Something for the weekend #258

Something for the weekend #258

Welcome to my ‘round-up’ newsletter, surveying recent causes for optimism as found in the media. I also find it among the think-tanks and sometimes on podcasts. There are also occasional links here to a debunking of alarmism, or to opinion articles on the curious gaps that exist between optimists and pessimists.

* Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) in the latest edition of Spiked!, on “Why humanity is good for the natural world” on the whole.

“Whenever I write an article about environmental good news, editors insist I put in a sentence, beginning ‘However…’, to point out that the environment is still deteriorating in other respects. They don’t make the same request to those who write pessimistic articles.”

* In the Maritime Executive, “The World’s Coral Reefs are 25 Percent Bigger Than We Thought”. Researchers focused on the world’s “shallow reefs”, rather than deep-water reefs. They used high-res satellite imagery (rather than questionable fly-overs by light-aircraft pilots), and tested this data against actual site reports from experienced scuba divers. The divers were drawn from… “400 individuals and organisations in countries with coral reefs”.

* A new study by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology suggests that alarmist or over-claiming messaging can “backfire entirely” in raising awareness of environmental harms. 59,000 participants, across 63 countries (including Kenya, seemingly representing Africa), were tested to see how they reacted to climate claims relating to four areas of action: “belief in climate change; support for climate policies; willingness to share climate information; and contributions to tree-planting efforts.” In all cases “overall effectiveness was limited” with most messaging “having small to negligible effects on the targeted outcomes”… and only then because the messaging played on “participants pre-existing beliefs”. The only success was in raising the already-high level of hysteria on social media…

“Willingness to share climate change information on social media was increased most by inducing negative emotions through ‘doom and gloom’–styled messaging about the consequences of climate change.”

* In New Zealand, the alarmist use of RCP 8.5 in local government decision-making appears to still be the norm. For instance the debunked RCP 8.5 future-scenario has led to local speculative maps of ocean… “inundation in the district extending more than 2 kilometres inland along most of the coast, impacting 2,000 properties with a possible value of a billion dollars”. Since these are official maps, insurance companies raise prices and realtors discount valuable ocean-front homes.

* And finally, it’s good news that clean used clothing is now free to sell on eBay UK, with the aim of reducing illegal dumping and landfill. Nicely timed for the annual springtime wardrobe renewal, and eBay’s imminent launch of an AI ‘clothes matcher’. Note that the UK also offers many ways to dispose of old clean clothes for recycling, if the clothes are unlikely to be worn again. Some retail stores have big cardboard hopper-bins next to their payment counters, for instance, for drop-off.

Enjoyed this post? There’s more over at the ‘Something for the Weekend’ newsletter archive.

Something for the weekend #250

Something for the weekend #250

Welcome to my ‘round-up’ newsletter, surveying recent causes for optimism as found in the media. I also find it among the think-tanks and sometimes on podcasts. There are also occasional links here to a debunking of alarmism, or to opinion articles on the curious gaps that exist between optimists and pessimists.

* Something for the weekend reaches its 250th edition. Truly a cause for optimism! 🙂

* Feeling a bit weedy? Newly released in open-access, the “world’s largest database of weeds”. Which can only be a good thing, an aid to both farmers and agricultural scientists.

* Social media use is depressive, or so the journalistic consensus would seem to say. The Oxford Internet Institute recently tested this self-interested claim against real-world health records and data. With a 12-year study of nearly a million people in 72 nations, matched with actual Facebook use-data. At the national level across all nations they found no consistent link with what they call “negative well-being”. In fact, they suggest a possible small positive aspect, especially for young males. Previous work by the team’s leader also found… “little association between teenagers’ technology use and mental health problems.” So why the hysteria? My guess here is that many journalists like deflecting attention from their own relentlessly negative and alarmist reporting: “hey, look at those slick guys over there… we’re not to blame for making people depressed and anxious”.

* In the USA, trade magazine Pharmaphorum reports that the FDA has officially cleared an AI device which does… “real-time, non-invasive skin cancer detection”. The DermaSensor device approval appears to be for initial checkups in “primary care” (i.e. family doctors), and approval was based on a 1,000 patient trial. However, note that it only has a… “97% chance of accurately identifying a lesion as benign”, not 100%. So it’s an AI assistant for a human, not an infallible oracle. Still, sounds like a spot of good news to me.

* There’s a new Open Data Portal for Africa, being a… “website that provides Africa-related datasets and links to other websites with data specifically about Africa”. There are currently around 4,000 verified data sets available.

* In the latest issue of The Critic magazine, the cryptically-titled article “Doomsday is not a day of the week”. Which turns out to be a long look at the politicisation, and the increasingly ridiculousness, of the so-called ‘Doomsday Clock’. Thankfully there are increasing numbers of people around who can see through such alarmism…

Generation X are [especially] resistant to claims that ‘the sky is falling’ because, for them, the sky has been falling for the last sixty years. From the day they were born, they were told their life would end in some fantastic and painful manner. But the Cold War never got hot; the nuclear winter never came. There was no Big Freeze or Big Crunch. No famine came from the population boom, nor an eternal winter brought about by [the 1970s scare about] Global Cooling.

Several new surveys also strongly suggest that large percentages of younger people are become more wary about key alarmist claims.

* “Many experts feared a recession. Instead, the [U.S.] economy has continued to soar”…

“All the positive news was particularly striking given how much the Fed has raised interest rates in an effort to curb inflation. [but] the economy ended last year 3.1% larger than it was 12 months earlier”.

* Elon Musk recently tweeted… “we should be expecting a billion humanoid robots on earth in the 2040s”. And they won’t be sitting at a desk, being effectively just a big PC with a face on top. Japan’s Tohoku University’s has unveiled a successful “replication of human walking mechanisms in a robot”, and with highly “optimised energy efficiency” too. Billed as a major breakthrough via a new algorithm, which has enabled…

“steering by a reflex control method reflective of the human nervous system [which should] revolutionize the design and development of high-performance bipedal robots, advanced prosthetic limbs, and state-of-the-art powered exoskeletons”.

* Google’s DeepMind has reportedly developed a new AI system called AlphaGeometry. It’s claimed that the AI can solve complex geometry problems. Further its output has much-needed clarity, something required by both geometry boffins and computers. Since… “its solutions have machine-verifiable structure. Yet despite this, its output is still human-readable.”

* Another quantum computing breakthrough, this time in cost… “a new semiconductor system with single atoms that automatically all emit light at the same frequency, removing the need for additional equipment and reducing significant costs.” The ability to make atoms that emit consistent light sounds fairly major to me, and probably fairly energy conservative.

* And finally, just for a change for my issue #250, what seems some truly bad news from China. A new scientific paper in Biorxiv shows that Chinese researchers reportedly sought out a nasty COVID virus in wild pangolins, and then deliberately created a human variant. The lab-created variant is said to be 100% lethal to humanised mice, and thus would almost certainly be 100% lethal in humans… “a SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus can cause 100% mortality in hACE2 mice”. Nowhere in the article can I find exact details of the bio-security level at which these highly dangerous experiments were done.

Enjoyed this post? There’s more over at the ‘Something for the Weekend’ newsletter archive.

Heinlein Society Scholarship for 2024

The Heinlein Society Scholarship is now open for 2024. The 2024 essay topics, in short, are:

* How Heinlein influenced your career choice.

* Heinlein’s anticipation of social media.

* Will you see a scientific ‘golden age’ in your lifetime?

* Heinlein future-technical ideas, become modern realities.

* Heinlein’s uses of female characters in his novels.

* How a knowledge of other fields might benefit you in your chosen field.

Deadline: 1st April 2024.

Something for the weekend #248

Something for the weekend #248

Welcome to my newsletter which surveys some recent causes for optimism, as found in the media. I also find it among the think-tanks and sometimes on podcasts. There are also occasional links here to a debunking of alarmism.

* Hunt Scanlon looks back at 2023 and finds “Reasons for Cautious Optimism in 2024”. One being that… “Workers came flooding back into the [U.S.] labor force […] The so-called “Great Resignation” that marked the early post-pandemic years ended”. Workers are also less likely to be sacked, especially in the U.S. retail trades. There are workforce capacity challenges ahead in the next decades, as Scanlon points out, but I suspect that will help the drive toward AI augmentation and/or robots.

* In a New Year one-hour podcast, Elon Musk offers some informed speculation on what we need and what we will be able to do in the future. He also does a little on-the-fly book reviewing: Ehrlich’s alarmist The Population Bomb is… “the most anti-human book ever written”.

* “Elon Musk Reclaims Title as World’s Richest Man”.

* At the Utterly Moderate Podcast, Johan Norberg discusses why “The Good Old Days Are Now”.

* New figures show that the U.K. services sector… “ended last year [2023] on a high”, and the sector is continuing to grow and export into 2024.

* U.S. beaver scientists have taught an AI to spot beaver dam-ponds on satellite imagery. The aim is not to alert farmers of potential flooding of fields, as any good farmer will already be well aware of what’s happening on the land. Rather the results can inform conservationists of where beavers are lacking, and there may be potential for watercourse rectification and releases. California is set to be a state-wide test-bed for beaver-spotting in 2024. The methods should also be useful in the Arctic tundra, now a growing and vast beaver habitat, allowing the correct numbers of hunting and trapping permits to be issued there.

* New to me, Afrorama is a fledgling ‘knowledge hub’ that aims to become the go-to source for balanced background articles on Africa. The site’s writers also see the importance of covering the many and much-neglected positive aspects of Africa.

* Fancy a visit to Africa? The U.S. passport wait times are finally… “back on track to pre-pandemic norms” says the U.S. state department. Oh, and international air travel is now more popular and safer than ever, as we enter 2024. Admittedly air travel is definitely lacking in its old 1960s glamour, but it gets you there safely.

* If you feel irrationally guilty about air-travel, there’s good news. An affordable no-changes sleeper train service is set to travel across Europe in 2024, connecting Brussels to Prague. Snoozing across Europe is now possible because rail markets have been made freer.

* The Critic magazine has a go at “Debunking degrowth”… “Wrongly assuming that economic growth is incompatible with tackling climate change, the [activists] want economies to produce less. [With their ultimate aim being] “not just zero growth, but degrowth”. Which would be very far from a benign middle-class localist paradise, where we all tend organic vegetable allotments (pumping out 6x more CO2 than regular farming) and use solar-powered bicycles. As the article shows.

* The latest City Journal podcast discusses the “New Golden Age” in the modern space industry, and also points out the real-world spin-offs and benefits… “If you care about the environment, a couple steps down the road, we may be able to do a lot of our more polluting industrial activities off-planet.” And underwater, I’d add, in sunken robo-factories powered by the sort of tidal turbines recently demonstrated by the Japanese.

* This month’s Reason magazine celebrates “The Modern Miracle of Cheap Aluminum Foil”.

* And finally, are you wearing your aluminium-foil hat? 🙂 Ok, then know that a team of scientists from South Africa and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain have demonstrated a form of teleportation…

“the researchers successfully teleported images across various networks, maintaining the integrity of the original image … without the need for physical travel of [the] information”.

Enjoyed this post? There’s more over at the ‘Something for the Weekend’ newsletter archive.

Something for the weekend #246

Something for the weekend #246

Welcome to my newsletter which surveys recent causes for optimism as found in the media, and cogent debunking of alarmists and doom-sayers.

* The latest Spectator magazine asks “Has there ever been a better time to be alive?” ($ paywall).

* UK’s first-ever Seagrass Symposium is a ‘resounding success’. Seagrass meadows being underwater wildlife habitats, and the British Isles having an immense coastline suitable for planting such things.

* A new wildcat breeding programme has begun in the mountains of Scotland, with the oversight of the Royal Zoological Society. 22 captive-bred cats were released this summer, of a planned total of 60 cats. The area is a remote National Park, which its hoped should prevent interbreeding with domestic pets. Despite long-standing concern over the decline in wildcats and the decay of their bloodlines through interbreeding, this is the first time a ‘breed and release’ programme has been tried.

* Coral reefs that are subject to repeated temporary ‘mass bleaching’ effects appear to be able to adapt to it with relative rapidity. The researchers in the journal Nature reveal… “an emergent increase in the thermal tolerance of coral assemblages, at a rate of 0.1°C/decade for a remote Pacific coral reef system”.

* In the journal Polyoxometalates, a new “high efficiency” method to convert “nitrate pollution into valuable ammonia”. The method uses a “metal-added polyoxometalate as the catalyst” and the process apparently works “under mild operating conditions”. Ammonia is fertiliser for farm fields.

* Twitter is nearly back in profit, even with its substantial debt-servicing costs and the loss of some prissy politically-correct advertisers.

* In the USA, “Bumper crop pushes corn prices to three-year low”. In Africa, a bumper coffee harvest for Uganda. In the Philippines, a bumper rice harvest.

* FreightWaves trade magazine on how the air cargo sector is moving “From ‘doom mongering’ to stability.

* American indie film-making is coming back, a little… “After nearly flatlining during the pandemic years, American independent film saw some signs of life in 2023”, says Filmmaker magazine.

* Spiked! on a curiously deranged and intractable British form of alarmism… “The hysteria of the anti-Brexit Remoaners”. “Seven years on from the Brexit vote and the supposedly sensible wing of politics is as disoriented and deranged as ever. They can’t even watch [Nigel Farage on the TV show] I’m a Celebrity without seeing it as a harbinger of fascism. Time to stop taking these people seriously.”

* The latest Reason magazine on “The Media’s Misleading Fearmongering Over Climate Change”. It’s a short teaser article for a strong 40 minute YouTube interview with Bjorn Lomborg, questioned by a seasoned interviewer.

* Ronald Bailey in the latest Reason magazine… “when the world passes through the 1.5C target, it will not be plunging to its death over a climate cliff”, as many hysterics would like you to believe.

* The Spectator podcast on “Superabundance: why the planet won’t run out of resources”.

* The Critic magazine on “The rise and rise of AAAAAH-ctivism”… “There’s no end to the nuisance and problematic nature of AAAAAH-ctivists — the biggest issue being that no one will know when there is an actual apocalypse, given how many times alarms have been raised. They ruin every sensible political exchange, reducing it to a hysterical binary of ‘do or die’.”

* And finally, entire galaxies are now being scanned for signs of advanced alien civilisations.