Category: Technology

California fights wildfires like wars, but this one may be unwinnable.

This article originally ran on January 9, 2025 in New York magazine.

Walls of flames pushed by hurricane-force winds are devouring the Los Angeles basin, leveling whole neighborhoods and overwhelming firefighters. The water streaming from fire hydrants slows to a trickle. Ash rains down over the tens of thousands fleeing their homes, masked against the choking smoke. For Angelenos watching their city burn, there is no prior experience that can help them grasp the scale of what is happening. As a friend texted me from Hollywood, “This may be the biggest wildfire disaster in world history.”

The scale of the destruction is all the more dismaying given how assiduously California has prepared itself to combat wildfires. The state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as CAL FIRE, spends $4 billion a year on prevention and mitigation. Over the last decade that money has allowed it to assemble an army-like force of unprecedented sophistication and scale, with a staff of 12,000 and an aerial firefighting fleet larger than most countries’ air forces.

Yet in the face of some of the worst fire conditions in over a decade, it hasn’t been enough. Though some 9,000 firefighters were on hand to battle this week’s blazes, they were overwhelmed by the multiple wildfires that moved at hundreds of yards per minute. “We don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all the departments to handle this,” L.A. County fire chief Anthony Marrone told the L.A. Times on Wednesday.

The problem wasn’t only a shortage of manpower. Even the most formidable human efforts are useless when bone-dry undergrowth is whipped by the strongest winds the area has experienced in years, with gusts up to 100 mph. “When that wind is howling like that, nothing’s going to stop that fire,” says Wayne Coulson, CEO of the aerial firefighting company Coulson Aviation that’s battling the fires. “You just need to get out of the way.”

The winds slackened Wednesday night and on Thursday morning, helping firefighters gain the upper hand against some of the infernos. The city’s fire chief announced on Thursday that the Woodley fire in the San Fernando Valley had been brought under control and that firefighters had made gains against the Sunset fire threatening Hollywood. But other fires still burned out of control and further danger loomed. According to the National Weather Service, humidity remains dangerously low and gusty winds of up to 70 mph are expected between Thursday night and Friday evening. By Thursday morning, five major fires were still burning and tens of thousandsof people were under evacuation orders. Warned the NWS: “Any new wildfires that develop will likely spread rapidly.”

This article originally ran in Sherwood News on December 26, 2024.

In 1959, physicist Robert Noyce and his colleagues at the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation created a nifty little piece of technology: a wafer of silicon with an entire electronic circuit printed on it. As a technical breakthrough, it was an impressively clever feat, but what made Noyce’s achievement historically important was the cascade of innovations that followed. By making it possible to progressively shrink computing power into smaller and cheaper packages, the integrated circuit gave rise to wave after wave of transformative products, from the pocket calculator to the personal computer, the internet, and mobile computing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Noyce’s invention engendered the entire digital world as we know it today.

Noyce and some of his collaborators left Fairchild to form their own company, IntelINTC $19.92 (-2.41%), in 1968. Like OpenAI today, Intel had a head start on a new field of almost unlimited promise, and it used its advantage to great effect. In 1971 the company invented the microprocessor chip, a development that would later enable personal computers to bring the information age into homes of retail consumers. In 1997, Time magazine named Intel CEO Andrew Grove its Man of the Year. By 2000, the company had a market cap of $250 billion and ranked as the sixth-most-valuable business in the world.

That, however, proved to be the company’s high-water mark. In the years that followed, the company learned that being present at the birth of a technology and riding it to great heights doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll be able to sniff out market trends and outcompete newcomers indefinitely. In 1999, NvidiaNVDA $138.46 (0.28%), a much smaller rival, began shipping its first graphics processing unit, or GPU. In the decade to come, these chips would prove essential to the growth of PC gaming and multimedia applications, and then proved equally vital to both cryptocurrency mining and the large language models that power OpenAI. This time it was Nvidia, not Intel, whose chips were powering the revolution, and the changing of the guard was reflected in the company’s share prices. Ten years ago, Intel’s market cap was 15x bigger than Nvidia’s; today Nvidia’s is 30x bigger.

Investor Warren Buffett famously once said that he likes to invest in companies whose business has an “economic moat” around it — some factor, whether brand strength, network effects, patents, or economies of scale, that prevents rivals from swooping in and poaching its business. A head start in a technology can function as a moat for a while. But success inevitably draws rivals, and sooner or later some of them will catch up, or the demands of the market will change and favor a different technology. For now, OpenAI has a first-mover advantage in machine learning, and it has every reason to be optimistic about its fortunes in the years ahead. But if history is any guide, its halcyon days will eventually go the way of all flesh.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on October 9, 2024

The warnings began arriving by telegram. A fierce hurricane had just swung around the western tip of Cuba and was heading for Tampa, Florida. When it made landfall at Tarpon Springs on October 25, 1921, it was the storm of the century. Winds of 120 mph smashed steamships and toppled trees, and an 11-foot storm surge swept away buildings and destroyed crops. At least eight people were killed. “Tampa City of Ruins,” a local newspaper declared.

It’s been more than 100 years since a storm this fierce has hit Tampa, but given the climatic trends, storms that formerly registered as once-in-a-lifetime events are going to be happening a lot more frequently. Hurricane seasons are getting more intense, researchers say, and outlier storms are getting bigger. So while Milton is going to be the worst storm that anyone alive has ever seen in the area, it might not be the last of its scale to come around for a while.

Jill Trepanier, a professor of geography at Louisiana State University, has studied the kind of extreme storms that only appear every 30 years. She found that as waters have gotten warmer, the intensity of these storms has increased. “Thirty years ago, when we thought about what a typical 30-year event looked like in Tampa, it was a Category 3,” she says. “Now, it’s inching toward Category 4.”

This article originally ran in New York magazine on September 18, 2024

The wave of exploding pagers that injured nearly 3,000 and killed at least nine, including a 9-year-old girl, in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday was a stunning and unexpected blow against Israel’s longtime foe, Hezbollah. While the sheer number of casualties will put a damper on the terrorist group’s ability to wage offensive action, physical incapacitation of enemy fighters likely wasn’t Israel’s primary goal. Rather, the move was likely aimed at creating fear and internal suspicion that would more significantly undermine the group’s ability to fight.

“It promulgates fear,” says Dr. Patrick Sullivan, director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. “It demonstrates to their enemy, ‘Hey, we can reach out and touch you anywhere, anytime.’ I would imagine that Hezbollah is significantly questioning who is in their ranks, who are their suppliers, and what vulnerabilities they have.”

In military science terms, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is described as asymmetric. Israel is a nation with a standing army and all the resources of a modern economy. Hezbollah is a paramilitary organization whose members are dispersed among the population of Lebanon. While they have fewer men and weapons than Israel, they can attack by surprise then melt away. (Hezbollah has used these sorts of hit-and-run tactics most recently in its ongoing shelling of Israel’s north.) You can’t destroy a guerrilla organization through the kind of direct, tank-on-tank attritional slugfest that Russia and Ukraine are currently waging. Instead, the core struggle is waged in the informational domain and the strategic objective is to degrade the psychological state of the enemy, according to Sullivan.

This article originally ran in New York magazine on August 26, 2024

The sinking of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s yacht in a freak storm off the Sicilian coast last week certainly has to rank among the most bizarre fatal celebrity accidents in years. There was the weird coincidence that Lynch had just gotten acquitted after a yearslong legal battle over a multibillion-dollar fraud; the eerie synchrony of the same-day death of his co-defendant after being struck by car while jogging; the fact that the $40 million vessel had been described as virtually unsinkable; the fact no vessel that size had been sunk by a waterspout in centuries; and the fact that the area where it struck is not known for waterspouts. But perhaps the wildest thing about the whole saga is the yacht’s name, Bayesian.

It refers to a method of statistical calculation that was originally devised by an 18th-century Presbyterian minister, Thomas Bayes. Lynch named his yacht after Bayes’s method in recognition of its role in building his fortune. In short, he had honored a method of calculating probabilities — only to be killed aboard its namesake by an accumulation of wildly off-the-chart improbabilities.

“The irony is tragic,” says British science journalist Tom Chivers, who writes for Semafor and published a book this year on Bayesian statistics calledEverything Is Predictable. “It’s not a subtle irony. Bayes is the maths of prediction. This sequence of events is just spectacularly unlikely.”

It’s as if Charles Kane had been crushed to death under a giant rosebud.

This article originally ran on June 6, 2024 in Sherwood News.

On a morning in May, an 78-year-old, 64-foot schooner named the Apollonia raised its sails and cast off from Hudson, New York. As it sailed south it was borne along the half-mile-wide river by a falling tide. The wind was not favorable. The Apollonia could make progress only by tacking at angles to the wind, a process that required three crew members to haul ropes pulling in the sails as the ship turned, before letting them out again once the ship reached its new heading. The ship zigzagged a hundred times before the crew called it quits and tied up for the night. 

In the following days other challenges awaited. At Poughkeepsie the crew was becalmed; at Ossining they had to wait for the tide to rise until the water was deep enough to dock. The most difficult stretch of the voyage lay at World’s End, a narrowing of the river near West Point, where the current runs strong and mountain slopes funnel the wind unpredictably. To get through, said the vessel’s captain, Sam Merrett, “you really have to understand the Hudson.”

A week after it set out, and a hundred miles downriver, the Apollonia at last docked at the One°15 Brooklyn Marina. A morning shower had soaked the deck and in the cabin rain gear was hung to dry. The crew looked tired but happy. What they’d accomplished was not much from a practical standpoint — unloading barrels of barley malt at breweries along the way and picking up assorted goods like grain, flour, beer, whiskey, and preserves to deliver to customers downstream — but from a symbolic perspective it could be seen as epic. The Apollonia is the first sail-powered vessel in decades to run cargo along the US coast, and while the ship and its technology are old, its goal is new and ambitious: to demonstrate effective ways to decarbonize the maritime transport industry by 2050. 

Exciting rumors have been swirling in the halls of astrobiology. The James Webb Space Telescope, which has been scrutinizing the cosmos in unprecedented detail since its deployment in 2022, has been on a tear lately, and folks in the know say it might finally have detected life beyond Earth. That’s the buzz, anyway. Says astrophysicist Rebecca Smethurst, as reported by The Spectator, “I think we are going to get a paper that has strong evidence for a biosignature on an exoplanet very, very soon.”

In other words: Awesome! But also: Calm down. “Strong evidence for a biosignature” is a long way from proof of life on other planets. A biosignature is basically a signal that’s consistent with life but that may also be produced by something else. It’s intriguing but not incontrovertible evidence. And given the many uncertainties surrounding a discipline still in its infancy, the public should not get its hopes up. “So many people want this to be the year. There will definitely be claims,” says Sara Seager, an MIT professor of astrophysics. “There won’t be any robust findings.”

One reason it’s hard to pin down unequivocal evidence of life is that we don’t really know what life is. Here on Earth, biology involves DNA and carbohydrates and requires liquid water, but the chemistry could be different on other worlds. Maybe life could use liquid methane instead of water, or silicon instead of carbon. So, in its most fundamental formulation, what is life all about, and how do we know what to look for?

In theory, science is an entirely rational and transparent undertaking. Scientists gather data, form hypotheses, and then collect more data to find out which hypothesis is correct. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, real-life science is messy and often opaque. Data can be ambiguous. Scientists can be bull-headed. The process of shifting consensus has always been as much about politics and intellectual fashion as about theory and data. Now throw in social media, fanboy culture, preprint archives, and virality — you have a world that breeds all kinds of oddities that can pop up, disappear, and reemerge like quantum virtual particles. All sorts of wild discoveries are bouncing around the information ecosystem before any peer-reviewed journals are able to sort out whether they’re real. And scientists aren’t even all on the same page as to whether this is a good thing or not.

An iteration of flash-mob science erupted last summer, when Twitter users began hyping the work of a South Korean team that said it had discovered a material that was superconductive at room temperature and pressure. Bolstering the claim was a video showing a chunk of material partially levitating. As we reported at the time, if the findings were replicated, it would have massive practical implications for things like levitating trains and quantum computing.

Then the story collapsed.