Quick takes and random stuff, December 14, 2023

Netflix, jerks, a CO2 visual, cats, and more

Netflix hours viewed

Netflix has released a report on hours viewed by title (12/12/2023) for the first half of 2023. What I found interesting is the skewedness of the distribution. Note that it is skewed even with a log-scale x-axis. Also interesting is the dip in the second bar.

Because you want to know the top shows, here are the top 12. Note that the eighth-best show had half the viewing hours as the top.

Another data center, another 300 MW

DCD reports (12/8/2023)

Newly announced data center company CalEthos plans to build a 300MW wholesale campus in Southern California.

On one hand, the good news is that

It has hired ZGlobal, an energy consulting firm, to engineer a grid connectivity plan to enable the delivery of 100 percent clean geothermal and solar energy to the site.

Well, sort of good news; note the word “enable.” On the other hand, 300 MW of clean energy is enough to power about 225,000 homes, and its addition to the grid is for new energy use. Our modern lifestyles use a lot of energy. It is a tall order to move to renewable energy while we continue to increase our consumption.

Graph of the week: What cats eat

From A global synthesis and assessment of free-ranging domestic cat diet (12/12/2023)

Taxonomy of the diet from an exhaustive review of cat diet studies globally (A) and by closest continent to the study area (B). The “Other” category consisted primarily of invertebrates, including, but not limited to, Arachnida, Malacostraca, Chilopoda, and Gastropoda. The numbers above each column (B) refer to the number of species identified on each continent. We note that these numbers do not sum to the total number of unique species identified globally because many species were identified on multiple continents.

First, who knew there were that many house cats in Antarctica? This is a good example of how a global result, graph A, can hide more local patterns, graph B. House cats are invasive predators (I have four), and the importance of the study is this:

A total of 347 (16.65%) cat-consumed species were of conservation concern, listed as Near Threatened, Threatened (i.e., Vulnerable, Endangered or Critically Endangered), or Extinct on the IUCN Red List (Fig. 3), with these tallies including 7.1% of the world’s birds of conservation concern, 4.9% of mammals, and 2.7% of reptiles (Table 2).

Jerks rule

The world could use more jerks from the Washington Post (12/12/2023).

Allow me to introduce myself, then, as the jerk who thinks we need more jerks, particularly in knowledge-making fields such as journalism and academia — or at least the kind of people who get called jerks for saying things their colleagues don’t want to hear.

The point is that we have moved to valuing niceness over truth. It is a problem, and I would say it is bigger than even this essay suggests.

These days, human resources departments have cracked down on all manner of jerk-ish behavior — including, of course, saying things that offend one’s colleagues. But if you’re in the truth business, all this niceness comes at a cost, as a perspective just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes clear.

From NASA’s scientific visualization studio

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most prevalent greenhouse gas driving global climate change. However, its increase in the atmosphere would be even more rapid without land and ocean carbon sinks, which collectively absorb about half of human emissions every year. Advanced computer modeling techniques in NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office allow us to disentangle the influences of sources and sinks and to better understand where carbon is coming from and going to.

This is a great video from NASA but you may need to watch it a few times.

PISA results

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released a new report (12/5/2023). It is a long report rich with information and data. I’ll highlight just two graphs for today.

What I see here is that there are general declines starting around 2012. This matches Haidt’s data (see his work at After Babel) that mental health started declining around 2012 due to smart phones. My second point is that 2022 is post-pandemic, and for the most part, the results don’t suggest the pandemic changed trends. In other words, the pandemic had much less of an influence than people suggest.

The second graph is this one, which shows the relationship between math scores in 2022 and the result of a math anxiety survey (note the graph doesn’t explain the blue and black colors).

Within countries/economies, mathematics anxiety is negatively associated with student achievement in mathematics in every education system that took part in PISA 2022 regardless of student and school characteristics. On average across OECD countries, a one-point increase in the index of mathematics anxiety is associated with a decrease in mathematics achievement of 18 score points after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile (Table I.B1.2.17).

Countries/economies with higher average levels of mathematics anxiety perform less well in mathematics. International differences in the index of mathematics anxiety account for about 25% of the variation in student performance in mathematics across all countries and economies that took part in PISA 2022 (Figure I.2.1).

The math anxiety issue is interesting and worth studying. At the same time, I’d like to see more effort put into understanding how students with above-average anxiety cope and do well. For example, Japan is well above average in anxiety yet scores in the top 5. Similarly, there are low-anxiety countries that are barely above average—Finland, for example. In fact, I reject trying to think of this as a linear relationship. In my sport psychology class from long ago, it was known that either too little or too much anxiety is bad for performance. I don’t think we should talk about anxiety as all bad; some is good.

EIA graph of the week

This is from California leads the United States in electric vehicles and charging locations (12/14/2023).

There are two points worth making here. First, the U.S. has about 3 million EVs, which is almost nothing. In my post What will it take to run the U.S. on electricity? you will see there are almost 103 million cars—just cars, as this doesn’t count trucks, buses, or motorcycles. EVs make up about 3% of the car fleet.

The fact that EVs and charging stations are concentrated in California suggests that most of the rest of the country is well behind in moving to EVs and may be less interested. Note that California has over a third of the registered EVs, while being about 12% of the U.S. population. I don’t think the move to EVs will be as fast as some would hope.

The spinning CD

Cadet Carter: Lift Me Up. Fun song.

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Thank you

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Disagreeing and using comments

I'd rather know the truth and understand the world than always be right. I'm not writing to upset or antagonize anyone on purpose, though I guess that could happen. I welcome dissent and disagreement in the comments. We all should be forced to articulate our viewpoints and change our minds when we need to, but we should also know that we can respectfully disagree and move on. So, if you think something said is wrong or misrepresented, then please share your viewpoint in the comments.