This interview is extremely fun to listen to. They discuss historic views of how people thought the world worked, and how that got changed over the centures. Lots of fun and wacky ideas, like fossils being rock that tries to become animal!

And the meta-question:

When you’re studying the way that people very far in the past conceived of the world, what they thought about the natural sciences, you just constantly encounter ideas that seem very misguided, kind of batty from our modern point of view. And I think people go in different directions in their aesthetic about how to react to this. Like one strain of thought is that this just shows how hard it is for humans to reason at all. It shows the fallibility of our ability to make sense of the world. And so it should make us extremely humble, and we shouldn’t dismiss the way that they thought about things because we will probably be just as mistaken as they were by the lights of people in the future.

I think another take you might have — which is, I think, less fashionable, but it’s my instinct perhaps because of my personality — is to say, wow, they just thought really stupid stuff. I can’t believe how misguided they were. And I understand how they got there. And if you send me back in time, I would be just as misguided. Absolutely. But nonetheless, this just shows how much progress we’ve made, and how much better we are at figuring things out today.

I am with Rob here, in that we should not have false humility and assume that we are as wrong as our ancestors. We clearly have made progress and can explain the world better than ever before today.

Putting the axe into the right spot and then hitting it with a sledgehammer turns out to work nicely for splitting larger logs. Small ones are easier to just chop.

Since I just claimed that plastic bags are good, in spite of their bad reputation, here is a video that goes through some numbers.

The only thing I can add is that the pollution aspect very much depends on where you are in the world. If that place has a working system of garbage collection and management, then it is very unlikely that a plastic bag ends up in the oceans. So maybe we should spend the money that plastic bans cost on helping poorer places improving their waste management to pollute less.

In any case, I'll happily continue to buy plastic bags, reuse them a few times before they become garbage bags. And pay the counterproductive tax that would rather have me buy something worse.

I got nuthin for ya today! Sleep tight!

I still listen to the excellent podcast with German virologist Christian Drosten and in the latest episode (transcript), he puts the recent media attention for the lab leak hypothesis into context.

Lots of intersting bits of information there! I tried to run some paragraphs through automatic translations, but the result did not do it justice. So brush up your German, if you know some, and do listen or read!

The photo does not do it justice, the magical fog early this morning, when the sun was just about to break through it.

Our two new hop plants, the old Swedish varieties Grimsarbo and Olarsbo, seem to be growing nicely. For the first year, I dont't expect them to make it all the way up their respective 6m high poles, or produce any amount of cones that will be worth harvesting.

North Face, the outdoor clothing brand, apparently refused to sell to an oil company jackets with their logo on it. Which prompted this quite funny response, which shows that 90% of North Face's product line is made out of petroleum products.

I think it is fair to point out such hypocrisy, assuming that the story is indeed as told. Coming from the oil industry, the video of course makes it sound like a good thing to produce clothes out of oil based raw materials, thus #ThankYouNorthFace.

This could easily be spun into a campaign of shaming the company for that very fact. But that would be an example of well-meaning environmentalism gone bad, because contrary to energy production it is often much less resource intensive, and therefore environmentally friendly, to make things from plastic, compared to "organic" materials.

The prime example of this are plastic shopping bags that have been banned or taxed in many places after an outrage some year ago. Never mind that the paper bag that replaced it takes ten times more resources to produce and cannot have a second use as waste bag.

From this book review:

Three hundred years ago, we burned wood for energy. Then there was coal and the steam engine, which gave us the Industrial Revolution. Then there was oil and gas, giving us cars and airplanes. Then there should have been nuclear fission and nanotech, letting you fit a lifetime's worth of energy in your pocket. Instead, we still drive much the same cars and airplanes, and climate change threatens to boil the Earth.
[...]

"Where is my Flying Car?", by J. Storrs Hall, is an attempt to answer that question. His answer is: the Great Stagnation was caused by energy usage flatlining, which was caused by our failure to switch to nuclear energy, which was caused by excessive regulation, which was caused by "green fundamentalism".

Counterfactuals are fun! I think I dismissed them too quickly as unknowable for a long time, but as with mot things, there can be better and worse arguments for how things could have turned out differently.

The environemntal movement is an interesting case, because what is considered good or bad in that context depends very much more on culture than on a problem solving strategy. The underlying conviction that human activity is inherently destructive leads to moralizing calls to give up things, that are not very effective. Whereas the obvious alternative is to improve technology to do more with less environmental impact. But that does not fit the narrative; to berate people and make them feel quilty lets one feel more morally superior and pure.

Would climate change never have become a problem, if the environmental movement would have empraced nuclear power instead of crippling it? No one knows for sure, but it certainly is interesting to think about.

Barbecue season started last week-end.