Posts Tagged ‘invention’
“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…
Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…
In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…
… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.
Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.
I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…
[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]
We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.
Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.
The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.
There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”
Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.
Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.
And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.
Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.
For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).
We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…
… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.
In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).
There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.
My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.
On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz
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As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.
“This incompleteness is all we have”*…
The impulse to “systemitize” morality is as old as philosophy. Many now hope that AI will discover and organize moral truths. But Elad Uzan suggests that Kurt Gödel’s work on incompleteness demonstrates that deciding what is right will always be our burden…
Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted with the highest moral responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even mediating conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human progress: an entity unburdened by emotion, prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical decisions with impeccable precision. Unlike human judges or policymakers, a machine would not be swayed by personal interests or lapses in reasoning. It does not lie. It does not accept bribes or pleas. It does not weep over hard decisions.
Yet beneath this vision of an idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined to a simulacrum of ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might only reproduce our limitations, not transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition, historical awareness and context – qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in the first place.
Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as conclusions, but as starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism, which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle that one should act to maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for example, that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be judged by their consequences for total happiness. As computational resources increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed ethical assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations.
But what, exactly, does it mean to formalise something like ethics? The question is easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long played a central role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single physical theory that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories, each designed to describe specific aspects of the Universe: from the behaviour of quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge. Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion toward Earth’s centre; Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of gravity. These explanations are not just different; they are incompatible. Yet both share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates – assumptions about motion, force or mass – and derive increasingly complex consequences. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and James Clerk Maxwell’s equations are classic examples: compact, elegant formulations from which wide-ranging predictions about the physical world can be deduced.
Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like physical theories, they attempt to describe a domain – in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge and, even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set of foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral problems. A consequentialist begins with the idea that actions should maximise wellbeing; a deontologist starts from the idea that actions must respect duties or rights. These basic commitments function similarly to their counterparts in physics: they define the structure of moral reasoning within each ethical theory.
Just as AI is used in physics to operate within existing theories – for example, to optimise experimental designs or predict the behaviour of complex systems – it can also be used in ethics to extend moral reasoning within a given framework. In physics, AI typically operates within established models rather than proposing new physical laws or conceptual frameworks. It may calculate how multiple forces interact and predict their combined effect on a physical system. Similarly, in ethics, AI does not generate new moral principles but applies existing ones to novel and often intricate situations. It may weigh competing values – fairness, harm minimisation, justice – and assess their combined implications for what action is morally best. The result is not a new moral system, but a deepened application of an existing one, shaped by the same kind of formal reasoning that underlies scientific modelling. But is there an inherent limit to what AI can know about morality? Could there be true ethical propositions that no machine, no matter how advanced, can ever prove?
These questions echo a fundamental discovery in mathematical logic, probably the most fundamental insight ever to be proven: Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. They show that any logical system powerful enough to describe arithmetic is either inconsistent or incomplete. In this essay, I argue that this limitation, though mathematical in origin, has deep consequences for ethics, and for how we design AI systems to reason morally…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The incompleteness of ethics,” from @aeon.co.
And as if that were not enough, consider the cultural challenge implicit in this chart:
More background at “Cultural Bias in LLMs” (and here and here).
* Charles Bukowski
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As we own up to it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil received a patent (#2,292,387) for a frequency-hopping radio communication system which later became the basis for modern technologies like Bluetooth, wireless telephones, and Wi-Fi.
Hedy Lamarr made it big in acting before ever moving to the United States. Her role in the Czech film Ecstasy got international attention in 1933 for containing scandalous, intimate scenes that were unheard of in the movie industry up until then.
Backlash from her early acting career was the least of her worries, however, as tensions began to rise in Europe. Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, grew up in a Catholic household in Austria, but both of her parents had a Jewish heritage. In addition, she was married to Friedrich Mandl, a rich ammunition manufacturer with connections to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Her time with Friedrich Mandl was bittersweet. While the romance quickly died and Mandl became very possessive of his young wife, Lamarr was often taken to meetings on scientific innovations in the military world. These meetings are said to have been the spark that led to her becoming an inventor. As tensions in both her household and in the world around her became overwhelming, she fled Europe and found her way to the United States through a job offer from Hollywood’s MGM Studios.
Lamarr became one of the most sought-after leading women in Hollywood and starred in popular movies like the 1939 film Algiers, but once the United States began helping the Allies and preparing to possibly enter the war, Lamarr almost left Hollywood forever. Her eyes were no longer fixed on the bright lights of the film set but on the flashes of bombs and gunfire. Lamarr wanted to join the Inventors’ Council in Washington, DC, where she thought she would be of better service to the war effort.
Lamarr’s path to inventing the cornerstone of Wi-Fi began when she heard about the Navy’s difficulties with radio-controlled torpedoes. She recruited George Antheil, a composer she met through MGM Studios, in order to create what was known as a Secret Communication System.
The idea behind the invention was to create a system that constantly changed frequencies, making it difficult for the Axis powers to decode the radio messages. The invention would help the Navy make their torpedo systems become more stealthy and make it less likely for the torpedoes to be rendered useless by enemies.
Lamarr was the brains behind the invention, with her background knowledge in ammunition, and Antheil was the artist that brought it to life, using the piano for inspiration. In 1942, under her then-married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, she filed for a patent for the Secret Communication System, patent case file 2,292,387, and proposed it to the Navy.
The first part of Lamarr and Antheil’s Secret Communication System story did not see a happy Hollywood ending. The Navy refused to accept the new technology during World War II. Not only did the invention come from a civilian, but it was complex and ahead of its time.
As the invention sat unused, Lamarr continued on in Hollywood and found other ways to help with the war effort, such as working with the USO. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s Hollywood career came to an end that her invention started gaining notice.
Around the time Lamarr filmed her last scene with the 1958 film The Female Animal, her patented invention caught the attention of other innovators in technology. The Secret Communication System saw use in the 1950s during the development of CDMA network technology in the private sector, while the Navy officially adopted the technology in the 1960s around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The methods described in the patent assisted greatly in the development of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Despite the world finally embracing the methods of the patent as early as the mid-to-late 1950s, the Lamarr-Antheil duo were not recognized and awarded for their invention until the late 1990s and early 2000s. They both received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, and in 2014 they were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame…
“Heap high the farmer’s wintry hoard! Heap high the golden corn! No richer gift has Autumn poured From out her lavish horn!”*…
… but exercise care. In an excerpt from his new book, We Are Eating the Earth- The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, Michael Grunwald with the story of Tim Searchinger, the cascading impact of ethanol production on climate change, and the importance of fighting for lost causes…
Something felt off.
Tim Searchinger lacked the proper credentials to say exactly what was off that day in the spring of 2003. He was a lawyer, not a scientist or economist. He was reading a complex technical paper on an unfamiliar topic, produced by well-respected researchers at the world-renowned Argonne National Laboratory. Sitting at his cluttered desk in the Environmental Defense Fund’s sixth-floor offices in Washington, D.C., overlooking the famous back entrance to the Hilton where President Ronald Reagan was shot, he just had a sense the paper didn’t add up.
Searchinger tended to distrust new information until he could study it to a pulp. He never assumed consensus views were correct, conventional wisdom was wise, or sophisticated-looking scientific analyses reflected reality. He questioned everything, so his unease that day didn’t feel particularly unusual. He had no inkling it would eventually lead him to a new profession—and the world to a new way of thinking about food, farming, land use, and climate change.
The Argonne study analyzed whether fueling cars with corn ethanol rather than gasoline reduced greenhouse gas emissions, which did not seem like a particularly urgent question in 2003. And Searchinger was a wetlands guy fighting to save the streams and swamps that provide kitchens and nurseries for fish and wildlife, not an energy-and-climate guy trying to keep carbon out of the atmosphere. So it was a bit odd that he would slog through such an obscure report.
But not too odd.
He was also an agriculture guy, because farms were the main threat to the wetlands he wanted to protect. And he was above all a details guy, a data sponge willing to soak up minutiae far too technical for less obsessive laymen. The revelatory stuff usually seemed to be hidden in arcane modeling assumptions and other fine print. He was a compulsive reader of boring papers, all the way through the footnotes, and he had learned from his uphill legal and political battles that knowledge could be a powerful weapon against money. He always did the reading, and his burden in life was that others didn’t.
Ethanol was just his latest uphill battle.
It was the most common form of alcohol, the fermented magic in beer, wine, and liquor. It was also a functional automotive fuel; it had powered the first internal combustion engine, and Henry Ford once called it the future of transportation. Gasoline turned out to be more efficient and better for engines, so ethanol mostly ended up in solvents and booze. But in the 1970s, ethanol distilled from corn—the “field corn,” or maize, grown by grain farmers, not the “sweet corn” you eat off the cob—had carved out a small role as an additive in US fuel markets.
That was the start of a twisted political love story. Farm interests, whose outsized political influence dated back to America’s origins as an agrarian nation, seized on ethanol as a new government gravy train. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, founded under President Abraham Lincoln for the express purpose of supporting farmers, backed ethanol as enthusiastically as it backed farm subsidies, farm loans, and other federal farm aid. And presidential candidates sucked up to farm interests so reliably that a West Wing episode lampooned the quadrennial tradition of ethanol pandering before the Iowa caucus, as the fictional future president Matt Santos considered denouncing subsidies he considered stupid and wasteful.
“You come out against ethanol, you’re dead meat,” an aide warned Santos. “Bambi would have a better shot at getting elected president of the NRA than you’ll have of getting a single vote in this caucus.”
The Midwestern grain interests behind ethanol did have serious political swat. The top ethanol producer was agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, whose former CEO helped finance the Watergate burglary, and whose reputation as an all-powerful force of corporate darkness would soon be satirized in The Informant! The U.S. industry owed its existence to a lavish tax break for domestic ethanol and a punitive tariff on foreign ethanol, both of which owed their existence to Big Ag lobbyists. The corn the industry distilled into fuel was also subsidized through “loan deficiency payments,” “counter-cyclical payments,” and a slew of other bureaucratically differentiated programs that all diverted taxpayer dollars into farmer wallets. The farm lobby usually got what it wanted out of Washington—not only subsidies and tax breaks, but exemptions from wetlands protections, pollution limits, and other regulations. Even the federal rule limiting the hours truckers could drive had a carve-out for agricultural deliveries.
Still, barely 1 percent of America’s fuel was ethanol, and barely 1 percent of America’s corn became ethanol. The issue wasn’t on Searchinger’s radar until Big Ag began pushing an ethanol mandate, and he began worrying it could become the corn industry’s new growth engine.
His concern had nothing to do with climate change, because that wasn’t on his radar, either. It wasn’t yet a front-burner issue in Washington, and he knew no more about it than the average newspaper reader. He was focused on preserving what was left of nature in farm country, and preventing polluted farm runoff from fouling rivers and streams. More ethanol would mean more cornfields, more pollution, and more drainage of the Midwest’s few remaining wetlands.
Most Americans seemed to think the middle of the country was somehow ordained to be amber waves of grain—he used to think so, too—but he always kept in mind that it had once been a vibrant landscape of tallgrass prairies and forested swamps, a temperate-zone Serengeti with spectacularly diverse plant communities and birds that darkened the sky. Washington had accelerated the near-total obliteration of that ecosystem, with incentives as well as rhetoric encouraging farmers to grow crops from “fence row to fence row,” and ethanol seemed like the latest excuse to complete Middle America’s metamorphosis into an uninterrupted cornfield. Searchinger was on the prowl for science he could use to prevent that, so when he heard about the Argonne paper, in those days before studies were routinely posted online, he called the lead author, a Chinese-born environmental scientist named Michael Wang, and asked him to FedEx it.
Unfortunately, Wang’s team had calculated that ethanol generated 20 percent fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline, a modest but measurable improvement. Wang had helped pioneer the “life-cycle analyses” that were becoming standard in the field, and the emissions model known as GREET that he developed at Argonne was considered state-of-the-art, while Searchinger had never even read a climate study. So he didn’t really have standing to object.
But he did know models could mislead, because one of his professional obsessions was exposing how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cooked the books of cost-benefit analyses to justify its own ridiculously destructive water projects. He had learned from Army Corps documents how economic and scientific models could be structured and twisted to reach convenient conclusions, how garbage in plus garbage assumptions could produce garbage out. And when he started thumbing through the ethanol study, he had familiar bad vibes.
Wang had found that drilling oil and refining it into gasoline emitted much fewer greenhouse gases than planting, fertilizing, and harvesting corn and refining it into ethanol. Initially, Searchinger was confused: If the agro-industrial complex was twice as carbon-intensive as the petro-industrial complex, why would ethanol have a smaller carbon footprint?
The study’s answer was that cornfields, unlike oil wells, were carbon sinks. The Argonne team assumed that growing corn on a farm offset the tailpipe emissions from burning corn in an engine, because cornstalks sucked carbon out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. The climate case for farm-grown fuels was that ethanol merely recycled carbon, while gasoline liberated carbon that had been buried for eons. It made sense that ethanol, a renewable fuel, would be climate-friendlier than gasoline, a fossil fuel. “Renewable” sounded clean and green, while “fossil” evoked zombies coming back from the dead to destroy the earth.
Searchinger’s spidey-sense kept tingling, though. His father, another question-everything guy, liked to quote H. L. Mencken: “For every complex human problem, there’s a solution that’s clear, simple and wrong.” That’s what ethanol felt like. And the more he thought about the study, the less he understood its conclusions.
Yes, corn soaked up carbon as it grew. But it soaked up just as much carbon whether it was grown for fuel or food! Why would growing corn for ethanol and burning it in an engine be any climate-friendlier than growing that same corn for food and burning an equivalent amount of gasoline in an engine? The carbon absorbed in the field wouldn’t change; neither would the carbon emitted from the car. If the only difference was that producing ethanol emitted much more carbon than producing gasoline, where were ethanol’s benefits?
That led back to his original concern: If more corn was diverted from food to fuel, how would the lost food be replaced? Presumably, Midwest farmers would plant more corn, converting more wetlands into farmland that would get blasted with more chemicals. Again, he wasn’t focused on the climate impact, just the environmental impact of losing habitat and increasing pollution. But he had a hunch the Argonne researchers and their spiffy analytical tools were also understating the climate costs of using grain to fuel our cars instead of ourselves.
Searchinger loved figuring things out, and he was on the verge of figuring something out that would transform climate analysis.
Uncharacteristically, though, he lost interest.
For one thing, it became clear that climate would be irrelevant to the debate over the proposed “Renewable Fuels Standard.” With America at war in Iraq, ethanol’s boosters were touting the mandate as a win-win that would reduce reliance on Middle Eastern oil while propping up demand for Midwestern corn. They weren’t touting it as a climate solution, because Washington wasn’t looking for climate solutions. The Senate had unanimously rejected the Kyoto Protocol a few years earlier, and Congress had ignored the issue ever since.
It also became clear the biofuels debate would be another charade controlled by farm interests and farm-friendly politicians. President George W. Bush had genuflected to ethanol in Iowa, as future presidents always do. (Even The West Wing’s Santos caved.) Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, whose top aide later became an ethanol lobbyist, and Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois—who also became an ethanol lobbyist, before going to jail in a child molestation scandal—were both farm-state biofuels boosters.
Searchinger did try to lobby some non-Midwestern politicians to oppose the mandate, arguing it would punish their constituents at the pump to subsidize out-of-state agribusinesses. But even an aide to Democratic Senator Jon Corzine, a former Wall Street titan from corn-free New Jersey, sheepishly admitted his boss couldn’t buck the ethanol lobby, because he might need Iowans someday.
Come on, Searchinger pleaded, the guy who ran Goldman Sachs thinks he’s running for president?
“Tim, they’re all running for president,” the aide replied.
Searchinger sometimes joked that he was the patron saint of almost-lost causes, because he spent his days failing to save wetlands, failing to stop farms from degrading the environment, and failing to reform the Army Corps. He didn’t go looking for uphill battles—he’s a generally friendly guy with no particular lust for conflict—but he didn’t shy away from them, and as an enviro in ag world, he ended up in a lot of them. Even his victories felt temporary, because defenders of nature have to win again and again to keep wild places wild, while despoilers of nature only have to win once. And unlike campaigns to save the whales or the Grand Canyon, causes that inspired public outrage and sympathetic press, his fine-print fights to limit the damage from American agriculture went mostly unnoticed.
Usually, he was fine with that. He was a relatively happy warrior who believed knowledge could at least sometimes be power. But sometimes, power was power, and the anti-ethanol cause felt unusually lost. ADM, which owned half of America’s ethanol plants, seemed to own half of Congress, too. The proposed mandate wasn’t big enough to transform the Midwest, anyway, so he moved on to issues where victory was at least conceivable.
In retrospect, he’s embarrassed by how much he failed to grasp in 2003. At the time, he was totally unaware of the climate benefits of the wetlands he was fighting to save. He also knew almost nothing about international agriculture and its intrusions into tropical rainforests, so he overlooked how mandating farm-grown fuel in America could trigger deforestation and food shortages abroad. It certainly hadn’t dawned on him that biofuels represented a larger land-use problem that threatened humanity’s future on a planet with limited land to use.
Then again, it hadn’t dawned on anyone else, either.
Searchinger would later return to ethanol and climate, making scientific and economic connections the field’s scientists and economists had missed. He would then figure out how agriculture was eating the earth, and create the first serious plan for preventing that. It was an odd plot twist for an urban lawyer whose closest encounter with farm life growing up had been the petting zoo in Central Park.
But not too odd.
Taking on biofuels, and then the broader food and climate problem, required a wonk-crusader smart and stubborn enough to master the intricacies of esoteric models in unfamiliar disciplines, intellectually arrogant enough to believe he could parachute into the new fields and prove the experts wrong, and foolishly romantic enough to believe his impertinent crusades could help save the world. That’s always been who he is…
“How Big Agriculture Mislead the Public About the Benefits of Biofuels,” from @mikegrunwald.bsky.social via @literaryhub.bsky.social.
For more, see this World Resources Institute reports authored by Searchinger: “Why Dedicating Land to Bioenergy Won’t Curb Climate Change.”
* John Greenleaf Whittier
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As we tackle tradeoffs, we might spare a thought for James Lovelock; he died on this date in 2022 (which was also his 103rd birthday). An independent scientist, environmentalist, and futurist, he invented (in 1957) the Electron Capture Detector, a portable analytical instrument able to detect infinitesimal traces of halogenated organic compounds. The device revealed once untraceable amounts in the biosphere, of man-made chemicals such as CFCs or pesticide pollutants. French philosopher Bruno Latour compared that technological advance to the leap when Galileo’s telescope invention could peer deeper into space, revealing so much previously unseen.
He is better known for his Gaia Hypothesis, which he developed in the 1960s while designing scientific instruments for NASA and working with Royal Dutch Shell. Lovelock suggested that the Earth functions as a planet-sized superorganism—subterranean bacteria to the ice crystals of the stratosphere, working in a gigantic living network.
For more on the remarkable man, his accomplishments, and the Gaia Hypothesis, see Jon Watts‘ The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory.
“We must not forget that the wheel is reinvented so often because it is a very good idea”*…
… but when was it first discovered? And, and given its obvious and ubiquitous utility, why there (and not somewhere else)? Kai James offers an answer…
Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.
You’ve resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable.
With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative.
What you don’t realize: You’re witnessing something that will change the course of history – not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity.
Despite the wheel’s immeasurable impact, no one is certain as to who invented it, or when and where it was first conceived. The hypothetical scenario described above is based on a 2015 theory that miners in the Carpathian Mountains – in present-day Hungary – first invented the wheel nearly 6,000 years ago as a means to transport copper ore.
The theory is supported by the discovery of more than 150 miniaturized wagons by archaeologists working in the region. These pint-sized, four-wheeled models were made from clay, and their outer surfaces were engraved with a wickerwork pattern reminiscent of the basketry used by mining communities at the time. Carbon dating later revealed that these wagons are the earliest known depictions of wheeled transport to date.
This theory also raises a question of particular interest to me, an aerospace engineer who studies the science of engineering design. How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not?…
Read on to find out: “How was the wheel invented? Computer simulations reveal the unlikely birth of a world-changing technology nearly 6,000 years ago,” from @us.theconversation.com.
* “We must not forget that the wheel is reinvented so often because it is a very good idea; I’ve learned to worry more about the soundness of ideas that were invented only once.” – David Parnas
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As we roll along, we might we might send a “Alles Gute zum Geburtstag” to man at the center of the question of the invention of another foundational “technology”: the polymathic Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the philosopher, mathematician, inventor (of, among other things, an early calculator) and political adviser.
Leibnitz was important both as a metaphysician and as a logician, but who is probably best remembered for his independent invention of the calculus; he was born on this date in 1646. Leibniz independently discovered and developed differential and integral calculus, which he published in 1684; but he became involved in a bitter priority dispute with Isaac Newton, whose ideas on the calculus were developed earlier (1665), but published later (1687). Scholars largely agree that, in fact, Leibnitz and Newton independently developed “the greatest advance in mathematics that had taken place since the time of Archimedes.”
“If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it”*…
The Shakers, a millennial Christian sect founded in the mid-18th century, are characterized by their simple, communal lives… and their celibacy (as a product of which there are only three known Shakers alive today). That said, they had an outsized impact on design– now on display at Frank Gehry-designed Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Jane Enfield unpacks the Shakers’ legacy…
Vitra Design Museum is presenting The Shakers: A World In Making, an exhibition highlighting the enduring design principles of the 18th-century Shakers who prioritised utilitarianism, craftsmanship and ethics.
Designed by Milan studio Formafantasma, the exhibition spotlights the design legacy of the Shakers, a Protestant sect founded in England around 1747 whose members created unadorned and meticulously built architecture and furniture.
“Today, the relevance of Shaker principles feels more urgent than ever,” Vitra Design Museum curator Mea Hoffmann told Dezeen.
“Their approach to democratic design, combining utilitarian function with exceptional craftsmanship and ethical intent, offers a compelling alternative to the excesses of modern consumer culture.”…
… The historical works were created after the Shakers emigrated to the USA in 1774, where they established 18 communities from Kentucky to Maine and created pieces that set the tone for a utilitarian, wood-heavy trend that endures to this day.
Among Hoffmann’s highlights is an four-metre-long bench from 1855, which was designed as communal but gender-segregated seating for the traditional Shaker meetinghouse.
“Community and shared property were at the heart of Shaker life,” explained the curator.
“There’s something very compelling about the inherent proximity that comes from sitting together on a bench – you can’t help but feel your connection to the people around you.”
Also on display is an “elevator” shoe, created around 1890. The footwear was specially designed with a raised sole for a woman whose legs were of two different lengths to facilitate her mobility.
“The Shakers were dedicated to including all members in daily life and often adapted or created objects to allow everyone to contribute,” noted Hoffmann.
The curator emphasised that the exhibition strives to highlight the Shakers’ knack for embracing external influences despite their particular way of life, highlighting the sect as early adopters of electricity, indoor plumbing and telecommunications.
An object that reflects this is a 1925 radio designed by trailblazer Elder Irving Greenwood, who is said to have persuaded the Canterbury Shakers to install electricity throughout his New Hampshire community in 1909.
“It’s an interesting example of the Shakers’ openness to technological change and innovation,” reflected Hoffmann. “Although they retreated from the world, the radio demonstrates that this apparent division may have been far more permeable.”
“Beyond adopting existing technologies, the Shakers also engineered their own machinery, such as steam engines and specialised cutting devices, to streamline labour-intensive tasks,” continued the curator.
“As they mass-produced their standardised goods, they also developed the tools necessary to improve production.”…
… Considering the sect’s enduring visual language, Hoffmann described the Shakers as holding a “unique position within the design canon”.
“Although their object culture emerged from an organic craft tradition rather than a centralised design ideology, their work has had a lasting influence, particularly on 20th-century Scandinavian designers such as Kaare Klint and Børge Mogensen, and continues to inspire contemporary practitioners today,” said Hoffmann.
“In many ways, Shaker design anticipated modern aesthetics, though it was entirely unintentional,” concluded the curator. “It’s an interesting example of groups of people getting to similar places from very different starting points.”…
More (and more photos) at: “Shaker exhibition at Vitra Design Museum “feels more urgent than ever‘,” from @dezeen.com.
* Shaker maxim
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As we keep it simple, we might spare a thought for a contemporary of the earliest Shakers, Richard Lovell Edgeworth; he died on this date in 1817. A politician and writer, he is best remembered as an inventor (perhaps most notably– and Shaker-like– a turnip-cutter and a velocipede [an early bicycle]).
That said, Edgeworth was no Shaker. He was a member of the Lunar Society, an informal organization of Birmingham-based industrialists, scientists, and intellectuals that met regularly to discuss and share ideas relating to their (amny and various) fields of interest. Other members included Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and James Watt.
And perhaps more tellingly, Edgeworth was anything but celibate: he married four times and fathered 22 children.
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