Something for the weekend #140

Welcome to my round-up of recent causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus occasional links to debunking of alarmism, and general discussions of the optimism vs. pessimism gap.

* The ultimate techno-optimist Elon Musk has founded the new Carbon Removal XPRIZE. With a reported $100m prize purse it is the largest ‘incentive prize’ in history. To win it inventors are asked to devise a viable and reliable way to do carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, and to do so at the gigaton scale.

* Elon’s SpaceX Starlink has opened pre-orders and is already set to supply parts of the UK which until now had had very patchy broadband Internet. In the U.S. there are still “about 60 million people in rural areas” who lack viable Internet, many of whose voices are now set to come online by 2022.

* There’s a fine new video documentary of the life and eminently sensible work of veteran U.S. economist Thomas Sowell. It’s been available for a while now, but of course has been totally ignored by the media. There is however a major biography forthcoming in May 2021, that will be harder to ignore.

* “Millennials of Color Are Optimistic About the American Dream”… More than 4,000 [USA] respondents ages 13 to 23 (Gen Z) and 24 to 39 (Millennials) were surveyed in late June 2020 by Echelon Insights … The most striking attitude of these young people is their faith in the work ethic [and that] it allows them to move up the economic ladder. Nearly eight in ten believe their individual lives will be better or the same as their parents”.

* Bitcoin has passed $50,000 for the first time, defying the nay-sayers.

* The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s India department anticipates a record wheat harvest in India in 2021-22. This is also good news for the India poor, as booming wheat production has led to lower domestic wheat prices.

* 15 year Japanese government study finds genetically-modified crops safe for soil. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) have found “no sign of any impacts” on the health of places where GM oilseed or soybean crops were planted. Their study has been ongoing for 15 years, and confirms other recent findings on the lack of harm to surrounding ecologies.

* In the UK, the University of Sussex has discovered that adding a kink to graphene makes it a transistor. We’re still very far from a god-like graphene-powered gaming PC which is the size of a USB stick. But the researchers claim the method… “can create a smart electronic component, like a transistor, or a logic gate” and that the manufacturing process is an environmentally friendly and room-temperature one.

* And finally, The black-footed ferret has been cloned at last, and from a long-dead animal too. There are said to be less than 500 of the animals in the wild, and they are so dangerously in-bred that cloning them is required to get better genes.

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Something for the weekend #139

Welcome to my regular round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to debunkings of alarmism, and general media discussion of the optimism vs. pessimism gap.

* The American Institute for Economic Research has a fine long article this week, on “The Political Economy of Mass Panic”. Who stirs it up, how, and the ongoing cumulative toxic effects on society. By implication, one can also see more clearly who benefits.

* A new study in the Taylor & Frances journal Geomatics, Natural Hazards & Risk looked at drought. It’s getting worse and your supply of wheaty buns is in danger, right? Erm, no. Not according to actual long-term observations. The authors of the new article “Near 40-year drought trend during 1981-2019” conclude that… “based on vegetation health trends observable in […] satellite-derived 38-year high-resolution drought data sets [1981-2018] for the entire globe, [both] hemispheres and the main grain-producing countries (China, USA and India), drought has not intensified and expanded” its range.

* In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a new seven-year study looked at water-use efficiency in trees. They’re all gasping for breath and turning brown, right? Erm, no. The study finds trees are far better at water-use efficiency that the models had assumed. As the earth greens up, trees have been gently and naturally increasing their rate of photosynthesis. This has helped today’s trees to use their water 40% more efficiently than back in 1901, according to studies of 36 tree species at 84 sites around the world.

* In the UK, college courses data shows a decade-long surging interest in Computer Science and now AI. Sounds good, but strong caution is needed. Consider that first-year drop-out rates can be brutally high on such hard courses. What’s actually important to the nation is the number of graduates coming out the other end with upper second and first-class degrees, and if they are ‘work ready’. Those figures are very very hard to find and no-one is trumpeting them. Even if they could be found, I’d be willing to bet no-one is daring to break the graduates / graduates-into-employment figures down by demographic and degree classification.

* Forbes this week reports that particulate air pollution “Kills Twice As Many As Previously Thought”. However, caution is needed. The “study” being reported turns out to be from two computer models based on “estimates”, and one of the models is of a new type and applied in a new area of study. The modellers did not, it seems, painstakingly thumb through the death certificates for years and probe tissue samples. Their media statements also suggest they have a strong slant toward political advocacy against fossil fuels.

* Levels of Australian youth crime have dropped dramatically over the decades… “One example is ‘break and enters’, which fell 68 per cent between 2001 and 2017” says Sky News Australia. Actually that’s not quite such good news as it sounds, since Australia started with the world’s highest rate of burglaries, and the second-highest car-theft. But now nearly all crimes are falling heavily and in a sustained and incontrovertible way, in all states and territories, albeit from a very high level. The recent excellent Australian employment figures dovetail with this trend, and seem likely to hasten it.

* During the lockdowns of 2020, bookstore sales actually rose. Here in the UK the overall volume of printed books sold rose by 5.2%, the biggest since 2007. In the USA the rise is even better, at 8.2% for print books, and printed graphic novel sales rose by a huge 29%. Good news for readers and authors, but perhaps not so good for the much vaunted ‘High St. and mall’ book-buying experience. It may not be quite so vital to buyers after all.

* Mike Causey somewhat quiets the alarmism on the supposed “Retirement tsunami” that is set to hit the USA… “For nearly three decades now, experts […] have been predicting a mass exodus of civil servants. A retirement tsunami that would strip the government of many, if not most, of its best and brightest. […] Leaving some of our most important functions in the hands of less experienced and dedicated people. […] but so far not much has happened.”

* In The Spectator this week, “The myth of ‘progressive’ thinking”… “It is misleading for its implication that human progress is linear: that either we go one way, which is progressive, or we go the other, which is regressive. History shows that this isn’t so. […] The historical record is littered with the debris of apparently progressive projects that turned out to be nothing of the sort.”

* Good news from the UK. Sales of The Spectator have smashed through 100,000 per week, this being… “the biggest increase in its 192-year history”. The new Spectator TV channel also now has nearly 100,000 subscribers. As the Editor remarks… “When I became editor in 2009, it was said that digital would kill print. That no one would pay to read journalism when so much was free. In our case, digital has not just saved print but grown print sales of the magazine”.

* And finally, “Back from the brink: A Przewalski’s horse success story”. Hungary and Mongolia’s horse herds, of a type seen in ancient cave-paintings, are now growing and generally thriving. The genetic strength of the horse has… “stabilized at a relatively high value.”

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Something for the weekend #138

Welcome to a survey of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus occasional links to debunking of both alarmism and optimism, and to general discussions of the optimism / pessimism gap.

* A raft of happy-clappy optimism, if not debunked then at least dented. Consumer products and services aimed at eco-worriers can be quite misleading in their claims… “The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and its Dutch counterpart have led an annual sweep of websites which has found that 40 per cent of ‘green’ claims made online could be misleading consumers. Almost 500 randomly selected websites promoting products and services [as ‘eco-friendly’ were analysed and] 40 per cent of these websites appeared to be using tactics which could be considered misleading to the point of breaking consumer law.”

* A substantial “new study highlights success of Marine Protected Areas [MPA] for large sharks”. Researchers spent two-years in the ocean around the Bahamas, monitoring 50 sharks in 243,000 square miles of new shark sanctuary. Remarkably, in a field that is supposed to be ‘science-led’, their study is… “one of the few to evaluate whether these [MPA] management actions are effective scientifically”. The relative success of the vast sanctuary suggests that other Caribbean nations may now wish to copy the Bahamas.

* In the waters off Alaska, giant Bowhead whales are a conservation success story… “with the population north and west of Alaska now numbering more than 16,000.”

* The inspection of ship hull paint layers can now be done in port, rather than at sea. Since the new system uses infra-red light and would lead to smoother-sailing vessels, if widely adopted it could reduce ocean noise — to the benefit of the creatures living there.

* Amazingly, data drops from the Space Station really were dropped… being carried back to Earth on a physical hard-drive in a flaming capsule. Now the UK is finally fitting the ISS with a dedicated antenna link to Earth.

* “SpaceX launches record-breaking number of satellites” as it successfully launches (literally) its… “SmallSat Rideshare Program that lets organisations launch their satellites into different orbits for as low as $1m.”

* Physics World, on “Why we shouldn’t worry about the Internet’s rising electricity consumption”. The article debunks some wild claims on the matter, finding that for some the… “maths is out by several orders of magnitude”. On looking at big data-centres, these are found to be… “laser-focused on energy efficiency” and making great progress in that area. The article doesn’t mention the better energy-efficiency being integrated into home computing and gaming, but there’s that too. Long-distance energy transfer is also vastly more efficient than it used to be.

* And finally, a working prototype of a moth-powered “Smellicopter Drone”, to track down the source of elusive smells. It’s simple enough for High School students to build, though as yet it can do little more than seek out night-flowering plants.

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Something for the weekend #137

Here’s my regular round-up of causes for optimism, as spotted in the media. Plus links to discussions of the gap between optimism and pessimism.

* In the common imagination, a massive treeless desert covers much of west Africa, and is further imagined to be drying out ever-more dramatically. Actually, that part of the Sahara turns out to be greening up quite nicely. A new study from the University of Copenhagen shows it has about 10 percent tree-cover, where before there were no trees. In such a vast area, that adds up to hundreds of millions of new trees. The trees might be due to the simple lack of goats and other grazing livestock, because of the bitter wars in the region. But, when found on such a scale, the trees are far more likely to be part of the ongoing global greening.

* At Human Progress, “The Return of the Dead”… “In his book, More From Less, Andrew McAfee … discusses how relatively rare recorded extinctions are” and that “many species that were wrongly believed to be rapidly sliding towards extinction have seen major improvements to their numbers.”

* In Australia, new “Record-breaking job figures”… “Nobody expected the labour market to recover this quickly. The latest labour force data is a beautiful set of numbers [and] records are being set in labour force participation.”

* Computer Weekly has details on the very positive and ongoing surge to upgrade old PCs and their kit. “Shortages causing concern, but distributors optimistic”… “Context found that mobile computing, monitors, computing accessories and AV systems all saw double-digit growth year on year in the past 12 months. … the momentum in the market will continue, with healthy pipelines providing confidence for a good 2021”.

* Contrary to popular belief, the amount of U.S. e-waste is declining… “Findings contradict expectations that e-waste is growing with mobile device proliferation, instead showing that the total mass of the e-waste stream is actually declining [with a] 10% decrease since the estimated peak in 2015”.

* A syndicated columnist in the USA muses on “The pandemic of pessimism vs. the opportunity of optimism”… “The typical pessimist doesn’t realize he or she is a pessimist. They say things like, ‘I call them the way I see them’, or, ‘I’m a realist’. [But] When you believe the worst is coming, what do you think you look for? And when you look at life through pessimistic eyes, everything looks negative.”

* The “Polish government plans free-speech social media law”… “The new law, if passed, would establish a free-speech council that would attempt to stop social media firms from deleting content or banning users”. If the removed content “didn’t violate Polish laws”, then a $13m fine would be levied on the media companies.

* And finally, the Indian Ministry of Environment has announced an “increase in the leopard population by nearly 60% in four years.” There also also likely many more leopards in areas of India that could not be sampled by conservation camera-traps, such as on the vast coffee and tea plantations, up in the Himalayas, or out in the arid semi-deserts. Also, “the majority of the North East” of India was not sampled.

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Something for the weekend #136

Welcome to my regular round-up of recent causes for optimism, as noted in the media. Plus links to debunking of alarmism, and general discussions of optimism vs. pessimism.

* Namibian fishermen used to be one of the biggest killers of the albatross, the famous giant ocean-bird. Now such bird deaths are down by 98%, thanks to a decade of boots-on-the-ground conservation work… “A new paper shows that seabird deaths in the Namibian demersal longline fishery have been reduced by 98%”.

* Despite 40 years of research, it is still difficult to say how water moves through filtration membranes in the current desalination process. But a new paper finds a new key factor, that the most efficient membranes are the most uniform at the nano-scale. The researchers at the University of Texas made better filters accordingly… and improved the desalination process “efficiency by 30 to 40 percent”.

* The major British digger manufacturer JCB has launched a new on-road machine designed to quickly fill potholes. Ever-increasing road traffic has made potholes a major problem in the UK in the last decade. The JCB PotholePro is a service-ready heavy-duty machine, which can also move at around at 25 miles per hour for easy transport between sites. For the next few months the PotholePro is still undergoing road trials, but it looks like JCB should be taking orders by the summer.

* A new type of fixed flammable gas detector has just been launched as a commercial product. It is said to represent… “one of the biggest breakthroughs in flammable gas detection for several decades”.

* The UK Space Agency (UKSA) and Rolls-Royce have signed a new research contract… “that will bring the two together to investigate nuclear energy as a source for deeper space exploration”.

* Reuters reports that despite the lockdowns, the U.S. economy is still “growing modestly” according to a new report by the Fed. Also, “manufacturing, construction and transportation industries continued to add jobs” across the country. Meanwhile a “new Talent Attraction Scorecard 2020 from EMSI” finds that U.S. States of “Texas, Florida, and Arizona” strongly attracting talent in 2019, to the detriment of over-regulated places like California. This was part of a growing trend for talent-flight from the cities, a trend likely to have been turbocharged by the recent lockdowns.

* The latest issue of the National Review magazine has Joel Kotkin making “The Case for American Optimism”.

* The American Enterprise Institute interviews Johan Norberg in a new podcast, on “The history and psychology of progress”, and the apparent threats to “the future of the most open and prosperous society in human history”.

* The City Journal remembers “Peter Huber, Philosopher of a Brilliant Future”, being the coiner of the term “junk science” and author of the book Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists among others.

* Frank Ferudi in Spiked, on why “We need scepticism more than ever”… “Society needs scepticism to develop. Scepticism encourages society to question the assumptions and taken-for-granted ‘facts’ that otherwise might ossify and become dogma. It allows our intellectual life to yield to new experience. In short, it is the antidote to an excess of certainty.”

* In the UK, the well-known broadcaster and interviewer Andrew Neil has reportedly raised $60m to provide a rolling news alternative to BBC News bias. The new service will be called GB News and will join Rupert Murdoch’s digital-only TalkRADIO alternative to BBC Radio 4, a similar service which currently has around 500,000 listeners and 250,000 YouTube subscribers. TalkRADIO was recently removed by YouTube, but reinstated after an outcry.

* And finally, OpenAI has trained an AI to make a unique picture based on precisely-worded text descriptions. It works, and seemingly reasonably well, but is not yet public. There’s a full article on it, from the makers. Microsoft will also shortly release the reverse for Office users, auto text-captioning of pictures.

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