Cubic boron arsenide may be best semiconductor of them all

Wednesday, August 17th, 2022

Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, but its properties as a semiconductor are far from ideal:

For one thing, although silicon lets electrons whizz through its structure easily, it is much less accommodating to “holes” — electrons’ positively charged counterparts — and harnessing both is important for some kinds of chips. What’s more, silicon is not very good at conducting heat, which is why overheating issues and expensive cooling systems are common in computers.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT, the University of Houston, and other institutions has carried out experiments showing that a material known as cubic boron arsenide overcomes both of these limitations. It provides high mobility to both electrons and holes, and has excellent thermal conductivity. It is, the researchers say, the best semiconductor material ever found, and maybe the best possible one.

So far, cubic boron arsenide has only been made and tested in small, lab-scale batches that are not uniform. The researchers had to use special methods originally developed by former MIT postdoc Bai Song to test small regions within the material. More work will be needed to determine whether cubic boron arsenide can be made in a practical, economical form, much less replace the ubiquitous silicon.

[...]

Not only is the material’s thermal conductivity the best of any semiconductor, the researchers say, it has the third-best thermal conductivity of any material — next to diamond and isotopically enriched cubic boron nitride.

Posted in Science, Technology | No Comments »

Crime’s costs are even higher than we thought

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

How bad is crime?, Ben Southwood asks:

In the paper, whose calculations were done in 2006, Americans were willing to pay $25,000 to avert a burglary across their society, $70,000 to avoid a serious assault, and nearly $10m to avoid a murder.

A more practical situation comes when juries award money to ‘make people whole’ for physical injury, pain, suffering, mental anguish, shock, and discomfort that they have experienced due to some illegal action. For example, one 68-year old lady was shot through the spine in a drive-by shooting, and left paraplegic — a jury gave her $2.7m in addition to her medical costs.

If you combine these awards, in a large sample, with separate ‘physician impairment ratings’ — basically how bad doctors think the injury is compared to death — then this is another method of estimating the statistical value of a life, something we have hundreds of estimates for, which typically comes out somewhere above $5m, depending on the wealth of the country and the methodology.

[...]

Their central estimate is that crime costs America $2.6 trillion annually, mostly coming from violent crime. This is about 12 percent of US GDP. By this metric, it would be, in GDP terms, one of the US’s biggest problems, on par with housing. For a country like the UK with a murder rate about five times lower, the problem is probably about five times smaller.

I actually think the American problem is considerably bigger than this estimate, because this study only includes the costs of crimes that actually get committed. However, people try their damnedest to avoid being the victims of crime. This leads to many extremely socially costly behaviours.

What are some of these extremely socially costly behaviors?

For example, one study by Julie Cullen and Steven Levitt finds that when crime rates across the city rise ten percent, city centre populations fall one percent — with people generally moving to the suburbs. One crime tends to push one person out of the city centre, on average.

Quantifying this in terms of a real world city, the roughly 400 percent increase in New York City’s murders from 1955 to 1975 (from around 300 to over 1,500 per year) would have been expected to empty the densest parts of the city out by about 40 percent, assuming that other crimes rose in line with murder. And indeed, the population of the centre city — Manhattan — fell about 35 percent over that period, while the population and physical extent of the suburbs grew rapidly.

Murders in New York City peaked in 1990 at over 2,000 per year, roughly as population reached its nadir in the city centre. They have cratered by over three quarters, to about 300. This would have likely driven city centre population up massively, much moreso than it actually did recover, but building restrictions have prevented this happening anywhere near as much as it might, meaning that it has driven up prices instead.

So this story implies that crime in city cores drives people to the suburbs, creating urban sprawl. If so, then crime’s costs are even higher than we thought.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 6 Comments »

Sauna bathing demonstrated a substantially supplementary effect on CRF, systolic BP, and total cholesterol levels

Monday, August 15th, 2022

Regular exercise and sauna bathing have each been shown to improve cardiovascular function in clinical populations:

However, experimental data on the cardiovascular adaptations to regular exercise in conjunction with sauna bathing in the general population is lacking. Therefore, we compared the effects of exercise and sauna bathing, to regular exercise using a multi-arm randomized controlled trial. Participants(n = 47) aged 49 ± 9 years with low physical activity levels, and at least one traditional CVD risk factor were randomly assigned (1:1:1) to guideline-based regular exercise and 15-minute post-exercise sauna (EXS), guideline-based regular exercise (EXE), or control (CON), for eight weeks. The primary outcomes were blood pressure (BP) and cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF). Secondary outcomes included fat mass, total cholesterol levels, and arterial stiffness. EXE had a greater change in CRF (+6.2 ml/kg/min; 95% CI, +4.2. to +8.3 ml/kg/min) and fat mass, but no differences in BP when compared to CON. EXS displayed greater change in CRF (+2.7 ml/kg/min; 95% CI, +0.2. to +5.3 ml/kg/min), lower systolic BP (-8.0 mmHg; 95% CI, -14.6 to -1.4 mmHg) and lower total cholesterol levels compared to EXE. Regular exercise improved CRF and body composition in sedentary adults with CVD risk factors. However, when combined with exercise, sauna bathing demonstrated a substantially supplementary effect on CRF, systolic BP, and total cholesterol levels. Sauna bathing is a valuable lifestyle tool that complements exercise for improving CRF, and decreasing systolic BP. Future research should focus on the duration, and frequency of exposure to ascertain the dose-response relationship.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 2 Comments »

Why that new “science-backed” supplement probably doesn’t work

Sunday, August 14th, 2022

In much the same way that everything in your fridge both causes and prevents cancer, Alex Hutchinson notes, there’s a study out there somewhere proving that everything boosts endurance:

A new preprint (a journal article that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, ironically) from researchers at Queensland University of Technology in Australia explores why this seems to be the case, and what can be done about it. David Borg and his colleagues comb through thousands of articles from 18 journals that focus on sport and exercise medicine, and unearth telltale patterns about what gets published—and perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t. To make sense of the studies you see and decide whether the latest hot performance aid is worth experimenting with, you also have to consider the studies you don’t see.

[...]

One way to illustrate these results is to plot something called the z-value, which is a statistical measure of the strength of an effect. In theory, if you plot the z-values of thousands of studies, you’d expect to see a perfect bell curve. Most of the results would be clustered around zero, and progressively fewer would have either very strongly positive or very strongly negative effects. Any z-value less than -1.96 or greater than +1.96 corresponds to a statistically significant result with p less than 0.05. A z-value between -1.96 and +1.96 indicates a null result with no statistically significant finding.

In practice, the bell curve won’t be perfect, but you’d still expect a fairly smooth curve. Instead, this is what you see if you plot the z-values from the 1,599 studies analyzed by Borg:

Borg Distribution of Z Values

There’s a giant missing piece in the middle of the bell curve, where all the studies with non-significant results should be. There are probably lots of different reasons for this, both driven by decisions that researchers make and—just as importantly—decisions that journals make about what to publish and what to reject. It’s not an easy problem to solve, because no journal wants to publish (and no reader wants to read) thousands of studies that conclude, over and over, “We’re not yet sure whether this works.”

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Turmeric is routinely adulterated with a yellow pigment that contains lead

Saturday, August 13th, 2022

Rural Bangladesh has a lead-poisoning problem — because turmeric is routinely adulterated with a yellow pigment that contains lead, PbCrO4. Wow.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

Resistant starch reduced upper gastrointestinal cancers by more than half

Friday, August 12th, 2022

An international trial with almost 1,000 patients with Lynch syndrome revealed that a regular dose of resistant starch, also known as fermentable fibre, taken for an average of two years, did not affect cancers in the bowel but did reduce cancers in other parts of the body by more than half:

This effect was particularly pronounced for upper gastrointestinal cancers including oesophageal, gastric, biliary tract, pancreatic and duodenum cancers.

The astonishing effect was seen to last for 10 years after stopping taking the supplement.

The study, led by experts at the Universities of Newcastle and Leeds, published today in Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, is a planned double blind 10 year follow–up, supplemented with comprehensive national cancer registry data for up to 20 years in 369 of the participants.

Previous research published as part of the same trial, revealed that aspirin reduced cancer of the large bowel by 50%.

“We found that resistant starch reduces a range of cancers by over 60%. The effect was most obvious in the upper part of the gut,” explained Professor John Mathers, professor of Human Nutrition at Newcastle University. “This is important as cancers of the upper GI tract are difficult to diagnose and often are not caught early on.

“Resistant starch can be taken as a powder supplement and is found naturally in peas, beans, oats and other starchy foods. The dose used in the trial is equivalent to eating a daily banana; before they become too ripe and soft, the starch in bananas resists breakdown and reaches the bowel where it can change the type of bacteria that live there.

“Resistant starch is a type of carbohydrate that isn’t digested in your small intestine, instead it ferments in your large intestine, feeding beneficial gut bacteria — it acts in effect, like dietary fibre in your digestive system. This type of starch has several health benefits and fewer calories than regular starch. We think that resistant starch may reduce cancer development by changing the bacterial metabolism of bile acids and to reduce those types of bile acids that can damage our DNA and eventually cause cancer. However, this needs further research.”

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Your name goes on your…

Thursday, August 11th, 2022

Rob Henderson explains social class through the example of where your name goes:

Working class: Your name on your uniform
Middle class: Your name on your desk
Upper middle class: Your name on your office door
Upper class: Your name on the building

Posted in Policy | 10 Comments »

Elbows are very hazardous to the hands

Wednesday, August 10th, 2022

James LaFond is surprised by how poorly boxing coaches understand their bareknuckle roots:

In gloved boxing, the hooker is better served in the pocket or wheelhouse and the straight puncher wants to be on the outside. In bareknuckle boxing the straight puncher can stay on the inside and do damage.

Body punches count for more in bareknuckle than with gloves.

Elbows are very hazardous to the hands in bare knuckle so:

  • Throw palm down punches under his elbows
  • Throw thumb-up punches to his chest
  • Throw palm up punches to his face [if in close, even with the rear hand], with the up jab targeting the eye

If it is legal, and your man leaves his head open, not worrying about you hitting it because he wants you to break your hand, than:

  • Slap him in the ear or on top of the head with a pivot
  • Hit with the heel of your hand in a lateral hammer-fisting motion, which can be done like a spinning backfist or as a way to catch a guy who has bobbed under your hook and is popping back up of has slipped your rear straight, by slamming the side of your fist into the side of his head while pivoting off the opposite foot and dropping the heel of the foot under the hand you are hammering with.

To set up the spinning backfist, just get him to back up a step and launch.

Shovel hooks to the chin are better than Philly hooks to the head.

The jab should be used for power, not just targeting.

Use more feints. My favorite bare knuckle feint is a loop-3:

  • Fake the lead rear straight.
  • Then fake the shovel hook and either jab hard or throw the rear straight off of that.
  • When he goes for the body, really drop those elbows on his hands.

Posted in Martial Arts | 3 Comments »

When people arrive at the same policy recommendations but shift to the opposite rationale, it seems fair to doubt their objectivity

Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

There are two carbon calculation problems, Arnold Kling explains, and they are interdependent:

One problem is to figure out the optimal amount of carbon emission reduction. That means making a judgment about how much harm carbon emissions cause (and this relies on unreliable models) and comparing this with the cost of the carbon-emission reduction measures. The other problem is to figure the optimal carbon-emission reduction measures, which will in turn help you to calculate the cost of those measures.

When someone makes a specific proposal, such as changing fertilizer use, I want to say: Show Your Work. That is, show the assumptions and calculations that you made in order to arrive at this proposal. Otherwise, it may not even be true that your proposal would reduce carbon emissions.

In the economy, central planners face a well-known calculation problem. Even when they are sure that the market is getting things wrong, they usually lack a way to measure the degree of correction needed.

To a first approximation, the best way to have a sustainable economy is to let the market work. In order to determine sustainability, markets perform a complex calculation problem. If a firm’s output sells for more than the cost of its inputs, then its production process is sustainable, and it remains in business. If it sells for less, it experiences losses, and it goes out of business. No public official has knowledge that can enable a regulator to outperform the price system.

But there are costs that the market does not count. One cost that is on the minds of most policymakers today is the cost of carbon emissions, which add to greenhouse gases and hence to global warming.

Markets can still help in addressing the carbon emissions calculation problem.

[...]

As an aside, I should point out that animosity toward gasoline-fueled automobiles and “smokestack” industry long preceded the focus on global warming. Fifty years ago, one concern was air pollution. This was a fair concern, and I would say that the regulators who mandated filtering systems probably got it right. Certainly, the air in Los Angeles is cleaner because cars no longer spew as much pollution. And the air in Pittsburgh is cleaner because it no longer is a steel town.

Also fifty years ago, there was a concern that we would soon run out of fossil fuels. This motivated President Carter and Congress to create the Department of Energy, tasked with developing alternative energy sources in what Mr. Carter called a “moral equivalent of war.”

The global warming issue shifted the rationale for opposing gasoline and “smokestack” industries. The concern that fossil fuels were subject to scarcity was replaced by a worry that they are too abundant. When people arrive at the same policy recommendations but shift to the opposite rationale, it seems fair to doubt their objectivity.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 5 Comments »

Dr. Raymond Kuo shares the Statecraft and Negotiations simulations he created for his class

Monday, August 8th, 2022

Dr. Raymond Kuo created a Statecraft and Negotiations course when he was a professor, and he has shared his Statecraft and Negotiation Simulations:

I created about a dozen original simulations that:

  • Could be played in ~1 hour or less.
  • Examined 1-3 concepts at once (I find the commercially available sims too sprawling and pedagogically confusing).
  • Could be scaled for many different class sizes, but with teams no larger than 4.
  • Ideally don’t use points.

They are listed and linked below. You might need WinRar to open the zipped files. A few notes/caveats:

  • Please attribute them to me.
  • If you modify the design, please let me know! I’m not a professional game designer, so many things need improving. I’d love to see what you’ve done and would be happy to host new, better versions here.
  • They are purely a teaching aid. Feel free to substitute fictional countries if you’d like. I think (?) the learning goals and teacher’s guides are in the negotiation packages, but please let me know if not.

Aid and Development
Three players (USAID, USTR, DRC) negotiate an aid package for the DRC. Explores aid conditionality.

Electoral System Design
Design an election system for an ethnically fractionalized country emerging from civil violence.

Human Rights
Acting as specific countries, players create the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Negotiate over wording and try to exclude certain rights to align the declaration with your domestic political, legal, and economic systems.

Nuclear Weapons
Go nuclear! Or try to mutually disarm. But don’t get tricked. A simple game requiring only 1-2 decks of cards for the whole class.

War Initiation
Can the players avoid starting World War 1? My largest sim, 5-6 countries, ideally represented by teams, not individuals.

War Termination
Companion to “War Initiation.” Players relive the Versailles conference, attempting to end World War 1 on the most advantageous terms. Can you do better than the real diplomats?

COIN and Laws of War
A four-stage tactical decision game that requires some instructor moderation/adjudication. Can you defend a town without violating the laws of war?

Trade
NOTE: A couple of my students designed this simulation, and I think it’s better than my trade sim. Negotiate NAFTA!

Posted in Education, Games, Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Bromberger pegged additive manufacturing at 2-3% of the $12 trillion production market

Sunday, August 7th, 2022

Additive manufacturing — 3-D printing — is on the cusp of being adopted more widely by industry — still:

In May, Goodyear opened a $77 million plant in Luxembourg that centers on 3-D printing and can make tires four times faster in small batches than with conventional production. Goodyear also is testing its new 3-D printed airless tire technology on Tesla electric vehicles and Starship Technologies’ autonomous delivery robots. It has been working for the past several years on improved manufacturing techniques at an R&D center near Columbus, Ohio.

By 2030, Goodyear aims to bring maintenance-free and airless tires to market, and 3-D printing is part of that effort for the Akron-based tire-making leader founded in 1898 and named after innovator Charles Goodyear. Currently, about 2% of its production is through additive manufacturing and more integration into the mix is in sight.

“Like with any innovation, targeting the right use case is key. 3-D printing is not for every job. We’re using additive manufacturing for higher-end, ultra-high performance tires that require much more complexity, and in smaller lot sizes,” said Chris Helsel, senior vice president, global operations and CTO at Goodyear. “There is still a benefit of making large runs of tires efficiently through a normal assembly line.”

Leveraging the new technology takes patience. “You can’t bring it in, turn it on. It is not a short journey. We have been on this route for 10-12 years,” Helsel said. In an initial commercialization of its 3-D printed airless tires in 2017, Goodyear started equipping premium lawnmower models made by Bad Boy Mowers.

[...]

Primarily useful for making specialized high-value parts and smaller production volumes, Bromberger pegged additive manufacturing at 2-3% of the $12 trillion production market.

3-D printing industry consultant Wohlers Associates expects additive manufacturing to grow at a relatively strong pace and predicts the market worldwide will reach $85.3 billion in 2031 from $15.2 billion in 2021. The leading industrial sector using the technology is aerospace, followed by medical/dental and automotive, while the most common applications for 3-D printing are for making end-use parts and functional prototypes, according to the firm’s Wohlers Report 2022.

The main advantages of the technology include design flexibility in various 3-D shapes that can perform better or cost less, and customized production of parts. Other advantages are cutting out time-consuming, pre-production processes and making products on-demand from digital files.

A chief barrier to adoption is investment costs. Prices for industrial 3-D printing machines can vary from $25,000 to $500,000 and up to $1 million for huge systems. Further limitations are a lack of engineering talent to implement the technology, a knowledge gap among businesses about why and how to use it, cultural resistance on the shop floor to change, and too few end-to-end 3-D printing systems.

[...]

But stock market reception of 3-D printing as a pure-play investment theme has not been good in recent years. Desktop Metal has lost almost 80% of its value since going public in 2021, and the performance of other 3-D printing sector plays has been poor even as the technology advances.

[...]

For Boeing’s Millennium Space Systems subsidiary, acquired in 2018 as a maker of small satellites for the national security space, 100% 3-D printed satellites have been made this year with 30% less cost and a five-month reduction in production lead time. A regular user of the technology for several years, Boeing also has 3-D printed parts for helicopters and seats for the Starliner spacecraft, as well as components for the Boeing 787, and tooling for 787 aircraft wings.

Posted in Business, Technology | 1 Comment »

Passenger trains generally travel on the same tracks as freight trains

Saturday, August 6th, 2022

Modern American passenger trains take longer to travel the same routes than trains used to take:

First, Amtrak trains often have to make more stops than their pre-Amtrak counterparts. (Abrams didn’t go into detail why, but as a quasi-government corporation, Amtrak sometimes makes more stops along a route to please Congressional representatives who need to authorize its funding, unlike the private railroads that existed before Amtrak’s formation in the early 1970s.) As an example of the added stops Amtrak now makes, Abrams pointed out the 1959 New York Central’s New York-Chicago route took 16 hours and made eight stops, whereas Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited along the same route takes 19 hours 10 minutes making 18 stops, including a lengthy pause in Albany where train cars coming from Boston are linked up.

The second reason has to do with track priority. Passenger trains generally travel on the same tracks as freight trains. When the passenger and freight trains were owned by the same company, they typically prioritized passengers. Now, in the Amtrak era, freight rail companies no longer operate passenger train service but still own, operate, and maintain the tracks, which Amtrak uses. Although the law requires them to prioritize Amtrak trains, in practice they rarely do, resulting in an escalating beef between the freight companies and Amtrak.

[…]

One of the few places Amtrak does not have to contend with freight rail is along the Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C. to Boston via New York. Either Amtrak or regional commuter rail systems own those tracks. And it is one of the few routes with noticeable time improvements since the Eisenhower Era and the only stretch with anything approaching high speed rail service, saving riders some 45 minutes between New York and Washington when compared to Olden Times. And New York to Boston on Acela — until recently the only stretch of track in the U.S. with true “high-speed rail” — is 21 minutes faster than the fastest train in 1952.

Posted in Policy, Urbanism | 5 Comments »

Diamonds are forever

Friday, August 5th, 2022

Back in 1982, Edward Jay Epstein asked, Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value — and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems.

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as “The Syndicate.” In Europe, it was called the “C.S.O.” — initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height — for most of this century — it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

De Beers proved to be the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. While other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber, and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds have continued, with few exceptions, to advance upward in price every year since the Depression. Indeed, the cartel seemed so superbly in control of prices — and unassailable — that, in the late 1970s, even speculators began buying diamonds as a guard against the vagaries of inflation and recession.

[…]

To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever — “forever” in the sense that they should never be resold.

[…]

Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love. In addition, the agency suggested offering stories and society photographs to selected magazines and newspapers which would reinforce the link between diamonds and romance. Stories would stress the size of diamonds that celebrities presented to their loved ones, and photographs would conspicuously show the glittering stone on the hand of a well-known woman. Fashion designers would talk on radio programs about the “trend towards diamonds” that Ayer planned to start. The Ayer plan also envisioned using the British royal family to help foster the romantic allure of diamonds. An Ayer memo said, “Since Great Britain has such an important interest in the diamond industry, the royal couple could be of tremendous assistance to this British industry by wearing diamonds rather than other jewels.” Queen Elizabeth later went on a well-publicized trip to several South African diamond mines, and she accepted a diamond from Oppenheimer.

Posted in Business, Economics | 1 Comment »

The Amish have been breeding themselves for plainness

Thursday, August 4th, 2022

The Amish population doubles every 20 years:

The North American Amish population grew by an estimated 195,710 since 2000, increasing from approximately 177,910 in 2000 to 373,620 in 2022, an increase of 110 percent. The Amish population doubles about every 20 years.

[…]

The primary forces driving the growth are sizable nuclear families (five or more children on average) and an average retention rate (Amish children who join the church as young adults) of 85 percent or more.

The Amish probably won’t pass 10 billion in the early 24th Century, Steve Sailer notes:

I wrote about the Amish in 2013, including the Cochran-Harpending theory that one reason their retention rate has gone up over the generations is because they have been boiling off Amish-born individuals with genomes that don’t put up well with the Amish lifestyle, that the Amish have been breeding themselves for their favorite trait: “plainness.”

Posted in Policy, Science | 12 Comments »

A person who took a 500 mile flight every single day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022

Amtrak passengers are about 58 times as likely to get injured as train riders in France, but American trains are still much safer Than many alternatives:

Automobiles are one of the most deadly ways to get from Point A to Point B, with 7.28 deaths for every billion passenger miles.
This fatality rate was 17 times as high as the rate for trains, which stood at 0.43 deaths per billion miles. Subways, buses and planes are even safer still.

[…]

“A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying,” Savage wrote. “The rate per passenger mile was 29 times that for automobiles and light trucks.” By contrast, “A person who took a 500 mile flight every single day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000.”

Posted in Urbanism | 6 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »