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2026-06-05

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  • How Long Does It Take to Plan a Bridge?

    Many folks, including me, have observed that it seems to take much longer to build infrastructure in the US than it used to. People point to things like the rapid construction of the Empire State Building (one year) or the Golden Gate Bridge (just over four years) and note that for a modern infrastructure project it can take that long or longer to even get the permits or do the environmental studies. But when doing these sorts of comparisons, it’s important to compare like with like: specifically, we shouldn’t measure the time spent planning a project (which would include doing the environmental studies and securing the permits) against the time spent actually building it. (The Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, was constructed in four years from 1933 to 1937, but planning for the project began around 1921.)

    The average time to construct a bridge between 1980 and 1999 (6.5 years) was more than twice as long as the average construction time for bridges built between 1940 and 1959 (3.1 years). Construction times for bridges built between 2000 and 2025 are down from this peak (5.4 years), but they’re still well above the times of the 1920s through the 1950s.

    One notable thing about recent bridge construction is that a very large fraction of modern bridges are replacements for existing bridges. Of the 17 bridges on the list that were completed after the year 2000, 14 of them were replacement bridges. Some of these were for bridges that collapsed, like the I-35W bridge replacement in Minneapolis; others were for bridges that were damaged and at risk of collapse, like the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Maine; and some were for bridges that were near the end of their design lives, like Florida’s Pensacola Bay Bridge. All else being equal, I’d expect a replacement for an existing bridge to get built more quickly than a completely new bridge, because people will react more viscerally and negatively to a major traffic route being removed than they will for construction of a nonexistent bridge getting delayed. This visible sentiment probably creates a sense of urgency to replace an existing bridge that doesn’t exist for a completely new bridge that people haven’t developed expectations for. One illustration of this dynamic is that collapsed highway overpasses often get rebuilt exceptionally quickly. When a highway overpass in Atlanta collapsed following a fire, it was rebuilt in just six weeks. We saw something similar with collapsed highway overpasses in Los Angeles and Pennsylvania. (The long time it took to rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore thus may be something of an outlier.)

Horseshit

Epstein

  • Bill Gates told staff more than 20 affairs were claimed in divorce during tense town hall meeting: report

    Bill Gates was accused of having more than 20 extramarital affairs in the fallout from his divorce from ex-wife Melinda, the billionaire told Gates Foundation staffers during a sullen town meeting earlier this year, according to a new report. While Gates, 70, owned up to having two affairs with Russian women referenced in the Epstein files during the February gathering, the Microsoft co-founder left employees stunned when he revealed that allegations related to more than 20 affairs had come up during the 2021 divorce proceedings, sources told the Wall Street Journal. Gates, who had been married to Melinda for 27 years, had issued a groveling apology at the time, but claimed he “did nothing illicit” during his meetings with late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

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  • US Marine Corps retires the first fighter jet that didn't need a runway

  • Swarms of 'killer mosquitoes' released on innocent Americans

    The Daily Mail has unearthed a 69-page report which was quietly declassified in 1977 and dumped on the website for the Defense Technical Information Center, the Pentagon’s official library for scientific and technical information. The file detailed a classified US Army program, dubbed Project Bellwether, that conducted real-world experiments to study how well mosquitoes bite people outdoors in hot, desert conditions. The goal of the tests, carried out between September and October 1959, was to gather data to evaluate the insects as potential biological weapons that could be unleashed against enemy troops or other populated areas.

    • news from 1977, about events in 1959... I'm pretty sure this has been reported before.

World

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  • Academics propose a plan for planetary survival and improved living standards

  • Humans Are Changing How Nature Smells, with Risks for Wildlife

  • Oregon gets its first California condor visit in 122 years

  • The Quest to Mine the Bottom of the Sea

  • Flesh-eating screwworm confirmed in Texas as parasite crosses Mexican border

    This first case in 60 years was detected in a three-week-old calf, with the larvae found in its umbilical area.

    COPEG (Panama–United States Commission for the Eradication and Prevention of Screwworm Infestation in Livestock) is an international mission between the U.S. and Panama for the control of the Screwworm pest. The project began dispersal operations in Panama in 1998, and the Sterile Fly Production Plant was inaugurated in Pacora in 2006. Until June 2023, Panama was considered the biological barrier against this pest for the rest of Central and North America, through the dispersal of sterile flies from Lake Bayano to 20 nautical miles into Colombia.

    So why give up on the full-on effort to restore the Panama barrier? As Zhang notes in her article, this was an American-led success in international cooperation

    • doesn't answer the question, because the answer is that the Left has an anti-beef agenda and the Biden administration was happy to advance it by canceling the screw fly prevention program that had been working well.

  • Viral claim says pilots are dropping ticks from planes, but experts point to far more obvious explanation.

    Canadian residents are noticing more ticks — and more wild rumors about why they are appearing, even though public health experts say the rise in blacklegged ticks is tied to real-world factors, not secret aerial drops. According to The Canadian Press (via CP24), the unsubstantiated rumor about aerial drops appears to have started with an anonymous March 16 forum post claiming a private charter company in Ontario was being paid to disperse "millions of ticks" by air in the spring and fall. "I work for a private charter company in Ontario Canada. We are paid to spread ticks by plane," the poster alleged without evidence. They went on to claim that "last spring the ticks dispersed were mostly American dog ticks" and that this year, "they are all deer ticks."

    The bite of the lone star tick spreads alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy. Public health departments warn against lone star ticks and AGS, and scientists are working to develop an inoculation to AGS. Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible. After explaining the symptoms of AGS and how they are transmitted via ticks, we argue that tickborne AGS is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat.

    The paper was a philosophical exercise, not a policy recommendation or a roadmap to explain an increase in the lone star tick population and cases of alpha-gal syndrome, both of which are the result of other factors, including climate change. Its authors acknowledged in the 2025 paper that it's not yet technologically possible to "proliferate" tickborne alpha-gal syndrome. As a false rumor spread that Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates was behind the proliferation of the lone star tick, whose bite can result in a potentially fatal red meat allergy, a separate claim circulated in May 2026 that a peer-reviewed paper argued it is "morally obligatory" to genetically engineer ticks to spread said meat allergy. The rumor appeared on social media, including Instagram and TikTok. On X, a longer post asked, "At what point do we stop treating papers like this as fringe academic exercises and start asking whether anyone is already acting on them?"

    • The more the news assures us it's a "false rumor", the more I'm willing to bet that it's true and they've been paid to participate in the cover up. History keeps repeating in this respect.
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