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Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?
Humanity has 30 years to find out
Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?
Humanity has 30 years to find out
All parents remember the moment when they first held their children—the tiny crumpled face, an entire new person, emerging from the hospital blanket. I extended my hands and took my daughter in my arms. I was so overwhelmed that I could hardly think.
Afterward I wandered outside so that mother and child could rest. It was three in the morning, late February in New England. There was ice on the sidewalk and a cold drizzle in the air. As I stepped from the curb, a thought popped into my head: When my daughter is my age, almost 10 billion people will be walking the Earth. I stopped midstride. I thought, How is that going to work?
In 1970, when I was in high school, about one out of every four people was hungry—“undernourished,” to use the term preferred today by the United Nations. Today the proportion has fallen to roughly one out of 10. In those four-plus decades, the global average life span has, astoundingly, risen by more than 11 years; most of the increase occurred in poor places. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have lifted themselves from destitution into something like the middle class. This enrichment has not occurred evenly or equitably: Millions upon millions are not prosperous. Still, nothing like this surge of well-being has ever happened before. No one knows whether the rise can continue, or whether our current affluence can be sustained.
Today the world has about 7.6 billion inhabitants. Most demographers believe that by about 2050, that number will reach 10 billion or a bit less. Around this time, our population will probably begin to level off. As a species, we will be at about “replacement level”: On average, each couple will have just enough children to replace themselves. All the while, economists say, the world’s development should continue, however unevenly. The implication is that when my daughter is my age, a sizable percentage of the world’s 10 billion people will be middle-class.
Like other parents, I want my children to be comfortable in their adult lives. But in the hospital parking lot, this suddenly seemed unlikely. Ten billion mouths, I thought. Three billion more middle-class appetites. How can they possibly be satisfied? But that is only part of the question. The full question is: How can we provide for everyone without making the planet uninhabitable? …
The Tale Is the Perfect Movie for Our #MeToo Moment
The film that left Sundance shell-shocked blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction, past and present, victim and hero.
Laura Dern and Isabelle Nélisse in The Tale.
“The story you are about to see is true,” says the protagonist of Jennifer Fox’s The Tale, “as far as I know.” That opening line of narration sets the stage for a movie in which the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, past and present, agency and abuse are in constant flux.
Although the Sundance Film Festival’s catalog description didn’t give it away, it became clear that The Tale, in which Laura Dern plays a documentary filmmaker named Jennifer Fox, was pressed right up against the edges of truth, and if any doubts remained by the time the lights came up on the film’s shell-shocked audience, Fox erased them in the post-screening Q&A when she called the film “pure memoir.”
Knowing that it’s heavily based on Fox’s own recollections makes The Tale’s already tough story even harder to absorb. In the movie, Dern’s Jenny gets a series of increasingly alarmed voicemails from her mother, played by Ellen Burstyn, who has discovered a story Jenny wrote when she was 13. The story, called “The Tale,” is itself a thinly veiled fiction describing Jenny’s “special” relationship with her horse-riding instructor (Elizabeth Debicki) and her track coach (Jason Ritter), and its resurfacing opens up doors inside Jenny she had long since closed, memories she has either suppressed or rewritten. (That the film screened the day after Aly Raisman’s testimony at Larry Nassar’s sentencing hearing made its real-world resonance almost overwhelming.) She doesn’t understand the story, even though it’s a product of her younger self, but she can’t get away from it. “This is important to me,” she says, “and I want to figure out why.”
The secret at The Tale’s center is that 13-year-old Jenny was sexually abused by her coach, Bill (Ritter), who spends months lecturing her on the limitations of bourgeois morality and reading her Rumi poems before raping her. …
Now We Know Paul Ryan’s Price
Thanks to a timely donation from the Family Koch.
One thing you have to give the members of the Koch family: They’re excellent tippers. From The Washington Examiner:
House Speaker Paul Ryan collected nearly $500,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Koch and his wife after helping usher through a massive tax reform law. According to a recent campaign finance report filed Thursday, Koch and his wife Elizabeth each donated $247,7000 to Ryan’s joint fundraising committee… The Republican tax overhaul plan passed in December benefited Koch Industries, as it cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, among other cuts. The legislation then got a boost from the Kochs’ multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to highlight its benefits. And 13 days after it passed, Charles and Elizabeth Koch made the near $500,000 donation to Team Ryan, which raises money for the congressman, the National Republican Congressional Committee and a political action committee run by Ryan. On the same day, Charles and Elizabeth Koch also each donated $237,000 to the NRCC.
There are a lot of political journalists who are going to be doing hard time in Journalism Purgatory for the puffing they’ve given the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin over the first years of his career. We don’t even have to argue about the price any more with him. It’s 500-large. And, as always, it’s time to revisit the wisdom of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy, from his opinion in Citizens United v. FEC.
“Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.”
Deathless brilliance. …
If You’re a Centrist, Be Proud of It
Germany, like France, shows how centrism can be an effective governing platform.
Both have shown the power of centrist platforms.
The German Social Democrats’ vote to continue coalition talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union isn’t just another bridge crossed on the path toward the fourth Merkel cabinet since 2005. It’s a decision that should resonate for all center-left parties: Are they actually better off as part of a strong moderate center rather than as stand-alone parties? That’s an existential question many members and leaders of these parties are afraid to ask, and there’s a chance that answers reached without their cooperation will wipe them off the political stage.
The vote on Sunday went 362-279 in favor of formal coalition talks, which will go on for weeks and produce a detailed, binding agreement of the kind Merkel has already carried out in two previous “grand coalitions” with the SPD. The Social Democrats have hesitated to repeat the experience because, in the public mind, Merkel came to be responsible for all the joint achievements — not just for the economic prosperity that’s the key goal of her center-right party, but also for social policies like the introduction of the minimum wage, which the SPD had championed. She has even stolen — albeit at a high political cost — the mantle of refugee protector-in-chief, which by rights belongs to the socialists, not to conservatives.
The public no longer comprehends what the SPD stands for, the party worries. In 2009, after four years of the previous Merkel-led grand coalition, voters punished it with a 9 percentage point drop. After rebuilding its image somewhat in opposition between 2009 and 2013, the party agreed to another “GroKo” deal with Merkel — only to lose 5 percentage points again in 2017.
As Kevin Kuehnert, the 28-year-old leader of the SPD’s youth branch and a tireless agitator against yet another GroKo, put it at the Sunday party conference, “If we were a pub, one could say the Union has been running up a tab with us for years.” …
The kill chain: inside the unit that tracks targets for US drone wars
Amid Kansas bean fields military analysts watch live video of far-off suspects’ lives … and mark them for death. The killings, and accompanying civilian casualties, take an emotional toll.
In a dimly lit room at McConnell air force base in south central Kansas, analysts from a national guard intelligence reconnaissance surveillance group watch live drone surveillance video coming from war zones in the Middle East.
During combat, the analysts become part of a “kill chain” – analyzing live drone video, then communicating what they see – in instant-message chat with jet fighter pilots, operators of armed Predator and Reaper drones, and ground troops.
They carry out drone warfare while sitting thousands of miles from battlefields. They don’t fly the drones and don’t fire the missiles. They video-stalk enemy combatants, and tell warfighters what they see. The work, they say, helps kill terrorists, including from Isis.
The group does this work in the middle of America, at an air base surrounded by flat cow pastures and soybean fields. The 184th Intelligence Wing of the Kansas air national guard, started this work about 2002. Until last year, most people in Kansas knew nothing about their role in drone warfare.
The work is top secret.They say that they see things in those drone images that no one wants to see. Sometimes, it’s terrorists beheading civilians. Sometimes it’s civilians dying accidentally in missions that the Kansans help coordinate.
They agonize over those deaths. The most frequently heard phrase in drone combat, one airman says, is: “Don’t push the button.” …
Cleaning Up Air Pollution May Strengthen Global Warming
New research is helping quantify just how big that effect might be
Pollution in the atmosphere is having an unexpected consequence, scientists say—it’s helping to cool the climate, masking some of the global warming that’s occurred so far.
That means efforts worldwide to clean up the air may cause an increase in warming, as well as other climate effects, as this pollution disappears.
New research is helping to quantify just how big that effect might be. A study published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters suggests that eliminating the human emission of aerosols—tiny, air-polluting particles often released by industrial activities—could result in additional global warming of anywhere from half a degree to 1 degree Celsius.
This would virtually ensure that the planet will warm beyond the most stringent climate targets outlined in the Paris climate agreement. World leaders have set an ambitious goal of keeping global temperatures within 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius of their preindustrial levels. But research suggests the world has already warmed by about 1 degree—meaning even another half a degree of warming could push the planet into dangerous territory. …
Researchers are worried that a brain illness known as ‘zombie deer’ disease may start infecting humans
- Chronic wasting disease was discovered in the 1950s when researchers observed deer in Colorado behaving like zombies, staggering around blindly as they starved to death.
- The disease, caused by the spread of proteins called prions, has since been reported in Canada and some US states, including Michigan and Wisconsin.
- No human has caught the disease, but a recent study suggests it could get into a person’s brain if they were to eat meat from an infected animal.
When a deer gets infected with chronic wasting disease, it can take up to two years before signs of the illness become visible.
At some point, the animal will lose weight, stop interacting with other deer, and lose its fear of humans, and it may start drinking and salivating more. It winds up staring vacantly as it starves to death, which is why the illness is also known as “zombie deer” disease.
As far as we know, though, no human has ever been infected with the disease, caused by the spread of misfolded proteins called prions.
But Canadian researchers have recently expressed concerns that the disease could infect people who eat deer, elk, moose, or others that carry the proteins.
Preliminary results from an ongoing study by a branch of Health Canada show that macaques, the primates most similar to humans that can be used in research, can catch the disease after regularly consuming infected meat. …
6 Millennial Fads That Are Way Older Than You Think
There are a few things almost everyone agrees on: Water is wet, babies are cute, and Millennials are the worst generation humanity has ever created. There isn’t a thing they like, from selfies to avocado toast, that hasn’t become a sign that their inventions and fads are ruining the very fabric of society. But guess what? Half of the “Millennial” trends your grandpa complains about are actually even older than he is. For example …
#6. “Sexting” Has Been Around Since The Renaissance
It’s unsurprising that the invention of a device that is capable of both taking pictures and sending those pictures to another human being was followed immediately by the invention of the practice of sending people photos of your own sex bits — or as people much cooler than we are call it, “sexting.” But the idea of “sending nudes” in order to make someone horny for you is much older than camera phones. Hell, it’s older than cameras.
This was accompanied by a smaller painting of eggplant and peach emojis.
Take this 17th-century portrait of a lady preparing food while a black servant gives her an expression that seems to ask “Why are your boobs out?” The woman in the picture is Nell Gwyn, comedic actress and mistress to English King Charles II, who sent this lusty portrait to her lover sometime during their 16-year affair. The very suggestive piece shows a virginal white Gwyn flash ample cleavage while “stuffing sausages,” which we’ll assume was the Renaissance equivalent of sending the eggplant emoji. The original picture, made by a wisely anonymous painter in the late 17th century, is only a little larger than a postcard — not big enough to hang on a wall, but probably just about the right size to carry around in a king-sized pocket and show to his ducal bros.
Flash-forward to 1828, and this self-portrait by Boston painter Sarah Goodridge might be the first sext selfie. And unlike Gwyn, Goodridge knew there was a quicker way into a man’s unmentionables than some subtle iconography: …
Nursing Home Recreates Communist East Germany For Dementia Patients
AlexA Residence for Senior Citizens Director Gunter Wolfram, 49, shows resident Gerda Noack, 93, an old East German variety magazine. It’s one of many communist-era items available to dementia patients to touch and look at in two “remembrance rooms” at this Dresden nursing home.
It’s said that time heals all wounds. But not for people afflicted with dementia like Gerda Noack. The 93-year-old German woman’s memory is fading, as is her eyesight.
The losses scare her. On a recent morning at the AlexA Residence for Senior Citizens in Dresden, where she lives, Noack sounded anxious as she asked, over and over: “Where am I supposed to go?”
Director Gunter Wolfram gently took her arm and suggested they visit a government-run store from the former communist East Germany called Intershop. The once popular chain no longer exists — but a mockup of the store is only a few steps away.
For the many East Germans who spent decades trying to free themselves from communism’s regimented lifestyle, it might seem like a return to captivity. But for Noack, it’s an escape from a mental jail that today’s reunified Germany can’t unlock.
With the director’s help, she searches one of the shelves featuring the Intershop logo for items produced in the former East.
The sight soothes Noack, and her face lights up each time she recognizes something. Like a shopping bag made out of a polyester fabric called Dederon — a name based on DDR, the German initials for the German Democratic Republic. Or a laundry detergent called Spee. …
Linus Torvalds declares Intel fix for Meltdown/Spectre ‘COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE’
The always outspoken Linus Torvalds, best known for his continuing work on the innermost code of Linux systems, has harsh words to say and accusations to level against Intel. His evaluation of Intel’s latest proposed fix for the Meltdown/Spectre issue: “the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE.” As a potential line of inquiry, he suggests: “Has anybody talked to them and told them they are f*cking insane?” (Asterisk his.)
These and other kind epithets are awarded by Torvalds in a public email chain between him and David Woodhouse, an engineer at Amazon in the U.K., regarding Intel’s solution as relating to the Linux kernel. The issue is (as far as I can tell as someone far out of their depth) a clumsy and, Torvalds argues, “insane” implementation of a fix that essentially does nothing while also doing a bunch of unnecessary things.
The fix needs to address Meltdown (which primarily affects Intel chips), but instead of just doing so across the board, it makes the whole fix something the user or administrator has to opt into at boot. Why even ask, if this is such a huge vulnerability? And why do it at such a low level when future CPUs will supposedly not require it, at which point the choice would be at best unnecessary and at worst misleading or lead to performance issues?
Meanwhile, a bunch of other things are added in the same patch that Torvalds points out are redundant with existing solutions, for instance adding protections against an exploit already mitigated by Google Project Zero’s “retpoline” technique. …
A Reddit mattress conspiracy theory got even weirder after top comment got deleted
A comment about mattress stores on the Reddit thread “What conspiracy theory do you 100% buy into and why?” recently received over 41k upvotes and sparked hundreds of responses in a matter of hours. And then it was mysteriously deleted.
It’s tinfoil hat time.
The Redditor — whose name we’re omitting just in case they’re currently on the run — theorized that popular retailer Mattress Firm was engaged in a money laundering scheme.
The reasoning? Where the poster lives there are numerous stores within a couple city blocks of one another.
Click to embiggen. Luckily, one user saved a screenshot. You can find it in the thread, we’re not linking because it has the OP’s handle.
And then came the replies. …
SLO-MO —
Video demonstrates the marvel of CRT displays at 380,000 frames per second
The video makes common display tech concepts easy to grasp.
We spend a lot of time reading about the differences between display technologies like LCD and OLED, which, like all display technologies, are built to fool our eyes into seeing things that are only simulated, not real, like colors, or realistic movement. But it helps to see it in action.
A video from YouTube channel The Slow Mo Guys (originally reported on by Motherboard) vividly illustrates how CRT, LCD, and OLED displays work by either zooming in very close or by recording in insane frame rates at ultra slow motion.
You’ll still find enthusiasts who insist that it’s all been downhill since CRT monitors and TVs went sunset for most of the market. While this video doesn’t make much of a case for CRT’s relative quality, it does show that they were engineering marvels for their time.
When the capture frame rate hits 380,000 frames per second while recording Super Mario Bros. playing on an NES and a CRT TV, the video shows the image drawing not just vertically, one scan line at a time, but one pixel at a time as it builds out each scanline from left to right. It all happens so quickly that the naked eye can’t tell, even on that old hardware. …
‘Art can be for everyone’: behind the scenes at the Museum of Selfies
A new pop-up exhibition in Los Angeles aims to explore the history of the self-portrait and the danger of the ‘death selfie.’
Museums are no longer just places to see art – they’re venues to take selfies posted with #museum. So why not call out the elephant in the room? That’s the philosophy behind the Museum of Selfies, a pop-up exhibition which opens next month in Los Angeles.
The exhibition traces the history of self-portraits from the prehistoric era to 2006, the year Paris Hilton claims to have “invented” the selfie. There are self-portraits in 21st century art, mirror selfies by Jacqueline Kennedy in the 1960s, food selfies from Instagram, iconic skyscraper selfies and the infamous bathroom selfie. Naturally, there is an entire section devoted to “the art of the narcissist”.
The California game designers Tommy Honton and Tair Mamedov came up with the idea last year after learning that more people take selfies with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris than photograph the artwork itself.
“We joked around with the idea of a selfie museum and thought: ‘What about a space that explored something that was polarizing but undeniably catchy, in terms of selfie culture?’” asked Honton. “We bring in sceptics while exploring the history and the culture around this whole phenomenon.” …
Silicon Valley wrestles with religion. Is high-tech “clean meat” kosher and halal?
Meaty Questions
Silicon Valley wrestles with religion.
Leviticus has swept into Silicon Valley.
For thousands of years, meat has come exclusively from sentient animals. And for a sizable portion of humanity, how to raise and slaughter those animals has been a central component in religious-dieting doctrine. But religious scholars are now being confronted with a brand new meat question: how does high-tech cell cultured meat—known in the food industry as “clean meat”—fit in an adherent diet?
The ascendance of high-tech meat companies such as Hampton Creek, Memphis Meats, SuperMeat, and Finless Foods has sparked novel conversations in Jewish and Muslim circles over whether these novel products are kosher and halal, respectively. And with the first clean meat products expected to hit the market this year, tech companies are actively engaging with groups responsible for certifying food products as kosher and halal, for obvious reasons. The global kosher market is worth more than $24 billion; the halal market $1.6 trillion globally.
Clean meat turns conventional meat production on its head. The startups developing these products don’t rely on raising and slaughtering chickens, cows, and pigs; they need only a handful of animal cells. They then take those cells, put them in a nutrient-dense liquid medium in a bioreactor, where they grow and proliferate. The scientists behind the resulting product—a combination of muscle and fat tissue—say it’s identical to conventional meat on a molecular level. …
THE DIFFICULT DECISIONS OF ROBERT E. LEE
If you look back on your life, you can probably point to a time or two where you were faced with a really tough decision. Had you chosen differently, your world would look very different right now. So it was for Confederate general Robert E. Lee (1807–70)—one of the most divisive figures in American history. To his fans, Lee was the hero of the Civil War—which explains why there are so many roads and schools named after him in the South. But to his critics, Lee was a traitor who fought to keep slavery legal. It turns out that Lee was just as conflicted as his legacy. Let’s look at Lee’s life through the scope of some of those choices to look at the impact they did have…and are still having today.
DECISION 1: MATHEMATICS OR MILITARY?
Robert Edward Lee was born in 1807 to one of Virginia’s most wealthy and respected families. When he was 18 years old, he applied to West Point Military Academy in New York, which was expected of a young man of his social status. But late in life he confided to a friend that attending a military college was among his greatest regrets. It may seem like an odd comment for a man who was venerated as a war hero, but as a boy it was mathematics, not soldiering, that interested him. Robert was an intelligent child and could have studied to become a teacher, architect, or an engineer. But there was another factor in play: the once-proud family name had been tarnished.
Two centuries earlier (a few years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock), Richard Lee I emigrated from England to begin a new life in what is now Virginia. That was Robert E. Lee’s great-grandfather. Lee’s grandfather was Colonel Henry Lee II, a prominent Virginia politician. And Lee’s father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee III, fought alongside George Washington in the Revolutionary War. In fact, at Washington’s funeral in 1799, it was Harry Lee who famously described the late general and president as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Harry Lee would go on to become Virginia’s governor and then a U.S. congressman.
But things turned sour for the family when Harry’s poor financial habits and risky business ventures led to bankruptcy and a one-year stint in debtor’s prison. A few years later, during the War of 1812, Harry was nearly beaten to death after defending a friend who opposed the war. He fled to the West Indies to “heal,” but it was more likely to escape his debts. He died before he could make it home. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Congress shuts down the government for a weekend after failing to renegotiate DACA, forcing President Trump to “work” through his one-year anniversary party.
An Egyptian audience member inspires Trevor to translate Trump-speak into Arabic.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Things got greasy as Democrats and Republicans sparred through the weekend over a deal to end the government shutdown.
When the government shutdown prevented the President from visiting Mar-a-Lago last weekend, he had to send Eric and Lara Trump in his place.
The President, cooped up “working hard” at the White House all weekend, missed all the fun in the streets.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at how the one-year anniversary of the president’s inauguration was marked by nationwide protests and a government shutdown that ended today despite Trump doing as little as possible to resolve it.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Everything is fine. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver returns for Season 5 on February 18 at 11pm on HBO.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
Max is a professional bottle dismantler.
FINALLY . . .
If You Find Aliens, Who Do You Call?
Let’s say your house is on fire, or overrun by a gang of psychotic raccoons. You don’t hesitate—you take out your phone, and you call the fire department, or animal control, and then firemen/raccoon-wranglers are promptly dispatched to your home. These are well-established protocols, essential to the maintenance of a mostly not-on-fire, feral-animal-free society.
But what about UFOs? What about extraterrestrial beings? Faced with some six-eyed slime-being rooting through your trash, or a spacecraft idling above your backyard (provided it’s not Elon Musk’s “nuclear alien UFO” again), who exactly would you think to call? And what would whoever you called do, when you called them?
These questions—suddenly pressing, what with the recent revelation that the Pentagon had spent $22 million between 2008 and 2012 to investigate mysterious, potentially alien-related phenomena—form the basis of this week’s Giz Asks. We reached out to dozens of agencies, everyone from NASA to the Center for Disease Control to the NYPD to find out who to call in such a situation, and what (if any) protocols are in place when these things are reported, and we came up mostly empty-handed—though the astronomers and independent institutes we spoke with did provide us with some hope. The US government might, at present, be grievously ill-prepared for first contact, but there are countless hobbyists and professionals keeping an eye on what’s happening up there. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?