Consideration of Works Past: The Revolving Boy

(Picture from here.)

By now it cannot be a secret that I like small stories.

These are stories where there might be a major cataclysm, catastrophe, war or other great event but that is backdrop. It might impact the story and the characters. It might not.

But the story of the characters is what interests me.

I read The Revolving Boy when I was a boy. It had resonance with me then. It has resonance with me now.

The author of TRB is Gertrude Friedberg. That's about as much as I can say. The wiki article says she wrote two plays that were well received-- one, Three Cornered Moon, had Ruth Gordon in it and was almost immediately made into a film. She wrote three SF stories and one novel. She was admired but, as far as I can tell, doesn't have much impression on the internet as a person.

This is a shame. I would love to know more about her.

I do know a lot about The Revolving Boy in that I've read it more than once recently.

First, like any SF book of that era, it has a lot of SF tropes like flying cars, fancy home machines and the like. I think the problem with a lot of those works is people didn't expect to actually reach the future. One of the interesting things about current near future fiction is its conservatism: people have read those dated works and don't want to have their own works suffer the same fate.

But Friedberg wrote TRB in 1966 and she was fifty-two. She'd already seen how works dated. Much of the future stuff is a bit over the top. I suspect Friedberg was having fun.

That said, it's a minor criticism and can be easily overlooked.

The book is the story of Derv Nagy from his early childhood until his late middle age. As I said, this is a small book. The big things happen around in his life and don't necessarily affect him all that much. The book is tightly focused on Derv.

Derv is born (and expresses at an early age) a marvelous sense of absolute direction.  He can tell north without thinking about it. He feels twisted over the course of daily life relative to his sense of direction-- to the point of unwinding over the day.

Later in his life (early in the book so I'm not giving much away) he determines that his sense of direction is relative to something absolute. He doesn't know what it is. He only knows where it is and he must bend his life around that direction.

Friedberg has done something remarkable here. She takes something as simple as a sense of direction and pins it down as a pivot around which someone orients his life in a very real, physical way. By doing this, she shows us how people are bent by simple things. It's easy to extrapolate from this to higher moral conundrums but she does not. She stays with this simple, fundamental thing Derv must accommodate. Derv revolves.

Derv is a true character. He has a sense of humor. Like anyone, he tries to find his place (and a place for his uniqueness) in the world. He does not become a hero or a captain of industry. He finds love. He finds a life. He finds a job. There is nothing dramatic in what he does except where those things are dramatic to him.

There were a couple of things I pulled from this book-- reinforced by other books I was reading at the same time. Derv reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. Huck also makes his way through his life. He does not accomplish great things. The world is not greatly changed by his passing through it any more (or any less) than Derv's world is changed. Raintree County is another book I read at the same time.

What these books have in common is the placement character in the context of the larger world. The world is unchanged by their movement through it-- and that is just fine. Most of us don't change the world much. We change our little piece of it in our friends, our family, our children.

I have no illusion that my writing will change the world-- it won't. The wheel of the world will go on pretty much unswerved by anything I do. But I do like to thing I have made some things, some people, some situations, a little better for me having passed through by. No doubt those changes will be swallowed up by time. I don't have a problem with that.

I never knew Gertrude Friedberg. I wish I had so I could tell her that her book made a difference to me. And I hope that difference will shine through my own work and further its effect, as little as any effect I have might be.

While the differences she made will likely outlive my own, they won't last a thousand years.

So what? What does?

Doing

Okay. I've been home a month now.

Things have settled out some. There's no longer the issue of feeling anxious until I start to work. My desk had three monitors on it but I can only use one at home. That took more accommodation than I expected.

Being home with my wife is nice. But I find I miss the commute.

I took the train in and out every day. 90 minutes, one way. About 50 minutes on the actual rail plus 30 minutes, plus or minus, on the subway, walking or biking. I didn't much care for the subway but getting a good half hour workout by getting to work was worth the deal.

The 50 minutes was where I did most of my writing.

Now, at home, I have no defined time for that and my writing has suffered. I've managed to get an hour in just before work but it's been hard to increase it.

But there have been other issues. One is what I call the Urge to be Doing.

For me, there are a number of itches that need to be scratched in my life. Time with people. Writing. Work. And, doing things. By this I mean doing something beyond what needs to be done just to keep going. Work, writing, time with people-- these are necessary actions of living. Doing things is one step beyond that. It could be as simple as making a new base for a lamp. Or making something out of a worn out pair of shoes. Or going fishing. Or taking a walk in a new place. Or seeing an art exhibit. Sometimes, it's this blog.

The instant something moves into the has to be done category, it falls out of the category of doing things.

A couple of weeks I found myself itching to do something. Go for a walk or a bike ride? Weather was awful. Can't go out to see something-- social distancing.

So I went into the shop and made the pen and tiny bowl above.

These are not great works of art. The pen is made from some black birch I had lying around. Birch is soft in general and this wood seems especially porous. I probably should have stabilized the wood, first. But I've been having a little trouble with my lathe tools and stabilized wood feels like turning a rock. So I was lazy and didn't do it. The pen came out okay but not great.

The bowl was nicer. It was from a piece of plum wood I had saved when we had to cut down some fruit trees. (See here.) The wood is multicolored and has a slight tinge of pink. Unfortunately, the wood developed a crack as I was turning it. I finished it and it is usable as a little pill bowl but it's, again, not great.

That said, I felt great afterwards.

I had done something.

I think it's important these days that we remember it's not enough to do what we must do to survive. To make sure we and our loved ones are safe. We must also live. We must satisfy those itches and needs.

I've been doing a lot of teleconferencing at work and over time people have quit using their cameras. It's not surprising as video taxes the network and servers of most of the teleconferencing applications.

But I hate it.

I've been home for a month. I've seen my wife, dog and cat regularly. A couple of times I've seen my son. The only other human visual contact I've had is via these teleconferences. To see a blank screen with someone's initials just doesn't satisfy that need.

Humans are not solitary creatures. We need other human beings like we need oxygen to breathe.

So talk to each other.

State of the Farm: Grape Pruning, 2020

I spoke a few weeks back how I'd pruned the grapes. (See here.) At that time I said I would go into it more when I was able to upload the pictures.

Well, the pictures are uploaded now. Heck, they were uploaded a few days after that blog entry. But COVID-19 intervened.

So I said to myself: Self! It's time to get those pictures up. Things are budding. In just a week they're going to be out of date.

Here they are.

The first picture, up at the top, shows what I started with. Recall, we had grapes from the Concord but they were little and puny and there was a fungus problem. I surmised the problem was, at least in part, that the vine had become too thick. Not enough light and air movement for the grapes to grow in a healthy way.

In this picture, you can see the branches are all over the place. It's interesting that where the branches were the thickest is where the grapes had the most difficulty-- evidence for my hypothesis.

This picture was taken about half way through the process.

A lot of grape vines are designed to maximize production of a few, very high quality bunches. That's why you see very spare vines in the vineyards.

I've take a somewhat different tack. I have limited space so I can't sacrifice a hundred feet of many grape vines for twenty pounds of grapes. I need to have this vine produce fifty pounds of grapes in the space I have.

Consequently, I've thinned the vine down to a few strong horizontal leaders. But there are still some crosses-- vine branches that cross one another.

This is where I stopped. I could have trimmed more aggressively. There's a little complex towards the second bar I could have brought from three to one. I decided to wait and see. From that complex, the lower branch goes along the top wire. The middle goes up towards the top bar. The left branch turns back towards the camera on the other side of the top wire. I'm asking a a lot of that complex so we'll see.

The next picture is not the Concord but the Marechal-Fochs vine. We got a good harvest from that last year and I did very little.

This is an extremely vigorous vine. The structure here is sort of like a house in that there are slanted faces to the east and west. (The Concord slants towards the south.)

There are two vines here, one at each corner of the far side of the "house." Between the two of them, cover both sides of the "house" and follow the fence and terminate below that green garden stake in the foreground.

I decided I need do nothing about it this year.

That said, I may regret that decision. The weather has been chancy over the last few years and one of the effects of this is to have different sections of the vines ripen at different times. And it's possible I'm just asking too much of them. But I like the vine going everywhere. It fights with me and tries to take over the pears. It tried to take over the cherry. It's a tough customer.

Okay. That's it for now.

Consideration of Works Past: A Mirror for Observers

(Picture from here.)

I've been wanting to reread this for a while now for a number of reasons. It is a small novel-- the great movements and changes that SF is so famous for are either absent or merely backdrop for the transition of the characters.

I like books like this-- for that matter, I write books like this. I like a great space opera as much as the next SF reader but there's a soft spot in my heart (or head) for little books.

The other book I was considering was The Revolving Boy by Gertrude Friedberg but I decided on this one. It has a plague in it.

Edgar Pangborn, like Clifford Simak, is a writer that has fallen out of the limelight. Both are good writers of their time but their time has largely passed. It is interesting how what I considered canon when I was younger in fiction and in film has changed. Heinlein and Asimov remain but I think, like Pangborn and Simak, the change is generational. New readers don't tend to read them unless it's part of a class or a book club.

A Mirror for Observers tells the story of Elmis, an expatriate Martian-- who name themselves Salvayans-- who has lived for hundreds of years. His species came to Earth over thirty thousand years ago and live among humans. Some guide human beings. Some vilify them. Some leave them alone. Elmis is an Observer: a Martian whose task it is to live within humanity and report. Observers are hopeful of humanity's future.

Elmis is pursuing a boy named Angelo Pontevecchio, a precocious child of tremendous potential. Also pursuing Angelo is Namir, an Abdicator-- those Martians who want to find human beings a lost cause and want to destroy them.

Angelo is the intended target of influence of both Martians. (I was reminded of the Giacinto Gimignani painting at left.) Elmis meets Angelo when Angelo is twelve.

Pangborn writes love stories. Not romantic stories but love is often the primary motivation between people in his works. This was true of West of the Sun. Like WOTS, Mirror is about love and the lack of it. Again, I must emphasize, neither novel is romantic at all.

The book is in two parts. The first part, where Angelo is a child, consists of the tug of war between Elmis and Namir. This ends when Angelo flees them both. Later, Elmis rediscovers him.

One would expect the love Elmis has for Angelo would be the center of the story. And there is a good deal of it. Elmis loves people and Angelo in particular. He was married for decades but his wife is dead.

However, the real affection here is between Elmis and another child prodigy, the musician Sharon. Pangborn was an artist and musician. It's not surprising, then, that Angelo is a gifted painter and Sharon a gifted pianist.

This relationship is the heart of the novel. Elmis has some affection for Angelo but he deeply loves Sharon. And she has great love for him-- though, of course, her romantic fixation is for Angelo and his for her.

When I read this book-- when I remembered this book over the years it was this relationship between truth and falsity, the continuing philosophical discussion between the characters and the mirror-- a Cretan masterpiece referred to in the book-- that reveals the truth of the person. Not in a crass way-- that person is a Martian. This is a human. But the underlying self. Pangborn stays inside Elmis throughout the book so when revelations come to the characters, he can only see what they do and say and is denied their internal revelations. There are several scenes where such a revelation occurs and Elmis cannot know what it is because the character does not reveal it.

In rereading this book, I found I wanted Pangborn to be a better writer. He chose a set of mirrors himself in which to write the book. Elmis is writing letters back to his friend Drozma about what has already occurred. I am no fan of epistolary novels. I find them tedious. They lack immediacy.

It is worse in this novel. Elmis is already removed from the changes in his character just by being the point of view character. He's further removed by not being human. And, finally, he is removed further in the writing of these letters.

The first section feels too long. Pangborn skips the intervening years where Elmis is searching for Angelo-- a first rate opportunity to see how Elmis ticks. The second section-- where the plague happens-- feels actually too short, though both sections are more or less the same. We never find out what Angelo is capable of or if he will realize anything at all-- which doesn't bother me. The book stops before  Angelo can show that.

Mechanical issues aside, Pangborn is not afraid to show love in his work and he's not terribly sentimental about it. That part I liked.

The plague is well executed, though contrived. It comes with a sort of leaden inevitability.

I don't remember when I read Mirror but it was probably before I graduated high school. The book cannot mean the same to me now as it did then. But while it did reach as far as I remembered, I did enjoy the love.

Which brings us to our own plague. This is one of those situations where if we sit still and do nothing, the reaper might pass us by. Even more, we might enable it to pass others by as well.

This is not a narrow temporary thing. It is a marathon, not a sprint. And when we reach the other side, if we are honest,  how we dealt with this will remain with us. Will we handle it with kindness and patience? Will we blame people with whom we did not agree?

Will we act with love?

State of the Farm: Spring, 2020

(Picture from here.)

With the advent of COVID-19, the state of the farm is intimately connected to the state of the country. So, we'll start with that.

This is the beginning of week 2 staying at home. Draper Labs (my employer) told us to work from home starting last Monday.

Because of my wife, Wendy, we were prepared. Wendy has been tracking the virus since middle January. We've been apocalyptishopping ever since. We have about three months of staples.

This sound like a lot but it's actually not all that much more than we usually have. When we moved into the house back in 1993 we were at the tail end of the electrical lines. We lost power when the wind changed direction. That first winter there was so much snow that roofs collapsed all over Massachusetts and interior floods so frequent that the resulting claims for damaged walls and floors weren't even investigated. Adjusters said, "Go ahead. We'll cover it."

That winter, when the roof blockages sent streams of water across the walls inside, we looked at our new house and developed a mantra: "There is nothing wrong with our house."

We developed a sort of apocalyptic mindset. Every essential piece of equipment had to be doubled-- with a 150 foot drive way and a foot of snow a week, the snow blower became essential equipment. We had two: one we bought, one we inherited from my father-in-law. We had a generator. We had two cars. We had enough food that we could hunker down for a couple of weeks if the weather forced us to.

So, hunkering down these days isn't that much of a stretch.

But I find it depressing, just the same.

The main problem for me is finding that my main stay of human contact is work. Wendy and I get along very well but our son is out of the house and it's now just us. That's a great burden for any couple.

We've been managing it, so far, through technology. Skype, webex, duo and the like. So far it's been adequate. I'm unsure how it's going to handle the long haul. Our Incompetent-in-Chief disbanded the pandemic response team early in his administration and didn't seem to understand what he was being told until it could no longer be ignored. Because of his administration we're in a bad situation.

It's possible someone else would have done no better. But so what? He's the one in charge and he dropped the ball. No, he deliberately tossed the ball off the field, declared he didn't need it, that the ball was a lie and then was forced to trot off the field and dig through the weeds until he could find it. He still hasn't yet been able to bring the ball back on field.

But even he had to finally state that this can go as far as July. I think he's wrong again, there. I think we're going to be dealing with this until we get a vaccine.

So. Back to the farm, I suppose.

Last year we had a poor crop of Concord grapes. I think the grapes had grown two clustered and could no longer get good sunlight and air circulation. The grapes had no obvious fungus but looked withered. So this spring I cut them back hard. I have pictures of them but the upload isn't working quite right. So, I'll leave that for a future post.

The Ruth Stout method I talked about before-- laying down a layer of straw and planting potatoes under it-- was so successful we're expanding it significantly. We increasing from two 4x8 beds to about three times that much. The idea is that we want to be as calorie independent as possible. (See COVID-19 above.)

Corn is already sprouting in the greenhouse so that will go in by the end of May. We're going to aggressively try the Three Sisters method: corn, beans and squash. We've practiced this before with significant success. We're using Glass Gem corn-- it looked so cool I had to try it. It's a seed corn so we'll have corn meal. It can also act as popcorn.

Lots of beans this year. We already have had success with tomatoes. We're going to try intercropping the tomatoes with carrots-- an idea we got from a video from MIGardener.

We've been essentially practicing to get the most calories and nutrition from the garden for some time. This year is no longer practice. The goal is to have a substantial portion of our diet to come from the garden over the winter.

In addition, we've had good luck from our peaches, grapes Cornelian cherries and persimmons over the years. Peaches go into the freezer. The CCs, grapes and persimmons go into wine.

This last week we bottled the Marechal-Foch and a Concord/persimmon combination. The M/F did not taste great. It didn't go bad. It just wasn't very good. So we bottled it with the name, Unpromising. The C/P combination, by contrast, is very promising. We've transferred some additional persimmon wine from primary fermentation to the glass rack stage, where it will remain for some months.

One of the persimmon wines we cooked up with an amylase-- we were of the opinion that the persimmon had a lot of starch in it by the way we were able to make persimmon bread out of it. Amylase breaks the starch into sugar and makes it more available to fermentation. The result was dubious. The remaining specific gravity was 1.005 (1.0 == water) so there was something left in the proto-wine that had not fermented. Was it unfermentable sugars? No clue.

There was also a great deal of material left over from the process. This was not left over yeast. It tasted persimmon-ey. So we tried some in bread and it seemed to taste okay. We froze it and maybe will use it in bread making. Sort of like chestnut flouer.

Regardless, we want to make better use of the fruit material. Wine is good and all but it's not a source of nutrition. We're considering the problem.

As I said, we have about three months of supplies in house. But we're expecting our first harvests in May. The spring peas are in and other cold crops are being prepared for planting.

The big fear we have is another cold, wet May and June like we had last year. We're probably going to put out some crops under row covers to see if that helps. It's possible that eventually we'll have to follow some of the solar gardening principles (See here.)  and put everything under semi-permanent covers. At least until July. But we won't have that ready this year.

That's it for now.

Be safe out there. Maintain social distance. Don't be stupid. This bug is nasty to people with comorbidities such as age, obesity, smoking or diabetes. It turns out over 35% of the population has one or more of these so if we're not personally vulnerable someone right next to us is.

The whole idea is to keep within the capacity of the health care system so people don't die from lack of care rather than the disease itself.

I was at Boskone 57

I was at Boskone 57. Here was my schedule.

I will be at Boskone 57 at the Westin this coming weekend. (Feb 14-Feb 16, 2020)

Come and have fun with me.

Here’s my schedule.

14 Feb 2020, Friday 17:00 - 17:25, Independence (Westin)

Reading: Steven Popkes

From my new story collection, Simple Things. Available here. The print version will be available at Larry Smith books in the dealer room.

15 Feb 2020, Saturday 13:00 - 13:50, Marina 1 (Westin)

Alien Tales of Reproduction

Life persists! But what might life look like on alien worlds? From fungi to non-carbon life forms, we look at interesting other ways of nature contributing to the next generation—wherever and whatever it may be.

15 Feb 2020, Saturday 14:00 - 14:50, Burroughs (Westin)

Genetic Engineering in SF

We have developed the ability to modify and change the genes in plants, animals, and creatures that fall into neither category. To some degree, we have the power to play god, but what are the possible consequences? What is actually possible versus probable? Can we create new species? Can we solve health care problems before conception? Can we grow non-sentient meat like we grow corn? Can we modify humanity to withstand climate change? If the science were only possible, what changes might we make to create a better future for mankind?

Boskone 57 Book Party

15 Feb 2020, Saturday 18:30 - 19:30, Galleria - Stage (Westin)

Come join the fun at Boskone 57’s Book Party. You’ll meet the authors and publishers who have new books coming out at the con! This is your chance to see what’s new from writers you already love, as well as those you have yet to discover.

I will have swag.

16 Feb 2020, Sunday 11:00 - 11:50, Marina 4 (Westin)

Adventures in Eco-Fiction

Since the ancient tales of Great Floods, storytellers (like our panelists, for instance) have set their adventurers moving through half-drowned cities, poisoned hills, deserts that eat men, and worlds overgrown by plants. When does a story’s ecology stop being a setting and become a character? How much real science should be behind a good eco-adventure? Can a story be eco-centric without being eco-catastrophic?

Autographing

16 Feb 2020, Sunday 12:00 - 12:50, Galleria - Autographing (Westin)

Bring what you want. I will sign it.

Why There is Hope

(Picture from here.)

I spoke last week on the disheartening aspects of the issues we’re facing today. It occurred to me that I couldn’t talk about one side of the problem without talking about the other side.

While I have problems with our cultural moment inhibiting us, there are many, many causes for hope. We can solve the problems in front of us—many of the solutions are either on the table or about to be. We just have to reach out and grab them.

Here are just a few.

Energy

We get enough renewable sources of power to more than cover our needs. Like so many things, the problem is not production. It is distribution and storage.

We have a head start on the storage aspect by virtue of lithium ion batteries. New sources of lithium in South America and other places make using these batteries relatively cheap—the Tesla Power Wall is an example. You can put more power into a “wall” than into a score of lead-acid batteries. While lead batteries are still cheaper, lithium batteries have a much higher density and better charge history.

But lithium ion batteries are just a stopgap. They depend on lithium, for one. Lithium is not such a common material. Lithium ion batteries are and will always likely be a bit on the expensive side. We need something cheap enough it will replace the gas-fired turbine that is in reserve for when the sun don’t shine.

To this end there are a number of interesting alternatives being worked on.

In the periodic table, sodium lies just below lithium. Chemical properties have a tendency to group on the columns in the table and the sodium/lithium relationship is no exception. There has been a lot of work on sodium-ion batteries. This is extremely exciting. There is absolutely no shortage of sodium in the world. In fact, one of the side products of desalination is—you guessed it—sodium. Total tonnage of lithium mined in 2018 was 85k metric tons. There are 35g salt in every litre of saltwater. To get the same amount of sodium would take (if I’ve done the math correctly) 24 billion litres—about 24 million cubic meters. Right now there is, world wide, about 86.55 million cubic meters of water being desailnated every day. Sourcing the sodium won’t be a problem.

But I’m even more excited by iron flow batteries. These are batteries that depend on a fluid flow of ion exchange. It is not as energy dense as lithium batteries but they are very cheap and environmentally responsible. ESS is a startup that intends to act as an energy storage system for business and—most importantly—power plants. Remember that gas turbine on stand by I mentioned? This is where they would be effective.

There are a lot of storage solutions being worked on and when you read the research it looks like we are not far from real solutions.

Which brings us to distribution.

Probably you’ve heard of the Smart Grid—having the grid smart enough to route power more efficiently. This is one of the things that makes having home solar power really a game changer. Right now your solar party goes on the grid to be shipped somewhere else. Probably it transfers to local stations and maybe from there it can be distributed. But that doesn’t make much sense when your neighbors are right down the street. If the grid can pull in your power why can’t it send it down your street?

The Smart Grid does more than that. It can be locally resilient. It can allow you as a producer get the most bang for your buck. If you have solar and local storage, why can’t you sell it back that night when it is most needed?

A Smart Grid might also be poised to take advantage of high temperature superconductors. Right now, the highest temperature super conductor is about -23 C. But it’s under incredible pressure so it certainly isn’t ready for prime time. At normal atmospheric pressure the high temperature is about -135C.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the power production research. We’re getting better and better at solar, wind and water power. But I’m, frankly, much more excited by new nuclear power approaches.

While renewable power systems are really important and will have to be a major part of the solution, there are incredibly power intensive applications that may exceed them. I’m talking about iron and aluminum production and that order of magnitudes. About half a pound of CO2 is produced for each pound of aluminum produced.

One of the nice things about electricity is, like money, it is fungible. The same thing can be used in many different ways. This means the output of a heavy power production plant can be used for industry just as well as it can be used for cooking ramen.

Here are three new areas of nuclear research that I find interesting:

The first is thorium reactors. Thorium is more abundant than uranium and has much less opportunity to make nuclear weapons. It has better physical and fuel properties and doesn’t have the same scale of nuclear waste problems.

The second is the traveling wave ractor. I’ve heard that Bill Gates is funding this one to some degree. Imagine a sort of pipe packed with material. On one end there is more enriched material. It is “lit” and begins producing heat through fission. That reaction not only heats water to run a steam turbine, it also transmutes adjacent material into a fissionable state. Which, in turn, generates heat, etc. It’s also called a “nuclear candle.”

There are different configurations for this that are not a linear construction like a pipe. But that is the idea. (In September, TerraPower and the China National Nuclear Corporation signed a memorandum to jointly develop this technoligy. This was abandoned in 2019 due to restrictions placed on it by the Trump administration.)

Finally, there is the old standby, fusion power.

This is a hard problem. It’s why people have been saying that no matter when you ask about it, it’s always fifty years in the future.

That said, there have been some very interesting developments that suggest it may actually become doable in the near future. I would not wager a lot of money on it but I would wager some. Certainly, it’s the correct long term solution. The above two technologies, coupled with reneables, would give us the breathing room we need to finish development of fusion. There are some significant major energy requirements in our future and we will need a much larger source of power than we have now. We’re need power for those lasers to send off probes to Alpha Centauri.

Medicine

We are on the cusp of really starting to attack the problems of aging. I’m just going to talk about a few:

A while back there was a length of life study of diabetics. Diabetics generally have a significantly reduced lifespan even when the problem is controlled. They found one population of type 2 diabetics that had an average lifespan that exceeded the control group. When they investigated this they discovered this group was taking metformin. Metformin is a cheap, well tolerated drug.

Subsequent studies have suggested that it has a beneficial effect on many age related conditions. There is now longevity study for it.  

You can always tell when something works: Big Pharma circles around it like sharks after a wounded seal.

Recently, a fish oil derivative has been approved by the FDA as a heart disease.

My own favorite is some research in intracellular antiviral responses. This mechanism is a relatively weak response when compared to the normal immune response. Essentially, if a cell detects it’s been infected it kills itself. The idea is that initially there aren’t very many cells that get infected by the virus so we can afford to lose them. In addition, the infected cell is compromised anyway so it’s a small loss.

Most pathogenic viruses have figured this one out. Which is why they are pathogens.

There’s been some work in attaching virus identification molecules to triggers in the system, enhancing the response. Thus, a mouse cell would be infected and in the normal course of events burst with new viruses and the organism dies. The engineered protien identifies the virus and triggers the cell death.

Environment

Conservation systems are also becoming mainstream—we have all seen how LED lighting can now be competitive with other forms so powering a home takes less energy. We need it. CO2 is going to make our lives miserable.

It’s all well and good if we stop putting CO2 into the air. What do we do with the CO2 that’s already there?

Recent research has suggested that reforestation might well get a huge bang for the buck by something as simple as reforestation. Remember the global warming problem is two fold: 1) We are putting out an enormous amount of fossil carbon into the atmosphere and 2) We’re removing many mechanisms by which that carbon is pulled out of the atmosphere.

Apparently, this has a much bigger impact than was previously considered. It’s cheap and it’s scalable. Consider it geoengineering that we can live with. Or would you like to put up enough hydrogen sulfide to block the sun?

Plastic is another problem. There are two big problems here: 1) plastics that have already degraded into micro plastics and 2) that fact we’re still producing it.

It’s probable we’re not going to get rid of plastics—it has become just too useful. That leaves two other alternatives: better recycling and biodegredation.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the loss of recycling capability in recent years. Let’s be clear. Most plastics can be recycled. It’s not a matter of technology. It’s a matter of labor and energy.

There are a number of communities springing up that demonstrate. The one I like is Precious Plastics. They have developed methods and techniques to take things considered “unrecyclable” and, well, recycle them into building products, textiles and jewelry.

Microplastics are created by us and dumped into waterways and the sea and they are also created by plastics that are ground up by ocean action.

Capturing microplastics before they reach the ocean is an area of ongoing research. Here are a couple of interesting technologies that may be fruitful.

This one is strange: the cora ball. It claims to capture 26% if microfibers before they ever get out of the washing machine. I don’t think any consumer item is going to be that effective. But I could see technology like this introduced into washing machines. This article attacks the problem in a larger scale manner.

There are research efforts in trying to clear the microplastics out of the ocean. Alfa Laval has some pilot projects on doing this.

But we still have to clear the material that is already there. That is a huge problem for which I haven’t seen a solution. Any process that filters out microplastics also filters out plankton and we’d have to put that back uninjured.

Recycling microplastics has a different scale of problem than full sized products. Full sized products can be sorted. Different materials have different recycling techniques. That said, I don’t think this is insurmountable.

Community

I’ve saved the best for last.

One thing the internet has given us is the ability to form communities. Many artistic, technological and scientific endeavors have been enabled by using indie-go-go and kickstarter. The above Precious Plastic is a world wide community.

It’s convenient to rail against the bad communities. The same medium that gave us Precious Plastic also gives us neo-nazies.

That said, we are—as a community of human beings—are at the cusp of amazing things. Human beings have always been a mix of cooperative and antagonistic individuals. We invented religion and government to keep ourselves in harness to one another, to pick cooperation over conflict. That we enabled conflicts between religions and governments should come as no surprise. Gaming the system is always one of our options.

But the tribalisms, conflicts and grudges that got us here will not get us much further. We cannot solve these problems without working together.

All that holds us back is us.