Wood-burning stoves are reckoned to be responsible for thousands of premature deaths due to their particulate output.CC-licensed photo by Andy Rogers on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Fuelish. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
The government’s computing experts say they are terrified • The Atlantic
Charlie Warzel and Ian Bogost:
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Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical. A single program run by the FAA to help air-traffic controllers, En Route Automation Modernization, contains nearly 2 million lines of code; an average iPhone app, for comparison, has about 50,000. The Treasury Department disburses trillions of dollars in payments per year.
Many systems and databases in a given agency feed into others, but access to them is restricted. Employees, contractors, civil-service government workers, and political appointees have strict controls on what they can access and limited visibility into the system as a whole. This is by design, as even the most mundane government databases can contain highly sensitive personal information. A security-clearance database such as those used by the Department of Justice or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, one contractor told us, could include information about a person’s mental-health or sexual history, as well as disclosures about any information that a foreign government could use to blackmail them.
…n the faa, even a small systems disruption could cause mass grounding of flights, a halt in global shipping, or worse, downed planes. For instance, the agency oversees the Traffic Flow Management System, which calculates the overall demand for airspace in U.S. airports and which airlines depend on.
“Going into these systems without an in-depth understanding of how they work both individually and interconnectedly is a recipe for disaster that will result in death and economic harm to our nation,” one FAA employee who has nearly a decade of experience with its system architecture told us.
“‘Upgrading’ a system of which you know nothing about is a good way to break it, and breaking air travel is a worst-case scenario with consequences that will ripple out into all aspects of civilian life. It could easily get to a place where you can’t guarantee the safety of flights taking off and landing.” Nevertheless, last Wednesday Musk posted that “the DOGE team will aim to make rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”
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As I said before: letting people with hammers loose in a nuclear control room.
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Europe ‘not in the AI race today,’ French President Macron says • CNN
Joseph Ataman and Richard Quest:
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For a man who’s spent his career battling to make France more pro-business, Europe’s prospects on artificial intelligence are worrying: an oversight that could cost the bloc dearly.
“We are not in the race today,” French President Emmanuel Macron told CNN’s Richard Quest in an exclusive interview at the Elysee Palace on Thursday. “We are lagging behind.”
“We need an AI agenda,” he said, “because we have to bridge the gap with the United States and China on AI.” The French leader added that he fears Europe becoming merely an AI consumer, losing control over the future direction and development of the technology.
That’s part of the impetus behind this week’s AI summit in Paris — the latest effort by Macron to put France at the heart of the debate and decision-making on international questions of the day.
Macron regularly touts the prospects of Paris-based company Mistral, widely considered OpenAI’s European competitor, which launched a new app on Thursday.
The company boasts of its ability to rival its US competitors, by getting the same results with less computing power needed, although the surprise arrival of lower-cost Chinese competitor DeepSeek has put pressure on the French firm.
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Amazon, Google and verification vendors among ad tech cohort under fire from U.S. senators over child safety shortcomings • Digiday
Marty Swant:
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Adalytics has been a thorn in the side of major ad platforms that have characterized its research as flawed, but now it has found an audience in the highest echelons of government.
Members of Congress have sent letters to major tech companies, including Google and Amazon, expressing concern about ads served on websites known to host child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Signed by U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) the open letters come after new research from watchdog group Adalytics showed examples of ad tech companies serving ads on websites known to carry CSAM.
The letters, sent today, detail “grave” and “profound” concerns after a new Adalytics report found evidence of ads on CSAM websites promoting major brands and other advertisers, including the federal government. The report was shared earlier with lawmakers in private and released publicly today. Letters to Amazon and Google say the companies’ “actions here—or in best case, inaction—are problematic.”
“The dissemination of CSAM is a heinous crime that inflicts irreparable harm on its victims,” senators wrote in the letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “Where digital advertiser networks like Google place advertisements on websites that are known to host such activity, they have in effect created a funding stream that perpetuates criminal operations and irreparable harm to our children.”
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Sites like this can get approval to run adverts in the first place because they’re just money sources for the platforms. There might be a cursory inspection to start with, but how carefully are they monitored afterwards except for spam?
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Billions for ‘unproven’ carbon capture technology will have ‘very significant’ impact on energy bills, MPs warn • Sky News
Sarah Taaffe-Maguire:
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The government is spending £22bn on “unproven” technologies which will have a “very significant effect” on energy bills, according to an influential committee of MPs.
There has been no assessment of whether the programme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is affordable for billpayers, said a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of MPs.
The financial impact on households of funding the project has not been examined by government at all, the PAC said.
Even if the state’s investment pays off, the technology is successful and makes money, there is no way for profits to be shared to bring down bills, it added.
Private sector investors, however, would recoup investment, according to committee chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown.
“All early progress will be underwritten by taxpayers, who currently do not stand to benefit if these projects are successful,” he said. “Any private sector funding for such a project would expect to see significant returns when it becomes a success.”
That’s despite the vast majority (two-thirds) of the £21.7bn investment coming from levies on consumers “who are already facing some of the highest energy bills in the world”, it said.
But there is no evidence to say the programme will be successful despite the government “gambling” its legally mandated net zero targets on the tech, committee chair Sir Geoffrey added.
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Carbon capture is a never-quite-there technology which needs another never-quite-there technology, fusion, to make it even vaguely worthwhile. Chemistry and physics are not our friends in trying to fix our planet’s problems.
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Wood-burning stoves are a serious problem for your health – and the environment • The Conversation
Asit Kumar Mishra and John Wenger:
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There is something cosy and appealing about settling down next to a roaring fire in winter but, every year, nearly 61,000 premature deaths in Europe are caused by air pollution as a result of people burning wood or coal to heat their homes.
Wood-burning stoves are often considered safer, cleaner and more attractive than open fires. This may, in part, explain why from 2021 to 2022, sales of wood-burning stoves increased by 40% in the UK.
However, burning wood is not necessarily a healthier or greener alternative to coal or gas for home heating.
Wood burning produces a complex chemical mixture of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and gases, which can be breathed deep into the lungs. The specific contents vary based on the type of stove and the type of fuel, but chemicals can include carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and a range of volatile organic compounds, such as cancer-causing formaldehyde and benzene.
Exposure to wood smoke affects the heart, blood vessels and the respiratory system – and PM2.5 is considered to be the biggest threat. Wood smoke increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes and can exacerbate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. Exposure to PM2.5 from wood burning can also cause premature death.
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Tricky! If people can’t have gas burners and can’t have wood stoves, they’re not going to be pleased. Wood is often a cheap fuel source and a burner can heat a lot of a house.
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El Salvador walks back its bitcoin law, ending its status as legal currency • Reason
Katarina Hall:
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Four years after becoming the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, El Salvador is taking a step back. The Legislative Assembly has approved changes to the country’s Bitcoin Law, effectively removing bitcoin’s status as legal currency.
On January 29, the assembly—controlled by President Nayib Bukele’s New Ideas Party—passed the legislation with a 55–2 vote. Six articles of the Bitcoin Law were modified and three others were repealed.
Under the new rules, bitcoin is no longer considered “currency,” though it remains “legal tender.” Another change makes using bitcoin entirely voluntary. (Previously, the law mandated that businesses accept bitcoin for any goods or services they provided.) Additionally, bitcoin can no longer be used to pay taxes or settle government debts. The government is also stepping back from its involvement in Chivo Wallet, the state-backed digital wallet.
The changes are expected to take effect 90 days after their publication in the official gazette, which is likely to happen in the next few days.
The reforms come as part of a broader financial agreement between Bukele and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). One of the conditions for a proposed $1.4bn Extended Fund Facility loan was that El Salvador mitigate “potential risks of the Bitcoin project.”
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The difference between “currency” and “legal tender” is that the latter is only for use between individuals and private companies, and acceptance by the receiving party is voluntary. A “currency” must be accepted as payment in any transaction, including paying taxes; the recipient cannot refuse it.
This was lined up when the IMF (which doesn’t like bitcoin being used as a currency) made downgrading bitcoin conditional on the loan. But it also shows that bitcoin is a long way from a panacea. Will we see anywhere else adopt it?
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It’s time for climate populism • New Statesman
Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read:
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Today’s arch climate deniers are master tacticians, and have an innate grasp of short-term popular appeal. But our problems can’t be blamed on them. A climate movement that hasn’t succeeded in making the cause of human survival genuinely popular is clearly missing something. So just how can we make climate action great again?
Our suggestion is this: start where people are. Talk to them less about an invisible gas that needs to be eliminated by some future date, and more about high energy bills caused by volatile fossil fuel prices we can’t control (compared with wind and solar energy which are now far cheaper). Talk to them about homes vulnerable to extremes of temperature (30% of UK buildings, mostly rentals, have no loft insulation whatsoever), and the encroaching, destructive impact of everything from floods to fires. The global north isn’t immune to climate catastrophe; but it certainly isn’t ready. What happens in Valencia or Los Angeles won’t stay in Valencia or Los Angeles.
Begin, in other words, not with an abstraction but with direct experience, and with quality of life. Climate action can become popular when people understand its benefits in the terms of their own communities, and their own lives. For the climate movement, this means shifting adaptation and resilience-building from the margins to the centre of our strategic message.
This is about more local, nature-friendly food-growing that people can have a stake in: for instance, through planting fruiting tree and bush varieties that are able to cope with higher summer temperatures. It’s about the kind of visionary community retrofit programme exemplified by Retrofit Balsall Heath in a deprived part of Birmingham, a Victorian house transformed into a zero-carbon dwelling. And it’s about restoration of wetlands and peatlands to reduce the danger of flooding closer to source.
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Caroline Lucas was the UK’s first Green MP; Read is an “environmental philosopher”. Climate populism seems like a difficult needle to thread.
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Plastic or paper? The truth about drinking straws • BBC Future
Ally Hirschlag:
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One not very scientific, but much repeated estimate, put the number of disposable drinking straws used every day in the US at 500 million.
The validity of that statistic has been disputed, and the real figure could be less than half that amount. Certainly, the amount being spent on disposable drinking straws has been rising year on year for the past two decades. And although the estimates for exactly how straws are used each year and how many end up in the environment are tricky to confirm, what’s clear is that plastic straws get everywhere. They are found in huge numbers in beach clean-ups around the world. They have been found perforating the stomachs of penguins, and even jammed inside the nostril of an Olive Ridley sea turtle.
An infamous, horrifying video of this last case particularly stuck in my mind. I’m a huge animal lover, so was quick to urge my friends to opt for plastic alternatives instead. Most plastic waste experts I’ve spoken with consider this video a major catalyst for the anti-plastic straw movement.
Milo Cress also deserves some credit – he uncovered that 500 million straws a day statistic ad started the Be Straw Free movement in 2011 when he was only nine. The campaign eventually inspired major companies such as Starbucks and McDonalds to stop using plastic straws and entire states like California to ban them outright.
While that may sound like a huge boon for sustainability, as I took a closer look at the environmental impact of plastic straws, I was surprised to learn that it’s a drop in the bucket compared to other plastic pollution.
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With Trump signing a bizarre Executive Order demanding plastic straws, what’s clear is: straws are bad, and it would make more sense not to use them at all.
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Have doctors been wrong about how to treat Alzheimer’s disease? • The Economist
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The leading explanation of Alzheimer’s is the “amyloid hypothesis”, which suggests that deposits of beta-amyloid, a type of protein, accumulate between neurons and disrupt their function. But the theory remains controversial: all brains with Alzheimer’s show beta-amyloid plaques, yet not everyone with these plaques experiences cognitive decline. Whether amyloid build-up causes Alzheimer’s, or is merely a symptom, remains unresolved.
In “Doctored” Charles Piller, a science journalist, details how groupthink and dishonesty steered Alzheimer’s research off course. In 2006 a Nature paper by researchers at the University of Minnesota appeared to provide a major breakthrough. The study claimed that a subtype of beta-amyloid caused memory impairment.
It quickly became one of the most cited papers and inspired hundreds of millions of dollars in public-research grants. Another influential paper published in 2012 by scientists associated with Cassava Sciences, a biotech firm, bolstered the amyloid theory by linking insulin resistance to amyloid plaque formation. The finding fuelled a wave of research into the idea of Alzheimer’s being a “diabetes of the brain” that could be managed with drugs. There was just one problem—both studies were based on falsified data.
“Doctored” follows Mr Piller’s investigation into the deception. Central to the story is a group of image sleuths, with a sharp eye for manipulated pixels of Western blots (a lab technique used to study proteins, which were doctored in the studies).
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My jaw literally dropped when I read the bit about the falsification: I didn’t know about it, though it was reported in 2022. (Mid-July, maybe I was away.) Worth reading that “falsified data” link, which gives lots of context from Science magazine.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 