Sorting the trash: the good news

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In the recycling industry, waste materials are typically crushed and torn into tiny pieces to make them easier to sort. The mixture is then dumped into a pool where wood and plastic float, and metal and rock sink.  Salvage robots like those made by Zen Robotics in Helsinki, Finland, are making this process obsolete. The robots can spot items of value – like pieces of hardwood or copper – and pick them out as they pass by. This is quicker and larger items may be worth more whole than in pieces. In two years, Zen Robotics installed its robots at 14 sites around the world and collected 4200 tonnes of valuable material.

Apple has developed a phone recycling robot called Liam, which can pull apart a discarded phone in seconds, preparing the device for recycling. Zen Robotics wants a “Liam” for all kinds of waste, but this is too hard to program by hand.

Enter  machine learning, where robots can teach themselves and acquire the ability to monitor their own performance, adjusting their behaviour accordingly. The idea is that faced with a conveyor belt of unfamiliar electrical items, say, the robots might do a poor job of taking them apart to extract the copper initially, but through trial and error they would learn to complete the task efficiently without human intervention.

The robot drops salvaged items on to a second conveyor belt. Overhead cameras monitor what the robot has grabbed and essentially grade its performance. Each success and failure is used to tweak the algorithm controlling the robot, improving its performance over time.  Once the machine learning system is in place, the robots can be given more advanced hardware. With a flexible arm they could learn to sort and dismantle trash far more effectively.  (reported in the New Scientist)

Now this is automation that really benefits the planet.  My wife and I visited a recycling plant some years ago.  It was very labour- intensive.  Human beings stood next to a conveyor belt all day, sorting the trash by hand.  It seemed an incredibly boring and smelly job I wouldn’t want to do myself.   Roll on machine sorting.

Thoughts for the day

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Thoughts for the day

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you’re heading.
Philosopher Lao Tzu, quoted in The Guardian

Work isn’t to make money; you work to justify life.
Marc Chagall, quoted on Bustle.com

The best things in life are free. The second-best things are very, very expensive.
Coco Chanel, quoted in the Financial Times

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

George Santayana, quoted in The Wall Street Journal
If God wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates.
Jay Leno, quoted in the Observer-Dispatch (Utica, New York)

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in The New York Times

Money doesn’t talk, it swears.
Bob Dylan, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle

The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Tom Stoppard, quoted on The Browser

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, quoted on Forbes.com

Fame is only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted in The Guardian

TV drama is like the picture on the Quality Street tin, but with less quality and nothing of the street.Ken Loach, ibid

It is a good rule in life never to apologise. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.P.G. Wodehouse, in The Man Upstairs, quoted in The Times

Speaking in front of a crowd is considered the number one fear of the average person. Number two was death. Death is number two? This means to the average person, if you have to be at a funeral, you’d rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.’’Jerry Seinfeld, quoted on Intelligence Squared

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau, quoted in The Tablet

A soul that is unbound is as mad as one with cemented borders.
Philosopher Gillian Rose, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle

Events which cannot be prevented must be directed.
Count Metternich, quoted in The Guardian

Anger is the prelude to courage.
Eric Hoffer, quoted on Forbes.com

If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.
Ted Turner, quoted on Aeon.com

Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, and tout pardonner makes dull copy.
Journalist Nicholas Tomalin, quoted in the New Statesman

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill, quoted in The Jerusalem Post

Life’s disappointments are harder to take if you don’t know any swear words.
Cartoonist Bill Watterson, quoted in The Wall Street Journal

I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting you really believe what you just said.
William F. Buckley Jr, quoted on Medium.com

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
Martin Amis in The New York Times

“We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we are young. The young sow wild oats; the old grow sage” (Winston Churchill

Nuance is the first casualty of politics and, too often, decency is the second.
Alex Massie, on Slate.com

The most dangerous world view is the world view of those who have not viewed the world.
Naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, quoted in the journal Nature

Most critics are educated beyond their intelligence.
Critic Kenneth Tynan, quoted in the Pasadena Star-News

Aim at simplicity, and hope for truth
Philosopher Nelson Goodman, quoted on The Browser

A baby is a loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Knox’s definition, quoted in The Times

Who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what did he think he was doing at the time?­
Billy Connolly, quoted in The Daily Telegraph

Ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.
David Bowie, quoted in The Guardian

Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.
Woody Allen, quoted in The Daily Telegraph

Montaigne

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to
me.

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.
The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them… Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will. Book I, ch. 20

Things are not bad in themselves, but our cowardice makes them so.

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us

There are no angels and no devils. Montaigne

pStability is a mirage, nothing more than “languid motion”, because everything is in constant motion. Human behaviour istypical of nature, constantly changing.

Go out of the world as you entered it. The same passage that you made from womb to life, without feeling or fright, make again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe, the life of the world

Fear of death is the cause of all our vices
e I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?” Book II, ch. 12. Apology for Raimond Sebond
The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them… Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will. Book I, ch. 20
——————————————————————————————-

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in The Sunday Times

John Stuart Mill famously said that if just one man in the world thinks differently from all the rest, there’s still no excuse for silencing him.

I would rather be terrified occasionally than supervised continually.

Make envy your enemy.
Artist Marilyn Minter, quoted in NYMag.com

It is the summit of idleness to deplore actuality.
Martin Amis, quoted in The Atlantic

It takes a sharp tongue to speak bluntly (Actor Robert Eddison, quoted in The Times)

To describe happiness is to diminish it.
Stendhal, quoted on Forbes.com

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson, quoted on The Browser

Face up to death. Thereafter anything is possible. Albert Camus, quoted in The Guardian

Commitment is an act, not a word.
Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted in the New York Daily News

An old error is always more popular than a new truth.
German proverb, quoted on Forbes

They who are of the opinion that money will do everything may very well be suspected to do everything for money. English statesman George Savile, quoted in The Boston Globe

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Arthur C. Clarke, quoted on BBC.com

In every calm and reasonable person, there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.
Philip Roth, quoted in The New York Times

It is part of human nature to hate the man you have hurt.
Tacitus, quoted in The Times

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it’s such a nice change from being young.
Author Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quoted on Forbes.com

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not, and a sense of humour to console him for what he is. Francis Bacon, quoted in The Guardian

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell, quoted in The Independent

British university fees

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The British government plan to increase University tuition fees in England to £9,250 per year from 2017. Thereafter, fees will increase by the rate of inflation in subsequent years. This represents a 2.8% increase and if that continued would mean fees rising above £10,000 (over $14,000) in the next few years. Other increases will be linked to evidence of high quality teaching, which will be decided by a new mechanism called the “teaching excellence framework”.  A government spokeswoman said: “The teaching excellence framework will allow universities to maintain fees in line with inflation only if they meet a quality bar, as set out in the recent Higher Education White Paper.”

As you can imagine, this dumb idea has met fierce political resistance. How do you rate a university on its teaching? Do you poll the customers? In which case teachers must be tempted to lower standards and inflate grades. By graduation rates and levels of degree attained?  We already have degree inflation, something that potentially misleads potential employers, lowers the value of university education, and lets students think they have had a good education when they (possibly) haven’t. Will there be a government inspector sitting in the room critiquing the approach of the teacher? A good teacher challenges a student, makes them think, is tough on them, trying to get the best out of them. This is not always appreciated by those students mostly intent on partying and boozing.

Conservatives everywhere are trying to apply the techniques of running a business to higher education. Efficiency, efficiency! You can imagine the business consultants crawling over the Modern History department of Oxford University. The fact is that once you charge for university you change the incentives. Because of the fees and the likely debt, the preoccupation is “can I get a job at the end of it”. This leads to emphasis on training, not education for a lifetime.  Training should be something undertaken after, not during, time at university. (Exhibit A: Business Studies as a first degree is a bogus moneyspinner. It recalls the old adage “If you can’t do it you teach it”).

Unrelated statistic (or is it?): 27% of undergraduates say they have a mental health problem: 34% of female students have mental health problems, compared with 19% of male students. (YouGov/BBC)

 

 

The hounding of the bee scientist (follow-on from Friday’s posting)

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This is a disgraceful.

Dr. Jonathan Lundgren is the award- winning scientist, who discovered that Bayer pesticides were killing bees in huge  numbers, as discussed on this blog last Friday.

It appears that Dr. Lundgrun was told by the US Department of Agriculture to stop publicizing his research, which didn’t suit USDA at all.  When he refused  he was suspended, then fired.  He attempted to continue his research in the private sector, at which point the USDA is blacklisted him from USDA-funded research grants and pressured other scientists not to collaborate with him.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is notoriously friendly with giant corporate agribusinesses, and lobbyists for big pesticide companies like Monsanto and Bayer, who don’t want government researchers looking into the impact of bee-killing pesticides. USDA is not a normal government agency; it was created expressly to promote American agriculture, not as a service to the general electorate.  It is an open secret that what the big agribusinesses want they generally get.

What  USDA is doing is a blatant attack on to scientific freedom at the behest of lobbyists. It is against the interests of  both consumers and all food producers who rely on insect pollination.

As Epicureans we should hold the big corporations to account.  They got their formulations disastrously wrong, and, instead of taking the pesticides off the market, are trying to smother the news and destroy the career of the messenger. It is sad to see this happen under President Obama’s watch.

Dr. Lundgren has fought back by filing a whistleblower complaint, a scientific integrity complaint, and a federal lawsuit.  Dr. Lundgren’s case has gotten enormous press coverage, and he was personally honored with the Joe A. Calloway Award for Civic Courage—a prestigious award for public-interest activism. Meanwhile, USDA needs root and branch reform.

Latest news

A terrifying study has found that the exact same pesticides causing the massive global bee die-off are now killing birds as well.

The global bee die-off has been happening so fast that scientists are still scrambling to detect all the impacts. And now, this new study also finds that neonic pesticides are killing warblers, swallows, starlings and thrushes nearly as fast as the bees — at current rates, 35 percent of the bird population will disappear in just 10 years in the areas studied.

 

When God Lost the Planet

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Recent news indicates that there are upward of 400 billion stars, a management problem, even for God. Where on earth do you start?

When God Lost the Planet

Each day unfurled
Another world!
God sits up there and gently nurses
Spanking, brand new universes.

Purblinding flash!
Oh, boom and crash!
A zillion atoms spun in space.
Where did they fly? Some place, some place.

For thirteen billion years, we’re told,
Did God his galaxies unfold
With neutron stars and cosmic rays.
Thus did God spend timeless days.

For goodness sake,
One needs a break.
Even those with mighty power
Like to relax for half an hour.

He thinks a thought!
Just what he sought
To liven up the daily grind – –
He has a unique scheme in mind!

Aha! Ambition!
Matchless mission – –
A scheme to create a race of men
With ethics and with acumen!

Experiment
Was his intent.
“I’ll pick a rock of random worth,
And, ah! I’ll call the planet “Earth”!

“And at its birth
I’ll make this Earth
As beauteous as an April sonnet
And place my new creations on it.”

“They’ll look like me
Be good like me.
And every man will love his wife,
And thank me for his daily life!”

And so it was, and in a trice
God created paradise,
And placed in it a married pair,
A test to see how they would fare.

But space expands
If left unplanned.
A planet whirls away in space,
And nothing’s left to fill the space.

Space grew too vast,
And God at last,
Taking years to get around,
Discovered Earth could not be found.

Thus men are left
On Earth, bereft,
Without a God to tell them “nay”,
Lost amidst the Milky Way.

It’s rather rare
To sit up there,
And even in ten billion years,
To lose a planet in the spheres.

“Oh, huge mistake
For me to make!
Where is that H2O and granite?
Where is my chosen little planet?

“Oh! Fractured hope!
How will they cope,
Lost in the vast ethereal sphere
Gripped by suspicion, greed and fear?

“Oh, doom, oh, gloom.
Not I? Then whom?
Who will be there to keep them moral,
To teach them how to love, not quarrel?

God searches here,
He searches there,
On moons, black dwarfs, dark energy,
But not a human could He see.

“Ah! Infinitesimal speck!
Hey, what the heck?
If men on Earth possess a flaw
Forget it! I’ll just make some more.

And thus time passed
Until at last,
While rambling through a group of stars,
Why, Earth appeared, alongside Mars.

Ah! Eureka!
Planet seeker!
He cried, “Aha, that’s where they’ve gone!
Let’s see how they are getting on.”

Amazed, He found his two creations
Had spawned a multitude of nations.
No one thought or spoke the same,
Or, if in the wrong, would take the blame.

“Jehovah! Lord!
(With one accord!)
We’re glad you’ve come as prophesied!
We thought we’d see you when we died”.

So saying, men
Proceeded then
To pepper God like proper pests
With thousands of inane requests.

Most were self-seeking,
Falsehood-reeking,
“Bless me, Lord, and kindly strike
And punish those whom I dislike”.

“Oh, God, to whom we genuflect
Mine’s by far the holiest sect.
We praise you more, and they are weird.
What’s more, we wear a longer beard”.

And God was pained
When people claimed
He’d picked upon a chosen few
And helped them win a war or two.

And God above
Said “Where is love?
I should have been around to ground ’em,
I rather wish I’d never found ’em”.

“When God Lost the Planet” is part of a collection of light verse, written by Robert Hanrott and published by ByD Press under the title “The Rueful Hippopotamus”, available from Amazon.com in the US and Amazon.co.uk in the United Kingdom .