I was reading about things that have a significant influence on student outcomes, and I came across something rather interesting in the late Robert Slavin's blog.
While he was complaining about John Hattie's awful methodology, he off-handedly mentioned:
> If you are familiar with the What Works Clearinghouse (2007), or our own Best-Evidence Syntheses or Evidence for ESSA, you will know that individual studies, except for studies of one-to-one tutoring, almost never have effect sizes as large as +0.40, Hattie’s “hinge point.” This is because WWC, BEE, and Evidence for ESSA all very carefully screen individual studies. We require control groups, controls for pretests, minimum sample sizes and durations, and measures independent of the treatments. Hattie applies no such standards, and in fact proclaims that they are not necessary.
There's something very important in there - the value of one-on-one tutoring.
One of the interesting things about homeschooling is that it doesn't produce massively worse outcomes than traditional schooling; homeschooled students seem to come out about as well or slightly ahead of traditionally schooled students.
This seems to imply that trained teachers are almost useless, having virtually no impact at all on student performance.
However, if one-on-one tutoring has a very large effect size (greater than 0.4 standard deviations), then this might explain why these untrained teachers do so well - homeschooled students may indeed have much worse teachers, but because the advantage of having a one-on-one tutor is so large, it "cancels out".
It would be interesting to see what effect totally untrained teachers would have in the classroom, but it feels like no one is willing to run that experiment.
One question is how much teacher training has to do with becoming better at one-on-one instruction, and how much has to do with managing a classroom or grades or special needs kids or any of the other stuff that most homeschooling parents don't have to deal with?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yehowah rather than Yahweh: How comes it's hallelujah and Elijah rather than hallelujeho and Elijeh?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yahweh rather than Yehowah: How comes it's Yehoshua and Yehoḥanan rather than Yahshua and Yahḥanan?
It's not cheaper. Indeed, it's way more expensive than planting a field of corn and harvesting it. But it's more efficient in its use of energy, in a strict kJ in/out sense. However, since the corn can use the kJ raining down from the sky each day, while the chemical plant would (typically) need to burn fossil fuels to get its kJ, it's not clear the increased efficiency is of any use.
I mean, photosynthesis *is* making carbohydrate from CO2, but if doing it in a chemical plant is less expensive (and the same goes for everything else we need food for), then it probably winds up as fields of solar panels supplying reactors in the cities - the reactors are in the cities because transporting electricity is cheaper than transporting the products.
not sure those "fields of solar panels" would not turn out to be much more land-wasting and less energy-efficient over-all than "traditional" highly-efficient agro-business-"fields of gold". - With nuclear-fission ("power too cheap to meter") and a global population of 89 billion, those reactors for sugars/fats and probably proteins will be found in any mayor district of whatever that world-spreading town will be called.
I mean, if it's literally just carbohydrates, then you take out the staple calorie crops - rice in particular is very low in everything except calories; all the rest have at least some vitamins, although they're not necessarily good sources - and that's it (this is still a huge deal).
These days shelled white rice and white flour are carbohydrates only (starch). But traditional crops had way more nutrients and vitamins: whole grains rice, wheat etc. Wheat contains a whole lot of proteins - up to 20% (called gluten or wheat glue), lots of grains/seeds contain a whole lot of fats or oils. Parboiled rice is pressure cooked before shelling which presses the nutrients from the shell into the core. And so on
Peru's electricity is 220 volts, 60 hz, and Chile's electricity is 220 volts, 50 hz. How much of a problem does this pose to interoperability of electrical devices from one country to the other? A 10 hz difference doesn't sound like much.
Putting the political factors aside, how technically difficult would it be for one of the countries to adopt the other's electrical standard (Peru throttles down by 10 hz or Chile goes up by 10 hz)?
It doesn't seem to me to pose any problem for the end user. Almost nothing depends on the frequency of the AC. I suppose long ago there might have been some devices with clocks that would use the line frequency for timing, but I suspect those days are long gone, with the ubiquity of crystal-controlled oscillators.
However, the technical challenges for electricity generation and transmission are nontrivial. It's quite important, as you might imagine, for different sources and sinks of electrical voltage to have their voltage and phase matched up when they combine -- if you combined two AC voltages 180° out of phase, for example, then they would just cancel and the net result would be a reduction in power in the combined current. So the voltage and phase of all the power generators and transmission circuits has to be synchronized within a few tenths of a Hz:
The main interoperability problems will be with devices that incorporate clocks or timers. A digital clock made for 60Hz will run slow on 50Hz. Most computers, laptops, cellphones etc don't care about frequency. Anything with an AC motor will run slower, but most appliances have DC motors which shouldn't be affected.
When I was a kid my family moved from the US (110/60) to a country that had 220/50, and we took a number of household appliances and electronics with us. We could use transformers to step up the voltage, and pretty much everything worked fine - except we had no way to change the frequency, so anything with a clock (the VHS player) was always slow.
I am not sure if this is really related to your question, but 3-phase AC motor speeds depend on the frequency. So a motor running at 1800 RPM on 60 Hz will run at 1500 RPM on 50 Hz. Engineers plan for this based on the expected power supply frequency.
Most electronic devices (computers, TVs, phone chargers, etc) don’t care.
Turns out our special young sun is calming down and fits way more socially in at home, in school and at the grandparents home by taking SSRI every morning. Before he was starting to get engry some days every 10 Minutes over minor things. He is just taking taking half of my dose (5mg, 30kg weight) of escitaliprame and we didn't get a prescription for him after half a year of talking and testing with a local state-owned hospital specialized in psychiatry of kids and teenagers. The doctors just are trying to play safe for themselves and leaning not a millimeter out of the window by conducting a 4-week long test with a given SSRI medication. They told us the rules in our country demand a year long talk and behavioural therapy as a first step and a SSRI only as the sexond, parallel step. This would mean year long stress for the sun and us parents.
So now the question for us parents is: how can we go forward an legalize his medication without getting sued by a doctor following strictly the books.
In our country there is 1 SSRI prescribable for kids from an age of 8. We heard there should exist some children's doctors doing prescribing of SSRI. But how to find, approach and talk with them?
"What do doctors know, ho-ho-ho, I'll just share my prescription with my young child, going by guess and by God, and if it makes his liver explode, so what? You can't get any child quieter than a dead child!"
Ah, you sir, are the fuckhead. Marcel is a loving and kind parent who is trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world.
Have you, Deiseach, ever been prescribed a psychoactive drug. If so, you may already know what I'm about to tell you. Doctors are prescribing these powerful drugs "by guess and by God". "Let's try Wellbutrin for six weeks and see how it goes."
What age is the child? Escitalopram is not prescribed for those under the age of 12 years. There has been a safety study done on dosing children ages 7-11:
"On March 19, 2009, escitalopram was approved for the treatment of MDD in adolescents 12 to 17 years old. Safety and effectiveness have been established in adolescents 12 to 17 years old for the treatment of MDD. Maintenance efficacy is supported from extrapolation of data from adult studies along with comparisons with racemic citalopram pharmacokinetic parameters in adults and adolescents. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients
less than 12 years old with MDD. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients less than 18 years of age with GAD. Adverse events were generally similar to those observed in adults."
There are side effects:
"Lexapro is not approved for use in children in adolescents. When taken by pediatric populations, side effects can include: increased thirst, muscle twitching, nose bleeds, difficult urination, heavy menstrual periods, and slowed growth rate. For children or adolescents treated with Lexapro, your physician should check vital statistics and evaluate height and weight. If any problems are found, your doctor may recommend discontinuing treatment."
And there seems to be only one drug licenced to treat anxiety in children 7 years of age and older:
"For childhood anxiety disorders, only one medication, duloxetine, has received FDA approval and can be prescribed “on label” for children 7 years of age and older with generalized anxiety disorder."
Granted, Marcel doesn't live in the USA so his home country may allow any and every kind of medication, but I'm betting it has *some* restrictions around who can give medication to children and what kind.
Escitalopram is for major depressive disorder and anxiety. This does not sound like what Marcel is describing: "angry every day every ten minutes over minor things". The doctors they were attending advised against drugging up the kid until after a year of other interventions had not worked.
But our friend here knows better, and now the kid is sedated into a state of docility, he's not a problem at home, in school, or at granny's house. Previous generations used to achieve the same effect with opium or alcohol for children.
"Loving and kind parents trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world" kept the charlatans peddling Miracle Mineral Solution/Supplement in business by ignoring what the medical professionals were telling them about their children with autism, and when the force-feeding their kids with chlorine dioxide resulted in the kids vomiting up bloody shreds of their digestive systems, the parents were convinced these were the "worms" alleged to cause autism and were convinced the treatment was working. Being "loving and kind" did not prevent them from doing severe harm to their children.
So yeah: he's a fuckhead for ignoring the doctors, you're a fuckhead for apologia for harming kids under the guise of "but the parents love them".
All the prescribing of anti-depressants for children is assumed to be done on medical advice and under medical supervision. Even for ordinary ailments, you are not supposed to share your prescription medication with another adult, or give them tablets you have not finished taking. "It works okay for me, so it must be okay for my kid" is *not* a good rule of thumb, and we would heavily censure any father who decided that a glass of whiskey or XXX porn videos were okay for their young kid. I'm on a rake of medications, if I had young kids I sure as hell would not decide "well this might help them with their own problems" and start sharing my prescriptions.
I would think your main legal risk is whatever exists in your country that functions as a child welfare agency. Most would probably have significant concerns about you sharing your psychiatric meds with your kid on your own initiative, without a doctor's prescription, especially if there is some specific statute laying down conditions for child use of that particular medication. In most US states the child welfare agencies are a nightmare with which to deal, and once you come to their attention it's very hard to escape completely, so I would not do this except under conditions of great need.
Thanks for your perspective. That's exactly our situation. Guidelines are pretty first world-like strict for medication of kids. But all that is with the background of 1) normal average circumstances 2) the idea that doing something actively which later could turn out bad with 1% chance is perceived as 10x worse as just doing nothing and bad things happen with 10% chance.
Till late 50's, early 60's lots of children were treated very badly in this countty - like some protectionless groups of adults as well. So now we have the opposite situation. Lots of professionell personal is very reluctant to lean out to much of the window just to play safe (for them). My wife is a teacher in a private school for special teenagers with ADHS, Autism, Asperger and more who were kicked out of public schools. She tells a lot if heart breaking stories how these kids suffered because just nobody tried the obvious, started to connect with these kids and just ask, what's up. Just today a teenage boy, who is doing nothing in school since months each lesson told her, that he's woken up every morning at 4:30am by his shift working parenrs, then sitting in front of the TV till 8am, staring at the wall in school till 4pm and being awake till 11pm in the night. This boy foreseeable will be a totally different 2.0 version of himself after just sleeping full 8 hours a couple of days.
I am sure this is the right place to pose a question. If one takes the entire span of years that the universe has been around, whatever billion figure that is and were to reframe that period of time as a 24 hour day, then what would the average human lifespan correspond to as fractions of seconds?
I was musing that there might be some sort of analogy made between that and subatomic particles.
It appears that a typo has survived on one of the Hoover Dam's towers without ever being commented on (at least on the internet). Is the person who asked the question correct that this is a typo?
I like the gracious sentiment of the inscription. I learned something about early English verb suffixes and I bookmarked an interesting spot on Stack Exchange. Many thanks Mr... uh Anonymous.
So the progression over time would be "we buildeth" --> "we builden" --> "we build"? Still seems like the Hoover dam inscription is just an error, then.
I’m sure this isn’t an original observation, but -
lmao AI learned how to do art (clip+Some GAN, TADNE, etc) before it learned to code and learned to operate mechanical moving robots. Take that ... everyone’s guesses about that beforehand
For some definitions of "art" all that an AI had to do was create a visual medium of any kind, based on any inputs. I enjoy some art, but the field as a whole is way too easy to gimmick because what we call art can vary so much without good explanation (to a layman at least). Asking an AI to create a masterpiece Rembrandt-level painting without copying Rembrandt would be more interesting than this (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-art/index.html) which apparently involved taking actual pictures of famous paintings as part of the AI programming. As a real painting of a real thing, it's terrible. The eyes and face are all messed up, the coloring is off, etc. As "art" it can be considered good as some kind of abstract thing.
Try to write some code where you fudge the instructions because that's more interesting, and you'll see why it took AI much longer to be able to do it.
but I grabbed https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Power-Chinas-Twenty-first-Century-ebook/dp/B00BH0VU4W/ from scholars stage, and it looks a bit to be what you want -“ Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation—culminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?
Scholars stage is also a china related blog, not really economic though
Ronald Coase's final book, coauthored with Ning Wang, is _How China Became Capitalist_ and very interesting. There is a long review of it up on my web page:
The book that made me emotionally grok the opening of the Chinese recovery was "A Chinese Life" by Li Kunwu. It covers Li's experiences growing up in China from 1955 to about 2005. He includes several revealing vignettes about how ordinary Chinese people navigated the change from planned economy to open economy: how some got rich, and others couldn't handle losing the "iron ricebowl" they were promised and were unsuited to the life of an entrepreneur. It doesn't have much in the way of statistics, but it gives an excellent emotional understanding of how much life changed for poor and middle class Chinese.
palladium mag for articles on China, although they’re not very central / comprehensive, they have a unique approach - just fun to read IMO
For the economic development, I’ve heard how Asia works, although it’s about all of Asia and I haven’t read it and it seems like the sort of unifying large scale book that’ll miss a lot
not really the best person to answer this one tbh, but in case that’s interesting
>The human race will run out of time before it runs out of space to develop.
Not with any significant growth rate, it won't (and I'm not seeing fertility staying below 2 forever, at least not without draconian state intervention; subcultures with high fertility and high retention exist (see: Amish), and once you get to biological immortality and removing menopause, the "I want a million babies" people start being a very much non-negligible contribution as well). 0.1% growth for a million years is a multiplier of 1.1 * 10^434, which is absurdly greater than the amount of matter within a million lightyears (or indeed the observable universe).
The big exception is if FTL is possible - more specifically, if you can use FTL to go to a place for the first time (as opposed to, say, FTL wormholes that have to be tugged places at STL). Estimates for the size of the actual universe are incredibly variable due to our inability to directly observe it, but the larger guesses such as "10^10^10^122" and "infinite" would definitely give us more Lebensraum than we could use.
In terms of birth rate - i would recommend anyone here, especially long time posters who are smart and very skilled, have lots of kids - but I’m just not sure what LP happen in the future as technology evolved and radically changes more, so idk about future predictions of childbearing rates at all
Also consider sperm donation, although I think personally raising children has a large effect that isn’t seen in the heckin twin studies because nobody actually does it properly
But I say that because despite adopting some goals that would heavily increase local birth rate, it seems like the smart folks still are adopting them less than the, well, not, and that seems to hold within most groups I can think of. But I’m not even sure the effect of that will be that great, because again social stuff and technology effects continue to change and accelerate and we respond to them late often
You might find some interest in a very old piece of mine, in which I tried to estimate whether the net externalities from having one more child were positive or negative and concluded that the results were so uncertain that I could not sign the sum.
That was back when the thread of population played the same role in the popular discourse that climate does now, the looming threat that all the experts knew was hanging over us. What happened since then was the precise opposite of the predictions — population in poor countries continued to grow, calories per capita in poor countries went up instead of down, poverty in poor countries went down instead of up.
It is always possible that the predictions were correct, just off by fifty years or so — but the fact that the predictions were made with confidence should be a reason to lower one's faith in both the arguments and the people who made them.
>>I suggest imagining that your readers are the prospective parents thinking of a third child, and to address the motives that are important to them.<<
I'm not trying to convince parents they should not have a third child. Fertility is declining rapidly already (everywhere but Africa). With many persons having one or no child, there is certainly space for some to have three.
The suggestion to try to imagine my readers more clearly is right on.
I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. It covers a lot of topics that may or may not be related, especially with the 10 billion humans living in space and the paragraphs after that. I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.
Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there. The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs. After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting (other than very speculative space habitats we couldn't possibly work on now). Lowering our population actually makes it much harder to achieve space colonization. We would never be able to spread out even in our own solar system with a reproductive rate below replacement. We would need to be far above replacement, actually. Without any intervening changes, you go from a current bad situation to colonizing all of existence. Other than speculating about the future, what is the purpose of your article?
Some other notes -
You mention growing technology, a steady state economy, and growing to 10+ billion people living in space. A steady state economy doesn't fit at all with the other two. Any meaningful technological growth will expand the economy. A steady state economy will not permit expansion into space (or people can starve as you transition resources to moving other people into space, which makes the problem mentioned above about not enough people even worse).
>>I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.<<
I think I will break out the space part to a separate article with a link. That would give me room to expand on the optimum population part. People interested in space exploration can follow the link.
>>I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. <<
Could you give me some examples? Which parts are most speculative?
>>Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. <<
What is your personal opinion? Do you think 8-10 billion is sustainable indefinitely? I would like to reference some experts who agree with that if you know of some.
If you believe 8-10 B is NOT sustainable, what facts convince you of this?
>>You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there.<<
There is no acceptable alternative. A world wide pandemic is not reducing the population. Nuclear war would work. If we abandon the common assumption that the population of Africa is certain to triple, the peak could happen sooner and decline faster. Perhaps I should say that.
>>The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs.<<
I believe it's going to be very rough but the human race will survive.
I'm saying:
* We need to reduce the Earth's population.
* The population is already too large which will cause great suffering.
* The population will begin shrinking in this century.
* The population will shrink for centuries.
* Eventually the Earth will be such a pleasant place that the population will stop shrinking.
Which statements do you disagree with?
>>After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting<<
I think that things will go better if we understand what is going on. For example some (many?) people will be alarmed when the population starts to fall and try to prevent the fall. In fact this is exactly what we need.
I can work on clarifying why I am writing and what I am suggesting.
The history of humanity is filled with people saying that there are too many people, followed by periods of rapid population growth when things worked just fine. Malthus was wrong on all of his specific predictions, so I feel the need to question his underlying assumptions. Intuitively he made sense, but he was flat out wrong.
I don't know if 10 billion is too many, or if the number is actually much larger or much smaller. By physical space, we could fit far more people. Something I heard on SSC a few years back was a comment that we could colonize inhospitable parts of Earth, like deserts and Antarctica, far easier than living in space stations or even on Mars. If we could make a sustainable space station for 20 million people, we could easily find a way to live where nobody lives right now, and have the benefit of easier travel and plentiful oxygen. If we can grow crops in space, we can grow crops in the Sahara.
I'm neutral on whether we should allow populations to decline on their own, and adamantly against trying to force them down. Declining populations have many medium term (50-100 years) effects on economies and family life, which are non-negligible problems. 300 years of declining population would create some very weird and disturbing situations, and I think an actively declining population could easily lead to wars, resource scarcity, and massive social adjustments that would be hard to predict. That they are happening naturally without overt government coercion may be reason to leave it alone, but places like South Korea are going to struggle immensely over the next few generations if they lose half their population per generation. The younger generations will be burdened with caring for the older, with even fewer people to help below that. Infrastructure will go into disrepair and eventually collapse, including infrastructure we currently consider essential. Not that these are unsolvable issues, but I want to be clear that population decline is not an automatic good. We could easily see a weakened South Korea get conquered by a North Korea with high birth rates after a few generations. Right now North Korea is in no shape to do anything, but we're talking about a pretty radical change.
"Indefinitely" is a tough word, because it implies a steady state, which we've rarely had and certainly not in modern times. Could we find ways to sustain 10 billion or more people on Earth with reasonable qualify of life? I certainly think it's quite possible, especially over the 300 year timeframe you are talking about. And I do believe the population will need to level off at some point, as there really will come a point when it's not possible for the planet to hold more people. For all I really know that point might be 40 billion people, with most of them living in underwater colonies or in the sky like the Jetsons, or something else we never thought about.
My response here is very speculative, but I think in the same way that your article is speculative. You gesture at lots of possibilities, and cite people who say that those things may/will happen, but the scientific justification for your view feels weak, and based heavily on Malthusian thinking.
I generally disagree with * points 1, 2, and 5, with some uncertainty on 3 and 4. Not that it's impossible that you are right, just that I am at least skeptical.
If you added a section (perhaps instead of your spacefaring section) that offered some thoughts on how to deal with a declining population and accept it, that would be a pretty solid ending to your article. Right now countries are looking at the population crunch (think Social Security in the US, and how it's funded - like pretty much all programs to care for the elderly) and how difficult it will be to handle those problems in the timeframe we're talking about. The reason a country or individual might push back is due to those concerns. Who wants to live in a country with 80 million retired people and 20 million kids being supported by 40 million working people?
I'm not sure I'm following your question or it's purpose, so feel free to elaborate as needed. In regards to #3 and #4, China losing population would certainly be a contributing factor in my thinking. My skepticism about those two points is more in line with "non-Western" countries having growing populations now. It's easy to draw a straight line from current trends and make a prediction, it's much harder to predict second-order effects. Maybe a declining 1st World population encourages other countries to increase population such that there is no overall decline. As I said, I'm quite uncertain about that, but open to the possibility. If that were true, it would affect our planning and what we recommend for people to do. If, for instance, 3rd World countries would see population increases that play off of declines in the 1st World, but would naturally reduce population growth if the 1st World held steady, then I would argue that we should encourage growth in the 1st World, where there is already abundant infrastructure and the means to care for these people, rather than encourage growth in the 3rd World and spend enormous amounts of money and time tearing down excess infrastructure in one part of the world to move it to another. Of course, if there's no relationship on overall population, then encouraging growth in the 1st World could end up being a bad idea.
Let's go all the way back to one of my basic assumptions: that we don't want a slowly dying natural world which I equate with a rate of extictions above the background rate.
Now I could be completely wrong about that perhaps the majority of humans don't care about extinctions.
Rate of extinctions above background rate doesn't equal "slowly-dying natural world". Nature isn't analogous to a person where you can talk about "how healthy" the person is and where sufficient unhealth results in total death; ecosystems can be thrown into chaos, but there are almost always winners as well as losers.
There are obvious scenarios - possibly-anthropogenic scenarios, even - in which the natural world would be destroyed. #1 is humanity reaching Kardashev 1+ and consuming all the light that powers nature (there are some things that wouldn't immediately die from lack of energy, like submarine-volcano ecosystems, but it's not obvious whether those could survive in the long-term without sun-powered life recycling nutrients and in any case that's a much-reduced biosphere). #2 is a true Runaway Greenhouse, in which the temperature goes up to 500 degrees, the water boils off into space, all organic matter on the surface burns and the planet becomes essentially a copy of Venus with sulphuric acid clouds - evolution has constraints (e.g. you can't evolve to not use DNA/RNA/proteins) that do not permit survival in those temperatures or in nearly-pure sulphuric acid. But these are specific apocalyptic scenarios with an obvious nonsurvivable criterion, not a vague "the environment being stretched beyond what it can bear".
Mass extinctions have happened a lot of times before; they change the distribution of species and in the short-term the number of species, but the actual amount of living matter on the planet changes only for the briefest instant - Moloch doesn't leave pennies lying on the ground.
I find the link to extinctions in 1800 somewhat dubious, as that's the timeframe where we starting cataloging species. Prior to that we didn't have a systematic approach, so it's much harder to estimate how many species were actually dying out (especially in places Europeans wouldn't have had access). We now discover far more species going extinct, and surmise that humans have some/most/all to do with it, but that may be less true than we think - we could just be that much better at cataloging. We have also discovered tens of thousands of species that went extinct before humans existed - how many more went extinct and didn't leave any records behind? The more we study the more species we find that went extinct without any human help. I don't trust that our understanding of "background rate of extinction" is accurate.
Putting that aside, I am concerned on some levels with human encroachment on animal habitats, and definitely believe that humans can have a devastating effect on certain ecosystems. I think that most people have moderate levels of concern about animal extinctions, but correctly recognize that there isn't much we can do about it and maybe not a lot that humans are doing to cause it. Some specific examples, like African elephants, are directly attributable to humans. Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.
The idea that we have a "slowly dying world" does not appear to me to be correct. Overall there are many more square miles of land where there are few to no humans than there are of tightly clustered humans. Those tight clusters of urbanization seem overwhelming to people in them or close to them, but they represent a pretty small portion of the planet. A quick Google shows 3% of the surface is urbanized. Which means 97% isn't, including almost all of the oceans. Sure, human waste shows up all across the Pacific, but it's more of a perceived blight than an actual devastation. Go visit some truly rural areas, and you can find land that hasn't seen a human in years, with almost no human interaction. It's quite liberating. Or check out Chernobyl, which within my lifetime was a busy industrial center, a nuclear disaster, and is now a wildlife refuge full of nature. Nature isn't so weak or beaten as many want to claim.
>>Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.<<
Even before I read your response I was considering focussing on mammals as a proxy for the natural world that I am concerned about. (Because as you explain, we can relate to mammals much better than insects.)
For example I could ask the reader: would you care if a thousand years from now there was only a dozen species of mammals left in the wild on Earth?
Or ... One Billion Americans by Matthew Ysglesias. if you want to not have industrial society (and its future), a billion is high. If you want technology, what’s wrong with today, we can just use even more of the planet and make even more peeps
Why not nature AND humans? As a human I'm very much in favor of that. The question is: What would an American Bison think? When there were some 30 million bisons in North America in 1400, were they pining for humans? Or were they quite satisfied to exist without them indefinitely,?
And since I have no way of knowing whether a bison can contemplate near extinction at the hands of humans or certain extinction from a comet impact, the question is more like: What would a bison with a human brain think?
Contemplating this question as Peter/Bison Advocate, I would need to know what kind of humans are we talking about? Humans that would shoot bison from a passing train in order to crush native peoples? Or humans that would set aside vast areas of the continent so that bison and many other species could survive and also be prepared to protect the planet from a comet strike?
I (Peter/Bison Advocate) could embrace the presence of the latter type of human.
>A world fertility rate of 1.4 would result in 1 billion persons on Earth around the year 2300.
I'm pretty sure all of the problems related to resource extraction and pollution will be solved by 2100 and be well on the way by much sooner than that. There are much easier ways to solve these problems than depopulating the world.
It would also be worthwhile keeping one foot in reality while thinking up ideas to solve problems.
When you say "the technology is there" do you imagine the solution is easy? If it easy, one would expect to happen quickly. Certainly within a decade. You don't expect that, do you? Because you recognize that there is a lot more involved than just technology.
I'm thinking the planet will begin to cool sometime in the 22nd century because of a shrinking population. Do you expect cooling sooner? When?
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
I don't see why this is reasonable. "nature" is an abstract concept, like "life" or "evolution" or "welfare"; it doesn't exist as an entity in reality and so cannot have feelings. Perhaps you mean animals, like hens and foxes. Perhaps these have feelings, but in nature their existence is usually meagre, and one will eagerly kill the other without a second thought. Humans are animals too, and they sometimes kill each other as well, but at least they have the potential to make lasting truces. This is one reason to keep humans around. Another is our unusual ability to make discoveries, so that perhaps one day we will scientifically unravel the Hard Problem of Consciousness. A third reason is that if you decide not to keep humans around, they're not going to take kindly to your decision and the resulting animosity will be unproductive.
Which leads me point out that even if 2 billion is better than 7 or 10, it's going to be ridiculously hard to get everyone on board with a depopulation plan.
Luckily I don't think depopulation is necessary. First, let's talk energy: we can do 100% clean energy, lower pollution and stop global warming, no problem. Especially if we accept nuclear energy: it consumes very little land for the electricity produced, and all the waste produced in a plant's lifetime can easily fit on the site of the power plant itself. Moreover, long-lived waste (which is mostly plutonium) is nuclear fuel that can be burned to produce much shorter-lived waste. Nuclear energy was once affordable (http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html) and could be affordable again if we chose to make it so, even without new technology. But by using new technology, the outlook is even better. Using Molten Salt Reactors, today's ultra-high safety standards can be achieved at a much lower cost (and with more legibility: how the safety works in an MSR is easier to understand than in a traditional reactor with its more complex and often probabilistic set of safety systems.)
I also find the possibility of Enhanced Geothermal Systems interesting because they can use some of the same technology as unconventional oil and gas drilling, making them a smart thing to include in a clean energy transition plan.
Second, food. Much of Earth's land area grows crops to feed animals that humans eat. Plant-based meat (and lab-grown meat) should require dramatically less land. I expect that switching over to this new meat supply will allow Earth to sustainably accommodate 10 billion humans at the same level of food consumption seen in the developed world. In addition, there are now various greenhouse and vertical-farming techniques that could increase Earth's carrying capacity even further.
Third, housing and other buildings. Not that much of Earth's land area is consumed (as a percent) for buildings for Earth's 7 billion humans, so I don't expect 10 billion to be a problem either.
I am optimistic that we can switch to sustainable living as time goes on. The trick to it is convincing people to work in reasonable ways toward that goal; e.g. carbon taxes have been really hard to pass in some places. But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win
On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. But of course, maybe there will be a breeakthrough. Regardless, a few of us could still visit other star systems within a few centuries, but only a few. Also, there's a good chance AGIs will visit other stars before we do, or kill us all, or both.
>>But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure:
"On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. "
A space elevator is much more efficient and should be doable with possible improvements in the relevant technology, mostly a much stronger cable than we can now make.
Like you I am very much a proponent of new reactor designs. I should sympathize with the anti-nuke folks since I was one myself. I can identify two turning points for me. One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble". Another was Chernobyl or rather the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone which turned out to be a nature preserve. I should mention a third which is the growing doubts about the "linear no threshold" model of radioactivity impacts.
Pebble beds are interesting and I don't know a lot about them, but what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"? I don't think there's any way not to end up with used fuel that is significantly radioactive for 500 years or more. [edit: not sure, 400 years-ish may be doable]
The key pieces of information for me about Chernobyl were that
(1) the reactor had design "flaws" that don't exist in *any* western reactor (I put "flaws" is in quotes because the most important flaws appear to be intentional decisions to achieve low cost, though some flaws were just bad engineering I guess),
(2) the 4000 or 9000 deaths referred to in two key studies are upper limits on cancer cases for all the decades after Chernobyl assuming the linear no-threshold, so actually it's a small disaster compared to the Banqiao Dam disaster, which in turn is a very small disaster compared to the ordinary air-pollution deaths we get from burning coal.
(3) Plus there's the recent paper concluding that relocation was unjustified for 75% of nearby residents, IIRC (and virtually all residents around Fukushima)
I haven't been able to work out if scientists are close to a consensus about linear no-threshold; depending on my search queries on Google scholar I've been able to get lots of papers saying LNT is dead, or else a mix of "LNT" and "no LNT" papers. Regardless, there's a great 1990 book by the late Bernard Cohen: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
As the book notes, it doesn't make that much difference if LNT is true because of how small the risks are to begin with.
David, I have no interest in discussing PBRs at this level of detail. I said:
>>One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble".<<
Try to forget I said that. Try this instead:
One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that if safe and simple to store.
If you want to pick at that sentence, please don't do it with me.
The irony here is that PBRs were not even the main point in my re-evaluation of nuclear power. The point then and now is that I realized my opposition to nuclear power was focused on a single design (pressurized water reactor) that is essentially 80 years old. (Research began during WW II.) I was ignorant of the many new possibilities: PBRs, thorium reactors, traveling-wave reactors, molten salt reactors, small modular reactors, etc.
At some point I realized I had discounted the power of technological development. I was acting as if humanity had encountered an unsolvable problem.
It's sad that the nuclear power problem became so convoluted and lost along a development and deployment pathway that is so frustrating (particularly in the US).
Now if you want to talk about Universal Basic Income in excruciating detail, I'm your man.
What was eye-opening for me about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is that so many animals are thriving including 100 rare species. Thriving much better than before the reactor explosion. This means that the presence of humans is more toxic than the presence of radioactivity (for wild animals).
This realization launched two independent lines of thought for me.
1) The negative effects of radioactivity are greatly overstated.
2) For wild animals to thrive, one must remove most humans.
There are exceptions of course. Coyotes are adapting to the presence of humans. However it would seem that less desirable wild animals (like Norway rats, pigeons, and grackles) are best at adapting.
>what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"?
>>In most stationary pebble-bed reactor designs, fuel replacement is continuous. Instead of shutting down for weeks to replace fuel rods, pebbles are placed in a bin-shaped reactor. A pebble is recycled from the bottom to the top about ten times over a few years, and tested each time it is removed. When it is expended, it is removed to the nuclear-waste area, and a new pebble inserted.<<
As long as there is useful radioactivity left, a pebble continues to be recycled into the reactor. "Exhausting radioactivity" may be overstating the case. I'm sure used up pebbles would still set off a geiger counter. But the level of radioactivity would be much lower. Presumably spent pebbles would no longer be capable of criticality which would make on-site storage simple.
The problem is that there isn't really any such thing as "useful radioactivity". Well, not in the power-generating context, at least. What is useful is nuclear potential energy, of fissile isotopes. That's not the same thing as radioactivity; the most useful fissile isotopes for power generation are only weakly radioactive.
But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy. It's just going to sit around for years to millennia gumming up the works and doing damage to any thing or any one in the vicinity.
There is no sort of nuclear fission power plant that doesn't produce some very intensely, dangerously radioactive waste that you're going to deal with. Saying "well, burn it again until we get out all the energy and it's harmless!", is like saying we should take a pile of arsenic-laden ash from a coal powerplant and burn it again; it just doesn't work that way.
That doesn't mean that nuclear fission power can't be used safely. It can, and it's an essential part of any realistic plan to address global warming. But you'll damage the credibility of that argument if you try to handwave away the waste-disposal problem by saying pebble bed reactors will just burn it all up.
>>But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy.<<
John, do you disagree with this statement?
>One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that is safe and simple to store.
By "safe" I mean the hot isotopes are safely bound within the removed pebbles (chemically isolated from the environment) and the fissile potential of the pebbles has been reduced to the point that you can store them in close proximity to each other. Both of these attributes make the spent pebbles simple to store. No pools needed. They are of course quite radioactive which must be allowed for.
I am quite aware that Uranium and Plutonium are only weakly radioactive. Radioactivity is inversely related to half-life.
Uranium-235 700,000,000 years
Uranium-238 4,500,000,000 years
Plutonium-239 24,100 years
Strontium-90 30 years
Cesium-137 30 years
And decaying isotopes in active pebbles would indeed contribute to the heat being generated in a PBR.
Please note that the phrase "full burnup" came from the DOE, not me.
I said:
>My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
I am hoping that ignoring true main points while picking on unimportant but imprecisely-stated details is the exception rather than the norm in this forum. And the next time I discourse with you and David I will assume that this is a hostile process and I must watch my words.
2. In spent (or partially spent) fuel, the overwhelming majority of radioactivity comes from fission products (the new elements created by splitting atoms). Since pebble beds are a kind of solid-fuel reactor, the fission products stay within the pebbles.
3. The radioactivity can't be turned off, you just have to wait a few years for it to become less extreme, and then about 500 years for the fission product radioactivity to die down to levels below uranium ore.
4. Unless the reactor is designed to (i) burn waste, or (ii) be refueled exclusively from thorium, its spent fuel will always have substantial levels of plutonium isotopes, the isotopes people complain will be radioactive for 10,000+ years. I expect that, typically, bebble beds are neither waste burners nor thorium breeders.
This is non-obvious, as the pebbles are covered in graphite, just what you don't want for the purpose of avoiding criticality. Graphite enables fission; it's basically having part of the reactor merged with the fuel. It certainly lowers the fuel density though; one document tells me "each fresh fuel pebble contains only 9 grams of low enriched uranium in a spherical fuel pebble having a mass of 200 grams" (https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/4374060.pdf)... that's under 1 gram of U-235 fuel at 9.6% enrichment. The same document states that spent fuel still has 2.5% enrichment (so, 0.225 grams), much higher than natural uranium (0.7%). But maybe they only take the fuel out when it's no longer possible to achieve criticality. It is also stated that spent fuel will have 0.154 grams of plutonium. The radioactivity-per-unit-mass will be lower than conventional fuel mainly because it will have dramatically more graphite than anything else.
>>The reactor continuously refuels by adding fresh pebbles daily in at the top, as older ones are discharged from the bottom of the core. Each pebble remains in the core for a little more than three years and are circulated through the core up to six times to achieve full burnup. The spent fuel is then placed directly into dry casks and stored on-site—without the need for interim or active cooling.<<
I never represented myself as an expert on reactors of any kind. My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
David, thank you for your extensive comments! I mean to address one point at a time.
>>"nature" is an abstract concept, <<
By "nature" I mean "the natural world" and by that I mean everything living on our planet excluding humans and things created by humans. In my mind that is a physical concept (has a mass).
Is that acceptably clear? Do I need to remove further ambiguity? What would be a better term for this?
So when I write:
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
What I mean is:
What's wrong with an Earth (living planet) with no humans on it?
Well, to me it can only be the life that matters, particularly consciousnesses; no one worries about "harming Mars" if we move in there. The relative importance of different life forms is arguable and different people have different opinions, so you should probably design your writing for these different audiences.
There are also people who seem to think Earth itself is valuable quite apart from the life forms on it, so that even if there were no animals whatsoever it would still "matter" somehow. But people don't come right out and say it that way, they only imply it, so I wonder if they haven't actually thought through the matter. As a child I wondered if the sun - compared to which Earth is nothing - was in hellish pain because it burned so hot. One must assume that nonliving things feel nothing and value nothing, otherwise life on Earth is far too small to matter in the scheme of things.
I am somewhat agnostic about which life forms matter. I think consciousnesses are of key importance, but we don't really know what consciousnesses are, so we can't figure out how conscious animals are. I also think avoiding suffering is super important, and I think the wilderness is filled with suffering, which humans may someday reduce. So this is ultimately the value humans offer to other life forms: someday we may reduce their suffering. And since we are also life, we can be of value to ourselves.
There is no life in nearby space and alien life in our galaxy probably constitutes a very small percentage. This is why I see space as the answer to human expansion. We can grow our numbers in space practically without limit without impacting any living thing.
Note that global farmland per capita has fallen by 50% in the past 50 years, and the trend continues downward. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that another 50% more humans can be fed without much change at all in total amount of cropland, given a few decades of time for adjustment and technology improvement.
If we double CO2 concentration, as the IPCC projects by the end of the century, that will raise the yield of most crops by about 30% (less for maize and sugar cane), which feeds almost 30% more humans from the same land with the same agricultural technology.
Well, sure, but it won't last. We can reasonably assume that green plants drive atmospheric CO2 as close to zero as they can without starving themselves, after all, they took it from 99% of the atmosphere to 300ppm ha ha. They probably have ancient epigenetic mechanisms for using CO2 more aggressively when there is more around. How long it takes them to recapture the extra CO2 is an interesting question, though. Decades? Centuries? Millenia?
And let us hope they don't overshoot, the way they did during the "Snowball Earth" era. Having the entire planet ice over would be a much bigger problem for human society than even the worst nightmares of the IPCC in the warming direction.
I used the verb "needs" in my first sentence advisedly. It's certainly not likely that increasing agricultural efficiency is anywhere cost-free, so people will only do it if the alternatives -- including simply clearing virgin land -- are more expensive, either naturally or through regulatory action to solve tragedies of the commons.
I don't think *knowledge* was the problem on the way up. I think it's a question of decision and will. And...governments are only as strong as their popular support, so what I'm asking is: if you have a world of enormous wild area and far less people -- indeed, even more so than long ago because we also imagine the people are much more concentrated in sophisticated cities -- that is, we imagine that, for example, the State of California is essentially wilderness except for a few dozen square miles around LA and SF -- why would there be strong *popular support* for putting strong legal frameworks around preserving wilderness, the environment, et cetera?
I think there probably wouldn't be. People would say -- as they said long ago -- why bother? Look! There's like infinity redwoods, why are you fussing if I want to chop down a few to improve my sight lines?
Hmm. History argues against you. We were much *less* careful about pollution, wildlife preservation, natural spaces, et cetera, when there *were* 1 billion of us. Not, I think, because we were stupider, but because the issue seemd much less urgent. Why would we behave differently on the way down below 1 billion than we did on the way up above it?
We are at 8bn now. So 10bn is a 25% increase in 80 years. In the last 80 years population grew 400%. Of course a lot of that new population will be getting richer.
In “things you read on the internet maybe aren’t true”, apparently the study showing that modern posture makes little protrusions on the back of your head grow more was weak -
“Nature Scientific Reports”, with the most articles of any journal, passing Plos One in the past, not exactly the highest quality standards lol. Not all nature brand journals are the same as Nature!
Yay science! Meanwhile, serious and accomplished work goes in quantum and bio and chem and materials and thousands more, but nobody cares about that (other than the entire world economy depending on it). One strange attitude I’ve seen around here and on adjacent Twitter stuff is that “university and science research is all bad and irrelevant”, and I don’t wanna sound like I’m supporting that. Lots isn’t, lots is, but do be suspicious (and if you aren’t, and don’t understand the thing more than superficially, you may not be getting anything out of the article / headline!
‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. Phone use is to blame, research suggests” headline at the time, although in the reduced form of “more force in those tendons makes the bones a hit bigger” as opposed to the “this shows satan is working through phones” that the article appeals to. But even the reduced form is questionable...
The tweeter messed up his currency conversion, but even 638USD (for the gloss white Skullpot) is surprisingly inexpensive for a luxury-market novelty toilet.
I'm blowing through several ~$10 kindle books a week. It seems silly not to sign up for kindle unlimited at $10 a month to feed my reading habit. Is there some down side. (Besides not 'owning' the books.)
Ironically, one of the first books to "disappear" in this way was Orwell's 1984, but that was because it has an ambiguous copyright status and they weren't 100% sure they had the rights to it.
I was reading about things that have a significant influence on student outcomes, and I came across something rather interesting in the late Robert Slavin's blog.
While he was complaining about John Hattie's awful methodology, he off-handedly mentioned:
> If you are familiar with the What Works Clearinghouse (2007), or our own Best-Evidence Syntheses or Evidence for ESSA, you will know that individual studies, except for studies of one-to-one tutoring, almost never have effect sizes as large as +0.40, Hattie’s “hinge point.” This is because WWC, BEE, and Evidence for ESSA all very carefully screen individual studies. We require control groups, controls for pretests, minimum sample sizes and durations, and measures independent of the treatments. Hattie applies no such standards, and in fact proclaims that they are not necessary.
There's something very important in there - the value of one-on-one tutoring.
One of the interesting things about homeschooling is that it doesn't produce massively worse outcomes than traditional schooling; homeschooled students seem to come out about as well or slightly ahead of traditionally schooled students.
This seems to imply that trained teachers are almost useless, having virtually no impact at all on student performance.
However, if one-on-one tutoring has a very large effect size (greater than 0.4 standard deviations), then this might explain why these untrained teachers do so well - homeschooled students may indeed have much worse teachers, but because the advantage of having a one-on-one tutor is so large, it "cancels out".
It would be interesting to see what effect totally untrained teachers would have in the classroom, but it feels like no one is willing to run that experiment.
One question is how much teacher training has to do with becoming better at one-on-one instruction, and how much has to do with managing a classroom or grades or special needs kids or any of the other stuff that most homeschooling parents don't have to deal with?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yehowah rather than Yahweh: How comes it's hallelujah and Elijah rather than hallelujeho and Elijeh?
People who think the Tetragrammaton was pronounced Yahweh rather than Yehowah: How comes it's Yehoshua and Yehoḥanan rather than Yahshua and Yahḥanan?
Obviously it is a quantum superposition of both names.
https://interestingengineering.com/its-official-scientists-synthesized-starch-from-co2-in-a-world-first
If it's cheaper to make carbohydrates from CO2 than to use photosynthesis, what does food production end up looking like?
It's not cheaper. Indeed, it's way more expensive than planting a field of corn and harvesting it. But it's more efficient in its use of energy, in a strict kJ in/out sense. However, since the corn can use the kJ raining down from the sky each day, while the chemical plant would (typically) need to burn fossil fuels to get its kJ, it's not clear the increased efficiency is of any use.
I mean, photosynthesis *is* making carbohydrate from CO2, but if doing it in a chemical plant is less expensive (and the same goes for everything else we need food for), then it probably winds up as fields of solar panels supplying reactors in the cities - the reactors are in the cities because transporting electricity is cheaper than transporting the products.
not sure those "fields of solar panels" would not turn out to be much more land-wasting and less energy-efficient over-all than "traditional" highly-efficient agro-business-"fields of gold". - With nuclear-fission ("power too cheap to meter") and a global population of 89 billion, those reactors for sugars/fats and probably proteins will be found in any mayor district of whatever that world-spreading town will be called.
I was thinking that people can't just live on carbohydrates, so there will still be some sort of agriculture. But what?
I mean, if it's literally just carbohydrates, then you take out the staple calorie crops - rice in particular is very low in everything except calories; all the rest have at least some vitamins, although they're not necessarily good sources - and that's it (this is still a huge deal).
These days shelled white rice and white flour are carbohydrates only (starch). But traditional crops had way more nutrients and vitamins: whole grains rice, wheat etc. Wheat contains a whole lot of proteins - up to 20% (called gluten or wheat glue), lots of grains/seeds contain a whole lot of fats or oils. Parboiled rice is pressure cooked before shelling which presses the nutrients from the shell into the core. And so on
Peru's electricity is 220 volts, 60 hz, and Chile's electricity is 220 volts, 50 hz. How much of a problem does this pose to interoperability of electrical devices from one country to the other? A 10 hz difference doesn't sound like much.
Putting the political factors aside, how technically difficult would it be for one of the countries to adopt the other's electrical standard (Peru throttles down by 10 hz or Chile goes up by 10 hz)?
It doesn't seem to me to pose any problem for the end user. Almost nothing depends on the frequency of the AC. I suppose long ago there might have been some devices with clocks that would use the line frequency for timing, but I suspect those days are long gone, with the ubiquity of crystal-controlled oscillators.
However, the technical challenges for electricity generation and transmission are nontrivial. It's quite important, as you might imagine, for different sources and sinks of electrical voltage to have their voltage and phase matched up when they combine -- if you combined two AC voltages 180° out of phase, for example, then they would just cancel and the net result would be a reduction in power in the combined current. So the voltage and phase of all the power generators and transmission circuits has to be synchronized within a few tenths of a Hz:
https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/preparing-to-synchronize-a-generator-to-the-grid
The main interoperability problems will be with devices that incorporate clocks or timers. A digital clock made for 60Hz will run slow on 50Hz. Most computers, laptops, cellphones etc don't care about frequency. Anything with an AC motor will run slower, but most appliances have DC motors which shouldn't be affected.
When I was a kid my family moved from the US (110/60) to a country that had 220/50, and we took a number of household appliances and electronics with us. We could use transformers to step up the voltage, and pretty much everything worked fine - except we had no way to change the frequency, so anything with a clock (the VHS player) was always slow.
It's gets even better in Japan - one 50 Hz grid and one 60 Hz grid.
I am not sure if this is really related to your question, but 3-phase AC motor speeds depend on the frequency. So a motor running at 1800 RPM on 60 Hz will run at 1500 RPM on 50 Hz. Engineers plan for this based on the expected power supply frequency.
Most electronic devices (computers, TVs, phone chargers, etc) don’t care.
Turns out our special young sun is calming down and fits way more socially in at home, in school and at the grandparents home by taking SSRI every morning. Before he was starting to get engry some days every 10 Minutes over minor things. He is just taking taking half of my dose (5mg, 30kg weight) of escitaliprame and we didn't get a prescription for him after half a year of talking and testing with a local state-owned hospital specialized in psychiatry of kids and teenagers. The doctors just are trying to play safe for themselves and leaning not a millimeter out of the window by conducting a 4-week long test with a given SSRI medication. They told us the rules in our country demand a year long talk and behavioural therapy as a first step and a SSRI only as the sexond, parallel step. This would mean year long stress for the sun and us parents.
So now the question for us parents is: how can we go forward an legalize his medication without getting sued by a doctor following strictly the books.
In our country there is 1 SSRI prescribable for kids from an age of 8. We heard there should exist some children's doctors doing prescribing of SSRI. But how to find, approach and talk with them?
Now, this is going to sound the teeniest bit harsh, but whatever.
You, my dear sir, are a fuckhead.
Sure, it's way more convenient to have your kid docile and drugged-up, that's the same rationale as Victorian dosing of infants with opium:
https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-medicine-opium-the-poor-childs-nurse/
"What do doctors know, ho-ho-ho, I'll just share my prescription with my young child, going by guess and by God, and if it makes his liver explode, so what? You can't get any child quieter than a dead child!"
Ah, you sir, are the fuckhead. Marcel is a loving and kind parent who is trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world.
Have you, Deiseach, ever been prescribed a psychoactive drug. If so, you may already know what I'm about to tell you. Doctors are prescribing these powerful drugs "by guess and by God". "Let's try Wellbutrin for six weeks and see how it goes."
FYI.
What age is the child? Escitalopram is not prescribed for those under the age of 12 years. There has been a safety study done on dosing children ages 7-11:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/results/NCT01198795
but this has not shifted the recommendation on age to give children anti-depressants:
https://www.fda.gov/media/116420/download
"On March 19, 2009, escitalopram was approved for the treatment of MDD in adolescents 12 to 17 years old. Safety and effectiveness have been established in adolescents 12 to 17 years old for the treatment of MDD. Maintenance efficacy is supported from extrapolation of data from adult studies along with comparisons with racemic citalopram pharmacokinetic parameters in adults and adolescents. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients
less than 12 years old with MDD. Safety and effectiveness have not been established in pediatric patients less than 18 years of age with GAD. Adverse events were generally similar to those observed in adults."
There are side effects:
"Lexapro is not approved for use in children in adolescents. When taken by pediatric populations, side effects can include: increased thirst, muscle twitching, nose bleeds, difficult urination, heavy menstrual periods, and slowed growth rate. For children or adolescents treated with Lexapro, your physician should check vital statistics and evaluate height and weight. If any problems are found, your doctor may recommend discontinuing treatment."
And there seems to be only one drug licenced to treat anxiety in children 7 years of age and older:
"For childhood anxiety disorders, only one medication, duloxetine, has received FDA approval and can be prescribed “on label” for children 7 years of age and older with generalized anxiety disorder."
Granted, Marcel doesn't live in the USA so his home country may allow any and every kind of medication, but I'm betting it has *some* restrictions around who can give medication to children and what kind.
Escitalopram is for major depressive disorder and anxiety. This does not sound like what Marcel is describing: "angry every day every ten minutes over minor things". The doctors they were attending advised against drugging up the kid until after a year of other interventions had not worked.
But our friend here knows better, and now the kid is sedated into a state of docility, he's not a problem at home, in school, or at granny's house. Previous generations used to achieve the same effect with opium or alcohol for children.
"Loving and kind parents trying to thread a course through a very imperfect world" kept the charlatans peddling Miracle Mineral Solution/Supplement in business by ignoring what the medical professionals were telling them about their children with autism, and when the force-feeding their kids with chlorine dioxide resulted in the kids vomiting up bloody shreds of their digestive systems, the parents were convinced these were the "worms" alleged to cause autism and were convinced the treatment was working. Being "loving and kind" did not prevent them from doing severe harm to their children.
https://www.autism.org/dangerous-miracle-mineral-solution/
So yeah: he's a fuckhead for ignoring the doctors, you're a fuckhead for apologia for harming kids under the guise of "but the parents love them".
All the prescribing of anti-depressants for children is assumed to be done on medical advice and under medical supervision. Even for ordinary ailments, you are not supposed to share your prescription medication with another adult, or give them tablets you have not finished taking. "It works okay for me, so it must be okay for my kid" is *not* a good rule of thumb, and we would heavily censure any father who decided that a glass of whiskey or XXX porn videos were okay for their young kid. I'm on a rake of medications, if I had young kids I sure as hell would not decide "well this might help them with their own problems" and start sharing my prescriptions.
I would think your main legal risk is whatever exists in your country that functions as a child welfare agency. Most would probably have significant concerns about you sharing your psychiatric meds with your kid on your own initiative, without a doctor's prescription, especially if there is some specific statute laying down conditions for child use of that particular medication. In most US states the child welfare agencies are a nightmare with which to deal, and once you come to their attention it's very hard to escape completely, so I would not do this except under conditions of great need.
Thanks for your perspective. That's exactly our situation. Guidelines are pretty first world-like strict for medication of kids. But all that is with the background of 1) normal average circumstances 2) the idea that doing something actively which later could turn out bad with 1% chance is perceived as 10x worse as just doing nothing and bad things happen with 10% chance.
Till late 50's, early 60's lots of children were treated very badly in this countty - like some protectionless groups of adults as well. So now we have the opposite situation. Lots of professionell personal is very reluctant to lean out to much of the window just to play safe (for them). My wife is a teacher in a private school for special teenagers with ADHS, Autism, Asperger and more who were kicked out of public schools. She tells a lot if heart breaking stories how these kids suffered because just nobody tried the obvious, started to connect with these kids and just ask, what's up. Just today a teenage boy, who is doing nothing in school since months each lesson told her, that he's woken up every morning at 4:30am by his shift working parenrs, then sitting in front of the TV till 8am, staring at the wall in school till 4pm and being awake till 11pm in the night. This boy foreseeable will be a totally different 2.0 version of himself after just sleeping full 8 hours a couple of days.
Just a random example.
I think you have identified the key perspective (avoiding the attention of any child welfare agency) in addition to avoiding any harm to the child.
When I began reading your post I thought the subject was sun spots and solar minimums!
In which country do you reside?
Do doctors sue people?
No, doctors don't sue here. They might inform a child welfare agency or the police instead
Sorry, foreign language, auto correction intervening, no chance of correcting a post afterwards... 'Our son' was meant indeed.
It didn't take long for me to figure that out!
I thought the same lmao
That sounds like something to ask a lawyer. Sorry do be of no further help.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/impossible-particle-discovery-adds-key-piece-to-the-strong-force-puzzle-20210927/
I love this:
“ a double-charmed tetra-quark.”
It’s Shakespearean.
More Joyce than Shakespeare.
and more like Finnegans Wake than Ulysses
I am sure this is the right place to pose a question. If one takes the entire span of years that the universe has been around, whatever billion figure that is and were to reframe that period of time as a 24 hour day, then what would the average human lifespan correspond to as fractions of seconds?
I was musing that there might be some sort of analogy made between that and subatomic particles.
What fraction of the age of the universe is one day?
1 ÷ 14,000,000,000 * 365
A human life in seconds = 70*365*24*60*60
Human life in seconds as fraction of universe:
70*365*24*60*60/(14,000,000,000*365) =
0.000432 seconds
.432 milliseconds
Or if the universe is analogized to one year, an 80-year lifespan would be 0.18 seconds.
(80/13'800'000'000 * 365*24*60*60)
Or if the universe is analogized to Central Park NYC, an 80-year lifespan would be 20 square centimeters.
(80/13'800'000'000 * 3'410'000 m³ * 100^2)
Here’s Danny Glover’s take on that in “Grand Canyon”
One man’s life? That’s too small to even have a name.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=D3JmqDsnfbw
But what does it work out to in numbers?
Using the numbers from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time
it's about 0.46 milliseconds.
Cool. Thanks.
Its longer than I might’ve guessed.
Yeah that’s a pretty good scene.
I saw this question on the English Stack Exchange and find it surprising that there are no answers:
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/572885/is-eth-as-in-the-verb-buildeth-always-the-singular-is-this-inscription-a
It appears that a typo has survived on one of the Hoover Dam's towers without ever being commented on (at least on the internet). Is the person who asked the question correct that this is a typo?
I like the gracious sentiment of the inscription. I learned something about early English verb suffixes and I bookmarked an interesting spot on Stack Exchange. Many thanks Mr... uh Anonymous.
Who was that masked man?
Yes. The suffix indicates third-person singular.
So the progression over time would be "we buildeth" --> "we builden" --> "we build"? Still seems like the Hoover dam inscription is just an error, then.
I’m sure this isn’t an original observation, but -
lmao AI learned how to do art (clip+Some GAN, TADNE, etc) before it learned to code and learned to operate mechanical moving robots. Take that ... everyone’s guesses about that beforehand
For some definitions of "art" all that an AI had to do was create a visual medium of any kind, based on any inputs. I enjoy some art, but the field as a whole is way too easy to gimmick because what we call art can vary so much without good explanation (to a layman at least). Asking an AI to create a masterpiece Rembrandt-level painting without copying Rembrandt would be more interesting than this (https://www.cnn.com/style/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-art/index.html) which apparently involved taking actual pictures of famous paintings as part of the AI programming. As a real painting of a real thing, it's terrible. The eyes and face are all messed up, the coloring is off, etc. As "art" it can be considered good as some kind of abstract thing.
Try to write some code where you fudge the instructions because that's more interesting, and you'll see why it took AI much longer to be able to do it.
How worried should I be about possible Natural Gas shortages this winter?
My instinct is that this easily could be "as bad as COVID" in terms of life disruption.
Where do you live?
Can anyone recommend book/blogs on the Chinese economy?
I'm interested especially in the historical transition to a more open economy
Thank for all the suggestions. I'll have a look at them
Not to recommend another book I haven’t read.....
but I grabbed https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Power-Chinas-Twenty-first-Century-ebook/dp/B00BH0VU4W/ from scholars stage, and it looks a bit to be what you want -“ Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation—culminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?
Scholars stage is also a china related blog, not really economic though
Ronald Coase's final book, coauthored with Ning Wang, is _How China Became Capitalist_ and very interesting. There is a long review of it up on my web page:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Academic.html
(search for "A Very Coasian Revolution")
The book that made me emotionally grok the opening of the Chinese recovery was "A Chinese Life" by Li Kunwu. It covers Li's experiences growing up in China from 1955 to about 2005. He includes several revealing vignettes about how ordinary Chinese people navigated the change from planned economy to open economy: how some got rich, and others couldn't handle losing the "iron ricebowl" they were promised and were unsuited to the life of an entrepreneur. It doesn't have much in the way of statistics, but it gives an excellent emotional understanding of how much life changed for poor and middle class Chinese.
https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Life-Philippe-Otie/dp/1906838550
Sorry, autocorrect changed "opening of China's economy" to "the Chinese recovery".
palladium mag for articles on China, although they’re not very central / comprehensive, they have a unique approach - just fun to read IMO
For the economic development, I’ve heard how Asia works, although it’s about all of Asia and I haven’t read it and it seems like the sort of unifying large scale book that’ll miss a lot
not really the best person to answer this one tbh, but in case that’s interesting
the book is “how Asia works”
Too short notice for me to join in Madrid last weekend. Any plans to repeat soon?
The Solution to Many Problems: One Billion Persons on Earth
[Revised & expanded September 2021]
Author: Peter Rodes Robinson
How many humans are too many?
...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vM6FRpKebtTTlQYBUWsan06x_gxLP9XjZTaGyNH2GLk/
I would love to get feedback on this article: positive, negative, picky, useful...
Whatever.
>The human race will run out of time before it runs out of space to develop.
Not with any significant growth rate, it won't (and I'm not seeing fertility staying below 2 forever, at least not without draconian state intervention; subcultures with high fertility and high retention exist (see: Amish), and once you get to biological immortality and removing menopause, the "I want a million babies" people start being a very much non-negligible contribution as well). 0.1% growth for a million years is a multiplier of 1.1 * 10^434, which is absurdly greater than the amount of matter within a million lightyears (or indeed the observable universe).
The big exception is if FTL is possible - more specifically, if you can use FTL to go to a place for the first time (as opposed to, say, FTL wormholes that have to be tugged places at STL). Estimates for the size of the actual universe are incredibly variable due to our inability to directly observe it, but the larger guesses such as "10^10^10^122" and "infinite" would definitely give us more Lebensraum than we could use.
In terms of birth rate - i would recommend anyone here, especially long time posters who are smart and very skilled, have lots of kids - but I’m just not sure what LP happen in the future as technology evolved and radically changes more, so idk about future predictions of childbearing rates at all
Also consider sperm donation, although I think personally raising children has a large effect that isn’t seen in the heckin twin studies because nobody actually does it properly
But I say that because despite adopting some goals that would heavily increase local birth rate, it seems like the smart folks still are adopting them less than the, well, not, and that seems to hold within most groups I can think of. But I’m not even sure the effect of that will be that great, because again social stuff and technology effects continue to change and accelerate and we respond to them late often
You might find some interest in a very old piece of mine, in which I tried to estimate whether the net externalities from having one more child were positive or negative and concluded that the results were so uncertain that I could not sign the sum.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Laissez-Faire_In_Popn/L_F_in_Population.html
That was back when the thread of population played the same role in the popular discourse that climate does now, the looming threat that all the experts knew was hanging over us. What happened since then was the precise opposite of the predictions — population in poor countries continued to grow, calories per capita in poor countries went up instead of down, poverty in poor countries went down instead of up.
It is always possible that the predictions were correct, just off by fifty years or so — but the fact that the predictions were made with confidence should be a reason to lower one's faith in both the arguments and the people who made them.
This is great! Setious critiques. Thanks to everyone who responded. I will be taking one point at a time.
I suggest imagining that your readers are the prospective parents thinking of a third child, and to address the motives that are important to them.
>>I suggest imagining that your readers are the prospective parents thinking of a third child, and to address the motives that are important to them.<<
I'm not trying to convince parents they should not have a third child. Fertility is declining rapidly already (everywhere but Africa). With many persons having one or no child, there is certainly space for some to have three.
The suggestion to try to imagine my readers more clearly is right on.
I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. It covers a lot of topics that may or may not be related, especially with the 10 billion humans living in space and the paragraphs after that. I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.
Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there. The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs. After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting (other than very speculative space habitats we couldn't possibly work on now). Lowering our population actually makes it much harder to achieve space colonization. We would never be able to spread out even in our own solar system with a reproductive rate below replacement. We would need to be far above replacement, actually. Without any intervening changes, you go from a current bad situation to colonizing all of existence. Other than speculating about the future, what is the purpose of your article?
Some other notes -
You mention growing technology, a steady state economy, and growing to 10+ billion people living in space. A steady state economy doesn't fit at all with the other two. Any meaningful technological growth will expand the economy. A steady state economy will not permit expansion into space (or people can starve as you transition resources to moving other people into space, which makes the problem mentioned above about not enough people even worse).
>>I would recommend sticking to your basic points about the need for a limit on the numbers of humans and determining what the correct number is or should be.<<
I think I will break out the space part to a separate article with a link. That would give me room to expand on the optimum population part. People interested in space exploration can follow the link.
Thank you for your comments.
>>I find the article itself to be high in speculation and low on grounded fact. <<
Could you give me some examples? Which parts are most speculative?
>>Right now your article is a bit weak on justification for reducing the number of people, and your proposed means is already in effect. <<
What is your personal opinion? Do you think 8-10 billion is sustainable indefinitely? I would like to reference some experts who agree with that if you know of some.
If you believe 8-10 B is NOT sustainable, what facts convince you of this?
>>You don't suggest any alternatives to peaking at 9.7 billion (which you argue is far too high) and gradually decreasing from there.<<
There is no acceptable alternative. A world wide pandemic is not reducing the population. Nuclear war would work. If we abandon the common assumption that the population of Africa is certain to triple, the peak could happen sooner and decline faster. Perhaps I should say that.
>>The timetable, according to your article, for when that will happen is also far too late to achieve the necessary corrections you mention in your opening paragraphs.<<
I believe it's going to be very rough but the human race will survive.
I'm saying:
* We need to reduce the Earth's population.
* The population is already too large which will cause great suffering.
* The population will begin shrinking in this century.
* The population will shrink for centuries.
* Eventually the Earth will be such a pleasant place that the population will stop shrinking.
Which statements do you disagree with?
>>After reading it, I find myself unsure what you are suggesting<<
I think that things will go better if we understand what is going on. For example some (many?) people will be alarmed when the population starts to fall and try to prevent the fall. In fact this is exactly what we need.
I can work on clarifying why I am writing and what I am suggesting.
[More points to come.]
The history of humanity is filled with people saying that there are too many people, followed by periods of rapid population growth when things worked just fine. Malthus was wrong on all of his specific predictions, so I feel the need to question his underlying assumptions. Intuitively he made sense, but he was flat out wrong.
I don't know if 10 billion is too many, or if the number is actually much larger or much smaller. By physical space, we could fit far more people. Something I heard on SSC a few years back was a comment that we could colonize inhospitable parts of Earth, like deserts and Antarctica, far easier than living in space stations or even on Mars. If we could make a sustainable space station for 20 million people, we could easily find a way to live where nobody lives right now, and have the benefit of easier travel and plentiful oxygen. If we can grow crops in space, we can grow crops in the Sahara.
I'm neutral on whether we should allow populations to decline on their own, and adamantly against trying to force them down. Declining populations have many medium term (50-100 years) effects on economies and family life, which are non-negligible problems. 300 years of declining population would create some very weird and disturbing situations, and I think an actively declining population could easily lead to wars, resource scarcity, and massive social adjustments that would be hard to predict. That they are happening naturally without overt government coercion may be reason to leave it alone, but places like South Korea are going to struggle immensely over the next few generations if they lose half their population per generation. The younger generations will be burdened with caring for the older, with even fewer people to help below that. Infrastructure will go into disrepair and eventually collapse, including infrastructure we currently consider essential. Not that these are unsolvable issues, but I want to be clear that population decline is not an automatic good. We could easily see a weakened South Korea get conquered by a North Korea with high birth rates after a few generations. Right now North Korea is in no shape to do anything, but we're talking about a pretty radical change.
"Indefinitely" is a tough word, because it implies a steady state, which we've rarely had and certainly not in modern times. Could we find ways to sustain 10 billion or more people on Earth with reasonable qualify of life? I certainly think it's quite possible, especially over the 300 year timeframe you are talking about. And I do believe the population will need to level off at some point, as there really will come a point when it's not possible for the planet to hold more people. For all I really know that point might be 40 billion people, with most of them living in underwater colonies or in the sky like the Jetsons, or something else we never thought about.
My response here is very speculative, but I think in the same way that your article is speculative. You gesture at lots of possibilities, and cite people who say that those things may/will happen, but the scientific justification for your view feels weak, and based heavily on Malthusian thinking.
I generally disagree with * points 1, 2, and 5, with some uncertainty on 3 and 4. Not that it's impossible that you are right, just that I am at least skeptical.
If you added a section (perhaps instead of your spacefaring section) that offered some thoughts on how to deal with a declining population and accept it, that would be a pretty solid ending to your article. Right now countries are looking at the population crunch (think Social Security in the US, and how it's funded - like pretty much all programs to care for the elderly) and how difficult it will be to handle those problems in the timeframe we're talking about. The reason a country or individual might push back is due to those concerns. Who wants to live in a country with 80 million retired people and 20 million kids being supported by 40 million working people?
>>I generally disagree with * points 1, 2, and 5, with some uncertainty on 3 and 4<<
If the population size in China is falling within ten years, would that have an effect on your expectations?
I'm not sure I'm following your question or it's purpose, so feel free to elaborate as needed. In regards to #3 and #4, China losing population would certainly be a contributing factor in my thinking. My skepticism about those two points is more in line with "non-Western" countries having growing populations now. It's easy to draw a straight line from current trends and make a prediction, it's much harder to predict second-order effects. Maybe a declining 1st World population encourages other countries to increase population such that there is no overall decline. As I said, I'm quite uncertain about that, but open to the possibility. If that were true, it would affect our planning and what we recommend for people to do. If, for instance, 3rd World countries would see population increases that play off of declines in the 1st World, but would naturally reduce population growth if the 1st World held steady, then I would argue that we should encourage growth in the 1st World, where there is already abundant infrastructure and the means to care for these people, rather than encourage growth in the 3rd World and spend enormous amounts of money and time tearing down excess infrastructure in one part of the world to move it to another. Of course, if there's no relationship on overall population, then encouraging growth in the 1st World could end up being a bad idea.
Let's go all the way back to one of my basic assumptions: that we don't want a slowly dying natural world which I equate with a rate of extictions above the background rate.
Now I could be completely wrong about that perhaps the majority of humans don't care about extinctions.
Where do you land?
Rate of extinctions above background rate doesn't equal "slowly-dying natural world". Nature isn't analogous to a person where you can talk about "how healthy" the person is and where sufficient unhealth results in total death; ecosystems can be thrown into chaos, but there are almost always winners as well as losers.
There are obvious scenarios - possibly-anthropogenic scenarios, even - in which the natural world would be destroyed. #1 is humanity reaching Kardashev 1+ and consuming all the light that powers nature (there are some things that wouldn't immediately die from lack of energy, like submarine-volcano ecosystems, but it's not obvious whether those could survive in the long-term without sun-powered life recycling nutrients and in any case that's a much-reduced biosphere). #2 is a true Runaway Greenhouse, in which the temperature goes up to 500 degrees, the water boils off into space, all organic matter on the surface burns and the planet becomes essentially a copy of Venus with sulphuric acid clouds - evolution has constraints (e.g. you can't evolve to not use DNA/RNA/proteins) that do not permit survival in those temperatures or in nearly-pure sulphuric acid. But these are specific apocalyptic scenarios with an obvious nonsurvivable criterion, not a vague "the environment being stretched beyond what it can bear".
Mass extinctions have happened a lot of times before; they change the distribution of species and in the short-term the number of species, but the actual amount of living matter on the planet changes only for the briefest instant - Moloch doesn't leave pennies lying on the ground.
I find the link to extinctions in 1800 somewhat dubious, as that's the timeframe where we starting cataloging species. Prior to that we didn't have a systematic approach, so it's much harder to estimate how many species were actually dying out (especially in places Europeans wouldn't have had access). We now discover far more species going extinct, and surmise that humans have some/most/all to do with it, but that may be less true than we think - we could just be that much better at cataloging. We have also discovered tens of thousands of species that went extinct before humans existed - how many more went extinct and didn't leave any records behind? The more we study the more species we find that went extinct without any human help. I don't trust that our understanding of "background rate of extinction" is accurate.
Putting that aside, I am concerned on some levels with human encroachment on animal habitats, and definitely believe that humans can have a devastating effect on certain ecosystems. I think that most people have moderate levels of concern about animal extinctions, but correctly recognize that there isn't much we can do about it and maybe not a lot that humans are doing to cause it. Some specific examples, like African elephants, are directly attributable to humans. Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.
The idea that we have a "slowly dying world" does not appear to me to be correct. Overall there are many more square miles of land where there are few to no humans than there are of tightly clustered humans. Those tight clusters of urbanization seem overwhelming to people in them or close to them, but they represent a pretty small portion of the planet. A quick Google shows 3% of the surface is urbanized. Which means 97% isn't, including almost all of the oceans. Sure, human waste shows up all across the Pacific, but it's more of a perceived blight than an actual devastation. Go visit some truly rural areas, and you can find land that hasn't seen a human in years, with almost no human interaction. It's quite liberating. Or check out Chernobyl, which within my lifetime was a busy industrial center, a nuclear disaster, and is now a wildlife refuge full of nature. Nature isn't so weak or beaten as many want to claim.
We’re Living Through One of the Most Explosive Extinction Episodes Ever https://nyti.ms/3AX7JVV
>>Random insect/bird/rodent no one has ever seen #0192881 probably isn't. I have a real problem with people killing elephants. I don't actually care about random insects dying out. Maybe I should, but I leave the burden of proof on those that say I should. Too many of those species die for me to know anything about them all, and it's a tall ask that I try.<<
Even before I read your response I was considering focussing on mammals as a proxy for the natural world that I am concerned about. (Because as you explain, we can relate to mammals much better than insects.)
For example I could ask the reader: would you care if a thousand years from now there was only a dozen species of mammals left in the wild on Earth?
Or ... One Billion Americans by Matthew Ysglesias. if you want to not have industrial society (and its future), a billion is high. If you want technology, what’s wrong with today, we can just use even more of the planet and make even more peeps
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21449512/matt-yglesias-one-billion-americans
Por-que no los dos?
Why not nature AND humans? As a human I'm very much in favor of that. The question is: What would an American Bison think? When there were some 30 million bisons in North America in 1400, were they pining for humans? Or were they quite satisfied to exist without them indefinitely,?
And since I have no way of knowing whether a bison can contemplate near extinction at the hands of humans or certain extinction from a comet impact, the question is more like: What would a bison with a human brain think?
Contemplating this question as Peter/Bison Advocate, I would need to know what kind of humans are we talking about? Humans that would shoot bison from a passing train in order to crush native peoples? Or humans that would set aside vast areas of the continent so that bison and many other species could survive and also be prepared to protect the planet from a comet strike?
I (Peter/Bison Advocate) could embrace the presence of the latter type of human.
https://www.flatcreekinn.com/bison-americas-mammal/
I read Lambert as joking "why not 1 billion humans AND 1 billion Americans"
I would like to hear more from both posters (los dos)!
>A world fertility rate of 1.4 would result in 1 billion persons on Earth around the year 2300.
I'm pretty sure all of the problems related to resource extraction and pollution will be solved by 2100 and be well on the way by much sooner than that. There are much easier ways to solve these problems than depopulating the world.
It would also be worthwhile keeping one foot in reality while thinking up ideas to solve problems.
>>It would also be worthwhile keeping one foot in reality while thinking up ideas to solve problems.<<
Which part do you think is unreal? Do you dispute that fertility rates are falling rapidly?
>>I'm pretty sure all of the problems related to resource extraction and pollution will be solved by 2100<<
Have you expounded on this idea where I could read more detail? Or can you reference some other authors.
Presumably that would include reversing global warming. What approximate year do you expect that to happen?
Reversing global warming is a political problem. The technology is there.
When you say "the technology is there" do you imagine the solution is easy? If it easy, one would expect to happen quickly. Certainly within a decade. You don't expect that, do you? Because you recognize that there is a lot more involved than just technology.
I'm thinking the planet will begin to cool sometime in the 22nd century because of a shrinking population. Do you expect cooling sooner? When?
Same with building a space habitat. I expect habitats within a thousand years. When do you expect the Earth will begin to cool?
I don’t expect habitats at all, or I can’t give a date. The technology for renewables is there. Wind alone can provide 18 times more electricity than we need. (Source IEA https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/offshore-wind-technical-potential-and-electricity-demand-2018 )
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
I don't see why this is reasonable. "nature" is an abstract concept, like "life" or "evolution" or "welfare"; it doesn't exist as an entity in reality and so cannot have feelings. Perhaps you mean animals, like hens and foxes. Perhaps these have feelings, but in nature their existence is usually meagre, and one will eagerly kill the other without a second thought. Humans are animals too, and they sometimes kill each other as well, but at least they have the potential to make lasting truces. This is one reason to keep humans around. Another is our unusual ability to make discoveries, so that perhaps one day we will scientifically unravel the Hard Problem of Consciousness. A third reason is that if you decide not to keep humans around, they're not going to take kindly to your decision and the resulting animosity will be unproductive.
Which leads me point out that even if 2 billion is better than 7 or 10, it's going to be ridiculously hard to get everyone on board with a depopulation plan.
Luckily I don't think depopulation is necessary. First, let's talk energy: we can do 100% clean energy, lower pollution and stop global warming, no problem. Especially if we accept nuclear energy: it consumes very little land for the electricity produced, and all the waste produced in a plant's lifetime can easily fit on the site of the power plant itself. Moreover, long-lived waste (which is mostly plutonium) is nuclear fuel that can be burned to produce much shorter-lived waste. Nuclear energy was once affordable (http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html) and could be affordable again if we chose to make it so, even without new technology. But by using new technology, the outlook is even better. Using Molten Salt Reactors, today's ultra-high safety standards can be achieved at a much lower cost (and with more legibility: how the safety works in an MSR is easier to understand than in a traditional reactor with its more complex and often probabilistic set of safety systems.)
I also find the possibility of Enhanced Geothermal Systems interesting because they can use some of the same technology as unconventional oil and gas drilling, making them a smart thing to include in a clean energy transition plan.
Second, food. Much of Earth's land area grows crops to feed animals that humans eat. Plant-based meat (and lab-grown meat) should require dramatically less land. I expect that switching over to this new meat supply will allow Earth to sustainably accommodate 10 billion humans at the same level of food consumption seen in the developed world. In addition, there are now various greenhouse and vertical-farming techniques that could increase Earth's carrying capacity even further.
Third, housing and other buildings. Not that much of Earth's land area is consumed (as a percent) for buildings for Earth's 7 billion humans, so I don't expect 10 billion to be a problem either.
I am optimistic that we can switch to sustainable living as time goes on. The trick to it is convincing people to work in reasonable ways toward that goal; e.g. carbon taxes have been really hard to pass in some places. But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure: https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win
On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. But of course, maybe there will be a breeakthrough. Regardless, a few of us could still visit other star systems within a few centuries, but only a few. Also, there's a good chance AGIs will visit other stars before we do, or kill us all, or both.
>>But see Ted Halstead presenting a Republican vision for a "viral" carbon fee & dividend that naturally tends to spread to other nations via economic pressure:
https://www.ted.com/talks/ted_halstead_a_climate_solution_where_all_sides_can_win<<
Great talk. Easy to agree with because I've already endorsed three of the four planks:
(H) HUMAN BEHAVIOR CHANGE (8)
* A serious carbon tax with the proceeds devoted to universal basic income
* Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism
https://tinyurl.com/HowStopAGW
I also endorse the final plank: Regulatory Rollback. I always prefer using market mechanisms to regulations.
"On the other hand, I don't see how space travel can be sustainable within a few centuries, due to the need for inefficient rockets, because it's so darn hard to build anything more efficient. "
A space elevator is much more efficient and should be doable with possible improvements in the relevant technology, mostly a much stronger cable than we can now make.
I think space habitats and space elevators go hand in hand. Not soon though: 1000 year timeframe.
Like you I am very much a proponent of new reactor designs. I should sympathize with the anti-nuke folks since I was one myself. I can identify two turning points for me. One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble". Another was Chernobyl or rather the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone which turned out to be a nature preserve. I should mention a third which is the growing doubts about the "linear no threshold" model of radioactivity impacts.
Pebble beds are interesting and I don't know a lot about them, but what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"? I don't think there's any way not to end up with used fuel that is significantly radioactive for 500 years or more. [edit: not sure, 400 years-ish may be doable]
The key pieces of information for me about Chernobyl were that
(1) the reactor had design "flaws" that don't exist in *any* western reactor (I put "flaws" is in quotes because the most important flaws appear to be intentional decisions to achieve low cost, though some flaws were just bad engineering I guess),
(2) the 4000 or 9000 deaths referred to in two key studies are upper limits on cancer cases for all the decades after Chernobyl assuming the linear no-threshold, so actually it's a small disaster compared to the Banqiao Dam disaster, which in turn is a very small disaster compared to the ordinary air-pollution deaths we get from burning coal.
(3) Plus there's the recent paper concluding that relocation was unjustified for 75% of nearby residents, IIRC (and virtually all residents around Fukushima)
I haven't been able to work out if scientists are close to a consensus about linear no-threshold; depending on my search queries on Google scholar I've been able to get lots of papers saying LNT is dead, or else a mix of "LNT" and "no LNT" papers. Regardless, there's a great 1990 book by the late Bernard Cohen: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/BOOK.html
As the book notes, it doesn't make that much difference if LNT is true because of how small the risks are to begin with.
David, I have no interest in discussing PBRs at this level of detail. I said:
>>One was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which exhaust the radioactivity in each "pebble".<<
Try to forget I said that. Try this instead:
One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that if safe and simple to store.
If you want to pick at that sentence, please don't do it with me.
The irony here is that PBRs were not even the main point in my re-evaluation of nuclear power. The point then and now is that I realized my opposition to nuclear power was focused on a single design (pressurized water reactor) that is essentially 80 years old. (Research began during WW II.) I was ignorant of the many new possibilities: PBRs, thorium reactors, traveling-wave reactors, molten salt reactors, small modular reactors, etc.
At some point I realized I had discounted the power of technological development. I was acting as if humanity had encountered an unsolvable problem.
It's sad that the nuclear power problem became so convoluted and lost along a development and deployment pathway that is so frustrating (particularly in the US).
Now if you want to talk about Universal Basic Income in excruciating detail, I'm your man.
Tinyurl.com/UBIMD
What was eye-opening for me about the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is that so many animals are thriving including 100 rare species. Thriving much better than before the reactor explosion. This means that the presence of humans is more toxic than the presence of radioactivity (for wild animals).
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/interviews/wildlife-biodiversity/-the-difference-between-chernobyl-and-fukushima-wildlife-is-the-wolf-is-extinct-in-japan--75899
https://www.npr.org/2011/03/17/134627793/chernobyl-a-quiet-wilderness-teeming-with-life
This realization launched two independent lines of thought for me.
1) The negative effects of radioactivity are greatly overstated.
2) For wild animals to thrive, one must remove most humans.
There are exceptions of course. Coyotes are adapting to the presence of humans. However it would seem that less desirable wild animals (like Norway rats, pigeons, and grackles) are best at adapting.
>what do you mean about "exhausting radioactivity"?
>>In most stationary pebble-bed reactor designs, fuel replacement is continuous. Instead of shutting down for weeks to replace fuel rods, pebbles are placed in a bin-shaped reactor. A pebble is recycled from the bottom to the top about ten times over a few years, and tested each time it is removed. When it is expended, it is removed to the nuclear-waste area, and a new pebble inserted.<<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor
As long as there is useful radioactivity left, a pebble continues to be recycled into the reactor. "Exhausting radioactivity" may be overstating the case. I'm sure used up pebbles would still set off a geiger counter. But the level of radioactivity would be much lower. Presumably spent pebbles would no longer be capable of criticality which would make on-site storage simple.
The problem is that there isn't really any such thing as "useful radioactivity". Well, not in the power-generating context, at least. What is useful is nuclear potential energy, of fissile isotopes. That's not the same thing as radioactivity; the most useful fissile isotopes for power generation are only weakly radioactive.
But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy. It's just going to sit around for years to millennia gumming up the works and doing damage to any thing or any one in the vicinity.
There is no sort of nuclear fission power plant that doesn't produce some very intensely, dangerously radioactive waste that you're going to deal with. Saying "well, burn it again until we get out all the energy and it's harmless!", is like saying we should take a pile of arsenic-laden ash from a coal powerplant and burn it again; it just doesn't work that way.
That doesn't mean that nuclear fission power can't be used safely. It can, and it's an essential part of any realistic plan to address global warming. But you'll damage the credibility of that argument if you try to handwave away the waste-disposal problem by saying pebble bed reactors will just burn it all up.
>>But extracting the useful nuclear potential energy, results in a whole lot of *useless* radioactivity. Isotopes that are *not* fissile, but are still intensely radioactive. Which, as David Piepgrass notes, you can't turn off. Nor can you run it through your reactor for a few more cycles and turn it into useful energy.<<
John, do you disagree with this statement?
>One turning point was when a pro-nuke friend clued me in to pebble bed reactors which cannot melt down and create nuclear waste that is safe and simple to store.
By "safe" I mean the hot isotopes are safely bound within the removed pebbles (chemically isolated from the environment) and the fissile potential of the pebbles has been reduced to the point that you can store them in close proximity to each other. Both of these attributes make the spent pebbles simple to store. No pools needed. They are of course quite radioactive which must be allowed for.
I am quite aware that Uranium and Plutonium are only weakly radioactive. Radioactivity is inversely related to half-life.
Uranium-235 700,000,000 years
Uranium-238 4,500,000,000 years
Plutonium-239 24,100 years
Strontium-90 30 years
Cesium-137 30 years
And decaying isotopes in active pebbles would indeed contribute to the heat being generated in a PBR.
Please note that the phrase "full burnup" came from the DOE, not me.
I said:
>My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
I am hoping that ignoring true main points while picking on unimportant but imprecisely-stated details is the exception rather than the norm in this forum. And the next time I discourse with you and David I will assume that this is a hostile process and I must watch my words.
I think you're confused about some terminology.
1. Fresh fuel is only slightly radioactive.
2. In spent (or partially spent) fuel, the overwhelming majority of radioactivity comes from fission products (the new elements created by splitting atoms). Since pebble beds are a kind of solid-fuel reactor, the fission products stay within the pebbles.
3. The radioactivity can't be turned off, you just have to wait a few years for it to become less extreme, and then about 500 years for the fission product radioactivity to die down to levels below uranium ore.
4. Unless the reactor is designed to (i) burn waste, or (ii) be refueled exclusively from thorium, its spent fuel will always have substantial levels of plutonium isotopes, the isotopes people complain will be radioactive for 10,000+ years. I expect that, typically, bebble beds are neither waste burners nor thorium breeders.
I'm no expert in solid-fuel designs, but Google tells me the waste storage for pebbles has some nice characteristics (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA365756).
This is non-obvious, as the pebbles are covered in graphite, just what you don't want for the purpose of avoiding criticality. Graphite enables fission; it's basically having part of the reactor merged with the fuel. It certainly lowers the fuel density though; one document tells me "each fresh fuel pebble contains only 9 grams of low enriched uranium in a spherical fuel pebble having a mass of 200 grams" (https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/4374060.pdf)... that's under 1 gram of U-235 fuel at 9.6% enrichment. The same document states that spent fuel still has 2.5% enrichment (so, 0.225 grams), much higher than natural uranium (0.7%). But maybe they only take the fuel out when it's no longer possible to achieve criticality. It is also stated that spent fuel will have 0.154 grams of plutonium. The radioactivity-per-unit-mass will be lower than conventional fuel mainly because it will have dramatically more graphite than anything else.
>>The reactor continuously refuels by adding fresh pebbles daily in at the top, as older ones are discharged from the bottom of the core. Each pebble remains in the core for a little more than three years and are circulated through the core up to six times to achieve full burnup. The spent fuel is then placed directly into dry casks and stored on-site—without the need for interim or active cooling.<<
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/x-energy-developing-pebble-bed-reactor-they-say-cant-melt-down
"Full burnup".
Are you going to argue with that terminology?
I never represented myself as an expert on reactors of any kind. My basic conception that the "pebbles" pass through the reactor multiple times until the fission potential is depleted is correct.
David, thank you for your extensive comments! I mean to address one point at a time.
>>"nature" is an abstract concept, <<
By "nature" I mean "the natural world" and by that I mean everything living on our planet excluding humans and things created by humans. In my mind that is a physical concept (has a mass).
Is that acceptably clear? Do I need to remove further ambiguity? What would be a better term for this?
So when I write:
> One might reasonably demand to know: of what use are humans to nature?
What I mean is:
What's wrong with an Earth (living planet) with no humans on it?
How would you answer that question?
Well, to me it can only be the life that matters, particularly consciousnesses; no one worries about "harming Mars" if we move in there. The relative importance of different life forms is arguable and different people have different opinions, so you should probably design your writing for these different audiences.
There are also people who seem to think Earth itself is valuable quite apart from the life forms on it, so that even if there were no animals whatsoever it would still "matter" somehow. But people don't come right out and say it that way, they only imply it, so I wonder if they haven't actually thought through the matter. As a child I wondered if the sun - compared to which Earth is nothing - was in hellish pain because it burned so hot. One must assume that nonliving things feel nothing and value nothing, otherwise life on Earth is far too small to matter in the scheme of things.
I am somewhat agnostic about which life forms matter. I think consciousnesses are of key importance, but we don't really know what consciousnesses are, so we can't figure out how conscious animals are. I also think avoiding suffering is super important, and I think the wilderness is filled with suffering, which humans may someday reduce. So this is ultimately the value humans offer to other life forms: someday we may reduce their suffering. And since we are also life, we can be of value to ourselves.
There is no life in nearby space and alien life in our galaxy probably constitutes a very small percentage. This is why I see space as the answer to human expansion. We can grow our numbers in space practically without limit without impacting any living thing.
It's not obvious any more land needs to be devoted to crops to have 10 billion humans:
http://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/
Note that global farmland per capita has fallen by 50% in the past 50 years, and the trend continues downward. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that another 50% more humans can be fed without much change at all in total amount of cropland, given a few decades of time for adjustment and technology improvement.
If we double CO2 concentration, as the IPCC projects by the end of the century, that will raise the yield of most crops by about 30% (less for maize and sugar cane), which feeds almost 30% more humans from the same land with the same agricultural technology.
Well, sure, but it won't last. We can reasonably assume that green plants drive atmospheric CO2 as close to zero as they can without starving themselves, after all, they took it from 99% of the atmosphere to 300ppm ha ha. They probably have ancient epigenetic mechanisms for using CO2 more aggressively when there is more around. How long it takes them to recapture the extra CO2 is an interesting question, though. Decades? Centuries? Millenia?
And let us hope they don't overshoot, the way they did during the "Snowball Earth" era. Having the entire planet ice over would be a much bigger problem for human society than even the worst nightmares of the IPCC in the warming direction.
https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2020/11/04/Climate-change-will-offset-CO2-crop-yield-gains-We-need-to-breed-and-engineer-future-proof-crops
Would be nice if you are correct that increased CO2 would be a net gain for crops because the concentration is certainly going up.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-area-per-capita
Why is there economic pressure to cut rainforest?
I used the verb "needs" in my first sentence advisedly. It's certainly not likely that increasing agricultural efficiency is anywhere cost-free, so people will only do it if the alternatives -- including simply clearing virgin land -- are more expensive, either naturally or through regulatory action to solve tragedies of the commons.
>Why would we behave differently on the way down below 1 billion than we did on the way up above it?
Because we know a lot more now and we are much more urban and because we have stronger governments.
I don't think *knowledge* was the problem on the way up. I think it's a question of decision and will. And...governments are only as strong as their popular support, so what I'm asking is: if you have a world of enormous wild area and far less people -- indeed, even more so than long ago because we also imagine the people are much more concentrated in sophisticated cities -- that is, we imagine that, for example, the State of California is essentially wilderness except for a few dozen square miles around LA and SF -- why would there be strong *popular support* for putting strong legal frameworks around preserving wilderness, the environment, et cetera?
I think there probably wouldn't be. People would say -- as they said long ago -- why bother? Look! There's like infinity redwoods, why are you fussing if I want to chop down a few to improve my sight lines?
My basic thesis is that in a world with one billion persons setting aside vast undisturbed (or rehabilitated) natural areas would be easy to agree on.
Hmm. History argues against you. We were much *less* careful about pollution, wildlife preservation, natural spaces, et cetera, when there *were* 1 billion of us. Not, I think, because we were stupider, but because the issue seemd much less urgent. Why would we behave differently on the way down below 1 billion than we did on the way up above it?
We are at 8bn now. So 10bn is a 25% increase in 80 years. In the last 80 years population grew 400%. Of course a lot of that new population will be getting richer.
In “things you read on the internet maybe aren’t true”, apparently the study showing that modern posture makes little protrusions on the back of your head grow more was weak -
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/18/text-neck-aka-horns-paper-earns-corrections/#more-116135
“Nature Scientific Reports”, with the most articles of any journal, passing Plos One in the past, not exactly the highest quality standards lol. Not all nature brand journals are the same as Nature!
Yay science! Meanwhile, serious and accomplished work goes in quantum and bio and chem and materials and thousands more, but nobody cares about that (other than the entire world economy depending on it). One strange attitude I’ve seen around here and on adjacent Twitter stuff is that “university and science research is all bad and irrelevant”, and I don’t wanna sound like I’m supporting that. Lots isn’t, lots is, but do be suspicious (and if you aren’t, and don’t understand the thing more than superficially, you may not be getting anything out of the article / headline!
Ugh. Hate how Nature confuses the public by having a low-quality journal named after their high-quality journal.
*writes down cranial exoxtosis on the list of things that are benignly weird about my body*
I sort of believed the “ Mix
‘Horns’ are growing on young people’s skulls. Phone use is to blame, research suggests” headline at the time, although in the reduced form of “more force in those tendons makes the bones a hit bigger” as opposed to the “this shows satan is working through phones” that the article appeals to. But even the reduced form is questionable...
Something just a little off the "Wither Art?" discussion....
Skull toilets!
How long until there are cheap knockoffs for the mass market?
https://twitter.com/rob_sheridan/status/1440404606589145094
This is amazing, thanks for posting!
The tweeter messed up his currency conversion, but even 638USD (for the gloss white Skullpot) is surprisingly inexpensive for a luxury-market novelty toilet.
The Porcelain Skull Throne!
I'm blowing through several ~$10 kindle books a week. It seems silly not to sign up for kindle unlimited at $10 a month to feed my reading habit. Is there some down side. (Besides not 'owning' the books.)
The books disappear when Amazon wants them to, and the Kindle reports everything you read and highlight to them.
Ironically, one of the first books to "disappear" in this way was Orwell's 1984, but that was because it has an ambiguous copyright status and they weren't 100% sure they had the rights to it.
libgen or archive dot org will get you probably half of them for free
if you use kindle unlimited you can absolutely rip the books and get PDFs or whatever
I mean depends a lot oh what you’re reading