Hi, I’m Gavin. This is my experimental newsletter that explores thinking - how we might think better and learn together as we do so. A big thank you to Markham for taking over last week’s edition and giving me a short break!
I explore several key topics through the lens of several core themes: systems thinking, scenario planning, trends, and cross-disciplinary innovation. These often relate to key issues: climate change, pandemics, astronomy, physics, health, history, philosophy, culture, rocketry, conflict, the impact of technology on society and more (lol!). With a larger question behind it all: how do we progress and how do we progress better?
I hope you like where we go. (620 - nope - 653 of us now! - welcome all new arrivals)
Gavin
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Reading list - the best stuff to read
🌏 Climate change
Recent weather events are increasingly alarming - and even scientists are surprised. This is never a good sign. We have not yet started even building infrastructure to be climate resilient as we do with more extreme weather events - and these future extreme weather events are already “baked in”. The question isn’t if they happen anymore, it’s how we deal with them.
Even recent events were not forecast. (5 mins by Chelsea Harvey)
“The temperatures broke way above this upper bound,” van Oldenborgh said. “Our standard methods of evaluation didn’t work.”
The researchers ended up having to adjust their model, essentially forcing it to include the recent extreme temperatures in its historical record. Afterward, the model suggested that the heat wave was probably at least a 1-in-1,000-year event.
That number is highly uncertain, van Oldenborgh cautioned; it could be even more rare. The main takeaway is that the heat wave was outside the realm of anything the Pacific Northwest—and, in fact, much of the world—has ever experienced.
Think about that for a moment. What other events will climate change bring that we have not already factored in? How bad can things get? (Quite bad, you’d imagine).
Continuing on the depressing theme - heat deaths will increase, and not just for people but for wildlife too (NYT). And increasingly there will be little we can now do to prevent some of it.
“Climate change is not something in the future: It’s something in the present, and it is already affecting our health in very dramatic ways,” she says. Extreme, deadly heat events like the one battering North America are a foreshadowing of what will come. “We can expect that what we’ve seen in the past—that 37 percent—is going to increase exponentially in the future.”
“Our choices for the future are more of this, or a lot more of this. We can still choose between bad and worse,” he says.
Either way, it is well past time to start helping people across the country prepare for extreme heat, says University of Washington’s Kristie Ebi, a global environmental health expert. Some actions can be simple, like making sure people have access to fans, air conditioning, and shade. Other actions, such as figuring out how to make the electrical grid robust enough to stand up to the extra stresses imposed by too much heat, will be much more complex.
And from the NYT story:
To calculate the death toll, Dr. Harley first looked at how many blue mussels live on a particular shoreline, how much of the area is good habitat for mussels and what fraction of the mussels he observed died. He estimated losses for the mussels alone in the hundreds of millions. Factoring in the other creatures that live in the mussel beds and on the shore — barnacles, hermit crabs and other crustaceans, various worms, tiny sea cucumbers — puts the deaths at easily over a billion, he said.
Dr. Harley continues to study the damage and plans to publish a series of papers.
Scientists have only begun to consider the domino effects. One concern is whether the sea ducks, which feast on mussels in the winter before migrating to their summer breeding grounds in the Arctic, will have enough food to survive the journey.
“It’s at least something that we’re starting to think about,” he said.
Species that live in intertidal zones are resilient, he noted, and the mussels on the shady north side of boulders seem to have survived. But if these extreme heat waves become too frequent, species won’t have time to recover.
I really cannot emphasise enough how much trouble we’re already in - we’re not moving fast enough, there is not enough urgency to tacking the climate emergency and increasingly, we’re losing. And finally:
Another critical look at carbon capture. We definitely do need some way of capturing it, while bringing emissions down too. But how? (6 mins by James Temple)
Global climate emissions continue to rise, ratcheting up temperatures and driving increasingly extreme heat waves, fires, and droughts. Since carbon dioxide persists for hundreds to thousands of years in the atmosphere, there’s little scientific dispute that massive amounts of it will have to be removed to prevent really dangerous levels of warming—or to bring the planet back to a safer climate.
The question is how much. A variety of scientific models have put it at anywhere from 1.3 billion tons per year to 29 billion tons by midcentury to hold global warming at 1. 5 ˚C. A 2017 UN report estimated that keeping the planet from heating past 2 ˚C will require removing 10 billion tons annually by 2050 and 20 billion by 2100.
🦠 COVID-19
A quarter dose of Moderna could be enough to provide protection - which may alleviate some of the vaccine shortage issues. (4 mins by Elie Dolgin)
Weiskopf and her study co-author Shane Crotty, also at LJI, are among the scientists who would prefer carefully planned trials to confirm the efficacy of reduced vaccine doses before any such regimen is widely deployed. One such trial is ongoing: a study in Belgium is comparing a lower-dose version of the vaccine from Pfizer–BioNTech against the standard dose.
But Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of Chicago in Illinois and a co-author of a 5 July Nature Medicine commentary5 supporting dose ‘fractionation’, disagrees about the need for time-consuming data collection.
“We shouldn’t wait that long,” she says. “People are dying, and we have historical precedent for making very well-reasoned guesses that we think are going to save lives.”
This is a great Q&A on long COVID. (6 mins by Tara C Smith)
We are still working to develop a specific case definition of PASC, but most studies describe patients with symptoms including fatigue, headaches, joint pain, muscle aches and shortness of breath lasting months or longer after resolution of the acute infection. Some patients also seem to have long-term damage to the heart, lungs or other organs, which can lead to cognitive issues such as “brain fog,” depression, anxiety and issues with sleep. Up to one-third of COVID patients may still suffer from symptoms months after their initial infection, even if their symptoms were mild.
🇨🇳 Computing - China
It looks like China has taken a lead in the quantum computing race. These machines will have wide geopolitical implications over the coming decades. (3 mins by Tibi Puiu)
Researchers in China have demonstrated the most powerful quantum computer in the world, a 56-qubit machine that can perform operations orders of magnitude faster than Google’s quantum computer — its closest competitor. The Chinese quantum computer completed a complex calculation in a little over an hour, a task that would take a classical supercomputer eight years to perform.
🐺 Wildlife - killing wolves
In an earlier edition we looked at this shift in policy and how rather senseless it was under the Trump administration. Well, 100s of wolves have died. (3 mins by Douglas Main)
But the unexpectedly high number of wolves killed this year in Wisconsin shows how wildlife can suffer when management decisions are constantly in flux between federal and state control, Olson says. This flip-flopping has also led to worsening attitudes towards wolves.
“We need to start coming together,” Olson says, “to reduce the intensity and frequency with which this pendulum is swinging from full federal protection to state-managed harvest.”
🏛 Society - Memory laws
This is a long essay on the history and recent implementation of “memory laws” - and explores how they are used in society to change history in the minds of people (or children mainly). The recent US trend to implement such laws is another signal of a declining situation more generally. (15 mins by Timothy Snyder) (€)
Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws’ portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.
We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.
🧠 Brains - neurology
How do brains learn so quickly? Well - it might be musical. Traditionally it was believed the rate at which neurons fire was the key measure - now though it turns out it might also be about the timing. I learned so much new stuff from this one article. (5 mins by Elena Renken)
Neuroscientists are, in fact, on the lookout for a new kind of coding in the brain to answer the longstanding question: How does the brain encode information so quickly? It’s understood that patterns in external data become ingrained in the firing patterns of the network through the strengthening and weakening of synaptic connections. But artificial intelligence researchers typically have to train artificial neural networks on hundreds or thousands of examples of a pattern or concept before the synapse strengths adjust enough for the network to learn the pattern. Mysteriously, humans can typically learn from just one or a handful of examples.
Phase precession could play a role in that disparity. One hint of this comes from a study by Johns Hopkins researchers who found that phase precession showed up in rats learning an unfamiliar track — on their first lap. “As soon as you’re learning something, this pattern for learning sequences is already in place,” Qasim added. “That might facilitate very rapid learning of sequences.”
🧬 Biology - mitochondria
So like the article above, this article raises all sorts of interesting questions about mitochondria, their function in the body and how they cooperate and communicate. I had no idea about the lack of knowledge in this area. Socialise your mitochondria seems to be a good idea. (10 mins by Katya Zimmer)
Picard said that his best guess “is that there’s some kind of electromagnetic signal that’s being transferred.” At those inner membrane folds, molecules derived from food are used to pump charged ions across the membrane, creating a membrane potential of around 180 millivolts. The resulting force of ions rushing back across the membrane to equalize the difference is used to generate ATP. It also generates an electrical current and an accompanying magnetic field. If an electromagnetic signal is indeed being relayed between mitochondria, that signal would be propagating faster than the chemical signaling that occurs between the organelles. Whether that additional speed has functional significance isn’t yet known.
Researchers have probably not exhausted the range of interactions to be discovered. “We’re only at the beginning of trying to understand how the mitochondria communicate with each other,” said Brian O’Rourke, a cardiac physiologist at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
🇨🇳 China - the coming Taiwan invasion
As we have frequently looked at in the past - the scenarios in which this happens seem to keep growing. We shall see. (5 mins by Bill Gertz)
“It’s already a struggle underway,” he said. “Whether or not the Chinese resort to a military option is in question. To us, it’s only a matter of time, not a matter of ‘if,’ because if you understand the problem set, you understand that Taiwan will unlikely fold based on economic, and informational and diplomatic influence alone.”
China is also increasing production of AIP submarines. As the pervasiveness of satellites grows (radar and imaging), the importance of submarines increases because of their ability to hide. (From February)
🌍 Climate change and hyperobjects
Charlie Warzel had a thoughtful essay on thinking about “hyperobjects” and constructing an understanding of how we’re simply not ready for the future that faces us. I agree. Read it all. (10 mins by Charlie Warzel)
🐦 Birds - birdsong
It’s great to have Ed Yong back. This is a fascinating story. I never knew these things. (5 mins by Ed Yong)
In his book Where Song Began, Low reasoned that Australia’s birds have benefited from the island’s free-flowing calories, becoming unusually large, aggressive, intelligent, and vocal. They are also extraordinarily successful. Genetic studies show that the largest group of birds—the oscines, or songbirds—originated in Australia before spreading worldwide. That group now contains about 5,000 of the 10,000 known bird species, including robins, cardinals, thrushes, sparrows, finches, jays, and starlings. All of these birds descended from an ancestor whose voice lilted through Australian trees and whose taste buds were tickled by sweet Australian nectar.
Philosophy Corner (a journey through thinking about thinking every week)
We are merging Documentary and this Corner for 3 weeks with this nice little documentary. (59 mins)
Podcast(s)
I didn’t get listening to much podcasts this week but:
Ezra Klein spent 90 mins talking to Eve Ewing about the value of public schools, poetry and comic books. (There’s a lovely poetry reading early on)
David McWilliams tried to explore the future of Irish towns (and cities). I think the DL architect was not being near as ambitious as he could be. (33 mins) All of this was clear before the pandemic too - but people are too used to seeing the world as it is, not as it could be.
Still in my tabs
How long before AI can 'understand' animals?
Droughts, fires and floods: How climate change will impact Europe
Artificial Proteins Never Seen in the Natural World Are Becoming New COVID Vaccines and Medicines
Human Evolution Led to an Extreme Thirst for Water
A Black Hole Feasted on a Neutron Star. 10 Days Later, It Happened Again.