cool.
Category: Science and Stuff,
Why trains run slower now than they did in the 1920s.
The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York’s Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal’s (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York’s Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride. The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak’s Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours. Going from Brattleboro, Vt., to New York City on the Boston and Maine Railroad’s Washingtonian took less than five hours in 1938; today, Amtrak’s Vermonter (the only option) takes six hours—if it’s on time, which it isn’t, nearly 75 percent of the time.
… 220 mph would be phenomenal, but we would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration. Consider, for example, the Burlington Zephyr, …which barreled from Chicago to Denver in 1934 in a little more than 13 hours. (It would take more than 18 today.) An article later that year, by which time the Zephyr had put on the “harness of a regular railroad schedule,” quoted a conductor complaining the train was “loafing” along at only 85 mph. But it was not uncommon for the Zephyr or other trains to hit speeds of more than 100 mph in the 1930s. Today’s “high-speed” Acela service on Amtrak has an average speed of 87 mph and a rarely hit peak speed of 150 mph. (The engine itself could top 200 mph.)
…Less rail capacity (and rail quality) has coincided with a dramatic rise in freight traffic in recent years, owing in part to a buoyant economy and in part to trains’ improving (and now superior) fuel efficiency to trucks—particularly as diesel fuel prices have risen. Despite recent infrastructure spending, bottlenecks are routine, as passenger trains typically yield to passing freight trains.
…As it turns out, there are actually plenty of examples of “technological regress” throughout history. As this fascinating paper notes, the process of building with cement had reached a high point during the Roman Empire, only to be “lost” until its reinvention in the early 13th century. The United States has lost not so much the technology of rail speed as the public will, the cultural memory; this may have made sense for a historical period, but now, weighed in terms of the congestion, carbon emissions, and comfort of other travel modes, it seems time to reach for the way-back machine. As journalist Philip Longman has pointed out, where “fast mail trains” once “ensured next-day delivery on a letter mailed with a standard two-cent stamp in New York to points as far west as Chicago,” today, “that same letter is likely to travel by air first to FedEx’s Memphis hub, then be unloaded, sorted, and reloaded onto another plane, a process that demands far greater expenditures of money, carbon, fuel, and, in many instances, time than the one used eighty years ago.” In building our “bridge to the 21st Century” we might remember the Roman god Janus, patron of, among other things, bridges: He looked backward as well as forward.
Why trains run slower now than they did in the 1920s.
Sigh…
Grocery bags and takeout containers aren’t enough. It’s time to phase out all single-use plastic
The state and local rules certainly have raised public awareness about the problem. Denying free plastic bags at checkout or providing plastic straws only on request sends consumers an important message that there’s a bigger cost to these everyday items than they may have considered. But the actual flow of trash has been disrupted only modestly.
…Cutting jobs on a disposable plastic product line doesn’t automatically translate into fewer people employed. If the door closes on polystyrene takeout containers, for example, it will open for cardboard and other biodegradable alternatives.
No one expects consumers to give up convenience completely. In fact, the market for bio-plastic alternatives, which are made from corn starch and other biodegradable sources, is already growing thanks to public awareness and the sporadic efforts to curb plastic waste.
Opponents will insist that the answer is just to encourage more recycling. Not only is recycling not the answer (see China’s diminished appetite for imported plastic trash), it has only enabled our addiction to convenient, disposable plastic packaging to deepen for some 60 years.
Grocery bags and takeout containers aren’t enough. It’s time to phase out all single-use plastic
hmmmm
Scientists Have Found Cave Art That May Be From Neanderthals
The painted caves were discovered in Spain. The walls were the canvasses, and the paintings are bold and clearly not some kind of smeary accident. The paint used was red ochre, from soil mixed with water.
One geometric design looks like part of a ladder, forming rectangles. There are stencils where someone pressed a hand up against the wall and then apparently blew liquid ochre over it. Someone painted swirls of bright red dots and patches onto flowing curtains of stalactites that hang from the cave ceilings.
…New tests on the rock and calcium carbonate that formed over parts of the ochre show that they were painted 65,000 years ago. That’s about 20,000 years before the first modern humans got there.
“The only species that were around at that time were Neanderthals,” explains Alistair Pike, an archaeologist from the University of Southampton in England who was part of the team that did the work. “So, therefore, the paintings must’ve been made by them.”
Scientists Have Found Cave Art That May Be From Neanderthals : Shots – Health News : NPR
cool
Amazon confirms that Echo device secretly shared user’s private audio
Amazon confirms that Echo device secretly shared user’s private audio [Updated] | Ars Technica
[another snicker] Echo listens to and apparently records private audio? No shit, Sherlock?
NASA cancels carbon monitoring research program
NASA cancels carbon monitoring research program | Science
Agggggggggggggggggggggggggh
Emails Suggest the Department of the Interior Is Prioritizing Fossil Fuel Interests Over Wildlife Well-Being
A top official at the Department of the Interior (DOI), Vincent DeVito, appears to take credit for helping to delay federal protections for the species at the behest of fossil fuel industry groups, one of several examples of his willingness to prioritize the needs of extractive industries with business before the government, according to public records.
…”We really hope that you can intervene before this species gets listed next month,” Samantha McDonald, the IPAA’s government relations director, wrote to DeVito. In his reply, DeVito asked that McDonald keep him apprised of “what you may be hearing as this unfolds.”
Less than a month later, in August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service granted the delay that IPAA sought. McDonald again wrote DeVito, as well as the acting director of the fish and wildlife service, in an email with the subject line “THANK YOU!”
“On behalf of my members, I wanted to thank you for the six-month delay on the Texas Hornshell,” she wrote, adding that it was “a good call.”
DeVito responded to McDonald that same day. “No problem,” he wrote.
…DeVito’s penchant for “energy dominance” has played out in other ways as well. As chairman of the DOI’s royalty policy committee, he helps determine the royalty rates that energy companies must pay to drill and mine on federal lands and waters, effectively encouraging or disincentivizing them.
At his Americans for Prosperity speech, DeVito described how he consulted closely with fossil fuel groups before recommending to Zinke in February that the DOI reduce royalty rates on offshore oil and gas drillers by a third, from 18.75 percent to 12.5 percent.
…On June 14th and 15th last year, DeVito traveled to West Virginia and came to the industry’s aid. According to records, his trip was planned in part by the West Virginia Coal Association itself, which submitted a trip schedule to one of DeVito’s colleagues. The schedule included meetings with the coal association as well as both state and FWS regulators overseeing crayfish conservation in the region.
Four days after DeVito’s trip, the Fish and Wildlife service approved the Berwind mine’s “protection plan” for the crayfish. In his speech to Americans for Prosperity, DeVito highlighted his role in enabling the mine’s approval.
…Conservationists, however, say the DOI’s decision to approve the Berwind mine’s crayfish protection plan was deeply flawed.
Sigh….
Scientists create mutant enzymes that eat plastic bottles
The creation of the enzyme came by accident when the team, led by Professor John McGeehan at the University of Portsmouth, UK, tweaked a bacterium they had discovered in a waste dump in Japan in 2016. The bacterium had naturally evolved to eat plastic, and the scientists inadvertently made it even better at breaking down polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the plastic used for drink bottles. The break-down process starts in a matter of days, not the centuries it can take in the ocean.
Scientists create mutant enzymes that eat plastic bottles – CNET
Whoa! Cool
Donors to Pruitt’s Oklahoma Groups Now Lobby EPA, and Reap Benefits
As an Oklahoma politician, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt received $181,000 in political contributions from donors who lobbied the EPA last year, according to a MapLight review.
The donors include lobbyist J. Steven Hart and his wife, who have attracted attention for renting a townhouse to Pruitt, even as Hart’s firm, Williams & Jensen, has lobbied to relax the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gas regulations. Hart and his wife donated $4,366 to Pruitt’s campaigns for Oklahoma attorney general and his federal leadership political action committee.
A handful of companies lobbying Pruitt’s EPA have also been major donors to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which Pruitt chaired for two years as Oklahoma attorney general. At least one organization that lobbied the EPA last year donated to RAGA’s nonprofit policy arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, while Pruitt served on its board of directors.
…As Oklahoma’s chief law enforcement officer from 2011 to 2017, Pruitt earned a reputation for working hand-in-hand with energy industry donors to challenge Obama-era EPA rules. Now, previous donors are benefiting from Pruitt’s new position.
…A total of 49 organizations that contributed to Pruitt’s campaigns or PACs from 2010 to 2016 reported lobbying the EPA last year, according to campaign finance and lobbying records.
…Koch Industries, the global conglomerate run by billionaire libertarian brothers Charles and David Koch, donated $10,000 to Pruitt’s attorney general campaigns, and gave $525,000 to RAGA from 2014 to 2016. Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a secretive “dark-money” organization that receives funds from the Koch brothers, contributed $175,000 to RAGA’s nonprofit arm in 2014.
An affiliate of Koch Industries, Koch Companies Public Sector, lobbied the Pruitt-led EPA and Congress on the Clean Power Plan, and the family’s billionaire donor network recently praised the EPA’s plan to repeal the plan, according to a document obtained by the Intercept.
Donors to Pruitt’s Oklahoma Groups Now Lobby EPA, and Reap Benefits | Oklahoma Watch
Aghhhhhhhhhh
The contrails conspiracy is not only garbage, it’s letting aviation off the hook too
The pollutants spread by planes are a major issue. They make a significant contribution to global warming, yet they are excluded from international negotiations, such as the conference taking place in Paris. As a result, aviation’s expansion is unchecked by concerns about climate change.
…This exclusion is ridiculous, not least because aircraft emissions have a particular role in heating the planet, due to the height at which they are released, and the multiplying impacts of the water vapour and other gases the planes produce. Gases that sometimes form contrails in the sky.
…The most vocal people protesting against aviation emissions have no interest in their contribution to global warming. Quite the opposite. Many of those now denouncing the pollution of the skies see climate science as part of the problem: a conspiracy by corporations, military planners and other nefarious interests to control the skies.
…So on one hand we have a real threat, measurable and attestable, that is caused by an identifiable industry and persists as a result of the indifference and short-termism of the world’s governments. On the other, we have a conspiracy, attributed to forces unknown and interests unspecified, so powerful and pervasive that it extends from Mark Zuckerberg to the Paris terrorists. Why does it seem to be harder to generate interest in the real issue than the improbable one?
The real issue – global warming caused by aircraft emissions – calls on us to act. Reducing our impacts means flying less; something that few people are prepared to do. It involves an exhausting battle against a powerful industry and unresponsive governments. It means reading boring papers, attending boring meetings and engaging with a level of political and technical complexity that many people find repulsive. There’s plenty of grind and precious little glory.
…onspiracy theories. They make sense of what can sometimes feel like a senseless world. They tell you that you are among the elect: aware of a grand scheme that other people (or sheeple or sleeple as the conspiracy sites often like to call them) are unable or unwilling to see. It tells you that you are a lonely crusader fighting evil of the kind that’s otherwise encountered only in films about superheroes.
And if hardly anyone reads your website, it only goes to prove how important you are: why else would the authorities go to such lengths to limit your followers?
It also absolves you of the responsibility to act. Sure, you might feel moved to create a website, take some photos, perhaps sign the odd petition or even attend one or two noisy demonstrations. But you don’t have to change anything, because somewhere, buried deep in the forebrain, is the knowledge that there’s not really anything to change. You get the glory without the grind.
Perhaps such movements are also a response to a sense of helplessness. In a world so complex, chaotic and badly governed that its most dangerous predicaments often seem intractable, it is paradoxically comforting to believe that godlike powers are in control, even if those powers are malign.
Here is a factsheet, written by the author, on contrails and why they aren’t actually chemtrail
hmmm
“The Clock Is Ticking”: Inside the Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in Decades
It has been reported that a major merchant ship goes down somewhere in the world every two or three days; most are ships sailing under flags of convenience, with underpaid crews and poor safety records.
…Captain Lawrence? Captain Davidson. Thursday morning, 0700. We have a navigational incident. I’ll keep it short. A scuttle popped open on two-deck and we were having some free communication of water go down the three-hold. Have a pretty good list. I want to just touch—contact you verbally here. Everybody’s safe, but I want to talk to you.
…“I have a marine emergency and I would like to speak to a Q.I.[Qualified Individual] We had a hull breach—a scuttle blew open during a storm. We have water down in three-hold with a heavy list. We’ve lost the main propulsion unit. The engineers cannot get it going. Can I speak to a Q.I., please?”
…[Ship’s Captain Davidson] did not know the wind speeds because the ship’s anemometer was in disrepair and had been for weeks; it is now believed that the winds were sustained at 115 m.p.h., with higher gusts. As for the waves, Davidson appears to have underreported them, perhaps as a matter of professional style. El Faro was in fact struggling to endure steep breaking waves 30 to 40 feet high, and was occasionally encountering waves still higher. These monsters were smashing over the ship, knocking containers overboard, and boiling across a lower second deck that by design was watertight below but open to the sea. That second deck was the location of the scuttle that had been opened. Three-hold was a cavernous two-deck space below it, just aft of midship.
Lawrence asked for a measure of the list. Davidson said, “Betcha it’s all of 15—15 degrees.” Fifteen degrees is steep.
…The ship was found resting upright on a sandy plain 15,400 feet beneath the surface, and the recorder—a circuit board barely 2.5 inches long—was eventually retrieved. It contained the final 26 hours of conversations among nine doomed people on the bridge. The audio quality was poor, but a technical team was able to extract most of the spoken words and produce a 496-page transcript, by far the longest in the N.T.S.B.’s history. The transcript is a remarkable document—an unadorned record of nothing more than the sounds on the bridge. The people involved are identified in the transcript only by their shipboard ranks, but the names of the officers are part of the public record, and in the time since the tragedy other names have been revealed. It is now possible to know with reasonable certainty what occurred.
…[Captain Davidson] was a by-the-book mariner with a reputation for being unusually competent and organized. By training and temperament he was a safety-first man.
…At the time, TOTE was busy blaming Davidson by insisting that all routing and weather decisions were his alone to make, but here Davidson appeared to be asking permission for the Old Bahama Channel run. To make matters worse, it was answered by one of the cc’d managers, the director of ship management, Jim Fisker-Andersen, who was in San Francisco at the time. Fisker-Andersen wrote, “Captain Mike, diversion request heads up through Old Bahama Channel understood and authorized. Thank you for the heads up. Kind regards.”
…As is usually the case, the catastrophe was unfolding because of a combination of factors that had aligned, which included: Davidson’s caution with the home office; his decision to take a straight-line course; the subtle pressures to stick to the schedule; the systematic failure of the forecasts; the persuasiveness of the B.V.S. graphics; the lack of a functioning anemometer; the failure by some to challenge Davidson’s thinking more vigorously; the initial attribution of the ship’s list entirely to the winds; and finally a certain mental inertia that had overcome all of them. This is the stuff of tragedy that can never be completely explained.
“The Clock Is Ticking”: Inside the Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in Decades | Vanity Fair
Jeezus…
Coral reefs are in crisis – but scientists are finding effective ways to restore them
A major goal of coral restoration is to revive populations of stony corals that provide structure and habitat for the rest of the coral reef community, including soft corals, urchins, lobsters and fish. However, as restoration efforts expand around the globe, it is becoming increasingly clear it is not enough just to outplant corals. Healthy coral reefs are diverse communities with many intricate relationships between species that live on and around them.
…Fish also help corals grow by excreting nitrogen, an important nutrient for the symbiotic algae that live inside corals. This allows the algae to give more energy back to corals and make them grow faster. Planting coral at restoration sites in dense aggregations may help attract more fishes, which will fertilize the corals, help them grow and attract more fish.
However, planting corals too densely can hasten disease transmission and competition between them – factors that can drastically impede the success of restoration. Finding the sweet spot, where corals are grouped densely enough to promote growth and attract fish but not so densely that they spread diseases and complete with each other, should be incorporated into restoration design.
…There are many more processes that restoration practitioners can harness to help facilitate repopulating reefs with corals. The future of coral restoration lies in combining experience in growing corals for transplantation with accumulated ecological knowledge about how reefs function. Until now, those two camps generally have operated in separate spaces. With corals in crisis worldwide, it is time to bring them together.
hmmmm
Wipeout: Human role in climate change removed from National Parks science report
National Park Service officials have deleted every mention of humans’ role in causing climate change in drafts of a long-awaited report on sea level rise and storm surge, contradicting Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s vow to Congress that his department is not censoring science.
The research for the first time projects the risks from rising seas and flooding at 118 coastal national park sites, including the National Mall, the original Jamestown settlement and the Wright Brothers National Memorial.
…In changes dated Feb. 6, a park service official crossed out the word “anthropogenic,” the term for people’s impact on nature, in five places. Three references to “human activities” causing climate change also were removed.
The 87-page report, which was written by a University of Colorado Boulder scientist, has been held up for at least 10 months, according to documents obtained by Reveal. The delay has prevented park managers from having access to the best data in situations such as reacting to hurricane forecasts, safeguarding artifacts from floodwaters or deciding where to locate new buildings.
…Columbia University’s Silencing Science Tracker documents more than 100 instances of government trying to restrict research or public information about climate change. Among them are reports on climate change that have been stripped from government websites. Climate change was removed from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s strategic plan. Environmental Protection Agency employees were issued talking points that promote an inaccurate message about gaps in climate science and downplay the role of human activities in global warming.
The edited national parks report “is probably the biggest scientific integrity violation at the Department of Interior, by far … because this is an actual scientific report.”
…The introduction also was substantially altered in February. These two sentences were deleted: “While sea levels have been gradually rising since the last glacial maximum approximately 21,000 years ago, anthropogenic climate change has significantly increased the rate of global sea level rise. Human activities continue to release carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm.”
…The National Park Service’s scientific integrity policy prohibits managers from engaging in “dishonesty, fraud, misrepresentation, coercive manipulation, censorship, or other misconduct that alters the content, veracity, or meaning or that may affect the planning, conduct, reporting, or application of scientific and scholarly activities.” It also requires employees to differentiate between their opinions or assumptions and solid science.
Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said “the edits are glaringly in violation” of the science cited in the report and “such alterations violate” the policy.
“The individual who edited the document is making a personal opinion/assumption that runs counter to the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions responsible for sea level rise are of anthropogenic origin and that the threat to the National Park Service assets arises primarily from human activities,” said McNutt, who led the U.S. Geological Survey, the Interior Department’s main scientific agency, from 2009 to 2013.
Wipeout: Human role in climate change removed from science report | Reveal
sigh….
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