Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Oscar Farinetti. Serendipity.

   A very cool book by a Piedmontese nationalist, so much so that the book contains sentences written in Piedmont dialect -- how many people speak it today -- and ascribes all culinary "firsts" to Italians, and most to the Northern Italians. But it is a pleasure to read. 

[1] I would make a single comment concerning Italian, rather than the French origin of the "Russian Salad". The story that it emerged because the Italian chefs replaced beets in Insalata Rossa (Rusa in some dialect) for the Tsar (more probable, for the heir to throne) with potatoes and carrots and renamed it Insalata Russa in honor of the august guest is quite possible. In Russian a beet version is called vinegret (from the word 'vinegar'). But the reason for occasional renaming must have been that the red color was associated with the French Revolution, equally detestable for the Imperial Prince and his hosts in Nice. 

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Erika Nesvold. Off-Earth. Ethical questions and quandaries for living in outer space.

     It is good that some people think about these problems. But the more I read about space colonies, the more I doubt their viability. All that Erika writes about their potential problems suggests to me that the best solution (who owns what, how environment is shared and protected, who can have kids, who receives scarce medical care) for the management of the space colonies is totalitarian rule. Furthermore, in conditions that all resources are strictly rationed, the emergence of totalitarianism is inevitable. And this is not a pleasant option. One of the reason for extreme unpleasantness of totalitarian rule is that it needs periodic lethal intimidation of the populace for its reinforcement. The attempt of Soviet rulers to dispense with random terror after Stalin resulted in collapse of the state. 

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Vaclav Smil. Invention and Innovation.

 Chinese Communists determined early on that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. This closed the discussion and spared the Chinese the disasters of perestroika. The book, as everything Smil, seems to be 99% accurate but 1% of his idiosyncrasies and grotesque mistakes sow doubt in the rest of his narrative. 

    Of course, as a loyal Czech he must disparage all things Soviet and Russian, which is a minor distraction, and a climate sceptic that biases his outlook on many important matters. In his book on energy (which? he has many) he suggested that electric cars cannot replace gas-powered vehicles based on his estimate that a combined power of all electric vehicles is comparable to a power of all the world's utilities. 

    He forgot that at any given moment only a tiny fraction of motor vehicles is on the road and most rarely, if ever, run the engines at their maximum. Similarly silly is his suggestion that photovoltaics are not that efficient despite a spectacular decline in price because "the module cost is now about 15 percent of the total investment. The rest is needed to cover structural costs and electrical components... , inverters... , labor costs and other soft costs. Obviously, none of these components, from steel and aluminum to transmission lines, permitting, inspection and sales taxes is tending to zero, and hence the overall cost of installation show a distinctly declining rate of improvement..." Yes, indeed, but these costs are the costs of any electric infrastructure, so if the new houses were to have electricity at all, they have to be factored in. Furthermore, old electric infrastructure is continually replaced irrespectively of underlying method of generation. 

    Smil also claims that in the last half-century there were few breakthroughs outside of computing and electronics, which he measures by the size of electronic components. Yet, he misses a revolution in biotech. If it were not for it, new Covid-19 vaccines might never appear, certainly not at that short times scale and humanity would have suffered truly catastrophic consequences. Without the Internet, slow or fast, quarantine and isolation of that many people -- to the utility of which Smil obviously does not subscribe -- would be impossible. But the humanity might not progressed to Covid era at all without modern antiviral drugs becoming extinct in early 2000s because of the HIV (I am joking). 

    His points about obvious boondoggles: Musk's hyperloop, electric aircraft and fusion energy are well taken. I can also agree with his judgement that there is no net acceleration in the pace of inventions. If any era in human history was truly explosive, it was the century beginning some time in 1840-1850s. These were electric telegraph (predecessor of the internet), telephone, automobile, radio, aircraft, synthetic drugs and fertilizers, television, jet propulsion, nuclear energy, and, finally electronic computers. 

    Vaclav Smil is certainly an intellect to be reckoned with unlike philosophical charlatans of the Fukuyama school. I would like to talk to him rather than the neighbors' dogs to whose company I am now confined. But his 1% messes it all.