Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Technology

Health

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Worldview may have more impact on mental health than chemical imbalances – study (Ryan Foley, 30 September 2024, Christianity Today)

The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University released the study Tuesday, attributing the rise in mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and fear, to what researcher George Barna calls “worldview deficiencies” rather than “psychological or chemical imbalances.”

The findings are based on interviews conducted in January with 2,000 U.S. adults aged 18 or older, with a sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

The report highlighted mental health struggles among younger generations, noting that 56% of Generation Z and 49% of millennials regularly experience anxiety, fear or depression. Generation Z refers to the youngest group of American adults, while millennials are defined as those born between 1984 and 2002. In total, one in three adults from these generations has at least one diagnosable mental disorder.

Health Identitarianism

JUST DON’T CALL IT SYSTEMIC:

The Downstream Effects of Fixing a Racist Lung Test (Felice J. Freyer, Harvard Public Health, 09.24.2024, UnDark)

Before, the computer program that assessed lung function sorted patients into one of four categories: Caucasian, Black, Asian, or Hispanic. It automatically lowered the threshold for what is “normal” for Black and Asian patients. It’s a startling example of how racial bias has literally been written into the machinery of 21st-century health care and how formulas based on supposed racial differences have skewed decision-making in many corners of medicine. Boston Medical Center is among the institutions working to address this problem, after an April 2023 recommendation by the American Thoracic Society that laboratories adopt a race-neutral algorithm, or set of rules, for assessments. But with thousands of lung-function laboratories and clinics scattered across the country, the movement for change faces manifold obstacles and thorny consequences.

Applying the race-neutral algorithm means broadly that Black patients will be deemed sicker and White ones healthier than before. A higher proportion of Black people (and, to a lesser extent, Asians) will be designated impaired — which could make them ineligible for certain occupations but increase their access to disability benefits, additional testing, and referral for lung transplants. White people will experience the opposite, with some potentially seeing their disability benefits reduced or eliminated.

Energy

BUT THEN, YOU KNEW THAT ALREADY…:

Even solar energy’s biggest fans are underestimating it: Solar’s extraordinary forecast-defying growth, explained. (Umair Irfan, Sep 20, 2024, Vox

“Solar does continue to surprise us,” said Gregory Nemet, who wrote How Solar Energy Became Cheap, in an email. “It seems like it shouldn’t at this point. It’s been roughly 30 percent growth each year for 30 years. And costs continue to fall so new users — and new uses — continue to emerge.”

In the past year, solar power has experienced Brobdingnagian growth, even by solar standards. According to a new report from Ember, an energy think tank, the world is on track to install 29 percent more solar energy capacity this year — a total of 593 gigawatts — compared to last year, which was already a record year. This is more than one-quarter of the electricity produced by every operating coal plant in the world combined. In 2020, the whole world had installed just 760 GW of solar in total.

Energy

IT’S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

Electricity That Costs Nothing—or Even Less? It’s Happening More and More (Matthew Dalton, Sept. 22, 2024, WSJ)


Wholesale prices swing wildly each hour of the day, and even more so as a larger share of electricity flows from wind and solar installations. Because the generation costs of wind or solar farms are negligible, market prices will be near zero when there is enough renewable power to cover most of a region’s electricity demand.

Electricity market dynamics get weirder when renewable-energy producers don’t have an incentive to stop feeding power into the grid, usually because of government subsidies. Then grids can be flooded with excess power, pushing prices into negative territory.

Van Diesen said he’s made 30 euros, equivalent to around $34, over the past five months charging his car, enough to cover the service fee from his power supplier, a Norwegian company called Tibber.

“I’m charging the car for free,” said van Diesen, who is part of a group of clean-energy enthusiasts in the Netherlands who call themselves green nerds. “To me it’s also like a hobby and a game—how far can I go?”

Doing laundry in the evening? The electricity could be free a few hours later when demand dies down and the wind picks up. Likewise, in regions with lots of solar power, charging an electric vehicle in the morning is usually far more expensive than powering up under the midday sun—or whenever the price is right.

In the U.S., most states don’t currently allow such real-time pricing, but many think that will change. Already, in some of the world’s biggest economies from Western Europe to California, the occurrence of zero and negative wholesale power prices is growing fast.

Energy

YOUR NEXT PLANE WILL BE A VOLT:

Full-scale demonstrator paves the way for hybrid-electric airliner (Ben Coxworth, September 12, 2024, New Atlas)

What this means is that for flights of up to 200 km (124 miles), the aircraft will just use two electric motors located relatively close in to the fuselage on each wing. For going farther – up to 400 km (249 miles) – two small turboprop engines located farther out on the wings will kick in to extend the aircraft’s range.

One charge of the aircraft’s BAE-Systems-designed batteries should take only 30 minutes.


Like other electric airliners, the ES-30 should produce fewer carbon emissions than its conventional counterparts, while also being quieter, cheaper to operate, and easier to maintain. Additionally, because its electric motors quickly deliver maximum torque, it will be able to take off from runways as short as 1,100 m (3,609 ft) – with its turboprops helping.


Sporting a 32-meter (105-ft) wingspan, the fully-functional new demonstrator aircraft is the planned size of the ES-30.

Health

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

When pain really is in your head (Nancy Shute, 9/-7/24, Science News)


As we report in this issue, researchers are now getting a better handle on the complexities of chronic pain, including the brain’s role in amplifying or maintaining pain, and people’s perceptions. As freelance science journalist Cassandra Willyard reports, scientists are pursuing possibilities ranging from new medications to a tiny injectable electrode to forms of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help patients grasp that chronic pain is sometimes a misfiring signal from the brain that can be managed. Rather than one-size-fits-all, these treatments will be tailored to the patient, and will likely include multiple treatments to better address the complexities of chronic pain.

Deflation Energy

AS ENERGY COSTS TREND TOWARDS ZERO…:

Some Signs of Renewed American Techno-Optimism (James Pethokoukis, 9/03/24, AEIdeas)

A Pew Research poll last month found 56 percent of us favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, up from 43 percent in 2020. The National Nuclear Energy Public Opinion Survey, conducted in May, found that 77 percent favored using nuclear energy for electricity in the USA, a record high.

Given public opinion, maybe it’s not surprising that nuclear energy may benefit no matter who wins the presidential election in November.[…]

Kamala Harris hasn’t been so definite, but analysts think she would also be supportive by continuing the pro-nuclear policies contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, including various production and investment tax credits. In “Nuclear revival’ priced into a potential Harris administration,” the Financial Times points out that if Harris wins, a likely Republican-controlled Senate would block major climate legislation. Moreover, recent Supreme Court rulings have limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority on climate regulations, making agency-led climate action more difficult. This shifts the focus to Congress, “and that means Harris will need to find climate policies that have bipartisan support—like nuclear power,” one investment analyst told the Financial Times.

This is all very encouraging, especially when you add in the declining political support for severe limitations on AI due to fear of science-fictional threats. The combination of more energy and more intelligence is what made the modern world and will help make a better world tomorrow.

Health

CHASING FADS:

The Case for Hypochondria (Anna Altman, August 21, 2024, New Republic)

“Hypochondria has been called ‘the ancient malady,’” writes Caroline Crampton in her lyrical new book, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. “For as long as humans have had an understanding of health, there has been anxiety about it”—especially when that understanding is subject to superstition and misconception.

What happens with that worry—what behaviors develop, how much it hampers or deforms us, how it relates to our symptoms and our interpretation of them—is where things get tricky. If doctors tell us there is nothing wrong with us, but we persist in our anxiety, are we acting pathologically? Or are we experiencing something as yet unknown, at the edge of medical knowledge? Is hypochondria a somatic condition—a form of mental illness, an experience of the mind expressed in the body—or is it rooted in physical experience? Is it a diffuse anxiety about health, fear of contracting communicable disease, or the conviction that an illness is already present? Is it a form of obsessive compulsion? What is hypochondria’s relationship to diagnosed illness, anyway? Is it always an unhinged departure from what’s happening in the body, or is it sometimes a reasonable response to the uncertainty of corporeal experience?

It was bad enough when hypochondria was just a form of keeping up with the Joneses, but now that so many “conditions” have been valorized it’s also a way of making yourself seem special, without any risk of being judged weak.

« Previous Page — Next Page »

You Missed

Robotics/AI

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU EXPECT:

India

THE NEXT ORBAN?:

One Economy to Rule Them All

RISE THE TIDE:

Film/TV

IT DEMONSTRTES THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF EMPATHY:

Copyright © All rights reserved | Blogus by Themeansar.