Wired: Slovakia’s Hyperloop Moves a Step Closer to Not Being a Joke

On Wednesday, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies signed an “exploratory agreement” with the Czech city of Brno, which wants to examine the feasibility of a hyperloop line to Bratislava, Slovakia, where HTT also is working with the government. Being fired through a tube will cut the 80-mile trip, which takes 90 minutes by rail, to 10 minutes. [...]

It has just over 30 full-time employees, and most of the development work is done by more than 800 engineers with day jobs at places like SpaceX, NASA, and Boeing. They trade their time for stock options, and the challenge of making this crazy idea work. [...]

Of course, the technology is but one hurdle. In fact, the engineering, though tricky, is totally doable. It relies on a clever remix of technology already at work in things like maglev trains and the oil industry. “It’s not a technology challenge,” Ahlborn says. Making hyperloop work is easy compared to making hyperloop feasible. If this thing is to have any chance at success, it must offer reliable, useful, cost-effective service against things like railroads and airlines. And then there’s the regulatory challenges.

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Boing Boing: Map shows Middle East based on who actually holds territory

From Geopolitical Futures via Joshua Landis. Seems rough on details. If Islamic State gets wee satellites down in Yemen, you'd think the Sinai Insurgents would at least get some diagonal shading!

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The New Yorker: Where the Second Avenue Subway Went Wrong

celebrate the opening of the long-awaited Second Avenue subway, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the project showed that government “can still do big things and great things.” What he didn’t say is that the project also shows that government can do really expensive things. The line, which so far consists of just three stations and two miles of track, is, at a cost of roughly $1.7 billion per kilometre of track, the most expensive ever built. And it will keep that record as Phase 2 begins, at a projected cost of $2.2 billion a kilometre.

Construction projects everywhere are subject to delays and cost overruns. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish economic geographer, has found that nine out of ten infrastructure mega-projects worldwide ran over budget and the same number finished behind schedule. But the U.S. is the world’s spendthrift. A 2015 study by David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School, and Tracy Gordon, a fellow at the Urban Institute, looked at a hundred and forty-four rail projects in forty-four countries. The four most expensive, and six of the top twelve, were American, the Second Avenue subway among them. In a study of transit construction costs worldwide, Alon Levy, a transit blogger, has found that they are often five to six times higher here than in other developed countries. [...]

Then, too, because most infrastructure decisions in the U.S. are made at the state or local level, involving multiple governing bodies, projects must also satisfy a wide range of constituencies. Political considerations are often as important as technical ones, and schemes that are initially well defined can end up like Swiss Army knives, fulfilling any number of functions. Long-suffering engineers call this “scope creep.” Washington and Oregon, for instance, spent years collaborating on plans for a new bridge on I-5, spanning the Columbia River. What started as a simple proposal quickly morphed into a full highway expansion (including the rebuilding of five miles of interchanges), along with a light-rail extension. The cost rose to more than three billion dollars, after which the idea was abandoned.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Argument for God is Out of Tune

In fact, one possibility—suggested by the mathematical string-theory that many think will be the key to an adequate cosmology—is that what existed from the beginning was not just our universe but an infinite multitude of universes, a "multiverse,” each specified by a different set of constants relevant to the emergence of life. It seems highly probable that at least one of this infinite set of universes would have constants with values needed to produce life. We may be inclined think that it would still be highly improbable that our universe would be such a universe, so that we still need an explanation for this fact. But this improbability is comparable to the improbability of winning a lottery. My winning a billion-dollar Powerball drawing wouldn't support that claim that someone had rigged the outcome. The highly improbable event would need no explanation beyond the luck of the draw. The same holds for our universe's being one that allows the emergence of life.

The second difficulty also concerns the fine-tuning argument's assumption that mere chance can never be an adequate explanation of an improbable event. It's reasonable to exclude chance when we've learned from our previous experience about causes that could plausibly explain the event. To use philosopher John Leslie's example, if I've been sentenced to execution by a firing squad of expert marksmen and all the shots miss me, there's reason to think, from what we know about guns and the people that fire them, that this was intentional and not mere chance. But when it comes to the origin of the universe, we have no relevant previous experiences. Our data about the Big Bang are all we know about this apparently unique event; we have no experience of any similar event. So we have no basis for judging what might be plausible in this unique situation. In particular, we have no basis for thinking that intelligent design is better than chance as an explanation of why organisms exist. [...]

But this effort to turn cosmology against religion is no more effective than the fine-tuning effort to support religion. A major failing is the assumption that we could have any plausible sense of how a divine designer would be thinking. A being with knowledge and power utterly exceeding ours might well be aware of possibilities beyond our feeble capacities. But even from our merely human standpoint we can suggest reasons why our apparently ordinary place in the universe might not count against a privileged relation to the creator. Why should an essentially spiritual status have to be reflected in the physical world? Might God not have created the universe precisely as an object of knowledge and awe for us? And why should our privileged relation to God exclude similar relations for other sorts of creatures? Scientific cosmology is an endlessly fascinating study in its own right. But, on reflection, it seems to have no particular significance for fundamental questions of religious belief. 

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Nautilus Magazine: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

This turns out to be a very difficult question to answer just by looking at individuals. We all know stories of ambitious and talented people like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, who grew companies and created great wealth. But for each one of these superstars, there may have been many more people who were equally ambitious and talented, yet did not succeed. Maybe the string of investment and managerial decisions that made one person’s company successful, and that seem so very wise in retrospect, were actually just the entrepreneurial equivalent of flipping a coin 20 times and getting all heads. The chances of that happening are about 1 in 1 million, so if enough people try it, someone is bound to get lucky and look like a coin-flipping genius—purely by chance. [...]

To illustrate the basic idea, suppose that we are flipping coins and trying to figure out whether they are fair or biased. This is tricky with only a single coin. If we flip it 20 times and get 14 heads versus 6 tails, we might be a little suspicious that it’s biased. But we could not be completely sure: The chance of a fair coin yielding 14 heads or more is still about 6 percent, and unlikely events do sometimes come to pass. A much better approach would be to perform the same 20-flip experiment with thousands of identical coins: If we still see lots of them coming up with an overabundance of heads, then something is definitely fishy. [...]

Or is it? The obvious objection, of course, is that the coin-flip investment game is a gross oversimplification of reality. For example, it takes no account of consumption—the money that rich people siphon out of the market to spend on travel, penthouses, yachts, or whatever. Nor does it allow for the fact that some people are born with inherited wealth that gives them a huge head start in life. Yet it turns out that neither consumption nor inherited advantages make much of a difference: Even when the model is adjusted to allow for such factors, Pareto still rules. Another possible objection is that it may take a very long time for the wealth distribution to converge to its steady state. However, it has been shown both numerically and experimentally that the convergence to the Pareto wealth distribution is actually quite fast. [...]

Still, it is possible to get a crude sense of the effect of talent by modifying the investment game to include two types of players. Normal investors are just like those in the first game: They flip a coin with heads yielding a return of 30 percent, and tails producing a loss of 10 percent. But the talented investors are more skilled at playing the market: They earn slightly more than 30 percent when the coin comes up heads, and lose slightly less than 10 percent when the coin comes up tails. Now we set the players loose and ask an empirical question: How big can this “talent differential” be and still stay statistically consistent with the power law wealth distribution we see in the real world?

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