* 23 entries including: US Constitution (series), repairing the welfare state (series), loyal wingmen, geological traces of dark matter, dilapidated bitcoin, MROI optical interferometer, Amazon does machine learning, rapid Antarctic meltdown, great Texas emu rush, and Trillion Trees project.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR MAY 2019: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Carbon neutral by 2050?", 2 May 2019), on 2 May 2019, an advisory panel to the British government released an official plan to deal with climate change. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) said Britain country should aim to eliminate net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. The government is considering the report; Michael Gove, the environment secretary, says he is open to a stricter target.
Members of Extinction Rebellion, a noisy British environmental group, will not be happy with the 2050 target, having called for emissions to end by 2025. That's clearly unrealistic; in fact, the CCC's target is one of the most ambitious in the world:
The CCC assessment says these goals can be met with existing technology, but it won't be easy. Britain's electrical power system will need to go renewable, with all cars going electric, and gas boilers replaced with electric heating or the more efficient heat pump. The public would need to eat 20% less meat and dairy products. In sum, the CCC believes the measures outlined in the report should cut emissions by 95% by 2050, with the rest up by a vast tree-planting program and a new industry to capture CO2 and store it underground, or beneath the North Sea.
While all the technology is available, not all of it is ready for large-scale use. Nonetheless, the cost and learning curve of renewable energy and other green technologies encourages optimism. In 2008, the CCC estimated that lowering emissions by 80% by 2050 would cost up to 2% of GDP annually by then. Unforeseen drops in the cost of renewable energy and batteries, among other things, mean the committee now says net-zero can be achieved for the same price.
Lord Debden, the CCC's chairman, announced along with the release of the report: "This is not about what we hope or we think ought to happen, it's about what can happen, We can do it, and therefore if we don't it's because we have chosen not to."
ED: One of the particularly annoying tropes of the climate-change deniers on Twitter is the insistence that climate action is futile, unless China and India get serious about it. The rejoinder is that it might help a lot if we can show them how to do it. China, at least, seems to take the problem very seriously.
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("When The Lights Go Out", 4 May 2019), North Korea is a tightly closed society, and so it is hard to know much about the place. However, the country is perfectly visible from orbit, and much can be reasonably inferred about the place by how well-lit it is at night. It isn't, looking like a black hole, surrounded by the glittering lights of China, Russia, and South Korea. It suggests North Korea's economy is poorer, more unstable, and more vulnerable to the whims of nature than had been thought.
A recent paper from the International Monetary Fund concludes that night lighting accounts for almost half of a country's GDP per person, that correlation being about as strong as that between a person's height and hand size. That's not such a tight correlation, but there's not much else to go on when trying to obtain economic data about authoritarian states. They do release official figures, but nobody with sense believes them.
Working from estimates of production output, South Korea's central bank has estimated North Korea's GDP is about $2,500 USD per person. However, an analysis on night lighting from World Data Lab, a startup, and a team of scholars suggests that North Korea's GDP is only about $1,400 USD per person -- making North Korea one of the world's ten poorest countries.
In addition, luminosity fell in 2013 to 2015 by 40%, though it recovered in 2016. It doesn't appear the fall in luminosity was due to economics as such, as it was to the fact that North Korea runs on hydropower, and there was a drought. Nonetheless, the fall in night lighting meant economic hardship -- and this year, 2019, the government has publicly admitted that heatwaves, floods, and drought have created a painful shortage of food. Sanctions hurt North Korea; they hurt worse when nature gangs up on the country as well.
* To this time, the USA has had one of its longest economic booms in its history, lasting over ten years, with the stock market soaring in pace. As discussed here in 2018, stock market growth can't last forever, but it seems to be hanging in there steadily. What's going on?
As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("The US Stock Market Can't Stop, Won't Stop Its Endless Rally" by Michael P. Regan, 3 May 2019), the continuing stock market boom gets even more puzzling, since money has been draining out of stock mutual funds for months. The dizzying heights of the current market are making individual investors nervous with the prospect of a nosedive -- the worries aggravated by the market instabilities of 2018 -- so they are cashing in now and moving to safer investments.
So what, then, is driving the boom? It appears to be corporations buying back their own stock, at about twice the pace that individual investors have been bailing out of mutual funds. Corporate profits are very strong, and boosted by the Trump tax cut; companies have more money than they need for new factories or research & development, so they use the excess to buy back their own stock.
That the buy-back is at inflated prices doesn't concern them as much as it does individual investors. Indeed, there's an advantage to high-priced buybacks. It might seem more proper to distribute excess profits to shareholders, but if a corporation gives shareholders a generous deal on the buy-backs, the shareholders have no cause for complaint. Besides, not all stocks yield dividends. Since investors are cashing in anyway, this seems like a peculiar combination of a buyer's and a seller's market.
For now, the corporate stock buybacks are keeping the market going. How much longer can the boom last? Who knows? What is known is that corporate inventories are rising, meaning there are likely to be production cutbacks, -- and that will mean cooling of corporate profits, with stock buy-backs fading in turn. That the boom will end is not in doubt, it's only a question of when, and that timing represents a political radioactive hot potato. A deep stock-market fall before the 2020 elections would be very bad news for Donald Trump; a fall in 2021 would be bad news for an incoming Democratic administration, since it would hobble the government at the outset. There's nothing to be done but wait and see.
BACK_TO_TOP* TAG TEAMING: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Autonomy Is Ready To Enable Manned-Unmanned Combat Aircraft Teams" by Graham Warwick, 1 August 2018), the advance of drone combat aircraft has created a certain tension with piloted combat aircraft, leading to the question of: which is better? A study by a Washington DC think-tank suggests the two are symbiotic. Robotics could boost US airpower in the near term, by teaming piloted fifth-generation fighters with available fourth-generation aircraft converted to unpiloted operation as "loyal wingmen".
A policy paper by the Air Force Association's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies says the service "desperately needs to add combat capability" -- and so piloted-unpiloted teaming "is an opportunity that must be explored and exploited." The paper suggests starting out by converting surplus Lockheed Martin F-16s now in storage, before moving on to the expense of purpose-designed "unpiloted combat air vehicles (UCAV)".
The study suggests the technology is available, citing work by BAE Systems going back more than 20 years -- including the DARPA-led "Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS)" and "Unpiloted Combat Armed Rotorcraft (UCAR)" programs of the previous decade, and the ongoing "Distributed Battle Management (DBM)" demonstration. For J-UCAS, Boeing developed the X-45/X-46 and Northrop Grumman the X-47 UCAV demonstrators, with BAE providing an autonomous flight system for the J-UCAS common operating system". BAE also applied the autonomy software to UCAR. In piloted simulations, this program demonstrated piloted-unpiloted teaming, in which an AH-64 Apache weapons officer became the commander of a "wolf pack" of unpiloted armed rotorcraft.
UCAR was canceled in 2004, but BAE's autonomy development moved on to DARPA's Northrop-led "Heterogeneous Airborne Reconnaissance Team (HART)" project late in the decade. In HART, multiple drones autonomously conducted urban reconnaissance, supplying imagery directly to users. Under the current DBM project, BAE is demonstrating two capabilities for operations in contested environment:
According to a BAE official: "We are developing flexible, open, assured autonomy technology that is aircraft-agnostic. The software does not care if it is a UCAV or an unmanned F-16. It can be horizontally integrated across multiple vehicles or vertically integrated across multiple mission sets."
BAE is working on both "inner-loop" autonomy, for the digital flight control system, and "outer-loop" autonomy, for the mission management system. Flight-critical inner-loop capabilities include automatic ground collision avoidance; while mission-critical outer-loop functions include automated route planning, resource and task management, and sensor fusion. The two approaches mesh, the ultimate objective being full end-to-end autonomy.
The effort is reinforced by software standards -- such as the consortium-based "Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE)" and the US Air Force's "Open Mission System (OMS)" -- as well as standards for best practices -- such as DARPA's "High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS)", which developed tools to aid construction of highly reliable, robust, and testable code. Having assured code reduces testing overhead; if something is changed, the modularization of the code means that only the modules that have been changed have to be tested, not the entire software system.
The Mitchell Institute paper does not foresee piloted-unpiloted teaming as taking on intense combat scenarios in the near term. The immediate focus should be on easy and moderately-challenging scenarios, freeing up piloted aircraft for the tough jobs. Early on, full autonomy won't be required: first-generation autonomous aircraft might execute significant parts of its mission independently, but require human authorization to use its weapons.
Initial missions for such teams could include intelligence; surveillance and reconnaissance; air-to-ground strike; and standoff air-to-air engagements, with unpiloted combat aircraft carrying sensors and weapons to augment the capabilities of the piloted fighters. The software to do the job is available, or nearly so; and unpiloted F-16s could be quickly fielded to act as UCAVs. The robot F-16s could be flown with safety pilots in development and training, allowing piloted-unpiloted teams to get into combat sooner.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DARK MATTER & DEEP EARTH: Some years ago, cosmologists came up with an estimate of the mass of the Universe -- to find out that its mass was well greater than was consistent with the estimated availability of matter. This extra matter became known as "dark matter", and a lot of work has been expended to figure out if there's something wrong with theory; or if there's some form of matter that we haven't observed yet.
The two approaches dovetail: all efforts to observe dark matter have so far come up zeroes, which places constraints on theoretical work. As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Hunt For Dark Matter Turns To Ancient Minerals" by Anil Ananthaswamy, 9 July 2018), the search for dark matter has become more ingenious.
Researchers using sophisticated detectors in deep mines and other underground facilities have searched for signs of dark matter for decades. But now, Katherine Freese, a physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her colleagues suggest that inspecting minerals such as halite -- sodium chloride, chemically table salt -- and zabuyelite -- lithium carbonate -- might reveal traces of dark matter.
Those engaged in the hunt for dark matter generally think it's made up of "weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)", which interact with normal matter mainly through gravity. Direct-detection experiments tried to find the effects of WIMPs from collisions with the nuclei of atoms in materials such as germanium, silicon or sodium iodide inside a detector.
The experiments had to be placed deep underground to screen out cosmic rays, energetic particles from deep space that strike the Earth's atmosphere. If they weren't screened out, they'd confound the detector with "false positives". To date. So far, only one experiment -- the DAMA/LIBRA experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, in a gallery offset from a tunnel through a mountain -- says it has detected dark matter, but the claim remains unverified.
Freese and her colleagues suggest that minerals such as halite and zabuyelite, found in the deep Earth, are shielded from cosmic rays. If a WIMP were to hit the nucleus of an atom of, say, sodium or chlorine, the nucleus would recoil -- leaving a trace from one to 1 nanometer to 1 micrometer long in the mineral. The minerals could be extracted from kilometers-deep boreholes that have already been drilled for geological research and oil prospecting. Samples would be examined using an electron or atomic force microscope to find the tracks. X-ray or ultraviolet 3D scanners could be used to examine bigger chunks of minerals faster, but with lower resolution.
Collisions of WIMPS with different elements would have distinct signatures, providing a degree of cross-checking. According to Freese: "For example, sodium chloride consists of both sodium and chlorine, so you get multiple signals from just one mineral. If you do find some positive signals, then you can figure out what kind of WIMP it is based on its scattering off of sodium and its scattering off of chlorine."
The physics community finds the idea exciting, though there are skeptics. In the mid-1990s, physicists considered using the mineral mica as a target for similar searches for dark matter -- but as it turned out, radioactivity from uranium in the minerals would create tracks in the mica that would be impossible to distinguish from those created by WIMPs. Radioactive uranium and thorium are relatively common in the Earth, and it would be hard to find mineral samples not affected by them.
Freese admits that's a concern, but she believes it may well be possible to distinguish traces caused by radioactivity from those caused by WIMPS. She says: "The truth is you have to do it and find out."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DYING BITCOIN: The difficulties afflicting the bitcoin cryptocurrency were last discussed here in 2018. An article from ECONOMIST.com ("Can Cryptocurrencies Recover?", 28 March 2019), suggests that bitcoin's health has not improved since then. In early 2018, one bitcoin cost about $20,000 USD. By the summer, the value had fallen to about $7,000 USD, and now it's about $4,000 USD.
When bitcoin was at its peak, big financial institutions such as Barclays and Goldman Sachs were flirting with it. There was furious activity, with scores of copycat cryptocurrencies flooding in, some of them becoming hotter than bitcoin itself. Now the big players have given up on bitcoin, while rival cryptocurrencies struggle, with many of them gone bust.
The rapid expansion and collapse of the bitcoin bubble suggests comparisons with past financial bubbles, such as the Dutch tulip craze in 1636-37, the rise and collapse of the South Sea Company in London in 1720, and the parallel Mississippi investment mania in France. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are more inclined to point to the dotcom bubble of 2000, which was merely a burst of excessive enthusiasm in a fundamentally healthy industry. Alas, cryptocurrencies don't seem fundamentally healthy, suffering from three problems: activity is exaggerated, the technology doesn't scale well, and fraud appears to be common.
Consider the exaggeration of activity. Ten years after their invention, use of cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services remains a niche pastime. Bitcoin is the most popular, with one cryptocurrency firm claiming that Bitcoin transactions in 2018 totaled about $3.3 trillion USD, over six times the volume of Paypal. Analysts suggests that figure involved a lot of double-counting, and that the actual transfers of value in 2018 were somewhat over $800 billion USD.
That's a fair sum of money, but it appears that only about $2.4 billion USD of it actually went to merchant-service providers, which handle payments for businesses. Compare that to the $15 trillion USD in transactions handled in 2017 by Chinese payment firms Alipay and WeChat Pay. Underground "darknet" markets, which deal in stolen charge-card numbers, recreational drugs, and so on, made up $605 million USD, and gambling sites $857 million USD. Most of the rest was related to speculation. Not incidentally, there's a lot of suspicion that activity in the speculation market is artificially inflated -- what's known as "wash trading", in which traders sell back and forth to each other, or even to themselves. It is, of course, a dodgy practice.
Next, consider the failures of the technology. Bitcoin operates using a "blockchain", which contains all the bitcoin transactions, linked together cryptographically in sequence. The entire bitcoin "ledger" is sent out to everyone on the network, like about once every ten minutes. As the numbers of users increase, the communications overhead increases as well, gradually bringing the system to a halt. Bitcoin is also limited in the number of bitcoins that can be created or "mined" -- to an ultimate total of 21 million bitcoins -- with the mining process being a gross energy hog. It was suspected at the peak of boom that the electricity use of all the miners was equivalent to that of Ireland.
Finally, consider fraud. The secrecy and security of bitcoin makes it ideal for con-artists and other crooks. Ponzi schemes are common, as is simple incompetence. Cryptocurrency exchanges often collapse, or are hacked.
Efforts are being made to get around some of these limitations. Some Bitcoin enthusiasts are testing an add-on called the Lightning Network, which tries to speed things up by moving many transactions off the blockchain. However, for the most part, bitcoin advocates are just trying to get excitement going for it again; for example, in 2018, Jack Dorsey, the boss of Twitter, said he thinks Bitcoin will be the world's "single currency" within a decade. Market analysts and pundits provide cheery reassurance that the currency will soon soar again.
Good luck with that. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett was far more persuasive when he compared bitcoin to "rat poison". At the outset, bitcoin seemed ingenious, even revolutionary -- but there was also plenty of skepticism. The skeptics, it turns out, were right. "Do-it-yourself currencies? What COULD go wrong?!"
ED: I run into Bitcoin pushers on Twitter, and reply: "BITCOIN: There's a sucker born every minute!"
They shoot back: "You could say the same thing about government-controlled currencies!"
"Yeah, and you could say Mickey Mouse lives at the North Pole of Mars with his elves -- but that wouldn't make it true." The funny thing about bitcoin pushers is that they're running an obvious scam, but for the most part have pumped themselves up so much, they don't realize it. Consider it a triumph of ideology over reality.
* As a follow-on comment from early 2021: bitcoin has risen to even more dizzying heights. There really is one born every minute.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (9): As discussed by an article from NBCNEWS.com ("Migrants Don't Bring Disease" by Maggie Fox, 5 December 2018), a report by health experts published in the LANCET late in 2018 took aim at a number of myths about immigrants, starting with the idea they spread disease. Dr. Paul Spiegel -- director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and one of the 24 authors of the two-year-long study -- says that's not so: "There is no evidence to show that migrants are spreading disease. That is a false argument that is used to keep migrants out."
Terry McGovern -- head of Columbia University's Department of Population & Family Health, another author of the study -- adds: "Contrary to the current political narrative portraying migrants as disease carriers who are a blight on society, migrants are an essential part of economic stability in the US."
LANCET editor Richard Horton comments:
BEGIN QUOTE:
In too many countries, the issue of migration is used to divide societies and advance a populist agenda. With one billion people on the move today, growing populations in many regions of the world, and the rising aspirations of a new generation of young people, migration is not going away. Migrants commonly contribute more to the economy than they cost, and how we shape their health and well-being today will impact our societies for generations to come.
END QUOTE
The study said that about a quarter of the one billion migrants are moving from one country to another, with the rest moving internally. International migrants are less likely than people in their host countries to die of heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases and other ills. They do suffer from hepatitis, tuberculosis, and HIV, but such afflictions are generally only spread within the affected immigrant communities, and not to the wider population. Conditions in refugee camps and detention centers can lead to under-vaccination and the spread of infectious disease -- but reflects more on the failure to provide adequate support of refugee populations.
As for fears that immigrants will outbreed their hosts, in six European countries, fertility rates among migrant women were lower than among native-born residents. In addition, several reports have found that immigrants make up a substantial portion of the healthcare workforce, including in the USA. One study has found that 16% of healthcare workers in the USA were born somewhere else, including 29% of physicians, 16% percent of registered nurses, 20% percent of pharmacists, 24% of dentists, and 23% of nursing, psychiatric and home health aides. In the UK, 37% of doctors were educated in another country.
Attempts to shut down immigration, then, have the perverse result of reducing the healthcare workforce, and undermining public health. They also have the equally perverse result of degrading the health of migrants, Columbia's McGovern saying: "The criminalization and detention of migrants seeking internationally protected refuge violates international law, and puts them at greater risk of ill health." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (59): Although the Radical Republicans were extreme, Andrew Johnson did much to pointlessly antagonize them, and to undermine his public position by his indifference to the troubles of the free black people. Johnson wanted no part of land redistribution to help free blacks; he shared the common view of many Southerners that giving property to black people would make it more difficult to keep them down. Johnson pardoned the original plantation owners, their old property rights on the islands were re-affirmed, and the black folk were driven off the land. That was the way Johnson wanted it; despite the fact that he hated the Southern aristocracy, he felt the planter elite was in the best position to control the black folk, and chose to restore the planters as the lesser of two evils. Johnson's lenient attitude towards ex-Confederates was much less driven by any sense of forgiveness than a determination to maintain white supremacy. In some cases, Federal troops performed the evictions.
Southerners were clearly taking remarkable measures to keep the black people suppressed. All four of the ex-Confederate states recognized by the Johnson Administration passed "Black Codes", which were sets of laws that guaranteed free blacks certain rights, such as the right to marry, while denying them many more. Blacks could not bear arms, did not have the right of free assembly, could not serve on juries, could not testify against white people in court, and had limited personal and economic freedoms. At their worst, the Black Codes were designed to restore slavery under a set of legal fictions. Johnson did nothing about the Black Codes.
While the rights of black people were not at the top of the list of concerns of most of the Northern public, the measures taken by the Southern states to suppress blacks and the bland acceptance of those measures by the Johnson administration antagonized Congress and public opinion. Why, so the thinking went, had the Union fought and won the war at such cost, to have a president then let Southerners do whatever they pleased? In fact, Johnson seemed to be in outright collusion with Southern reactionaries when he had vetoed in February a two-year extension of the life of the Freedman's Bureau -- it was only supposed to have lasted a year following the end of the war -- on the basis that the Constitution did not sanction such organizations. Of course, it didn't rule them out, either.
Johnson's acts, or refusal to act, had so far been more disturbing than damning, but on 22 February 1866, he politically shot himself in the foot. A crowd came to the White House to listen to him speak, and it was too much of a temptation for an old stump politician to resist. He grew hot and said wild things, implying some of the Radicals were traitors, specifically naming Sumner and Stevens among others, and even hinted that the Radicals were planning to assassinate him. Johnson succeeded only in antagonizing the moderates and enraging the Radicals.
In March 1866, Congress passed a "Civil Rights Bill", intended to nullify the Black Codes by banning discriminatory state laws. The act declared that all persons born in the USA who were not subjects of a foreign power were citizens, regardless of their skin color, even if they had been slaves. All citizens, white and black, had the same rights to make and uphold contracts; to sue or be sued; and to give evidence in court. All citizens had the same rights to property, and the same rights to justice. Johnson vetoed it; the veto was overridden by one vote. It was the first time in American history that Congress had overridden a presidential veto on a major bill. It set a precedent.
The political drama went on against a backdrop of continued outrages and violence against blacks in the South. Congress redoubled efforts, pushing through an act in May extending the life of the Freedman's Bureau. The act also extended the Civil Rights Bill, granting ex-slaves "any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to ... inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms."
The comment on the "right of bearing arms" reflected on a redefinition, generated by the conflict, of the 2nd Amendment. Originally, the 2nd Amendment had been set up to support state militias, which were in principle to be the backbone of America's ground forces -- but by the time of the Civil War, militias were largely an obsolete concept. In its new reading, the 2nd Amendment was seen as emphasizing the right of citizens to own arms for self-defense. The Black Codes had attempted to deny weapons to black folk; one of the 14th Amendment's objectives was to ensure that black folk could own weapons to protect themselves.
Congress, through the work of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, finally issued a Reconstruction plan, in the form of a 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Considering the anger in Congress, the 14th Amendment was surprisingly even-tempered in tone, nothing vindictive in it; but it was nonetheless a loud and emphatic rebuke to Roger Taney and his decision in DRED SCOTT V. SANFORD, not only affirming the rights of blacks as citizens, but informing the states that they had to respect the rights of citizens as established in the Federal Constitution.
Congress voted through the amendment in mid-June 1866, and it was then sent out to the states for ratification. Johnson obstinately called for the amendment's defeat. There seemed to be hope for the 14th Amendment when Tennessee ratified it, but that was misleading; the other ex-Confederate states all voted against it. Kentucky and Delaware also voted against it, and the final tally was 25 states for, 12 states against. The 14th Amendment had been defeated. Whatever satisfaction those who had fought against it felt was shortsighted; those who refused to play the game had not stopped it, simply dealt themselves out of it. What little spirit of compromise the Radicals felt was dead. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As reported by an article from ENGADGET.com ("The Reality Of Pollution Kills Your Dream Of A Flying Car" Jon Fingas, 10 April 2019), there's been a lot of hype about urban electric / hybrid air vehicles. A study by the University of Michigan and Ford set limits on the practicality of such flying machines, concluding they would be less energy-efficient than cars for commutes of 35 kilometers (22 miles) or less.
The research used a physics model that reflected technological trends in the design of such machines, considering factors such as weight, weight, battery energy density, and aerodynamic efficiency. The study is actually encouraging, since the balance tips in favor of air vehicles for flights of more than 35 kilometers, and gets ever better for longer trips, since at economical flight speed -- about 240 KPH (150 MPH) -- they are well more efficient than ground vehicles.
According to the study, a 100-kilometer (62-mile) air trip in a fully-loaded air vehicle with four seats would generate 52% lower emissions than equivalent ground transport with a combustion engine, and even 6% less than ground transport with electric engines. Air vehicle have an additional advantage in that they are not constrained by road patterns, and can (more or less) take straight lines from point to point. This is not really news to companies like Bell and Airbus that are working on urban vehicles. Urban air vehicles are a coming thing, the challenges with them being affordability, noise, regulations, and public perception.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("France And Germany Agree Next-Gen Fighter Design Studies" by Gareth Jennings, 21 November 2018), activity is growing towards development of next-generation fighter aircraft. As further evidence, France and Germany have agreed to move forward on development of a next-generation combat aircraft, having announced in November 2018 that they will launch demonstrator design studies in 2019.
Referred to as the "New Fighter (NF)" or "Next-Generation Fighter (NGF)", the piloted combat aircraft is to be developed to operate in conjunction with a swarm of drone 'wingmen" as a "next-generation weapon system (NGWS)". The NGWS will be part of a wider "future combat air system (FCAS) that will include:
Spain will join the effort in the near future. France and Dassault should be the lead nation for the NF/NGF component, while Germany and Airbus will take charge of the other FCAS systems. French engine manufacturer Safran will work with Germany's MTU to develop the aircraft's powerplant. BAE Systems of the UK has engaged in design studies with some of the industrial participants, but the UK wasn't mentioned as a partner -- possibly reflecting the uncertain status of Britain until the Brexit issue is resolved.
* According to an article from JANES.com ("Raytheon, Saab Disclose Guided Carl-Gustaf Munition Development" by Robin Hughes, 05 October 2018), the venerable 84-millimeter Carl Gustav recoilless rifle -- discussed here in 2016 -- is now acquiring a guided munition, of course designated the "Guided Carl-Gustaf Munition (GCGM)".
Raytheon and SAAB signed an agreement in 2017 to develop the GCGM for the Jointly funded by Raytheon and Saab and intended for use with the SAAB Carl Gustaf M3 and M4 weapon system launchers -- respectively designated in US service as the M3 and M3E1(A1) "Multi-role Anti-armor, Anti-personnel Weapon System (MAAWS)".
GCGM is based on the earlier SAAB "Ultra Light Munition" investigation, having been improved and more tightly specified. The current GCGM baseline concept envisions a semi-active laser (SAL) / INS-guided munition capable of engaging multiple target types -- light armor, personnel, concrete structures, and bunkers -- at ranges from 30 meters to 2 kilometers (100 feet to 1.25 miles), with a circular error probability of less than a meter, and maximum time to target of 15 seconds. The munition will also be able to reliably engage moving targets at up to 75% of maximum range.
The GCGM round is pre-packed in a cylindrical canister with a weight of 6.8 kilograms (15 pounds), which is loaded into the Carl Gustaf launcher. The SAL seeker is based on that used on the Raytheon 40-millimeter Pike guided munition. SAAB, on its part, is providing the a multi-purpose tandem warhead, and a nearly smokeless / low launch signature rocket motor. GCGM not only brings the Carl Gustaf into the guided-weapon category, it also doubles range compared to existing munitions.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIANT EYE MROI: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Telescope Array Will Spy On Spy Satellites, Star Surfaces And Black Holes" by Adam Mann, 3 July 2018), telescope technology has been advancing by leaps and bounds over the past few decades -- and the action is not restricted to giant telescopes.
In July 2018, a 1.4-meter (55-inch) telescope was installed on top of South Baldy Mountain in New Mexico, at an altitude of 3,200 meters (10,500 feet) above sea level. By modern standards, that's not much of a telescope -- but it will gradually be joined by nine more identical telescopes to form a Y-shaped array, the "Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI)" that will have an effective aperture of 347 meters (1,138 feet).
The light-gathering power of the MROI will still only be as great as the sum of the areas of the ten telescopes -- equivalent to a single telescope 4.43 meters (174 inches) in diameter. However, that's nothing to complain about, and MROI is not designed to pick up faint objects anyway, instead being intended to obtain very high resolution images. It will be able to make out details of stellar surfaces, image dust around newborn stars, and inspect supermassive black holes at the center of some galaxies.
It will also be able to make out details as small as a centimeter across on satellites in geosynchronous orbit, 36,000 kilometers (22,360 miles) above Earth, enabling it to check out spy satellites. That's one of the main reasons the US Air Force is funding MROI, to the tune of $200 million USD. The USAF wants to be able to check out its own satellites, and presumably those of adversaries. Michelle Creech-Eakman, an astronomer at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and project scientist on MROI, comments: "They want to know: did the boom break, or did some part of the photovoltaic panels collapse?"
MROI is a great leap forward in optical interferometry -- the art of combining imagery from multiple telescopes. Radio astronomy has long used interferometry, combining radio data obtained by radio telescopes spanning the globe to create a radio telescope with an aperture that stretches across the world. However, radio wavelengths are much longer than optical wavelengths, making combining radio maps easier than optical images. Radio waves can be digitized, stored, and processed, then combined; but that's not so easy with optical, and so optical inputs have to be combined in real time, with nanometer precision.
In the 1990s, advances in fiber optics, lasers, and computers reached to the point where the Keck Observatory's twin 10-meter (33-foot) telescopes, separated by 85 meters (280 feet) atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, could be made to work as an optical interferometer. The system needed at least four additional NASA-funded "outrigger" telescopes to reach its full potential, but they were canceled in 2006, after protests by native Hawaiians, who consider the summit of Mauna Kea sacred.
Smaller arrays were successfully put together and operated, the best-known being the "Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA)", an array of six 1-meter (40-inch) optical telescopes on Mount Wilson in Los Angeles, California. CHARA and other optical arrays have imaged the flattened shapes of rapidly rotating stars; captured roving sunspots on stellar surfaces, filmed binary companion stars exchanging material; and spotting objects spinning around the Milky Way's central black hole in real time.
New big telescopes are also getting into the optical interferometer act. After linking up the four 8.2-meter (323-inch) telescopes of the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert of Chile, in 2017 researchers with the European Southern Observatory last year were able to image boiling convective cells on the face of a star 530 light-years away. A new infrared instrument should allow the interferometer to image the warm dusty disks where planets are forming around distant stars. NASA is also supporting interferometric observations with the twin 8.4-meter (331-inch) instruments at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory atop Mount Graham in Arizona.
Although the ten telescopes of MROI are of modest size, it will have well the longest baseline of any present optical interferometer, giving it the best resolution. Those pushing MROI are holding their breath: the US Navy began funding the facility in 2000, but pulled out in 2011, while Air Force support is not assured beyond the array's first three telescopes.
If MROI is completed and meets expectations, it will pave the way for even more ambitious optical interferometers -- such the Planet Formation Imager, a proposed 12-telescope, 1-kilometer-baseline optical interferometer that would be able to resolve dusty disks not just around young stars but newborn planets. NASA is also considering future options in space optical interferometry, since bigger and bigger space telescopes increasingly strain launch capacity. It might make well more sense to launch many smaller telescopes that, using precision space formation schemes, can have very wide baselines.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMAZON LOVES MACHINE LEARNING: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Learning Machine", 11 April 2019), online retail giant Amazon.com is well-known for its "six-page memos"; executives have to write one each year, outlining their business plans. It turns out that one of the significant components of the plan is the use of artificial intelligence, or "machine learning (ML)".
ML took root at Amazon in 1999, when Jeff Wilke -- now second-in-command to CEO Jeff Bezos -- joined the company, to set up a research team to study Amazon's internal processes, and see how they could be improved. He integrated his team into business units, with the units then operating on a continuous cycle of self-assessment and improvement. One of the enabling technologies they acquired was the emerging field of practical machine learning. One of the first ML systems Amazon acquired recommended books people might like. Amazon recommendations have become so normalized that customers now take them for granted.
From that start, Amazon has become ever more involved in ML. However, while other tech giants like Facebook, Apple, or Alphabet play up their AI technology, Amazon keeps a public low profile. Although Amazon's Alexa is a direct competitor to Apple's Siri, and the company offers AI services in its cloud, Amazon's real focus in AI is the constant fine-tuning of its operations, operating in a cycle: build a service, get users, obtain data, and let computers learn from the data, at a scale that no human workforce could handle.
For example, consider Amazon's fulfillment centers, from which it distributes its vast range of products -- there's more than a hundred centers in North America, and about 60 more around the world. Inside a fulfillment center near Seattle, packages shuttle rapidly down conveyor belts; the noise is deafening, while humans are not much in evidence. At the core of the center is a fenced-off area, about the size of an athletic field, crammed with thousands of yellow, cuboid storage units, each 1.8 meters (6 feet) tall, which Amazon calls "pods".
Swarms of robots pick up and shuffle the pods around. A wide array of products is stacked in the pods, in a way that seems haphazard to a human observer -- but the order is carefully determined by the algorithms directing the robots. Human workers, known as "associates" in company lingo, attend stations at gaps in the fence that surrounds this "robot field". Some of the associates pick items out of pods brought to them by a robot; others pack items into empty pods, to be hauled away and stored. As they handle items, the associates scan the product and the relevant shelf with a bar-code reader, so that the software knows what's going on.
The man in charge of developing these algorithms is Brad Porter, Amazon's chief roboticist. His team is Wilke's optimization squad for fulfillment centers. The primary goal is to reduce "pod gaps", or the amount of time it takes to get a pod to a station. However, the system designers also have to take care of robot traffic management, or they end up with ghastly traffic jams.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the other central element of Amazon, underpinning the company's $26 billion USD cloud-computing business, which provides computing services for hire to other companies. AWS's main use of ML is to forecast demand for computer power. Amazon doesn't want to invest any more in cloud servers than necessary, but also wants to make sure that customers get the services they pay for. Andy Jassy, AWS's boss, says: "We can't say we're out of stock."
To avoid data brownouts, Jassy's optimization team crunches customer data. Privacy considerations mean that Amazon has to keep out of customer systems, but it is still possible to monitor how much traffic a customer gets, how long the traffic lasts, and how robust the connection are. As in its fulfillment centers, these metadata feed ML models which predict when and where AWS is going to see demand.
Of course, since AWS had its roots in development of the company's internal system, one of AWS's biggest customers is Amazon itself. Amazon business units rely on AWS for forecasting, with demand for forecasts being so high that AWS has developed a new chip, named "Inferentia", to handle them. Jassy sees Inferentia as a major enhancement to AWS: "We believe it can be at least an order-of-magnitude improvement in cost and efficiency," he says. The algorithms which recognize voices and understand human language in Alexa will also be a beneficiary.
The company's new grocery venture, Amazon Go, isn't such a low-profile exercise, having attracted a lot of media attention. Customers walk into an Amazon Go store, to be tracked by smart camera systems as they pick up products, to be billed electronically when they go out the door. Dilip Kumar, the boss of Amazon Go, emphasizes that the system is tracking the movements of shoppers' bodies; it is not using facial recognition to establish their Amazon accounts. Data on the purchases is tracked for each account, but any supermarket chain today does the same.
Amazon is now experimenting with using AI body tracking in fulfillment centers, through a project called the "Nike Intent Detection" system, which tracks associates as they pick up or shelve products, eliminating the need for manual product scanning. The workers find that convenient, Porter saying: "It feels very natural to the associates."
Other tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, have come under fire for allegedly misusing customer data, passing it on to advertisers. Amazon doesn't have that kind of a problem, since it collects customer data for its own use. Regulators remain suspicious of Amazon because of its sheer size and clout, the company sometimes coming across as an unstoppable juggernaut. One would be hard-pressed to say it wasn't.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (8): Migrants leave home for their own benefit, and on the average do well for themselves. That doesn't imply they are parasites on society -- indeed, as they achieve success, they become a net benefit to society. They tend to be disliked as socially disruptive; possibly, they might be more welcome if the benefits they bring were made more obvious.
One way of making it obvious is to require immigrants to pay their own way. That's not as outrageous as it sounds; a number of countries offer visas to those who invest a certain sum of money. Gary Becker, an economist, suggested auctioning them to the highest bidder. The money could then be used for popular causes such as supporting health care.
Suppose that America accepted enough migrants to increase its population by a third, and each migrant paid what amounted to a tax of $6,000 USD a year for the privilege -- with the payments presumably ending if they became naturalized citizens. A native-born household of four would earn about $8,000 USD a year from such an arrangement, according to Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, the authors of the book RADICAL MARKETS -- which would give them a profitable stake in open borders. Since the immigrants would still be making more money than they would at home, they would benefit as well. Posner and Weyl even suggest that citizens could sponsor immigrants, and take a cut of their earnings.
That may sound like a mercenary approach to the problem, or even a libertarian fairy tale. However, if immigrants are a resource for a host country, they ought to be recognized appreciated as such. Nearly every rich country has an ageing population and a shortage of workers to care for them -- but there's little interest in recruiting and training foreign workers to meet this demand. The German government, anticipating a huge shortfall of geriatric nurses, is training young Vietnamese in Hanoi in both nursing and the German language. Unfortunately, that's very much an exception to the rule.
The biggest worry about immigration is that people flocking to a democratic, prosperous country from places that are neither democratic nor prosperous might -- so the thinking goes -- drag down the host country. What if Nigerians, flocking to Switzerland, turned it into Nigeria?
Another way of putting this question is: how many newcomers can rich countries absorb without destabilization? American history suggests that simply can't happen. Its population has grown from some 5 million (including 900,000 black slaves) in 1800 to 320 million of many colors today. Models suggest that the rate of immigration needed to "swamp" a country is a fantasy. The cultures of rich countries are both strong and attractive. Migrants typically move to the West because they admire it. By and large, immigrants fit in, learning to obey the laws and adopt the customs; they have little inclination to challenge the social order.
In 2005, a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Riots erupted in several Muslim countries, with about 200 people killed. It was the worst cultural clash between Danes and Muslim immigrants in recent times. Yet the country has moved on. Ahmad Akkari, one of the Danish Muslim leaders who toured the Middle East stirring up trouble, says he was in the wrong: "I was part of a movement that led to catastrophic events."
Shocked by the violence, he retreated and read Karl Popper's THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES, twice. He realized that he had taken Western freedoms for granted. He says: "If I had protested over cartoons in Saudi Arabia or Iran, they would have hanged me." He adds that many Muslims who have grown up in Denmark "don't realize how Danish they are".
As for Tarek, the Syrian refugee in Sweden, eventually he was granted asylum and allowed to work. He found a job as a data analyst. He has brought his family over, and is much happier. He praises the way Christians and Muslims can live peacefully side by side in Sweden -- though he says he would like to go back to Syria, if the war ends, to help rebuild his country. Meanwhile, he says: "I'd love to take up golf." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (58): Reconstruction lasted twelve years. The Constitution, having been silent about secession, of course said nothing in specific about Reconstruction of states that had seceded -- and so, it was effectively anybody's educated guess of how to go about it. Lincoln had wanted to streamline the re-admission of the South to the Union, seeing no necessity in asking much more than for Southern citizens to swear loyalty to the Union and ban slavery. Now he was dead; the Radicals in Congress felt that Lincoln's approach was much too lenient, and preferred a more punitive approach.
There was not only the problem of what to do with the rebels, but of what to do with the slaves who had been freed by the war. The question of civil rights for the freed blacks was politically tricky. Free blacks did not have civil rights in most "free" states of the Union. Only Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Rhode Island even gave black men the unrestricted right to vote. In 1867, Connecticut, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio considered suffrage for blacks, and all rejected it.
Many in positions of power did not feel that indiscriminately giving the vote to illiterate ex-slaves was wise, but many of the Radical Republicans in Congress believed in Negro suffrage as a matter of principle, and as a means of strengthening the Republican hold on the South. There was also the issue of land redistribution. General Sherman had issued an order late in the war to hand land on islands along the coast of the Carolinas to freed slaves -- the order being summarized as "forty acres and a mule" -- but the government had not confirmed the titles to the land parceled out to the black folk, and the landowners took it back. Conservatives disliked the concept of land redistribution; moderates were uncertain; Radical Republicans were all for it, though some tempered the action by suggesting that the Federal government buy up lands, instead of simply seizing them. In sum, circumstances were such that no policy could please everybody.
Exactly what would Abraham Lincoln would have accomplished had he lived to complete his second term in office is an unanswerable question that has been endlessly discussed. The Radical Republicans hadn't liked his ideas on Reconstruction, and he would have been forced to compromise in many ways, but Lincoln was a shrewd card player; the odds were that he would have got more than his half-loaf out of it. Lincoln was also an astute visionary, and though he placed his ideology in the background and was willing to trim to the winds of practicality, he did have strong ideals and a desire to put them into practice.
Again, nobody knows what would have happened had Lincoln not been assassinated -- but it seems hard to believe that it wouldn't have turned out better than it did under Johnson, a person who hardly knew the meaning of the word "compromise".
In the summer of 1865, while Congress was out of session, Johnson implemented his Reconstruction plan. He recognized the legitimacy of the state governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, which Lincoln had recognized, as well as that of Virginia. In the seven other states still not readmitted to the Union, amnesty was to be given to anyone who signed the loyalty oath, with some exceptions. Once an adequate number of loyal voters had been registered, the state would then stage a convention. The convention would nullify the state's ordnance of secession, abolish slavery, and repudiate Confederate and state war debts.
Given little choice, the governments of the ex-Confederate states mostly chose to ratify the 13th Amendment -- Georgia becoming the 27th state to ratify, on 6 December 1865. Over three-quarters of the states having given their assent, the 13th Amendment was law, and slavery was formally ended. It seems something like extortion to make ratification a requirement for the re-admission of these states to the Union, but these were extraordinary times. Ratification, after all, could be seen as establishing the sincerity of the ex-Confederate states in returning to the Union, slavery having taken them out of the Union in the first place.
In any case, the 13th Amendment is one of the more simple and straightforward elements of the US Constitution, stating that slavery was outlawed, though penal servitude was still allowed:
BEGIN QUOTE:
THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
END QUOTE
The 13th Amendment was not only significant in banning slavery; it was also significant in that Congress trampled all over the sacred cow of States' Rights. Three ex-Confederate states did add "interpretive declarations" to their ratification, insisting that the Federal government could not determine the status of ex-slaves in those states. The declarations were, in themselves, neither here nor there, being merely statements with no authority. A few of the ex-Confederate states held out; Mississippi didn't ratify until 1995.
With Georgia's ratification, Johnson declared the Union restored. The Radical Republicans in Congress did not agree. Congress had returned to session on 4 December, with representatives and senators from eight Southern states then demanding to be readmitted. They included Confederate generals, cabinet secretaries, congressmen, and even the Confederate ex-vice-president, Alexander M. Stephens.
Congress, as per the Constitution, made its own rules. The Southerners were all angrily refused admission -- which was a bit of a tricky operation in the House, since the entire House changes hands with each election, with nobody really in charge during the change-over. That issue had been covered by a law passed in 1863, in which the clerk of a previous Congress would, on the first day the new Congress met, call roll, and only put on the roll-call list those representatives who had been judged "regularly elected" by the previous Congress. The new Congress, sans its bogus ex-Confederate members, then set up a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to define a different program. A violent collision between the legislative and executive branches was brewing. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for April included:
-- 01 APR 19 / EMISAT -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) booster was launched from Sriharikota at 0357 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the ISRO "EMISat" satellite into Sun-synchronous polar orbit. It was a military electronic intelligence satellite. EMISat was built by ISRO, being built around the Indian Mini Satellite 2 (IMS 2) Bus. It had a launch mass of 436 kilograms (961 pounds). The mission also launched 28 CubeSats:
In addition to the CubeSats, the upper stage carried three attached payloads:
The upper stage was fitted with solar panels to power the three payloads. The idea is that the upper stage will eventually be used as an operational satellite in its own right. This followed a similar experiment in the previous PSLV launch, though then the stage was battery-powered.
The EMISAT launch was the first of the "PSLV-QL" variant, tailored to handle intermediate loads. The PSLV-QL has four solid rocket motors (SRM), as opposed to the six on the PSLV-XL; two on the PSLV-DL; or none on the smallest PSLV-CA ("Core Alone"). The PSLV-G was the original booster in the family, with six SRMs, as with the PSLV-XL, but the SRMs being smaller. The PSLV-QL is effectively a cheaper replacement for the PSLV-G.
The first stage of the PSLV uses solid fuel; the second uses storable liquid propellant, including UH25 fuel propellant, a mixture of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and hydrazine hydrate, and dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer; the third uses solid fuel; while the fourth, upper stage uses storables.
-- 04 APR 19 / PROGRESS 72P (ISS) -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Baikonur at 1101 UTC (local time + 6) to put a Progress tanker-freighter spacecraft into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) supply mission. It docked with the station's Pirs module three and a half hours after launch. It was the 72nd Progress mission to the ISS.
-- 04 APR 19 / O3B F5 -- A Soyuz ST-B booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1631 UTC (local time + 3) to put the fifth set of four satellites for O3b Networks in orbit. The satellites were built by Thales Alenia Space; they had a launch mass of about 700 kilograms (1,545 pounds) each, and carried a Ka-band relay payload with ten spot beams. They were placed in an orbit with an altitude of 8,000 kilometers (5,000 miles), joining 16 other O3B satellites, launched from 2013. These were the last first-generation satellites, with next-generation satellites to be launched from 2021. O3b provides broadband service to international businesses & organizations.
-- 11 APR 19 / ARABSAT 6A -- A SpaceX Falcon Heavy booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2235 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "Arabsat 6A" geostationary comsat into orbit for Arabsat of Saudi Arabia. Arabsat 6A was built by Lockheed Martin, and was built around the LM2100 satellite bus. It had a launch mass of 3,520 kilograms (7,980 pounds) and a payload of Ku / Ka-band transponders.
Arabsat 6A was placed in the geostationary slot at 30.5 degrees East longitude to provide communications services over the Middle East and North Africa regions, as well as a footprint in South Africa. It joined and later replaced the nine-year-old Arabsat 5A.
-- 17 APR 19 / CYGNUS 11 (NG 11) -- An Orbital Sciences Antares booster was launched from Wallops Island off the coast of Virginia at 2046 UTC (local time + 4) to put the 11th operational "Cygnus" supply capsule, designated "NG 11", into space on an International Space Station support mission. It docked with the Unity station a day and a half later.
The upper stage of the Antares booster carried 63 tiny student-built "ThinSats" as secondary payloads. Stacked together in groups of three or six, the ThinSats were each about the size of a slice of bread, containing solar cells to produce power, along with data transmitters and sensors to measure parameters such as temperatures and pressures. They were built by students, ranging from middle school to universities. The Antares upper stage deployed the ThinSats a few minutes after Cygnus spacecraft separation.
The launch also carried the "Student Aerothermal Spectrometer Satellite of Illinois & Indiana (SASSI^2)" -- a three-unit CubeSat, built by students of the University of Illinois and Purdue University, being designed to measure pressure, heat flux, and other data when the CubeSat fell back to Earth. Sketchy documentation suggests there were other CubeSats on the flight, including "NepaliSat 1" and "Raavana 1", being one-unit CubeSats and the first satellites from Nepal and Sri Lanka respectively.
The booster was in the Antares 230 configuration, with two RD-181 first stage engines and a Castor 30XL second stage. Northrop Grumman has a NASA contract to develop a habitat concept based on the Cygnus capsule, which could be attached to NASA's Gateway around the Moon to provide living quarters for astronauts. Lunar landers could be staged at the Gateway for trips to and from the moon's surface.
-- 20 APR 19 / BEIDOU 3 -- A Chinese Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1441 UTC (local time - 8) to put a "Beidou" navigation satellites into orbit. The satellite was put into inclined geostationary orbit, being given the series number of "Beidou 44".
-- 29 APR 19 / TIANHUI 2-01A,B -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from Jiuquan at 1052 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianhui (Sky Drawing) 2-01A" and "2.01B" cartographic satellites into Sun-synchronous orbit. They followed three previous "Tianhui 1" satellites, with launched of single satellites in 2010, 2012, and 2015. The Tianhui satellites feature a 3D survey camera and a CCD camera, with best resolution of 5 meters (16 feet).
* OTHER SPACE NEWS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("US Air Force Develops EAGLE ESPA Satellite Ring With Propulsion Capability" by Pat Host, 25 April 2019), space launch vehicles often carry a "secondary payload adapter (SPA)" -- a frame to which small satellites -- flown along with big satellites, the primary payloads -- are attached. The SPA seems like a mundane sort of space technology, but the Air Force has now come up with one that also operates as a space tug.
The "Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) Secondary Payload Adapter (ESPA) Augmented Geosynchronous Laboratory Experiment (EAGLE)" not increases the number of payloads carried compared to its predecessor, it features a chemical propulsion system that can put its satellites into different orbits. While traditionally SPAs remain attached to the booster upper stage, EAGLE can separate from the upper stage, maneuver and operate on its own, then independently deploy the satellites attached to it. EAGLE was first launched in April 2018 on the Air Force Space Command 11 (AFSPC 11) mission.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANTARCTIC MELTDOWN? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Discovery Of Recent Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Raises Fears Of A New Global Flood" by Paul Voosen, 18 December 2018, about 125,000 years ago, during the last brief warm period between ice ages, sea levels were about 6 to 9 meters higher than they are now, with a rate of rise of about 2.5 meters per century -- even though average temperatures during this warm period, known as the "Eemian", were not much higher than at present.
From analysis of a sediment core, researchers have now identified the source of that excess water: a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Glaciologists have worried about the stability of this ice mass, since it appears at risk. Its base lies below sea level, meaning it could be undermined by warming ocean waters, and glaciers fringing it are retreating quickly.
As a stand-in for the present, the Eemian, from 129,000 to 116,000 years ago, is "probably the best there is, but it's not great," according to Jacqueline Austermann, a geophysicist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The Earth was about 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, compared to 1 degree today. However, the warming was not caused by greenhouses gases, but by slight changes in Earth's orbit and spin axis, and Antarctica was probably, overall, cooler than it is today. The rise in sea levels is evident from fossil corals now found well above high tide, but nobody knew where the melting came from.
Researchers were inclined to blame it on the melting of Greenland's ice sheets, but didn't have solid evidence for it. In 2011, a team under Anders Carlson -- a glacial geologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis -- examined a core of Greenland's bedrock, drilled off its southern tip, with the isotopic composition showing that Greenland's glaciers were still grinding away at the bedrock during the Eemian. That left the vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet as the prime suspect.
To get to the bottom of the matter, Carlson and his team applied their isotopic analysis to Antarctica. They began by examining archived marine sediment cores drilled from along the edge of the western ice sheet. Working with 29 cores, they identified geochemical signatures for three different bedrock source regions:
Carlson's team then analyzed marine sediments from a single archived core, drilled farther offshore in the Bellingshausen Sea, west of the Antarctic Peninsula. A stable current runs along the West Antarctic continental shelf, picking up ice-eroded silt along the way, to then dump it in the locale from which the core was obtained.
The silt trapped single-celled marine organisms known as "foraminifera", which can be dated by comparing their oxygen isotope ratios to those in cores with known dates. Over a segment of 10 meters, the core contained 140,000 years of built-up silt. For most of that time, the silt contained geochemical signatures from all three of the West Antarctic bedrock regions, suggesting ongoing glacial erosion.
However, in a section dated to the early Eemian, the fingerprint of the Pine Island Glacier faded out, followed by the fingerprint from the Amundsen province. Carlson says: "We don't see any sediments coming from the much larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which we'd interpret to mean that it was gone. It didn't have that erosive power anymore."
The evidence is indirect, and the dating of the core is not very precise. The pause may also be an illusion, the result of a temporary shift in ocean currents. The International Ocean Discovery Program's JOIDES Resolution research ship has now obtained a set of marine cores off West Antarctica, and they are already under preliminary analysis.
Jeremy Shakun -- a paleoclimatologist at Boston College -- says that the finding holds up, that would confirm that "the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might not need a huge nudge to budge." He adds that "the big uptick in mass loss observed there in the past decade or two is perhaps the start of that process rather than a short-term blip."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* STILL DYING COAL: The decline of coal power has been discussed here in the past, last in 2017. An article from CNN.com ("More Bad News For Coal: Wind And solar Are Getting Cheaper" by Matt Egan, 25 March 2019) tacked another nail into its coffin.
The nail is renewable energy. Wind and solar costs have fallen so rapidly that 74% of the US coal power system could be phased out and replaced with renewable energy -- with customers paying less for electricity, according to Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank. By 2025, that figure will be 84%. Mike O'Boyle, director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation, told CNN: "US coal plants are in more danger than ever before. Nearly three-quarters of US coal plants are already 'zombie coal,' or the walking dead."
Donald Trump won the presidency, in part, by promising to bring back coal. In 2018, the Trump Administration announced plans to reverse an Obama-era coal emissions rule to make it easier to open new coal plants. Trump even appointed Andrew Wheeler, previously a coal-industry lobbyist, to run the Environmental Protection Agency. The effort has been a dud. According to O'Boyle: "Trump administration efforts to cut environmental regulations are too little, too late to save coal."
The Energy Innovation report says that in 2018, 211 gigawatts of existing US coal capacity was being challenged by local wind or solar power generation. The threat to coal to local renewable sources is greatest in North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, where "local" is defined as a radius of 55 kilometers (35 miles). By 2025, coal power in Midwestern states Indiana, such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Of course, the decision to shut down a coal plant isn't entirely based on a simple economic calculation. State regulators will have to decide if doing so makes sense, in part by considering its impact on the local economy. Some coal plants might just roll on, passing on higher costs to customers.
Renewable energy is only part, and for the moment the lesser part, of the threat to coal. Coal was once the predominant source of electric power -- but over the last decade, it's been pushed back by natural gas, which has become abundant in the USA, thanks to the shale revolution. In 2016, natural gas surpassed coal for the first time as America's leading power source. In 2008, total US power generation from coal was 48%; it declined to 28% in 2018. Meanwhile, solar prices have fallen 90% since 2009 -- and they're projected to continue declining, according to Energy Innovation.
Over the near term, renewable energy is projected to be the fastest-growing source of US electricity generation, according to a report from the government's US Energy Information Agency (EIA) -- it is a great irony that not all the Federal government has signed on to the Trump Administration's crusade to save coal. True, renewables are growing from a modest level, but utility-scale solar power is expected to increase by 10% in 2019, while wind power is projected to take the lead over hydropower for the first time, the EIA said. Says O'Boyle: "Coal's biggest threat is now economics, not regulations."
On top of the cold economic facts, American consumers and businesses are increasingly demanding clean energy, even installing their own solar panels. The EIA estimates that small-scale solar generating capacity is expected to grow by 44% over the next two years. Many US states are adopting ambitious clean energy targets -- and they're portraying them as job creators. New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham recently signed into law a plan that aims to source half the state's power from renewable energy by 2030 -- with New Mexico to have 100% carbon-free power by 2045.
Power companies are getting the message. Xcel Energy, a Minneapolis-based power company that serves Western and Midwestern states, has pledged to deliver 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050. The company intends to double wind power while slashing its dependence on coal. Yes, there may be less than meets the eye to such commitments to green power -- but there's absolutely no doubt that the direction of coal is towards the down and out.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (7): While the Gulf states have admitted large numbers of immigrants suddenly but temporarily, America has done it gradually but permanently. Babies born on American soil are automatically citizens, and so even families of illegals can become American in one generation.
America's flexible labor market makes it easy for migrants to find entry-level jobs, and its stingy welfare state means they have to. The unemployment rate for immigrants is 4% compared with 16% in Sweden, where benefits are more generous, but unions have negotiated industry-wide pay scales that price unskilled migrants out of jobs. The US National Academies of Sciences found that even immigrants who drop out of high school are net contributors to the public purse, if they arrive in America before the age of 25.
Migration has also made America a powerhouse of innovation. Immigrants are twice as likely as natives to start a company; more than 40% of the Fortune 500 companies were founded either by an immigrant, or the child of one. A spectacular example is Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant who co-founded Google with Larry Page. For a less prominent example, Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic moved to the USA in 1993, fleeing the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession. An engineer with an interest in biology, she found a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, getting her resident "green card" in three weeks. Now at Columbia University in New York, she has helped create four companies, including Epibone, which uses stem cells to grow new bones.
She believes that New York City has a particular energy because its citizens include so many people from elsewhere, with such a wide range of perspectives and experiences. Two-thirds of the people she works with are immigrants or their offspring. She worries that the flow of foreign talent is drying up; on a recent trip to China, she found that many students wanted to know if they were still welcome in America. The number of visas issued to foreign students fell by 40% between 2015 and 2017, to fewer than 400,000. America's visa system is, by rich-country standards, unusually biased against talent. Of the one million green cards -- permanent residence visas -- issued each year, only 15% are granted because of the applicants' skills; in Australia the figure is 68%.
Historically each wave of immigrants, once settled, has worried that the next one will ruin America, the syndrome being identified as: "I'm on board, pull up the ladder." In the 1850s, American newspapers complained that newcomers were "prone to violence" and "wedded to the worst forms of superstition". They were referring to Catholics from Germany and Ireland, in language that echoes that used today about Muslims and Mexicans. German-Americans are now so well assimilated that most, like Donald Trump, no longer identify as such.
Have things changed with the new wave of immigrants to the USA? Looking at such things as jobs, schooling, English ability, and intermarriage, Jacob Vigdor of the University of Washington finds that recent immigrants to America are assimilating at least as well as those a century ago. An OECD study finds that the children of immigrants to America earn as much as the native-born, and are more likely to attend university.
In fact, cultural assimilation is very rapid in America. Fully 60% of foreign-born Latinos speak mostly Spanish, but by the next generation this falls to 6%. Some 15% of newlywed foreign-born Hispanics in 2015 were married to non-Hispanics; among US-born Hispanics, it was a 39%. For Asians, the figures were 24% and 46%. Five years after refugees arrive in Sweden, only 3% of women and 4% of men are in a relationship with a native Swede.
Studies probably underestimate assimilation. The reason is what demographers call "attrition": when migrants have lived in America for a couple of generations, they often cease to identify as "Mexican-American" or "Hispanic". In the first generation, 99% use such ethnic labels; by the sixth generation, only 6% do. One reason for this is intermarriage -- those with only one Hispanic parent are much less likely to call themselves Hispanic. Since Hispanics who intermarry tend to be better educated than those who don't, surveys that rely on self-identification -- that is, most of them -- probably greatly underestimate their progress. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (57): The death of Abraham Lincoln meant a change in American leadership at a critical juncture. The last fading embers of Confederate resistance faded out; John Wilkes Booth was hunted down and killed.
Jefferson Davis's deposed government, on the run, had broken up into groups and gone their separate ways; Union cavalry tracked down Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his party, capturing them on 10 May. Davis was thrown in prison and, for the time being, treated harshly by his captors. A handful of other senior Confederate officials were also imprisoned.
Although Andrew Johnson had been breathing fire and brimstone about vengeance -- and there were those among the Radical Republicans in Congress who talked the same, or worse -- Johnson proved conciliatory. On 27 May 1865, he ordered the release of most rebel prisoners. Two days later, on 29 May, he issued a "Presidential Proclamation Of Amnesty", which stated that any ex-rebel who took an oath of loyalty to the United States would be fully pardoned and would have full property rights, except for slaves.
The proclamation did have a long list of exceptions, but it went on to state that those on the list of exceptions could apply to the president for pardon, which would be "liberally extended". The Radicals in Congress, notably Thaddeus Stevens in the House and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate, had uncompromisingly pushed for hard war on the Confederacy, their goal being to absolutely crush the slave power once and for all. They called for hanging Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other prominent rebels -- but the public had no stomach for such savageries. There had been more than enough killing and cruelty. Johnson took extraordinary advantage of the presidential pardon power, issuing pardons almost on request.
Taking the loyalty oath became much more acceptable when Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy's greatest hero, took the oath himself and encouraged others to do so. Lee had felt misgivings about secession before the fighting broke out, and in the end admitted that he had expected failure. Although Jefferson Davis had called for continuation of the war in the face of Union victory through guerrilla operations, Lee regarded guerrillas as no better than bandits, and made clear his disapproval of the idea; he wanted reconciliation with the Union.
By the end of 1866, all Confederate government officials were free men -- though Jefferson Davis remained in custody for another year after that. Talk of putting him on trial never went beyond talk. Davis was too prominent, such a trial would be too visible to the public, while every outrage against justice would be splashed up and dissected in newspaper headlines.
One of his strongest advocates was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Salmon Chase. Justice Chase felt there was no clear-cut legal case against Davis for having been the president of the Confederacy, and wisely added: "Lincoln wanted Jefferson Davis to escape, and he was right. His capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason. Secession is settled. Let it stay settled."
The forgiveness extended to Confederate officials seems remarkable in hindsight -- but it masked an agenda, manifested in the actions of Andrew Johnson. He was hard-minded, charmless, inflexible, arrogant, a solid State's Rights man, a person who believed in the Constitution with the conviction of a Biblical literalist, and a white supremacist who believed that free blacks should be kept in their place. Restoring the old Southern leadership class, however traitorous they had been, would achieve that end.
To be sure, in the wake of the conflict, the job of repairing the damage appeared almost impossible, and nobody was going to do a perfect job of it. Large regions of the South had been shattered and impoverished by the war. The South had expended all its financial resources in the struggle; Southern citizens who had invested in Confederate central and state government bonds lost all their money, while the uncompensated liberation of slaves resulted in an enormous loss of capital. Plantations and farms lay idle, roads and bridges were in disrepair or ruined, factories were burned and gutted, and the rail system, not particularly robust to begin with, had been almost completely destroyed.
The most immediate problem was simple starvation. The Federal government, although lacking a comprehensive plan for rebuilding the South, took some measures to help the destitute Southerners. In March 1865, the US Congress had established the Freedman's Bureau, led by Union General Oliver Howard, to assist the liberated slaves through supply of provisions, teaching them to read and write, providing assistance in court, re-uniting families scattered by the war, and even conducting marriages -- slave marriages having had no legal standing.
The Freedman's Bureau was also empowered to help whites who had sworn loyalty to the United States, and so between 1865 and 1870 the bureau distributed over 21 million rations, with a quarter of them going to starving white people. This act of sensible compassion was appreciated by Southerners not too far gone in their resentment. One wrote: "There is much in this that takes away the bitter sting ... Even crippled Confederate soldiers have their sacks filled and are fed." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from NBCNEWS.com ("Dutch City's 3D-Printed Homes Could Help Upend The Construction Industry" by Ella Koscher, 2 July 2018), the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands is moving forward on a plan for a commercial housing project, based on 3D-printed houses.
"Project Milestone", as it is named, will use a construction-grade concrete printer to set up five concrete houses in a wooded area near the Eindhoven airport. The first step will be a three-bedroom house of about 93 square meters (1,000 square feet), which will be completed in mid-2019. The full project will take about five years to complete, since development of the technology is ongoing.
The printing machine will put down layers of a special concrete mix as per architectural plans. The first home's roof will be fabricated off-site and hauled on-site for installation, though the long-term goal is to do everything on-site. The home designs are curvilinear and futuristic, one of the goals being to show that printed homes aren't constrained to traditional home designs. The 3D printing approach will reduce labor and concrete waste.
* As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("Bose's $199 Audio-Based AR Sunglasses Are Available For Preorder" by Jon Porter, 4 December 2018), Bose is now shipping "Frames", which are audio-only augmented-reality sunglasses with a microphone and open-ear headphones.
At the outset, the primary mission of Frames is to interact with Siri and Google Assistant, as well as conduct phone conversations or listen to music. When coupled to a smartphone, the glasses can obtain location, and have their own built-in motion sensor to determine orientation and direction of movement. A wearer can simply look at an object, and get relevant voice comments on it.
Frames are only slightly heavier than equivalent sunglasses. Battery life is 3.5 hours for listening to music, 12 hours on standby. Bose will soon support apps on Frames, having shipped the product to developers to get them going. Frames cost $199 USD at present, with Bose offering glasses with either round or square frames.
* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("From Scooter To Slaughter", 6 December 2018), food-delivery apps have caught on big in Africa's cities, thanks to a growing middle class with smartphones. Traffic tends toward extreme congestion in these cities, but delivery scooters can weave their way through gridlocks. Jumia Food delivers meals to urban dwellers in eleven countries, while in South Africa, Mr D Food competes with Uber Eats, an offshoot of the US ride-hailing app. Tupuca has been taking meals to residents of Angola's capital, Luanda, since 2016.
Like its siblings, Tupuca began by connecting users with restaurants, and delivering prepared food still makes up most of its revenue. The firm's 140 drivers make 17,000 deliveries a month for consumers, who spend an average of $40 USD per order. More recently, however, users of the Tupuca app have been seeing other options, including coal, fuel, fruit and vegetables -- and even meat on the hoof, including chickens ($7 USD for a big chicken, $5 for a middling one), pigs ($124 and $103 USD) or goats ($82 and $64 USD).
To offer live animals, Tupuca has teamed up with Roque Online, a startup assuming the mantle of Mercado Roque Santeiro, a big open-air informal market in Luanda that was closed by the nanny state in 2011. Roque Online employs of runners who track down chickens, pigs, or goats -- then buy the goat, hand it a driver, who hauls it off, trussed up for slaughter by the customer.
Luanda has a sizeable middle class, plus many expats and a rich elite. However, it millions of poor people, living in slums between skyscrapers, with more than a third of households have at least one person living by informal vending. Through Tupuca and Roque Online, they have larger markets. In the West, many people worry that the gig economy promotes insecure work and impoverishment -- but in sub-Saharan Africa, where the informal economy is equivalent to more than a third of GDP, about twice that in rich countries, it is by all evidence making people richer.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE GREAT EMU RUSH: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("The Great Texas Emu Bubble", 18 December 2018), Australians have long had a love affair with the emu -- a relative of the ostrich, second to it in size -- with the big bird appearing on the country's coat of arms, stamps, and coins. It has become a common sight in the world's zoos -- and in the 1980s, it came to Texas, as a commercial proposition.
Texans became very excited about emus. In the late 1980s, a breeding pair cost a few hundred dollars; by 1993, the price was $28,000 USD -- and it doubled in 1994. Membership in the American Emu Association, an industry group, rose 27-fold between 1988 and 1994, to 5,500 members, most of them in Texas.
The emu seemed attractive because there was a demand for healthier meat, and Texas had a long tradition of raising meat on the hoof. It also seemed like a clever idea. There were boosters for ostriches too, but the emu was much more popular. Advocates claimed the emu was not just a good source of meat; it also provided oil for lotions, skin for leather, feathers for clothes, and huge emerald eggs for four-person omelets. Emu ranchers could also raise more emus for sale to aspiring emu ranchers. Emus lay 5 to 15 eggs in each clutch, and can keep doing so for more than 16 years. With 12 surviving chicks a year, a single breeding pair can spawn 133 breeding pairs within five years, and in principle nearly 36,000 within ten years.
The government of the state of Texas promoted the enthusiasm. Between 1992 and 1995, the Texas department of agriculture was said to have handed out about $400,000 US in loans to encourage emu ranching. The state also offers tax breaks to people who use their land for agricultural purposes -- so why not buy a few emus, and claim the tax break? It's not like the birds should be so much trouble, should they? In addition, Texas law was and is very lax with regards to importation of exotic animals: it is believed that there are more tigers living in backyards in Texas than survive in the wild.
Few of the people who got into emu ranching knew what they were getting into. Gina Taylor bought a pair of emus with her husband in 1995, soon after they moved from Dallas to a rural town called LaRue. She says: "We were clueless. We had never even raised chickens."
Emus turned out to be more trouble than expected. One difficulty with emus is their size: they can grow up to 190 centimeters (6 feet 2 inches) and easily weigh 55 kilograms (120 pounds). They are excellent runners, capable of up to 50 KPH (30 MPH), and were not easy to catch if they got loose. They also kick pretty good. During the height of the emu rush in the 1990s, a young Latino man came into a hospital emergency room in Austin, with bad cuts and bruises, shouting: "Pollo gigante! [Giant chicken!]"
The birds weren't so cheap to raise either, demanding fencing and feed. Some ranchers microchipped their emus, since emu rustling emerged after the price of the birds went sky-high. Scams also emerged, with emus sold for high prices, then never delivered.
A few dozen Texas restaurants added emu to their menus, but there was no real consumer interest. Claims that emu meat was healthy were undermined by the high price, and the emu ranchers never developed a distribution system that could properly sell the birds. Even as it was becoming obvious there really wasn't a market for emu, their population was exploding, making them even more burdensome for their owners.
By 1998, emus were worthless -- nobody could even give them away. Some ranchers simply let the birds starve; others, finding that too cruel, shot them. Two brothers living outside Fort Worth used baseball bats to kill the birds. Neighbors who saw the slaughter called police, but the brothers weren't charged, Texas being lenient on animal cruelty as well.
Instead of going through the bother of slaughtering them and disposing of them, some emu owners simply let the birds loose, to make their own way in the world. There are now mobs of feral emus in parts of rural Texas. They can cause crashes walking across roads, or wander into small towns. Animal-control officers and police find them too fast to easily catch, and too big to easily handle when they do.
More recently, India got into an emu-ranching craze, which ended in 2013, exactly as miserably as the Texan craze. In a way, however, the emus were winners. For millennia, they wandered the Outback of Australia; now they have established themselves on three continents. They may not yet be done with their mad plot to conquer the world.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* A TRILLION TREES? As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("The Most Effective Way To Tackle Climate Change? Plant 1 Trillion Trees" by Mark Tutton, 17 April 2019) Tom Crowther -- an ecologist at Swiss university ETH Zurich -- believes he has at least part of the solution to climate change.
In 2015, Crowther estimated that there are about 3 trillion trees on Earth, much more than an earlier NASA estimate of about 400 billion. Crowther believes there's room for still more, and that we ought to plant those trees to relieve the pain of climate change: "The amount of carbon that we can restore if we plant 1.2 trillion trees, or at least allow those trees to grow, would be way higher than the next best climate change solution."
Crowther's research hasn't been published yet or reviewed, so he's reluctant to share figures from it just yet. However, he points to figures from Project Drawdown -- a non-profit that ranks climate solutions by the amount of CO2 they could remove from the atmosphere. The top solution listed by Drawdown is controlling the release of HFC greenhouse gases from fridges and air conditioners, which would have the equivalent effect of reducing atmospheric CO2 by 90 billion tons, because HFCs are such potent greenhouse gases. Crowther says planting 1.2 trillion trees would give a reduction "way above" that figure. To put that in context, global CO2 emissions from all sources are around 37 billion tons per year, with about two-thirds of that from human sources.
The good question is, of course: is it practical to plant a trillion trees? One organization that believes so is "Plant for the Planet (PFTP)", a youth organization that's running the "Trillion Tree" campaign to do just that. In 2006, the United Nations began a "Billion Tree" campaign, with PFTP later taking over the effort, and now upping the quantity in response to Crowther's work. PFTP has already planted almost 15 billion trees, with the help of various governments -- including India's, which has planted more than 2 billion trees as part of the initiative.
PFTP chairman Sagar Aryal says: "I think a trillion trees is achievable. It's not that we don't have enough money in the world -- maybe governments alone can't do enough, but if we work together with the private sector we can do it."
Crowther is a scientific adviser to PFTP, helping identify the best places to plant trees. He says appropriate locations are degraded land, not agricultural or urban areas. "These are places where farms have been abandoned, or where there's been deforestation." Site selection is important. If evergreen trees were planted in northern latitudes, for example, they would reduce the amount of light and heat reflected from snow, and actually increase warming.
Joseph Veldman, of the department of ecosystem science and management at Texas A&M University, warns: "There is no doubt that super-aggressive tree planting efforts that are not done with consideration of the historic ecosystem will be a bad investment." According to Veldman, some previous reforestation projects targeted grasslands and savanna ecosystems that already play an important role in storing carbon. Sometimes exotic species like pine and eucalyptus were planted, with these trees being flammable and also valuable as timber and pulp. They end up being burned or logged.
Crowther agrees: "All the models that previously existed about where forest can be restored disregard whether they should. We don't just model the forest, we also model grasslands and shrublands and piece them all together to reveal what should be where." Crowther adds that it take decades for tree plantings to reach full effect -- and that halting deforestation would help much more over the short term. Deforestation strips the planet of about 15 billion trees a year.
Nonetheless, planting trees is building up momentum. The Australian government has announced it will plant a billion trees by 2030, while work is underway on a "Great Green Wall" to stop the spread of the Sahara by restoring 100 million hectares of degraded land -- and sequester 250 million tons of carbon in the process. Similarly, China's anti-desertification program, also known as the "Great Green Wall," has planted more than 50 billion trees since the 1970s. The UN-endorsed Bonn Challenge aims to reforest 350 million hectares of degraded land globally by 2030.
Crowther says he was once skeptical about tree planting, but changed his mind:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Climate change is seen as such an immense and complicated issue -- it feels like it's seen as someone else's problem, someone else is dealing with it or not dealing with it, and no one has a simple message for how to go about tackling it. I'd like to try and champion [tree planting ] as a solution that everyone can get involved in. If all the millions of people who went on climate marches in recent weeks got involved in tree planting, the impact would be huge.
END QUOTE
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* REPAIRING THE WELFARE STATE (6): Contrast three developed countries -- the United States, Sweden, and the United Arab Emirates -- relative to the impact of immigration, and how they handle it.
In the United States, 13% of the population is foreign-born; in Sweden, it is 18.5%. In both places, this is about three times as high as in 1970, but in America's case it is a reversion to an historical norm, while in Sweden it is a huge change for a previously homogeneous society. In the UAE, nearly 90% of residents are foreign-born -- another huge change within less than two generations.
America once had completely open borders, in the days when crossing the Atlantic took weeks and could be fatal. Now it lets in families of current residents, plus the skilled and those who are already rich. Unskilled migrants have almost no legal way in, though there are possibly 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA. America has more foreign-born residents in total than any other country, running to 43 million. However, as a share of the population, at 13%, it has fewer than Australia -- 28% -- or Canada -- 22%. America's current level is about what it was in the 19th century, but much higher than its low of 5% in 1970. It has not changed much in the past decade.
Sweden is not seen as an attractive place to settle by highly-skilled migrants from other developed countries, due to its cold weather and high taxes. Half of its foreign-born population comes from outside Europe, with Iraqis and Syrians being the largest groups after Finns. To no surprise, many Swedish-born fear that the newcomers won't adopt Swedish cultural values, and worry that they strain its generous welfare state.
Emiratis have no such fears. Foreigners cannot drain their welfare state, because they have no access to it. They're not second-class citizens, they're nothing that resembles citizens; they come to work, and are thrown out if they stop working. It is virtually impossible for a foreigner to become a citizen. And though some locals worry that aliens will sully their culture, few locals wish to do their own laundry.
No country has a perfect system, but four policies can help maximize the benefits of immigration, minimize its costs and boost public support for it. First, the influx should be orderly and legal, as well as humanely handled. This is obvious sensibility in the first place, but it's also needed to maintain public support. Citizens tend to feel panicky if immigrants appear to be flooding in uncontrolled.
The other three policies are all about integration:
In the UAE, immigration is well-controlled. Migrants are not merely encouraged to work and pay their own way; that's the only way they can get in, and they are not encouraged to assimilate. They fill 99% of private-sector jobs, from designing skyscrapers to scraping dirty saucepans. Emirati citizens prefer to work for the state which, flush with petrodollars, pays great wages for soft work.
It's not necessarily a bad deal for migrants. Raffy Fermin moved from the Philippines to the UAE to fix cars, as part of a scheme with German car-maker Porsche. Filipinos go to a Porsche-sponsored school in Manila to learn how to service Porsche cars, and then get jobs in the Gulf. Fermin arrived in Abu Dhabi in 2013, when he was 21. He works on cool cars in a cool workshop. He earns twice what he would at home, tax-free, sending 70% of it home to support his widowed mother and invest in property. He wants to go home some day and set up a car-repair business, saying: "I'm happy I came."
It can be worse in other Gulf states. In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, migrants are often tied to one employer, whose permission they need to switch jobs. There have been cases of migrant workers being reduced to effective slavery and brutalized. Domestic workers are particularly vulnerable, since they work out of sight. On the plus side, although migrants can't become citizens in the Gulf states, they are generally welcome and well-compensated. Most benefit, and are in no hurry to leave. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (56): By the time of the House vote, Sherman's army had left Savannah, to advance north against scattershot Confederate opposition. The strategy was simple: Grant would maintain pressure against Lee's forces at Petersburg, keeping them pinned in place, until Sherman finally joined hands with Grant, to bag Lee's army. It was only a matter of time until the two Union forces met up. The Confederacy had no future.
There were contacts between the Confederacy and the Union on ending the conflict, but they amounted to nothing. Jefferson Davis was under pressure to find peace terms -- though he had absolutely no intention of surrendering, and knew Lincoln was not going to accept anything less. Davis went through the motions, setting up a commission that met with Lincoln on 3 February. Lincoln made it clear that the fighting would end only when the South stopped resisting Federal authority. The most he would promise is that he would grant executive clemency to rebel officials to the extent that he was able.
The commissioners went away empty-handed. Lincoln wanted to give the South an opportunity to determine how the Union would be restored; but Southerners were in denial over the possibility. Whether they liked it or not, the Union was going to be restored, and it was the victors who would determine how it was done.
Sherman and Grant never did join hands. On 2 April, after growing pressure against Lee's forces at Petersburg, Grant's troops broke Confederate lines, rebel troops being put to flight. That day, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fled Richmond, with the city falling to Union forces the next day. The day after that, Lincoln arrived in Richmond to inspect the conquered city.
On 10 April 1865, at Appomattox court house in Virginia, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses Grant, commander of the Union force. On 12 April 1865, after four years of war, the Army of Northern Virginia formally laid down its arms and dispersed. After four years of fighting, with hundreds of thousands of casualties and widespread destruction of the battleground states, the American Civil War was effectively over -- though there were many details to be tied up.
On 11 April, Lincoln gave a speech to the public from the window above the White House's front door, discussing the path forward. He began by praising the victories of Union forces, and then went on to discuss the restoration of the Union:
BEGIN QUOTE:
By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority -- reconstruction -- which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed much more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty. Unlike a case of a war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with. No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.
END QUOTE
Lincoln went on to conditionally defend, at awkward length, his Ten Percent Plan for the reconstruction of Louisiana; to then suggest that the states of the South be welcomed back into the Union fold:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it.
Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.
END QUOTE
Lincoln admitted the reconstructed Louisiana government left something to be desired, one sore point being the small proportion of citizens that had taken the loyalty oath. The president added:
BEGIN QUOTE:
It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.
END QUOTE
Was obtaining the loyalty oath from only 10% of the population of Louisiana, Lincoln asked, satisfactory? The new Louisiana state government was clearly loyal to the Union, even having ratified the 13th Amendment. What purpose would there be in repudiating it?
BEGIN QUOTE:
Now, if we reject, and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We in effect say to the white men: "You are worthless, or worse -- we will neither help you, nor be helped by you."
To the blacks we say: "This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how."
END QUOTE
Louisiana's ratification of the 13th Amendment suggested other ex-Confederate states might well follow. Ratification by three-quarters of all the states in the restored Union would deny the possibility of its repudiation.
The address didn't go over well with the excited public on the White House lawn; they were looking for a celebration of the Union victory, not a consideration of the difficult path of winning the new-found peace. That path was, however, of necessity weighing heavily on Lincoln's mind.
On the 14th, Lincoln held a cabinet meeting at mid-day, with General Grant in attendance. Among the items of discussion were what should be done with Confederate officials. Lincoln commented: "I hope there will be no persecution, no bloody work after the war is over. No one need expect me to take any part in hanging or killing these men, even the worst of them. Frighten them out of the country; open the gates; let down the bars." He made waving motions with his hands. "Shoo; scare them off; enough lives have been sacrificed."
That evening, Lincoln and wife, with two guests, went to nearby Ford's Theater in Washington DC, to see the play OUR AMERICAN COUSIN. During the performance John Wilkes Booth, a prominent actor, broke into the presidential box, and shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head. The President lingered for some hours, then died. Vice-President Andrew Johnson was sworn in as president in Lincoln's place, becoming POTUS 17. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Climate Panel Killed By Trump Releases Plan To Help United States Deal With Warming" by Jeff Tollefson, 04 April 2019), in 2015 the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) created a panel to provide advice on how American businesses and communities can adapt to climate change. In 2017, the Trump Administration killed off the panel -- but it didn't stay dead. Its members rebooted it, using funding from the state of New York, Columbia University, the American Meteorological Society, and others.
The panel -- now known as the "Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment" -- has now issued a study that outlines a plan to translate the climate science into practical information to help communities and businesses prepare for rising seas, more frequent wildfires and other impacts of climate change.
Richard Moss -- the advisory committee's leader and a visiting climate scientist at the Columbia University in New York City -- says their goal is to provide a resource where climatologists can work with governments and professional societies to refine policies, such as flood maps and building codes. Several of the committee members are working to set up a climate-planning consortium and obtain seed funding. They see the consortium as self-supporting over the long run, obtaining funds by doing contract work for governments and professional societies.
Committee member Andy Jones, a climate modeler at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, is already working with several water agencies across the country use data from global climate models to plan for changing patterns of precipitation, runoff, and flooding. Jones says: "People are just hungry for this information -- but without some sort of coordination with [decision-makers], the scientists aren't going to know what to provide."
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Ancient 'Snowball Earth' Thawed Out In A Flash" by Lucas Joel, 2 April 2019), over a half-billion years ago, the Earth was largely or completely frozen over, with glaciers stretching to the equator. There were at least two such freeze-overs in succession. Now researchers have determined that the last such event ended abruptly -- by geological standards -- about 635 million years ago.
The ice built up over thousands of years, then "melted in no more than 1 million years," according to Xiao Shuhai, a paleobiologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, and part of the research team that made the discovery. A million years is a "blink of an eye" on a geological timeframe, with the thaw suggesting some abrupt planetary transition -- possibly high levels of carbon dioxide from a burst of volcanic eruptions.
The researchers made this discovery by dating volcanic rocks from southern China's Yunnan province. These rocks were laid down below another kind of rock called a "cap carbonate" -- distinctive deposits of limestone and dolostone that formed during Snowball Earth's shutdown, thanks to high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Radiometric dating determined that the volcanic rocks were 634.6 million years old, plus or minus about 880,000 years. That didn't reveal the speed of the melting, but in 2005 another team dated rocks from a similar formation in China's Guizhou province. These rocks were about 635.2 million years old, plus or minus 570,000 years.
According to Xiao, the two samples suggest a rapid thaw of about a million years. The trick, Xiao says, is that the two dates are much more precise than dates obtained with other samples, with error bars of less than a million years. The error bars effectively bars essentially bracket the period in which the cap carbonates formed, and set bounds on the period of the last Snowball Earth thawing event.
The two samples were both from southern China, and so they don't actually give a global picture of what happened. However, if the entire Earth froze over, they certainly could be said to be indicative -- and in any case, they provide exciting encouragement for geologists to perform more datings elsewhere.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("How An Aquarium Trick Became A Fad In The Dolphin World" by Frankie Schembri, 30 August 2018), dolphins in captivity have long known to perform a trick called "tail walking", in which the mammal rises vertically out of the water, supported by the thrashing of its flukes, and then scoots forward or back.
Researchers were surprised when they found that wild dolphins off the coast of Adelaide, Australia, had learned to tail-walk as well. An extended study showed the wild dolphins had learned the trick from a captive dolphin named Billie that had been released. The fad spread through the dolphin pod, until by 2011, there were nine tail-walkers. Like all fads, it passed, not being observed much three years later. Why did the dolphins pick up the habit? Well duh, obviously they thought it was fun -- and when they got bored with it, they gave it up.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: An article from TIME.com ("The Google Doodle Honoring Seiichi Miyake Will Make You Think About What's Under Your Feet" by Ashley Hoffman, 18 March 2019) commented on a Google Doodle run in March as a tribute to Japanese inventor Miyake Seiichi (1926:1982). Few have heard of him, but everyone has seen his invention: "braille blocks" AKA "Tenji blocks", which are sections of walkways with sets of bumps to assist the visually impaired. Arrays of bumps warn of a hazard ahead; straight bars guide towards safety.
Miyake came up with the idea back in the 1960s, as a scheme to help a friend who was going blind. The "tactile pavement" began to emerge in Japan from mid-decade, with the braille blocks becoming part of municipal codes and common across the country. In the 1990s, they went global, with variations -- for example, color-coding to help those with sight.
ED: I found this article interesting because I've seen braille blocks here and there for decades -- but I not only didn't know what they were for, I never bothered to wonder about them. "Well, duh!" I found a neat little video from a Thai lad, who simply started walking with a camera pointed to the pavement, following the braille blocks and strips like they were a railroad.
In related news from REUTERS.com, South Koreans are extremely fond of smartphones, so much so that the authorities are now installing warning systems to prevent "smartphone zombies" AKA "smombies" from wandering mindlessly into the path of an oncoming car. It uses infrared cameras and radar to track pedestrians and cars, to then use LED lights and lasers to provide warnings. The system even sends a message to the smartphone of the user at risk. It costs about $13,000 USD per intersection.
On writing up notes, I got to wondering if the date on the article was 1 April, but it wasn't. REUTERS had a video to show how the system worked, and looked slick. They installed blinking LEDs alongside crosswalks; at night, it looked very pretty. They also had videos of people walking into lamp-posts or the like, while being excessively engrossed in their smartphones.
* I ran an article in March on the persistence of Chinese counterfeiting. An article from BBC.com ("Fake Lego Gang Dismantled In $30m Chinese Raid", 27 April 2019), discussed how Chinese police raided a toy manufacturer in the southern city of Shenzen, arresting four people. The manufacturer was turning out fake Lego blocks, with a total of 630,000 pieces worth about $30 million USD on hand.
They called their product "Lepin blocks", but they were straight ripoffs of Legos, and they were turning out copies of Lego kits for STAR WARS and other media franchises. They were selling them at a fifth of the price of equivalent Lego products. The raid demonstrates that the Chinese government is serious about cracking down on product piracy.
Lego sells about 75 billion bricks each year in over 140 countries, with kits manufactured in five countries -- Mexico, China, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Denmark. There used to be Lego facility here in Loveland, Colorado, the building being characterized by front columns in the form of Lego blocks. However, the building's since changed hands a number of times, and the columns were remodeled to a conventional configuration. Pity, they gave the building a distinction, but I suppose they sent the wrong message for the later tenants.
* As for the Real Fake News for April, events in the USA seem to have settled into a tense muddle. Attorney General Bill Barr, after releasing a short summary of the Mueller report in late March that said "no collusion" between Russia and the Trump Administration, issued the redacted version of the report in early April that set off a firestorm.
Trump advocates continue to crow that the report didn't show any collusion between Russia and Trump. Actually, even in the early days of the Mueller investigation, knowledgeable commenters said that it was most unlikely that charges of collusion would come out of it. To make a collusion charge stick would have required a paper trail, in effect a validated document in which the two parts agreed to collude -- and that was just not going to happen.
Indeed, on consideration, it didn't seem likely that the release of the report was going to change the status quo very much: on one hand, it wouldn't contain any "smoking guns", and on the other, it would leave many loose ends hanging. The report indicated there were indeed plenty of loose ends, with 14 ongoing investigations, 12 of them redacted in the released report. The report also showed that Trump was incompetent, tiny-minded, mean-spirited, and amoral.
That was not news to anyone with sense -- but it was established by a rigorous and impartial investigation, meaning its credibility was beyond sensible dispute. Republican Senator Mitt Romney released a statement:
BEGIN QUOTE:
I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President. I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia.
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To the extent the report did change the status quo, it was to intensify the struggle, with the Left making loud calls for impeachment of Trump. Democratic leadership was not keen on that idea, mostly because without Republican support, an impeachment attempt was likely to fail. The result might be to boost Trump's standing enough to get him re-elected in 2020, and certainly leave the Democrats looking like losers.
The Democrats are focused on "flipping" GOP Red states to Democrat Blue states -- and that means shifting voters from the GOP to the Democrats. A failed impeachment effort would be no help to that end. If things got so bad that Republicans called for Trump's impeachment as well, that would give the Democrats political cover and give chances of success -- but again, that doesn't seem likely to happen.
The calls for impeachment on Twitter demonstrate that people are not thinking things out:
There's no prospect of impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is too smart and experienced to take on futile battles; she has also repeatedly made it clear that she isn't concerned with the tantrums of the Hot Left. There's no agreement among the voters for it anyway, with the arguments becoming heated at times. That's all for the good, really, since talk of impeachment clearly drives Trump up the wall.
The Democrats, of course, have every good reason to continue their investigations of the Trump Administration -- with Trump's belligerent stonewalling only strengthening the drive towards further investigation. The Democrats are also attempting to get their hands on Trump's tax returns. A well-established IRS rule says that the chair of the House Ways & Means Committee gets tax returns for the asking. There is the catch that the request has to be for a valid legislative reason, not out of animus -- but Trump's failure to properly divest himself of his business interests on becoming president has given all the basis for the request that anyone might need. The Trump Administration would find it hard to prove animus.
Of course, second-guessing the Supreme Court decision on the request for the tax returns is tricky. However, Trump believes, with plenty of good reason, that he personally owns the GOP in Congress. He is likely to also believe that the Supreme Court is beholden to him -- and to the extent he makes that belief evident, as he is likely to, he will only antagonize the justices. Besides, the sorry story of the Trump White House is only too evident in the Mueller report. It's not a good bet the Supreme Court will side with him.
It is all for the good for the Democrats to keep Trump on the defensive, leaving him under the heavy thumb of the question: What is he trying to hide? Trump fans have taken the Mueller report as a win, jeering at the Democrats, saying they've lost the game. It wasn't a win by any means, the game's only at half-time. Of course, the Trumpies complain bitterly, but they always do. They would in any case; the people who voted for the Democrats either insist on continued pressure on Trump, or don't really concern themselves with it much. As for Trump, he has no win if he can't make the investigations go away.
In the meantime, the Trump Administration has continued its assault on ObamaCare, with the Justice Department endorsing a decision by a Texas court striking it down. That decision is very likely to be reversed, its propriety being entirely dubious. The rational of the judge was that, since the Republican-controlled Congress had zeroed-out special taxes implemented for ObamaCare, the entire ObamaCare Act was then invalid. In reality, if anything could be inferred from the zeroing-out of taxes without killing off ObamaCare, it's that the taxes should be restored. That's not likely to happen, but certainly the Texas court judgement is preposterous.
Trump got very enthusiastic about the renewed assault on ObamaCare, saying that a new plan would be generated, without giving any details. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made it publicly clear that the Senate was not going to touch healthcare with a ten-foot pole. The Republicans got beaten up on that score by the voters in 2018, and didn't want to try it again. Trump then declared that healthcare would be revisited, but only after the 2020 elections.
Along similar lines, Trump made threats to close off the border with Mexico, to then reverse himself, and say it wasn't going to happen. It appears that the border states complained very loudly -- it would have been an economic disaster for them -- and Trump was finally convinced it would be "government shutdown 2.0": it wouldn't work, and he'd have no sensible exit strategy. While Trump's behavior has always been erratic, it seems it is becoming more so as of late. It is likely to continue to deteriorate. The pressure is not going to let up, it's just going to get worse.
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