News Feeds

A breakthrough hydrogen-production method could make clean fuel far cheaper and easier to generate. Researchers at the University of Birmingham developed a perovskite-based catalyst that splits water into hydrogen at much lower temperatures than existing technologies, potentially allowing factories, steel plants, cement works, and renewable energy sites to turn waste heat into valuable hydrogen.

Scientists have created a tiny chip that can generate, steer, and read light-based information all in one device, marking a major leap toward ultra-fast, energy-efficient computing. The breakthrough uses atomically thin materials and nanoscale structures to control a unique quantum property of light called the “valley” degree of freedom, allowing information to be encoded in new ways.

Scientists have created a tiny chip that can generate, steer, and read light-based information all in one device, marking a major leap toward ultra-fast, energy-efficient computing. The breakthrough uses atomically thin materials and nanoscale structures to control a unique quantum property of light called the “valley” degree of freedom, allowing information to be encoded in new ways.

The dwarf planet Ceres has a surface that seems to get more perplexing with each new study. A recent paper presented at EGU26 in Vienna only adds to its mystery.

The JWST found an abundance of overmassive black holes at high redshifts, pushing the limits of black hole (BH) science in the early Universe. Results have claimed that these BHs are significantly more massive than expected from the BH mass-host galaxy stellar mass relation derived from the local Universe. But new research shows they were just outliers in the normal range of masses that don't require any special causes.

Multi-billion dollar space telescope programs aren’t only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, it’s hard to find lots of samples of planets with alien life on them. And even harder to prove that the signals we think are caused by alien life aren’t caused by some other non-biological process. Or at least that’s the theory underpinning a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from David Kipping of Columbia University (and Cool Worlds YouTube fame).

I’m a humanistic weirdo, and as such I’m not sure where I belong in this modern culture war. I love truth and reason — I’ve built a career on them — but I belong to a humanistic tradition that refuses to stop at the head and leave the heart out of it. And these days there aren’t many of us. So when I look at the people we’ve come to call “anti-woke intellectuals”—many of whom have written for Skeptic or appeared as guests on The Michael Shermer Show podcast—I don’t see them the way either side wants me to.

I see two very different people wearing the same coat. One wants to make the world more reasonable. The other is settling a score. As a humanistic psychologist who studies narcissism, I’ve come to think the difference between them is stark, and that telling them apart matters more than almost anything else in our culture war.

How did this come about?

A Brief History of Anti-Woke Intellectuals

In 2018, the journalist Bari Weiss wrote an essay in The New York Times introducing readers to what the mathematician Eric Weinstein had half-jokingly named the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW): a loose constellation of thinkers who had either been pushed out of mainstream institutions or had walked away from them, because they would not go along with what they saw as a tightening orthodoxy on race, gender, and identity. The roster was eclectic and included Eric Weinstein, of course, along with his brother Bret and his biologist wife Heather Heying, but also the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the political commentators Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and Douglas Murray, the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, the Quillette publisher Claire Lehmann, and Skeptic’s own Michael Shermer. Joe Rogan handed many of them their largest microphones. Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Debra Soh, Maajid Nawaz, Gad Saad, and others orbited nearby.

So what is an anti-woke intellectual? It isn’t simply someone who disagrees with progressive politics. Plenty of people hold conservative or classical-liberal views without building a vocation around them. The anti-woke intellectual makes the critique of progressive social ideology the central, organizing feature of their public work. The argument, in its strongest form, goes like this: a movement that began as a genuine response to real injustices has, in places, curdled into something illiberal—a secular religion complete with heretics, blasphemy, and excommunication; a hostility to open inquiry; a habit of treating disagreement itself as a kind of violence, in which words become a form of violence, or even saying nothing when others think you should, as in the activist phrase “silence is violence.”

The first type of anti-woke intellectual criticizes ideas; the second type is consumed by them.

And here’s the thing worth saying up front before anyone reaches for the comment box: A lot of that critique is correct. The grievance studies affair, in which James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian managed to get absurd hoax papers (one rewriting a chunk of Mein Kampf in intersectional jargon, another about dog park “rape culture” … by dogs) accepted by peer-reviewed journals, exposed something real about the collapse of standards in certain corners of the academy. Gad Saad’s notion of “idea pathogens” names a phenomenon many of us have watched spread. Steven Pinker’s Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard responded to a genuine chilling of speech on campus. I am not here to defend the excesses of the movement these thinkers criticize. I’ve seen those excesses up close, and some of them are indefensible.

I would like to make a different observation. Watch these intellectuals long enough and you notice they don’t all have the same vibe. There are, I argue here, two distinct types—and the difference between them has almost nothing to do with their stated positions, which often overlap, and almost everything to do with what’s driving the engine underneath.

The Two Vibes

The first type of anti-woke intellectual criticizes ideas; the second type is consumed by them.

The first type can tell you, specifically, which policy or claim or practice they object to and why—and they can also tell you, without choking on the words, what the other side gets right. This is the critic who goes after a practice (a mandatory diversity statement, the erosion of institutional neutrality) rather than after the souls of the people who hold it; the scholar who writes a whole book arguing that left and right are each tracking real moral goods the other is half-blind to, which is not a book you write if your aim is to humiliate anyone. You can imagine this person being talked out of a position by a better argument.

The second type is different, and you sense it before you can name it. The fight isn’t part of their work; the fight is the work—and you can watch the arc unfold in public. There’s the scholar who raised a reasonable campus objection, was treated abominably for it, left academia over it, and whose public thinking has since widened into a steadily more totalizing suspicion of nearly every mainstream institution. There’s the writer who genuinely named something real about the culture and then built a combative public identity around an enemy that only ever expands—because naming a real problem and being consumed by it are not mutually exclusive. There’s the public figure for whom a private grief and a civilizational crusade have fused into a single object, so that one enemy now explains even a death. In each case, a suspicion that began aimed at one bad idea has metastasized into a distrust of whole institutions, whole classes of people, anyone who won’t agree that the virus is everywhere.

You’ll notice I’m not naming names, and that’s deliberate. I’m a psychologist, not a mind reader: I can’t diagnose anyone I haven’t personally assessed, and I’m describing publicly observable behavior, not pronouncing on anyone’s character or sorting real people onto a permanent list. (I surely wouldn’t want that done to me.) Since you likely know who you’d put in each camp, I’d rather you fill in the names yourself than hand you a roster to argue with.

Also, I’d like to add that these camps are fluid—in fact, that’s the part I most want to stress. A first-type thinker can have a second-type week and find his way back; a second-type crusader can cool into a first-type critic once the wound finally heals. Nobody is fixed. But the behavior sorts cleanly, and once you can see the tells, you can’t unsee them—including, if you’re honest, in yourself.

The Tells

How do you know which vibe you’re dealing with, including when the intellectual in question is you?

The first tell is the object of attack. The grounded critic goes after a claim, a policy, a specific bad argument. The consumed critic goes after a people: an enemy class, vaguely defined and infinitely expandable, into which any new opponent can be folded.

The second tell is revisability. Ask yourself: what would it take for this person to say “I was wrong about that one”? For the first type, you can imagine an answer. For the second, the question is almost unintelligible; being wrong isn’t a possibility they’re holding open, because the position isn’t really a hypothesis. It’s an identity.

The third tell—and this is the one I most want to flag—is reflexive cynicism about compassion. The consumed anti-woke critic has come to treat every expression of care as a cover story. Someone advocates for the vulnerable? Status-jockeying. Someone expresses concern for a marginalized group? A bid for moral superiority. Everything kind is secretly a maneuver. Now, sometimes there is a hit there. Performative compassion is real; moral grandstanding is real; some people absolutely do weaponize the language of care for advantage. A good skeptic keeps that possibility on the table.

The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.

But there’s a vast difference between calibrated suspicion, applied where the evidence warrants it, and a blanket presumption that all compassion is fraud. The second isn’t insight. It’s a worldview in which goodness has been defined out of existence, and that’s not reason. It’s a kind of paranoia wearing reason’s clothes.

Which brings us to the fourth tell: the totalizing frame. One enemy explains everything. The virus is everywhere. Every disappointment, every institutional failure, and every personal grievance flows back to the same source. That’s not a theory anymore; it’s the structure of a conspiracy theory, or worse an all-consuming worldview, and it has the airless quality of one.

What’s Actually Running the Engine

Here’s where my own research comes in, because I think there’s a real psychological mechanism underneath the second vibe of the anti-woke intellectual, and it’s not the one people might expect.

When we hear “narcissism,” we picture the grandiose type: the swaggering, self-promoting, attention-hungry performer. But in a study with Joshua Miller, W. Keith Campbell, and Brandon Weiss, my colleagues and I mapped how narcissism actually breaks apart into different faces. There’s grandiose narcissism: antagonistic, dominant, status-seeking. And there’s vulnerable narcissism: neurotic, hypersensitive, easily wounded, perpetually aggrieved, convinced the world has failed to grant the recognition it owes. The antagonism is the thread the two share.

Both feed the second anti-woke intellectual, but in different ways. Grandiose narcissism builds the brand: the crusader who discovers that being The Person Who Fights This Thing brings a following, a revenue stream, a standing ovation, and who needs the enemy to stay enormous because the enemy is now load-bearing for the self. Vulnerable narcissismsupplies the wound: the person who was genuinely humiliated—fired, mobbed, exiled, betrayed—and for whom the critique is no longer about the world at all but about settling a score that never closes. A real injury becomes a permanent organizing principle. The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.

And when this goes collective, it gets its own engine. The work of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on collective narcissism describes groups built around the belief that we are exceptional, that we are not sufficiently recognized, and shows that such groups reliably turn hostile toward whoever they cast as the threat to the in-group’s image. An anti-woke movement organized around shared grievance, rather than shared inquiry, will behave exactly this way: ever-vigilant, ever-aggrieved, retaliating against perceived insults to its own greatness. The truth-seeking recedes; the score-settling takes over.

That’s the distinction I’d draw, and I’d put it as a question anyone in this fight can ask themselves: Am I doing this to make society better, or to repair a narcissistic injury? The two can look identical from the outside. They have very different effects on the world.

The Mega-Irony of the Narcissist

And here is the part I find mega-ironic: the second camp talks, almost without exception, from a place of pure victim mindset. The very thing they are most likely to mock in their opponents (the grievance gang, the victimhood culture, the perpetual woundedness group, the “everyone is out to get us” cohort) is the thing they have most thoroughly become. Their accusation becomes a mirror of themselves.

The woke didn’t take your life from you. Make them the smallest possible part of your story, not the largest, and the crusade loses its grip.

I spent an entire book, Rise Above, on the victim mindset, and its final chapter is about what happens when that mindset goes collective. The research is unsettlingly precise here. The psychologist Rahav Gabay and her colleagues identified a stable personality trait they call the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, with four signature marks: (1) an incessant need for recognition, (2) moral elitism, (3) a lack of empathy for the suffering of others, and (4) frequent rumination about one’s own victimization. Read that list slowly and ask yourself whether it describes the obsessed anti-woke crusader any less exactly than it describes the “wokester” campus activist he can’t stop ranting about. It describes both, and that’s the point. As I put it in Rise Above:

To the extent that real wounds have been incurred, we need to acknowledge that, metabolize it, and move on. But our current society does not allow that. Instead, it encourages perpetual victimhood, where emphasizing wounds nets societal rewards.

That incentive structure does not check anyone’s politics at the door. It rewards the aggrieved progressive and the aggrieved anti-progressive in exactly the same language.

At the group level, the wound becomes a flag. Collective victimhood confers real psychological benefits: entitlement and moral superiority, the sympathy and support of onlookers, and a powerful sense of group cohesion, because nothing unites people like a shared grievance. Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner’s work on moral typecasting shows that we instinctively sort the world into weak-but-moral victims and strong-but-immoral perpetrators, and once a group has cast itself as the victim, it tends to grant itself a moral pass on the harms it does to the designated perpetrator class, a phenomenon researchers have called the “egoism of victimhood.” “It’s all the fault of the woke” is precisely this move: a chosen trauma installed at the center of an identity, reactivated whenever the world feels threatening, and used to license whatever comes next. It is the same machinery as collective narcissism, just flying a different flag.

Why I’ve Never Called Myself Woke or Anti-Woke

I should be honest about where I stand, because it shapes how I see all this. I love truth and reason. I’ve spent my career insisting that psychology earn its claims, that we follow the evidence, that we not flinch from uncomfortable findings. By temperament and training, my head belongs in the reason camp.

But as a humanistic psychologist, I don’t stop at truth and reason. I’m a particular kind of creature in this debate, and there aren’t many of us: the humanist who loves truth as much as the skeptics do but won’t amputate the heart to prove it.

Which is to say that the two camps I’ve just described don’t actually have a slot for me, and I’ve stopped expecting one. Both are organized around the same false choice: rigor or compassion, truth or justice, the cold eye or the warm one. I refuse it.

And that refusal isn’t a gap in the taxonomy I haven’t gotten around to filling. It is the position. The whole argument of humanistic psychology, going back to its founders, is that a fully developed human being holds both at once. According to the field’s founder, Abraham Maslow, the transcending self-actualizing person is the one who can do “dichotomy-transcendence.”

I’m also interested in prosocial motivation, in humanitarianism, in actually improving the lives of the downtrodden that are, not incidentally, the very things the progressive movement cares about when it’s at its best. Even though politically, I feel like I’m most accurately described as a left-leaning libertarian (but I’m politically fluid, so chill).

So I’ve never been able to plant my flag in the anti-woke camp, even as I’ve watched and named plenty of foolishness and failures of reason on the woke progressive side. Because beneath that foolishness I can usually still see the compassion that started it, a real moral impulse toward people who’ve been hurt. I’m not willing to throw that out. The error I want to correct is the abandonment of reason and the hyper-cynicism of the anti-woke obsessed. It is not the presence of care.

A Better Way Forward

Here is what I would like to offer the anti-woke intellectuals I admire, as well as the ones I worry about: The goal is integration, not demolition. You don’t have to choose between rigor and compassion; the whole humanistic tradition is an argument that a fully developed person holds both. And the first move is the one I prescribe for any victim mindset, individual or collective: as I wrote in Rise Above, it requires “moving victimhood from the center of a group’s identity to the periphery.”

A critique launched from faith in humanity, aimed at making things better, can self-correct … A crusade launched from a narcissistic wound, aimed at vindication, never arrives, because the wound is the point and the wound is bottomless.

The woke didn’t take your life from you. Make them the smallest possible part of your story, not the largest, and the crusade loses its grip. In our research on the lighter side of human nature, my colleagues and I described a “Light Triad,” and one of its facets is faith in humanity, a basic willingness to believe in people’s fundamental decency. I’d argue that faith in humanity, not reflexive cynicism, is the sounder default from which to criticize a movement, with appropriate cynicism deployed where the evidence actually warrants it. Not naïveté. Calibration. Trust as the baseline; suspicion as the targeted tool, not the air you breathe.

Because here’s the asymmetry that should worry anyone in this fight: A critique launched from faith in humanity, aimed at making things better, can self-correct. It has somewhere to land. A crusade launched from a narcissistic wound, aimed at vindication, never arrives, because the wound is the point and the wound is bottomless.

Criticize the ideology. Please. Some of it deserves it, and reason is precisely what’s been missing. But do it as the first type, not the second. Go after the bad argument, stay open to being wrong, keep the compassion you’re tempted to mock, and check, every so often, whether you’re trying to repair the world or just your wounded self.

The difference won’t always show in your conclusions. It will show in whether, years from now, you’ve helped make the world a better place—or just devoted your life feeding a virus of your own.

The universe is full of fascinating structures, and some of the most striking take shape inside the giant clouds where stars are born. There, streams of gas appear to converge from all directions toward a dense central hub, like spokes meeting at the center of a wheel. New simulations show why this is, and why star formation overall is so inefficient.

People with advanced pancreatic cancer taking an experimental daily pill lived nearly twice as long as those receiving chemotherapy infusions

The physics of neutron stars are almost too fantastic to believe. Something the weight of two Suns compacted to a sphere the size of a city. Each teaspoon of its material would weigh billions of tons. If you’ve done any reading on the topic, you’ve heard these facts before. But despite the intense interest these extreme objects hold, we are still actively learning lots about them. One of the most pertinent outstanding questions is where is the line between becoming a neutron star and becoming a black hole when a star dies. A new paper by researchers at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics in Hungary describes what they believe to be a definitive answer to that question - between 2.2 and 2.3 solar masses.

Turmeric is heralded for its anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties, but columnist Alice Klein finds that the evidence for this is shaky. Taking high doses of its curcumin extract in supplement form can be risky

Mathematicians are stunned at the progress AI is making in solving advanced problems, leaving some questioning whether there will still be room for humans

Alan Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence: could a computer convince a human it was human? We have begun conducting the same test on ourselves, writes Max Moser

Jupiter helped create the different rocky bodies in the Solar System. The massive gas giant created a planet-induced pressure bump in the gas in the disk surrounding the young Sun. This pressure bump filtered different types of dust at different times, leading to the formation of planetesimals with different compositions at different times.

There’s a dearth of news, or should I say there’s a dearth of news that I want to write about: the interesting news is relevated to the morning Hili post.  But since it’s June 1, which marks for me the Day to Begin Wearing Hawaiian shirts, I present my garb for today. I have about 50 Hawaiian shirts, acquired when I went through an aloha-shirt phase, but I wear them only in appropriat weather. This one is semi-authentic, as it’s not old but has coconut buttons and a pocket matched with the shirt’s pattern—two features of an authentic Hawaiian shirt. (The real old ones from decades ago are made of rayon, not cotton.  I got it from a now-defunct outfit that had gorgeous Hawaiian shirts: “Paradise on a Hanger” (great name). Sadly, it is not longer in business, but i have enough shirts.

This one has a lovely green-and-orange fish pattern. I wish that mainland Americans would take up this habit, for you see them all over the islands of Hawaii, especially on “aloha Fridays.” It counts as “business casual” garb, too. You can hardly be unhappy when all around you are colorful shirts.

And Matthew sent this short YouTube video about a new puggle (the name for a baby platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus) from ZoosVictoria, which really does seem to be interested in conservation. Note that the incubation for the egg is just ten days, but it’s four months until it emerges from the den. It’s okay to hold females, but remember that males have poison spurs on their hind legs, which can inflict a painful and slow-healing wound.

4.5 billion years ago was an interesting time for the Earth. The atmosphere was thick and what we would now think of as toxic. The Moon, which was freshly formed, looks much more massive than it does today and faintly glows with the residual heat from its own creation. And the floor was literally lava. Everywhere. If there were any children alive at the time, they would have no chance of winning that game. But for a long time, scientists had thought this molten phase of the Earth didn’t last long. But according to a new paper, available in preprint on arXiv by researchers at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, it might have lasted for upwards of half a billion years.

From PCC(E):  After watching the explosion of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket last week, a rocket that is designed to help create the first human colony on the Moon, I thought to myself, “What is all this mishigass? Why do we need a human colony on the Moon? What will it tell us that unmanned exploration using drones or robotic vehicles won’t?” I couldn’t think of any answers, but I beefed about this to my friend (and reader) Jim “Bat” Batterson, who used to work for NASA.  I was surprised that he pretty much agreed with me, and wrote an email to that effect. I asked him if he could turn the email into a short post, and he gladly assented.  So here’s Bat’s take on space missions (indented):

Before Trump’s election and, really, its Project 2025 budgetary guidance, NASA spent roughly equal amounts on “human spaceflight” (also called “human exploration”) and “science”. In the NASA budget, “science” is a category that includes basic/fundamental science —mostly via grants to universities and institutes in the sub-areas of planetary science, like heliophysics, astrophysics, and earth/atmospheric science.  The areas within “science” are prioritized by “decadal” committees of experts who, every ten years, assess the possible knowledge that NASA could help create.  These needs can be very expensive, requiring the engineering of entirely new spacecraft and instrumentation needing long timelines and large teams of unique technical expertise (think space telescopes, planetary landers, comet or asteroid fly-bys). 

Human Exploration, on the other hand, deals with all endeavors in which humans go into space in rockets, capsules, and space stations.  The Mars Rover, for example, counts as “Science” and not “Human Exploration” because humans aren’t involved. 

Until this past year. Human Exploration and Science were each budgeted at about $8 billion yearly with an additional $3 billion in human spaceflight operations such as running the International Space Station.

Last year, the administration’s (i.e., the President’s) budget recommended cutting Science by about 50%(!), and raising Human Exploration by $1 billion. Congress rejected that and kept the budget as it was.  The same attempt to cut the budget was made this year, and Congress again rejected it.

The lunar moon base or colony, as well as the Mars colonization form of mental masturbation, both fit under the exploration and human spaceflight operations budget. Space telescopes, robotic missions to the planets and asteroids, earth-observing satellites and the like are generally counted in the “Science” portion of NASA’s budget.  Even if Congress again restores the full Science budget, the chaos and uncertainty brought on these multi-year efforts can easily erode NASA if talented engineers and scientists seek more stable work to support their families.

I fully agree that there is no “science” in human colonization of the Moon as opposed to using robotic rovers; and the addition of humans to the mix entails not only danger to human lives, but much extra expense.  The significant science that comes out of human exploration of space is limited to understanding the complexities of humans living and working in space. The only justification I see for a lunar base is the same as that given for the “first man in space” competition with Russia in the 1960’s:  the claim of “soft” military/international presence IF another country such as China plants their flag along with a human colony.  Adjusted for inflation, the NASA budget of the early 1960’s was three times that of today’s budgets, reflecting the more serious devotion to putting humans on the Moon in the Sixties.  You can see a good budget summary from planetary society at this link.  

By the way, using Department-of-Defense comparisons, I like to think in terms of how many aircraft0-carrier-equivalents aspects of the NASA budget represent. A new aircraft carrier these days costs around $13 billion +/- out the door.  So the cost of the of NASA Human Exploration program is on the order of a new aircraft carrier each year.

So, dear readers, both Bat and I agree that we’re wasting a lot of dough (our dough) trying to put human colonies on the Moon and on Mars. It is a performative gesture with no real scientific benefits, and only tiny and unforseeable military benefits.  That money could well be used to alleviate human problems right here on Earth.

If you have any questions about this, put them in the comments and Bat will be glad to answer them.

Here from Wikipedia is a “NASA concept art of an envisioned lunar mining facility” and, below that, an “Inflatable module for lunar base”.

NASA/SAIC/Pat Rawlings, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons NASA, Kitmacher, Ciccora artists, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The TRAPPIST-1 system, located about 41 light years from Earth, has been a focal point of much exoplanetary discussion - mainly because it has 7 confirmed planets orbiting a dim M-dwarf star. Two of those planets - TRAPPIST-1e and -1f - are thought to be in the star’s habitable zone. However, the habitable zone of M-dwarfs is so close to the star itself the planets are likely tidally locked to it, meaning they have a permanent day and night side, with a “twilight terminator” in between. Armed with that knowledge, scientists have been attempting to model the climate on these two exoplanets, and a new paper from Jacob Haqq-Misra of Blue Marble Space uses a new type of climate model to accurately do so with much less computational power.

Today we have pictures from the shore of New Jersey taken by Jan Malik.  Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are a few pictures from my walks on Cape May and Sandy Hook, taken this April.

Starting from the Atlantic Ocean (eastern) shore on Cape May, I met this pair of American Oystercatchers (Haematopus palliatus). In Cape May, a section of the beach is fenced off to protect nesting sites for them and for Piping plovers. They are feisty birds and every spring there is a competition for nesting sites; the bird on the right is calling at another Oystercatcher:

The pair took off to drive out the intruder:

The place where I found that pair was littered with the remains of Sand fleas (possibly Emerita talpoida). These fossorial crustaceans normally stay buried in the sand, exiting only when the sand is awash with the shallow tide, but Oystercatchers’ bills are well adapted to dig them out. I think the birds ate only the soft and juicy parts of their telsons, leaving the crustaceans mortally wounded and unable to move:

These Sand fleas are small and difficult to catch alive. That’s what their front end and first pair of legs look like. These crabs dig backwards, starting from their telson, and the front pair of legs is used as a sand anchor:

Another arthropod – the Horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), came ashore, atypically for it, on the Atlantic Ocean side of the peninsula. These are treacherous waters for these spiderlike creatures, for they are easily flipped over by ocean waves and become stranded. They are an interesting part of the Delaware Bay ecosystem and I may share more pictures of them later:

On the Delaware Bay shore of Cape May, there were already many Laughing gulls (Leucophaeus atricilla), which mostly move south in winter but return to their breeding grounds in the spring. They are quite similar to the Eurasian Black-headed gull:

Terns also made their appearance. I think this may be a Forster’s tern (Sterna forsteri) because of the lack of black tips on its primaries and its pure white underbelly, but they are difficult to tell apart from Common terns (Sterna hirundo):

The terns landed on old quay pilings and started courting. There’s no way to tell females from males other than by their courting behavior; males can be slightly larger, but the difference is less than 5%, which is hardly discernible to the human eye:

The courting consists of the two mates trying to look “smug”, with wings drooped, necks extended, and bills pointed toward the sky:

Then there’s the courtship dance and ritual feeding. Here is a fragment of it, taken from a large distance, so I’ve compensated for the lack of pixels by cobbling together this composite. The male presents a fry to the female and then, if she accepts (which is not a given), circles around the female while stomping his feet:

On my way home, I stopped at Sandy Hook, a sand spit where shore gun batteries protecting New York Harbor were once located. It is now a prime nesting site for Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus):

The former Army garrison required many houses for the officers, and these are now excellent nesting sites for Ospreys. Standing in the center of Officers Row (as the area is called), I counted four nests on top of chimneys:

The meadow below the houses was full of American robins (Turdus migratorius) fattening up for the nesting season by preying on earthworms. I know little about annelids, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it is the common earthworm (Lumbricus terrestris), since it is a favorite prey for robins:

Finally, moving to the class Mammalia, here are Sandy Hook’s harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), congregating on rocks exposed by low tide (the tide was rising so, one by one, the seals were forced to slip back into the water). There are eight seals in this picture, but I counted 15 in total. Their population around the New York inlet has increased in recent years, which may soon put them on a collision course with the fishing industry:

In Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel he imagines a future in which most of humanity lives in gigantic cities, extending many levels underground. This leaves the majority of the Earth’s surface for industrial farming, necessary to feed all those densely populated cities. If you take a similar strategy, however, and keep the population at sustainable numbers, this could maximize land for natural ecosystems and also minimize the environmental footprint of the average person. So if we are going to plan our civilization around environmental sustainability we would not necessarily need Asimovian megacities, but we could concentrate the population in cities and in densely developed areas around cities, and leave large stretches of land in between undeveloped. This is far better than endless suburban sprawl.

But of course, we are not starting from scratch, and our current layout was not planned by some central committee but evolved organically. Pragmatically, the question we need to ask is – where do we go from here. Cities are growing dynamic things, so we can use city development to move in a certain desirable direction, even if we can’t tear it all down and start anew. This means it is important to study what the best city planning and development would be going forward.

When most people think of city planning to reduce the carbon emissions of transportation, the first thing that comes to mind is planning city centers so that they are walkable/bikeable and to provide public transportation, in order to minimize reliance on fossil-fuel burning cars. This also has the advantage of reducing city traffic, which can be a nightmare. However, a recent study suggests that, while important, this may be of secondary concern with respect to impact on CO2 emissions. For many cities, especially those with a single concentrated hub (as opposed to multicentric cities, like LA), the most impactful strategy might be the densification of a ring surrounding the city center. The range of this ring depends on the city, but is something like 10-20 km for a typical large city, but can extend to 40 km. Increased density can be accomplished with infill development, as many such zones are only moderately developed leaving lots of room for densification.

The idea is that the workplaces will be concentrated in the city center, and the workers will live in the ring around the city center, minimizing their commute distance. This could have a significant impact on the average commute distance that people have and therefore their transportation carbon footprint. This approach would work better for some cities than others, depending on geography. This plan could also maximize the impact of public transport, like buses and trains, dedicated to bringing people back and forth from this densified ring to the city center.

One of the major findings of the study, which used gps data to track 10 million “mobility data points”, is that there are many interdependent variables at work. It is not as simple as just densifying a certain distance from a city center. Road planning, public transportation, carpooling, and working from home are also important variables that affect each other. Essentially, what this study does is provide additional information to city planners, using an AI model to help individual planning to each city in order to minimize average commute distance.

The authors acknowledge that there is still a lot of research to do in this area. The one variable that is always the most difficult to predict is human behavior. For example, we cannot simply build more roads to accommodate increased traffic, because more roads creates “induced demand” and may actually worsen traffic. In this case we need to deal with the fact that many people move out into the suburbs, increasing their commute, because they want to. It’s nice there. At the same time there is a “build it and they will come” phenomenon – people will buy or rent houses that exist. Since we are having a housing shortage, we have an opportunity to decide where to build the millions of homes we need to meet demands.

Generally speaking, however, it is a good idea not to assume that people will do what you want them to do, and to provide multiple options for different people with different desires and in different situations. At the same time, when dealing with these big environmental issues, it is not necessary for every single person to do the same thing. We just need to move some people toward behavior associated with lower emissions, by making certain choices more desirable or easier. The effects of behavior and infrastructure on CO2 emissions are cumulative – in both directions, good and bad.

I also think generally we should not expect most people to make big sacrifices to achieve our collective goals, not for moral reasons but for practical reasons. But I also think we should not always put the burden on the individual to make the sacrifice. It’s better to look for the win-wins, to make the system work for people rather than making people work for the system, and to provide the infrastructure and opportunity for people to make choices that are good for them and good collectively, in this case for the environment.

With all that in mind, what would I like to see in terms of minimizing the carbon footprint of transportation? First, I would love more walkable cities with less traffic, and with convenient low-cost transportation options. More convenient and cost effect transportation options into city centers would also be nice. Where I live the best option I have is to drive to the nearest train station and then pay ridiculous prices for a train ticket. If the family is taking a day-trip to the city, it could literally cost hundreds of dollars.

Also, as this study indicates, careful city planning to minimize commute distance could have a significant impact. There is a confluence of issues here. In the US we lack overall housing, we also lack mid-level housing in terms of costs.  We need more condos, row houses, and multi-family units – something between an apartment and a large house sitting on a half-acre. These are exactly the kinds of homes that could be built to densify key regions around city centers. We could essentially address three problems at once.

Meanwhile, we need to continue to convert from fossil fuel burning to electric vehicles. These are more energy efficient and have a much lower carbon footprint over their lifetime. They are also now cheaper to own and have much less maintenance. Having shorter average commute distances would also make EVs, even those with modest ranges, more convenient. We are already past the technological tipping point in terms of the features of EVs themselves. The big issue is that we need to continue to build out the EV public charging infrastructure. They need to be ubiquitous.

I also think that we need to make a big push for working from home. This happened during COVID and I was hoping that everyone would realize the benefits and the trend would continue. However, once the pandemic was over some businesses snapped back to their old policies, and mostly with no good reason. We did make good progress, but not as much as we should have. We should be doing everything we can to maximize working from home. If the average worker worked from home 2 days a week, that would reduce commuting by 40%. This massively reduces traffic and CO2 emissions. Increasingly many people’s jobs involve lots of time sitting in front of a computer. There is no reason for them to commute to an office to do that. Schedule meetings on one or two days a week. In fact, in my experience, many work places have too many meetings. Most of what needs to be accomplished can happen in virtual time, then you can have one meeting to review everything. Obviously this has to be individualized to the workplace, but there are many businesses where there are lots of opportunities to reorganize workflow so that many people can work from home much of the time. Further – working from home increases productivity.

The same is true of the 4 day work week – it maintains or increases productivity. This is because of the same principle I discussed above – people are not machines that will just do what you tell them (short of oppressive environments). People work more efficiently when they are in a better mood, and have a better work-life balance.

Most of these things are win-wins. People do not want to spend large amounts of their life stuck in traffic, sitting in a car that is spewing out pollution. So give them other options, make commutes shorter, let people work fewer days and many days (or all days) from home. Provide cheap public transportation. And when they do have to drive, EVs are a superior option for many people, and we should do what we can to make it the best option for as many people as possible.

The post City Planning and CO2 Emissions first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.