Fitness Watches: Too Much (Health) Information?

Recently a friend of mine replaced his recalled Fitbit watch with a more expensive, but more versatile, Apple watch.  (The recall was caused by multiple reports of Fitbits that were overheating and injuring users, but the irony of a health-related consumer product causing burns is a subject for another day.)  A biomedical engineer by profession, he showed me how the Apple watch can even display his electrocardiogram (EKG) in real time.  You press a button on the side of the watch, thereby completing a circuit that includes your arms and heart, and right there on the watch's screen is the same kind of wave that we're used to seeing in hospital bedside monitors costing many thousands of dollars.

 

While I was glad for him that he no longer has to worry about sustaining wrist burns from his watch, it turns out that any fitness or health-tracking device that provides instant health information has the potential to cause harm in the form of the nocebo effect.  Strangely enough, finding out too much about the immediate state of your health can make you feel less healthy.

 

Tim Culpan, writing in Bloomberg News, points out that "nocebo" (Latin for "I shall harm") means the opposite of "placebo" ("I shall please").  A placebo is a medication or treatment that has no objective scientific basis, but is perceived by the patient as being helpful.  For unclear reasons that have to do with the mind-body interface, placebos often lead to objectively measurable improvements in health.

 

Culpan cites studies in which researchers reminded concussion victims of their history of head injury, and that reminder by itself made them perform worse on cognitive tests.  Another example he quotes is the online comment of a fitness guru, who complained about his sleep-tracking watch app.  He'll wake up after what he feels was a good night's sleep.  Then he looks at his watch, and it tells him that actually, he was X percent lower in REM sleep than he should have been, or whatever.  And suddenly he doesn't feel as rested as he did before he looked at his watch.

 

The nocebo effect is a lot more widespread than we think.  How many drug ads are aimed not at making you feel better, but at lowering some number that diabetics or hypertensives are told is the key to their health and well-being?  The A1c average-glucose-level test for diabetics and the blood-pressure test for high blood pressure are both things that consumers can now do in the comfort of their own homes—or discomfort, if the numbers aren't what we want.

 

Economics is at work as well.  What begins as a means to an end—measuring blood sugar or blood pressure to avoid the serious negative consequences of diabetes or hypertension—subtly and gradually becomes an end in itself, as patients begin to obsess over the numbers and small shifts up or down that probably have no statistical significance.  But they demand lower numbers from their doctors at any cost, which the pharmaceutical companies are glad to assist with.

 

As with so many other areas of life, one can have too much of a good thing, even if the good thing is personal medical data.  Because the problem originates in one's mind, that is where we need to deal with it, and the best advice I have come across to deal with the nocebo effect comes from an unlikely source:  G. K. Chesterton.

 

Chesterton is nobody's idea of a poster boy for good health habits.  He drank (in moderation), he was fond of cigars and mildly baffled by anyone who questioned the propriety of his smoking habit, and in later life he weighed upwards of 300 pounds before dying of congestive heart failure at the age of 62 in 1936.

 

But while he lived, he lived with a gusto and joie de vivre that made him a model for how to enjoy life, and health while it lasted.  Health as such was not an obsession with Chesterton, but in his voluminous writings he made a few remarks that can guide our health-data-obsessed age toward more helpful attitudes.

 

In his book Heretics, while countering the eugenicist tendencies of H. G. Wells, he remarked, "The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care.  What has health to do with care?  Health has to do with carelessness."  By "carelessness" Chesterton did not mean negligence, exactly, but something close to it.  Being healthy enables one to do all the things that one wants to do in one's station in life, and that is the real purpose of good health.  Just sitting around concentrating on being healthy for health's sake is not only silly, but dangerous to your health.

 

In Orthodoxy, he has this to say along similar lines:  "The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy.  Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped."  He points out a profound truth that applies to obsessions with health as well as with any other created thing:  if enjoyment turns to worship, freedom has turned into slavery.  We can make ourselves unhappy by pursuing the happiness of good health to the exclusion of the rest of what life has to offer.

 

My friend with the new Apple watch is a pretty well-balanced individual, and I think he's not going to let himself be waylaid into checking his EKG compulsively and noting tiny changes in the waveform, as his training would allow him to do.  (If it was me, I'd just be happy to see any wiggles at all.)  But the nocebo effect is a reminder that our health accessories and toys can lead us down a road to unhealthy concern with information that in most cases can be safely ignored.

Sources:  I thank my wife for pointing out to me the article "Beware That Nocebo Strapped To Your Wrist" at https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-12-15/wrist-size-fitness-gadgets-make-for-great-gifts-but-beware-of-the-nocebo-effect.  The Chesterton quotes were from https://historyengineers.com/2017/07/05/our-health-obsession-a-few-thoughts-from-a-mormon-and-g-k-chesterton/ (Heretics) and https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7177711-the-mere-pursuit-of-health-always-leads-to-something-unhealthy (Orthodoxy).

 

Electrifying New York — Again

 

Thomas Edison famously electrified New York City in 1882 when the first commercial central power plant in the world went online at 255-257 Pearl Street.  It took most of the next three decades to spread the blessings of electric power through the rest of the city, but it got done without much help from any government.  Electric lights were cheaper, safer, and just better than gaslight or kerosene lamps, and little government intervention was required to persuade millions of New Yorkers that going electric was the thing to do.

 

New York City now faces a new kind of electrification:  the electric car.  As an article in the New York Times recently described, the futuristic vision of having only all-electric vehicles inside the confines of the five boroughs that make up New York is being realized slowly, if at all. 

 

One significant drawback is the lack of public charging stations.  Even after setting a modest goal of installing 120 new charging stations, the city ended up as #93 in a recent survey that rated 100 cities in terms of how electric-car-friendly they were.

 

New York City's commissioner of transportation Hank Gutman is determined to change the situation.  His commission issued a report calling for 1,000 curbside chargers by 2025 and 10,000 by 2030.  Every municipal parking lot will have one-fifth of its slots equipped with chargers, if the plans in the report are carried out.

 

One might ask if those slots will be reserved for electric cars only, of which there are presently only 20,000 registered in all of New York City.  If only electric cars can park in those slots, all this means for the old-fashioned gas-guzzler driver is that the municipal parking lots will effectively shrink by 20%.

 

The electric car is perhaps one of the few major mass-market items whose main selling point is ideological.  From a purely pragmatic individual point of view—whether you are looking at personal safety, saving money, or convenience—there is really nothing an all-electric car can offer that a gasoline model can't also offer.

 

The ideological reason to buy an all-electric car is that it is one small step for a car buyer, but multiply that by a billion or so and it will be a giant leap toward a fossil-fuel-less future in which global warming is defeated.  And this reason cannot be discounted, because I think it is one of the main reasons people currently buy electric vehicles.

 

Whether it makes sense for someone to spend an extra ten to thirty thousand dollars on a car that requires careful logistical planning to make it between charging stations and may not in fact reduce carbon emissions at all if the local electric utility burns coal, is a decision that individuals are free to make.  But so far, despite the growing sales figures of upstarts such as Tesla, the prospect of gasoline vehicles going the way of kerosene lamps by 1910 actually looks pretty reasonable, if you give it another three or four decades.

 

In 1910, there were still lots of people who used kerosene lamps, and it would be another twenty or thirty years before such things were found only in extremely rural areas.  And it would take government intervention, in the form of the Rural Electrification Administration, to bring electricity to the remaining rural areas without electric power.  Still, nobody was forced to put away their kerosene lamps and get connected.  People in rural areas had to wait longer because it cost more to install the lines than in urban areas, but they still wanted electricity as much as their city cousins did.

 

Until all-electric vehicles are cheaper and easier to buy and operate than gasoline-powered ones, it will be like pushing on a string to get most people to buy one.  Some of the string moves when you push on it, but most of it doesn't.  There are those who feel that the chronic global-warming emergency is so urgent that fossil fuels should be effectively banned—taxed out of existence or otherwise made inaccessible to the average person.  This would represent a draconian market intervention by governments in an area where government has not exactly covered itself with glory, judging by similar historical interventions such as the price controls during the gasoline crisis of the 1970s.

 

The technological optimists among us (and on some days I count myself in that number) look to a day when some new and currently unthought-of technology improves battery storage capacity by another factor of 10 and lowers the price by the same factor.  If that happened, electric cars would simply out-perform and undercut the price of gasoline vehicles, which hold the record as being the most complicated mass-produced human-sized object in history. 

 

By contrast, the entire drive train of an electric car is a battery, some electronics, and electric motors hooked to the wheels.  The rest is software, and we all know how cheap software is.  I don't think we'll get to the point that companies will give away electric cars for free as long as you put up with the ads, but it might come close.

 

At that point, we won't need government subsidies or carbon taxes or prohibitions to make the transition from gas to electric vehicles.  People will want to do it of their own free will, and the market will be more than happy to oblige.  But it might not happen for a while yet.

 

One of the most scarce commodities these days is patience.  Even with the vastly superior performance of electric lighting, which was not cheaper than gas to begin with, it took the better part of four decades before most people were able to make the transition.  Heavy-breathing global-warming alarmists may say, "We don't have four decades! We've got to do something now!!"  We are just emerging from the results of two years of governments "doing something now" to fight COVID-19, and offhand I can think of only one of those things that had an unequivocally positive effect on the outcome:  the rapid development of vaccines.  Most other actions arguably did more harm than good, or at least mixed in a lot of harm with the good. 

 

Let's not make that mistake again.

 

Sources:  Ginia Bellafante's article "New York's Electric Car Future Faces Several Challenges" appeared in the Mar. 13, 2022 edition of the New York Times.

If We Could Stop ICBMs, Would We Want To?

 

Along with invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has put his country's nuclear arsenal on high alert.  He hopes by this measure to prevent the U. S. or its allies from interfering militarily with his exploits, but by doing so he has provided an unpleasant reminder that Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world.   

 

According to Wikipedia, the Russians, with about 5900 nuclear warheads, have a slight edge over the U. S. with about 5400.  But considering that just one nuclear weapon can spoil your whole day, this is a distinction without a difference.

 

What if we could erect something like Israel's Iron Dome system used against Palestinian rockets, a system that shoots down the vast majority, or even all, of a rival state's intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)?  Besides being able to cross that off our worry list, we could then unilaterally disarm ourselves from nuclear weapons, at least in principle. 

 

There are several problems with that idea.  One of the biggest, according to a recent article at Salon.com, is that we've tried building an ICBM defense system, and it probably doesn't work.

 

I say "probably" because, thank God, it's never been subjected to a real-life test.  Termed the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system (GMD), it was designed primarily to guard against potential nuclear launches from North Korea.  GMD consists of some 44 interceptor rockets stationed in Alaska and California.  It's been tested with dummy targets dozens of times since it was first deployed around 1999, and while its record would look pretty good as a baseball batting average, even one strike with a nuclear missile is too many. 

 

Scientists consulted by Salon say there is no fundamental theoretical barrier that prevents us from developing a 100% effective anti-ICBM defense.  But it's a very hard technical problem.

 

An ICBM undergoes powered flight (the "booster phase") for only its first three or four minutes.  After that it goes ballistic, literally—meaning that it's moving like a thrown rock in space, subject only to Newton's laws and without any steering.  This is the phase in which it is easiest to get a radar handle on where it is and where it's going, and steer any prospective anti-missile weapons toward it.  Once it gets close to its target and slows down in the atmosphere, it's too late to do much about it, because blowing it up a few thousand feet above a populated area and scattering the radioactive residue all over would not be much better than just letting it do its job.

 

Also, modern ICBMs launch multiple warheads at the same time, some of which are decoys.  This makes hitting all the real ones much harder, especially considering that each one is only about a meter long, according to one source.  Against a single ICBM consisting of a single nuclear warhead, our GMD stands a good chance of whacking it out of the air.  But a massive full-scale ICBM attack such as Russia would be able to do is far beyond GMD's capabilities, and probably beyond the capability of any conceivable system we could put in place at a reasonable cost.

 

Suppose, however, the political will was there to mount an Apollo-space-program-style effort to design the ultimate ICBM-deflector, a U. S. version of Israel's Iron Dome that would really make us free from any concern about nuclear attacks by ICBMs.  Would we want to deploy it? 

 

For those of us with long enough memories, this was the ultimate goal of Ronald Reagan's so-called Star Wars program, which never got very far.  But if scaring the old USSR to pieces was the goal, Star Wars achieved its aims without even being built.  Historians will argue till doomsday about the true causes of the USSR's collapse, but Star Wars was certainly a factor.

 

The political prospects of the present U. S. administration announcing something like Star Wars for the twenty-first century are about the same as the prospects of a snowball in a volcano.  But if we built such a thing, would it be wise to scrap our nuclear arsenal and say that now we don't have to worry about nuclear attack, we don't need to threaten anyone else with it either? 

 

That would certainly be an option, and if we did so it would be a sign that we really trusted our ICBM defenses.  But I note that even with the Iron Dome, Israel has not divested itself of conventional rockets, and they hammer back at their enemies who throw rockets at them whether or not they land on Israeli territory.

 

Realistically, there are always going to be some regimes that won't feel safe until they have nuclear weapons.  North Korea is one such place, and currently Russia is another one.  A major nuclear war anywhere in the world would probably be a global disaster, with dangerous levels of radiation rising into the stratosphere and coming down gradually everywhere. 

 

While it would be nice to think that the world would follow our example and get rid of its nuclear weapons after the U. S. did, all it would take is one holdout to spoil the game.  And so it looks like the path to nuclear disarmament doesn't lie along the lines of developing a really good ICBM defense system first and then getting rid of our own nuclear weapons.

 

As in other aspects of war, you never know for sure whether you've prepared adequately for the next war until you lose it.  If you win, you might have gotten by with considerably less preparation than you did.  So war is always a wasteful proposition, among its many other disadvantages.

 

The current war in Ukraine is tragic enough without pulling us closer to the brink of what has become for many the secular Armageddon, the nuclear end of the world.  Let's hope that the prospect of mutually assured destruction, which has kept us free from nuclear war for seven decades or so, will continue to convince Putin and others that the nuclear option is really no option at all.

 

Sources:  The Salon article " Why scientists still can't figure out how to intercept nuclear missiles" by Nicole Karlis appeared on Mar. 3 at https://www.salon.com/2022/03/03/why-scientists-still-cant-figure-out-how-to-intercept-icbms/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Ground-based Midcourse Defense and obtained the statistics on nuclear weapons from the Wikipedia article "Russia and weapons of mass destruction."

Preparing for the Chipocalypse

 

A friend of mine who used to work in the aerospace industry is fond of referring to "single-point failures."  If a rocket relies on any single component that has no backup to take over in case that component fails, you are liable to have a single-point failure that destroys the rocket.  The Chipocalypse of the title refers, not to the actions of a character in a new Disney animated series called "Big City Greens," but to what might happen if the world's supply of critically important integrated circuits (ICs) was disrupted in a major way.  And the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) is the most obvious single-point failure in the global semiconductor supply chain.

 

Last week's invasion of Ukraine by Russia draws attention to the way war can interrupt the peaceful international exchange of goods and services which is the realization of economist Adam Smith's "invisible hand."  We have already seen the price of gasoline leap upward in response, and further disruptions may come in other markets.  But that is chump change compared to the costs consumers in the U. S. and Europe would pay if Asian IC suppliers quit making chips.

 

An article published over a year ago in Bloomberg News points out that the great majority of the world's semiconductor "foundries" (factories that produce chips designed by outside customers, not by their own engineers) are in either China, South Korea, or Taiwan, with TSMC running the largest single foundry in the world. 

 

Taiwan is not the first place you would choose to site such an important facility.  For one thing, it's prone to earthquakes.  As recently as 1999, a 7.6-magnitude quake hit Taiwan and killed thousands of people, leaving about 100,000 homeless.  Given the atomic-scale precision that is required for successful IC manufacturing, a major earthquake that caused significant damage to TSMC's facilities could knock it out for up to a year or more.

 

But besides Mother Nature, Taiwan has been in the military sights of the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC) ever since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist followers evacuated to Taiwan and established their government there.  The PRC has claimed ever since that Taiwan is rightfully theirs, and would like to find an excuse to invade and take over what has since become a manufacturing giant that overshadows the PRC's IC production capability. 

 

But as we will no doubt rediscover in the next few days and weeks with regard to Ukraine, wars never go quite like they are planned.  And an armed conflict in the Far East could easily cut off supplies of ICs to the rest of the world for months or even years.  Hence the Chipocalypse.

 

Now that we've embarked on this dismal speculation, what would it be like?  Chips aren't the only thing made in Asia, but they are at the heart of many of the most highly-capitalized modern industries.  Apple, for example, derives much of their profit from hardware rather than software, although this has been changing in recent years.  And as I discovered recently, a lot of hardware sales are driven by changes in systems and software.  The recent upgrade to 5G by T-Mobile and other telecomm firms in the U. S. has obsoleted millions of devices that otherwise work fine, including yours truly's third flip phone in almost as many years. 

 

Left to my own devices, I would still be using my Motorola mini-brick with the pull-out antenna that was my first mobile phone.  But the telecomms are not about to let that happen, and so as a chronic late adopter, I have been dragged kicking and grumbling through the various G's, always one of the last trailing points on the bell curve, until now I am the reluctant possessor of a flip phone with a touchscreen. 

 

Multiply this experience by the millions, or even billions worldwide, as more enthusiastic early adopters drop their phones for the latest model, and you get the synergistic process of innovation in both software and hardware which is our age's best answer to the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, but not nearly as long lasting, unless you count the piles of dead electronics in landfills.  A chipocalypse would put a serious brake on this process, leading to all sorts of disruptions like the one we saw in the automotive industry last year, when car makers could not get chips to go into their electronified cars, and so they simply shut down whole lines for months.

 

That is bubkis (beans, as the Yiddish speakers used to say) compared to what we would see in a full-scale chipocalypse.  Imagine there's no new mobile phones, server farms, robotic manufacturing systems, Xboxes, or anything electronic with a chip in it, which means basically anything electronic these days.  In principle, software updates would not be affected, although by halting the production of new hardware you would be cutting off one of the two legs of the consumer-electronics giant, the other being software.  Like a one-legged man, it might manage to hobble around, but at a greatly reduced speed.

 

One of the most serious threats posed by a chipocalypse to a nation's integrity would be the consequences to military operations, dependent as they are on electronics for everything from communications to military vehicles.  Military hardware wears out fast, and if the armed forces are constrained to hunt around in used-electronics scrapyards for replacement ICs like the Space Shuttle technicians had to do for the last few years of its existence, that will put a severe cramp in the military's style.

 

But undoubtedly the most severe consequences would be economic.  Although the tech sector (e. g. Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc.) made up only about 10% of the U. S. GDP in the period 2017-2020, it is a highly critical 10%, employing some of the best-paid workers in the country and providing new capital and growth to the fastest-growing locales.  Anything that severely damaged this sector would have ripple effects much larger than the 10% directly affected, ranging from real estate to luxury-goods consumption.

 

All of which makes me wonder whether we are a little too dependent on our shiny new toys.  But that is an argument for another day.

 

Sources:  The Bloomberg report on TSMC's critical role in the global economy is at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-25/the-world-is-dangerously-dependent-on-taiwan-for-semiconductors.  Earthquakes in Taiwan can be read about at https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/earthquake-kills-thousands-in-taiwan, and the statistics on the tech sector are from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1239480/united-states-leading-states-by-tech-contribution-to-gross-product/. 

Are There Batteries In the Grid's Future?

 

Texas has the largest installed capacity of wind generation of any U. S. state as of 2019.  But all those windmills did no good a year ago when historically low temperatures knocked out natural-gas production and generators, leading to the Big Freeze and the deaths of over 200 people.  The reason?  There was almost no wind associated with the cold snap, and no wind means no wind generation. 

 

In the debate about the Texas power grid that followed, some charged that our increasing reliance on wind power (and to a lesser extent, solar power) was destabilizing the grid.  Up to now, at least, power has to be generated on demand, so electric-utility operators have come up with a combination of base-load and peak-load generators to deal with the fluctuations in demand, which can go very low at 2 A. M. on a mild spring day, but soar to many times the minimum on a blazing August afternoon.

 

Base-load generators are most efficient when they run all the time.  Nuclear power is in this category, as are fossil-fuel plants that use steam turbines and large boilers fired by natural gas (or, decreasingly, coal).  These types of plants are used for base loads because starting and stopping them is a big deal and can take hours or even days. 

 

Peak-load plants, on the other hand, are designed to come on line in just minutes.  One example is the gas-turbine plant, basically a bunch of jet engines hooked to generators.  Peak-load plants are typically less efficient than base-load plants, but they can be started up quickly to meet soaring demand in emergencies. 

 

Solar and wind don't fit either of these categories, as they depend on whether the sun's out or the wind's blowing, respectively.  Fitting the fairly unpredictable output of these renewable types of energy into an existing grid can be challenging, because it adds fluctuations that weren't there before.  If the wind's blowing hard and Texas is getting up to 10% or more of its total electricity demand met by wind energy, and all of a sudden the wind stops, you have to be ready to jump in with peak-load plants and supply what's missing, and that isn't always easy.  So as more fluctuating renewables are added, the problem of managing the grid to meet fluctuating demand gets even harder.

 

Although experts determined that this issue was not a primary cause of the February 2021 Texas blackout, it's an ongoing concern, and one way of dealing with it is a very old one:  batteries.

 

Using batteries as electric-utility energy storage is not a new idea.  I have a 1910-era book on my shelves that describes how electric-streetcar power plants were supplemented by banks of lead-acid batteries attached across the lines at strategic places along the streetcar routes.  In periods of light demand with low traffic, the batteries were charged by the central power plant.  And during rush hour when there were more trolleys on the line than usual, the batteries would discharge into the overhead wires and supplement the base-load power generated at the central plant.

 

The problem with lead-acid batteries is that it takes a huge number of them to store enough energy to make a difference with a large-scale power grid.  Depending on the technology, a lithium battery of the same volume as a lead-acid battery can store up to ten times the energy, and the weight advantages are even better.  That's why electric cars had to wait until lithium batteries were fairly practical to compete with internal-combustion cars. 

 

In December of 2020, Vistra Energy connected what was then the largest battery-storage energy facility in the world to the California grid at Moss Landing in Monterey County.  The system can provide up to 300 MW of power and can store 1.2 gigawatt-hours, implying that it could provide its peak energy output for three or four hours before pooping out.  But that is plenty of time to tide a grid over an emergency until other more conventional sources can be put online.

 

Actually, because batteries can start supplying massive amounts of power in less than one cycle of the 60-Hz power frequency, they are very useful for damping out short-term instabilities in power grids that can otherwise trip relays and cause blackouts.  This type of operation can't be done with mechanical generation systems.  So a battery storage facility like this is one more tool in the power-dispatcher's toolbox to use in meeting fluctuating demand.

 

The Moss Landing facility was in the news recently because of a fire that destroyed ten of the nearly 100,000 battery packs at the facility, the second such fire in five months.  The first fire was caused by leaking water from cooling pipes, and so the second one may be due to similar causes.  The fire was contained and out before the fire department had a chance to do anything. 

 

The nice thing about battery systems is that failures can be isolated fairly easily, as the Moss Landing mishaps show.  Although the plant was shut down during the fire for safety reasons, repairs are fairly straightforward and the system was back online in short order.  This feature of gradual degradation is a big asset in the utility business, where shutdowns can cause big headaches.

 

It remains to be seen how significant a role battery storage will play in the future of the so-called smart grid.  Electric-car makers such as Tesla have dreams of distributed battery storage, in which thousands or millions of electric cars plugged in overnight could serve as a virtual storage facility controlled by the electric utility they're plugged into.  That would require massive changes in both hardware and regulatory structures that I'm not sure we're ready for.  But it's a nice dual-use idea that might evolve into a much more reliable, robust, and efficient grid than the fairly brittle things we have now. 

 

When I worked at an electronics repair shop one summer in college, I'd be amused when a customer would say, "This radio isn't electric, it runs on batteries."  In the future we may all be running on batteries more than we realize, and the grid will be more stable as a result.

 

Sources:  The website www.vice.com carried a story about the Moss Landing fires at https://www.vice.com/en/article/dypw5x/largest-lithium-ion-battery-in-the-world-meltdown-moss-landing.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on "Wind generation in the United States" and "Battery storage power station."

 

SpaceX Versus the Astronomers: Starlink In the Telescope Crosshairs

 

Elon Musk, who no one has accused of being shy and retiring in his corporate ventures, is engaged in deploying what he hopes will be some 40,000 low-earth-orbit satellites to form what he calls a Starlink system to provide internet service to underserved areas of the globe, and also presumably to make money.  So far, several thousand of the mass-produced satellites have been launched in batches of dozens at a time, although a recent geomagnetic storm caused an early demise for some of the newest ones as the resulting denser atmosphere at their orbital heights dragged them to a fiery death.

 

The satellites are comparatively small—about 500 pounds (220 kg) and about the size of a table—and burn up completely when they de-orbit, so we don't have to worry about pieces of them falling on our heads.  But the folks who are worried about the ones staying in orbit are astronomers, who are already seeing little bright Starlink satellite dots streak through their telescope fields of view, especially when they try to observe close to the horizon near dusk or dawn.

 

For some time now, the astronomers have been trying to garner attention for their plight, which only promises to get worse as other commercial space firms compete with SpaceX, Musk's company, to gain low-earth-orbit communications satellite market share.  Last week, the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a sort of United Nations of astronomy, announced the organization of the Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Skies from Satellite Constellation Interference.  For once, the name of the new organization doesn't form a cute acronym, which perhaps bespeaks the seriousness of the endeavor.

 

The reason they call it both dark and quiet is that communications satellites, by nature, emit electromagnetic waves, usually in the microwave radio spectrum.  And although astronomers are provided with protected bits of the electromagnetic spectrum in which no radio emissions are allowed, these tend to be fairly narrow slices surrounded by wide bands where communications-related emissions are permitted.  Radiotelescopes use the most sensitive and delicate radio receivers on the planet, and they are not designed to reject nearby out-of-band interference very well.  If one of the Starlink satellites happens to sweep through the narrow beam of a radiotelescope, the satellite's emissions are likely to mess up the astronomy receiver in an unpredictable way.

 

And of course, visible-light telescopes pick up the Starlink satellites easily, even if the satellites are painted black.  One recent report in The Independent (UK) says that astronomers are seeing their visible-light exposures messed up with Starlink tracks an average of once every ten days.

 

So far, the problem is at a manageable annoyance level.  But multiply it by ten or more, and just the Starlink satellites will interfere seriously with a lot of astronomical projects, including the search for killer meteorites that might bring a premature end, not only to Starlink, but to everybody who could use it as well. 

 

It's an interesting problem in engineering ethics, if you want to view the situation through that lens.  In this corner, you have the public that would presumably like Internet access but lives too remotely for it now, and SpaceX wanting to provide that service with Starlink.  And in that corner, you have the IAU saying that what Starlink and similar firms are doing could raise havoc with a large portion of their activities.  

 

Historically, when you have a conflict between an entire industry and another popular institution such as astronomy, a third party such as government or an international organization has to get involved.  This is the way that radioastronomers obtained their reserved slices of the electromagnetic spectrum, by pleading with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for them and making effective arguments, possibly together with a little political diplomacy. 

 

Now that the commercialization of space has been going on for at least a couple of decades, we are seeing the kinds of conflicts that led to the formation in former years of the ITU for radio.  Although nobody "owns" the low-earth-orbit region of space in an exclusionary sense ("this is my two quadrillion cubic meters and you can't send your satellite into it"), it is clearly a limited resource, just like the electromagnetic spectrum, and we are now seeing an increasing need for some kind of global regulatory body to adjudicate issues such as the one that has arisen between SpaceX and the astronomers, represented by the IAU.

 

Something similar came about when transoceanic flights became routine and different countries had to arrange for protocols of using flight routes and standards for international airports.  The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), whose present embodiment dates back to 1947, arose as a part of the United Nations to perform these duties. 

 

The UN currently has a couple of branches dealing with space: the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs and a registry of objects launched into orbit.  But neither of these outfits appears to have the regulatory clout needed to deal with disputes between a brash private firm bent on networking the Earth with 40,000 satellites, and a bunch of scientists who have little money for lobbying and whose main argument is that if you clutter up our telescopes too much, there's a teeny little chance that we'll miss seeing a meteor that will creep up on us and destroy civilization.

 

So far, the astronomers are just having to deal with the problems that Starlink causes them on a case-by-case basis.  And ultimately, it's quite possible that most cutting-edge observational astronomy will move to outer space anyway, as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope promises to beat anything you can do with earth-based telescopes.  As a global culture, we may find that turning the night skies into shimmering collections of satellites and ruining them for astronomy is a reasonable price to pay for letting the most remote tribe in the world livestream SuperBowl C (100, if you're rusty on your Roman numerals).  But if that happens, I think we will have lost something that will be hard to get back.

 

Sources:  I referred to a report on The Independent's webpage at https://www.independent.co.uk/space/astronomers-elon-musk-satellites-asteroids-b2009163.html, a BBC report at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-60317806 about satellites lost to a geomagnetic storm, and the Wikipedia articles on the ICAO and the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. 

The Surveillance State of the Olympics

 

On this date, Feb. 6 of 1936, the Winter Olympics opened in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria—the last time both the Winter and Summer Olympics were held in the same country in the same year.  The Olympics that year attracted some controversy in the U. S. because of the nature of the German political regime under Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who had by then been in power only three years.  But the argument that sports should be independent of politics won out, and so the U. S. went on to participate in both sets of Olympic games.

 

Last Wednesday, the 2022 Winter Olympics kicked off in the Peoples' Republic of China.  The U. S. is once again participating, although the Biden administration has enforced a diplomatic boycott of the event in protest of  "the PRC’s ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.”  Britain, Australia, and Canada joined the U. S. in the diplomatic boycott, which does not prevent athletes of those countries from participating in the games.  Chinese government representatives fired back that the U. S. was taking actions that “politicize sports, create divisions and provoke confrontation," according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

 

If you are an athlete or anyone else attending the games, the Chinese government is requiring you to download an app to your smartphone called "My 2022," two weeks before your arrival, and make daily reports of the state of your health.  Ostensibly, the app is supposed to help the government achieve a 100% COVID-free event.  But when computer scientists examined the app, they found serious security flaws in it that can allow not only the Beijing government but random hackers to gain entry to your phone.

 

It's no surprise to Chinese citizens that the My 2022 app is full of holes.  The Chinese government explicitly reserves the right to access any information stored on an electronic device.  My 2022 just makes it easier for them to do so.  According to the University of Toronto's cybersecurity group Citizen Lab, the app can transmit confidential information such as passport and travel data with encryption that can be "trivially sidestepped."  So even before leaving the U. S., Olympic athletes and anyone else attending will be subject to the Chinese national security apparatus.

 

Some people may not be bothered by this.  After all, there is some weight to the argument that sporting events shouldn't be politicized.  But it seems to me that the only way to completely divorce politics from sports is to have all competitors hail from the same political entity.  Victor Cha, writing on the Center for Strategic and International Studies website about the U. S. diplomatic boycott, quotes famed anti-totalitarian author George Orwell as saying, "sport is war minus the shooting."  Any time you have competition, you're going to have partisan cheering, even at the most humble level of small-town sporting events like the Ponca City Wildcats playing against the Enid Plainsmen in the wilds of northern Oklahoma. 

 

So at the basic level of identification, all sporting events are politicized.  What Beijing objects to is not mere identification with the participants, however, but any action that singles China out as being a less worthy player on the international political stage. 

 

Are they?  Consider the fact that for the last decade or more, China has been busily constructing a surveillance state that goes beyond the wildest dreams of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  One of the most chilling aspects of that book, which came out in 1949, was the omnipresence of "telescreens" which simultaneously broadcast state propaganda from "Big Brother" and spied on people.  Back then, readers reassured themselves that this was rank science fiction, because no regime could possibly afford to hire half the population to spy on the other half, and so most of the time, nobody was watching on the other end.

 

That was before the Internet and the advent of artificial-intelligence (AI) systems that can recognize faces, voices, and certain words, such as the 2,422 terms in the "illegalwords.txt" file bundled with the My 2022 app.  In it are phrases such as "Tiananmen Riot" and "Dalai Lama." Woe unto anyone who uses those words at the Olympics this winter.

 

China's goal is to use any information it can get to establish social-credit scores that determine the degree of freedom allotted to each citizen.  People who behave well, according to standards set by the government, can travel, hold jobs, visit certain places, and behave almost like free citizens.  Those lacking a high social-credit score find that their privileges are suddenly withdrawn, and may feel some sympathy with the Uighur people of Xinjiang Province, many of whom have disappeared into "reeducation camps" for no other reason than their identity.

 

If anyone happens to download this blog onto their My-2022-equipped phone, I will not be held responsible for the consequences.  But it doesn't matter, because the truth about the Beijing regime isn't affected by what I say about it, or by what anybody else says or doesn't say about it.  The Chinese surveillance state has to be one of the grandest violations of human rights, extended over time and space, that the world has ever seen.  Because it has been put in place gradually and folded into the other routine malfeasances and wrongdoings of the regime, it hasn't attracted that many headlines, and billions of people in China manage to go about their business without being seriously inconvenienced by it.

 

But it's like living in a house with four-foot ceilings.  Nobody would want to live there if the ceilings were dropped all in a day, but if they were moved down three inches a year, you might be able to get used to it.  But it still wouldn't be a good thing.

 

I can't help but wonder what the endgame will be in China.  Germany overreached its hand, and in 1936 the thousand-year reich actually had less than a decade of future left.  China clearly covets world domination, and in some measures it is well on the way to achieving it. 

 

But a world in which true freedom is vanquished by an AI-enhanced surveillance regime and every action is monitored and evaluated, is not a world I would care to live in, given a choice.  So far, we still have a choice.  Let's learn from our experience with things like My 2022 that the choice is worth preserving.  

 

Sources:  I used material from the following websites:  VOA News at https://www.voanews.com/a/required-app-raises-fears-china-will-track-sensitive-data-during-olympics-/6412900.html, Japan Forward at https://japan-forward.com/attending-the-beijing-winter-olympics-use-a-burner-phone/, CSIS at https://www.csis.org/analysis/biden-boycott-2022-beijing-winter-olympics, and the Wikipedia articles on the 1936 Winter and Summer Olympics.