Hopefully Interesting

I'd  previously written  about year end charitable giving.  This year I'm giving money to a new organization, though I'm giving a lot to Givewell too.  The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, or ALLFED , is researching ways to rapidly scale up food production in the case that traditional means might suddenly become less viable.  Say a super-volcano erupts, or a huge meteor strikes, or a nuclear winter happens, or something along those lines.  Humanity would have to get through years of reduced sunlight that would make growing plants very hard. Crop failures would naturally lead to massive starvation but ALLFED is looking into ways to turn biomass we might have laying around into edibles via routes such as fungus or methane eating bacteria.  Food produced this way wouldn't be especially tasty but it would hopefully be enough to keep people alive until the dust settles out of the atmosphere and normal farming can start back up. The idea here is to research the te

So, imagine someone is walking along, down a street.  They see the store their going to and they enter through the shop door.  So, when you were imagining this, did you see it?  Which direction was the person walking, relative to your mind's eye?  Did they turn to the left or right to enter the store?  What color was everything? When someone first did this exercise with me they were walking away from me and turned to the left.  I could still see them inside the shop through the wall because nothing in my visualization had any color.  For other people they might be imagining it more like a video where things have color and you can't see people after they move behind walls.  Some people don't form mental images of the scene at all,  here's  a widely shared Facebook post by someone who was surprised to discover that other people actually did form mental images in their minds.  Francis Galton was the first person to study this in 1880. A related topic is the notion of

Every year people climb up Mount Everest.  Generally the number keeps growing.  Not everybody makes it up.  Some people turn back.  Other people die on the mountain.  Generally  around 1 in 100  of the people who attempt to climb it.  K2 is another mountain nearby.  For a little bit people thought it might be taller than Everest.  It isn't taller, but it is deadlier and about 1 in 10 of the people who try to climb it die. Why do people climb dangerous mountains?  To test themselves.  For the sense of achievement.  And despite the danger nobody is seriously proposing that we stop people from attempting these summits.  If they want to risk their lives they can.  They know the risks.  We should stop people who don't know what they're doing but you'll never even get to base camp without serious dedication and preparation. If we allow mountain climbers to face severe dangers for the sake of achieving something few others have why don't we allow this with astronauts? 

The CPU in your laptop or desktop has a lot of transistors in it.  The Core i7-6700HQ that I'm typing this on has 1.35 billion of the little guys.  Buck back in the day on of the earliest computers, ENIAC , had only 20 thousand vacuum tubes which more or less fufilled the same role as transistors do now.  So what do all those extra transistors we've added accomplish, if we were able to do useful mathematical operations with just 20,000?  Most of the increase in the speed at which we run computers, the clock rate, has come from replacing large and slow transistors with smaller and faster transistors after all. Well first, what was ENIAC doing with it's transistors?  A single transistor isn't very useful.  If you're willing to use a resistor too you can perform an operation like making an output the logical and of one input and the inverse of a second input, call it AND(A, NOT(B)).  But that circuit is a very jury rigged thing which will be slow, unreliable, and fai

Eric Drexler is the person who came up with the name "nanotechnology" and is probably the one most responsible for public awareness of the idea.  After a pretty long haitus he's published a new book and I thought I'd take a look but before I get to the new book I think I should provide some history. Way back in 1986 Drexler published Engines of Creation .  In it he outlined a vision of a world remade by the ability to engineer chemicals the way we engineer widgets today, assembling them precisely using mechanical arms placing bits in position rather than waiting for the random thermal motion of molecules to bring parts into contact where they can stick.  In the book he envisioned tiny robots called assemblers constructed with atomic precision using tiny arms to assemble other devices - and also replicate themselves.  That ability to replicate could potentially be a big danger if an error in programming caused them to replicated without bound like a cancer.  The cell

A while ago I made a post on  Anarchy in History , on how most traditional societies didn't have governments as we'd understand them as some group with a monopoly on the use of force.  But just because a country exists as an anarchy doesn't mean that the people in it are anarchists.  They just have their traditions and laws and accommodations and don't hold their opinions on government as an ideology.  In the same way most people who have lived under monarchies haven't considered the alternatives in a way that would make them monarchists, you mostly find those in places like the 19th century or ancient Greece where monarchies and republics lived side by side. There is one society, though, that I think you could reasonably claim was actually anarchist.  That would be medieval Iceland.  Iceland was settled by mostly Norwegians around 900 AD.  This was around the time the famous Harald Fairhair was unifying Norway under a kingdom.  We know most of what we do about Ic

Fusion is famously the technology that's always 20 years in the future.  And because of that I hadn't really seriously considered it as a realistic solution to climate change, sustainable energy, etc.  But recently I've become more optimistic about the prospects of fusion so I thought maybe I'd explain why I've changed my views. What is fusion?  Well, it's a process that releases energy by combining elements together.  Atoms tend to resist this, so they have to be smashed together very hard in order for it to work.  In a thermonuclear bomb the fusion is triggered by a standard fission bomb going off to provide the needed energy.  Atomic weapons are rather hard to contain, though, and impractical to use as part of a power plant.  So for fusion we'd need to heat up some hydrogen very hot and keep it all together rather than expanding and escaping as very, very hot things like to do. In the Sun our star's gravity is enough to keep everything together. 

I recently finished reading William Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good .  Reading some reviews online before starting it I was expecting it to be much more of a screed than it actually was.  Easterly criticizes the efforts of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to further the development of poorer countries but his nuanced criticisms are in sharp contrast to most of their critics.  There's a lot of discussion about all the complicated moving parts that go into a modern commercial society, all the problems with both causing trust and causing trust to be justified between commercial actors and how people have found ad hoc  solutions in the absence of regular institutions, and how it's very hard to know in advance which interventions will actually make things better rather than just funnel money into someone's pocket.  He provides some fairly compelling statistics showing tha

First of all, in case you aren't following this sort of thing, the Uber crash I mentioned in my  last post on self driving cars  is actually a lot worse than it looked at first.  According to the NTSB report  the victim of the crash had been detected but emergency braking maneuvers are not enabled while the vehicle is under computer control, to reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior. The vehicle operator is relied on to intervene and take action. The system is not designed to alert the operator.  which makes me wonder if this rises to the level of criminal negligence.  Certainly there are currently no localities that are allowing Uber to test on their roads which might be the end of Uber's program. Tesla has also been in the news with some crashes involving its cars running on autopilot.  But autopilot of the sort you normally have in a boat or plane or one of Tesla's cars isn't full self driving.  The pilot or driver is supposed to remain on alert a

I'm a little behind on my blogging but a couple of months ago NASA released some information on their new  Kilopower  small reactor for use in space.  So I thought this would be a good opportunity to write something about power generation in space.  Most satellites and probes in the inner solar system use solar power.  This was one of the first practical uses of solar power back when solar panels were very expensive and now that solar panels have gotten much, much cheaper it's even more of a good idea.  The solar panels on your roof are built tough and will weigh about 10 kg for every square meter or, on the Earth.  At 1300 watts of sunlight coming in times an optimistic 20% efficiency for typical solar cells you've got 26 watts per kilogram.  According to Wikipedia more expensive spacecraft-grade solar panels will give you 77 watts per kilogram, but even then the majority of the expense is going to be lifting the weight of the panel into orbit. Solar panels are great

There are a lot of countries in the world with declining populations.  Historically this isn't unusual if there's famine or disease or war causing it but in the developed world this is mostly just people choosing to have fewer children.  In Japan it's all the way down to 1.46 children per woman which, since half of kids are male, means that every generation will tend to be three quarters as large as the one before it. There are a lot of reasons for this.  People having better options than they did in the past seems like the biggest one.  There are differences within the industrialized world in many ways involving religion ,  attitudes towards child care , and other thing. But those are societal factors and there are also individual factors at play in a couple's decision to have kids.  People have different personalities and personality seems to have an effect on child bearing just like you'd expect.  Here's a study I recently saw linked on twitter. So,

Yesterday, for the first time, an autonomous car killed a pedestrian .  It isn't clear that the car was at fault but we're almost certainly going to have an accident where the car was at fault at some point.  At this point autonomous cars haven't driven enough miles for us to know if they're currently safer or more dangerous than human drivers.  But I think they have the potential to be much safer in the long run for a combination of technical and institutional reasons. Technically, cars can learn in the same way that humans can.  But while we humans are mostly limited to learning from the situations we encounter a fleet of cars can hope to learn as a unit.  Some accident occurs, engineers analyze it, and then no car in that fleet will make that particular mistake again.  It's reasonable to think about robo-cars trained on a body of experience far greater than a human could amass in a lifetime. And I think that robotic car manufacturers have the right incentiv

I was walking in to work today and as I did I was listening to a nice podcast on the Drake Equation .  The Drake Equation is an estimate of the number of civilizations in the galaxy based on things like how many planets there are, how many develop life, etc.  I learned a lot in the Podcast but it reminded me of a post I'd been meaning to make about why I think the origin of life probably wasn't the hard part in creating us.  Also, I promise this post on the Drake Equation is more pleasant than the  last one . A graph: Dates taken from Wikipedia's  timeline of life  and  timeline of the future . It was just a pretty short amount of time, geologically, from when the Earth cooled down enough for oceans to start forming until we have proof of the first life - just 120 million years.  And that's probably a conservative estimate.  But from there it took three quarters of a billion years for photosynthesis to arise.  Then one and a half billion until one bacteria

Apart from  the obvious , or course.  Once, when our planet was young, the atmosphere was very high in carbon dioxide.  Then photosynthesis evolved and the cyanobacteria that spread across the oceans turned most of that carbon dioxide into oxygen about two and a half billion years ago.  Modern complex life, like ourselves, loves oxygen but for the creatures at the time this was a huge problem since oxygen was toxic to them and most of them died.  Plus the interruption of the greenhouse effect combined with the dimmer sun we had back then to turn Earth into a giant snowball for a bit. But here we are billions of years later and carbon dioxide levels are increasing.  We should be worried about increasing temperatures but are there other reasons to worry?  For a very long time, compared to humanity, Earth's carbon dioxide levels were around 280 parts per million.  That's been going up recently and is now at 407 parts per million, a 45% increase. If you are a photosynthesizing

One of the interesting discussions in  The Wizard and the Prophet  was what the wizards are trying to get up to next in terms of trying to increase food production.  One idea goes to the fundamentals of photosynthesis. The most important protein in photosynthesis is affectionately known as  RuBisCO  and makes up about half the protein in a leaf.  Photosynthesis seems to be pretty hard and so RuBisCO doesn't work as well as most other catalyst proteins.  It's supposed to grab the carbon in carbon dioxide from the air but frequently grabs plain oxygen instead.  I suppose it worked a lot better before the  Great Oxygen Catastrophe .  Some plants have versions that are a bit more selective but they work more slowly.  Some are faster but they mess up which to grab more frequently.  Biologists hoped they could improve RuBisCO but it seems that evolution did about as good a job as could be done. There are some plants, though, that do have method of photosynthesis that's often

I just recently finished The Wizard and the Prophet  by Charles C. Mann.  He'd previously written a book about the Columbian exchange I'd really liked, 1493, so I was ready to like this book too. It concerns the dueling ideals of two men regarding man's relationship with the environment.  The prophet of the title, William Vogt, believed that the world has a finite carrying capacity that humans had to respect and that we had to limit ourselves to what the Earth could sustain.  The wizard, Norman Borlaug, worked tirelessly to increase the yields of the crops that man depends on and allowed large new generations of people to grow up without the famine that had plagued their parents. Going through the book Mann seems to do an admirable job of looking at the lives of each; their successes and failures and the events that led them to be the people they were.  And the books makes a valiant effort to portray both fairly though, as you might expect, I end up sympathizing with th