Today I experienced the Roedelius Cells installation, and I saw Joep Beving, some Coupler, Mary Lattimore, Meredith Monk (and vocal ensemble) performing ‘Cellular Songs’. And then finally danced my ass off to Jlin. Have now hauled my tired, wired corpus back to the hotel. May edit this post with richer details and discussion, but too near falling out to do that now.

Edit: whoops, forgot to mention one of the best experiences I had yesterday! Peter Gregson and five local cellists (and several synths) performing his remarkable recomposition of Bach’s cello suites. It seemed like there were a couple of small problems with the performance, but it was nevertheless absolutely transporting 💛

About 25 percent of what ends up in the blue bins is contaminated, according to the National Waste & Recycling Association. For decades, we’ve been throwing just about whatever we wanted—wire hangers and pizza boxes and ketchup bottles and yogurt containers—into the bin and sending it to China, where low-paid workers sorted through it and cleaned it up. That’s no longer an option. And in the United States, at least, it rarely makes sense to employ people to sort through our recycling so that it can be made into new material, because virgin plastics and paper are still cheaper in comparison.

Even in San Francisco, often lauded for its environmentalism, waste-management companies struggle to keep recycling uncontaminated. I visited a state-of-the-art facility operated by San Francisco’s recycling provider, Recology, where million-dollar machines separate aluminum from paper from plastic from garbage. But as the Recology spokesman Robert Reed walked me through the plant, he kept pointing out nonrecyclables gumming up the works. Workers wearing masks and helmets grabbed laundry baskets off a fast-moving conveyor belt of cardboard as some non-cardboard items escaped their gloved hands. Recology has to stop another machine twice a day so a technician can pry plastic bags from where they’ve clogged up the gear.

Cleaning up recycling means employing people to slowly go through materials, which is expensive. Jacob Greenberg, a commissioner in Blaine County, Idaho, told me that the county’s mixed-paper recycling was about 90 percent clean. But its paper broker said the mixed paper needed to be 99 percent clean for anyone to buy it, and elected officials didn’t want to hike fees to get there. “At what point do you feel like you’re spending more money than what it takes for people to feel good about recycling?” he said.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/

From a modern perspective, “Functional finance” is really cavalier in its discussion of monetary policy. Lerner says that the interest rate should be set at the level that produces “the most desirable level of investment,” and that fiscal policy should then be chosen to achieve full employment given that interest rate. What is the optimal interest rate? He doesn’t say – maybe because through the 30s the zero lower bound made that point moot.

Anyway, what actually happens at least much of the time – although, crucially, not when we’re at the zero lower bound – is more or less the opposite: political tradeoffs determine taxes and spending, and monetary policy adjusts the interest rate to achieve full employment without inflation. Under those conditions budget deficits do crowd out private spending, because tax cuts or spending increases will lead to higher interest rates. And this means that there is no uniquely determined correct level of deficit spending; it’s a choice that depends on how you value the tradeoff.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/whats-wrong-with-functional-finance-wonkish.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/how-much-does-heterodoxy-help-progressives-wonkish.html

https://twitter.com/ThingsWork/status/1108073217199992832

https://twitter.com/i/status/1108073217199992832

One hypothesis for how knowledge is organized in the brain proposes that representations of the things we know are optimally connected to other parts of the brain that are necessary for processing that information.

“For example,” Caramazza said, “knowledge of something I can see will be organized in a part of my brain that is easily connected with the visual system. But what about color in the blind? It cannot be represented in an area that’s connected to visual processing. Because they learn about it through language, it will be organized in an area that is especially well-connected with language processing. So if the question is where does a blind person store a representation of a rainbow in their brain, they store it in the same area where a sighted person would store a representation of a concept like justice or virtue.”

To see that process in action, Caramazza and his colleagues recruited both blind and sighted volunteers and used fMRI scanners to track activity in their brains as they performed various tasks, including answering questions about rainbows and colors.

“We found that, in the congenitally blind, the neural responses for red were in the same areas as the neural responses for justice,” he said. “The abstractness of something like red in the blind is the same as the abstractness of virtue for the sighted, and in both cases that information is represented in a part of the brain where information is obtained through linguistic processes.”

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/making-sense-of-how-the-blind-see-color/

Faba bean necrotic stunt virus, or FBNSV for short, infects legumes, and is spread through the bites of aphids. Its genes are split among eight segments, each of which is packaged into its own capsule. And, as Blanc’s team has now shown, these eight segments can reproduce themselves, even if they infect different cells. FBNSV needs all of its components, but it doesn’t need them in the same place. Indeed, this virus never seems to fully comes together. It is always distributed, its existence spread between among capsules and split among different host cells.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/03/the-revolutionary-discovery-of-a-distributed-virus/584884/

If, in the wake of our utter failure to reduce emissions, we fail to agree on geoengineering because of political squabbling, with the consequence that we all just bake slowly, I will just give up on everyone forever. Not that that will matter much at that point…

On the other hand, unlike emissions reduction, geoengineering can at least in theory the executed unilaterally. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what it comes down to in the end.

Not, mind you, that I think geoengineering is a great idea. I just think it will turn out to be the least bad of several lousy alternatives.

The idea of cooling the climate with stratospheric sunshades that would shield the planet from the sun’s warming rays moved up the international agenda this week, with mixed results. On the one hand, new research suggested that it is theoretically possible to fine-tune such a shield without some of its potentially damaging consequences. Publication of this work coincided with a proposal at the biennial un Environment Assembly (unea), held in Nairobi, Kenya, for an expert review of such geoengineering methods. This was the highest-level discussion of the topic so far. On the other hand, the more than 170 nations involved could not arrive at a consensus. In a fitting illustration of the heat surrounding geoengineering, the proposal was withdrawn at the eleventh hour.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/03/14/countries-look-at-ways-to-tinker-with-earths-thermostat

Modern Monetary Theory is an enormous (and currently popular) temptation for anyone on the left who wants to spend a lot of money on climate and/or the social safety net, so I’m pretty impressed to see socialist magazine Jacobin publish an extremely thorough critique of it:

Though it might scandalize some liberals to say so, it’s dangerous to be sanguine about inflation. People find it destabilizing and it feeds a hunger for order. The rise in inflation through the 1970s that climaxed in that 15 percent record helped grease the way for Reagan. The extreme inflation of Weimar Germany in the 1920s contributed to the rise of Hitler. As a British diplomat stationed at the embassy in Berlin wrote to his bosses at home during the hyperinflation: “The population is ripe to accept any system of firmness or for any man who appears to know what he wants and issues commands in a loud, bold voice.”

The standard view of the Weimar inflation is that the German economy, severely damaged by World War I and forced to make huge reparations payments to the victors, wasn’t up to the task — it just didn’t have the productive capacity, and its citizens were both unwilling and unable to pay the necessary taxes. So instead the government just printed money and spent it, not only to pay its own bills, but to support bank lending to the private sector. (The printing presses were so overworked that they had trouble keeping up with the demand for fresh banknotes. At least keystroke money wouldn’t face this problem.) Inflation peaked at 29,500 percent in October 1923, meaning that prices doubled every four days. The value of the mark collapsed from 320 per US dollar in early 1922 to over 4 trillion per dollar in late 1923, meaning the mark lost 99.999999992 percent of its value in a year and a half. The value of the real wage, if it’s possible to measure amid such rapid inflation, fell by over 80 percent, as pay badly lagged price increases.

Wray’s explanation of the Weimar hyperinflation, one of the most dazzling of all time, is odd. The deficits, Wray explained in his book, were caused by the inflation, not the other way around. In the end, “Germany adopted a new currency, and while it was not legal tender, it was designated acceptable for tax payment. The hyperinflation ended.” Almost nothing about the printing press — he dismisses “printing money” explanations as “far too simple” — and nothing at all about the austerity program. No, there was just an unexplained monetary intervention somehow linked to tax payments. Weimar Germany may be an extreme case, but since it’s often brought up by critics of MMT — “won’t all that keystroking lead to inflation, like Argentina or Weimar?” — it’s one for which they need to have a good answer. Wray’s reluctance to face head-on the risks of printing money makes you wonder how confident he really is of his own theory.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/modern-monetary-theory-isnt-helping

Coleoid cephalopods, a group encompassing octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, are the most intelligent invertebrates: Octopuses can open jars, squid communicate with their own Morse code and cuttlefish start learning to identify prey when they’re just embryos.

In fact, coleoids are the only “animal lineage that has really achieved behavioral sophistication” other than vertebrates, said Joshua Rosenthal, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. This sophistication could be related to a quirk in how their genes work, according to new research from Dr. Rosenthal and Eli Eisenberg, a biophysicist at Tel Aviv University.

In the journal Cell on Thursday, the scientists reported that octopuses, squid and cuttlefish make extensive use of RNA editing, a genetic process thought to have little functional significance in most other animals, to diversify proteins in their nervous system. And natural selection seems to have favored RNA editing in coleoids, even though it potentially slows the DNA-based evolution that typically helps organisms acquire beneficial adaptations over time.

He and Dr. Rosenthal found that RNA editing is enriched in coleoids’ nervous tissues, so they suspect it contributes to these animals’ behavioral complexity, possibly by allowing for dynamic control over proteins in response to different environmental conditions or tasks. Previously, Dr. Rosenthal showed that RNA editing might help octopuses rapidly adapt to temperature changes.

Other organisms use all sorts of different methods to modify their RNA, but the possibility that coleoids use extensive RNA editing to flexibly manipulate their nervous system is “extraordinary,” said Kazuko Nishikura, a professor at the Wistar Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research institute in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the study.

“We may learn a lot from squid and octopus brains,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/science/octopus-squid-intelligence-rna-editing.html