* 21 entries including: US Constitution (series), global decarbonization (series), space ADS-B constellation, Lithuanians against fake news, human mutation rates, Deepmind versus Starcraft II, AI face diagnostic, billion hectares of forest, marine viruses, and India's face recognition system.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR NOVEMBER 2019: A survey from THE ECONOMIST ("The End Of Inflation?", 12 October 2019) posed the question: whatever happened to inflation? Inflation used to be something that happened every now and then -- notoriously in the 1970s -- but today, there's more concern about inflation being too low, threatening to tip into the economic suffocation of deflation.
It was once believed that a healthy economy and low unemployment would tend towards inflation, but it's just not happening, even though central banks have cut their prime lending rates to the bone. Partly the reason inflation has been tamed is because central banks have indeed become more adept at keeping it under control. However, there are other reasons, and not all of them are good.
The supposed link between high employment and inflation is represented by what is called the "Phillips curve", devised by New Zealander economist William Phillips in the 1950s -- incidentally, as something of an end-product of an ingenious hydraulic analog computer Philips built to simulate economic systems. What's happening now is simply not on the curve; there's no visible correlation between high levels of employment and inflation. There are several possible reasons for this:
One line of thought has suggested that Amazon.com, the world's monster online retailer, is helping to keep inflation low, by a relentless drive towards low prices, with a concomitant drive towards leading-edge automation. Amazon is also not noted for its generosity to employees. This doesn't seem to be the whole truth, since retailers like Walmart and Target have been pursuing the "low-cost leader" strategy for decades, linked to low-cost producers elsewhere -- and Amazon is also gradually showing signs of becoming more employee-oriented.
Nonetheless, there does seem to be a relationship between high technology and low inflation. Not only has technology meant business automation, it has also meant dramatically falling costs for consumer technology. Today, anyone can buy a cheap smartphone that's far more powerful than an expensive mainframe computer of the 1970s. In addition, in an information-driven society, most of the information is free to the consumer, being supported by advertising; or available at modest cost, since the internet provides huge volumes of distribution. Inflation has continued in sectors that aren't easily automated: education, medicine, housing, insurance.
Of course, there's a global aspect to inflation as well. One big one is commodities prices: it was, after all, the oil shocks of the 1970s that did much to drive up prices in that era. The growth of demand for commodities in emerging markets, particularly China, did have inflationary effects -- but for the time being, demand for commodities has been sluggish overall, and so not inflationary. It is an interesting possibility that the movement towards renewable energy, as well as sustainable production, will mean commodities will have less influence on inflation.
Another factor is the availability of low-cost labor markets elsewhere. However, not all work is sensibly off-shored, and the global economy is shifting towards services at the expense of menial manufacturing jobs -- particularly as automation keeps making inroads on factories. A third global factor is the graying populations of the developed world, who have been more inclined to save than the young, restraining economic activity.
So is inflation beaten for good? Nobody believes that -- but at present, the real fear in monetary policy is deflation. Central banks, unfortunately, have become targets for ideologues of the Left and Right. The Left has pushed dubious policies like "modern monetary theory", which suggests governments can run up massive deficits, as long as inflation doesn't take off. The Right has pushed against any interest rate cuts, to keep the economy booming, inflation be hanged.
The Right actually has a good point, in that in a global economy tending towards deflation, there's a fair case for risking more inflation; but ignoring the risks of inflation is careless. There is, at present, a need for central bankers to reconsider monetary policies of the past in a changed global economic landscape. They will do so carefully; central banks are necessarily conservative, not daring to conduct risky experiments.
* As discussed by an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("Squeezing The Rich", 9 November 2019), the Era of Trump has, not surprisingly, led to a resurgence of popular anti-capitalist sentiment. Presidential candidates are leading the charge, targeting America's billionaires. Elizabeth Warren wants to take up to 6% of their wealth -- not income, wealth -- in tax every year, while Bernie Sanders says they "should not exist". In the UK, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn similarly asserts that a just society would have no billionaires, and had vowed to "go after" Britain's super-rich.
The Left is inclined to believe that billionaires represent policy failures, that billionaires are corrupt on the face of matters. Sometimes, realities appear to support that view. On both sides of the Atlantic, some billionaires have thrived in anti-competitive markets -- for example, Facebook and Google dominate online advertising. One can find lists online of companies that offer online advertising services for those who are shut out of Google's Adsense online advertising network -- but the "Adsense alternatives" are tiny, and exist strictly on the margins. Google gives them little chance to compete.
In the meantime, Big Money sends lobbyists to the offices of politicians to make sure the system works for Big Money. About a fifth of America's billionaires made their money in industries in which government capture or market failure is the norm. In particular, they also fund Rightist advocacy organizations to tear down regulations and cut taxes.
However, that's a one-sided view of the world. For every Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, there are several technology entrepreneurs with plenty of rivals. Think of Anthony Wood, who created Roku, a video-streaming platform; or Tim Sweeney, co-founder of the firm behind "Fortnite", a video game. Nobody can sensibly accuse these innovators of having sewn up their markets or of depending on state favors. The same goes for sportsmen such as Michael Jordan or musicians like Jay-Z, billionaires both.
Business competition can be brutal, sometimes cruel, but it also means innovative companies responsive to consumers -- with only a small number of business leaders getting filthy rich in the process, in somewhat the same way that few musicians are as rich as Jay-Z. As far as billionaires pushing Rightist causes go, there are others who push Leftist causes.
The central difficulty with an indiscriminate hostility to the wealthy is that the "wealthy" tend, in the limit, to be defined as "anyone who is better off than I am." It makes people worry that an overbearing state will take away what they've got. Yes, wealth is a worry when it becomes entrenched, or is shielded from disruptive forces, and governments are right to take it on. Yes, in the USA, marginal income tax rates for the rich are absurdly low, and inheritance taxes have been largely allowed to fade away. Anyone with a vast fortune should have no problem passing a comfortable living on to offspring; but what value is there to America in establishing a hereditary empire?
More generally, it might be wise to take on the push towards indefinite intellectual-property and copyright protections; to penalize clearly anticompetitive business practices; to take a cautious approach towards mergers and acquisitions; and to fix campaign-finance laws that give excessive clout to Big Money. Such focused measures promise to accomplish much more than demagogic attacks on the wealthy as a class.
* In that vein, billionaire Steve Ballmer, once boss of Microsoft, was on the DAILY SHOW with Trevor Noah, who asked him:
BEGIN QUOTE:
TN: According to FORBES, a man who is a billionaire worth $51.7 billion dollars ... Elizabeth Warren, I've heard, is coming for you. How are you feeling about this whole thing? Is there a war on the billionaires? How do you feel about it?
SB [grinning]: I think there's a great discussion to be had about who should pay how much taxes. I, personally, would be fine with paying more. And yet the most ... important thing, frankly, is that people just get the numbers.
... "You should pay this much tax!" But it's gotta be based on what we wanna do. What do we wanna do with the money? How much? Who can pay? What other expenses can we cut? And then the will of the People will decide, and I'll be okay with it.
END QUOTE
Ballmer looks like a big mug, along the lines of the late actor Pete Boyle, but he's very sharp, and surprisingly charismatic. Noah found that Ballmer struck exactly the right note, not whining at all about the alleged "war on billionaires", instead saying in effect: "It's negotiable."
As Noah seemed to understand, Ballmer was not really conceding much to Elizabeth Warren. He knows perfectly well that, in the discussion on taxes, he's got a better hand to play. One of the first problems is that a wealth tax is, effectively, a kind of property tax, and the US Constitution denies the right of the Federal government to impose property taxes -- never mind the details, it's painful.
In addition, a wealth tax is easily gamed, since it can be very difficult to determine net wealth -- particularly for the ultra-rich, whose fortunes are largely tied up in non-liquid and not all that tangible assets. The French government had a wealth tax for a while; they gave it up in 2017, replacing it with a property tax. On top of all that, there's the obvious reality that, if overbearing taxes are imposed on the ultra-rich, they will inevitably offshore their wealth. If there's a war on billionaires, they know they have the means to fight back. The bottom line is, again: "It's negotiable."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Saudi-Led Coalition Identifies Iranian Cruise Missile Used Against Airport" by Jeremy Binnie, 26 June 2019), on 12 June 2019, an Iranian-made Ya Ali cruise missile, launched by Ansar Allah fighters in Yemen, struck the Abha International Airport in southwest Saudi Arabia. The missile hit the arrivals terminal, but caused no serious damage or injury. Ansar Allah also took responsibility for another cruise missile attack on the Al-Shuqaiq power plant a week later. The two cruise missile strikes were a reflection of the high level of tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as of the sophistication of Iran's home-built weapons.
The Ya Ali was unveiled during a public exhibition in 2014. It is of conventional cruise missile configuration, being an "aerial torpedo" with straight pop-out wings and pop-out tailfins, with an intake for a turbojet engine under the rear fuselage. It is fired from a box launcher using a solid-fuel booster rocket, and can also be air-launched.
Not many details are known of the Yah Ali missile. It is said to have a range of 700 kilometers (435 miles) and a warhead with a weight of 200 kilograms (440 pounds). It has precision guidance, but the details are not known. It may have been built with Chinese assistance, or derived from a Chinese missile design.
Engine parts recovered from the wreckage by the Saudis show it is powered by a TJ100 turbojet, produced by PBS Aerospace of the Czech Republic, and often used with target drones. PBSA officials deny ever supplying TJ100 engines to Iran; presumably, the engines were obtained by Iran through an intermediary, or were built by Iran without a license. The TJ100 is a simple cheap centrifugal-flow turbojet, and is not difficult to build.
[ED: Of course, this was followed up on 14 September by a coordinated, highly accurate, and devastating cruise missile attack on the Saudi oil complex on 14 September. Iran denies involvement; nobody believes them; and they don't care.
Iran's cruise missile capabilities are mysterious. Iran's military budget is like $13 billion USD a year; that's about a fifth of the Saudi budget, a 50th of the US budget. How many cruise missiles could, say, a billion dollars out of the Iran budget buy a year? They're really not particularly sophisticated in themselves; including mobile truck launchers, one might guess about $10 million USD each, so that means a hundred a year.
The only really tricky thing is precision navigation, using a navigation satellite receiver, and some sort of terminal attack guidance system. Iran can get assistance on that from China; indeed, the Chinese might be very helpful, since it would give them a chance to live-test their weapon systems against adversaries with Western miltech. The Iranians didn't follow up the attack. It's hard to believe they've just given up.]
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Rafael Enhances SPICE 250 With Advanced Automatic Target Recognition Capability" by Robin Hughes, 10 June 2019), Rafael Advanced Defense Systems of Israel produces a series of "Smart, Precise-Impact, & Cost-Effective (SPICE)" smart munitions.
The SPICE line includes the "SPICE 1000" and "SPICE 2000" variants -- which amount to an electro-optic / infrared (EO-IR) guidance unit, attached to standard 450-kilogram (1,000-pound) and 900-kilogram (2,000-pound) general-purpose (GP) or penetration bombs -- and the SPICE 250 -- an "all-up" glide munition with a weight of 112 kilograms 250 pounds). Rafael is now introducing an improved SPICE 250.
The SPICE 250 is a boxy weapon, with cruciform tailfins and pop-out wings. It can carry a 75-kilogram (165-pound) GP or penetration warhead; it features an EO-IR guidance system, midcourse INS-GPS navigation, a two-way datalink, and a pre-set or cockpit selectable warhead fuzing options. It has a glide range of 100 kilometers (60 miles) when released from altitude, and a "circular error probability" of less than 3 meters (10 feet).
All three SPICE variants feature "automatic target acquisition (ATA)" capability, with guidance system homing in a target acquired by the imaging seeker, compared to a target image stored in memory. Now SPICE 250 is adding a "moving target detection & homing" capability, to allow it to hit mobile targets.
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Thales Highlights BRAIN Modular Unmanned System" by Andrew White, 09 April 2019), European defense giant Thales has now unveiled a modular autonomous vehicle system that can be configured to support air, ground, and maritime mission sets conducted by special operations forces (SOF).
The BRAIN system -- the meaning of the acronym, if it is one, is unclear -- consists of a central connection & control system that can be plugged into a drone aircraft, ground vehicle, or water vehicle. BRAIN was developed in collaboration with the French SOF and industry partners, including those working in robotics.
Thales has displayed a handheld ground control station for BRAIN, along with the central connection component and a series of modular kits that enables it to be configured as a quad-rotor aerial drone or 4*4 ground drone. Work is underway to fit BRAIN to a water vehicle, as well as a flying-wing tilt-rotor drone. The BRAIN system is also designed to handle a variety of sensor payloads, as per mission needs.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SPACE ADS-B CONSTELLATION: As discussed by an article from THEVERGE.com ("Watching The Skies From Space" by Loren Grush, 7 February 2019), from 2017, the Iridium company began launching satellites for its next-generation global telecommunications network, named Iridium NEXT, in 2017, with the constellation completed in early 2019. The Iridium NEXT constellation consists of 75 satellites -- 66 operational satellites, plus 9 spares -- orbiting at an altitude of 780 kilometers (484 miles) in six orbital planes, spaced 30 degrees apart, with 11 operational satellites in each plane. The constellation allows users to communicate with handheld phones from anywhere on Earth.
The Iridium NEXT constellation also supports tracking airliners all over the globe, since each satellite carries a secondary payload, an "automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B)" receiver. ADS-B involves an airliner communicating its position -- as obtained from the GPS satellite network -- along with ID, altitude, bearing, velocity and other data, allowing ground stations and other aircraft to know where the aircraft is and where it's going.
ADS-B is not quite universal to airliners yet, but it's getting there. In 2010, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mandated that all aircraft operating in the US need to be equipped with ADS-B technology; more recently, Australian and Europe have mandated ADS-B as well. The airlines have been given a grace period to install ADS-B units in their aircraft, so not all have been fitted yet. ADS-B is not mandated for general aviation aircraft.
Traditionally, airliners have been tracked by ground radar installations, but that means no coverage over oceans and other unpopulated areas. ADS-B receivers can be part of a ground network, but that has the same limitation. Putting ADS-B receivers on a global satellite network means airliners can be tracked all over the Earth.
Without global ADS-B, airliners over uncontrolled airspace have to be given a very wide spacing, from about 50 to 160 kilometers (30 to 100 miles), which means they don't fly the most efficient flight paths. With ADS-B and a "smart" air traffic control system, they can optimize their flight paths, reducing time and fuel consumption. The system can also adjust much more easily to flight emergencies.
Aireon was established as a collaboration between Iridium, the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA), and a number of other air navigation service providers (ANSP). The satellites are under the direction of a ground network, which obtains and processes the position data, with the data distributed to subscribers to the network. Initial operational capability was in the spring of 2019, serving ANSPs like those of Canada, Ireland, and the UK. The US FAA is evaluating the system, but hasn't committed to signing up yet.
Bringing up the global system will take time. Air traffic controllers will have to be trained, and the greater flexibility in flight planning will demand the construction of elaborate systems to do the job, which will have to be extensively tested before being put to use. The system should be fully operational sometime in the next decade.
* In related air traffic control news ... the concept of the "digital control tower (DCT)" was discussed here in 2011. The idea behind DCT is to get rid of the air traffic control tower at an airport, replace it with day-night cameras on poles, and put the air traffic controllers in a ground-level room with a wrap-around display on the walls showing what's going at the airport.
The DTC is moving along, evidence being that one is being set up here in northeast Colorado. The system at the Fort Collins-Loveland airport has a central camera tower, with 17 cameras, and a tower at each end, with 6 cameras each. The control system of course integrates other data on aircraft, no doubt including ADS-B.
So far, DTC has been implemented at smaller airports, in order to gain experience before moving on to larger airports. One of the main motives of setting up a DTC system, it appears, is because a control tower is a relatively expensive structure; the tower at Denver International Airport is a hundred meters (330 feet) in height, and was the tallest ATC tower in the USA when it was built. Smaller airports don't need such a tall tower as does sprawling DIA, but it's still cheaper to replace a tower with a lot of technology. The DTC system here is expected to be fully up and running sometime next year.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* LITHUANIANS AGAINST FAKE NEWS: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Lithuanians Are Using Software To Fight Back Against Fake News", 25 October 2019), the Baltic States -- Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia -- were swallowed up by the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, they all declared their independence in 1990. Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn't like the idea of Baltic independence. As a result, the Baltics are inundated with Russian cyber-subversion, most notably "fake news", intended to destabilize them.
In order to cope with fake news, Delfi -- a media group headquartered in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius -- has worked with US information giant Google, to develop a software system named "Demaskuok", meaning "debunk" in Lithuanian, to trace back fake news to its source, AKA "patient 0".
Demaskuok uses many different schemes for identifying fake news. One is to identify wording often used by propagandists -- such as poverty, rape, environmental degradation, military shortcomings, war games, societal rifts, viruses and other health scares, political blunders, poor governance, and, ironically, the uncovering of deceptions.
Since disinformation appeals to emotions, Demaskuok also looks for emotionally-loaded terminology. Items that discuss current-account deficits, new smartphone features, and other technical issues is much less likely to be fake news than items that mention children, immigrants, sex, ethnicities, animals, national heroes and injustice. Discussions of sports, weather, music, or cooking are similarly much less likely to be fake news than discussions of scandals, and not necessarily recent ones. Earnest discussion of scandals known to be frauds is a big give-away.
Another clue is that disinformation is intended to "go viral", so Demaskuok measures the "virality" of an item, or the number of times it is shared or commented on. Still other factors are the reputations of websites on which the item appears; news from the Russia Today or Sputnik websites, both regarded as organs of Russian propaganda, is automatically suspect. The time at which an item appears is important as well, since disinformation often appears on Friday evening, since that gives a weekend before a hosting service will react.
Demaskuok went online in 2018, and has improved considerably in a year's time. It can now flag up not just total fabrications, but also subtler trickery that works by exaggeration or omission. Viktoras Dauksas -- who runs Debunk EU, a charity in Vilnius that was created in June 2019 to develop the technology further -- says it can now even sometimes spot "broken mirrors", meaning disinformation that is technically correct, but presented selectively in order to mislead. Half-truths are lies in disguise.
Demaskuok is essentially an aid, since only about half of the items it flags turn out to be disinformation under inspection. Inspection is provided not only by Delfi personnel, but also Lithuania's foreign ministry, and a number of news outlets, think-tanks, universities, and other organizations. Reviewers pass judgment on items, and then provide a score to the system, so it can improve its performance in the future.
Demaskuok is also supported by more than 4,000 volunteers known as "elves". About 50 of them screen through Demaskuok's feed of suspected disinformation, to pass on those that look suspicious to the other elves for investigation. Reports are written up as necessary, then emailed to newsrooms and other organizations, including Lithuania's defense ministry, that produce written or video "debunks" for the public. The system works very fast, with an elf in Vilnius saying that it is like playing "Kremlin ping-pong". The speed makes a big difference, since it's best to sideline disinformation before it can spread.
Officials say that abundant debunking has led to a healthy skepticism in most Balts. However, there is the danger of skepticism becoming empty-headed cynicism. Rob Procter -- a professor of social informatics at the University of Warwick in the UK -- suggests that Kremlin's goal suggests, is not so much to convince Westerners that certain falsehoods are the truth, but instead make its targets think nothing can be believed. Proctor is right, but there's no way disinformation can be allowed to propagate unchallenged. What is necessary is a cultural shift, backed up by educational systems, to train people to assess the validity of the information they receive -- to know the difference between information that may be ambiguous or arguable, and information that is fraudulent and deceitful.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DECARBONIZING THE WORLD (14): One class of elaborate molecules that could be readily produced with electricity is carbon nanotubes. They are something of a new material and applications are still emerging, but are clearly useful for their strength and electronic capabilities. At present, they are usually made by chemical vapor deposition, which involves pumping acetylene gas into a heated quartz tube. Cobalt and iron catalysts in the tube tear carbon atoms from the acetylene gas, with nanotubes growing from the metal particles.
This is an energy-intensive and expensive process, with a typical cost of about $100,000 USD to fabricate a tonne of nanotubes. However, Stuart Licht -- a chemist at George Washington University in Washington DC, mentioned here in 2016 -- and his colleagues have devised an electrolytic approach that they believe will reduce the cost to about $1,000 USD a tonne.
Licht's setup begins with molten lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) spiked with metal catalysts. An electric current strips carbon atoms from the lithium carbonate, while also adding heat that sustains the reaction. The catalysts pick up the carbons and insert them into growing nanotubes; bubbling CO2 into the mix then regenerates the lithium carbonate. The process is 97.5% efficient -- and since it uses CO2 as a feedstock, it acquires CO2 instead of producing it. Each tonne of carbon nanotubes sucks up four tonnes of CO2.
The nanotubes can then be mixed into cement to create a high-strength concrete that sequesters the carbon, keeping it from oxidizing and returning to the atmosphere. The tubes can also be mixed with metals such as aluminum, titanium, and stainless steel to strengthen them. C2CNT, a company Licht formed to commercialize the technology, is now competing for the "Carbon XPrize" -- which will award $20 million USD for demonstrations of how to turn CO2 into products.
Obviously, decarbonizing the global chemical industry is not going to happen overnight. Nate Lewis, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology, points out that one of the problems with moving to renewables is that they are intermittent. A chemical plant running on fossil fuels can operate all day, all night; one driven by solar power can't work at night. Wind and hydropower typically only work about 50% of the time, and solar drops to below 25% because of nighttime and cloudy days.
The solution to this problem is a distributed power system, with long-range power trunk lines spanning the continent, along with power storage. We are not remotely close to establishing such a network. Researchers have estimated that running the global chemical industry on renewables would require more than 18 petawatt-hours of electricity -- 18,000 terawatt-hours -- every year. That's 55% of the total global electricity production expected from all sources in 2030.
Decarbonization of the chemical industry will occur in phases. Until chemists can find catalytic processes able to make complex hydrocarbons with high efficiency, companies may use renewable electricity to produce simple molecules such as H2 and CO, to then use on fossil fuels to drive the reactions to turn them into more complex hydrocarbons. Those working in the field believe that, in some number of decades, the global chemical industry will be fully decarbonized. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (81): Herbert Hoover was voted out of office in the election of 1932, with Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) winning handily, with 57% of the vote. FDR was, incidentally, a distant cousin to Teddy Roosevelt, and married to TR's niece, Eleanor.
Inauguration Day was 4 March 1933. At that snapshot in time, a quarter of the workforce didn't have jobs; the price of farm produce had fallen by 60% from 1929, while industrial production had fallen by a similar level. Two million Americans were homeless. Public agitation was growing in the USA, with legitimate fears of the rise of a dictatorship of the Right or Left.
There had been a run on the banks for a month, thousands of them going broke, with the banking system headed for collapse. The next day, FDR declared a "bank holiday", effective 6 March, to temporarily shut down the banks, and also called for a special session of Congress, to begin 9 March, to pass emergency legislation in a legendary "Hundred Days" of energy, the focus being on "relief, recovery, and reform".
The first item of business was the banks, with Congress passing on 9 March the "Emergency Banking Act" -- which authorized the executive to control the opening and closing of banks, and authorized the Federal Reserve to issue bank deposits. Banks re-opened on Monday, 15 March, with deposits exceeding withdrawals; the panic was over. More laws followed in quick sequence:
In addition, the FDR Administration expanded Hoover's RFC, and gave the Federal Trade Commission additional powers. The package of government measures became known as the "New Deal". FDR backed up the effort by going directly to the people, with his radio "fireside chats". His goal, in which he was largely successful, was to maintain public confidence.
At the same time, FDR attempted to maintain a balanced budget, at least for non-emergency programs, by cutting the wages of government employees and reducing military pensions. He was willing to suffer deficits for emergency measures, on the basis that they could be paid off gradually once the emergency had passed, but not so willing to do so with regards to the regular operation of government. The cutbacks for veterans were strongly opposed. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for October included:
-- 04 OCT 19 / GAOFEN 10R -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 1850 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 10R" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. It was a replacement for Gaofen 10, lost on launch in August 2016.
-- 09 OCT 19 / EUTELSAT 5 WEST B, MEV 1 -- A Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 1017 UTC (local time - 6) to put the "Eutelsat 5 West B" geostationary comsat, and the first "Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV 1)" into space.
Both satellites were built by Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, previously Orbital ATK. Eutelsat 5 West B had a launch mass of new 2,860 kilograms (6,305 pounds), and had a payload built by Airbus Defense & Space, with 35 Ku-band transponders. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 5 degrees west longitude to provide communications service to Europe and North Africa -- specifically France, Italy, and Algeria. The satellite also hosted the "GEO 3" payload for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System (EGNOS), to beam GPS and Galileo navigation augmentation signals to improve position accuracy and reliability. It was a replacement for the 17-year-old Eutelsat 5 West A satellite.
MEV 1 had a launch mass of 2,330 (5,135 pounds); it was in effect a robot propulsion module, using an ion propulsion system, with a design life of 15 years. It took three and a half months to reach and then dock with the Intelsat 901 satellite, which MEV 1 then placed in a "graveyard orbit" after 18 years of service at 18 degrees west longitude. After months of testing in the graveyard orbit, MEV 1 moved Intelsat 901 to a new service position at 27.5 degrees west longitude, to continue operations for at least five years. At the end of its service life, Intelsat 901 will be placed back in the graveyard orbit, with MEV 1 moving on to another satellite. MEV 1 was owned by Space Logistics LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman.
-- 09 OCT 19 / ICON -- A Pegasus XL booster was air-launched from near Cape Canaveral at 0130 UTC (previous day local time + 4) to put the NASA "Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON)" satellite into orbit for near-space / upper-atmosphere studies. It was flown under the NASA Explorers program, and was operated by the University of California Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.
ICON had a launch mass of 288 kilograms (634 pounds), and was built by Northrop Grumman, being based on the company's "LEOStar 2" bus. It was intended to perform observations for two years, using four instruments:
The launch had been delayed multiple times.
-- 17 OCT 19 / PALISADE -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from a facility on the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island at 0122 UTC (local time - 11) to put the "Palisade" CubeSat into orbit for Astro Digital. Palisade was a 16-unit CubeSat, being a technology demonstrator with an on-board propulsion system and a next-generation communications system. The flight was nicknamed "As The Crow Flies."
-- 17 OCT 19 / TJSW 4 -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1521 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "TJSW 4" satellite into geostationary orbit. No details were announced, suggesting it was a classified military mission -- possibly an early-warning or signals-intelligence platform.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* HUMAN MUTATION RATES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Why Microbes Are Better Than People At Keeping DNA Mutations At Bay" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 11 April 2018), every human newborn carries an average of 60 mutations -- most of which are not troublesome or even noticeable. Unfortunately, some lead to birth defects and disease, including cancers.
The single-celled organism called the paramecium, in contrast, can go thousands of generations without a single mutation. Kelley Harris -- an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle -- says that: "If we evolved paramecium-like replication and DNA repair processes, [such human defects] would never happen."
Why are human genomes so easily broken, in comparison to that of the paramecium? Researchers attending a 2018 "Evolution of Mutation Rate" workshop at the University of Washington concluded: it's a legacy of our origins. Although there are billions of humans on Earth today, humans were a small population in the early days, numbering only thousands, tens of thousands. In large populations, deleterious genes are weeded out by selection -- but in small populations, they tend to linger.
Data from a range of organisms supports this observation: there's an inverse relationship between mutation rate and ancestral population size. This realization provides insights into how cancers develop, and also has implications for efforts to use DNA to date branches on the tree of life.
Mutations occur, for example, when cells copy their DNA incorrectly, or fail to repair damage from chemicals or radiation. Some of these errors have the perverse inclination to increase the mutation rate, leading to more mutations. Biologists long assumed that mutation rates were identical from species to species, and predictable enough to be used as "molecular clocks". By tallying differences between the genomes of two species or populations, evolutionary geneticists could date when they diverged.
However, thanks to whole-genome sequencing, that doesn't turn out to be the case. Sequencing and contrasting genomes from parent to offspring allows mutations from one generation to the next to be counted. Mutation rates have determined for about 40 species. Orangutans, gorillas, and green African monkeys have mutation rates similar to those of humans -- but bacteria, paramecia, yeasts, and nematodes, which all have much larger populations than humans, have mutation rates orders of magnitude lower.
In 2016, evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch of Arizona State University (ASU) suggested a reason why this is so, which he calls the "drift barrier hypothesis". He sees the discrepancy as rooted in genetic drift, or chance genetic changes -- what Lynch calls "noise in the evolutionary process that is greater than the directional force" of selection. Genetic drift in large populations tends to be weeded out, or compensated for by new mutations. The noise, in a sense, is swamped out. In smaller populations, the original mutation tends to linger and do damage.
As determined by population geneticists, the amount of genetic variation in the 7.6 billion humans alive today can be accounted for by an ancestral population of 10,000 individuals -- and that population was divided into smaller populations that largely bred among themselves. Harris says "we can't optimize our biology because natural selection is imperfect."
Harris has performed research on the genetics of human populations, focusing on the frequency of changes in each kind of DNA base molecule in the populations she studied. That "mutation spectrum" varies widely between different groups of people. In 2017, she and her colleagues estimated that between 15,000 and 2000 years ago, Europeans had an unusually high number of some conversions of the DNA base cytosine to thymine. She has since found differences in the mutation spectrum between Japanese and other East Asian populations. The difference in bases not only reflects mutational change, it shows different changes in different populations, Harris saying: "The way the genome tends to break is not the same in Europeans" as in other peoples.
Harris and researchers at the University of Copenhagen have determined that the cytosine-to-thymine mutations existed in early farmers, but not in hunter-gatherers. She suspects that the wheat diet of the farmers led to nutrient deficiencies, which in turn predisposed them to a mutation in a gene that in turn favored the cytosine-to-thymine changes. With relatively small populations involved, the mutation stayed around. Harris Eventually hopes to pinpoint the pathways and the genes responsible.
Charles Baer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, says it's become clear that "mutation rates can evolve pretty quickly, and in all sorts of ways. If you really want to understand mutation rate, you have to put a fine magnifying glass to it."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DEEPMIND VERSUS STARCRAFT II: Deepmind -- an artificial intelligence foundry that's an arm of Alphabet, the parent company of Google -- made a big splash in the AI world with "AlphaGo", an AI system that mastered the Asian board game of Go, that matter being discussed here in 2018. Go is a simple game, being very easy to learn how to play, if very difficult to master; following AlphaGo, the Deepmind crew wanted to take on a game that wasn't so easy to learn.
As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Google AI Beats Top Human Players At Strategy Game StarCraft II" by Dan Garisto, 30 October 2019), Deepmind zeroed in on StarCraft II massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG). In the game, players compete in real time as one of three factions -- the human Terran forces, or the alien Protoss and Zerg -- engaging in combat in science-fiction landscapes. Developed an AI system named "AlphaStar" to play StarCraft II, and then released it on the game's European servers. It quickly advanced through the ranks, to be rated in the top 0.15% of the region's 90,000 players.
StarCraft II has hundreds of "pieces" -- different types of battle fighters -- that take action in real time, and not in a turn-based fashion. While chess has only a handful of rules, AlphaStar has 1,026 actions to choose from at any moment. In addition, while a chessplayer sees everything an opponent is doing, StarCraft II is more like real war: players may have no idea of what an opponent is doing until an engagement begins.
StarCraft professionals play at lightning speed, sometimes taking hundreds of actions in a minute, intuitively balancing the resources available to them against the tactical environment, guided by a broad strategy. AlphaStar used an artificial neural network with "deep learning" to master the game. DeepMind engineers originally tried out the system in lab tests in December 2018, with AlphaStar beating two pro human players.
There were complaints following the tests that AlphaStar played too fast to make it a fair contest against humans. Since StarCraft II is not a turn-based game, the ability to click fast is an asset in StarCraft II, and so the engineers put a delay in AlphaStar to limit its rate to human proportions. In July 2019, players received notice that they could opt-in for a chance to potentially be matched against the AI. The trial was blind: players could ask to play the AI, but they were given no clue as to the online identity of AlphaStar. As it turned out, AlphaStar brushed aside novice and intermediate players, to ultimately win 61 out of 90 games against top-ranked players.
Computers have actually been playing StarCraft, and then StarCraft II, for almost a decade. However, traditionally, most of these "bots" were rule-based systems, not deep-learning AIs, with programmers laboriously implementing elaborate sets of rules on how to play the game. Oriol Vinyals, who now co-leads the AlphaStar project, was on a team from the University of California, Berkeley, that won the first competition in 2010, using a rule-based system. He says: "Back then, I kind of started thinking maybe we should just do [machine] learning, but it was just too early."
Vinyals joined DeepMind in 2016, to begin working on AIs that could teach themselves how to play StarCraft II. AlphaStar started out its training by absorbing a set of nearly a million human games. From that point, AlphaStar then played against versions of itself, and then against players on the European StarCraft II network. In 27 days of open play, AlphaStar placed within the top 0.5% of all players.
After 50 games, however, some clever human players notice that three user accounts on the gaming platform had played the exact same number of StarCraft II games over a similar time frame -- and then noticed that these three accounts were doing things that would be very difficult, maybe impossible, for a human. Those three accounts were, indeed, those that AlphaStar was using. To keep the trials blind, the DeepMind engineers came up with a set of tricks, such as switching accounts regularly. That fixed, after 44 cumulative days of open play, the DeepMind team concluded they had met the StarCraft II challenge. The AI wasn't able to beat the best player in the world, as AIs have in chess and Go, but the DeepMind teams believes they have accomplished what they set out to do.
There's more to be done, of course. Dave Churchill, an AI researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Saint John's, Canada, believes AlphaStar still has a number of weaknesses, such as a vulnerability to strategies it hasn't seen before. Churchill says: "AlphaStar is very impressive, and is definitely the strongest AI system for any StarCraft game to date. That being said, StarCraft is nowhere near being 'solved', and AlphaStar is not yet even close to playing at a world champion level."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DECARBONIZING THE WORLD (13): The real dream of green industrial chemistry is to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and convert it into fuels. A company named Sunfire in Dresden, Germany, has conducted tests with a high-temperature electrolysis reactor, known as a "solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC)", that performs this trick, and promises greater efficiency than PEM electrolyzers. The test system is about the size of a boxcar, and has four stages:
The process works at high temperature, which allows it to convert electrical energy to chemical bonds at nearly 80% efficiency. The pilot plant can only produce 10 liters (2.6 US gallons) of fuel a day, but Sunfire is working to open its first commercial plant, in Norway, in 2020. It will eventually evolve into a plant that will use 20 megawatts of hydropower to product 8,000 tonnes (8,800 tons) of fuel a year, enough to power 13,000 cars. It will avoid producing 28,600 tonnes (31,460 tons) of CO2 a year.
One thing that needs to be improved in this and similar processes is the electron-producing formation of oxygen at the anode. This is a sluggish reaction and an energy hog. Chemist Paul Kenis -- of the University of Illinois in Urbana -- and colleagues have experimented with spiking the anode with glycerol. Glycerol is a clear, viscous liquid, a byproduct of biodiesel production, which more readily gives up its electrons, halving the energy requirement for oxygen production. In addition, when glycerol loses electrons, it produces a combination of formic acid and lactic acid, two common industrial compounds used as preservatives and in cleaning products and cosmetics. Kenis says: "You take a waste and turn it into something of value."
Synthesizing elaborate hydrocarbons turns out, not surprisingly, to be more difficult than synthesizing simple ones. Even making compounds with just two carbons, such as ethylene and ethanol, yields fuels that only have 35% of the energy value originally used to synthesize them. With three-carbon compounds, the efficiency can drop below 10%, and it gets worse for additional carbons. There are two problems:
Better catalysts can help. Edward Sargent and his colleagues have built a device that uses a membrane coated with a copper catalyst to convert CO2 and steam to a mix of two-carbon compounds, including ethylene and ethanol, with 80% efficiency. They achieved that efficiency by pressing one electrode directly onto the membrane, eliminating a fluid-filled gap that was sapping energy and was causing the device to break down quickly. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (80): Much to the surprise of the nation, Calvin Coolidge did not run for re-election in 1928, feeling he had enough of the presidency. He was replaced by another Republican, Herbert Hoover. Hoover had been commerce secretary for both Harding and Coolidge, and had been in charge of international relief efforts before that. Hoover continued the policies of his predecessors, believing in small government and low taxes. The limits of this agenda became obvious after the great stock-market crash of October 1929, which initiated the global Great Depression.
At first, the general assumption was that the economy would quickly rebound, as it had from the 1920-1921 depression. Hoover continued on the path of his predecessors, unwilling to raise taxes or increase Federal government spending, on the belief that the economic crisis would soon pass. It didn't; it got worse, with Hoover publicly blasted for his apparent indifference to the plight of Americans thrown out of their jobs. Hoover did try to persuade businesses to avoid wage cuts, and to invest in infrastructure development -- but he also signed the "Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act" into law in 1930, which raised US tariffs across many sectors. Other countries raised tariffs in retaliation, and the net effect was to make the Depression worse. He also refused to give up the gold monetary standard, which helped straight-jacket the money supply, at a time when it needed flexibility.
With the economy lagging, the Federal government was running deficits. Although economists were starting to come around to making a case that there was something to be said for running deficits in a depression, deficit spending was not the political wisdom of the time. Hoover, as a result, came up with a tax plan that would increase government revenues by 30%, with the plan enacted in the "Revenue Act of 1932". The income tax on top earners was raised to 63%, with the top estate tax doubled, and other tweaks to the tax code. It was certainly a prudent measure, tax rates being arguably much too low -- but it wasn't enough, and indeed may well have made things worse by soaking up funds from commercial activity.
The Depression stubbornly refused to go away. Hoover finally faced reality, and began to take measures to get the country back on track. In early 1932, he pushed through the establishment of the "Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC)", which was set up to provide government-secured loans to financial institutions, railroads, and local governments. It was a government-run corporation -- a "state-owned enterprise", in modern terminology -- modeled on the "War Finance Corporation (WFC)", which had been established in 1918 to help finance the war effort.
The RFC was, in effect, an extension of the Federal Reserve bank system, acting as the Fed's "discount lender", and saving many businesses from collapse. It would survive into the postwar period, finally fading out in the 1950s. In parallel with the establishment of the RFC, Hoover signed into law the "Federal Home Loan (FHL) Bank", a government-chartered network of what would end up being 11 district banks, and which is still in existence. The FHL was clearly modeled on the Federal Reserve, but focused on helping Americans acquire homes. In addition, Hoover signed the "Glass-Steagall Act" of 1932, which loosened the standards for loans from the Fed.
None of it worked; the Depression continued to deepen. In the summer of 1932, in hopes of turning things around, Hoover signed into law the "Emergency Relief & Construction Act", a $2 billion public works bill -- which didn't work, either. 1932 was an election year, with Hoover standing for re-election, though his prospects were weak. The economy was in dire straits, and he hadn't been able to respond effectively. He couldn't move fast enough, and he steadfastly refused to consider Federal relief efforts.
There is a saying: "When the tide goes out, it becomes obvious who's been swimming naked." The 1920s had been a decade of pro-business, limited-government Republican administrations; the Great Depression demonstrated the limitations of their policies. Hoover's personality didn't help him under the circumstances, either. He was a conscientious man and a competent administrator, having originally been a mining engineer -- but he wasn't comfortable with politics, and had no ability to inspire the public. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from BBC.com ("Smart Lockers For Patients' Drugs Wins Inventors' Award", 5 June 2019), South Africa runs the world's largest HIV-AIDS treatment program, which implies handing out a lot of drugs. A South African engineer named Neo Hutiri has figured out a way to streamline the process. His "Pelebox" is a locker assigned to an individual patient that's stocked with drugs; a one-time PIN is sent to the patient's smartphone, with the patient then picking up the drugs at convenience.
According to Hutiri, the lockers reduce the wait for a patient "from three-and-a-half hours to under 36 seconds." That means not so much time taken away from work or leisure, and also masks the stigma of having AIDS: "If you collect your ARV medication for HIV from a locker, you don't have to deal with the fear that 'somebody's watching me.'"
He came up with the idea after he was diagnosed with TB in 2014, and went to his clinic to collect medicine. Long queues at pharmacies can be caused by staff shortages and high volumes of patients with chronic illnesses, such as AIDS. Hutiri won the $32,000 2019 Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation from the British Royal Academy of Engineering. Only a handful of lockers are in service at present; Hutiri wants to use the prize money to ramp up production, as well as improve the product.
* As discussed by an article from ENGADGET.com ("Researchers Want To Store Excess Renewable Energy As Methane", 5 May 2019), renewable energy tends to be inconstant, and so there's been a lot of interest in devising large-scale means of storing energy. Batteries are the go-to solution for now, but they have scaling problems, and are expensive.
Now researchers at Stanford University in California have come up with a big idea: store the energy by converting it to methane, and then burning the methane to, say, drive a gas turbine electric generator when power is needed. The methane would be produced by the microorganism Methanococcus maripaludis, which consumes hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and produces methane. To feed the microorganisms, electrodes driven by renewable energy hydrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen. The resulting methane is tanked, and then burned when needed. It also gives the option of providing hot water to nearby areas.
The scheme likely requires scale to be cost-effective, but the researchers see it as well-suited to scale. The research has received funding from the US Department of Energy, while the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Southern California Gas are providing technical assistance.
* As discussed in a video from CNN.com, London's Gatwick airport is conducting a trial of a car-parking robot named "Stan", in the form of a rolling box with lift arms behind it. Stan rolls up to a car, slides the lift arms under it, then picks up the car and scoots off with it, to insert it into a parking slot.
Users lock their cars before Stan literally picks them up, with the users employing a smartphone to record that the car has been stowed, and later to retrieve it -- though the system can automatically retrieve a car on the arrival of an owner's flight. The car park itself is a secure area, with cars stowed much more space efficiently -- no need to open doors, so they can be tucked in neatly next to each other.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI FACE DIAGNOSTIC: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("AI Face-Scanning App Spots Signs Of Rare Genetic Disorders" by Elie Dolgin, 7 January 2019), researchers have now developed a diagnostic aid named "Face2Gene" -- a smartphone app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to classify distinctive facial features in photos of people with congenital and neurodevelopmental disorders. The app uses the images to zero in on possible diagnoses, providing a list of likely options.
Doctors have been using Face2Gene as an aid; it's not intended to provide definitive diagnoses. Even at that, however, it still poses a number of ethical and legal concerns -- such as ethnic bias in training data sets, and the commercial fragmentation of databases, both of which could hinder the reach of the diagnostic tool.
Researchers at FDNA -- a digital-health company in Boston, Massachusetts -- first trained the system to spot "Cornelia de Lange syndrome" and "Angelman syndrome", which both have distinct facial features. They also taught the model to classify different genetic forms of a third disorder, known as "Noonan syndrome". Working from there, the researchers -- led by FDNA chief technology officer Yaron Gurovich -- fed the system more than 17,000 images of diagnosed cases, covering 216 different syndromes. When then handed new images of people's faces, the app's best diagnostic guess was correct in about 65% of cases; Face2Gene's "top-ten" list contained the right diagnosis about 90% of the time.
FDNA wants to make their technology widely available in time. However, to train its models, FDNA needs data, and so the Face2Gene app was made available for free to healthcare professionals. Karen Gripp -- FDNA's chief medical officer, and a medical geneticist at the Nemours / Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware -- says that many of the users like the app because it gives them a "second opinion" for diagnosing rarely-seen genetic disorders. It can also give a starting point in cases in which a doctor isn't sure what to make of a patient's symptoms, Gripp saying: "It's like a Google search."
Gripp used the algorithm to help diagnose "Wiedemann-Steiner syndrome" in a young girl she treated in 2018. Although a little short for her age, the four-year-old didn't have many of the syndrome's distinguishing physical features, other than the fact she had lost most of her baby teeth, and several adult teeth were already coming in. Gripp had seen case reports describing premature dental growth in children with Wiedemann-Steiner syndrome -- an exceedingly rare disorder, caused by mutations in a gene named KMT2A. To reinforce the diagnosis, Gripp uploaded a photo of her patient to Face2Gene, with Wiedemann-Steiner syndrome appearing in the software's top-hits list.
Gripp later confirmed the girl's diagnosis with a targeted DNA test, but considered the app valuable in narrowing down possibilities, reducing the need for different tests. The program's accuracy is gradually improving as more healthcare professionals upload patient photos. At last count, there were some 150,000 images in its database.
In an unofficial comparison conducted between Face2Gene and clinicians in a 2018 workshop on birth defects, the program outperformed the people. Photos of the faces of ten children with "fairly recognizable" syndromes were handed to attendees, who were asked to diagnose them. In only two instances did more than 50% of the 49 participating clinical geneticists pick the right syndrome. Face2Gene made the right call for seven of the pictures.
Face2Gene is still only as good as its training data set -- and there's a risk, especially where rare disorders that affect only small numbers of people worldwide are concerned, that companies and researchers will begin to hoard and commodify their data sets. In addition, ethnic bias in training data sets that contain mostly Caucasian faces remains a worry. A 2017 study of children with an intellectual disability found that Face2Gene's recognition rate for Down syndrome was 80% among white Belgian children -- but only 37% for black Congolese children.
The solution to capability gaps is to extend the training data set. Face2Gene's accuracy has clearly improved as the data set has been extended. Gurovich says: "We know this problem needs to be addressed, and as we move forward, we're able to have less and less bias."
ED: As commented here before, this implies that the community of interest for the app will have to take ownership of feeding it data. That will demand setting up a system to which everyone in the community can contribute, with quality control being an issue. "Garbage in, garbage out": any system with a large number of contributors will have some who are sloppy, and might corrupt the system. The system itself could screen for submissions that don't seem consistent with the rest, flagging them for review.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* A BILLION HECTARES OF FOREST? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Adding 1 Billion Hectares Of Forest Could Help Check Global Warming" by Alex Fox, 4 July 2019), one response to the threat of climate change has been programs to plant more trees and other vegetation to soak up carbon dioxide -- that matter having been discussed here in the past, last in May 2019. A new analysis suggests that adding about a billion additional hectares (3.85 million square kilometers / 1.49 million square miles) of forest could remove two-thirds of the roughly 300 gigatonnes of carbon humans have added to the atmosphere since the 1800s.
The latest report from the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended adding 1 billion hectares of forests to help deal with climate change. Ecologists Jean-Francois Bastin and Tom Crowther of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and their co-authors wanted to determine if the Earth could support that many more trees, and where they might all be planted.
They inspected almost nearly 80,000 satellite photographs for existing forest coverage, and then categorized the planet according to ten soil and climate characteristics. This identified areas that were generally suitable for different types of forest. After subtracting existing forests and areas dominated by agriculture or cities, they calculated how much of the planet could support more trees.
Their conclusion was that the Earth could naturally support 900 million hectares of additional forest, without sacrificing existing urban or agricultural lands. Those new added trees could sequester 205 gigatonnes of carbon, roughly five times the amount emitted globally in 2018. Along with sequestering carbon, forests provide other benefits, such as biodiversity, improved water quality, and reduced erosion. Based on prices of about 30 cents a tree, Crowther believes the cost would be about $300 billion USD.
Laura Duncanson -- a carbon storage researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park and NASA -- says the study is "an admittedly simplified analysis of the carbon restored forests might capture, and we shouldn't take it as gospel."
Duncanson says NASA has new instruments in space that will use lidars -- laser radars -- to create high-resolution 3D maps of Earth's forests from canopy to floor. She points to the "Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI)", a refrigerator-sized instrument launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in December 2018. While imaging satellites can map forest cover, they can't determine the depth of the forest canopy. According to Duncanson: "GEDI gets you the third dimension." She comments: "With GEDI, we can take this paper as a stepping stone, and inform it with much more accurate carbon estimates. There have always been large uncertainties on large-scale carbon totals, but we have richer data coming soon."
GEDI won't give the complete answer, one big reason being that the ISS orbit restricts its scans to 51 degrees latitude north and south, with no coverage of areas towards the poles. It also can't distinguish tree species, and the mission will only last two years. However, it will pave the way for a stand-alone satellite to do the job.
Artificial intelligence (AI) tech may help. Alessandro Baccini -- a remote sensing scientist at the Woods Hole research institute in Massachusetts -- wants to train machine-learning algorithms to extend carbon estimates into the past and future by using GEDI's carbon maps to calibrate long-term forest-cover data from imaging satellites. He adds that by combining data from GEDI and ICESat 2 -- a NASA lidar satellite that primarily measures ice sheets but has planetary coverage -- could construct a global carbon map. Still, Baccini asks: "Why can't we have a proper mission designed for vegetation that is global?"
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DECARBONIZING THE WORLD (12): Using renewable electricity to provide heat to chemical processes is a straightforward idea; integrating renewables into the chemical processes themselves is a trickier one. Industrial chemists already use electricity to smelt aluminum from bauxite ore and generate chlorine from salt-electron-adding reactions; but currently, most commodity chemicals are themselves made from fossil fuels, transformed with heat and pressure.
It's not hopeless to get fossil fuels out of the loop. Key industrial chemicals such as carbon monoxide (CO) and ethylene can already be made by adding electrons to abundant starting materials, such as CO2 and water. The problem is doing it economically. Of course, that means having plenty of cheap renewable energy, but just how "cheap" depends on the process.
A 2019 paper by Edward Sargent -- a chemist at the University of Toronto in Canada -- and Thomas Jaramillo -- a chemical engineer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California -- examined the costs of synthesizing a range of simple industrial compounds with fossil fuels or renewable electricity. They found that electrosynthesis would be competitive for producing chemical staples such as CO, H2, ethanol, and ethylene if electricity cost 4 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) or less, and if the conversion of electricity to chemical-bond energy was at least 60% efficient.
Some renewable energy systems have reached the 4 cent per kWh level, and costs can be expected to fall further. If it does, more compounds would be within reach. A 2018 analysis by Sargent and other colleagues showed that, if renewable power fell to 2 cents per kWh, that would allow synthesis of formic acid, ethylene glycol, and propanol. Harry Gray -- a chemist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, who has analyzed what's needed to displace fossil fuels with electrosynthesis -- says the papers are "right on the mark", adding: "I think we'll be there within 10 years."
What about 60% conversion efficiency? Some of the simplest processes, those that produce H2 and CO, are already reaching that second benchmark. According to Fleischer, commercial electrolyzers from Siemens and other companies already do better than 60% efficiency in splitting water to produce H2. Siemens uses a well-established technology called "proton-exchange membrane (PEM)" electrolyzers. They involve a voltage applied between two electrodes, one on each side of a polymer membrane, with the voltage splitting water molecules at a catalyst-coated anode into O2, hydrogen ions, and electrons. The membrane only allows hydrogen ions to pass to the other catalyst-coated electrode, the cathode, where they gather electrons to generate H2 gas.
The cost of the H2 produced has fallen rapidly in recent years as the size of electrolyzers has increased to industrial scale. Still, Bill Tumas -- an associate lab director at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado -- says that the cost of the electrolyzers, as well as their component electrode materials and catalysts, needs to drop further to generate H2 at a competitive price.
Opus 12 and other companies also rely on PEM electrolyzers, but add a supplementary catalyst to the cathode to split piped-in CO2 into CO and O2. The CO can be captured and sold for use in chemical manufacturing; or it can be combined with hydrogen ions and electrons generated at the anode to fabricate a range of other building blocks for industrial chemistry, for example gases such as ethylene -- the raw material for certain plastics -- and liquids such as ethanol and methanol. Opus 12 officials say the company can already produce 16 commodity chemicals. It is now working to scale up its reactors to process tons of CO2 per day, it seems to be captured from flue gas from power plants and other industrial sources. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (79): The central failing of the Harding Administration was that it was one of the most corrupt in American history. Harding himself was not exactly corrupt; he was clearly something of a ladies' man, who was believed to have fathered a number of illegitimate children -- with that charge proven in one case by modern DNA testing. His problem with regards to government administration was that he had plenty of disreputable friends, and installed some of them in high government posts.
In 1922, one of Harding's cronies, Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall, leased the Teapot Dome oilfield in Wyoming to a oil-drilling company, without a competitive bid. The transaction might have gone unnoticed; but it was noticed, with a congressional investigation asking: "How did Interior Secretary Albert Fall get so rich so quickly?" Fall ended up being convicted of taking a $100,000 bribe, being fined and doing a year in prison. That wasn't the only scandal during Harding's watch, with his presidency forever tainted as a result.
The constitutional significance of the Teapot Dome scandal is that it led to legislation granting Congress greater oversight powers, and to reform campaign financing:
By that time, Harding was permanently out of office, having died in 1923 while on a political trip. He is believed to have had a heart attack, but tales circulated that his wife, tired of his philandering, poisoned him. There is no evidence to support that idea. He was replaced by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, who then won the election of 1924.
Coolidge was even more focused on cutting taxes and letting business have its own way than Harding. He slashed taxes to the bone, with only a small proportion of the population paying a Federal income tax, and then at a much reduced rate. He was ruthless in cutting spending as well, so the government stayed within its means.
In 1927, the Mississippi River overflowed its banks, resulting in a disastrous flood. Coolidge visited the stricken region, but didn't believe the Federal government should be involved in flood control. Congress passed legislation to that end in 1928 anyway; Coolidge signed it into law, but drew no attention to the signing, and said nothing about it. That was in character, since he was notoriously tight-lipped. It was less that he felt the government shouldn't have regulatory powers, and more that he regarded such powers as appropriate to state governments, not the Federal government.
On the positive side, Coolidge was direct in his support of racial equality. In 1924, he signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted US citizenship to all Native Americans living on reservations -- those living off-reservation were already citizens. However, in that same year, Coolidge somewhat reluctantly signed into law an "Immigration Act" that considerably limited immigration in general, and effectively banned Asian immigration.
One little-noticed innovation of the Coolidge administration was the "Federal Radio Commission (FRC)", established by the Radio Act of 1927. The US government had earlier passed the "Radio Act of 1912", which was focused on regulation of point-to-point communications, with oversight performed by the Commerce Department. With the rise of broadcast radio, the 1912 law was inadequate, with broadcasters transmitting as they pleased. The FRC was introduced to restore order. It would be replaced by the "Federal Communications Commission" in 1934, which would add regulation of the telephone network to its portfolio. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("This Engineered Wood Radiates Heat Into Space" by Robert F. Service, 23 May 2019), air conditioning is energy-intensive, and is a particular drain on resources in hot climates. Now a new composition of wood can help; if used for siding and roofing, it could cut a building's temperature by as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit).
Typically, when materials get hot, they radiate that heat as photons of near infrared (IR) light. The atmosphere is opaque to those photons, which are absorbed, warming the air around the house. In the past two years, researchers have come up plastic films and paints that absorb heat but re-emit is at longer mid-IR wavelengths, which air doesn't absorb, with the photons escaping into space. That's all well and good, but it adds to cost to add the films to wood, and it would be nice if the wood could do it without the films.
Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park, took a close look at wood to see if it could be modified to re-emit heat in the mid-IR. Wood has three main components: cellulose and hemicellulose, which form long strawlike structures, and lignin, which acts as a glue holding the straw strands together. Lignin is a strong emitter of IR light, so Hu and his colleagues knew they had to get rid of it.
The task proved straightforward. They soaked basswood in a solution of hydrogen peroxide, which chops the long lignin molecules into small fragments; the fragments diffuse out of the solution and can be washed away. That done, the researchers used a hot press -- an industrial vise for making wood composites -- to compress the remaining cellulose and hemicellulose components together.
The result was eight times stronger than natural wood, and was white, allowing it to reflect heat; it also radiates heat in the mid-IR. It's not as effective as plastic films, but it's still cool to the touch. The process doesn't sound particularly expensive -- though making shingles out of it may be problematic, since it's flammable, and not as durable as asphalt shingles or other conventional roofing materials.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("The Secret Of Static Electricity? It's Shocking" by Alex Fox, 12 September 2019), people have always known about static electricity. Kids today find out about by rubbing their feet on a thick carpet, and then giving someone a zap. However, scientists are still puzzled as to why certain, but not all materials, pick up static charges when rubbed.
Unlike the electrical currents flowing through a power line, static electricity -- as its name states -- stays put, building up in materials that don't conduct electricity very well, like rubber or plastic. Such insulators are "tribo-electric", accumulating a static charge when rubbed together, sometimes with each other.
In a recent study, researchers were investigating another electrical phenomenon, called "flexo-electricity", which concerns electrical charges concentrated by bending certain materials. In the microscale, even apparently smooth materials are covered with protruding bits; rubbing the material bends the protrusions, concentrating electric charges. It was long suspected that the tribo-electric effect had something to do with some difference between the materials being rubbed together -- but it turns out, it has mostly to do with the surface microstructure. This research could have applications in designing, say, oil refineries to make them safer, or to build more effective tribo-electric generators.
* In somewhat related news, as discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("A Fridge Made From A Rubber Band?" by George Musser, 10 October 2019), it's an interesting little experiment to stretch a rubber band, and hold it to one's lips; it will feel warmer. Let it go, and it will be cooler. This "elastocaloric" effect can transfer heat in much the same way as does compressing or expanding a fluid refrigerant in a fridge or air conditioner.
Now researchers have developed a cooling scheme based on both stretching and twisting a rubber band. Engineering graduate student Wang Run at Nankai University in Tianjin, China, and colleagues compared the cooling power of rubber fibers, nylon and polyethylene fishing lines, and nickel-titanium wires. For each material, they pulled a 3-centimeter length taut in a vise, and then wound it up using a rotary tool. The different fibers warmed up by as much as 15 degrees Celsius (27 degrees Fahrenheit). When the fibers were unwound, they cooled by the same amount.
To investigate the phenomenon, the researchers probed the molecular structure of each fiber using x-ray beams. The mechanical stresses of twisting rearranged molecules into a more ordered state -- but didn't change the net order in the system did not change. The twisting instead results from an increase in the molecular vibrations, meaning a higher temperature.
By twisting and untwisting the fibers in a water bath, the researchers were able to evaluate their efficiency as coolants. For the rubber fiber, they measured a heat exchange of about 20 joules of heat energy per gram -- up to eight times more energy than the rotary tool expended. The other fibers performed about as well. The efficiency is similar to that of standard refrigerants. A refrigerator based on twisting fibers would avoid the use of refrigerant gases, which have tended to be troublesome.
The researchers have gone on to build and test a tiny refrigerator, about the size of a ballpoint pen cartridge, using the "twistocaloric" scheme. They see the technology as not merely being useful for refrigeration, but for other applications as well -- such as strain gauges or mood rings.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MARINE VIRUSES: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Hundreds Of Thousands Of Marine Viruses Discovered In World's Oceans" by Erin I. Garcia de Jesus, 25 April 2019), a survey of marine microbes has revealed that the world's oceans are home to about 200,000 virus species -- two orders of magnitude more than given by an earlier estimate of 15,000 species. A spoonful of seawater is loaded with millions of viruses. Most are harmless to people, but they can infect a variety of marine life such as whales, crustaceans, and bacteria.
Ahmed Zayed -- a microbiologist at the Ohio State University in Columbus, and co-lead author on the study -- says that mapping viral biodiversity will provide a more accurate depiction of what's happening in the ocean and enable researchers to better predict its future.
Researchers collected seawater samples from almost 80 sites around the world between 2009 and 2013, at depths ranging from surface waters to 4,000 meters (13,100 feet). The effort was part of two larger projects, named "Tara Oceans" and "Malaspina", which study carbon dioxide and climate change in Earth's oceans.
Zayed and colleagues analyzed the viral DNA in the samples, to then separate the sequences into "viral populations" -- the closest approximation to species in the viral world. The researchers found nearly 200,000 populations in five ocean zones around the globe. The most diverse communities were in temperate and tropical surface waters, as well as in the Arctic Ocean. The Arctic is the most geographically and politically difficult region to access, and is particularly at risk from climate change.
According to Matthew Sullivan -- another microbiologist at Ohio State University, and senior author on the study -- this new map of virus diversity could allow scientists to manipulate specific areas of the ocean to boost the viral community's ability to move carbon dioxide from shallow waters into the deep ocean. The oceans soak up half of the CO2 that humans pump into Earth's atmosphere; earlier studies have shown that marine viruses help to drive carbon in the ocean's surface waters to the deeps.
Even with this new study, the samplings are spotty; more data is needed. Nonetheless, the new study has been well-received, with one scientist saying researchers "are creating the encyclopedias that we need to look through to understand what we're studying."
* In related science news, as discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("These Tiny Microbes Are Munching Away At Plastic Waste In The Ocean" by Helen Santoro, 20 May 2019), plastic makes up nearly 70% of all ocean litter, creating a threat to aquatic species. Now researchers have come up with microbes that can break down the plastic.
The researchers found out about these microbes by collecting weathered plastic from two different beaches in Chania, Greece. The plastic litter had already been exposed to the Sun, which made it brittle -- which turned out to be necessary to allow the plastic to be attacked by the microbes.
The pieces were either polyethylene -- the usual plastic for grocery bags and plastic bottles -- or polystyrene -- a rigid plastic stereotypically used for plastic eating utensils. The team immersed pieces of both types of plastic in saltwater with either naturally occurring ocean microbes or engineered microbes that could survive off of the carbon in plastic. After five months of observation, the microbes had considerably reduced the weight of both kinds of plastic, both by eating away at it, and by altering the structure of the material that was left. The work suggested that tailored marine microbes might be able to help with the oceanic plastic litter problem -- though obviously, it's not something that would be done without much work, and with considerable caution.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* INDIA FACE RECOGNITION SYSTEM: The government of India has been aggressively working to "digitize" the country's population -- as discussed here in 2017, constructing a national data system that's heavily reliant on biometric ID to help serve the citizens. According to an article from CNN.com ("India Is Trying To Build The World's Biggest Facial Recognition System" by Julie Zaugg, 19 October 2019), the next step in the project is to obtain facial IDs of all 1.37 billion Indians.
India has already made use of facial-recognition technology on a more modest scale. In 2018, Bhuwan Ribhu -- a child labor activist with the Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan -- launched a pilot program to match a police database containing photos of all of India's missing children, with another one containing photos of all the minors living in the country's child care institutions. It took 15 months to get the results, but the effort paid off, Ribhu saying: "We were able to match 10,561 missing children with those living in institutions. They are currently in the process of being reunited with their families."
Most of the children were victims of trafficking, being forced to work in the fields, in garment factories, or in brothels, according to Ribhu. The exercise was made possible by facial recognition technology provided by New Delhi's police. Ribhu says: "There are over 300,000 missing children in India, and over 100,000 living in institutions. We couldn't possibly have matched them all manually."
India's police forces are badly overstretched, with only 144 police officers for every 100,000 citizens -- compared to 318 per 100,000 citizens in the European Union. The authorities have turned to facial recognition technology to help make better use of limited resources. New Delhi's law enforcement agencies adopted the technology in 2018, and it's also being used to police large events and fight crime in a few other states, including Andhra Pradesh and Punjab. India's central government now wants to build the world's largest facial recognition system. When the project is completed, police of the country's 29 states and seven union territories will have access to a single, centralized database.
Currently unnamed, the project would match images from the country's growing network of CCTV cameras against a database containing mug shots of criminals; passport photos; and images collected by agencies, such as the Ministry of Women & Child Development. The platform would also enable searches based on photos uploaded from newspapers, images sent in by the public, or artist sketches of suspected criminals. The system could use surveillance cameras to locate suspects, while security forces would be able to use smartphones to capture faces and compare them to the database, using a dedicated app.
Vendors are now competing to build the system, with the successful bidder likely to be a partnership of a foreign and a local vendor. The schedule is very aggressive, with the system supposedly to be operational eight months after the contract is signed; skeptics suggest 12 months or a year is more reasonable. India already has a national database of all criminals prosecuted in the country, but penetration of CCTV cameras is low -- with 10 CCTV cameras per 1,000 people, compared to 113 in Shanghai and 68 in London. There are very few cameras in rural villages, where 66% of India's population lives.
However, the numbers and capabilities of CCTV cameras in India are growing rapidly, with New Delhi planning to install 330,000 new cameras. Facial recognition cameras were recently introduced in Bangalore airport, and are being trialed in Hyderabad airport, according to Reuters. New Delhi airport also recently started using the technology to speed up security checks. Most railway stations are now equipped with surveillance cameras as well, and the government plans to have them all covered by 2021.
Apar Gupta -- of India's Internet Freedom Foundation -- has concerns over the rapid spread of surveillance technology: "Most citizens will at some point in their life walk through a railway station ... India does not have a data protection law. It is also not planning to adopt a specific legal framework for the new facial recognition system, which means it will essentially be devoid of safeguards."
Gupta worries that the surveillance system will be hooked up to Aadhaar, India's vast biometric database, which contains the personal details of 1.2 billion Indian citizens -- with the result that India will have "a total, permanent surveillance state."
As is true elsewhere, India's law is only awkwardly coming to grips with the security and privacy issues raised by 21st-century surveillance technology. In 2017, India's Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling, which stated that a right to privacy is part of the fundamental rights defined in the country's constitution. The ruling paved the way for the draft "Personal Data Protection Bill", which was presented to the government in 2018, but hasn't been introduced to Parliament yet.
Civil-rights activists had argued that fingerprints and retinal scans collected under Aadhaar violate an individual's right to privacy. They were outraged when, in early 2018, reporters said they were able to buy access to citizens' personal details in Aadhaar for as little as $8 USD. The government responded by adding new security measures. Later in 2018, India's Supreme Court found the database did not violate the right to privacy. However, the court did introduce new restrictions on how Aadhaar information could be used, including measures preventing corporate bodies from demanding data. The issues are far from resolved, however; they won't be resolved for a long time.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DECARBONIZING THE WORLD (11): A related article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Can The World Make The Chemicals It Needs Without Oil?" by Robert F. Service, 19 September 2019) posed the question of what it would take to decarbonize the chemical industry. Hydrocarbons are a fundamental feedstock for chemical synthesis, being used to produce paint, plastics, pesticides, and detergents. By breaking the hydrocarbons in oil and natural gas into simpler compounds and then assembling those building blocks, scientists long ago learned to fabricate a vast range of useful products.
In addition, fossil fuels aren't just the feedstock for chemical synthesis, they also produce the heat and pressure needed to accomplish it. The result is that industrial chemistry accounts for 14% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Now, growing numbers of scientists and, more significantly, companies are realizing things must change. Their vision for the future is that renewable electricity will split abundant molecules such as CO2, water, oxygen (O2), and nitrogen into reactive fragments; more renewable electricity would then help plug those chemical pieces together to again fabricate the products on which society has become dependent. Daniel Kammen -- a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley -- comments: "This is very much a topic at the forefront right now."
Chemists in academia, at commercial startups, and at some industrial giants are testing processes, in some cases building pilot plants, that that use solar and wind energy, plus air and water, as feedstocks. Nicholas Flanders -- CEO of one contender, a startup named Opus 12 -- puts it simply: "We're turning electrons into chemicals."
Opus 12, based in a Berkeley office park, has designed a device the size of a washing machine that uses electricity to convert water and CO2 from the air into fuels and other molecules -- no oil needed. At the other end of the commercial scale is Siemens, the German manufacturing conglomerate based in Munich, which is selling large-scale electrolyzers that use electricity to split water into O2 and hydrogen (H2). Even some petroleum companies, such as Shell and Chevron, are tinkering with ways to turn renewable power into fuels.
Maximilian Fleischer, chief expert in energy technology at Siemens, says that the shift from industrial chemistry to fossil fuels to renewables "will not happen in 1 to 2 years." Renewables are still a small player in energy, but he sees them as the future, adding: "It's a general trend that is accepted by everybody" in the chemical industry.
The growth curve of renewables justifies that confidence. In 2018, the world surpassed 1 terawatt (TW) of installed solar and wind capacity; the second TW is expected by mid-2023, at just half the cost of the first, and the pace is likely to accelerate. One recent analysis suggests declining prices for renewable generation could lead to 30 to 70 TW of solar energy capacity alone by 2050, enough to cover a majority of global energy needs.
According to the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the cost of utility-scale solar power should drop by 50% by 2050, and the cost of wind power by 30%. In sunny places where renewables are well-established, such as Southern California, at midday electricity supplies can exceed demand. Of course, the price then falls dramatically, with utilities sometimes even paying customers to take up the load. The Right likes to mock renewable energy -- but whether they like it or not, it's the future.
The most obvious use of renewable power in the chemical industry is to provide heat to drive industrial processes. In a recent paper, Sebastian Wismann and Ib Chorkendorff of the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby and colleagues reported redesigning a conventional fossil fuel-powered reactor that makes H2 from methane and steam to run on electricity. In their new reactor, electricity flowing through an iron alloy tube generates heat from electrical resistance, generating temperatures as high as 800 degrees Celsius (1,500 degrees Fahrenheit). At such elevated temperatures, the methane and steam react, producing hydrogen from methane with high efficiency. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: I download music videos from YouTube every morning, convert them into MP3 files for my listening enjoyment. One of the channels I like is 8 BIT UNIVERSE, which is devoted to "chiptunes" -- music played as if on a 1980s computer, the genre sometimes being called "bleep-bloop music". 8 BIT UNIVERSE churns out at least one music video every day, and has over 850,000 subscribers.
Chiptunes are fun, as long as they are fun; music that isn't snappy or upbeat tends to be obnoxious. 8 BIT UNIVERSE does movie and TV themes, anime and game themes, and notably pop music -- tracking contemporary pop tunes closely, but also covering older pop music as well. I find some of their renditions of classic rock tunes fun, sometimes when I didn't like the original version very much.
With Halloween coming up, 8 BIT UNIVERSE focused on Halloween themes, for example THE MUNSTERS TV show theme; and then the fun, corny 1962 Halloween hit MONSTER MASH -- which works perfectly as a chiptune. On reading the comments for MONSTER MASH, one poster said that it was "the anthem of mathematicians everywhere!" Huh? What? I was mystified, but another poster explained:
THEY DID THE MATH! The monster math! THEY DID THE MATH! It was a monster graph! THEY DID THE MATH! They calculated in a flash! THEY DID THE MATH! THEY! DID! THE! MONSTER! MATH!
"Oh." All professions have their inside jokes.
* Back on the home front, I finally had to call it quits on my Oculus Go VR headset. I had heard that, after a time, people tend to work through VR sickness, but I found out it was just getting worse -- I would get nauseous right away. I mothballed the headset, and deleted my Oculus account, flushing the few games I had bought along with it. I'm going to visit my nephew for his college graduation in May, and I'll give the headset to him.
I was puzzled at my troubles with the headset, since I'm not particularly prone to motion sickness. I think I'll invest in augmented reality goggles one of these days; I doubt that augmented reality will cause me as much trouble. What I really want is something for activity games, which I really enjoy. For the time being, I'm getting good use out of my Xbox 360 / Kinect. I think I'll get a bigger TV for it, I have plenty of pocket money in my budget.
I also got curious to see if the old online Flash games were still around, or if they had been replaced by HTML5. They have indeed, as demonstrated by the website:
https://www.crazygames.com-- which has over 8,000 HTML5 games on it. I've only sampled a few, but on the basis of the sample, some of the games are slick. There's much more to explore there.
* As far as the Real Fake News for October went, the usual turmoil coming out of the White House took a grotesque turn on 6 October, when -- following a conversation between US President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan -- Trump ordered US troops out of northeastern Syria, where they had been supporting America's Kurdish allies. On 9 October, the Turks began an offensive into the region, the goal being to set up a "buffer zone" from which the Kurds were excluded, with Syrian refugees living in Turkey relocated into it.
There was a bizarre flurry of activity from the White House in response, with Trump making loud noises to tell the Turks to back off. They did after a few days, but apparently only because they had accomplished their objectives. Americans were treated to videos of Kurds being summarily executed by Turkish militias, and of the vehicles of American troops being stoned by Kurds as they pulled out. It appears that the military's reaction to the order was fury from the top down. It is not clear if Trump's outrage at Turkey's action was sincere -- or if he had been so ignorant as to not realize the obvious consequences of his decision.
That was overshadowed by the move in Congress towards impeachment of President Donald Trump. The House Democrats moved into aggressive investigation mode, slapping the White House with subpoena after subpoena. The subpoenas were all dismissed, of course, but that was clearly expected. The bottom line was that Trump is not offering a defense as the case builds up against him, which is not going to help him much when it comes to a vote.
The Trump White House has, as a defensive tactic, made a big fuss about the fact that the House didn't hold a vote to move forward on the impeachment investigation. That's nonsense, the House makes its own rules, and neither the executive nor the judiciary has much to say about it. The vote would be a foregone conclusion:
In short, holding a vote would simply underline what was already known. In addition, the demand for a vote by the White House was nothing more than stalling for time; if a vote were held, the White House would not be a bit more cooperative, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew it.
In the same way, on 23 October, a gang of House Republicans, led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, barged into the rooms in which the hearings were being conducted, with a disruptive ruckus following. The intruders were demanding that the investigations be conducted in public, which was really no more than trying to derail them -- after all, how many criminal investigations are conducted in public? The meetings were confidential, because the investigators didn't want witnesses coordinating their stories, and the investigation touched on classified matters. Indeed, were they conducted in public, the White House would be able to, and would, plead national security to be uncooperative.
Besides, there are plenty of Republicans in the investigation as well, so the claim that Democrats were plotting a "coup" was nonsense. However, after the Gaetz's "uprising", such as it was, Speaker Pelosi finally went ahead and scheduled a vote, knowing perfectly well that the Republicans would just find more things to nitpick about. Whatever, the vote would help show they're not really serious. As far as the complaints about a lack of transparency went, the Democrats have got into the habit of replying: "We'd really like to see Trump's tax returns."
* In the meantime, the Trump machine continued to try to smear Joe Biden, through his son Hunter Biden. That is going nowhere; Hunter Biden did indeed have a checkered past, but there was nothing in it tolink his father to illegal activity. That was not the case with Donald Trump, who had sent him minions around the world to "research" -- that is, fabricate -- conspiracy theories to smear his enemies. The fact that the transcript of the phone conversation with Ukrainian President Zelensky confirms all the accusations of illegal activity has been simply dismissed with a vehement: "There's nothing there!"
Oh, but there is something there. CNN conducted an interview with J.W. Verret -- a George Mason University law professor who advised Trump in the pre-transition phase of his presidency -- who said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
People have made the analogy to the Nixon-era scandals and Nixon's resignation, but this is a lot worse than that. Nixon was a patriot. Of all the crazy things he did, he never would have accepted help from a foreign power for his own personal interest in an election, particularly one that would compromise the US's strategic interests. This is much worse, and I think momentum continues toward impeachment.
... I think it's unfortunate that Speaker Pelosi took this long. I think she frankly empowered Trump to do this second major violation.
END QUOTE
Verret also urged Democrats to focus on both the Ukraine scandal and the findings in the Mueller report when dealing with the impeachment inquiry, saying they were interrelated:
BEGIN QUOTE:
They're both instances of a president blatantly seeking foreign support to help in his own election. In fact, it's the same playbook. He got away with it. He immediately pulled the same playbook off the shelf. I've seen this in white collar criminal work that I've done, where someone starts to plan the next Ponzi scheme while they're in prison serving for the last one. This is the same sort of deal.
END QUOTE
Verret is entirely correct that the Mueller report needs to be made one of the pillars of the case for impeachment, and it's likely it will be. His claim that Nancy Pelosi "empowered" Donald Trump to commit more crimes, however, seems off the mark. The Mueller report did not give the Democrats ammunition to make a persuasive case for impeachment of the president; attempting to do so under that circumstance was as likely, or more likely, to do the Democrats harm, instead of Trump. It might be better said that Pelosi gave Trump more rope, and now he's done a good job of hanging himself. The Democrats had to move on the issue: they couldn't possibly let such unethical conduct by a president slide.
The question is -- will the Republicans? Impeachment is certain to make its way through the House of Representatives. All it requires is a majority vote, the Democrats have the majority; the House GOP are almost certain to vote NO, though it will be meaningless. It won't be meaningless once it falls into the lap of the Senate GOP, since Trump's future hangs on their vote. They can either vote YES on impeachment, and inflame Republican voters, or vote NO, and approve corruption. Approving corruption would be fatal to the party over the long run.
Trump's conduct is appearing increasingly unhinged. On 16 October, House Democrats had a meeting at the White House with Trump, with Trump by all accounts throwing a massive tantrum, a "meltdown". The Democrats walked out. The specifics are not too clear, but it's perfectly believable. Later, Trump tweeted a photo of Nancy Pelosi at the meeting, claiming it showed her in a meltdown herself -- when all it showed was a woman, standing in a room full of seated men, emphatically speaking her mind to Trump. Nobody with sense could see anything unflattering to her in it. Apparently, she was telling Trump that with him, "all roads lead to Putin."
That accusation is true -- it doesn't make any sense, but it's still true. The next day, 17 October, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was giving a briefing to reporters, with one saying, in response to a comment by Mulvaney: "What you're describing is a quid pro quo." Mulvaney blandly replied:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We do that all the time. Did he also mention to me the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about it. But that's it. That's why we held up the money ... I have news for everybody: Get over it. There's going to be political influence in foreign policy.
END QUOTE
The bit about the DNC server related to a subtext of Trump's Ukraine story, involving dubious tales of a Democratic National Committee server in the Ukraine -- don't ask for details, it doesn't make sense. In any case, Mulvaney had flatly confirmed that, yes, the Trump Administration had pressure Ukraine to help smear Trump's enemies. A cartoonist summarized Mulvaney's response: "We're corrupt. Get over it."
The photo of Pelosi confronting Trump, incidentally, is one for the history books: it might be in the running for the Pulitzer Prize. Inspection of the details show some of the participants in the meeting obviously not enjoying being there. Seated directly to the right of Trump was Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; his hands were clasped on the table, and he was staring at the tabletop, as if trying to wall himself off.
Trump did score a clear win on 27 October, when he announced that US special forces had hunted down and killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a top Islamic State official, in Syria the day before. Trump crowed about the killing, and it was hard to begrudge him that. However, that evening he went to a World Series game at the Nationals Park stadium in Washington DC -- to be loudly booed by the fans, who chanted: "LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!"
That wasn't really surprising, Washington DC having heavily voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and most of the citizens never having been fans of Trump. However, it did seem to surprise Trump, with a video showing him clearly taken aback -- it was only a momentary lapse, and he quickly regained his normal blustery demeanor.
Given the high noise level, it's easy to forget the rest of the world exists. It hasn't gone away, of course, with one issue lurking, almost invisibly, in the shadows: Iran has been very quiet, which suggests a nasty surprise from their corner in the not-too-distant future.
* Trump's fans remain unshakeable in their faith in him, and insist the future belongs to them. During October, Moody's Analytics, a reputable analysis firm, released a study that said, given the strong economy, the 2020 election was "Trump's to lose". That was alarming -- four more years of Trump would be calamitous -- but on consideration, the Moody's report didn't bring anything new to the party. It was predicated on the idea that a good economy is a big boost to an incumbent president's popularity. That's true under normal circumstances, but these are not normal circumstances.
Trump just barely won in 2016, losing the popular vote on low voter turnout. Since entering office, he has continued his 2016 campaign, cultivating the same voters, while deliberately antagonizing everyone else. Voter turnout was strong in 2018, for a mid-term election, and it is easy to believe it will be very strong in 2020. Moody's admitted in their study that strong voter turnout would change the equation.
There is the possibility that Trump might lose the popular vote and win the electoral vote again; but the odds are against it. There have been over 50 US elections, with only five of them overturning the popular vote -- so on that basis, it's a one-in-ten throw. Worse for Trump, no one president has overturned the popular vote twice.
Trump still might win, no ruling that out, and no forgetting it: hope for the best, expect the worst. Much is predicated on who the Democrats nominate in the 2020 primary election. As for myself, I've given up concern over that matter. Yes, I have preferences, but all I can do is vote in the Colorado primary, and otherwise I have no control over the outcome. Whoever is nominated, I will vote for that person without hesitation. As they say on Twitter: #VoteBlueNoMatterWho. My course is fixed; my life is simplified thereby.
* Thanks to a reader for a donation this last month. It is much appreciated.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE