learned and act like you have always known.) Also mask up, anti-mask, anti-masker and mask-shaming. For the record, I wear a mask to protect myself and others, and even just to make others feel more comfortable even in low-risk situations. I still feel annoyed by the masks though, because they should be the last layer in a many-layered defense provided by our government. Because our government has failed in every other layer of defense, mask shaming and “personal responsibility” are all they have left. Fuck you guys. Do your jobs next time.
  • Superspreader
  • Reopening
  • furlough
  • Black Lives Matter, BLM (Bureau of Livestock and Mines?), George Floyd, cancel culture. I might add “police brutality” and “police reform”. I also found myself trying to distinguish between a “protest”, a “riot”, “civil unrest”, and “looting”. This year might be the first time I heard the term “civil unrest” referring to the present day where I actually live, rather than referring to the 1960s. I’m also going to add “of color”. It seems everyone now has to be classified as either white or “of color”. I’m not sure this captures the diversity of people we have in our country.
  • moonshot (Covid-19 vaccine development will probably go down in history as an example of how you can throw an enormous amount of money at a scientific problem and get rapid progress – alongside nuclear weapons and going to the moon. But this seems like easily the most positive and humanitarian of the three.)
  • unprecedented – gets used in the title and throughout the article, but they never actually call it the word of the year
  • mail-in
  • conspiracy theory, QAnon
  • “Isn’t now exactly the moment when we should be using Brexit more than ever?” (My answer as an American: NO!!! I’m sick of hearing about it. But maybe if you are in the UK it is relevant even if you are sick of it. My personal opinion is Europe is a nice continent and anyone should consider themselves fortunate to be part of it.)
  • Workcation and staycation are apparently popular somewhere, but I haven’t heard these much.
  • Impeachment, acquittal (already forgot about this)
  • “anthropause” – I have never heard this, but apparently it refers to a temporary dip in carbon emissions and air pollution during the pandemic. They say media coverage of climate change actually decreased for the year.