Something for the weekend #156

Welcome again to my round-up of some of the week’s causes for optimism or cheer, as noticed in the media. Plus some links to debunking of alarmism or undue ‘happy-clappy’ optimism.

* Trade journal Packaging News reports a “Breakthrough in enzymatically recycled bottles”… a consortium of major “global brands have announced the successful production of the world’s first food-grade PET plastic bottles produced entirely from enzymatically recycled plastic.” After ten years of research, the plastic can now incorporate “an enzyme naturally occurring in compost heaps that normally breaks down leaf membranes of dead plants.”

* An AI-powered robot Mayflower ship has attempted to sail from the UK to the USA without humans on board. Unfortunately, on this first attempt, the ship only made it three days before breaking down with a hard mechanical fault… one that the AI had no way to fix. The team will try again.

* Elon Musk’s Boring Company ‘Vegas Loop’ tunnel has exceeded “4,400 real passengers per hour” in a key demonstration test using Tesla cars. The $52 million loop tunnel connects three different halls of the convention city. Cars are not ideal for the narrow tunnels, but the development of a high-capacity vehicle specially designed for the tunnel was paused due to the virus. The people-carrier development should re-start, once the transit method becomes safer due to vaccinations. Costs should come it at around $5m per mile on such projects, once things are standardised.

* Astronomy.com on the plans for Breakthrough Starshot: a voyage to the stars within our lifetimes.

* NVIDIA to build a $100 million supercomputer in the UK.

* The Harvard Business Review debunks some of the optimism around solar panels in the new article “The Dark Side of Solar Power”… “The replacement rate of solar panels is faster than expected and given the current very high recycling costs, there’s a real danger that all used panels will go straight to landfill”. Many already do, shipped to landfills in the developing world. In some of these, the highly toxic materials could leech out into local and regional watercourses. Another factor is that, over in China, forced labour is allegedly being used to make the toxic panels.

* Spiked! looks back on “This brilliant revolt”… “… the narrative around Brexit, the political and media rendering of it, was entirely negative. There was a staggering disconnect between the pro-Brexit confidence of vast swathes of the electorate and the daily hysterical depiction of Brexit as an unmitigated disaster, as a demagogic nightmare, as Nazism with a new face. You couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of the chasm that now separates the outlook of ordinary people and the outlook of the political class. Now, though, on the fifth anniversary of this brilliant revolt, it is surely time to wrest the narrative back from the anti-democratic doom-mongers”.

* The local Epping Forest Guardian on the success of “Cows in Epping Forest” and the wider worldwide success of its new fencing technologies… “The grazing of cattle at Epping Forest, as well as being historically important, has in more recent years helped to break new ground using cutting edge invisible fencing technology. The success of trials at Epping Forest has helped other sites around the world adopt these practices to help to continue grazing ‘free range’ in more urbanised areas without venturing on to busy roads.”

* The local WCTV reports “Artificial Reefs Installed off of St. George Island” enhancing an existing reef in the Gulf of Mexico. Such artificial reefs are cheap to sink, at $70,000 total, and WCTV adds that… “These reefs have been installed across the Gulf Coast, including Mexico Beach, with great success in bringing in marine life.”

* The Greek Reporter reports on “A Huge Success in Greece”. A natural recovery of the “critically endangered” Mediterranean Monk Seal was spotted, and humans then helped with “the largest protected marine area in Europe … 849 square miles” and by protecting the isolated sea-caves vital for the rare seal’s breeding. There is now a small but viable breeding population of the seal in Greek waters.

* And finally, “The discovery of a new species of prehistoric man in Israel”… well-preserved “prehistoric remains that do not correspond to any known species of man, including modern humans” …. “The skeleton dates from 140,000 to 120,000 years ago”. There have been no scientific facial reconstructions issued, as yet.

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Something for the weekend #155

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

* In the latest Reason magazine (currently paywalled)… “A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has developed an ‘infinitely recyclable’ plastic called polydiketoenamine, or PDK […] the researchers calculate that recycled PDK resin will [in due course] be competitive with petroleum-based virgin plastic resins. […] Given innovations like these, it is possible that plastics won’t pose environmental challenges in the future.”

* Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser to the government of India, has a press article outlining his research on the causes of “The Bangladesh Miracle”. This nation has become “a shining model of development”, and a great rebuttal to the western doom-mongers who saw it as a hopeless case and as an argument for forcible global population reduction. Like other poor nations which made it big in just a few decades, strong “export performance” and low taxes were major factors. But the nation’s “plentiful labour” also helped it to escape from the foreign-aid dependency trap, despite its large size.

* A key large-scale experiment to prevent mosquitoes carrying dengue fever is reported to have gone very well. It went like this: dose mosquito eggs with a bacteria called Wolbachia, which usefully stops them from being infected by Dengue virus. The eggs are then hatched and the insects released. In a few months the bacteria spreads throughout the district’s mosquitoes. This new idea had been piloted in Australia with success, but now large-scale controlled field-trials have shown it works well across a large area called Yogyakarta on the island of Java. 400,000 Javanese people are now enjoying a 77% drop in Dengue cases.

* The Economist ($ paywall) reports that many regulators are now relaxing their tight laws on drones, and “business is booming” as a result, and the industry well set to develop further. A new method of transportation is at last on the horizon, if only for small goods and medicines.

* The Spectator Australia worries about what seems a genuine cause for pessimism, “woke corporates”. No, it’s not yet another conservative tediously whining about enduring corporate PR ‘wokewash’ in the media. The article warns about the developing of hard… “policies [that] are distorting business investment decisions”, and the article is especially concerned about vital investment and pension “funds that promote political objectives rather than maximising members’ returns”. I would add that, as we saw in the last great recession (triggered ultimately by politically-correct housing policies in the USA), such things can have huge spiralling ramifications when they go wrong. Such dangers have not passed. Just this week City Journal warns about the similar spread of Universal Housing Vouchers… “aimed at paying the rent of every lower-income American”, via money-printing. Loan standards are also to be relaxed, in the name of ‘fairness’.

* NASA will shortly have a new telescope in orbit to scan for dangerous asteroids. The NEO Surveyor craft has been approved, but won’t launch until 2026 — which on NASA’s time-scales counts as shortly. It will then search in the infra-red, looking for heat-signatures of asteroids as they approach the sun and heat up. In layman’s terms, the idea is to spot a previously unknown dino-killer with sufficient time to launch a ‘nudge it away from earth’ mission.

* A new academic journal article evaluates the possibilities for “Long-term woodland restoration on lowland farmland through passive rewilding”. The long-term studies cited were done in the inland East Midlands of England (midway between Birmingham and the east coast). The conclusion is that the ideal sites should be close to existing… “local seed/berry sources of trees and shrubs, and also the [other blown-or-carried in] dispersal fauna”. The advantages of passive rewilding, if one can get past the initial human annoyance at what looks like a mess of brambles and fluffy willow-herb, will be… “the potential to expand native woodland habitat at very low cost and within relatively short timescales”. It won’t quite be an old-school ‘fence and forget’ approach — the researchers add that remote-sensing and AI will be able to quickly spot failing sites and/or illegal human damage (wild campers, illegal raves, boy-racers on quad-bikes etc).

* A new survey by the UK magazine The Critic finds most people are clueless even about the basic terminology of the current culture-war… “most say they’ve heard at best ‘a little’ about the [key terminology], with large proportions saying they’ve never heard of common media and political tropes”. On the issues behind the heated rhetoric, when asked what the phrase… “‘culture wars’ makes them think of, by far the most frequent response is that it doesn’t make them think of any” issues at all. And this is after nearly forty years of the left’s ongoing ‘perpetual revolution’ in culture, their effective steering of many institutions, and also the hysteria of the last five years.

* Spiked! highlights and explores “The rise of multi-ethnic conservatism” in the UK.

* And finally, one of the things that Russia knows well is potato-farming. Their agriculturalists now appear to have made a new breakthrough in the field. Or rather, out of the field. Trade journal PotatoPro reports that a new prototype “Russian vertical farm can produce 10 times more seed potatoes a year”. This has so far… “managed to achieve six harvests a year” and has “already received the first commercial orders from major agricultural producers and potato processing companies.” The background here is that Russia needs native seed-potatoes, and rapidly, due to the recent disruption of supply-chains.

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All sidebar links checked

All of this blog’s sidebar links have been checked by hand, and either repaired or deleted as needed. A couple of lapsed domain names led to robo-spam sites, and four or five projects or book-promo sites had become 404. All fixed now.

Plastic fantastic

I came across a Dr. Chris DeArmitt debunking some key myths about plastics, in a video to promote his book The Plastics Paradox: Facts for a Brighter Future (2020). The book hadn’t appeared on my radar in 2020, for some reason, and I hadn’t known his name before now. Unfortunately the video’s sound initially suggests he’s not a good public speaker, seeming very nervous and defensive and with a thin voice. But the facts he presents seem clear, and are based on good peer-reviewed journal research that can be easily fact-checked.

What about reviews of the book? Trade journal Plastics Today had a review of the book and approved… “The plastics industry needs a book like The Plastics Paradox — nearly 200 pages filled with extensive studies, research, graphs, charts, scientific information, and some really beautiful photos”. All drawn and digested from 400 relevant journal and research papers. Which sounds encouraging. The senior editor of Plastics Technology trade journal also appears to approve of the book.

The Plastics Today review also notes there are digest summaries of the book at DeArmitt’s site plasticsparadox.com.

The author is interviewed here by another industry expert in packaging who, in linking to the interview in a post, noted that the book had sparked a debate on a packaging industry LinkedIn channel. The best of these questions are posed at the end of the interview. DeArmitt’s voice is far better here, so I’m guessing the YouTube voice (see my link above) may be partly due to the recording software or video compression settings?

So far as I can see there’s been no public response to the book from the political left since 2020, just silence. Which probably indicates DeArmitt is right, and thus they and their fellow-travellers have to act as though he doesn’t exist.

The relative silence does makes me a little nervous though, and as such I’d still be interested to see a heavyweight review of the book that is both fair-minded and critical.

Future

Interesting news about a new publication called Future…

Andreessen Horowitz this week unveiled a digital publication called Future after months of planning and adding editorial staff. Its goal is providing informed optimism about technology and the future.

Andreessen Horowitz is the venture capital firm that invested early in Facebook, AirBNB and Slack, and the Andreessen part of the team was a co-founder of Netscape back in the day.

Sounds good, until… you read in the announcement that it’s to be run by a former editor at the discredited CNN. Oh well. Probably not going to be a reincarnation of the old free-spirited pre-2000 Wired, then.