Bushfire prevention: Mechanical Megafauna

Bushfire prevention: Mechanical Megafauna

The megafauna in Australia and America used to munch up the smaller vegetation and defecate fertilizer for the trees. However when humans arrived at those places the megafauna assessed these new small mammals as harmless. Bad mistake. Compare this to Africa where the megafauna evolved alongside humans and they well know to be scared of us and attack us if necessary.

When the megafauna disappeared, the Aboriginal people in Australia discovered the need for controlled burning to maintain the open woodland that was safe from extreme bush fires. This was done on a continuous small scale basis. When European explorers first travelled through the outback they saw smoke from these fires all around.

Left wing governments in Australia and in California have been accused of skimping on controlled burning, contributing to the subsequent disasters. Who can blame governments for disliking controlled burning? It kills wildlife. It is done on windless days but that leads to an unhealthy build up of smoke, affecting local residents. And sometimes the wind picks up and the fire escapes to threaten life and property. And it puts CO₂ into the atmosphere, which seems like a bad idea. The regrowth probably cancels that, but it isn't completely obvious.

I favour attempting to bring back the megafauna, but that is a 100 year project. California and Australia are high tech places, so maybe we can do a high tech solution. I propose the Mechanical Megafauna which will do a better job than controlled burning, and sequester CO₂ as well. The following sci-fi description is one of many ways it might be done.

The giant airship-drone lifted the MechMeg base station from its location and lowered it down carefully between the trees to its next spot. The ground had been mapped with vegetation-penetrating radar. Drones had identified the vegetation at the next stop. 

Everything happened fast after the base station set down. Boston Dynamics robots came quickly out of the base station, cutting down plants and dragging them to the base. Other robots followed to rake up leaf litter and other small stuff. 

The base station processed these by chopping them finely and heating them in a furnace to a very high temperature in a near vacuum. This left a residue that was mostly carbon. It also created a gas with hydrogen and methane which was burnt as part of the energy needed to run the furnace and power the base.

Refueling drones arrived regularly to provide extra hydrogen for the base station and to take away the residual carbon to be sequestered earning carbon credits.

How practical is this? I don't know, but California is very rich.

Maths for better Batting

If we look at the bowler's delivery, then at any time the ball is at a specific point and travelling in a specific direction in 3D space. Let's imagine an arrow in space starting at the position of the ball and going in the direction of the ball at that point in time. (This is called a tangent vector of our moving point).

Now imagine the bat moving through space. We'll start by considering the line in the middle of the bat. At any moment in time our bat gives us a line in space, and the motion of the bat defines it's direction. There's a bit of subtlety here, but for our purposes we can pick out a flat plane that the bat is moving in at a particular moment (a tangent plane). When we add the width of the bat, then we get a thickened plane that the bat is moving in.

Now consider the moment when the ball meets the bat. If the ball's arrow is moving across that thickened plane from one side to the other, then any error by the batsmen will result in a miss or an edge. If, at the other extreme, the arrow for the ball is wholly within the plane then an error by the batsman will just mean that the ball hits higher or lower on the bat.

Consider, for example, the sweep shot where the batter uses a horizontal bat to hit the ball close to where it pitches so he doesn't have to worry about the spin. Looks great when it works, but it fails catastrophically. The alternative is to play with an angled bat pointing to the point where the ball pitches, and with the angle of the bat being the angle that the ball bounces up. Now the ball is staying in the bat's thickened plane and though it looks awkward it has a much higher margin for error.

This is harder with leg spin with the ball moving away. Then you have to angle the bat with the handle more away from you than the blade. But if you get the bat handle in front and the blade behind and back cut, then suddenly all is good. Indeed when the batter gets in a muddle, and is forced to back cut the ball to stop it hitting the stumps, they often find that surprisingly easy. It would be exciting to see a batsmen practice this and then do it deliberately and repeatedly.

When the ball is spinning (or swinging) in, then this theory recommends hitting into the spin with a straight bat. I think that is best for defensive shots. Alternatively if attacking then an angled bat hitting to the leg side is your best chance to hit the ball with the balls tangent vector within the bat's thickened plan. This is the slog that even weaker players often succeed with. Not just luck after all.

Safer red ball cricket

We see that pitches for red ball cricket (3, 4 or 5 days) are prepared that are quite dangerous, to increase the chance of a result. I have an alternative solution.

Wickets fall at a very random rate. Runs are scored at a more even rate. So, instead of having a target of more runs in 20 wickets, the plan is to a target of least wickets to fall to score a set number of runs. You can have as many innings as needed to get those runs.

For example suppose the target for a test match is 500 runs. Then the two teams alternate innings (an innings always counts as 10 wickets) till one team has 500 or more runs. If it is the team batting 2nd then they win because the other team has already lost more wickets. If it is the team batting first that first exceeds 500 runs, then the team batting 2nd knows how many wickets they can afford to lose before they get to 500 to win. Ties will be more common, so maybe have a tie-breaker system, but I don't have a problem with ties.

One nice thing about this scheme is that you can play the game to a finish, however long that takes with rain, without the dangers of matches going for a long time, as used to happen before WWII. Let's have more ties and no draws.

The main objective is that pitches be prepared that don't have the ball rising sharply from just short of a length.

This can be combined with another idea I like: Let the captains make a bid (in runs) for the right to decide who bats first. The side losing the auction starts their innings with the runs they bid.

Nuclear for Coal to Oil in Australia

Nuclear for Coal to Oil in Australia

Australia lacks oil reserves, and this is a security issue. A solution is the conversion of coal to oil. The carbon atoms in that oil do not lead to extra CO2 emissions. Oil from elsewhere would otherwise be used.

However the process of converting the coal to oil requires a lot of process heat, which is traditionally provided by burning half of the coal. However to do that would inevitably breach Australia's commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The alternative is to use nuclear power. The conversion process is cheaper and more efficient if done at very high temperatures, over 900 degrees C. It turns out that there are modern passively safe reactor designs which provide that level of industrial process heat.

Doing this will be politically very favourable for the current government:

• Every voter can understand the need for secure access to oil for transport fuels.
• Many on the Left now understand the need for nuclear power to reduce CO2 emissions, so the introduction of nuclear power will wedge the opposition.
• Indonesia is making tentative steps towards nuclear power, and many Australians will think that is a good reason for us to do the same.

There are various options to site nuclear power far from most voters. Perhaps the Bunda Cliffs on the southern edge of the Nullabor, which is close to water, but high above a low risk coastline.

Boom, Bust and DNA

Imagine it is boom time for a group of humans. There's lots of food, and time for recreational and romantic activities. What behaviour will favour our genes?

There's no reason to worry about competition from strangers. And strangers are attractive. We plan to have 10 children and 100 grandchildren. If we mix in some slightly different genes then we might produce some offspring that combine good genes of ours with their good genes and make individuals with an advantage. So we're tolerant of strangers, and looking to have offspring with more than one partner.

Now imagine things are bad. Life is a struggle. The population is falling. What behaviour favours our genes now?

People that are like us share more of our genes. People who are different probably don't. And they're competing with us for the limited resources. Maybe we should cooperate with similar people and make sure we get our share relative to those who are different. And note that deaths from fighting are less of a loss to our DNA because deaths are common and it at least leaves more resources for other copies of our DNA. We now hope to have 2 children and 4 grandchildren, or maybe less. And it makes sense to marry our 2nd cousin, or even our 1st cousin.

Obvious Things: Nuclear Power for Climate

There are a lot of problems with relying on renewables to cut CO2 production:

• Germany's has failed to make renewables work, despite throwing more money at it than most places can afford. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06/the-reason-renewables-cant-power-modern-civilization-is-because-they-were-never-meant-to/#7e7f8256ea2b).
• There might be technical problems (https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/renewable-energy-meets-power-grid-operations/). 
• It won't work well when we have a "year without a summer".

But we come back to the fact that the voters hate nuclear power. 

We are currently addressing this by exporting high energy activities (manufacturing) to non-democratic places, i.e. China. But despots have their own fears, and also don't like to annoy their citizens too much. So this may not continue to work. And the rise of robots means that manufacturing may become more uniformly distributed.

The solution has to be:

• We tell the electorate that we have to do nuclear to address the climate emergency.
• We are going to do it in a safely remote location and use it to make liquid fuels for transport (hydrogen would be good, ammonia is ok) and/or pump the electricity a long way.
• We are going to be very open about the planning. No secret stupidity like Fukishima.

And then let's throw a lot of money and expertise at it. Not in the Chinese way where all the eggs are in one basket. Multiple large competing projects. Plus let's start building reactors that are known to work just in case none of the advanced plans work out.

We've been asleep at the wheel. Time to get moving.

Obvious Things: Type 2 diabetes

We know that type 2 diabetes is associated with processed food.

We know that type 2 diabetes is associated with the top section of the gut. How do we know this? A treatment for obesity is to do surgery that bypasses that part of the gut. The intention was just to reduce the total size of the gut. But a miracle occurs: if the patient has type 2 diabetes (raised blood sugar), then they are instantly cured! No need to wait for them to lose weight.

So what is the role of the top section of the gut in a normal human primitive diet?

Normally primitive food will come in with the cell walls intact. So it is obvious that the first job, the job done by the top section of the gut, will be to deal with those cell walls. And it will be no surprise if it expects to see cell walls, and uses them to self regulate, and fails to function correctly without them.

And, of course, the characteristic property of processed food is that the cell walls have already been destroyed by industrial processes.

This ain't rocket science. (Whatever happened to "ain't").

AutoParliament

AutoParliament

I'd like to support the XR (Extinction Rebellion) movement, but in a way that pushes back against the anti-democratic forces that are keen to take it over (as in this video: https://youtu.be/haGLhlLDCUw -- plans for dismantling our system of government at the end). So I thought I'd create a plan for participatory democracy. Before I start, here is a response to some obvious objections that will come up:

• "It is too complex". I don't think a simpler plan will work.
• "It is too confrontational". I think it is crucial to confront the people with bad or misguided motives and sideline them. We can't save the world without confrontation.
• "It is too technical". I have to admit that the system is designed to attract the technically knowledgeable. We see XR people making totally unrealistic plans. I think the non-technical can join if working in groups with technical support. There are no secrets.
• "It can't decide anything". That remains to be seen. But what it can determine from the beginning is a consensus view of the relevant facts, and particularly the costs and benefits of various practical actions.
• "Without anonymity it puts participants at risk to reactionary forces". Absolutely. Participating in this will not be safer than blocking roads and getting arrested. It simply can't be anonymous and function correctly.

Infrastructure

Everything that happens in the AutoParliament is recorded in a replicated log (like a blockchain, but without the massive computing), which can't be changed without the extreme action of going back to an earlier version of the log and replaying some but not all transactions. Access to the log and to updates is available to all, so even if the official servers hosting the log conspire to change it in this way, copies of the log as it was can exist.

Participants have to be associated with public keys to sign their actions. This has to integrated with 2-factor authentication (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_2nd_Factor).

The Internet is an essential requirement. But indeed it is essential for the XR movement as well. This is a serious single point of failure. There is an urgent need for a decentralized backup Internet. This shouldn't be too hard, as the Internet is explicitly designed for decentralized operation. I won't address this in this document, as it demands its own independent planning.

Joining

Anyone can join. To join one attends a local meeting of other members, and does the following:

• Make a video recording where you say your name, approximate address (postcode), say that you are a citizen of [specify country] and the world, and promise to use your membership to address the world's environmental problems.
• Get (buy) a 2-factor authentication device.
• Create a record containing the video, the unique id (public key) of the 2-factor device, and the person's own public key, and maybe more.
• Sign this record with that public key (thus proving the ownership of it).

The signed record then gets added to the replicated log, and the member has joined. Ideally automatic recognition software will quickly discover people joining more than once. I doubt if anyone will attempt it.

Basic Operation

The basic operation of the AutoParliament is a combination of wikipedia and git. There are bills and amendments. Members can vote for or against or abstain for any bills, and can change their vote at any time. If you vote for a bill and for an amendment to that bill, it means you support either variant. If you vote for an amendment, but not for the original, it means you only support the amended version.

At any time there are bills with varying levels of support. Also, as we will see, there are various subgroups of members (caucuses), some self-selected and some automatically generated. Some bills will only be of interest to some caucuses, in which case percentages of those in that caucus will be of interest. External organizations can use a specific caucus (such as their members or supporters) for decision making.

Bills are accompanied by discussion areas where evidence of various sorts can be included.

Endorsements

Each member gets 100 endorsement points and 100 anti-endorsement points to allocate to other members. The member can move them around at any time. This turns into a continuous voting system that works like this:

1. Each person starts with 1 vote, and gets 0.01 of a vote for every endorsement point.
2. Now eliminate all the people with the lowest score.
3. Then multiply everyone's endorsements by their current vote.
4. And go to 2 and repeat.

This gives everyone a score, which is their highest vote before being eliminated.

This is also done within caucuses to give people a ranking within the caucus.

Members specify how important their caucuses are. The bills that they will normally be invited to consider and vote on will be determined by the current leaders in the parliament and in their selected caucuses. The arguments they will most readily have access to will be those endorsed by leaders. Of course all bills and arguments are available by diligent searching.

Anti-endorsements are also ranked so that anti-endorsement is more significant from people with high endorsement. People with high anti-endorsement scores will attract warning signs on their arguments.

Bills can be introduced arguing for specific people or groups to get endorsement or anti-endorsement and why.

Caucuses

Members are automatically added to geographical caucuses. Groups (or individuals) can create caucuses and determine the memberships.

The system can automatically determine groupings that can then get turned into caucuses. For example we can expect that members will be divided between pro- and anti- nuclear. The system will detect such clusters by similarities in voting and in endorsements. Members of such clusters can turn them into caucuses, so that the system will automatically discover leadership in those groups.

Women need to lead to get community action

If you want to sell community action (vaccination or climate change), don't put up a mansplainer talking science. Get an older women with technical leadership and high status to put the message of community solidarity and express anger at the opposition.

E.g. "My grandchildren have been vaccinated. But they might still be vulnerable because vaccines sometimes fail to fully protect. This isn't a problem if everyone is vaccinated because disease can't spread without many potential victims. Anti-vaxxers make all our children vulnerable. They provide enough vulnerable children to allow an epidemic, and some vaccinated children are effected. This is not about individual health, it is about community health. Everyone needs to get behind it."

For Climate Change she might say "Managing the climate is the community's responsibility. There has to be rational evaluation of what needs to be done, and that has to come from the scientific experts looking at all the data, not just a cool day in July. The community that counts is the whole world because we all share the same air. We need to be part of that community. People who don't get behind this shared effort are harming us all, and particularly our children"

Chemicals attacking the microbiome

The microbiome is complicated

Recent research into the health problems being experienced by bees showed that it was not just insecticides causing the problem. What made the bees sick was a combination of small amounts of insecticide with fungicide.

Why would fungicide affect bees? I think the answer is very clear from other research into the microbiome: the cocktail of living things in and on humans and other multicell creatures such as bees.

We used to think bacteria was bad, so antibiotics must be good. Then we learnt that we are home to lots of beneficial bacteria that are damaged by antibiotics. But now we know that the microbiome is a cocktail of bacteria, fungi and viruses. And they are all involved, some more beneficially than others.

Whether we are looking at insect health (which is urgent), or the health of humans, we need to investigate the overuse of a whole range of chemicals, whatever their targets, and even if they are not intended for biochemical effects. And we need to look at the effects of combinations. Given the large (and indeed exaggerated) reaction the general population has to radiation, I believe they can be induced to demand action on this.

[update 2/5/2019: More evidence that fungicide causes health problems: https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2019/apr/Additive-found-in-baked-goods-linked-with-possible-type-2-diabetes-risk-91661279.html]

Racism in Tim Flannery's latest book

Tim Flannery is a great bloke, fighting hard to save the world. The last person anyone, including himself, would suspect of racism. But we all want to think well of ourselves, and this very easily extends unconsciously to wanting to think well of groups that we belong to, compared to others.

For Europeans this now embraces Neanderthals, and the hybrids that are descended from them. So in Tim Flannery's book "Europe, A Natural History" we see on page 6 at the end of the Introduction the assertion that the rise of culture resulted from the "hybrid vigour" of the combination of humans from Africa with European Neanderthals. I will easily disprove that hybrid vigour could have anything to do with it. Which shows how tempting such ideas must be to get past the guard of an expert like Tim Flannery.

I have previously written about the genetic advantage of culture (https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2015/02/what-is-culture-for.html). If the genes for culture arose in hybrid populations in Europe, the question arises of how it then appeared in Africa? An easy answer comes along: parallel evolution. This, we remember, was the explanation the Chinese (and others) had for the rise of Homo Sapiens in multiple places. But it was easily disproved by genetic analysis. And even before that, the people who understand evolution know that there is no such thing as parallel evolution. If some substantial and complicated evolutionary change occurs in multiple places at roughly the same time it is because it is all descended from a single point. We can be certain that this is the case with culture. It arose in pure African homo sapiens. It might have taken a slightly different path after hybridization. It is a tempting fancy for us hybrids to regard that slightly different path as superior. If it was a harmless fancy we could let it pass. But it isn't, and we have to reject it.