Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Stephen Gorard opinionates in NewScientist (17 October 2015, paywall) about the problems of entering the world in September, at least in the UK:

ARE you an August or a September baby? This is a vexed question for parents; whether their children are born at the end or start of the UK school year can be crucial when it comes to performance at school.

The gap between these groups is substantial throughout primary and early secondary education. Attainment, self-esteem and the chances of being selected for sports teams or university are lower for children born in the UK summer, all other things being equal.

Figures suggest the attainment gap may be widest in the early years. In England, 49 per cent of summer-born children who start school in September having just turned 4 achieve a “good level of development” in their first year, compared with 71 per cent of autumn-born pupils, who are nearly five when they start.

In terms of numbers reaching the “expected” levels of writing, reading and maths, the gap is around 8 per cent from ages 5 to seven and drops very little from ages 7 to 11. By 15 or 16, around 6 per cent more autumn children gain five or more “good” grades at GCSE, in subjects including English and maths, than their summer peers. This suggests the possibility of different futures for many young people based on birth month.

OK, so there may be a problem.  His solution?

There is one solution to much of the problem though: to age-standardise all assessment results. This would mean pupils still sit annual tests or exams at the same time, but with results adjusted for age. These would form the official record for educational decisions by schools, universities, employers, individuals and family.

For the sake of fairness, this is what should be done.

Because … because … why?  How does this help when they are out of school, doing work … and finding it’s not up to snuff?  Do they then apply to the courts to force the employer to keep promoting them because of the month of their birth?  And when that bridge he designed falls down, who gets the blame?

Existence is not about making sure everyone is treated fairly because they bloody well exist, but to attempt to improve the populace on the assumption that an improved populace will make for a more prosperous, safe society; the populace must be treated fairly, but in such a way as to improve society, not just make the members feel better.  The former approach is full of unexpected consequences that pique my interest only because of a streak of morbid interest to which I really shouldn’t admit; and while the latter will have some, I don’t fear them nearly as much.

So, I understand it’s on me to make a concrete suggestion, so here it is: abandon the concept of school years.  Let’s use science to pick an optimal age for youngsters to start school; as we get better, each kid can be individually evaluated for the perfect beginning age, perhaps (although there’s something to be said for not greasing the skids too liberally).  Let’s say it’s 5 years old, and he was born in March.  The month of his fifth birthday, he starts school with all the other March kids.  They do their school for 9 months or whatever it might be in the UK, take their vacation, rinse and repeat.  The problems of differential development is greatly minimized – it’s 31 days or less, rather than something like 11 months.  The problem resolved in a stroke!

Perhaps this goes against the grain, as traditionally we group students into full years, celebrate with homecomings (in the US) and anniversaries, and damn these traditions must be much more important than the development of the students.  Perhaps this is a measure of how much society cares for its kids – and how much it cares for old, damaging traditions.  Rather than fix the problem, they’d rather paper over it with seasonal adjustments … which of course will be the subject of wretched politics, statistical analyses gone incredibly wrong, and windbags taking liberal potshots at the whole sleazy mess.  (For those of you wondering if I comprehend irony, please be assured that my spine writhes even as I peck this missive out.)

For the sake of the future of the UK, don’t do this.

Regarding that lonely planet, a reader asks:

How do they know how old it is? Without a star as a spatial age reference point, I have no idea how that can be done.

According to this paper on arXiv, while the planet is not orbiting any particular star, it is associated with a group of stars:

A member of the 23±3 Myr β Pic moving group, PSO J318.5-22 has Teff = 1160+30−40 K and a mass estimate of 8.3±0.5 MJup for a 23±3 Myr age.

A trifle obscure.  I’m thinking Myr means millions years.  “Teff” is “effective temperature“, and I will guess MJup is Mass of Jupiter.  And the assumption is the planet was created at the same time as the stars, out of the same dust cloud, although they also use a formula (with which I’m not familiar) based on measurements of the planet to independently confirm the age.

Star ages are estimated using the method gyrochonology.  From Wikipedia:

The basic idea underlying gyrochronology is that the rotation period P, of a main-sequence cool star is a deterministic function of its age t and its mass M (or a suitable proxy such as color). The detailed dependencies of rotation are such that the periods converge rapidly to a certain function of age and mass, mathematically denoted by P = P (t, M), even though stars have a range of allowed initial periods. Consequently, cool stars do not occupy the entire 3-dimensional parameter space of (mass, age, period), but instead define a 2-dimensional surface in this space. Therefore, measuring two of these variables yields the third. Of these quantities, the mass (or a proxy such as color) and the rotation period are the easier variables to measure, providing access to the star’s age, otherwise difficult to obtain.

The Economist describes a new species coming into existence due to competitive pressures and interbreeding:

LIKE some people who might rather not admit it, wolves faced with a scarcity of potential sexual partners are not beneath lowering their standards. It was desperation of this sort, biologists reckon, that led dwindling wolf populations in southern Ontario to begin, a century or two ago, breeding widely with dogs and coyotes. …

Interbreeding between animal species usually leads to offspring less vigorous than either parent—if they survive at all. But the combination of wolf, coyote and dog DNA that resulted from this reproductive necessity generated an exception. The consequence has been booming numbers of an extraordinarily fit new animal (see picture) spreading through the eastern part of North America. Some call this creature the eastern coyote. Others, though, have dubbed it the “coywolf”. Whatever name it goes by, Roland Kays of North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, reckons it now numbers in the millions.

Of course, there’s already CoyWolf.org:

Initially they were called coydog, then eastern coyote, but we now know that coywolf is the most appropriate descriptor of this animal because the original wolf found in the Northeast was most probably the smallish (~60 pound) eastern wolf (Canis lycaon), which is very closely related to (and possibly the same species as) the red wolf (Canis rufus). The eastern wolf is actually more closely related to western coyotes than they are to the larger gray (western) wolf (Canis lupus). Thus, the coywolf has “native” wolf genes and got here on its own four feet: it therefore should not be considered non-native or invasive. Furthermore, it is questionable if the gray wolf actually ever lived in the Northeast, or if the eastern wolf and possibly gray/eastern wolf hybrids (which are common in the Great Lakes states, Canis lupus x C. lycaon) were endemic to this region.

It leaves me wondering about other crossbreeds as well – what is the success rate insofar as new breeds surviving?  1%?  Lower?

(h/t William Cloose)

NewScientist (17 October 2015, paywall) comes up with a new caste of ants: robber ants.  These specialize in stealing food from other ant colonies.  But here’s where I start to goggle:

The thieving ants are not merely foraging ants that get their food from other colonies, says [Terrence] McGlynn [of California State University in Carson]. “When you watch thieves, they act like they’re working to avoid detection,” he says. “When disturbed, they’re more likely to freeze, and then move in the opposite direction. If you grab them, they drop their stolen food. Once they get in the clear, they scamper more quickly, while regular non-thieving foragers will hang onto their food, as they know it was rightfully acquired.”

OK, I suppose I could just take it as Dr. McGlynn anthropomorphizing inappropriately.  In fact, I’m sure that’s right.  But I couldn’t help but immediately speculate this might be evidence against free will – because how could something so bloody small have a sense of right and wrong?

Well, of course, if “right & wrong” has a survival characteristic – and it should – then it makes sense that it could be evolved into a genetically determined behavior.

But still … and it’s cool anyways.

ReverbPress reports on the day of takeover:

The memo went out, and November 3rd 2015 came to the National Geographic office. This was the day in which Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox took over National Geographic.  The management of National Geographic sent out an email telling its staff, all of its staff, all to report to their headquarters, and wait by their phones. This pulled back every person who was in the field, every photographer, every reporter, even those on vacation had to show up on this fateful day.

As these phones rang, one by one National Geographic let go the award-winning staff, and the venerable institution was no more.

WaPo has more solid information:

The National Geographic Society of Washington will lay off about 180 of its 2,000 employees in a cost-cutting move that follows the sale of its famous magazine and other assets to a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

The reduction, the largest in the organization’s 127-year history, appears to affect almost every department of the nonprofit organization, including the magazine, which the society has published since just after its founding in 1888. The reduction also will affect people who work for the National Geographic Channel, the most profitable part of the organization. Several people in the channel’s fact-checking department, for example, were terminated on Tuesday, employees said.

The National Geographic Society said “involuntary separations” will represent about 9 percent of its workforce. In addition, buyout offers have been made to an undetermined number of employees.

Sad day, although not quite the wholesale slaughter ReverbPress lead me to expect.  But it’s useful to keep in mind that layoffs need not have a linear impact – layoff the proper 1% of a staff and the whole enterprise can collapse – or completely change character.

I was not a subscriber, but my parents were and the exposure to NG was formative.  Why not subscribe when I attained majority?  Those beautiful magazines, oddly enough.  They were so substantial that I didn’t want to be responsible for lugging them about, and I knew I wouldn’t reread them; and then, in the back of my mind, were the amorphous questions about disposal and the environmental impacts of actually producing the magazine.  And so, I suppose, I failed them.

So this leads to questions about the future of truly high quality, leading institutions.  A friend was acting out today about those loathesome ads about odd tricks to lose weight, or today’s gem – the one food to “kill diabetes”.  I see these ads on sites I’d call respectable, such as CNN.com.  Are they merely a bubble in the timestream, a temporary inconvenience – or are they our future?  Saturated in false information, we’ll saunter on in trivialities while the institutions which delivered the world to us – no exaggeration! – are gutted by those who worship money?

(h/t Kevin McLeod on the mad cacophany we call Facebook)

NewScientist (17 October 2015, paywall) reports on the impact of the current monster El Niño on corals around the world:

So far coral bleaching has been seen around the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, around Hawaii in the North Pacific and around the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. This distribution was the trigger for the announcement by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that we are seeing the third ever global coral bleaching event. These observations confirmed predictions made by NOAA, giving the agency confidence in its forecast of a much bigger global bleaching event brought about by El Niño.

Which reefs are under threat next?
According to NOAA’s four-month projection, coral bleaching will affect 38 per cent of the world’s coral reefs by the end of the year. That includes everywhere from the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to reefs in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

Remember, bleaching is not the same as dying.  As noted in earlier in this thread, previous research had used poor proxies for understanding how coral reacts, and, even more importantly, coral can recover, or be replaced, fairly quickly.

Back in 2013 a rather strange object was found floating in space, around 75 lightyears out, and it was called PSO J318.5-22.  From the press release from the University of Hawaii:

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago—a newborn in planet lifetimes.

It was identified from its faint and unique heat signature by the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) wide-field survey telescope on Haleakala, Maui. Follow-up observations using other telescopes in Hawaii show that it has properties similar to those of gas-giant planets found orbiting around young stars. And yet PSO J318.5-22 is all by itself, without a host star.

“We have never before seen an object free-floating in space that that looks like this. It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars, but it is drifting out there all alone,” explained team leader Dr. Michael Liu of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “I had often wondered if such solitary objects exist, and now we know they do.”

During the past decade, extrasolar planets have been discovered at an incredible pace, with about a thousand found by indirect methods such as wobbling or dimming of their host stars induced by the planet. However, only a handful of planets have been directly imaged, all of which are around young stars (less than 200 million years old). PSO J318.5-22 is one of the lowest-mass free-floating objects known, perhaps the very lowest. But its most unique aspect is its similar mass, color, and energy output to directly imaged planets.

Follow-up information from the University of Edinburgh is now available:

Weather map of distant world revealed

Weather patterns in a mysterious world beyond our solar system have been revealed for the first time, a study suggests.

Layers of clouds, made up of hot dust and droplets of molten iron, have been detected on a planet-like object found 75 light years from Earth, researchers say.

Findings from the study could improve scientists’ ability to find out if conditions in far-off planets are capable of sustaining life.

Cloud cover

University researchers used a telescope in Chile to study the weather systems in the distant world – known as PSO J318.5-22 – which is estimated to be around 20 million-years-old.

They captured hundreds of infra-red images of the object as it rotated over a 5-hour period.

By comparing the brightness of PSO J318.5-22 with neighbouring bodies, the team discovered that it is covered in multiple layers of thick and thin cloud.

No star, yet so hot, suggests internal heating.  Must be nuclear.  Fascinating!

(h/t Melissa Breyer @ TreeHugger.com)

A reader comments on Jesse:

Yes it is. Pure ego.

To be fair, none of these candidates lack ego.  They know this is one of the toughest jobs around, and to think they can toss their hats in the ring requires a heady mix of ego and chutzpah.

Watching Jesse talk, though, you get the feel he’s more confident in himself than some of the others are in themselves.  Question: would he dare walk into a debate and say, “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’ll find the best expert I can and put him in charge of it”?  Would the electorate accept it?

On the Issues discusses Jesse‘s positions and comes up with this chart:

The summary at Ballotpedia would leave me mostly comfortable on domestic issues, with the possible position of opposing ACA expansion (I am undecided and waiting for results, both short and long term).  His positions are actually quite sensible, as he opposes expanding the military, going into Iran, and favors abortion rights, amongst others.

Yes, as in former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura.  A couple of weeks ago one of the local TV stations broadcast a short interview in which he stated that he hadn’t decided yet, but felt he had a credible chance.  It’s an interesting statement, partly because of what he has going for him, and partly in self-analysis of my (and wife’s reaction), which was a slight shock of disbelief, which is no doubt due to his former career as a pro wrestler.

So throw out the emotional reaction, as important as it may be in analyzing his chances, and look at what he brings to the table:

1. Military Service – Navy from late 1969 – Sep 1975, member of Underwater Demolition Team.
2. Highly credible career as a wrestler, along with being an actor
3. Has a wife and children (important to the electorate)
4. Mayor of Brooklyn Park, MN (four years)
5. Governor of MN – 1 term.  The link gives Wikipedia’s summation of his political positions, which seems accurate and quite progressive for the time: for gay marriage, for example.  As I recall, his administration was considered to be quite competent and nearly scandal free, with a problem with someone in the DNR, I believe.  He was a trifle thin-skinned about his privacy.
6. Quite charismatic.

Compare to the GOP contenders.  Jeb Bush ran a state, perhaps relatively competently, for two terms; Huckabee comes off less well, with hints of scandal.  Fiorina is more or less an incompetent at high posts, while Carson is a brilliant surgeon but doesn’t appear to know much about the principles of American government.  Trump is Trump – near bankruptcy, then success, bankruptcy, user of condemnation proceedings, no public service experience – his focus is money.  Rubio is a midget next to Ventura in terms of experience, as is Cruz.  And etc.

It’s rather eye-opening.  Toss out the emotions, and Ventura actually comes off rather well against that side.  But it’s not clear to me how much foreign policy experience would be available in a Ventura Administration.  Clinton has him badly beat there, and Sanders has at least some as well.

No endorsement here – like his gubernatorial run, I’d have to hear more before I’d consider him worth voting for.  But I did vote for him in that race, and I would have reelected him – the State did well, despite all the outrage from the professional political class, but when the politicians got together to put together a particularly disastrous budget, he stepped out and let someone else take that gig.  Minnesota struggled under Governor Pawlenty, partially because of that budget.

In response to my review of The Man in the Web, a reader critiques:

I had a hard time following that review. So Carolyn Jones plays a corpse for much of the movie? And no mention of her basic sexiness to help enliven the show, must mean she was quite dead — or acted it. What an odd sounding movie.

And, well, she wasn’t sexy.  At all.  No one was really sexy.  Mz. Jones basically played an alcoholic shrew of dubious charm throughout the first half of the movie, after which she disappears, not permitted to actually play her character’s corpse (this opportunity was given to an anonymous sheet).  I would not be surprised if the screenwriter claimed to be taking a subtle dig at the role of women in small town America by making her an alcoholic, money-obsessed woman trading sex for money behind her husband’s back. bored out of her skull – and subject to nervous breakdowns (although the episode did happen in NYC).

After the obligatory happy climax, Ladd’s character marries another woman, who never rises out of her gender-assigned role, has no color, no real personality except to weep when her own marriage ends in travesty.

I did want to mention this was not a traditional murder mystery, as there was no real way to deduce the killer given the array of clues.  You could try to cheat by considering the tropes of Hollywood, but that always deadens the impact of the story, as tropes often do.  Which reminds me, someday (maybe on a lovely blizzardy day in January) I must expound on my (no doubt naive and totally improper) theory of story-telling and its role in any human society.

We saw SHAUN THE SHEEP at the venerable Riverview Theatre (a lovely Art Deco era facility) today, and we’re happy to report that the herd of mildly meddlesome ruminants has successfully leapt from the confining corral of 7 minute long episodes to the wide open spaces of a movie length exploration of the Big City and the importance of shears in the life of a Farmer.  We were kept in ugly suspense as the Shaun assayed the dangers of public transport, only to discover his sheepmates found the bus ride to be of little consequence; their encounters with public service officers, not to mention (no, don’t mention it!  But I must, I must!) scalpels and dressing gowns and gloves (oh my!) were, however, discomfiting to all involved, especially the poor chap transformed into what might be described as a wanna-be Cthulhu before our very eyes.

For little kids and big kids, especially with some sly jokes for the elders, this was a fine movie.

From our Arts Editor: It wasn’t a ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-d movie at all!

A fascinating insight back in 2013 into the use of San Francisco as a towel by Google, Facebook, et al by Sven Eberlein:

I can understand the very narrow and self-serving motivations of these corporations — they are, after all, primarily in the business of making money. I don’t even question their good intentions in terms of wanting to reduce their carbon footprint. I just don’t think they’re quite as smart as they think they are, as their thinking seems to be painfully linear rather than rooted in a deeper whole systems analysis. And even their single-minded focus on transportation is not really yielding the kind of success their powerpoints claim, seeing that last year the Bay Area was one of the worst three congested urban areas in the U.S., on par with L.A.

I have a much harder time though understanding why the city is so single-handedly fixated on transportation stats instead of looking at sustainability from a broader cultural and socio-economic perspective, and why SPUR would fail to get anyone with a deeper knowledge of urban development on this panel. It feels like nothing was resolved at all, and the conclusion of the event was that this is just the way things are and how they’re going to be in the future, just more of it with better apps.

I do not know if things improved.

I’m tellin’ ya, the GMO thing is getting out of control.

Hand them a pocket gopher and they hand you a burrowing ELK!

I’ve been reading the Discover Blogs (associated with pop-sci Discover Magazine) recently & fitfully, and it finally occurred to me that most of the entries don’t really read like blog entries, but more like commercial column pieces: an interesting bit of science with the requisite journalism research behind it.  But opinion?  I don’t see it.

Granted, blogs are not precisely defined.  Andrew Sullivan’s entries often consisted of simply a toothsome quote from an entry on someone else’s blog (or more likely several, as he was trying to cover the entire blogosphere, juxtaposing various opinions on a topic); Andrew didn’t always comment.  I’m less likely to cover other blogs, but rather treat this as a way to blow off steam, to share my delight in the world (usually of science), to stop muttering to my wife, and to occasionally indulge in a bit of meta-irrationalism.  (Don’t ask.)

But I think I’m looking for blogs to be used creatively, much like the BBSes of old were used.  To me, the Discover Blogs are just another way to deliver news to the consumer, to entice them into subscribing to the primary product.  Call it NewsBytes, or something else, but I’d sure like to see a whiff of opinion, of creativity, of something – not just news under another label.  I suppose it’s not harmful, but it’s a mite irritating.

A reader asks about those new solar panels:

Is it possible to predict where this will work, i.e. in areas with lots of sunlight. Everywhere in the world? It depends?

It depends.

Let’s start with the ultraviolet side of things.  UV consists of two bands, UVA (wavelength of 315–400 nm) and UVB (280–315), courtesy Wikipedia.  This division is important because UVA is not absorbed by the ozone layer, while UVB is mildly to mostly absorbed by the ozone layer (there’s also a UVC layer, which is completely absorbed and also carries some energy).  From the Windows to the Universe solar emission chart,

we can see that UVA, which is closer to the visible spectrum than UVB, also carries more energy than does UVB.  Since UVA isn’t absorbed by the ozone layer, the depth of the ozone layer at the location of interest (or the altitude of the site, for that matter) isn’t as important as it might be.  It’s not irrelevant, since UVB is carrying some of the energy we’re interested in harvesting, but it’s not paramount.  My quick research suggests the ozone layer becomes thinner at altitude (thus pilots’ concerns about cataracts caused by solar rays and sunburn) as well as at the higher latitudes, i.e., near the poles.  So at higher altitudes and latitudes you may receive a little more harvestable energy.

What about infrared?  Turns out it, too, has problems reaching the Earth’s surface.  Windows to the World has another handy chart:

What is absorbing the radiation?  According to the Climate Science Investigations site, CO₂ is highly absorbent:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is also an important greenhouse gas. It has a long lifetime in Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide strongly absorbs energy with a wavelength of 15 μm (micrometers). This makes carbon dioxide a good absorber of wavelengths falling in the infrared radiation region of the spectrum.

This explains why CO₂ is classed as a climate change gas – by absorption, the gas warms.  And there’s lots of CO₂.  More or less evenly distributed, so siting your installation based on infrared considerations doesn’t appear to be an effective strategy, insofar as this amateur (me!) can tell.

There are other factors as well.  The tilt of the Earth relative to its orbital plane (the source of our seasons, basically) means differing levels of solar radiation reaching a given location on Earth varies with the season.  The location itself defines the angle of incidence, as moderated by the season.  Yet, interestingly enough, a location directly on the equator may not be as effective as a location at 20 degrees latitude, because wet tropical forests will screen out the rays, while at 20 degrees there are a number of dry deserts.

So, yeah, it depends.  Having gone through all this, I have to wonder if these are going to be a gimmick, or part of a larger array where the visible spectrum is also harvested.  The diagram from Windows to the World certainly  clarifies just how much radiation the Earth’s atmosphere (and magnetic belts) screen out, and what is the best part of the spectrum to harvest – the visible spectrum.

Tonight’s surprising fare was The Man in the Net (1959), starring Alan Ladd and Carolyn Jones as a couple under strain as Alan pursues his poverty-stricken painting muse, and her muse, being wealth and all it can bring in meaningless chit chat, is rapidly breaking up in inchoate pieces.  The actor behind the painter, Ladd, evidently played the entire movie from his hospital bed in the local ICU, for nothing else explains his wooden delivery and a face stricken of all expression, even boredom; I shiver even now to contemplate how little his mouth could move.

But when Carolyn’s body is dug out from beneath a woodpile, his character is assisted in his subsequent straits by a local pack of children, and they bolster a show we nearly turned off in the first five minutes, as, innocent as they first seem, they soon provide hollow echoes of the deceit bedeviling the little town of Stoneville, manipulative and deceitful, if in an innocent, forthright way.  The town’s very curtains of bucolic happiness slowly slide away to show us the murderous vigilantes lurking in every country store corner, even including those representatives of law enforcement who merely use the mob to fulfill their official duties; moral remonstrances are quite beyond the pale for these creatures of (I hope to titter not) the law.¹

As I commented to our Arts Editor, if the youngster named Angel is not convicted of the crime alleged in this drama, surely she will be convicted in the next; she has all the grace and subtley of Nero at his worst. Yet, with some seriousnes, we speculated as to the power behind the throne: was it her older sister, Emily?  Or her doll who saw all, Louise?

Coincidentally, Angel was played by a St. Paul actress by the name of Susan Gordon, who was aged ten at the time.

All in all, for all of its wobbly start, it held our attention from commercial abyss to commercial abyss, and we watched it in its entirety in a single evening, a rare feat for us.

¹I will refrain from superfluous comparisons to certain political parties.

Phone rings.  Heavy Indian accent, slow enunciation: “Sir, your computer has been sending mail to Microsoft Services indicating it is having problems.  Are you sitting in front of your computer, sir?”

Sigh.

“Yes.”

“Is it on?”

“It’s always on.  By the way, it’s not Windows.  This is Linux.  Does your mother know what you’re doing.”

Wait for the huh? from the other end of the world.

“Sir … I know what I am doing is bad.  I have no choice.”

What!

“Er, ah, surely can find another job.”

“No, sir, I must do this, there is no other jobs.”

We went on from there, but my evil plan to induce shame was foiled.

Lloyd Alter @ Treehugger.com continues to beat the drum for tall wood buildings as he reports that the University of British Columbia is planning to build a new student residence to be 18 stories tall:

No doubt the steel and concrete people will be out in force calling this a firetrap (thats what all the commenters are saying in the Vancouver Sun) However it is not. The architects note that “The conservative approach used for the design of the project is equally as safe as that for high rise buildings using a concrete or steel structure. ”

The building is comprised of a series of repetitive, highly compartmentalized small rooms so that in the event that a fire originates in one suite it is extremely likely the fire would be contained in the compartment in which it originated. To enhance compartmentalization, the typical one-hour fire separation required by the building code has been increased to two hours. Studies have shown that automatic sprinkler systems are effective in controlling over 90% of fire incidents. For this project an automatic sprinkler system with a back-up water supply offers additional protection for occupants, as well as for firefighters, for events that might originate during an earthquake, as the sprinkler system would remain operational.

The architect, Acton Ostry Architects, gives a description:

53m tall mass timber structure comprised of two-way CLT floor slabs, glulam columns and steel connectors; concrete, gypsum board, prefab building envelope with metal cladding

So it’s a hybrid.  Nothing wrong with that as more is learned about how to properly build tall wooden buildings.

Makes me wonder about the construction of most new homes in Minnesota.  Vinyl siding (which I detest, as it’s harder to paint than wood – which makes it harder to customize your house – and not particularly good for the environment)?  What else?

A reader remarks on this thread,

It’ll work, but only in places where there’s an optimal relationship between typical electrical use per person, household or building, available surface for these panels, and cost. That can be neatly encapsulated in an algorithm. Plug the variables in a spreadsheet – panel efficiency levels, local energy alternatives, power use levels, land costs, borrowing costs, etc. That would identify where the solar panels are economically viable now and point to where trends are converging to make them viable soon. I’d be shocked if it hasn’t been done a dozen times over already.

With no remarks about aesthetics.  I was going to say I don’t think aesthetics have formulas, but of course I’d be wrong.  There’s the Golden Ratio, courtesy Wikipedia,

Expressed algebraically, for quantities a and b with a > b > 0,

Some twentieth-century artists and architects, including Le Corbusier and Dalí, have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing. The golden ratio appears in some patterns in nature, including the spiral arrangement of leaves and other plant parts.

And then there’s the chaps claiming they know how to make the perfect movie sequel:

Based on factors such as whether key stars are still on board, how long it has been since the last film and how that performed, the researchers say they can calculate what producers can expect to gross relative to a film in the same genre that is not a sequel.

But that’s rather beside the point.  If homeowners hate the idea of draping their house in this stuff then the formula won’t be used.

NewScientist‘s Joshua Howgego investigates how the variety of soils on Earth is changing in response to human farming habits:

FIND the places where farms give way to the California wilderness and you’re sure to encounter an endangered species. It is not aggressive, but it is omnivorous, devouring anything that happens to fall dead within its reach. And like most rare beasts, the extinction of Abruptic durixeralfs would have cascading impacts on the ecosystem around it.

Don’t be misled by the name. This is neither animal nor plant nor microbe, but a subgroup of soils. Its members nonetheless slot into a classification system every bit as elaborate as that we use to categorise life forms. In the US alone, more than 20,000 soils have been catalogued. Many are facing extinction.

Soil Taxonomies are summarized by Wikipedia and covered academically by this lesson from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:

The nature and properties of soils can vary widely from one location to the next, even within distances of a few meters. These same soil properties can also be found to exhibit similar characteristics over broad regional areas of like climate and vegetation. The soil forming factors of parent material, climate, vegetation (biota), topography, and time (Principles Lesson 3.2) tend to produce a soil that describes the environment in which it is formed. By surveying properties of soil color, texture, and structure; thickness of horizons; parent materials; drainage characteristics; and landscape position, soil scientists have mapped and classified nearly the entire contiguous United States and much of the rest of the world.

So what’s the problem?  From Joshua:

Agriculture is by far and away soil’s biggest problem. In the wild, nutrients removed by plants are returned to the soil when they die and decay to form rich humus. Humans tend not to return unused parts of harvested crops to replenish those nutrients.

We realised this long ago and developed strategies to get around the problem. We left fields fallow, or rotated crops that required different nutrients, thereby keeping the soil in balance. Growing peas and beans can even add nitrogen, a vital nutrient, to the ground: nodules in their roots host rhizobia bacteria, which grab atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into nitrates.

But over the past few decades, it has become clear this wasn’t such a bright idea. Chemical fertilisers can release polluting nitrous oxide into the atmosphere and excess is often washed away with the next rain. This leaches nitrogen into rivers, damaging algal blooms. More recently, we have found that indiscriminate fertiliser use hurts the soil itself, turning it acidic and salty. It also suppresses symbiotic relationships between fungi and plant roots, and can even turn beneficial bacteria against each other.

And current status?

… we are losing soil at a rate of 30 soccer fields a minute. If we don’t slow the decline, all farmable soil [world-wide] could be gone in 60 years.

The International Soil Reference and Information Centre has released a map of currently known soils throughout the world.

Aviva Rutkin reports for NewScientist (10 October 2015, paywall) on the creation of a marine robot with a sense of curiosity:

At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, computer scientist Yogesh Girdhar is figuring out how to imbue bots with a sense of curiosity. He wants them to be able to filter out the more common features, and focus on the remarkable.

The curiosity software starts running the minute the robot is dropped into a new place. It has little information about what the world looks like initially, but slowly begins making sense of what it sees by searching for patterns in the data. In the ocean, those patterns represent things like sand, kelp or fish. …

Underwater, AQUA looked “like a puppy”, Girdhar says, racing and eagerly sniffing at new or unusual sights. In one set of tests, it successfully wandered over to check out nearby sea plants and corals, spending less time on bare patches of sand.

While Yogesh talks about curiosity, it’s not much different from purpose.  This collides with a latent sense of collective purpose I occasionally muse upon: the old question of what are we doing here?  For millenia, the answer was simply to survive long enough to multiply.

Then we began to seek understanding, once it became clear that understanding enhanced the chances to survive.  Sometimes, understanding took to the creation of the notion of Gods; it was simply too hard to come up with anything more realistic.

Then we moved on to nationalism.  I’m reminded of an entry in T. E. Lawrence’s Selected Letters, which I shall not dig out as I read it many years ago and can only hope my copy is upstairs (and it’s quite large), in which, upon learning that he’s lost a brother (or was it two?) in the fighting in the trenches of France, he laments that they have had the honor of dying for their country; by implicit contrast, he has not.  So their purpose was to serve the nation.

Nowadays?  Sometimes it seems like we are in a knowledge acquisition mode, frantically building and tearing down models of the world at various scales, confident in … what?  What is the purpose of the acquisition of all this knowledge?

The fly in my soup, I suspect, is attributing singletary purposes to a group of people.  We are individuals.  We, at least in the United States, are taught to follow our own interests – at least to some extent.  And, yet, I cannot help noticing how much the Millenials’ constant use of smartphones resembles a distributed computing project, frantically calculating … what?

Are we really just an arm of some otherworldly octopus, mere neurons in its exploratory arm?  Or a computer simulation?

Which brings us back to the robot’s curiosity.  While I’m fascinated by the thought of a robot flicking from new experience, or pattern, to another, I keep in mind that it didn’t develop that curiosity, but was programmed to do it; it’s not a survival urge, but just another knowledge acquisition strategy developed by its builders.  And what does that mean?

Kirk Douglas stars in Detective Story (1951), a sordid, even noirish slice-of-life story centered on a day at the 21st police precinct of New York City.  Various petty and not-so-petty characters wander on and off the stage, exhibiting motivations obscure and troubling, while Douglas struggles with a rigid, unforgiving, and ultimately unrealistic moral code which drives him and his wife to the edge of destruction, and then tumbles them over the railing in a welter of awkward knees and elbows.  Well-acted, well-paced, with a denouement ultimately depressing and accepting, it brings to mind questions of purpose vs fufillment, contrasting character motivations which leaves one wondering.

Concealed within a lament concerning the unjustified biases of her debate opponents, C. Christine Fair of LawFare gives an update on the costs and benefits of drone strikes in Pakistan:

With respect to Pakistan, there is one study that actually comes to the exact opposite conclusion as the one put forward by Mr. Greenwald. A few years ago, a Pakistan-based journalist sent a Waziri stringer into Waziristan to interview locals about who died in the drone strikes in their villages. According to the report from that six-month-long study, villagers claimed that “at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent–at least 138–were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011. Excluding one catastrophically disastrous strike which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants.

Her disdain for Glenn Greenwald, one of her opponents (she also classes the debate host as an opponent), is rather clear:

In contrast to the curated quotes of prominent personalities which Mr. Greenwald gathers and describes as a “mountain of evidence” about the dangers of drones, there is actually a robust body of scholarly work that addresses the effects of leadership decapitation on a wide array of militant groups operating in diverse countries and their ability to produce violence. In general, the scholarship produces mixed results, with some work showing the efficacy of leadership decapitation (e.g. Johnston 2012; Price 2012) while other studies find that it is sometimes effective (e.g., Jordan 2009) or even counterproductive (Hafez and Hatfield 2005).

It makes for interesting reading.