Linklist: October 31, 2021
"Hereâs my understanding of what happened. First, the setup.
The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together are responsible for a huge percentage of shipping into the Western United States.
There was a rule in the Port saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
This is despite the whole point of shipping containers being to stack them on top of each other so you can have a container ship.
This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing.
If you violated this rule, you lost your right to operate at the port.
In normal times, this was annoying but not a huge deal.
Thanks to Covid-19, there was increased demand to ship containers, creating more empty containers, and less throughput to remove those containers.
Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we wonât get into price mechanisms arenât working properly to fix supply shortages.
Trucking companies started accumulating empty containers.
The companies ran out of room to store the containers, because they could only stack them in stacks of two, and there was no practical way to move the containers off-site.
Trucks were forced to sit there with empty containers rather than hauling freight.
This made all the problems worse, in a downward spiral, resulting in a standstill throughout the port.
This was big enough to threaten the entire supply chain, and with it the economy, at least of the Western United States and potentially of the whole world via cascading problems. And similar problems are likely happening elsewhere.
Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.
None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away.
A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously."
"Blooms of translucent jellyfish with their trailing, stinging tentacles are sometimes described as âinvasionsâ because they often emerge en masse in way that appears sudden. Still, determined observers may find early clues of a jellyfish bloom. Spotting jellyfish swarms by way of drones requires balancing recognition accuracy with recognition speedâat least if the goal is to take preventative action to avoid nuclear power plant disruption. Scientists have been at work developing algorithms that foster this balance, including one study that delivered results within a desirable timeframe and over 90 percent accuracy.
In another early-detection effort, scientists have investigated the potential for acoustic characteristics of these sea creatures to detect their numbers, density, and threat level. The creaturesâ underwater undulations create soundsâknown as âecho energyâ or âacoustic scatteringsââthat give them away, as long as humans are willing to listen.
The clash between gelatinous jellyfish and hulking nuclear power plants has a long history. These spineless, brainless, bloodless creatures shut down the Torness nuclear power plant in 2011 at a cost of approximately $1.5 million per day, according to one estimate. Swarms of these invertebrates have also been responsible for nuclear power plant shutdowns in Israel, Japan, the United States, the Philippines, South Korea, and Sweden.
Humans have unwittingly nurtured the adversarial relationship between jellyfish and nuclear power plants. That is, human-induced climate change has raised ocean water temperatures, setting conditions for larger-than-usual jellyfish populations. Further, the relatively warm water near nuclear power plant discharge outlets may attract jellyfish swarms, according to one study. Also, pollution has lowered oxygen levels in sea water, which jellyfish tolerate more than other marine animals, leading to their proliferation."
"The fact that Starship flown expendably would be perhaps 10 times cheaper, in terms of dollars per tonne, than even Falcon is not relevant. For the last two years, space community responses to Starship can often be summarized as âStarship would be awesome! I can customize one or two and do my pet mission for cheap.â This is true, but it misses the point.
First, SpaceX is unlikely to spend a lot of engineering effort doing custom one offs for otherwise obscure science missions. Find a way to fit the mission in the payload fairing and join the queue with everyone else trying to burn down their manifest as quickly as possible.
Second, and more importantly, shoehorning Cassini 2.0 or Mars Direct into Starship fails to adequately exploit the capabilities of the launch system. Not to pick on Cassini or Mars Direct, but both of these missions were designed with inherent constraints that are not relevant to Starship. In fact, all space missions whether robotic or crewed, historical or planned, have been designed with constraints that are not relevant to Starship.
What does this mean? Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities.
Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing. It is time to raise the scope of our ambition and think much bigger."
"The design of the system was based on simple geometric forms â rectangles, triangles, and spheres â and on a color palette â comprising white, yellow, orange, blue and cyan â devised carefully to identify different functions.
Such an uncluttered, minimalist design was typical of VNIITE which, inspired by aerospatial design, prioritized simpleness, lightness, and the removal of unnecessary elements.
The plan was to install the SPHINX system in a large number of Russian homes by 2000. Yet, the economic and political downturns of the Soviet Union which culminated in its fall in 1991 (after which Dmitry Azrikan left Russia and moved to Canada, where he still lives) put an end to the project, which remained at a prototype stage and, today, looks like the swanâs song and the silent witness of an era of contradictions and tragedies but also of great expectations and insightful ideas."
đźď¸ https://artvote.net/ â "We are investigating the aesthetics of generative art. We have programmed the computational software Mathematica to generate thousands of different images. These images vary in many ways, including their style, their color palette, and the density of their composition. We are using your preferences to determine which properties make a piece of generative art the most aesthetically pleasing."
đš The fatiguing effects of camera use in virtual meetings: A within-person field experiment
"The COVID-19 pandemic propelled many employees into remote work arrangements, and face-to-face meetings were quickly replaced with virtual meetings. This rapid uptick in the use of virtual meetings led to much popular press discussion of virtual meeting fatigue (i.e., âZoom fatigueâ), described as a feeling of being drained and lacking energy following a day of virtual meetings. In this study, we aimed to better understand how one salient feature of virtual meetingsâthe cameraâimpacts fatigue, which may affect outcomes during meetings (e.g., participant voice and engagement). We did so through the use of a 4-week within-person experience sampling field experiment where camera use was manipulated. Drawing from theory related to self-presentation, we propose and test a model where study condition (camera on versus off) was linked to daily feelings of fatigue; daily fatigue, in turn, was presumed to relate negatively to voice and engagement during virtual meetings. We further predict that gender and organizational tenure will moderate this relationship such that using a camera during virtual meetings will be more fatiguing for women and newer members of the organization. Results of 1,408 daily observations from 103 employees supported our proposed model, with supplemental analyses suggesting that fatigue affects same-day and next-day meeting performance. Given the anticipated prevalence of remote work even after the pandemic subsides, our study offers key insights for ongoing organizational best practices surrounding virtual meetings."
"In 1948 he joined Brookhaven National Laboratoryâs instrumentation group. He served as head of that group from 1951 to 1968.
During that time, in October Brookhaven held annual visitorsâ days, during which thousands of people would come tour the lab. Higinbotham was responsible for creating an exhibit to show off the instrumentation divisionâs work.
Most of the existing exhibits were rather dull. Higinbotham thought he could better capture visitorsâ interest by creating an interactive demonstration. He later recalled in a magazine interview that he had thought âit might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society.â
The instrumentation group had a small analog computer that could display various curves, including the path of a bouncing ball, on an oscilloscope. It took Higinbotham only a couple of hours to conceive the idea of a tennis game, and only a few days to put together the basic pieces. Having worked on displays for radar systems and many other electronic devices, Higinbotham had no trouble designing the simple game display.
Higinbotham made some drawings, and blueprints were drawn up. Technician Robert Dvorak spent about two weeks building the device. After a little debugging, the first video game was ready for its debut. They called the game Tennis for Two."
đ How does a lithium-ion battery work? â Got a great animation of a Li-ion battery at work (HT @sudhamshu)
"So what misstatement of the facts did CNN make?
For this reason, CNN is wrong to double down on its smug reports that vaccine-skeptic podcaster Joe Rogan treated his coronavirus with âhorse dewormer.â He did not, as nearly as I can determine. Roganâs covid-19 was treated, he said, with a number of medicines, including the anti-parasite drug ivermectin â the same medication that former president Jimmy Carterâs foundation has used to fight the scourge of river blindness in Africa and Latin America. Like many drugs, ivermectin also has veterinary applications.
CNN reported that Rogan had treated his infection with a cocktail of glop â antibodies and ivermectin and vitamins, and who knows what else. That is accurate. Thatâs what Rogan himself announced. He was dosing himself with an anti-parasitic drug to treat a virus. This is a problem, because it spreads the word that maybe taking random drugs is an effective way to handle a specific disease, and maybe this columnist hasnât noticed, but there are people refusing to take the effective treatment because theyâre doping themselves with horse dewormer or betadine. We did not mock Rogan enough.
Further, talking about river blindness is a dishonest distraction. Itâs irrelevant. Did Joe Rogan have onchocerciasis? He had COVID-19.
So far, there isnât a lot of evidence that ivermectin is a good anti-covid therapy, and federal agencies have warned people who hear about the drug not to consume a paste intended for livestock. But that doesnât mean Rogan ate horse dewormer. You donât fight disinformation with disinformation. Not if youâre a good reporter.
A good reporter would explain that Rogan was misleading his audience by taking horse dewormer seriously as a treatment for a virus. Theyâd also mention that the evidence is in: ivermectin is not a good anti-COVID-19 therapy.
All we have here is a hack writing dodgy crap to sow doubt."
âď¸ Why aviationâs compass is shifting towards true navigation â "The aviation sectorâs increasingly outdated use of magnetic navigation could be heading for the exit, with Canada championing a Mag2True adjustment, targeted for 2030"
đ Female African elephants are evolving without tusks due to ivory poaching
"Relentless ivory hunting over decades has caused elephants to evolve in a way we never imagined them to. More and more female African elephants are now born without tusks. In other words, human actions are âliterally changing the anatomyâ of wild animals, according to a new study.Â
It is hard to imagine elephants without tusks. These sharp, off-white protruding organs are known to give the species an evolutionary advantage â helping them dig, gather food, strip bark from trees to eat, and defend themselves. âThe tusks also protect the trunkâanother valuable tool for drinking, breathing, and eating, among other uses,â World Wildlife noted.Â
Published in Science on Thursday, the study looked at the genetic changes engineered due to mass poaching for ivory. The phenomenon of elephants going tuskless is not new. Researchers found the number of tuskless female elephants in Mozambique increased by almost double over 30 years. This overlaps with a period of civil conflict, where armed forces slaughtered 90% of the elephant population to produce ivory. This ivory went on to finance the conflict.
Experts had previously observed this genetic change in elephants in places with rampant poaching. But nobody understood why."
"Although most people who contract polio will not have visible symptoms, a severe case can infect the brain and spinal cord and cause paralysis. Lillard's breathing muscles were weakened by the disease, and she survived thanks to the iron lung.
The machines are giant ventilators about 7 feet long. Patients lie inside with just their heads resting outside; a seal around the patient's neck creates a vacuum. Bellows at the base of the device do the work of a human diaphragm â they create negative pressure so the user's lungs fill with air, and positive pressure allowing the person to exhale.
Sixty-eight years later, an iron lung is still keeping Lillard alive â she sleeps in it every night. While many people who had polio or post-polio syndrome either weaned themselves off the machines or switched to another form of ventilator, Lillard never did.
"I've tried all the forms of ventilation, and the iron lung is the most efficient and the best and the most comfortable way," she told Radio Diaries.
The antiquated machines are now more likely to be found in a museum than in someone's home. In the 1990s, when her iron lung was breaking down, she called hospitals and museums that might have had old ones in storage. But they'd either thrown them away or didn't want to part with their collection. She eventually bought one from a man in Utah â the machine she still uses today."
"It's become painfully obvious over the past few years just how difficult fully autonomous cars are. This isn't a dig at any of the companies developing autonomous cars (unless they're the sort of company who keeps on making ludicrous promises about full autonomy, of course)â it's just that the real world is a complex place for full autonomy, and despite the relatively well constrained nature of roads, there's still too much unpredictability for robots to operate comfortably outside of relatively narrow restrictions.
Where autonomous vehicles have had the most success is in environments with a lot of predictability and structure, which is why I really like the idea of autonomous urban boats designed for cities with canals. MIT has been working on these for years, and they're about to introduce them to the canals of Amsterdam as cargo shuttles and taxis.
MIT's Roboat design goes back to 2015, when it began with a series of small-scale experiments that involved autonomous docking of swarms of many shoebox-sized Roboats to create self-assembling aquatic structures like bridges and concert stages. Eventually, Roboats were scaled up, and by 2020 MIT had a version large enough to support a human."
"In February 2018, a Facebook researcher all but shut off the News Feed ranking algorithm for .05% of Facebook users. âWhat happens if we delete ranked News Feed?â they asked in an internal report summing up the experiment. Their findings: Without a News Feed algorithm, engagement on Facebook drops significantly, people hide 50% more posts, content from Facebook Groups rises to the top, and â surprisingly â Facebook makes even more money from users scrolling through the News Feed.
The report comes from Frances Haugenâs disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal team. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including Big Technology. (Though I joined this consortium on Monday, Iâm in favor of its dissolution and the speedy, responsible release of all Haugenâs documents to the public.)
Turning off the News Feed ranking algorithm, the researcher found, led to a worse experience almost across the board. People spent more time scrolling through the News Feed searching for interesting stuff, and saw more advertisements as they went (hence the revenue spike). They hid 50% more posts, indicating they werenât thrilled with what they were seeing. They saw more Groups content, because Groups is one of the few places on Facebook that remains vibrant. And they saw double the amount of posts from public pages they donât follow, often because friends commented on those pages."
"The following is part one of a proposal detailing the need for a geothermal focused research organization (FRO). FROs try to push promising technologies through the chasm to reach wide commercialization.
The energy industry is going through a long-term deflationary period. Unconventional oil and gas, solar, wind, and batteries have all experienced rapidly falling costs. Every technology comes with tradeoffs. Solar and wind are not dispatchable, batteries have limited duration, and shale hydrocarbons require constant investment and a sophisticated supply chain.
Modern Geothermal provides:
High Capacity Factor (24/7 production)
Zero Fuel Costs
High Power Density (Plants use little land)
Provides Electricity, Heat, or Combined Heat and Power
Can be Sited Almost Anywhere (Reducing transmission costs)
Enough Energy Available to Power the World
Geothermal is a candidate to replace aging nuclear and hydropower plants, given that renewing permits for both types of generators will probably become difficult. It is also great to pair with industrial users that have steady 24/7 electricity demand.
Why don't we have geothermal everywhere? It's too expensive. Geothermal market share growth depends on substantial cost reductions."
đ Is scientific progress waning? Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
"In a series of studies over the last few years on competition and consumer marketsâscrutinizing everything from mutual funds to Korean pop songsâChu developed a theory he calls âdurable dominance.â The theory posits that consumers with too many choices will tend to become overwhelmed and react by choosing a familiar option. Second, it holds that when many of the options on the market are newcomers, the newbies compete so intensely amongst themselves that they canât compete with the established dominant choiceâin the case of research, that often means papers that had become the popular option before the market was so competitive.
Thanks to the explosion of new research papers in the last few decades, Chu thought the scientific literature was âa perfect testbedâ for his durable dominance theory. So he and his coauthor James Evans analyzed 1.8 billion citations from 90 million papers, across 241 subjects on Web of Science. They found that the most popular subjects on the search database, such as molecular biology, grow by more than 100,000 new papers every year. And in these mega-fields, the top 1% of papers get the vast majority of citations. Whatâs more, even the rankings of these highly cited papers rarely change; the top-cited article in molecular biology came out in 1976 and has been number one since 1982.
Chu and Evans also found that the odds of a paper reaching the top 0.1% of highly cited studies in a given year declines precipitously with field size. When the rare paper does break through, it usually does so in less than 12 months, suggesting that popularity comes from social media, news coverage, or via existing networks of people who are already well-connected in the subject areaârather than from citations in other work. Even iterative papers that seem to be written with the intent to eclipse older studies are not being cited in the largest fields, Chu says, based on his analysis of how effectively such papers introduce new ideas that disrupt the existing literature. The results imply that even if every new study was groundbreaking, there are just too many new papers now for readers to spend meaningful time on them."