A Musk-Owned Twitter: Threat or Promise?

 

After buying nine percent of outstanding Twitter shares recently, Elon Musk has announced his intention to buy Twitter and take it private.  The financial details are still in flux, but two numbers tell the story:  Musk is the world's richest man (estimated net worth north of $200 billion) and the largest money numbers Wikipedia associates with Twitter (assets and equity) are less than one-tenth of that.  So no matter what the SEC, shareholders, and even Twitter's board says or does, it's very likely that if Musk wants to buy Twitter, he'll be able to do it.

 

Then what?

 

On the face of it, why a serial entrepreneur and latter-day Tom Swift like Musk would want to buy a not-very-profitable social media company is not clear.  On Wikipedia's list of the ten most-followed tweeters (I don't use it myself, so excuse the linguistic infelicities if I don't use quite the right words in discussing Twitter), Musk is No. 8, just ahead of Narendra Modi (India's prime minister) and just behind Lady Gaga.  No. 1 is Barack Obama, who more than two years after stepping down from the presidency still has a twitter-hold on 136 million followers.  No. 2 is Justin Bieber, who Wikipedia dryly lists as "musician."  Musk is the only businessman in the top ten, but he's not just a businessman.  He's also an instinctive showman who has somehow managed to retain a teenage boy's "hold my beer and watch this" attitude while transforming whole industries—aerospace and automobiles, in particular. 

 

It's not in Musk's nature to lay out his plans in any coherent news-release way.  But my sense is that he thinks Twitter does too much censorship and suspension of accounts, and maybe also doesn't exploit their position as the globe's largest short-message service of its kind as effectively as they could.  Surprisingly for a company with over 200 million active users (and many more who receive tweets), they lost money in 2021.  So Musk's interest in the firm may be purely financial, and he may think he can just run it better.  If he buys it, he will have the opportunity to find out.

 

Twitter is a novel phenomenon in the history of communications.  Sociologists, political scientists, and historians are still sorting out its manifold effects on society, and many of the intellectual class worry that Musk's takeover bid will make things worse.  They fear that Musk, who has shown libertarian tendencies in the past, will reduce Twitter's efforts to monitor and control its content, as it famously did when it permanently blocked President Trump on January 8, 2021, thus ending what was perhaps the most-watched Twitter account ever. 

 

What is the worst-case scenario for a Musk takeover of Twitter, at least short of him shutting the whole thing down and dissolving the company (which Twitter has done to smaller rivals in the past)?  The greatest fear seems to be that Twitter will turn into some sort of common-carrier technology that literally anyone can use for anything—pornography, incitement to riot, murder threats, you name it. 

 

Twitter already allows pornographic messages but insists on labeling them as such.  So that wouldn't be much of a change.  I can imagine some changes in Twitter's policies that would make the free-for-all prospect less threatening.  I don't know what legal boilerplate one has to agree to in order to use Twitter (and probably nobody but a few lawyers understands it all anyway), but if there was some clause to the effect that Twitter will fully cooperate with any law-enforcement officials in the investigation of illegal doings using Twitter, that would allow the organization to point its fingers at wrongdoers, or at least their accounts.  Tracking down bad guys on the Internet is always hard, but to pretend that Twitter is the main security threat to Internet users is to ignore all the other cybercrime that goes on without it.

 

My point is that right now, Twitter seems to be pretty free, and if Musk made it totally free it would be a rather small and incremental change.  And on the plus side, allowing completely free speech on Twitter would comport better with the First Amendment rights guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution, although technically, as a private company Twitter can (and still could) censor anything and everything it wants to. 

 

Money is power, and we see here a fabulously rich and therefore powerful man attempting to control another center of power, or at least conduit of power, which Twitter as a prominent social-media outlet represents.  But what little I know about Musk tells me that his intentions, while they may have a touch of silliness now and then, are basically benign. 

 

There is a growing trend on the part of some to view certain ideas and discourse as so threatening that it should be suppressed, whether by Twitter censors or some other means.  Those of us raised long enough ago that freedom of speech was presented to us as grade-schoolers in a positive and un-ironic way tend to believe that such freedom is one of the bedrock foundations of U. S. democracy.  And if we start going down the path of censorship—whether it's called that or "stopping disinformation" or "countering fake news"—the consequence will be less freedom and a move toward tyranny. 

 

The technology of the Internet and social media have given rise to something that we as societies are still trying to figure out:  a way of reaching millions or billions of people that is potentially uncontrolled by any central authority.  This is a truly new thing in the world.  Some regimes have decided that Twitter is so bad in its current form that they won't allow it at all.  Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are on that list, and Nigeria banned it for a year after it deleted tweets from the Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari. 

 

That list suggests to me that whatever Twitter is doing, the good may well outweigh the bad.  In trying to buy Twitter, I think Musk is only trying to make it better.  And I for one am willing to see what he means by better.

 

Sources:  NPR carried a report on Musk's plans to buy Twitter at https://www.npr.org/2022/04/21/1094020022/elon-musk-twitter-money.  I also referred to a brief piece on the New Yorker website at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-would-elon-musk-want-to-buy-twitter and the Wikipedia article on Twitter.  For those who do not recognize the reference to Tom Swift, he was a fictional young inventor featured in dozens of novels published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate in the early 1900s aimed primarily at teenage boys. 

Is the Internet Making Us Too Literate?

 

Writing in the Spring 2022 issue of The New Atlantis, British author Kit Wilson wonders if the Internet is endangering our mental health by metaphorically burying us in words. 

 

In support of this conclusion, he cites some statistics.  For example, a report that the prestigious management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. published in 2012 stated that the average time Americans spent reading or writing each day was between one and two hours from 1900 all the way up to 1990.  But when the Internet came along and was joined by text messaging, that number rose to around four to five hours a day—almost a third of a person's disposable free time (that is, when you're not doing something like eating or going to the bathroom—and I'm sure some people read while doing those things too). 

 

He also found a journalist who claims that your average person browsing the Internet as part of their daily routine may expose themselves to as many as 490,000 words a day, which approaches the length of Tolstoy's War and Peace (600,000 words, according to Wikipedia's "List of Longest Novels.") 

 

But nobody reads the Internet like you would read War and Peace, and therein lies the problem.

 

Have we exploited digital technology's amazing ability to multiply words practically without end to flood cyberspace with an ocean of words that threaten to drown us? 

 

My title is something of a conundrum.  Being unable to read is what illiteracy means, but what is the measure of reading too much?  We have all known the so-called bookworm type who seems to prefer the library to the clubroom or the bar.  That isn't the problem here, because there were bookworms before the Internet. 

 

For his part, Wilson seems to be concerned that as we deal with the world more and more as it is mediated to us in the form of words, we will lose track of what reality is really like and begin to treat it as an abstraction that words adequately describe.  The overarching theme of this issue of The New Atlantis is expressed by the somewhat grim cover title "Reality:  A Post-Mortem." 

 

I think it's a little premature to write reality's obituary just yet, but I have to admit a general sense of creepiness remains with me after reading it. 

 

The problem we face was captured neatly by C. S. Lewis in his 1946 sci-fi novel That Hideous Strength, which involves a young sociologist named Mark Studdock who gradually becomes embroiled in some sinister doings as a part of his new job with the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (N. I. C. E.).  Mark was already in a bad way with regard to reality even before he took on his new job.  As Lewis points out:  " . . . his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw.  Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer's boy, was the shadow."

 

So the tendency has been with us longer than the Internet to take the written word more seriously than the reality that it attempts (always incompletely) to describe.  As Lewis shows later in the novel, this habit allows wicked people to do heinous things with the stroke of a pen—after all, the only direct contact a manager might have with the consequences of his order to liquidate thousands of people will be the alteration in some columns of population figures. 

 

Having access to more words than ever isn't all bad.  When evil is exposed to the light, it can lead to good people fighting it more effectively.  The Internet makes keeping secrets much harder, especially if they are secrets about evil things done in public. 

 

I may not be the best person to write about this problem, because whether out of old habits or laziness or something else, I think I am on the low end of Wilson's estimates of how much time people spend reading stuff on the Internet.  While I will admit to the occasional lapse of falling down a rabbit hole out of random curiosity, I try to be in charge whenever I'm browsing and attempt to keep my destination in mind.  If you know what you want before you go into the store, you'll probably spend less time (and money) there, and the same thing is true of the Internet.

 

If there's a specific problem caused by the superabundance of words on the Internet, it consists in what it's done to our reading habits.  Back when it took a person half a bottle of ink and an hour to write a three-page letter, the recipient felt obliged at least to read every word, and maybe some parts over more than once.

 

But now that words are so cheap and easily multiplied, we just zip through paragraphs like kids hunting for Easter eggs on the lawn—who needs all this grass?  Get to the good part.  But what if the good part won't emerge unless you read the whole thing?

 

If you've done me the good turn to read every word I've written down to this point, you have my thanks and appreciation.  But you are probably the exception.  Nobody can pay that kind of close attention to 490,000 words a day, nor should they.  The best we can do is to be a lot more selective about the stuff we look for, and favor sites that are well-curated (the term used to be "edited") which allow in only material that is truly worth our attention.  Because attention is what we bring to the table, or the screen, and because it's so limited, we should treat it as the valuable commodity that it is, for our own good and for the good of society as well.

 

Sources:  Kit Wilson's article "Reading Ourselves to Death" appears on pp. 73-79 of the Spring 2022 issue of The New Atlantis.

 

Will Solid-State Batteries Bail Out Electric Vehicles?

 

Last week, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a recall for electric-vehicle batteries made by LG Energy Solution of South Korea.  Fires have been caused by some of these batteries, which are used in Mercedes, Hyundai, and General Motors products, among others. 

 

The problem is that rare manufacturing defects can cause overheating and fires.  An Associated Press article describing the recall notes that recalls made voluntarily by individual manufacturers for these batteries date back to February of 2020.  In November of that year, GM began recalling over 140,000 Chevrolet Bolt EVs to replace possibly defective LG batteries, and LG paid GM $2 billion in compensation. 

 

The insurance industry obviously has a stake in this matter, and a small survey conducted by its Highway Loss Data Institute showed that the rate of fires for electric cars is about the same as it is for gasoline-burners:  0.2 per 1,000 insured vehicle years.

 

If the best you can say about electric car fires is that they're no worse than fires in gas-powered ones, that's faint praise. 

 

The underlying problem in electric-car battery fires is the technology.  You may not be aware that the liquid or gel electrolyte in the type of lithium battery used in electric vehicles cannot be exposed to air without catching fire.  This is one reason that manufacturing such a battery is so tricky.  Back when photographic film was the only way to take pictures, manufacturers figured out how to make hundreds of square yards of sensitive film every day in total darkness.  But it wasn't easy, and the fact that film never got as cheap as, say, toilet paper, had an incalculable effect on the entire industry.

 

Unless the electric-car business manages to break free of liquid-electrolyte batteries, it may find itself stuck in a similar rut.  Except for the battery, an electric car is markedly cheaper to make than a fossil-fuel one.  The electronics and the motors are much simpler than the corresponding parts of a gas-powered car.  But right now, the cheapest electrics on the market are many thousands of dollars more costly than an average gas model because of the darned battery, and so the vision of replacing most of our gas-guzzlers with electrics remains just that:  a vision.

 

On the technological horizon is a development that could change all that:  the solid-state battery.  Michael Faraday himself (1791-1867) discovered that solid materials such as silver sulfide could act as electrolytes, which means that ions can move about through them under the influence of electric fields.  But up to now, truly solid electrolytes (as opposed to the liquid or gel-like products used in most batteries today) have resisted commercialization for a number of reasons.

 

A significant milestone in the development of solid-state batteries happened when John Goodenough, who was one of the original developers of current lithium-battery technology, announced in 2017 that he had made a solid-state battery with a glass electrolyte.  According to some sources, solid-state batteries could have up to 2.5 times the energy density of current lithium batteries, although it is not clear whether this is a volume or mass energy density.  Either way, it would mean that for the same size or weight battery, a car using a solid-state battery might have a longer driving range than a gasoline car with a typical gas tank. 

 

No one knows yet how to make solid-state batteries cheaply.  Thin-film technologies such as vacuum deposition are sometimes used, and while there is concern that such technologies may be difficult to scale, vacuum deposition in other manufacturing areas has been applied to rolls of plastic and other large-scale manufactured goods.  So it's more a question of investment and effort than fundamental technological obstacles, I suspect.

 

Several automakers, notably Volkswagen and Toyota, are investing heavily in solid-state battery technology.  But they have the obstacle shared by all automakers that any product engineered for automotive use has to be a lot more durable and reliable than anything used in the military or even aerospace fields.  Do you thinkmilitary tank drivers go ten thousand miles without needing any service, or astronauts think they'll be able to ride their rockets for ten thousand launches without having any problems?  Yet we start a car several times a day for years and expect nothing to go wrong. 

 

It's that kind of standard that every electric-vehicle battery is expected to meet, and the wonder is that they have come this far.  Pardon an old technologist for making a statement that is more intuitive than fact-based, but when I look at a typical EV battery that consists of several thousand individually-manufactured, hermetically sealed, and electrically insulated cells, I see a technology that is fundamentally immature.  Digital computers remained the expensive province of a few wealthy institutions until manufacturers learned to take the many thousands of largely similar components and integrate them onto a chip.  I suspect that electric cars will also remain in the realm of the wealthy until solid-state batteries bring the core cost down to the point that people will want to buy them, not because they're afraid of global warming or want something to match their Patek Phillipe watch, but because they're cheaper and easier to run than gas-powered ones. 

 

In the meantime, we're going to have to put up with recalls like the ones for the LG batteries that catch fire on rare occasions, because it seems to be the nature of liquid-electrolyte lithium cells to do that once in a while.  The best manufacturers can do is to watch their processes and inspections rigorously and hope that a better technology will come along that will let them make batteries more like people make computer chips these days, rather than like photographic film was once made, under difficult and unique conditions that are hard to maintain for long.

 

Sources:  I referred to an article on the NHTSA recall carried by the Apr. 6, 2022 Austin American-Statesman and other outlets of the AP, such as ABC News at https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-agency-opens-probe-electric-vehicle-batteries-83882398.  I also referred to articles on solid-state batteries at https://www.dnv.com/to2030/technology/are-solid-state-batteries-the-holy-grail-for-2030.htmland https://www.samsungsdi.com/column/technology/detail/56462.html?listType=gallery, and the Wikipedia article "Solid-state battery."

How Secure are Decommissioned Communications Satellites?

 

These days, the vast majority of communications signals are carried over fiber-optic cables that gird the globe and form the backbone of the Internet.  But for certain purposes such as broadcasting, geostationary satellites are still important simply because they can access huge geographic areas much more cheaply than wired or fiber networks, and are sometimes the only way to access rural and remote areas. 

 

Like any other hardware, communications satellites have a limited lifetime, and after they are replaced by newer ones, the old satellites are eventually moved into "graveyard" orbits and later burn up in the atmosphere.  But in their retirement-home phase while they are still in place but not being actively used, they are vulnerable to being hacked, as a security researcher named Karl Koscher recently showed and Wired reported.  In contrast to ground-based digital networks, communications satellites are largely analog and can be hacked with relative ease.

 

The first communications satellite, Telstar 1, was launched in 1962, long before the Internet was even a gleam in Vinton Cerf's eye.  But it embodied the essential features of today's comm satellites:  a microwave receiver, some sort of signal processing that changes the frequency band to a different transmitting frequency, and an amplifier that sends out a boosted version of the weak signal received from a ground station.  Depending on the application, the transmitted signal can cover thousands of square miles where anyone with, for example, a DirecTV dish can get them.

 

While Koscher worked with the owners of a decommissioned satellite to perform his hacking, that wasn't strictly necessary.  He borrowed the transmitter and dish of an earth station set up for this sort of thing and aimed the appropriate signals at the dormant satellite, which was a Canadian unit launched in 2005 and at the end of its fifteen-year design life.  In doing so, he successfully demonstrated that he could broadcast to a good part of the North American continent using facilities that are within reach of a determined amateur hacker.

 

Someone with less benign intentions than Koscher could simply overpower a legitimate signal from a satellite's owner and essentially take over the satellite's receiver.  Whether the transmitted signal could be received by the customers would depend on how the signal is digitally encoded, but such encoding can also be hacked as well. 

 

On your list of things to worry about, this issue probably doesn't deserve a very high ranking.  Back when satellites were the only means of broadband connections between continents, they were a much more critical part of our communications infrastructure.  Now that most people, at least in North America, get their data from the Internet without need of a satellite link, because most Internet traffic is carred via undersea fiber-optic cables, the fact that old satellites can be hacked is not that threatening.  Still, the possibility exists that newer satellites could also be taken over with sufficiently powerful earth-station signals, and this would cause problems beyond simple bemusement. 

 

Unlike Internet hackers, who can hide in obscure basements in inaccessible countries and evade detection for months or years, a satellite ground station is not an easy thing to hide.  There is one such installation a few miles south of where I live in San Marcos, Texas, and although I've never driven by it to see how close I can get, the large (10-meter or so) dishes are easily visible from I-35 between here and San Antonio.  So if a satellite hacker began making a habit of pirating, it would not be that difficult to figure out where he was transmitting from, depending on the satellite's own characteristics and the amount of power needed.

 

But we are far from being done with our dependence on communications satellites.  Elon Musk is launching Starlink, a planned array of over 4,000 low-orbit satellites designed to provide Internet service for underserved nations, and eventually the entire world.  Such satellites are much harder to hack in a meaningful way, because they move fast and the loss of one or two out of several thousand is probably only a minor inconvenience to the network.  Any hacking to be done with Starlink will probably be at a higher level, resembling Internet hacking on the fiber network, which is basically independent of the hardware used for conveying the information.

 

Perhaps there is a lesson here about the nature of ethical lapses with regard to communications technologies.  Any technology that conveys meaningful information from one human to another human, regardless of what time or space intervenes, is a communications technology.  Other things being equal, enabling human-to-human communications (which is the only kind we use technology for so far) is better than not enabling it.  Of course, any communications medium can be used for evil purposes, but generally speaking, communications systems can make one of the best claims at being ethically neutral of any technology you can name. 

 

But those systems which by their nature enable one person simultaneously to communicate one way with thousands or millions of others are in a special ethical category.  This was implicitly recognized in the pre-Internet days by the extensive regulatory regimes that broadcasters worked under in many countries.  But with the advent of the Internet, the broadcaster-versus-private-communicator distinction broke down, and outfits such as Facebook found there was money to be made in intentionally blurring that distinction. 

 

Broadcast satellites are one of the few remaining technologies in which that distinction is still distinct.  But the fiber-optic Internet has made them somewhat of a niche issue in the wider scope of communications-technology ethics, and I don't worry much about facing a rash of takeovers of old comm satellites in the future, simply because there are lots easier ways to do nefarious things using communications systems that aren't tied to satellites at all. 

 

Nevertheless,Koscher's feat is a warning for future satellite operators to take extra precautions so that a hacker can't even take over the satellite except to block it from operating, which will always be possible.  But there isn't much illegitimate money to be made from that, and so Koscher's demonstration may be the last of its kind.

 

Sources:   Wired carried Lily Hay Newman's article "Researchers Used a Decommissioned Satellite to Broadcast Hacker TV" on Mar. 30, 2022 at https://www.wired.com/story/satellite-hacking-anit-f1r-shadytel. 

China's Flight 5735 Crash: Mechanical Failure or Human Action?

 

On Monday, March 21, China Eastern Airlines flight 5735 took off from Kunming in western China on a flight to Guangzhou,  on the southern coast.  After takeoff, the plane rose to a cruising altitude of 29,000 feet and leveled off, traveling east.  A little more than an hour into the flight, the plane abruptly took a nosedive and crashed into a muddy mountainous region after falling about five miles in a minute and a half.  Recovery crews at the scene confirmed there were no survivors among the 123 passengers and nine crew members.  The two flight recorders ("black boxes") were recovered and are undergoing analysis, but Chinese officials emphasize that it is too early to reach any conclusions about the cause of this tragedy, which is the worst air transport disaster in China since 2010.

 

As a precaution, China has grounded over 200 of its Boeing 737-800 series airliners for heightened safety inspections.  So far, no other country has taken similar steps, although the Boeing 737-800 is reportedly the most popular airliner of its size class in the world.  One reason may be that the circumstances of the crash do not seem to indicate any particular mechanical failure. 

 

Many types of mechanical problems in aircraft give some sort of warning before causing life-threatening conditions.  For example, the software problems that led to the crashes of two 737 MAX airplanes in 2019 were known to cause unexpected behavior of the aircraft in certain conditions, but the manufacturer assumed (wrongly) that training would enable pilots to take the appropriate actions to counteract the plane's tendency to nose up and stall. 

 

The information we have so far about Flight 5735 shows no sign that anything was wrong prior to the moment that the plane took a nosedive.  Even more oddly, despite repeated attempts by air traffic controllers to contact the pilots during the 90-second dive, no replies were received.  The lack of response would be understandable if an explosion or other violent breakup of the plane occurred in midair, but eyewitnesses and the crash scene testify that the plane was largely intact until it hit the ground, except for a small piece found some 10 km away that might have broken off during the dive.  Investigators estimate that the plane's velocity could have approached the speed of sound, which is beyond its design speed and could have broken small parts off before the crash.

 

Although Chinese officials have not addressed the question directly, one possibility that must be addressed is that one or more of the pilots deliberately crashed the plane.  While very unlikely, such a thing has happened before. 

 

In 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean with 239 people on board, and despite two extensive searches, the plane has never been found, although small pieces have washed ashore at various places.  In an extensively researched article in the Atlantic, William Langewiesche makes a strong case for the idea that the pilot, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, somehow overcame the other crew members, depressurized the cabin at an altitude that would have killed everyone on board outside the oxygen-supplied cockpit, and then let the plane crash in the ocean, possibly after committing suicide himself. 

 

It is too early to draw any definite conclusions from the preliminary data we have about Flight 5735, and we may have to wait quite a while before the official investigation produces any results.  By United Nations rules, the country in which an airplane crash occurs is in charge of the crash investigation, and while there are ties to U. S. investigation agencies by virtue of the fact that Boeing made the plane, they must play secondary roles. 

 

Information from the cockpit voice recorders, if any, will be extremely helpful in determining what was going on before and during the last minute and a half of the flight.  Reports state that no conceivable malfunction of the autopilot systems would cause the plane to take and persist in such an extreme nosedive, which apparently can only be induced by the pilot's manual intervention. 

 

This raises a more general question:  should new planes have software in place that would make it impossible to take such actions that would lead inevitably to the loss of the aircraft?  In discussions about how the MCAS system, which is mostly software, led to the crashes of two 737 MAX planes in 2019, it looked like we had already gone too far in the direction of a robot taking over a plane.  In any case, all new airliners are "fly-by-wire" in the sense that the pilot's manipulations of the controls pass through software systems that then execute the actual movement of control surfaces. 

 

In that view, it just becomes a matter of judgment on the part of the computer whether to let what the pilot is telling the computer to do take precedence over what the computer knows is best for the plane, or at least what might lead the plane to crash. 

 

Perhaps the rarity of a pilot going berserk is enough to allow us to lodge our ultimate trust in the person actually flying the plane, and not in some software that probably hasn't been tested under the conditions that would apply if a rogue pilot was determined to crash the plane.  Besides, a pilot that's smart enough to fly a plane safely is probably smart enough to outwit software designed to keep him from doing it. 

 

In any case, we will simply have to wait until Chinese accident-investigation officials reach their considered conclusions about what caused the crash of Flight 5735.  In his article on the Malaysian Air crash, Langewiesche says that important personal information about the pilot Shah was suppressed by accident investigators, who were reluctant to admit the possibility that one of their own pilots deliberately caused the crash, which officially still has no determined cause.  Political considerations can be a factor in accident investigations, and if the Chinese investigation comes up empty-handed, it may be because stating the most likely cause would be politically embarrassing.

 

Politics aside, if a mechanical failure was at fault, it's important to get to the bottom of it so that all the other users of 737-800s can avoid such disasters in the future.

 

Sources:  William Langewiesche's article "What Really Happened to Malaysia's Missing Airplane" is available at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/.  I also referred to articles on the Flight 5735 crash at the following sites:  https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/26/china/china-eastern-airlines-crash-intl/index.html, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60887970, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-plane-crash-china-crash-mystery-deepens-as-evidence-suggests-mid-air-breakup-2842114, and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/china-plane-crash-update-u-s-taps-investigator-boeing-falls. 

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."