Welcome. This is another edition of my newsletter offering a round-up of the week’s causes for optimism, as noticed in the media. Plus links to discussion of optimism and pessimism.
* In the U.S., “Conservationists Celebrate Big Win with Congressional Passage of ‘Great American Outdoors Act'”. This will provide $900 million annually for nature conservation projects on public lands, and a further $1.9 billion to clear a backlog of repairs that built up under Obama.
* “Japan plans massive national tech modernisation program”, spurred by the virus. It will sit alongside and complement other national programmes for radical decentralisation of government and official bodies.
* The British government has stated that universities must… “fully comply with their legal duties to secure freedom of speech”, if they are to become eligible for emergency government bailouts. Those who do not will “close or be taken over”.
* Ahead of his new pessimism-debunking book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, Bjorn Lomborg is in the Globe & Mail on how “The alarm about climate change is blinding us to sensible solutions”, and in the New York Post with “How climate change alarmists are actually damaging the planet”. There’s also a short podcast.
* The National Review magazine has a double-review of the new books False Alarm and Apocalypse Never.
* Liftport has released part two of its “The Future in Space: 2020-2035” videos. They foresee strong advances in: Launch, Communications, and Earth Observation capabilities; In-Space Transit; Infrastructure for a Lunar Space Elevator; Space Stations; Mining and Manufacturing; and Space-Based Solar Power.
* An optimism somewhat punctured. All those glittering fields of solar panels, that are meant to last 20-30 years? An in-depth industry investigation finds that many may only last four or five years, due to shoddy manufacturing.
* The latest PC Gamer magazine has a broadly optimistic article on computer performance gains and “Moore’s Law”, noting the huge gains still to be had simply through better coding….
Performance gains here will come through efficiency … a very hard sum (the multiplication of two 4096×4096 matrices) was coded in Python, and took seven hours to complete on a modern computer but using only 0.0006% of the peak performance of the machine. The same very hard sum was then coded in Java, and ran 10.8x faster. Then in C, which was 47x faster than the Python code. By tailoring the code to exploit the 18-core CPU in the test PC and its specific Intel optimisations, the very hard sum could be completed in 0.41 seconds. That’s 60,000 times faster.
* The U.N.’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report states that the number of “undernourished” people in India has declined from 249.4 million in 2004–06 to 189.2 million in 2017–19. It also raises legitimate worries about the possible impact of the virus lockdowns on extreme poverty and malnutrition. While the general trend is very positive, there may well now be a two-year “speed bump” in the world’s success story of reducing extreme poverty. However, that “speed-bump” involves pushing some 100 million people into extreme poverty due to the lockdowns. History may look very unkindly on the use of blanket lockdowns aiming to save a small number of very old or vulnerable people (who would have died within 18 months anyway), when these are compared with the final world tally of all the knock-on effects of the lockdowns.
* And finally, there are news reports of a new type of anti-noise device. A grid of small speakers is attached to a glass window and can reduce urban traffic noise by half. A sensor causes the speakers to emit noise-cancelling sound, which then acts as a buffer in front of the glass surface. However, at present it’s… “just a proof-of-concept device” in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Enjoyed this post? There’s more at the ‘Something for the Weekend’ newsletter archive.
20/20 : Tracking Optimism 