Newsletter 64

Disappearing birds, electric wounds and zero knowledge proofs

Jan 31, 2022

Hi, I’m Gavin. This is my experimental newsletter that explores thinking - how we might think better and learn together as we do so.

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. (938 - nope - 944 of us now! - welcome all new arrivals)

Gavin

PS: if you like the newsletter please share it! (And I always appreciate tweets about it too!) 🙏

Share Gav's Newsletter

If you support this newsletter and really like it you can also become a paid subscriber - you get nothing different except the satisfaction of knowing that you’re supporting this current weekly missive!

Reading list - the best stuff to read

(The best reads I’ve come across, with excerpts, links, authors and how long it will take to read. Climate change, COVID and China are consistently the stories at the top so are semi-permanent)

🌏 Climate change & biodiversity destruction

(I’ve updated the title of this section from biodiversity “loss” to “destruction” to better reflect what is happening - it’s not passive)

Birds are disappearing. Everywhere. (5 mins by Kim Heacox)

In the past half century, North America has lost more than one-fourth of its birds. Nearly everywhere, they are in decline. Massive die-offs of flycatchers, swallows, bluebirds, sparrows and warblers – described as thousands of birds “falling out of the sky” – have been recorded in recent years in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and Nebraska. Smoke from intense California fires forced tule geese to reroute their migration and take twice as long. Elsewhere, as birds lay their eggs earlier, due to a warming climate, more chicks die from sudden inclement weather events.

Maersk launches the world’s first offshore electric vessel-charging station venture (via Azeem)

The charging buoy will be large enough to charge an SOV-sized battery- or hybrid-electric vessel. It will be scaled and adapted to supply power to larger vessels, enabling vessels of all sizes to turn off their engines when lying idle.
By substituting fossil fuels with clean electricity, virtually all emissions and noise pollution are eliminated while the buoy is in use.

China and wind. Also Scotland is contracting for 25GW.

Simon Evans @DrSimEvans

Wow – China just built more offshore wind capacity, in 2021 alone, than the rest of the world had managed in the last 5yrs put together Its 26GW now accounts for half of the world's 54GW total Also, it added twice as much in 2021 as IEA had forecast in…December 2021

Track New Zealand’s Bid to Take Back Nature (Via subscriber Markham) (5 mins by Katie Peek)

Since then, New Zealand ecologists have cleared island after island of invasive pests. About two thirds of the country’s smaller islands are now pest-free, as are 27 fenced forest fragments on the main islands (which make up 97 percent of New Zealand’s land area). Native life surrounded by fence or sea is rebounding. And in 2016 the prime minister announced a first-of-its-kind nationwide goal: Predator-Free 2050.

The initiative aims to remove rats, stoats and possums from all New Zealand’s 600-plus islands by that year. “Those three animal predators are basically just eating our native wildlife out from under us,” says program director Brent Beaven.
Killing stoats and possums might startle some nature lovers, but University of Auckland ecologist James Russell describes the situation as an ecological trolley problem: “If we choose not to kill the mammals,” he says, “we’re essentially choosing to let the birds die.”

🦠 COVID-19

We have a way to go to figure out the path ahead. (5 mins by Apoorva Mandavilli)

Contrary to popular myth, the coronavirus is not guaranteed to transform into a milder form over time. A virus may evolve to be less virulent if it kills its hosts before it has been passed on to others, or if it runs out of hosts to infect. Neither is true of the coronavirus.
“It doesn’t kill enough of us, to be perfectly blunt, to actually deplete its reservoir of people to infect,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. “And it certainly is passed on from an infected person long before the virus kills.”
Even if the next variant is as mild as Omicron or even milder, a highly contagious variant may still wreak havoc on the health care system.
“When you’ve got something as transmissible as Omicron, you don’t need it to be incredibly severe to really screw things up,” said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Omicron-specific vaccine trials are now underway (2 mins by Beth Mole)

Leading mRNA-based vaccine makers Moderna and partners Pfizer and BioNTech each announced this week that they had dosed their first trial participants. The tweaked vaccine doses update existing formulations to match the mutations found in omicron's spike protein rather than the spike protein present in an earlier version of SARS-CoV-2.

Also: Omicron’s wave is at least 386% taller than delta’s—and it’s crushing hospitals

What Japan Got Right About Covid-19 (5 mins by Hitoshi Oshitani)

Japan’s approach to Covid-19 has often been misunderstood. Some have assumed the country was either doing poorly and hiding it or doing well because of Confucian traditions of people putting community over themselves. What really happened was that science was used to create an effective strategy and a digestible message. That message — to avoid the three C’s — was actionable without being alarmist and prescribed a solution that could outlast changing circumstances. It worked because of an underlying trust between the public and pandemic responders.
Our approach hasn’t been without consequences. Our economy was affected and people like service industry workers lost jobs as bars and restaurants were avoided. Some have suffered mental health challenges brought on by isolation. Going forward, the Japanese government needs to acknowledge the challenges, improve on them and work to protect the most vulnerable and underserved populations.

🇨🇳 China / Taiwan

More Chinese incursions (no doubt related to below events)

A rather large US/Japan was transiting the South China Sea (the largest in some time) and a single F-35C crashed and ended up in the ocean (video here). A race is now underway to recover the wreckage.

If you’re curious about the amount of hardware involved in the group, it’s quite a bit (wait for the fly past - this was filmed in the Philippine sea). The ships:

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70)

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier US Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72)

JMSDF Hyuga-class helicopter destroyer J Hyuga (DDH 181)

America-class amphibious assault ship USS America (LHA 6)

Wasp-class landing helicopter dock USS Essex (HD 2)

Arleigh Burke -class guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111)

Arleigh Burke -class guided-missile destroyer USS Chafe (DDG 90)

Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Gridley (DDG 101)

Ticonderoga -class guided-missile cruiser US Lake Champlain (CG 57)

Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Mobile Bay (CG 53)

Not forgetting that Neptune Strike exercises are underway in the Med - and Russian exercises in Belarus, and on the border with Ukraine, and off the coast of Ireland (and also planned Russian naval exercises, also in the Med and/or Black Sea)

🇷🇺🇺🇦 Russia / Ukraine

I started working on a Ukraine list a while back and made some additions recently.
Binkov takes another look at a potential invasion. (17 mins)

Bonus: NYT in eastern Ukraine.

☀️ Space - faint suns

What an interesting question - and possible solutions (methane, CO2, the moon). (8 mins by Jonathan O’Callaghan)

That original faint sun should have led to disaster here on Earth. If our modern Earth were placed under that sun, temperatures would average about −7 degrees Celsius — too cold for liquid water to flow. “The planet should have been completely frozen,” said Toby Tyrrell, an earth system scientist at the University of Southampton. “It shouldn’t have been possible for life to develop.”
And yet it did. We know that our planet had liquid water on its surface as early as 4.4 billion years ago, and maybe even earlier, as water vapor condensed out of the atmosphere. Single-celled life seems to have sprung up shortly thereafter. And both the planet’s water and its life have persisted — despite a few close calls — to concoct the relative oasis we inhabit today.

…

We know that life under our faint young sun was possible, and now we might know why. What we are starting to see is just how lucky we may have been in avoiding becoming a permanent snowball Earth or even a steam Earth. Somehow, conditions were just right on our planet, keeping us in this narrow window between being frozen solid and evaporating to oblivion, and allowing us to survive — despite a few near misses. “There’s a huge discussion about the requirements for habitability,” said Feulner. “Even on Earth, things could have gone wrong easily.”

🧠 Metals - cooling

How to overcome the Leidenfrost effect (4 mins)

🤖 AI - machines building machines

This is interesting research. (9 mins by Anil Ananthaswamy)

Boris Knyazev of the University of Guelph in Ontario and his colleagues have designed and trained a “hypernetwork” — a kind of overlord of other neural networks — that could speed up the training process. Given a new, untrained deep neural network designed for some task, the hypernetwork predicts the parameters for the new network in fractions of a second, and in theory could make training unnecessary. Because the hypernetwork learns the extremely complex patterns in the designs of deep neural networks, the work may also have deeper theoretical implications.
For now, the hypernetwork performs surprisingly well in certain settings, but there’s still room for it to grow — which is only natural given the magnitude of the problem. If they can solve it, “this will be pretty impactful across the board for machine learning,” said Veličković.

🤕 Medicine - using electricity in wound dressing

Electric wound dressing could heal injuries faster. (2 mins by Chris Stokel-Walker)

The circular wounds that received the electric dressing were 96.8 per cent closed after eight days, compared with between 76.4 and 79.9 per cent closed with other dressings, and 45.9 per cent closed for wounds that weren’t dressed. The straight wounds healed faster than round ones because they have less “defect tissue”, says Yao, but the relative performance was similar. “We are optimising the design of devices for more shaped wounds, including irregular shapes,” says Yao. The team is also doing preclinical preparations to prepare for human trials.

🌚 Space - Russia and the Moon

Russia is going back to the moon - with Luna 25. Planned for launch in July.

The Luna-25 is set to become the first domestic spacecraft in Russia’s modern history on the surface of the Earth’s natural satellite. The lunar mission will be launched atop a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with a Fregat booster from the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East. Under the lunar project, the Luna-25 automatic station will be launched for studies in the area of the lunar south pole. The lander is set to touch down in the area of the Boguslawsky crater.

Also: China and Russia are also considering a joint venture for a Moon base.

🧮 Mathematics - zero knowledge proofs

Another good one in the series. (22 mins)

Philosophy Corner (a journey through thinking about thinking every week)

(A serialised section that started with Greek Tragedy and moved to philosophy. Something to spark ideas. Feel free to go backwards!).

Rousseau on Inequality (48 mins)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (also known as the Second Discourse) tells the story of all human history to answer one simple question: how did we end up in such an unequal world? David explores the steps Rousseau traces in the fall of humankind and asks whether this is a radical alternative to the vision offered by Hobbes or just a variant on it. Is Rousseau really such a nice philosopher?