* 20 entries including: US Constitution (series) , China's Belt & Road Initiative (series), public security & data privacy (series), organism development, UK in space, Zwicky Transient Facility telescope, slowbalization, new space telescope proposals, using AI in genomics, smart traffic lights, and smart whiskers.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR FEBRUARY 2019: As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("US Is at Odds With European Allies, Munich Meeting Shows" by Marc Champion, 17 February 2019), it's apparent that US President Donald Trump doesn't have a high opinion of America's allies, and has a clearly low opinion of NATO. Europeans, as a result, are finding Trump increasingly hard to stomach. At the annual gathering of the trans-Atlantic security community in Munich Sunday, its organizer Wolfgang Ischinger -- a former German ambassador to the USA -- concluded at the end of the event: "We have a real problem."
That was easily observed when Vice President Mike Pence addressed the meeting, proclaiming that he brought greetings from a "great champion of freedom and of a strong national defense ... President Donald Trump." Pence paused for a few seconds, expecting applause. There was none.
Pence also played up Trump's stature in international leadership -- surprisingly, it seems nobody laughed. He also demanded that France, Germany and the UK join the USA in withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Europe, of course, has been desperately trying to save the deal, working to help their companies dodge US sanctions when trading with Tehran.
Audience reactions were more mixed to other US positions, including opposition to German plans for a new natural gas pipeline to Russia, and a potential trans-Atlantic trade war if the US Treasury should designate imports of automobiles a threat to US national security. The bottom line for Europeans is, as former Estonian President Thomas Ilves put it: "The actions of the US are getting a lot of people worried and they're thinking: Well, what do we do? Do we go it alone?"
So far, the answer is NO. American military and economic clout is too obvious, and the Trump Administration is swimming against the long-term current of US internationalist foreign policy anyway. Europeans recognize that the Trump White House is inept and incoherent, and that Trump will out of office -- possibly in court -- sooner rather than later. Pence wasn't the only American politician at Munich, there being more than 50 members of Congress there. Former Vice President Joe Biden was present, reassuring US allies that normal service would resume after Trump leaves office.
Two initiatives were put into motion at the conference to reinforce the common values written into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 1949 founding treaty, reflecting the sense that those values are being undermined:
NATO was not always so concerned with principles, being happy to keep both Turkey and Greece as members when they were ruled by military juntas. However, matters of principle became more significant after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the threat that NATO had been set up to meet had disappeared, and NATO needed a new organizing principle. Albright said: "I was there when we were admitting new members and we talked about it as an alliance of democracies." The new bottom line was that NATO was "trying to be not just against the Soviet Union, but to be for something."
The current crisis of NATO is unprecedented, a rot from within -- not merely the erratic hostility of Trump, but more importantly the lurch of NATO members such as Hungary and Poland towards authoritarian rule. Burns and Lute say most NATO members recognize the difficulty, but are reluctant to address it. The two former diplomats have proposed penalizing NATO governments that stray from the democratic path. Burns says: "It's a cancer."
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Resurgent Left", 14 February 2019), it might have seemed that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant the end of socialism. Only a few backwards states continued to cling to the idea, while China embarked on a "capitalist road" that proved wildly successful.
Over a quarter-century later, socialism is back in fashion. In the USA, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ("AOC"), a freshman congresswoman who calls herself a "democratic socialist", is grabbing headlines, while early contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination for 2020 are veering hard Left In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the hardline leader of the Labour Party, still hopes to become prime minister.
The Left has made a comeback because the Right, in attaining power, has proven itself hollow -- trapped in the past, unable to govern, tainted by bigotry, as well as servitude to the wealthy and powerful. The Left has the causes that ring true, such as inequality, the environment, and power to the People. Alas, while the reborn Left gets some things right, it suffers from a "nirvana syndrome" -- being infatuated with a perfect world that pointedly ignores the realities of commerce, economics, and governance.
From its last high tide in the 1960s, the Left became increasingly marginalized. In the 1990s, Left-leaning parties shifted to the center. As leaders of Britain and America, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton chose a "third way", an accommodation between state and market. The Left has bitterly resented its marginalization, expressing their frustration in 2016 by lashing out at Hillary Clinton.
The resurgent Left has now clawed back at its marginalization, but the revived movement is unfocused. The first irony of the resurgent Left is that its radicalism is more sound than substance. One of the major planks of the Left platform in the USA is universal health care -- which is normal everywhere else in the developed world. Many Leftists also accept an accommodation between state and market, conceding to the "third way"; the Left isn't uniform or regimented in its doctrines. Still, there are common beliefs:
Much of this perfectly true, notably the curse of lobbying and belligerent neglect of the environment. Inequality in the West has certainly skyrocketed over the past 40 years. In America, the average income of the top 1% has risen by 242%, about six times the rise for middle-earners. Unfortunately, the Left also gets important parts of its diagnosis wrong, and worse, comes up with unrealistic prescriptions.
It is, for starters, not completely true that inequality is spiraling out of control; it has leveled out in the USA from 2005. Yes, there's a problem, but not necessarily one that demands radical solutions. The Left also views jobs as under threat -- but in 2017, there were 97 traditional full-time employees for every 100 Americans aged 25 to 54, compared with only 89 in 2005, before the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
The Left also wildly misreads public sentiment. Certainly, Americans are generally frustrated with the status quo, and agree the rich should pay more taxes -- but there's no such agreement on radical redistribution, most people having no sympathy with the battle cry of "soak the rich!" The People do suspect the rich, but are at least as suspicious of government. Those who fail to realize this do so at their own hazard.
The Left embraces fantasy, pushing grand expansions of government, saying that the rich will foot the bill. However, as populations age, it will be ever harder to maintain existing services without raising taxes on the middle class. AOC has called for an income tax of 70% on top earners, but one accounting shows that would bring in about $12 billion USD -- a drop in the bucket for America's current budget.
Furthermore, the Left misreads public support for environmental issues. There is indeed plenty of support, but not so much for massive public spending on green energy. Can't regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, and a carbon tax do the heavy lifting? The fact that nobody can refute that position makes a huge public-works program a very hard sell. And the call for democratization of government bureaucracy and business organizations is impractical on the face of it. While they must obey the laws, anybody who's ever worked in them knows they can't be run on the basis of a vote. As THE ECONOMIST concludes:
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Rather than shield firms and jobs from change, the state should ensure markets are efficient and that workers, not jobs, are the focus of policy. Rather than obsess about redistribution, governments would do better to reduce rent-seeking, improve education, and boost competition. Climate change can be fought with a mix of market instruments and public investment.
Millennial socialism has a refreshing willingness to challenge the status quo. But like the socialism of old, it suffers from a faith in the incorruptibility of collective action, and an unwarranted suspicion of individual vim. Liberals should oppose it.
END QUOTE
* Many of the high-profile candidates emerging for the Democratic presidential nomination have taken a strongly Left line. However, the primaries won't take place for well over a year, and the Red tinge of the early jockeying for position is likely to be misleading. After all, even though high-profile Left candidates won in 2018, most of the Democrats that were elected are moderates, many of them who won out over Leftist candidates in primaries.
The jumps into the race appear to be motivated in large part by hopes of building up internet funding by appealing to the young and Left. That ignores the fact that moderates still dominate the Democratic Party. In the end, the nomination is likely to go to a younger candidate who can talk far enough Left to keep the energized Left happy, or relatively so, while not alienating the moderates.
Again, the hot Left and the moderates want the same things: universal healthcare, reducing inequality, addressing climate change, and taxing the rich. The difference is that moderates believe accomplishing these things will require thinking things out, instead of charging forward in emotional confusion.
It matters not; the moderates are in the Democratic party's driver's seat, and though the Left will have a voice, it is the moderates who will determine who runs for the White House. The Left will grumble, but what of it? None of them will refuse to vote for the candidate, since none of them want four more years of Donald Trump. Although that isn't a good bet at all, it's still possible.
Trump, in irony, has energized the American Left. In even more irony, once he leaves, the Left will lose much of that energy. When the USA is back on track, the Left will no longer have much to offer but pot-shots at leadership trying to get things done. The American Left was powerful in the 1930s and the 1960s, but their grasp on power was weak, and in neither era did they really run things. The Left is again at a high tide, and sooner or later the tide will go back out.
Incidentally, the receding of the tide is apparent in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn's drive for a general election -- in hopes of taking up residence in #10 Downing Street -- having come to nothing. Labour is outnumbered by the Tories, who won't allow it. Corbyn is a long-standing Leaver, regarding the European Union as a capitalist contraption, and persistently refused to accept a second referendum on Brexit. Now he's been forced to bend to reality, and is on the referendum train -- if reluctantly.
* Regarding AOC's notions of charging 70% income tax on the super-rich, an article from THEVERGE.com ("Bill Gates Says Tax Policies Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Are 'Missing The Picture' by Nilay Patel, 12 February 2019), reported on an interview with billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, in part which focused on the push of the Left for higher taxes.
Gates is unimpressed with the 70% income tax rate, calling it "extreme", and saying it would simply push the super-rich to off-shore their wealth. He added that the world's wealthiest people only have a "rounding error" worth of income, as such compared to their wealth -- their money is in stock options and other assets, which aren't taxed as income. The top 400 earners in the US are only paying something like a 20% tax rate. A 70% tax rate? It's not a question of right or wrong, it's just a practical non-starter. Gates says: "If you focus on that, you're missing the picture."
Gates, however, does believe the rich should pay more tax, speaking approvingly of a general wealth tax, the estate tax, and changes to Social Security in order to increase tax revenue. "But we can be more progressive, the estate tax and the tax on capital, the way the FICA and Social Security taxes work."
He also was not enthusiastic about "modern monetary theory (MMT)", whose most extreme advocates say that government deficits can be run up without limit, because the government controls the money supply. Gates says: "That is some crazy talk. It will come back and bite you."
Actually, it is not clear that most advocates of MMT advocate bottomless deficit spending. MMT is correct in saying that government debt is not inherently a bad thing. After all, the government is not a for-profit operation, and so it can only fund investment though debt, using ongoing tax revenues to pay off the debt. As long as the payments on debt don't become a painful burden, the system is healthy. Indeed, Gates himself suggests that deficits could be run up to 150% of GDP without difficulty -- which sounds extreme enough. It's something for the economists to argue out, but they'd have to make a very convincing case for it to be accepted by the rest of us.
The "wealth tax" Gates mentions is notably being pushed by Elizabeth Warren. It isn't regarded as all that credible, in part because it's hard to estimate total wealth -- and easy to cheat -- and in part because the wealth tax looks too much like a "direct tax", which is effectively denied to the Federal government by the Constitution. Of course, estate taxes are perfectly practical, having been imposed in the past, and they can be seen as an "end of life" wealth tax.
There's been a massive retreat from estate taxes, but that can be reversed. In short, the talk of "more taxes" is welcome and overdue; it's just that, carelessly handled, the rush to taxation will be self-defeating. Instead of radically changing the system, it might work much better to get the system we have working right.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BODY BUILDING: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How One Cell Gives Rise To An Entire Body" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 26 April 2018), it seems a marvel that a human, or other large organism, began its existence as a single cell that generated all the cells making up the body. Biologists never thought it was an inexplicable miracle, having a broad idea of how it happened -- but they didn't know the specifics.
Three new papers shine light on the process of development. Researchers using single-cell genetic sequencing and computer power have taken a sequence of "snapshots", taken at intervals ranging from minutes to hours, in most of the cells in developing zebrafish or frog embryos. Having collected the data, they then crunched into cell-by-cell histories of how those embryos take shape.
The studies began by gently dissolving embryos of different stages in special solutions, then shaking or stirring them to free individual cells. For each cell, the researchers then obtained the sequences of all the strands of messenger RNA (mRNA), showing what genes are being transcribed.
Harvard University teams led by Allon Klein, Marc Kirschner, and Sean Megason worked on zebrafish and frogs, both being long-standing "lab rats" for developmental research. In their zebrafish study, Klein and Megason sequenced the mRNA of some 92,000 zebrafish cells, compiling data from seven different embryo stages. Their group began with 4-hour embryos and ended 24 hours after fertilization, at which time the basic organs begin to appear.
To help trace the path of development, the researchers implanted a set of tracers -- short, unique segments of DNA -- into the cytoplasm some of the single-cell zebrafish embryos. As the single cell divided successively into multiple cells, with the tracers finding their way into a cell nucleus and into that cell's chromosomes. Once the tracer was in a chromosome, it was replicated in all that cell's descendants, allowing the branching paths of development to be tracked as the organism developed specialized cells, such as those for the heart, nerves, and skin.
An independent study by a team under Harvard developmental biologist Alexander Schier also focused on zebrafish, but took a somewhat different approach. His group sampled cells every 45 minutes over 9 hours of early embryo growth, sequencing the cell's mRNA. Software then reconstructed the history of embryonic development, starting at the end and working backwards, taking each cell and determining which of those in the snapshot before it had the most similar gene activity. The analysis was, of course, "computationally very intense", as Schier put it.
The reconstruction showed the initial one-cell embryo diversified into 25 main cell types. Surprisingly, in some cases cells developing along one line switched to another line, as revealed by their gene activity.
For comparison, Kirschner and Klein performed a second study on the frog Xenopus tropicalis, performing single-cell RNA sequencing at 10 embryonic stages between 5 and 22 hours after fertilization. They ultimately examined 137,000 cells. Gene activity showed that even when a frog embryo appears to be an undifferentiated blob, its cells have begun to take on their eventual identities, say as a tail bud.
When the research team compared the results for the frog and the zebrafish, they found surprising differences. For example, the developmental routes of certain cell types varied by species, and there were also greater variations in gene activity than expected. Both teams also tracked gene activity in zebrafish with a mutation that derailed development -- to find the mutation knocked out certain cell lines, while others continued to develop almost normally.
Getting a solid grasp of embryonic development is going to take a lot more work, and is definitely a "big data" project. However, the Harvard studies were a big step in the right direction. Detlev Arendt -- an evolutionary developmental biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany -- commented: "I think the future of development will be to routinely single-cell sequence embryos."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* UK IN SPACE: As discussed by an article from NASASPACEFLIGHT.com ("UK Space Sector On An Upward Trajectory" by Chris Bergin 31 January 2019), early in 2019, the UK Space Agency (UKSA) released a survey of Britain's space sector that shows significant growth in jobs creation and revenue. Although the UK space sector shrank a bit in 2014-2015, it has rebounded; it now employs over 40,000 people, with an average of 39 new companies having been added to the UK space sector every year since 2012.
Britain was long a laggard in space. In the 1960s, the UK developed the Black Arrow booster, which after three test flights, launched the Prospero satellite into orbit in 1971. The Black Arrow was then abandoned, giving Britain the dubious distinction of being the only country to obtain a space launch capability -- and then give it up. To be sure, British payloads were launched on American boosters, but even that wasn't a very high-priority activity for Britain.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher considered a partnership in what would become the International Space Station (ISS), photos from 1984 showing her being shown a model of the station, as it was then conceived, by US President Ronald Reagan. Thatcher was just being polite, announcing in 1986 that the UK would not engage in any crewed space program.
Helen Sharman, a British chemist, did become the first British astronaut, when she went on a flight to the Russian Mir space station in 1991, but she was backed by a consortium of British companies, not the UK government, under Project Juno. Several more British-born astronauts would follow, including Michael Foale, Piers Sellers, Nicholas Patrick, and Gregory Johnson; but they flew as naturalized American citizens, their patches being the Stars & Stripes, not the Union Jack.
It didn't help in 2003 when a British-made Mars lander, the Beagle 2, hitched a ride to the Red Planet on the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter -- with the lander simply vanishing after its landing attempt. An after-action report all but called Beagle 2 program management inept, with the probe the butt of jokes. However, in 2009, British space enthusiast Ian O'Neill was able to write:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... in a bloody fantastic turn of events, it's been announced (right at the time of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing) by Lord Drayson, UK Science Minister, that British astronauts will feature in the future of the UK's space ambitions.
"Britain should be playing a full role in space exploration. There was a special fund for training astronauts and we did not contribute, but that is now changed. There are important benefits that come from manned space-flight and we have dropped our opposition. We have an astronaut entering training soon and I hope he will be the first of many."
END QUOTE
That led to Britain's Tim Peake flying to the ISS in 2015 as an ESA astronaut. That was only one sign of Britain's new-found interest in space. The most visible evidence was the growth of Britain's Surrey Satellite Technology LTD (SSTL) -- now part of the European Airbus group -- which had been building satellites for decades, gradually working up toward ever more sophisticated and capable space platforms. It has since been joined by Clyde Space of Scotland, a maker of CubeSat nanosats, now part of the Swedish AAC Microtec firm.
Britain is planning to once again acquire a space-launch capability, working towards a spaceport in Scotland, based in Sutherland on the north coast. US space giant Lockheed Martin, and British startup Orbex, will help develop the site, along with the "Small Launch Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle (SL-OMV)" catering to the CubeSat market. Orbex is also developing its own launch vehicle, named "Prime", while foreign light booster developers are interested in the site as well. The Prime launcher is innovative, to feature a 3D-printed rocket engine burning bio-propane, and an airframe made of lightweight carbon fiber. Orbex already has customers lined up for launch services.
Britain's exit from the European Union obviously is not good news for the UK space industry, since it is highly collaborative with players in other countries. In a particularly perverse turn of events, Brexit may well force Britain to pull out of Europe's Galileo navigation satellite system, and fly its own navsat constellation. SSTL no doubt has mixed feelings about that: the company could easily build the satellites, but would do so wondering: "Is this trip really necessary?"
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* BELT & ROAD INITIATIVE (1): As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Gateway To The World", 26 July 2018), the economic awakening of China has tended to make its neighbors uneasy. They have had long histories dealings with an overbearing Imperial China, and so are ambivalent at economic alliances with modern China.
In Myanmar, there is noisy debate over a plan for a $7.3 billion USD deepwater port at Kyaukphyu on the Bay of Bengal, with an adjoining special economic zone. Subsidiaries of CITIC, a state-owned Chinese conglomerate, are taking a 70% stake, and will run the port for half a century. The plan is that Kyaukphyu will grow to handle 4.9 million containers a year, making it a world-class facility.
Western economists are not sure about what Myanmar stands to gain from Kyaukphyu, which is remote from the country's commercial capital, Yangon. It's easy to see what China gets: access to the sea for its landlocked south-western province of Yunnan. It is already a terminal for oil and gas pipelines capable of bringing in an estimated 10% of China's energy imports, bypassing the Malacca Strait, a strategic choke-point near Singapore.
Foreign diplomats fret that China sees Kyaukphyu as a future harbor for its warships. Skeptics in Myanmar worry about loans covering their government's 30% stake in the project. The skeptics point to the precedent of Hambantota, a port built by China in Sri Lanka that passed into Chinese hands in 2017, along with 69 square kilometers (27 square miles) of land, after the Sri Lankan government could not service debts incurred in its construction. Former Sri Lankan officials have told the NEW YORK TIMES about other, secret Chinese terms -- for instance, a demand to share intelligence on all traffic going through the port.
The discussion over the port at Kyaukphyu has been going on for years, but now it's taken on a broader significance, as an element in China's ambitious, sprawling, "Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)". Official Chinese announcements effusively proclaim that Myanmar is one of many friends that lie on a "21st-Century Maritime Silk Road" connecting China to far-flung markets and energy reserves from the Arctic to the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. That's the "Road"; the "Belt" is the "Silk Road Economic Belt", connecting China overland with Europe, Africa and the Middle East with railways, highways, and fiber-optic data links.
The BRI emerged in twin speeches given by Xi Jinping, China's president and Communist Party chief, in 2013. What to make of it? Some nervous diplomats and politicians see the BRI as a sinister master-plan intended to turn Eurasian nations into tributary states -- dependent on Chinese capital; criss-crossed with Chinese-owned railways, pipelines, and roads; and increasingly governed by Chinese rules covering everything from trade to cyber-security. In October 2017 America's defense secretary, James Mattis, denounced the idea of a trade infrastructure created by one power, saying: "In a globalized world, there are many belts and many roads." Visiting China in January 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron, cautioned that a modern Silk Road could not be "one way".
Other ambassadors, political leaders, and business bosses see China as pursuing lesser ambitions with the BRI. They think China wants to crate up and export surplus cement plants, steel mills and glass works built during years of stimulus spending, then reassemble them abroad -- where they will generate pollution formerly outgassed into China's skies. Of course, it's obvious that the BRI means fat contracts for Chinese firms, with the most cynical simply seeing the BRI as a marketing gimmick, rebranding everything that China does abroad under slogans that boost China's global stature.
All agree that there's going to be a lot of money in reviving the Silk Road for the age of the intermodal container. Adding up official announcements on the BRI gives about a hundred projects on the scale of Kyaukphyu; maybe more. Chinese officials proclaim that the BRI is benign, privately comparing it to American officials as like the Marshall Plan with which America funded the reconstruction of post-war Europe. China is certainly getting attention on the matter, with a BRI forum in Beijing in 2017 drawing in over two dozen world leaders. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (48): The drive towards secession split the Democrats. The Northern wing of the party nominated Stephen Douglas as their presidential candidate, while the Southern wing nominated Senator John C. Breckinridge of Tennessee. Election day was 6 November 1860. To no one's great surprise Lincoln won, though with only 40% of the vote; he carried all the free states, none of the slave states.
On 20 December 1860, South Carolina unilaterally left the Union. In modern times, there are those who insist that secession had nothing at all to do with slavery. The declaration of grievances drawn up by the South Carolina legislature justifying secession were explicit in saying that it did, making a windy but dubious case for the constitutional right of the state to secede, and citing at length the threats -- real or imagined -- posed by the Federal government against the institution of slavery as the primary justification for secession.
Other states moved toward secession. Congress was reduced to chaos following the exit of many of its Southern members. There was talk of patching things up, which finally congealed into the "Crittenden Compromise", put forward by Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden in mid-December. Crittenden proposed that congressional resolutions and constitutional amendments be implemented that would extend the Missouri Compromise line all the way to the West Coast, provide guarantees for slavery, and further tighten up the Fugitive Slave Law. In addition, the constitutional amendments would be perpetual; there would be no way to repeal them later.
The Crittenden Compromise was a non-starter. Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, saw it as unconditional surrender to slave-owners, not anything that looked like a compromise. Besides, the notion of an unrepealable amendment was absurd and incoherent. Both the House and Senate rejected the Crittenden Compromise by the end of the month. Matters had gone beyond the negotiable.
* Come the new year 1861, secession began in earnest. Mississippi left on 9 January; Florida on the 10th; Alabama on the 11th; Georgia on the 19th; Louisiana on the 26th. State legislatures passed resolutions generally along the lines of the South Carolina declaration of grievances, again prominently featuring Federal threats to slavery. Federal forts and arsenals, staffed only by caretaker detachments, were seized without a fight. A provisional government of the "Confederate States of America" was formed on 8 February, with Jefferson Davis -- only weeks before, a senator from Mississippi -- being sworn in as the first Confederate president on 18 February. For a time, the Confederate government was in Montgomery, Alabama, but it soon relocated to Richmond, Virginia.
The provisional constitution of the new nation was closely modeled on the old US Constitution, though it explicitly gave the Confederate president a six-year term; granted each member of the president's cabinet a seat in Congress; and banned tariffs as a protective measure, though it allowed them as source of government revenue. Surprisingly, not much was said about State's Rights, but very significantly the constitution guaranteed slavery, in section 9.4: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
This clause was at the heart of the Confederacy. Some jokers later suggested that the Confederate constitution only stopped short of making slavery mandatory -- but in a sense it did, specifically stipulating that any state admitted to the Confederacy in the future would have to accept slavery. In blunter terms, the constitution defined the Confederacy as a slave nation. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for January included:
-- 10 JAN 19 / CHINASAT 2D -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1711 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Chinasat 2D" military geostationary comsat into space. The satellite was built by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and based on the DFH4 bus.
China has fielded types of satellites for secure military communications: the "Fenghuo" and the "Shentong". The Fenghuo series is used for tactical military communications, providing secured digital data and voice communication to Chinese military forces. The Chinese are currently operating the DFH4-based Fenghuo 2 second-generation satellite, with the first of the series launched in 2011.
The Shentong geostationary military communication satellites are operated by the Army, to provide Ku-band secure voice and data communications services for ground users using Ku-band. The first-generation Shentong satellites were based on the DFH3 satellite platform. The first Shentong satellite was launched in 2003, with a second, similar satellite launched in 2010. A second-generation satellite, based on the DFH4 bus, was launched in 2012, followed by a sibling satellite in 2015. Chinasat 2D is possibly the third satellite of the second-generation Shentong series.
-- 11 JAN 19 / IRIDIUM NEXT 66:75 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 1531 UTC (local time + 8) to put ten "Iridium Next" satellites low-orbit comsats into orbit. This launch completed the replenishment of the Iridium constellation.
-- 18 JAN 19 / RAPIS 1, SMALLSATS x 6 -- A JAXA Epsilon booster was launched from Uchinoura at 00:50 (next day local time - 9) to to put the "Rapid Innovative Payload Demonstration Satellite 1 (RAPIS 1)" into Sun-synchronous orbit for JAXA, the Japanese space agency. The launch also included six Japanese and Vietnamese secondary payloads.
RAPIS 1 was a cube-shaped technology demonstrator, about a meter on a side, with a launch mass of 200 kilograms (440 pounds) and a design life of a year. It was built by AxelSpace of Tokyo for JAXA. Test payloads on the satellite included a "nanobridge-based field-programmable gate array (NBFPGA)"; an X-band communications payload; an environmentally-friendly reaction-control system; a particle monitor; and a star tracker with "machine learning" capabilities. The satellite also featured lightweight solar arrays.
There were three other microsatellites on the flight:
The other three satellites aboard Epsilon were CubeSats:
Friday's launch was the fourth flight for Japan's Epsilon, from its first flight in 2013.
-- 19 JAN 19 / NROL 71 (USA 290) -- A Delta 4 Heavy booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 1905 UTC (local time + 8) to put a secret military payload into space for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The payload was designated "NROL 71". The launch parameters were unusual, and all that could be said about the payload was that it was big.
-- 21 JAN 19 / JILIN 1 x 2, SMALLSATS x 2: A Long March 11 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0542 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Jilin 1-11" and "Jilin 1-12" high-resolution Earth observation satellites into orbit for the Chang Guang Satellite Technology Company LTD -- a commercial spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The launch mass of the minisatellites was a few hundred kilograms. They carried a payload of infrared and hyperspectral imagers. Chang Guang has launched 12 satellites in the Jilin 1 family since 2015. The Earth observation platforms are intended to collect high-definition video, color pictures, and detailed hyperspectral imagery of Earth, providing information to the Chinese military, civil agencies, and commercial users. The baseline Jilin constellation, to be completed in 2019, will have 16 satellites; the phase-2 constellation will have 60, while the phase-3 constellation will have 138. The launch also included two small demonstrator satellites:
-- 24 JAN 19 / MICROSAT R, KALAMSAT -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 1807 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the ISRO Kalamsat student payload, integrated with the upper stage, and the "Microsat R" imaging satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. Kalamsat was a demonstration payload to validate the "PS4 Orbital Platform", using PSLV's fourth stage as the basis for small satellites; it was battery-operated, and only stayed live for less than a day.
Microsat R was a secret military imaging satellite from India's Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), with a launch mass of 740 kilograms (1,630 pounds); few other specifics were announced. This was the first launch of the "DL" version of the PSLV, with two strap-on solid rocket boosters.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ZTF HUNTS THE SKY: The 122-centimeter (48-inch) Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory was a marvel of astronomical technology when it went online in 1948. As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org (New California Telescope Aims To Catch Quickly Moving Celestial Events" by Daniel Clery, 14 November 2017), the telescope -- known from 1987 as the "Samuel Oschin Schmidt", after a benefactor -- is still at work, 70 years on, and in fact has been dramatically brought into the 21st century.
Technically speaking, the Oschin Schmidt is a camera, not a telescope; it was designed to take photographs on curved plates, and there's no eyepiece to allow an astronomer to peer through it. It was designed for sky surveys, having a wide field of view of 4 x 4 degrees -- which is eight times wider than the apparent size of the full Moon. To the turn of the century, it took tens of thousands of sky images on plates; in 2001, it was fitted with a charge-coupled device (CCD) imager array, to become a digital camera.
The Oschin Schmidt was given updated CCD arrays in 2003 and 2008; it has now been updated again, with the new system labeled the "Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)" -- named in honor of Fritz Zwicky, the Bulgaria-born astronomer who worked for most of his career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Using the array, the ZTF can survey the entire night sky visible from Palomar every three nights.
The ZTF was put together by a team including Caltech and partners at other US universities, as well as institutions in Israel, Sweden, Germany, and Taiwan. is intended to spot "transients", cosmic events that change from night to night, for example supernovas; variable and binary stars; active galactic cores; asteroids that cross the Earth's orbit; and the mergers of neutron stars that might emit gravitational waves. While it is an operational system, it is also intended to act as a testbed for a more powerful instrument, the "Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)", which will begin observations from Chile's high Atacama Desert in 2022. The LSST will return far more data than the ZTF, and handling all that data will require an automated system that can keep up -- sifting through observations to find targets of interest, and then cueing robot telescopes to obtain detailed measurements.
In the days before automated astronomy, finding sudden events like supernovas was generally a matter of luck, astronomers tending to find such things while they were looking at something else. Now small automated wide-field telescopes scan the skies nightly, looking for something unusual to target for closer operation. The ZTF is the largest instrument put to this mission so far, being capable of picking up fainter and more distant objects.
One of the ZTF's primary targets will be the "Type Ia supernova", which is used as a "standard candle", a celestial yardstick, since it is assumed to always blow up with the same luminosity. It was by observing Type Ia supernovas that astronomers discovered in the 1990s that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, an effect linked to the mysterious dark energy. However, the nature of Type Ia supernovas is not clearly understood, and there's uncertainty as to if they really are of the same brightness. The ZTF is expected to spot thousands of Type Ia supernovas a year, with the data obtained putting doubts about them to rest.
The ZTF team also expects to see more than a hundred superluminous supernovas a year -- extra-bright explosions thought to be linked to gamma ray bursts -- and a dozen or so tidal disruption events -- flashes that occur when a star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole and is torn apart by its extreme gravity.
To achieve this, the team had to create a compact camera with a very wide field of view of 47 square degrees. It has an array of 16 CCD imagers, with a total resolution of about 575 megapixels. The array and electronics are stowed in a cryostat to keep the detectors cold, with the assembly small enough to fit into the Oschin Schmidt. The telescope was also given an updated drive system to allow it to be quickly and accurately be retargeted under program control. Shrinivas Kulkarni -- director of Caltech Optical Observatories, which has led the project -- found the transformation remarkable: "It was amazing to take an old telescope and turn it into a supertelescope."
The LSST, with its 8.4-meter (330-inch) mirror, will far outstrip the ZTF, able to spot up to ten million events each night. Handling those events will demand software capable of handling "big data", using machine learning and "event brokers" -- software that can pick out the most interesting effects and assign robot telescopes to give them a closer look. The ZTF, as a pathfinder for the LSST, is hooked up with the Las Cumbres Observatory, which runs a worldwide network of 18 robotic telescopes, and the Liverpool Telescope, a robotic scope in the Canary Islands run by Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom.
The ZTF points to an era when astronomers will hardly set foot in an observatory building, instead searching the sky via their computers. That seems to take away some of the romance of the endeavor, but astronomers will have too much to deal with to complain.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SLOWBALIZATION: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Slowbalization", 24 January 2018), America's tilt towards trade protectionism with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency led to fears that the world was headed for a dire economic slowdown. Now those fears seems overblown. Yes, China is slowing, and Western firms like Apple that are wired into China are suffering. However, during 2018 global growth was good, unemployment remained low, and profits rose. Although Trump had made great noise about revoking the North American Free Trade Agreement, much to the relief of America's business community, the replacement the Trump Administration fashioned for it amounted to little more than a handful of tweaks to the existing order. The furor over a trade war with China may soon settle out in much the same way.
Nonetheless, trade tensions are enhancing a shift in the global economic order that was put in motion by the financial crisis in 2008-2009. Cross-border investment, trade, bank loans and supply chains have all been on the retreat or stagnating relative to world GDP. The rush towards globalization of 1990 to 2010 has run out of steam, a Dutch writer suggesting it has been replaced by "slowbalization".
The golden age of globalization put the world economic system into high gear. Commerce soared as the cost of shifting goods in ships and planes fell, phone calls got cheaper, tariffs were cut, and the financial system liberalized. Firms set up around the world, investors roamed, and consumers shopped in supermarkets with a staggering array of choices. Why then, has it stopped? There are several reasons:
Donald Trump has given this fragile system a set of kicks. The most significant are tariffs. If the USA ratchets up duties on China in March, as it has threatened, the average tariff rate on all imports to the USA will rise to 3.4%, its highest rate for 40 years. Most companies intend to pass the cost on to customers. China, being faced with an economic slowdown, seems more willing to come to terms with Trump, but what happens next remains to be seen.
Less noticeably, but just as troublesome, is that the rules of international commerce are being rewritten, with nationalism as a guide. The principle that investors and firms should be treated equally, no matter where they come from, is being abandoned. Tech industries are increasingly engaged in international rivalries, while laws are being passed on privacy and data that crimp operations of giants like Google and Facebook overseas. Tax systems are being turned to patriotic ends, to favor the home team at the expense of foreigners.
America and the EU have rethought how they handle foreign investment, while China, despite its rhetoric, is not very interested in giving foreign firms a level playing-field. America has weaponized the power it gets from running the world's dollar-payments system, to punish foreigners such as Huawei. Even boring sectors such as accounting and antitrust are fragmenting. Trade is suffering, and is likely to get worse. International investment is on the decline, having fallen by 20% in 2018; Chinese investment into Europe and America fell by 73%.
As international trade declines, regional blocs become more important. Supply chains in North America, Europe and Asia are sourcing more from closer to home. In Asia and Europe most trade is already intra-regional, and the share has risen since 2011. Regional deals and spheres of influence are increasingly the order of the day.
The rise of regional blocs at the expense of global commerce isn't so frightening on the face of it, since continental-sized markets are big enough to prosper, and it is unlikely that the developing world will backslide into the poverty of the pre-globalization era. In some cases, the economies of the regional blocs will enjoy tighter integration than could have ever been accomplished with global trade. Slowbalization nonetheless has major disadvantages:
Globalization, overall, made the world a better place for almost everyone but, in good part due to timid political leadership too beholden to commercial interests, not enough was done to mitigate its costs. That's led to a public backlash against it, with the drawbacks seen to outweigh the benefits. Simply tearing down the global economic system, unfortunately, will not fix the drawbacks, instead it will diminish the benefits -- and nobody will be happier as a result.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (12): Surveillance gadgetry such as cameras, smartphone monitors, and wi-fi sniffers to keep track of Xinjiang's Uighurs are backed up by extensive data systems. The authorities have created biometric data records that including fingerprints, blood type, and DNA information, along with the subject's detention record, and trustworthiness. The government collects this data under the cover of a supposed public-health program titled "Physicals For All". Uighurs are not at all tricked by this subterfuge, but it doesn't matter; as one resident of Kashgar told the NGO Human Rights Watch, with dry understatement: "Not participating would have been seen as a problem."
A system titled the "Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP)", uncovered by Human Rights Watch, uses machine-learning systems; information from cameras, smartphones, financial, and family-planning records; and even abnormal electricity use, to generate lists of suspects for detention. The system is impressive, in a monstrous way, and continues to be refined.
In principle, the security system in Xinjiang applies to everyone, but everyone knows it's selective. In places where Uighurs are the dominant majority, the security is tough. In a city like Shihezi, which is 95% Han, the security is more like that in the rest of China; where there are checkpoints, Han Chinese are almost always waved through, but Uighurs are always stopped.
In Hotan, the neighborhood mosques have been closed, leaving a handful of large places of worship that are easier to control: Worshipers must register with the police before attending. Police maintain a presence at mosques, and pressure the staffs of mosques to toe the party line. Dozens of Islamic names may no longer be given to children, while Uighur-language instruction has been driven out of the schools. Dancing after prayers, and traditional Uighur wedding ceremonies and funerary rites, are banned.
Xinjiang is not overwhelmingly Uighur: according to the 2010 census, 46% of the population is Uighur, 40% is Han Chinese, the remainder being a number of other minorities, such as Kazakhs and Kirgiz. However, the Uighurs and Han Chinese live apart. The Uighurs regard Xinjiang as theirs, because they've lived there for thousands of years. The Han Chinese, on their part, believe they have brought "modern culture" and "modern lifestyle" to Xinjiang -- meaning the culture and lifestyle of modern Han China.
Han Chinese tend to approve of the crackdown, some even saying that Uighurs appreciate it. One Han Chinese said: "The Uighurs are being helped out of poverty, They understand and support the policy." Not all Han Chinese are so optimistic; they generally like the security, but sometimes wonder if there might be less heavy-handed ways to go about it. What do the Uighurs think about it? They don't tell outsiders what they think, since that would mean a ride to a re-education camp. It is obvious they are just bearing up as well as they can under the oppression. As Sultan, a student in Kashgar, says with a shrug: "There's nothing we can do about it."
It is just as obvious that Uighur resentment is building up under the surface. Ironically, the Xinjiang police state, as it expands, is ever more dependent on recruiting Uighurs as line police. They are not trusted by their superiors, and shouldn't be. The security system is very labor-intensive, which implies the need to keep an eye on the people who are supposed to be implementing it. Even to the extent that it works as designed, Xinjiang province is not going to thrive under such suffocating rule. The system is being built on an unstable foundation.
How much longer until an explosion that makes the troubles of the past seem trivial? A Han businessman who travels frequently across Xinjiang says he used to feel welcome in Uighur cities. "Now it has all changed. They are not afraid. But they are resentful. They look at me as if they are wondering what I am doing in their country."
* There's not much Westerners can do about the CCP's iron fist in Xinjiang, other stay aware of the situation, and make disapproval of the police state known to Beijing. The question for Western countries is, of course: Could it happen here?
As fully implemented, no. China has little concept of civil rights, or the authority of law over the ruling party. Heavy-handed social regimentation, much less a gulag of re-education camps, isn't going to happen in the US or Western Europe. Nonetheless, the Chinese example demonstrates just how 21st-century surveillance technologies can be misused, in the service of an authoritarian order. There's no doubt that Western societies are becoming more like surveillance states all the time. The game is to make sure that the surveillance is for the benefit of the people, and not a means to step on them. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (47): Public tensions over slavery continued to grow, to crystallize into one of the classic exercises of American political oratory. In 1858, Stephen Douglas ran for re-election to his Senate seat. He was challenged by an Illinois Republican named Abraham Lincoln, a prominent lawyer who had been a Whig in Congress in the 1840s. Although senators were selected by state legislatures in those days, the two men took their campaign to the public. Both men were brilliant orators; Douglas had the edge in sheer volume, since Lincoln had a somewhat shrill voice, but Lincoln had a knack for clever stories and satirical gibes that Douglas couldn't match.
Douglas pushed Lincoln by accusing him of being an advocate of "nigger equality", while Lincoln pushed back by forcing Douglas to stand on popular sovereignty. Lincoln achieved a new prominence through the campaign, but it was a notorious sort of prominence. Early in the electioneering, on 16 June 1858, he had delivered a speech in Springfield, Illinois, his hometown, that made his position perfectly clear:
BEGIN QUOTE:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new -- North as well as South.
END QUOTE
The confrontation between North and South was headed for an explosion. It was finally set off by John Brown, an abolitionist zealot and veteran of Bloody Kansas. On the evening of Sunday, 16 October 1859, Brown led a band of thirteen white and five black men into the town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia, along with a wagon full of guns and pikes. His band occupied the town's Federal armory, arsenal, and engine house, taking hostages in the process.
US Marines arrived and quickly put down the uprising, with ten of Brown's people killed. He was tried for treason -- against the state of Virginia, not the US government -- and hanged on 2 December 1859. His dignified conduct in his trial and execution won widespread admiration all through the North, though most were careful to describe his action at Harper's Ferry as the act of a madman.
Such distinctions were lost on Southerners. Brown's raid fully radicalized the South; Northerners in the region were treated with suspicion, when they weren't run out of town or even assaulted. Rumors ran wild of other conspiracies of Yankees to provoke slave uprisings, with some of the stories printed in the papers. Moderate Southerners tried to speak out, one saying that the stories inevitably turned out on examination "to be totally false, and all of them grossly exaggerated" -- but the rumors raged on.
Many Southerners began to seriously consider secession. There were those promoting the notion who believed it was a constitutional right; although there was absolutely no clause in the Constitution that discussed secession, the logic went that since the states had voluntarily joined together, they could voluntarily go their own way. That was nullification all over again; Andrew Jackson had emphatically rejected it a generation before, and it was just as preposterous as it had been then. The constitutional contract included no escape clause, and could not be unilaterally repudiated.
To be sure, if states didn't have the right to defy Federal authority, the states did have a right to challenge it. However, any such legal challenge would be dealt with in Federal court: it didn't matter if states thought they had a right to secede, since they would assume so automatically if they did; it only mattered if the Federal government was legally obligated to agree, and so could not obstruct them from doing so. The burden of proof was on the South to demonstrate the legality of secession, and Southerners recognized that might be difficult to do. Although the Taney Court had a tradition of sympathy with the South, few with sense would have bet the Federal government would agree to simply throw away its authority over the states.
To make a court case even more difficult for the states, the question of the legality of secession was obviously linked to the question of justification for doing so -- and the states would be hard-pressed to identify specific actions of the Federal government that honestly provided any such justification. Even if the states had claimed such specifics, the courts would have either rejected or accepted those claims; if accepted, the government would have been required to make correction. In neither case would the court have recognized that secession was justified, even if it were judged legal. If an appeal to the judiciary failed, of course the Constitution could be amended to explicitly permit secession, but that would effectively make secession dependent on a consensus obtained from the states. Given the temper of the times, that didn't seem likely to happen, either.
Secession, in short, was indefensible on a legal basis. There were Southerners who skeptical of secession, but they were a minority, drowned out in the loud howling. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from DIGITALTRENDS.com ("Robot jellyfish Could Be Used To Patrol Fragile Coral Reefs" by Luke Dohrmel, 20 September 2018), researchers from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) have built a prototype of an underwater jellyfish drone. Erik Engeberg, one of the project researchers from FAU, comments: "Jellyfish are highly efficient swimmers; they get a lot of miles per gallon, so to speak. Thus, we used them as inspiration for our design to enable long exploratory missions with low battery requirements."
Jellyfish use a combination of jet propulsion, vortex, rowing, and suction-based locomotion to get around. The researchers built their artificial jellyfish using two impeller pumps which draw in and push water to hydraulically drive the robot in the desired direction. The robot jellyfish is very simple in construction, requiring no valves; so far, the research team has printed five of them.
According to Engeberg: "We made [the robot jellyfish's tentacles] soft, so that it would not cause damage to delicate ecosystems like coral reefs. We used water to inflate the tentacles so that they undulate in a lifelike manner. Conventional underwater robots are rigid, and often use a propeller for locomotion, meaning they could unintentionally chop up coral reefs accidentally."
The research team is working to add sensors such as sonar, and to improve its navigational capabilities, to allow the robot to determine if it can fit through certain gaps. Engeberg says: "The jellyfish robots would work well in a drift dive situation, where they are inserted into the water at one point and drift with the current, with some maneuverability if any important sensor readings were found. We would be careful to monitor their locations so that they could be safely removed after the mission."
* According to an article from CNN.MONEY.com ("Mud Near This Small Japanese Island Could Change The Global Economy" by AJ Willingham, 17 April 2018), Japan has discovered a treasure, in the form of a small remote island, rich in millions of tonnes of mud -- but not any ordinary mud, instead mud laden with "rare earth" minerals.
As discussed here in 2011, the rare earths are a set of 17 elements that don't form concentrated ore, making them hard to mine, and have very similar chemical properties, making them hard to refine. They are commercially valuable, major applications being magnetic elements for hard disk read-write heads or for compact electric motors and such. Given the difficulty of exploiting rare earths, compounded by the fact that such exploitation tends to be environmentally messy, only China was really interested in the exercise, and obtained a corner on the market -- with 95% of global production in 2015.
Japanese researchers have found that Minamitori Island, 1,200 kilometers (790 miles) off the coast of Japan, is unusually rich in rare earths, a paper written by the research group saying the island might provide 780 years worth of the world's requirements for yttrium, 620 years worth of europium, 420 years worth of terbium, and 730 years worth of dysprosium.
Japan has complete economic control over the new supply. However, exploiting the island won't be trivial. Tom Crafford, a mineral resources expert at the US Geological Survey, says the deposits are underwater at depths of five or six kilometers: "That's pretty severe. You'd really require some very sophisticated technology to operate at these kinds of depths."
Crafford adds that the environmental impact has to be considered. However, as discussed here in 2012, there's considerable work being done on seafloor mining. Extracting the rare earths is certain to be difficult, but there is no cause to think it impossible.
* According to an article from ENGADGET.com ("Smugglers Used Drones To Sneak $80 Million Worth Of Phones Into China" by Mallory Locklear, 30 March 2018), it is a sign of the growing maturity of a product when criminals figure out how to make good use of it. A report from China described how the authorities busted a smartphone smuggling ring, with 26 suspects arrested in the bust. They used drones to string long lines from Hong Kong to Shenzhen, and then used the lines to smuggle smartphones across.
They could smuggle up to 15,000 smartphones in a single night. The smugglers are believed to have smuggled up to the equivalent of $80 million USD of smartphones. As drones become more used for product deliveries, it seems inevitable that they will be used for smuggling and running contraband. This leads to the interesting questions of how drone traffic across borders is going to be managed, and how drone traffic management schemes will deal with the Black Hats gaming the system.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* NEW SPACE TELESCOPES? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("NASA Is Planning Four Of The Largest Space Telescopes Ever -- But Which One Will Fly?" by Daniel Clery, 13 December 2018), the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) has been working on the "James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)", which will be the biggest telescope ever to be sent into space.
It hasn't been a smooth ride for the Webb. In June, a review board found that the Webb -- already overdue and, at $8.8 billion USD, painfully over budget -- is still not close to being ready to fly, being hobbled by problems such as torn sunshields and loose bolts. Another NASA space observatory, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), is suffering from budget inflation, even though work on actually building it hasn't started yet.
However, astronomers are looking forward to new telescopes beyond the JWST and WFIRST. They are working together on a "decadal survey" for astrophysics, to provide a roadmap for future projects by NASA, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation. The decadal survey will identify science goals, and identify possible telescopes, both in space and on Earth, that could achieve those goals.
One of the core tasks in the survey is to decide which of four possible successors to the JWST and WFIRST would be developed, as a NASA "flagship observatory". It would be launched in the 2030s to the L2 libration point, a gravitationally balanced spot beyond the Moon. Candidates include:
The history of projects selected by decadal surveys is not reassuring. The 2001 survey picked the JWST as its top priority, but the Webb will be lucky to meet its scheduled launch in 2021, 2 decades later. WFIRST was the top pick of the 2010 survey, but it won't fly before 2025. Roger Blandford of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who chaired the 2010 survey, says the two earlier selections were cursed by unrealistic expectations and immature technology, adding: "There's frustration all around."
NASA is being more careful this time around, having identified the four flagship concepts in 2015, with teams then funded to work up rough designs as risk-reduction. The teams will deliver recommendations in mid-2019. Competition for the ultimate selection is already fierce.
LUVOIR's advocates promote its wide appeal as a general-purpose observatory, along the lines of Hubble. LUVOIR's instruments cover the parts of the spectrum where the Universe is brightest, and the huge size of its mirror means it can peer the farthest, at the faintest objects, with the sharpest vision. Critics shoot back that LUVOIR's huge mirror mean a similarly huge price tag and inevitable delays, as the JWST's 6.5-meter (21-foot) mirror already has.
Advocates of the cheaper HabEx see it as fitting into the high excitement for exoplanet searches, and believe its lower cost will be a big selling point. However, flying in formation with a separate starshade hasn't been done before, and HabEx's 4-meter mirror would only be able to observe nearby star systems.
Origins would look back in time to see how dust and molecules coalesced to create the first galaxies and black holes, and how the disks around young stars clump into exoplanets. But the JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile can observe some of the same wavelengths, squeezing in Origins's discovery space. Lynx would follow on from NASA's aging Chandra X-ray Observatory, zooming in on hot gas swirling into a black hole or jetting from the center of a galaxy.
Whatever project is selected, the fear remains that it will end up being another boondoggle like the Webb. Study director Dwayne Day of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in Washington DC, which runs the decadals, says the survey is taking a more sophisticated approach to estimating costs, hoping "to avoid sticker shock, committing to something that is too expensive to afford."
Day says project teams traditionally have estimated costs by tallying labor, materials, and testing. "It's good, but it leaves out unforeseen circumstances, threats." As a result, for the past decade NASEM has been paying The Aerospace Corporation of El Segundo, California, to apply a cost model named "Cost And Technical Evaluation (CATE)" to decadal survey proposals.
CATE draws on a database that goes back decades, containing details of cost and performance for more than 150 NASA missions and 700 instruments. When fed a new mission, CATE can say how similar missions have fared in the past. The model is particularly powerful in assessing the things that can go wrong. Debra Emmons, a senior manager with Aerospace in Chantilly, Virginia, says that CATE] assesses technical threats, monetizes them, and makes a forward projection."
Emmons says that project teams are wary of CATE, fearing that if they come up with bold proposals, CATE might judge it too risky and expensive. The projects are supposed to be ambitious, after all. Nonetheless, astronomers also want to avoid the errors of the past, and ultimately will have to make trade-offs between ambition and practicality.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* PROBING THE GENOME WITH AI: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Machine Learning Spots Natural Selection At Work In Human Genome" by Amy Maxmen, 01 November 2018), the genomics revolution has resulted in a proliferation of human genomic data that can yield insights into human evolution, at a fine level detail. However, a single human genome contains three billion nucleotide base pairs, and a useful survey includes thousands of genomes. How can researchers sort through that mountain of data, and zero in on significant changes?
The parallel revolution in artificial intelligence is providing tools to help with the job. Genomics researchers are now using "machine learning" systems to find patterns that would otherwise be difficult to extract from so much data. Andrew Kern, a population geneticist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, comments: "Machine learning is automating the ability to make evolutionary inferences. There is no question that it is moving things forward."
From the 1970s, geneticists have created mathematical models to find the tracks of natural selection in DNA. Evolution works on the basis of variations emerging in the genome; those genes that provide a selective advantage will be propagated through the species population. One well-known example from human population is lactose tolerance. Humans can digest milk when they are infants -- but in the distant past, all humans lost the ability to synthesize lactase, an enzyme required for digesting milk, as they matured into adults.
Cultures with dairying traditions, however, often evolved lactose tolerance. By analyzing human genomes with statistical methods, researchers discovered that a mutation that kept lactase production going into adulthood spread rapidly through communities in Europe thousands of years ago. Now, 80% of people of European descent carry this gene variant. However, geneticists have struggled to find and confirm other mutant genes that spread through the population because they offered a selective advantage.
Machine learning turns out to be a good tool for this task, since it able to spot subtle patterns hidden in large amounts of data. There is, unfortunately, a "chicken & egg" problem in the exercise: machine learning requires training from known examples -- but this doesn't work very well with genomics, because there is only a small pool of known examples. Researchers have to train machine learning systems by simulated data, and they don't know just how realistic their simulated data is. Worse, machine learning systems tend to be "black boxes": they can match inputs to specific outputs, but it's hard to figure out how they get from here to there.
Nonetheless, a machine-learning system named "DeepSweep" -- developed by researchers at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in Cambridge -- has proven successful in genomic analysis. DeepSweep's creators trained their algorithm on signatures of natural selection that they inserted into simulated genomes, and then tested it on real human-genome data, with the system zeroing in on the lactase mutations that allow adults to drink milk.
Joseph Vitti, a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute, said that gave the team confidence that DeepSweep could be counted on. They then sifted through data from the 1000 Genomes Project -- an international initiative that sequenced DNA from 2,504 people around the world -- using a statistical method to identify regions that might be under evolutionary pressure. The statistical system didn't give very focused results, identifying about a third of the human genome as worth further investigation.
However, that data was then passed on to DeepSweep, which turned out a list of 20,000 single mutations to explore. Now Vitti and his colleagues plan to investigate what these mutations do by editing them in the DNA of living cells, and comparing what happens when they are there with when they are not.
DeepSweep isn't only machine-learning system being applied to evolutionary genomics. A deep-learning model developed by Andrew Kern suggests that at first, most mutations in humans are neither beneficial nor harmful. In practice, they seem to drift along in populations, increasing natural genetic variability, and only become more frequent when a change in the environment gives people who possess the mutation a selective edge. That is not a new idea, but data confirming has been previously lacking.
Pardis Sabeti -- a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute, and Vitti's PhD supervisor -- says: "These are incredibly powerful methods for looking for the signals of natural selection. Some people didn't think you could pinpoint variants when I started. Some thought it was impossible." In a decade or so, machine-learning systems will be widespread in genomic analysis -- and since they learn from experience, they will become ever more powerful.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (11): Visitors to Xinjiang province see the obvious, extensive security measures imposed by the Chinese government. Other aspects of the system are not so visible. Xinjiang has another extensive set of less obvious social controls, backed up by advanced technology.
Under a system known as "fanghuiju", teams of half a dozen -- composed of policemen or local officials plus an Uighur speaker, which typically means a Uighur -- go from door to door, making up dossiers of personal information. Fanghuiju is shorthand for a slogan: "researching people's conditions -- improving people's lives -- winning people's hearts!" However, it's more informally and bluntly described as "eradicating tumors".
About 10,000 teams were known to be operating in rural areas of the province in 2017; they report on "extremist" behavior, such as not drinking alcohol, fasting during Ramadan, or wearing long beards. They look out for "undesireable" items, such as Korans, or attitude problems -- meaning a lack of enthusiastic support for the CCP. Since the spring of 2017, the dossiers have been used to rank citizen "trustworthiness" -- "trustworthy", "average", or "untrustworthy" -- according to a list of criteria:
An "untrustworthy" grade can mean a ticket to a re-education camp.
The government adds a personal touch to the surveillance through a program known as "becoming kin" in which local families, typically Uighur, "adopt" officials, typically Han. The official visits his or her adoptive family regularly, lives with it for short periods, gives the children presents and teaches the household Mandarin. The official also validates information collected by fanghuiju teams. According to an official report from 2018, 1.1 million officials have been paired with 1.6 million families, which means that about half of Uighur households have had a family commissar assigned to them.
Mao Zedong would have smiled approvingly at all these security measures, but China now has the best high tech to provide the system with iron reinforcement. In Hotan and Kashgar there are poles bearing about eight or ten day-night video cameras at intervals of a hundred or two hundred meters along every street. Surveillance cameras are common in Chinese cities in general, but they are far more numerous in Xinjiang than elsewhere. The cameras can observe and recognize pedestrians; they can also read car license plates, and match them to the driver. Unregistered drivers will be arrested.
All smartphones in Xinjiang are required to have a spyware app installed, with the app tracking who calls are going to, who calls are coming from, social media use, and other online activity. It seems likely the app keeps a location log as well. Failing to install the app is, of course, a criminal offense, and very likely another ticket to a re-education camp. The authorities also use "wi-fi sniffers" in public places to monitor all wireless devices within range. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (46): Franklin Pierce, a Democrat from New Hampshire, won the election of 1852 to become SCOTUS 14. With Pierce, the rift between North and South began to widen dramatically. The decisive event was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Pierce signed into law on 30 May 1854.
The prime mover behind the law was Stephen Douglas, who was trying to broker a deal to push through a trans-continental railroad. The Kansas-Nebraska Act established the "Nebraska Territory", which stretched from present-day Kansas to the Canadian border. The law specified that the states created out of the Nebraska Territory would exercise popular sovereignty, with the people of the state determining whether the state would be slave or free.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act explicitly overturned the Missouri Compromise. To no surprise in hindsight, if it was even a surprise at the time, the law meant bloodshed, with the troubles focused in the Kansas Territory, which had been carved out of the Nebraska Territory. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions rushed into Kansas Territory, with the result that by early 1856, there were two territorial governments there -- a pro-slavery government in Lecompton, which had the distinction of being recognized by Washington, and a "free-soil" government in Topeka, which had the distinction of actually representing the majority of the territory's population.
Both sides were armed; the result was increasing violence. Pierce did not call in the Army to keep the peace. Dozens of people would be killed before the conflict sputtered out in 1858, the free-soilers having obtained the upper hand.
* By that James Buchanan, a Democrat, had been elected to the presidency, having won the 1856 election to become POTUS 15. He inherited a deteriorating situation that he was not equipped to deal with. Along with the agitation created by the fury in Kansas, anti-slavery forces acquired another reason for anger with pro-slavery forces when, in early 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney down a landmark decision on the question of slavery.
A decade before, a slave named Dred Scott from Missouri had sued for his freedom, setting off a remarkably complicated string of events. Scott had been originally owned by one Peter Blow, who moved from Alabama to Missouri in 1830, selling Scott to a US Army surgeon named Dr. John Emerson. Emerson had taken him to Illinois, then to Wisconsin Territory. Both locales were free, rendering Scott's status as a slave legally confusing; in Wisconsin Territory, he married a black woman named Harriet Robinson, owned by a local justice of the peace. Ownership of Robinson was passed on to Emerson, rendering the legal situation even more confusing. Scott could have sued for his freedom, but he did not, it appears largely because Emerson was a conscientious master.
Emerson was transferred to Saint Louis, then to Louisiana, with the slave couple following after him. Emerson died in 1843, with ownership of the couple passing on to the doctor's wife, Eliza Irene Sanford Emerson. Scott, back in Saint Louis, tried to buy himself, his wife, and their children from Mrs. Emerson, but she refused. He took the case to court in 1846, claiming that his residence in free territory meant he wasn't a slave any longer. To add to the confusions in the matter, Scott was supported in his effort to win freedom for himself and his family by the family of Peter Blow, his first owner -- the children of Blow having become anti-slavery.
Legal precedent suggested Scott would win, the traditional attitude in Missouri being "once free, always free" -- but the case was dismissed, on the pretext that Scott couldn't prove that Mrs. Emerson actually owned him. That was very confusing, because if Scott couldn't prove he was Irene Emerson's slave, wouldn't that mean Irene Emerson couldn't prove he was her slave, either? Alas, Scott's indeterminate status left him in legal limbo, so the case was retried, with Scott and his family being recognized as Mrs. Emerson's slaves; a jury gave Scott the win in 1850.
Mrs. Emerson appealed the judgement, with the Missouri Supreme Court striking down the original judgement in 1852. Ironically, the court cited antislavery sentiment in the free states as justification for overturning decades of legal precedent. In 1853, Scott went to court again. By that time, Mrs. Emerson had remarried and moved to Massachusetts, with ownership of the Scotts being passed to her brother, John F.A. Sanford. Sanford was not keen on granting the Scotts their freedom, because Scott had been "leased out" to other employers -- and Sanford would have owed Scott, if judged a free man, several years of back pay.
Since Sanford lived in New York state, not Missouri, as an interstate matter it went to a Federal district court, which decided against Scott. The matter was then appealed to the Federal Supreme Court. The court delivered its decision in March 1857, with Chief Justice Taney stating for the court majority that:
This decision would go down in history as the worst ever made by the Supreme Court -- capriciously overturning the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise, citing as justification:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... the rights of property are united with the rights of person, and placed on the same ground by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property, without due process of law. And an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular Territory of the United States, and who had committed no offence against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law.
END QUOTE
The sufficiently paranoid could see in Taney's judgement a day when there were no free states, with slavery legalized in all the United States. That was an extreme read on the decision, but not one that was out of the question, and it was bad enough as it stood. It was like abolitionism stood on its head, and anti-slavery forces were outraged. Taney had seen his decision as a weapon to be used against the Republicans, but it backfired. The Democrats, split on Taney's judgement, broke into halves; the Republicans could only end up stronger as a result.
Incidentally, through reshufflings in the wake of the case, Dred Scott ended up in the hands of the Blow family again, which gave him his freedom in 1857 -- though he died of tuberculosis the next year, not living to see how thoroughly Taney would be repudiated. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by a press release from the Carnegie Institution for Science ("Astronomers Discover Most-Distant Object Ever Observed In Our Solar System" by Scott Sheppard, 17 December 2018), A team of astronomers has discovered the most-distant body ever observed in our Solar System -- the first to be found beyond 100 astronomical units (AU), an AU being the distance from Sun to Earth.
The planetisimal, provisionally designated "2018 VG18" and nicknamed "Farout", was discovered by Carnegie's Scott S. Sheppard, David Tholen of the University of Hawaii, and Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University, who have been searching for distant Solar System objects. Tholen says: "All that we currently know about 2018 VG18 is its extreme distance from the Sun, its approximate diameter, and its color. Because 2018 VG18 is so distant, it orbits very slowly, likely taking more than 1,000 years to take one trip around the Sun."
Farout is roughly 500 kilometers (310 miles) in diameter, and is pinkish in color. Before the discovery of Farout, the most distant object was is Eris, at about 96 AU. For contrast, Pluto is presently at about 34 AU. In October 2018, the same group of researchers announced the discovery of another distant Solar System object, named "2015 TG387" and nicknamed "The Goblin," because it was first observed around near Halloween. The Goblin is presently at about 80 AU, and has an orbit that is consistent with it being influenced by an unseen super-Earth-sized Planet X on the Solar System's very distant fringes.
The discovery of Farout was made from imagery obtained on 10 November 2018 by the Japanese Subaru 8-meter (315-inch) telescope on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Other large telescopes confirmed the discovery. "Subaru", incidentally, is the Japanese word for the Pleiades star cluster, and doesn't otherwise reflect a connection with the Japanese car manufacturer -- whose logo is a representation of the Pleiades.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("The Average Person Can Recognize 5000 Faces" by Frankie Schembri, 9 October 2018), facial recognition is one of intriguing capabilities of the human brain. Researchers have found that test subjects can remember an average of about 5,000 faces.
To obtain the estimate of the average person's "facial vocabulary," the researchers gave 25 people an hour to list as many faces from their personal lives as possible, and then gave them another hour to do the same with famous faces -- such as those of actors, politicians, and musicians. If the subjects could recall a face, but not remember the name, they could use a descriptive phrase, like "the woman who played Uhura in the recent STAR TREK movies" or "the dentist I had when I was a kid". Not surprisingly, people came up with plenty of faces at first, but then the rate gradually fell off. The researchers graphed the curve and estimated from it how many faces would be remembered before the curve approximated zero.
To find out how many other faces people recognized but were unable to recall without prompting, researchers showed the participants photographs of 3,441 celebrities, including Barack Obama and Tom Cruise. A face was counted as recognize if a subject spotted it in two different images. The researchers then combing the two numbers, subtracting faces that were recognized in both sets, to determine that people could remember from 1,000 to 10,000 faces -- or an average of about 5,000. The researchers now plan to study why certain people, including "super-recognizers", can recall more faces than others.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Ravenous Insects May Be Coming For Our Crops In A Warming World" by Frankie Schembri, 30 August 2018), climate change poses threats to agriculture, include more drought, flooding, and withering heat. Now a paper adds insects to the list, suggesting that rising temperatures will lead to more hungry grasshoppers, caterpillars, and other crop-eating pests, with consequences ranging from "troublesome" to "calamitous".
The issue first came up a decade ago when Curtis Deutsch -- a biogeochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle -- published a study concluding that as temperatures rise, the great majority of insects multiply more rapidly, and end up with supercharged metabolisms. Deutsch and his team put together a computer model based on physiological data of hundreds of insect species and projected climate trends. In the model, given a planetary increase in temperature of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), insects reduced wheat crops by 46%, rice by 19%, and maize / corn by 31%.
Temperate, productive regions like the USA's "corn belt," wheat fields in France, and rice paddies in China were particularly hard hit. For wheat and maize, the model suggested that losses would continue to increase by 10% to 25% for each extra degree of warming -- but rice yields might stabilize after a 3C increase in temperature, since it is grown in many tropical environments, where insects might begin to die off once it gets too hot.
Robert Paxton, an insect ecologist at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany, who was not involved with the work, says: "The modeling is robust, and the conclusions are sound." Paxton says the study is "a stark warning" for future food security, and notes that German farmers are estimated to have lost one-fifth of their crops this year because of record-setting heat and lack of rainfall.
Paxton and Deutsch do agree that the model has left out many factors like how insects' natural predators will respond to warming, whether the insects' diets might change, and whether changes in farming techniques -- such as a shift towards indoor farming -- could meet the insect challenge. Nonetheless, Deutsch says that it's important to plan for the future of food production, since a decline in agriculture will disproportionately affect the poor: "If we think about food supply as the pie we all get to eat, some us of get smaller slices than others. If the pie begins to shrink, we need to find ways to stop it from shrinking and to carve it up more evenly so people aren't left without."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SMART TRAFFIC LIGHTS: As discussed by an article from TIME.com ("Want to Fix Road Congestion? Try Smarter Traffic Lights by Patrick Lucas Austin, 22 January 2019), robot cars, literally driven by artificial intelligence, are the leading edge in ground transport design. The robocar future promises a new age of safety and efficiency -- but it's not going to be soon.
In the near term, we could obtain improved safety and efficiency by using AI with a less sophisticated technology: the traffic light. The modern three-color traffic light was introduced by William Potts, a Detroit police official, in 1920. It hasn't changed that much since then. Aleksandar Stevanovic -- director of the Laboratory for Adaptive Traffic Operations & Management at Florida Atlantic University -- says that only about 3% of the traffic lights in the USA have any "smarts", the rest being based on simple timers, programmed based on estimates of traffic flows at given times of the day. He says: "Some of the old systems are still using outdated algorithms that use local knowledge. You're not really going to look at the bigger picture."
Some traffic lights are hooked up to cameras, radar systems, or sensors below the road, with the sensors picking up a car and turning a red light to green. It's also not unusual for the traffic light poles to have a button that pedestrians can push to get across a street, or a sensor that picks up flashing emergency lights to let an ambulance or cop car through an intersection. However, the car sensors usually don't pick up cyclists, and they may not work well in bad weather.
A smarter traffic light system could reduce fuel consumption and air pollution by reducing the time cars idle at intersections. It could also reduce traffic jams, which not only waste fuel, but cause frustration and interfere with emergency vehicles. A company named Rapid Flow is now working on a smart traffic-light system named "Surtrac".
Derived from a project led by Carnegie Mellon Institute researcher and Rapid Flow co-founder Stephen Smith, Surtac uses a distributed network of smart traffic lights equipped with radar, cameras, and other sensors to handle traffic flows. The system identifies approaching vehicles, calculates their speed and direction, then adjusts a traffic signal's timing schedule as required. Each intersection with a Surtrac system is networked with others in the locality, with the various lights then adjusting their timing to optimize traffic flow in real time.
The project started out in 2012 single-street corridor with nine Surtrac-equipped intersections, in Philadelphia's East Liberty neighborhood. Smith says of the experiment: "Overall, if you average by volume, we were reducing travel time through the network by 25 to 26%. Not so much because [cars] were moving faster, but because they were stopping 30% fewer times."
Surtrac tech is now found in 50 intersections throughout Philadelphia, and is expected to grow to as many as 200 intersections, thanks to a grant awarded to the city. In maturity, the system will become more sophisticated, able to spot and adapt for pedestrians with disabilities, or for that matter pedestrians who are in a hurry to get across an intersection before the light changes. In addition, the smart traffic system could adapt for inclement weather, such as snow, adapting their timing appropriately.
Smith believes that smart traffic system of the future will benefit from robot cars and city-wide coordination. Another option would involve the system communicating with cars over wireless to inform them of, say, their optimum speed. Such things are futures; for now, smart traffic lights offer substantial benefits at modest cost.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SMART WHISKERS: The ability of seals to use their whiskers for navigation in dark waters was mentioned here in 2011. As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Navy Seals", 9 August 2018), researchers are now working to exploit whiskers for guiding underwater robots.
An object moving through water leaves a trail of tiny vortexes behind it, this trail being called a "Karman vortex street". Seals follow this "street" using their whiskers. As Dr. Michael Triantafyllou of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) observes: "You can set a harbor seal loose to follow a towed fish, and even 30 seconds later, they will be able to follow the exact track, whether it's straight or zigzag or circular."
Triantafyllou and his colleagues at MIT's Center for Ocean Engineering are one of a number of groups unraveling the secret of seals' whiskers. Another team, led by Ben Calhoun of the University of Virginia, and involving the University of California, Santa Cruz; the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division at Newport, Rhode Island; and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has already performed a three-year investigation into the matter. Other projects are under way at Jeju National University in South Korea, and at Cleveland State University.
Seals can zero in on fish such as herring when blindfolded and wearing earmuffs -- but cover their whiskers, and they don't get dinner. The bases of seal whiskers have concentrations of nerve cells, making them sensitive as fingertips. In addition, the whiskers themselves are optimized for sensing; under a microscope, they aren't circular when sliced through, instead having an oval cross-section, as well as a surface with an elaborate undulating geometry.
This complex shape looked familiar to Triantafyllou and his team. They had come up with something similar when working on mooring lines for offshore gas rigs. They were trying to prevent the lines from vibrating in water currents, a phenomenon similar to telephone wires humming in the wind. The researchers accordingly printed out a scaled-up model of a seal whisker, to find that it didn't vibrate in "laminar-flow" currents -- that is, currents with no eddies in them.
Counterintuitively, this insensitivity to laminar flow increases sensitivity to vortices. The researchers towed an enlarged artificial whisker through water, to find out how a vortex street laid down in front of it affected it. They aligned the model whisker so that the long axis of its cross-section was in the direction of the flow -- which is just as it is in seals. In laminar-flow water, the whisker cut smoothly through the water; but vortices exerted forces on its flat surfaces, causing the whisker to vibrate.
Not surprisingly, bigger vortices meant bigger vibrations; in addition, the frequency of the vibration changed with the object's speed. A seal, it appears, uses the vibrations of its array of whiskers to assess a target's bearing, size, and velocity.
In 2016, with help from researchers at Singapore University of Technology and Design, Triantafyllou and his team attached an artificial whisker to a piezo-electric membrane, which generated an electrical signal in response to vibrations. The next step was to sort out what the vibrations mean. Ben Calhoun of the University of Virginia had already been working on the problem, having attached a recording device to one whisker of a trained seal. Recordings of the vibrations showed they had an elaborate spectrum, with multiple components.
A seal has dozens of whiskers, each generating an elaborate signal, with its brain sorting all these inputs out to locate, identify, and track a target. Triantafyllou and his team want to use machine learning (ML) to pull off the same trick -- building an array of whiskers, hooking it up to an ML system, and then training the ML system by presenting it with a set of targets. The training will allow the ML system to recognize the trails left by objects of different types and sizes, traveling at different speeds.
The US military is very interested in this research. Submarines are getting ever quieter and stealthier; but such a large vessel, moving at fast speeds, has to leave vortices underwater, and they last for hours. Whiskered robots could patrol the depths to find the vortex streets of a submarine, then zero in on it. Whiskers might have civilian applications as well, for example being used in fixed installations to map out currents.
Might there be aerial applications as well? Nightjars AKA nighthawks feed on flying insects, especially moths. Traditionally, it's been believed that they have good night vision to hunt down prey -- but they also have an array of whiskers around their beaks. There hasn't been much investigation of these whiskers yet, but they're an intriguing target for study.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DATA SLEUTHS (10): The Chinese government claims harsh measures are needed in Xinjiang province to suppress terrorist attacks by Uighur separatists. In 2013, a Uighur crashed his car into pedestrians in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, while in 2014 a knife-carrying Uighur gang butchered 31 travelers at a train station in Kunming, Yunnan province -- an action that led, not surprisingly, to great public alarm. Unrest in Yarkand later that year led to a hundred deaths; an attack at a coal mine in Aksu killed 50 people.
Uighurs have been blamed for a bombing which killed 20 at a shrine in Bangkok that is popular with Chinese tourists. Chinese authorities see, with good reason, connections between Uighur separatists and global jihad, with hundreds believe to have joined up with Islamic State (IS) and other jihadi groups. In 2016, a defector from IS provided a list of foreign recruits; 114 came from Xinjiang.
China is an authoritarian society -- but in most of China, it's the iron fist in the velvet glove. There's no glove in Xinjiang. The Chinese government does have good cause to worry about terrorism in Xinjiang; unfortunately, the government's actions are heavy-handed in the extreme.
In the city of Hotan, there is a new police station every 300 meters (1,000 feet) or so. They are quaintly called "convenience police stations", as if they were shops -- and in fact, they do offer some consumer services, such as bottled water and phone recharging. The windowless stations, gunmetal gray, with forbidding grilles on their doors, are part of a "grid-management system" like that which Governor Chen pioneered when he was CCP boss in Tibet from 2011 to 2016.
This is not actually anything all that new, China having a long tradition of community control schemes. In the 16th century, a system known as "baojia" was devised that required households to take turns to monitor each other's activities. Modifications of it have persisted for much of the country's history since then. Under Mao, city dwellers were assigned to workplace "danwei (units)", which were responsible for providing them with housing, while also informing the authorities about disloyal citizens.
In the post-Mao order, danwei mostly disappeared -- but from 2004, a scheme in which locals were recruited to keep an eye on small square sections of a city, the "grids", began to spread through China's cities. The "grid managers" tend to be retirees, with their job being to help citizens in need, watch out for crime and, once again, keep tabs on the disloyal. In Xinjiang, the paternalistic aspects of the grid system are not much in evidence. The squares are not monitored by retirees; each has a police station to keep tabs on the inhabitants, as does every rural village.
At a large checkpoint on the edge of Hotan, a policeman tells everyone to get off a bus. The passengers, all Uighurs, are cycled through a booth, where their identity cards are scanned; photographs and fingerprints of them are obtained; and high-tech iris-recognition scanners log their eyes. Women are ordered to take off their headscarves, while three young Uighurs are told to turn on their smartphones and enter their passwords. Nobody dares refuse; a policeman takes the smartphones, puts them in a device that copies their contents for analysis, and hands them back. One woman bitterly protests to a policeman: "You are Uighur -- why are you looking at my phone?!"
There are checkpoints from grid square to grid square, and Uighurs have to go through them several times a day. Shops and restaurants in Hotan have panic buttons with which to call the police, who can get there in a minute. In consequence to the Kunming knife attack, knives and scissors are as hard to buy as a gun in Japan. In butchers and restaurants all over Xinjiang, kitchen knives are chained to the wall, to prevent them from being snatched up and used as weapons. QR codes containing the owner's identity-card information are engraved on every blade.
In addition, all shops and restaurants in Hotan must have a part-time policeman on duty, with the result that thousands of shop assistants and waiters have been "deputized". Each is issued a helmet, flak vest, and a hefty baton; they train in the afternoons. In markets in Kashgar, these part-time police sit in booths and stalls, engaging in trade -- usually with their uncomfortable helmets and flak vests set aside. Full-time police patrol the markets, ordering them to put the helmets back on. At Kashgar's railroad station, travelers must endure three rounds of bag checks before buying a ticket. On board the train, police patrol the aisles, ordering Uighurs to open their luggage for further checks. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: The startup company Dreamscape Immersive, which develops virtual-reality (VR) environments for entertainment, was discussed here last year, with a description of the company's ALIEN ZOO environment. An article from THEVERGE.com ("Dreamscape Immersive Wants To Bring Location-Based VR To The Masses" by Bryan Bishop, 15 January 2019), took a tour of Dreamscape's new, refined VR facility in a Los Angeles shopping mall:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Walk into the new Southern California flagship location for location-based VR company Dreamscape Immersive, and the sights and sounds of the bustling shopping center it's located in quickly fade away. A large clock hangs over a wooden concierge desk, while a pair of monitors advertises "departure times" for the location's trio of immersive experiences, using three-letter abbreviations that echo an airport more than a movie theater or arcade.
The transition away from reality continues in the location's waiting lounge, where physical artifacts from the worlds explored in titles like ALIEN ZOO, THE BLU: DEEP RESCUE, and LAVAN'S MAGIC PROJECTOR: THE LOST PEARL await examination. The props set up backstories and plot details well before audiences get anywhere near a headset or backpack computer, and by the time guests are ushered into the gear-up rooms -- designed to echo train cars, decked out in wood and soft overhead lighting -- it's tough to shake the feeling that you're doing more than stepping into a virtual reality experience. This feels like a journey.
END QUOTE
For each experience, groups of as many as six people are kitted up with backpack computers, headsets, plus hand and foot trackers. They are then led into a room about 5 meters (16 feet) on a side, with a vibrating haptic floor -- the location has five such "pods", though not all are active yet. They then can interact with the virtual environment, with the visitors experiencing smells, mist, or wind. Tickets are $20 USD each, with the experiences lasting about 15 minutes each.
ALIEN ZOO, described in the previous article, is just what it says, a visit to an otherworldly zoo; while BLU: DEEP RESCUE lets the visitors ride undersea scooters to rescue a whale; and LAVAN'S MAGIC PROJECTOR is an INDIANA JONES experience, taking place in the ruins of an ancient temple. The "Magic Projector" of the title suggests the visitors have stepped into an old movie, with company officials saying that other old-movie environments are in planning for the series. Simple props support the VR experiences, though the effects aren't perfect: a visitor may try to touch a wall, and find nothing there.
Dreamscape is planning to expand beyond Los Angeles, having established a partnership with the AMC Theaters chain, initially bringing up four new locations. Dreamscape is also looking for partners in Europe and the Middle East. "Coming soon to a theater near you!" [ED: As of 2020, it seems not. Theaters were clobbered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and too many people, it appears, are afflicted with VR sickness.]
* As for the Real Fake News in January, it was dominated by Trump's government shutdown, which ended up being the longest such in US history, lasting over a month. Gradually, the pain being suffered by Federal employees became too obvious to disregard, and the Democratic caucus of the House of Representatives -- resolutely led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi -- showed not the least sign of budging. Trump's position was: "Give me $5.8 billion USD as a down payment for a border wall, then I'll re-open the government." Pelosi kept on replying: "Re-open the government, and we'll discuss border security."
It was Trump's plan, to the extent he has such things, to blame Democrats for the shutdown, and his admiring fans did so. However, the people who actually voted for the Democrats overwhelmingly blamed it on Trump, and so the Democrats had no reason to care what the Trumpies felt. Indeed, the general feeling was that the Democrats in Congress better not cave in, if they knew what was good for them. There were some people who at least claimed to blame both sides -- but that didn't really harm the Democrats, since it harmed Trump just as much. He could get no leverage out of the equivocation. Nancy Pelosi then made her contempt for Trump evident by saying that the president would not be allowed to give his annual State of the Union address to Congress until the shutdown ended. Her response seemed to catch him flat-footed; sure, he could deliver the address someplace else -- the venue suggested on Twitter being McDonald's -- but he'd look pathetic, and he knew it. After some pause, he announced he was going to make the address anyway, with Pelosi replying, in effect: "What part of NO did you not understand?"
By 24 January, Trump seemed to be softening, suggesting that he was agreeable to putting off the address until the shutdown ended. In the meantime, bills had been flying through Congress to try to end the shutdown -- with the endpoint being a bill pushed by Democrats that got a fair number of moderate Republican signatories, indicating impatience with Trump in the GOP. The next day, with airports going into partial shutdown because of absences of air traffic controllers, Trump re-opened the government.
The contest went entirely to Pelosi, who came out looking almost Thatcheresque. There was some grumbling about her snub with the State of the Union address, that it was petty-minded politics when Federal employees were suffering. Yes, it was petty-minded, but that was precisely the point. The Trump blitz into the White House took most of the media, politicians, and many others by surprise; they hadn't ever run into anyone so outrageous. Anybody who had spent a long time hanging around on the internet saw nothing surprising about him: he was just a loudmouthed, tiny-minded internet troll. Although it is unlikely Pelosi has spent that much time hanging around on the internet, it appears she's a quick study, and figured out that he needed to be treated roughly to let him know his cheap tricks weren't working.
What to say? It worked. Pelosi is the hero of the moment. It seems likely that Trump will treat her with more respect. He's full of bluster, but not very bold.
The agreement to re-open the government was specified as "temporary" -- but having not found the shutdown to his advantage, it is most unlikely Trump will try it again. Indeed, this may well be the very last government shutdown, legislators now attempting to come up with a formula that makes them impractical, if not impossible. They've never been very practical, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out a way to put them down for good. If the effort doesn't fly now, it will in the next administration.
However, Trump has been making noises about declaring a national emergency, which would allow him to take extraordinary measures without congressional support. He's completely welcome to try, since it would go nowhere. In 1952 President Harry Truman, citing the needs of the Korean War, seized control of the steel industry to deal with a strike. The courts replied: NO. Trump's position is far weaker than Truman's. How could Trump claim there was an emergency at America's southern border that demanded a wall? The Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress for two years, and Trump didn't get a wall. Now the Democrats have taken over the House, and suddenly it's an EMERGENCY! And THEIR FAULT!
Like I said, many of the powers-that-be aren't familiar with trolls -- but nonetheless, Trump's claim of a national emergency is unconvincing to anyone with sense. Incidentally, during the month I came up with my own proposal for a wall: build one out of wood and canvas, paint it to look like concrete, put wheels underneath it, then keep rolling it from place to place: "100% coverage, just not 100% of the time!"
Trump will give his delayed State of the Union address to Congress on 5 February. That leads to the interesting question of what happens when, as is sure to, Trump talks outrageous trash to Congress. Will the Democrats sit quietly and take it? Or respond with boos and laughter? That would entirely out of the question for any other president -- but Trump has never felt compelled to live up to the gravity of his office, claiming he is "new presidential". Very well, if he doesn't feel any need to observe norms, why should his audience? [ED: No, there was no confrontation.]
* As discussed in an article from TIME.com ("Christianity's Future Looks More Like Lady Gaga Than Mike Pence", 24 January 2019) by Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimons -- a gay Christian activist -- one of the background incidents to the shutdown was a media flap when Vice President Mike Pence's wife Karen went to work at a "Christian" private school that bans LGBTQ students and parents. Pop singer Lady Gaga, a demonstrative Christian who supports the LGBTQ community, fired back, saying from the stage in Las Vegas:
BEGIN QUOTE:
You [Mike Pence] say we should not discriminate against Christianity. You are the worst representation of what it means to be a Christian. I am a Christian woman, and what I do know about Christianity is that we bear no prejudice, and everybody is welcome.
END QUOTE
A few days later, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity asked White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her proposal for a "Green New Deal." The White House press secretary responded that climate change should be left up to God: "I don't think that we are going to listen to her [Ocasio-Cortez] on much of anything, particularly anything that we will leave into the hands of a much, much higher authority. And certainly not listen to the freshman congresswoman on when the world may end."
Ocasio-Cortez, who is also demonstrative about her faith, fired back on Twitter -- much like Trump, a favored tool -- with Biblical receipts. The author of the article concluded:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Since well before I was born in 1989, fundamentalists have defined our public imagination of what it means to be a Christian. They told America they were the only Christians and the only issues of "Christian" morality were attacking LGBTQ people and controlling women's reproductive choices.
First, the LGBTQ rights and climate change debates illustrate US Christianity's diversity. Progressive Christians embrace both causes, while fundamentalist Christians tend to support the discredited practice of gay conversion therapy and distrust climate science. Public opinion research on these two subjects shows how millions of Americans stand on each side of the divide:
... Denominational divisions within Christianity have largely given way to a progressive and fundamentalist divide. Mike Pence embodies this development: He self-identifies as an "evangelical Catholic" which obscures his opinion of the Protestant Reformation. But it's clear to everyone: He's a hero to fundamentalists Christians across denominations.
When Pence said: "This criticism of Christian education in America should stop." -- he didn't mean the type of "Christian education" a young queer Christian like myself gets from attending a Lady Gaga concert. He meant a fundamentalist Christian education. And sadly, I thought he was going to get away with equating Christianity with conservatism. But Lady Gaga stood up for our faith and fought back. And the fundamentalists took notice. Prominent fundamentalist flamethrower Franklin Graham took to Facebook to disparage Lady Gaga, and call the Pences "the best kind of Christian."
... Christian role models [like Lady Gaga] remind me why I'm a Christian myself. Christians must ask whether our faith compels us to embrace progressive or conservative values.
END QUOTE
Unlike many religious questions, that one is entirely relevant to non-believers. Being a non-believer myself, I have conflicted feelings about religion, desiring to be tolerant, but finding nothing in the fundamentalist style of intolerance, ignorance, and sanctimony to admire -- with the embrace of the amoral and odious Trump by many evangelicals lending the lie to their rotten act. It is a relief to find that many believers don't like that act, either.
Barack Obama ran on the campaign slogan of: CHANGE -- which got a bit tiresome, though it still was the truth, Obama attempting to lead America into the 21st century. The irony is that Donald Trump, in his clumsy attempts to turn back the clock, has greatly accelerated change. Yes, the new order is not entirely comfortable, but any misgivings about it have to be put aside, at least for the time being, in the face of an intolerable push to restore a dead past. Trump has forced people to take up sides; he has indeed made a revolution, but it is one that will discard him and what he stands for into the trash-heap of history.
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