US Presidential Prediction Market Post-Debate

Here's what the PredictIt US Presidential Race market shows after last night's debate:

PredictIt is a market where buy and sell "shares" in various categories. One which is closely followed this time of the election cycle is for US president. So here Kamala Harris's price rose sharply shortly after the debate started:

at 9 pm US Eastern Time. The blue column bars are shares traded, labeled on the left vertical axis, and the price per share, labeled on the right. 

Kamala Harris was superb in the debate and she badly outplayed him. Trump was an angry, lying, bombastic, bumbling fool. I'd like to think this sinks his chances, but in today's America apparently nine years of observing such a fool on the political stage may not be enough yet. 

Brains

 A human brain (average size 1,300 grams) versus a dolphin brain (1,600 g). However 

"The human brain has a far more developed hippocampus than the dolphin brain. The hippocampus is a somewhat small region in the human brain that is shaped like a seahorse. The hippocampus is responsible for the elements of memory, learning, motivation, emotion, and more."

Apparently it's too late for dolphins to ever transition back to land again. They're probably safer there anyway. Besides it looks much cooler, with significantly less waiting in line.

The Trend in Ocean Acidification

From a site called the Institute for Environmental Analytics:

So that's a pH change of about -0.075 in 40 years, or an average of -0.019/decade (-0.19/century, if you want to unfairly extrapolate). I don't know what the projections have been--will try to post that later. Is this a significant change in ocean water, if your species has chosen to reside there?  

This site looks legit, since 75% of the males who lead the Institute have beards. 

Seriously though, they looked funded by real sources. Worth exploring more. The data source for this graph is from a legit journal.

The data for the other oceans (at least, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian) look very similar. 

2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave

There's an article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) titled "As Extreme Heat Becomes More Common, the Unprecedented Pacific Northwest Heat Dome Offers Lessons." It might be paywalled, I'm not sure--I'm on their media list and not sure what I get for that. 

Anyway, it says a few interesting things [sorry/not sorry for the bullet point format]:

• An estimate of the total number of deaths is about 900, 600 of them in British Columbia. "Most of the deceased were older adults who lived alone and died at home."
• Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon together saw about 200 deaths. "There [Portland], the heat dome lasted from June 25 to June 30. Temperatures reached 116°F (46.6°C) in Portland—more than 40°F (4°C) higher than normal
• Except that last number is wrong, it should be 22°C. Strange they would make that error.
• "June 29 reached 121°F, or 49°C, in Lytton, a small town in British Columbia, becoming the hottest day on record in Canada."
• Researchers have since classified the 2021 event as one of a handful of the most extreme heat waves on modern record.
• They link to "The 2021 western North America heat wave among the most extreme events ever recorded globally" in Science Advances 4-May-2022. That's in terms of the deviation from normal, "coming in at over 4 standard deviations" from average.
• Here's a free PDF of the paper.
• They write, "Throughout the globe, where we have reliable data, only five other heat waves were found to be more extreme since 1960."
• "Excess mortality due to extreme heat is well documented, with an average of 6 heat-related deaths per 100,000 residents each year in North America estimated for 2000–2019.
• "We have shown that the western North America event of 2021may have been caused by a combination of high pressure and dry conditions, but it is well known that heat extremes in different parts of the world may be driven by other combinations of Earth system processes." They don't say anything particular about climate change per se related to this event.
• They give the following table for extreme heat waves with standard deviations of 4 or higher, since 1968.

Anyway you can read it if you want. Back to the JAMA article.

• "And this August, researchers reported in JAMA that heat-related deaths in the US have been steadily increasing since 2016." 
• The article talks with an emergency room physician and a director of emergency management. The latter said "We had heard, anecdotally, folks saying, “I called my uncle at 11 in the morning and he was fine. By 10 at night, he was dead.” I think 15% of the fatalities were in homes that had air conditioning. But these were people oftentimes on fixed income who were afraid they couldn’t afford the extra utility bill, so they never turned their air conditioning on."
• He also says, "I think my call to action on this is that we need to find that sense of community again. The thought of someone losing their life in a heat event by themselves in an apartment or in a mobile home that was 125 °F, 130 °F, 140 °F inside is devastating. There’s no reason in a city like Portland, in a metro area like Portland, in a place like the Pacific Northwest, that someone should be alone and suffering without a neighbor or someone being able to come and check on them." But that's exactly the situation I was in. My own fault, really. If I die here no one will notice for weeks, until I start to smell. My poor cat.

Anyway I obviously find this heat event interesting because I lived through it. (And without air conditioning! Nor did I go to anywhere else to cool down.) Others probably not so much. 

--

PS: Looking back at it, this is kind of a lousy blog post. Sorry. 

Sunspots May Be Getting Back to Normal

 Here's the monthly data, just updated with August's number:

Source: Solar Influences Data Analysis Center, Royal Observatory of Belgium

finir

finir

There's no point anymore. I will delete this blog in a few days.

I would really like to be done with this and just stop thinking about it.

US COVID Deaths Surpassing Last Year's

The last couple of weeks for the current year are always subject to changes (increases).

I'm not going to start wearing a mask yet, but I am going to get vaccinated as soon as the new batch is available in mid-September. (Will be my 7th; I still haven't had COVID yet.) 

Data source: CDC (scroll down to "Click here to download", then click "Export", then "Download file".)

Did You Know This? I Didn’t

I didn't expect this, but world per capita emissions peaked in 2012, according to OurWorldInData:


Notably this doesn't include land use changes, or any other anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

As of 2022, annual per capita CO2 emissions had declined by 4.6%. Since 2020, the height of the pandemic (but a local minimum in emissions), it has increased by 4.3%. It would need to increase by another 4.7% to reach the 2012 maximum.

Interesting to see the effect of two world wars and a Great Depression. But what happened between 1970 and 2000?

Global Temperature vs Change in CO2

Here's a plot of NOAA's annual global temperature (anomaly) versus the annual change in atmospheric CO2 as measured at Mauna Loa Observatory in uppermost Hawaii.

Temperature anomalies relative to 1901-2000. (But a change of anomaly wouldn't change the graph, only the numbers on the y-axis.)

Data:

NOAA monthly global temperature anomaly (in second box choose "All Months")

Mauna Loa monthly CO2

PS: Just for fun, mostly. Not a surprise.

PPS: As always here, click on the graph to get a cleaner picture. (Grrrrr)

Asparagus

"They left, saying they would return after five o'clock if they received permission to prune, and on their way out they muddied the interior terrace and the drawing room and ripped Fermina Daza's favorite Turkish rug. Needless disasters, all of them, because the general impression was that the parrot had taken advantage of the chaos to escape through neighboring patios. And in fact Dr. Urbino looked for him in the foliage, but there was no response in any language, not even to whistles and songs, so he gave him up for lost and went to sleep when it was almost three o'clock. But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus." 

-- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

(A wonderfully delightful book)

Dumb Climate Talk from a Dumb Guy

"9 Things Musk and Trump Said About Climate Change, Annotated: In a conversation on X, Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk spoke for a bit about climate change. Here’s what they got wrong and what they got right," New York Times, 13-Aug-2024. 

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/climate/elon-musk-trump-climate.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.suwF.jAIfEt7o6YMU&smid=url-share

Then there was this gem from Trump:

“The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years … and you’ll have more oceanfront property."

For the record, 1/8th of an inch is 3.2 mm, which global average sea level rises every 9 months now.

Climate Knowledge in the '60s

An interesting article that just came out:

"The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s: It wasn't just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated," Kate Yoder, Grist, 5-Aug-2024.

https://grist.org/science/lost-history-climate-1960s-clean-air-act-supreme-court/

H-T Volcano had a Slight Cooling Effect, and it's Now Over

The Hunga Tonga volcano, the underwater volcano that erupted in January 2022 and has been blamed for the recent warming spike, crop failures on Mars and the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, had an overall cooling effect when it injected vast amounts of volcanic aerosols and water vapor into the atmosphere, according to a paper just published in JGR Atmospheres. Its effect has been over since the end of 2023.

Plain Language Summary

The Hunga Tonga‐Hunga Ha'apai (Hunga) submarine volcanic eruption on 15 January 2022, produced aerosol and water vapor plumes in the stratosphere. These plumes have persisted mostly in the Southern Hemisphere throughout 2022 and into 2023. Enhanced tropospheric warming due to the added stratospheric water vapor is offset by the larger stratospheric aerosol attenuation of solar radiation. Hunga induced circulation changes that reduce stratospheric ozone and lower temperatures also play a role in the net forcing. The change in the radiative flux would result in a very slight 2022/3 cooling in Southern Hemisphere. The Hunga climate forcing has decreased to near zero by the end of 2023.

Here's a news article.

Lots of details of their conscientious work in the paper, which like all research published by the AGU is free, but here is graph of overall forcing from HT, compared to what would have happened without it.

Probably time to move on.

Darkness

Dirac on Theoretical Physics

Here's a video clip of Paul A.M. Dirac explaining how theoretical physicists worked -- or, at least, how HE worked:

 

He was British, and his full name was Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. I'm surprised I still remember that.

The Schrodinger equation wasn't consistent with Einstein's special relativity. Among other things, it got the spin of the electron wrong. (In fact, Schrodinger didn't include spin at all.)

Dirac derived the relativistic Schrodinger equation, consistent with Einstein, and, miraculously, it correctly predicted the spin of the electron (within a few percent; quantum electrodynamics--the field theory of relativistic quantum mechanics--would do the rest). Here's what Dirac's equation looked like:

That's kind of messy, though the Wiki page explains it. Psi is the usual wave function of quantum mechanics, although in Dirac's theory it's a 4-dimensionl vector. (In Schrodinger it's just a regular function over all of space and time, what physicists call a "scalar.") But my generation, and the one before, and those following know it as:

It's just mathematically simpler. Moreover, now we set c=1 (the speed of light), and, for that matter, G=hbar=k=1, where G is Newton's gravitational constant, hbar is Planck's constant divided by 2*pi, and k is Boltzmann's constant. These constants simply set the scale of dimensions, and can always be added back if you're looking for real-world predictions.

{If you're said it will take you "an hour" (or whatever) to drive from home to you grandma's, you did the same thing with units, taking your velocity to be =1.}

I don't think I've ever solved the Dirac equation except for a free electron, as has every other graduate student in physics, but I once saw a PhD dissertation that solved it for the hydrogen atom. It was nontrivial.)

Anyway...when he was a young physicist in Europe, Dirac derived his equation from general considerations, a real tour-de-force of both quantum mechanics, special relativity and mathematics for its time. It was better than Schrodinger.

Dirac was a little weird, no doubt an advantage:

His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour.

This likely contributed to his great success. Dirac put forth his equation in 1928, and by 1933 won the Nobel Prize in physics, along with Schrodinger. Dirac has just turned 32 years old.

Wiki:

"After having relocated to Florida to be near his elder daughter, Mary, Dirac spent his last fourteen years of both life and physics research at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida."

Dirac did other notable work besides his relativistic wave equation, but nothing on its scale, and it's what he will forever be known for. 

So I found it really interesting to watch him talk about what made him tick.   

An Unexpected iPhone Issue

I found an unexpected...issue...with iPhone's Siri when I asked it to do a calculation: It doesn't understand scientific notation. 

I wanted to know the ratio of the mass of Jupiter to the mass of the Earth, so I asked Siri to calculate it. I gave it instrutions:

"Hey Siri, divide one point nine times ten to the twenty-seventh by five point nine seven times ten to the twenty-fourth."

It returned 3.18 x 10⁵⁰, when the correct answer is 318.

It took me a minute to figure out that the calculation it did was

(1.9)*(10²⁷)÷(5.97)*(10²⁴)

which gives 0.31825 x 10⁵¹, which after adjusting the decimal point is the number it gave.

 
Siri treated multiplication and division equally, on the same level. It doesn't understand scientific notation. I really didn't expect that. But maybe I should have.

Nor does it understand a number in the form "one point nine e twenty-seven". She doesn't understand the "e".

It also gives the wrong answer, albeit a different answer, if you rotate the iPhone to the screen with the advanced functions and speak to it. 

For some reason it now took "e 27" to be 10^{20/7}, but got "e 24" correct as 10²⁴.

Now I know. But I hope someone on a project team, when rushing during a dire crisis, doesn't use Siri to calculate a rocket trajectory or whatnot.  

Good Bones

By Maggie Smith 

"Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful."

Via the Poetry Foundation

Warning About Blogging

Blogger was abandoned by Google a few years ago, and lately it's been getting worse and worse. A lot of problems. It's becoming so bad it may have to be abandoned soon. Just much more trouble than solution.

I'm not going to try to port all this to, I guess, Wordpress. Too much hassle, if it worked even a bit.

I don't have the enthusiasm anymore anyhow.

Bradbury Quote

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Ray Bradbury

I don't think he wrote this in his book Fahrenheit 451. I guess perhaps in an interview about it.

I just read 451°F two years ago. Never read it when I was younger, or was made to. Should have been much earlier. A good book that ended in a way I hadn't anticipated.

Did you know he wrote this book in 9 days? On a typewriter he rented by the hour at a local university?

Where US Coastal Land is Sinking

-4 to -6 mm/yr in a few places. Some less all across the Gulf Coast, and in many places along the Atlantic coast.

      

Source: 

CNN, 06 March 2024. 

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/06/climate/sinking-cities-us-sea-level-rise-climate/index.html