Newsletter 74
Mathematical poetry, removing cars and civil war
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. (1,028! - welcome all new arrivals)
Gavin
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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
California is introducing some of the most stringent anti plastic laws in the world and could have benefit downstream consequences for the rest of us. (5 mins by Winston Choi-Schagrin)
Under the state’s law, manufacturers would pay for recycling programs and will be charged fees based on the weight of packaging, the ease of recycling and whether products contain toxic substances, such as PFAS, a type of virtually indestructible chemicals that have been linked to increased risk of some cancers.
John Oliver does a good overview of water policies. (24 mins)
A look at the heat in India - and how people try to survive. (7 mins by Snigdha Poonam)
That climate change is exacerbating South Asia’s heat waves is no longer in question. This year alone, two new studies have explored the links. A report by World Weather Attribution found that the likelihood of a heat wave like this year’s has increased by 30 times since the 19th century. And an attribution study carried out by the UK’s Met Office pointed out that the chances of unprecedented heat waves in India and Pakistan have been made 100 times higher by climate change. The question to be answered next is how people faced with life-threatening heat are going to cope with it.
Zeke Hausfather and Jane Flegal from Stripe Climate argue that carbon removal is an essential element of our future (and it is). (3 mins)
Third, it is increasingly likely that the world will overshoot our most ambitious climate target—limiting warming to 1.5 ˚C. We are living in a world that has already warmed by 1.2 ˚C, leaving a vanishingly small carbon margin to work with.
Unfortunately, even if we get carbon dioxide emissions all the way down to zero, the world will not cool back down; it will just stop warming up. The only way to permanently reverse warming is through carbon removal.
Finally, carbon removal can be an important hedge against uncertainties in the climate system. While most of our emissions reduction scenarios aim for a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 ˚C or a 66% chance of limiting it to 2 ˚C, it is still not clear just how sensitive the climate is to rising levels of greenhouse gas.
Could we deliberately tweak the climate system to release more heat into space?(3 mins by James Temple)
Frost stresses that the federal government is not conducting or funding any efforts that involve the release of particles into the environment. He adds that most of the work pulls double duty as basic science that improves our understanding of how the atmosphere works and what effect particles from wildfires, volcanoes, rocket emissions, pollution, dust storms, or other sources play. All of that can improve climate modeling, weather forecasting, and predictions of what would happen if any nations moved ahead with climate interventions.
🦠 COVID-19
Why is there not yet a nasal vaccine for COVID-19? (2 mins)
Also: COVID variants found in sewage weeks before showing up in tests
🇨🇳 China / Taiwan
The NYT looked at how China’s surveillance state is growing. We looked at a related piece in the Tabs section two weeks ago. (14 mins)
Also: China demands end to US-Taiwan military ‘collusion’
China is biggest 'game-changing challenge', MI5 and FBI heads warn
🇺🇦 Ukraine / Russia
The RUSI had an excellent report analysing the war thus far. (40 mins) (Also see podcast recs)
Ukrainian victory is possible, but only with international support. In the absence of that support Ukraine may either be worn down through attrition and economically strangled, or else fight a protracted and bloody war over several years. International support so far has been hugely consequential in enabling Ukraine to survive but has also been piecemeal and is introducing significant logistical frictions into the Ukrainian military. The first step in delivering effective support to Ukraine is the rationalisation of the equipment being provided with standardisation of platforms and munitions supported by appropriate maintenance. Burden-sharing between Western defence industry and governments will be important. For this purpose, a committee to agree a process for rationalisation of support should be established to ensure its sustainability, where allies agree to each provide specific kinds of capability at scale, rather than each state offer small numbers of a wide range of capabilities
Bonus: Lawrence Freedman also posed the question of if Ukraine can win.
🚗 Society - cars
Cities have to move towards removing cars. Some cities are moving faster than others, and many people resist. (8 mins by Andrew Kersley)
The other issue is that, to put it simply, cars are never just cars. They’re interwoven into our culture and consumption as symbols of affluence, independence, and success, and the aspiration to achieve those things in future. “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure,” the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher reportedly once said. “That’s how we got in this mess in the first place, though,” says Crawford. “Everybody saw that the rich people were driving cars, and they wanted to too.”
That divide goes some way to explaining why the opposition to car-reduction schemes is often so extreme and can devolve into a “culture war”—which is what Holland has found in her experience with LTNs. But that struggle also outlines an important fact about car-free urban areas—that once cities make the decision to reduce or remove cars, they rarely go back. No one I spoke to for this piece could name a recent sizable pedestrianization or traffic-reduction scheme that had been reversed once it had been given time to have an effect.
Many of the cities that pioneered reducing car use—like Copenhagen in the 1970s—are rated today as some of the best places to live in the world. Even with London’s experimental and often unpopular LTN scheme, 100 of the 130 low-traffic areas created have been kept in place, Aldred says.
🇺🇸 US politics - civil war
A fascinating interview attempting to look forward at the chances of US civil war. (10 mins, interviewing Barbara F Walter)
I can’t say when it’s going to happen. I think it’s really important for people to understand that countries that have these two factors, who get put on this watch list, have a little bit less than a 4 percent annual risk of civil war. That seems really small, but it’s not. It means that, every year that those two factors continue, the risk increases.
🧠 Mathematics - winning a Fields Medal
This is a wonderful long read on how June Huh used a background in varied disciplines to give him fresh perspectives. (19 mins by Jordana Cepelewicz)
That poetic detour has since proved crucial to his mathematical breakthroughs. His artistry, according to his colleagues, is evident in the way he uncovers those just-right objects at the center of his work, and in the way he seeks a deeper significance in everything he does. “Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty,” said Federico Ardila-Mantilla, a mathematician at San Francisco State University and one of Huh’s collaborators. “But I think in his case, it’s really pronounced. And I just really like his taste. He makes beautiful things.”
“When I found out that he came to mathematics after poetry, I’m like, OK, this makes sense to me,” Ardila added.
Huh himself draws parallels between the artist and the mathematician. For both, he said, “it feels like you’re grabbing something that’s already there, rather than creating something in your mind.”
Quanta also took a look at “Langlands” in a wonderfully illustrated video. It also explores the concepts of cross-disciplinary research within mathematics. (13 mins)
🏛 History - criticising Harari
An analysis of Yuval Noah Harari’s work. (18 mins by Darshana Narayanan)
Maybe, as details go, knowing the distinction between cheetahs and leopards is not that important. Harari is after all writing the story of humans. But his errors unfortunately extend to our species as well. In the Sapiens chapter titled “Peace in our Time,” Harari uses the example of the Waorani people of Ecuador to argue that historically, “the decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state.” He tells us the Waorani are violent because they “live in the depths of the Amazon forest, without army, police or prisons.” It is true that the Waorani once had some of the highest homicide rates in the world, but they have lived in relative peace since the early 1970s. I spoke to Anders Smolka, a plant geneticist, who happens to have spent time with the Waorani in 2015. Smolka reported that Ecuadorian law is not enforced out in the forest, and the Waorani have no police or prisons of their own. “If spearings had still been of concern, I’m absolutely sure I would have heard about it,” he says. “I was there volunteering for an eco-tourism project, so the safety of our guests was a pretty big deal.” Here Harari uses an exceedingly weak example to justify the need for our famously racist and violent police state.
The author didn’t hold back on Twitter:
🏛 History - mosaics
Amazing thread:
♾ Mathematics - solving a riddle
Fascinating (18 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!).
Rawls on Justice. A brilliant listen. 48 mins)
John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed the face of modern political philosophy by reinventing the question of what constitutes fairness. From ‘the veil of ignorance’ to ‘reflective equilibrium’ it introduced new ways of thinking about the problem of justice along with new problems for thinking about politics. David discusses Rawls’s influence on what happened next.
Documentary
(A good thing to watch - also serialised - so feel free to go back through past editions!)
We are on Episode 5 of Modern Philosophy. This week it’s about Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by some to be one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. (48 mins)
Podcast(s)
(The best stuff I’ve listened to, or been recommended by subscribers)
Jack Watling, the co-author of the RUSI report mentioned above is interviewed on the new This Means War podcast. Very good. (40 mins)
Odd Lots interviewed FT journalists on the Wirecard fraud. (49 mins)
A really interesting interview with a self-made millionaire. Interesting insights on building a business and deploying capital. (77 mins)
A How Minds Change excerpt is read on the You Are Not So Smart podcast - a really interesting look at deep canvassing and good discussion afterwards. (104 mins)
Still in my tabs
(Or stuff I haven’t read yet, but looks promising)
Methane much more sensitive to global heating than previously thought – study
The Quest by Circadian Medicine to Make the Most of Our Body Clocks
Physicists discover a 'family' of robust, superconducting graphene structures
We need smarter cities, not “smart cities”
NASA releases James Webb telescope 'teaser' picture (first pics due this week!)
Dark matter: Our review suggests it's time to ditch it in favor of a new theory of gravity
His PTSD, and My Struggle to Live With It
And finally…
