Waymo Comes to Austin

 

In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas.  Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project.  It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.  Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure.  Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.

 

Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown.  Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street:  four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic. 

 

We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other.  There were no passengers and of course, no driver.  They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat.  A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is.  The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system.  Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each.  So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens. 

 

I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade.  But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them. 

 

The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it.  This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here.  Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was.  It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me.  I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas.  But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.

 

Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing.  Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle.  You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.

 

On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known.  Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles.  I have blogged about them probably dozens of times.  But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance. 

 

Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos.  I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger. 

 

Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines.  Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far.  According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash.  Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.

 

Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it.  The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month. 

 

There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis.  For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides. 

 

Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away.  The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been. 

 

Waymo isn't going to do that.  All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation.  At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5.  I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/. 

The Dire Wolf Dilemma

 

Many readers will have learned by now that a company called Colossal Bioscience has bio-engineered a creature that resembles the extinct dire wolf.  The last true dire wolf died more than 10,000 years ago.  Fossils recovered from Los Angeles's La Brea tar pits show that they had a more powerful bite than modern wolves, and they probably subsisted on wild horses and other large quadrupeds of their time. 

 

Exactly how much the cute white-haired puppies in Colossal Bioscience's publicity photos resemble the extinct species is a matter of some controversy.  The more technical statements from Colossal Bioscience admit that the creatures' DNA is closer to being inspired by ancient samples of DNA of true dire wolves obtained from museums around the world, than it is a direct copy.  That is rather like a movie that is "inspired by" true events—you can trust that the idea wasn't original, but don't look for exact correspondence in every detail either. 

 

If this was just an expensive exercise in dog-breeding, why bother?  That and many other questions are investigated in an article by D. T. Max in a recent issue of The New Yorker.  Max interviewed the company's founder, a Dallas billionaire named Ben Lamm; George Church, a professor of genetics whose dream of resurrecting extinct species caught Lamm's fancy; and Beth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA who was hired away from her U. C. Santa Cruz lab to become Colossal Bioscience's chief science officer. 

 

The 1990 Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park and the movie franchise that followed imagined what would happen if we were able to recreate million-year-old dinosaurs.  Shapiro admits that is impossible, because DNA deteriorates with time and we're lucky even to have enough DNA from dire wolves to make an educated guess at the complete genome of a species that went extinct less than 100,000 years ago.  The firm's most publicized goal is to re-engineer (probably the best term) the woolly mammoth.  One reason for that is that its DNA is abundant, as entire frozen carcasses have been discovered in Siberia and North America.  But even a billionaire's resources are limited, so why has Lamm spent a large fraction of his fortune so far on efforts that have gained him nothing more than publicity?

 

Among the reasons Lamm gives are altruistic motives, such as the restoration of ecologies that would be improved by the return of woolly mammoths.  It seems that they suppressed the proliferation of small shrubs, which would be stamped into oblivion by herds of mammoths.  It may be too late for the extinct dodo bird, but there are also species of endangered birds that could be assisted by genetic technology that Colossal develops. 

 

But bird species can't pay for such services, so is this nothing more than a rich man's hobby?  After all, the puppies receiving Kardashian-level publicity have DNA that started out from a living species, the gray wolf, and was modified with CRISPR technology to have traits that resemble what the scientists think the dire wolf had:  fluffy white hair, for instance.  And some genes from ancient dire-wolf DNA were inserted.  But no one has claimed that their DNA is identical to that of the dire wolf, because it isn't.

 

Even the piece's author Max can't come up with answers to questions such as whether these stunts will definitely lead to any sustained ecological changes.  There are no plans to breed the imitation dire-wolf puppies, for instance, and the longer-term goal of "resurrecting" the woolly mammoth is still in the future by a good bit.  The word "resurrect" appears in Colossal's PR material, but isn't used much by Shapiro, who is still trying to act like a scientist, although her company forbids her from publicizing intellectual property which in an open university lab would be the subject of many scientific publications.

 

And that may really be the main issue ethically with what Colossal Bioscience is doing.  Ever since the era of big-science projects began after World War II, and especially after biological science turned out to be massively profitable for drug companies, much research in the area has taken place under proprietary conditions.  This means that discoveries potentially beneficial to humanity are controlled by private organizations, and general knowledge of them is either delayed (in the case of trade secrets) or available only under license (in the case of patents).

 

Making money from a thing is a good way for the thing to become generally available, so this situation is not necessarily unethical.  It looks like Lamm is counting on his hundred or more scientists to develop methods and techniques that will turn out to be profitable, and that probably means human medical applications.  Letting one's imagination go leads to the so-far-forbidden area of human cloning, or the cloning of deceased individuals, which has rightly been banned outright in many countries, and highly regulated in others. 

 

But cloning is only part of what Colossal is doing—the ancient-DNA techniques they are developing are irrelevant to cloning recently deceased individuals. Perhaps Lamm really means what he says, and he simply wants to bring back extinct species as a way of atoning for the massive species destruction that humanity has been visiting on the rest of the biosphere since we developed minds that could plan attacks on other creatures, or simply plan new suburbs that wipe out whole ecologies.

 

The efforts to re-create extinct species are still in their early stages, and we will just have to wait to see what Lamm and his stable of scientists come up with next.  Maybe they will be able to take intact DNA samples from mammoths and do total-DNA cloning as they originally hoped.  But if Lamm is expecting to recoup his investments by selling live woolly mammoths to zoos, he's got another think coming.  Sometimes a hobby is just a hobby, even if it benefits the ecosphere as a byproduct. 

 

Sources:  The article "Life After Death" by D. T. Max appeared in the Apr. 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker on pp. 30-41.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on human cloning, the dire wolf, and the woolly mammoth. 

The JetSet Roof Collapse: Causes Yet Unknown

 

Many prominent people were in the exclusive but crowded venue of the JetSet nightclub on Avenue Independencia in the Dominican Republic's capital city of Santo Domingo late Monday night, April 7.  These included a provincial governor named Nelsy Cruz, ex-Major-League baseball players Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco, and famed merengue musician Rubby Pérez, whose singing was the main attraction.  An estimated five hundred people were jammed into the building, which occupied a corner block behind some trees and a canopied entryway.

 

Around a quarter to one A. M., someone pointed to the ceiling, saying that they had seen something fall.  Seconds later, a video showed Pérez himself on the stage as he glanced at the ceiling.  Thirty seconds after the first warning sign, the roof over the entire main room of the club collapsed, crushing people under the weight of concrete slabs. 

 

By Friday, the death toll stood at 225, with almost as many injuries.  Pérez, Dotel, Cruz, and Blanco were killed, along with 17 U. S. citizens and numerous residents of other countries.

 

Any time a crowded building collapses with loss of life, especially in the absence of natural causes such as hurricanes or tornadoes, questions are sure to arise about the cause.  While evidence to support a conclusion in which we can put confidence is lacking at this time, the little we know about the circumstances so far can guide cautious speculation.

 

According to news reports, the building was erected in the mid-1970s as a movie theater.  Theaters, coliseums, and other locations for public performances require long unobstructed sight lines, which means that the roof has to be supported only at the edges, with trusses spanning the distance from wall to wall.  Firefighters saw large blocks of concrete among the fallen rubble, and at least one remarked that he saw no "rebar" (reinforcing steel bars) in them. 

 

In the U. S., most spaces at least fifty feet (15 meters) wide or more will have primarily steel trusses supporting the roof, which may have a thin layer of concrete above them for waterproofing.  But the main supporting strength is in the steel trusses. 

 

It's possible to span such distances with a roof made primarily of concrete, but there has to be reinforcing means such as rebar or pre-tensioning cables and thicker concrete beams to support the rest of the roof.  The state of the construction industry in the Dominican Republic in 1975 is unknown to me, but it's possible that the builders of the original structure made the roof just strong enough to support itself.

 

If, as the fireman who saw the concrete slabs speculated, extra weight was added to the roof over the years, such as air-conditioning units or even solar panels, the weight might exceed the carrying capacity of the roof. 

 

Concrete is not like steel, which is homogeneous enough to fail almost as soon as it's overloaded.  Depending on how the concrete was mixed, a piece of concrete that is fundamentally overstressed may hang together for a relatively long time as cracks slowly propagate and stresses reorder themselves to go through the remaining connected pieces of the mix.  Concrete is more likely to fail with a crumble than a bang, although when the most stressed part fails, it usually takes the rest with it pretty fast.

 

This catastrophe recalls the collapse of the Surfside Condominium in a Miami suburb in June of 2021.  Repeated inspections of that structure pointed out serious deterioration in some supporting columns, exacerbated by recent building modifications.  Renovations had been scheduled before the collapse, but the building fell down, taking 98 people to their deaths with it, before they could be done.

 

It is not known at this point (at least by me) whether Santo Domingo required regular building inspections of places where people gather in large crowds.  Even if such inspections were required, it is not easy to inspect a concrete slab underneath layers of roofing material, although there are ways of doing so.  And even if inspections were required, they might not have been done on schedule.  And if they had been done, adverse findings might have been ignored.  The owners of the nightclub are reportedly one of the wealthiest families in the Dominican Republic, so they presumably could have afforded repairs if they were needed.  Now they're going to find out if they can afford the legal nightmares of liability for the two-hundred-plus deaths the collapse of the building caused.

 

If anything good can come out of this tragedy, it may take the form of improvements in building codes and inspections.  Every industrialized nation has followed a long road from basically free-for-all construction methods to increasingly strict regulation of building codes, materials used in construction, design methods, and inspections before, during, and after a building is erected.  While there is an argument to be made that we have now passed the point of diminishing returns in parts of the U. S. and building codes now serve to restrict the housing market more than improve safety, there is a lot more room on the other end of the road where inadequate codes and inspections allow conditions to happen such as the circumstances that led to the JetSet tragedy last week. 

 

Perhaps this horrible accident will stimulate a conversation in the Dominican Republic about building codes, inspections, and where on the tradeoff curves the country wants to reside.  There is always the possibility that some extremely rare and unlikely cause will be found—sabotage, perhaps, or a freakish set of circumstances that can't be predicted.  But currently, the little we know indicates that carelessness and perhaps incremental loading of the roof without an engineer's inspection and approval may be the cause.  If that's the case, then there is something the citizens of the Dominican Republic can do about it:  demand safer buildings, and whatever regulation and enforcement is required to get them.

 

Sources:  I referred to a CNN article at https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/10/americas/what-happened-dominican-republic-collapse-latam-intl/index.html and the Wikipedia article "JetSet nightclub roof collapse." 

 

P. S.  A month or so ago, editor Michael Cook of the website mercatornet.com notified me that his website would soon cease operations.  For over a dozen years, Michael did me the compliment of reprinting many of my blogs, always with my permission, and often with the result that they reached a much wider readership than they otherwise would have.  Originally one of the few conservative family-values-oriented news outlets in Australia, Michael's site recently experienced increased pressure from competition from similar sites and a lack of readership numbers that finally made it uneconomical to continue.  I wish Michael the best in his future endeavors and remind him that all the good things his website did have still been done, and will have unimaginable effects in the future—mostly good ones, I expect.---KDS

Ten Pounds of Plutonium

Plutonium was a major ingredient in the first nuclear bomb to be detonated successfully, the Trinity test on July 16, 1945 near Socorro, New Mexico.  The bomb contained thirteen pounds (5.9 kg) of plutonium, but subsequent measurements of the blast showed that only about three pounds (1.4 kg) of plutonium was consumed by the chain reaction.  This means that the remaining ten pounds (4.5 kg) spread from the blast site over the New Mexico counties of Guadalupe, Lincoln, San Miguel, Socorro, and Torrance, as well as other counties and states to the east.  As plutonium-239, the isotope used in the bomb, has a half-life of 24,000 years, virtually all that plutonium is still out there somewhere, with large amounts scattered among the ranches and villages of southeastern New Mexico.  However, later investigations showed that some plutonium from the bomb reached 46 of the 48 continental United States as well as Canada and Mexico. 

 

When breathed or ingested, the high-energy alpha particles (helium nuclei) that plutonium emits cause havoc in any living system they enter.  In a documentary I saw last week entitled "First We Bombed New Mexico," a woman recalled the summer day in 1945 during her childhood when white particles looking something like snow began to fall.  She and her brothers tried to form it into snowballs, but it wouldn't stick together.  It turned out to be fallout from the Trinity test.

 

Far from being an uninhabited area, the part of New Mexico selected for the world's first nuclear explosion harbored ranchers, cowboys, and others trying to extract a hardscrabble existence from the dry soil.  Most of them were poor, most of them were Hispanic, and virtually none of them knew anything about fallout, nuclear explosions, or radiation.  But as rates of cancer, thyroid disease, and infant mortality began to rise in 1945 and 1946, people started to wonder what was going on. 

 

It is impossible to "prove" that a particular case of cancer in one person was caused by radiation from the Trinity test.  But statistics cited in the movie persuaded me that a great injustice has been wrought on the residents of the region heavily contaminated by fallout, an injustice that continues to this day as  plutonium gets concentrated by rainfall in streambeds and aquifers in ways that no one has had the resources to quantify, except in rare cases.

 

Residents of Nevada near the subsequent thermonuclear-bomb test sites used in the 1950s, some residents of Utah, and some uranium miners were in principle compensated for their losses by the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), which was proposed in 1979 but not signed into Federal law until 1990.  Ironically, it excluded the first victims of nuclear fallout:  the New Mexico residents who were the nation's first guinea pigs in the uncontrolled experiment of seeing what ten pounds of plutonium spread over the landscape would do.

 

An activist (and cancer survivor) named Tina Cordova has devoted most of her adult life to getting New Mexico included in an extension of RECA, which was set to expire in 2022 but was extended to 2024 by President Biden's administration.  Cordova co-founded the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, a group of cancer survivors, uranium miners, and relatives of deceased victims of cancer who are trying to extend the reach of RECA to cover their region as well. 

 

As I watched the film, I found myself imagining what would have happened if the Trinity test had been performed outside, say, Albany, New York instead of Socorro, New Mexico.  Southeasterly winds would have carried the fallout over Springfield and Boston in Massachusetts and Hartford in Connecticut.  If anything close to the level of radiation after Trinity was found in that part of the country, it's likely a bill would have been passed to dig up every square inch of soil in New England to a depth of six inches and get rid of it somewhere—maybe New Mexico?  They need topsoil there, don't they?

 

There was very little in the way of technical information in the film.  Most of the time, the director, Lois Lipman, followed Tina Cordova around as she spoke at rallies, visited community events, and participated in memorial ceremonies in which paper bags with candles in them, one for each cancer survivor, were blown out one by one. 

 

The Catholic faith is a constant undercurrent in the region of New Mexico contaminated by plutonium, and many victims and relatives gave God credit for getting them through the tribulations of cancer treatments, the sadness of watching one relative after another die of cancer at an early age, and the frustration of seeing the RECA bill amendments turned down year after year.  At this moment, the U. S. Senate has passed a version of the bill, but Speaker Mike Johnson is preventing it from coming to a vote in the House.  God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but I'm sure He is interested in the outcome of this particular political tussle.

 

The nation was at war in 1945, and at least in the early stages of the nuclear bomb's development, we did not know how far Nazi Germany was in developing something similar.  This situation initially justified a habit of secrecy which continued well after the end of the war, when the USSR became the chief nuclear threat instead.  This air of secrecy perhaps explains, but does not justify, why virtually nobody in the path of the fallout was evacuated or even warned of the danger after the July 1945 test. 

 

But now that we know and have records of the injuries and premature cancer deaths that ten pounds of plutonium have wrought upon thousands of mainly poor people in New Mexico, it is a simple matter of justice to compensate them in some way roughly equivalent to what the other people covered by the RECA law have received.  That is the message of "First We Bombed New Mexico," and that is the message I hope our elected representatives get when Tina Cordova and others plead once again for its amendment and renewal.

 

Sources:  The award-winning film "First We Bombed New Mexico" was shown at a community center in San Marcos and accompanied by the director, Lois Lipman.  It is not generally available, but Lipman is trying to get it aired publicly in time for the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, which is coming up in July of 2025.  I also referred to a news article on Tina Cordova at https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2024/03/05/activist-who-has-fought-for-reca-expansion-chosen-as-lujans-guest-for-the-state-of-the-union-address/ and the Wikipedia articles on plutonium and the Trinity test. I also included some information provided to me by Lois Lipman concerning the extent of the fallout.