Articles to 2016-12-25

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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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“Optimism and looking at those things that get better are realism, not a rose tinted glasses. People are more prepared to promote improvements, if they believe in a chance for success.” Thus, freely paraphrased, Hans Rosling in the report by Maxmen. Now if that is not tiqqun olam, then I don’t know what is. According to Jewish teaching there is only one, this world and all divine covenants relate to it alone. A second, secular, subordinate world bound to perish is a Gnostic idea with deep roots in Christendom. The tiny Mitzwah you’re able to perform just now will probably not be the one to tip the scales for Mashiach to come immediately – but it won’t be completely lost and meaningless either.

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I have already commented on the preprint of Collard et al. in the list of 2016-08-28. A novel and promising idea, badly executed with faulty statistics and, unfortunately, not yielding any meaningful result.

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Non-biologists are often surprised by the astonishing speed at which selective breeding can work under optimal conditions. The best known example is cereal domestication which can be achieved in as little as twenty years, seemingly at odds with the archaeological record. Following Mitteroecker et al. it seems that industrial societies are currently generating and establishing a prevalent phenotype that can no longer give birth unaided or at all without caesarean surgery. In engineering we are quite used to optima lying at one end of the range of possibilities requiring a compromise that often comes out in favour of reliability over optimality. The distribution of implemented solutions tends to come out quite similar to Mitteroecker et al.’s figure 1.

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It’s often the senior students like Suzanne Ubick in her BA thesis, who’re least afraid of ridicule and most prepared to think outside the box, often aided by the different kinds of boxes their thinking was reared in. This does not make most of their wild hypotheses less wrong, but they’re at least worth a closer look for hidden gems.

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Griffin & Nesbitt are a confirmatory parallel to the currently dominant hypothesis for human development. Both dinosaurs and humans developed under highly volatile conditions and both responded by a large intraspecific variability – biological in the one case and (proto-)cultural in other.

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Louwen et al. do mention storage in a side remark near the end of their discussion, but omit two points completely:

• When more reserve capacity is needed on permanent standby to compensate for fluctuations, its cost and emissions per actually delivered kWh are bound to rise.
• Storage does not only itself cost money, cause emissions and use up energy in its production, it also lowers efficiency, so less actually end user available energy is produced by PV. This adversely influences both their emissions and their pay-back time. In a long term projection something like three quarters of used energy will have to come from storage with an efficiency of 50 % or less.

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Ludwig et al. is just another study treating models as data. And their statement “Compared to terrestrial proxy data, the CGCM results point to enhanced precipitation during LGM conditions over Europe.” can only be read to mean they take their model to be superior and to correct previous proxy-based assumptions. Models can be helpful, if they are simple and lucid and help to explain and order the data – overfitted abominations with an endless number of meaningless and infinitely tuneable parameters explain nothing.

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