DayVectors

* 21 entries including: 5th information revolution (series), Arab muddle (series), return to Venus, new oilseeds, a conscious universe, 2022 prospect.

[MON 31 JAN 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 5

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: An editorial from ECONOMIST.com ("Russia's Roulette", 29 January 2022), inspected Russian President Vladimir Putin's maneuverings against Ukraine and considered his options. Does he intend to attack? Or is he bluffing to extract concessions?

The most drastic possibility would be a full-scale invasion, the goal being to crush the Ukrainian state, and install a regime friendly to Russia. That would be very difficult and expensive, in terms of both casualties and sanctions. A military campaign would likely have more modest objectives -- one plausible scenario being that Russia would "save" Kremlin-backed separatists in Donbas, an eastern separatist region of Ukraine, from the "wicked" Ukrainians, while hammering Ukrainian forces with air and missile strikes.

Even such a "small" campaign would have risks, first and foremost that a small war might not stay small. It might also not yield an outcome to Putin's liking. He is unhappy about Ukraine's Westward drift, the Russians raising loud objections about the idea of Ukraine becoming part of NATO. Having the Poland and the Baltics in NATO was bad enough, from their point of view, but Ukraine in NATO would be much worse. However, might a small war accelerate that drift instead of retard it, without doing much to impair Ukraine's military capabilities?

A limited conflict would still mean tough sanctions on Russia, with its banks penalized and access to Western technology limited. The Russian oligarchy would be constrained in its movements and actions abroad. The Russian economy has been in decline; sanctions would accelerate that decline. There is also the lurking possibility of a massive cyber-attack on Russia. Western cyber-fighters have long strained at the leash in the face of Russian cyber-provocations, and are eager to show how much damage they can do in return.

Of course, such a demonstration of aggression would encourage NATO to beef up military power in the East. Sweden and Finland might join the alliance as well. Putin clearly wants to challenge NATO, but he could end up simply reinforcing it. In the meantime, a military campaign would create global economic chaos that would not benefit Putin. He clearly believes his actions are to his advantage, but rash action could instead undermine his regime. The best, if not the only, outcome, would be for the West to offer comforting but insubstantial concessions -- and for Putin to accept them and declare victory. "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!"

* There's a great deal of "pandemic weariness" out there, and the arrival of the highly contagious Omicron variant has made it worse. However, there is cause for thinking that we're getting out of the woods now. One reason is that the contagiousness of Omicron means that it climbs rapidly to a peak, infecting everyone it can, and then runs out of steam, to decline rapidly. This is what has happened in South Africa, where it apparently originated.

OK, there's obviously much more to the story, but a Dr. Tom Frieden -- previously a CDC director under the Obama Administration -- gave a report on Twitter saying that things may well be looking up.

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We are entering the post-COVID era, where it will be a nuisance but, given widespread exposure, yearly vaccinations, and antviral drugs, not the really dangerous threat that it was. There is also the interesting possibility that, over time, COVID-19 will mutate into a strain that is highly contagious but not troublesome. We will then have learned to live with it.

* This last week, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced his retirement. It was expected; Breyer had been under pressure to do so, on worries that the Republicans would derail a Biden nomination to the Supreme Court if they regained control of the Senate. Joe Biden had announced during his election campaign that he would nominate a black woman to replace Breyer, and quickly moved to do so.

There was a shrill outpouring of complaint from the Right, saying that the selection should be on the basis of competence -- as if someone without the best qualifications would be selected -- and not on race and gender. A video clip made the rounds in response, with Ronald Reagan on campaign announcing he would appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, to later appoint Sandra Day O'Connor. The nutjobs didn't shut up, but they kept getting Reagan shoved in their faces after that.

In even less substantial news, fashion designer Stella McCartney -- daughter of Sir Paul -- designed a blue-black polka-dot pantsuit for Minnie Mouse, to wear at Disneyland Paris. Minnie, of course, has always worn polka-dot skirts.

Hillary Clinton tweeted: "Tres chic!" What? Oh right, pantsuits, Hillary. There was some objection from the nutjob Right, not merely against the connection to Hillary, but also because -- somehow -- Minnie trying something new in fashion was supposed to represent "cancel culture" against something or other. I thought in reply: They'll get over this one quickly.

[FRI 28 JAN 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (13)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (13): In the era of the first generation of solid-state computers, batch operating systems predominated -- but other ideas emerged. In 1959 Christopher Strachey in the UK and John McCarthy in the United States independently came up with a concept they called "time-sharing", in which a single computer handled tasks in parallel. The essential idea was that, in a batch OS, some tasks might end up, say, waiting on a printer to handle output; given the value of computer time, it made sense to run another program in parallel.

In the meantime, JCR Licklider of MIT began to promote the idea of "interactive computing", the idea that a computer user or users could sit down at a computer and interact with it on an ongoing basis. Licklider was thinking in terms of hooking up a teletypewriter, with the user being in the "driver's seat", running jobs on the computer interactively. That was not at all the way a batch OS worked. It was not a completely new idea; the pioneering Whirlwind I vacuum-tube computer had operated in such an interactive fashion.

A prototype interactive time-sharing system was running by late 1961, having been developed by Fernando Corbato and Robert Jano at MIT. It ran on an IBM 709 computer, handling three users at IBM "Flexowriter" teletypes. The 709 was a late vacuum-tube computer; Corbato wanted to go on to build a better time-sharing system, named the "Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS)", but he needed to get his hands on a more powerful solid-state computer to do the job right.

In the meantime, Licklider had been put in charge of the US government's "Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)", which was set up by the Eisenhower Administration in 1957 to work on "blue sky" research projects for the Pentagon that the armed services would think too speculative to fund. It would later be renamed "DARPA", with the "D" standing for "defense", emphasizing its military focus. One early focus of ARPA was time-sharing and interactive computing; ARPA backed the CTSS effort, which evolved into Project MAC, which went online in 1963.

Other interactive time-shared systems soon emerged. They were accompanied by new programming languages, most notably the "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC)" -- invented in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. It was designed for college students, to be run on time-shared systems, and to be easy to use, hence the name BASIC. By modern standards, it was extremely crude, but it was leading-edge when it was introduced.

The early time-shared systems were generally ad-hoc efforts, leading to work to create a proper time-shared operating system. Driven by funding from ARPA and Project MAC, MIT, Bell Labs, American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), and General Electric -- which hadn't dropped out of the computer business at that time -- worked to develop a robust time-sharing system. AT&T dropped out, but the effort continued, resulting in the "Multiplexed Information & Computing Service (MULTICS)" OS, running on the GE 645, in 1965.

The idea behind MULTICS was to create an "information utility service" that could provide computing resources to all users in an urban area. It was supposed to support hundreds of users, on a machine that was -- again -- much less powerful than a budget modern smartphone. In those days, however, software was much simpler and more compact, with programs put together in a (generally) careful and handcrafted fashion.

MULTICS hardly took the world by storm. It was overly ambitious and immature at introduction -- one problem being its dependence on the PL/I programming language, which was late and never worked very well. GE and Bell Labs dropped out, leaving MIT to get MULTICS to work. Honeywell finally adopted it for commercial use, and it was in service almost to the end of the century. However, its primary importance was that its good ideas inspired many OS designers, while its deficiencies made them interested in designing something better. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 27 JAN 22] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As reported by an article from NEWATLAS.com, ("Sukhoi Shows Off Checkmate 5th-Gen Fighter To Compete With F-35" by David Szondy, 26 July 2021), during the Moscow MAKS-21 airshow in July 2021, Russian aircraft manufacturer Sukhoi revealed a new air-superiority jet fighter, the "Checkmate Su-75" -- its name indicating that it is intended to compete with the US Lockheed Martin F-35. The F-35 is an impressive aircraft, but it costs about $100 million USD; the Su-79 will sell for about $30 million USD.

The Checkmate is a stealthy, delta-wing light tactical fighter. Although most modern Russian jet fighters have twin engines, the Su-79 differs in having a single vectored-thrust engine -- presumably a Saturn Izdeliye 30 or some other Saturn AL41F afterburning bypass turbojet derivative. The fighter has twin canted tailfins; a built-in cannon; an internal weapons bay for five air-to-air missiles; an advanced passive detection system and electronic warfare system; an active-array radar; and an auxiliary power turbine.

The Su-75 can fly at sustained supersonic speeds of Mach 1.8 (2,150 KPH / 1,335 MPH / 1,160 KT), and has a range of over 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles / 1,515 NMI). It has a "glass cockpit" with an artificial intelligence flight assistant, and built-in diagnostic system.

Fight test is expected to begin in 2023, with production to start in 2027. Drone, two-seat, and carrier-based variants are in consideration. However, this being an export aircraft, full development is contingent on finding buyers.

* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Honeywell Reveals APU-Based Hybrid-Electric Power Plan" by Guy Norris, 8 March 2021), with hybrid-electric aircraft being a "big new thing", aircraft engine makers are scrambling to provide solutions. For an example, Honeywell is developing a 1-megawatt (MW) turbogenerator (TBG) based on the company's HGT1700 auxiliary power unit (APU).

The new TBG, which is in testing, is about 2.5 times more powerful than the company's first HTS900 turboshaft-based turbogenerator system, announced in 2019. The new generator, which weighs 127 kilograms (280 pounds), builds on lessons learned during the design and test of the smaller design -- as well as from a 1-MW generator that Honeywell developed for DARPA's XV-24A LightningStrike Vertical Take-off & Landing (VTOL) hybrid electric X-plane.

Although the Aurora-developed XV-24A was canceled in 2018, Honeywell continued to work on the generator, which was the basis for integrated 200-kilowatt (kW) units unveiled along with the HTS900 in 2019. Designed to achieve an efficiency of 98% compared with 92% for traditional aircraft generators, the XV-24A unit was also very compact, to reduce weight and bulk of aircraft carriage while providing enough power to fly the aircraft.

The new TBG is based on an APU developed for the Airbus A350 XWB airliner. It is a response to what Honeywell sees as a shifting market trend toward more demanding power needs for electric aviation, particularly for nearer-term cargo applications. Honeywell's earlier TBG efforts didn't get much of a response, but now the hybrid-electric market has begun to surge, with a number of cargo and passenger vehicle projects being started for missions requiring greater payloads and longer ranges.

For example, UK-based Faradair Aerospace is working with Honeywell to develop the "Bio Electric Hybrid Aircraft (BEHA)" hybrid, Honeywell having signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on systems and a TBG unit. The BEHA is a triple box wing concept -- a triplane, effectively -- designed to take off and land in less than 300 meters (985 feet), being able to operate off stretches of roadway.

It will be of composite construction and will have a wingspan of 17 meters (55 feet 9 inches). It will feature retractable bicycle landing gear plus wingtip outriggers, and will have underwing hardpoints for external stores.

Powered by a 1,195-kW (1,600-SHP) turbine engine and a 500-kW electric motor driving a contra-rotating ducted fan, the BEHA will take off using primarily battery power, with the turbine engine being used for sustained cruise mode. Speed is given as 370 KPH (230 MPH / 200 KT), with a range of 1,850 kilometers (1,150 miles / 1,000 NMI).

It will be able to carry 18 passengers, three LD3 cargo containers, or 5 tonnes (5.5 tons) of payload. It will be easily converted from passenger to cargo carriage, and will have the capability of being operated as a drone. A prototype is to fly in 2024, with certification is expected in 2025. All-electric and pure drone variants are being planned as well. We'll see what happens with it.

* There's been a lot of interest in "unpiloted combat aerial vehicles (UCAV)", or simply put, attack drones, as of late. According to an article from JANES.com ("Baykar Makina Unveils MIUS UCAV Concept" by Cem Devrim Yaylali, 26 July 2021), the Turks are now getting into the game, with drone manufacturer Baykar Makina revealing concepts for a "National Unmanned Aircraft System", or "MIUS" as rendered in Turkish.

As revealed, the MIUS features a stealthy tailless, blended wing-body design, with forward canards, twin canted tailfins and no tailplane, and air intakes on the side of the fuselage. Although details haven't been released, the take-off weight is expected to be in the 3,500 to 4,500 kilogram (7,715 to 9,920 pound) range. It will be able to carry up to 1,500 kilograms (3,300 pounds) of payload in internal weapons bays, and on underwing stores pylons for missions where stealth is not needed.

The MIUS will feature artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent fleet autonomy technologies, allowing several drones to operate independently, or fly in support of piloted fighter aircraft. It will be able to operate from helicopter landing ships, with the MIUS presumably featuring short-take-off capability. Combat roles will include close air support, suppression and destruction of enemy air defenses, and air-to-air combat. The first prototype is to fly in 2023. It is not clear what support the Turkish government is providing for the effort.

[WED 26 JAN 22] ARAB MUDDLE (9)

* ARAB MUDDLE (9): The Arab Spring seemed like a breath of fresh air, with the prospect of democratization in a region governed by authoritarians and autocrats. Even at the time, there was plenty of cause for suspicion that it might not work out well.

Nowhere is that more evident than Egypt. Egypt is physically and culturally the center of the Arab world, rooted in being the home of one of the first civilizations. Egyptians are proud of their history, sometimes calling their country "umm ad-dunya", or "mother of the world". Egypt is also the most populous Arab state.

From early in the postwar era, Gamal Abdel Nasser was arguably the most prominent voice in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood was born in Egypt, the Arab League is based there, and Egypt drove the struggle against Israel from the beginning. Ironically, Egypt also led the drive towards accommodation with Israel, when in 1979 Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, signed a peace treaty with the Zionist state -- which did much to lead to his assassination.

Sadat more positively pushed economic liberalization, and shifted the country away from the Soviet Union and statist policies towards America. Hosni Mubarak, who followed Sadat in the presidency, showed no interest in redefining Egypt, except as a police state to keep himself in power. The economic order became one of crony capitalism; corruption, and an effort to create an inherited presidency led to his downfall after 30 years in power. Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the current president, came to power in a coup after smashing the short-lived Brotherhood regime. He has little more vision than Mubarak did -- certainly no interest in leading the Arab world, in the way Nasser did.

He does have his hands full. There are over 100 million Egyptians, and the population is one of the fastest-growing in the world: it has doubled since 1987, and despite attempts to lower the fertility rate -- it is now 3.3 children per woman, as compared with 5 in the 1980s -- the United Nations estimates that the population will reach 160 million by 2050. Egypt is a big country, half again as big as Texas, but most of it is uninhabitable, with 95% of Egyptians living on 5% of its land. Efforts to build new cities in the desert have not gone well. Climate change will not help matters.

The government trumpets points to strong GDP growth of 5.3% in 2018 and 5.6% in 2019. Even in 2020, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy grew by 3.6%. However, the economy is skewed by an emphasis on oil and gas production. Not only is the future there problematic, but it does little to provide jobs for the unemployed, who are about 10% of the population and a quarter of the young. Almost a third of % of Egyptians fell below the official poverty line of $55 USD a month at the end of 2020.

Worse, the Army has a stranglehold on the economy, running everything from the cement industry to fertilizer plants and a huge fish farm. Sisi plays up such exercises to portray himself as a national developer. One of his advisers suggests that Egyptians since the time of the pharaohs have admired leaders who build big things. Accordingly, one of the other big projects is the new city rising in the deserts east of Cairo.

Egyptians often call Cairo "Masr", the Arabic name for Egypt itself: Cairo, for many practical purposes, is Egypt. One in four Egyptians live in greater Cairo, an urban sprawl that stretches more than 40 kilometers (25 miles) from its historic center. It is a dynamic, chaotic city in a process of rapid change. Some of the reconstruction is clearly useful, with new roads helping to tame Cairo's notorious traffic jams. However, many Egyptians see authoritarian goals in the reconstruction, which turning Cairo into a bigger city that is easier to control. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 25 JAN 22] BACK TO VENUS

* BACK TO VENUS: Exploration of the planet Venus has been stalled for decades. The last time the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) sent a probe to the planet was in 1989, with the launch of the Magellan radar-mapping orbiter; it operated until 1994. Now NASA is planning two new missions to Venus, to be launched in the 2028:2030 timeframe:

• "Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, & Spectroscopy (VERITAS)"
  
  
• "Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, & Imaging Plus (DAVINCI+)"

The two missions are being developed under the agency's Discovery program, a line of relatively low-cost planetary science missions. Each mission will get approximately $500 million USD for development, excluding launch costs and international contributions.

Development of VERITAS will be led at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The VERITAS orbiter will carry two instruments. The primary payload is an X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which will greatly improve the 3D topographic maps produced by the Magellan mission. The VERITAS SAR will produce data with a vertical accuracy of about 5 meters (16 feet), and a horizontal resolution of about 30 meters (100 feet). About a quarter of the planet will be imaged to a resolution of about 15 meters (50 feet).

The orbiter will perform "repeat passage interferometry" -- in essence, taking radar images separated by about seven months, to then check deformation between the images. This could reveal volcanic deformations, such as a caldera inflating or deflating, or faulting deformations.

The second payload on VERITAS will be a spectrometer to examine the composition of the Venusian surface. The spectrometer system will be able to detect thermal and chemical signatures of recent volcanic eruptions, and search for water that could be vented out of Venus's interior through volcanoes.

VERITAS will also perform gravity and radio science studies, using radio tracking to map the planet's gravity field, helping to identify internal structure, and will measure atmospheric properties through radio occultation. The orbiter will carry a deep space atomic clock built by JPL as a technology experiment. The atomic clock will help enable autonomous spacecraft maneuvers and support the radio science observations.

The spacecraft bus for VERITAS will be manufactured by Lockheed Martin. The mission's radar will be developed by JPL in partnership with ASI, the Italian space agency. Italy will also provide the mission's high-gain antenna. DLR, the German space agency, is providing the infrared spectrometer, and will assist in radar data processing. The French space agency, CNES, will provide components for the spacecraft's Ka-band communications system.

DAVINCI+ will be managed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It will include a flyby platform that will drop a probe, about a meter across, into the atmosphere of Venus. The probe will deploy a parachute and measure atmospheric conditions as it descends, to touch down on the planet's surface. The probe will be built in-house by NASA Goddard, while Lockheed Martin will supply the aeroshell, heat shield, and the carrier spacecraft.

The probe will be a titanium sphere housing a mass spectrometer and a tunable laser spectrometer to measure the composition of the atmosphere. It will also have instruments to measure pressure, temperature, winds, and accelerations during descent, while a near-infrared camera system peering out the bottom of the probe will take pictures of the planetary surface. The entire descent will take about an hour, targeting an area of Venus named Alpha Regio, a mountainous region first discovered in the 1960s using Earth-based radar observations. Data from the probe will be relayed to Earth by the flyby platform -- meaning that, even though the probe may continue to send data after landing on Venus, the data stream will stop once the platform gets out of range.

The DAVINCI+ flyby platform will have its own science instruments, including a suite of ultraviolet and near-infrared cameras to track cloud motion and measure thermal emissions from the surface. Assuming DAVINCI+ launches in 2029, the mission will perform two flybys of Venus in 2030 before the returning to the planet in 2031 to release the descent probe.

The two NASA missions will be complemented by a third from the European Space Agency (ESA). The "EnVision" Venus orbiter will carry an instrument suite including:

• A NASA-built synthetic aperture radar, named VenSAR, which will obtain surface imagery with resolutions of 10 to 30 meters (33 to 100 feet). It will perform close-up inspections of regions of interest.
  
  
• A "Subsurface Sounding Radar (SRS)", which will penetrate into the top kilometer of the subsurface, and search for underground layering and buried boundaries.
  
  
• Three spectrometers (VenSpec-U, VenSpec-H and VenSpec-M), operating in the ultraviolet and infrared, to map trace gases, including searching for volcanic gas plumes, above and below the clouds, and map surface composition.
  
  
• A gravity and radio science investigation.

EnVision is currently scheduled to launch in 2031.

[MON 24 JAN 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 4

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Last week was a bad week for Donald Trump, the blows coming in on a nearly daily basis:

• On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia "Tish" James announced that her civil investigation into the Trump Organization showed the company had misstated the value of several assets in tax disclosures and financial statements used to secure loans. James was also after a court order to compel two of the Trump kids, Ivanka and Don JR, to testify.
  
  
• On Wednesday, the Supreme Court agreed to allow the House 1-6 Committee to get their hands on 700 relevant documents from the Trump White House.
  
  
• On Thursday, the 1-6 Committee politely requested that Ivanka Trump answer a few questions. Well, it was only sort of a request; NO will not be an acceptable answer.
  
  
• Also on Thursday, District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County, Georgia asked for a special grand jury as part of her efforts to investigate Trump's attempt to set aside Georgia's 2020 election results. She requested the special grand jury because a "significant number of witnesses and prospective witnesses have refused to cooperate with the investigation absent a subpoena requiring their testimony." The special grand jury is for investigation only, but Willis is moving toward an indictment.

There is a faction that doubts that Trump will be held accountable in the end, one reason being that a good portion of Americans don't care about his criminal acts. The response to that is: so what? Once Trump falls under the shadow of the American justice system, his fate is not really up to a vote any longer. Sure, maybe a Republican will become president in 2025 and decide to pardon him -- but there's no saying how the 2024 election will turn out, and no saying if Donald Trump will really be a thing then, or even still alive. Trump was always something of a fad; now, is he anything more than a has-been?

* Incidentally, Trump has been complaining that the investigators are now going after "children". Ahem: Ivanka is 40 years old. Trump also once again complained about wind turbines in an interview with Sean Hannity:

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Same old tune, different verse. Incidentally, some Republican Members of Congress from prairie states, where wind power is economically powerful, have disagreed with Trump on this matter. The interview also included:

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Hannity didn't skip a beat. That makes sense: they were both talking nonsense, what difference did it make what kind of nonsense it was? It does pose the question: Was Trump always this bad, or is he getting worse? Is he a has-been? Or never really was?

* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Yellen Rebrands Biden Economic Agenda As Modern Supply-Side Economics" by David Lawder & Andrea Shalal, 21 January 2022), US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen suggested in a speech this last week that the Biden Administration's economic agenda is "modern supply-side economics", re-inventing a concept that favored by Ronald Reagan. She said:

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Reagan's view of "supply-side economics" was that the US government would cut taxes and regulations, unleashing capital investment that would "trickle down" to the wider economy, fueling growth, and hiring. According to Reagan, the tax cuts would "pay for themselves" through supercharged growth. There was always a lot of skepticism over "trickle-down", and it would seem that the end result was the creation of a class of the uber-rich -- while the tax cuts never paid for themselves.

Yellen stated that Biden Administration policies to assist in child and elder care will help grow the workforce. She criticized the Republican-passed tax cuts of 2017, saying that rather than encourage investment in the USA, they perpetuated the "perverse corporate tax incentives" that have encouraged companies to shift productive capacity overseas as countries compete on taxes. Yellen said the deal for a global 15% corporate minimum tax, which depends on passage of Build Back Better for implementation, would end this "race to the bottom".

This pitch for the Biden Administration's economic agenda had an underlying message: the Reagan Era is over. To be sure, the Biden plan is stalled in Congress for the moment, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema saying they won't consider changing the current Senate filibuster rules. The recent result was yet another failure to get the Democrat voting rights act through Congress.

Much anger has been focused on Manchin and Sinema, but much of it seems like over-reaction. Sinema follows Manchin's lead, and what Manchin clearly wants to do is pass the voter rights act with Republican support. That would be a great thing if it could be done, but can it? What happens if the Republicans simply refuse to play along? If GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell flatly says a voter rights act is out of the question? Obviously, Manchin can use the implied threat of leashing in the filibuster to gain leverage on the GOP -- but a credible threat implies a willingness to follow through on it.

How long will Manchin persist? What is his exit strategy if his effort fails? Only he knows. It doesn't seem like the effort can be sustained too much longer. When Sinema announced on 13 January that she wouldn't undermine the filibuster, she appeared to be on the verge of tears, clearly anticipating the wave of fury that has in fact swept over her. We'll just have to wait and see what happens next.

* From the time of the Great Recession that began in 2007, populist-nationalist parties seemed to be on a roll, gaining strength around the world. According to a survey just released by Oxford University in the UK, covering over a half-million people in 109 countries, the tide is now going back out, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The survey was from Cambridge's Centre for the Future of Democracy (CFD), the study lead being Dr. Roberto Foa of the CFD. Foa says:

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Populist leaders got a boost early on in the pandemic, but have seen a steady decline since then, with ratings dropping by 10% or more. The thoughtless handling of the pandemic by Right-wing leaders like Brazil's Bolsonaro did much to discredit the Right. Citizens now increasingly favor technocratic sources of authority, such as having "non-political" experts make decisions -- instead of leaving the decisions in the hands of elected officials. Foa adds:

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* I've been proceeding on course with my SIM-enabled smartphone. On Tuesday, I was over at the bank, and sent a text message from my phone to my Google Voice account. It was the first time in my life I'd ever communicated over an "untethered" phone, always using a wi-fi connection to make calls.

That done, I made sure the MyColorado ID app was properly configured. On Friday morning, I went to McDonald's to pick up an Egg McMuffin, my habit for that day, and tried out MyColorado in the parking lot, also sending a text to my nephew Graham in Texas to see if I could get through. It all worked fine. Incidentally, I can send as many texts as I like, though I only get 500 megabytes of data a month. No problem, I went back home and checked my phone account online, to find out I'd used maybe 1.5 megabytes of my allotment. I doubt I will use the MyColorado app very much in the near term, but the USA is entering the era of robust digital ID, and what seems like a gimmick now is likely to become an unavoidable necessity in the future.

Next up, I install Google Pay. It appears Google is enhancing the app to make it more useful; I'll have to see if I find it so. Incidentally, after visiting the bank on Tuesday, I got a hamburger at McDonald's and was driving home with it -- to notice a clutch of people at a corner in a residential neighborhood. I glanced at them at as I went past, to see what appeared to be three, maybe four teens plus a big adult, wearing a black shirt labeled SECURITY. He had one of the teens in a headlock.

I thought: What was THAT all about?! And then replied to myself: I DON'T want to know!

[FRI 21 JAN 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (12)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (12): With UNIVAC and IBM out of the supercomputer business, the field was generally left to Control Data Corporation (CDC), founded in 1957 by William Norris -- who had been the boss of the Sperry Rand UNIVAC division and worked on LARC. Norris felt that the people in charge of Sperry Rand didn't understand computers, indeed were afraid of them, and had no real vision for their use.

Norris believed that CDC should build the most powerful computers available and sell them to the government, universities, and private research organizations. That would be a low-volume market, but there was no real competition. There would also be no need for a big sales force when the customer base was small, and not so much need for technical support when the customers were technically savvy.

The first product introduced by CDC was the 1604, built to a US Navy requirement. It was designed by Seymour Cray, CDC's vice-president of engineering. Cray was brilliant, single-minded, and intolerant of disruptions of his efforts; he had his own lab, in his home town of Chippewa Falls, Minnesota, well away from company headquarters in Minneapolis, and even Norris had to have an appointment to visit. There, Cray worked on the machine he really wanted to build, the 6600, the work being funded in part by Livermore Labs, which wanted something more powerful than the LARC -- and the Stretch, one of them having been acquired as well.

The 6600 was announced to the world in August 1963. It was smaller than the vacuum-tube giants of the previous decade, but still about 4.25 meters long and 1.8 meters high (14 x 6 feet), with 350,000 transistors and cooled by a refrigerant system. It had ten "peripheral processors" -- specialized processors for I/O and other housekeeping -- to offload the central processor, which could handle 3 million instructions per second (MIPS). It was 20 times faster than the 1604 and 3 times faster than the Stretch.

IBM's Tom Watson took the 6600 as a personal insult, saying: "Contrasting this modest effort with our own vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world's most powerful computer." He told a group of company officials: "I refuse to be second best." He conveniently forgot the fate of Stretch, and few were inclined to remind him of it.

After the fall of Stretch, a group of IBM engineers had continued to tinker with supercomputer ideas as a sideline. Their efforts went on the front burner, with the "System 360 / Model 90" announced to the world in August 1964. IBM sales people, always aggressive, started pushing it, even though it was only a paper project at the time. Some orders for CDC 6600s were canceled in favor of the Model 90.

CDC was having problems getting the 6600 out the door, with the first delivered in August 1964, and the design suffering from teething problems. CDC was also having financial problems; the company built more conventional computers to help pay the bills, to only get caught in a price war with the competition. In addition, CDC had bought up a number of small firms that manufactured computer peripherals, and not all of them were healthy. CDC was faced with bankruptcy.

Things began to turn around in 1967, with the company back on a roll by 1968. As for the IBM Model 90, it was Stretch all over again: development was painful, the machine never met the ambitious specs set for it at the outset, and only a dozen were sold. It was an early example of the rule that small, smart development teams turn out faster, better, and cheaper products than big uninspired ones.

Bill Norris was not a mild-mannered person, and chose to sue the much bigger IBM for monopolistic practices in 1968, the lawsuit accusing IBM of using "paper machines and phantom computers" to undercut CDC sales. The litigation was finally settled out of court five years later, with CDC coming out $100 million USD ahead, and even acquiring a data-services arm from IBM. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 20 JAN 22] SPACE NEWS

* December was, as always, a busy month for space launches:

[03 DEC 21] STARLINK 4-3, BLACKSKY x 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2312 UTC (local time + 4) to put 48 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The launch also included two BlackSky optical remote-sensing satellites from Global. The booster first stage soft-landed on the SpaceX recovery barge; it was its ninth flight. The payload fairing was also recovered.

[05 DEC 21] GALILEO 27 & 28 -- A Soyuz ST-B booster was launched from Kourou at 0019 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put the "Galileo 27" and 28 navigation satellites into orbit. Each had a launch mass of 715 kilograms (1,576 pounds) and had a 12-year design life. They joined 26 Galileo satellites already in orbit. The full constellation needs 30 satellites, including 24 active platforms and six spares, at an orbital altitude of 23,200 kilometers (14,400 miles).

[07 DEC 21] GOLDEN BAUHINIA 1-03 ETC -- A Ceres 1 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0412 UTC (local time - 8) to put a set of smallsats into orbit. The main payload for this flight turns was the "Golden Bauhinia 1-03" satellite, developed by ZeroGLab based in Beijing, with the Hong-Kong Aviation Technology Group. This satellite was a technology demonstrator meant to test visible light imaging and remote sensing instruments. It was the third in the series. Other satellites flown on this mission that were identified were Tianjin University 1, Lize 1, and Baoshui as well as Golden Bauhinia 5.

The Ceres 1 AKA Gushenxing 1 is a four-stage booster, using three solid-fueled stages with a hydrazine-fueled fourth stage to complete orbital insertion and refinement. Ceres 1 is capable of launching a payload of up 400 kilograms (880 pounds) to low Earth orbit, or up to 230 kilograms (505 pounds) into a Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 700 kilometers (435 miles). It has four stages:

• The first stage is powered by a solid-fuel GS-1 rocket motor providing 534 kN (54,420 kgp / 120,000 lbf) of thrust.
  
  
• The second stage is powered by a single GS-2 rocket motor, with 249 kN (25,350 kgp / 56,000 lbf) of thrust.
  
  
• The third stage is powered by a single GS-3 motor, with 133 kN (13,600 kgp / 30,000 lbf) thrust.
  
  
• The top insertion stage has a single motor burning storable propellants.

Ceres 1 was developed by Galactic Energy, one of several Chinese companies currently fielding or testing small solid-fueled satellite launchers. The first Ceres 1 launch was conducted successfully on 7 November 2020, making Galactic Energy the second private Chinese company to launch a satellite into low Earth orbit. The booster was named after the dwarf planet Ceres.

[07 DEC 21] STPSAT 6, LDPE 1 -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1019 UTC (local time + 4) to put the USAF "USSF 7" payload into space for the US Space Force. The primary payload was the "STPSat 6" satellite, built by Northrop Grumman, which carried nine payloads including the National Nuclear Security Administration's "Space & Atmospheric Burst Reporting System (SABRS) 3" payload, and NASA's "Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD)" experiment. A rideshare payload was carried as well, named the "Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE) 1", and also built by Northrop Grumman. It carried other payloads that were not described. The booster was in the "551" configuration with a five-meter (16.4-foot) fairing, five solid rocket boosters, and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.

[08 DEC 21] SOYUZ ISS 66S (ISS) -- A Soyuz booster was launched from Baikonur at 0728 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 66S" AKA "MS 20" crewed space capsule into orbit on a 12-day International Space Station (ISS) mission.

The capsule successfully docked with the ISS Poisk module six hours after launch. The crew included Russian cosmonaut Alekasandr Misurkin, mission commander, on his third spaceflight; Maezawa Yusaku, a Japanese billionaire known for starting online businesses Start Today and Zozo; and Hirano Yozo, a media producer from Zozo, who was to document the mission.

The newcomers joined the ISS Expedition 66 crew, including NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, ESA Astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Russian Cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov. Misurkin, Maezawa, and Hirano returned safely to Earth on Soyuz MS 20 on 19 December, landing safely in Kazakhstan. They had spent 12 days in space.

[09 DEC 21] BLACKSKY GLOBAL 12 & 13 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 0002 UTC (local time - 13) to put the two "BlackSky Global" remote sensing satellite into orbit. The satellites had a launch mass of about 55 kilograms (120 pounds), and were about the size of a dorm refrigerator. There was no attempt to recover the booster. Including the two spacecraft on this flight, 13 BlackSky satellites have successfully launched since 2018, following a 2016 launch that deployed a technology demonstration satellite for the company. BlackSky officials plan to have around 30 satellites in orbit by the mid-2020s.

[09 DEC 21] IXPE -- A Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0600 UTC (local time + 5) to put NASA's "Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE)" into low-Earth orbit.

IXPE was a joint mission by NASA and the Italian Space Agency designed to study high-energy objects in space, including black holes, neutron stars, pulsars, supernova remnants, magnetars, quasars, and galactic nuclei through the observation of polarized X-rays. The satellite had a launch mass of 330 kilograms (730 pounds). It carried three identical X-ray telescopes set parallel on a long boom to give the proper focal length between the collectors and the gas-filled imagers in the aft section. It was placed in an equatorial orbit to limit interference from the Earth's radiation belts.

[10 DEC 21] SHIJIAN 6-5 -- A Long March 4B booster was launched at 0011 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Jiuquan launch center to put twin "Shijian 6 Group 05" satellites into Sun-synchronous orbit. These were the 9th and 10th Shijian 6 satellites to be launched, the previous pair being launched in 2010. They were vaguely described as technology satellites used to probe the space environment, but the Sun-synchronous orbit suggested they were surveillance satellites, being judged likely to be signals intelligence platforms.

[13 DEC 21] EXPRESS AMU3 & AMU7 -- An International Launch Services Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 1207 UTC (local time - 6) to put the "Express AMU3" and "Express AMU7" geostationary communications satellites into orbit for the Russian Satellite Communications Company (Roscosmos). Built by ISS Reshetnev, the satellites provide advanced communications, television and radio broadcasting services for millions of users in Russia and other countries. Thales Alenia Space supplied the telecom payloads on the satellites.

The Express AMU7 satellite had a launch mass of 1,980 kilograms (4,365 pounds), while Express AMU3 was somewhat heavier, at 2,180 kilograms (4,740 pounds). Express AMU3 and AMU7 had a payload with C-band, Ku-band, and L-band transponders, the payloads being supplied by Thales Alenia Space of France. They had a design life of 15 years.

Express AMU7 was placed in the geostationary slot at 145 degrees east longitude, where it took over from the Express A4 comsat, launched in 2002. Express AMU3 was positioned in the slot at 103 degrees east longitude, taking over from Express AM3, which had been in service since 2005. From its more western position, Express AMU3 covered Central Russia, Kazakhstan, and other parts of Central Asia. Express AMU7’s coverage zone was centered on Siberia and Russia’s Far East. This was one of the final flights of the Proton booster.

[13 DEC 21] TIANLIAN 2-02 -- A Long March 3BE booster was launched from Xichang at 1550 UTC (local time - 8) to put the second "Tianlian 2" geostationary space communications satellite into orbit. It was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), being based on the civil DFH 4 comsat, its mission being to support communications between ground stations and space platforms. The Tianlian satellites are conceptually similar to the US American Tracking & Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). They have a launch mass of about 5,200 kilograms 11,465 pounds), and a design life of 15 years.

The five first-generation Tianlian satellites were launched between 2008 and 2021, supporting different kinds of missions and especially the ones related to the Chinese manned space program. The satellites were based on the CAST's DFH-3 satellite platform. The Long March booster for Tianlian 2-02 was the "3B/G2" variant, featuring four up-rated strap-on boosters, and a lengthened core stage compared to the Long March 3B.

[15 DEC 21] GEESAT 1A & 1B -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A (KZ1A) booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2200 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "GEESat 1A" and "GEESat 1B" satellites into orbit. They provided navsat augmentation.

[18 DEC 21] STARLINK 4-4 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1241 UTC (local time + 5) to put 52 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The Falcon 9 first stage soft-landed on the SpaceX recovery barge, parked downrange in the Pacific Ocean. It was the 11th flight of the first stage.

[19 DEC 21] TURKSAT 5B -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0358 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "Turksat 5B" geostationary comsat into orbit for Turksat of Istanbul. The satellite was built by Airbus Defense & Space with significant Turkish contributions.

It was placed in the geostationary slot at 45 degrees east longitude to relay data and video across Turkey, the Middle East, regions of Africa, and Asia. Turksat 5B was based on the Airbus Eurostar3000EOR satellite bus; it had a launch mass of about 4,500 kilograms (9,900 pounds), a Ku / Ka-band payload, an electric-ion propulsion system, and a design life of 35 years.

[21 DEC 21] SPACEX DRAGON CRS 24 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1007 UTC (local time + 5), carrying the 24th operational "Dragon" cargo capsule to the International Space Station (ISS).

The payloads included

• Four CubeSats from groups at Kennedy Space Center, Aerospace Corporation, Utah State University, and Georgia Tech. The CubeSats were to be deployed from the station later.
  
  
• Two research pallets from the U.S. military’s Space Test Program are riding inside the Dragon spacecraft’s unpressurized trunk. The two payloads, named STP-H7 and STP-H8, were taken from the Dragon spacecraft and attached to the ESA Columbus and Japanese Kibo modules respectively, using the station's Canadian-built robotic arm.

Two weather instruments from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were hosted on the STP-H8 experiment package:

• Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer (COWVR), to measure the direction and speed of winds at the ocean surface.
  
  
• Temporal Experiment for Storms & Tropical Systems (TEMPEST), to observe atmospheric humidity.

COWVR was designed to fly on a standalone military satellite to replace an instrument named WindSat that collects ocean wind data for the Defense Department. WindSat is on the military’s Coriolis satellite, which has been in orbit since 2003 and is well beyond its design life.

The TEMPEST radiometer flying alongside COWVR was sensitive to a different range of microwave signals that yield information about moisture in the atmosphere. The instrument, just the size of a cereal box, is a spare left over from a CubeSat program. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX recovery barge; the stage had not been flown before.

[22 DEC 21] INMARSAT 6 F1 -- An H2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 1532 UTC (next day local time - 9) to put the "Inmarsat 6 F1" geostationary comsat into orbit for London-based Inmarsat. Built by Airbus Defense & Space, the satellite had a launch mass of about 5,470 kilograms (12,060 pounds), and carried L-band and Ka-band payloads to provide mobile communications services to airplanes and ships. The L-band payload was intended to support low-bandwidth applications such as maritime search and rescue, ship and asset tracking, and supply chain management. The H2A booster was in the "204" configuration, with four strap-on solid rocket boosters.

[23 DEC 21] SHIYAN 12-01 & -02 -- A Long March 7 booster was launched at 1012 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island to put the "Shiyan 12-01" and "Shiyan 12-02" satellites into geostationary orbit. Shiyan satellites are demonstrators, often being classified. Each of these two had a launch mass of about 3,000 kilograms (6,600 pounds). They were developed by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST).

[25 DEC 21] JWST -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 1221 UTC (local time + 3) to put the "James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)" in space. The JWST was developed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency; it is the largest space telescope ever built, with a deployable mirror measuring 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter, and four scientific instruments to observe the cosmos in infrared wavelengths. The observatory was placed at the L2 Lagrange stable point about 1.5 million kilometers (900,000 miles) outside of Earth's orbit.

[26 DEC 21] ZIYUAN 1-02E -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0311 (local time - 8) to put the "Ziyuan 1-02E" Earth remote sensing satellite into orbit.

The first Ziyuan satellite, Ziyuan 1-01, was launched in 1999 in a partnership between China and the Brazilian national space agency, INPE. Six of the nine Ziyuan satellites launched to date have been part of the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) program, with the other three -- including Ziyuan 1 02E -- being purely Chinese flights. Three more all-Chinese Ziyuan 3 satellites have also been launched, while the designation Ziyuan 2 was applied to a trio of military reconnaissance satellites deployed in the early 2000s, which are not part of the civilian Ziyuan series.

Ziyuan 1-02E was believed to be similar in design to the Ziyuan 1-02D satellite launched in September 2019. It carried the same two imaging payloads: a high-resolution visible and near-infrared camera and a hyperspectral imager, as well as a new long-wave infrared camera.

The high-resolution camera could return images with resolutions of up to five meters (16 feet) when operating in panchromatic mode. When operating in multispectral mode, it could produce images across three bands with a resolution of up to 33 meters. The hyperspectral payload could image across 166 spectral bands. The Ziyuan 1-02D spacecraft had a mass at launch of 1,840 kilograms (4,060 pounds), with Ziyuan 1-02E likely having a slightly higher mass due to the presence of the additional infrared imager.

The launch also included a 6-unit CubeSat payload named "Xiwang (Hope) 3 (XW 3)" AKA "Chinese Amateur Satellite 9 (CAS 9)", built by by the Chinese Amateur Satellite Group (CAMSAT). Along with its AMSAT gear, it carried a set of payloads including a visible-light camera, the payloads being monitored via amateur radio.

[27 DEC 21] ONEWEB 12 -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Vostochny at 1310 UTC (local time - 8) to put 36 "OneWeb" low-orbit comsats into space. In total, the initial OneWeb constellation will consist of 648 individual satellites. The satellites are built in Florida as part of a joint venture between OneWeb and Airbus Defense and Space.

[27 DEC 21] TEST FLIGHT -- An Angara A5 booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1900 UTC (local time - 3) on its third and final test flight. It featured a Persei (Perseus) upper stage. The flight was marred by an upper-stage malfunction.

[29 DEC 21] TIANHUI 4 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 1113 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianhui 4" Earth observation satellite into orbit.

[29 DEC 21] TJSW 9 -- A Long March 3B booster was launched from Xichang at 1541 UTC (local time - 8) to put the secret "TJSW 9" satellite into geostationary orbit. It was suspected to be an intelligence-gathering satellite.

[30 DEC 21] IRAN / SIMORGH -- Iran launched a Simorgh booster and claimed it placed payloads into orbit, but none were observed.

[WED 19 JAN 22] ARAB MUDDLE (8)

* ARAB MUDDLE (8): The Arab League has long been a fixture in the Middle East, and it has never accomplished anything. In 2016, Morocco was to host the Arab League summit -- but two months before the event, the Moroccan government decided against it, bluntly announcing: "This summit will be just another occasion to approve ordinary resolutions and to pronounce speeches that give a false impression of unity." The Arab League met in a big tent in Mauritania instead.

The Arab League was founded in 1945, making it one of the first multilateral bodies set up after the Second World War. It grew rapidly for a time, adding members and striking treaties on defense and commerce. Member states proposed a common market in 1953 and signed an economic unity agreement in 1957, the year when six European countries signed the Treaty of Rome that led to the European Union. The goal for the Arab League was along the same lines, to pull down trade barriers and link regional economies.

It didn't happen. Today, it is estimated that less than 5% of the Arab world's non-oil trade is internal. EU members, in contrast, send at least one-third of their exports inside the bloc; in ASEAN, around 20% of trade is internal. Within the Arab world tariffs are high, and poor infrastructure makes trade more expensive. French-speaking countries in North Africa have lower trade costs with Europe than with each other. There's been talk of free-movement zones, but it's mostly remained talk. A US citizen of America may travel to 16 of the 22 members of the Arab League without applying for a visa -- while a citizen of Egypt, where the Arab League is based, is allowed to visit only six. Israelis have more travel privileges in Arab states than Syrians.

The Arab League has been just as pathetic in diplomacy. In 2011, the league tried to mediate in Syria. Assad agreed to halt attacks on protesters and free political prisoners; the league deployed observers to verify, but the monitoring mission fell apart in weeks. The league froze Syria's membership and voted for sanctions on Syrian officials, but many Arab states maintained ties with Assad's regime.

The Arab Peace Initiative, which the league endorsed in 2002, seemed to be one of its few meaningful ventures: it promised Israel normal relations if it ended the occupation of Palestinian territory. That didn't happen; what happened, in 2020, was that four Arab states went ahead and normalized relations with Israel anyway. The league has done nothing to help deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) got off to a better start after its foundation in 1981. Most of its six states were small, satellites orbiting much larger Saudi Arabia, and integration made sense. The GCC is the closest thing in the Arab world to a working multilateral institution. Citizens of its six stable monarchies enjoy free movement and the right to work across the bloc, while a customs union and unified standards have eased internal trade. The bloc boasts a joint military force, known as Peninsula Shield. Though the GCC states account for only 13% of the Arab world's population, its oil and gas resources have made it an economic heavyweight. In 2020 the GCC accounted for 71% of the Arab world's foreign trade, up from 61% in 2000, and it drew 59% of the region's foreign direct investment.

However, the unity has only gone so far. Talk of a common currency remains talk. Big infrastructure projects, such as a railway network connecting the six Gulf States, are behind schedule. Peninsula Shield was not strong enough to shield the peninsula when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Its main accomplishment was to smash a popular uprising in Bahrain in 2011: it turns out it is less a deterrence to invasion than an internal security force.

In 2017 three members of the GCC -- Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE -- imposed a travel and trade embargo on Qatar, also a member of the GCC. The blockade was meant to pressure Qatar to abandon its pro-Islamist foreign policy and tone down its media, read as "al-Jazeera". The frictions were nothing new; Qatar has long irritated its neighbors in the Gulf. The blockade was lifted in January 2021, having accomplished nothing but to highlight strains in the GCC. Saudi Arabia and the UAE even formed their own coordination council to confront the Qataris.

The bigger Gulf States, in population and GDP, are natural partners, but they still can't see eye-to-eye. In the past few years they have disagreed over the war in Yemen, which the UAE pulled out of from 2019; over how to embrace Israel, which the UAE did in 2020; and over production caps at OPEC, from which the UAE is contemplating withdrawal. There has been particular dispute over economic issues; in July 2021, Saudi Arabia imposed tariffs on goods manufactured in free zones in the UAE, where many foreign firms are based, making a mockery of the GCC's customs union.

The Saudis are desperate to diversify their oil-dependent economy. Muhammad bin Salman, the crown prince, has made that his priority, announcing trillions of rials in investments. The kingdom is increasingly focused on building tourist resorts and blue-sky robot-filled cities. That puts Saudi Arabia in competition with the UAE, which is further along with post-oil plans. Any officials in both countries deny it, in practice the two countries see themselves in a zero-sum game. Unity has never come easily to the Arabs. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 18 JAN 22] NEW OILSEEDS?

* NEW OILSEEDS? As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Stinkweed To False Flax: Oilseeds Race To Reap Biofuel Bonanza" by Rod Nickel & Karl Plume, 26 May 2021), enthusiasm for biofuels seems to be cyclical, booming for a time and then fading. However, appearances are somewhat deceptive, since there's a lot of activity in the field.

Take, for example, stinkweed. Stinkweed AKA pennycress has traditionally been seen as, well, a weed that stinks. It's toxic, it smells bad, and it taints the milk of dairy cows that eat it. Now, it's been genetically edited to eliminate its smelly and toxic component, with backers seeing "covercress", as the edited plant is known, as a potential cash crop, thanks to its oil-rich seeds. Brian Engel -- director of biofuels at agribusiness giant Bunge LTD -- says: "How often is a brand-new oilseed introduced? We're going to do everything we can to get that seed crushed, and get the oil and meal into the marketplace."

Covercress is seen as an alternative to soybeans and canola, the world's most popular oilseeds -- whose seeds are crushed to produce oil used in cooking and biofuels, plus high-protein meal for pigs and chickens. Soybean and canola production can't keep up with demand, with prices skyrocketing. The new oilseed candidates, which include carinata and camelina AKA false flax along with covercress, can be grown "off-season", allowing farmers to raise crops and make money at times of the year when their fields would otherwise lie fallow.

Introducing a new crop of any sort is troublesome; they have to meet tough regulatory standards, and they have to be produced at large scale to be commercially viable. That imposes a "chicken & egg" problem, in that the unprofitability of small-scale production makes it difficult to scale up to large-scale production. Scaling up production can take years, requiring financial commitment and risk for both the developers and the farmers who grow the new crops.

However, the companies promoting the new crops see the regulatory push towards decarbonization as justifying their efforts. Biofuel demand is forecast to grow exponentially in coming years as more renewable diesel production capacity comes online. Soybeans and canola can't meet that demand; farmers say they can't expand plantings in any great way, since they have to rotate crops to keep soils healthy. Demand from soybean processors that crush it into oil and meal has risen 45% over the past decade, while production has grown just 37%.

In Argentina, farmer Horacio Merialdo is planning his first crop of carinata, a tall plant crowned with yellow flowers, another new oilseed candidate. He can plant carinata in the off-season from growing soybeans, with its long roots creating channels that allow rain to seep deep into the soil and stop weeds from flourishing -- and benefiting the later soybean crop.

Marialdo obtained his seeds from Nuseed, a component of Australian agrichemical company Nufarm LTD, which is now trying to expand the carinata market. Right now, plantings are relatively modest, but the company expects them to double in two years, then grow exponentially after that, as it expands production to the USA, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

At present, Nuseed sells all carinata production to Saipol, France's largest biodiesel producer. Saipol itself is also developing new crops, such as the flowering oilseed camelina, to produce biodiesel alongside the fuel it makes largely from rapeseed, a close relative of canola. Camelina already has a small established market, since farmers already grow it in small quantities for use in fish rations and in health products for dogs and horses.

However, there's another chicken-&-egg problem with the new oilseeds, in that refiners are hesitant to invest in biofuel production facilities if they're not sure the crops are winners. Fortunately, it is possible for a refinery to use seeds from different crop plants. Covenant Energy intends to produce renewable diesel from canola at its planned Saskatchewan refinery, but CEO Josh Gufstafson says the facility will also be able to use carinata and camelina. The difficulty is that large swings in the blend are unacceptable. Pioneers, as always, are driven by opportunity -- but have to deal with the hazards.

[MON 17 JAN 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 3

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: There has been a peculiar parallelism between British and American politics since 2016, when Britain voted to Brexit and the USA voted in Donald Trump. Both took sharp turns to the Right, and both resulted in the ascendance of dubious leaders with silly haircuts -- though the UK didn't get to Boris Johnson until after a stint with Theresa May. In any case, it seems at times as though the Right was invincible on both sides of the Pond -- Trump handily surviving impeachment, the Tories dealing Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party a brutal defeat in the 2019 general election. Nothing seemed to dent Boris Johnson's broad popularity.

How things can change. A by-election in North Shropshire this last December was a stinging defeat for the Tories, with a seat held by the Conservatives since 1904 lost by a good margin to a supposedly marginal Liberal Democrat. Worse, it came to light that, while the UK was under pandemic lockdown, Boris Johnson was presiding over a series of informal parties, in defiance of the government's own rules against gatherings. The fact that Johnson also got a very bad case of COVID-19 did not help his credibility.

Under Keir Starmer, Labour has revitalized -- Starmer's eviction of the bright Red Corbyn from Labour's councils had the desired effect -- and is now leading the Tories by ten points in the polls. It appears that the British public's appetite for Right-wing trolling has greatly declined. Senior Conservative politicians are talking about a vote of no confidence to depose Johnson. The government just moved to cut BBC funding, it seems to throw red meat to Tory trolls sitting in the back benches.

Beyond that lies the problem of what to do about Brexit. Brexit is, to be sure, a given; there's no going back on it. That, however, ignores all the details of implementation, which were so poorly thought out and which haven't been resolved yet -- above all, the relationship between the two Irelands. That, however, is another problem.

In the USA, Donald Trump retains much influence, though he is also much diminished. He continues to scheme, though he must have bad moments when he sees the House Select Committee on the January 6th Capitol riot passing out subpoenas that penetrate ever more deeply into his inner circle. The expectation is that his kids will be called in the not-too-distant future. Can we see in the fall of Boris Johnson the fate of Donald Trump?

* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Iraqi Cleric's Push To Sideline Iran-Backed Factions Risks Clash" by Ahmed Rasheed & John Davison, 14 January 2022), Iraq's parliamentary elections last October resulted in a shift of power away from Iranian-backed Shiite militias. The prominent Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr (MaS), who has no liking for Iranian meddling in Iraqi affairs, has rubbed in their marginalization. As the new parliament moved to select and install a president, he said: "We are on track to form a national majority government." -- with "national majority" including Sadrists, Sunnis, and Kurds, but no Iran-backed parties. One senior Sadrist official added that the Iran camp ...

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Iraqi politicians and analysts say that the ascendance of the Sadrists and the decline of the Iranian camp is welcome in Washington DC and American allies in the region -- even though MaS fought the US occupation of Iraq, at least for a time. Internally, the Iranian camp is going to resent being sidelined and push back, but how far will it go? An Iraqi government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he expected those in the Iran camp to use the threat of violence to get a place in government, but not to escalate into a full-scale conflict with MaS.

MaS is perfectly aware of the possibilities, but has thrown down the gauntlet. He wants an independent, unified, and -- by all appearances -- democratic Iraq, and will fight to achieve it. A second Sadrist politician, who also spoke anonymously, said: "We're powerful, we have a strong leader, and millions of followers who are ready to take to the streets and sacrifice themselves." Such is the power of the Shiite reverence for martyrdom.

* As mentioned in earlier installments, I've been working on properly establishing my online ID, which has -- not really to much surprise -- turned into a project. One aspect of this was that I determined I needed to be able to rely on the "MyColorado" smartphone app. The problem was that I didn't have a phone contract, and it wouldn't work once I left my house and didn't have a wi-fi hookup.

I don't really otherwise need a phone contract, since I live by myself, spend most of my time at home, and wouldn't make calls while I was out shopping or whatever anyway. It didn't make sense for me to pay like $45 USD a month for a full phone service, when I'd only use a tiny fraction of it. Accordingly, I got to searching around for budget phone services.

It turns out there are a lot of them around, examples being Ting, Mint, and Tello. It was confusing to sort through them, but I finally found "Trustpilot", a reviews site, and thousands of reviews gave Tello a 90% Good-Great rating. Ting, in comparison, got more bad reviews than good ones.

Sorting through the plan options from the various vendors was confusing, but I finally figured out that I could get a plan from Tello that only cost me $8 USD a month -- $6 USD for the service, $2 USD for surcharges, primarily to support the Colorado 911 emergency phone service. I would get 100 minutes of voice -- which I wouldn't use except for emergencies -- plus unlimited texts -- which I might use a bit -- and 500 MB of data -- which I likely wouldn't dent very much. Later I found out that once I overflow the data limit, I'm not cut off, just constrained to 3G transfer rates.

There was the issue of whether my Samsung Galaxy S10+ was compatible with the Tello service. The Tello website told me to figure out the IMEI ID number of my phone, accessed through the phone app by dialing in "#06#", and after fumbling a bit, figured out that it was. I signed up for the Tello service, paying $10 USD for a month's service, including $2 USD for a Tello SIM chip.

I had the S10+ in an armor case. It is very difficult to get the case off without breaking it -- I broke it -- so I ordered a cheap lightweight case instead from Amazon.com, and got it before the SIM chip arrived. When I got the SIM chip, I popped out the chip tray with a pin tool and stuck in the SIM -- it came as a pop-out item in a card, nested in full-size, micro, and nano frames, the S10+ using the nano frame. I plugged the tray back in, then got on the Tello site and entered the activation code I got with the SIM.

At that point, I was ready to fly, though I'm not quite flying yet. I still have to configure my phone service with an auto-answer message, and forward the phone to my Google Voice number, which is the one I use -- I don't have the phone on very much, and won't use its number except if I need to. I also have to puzzle out how to get connected to the GSM phone network while I'm out and about, and make sure I'm not gobbling up my data limits unintentionally by leaving the wrong app active. I doubt it's rocket science, but there are always a few glitches when I start on something new. One thing I did find out already: Turn off airline mode. Little things like that.

Again, I'm only using the phone for ID, and possibly for emergencies. I was thinking of using it to make contactless payments with Google Pay, but that idea mostly fizzled out. One problem is that contactless terminals are by no means universal yet, but the bigger problem is that so few people use smartphone payment systems. That's because they're not particularly useful, not doing much that a contactless charge card can't do -- while a contactless card can also be inserted, or even swiped, if one wants to take the low-security approach.

Since I don't have a contactless card right now, I'll tinker with Google Pay just for fun. One minor advantage is that I can use it to make interactive payments with Paypal, and it's not so easy to get a Paypal charge card. I was wondering if Paypal would charge me for the transaction, but Paypal says NO. Eventually, I'll get a contactless card and move on.

[FRI 14 JAN 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (11)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (11): Although IBM dominated the computer market in the 1960s, its competitors persisted, sometimes in niches. One niche was to aim smaller, which was the aim of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which focused on "minicomputers".

DEC's roots were out of the MIT Whirlwind program, the Whirlwind being the ancestor of computer -- it was relatively small compared to most other machines of the era. Two of the MIT engineers, Kenneth Olsen and Harlan Anderson, founded DEC in 1957; they introduced one of the first true minicomputers, the "Programmed Data Processor (PDP) 1" in 1957. It was built with 2,700 transistors and 3,000 diodes; it was much cheaper than other computers of the time, but also more limited.

It was the PDP-8, introduced in 1965 in rough parallel with the IBM System /360, that really put the minicomputer on the map. It evolved during its lifetime from a relatively large machine based on diode-transistor logic to a more compact machine based on TTL. It had a mere 4,096 12-bit words of core memory, starting out at about $20,000 USD, but with the price declining with maturity. It was sold along with an extensive set of peripherals, including disk drives, tape drives, and teletypewriters, and was relatively easy to interface to instrumentation, making it useful for research and machine control applications.

The low cost of the PDP-8 made it popular with schools, where students learned how to key in a "bootstrap loader" on the front-panel switches, to then load the system on paper tape, and communicate with the computer using the notoriously noisy ASR-33 teletype. A read-only memory (ROM) module was available to eliminate the need to set up the bootstrap loader.

* The introduction of solid-state computers also led to the development of the first "supercomputers", beginning with the UNIVAC Livermore Advanced Research Computer (LARC) for the University of California's weapons laboratory in Livermore. LARC went into operation in 1960, featuring 60,000 transistors; it could be matched up with a second processor unit, making an early example of a "multiprocessor". It also had a specialized I/O processor to ensure the main processor or processors weren't distracted by housekeeping.

The base unit had 20,000 60-bit words of core memory, expandable up to almost 100,000 words -- or in modern terms, about 750 kilobytes of memory, in hindsight puny. It performed decimal math. It could be hooked up to banks of magnetic drum memories and tape recorders; high-speed printers; a card reader; and "electronic page recorders", which were CRT displays with a 35-millimeter film camera set up to record display images. Performance was an order of magnitude greater than the previous generation of computers, with a basic cycle time of 4 microseconds, or about 250 kilohertz -- again, in hindsight puny. Nonetheless, it proved very useful, particularly for performing simulations focused on nuclear weapons research.

The simulations, it appears, were based on "Monte Carlo" algorithms, a form of "stochastic" programming in which a highly computation-intensive problem is fed random data points, with the solution getting better as the number of data points increases. Such simulations were boosted by John von Neumann in particular.

Only two LARC machines were sold. In the meantime, IBM was working on an even more ambitious "supercomputer", the 7030 AKA "Stretch", for the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, another weapons research organization. One was delivered in 1961. It had 169,100 transistors and wiring so complicated that the layout and implementation had to be automated as well. It didn't meet performance specifications, and was sold at a loss, with only eight machines built. Both UNIVAC and IBM gave up on the supercomputer market for the time being, preferring to build less challenging machines that could be sold in greater quantities. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 13 JAN 22] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Those Annoying Robocalls Aren't Going To Stop Today. But They Could Slow Down Soon" by Clare Duffy, 02 July 2021), the telephone has not adapted perfectly well to the digital age, being targeted by spam via "robocallers". Measures are being taken in response, however; now the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set up a program to help stop the robocall spam.

The program is named "Stir/Shaken", and is a set of technical standards that mobile carriers are required to adopt to help prevent call "spoofing" -- that is, indicating a call is coming from a number when it's actually coming from a different number. Robocallers often use call spoofing to make a call look like it's coming from a local area code, so targets are more likely to pick it up. Scammers invariably use faked numbers. Under the Stir/Shaken protocol, carriers are required to certify, with graded confidence levels, that calls really are coming from the numbers displayed on caller ID. All the major US carriers have signed up.

Stir/Shaken involves certification of callers; if a caller isn't certified as legitimate, a carrier can block it. The FCC waivered small carriers, with 100,000 or fewer subscribers. Of course, the Black Hats will get busy, trying to certify their bogus calling numbers, but that will become more difficult as the holes in the scheme are patched up.

ED: Since I've only got a Google Voice IP number, robocalls are no longer an issue to me. All my calls go to a web page; if I get a sequence of calls from the same number and no message is ever left, I block the number. The caller then gets a DISCONNECTED response. Google Voice has some limitations, but overall it's a good deal, particularly because it's free. I long hated to have to pay specifically for phone service; it's like having to specifically pay for email, but not as useful.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Disruptive Iron-Air Grid-Scale Battery Is 10% The Cost Of Lithium" by Loz Blain, 26 July 2021), a Boston-based startup named Form Energy is working on a pilot installation of a grid-scale battery installation -- based on iron-air batteries that cost only a tenth as much as lithium batteries of the same capacity.

Renewable energy tends to imply energy storage, to handle times when energy production is down -- at nighttime for solar power, for one obvious example -- and huge banks of batteries are the go-to solution for the present. Tesla more or less got the ball rolling in 2017 when the company built the world's biggest battery installation in South Australia, with comparable projects following. However, lithium is a relatively scarce metal, and lithium batteries are an expensive solution for grid-scale power storage.

Metal-air batteries feature a metal anode and an air-porous cathode, enclosing an electrolyte -- possibly aqueous potassium hydroxide (KOH), which dissolves into K+ and OH- ions, though it seems other, more sophisticated formulations are much more effective.

In the iron-air battery, the anode is made up of iron pellets, which effectively rusts thanks to the hydroxide ions by a two-stage process:

   Fe + 2OH- --> Fe(OH)2 + 2e-
 
   3Fe(OH)2 + 2OH- --> Fe3O4 + 4H2O + 2e-

-- which generates four electrons. The porous cathode has a catalyst on one side that promotes the breakdown of water in reaction to oxygen into hydroxide ions, boosted by electrons obtained through the load circuit:

   O2 + 2H2O + 4e-

The overall cell reaction is then:

   2Fe + 2O2 -> Fe3O4

-- with a cell voltage of 1.28 volts. Put cells in series, of course, the end result is as much voltage as desired. The reaction is reversible, meaning the battery is rechargeable. Compared to lithium batteries, iron-air batteries are much bulkier, and can't discharge as fast -- but they are several times cheaper. They are also relatively easy to recycle.

A startup named Form Energy, out of Somerville MA, is pushing iron-air batteries for grid storage. Each Form battery is about the size of a washing machine, with thousands of them in each installation. The array will likely have a small component of lithium batteries, to provide quick power. The company is now working on a commercial-scale project in Minnesota capable of delivering a constant megawatt of power for 150 hours.

* As discussed in an article from CBSN.com ("Louisville Company Claims New Technology Greatly Reduces Eagle Fatalities Near Wind Turbines" by Logan Smith, 1 February 2021), there have long been concerns over the literal impact of wind turbines on large birds such as eagles, who often killed by the sweeping blades.

A Louisville, Colorado, company named "IdentiFlight" is now offering a system that has high-resolution stereo optics, allowing it to detect a large bird from as far as a kilometer away. Using a machine-learning scheme, the IdentiFlight can categorize the kind of bird, assess its flight path, and alter the operation of a wind turbine intersecting its flight path -- even shutting it down in half a minute, if necessary. There is the question of how well the system works at night or in foul weather, both of which influence bird fatalities near wind turbines.

[WED 12 JAN 22] ARAB MUDDLE (7)

* ARAB MUDDLE (7): In the early years after Israel's foundation, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rightly saw the country as surrounded by Arab enemies -- and so he looked farther afield for friends, to establish diplomatic relations with Turkey and Iran in 1950. They were the first Muslim-majority countries to do so.

The scene looks entirely different now, with Israeli strategists seeing Iran and Turkey as their chief regional adversaries: Iran for its nuclear programs and support of Shia militias, Turkey for providing safe haven to Sunni Islamists, such as Hamas leaders. The Arabs, in contrast, are no longer so much of a threat. In 2020, the UAE and Bahrain established diplomatic relations with Israel under the "Abraham Accords", with Sudan and Morocco following. It really wasn't such news, since they had been quietly talking with the Israelis for years. Half of Arabs now live in states that recognize Israel.

The Palestinian cause still resonates with Arabs, and there is no great affection for Israel among Arab leadership; they align with Israel because the Sunnis fear Iran, Israel is the most militarily powerful state in the region, and Israel is a bitter enemy of Iran. Nonetheless, although Arabs have a long list of concerns today, the Palestinians are not close to the top. The Arab-Israeli conflict is effectively over: no Arab state has fought Israel in almost 50 years, and no non-Palestinian group since 2006. In effect, the Arab-Israeli conflict, which once did so much to stitch together the region, no longer truly exists.

The end of warring with Israel loosely coincided with the decline of Arab nationalism and the shift of power in the Arab world to the wealthy Gulf States. The Arab states barely even pretend to care any more, a diplomat from one of them that has recognized Israel saying: "With all our love for the Palestinians, and our traditional support for them, there comes a point where we will no longer be able to sacrifice our interests for local struggles on the Palestinian side."

That was a revealing remark in several ways. The Gulf States never "sacrificed their interests" for the Palestinians; the comment about the Palestinian "local struggle", on the other hand, was flatly saying it was irrelevant to Arab governments.

The Gulf States see themselves as the center of importance. In February 2021, an Emirati probe entered orbit around Mars, making the UAE the first Arab state to reach the Red Planet. The Emirates of course pumped the event up as an "Arab achievement", but the probe itself was made with international assistance, being assembled in the USA, and it was launched by a Japanese booster. Nonetheless, it demonstrated how the UAE regards itself as a regional leader -- though it is small in size and population, with little historical gravity in the Arab world. Arabs elsewhere tend to snipe at the Emiratis, regarding them as upstarts who got rich from oil and luck.

The key word there is "rich", with many Arabs also wanting to live in the UAE. The country is prosperous and secure, an oasis in a wilderness of Middle Eastern turmoil. That translates into a message and soft power, one official saying: "We want to have a Middle East, and an Arab world, that is similar to the way in which we run our own country."

The UAE appears on the surface a modern technocratic state, with an efficient government, thriving businesses, and support for education. Under the surface, there's not much high principle in evidence there, with the Emiratis quietly pursuing their own interests in the region. There's also not much interest in populism, the UAE being no democracy, though it wields autocratic government in a velvet glove: citizens are generally left alone if they don't rock the boat, and there's no great public complaint.

As for those who do rock the boat, the UAE's relationship with Israel serves the leadership well. Along with counterbalancing the Iranians, the Israelis are an excellent source of leading-edge surveillance tools, such as Pegasus software used to spy on journalists, activists, and others "troublemakers". The misery of the Palestinians under the Israeli gun is not a real concern. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 11 JAN 22] A CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE?

* A CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE? A great deal is written about consciousness, much of it being confusing. One of the more confusing ideas is "panpsychism", the idea that the entire Universe is conscious.

Taking a step back from this grand vision, we know humans are conscious, and have no reason to doubt that many animals are, too, if in a more limited way: humans and animals see, assess, and think things over. We don't see any evidence that inanimate matter can see, assess, and think things over -- so what basis do we have to believe inanimate matter has any consciousness at all?

The reply focuses on what has been called "the hard problem", associated with philosopher David Chalmers. If we think about things, why do we have this particular conscious experience in doing it? Yes, we know that when we think, it's the product of the firing of neurons, and we know a fair amount about the processes -- but that, so the story goes, isn't enough to explain it.

In reality it is; there is no "hard problem". Clinging to it misses the fact that all we can know about the material Universe is what we observe of it -- reliably observe, that is, meaning any honest and competent skeptic can make the same observations and repeatably get the same results. We observe what happens, and then devise a model, a theory, to allow us to predict the same sort of happenings in the future. Once we run out of reliable observations, that's the end of the road, we can know no more: "What you see is what you get, and what you see is all you get."

In the 17th century, Isaac Newton came up with his law of universal gravitation, showing how gravity worked. He didn't explain why it worked the way it did, famously saying: "I frame no hypothesis." Later, Albert Einstein would come up with a refined theory of gravity named general relativity -- but he was in the same boat, he could say how it worked, but not why it worked that way. Newton recognized that there was no "hard problem" of gravity, instead recognizing the futility of trying to go beyond observations, to see beneath appearances, to ask questions that don't have a real answer.

Ultimately, we don't know why the entire Universe works the way it does; yes, we can examine it in ever-finer details to understand its structure, interactions, and dynamic history, but if the question is asked: "Why is the Universe exactly the way it is?" -- the answer is: "Because if it wasn't, it would be exactly some other way." There is, and can be, no better answer.

The "hard problem" is like asking: "Why is it light in the room when we turn on the lights?" If the answer is not about the operation of the light source, the physics of light, or the operation of the eye -- all of which are factually explicable -- then the answer to the question is: "It's light in the room because you turned on the lights, silly."

If there's an insistence on knowing more, then the follow-up answer is: "The magic light fairy did it." That's a fair answer: when people decide the explicable answers are inadequate, then all we have left are the inexplicable ones, and any one is as good as we like it to be. The "hard problem" is a "pseudo-problem", spinning the wheels, never going anyplace.

We have no observations that suggest inanimate matter is conscious -- claiming that it is requires a vacuous definition of "consciousness" -- and no cause to think there is some undetectable "smidgen of consciousness" in the particles of the Universe. The operation of the brain is can be accounted for by the action of neurons, just as the ability of a mechanical clock to keep time can be accounted for by the coordinated function of its parts. In neither case is there any need for the neurons and clock gears to have some unseen and unseeable property that, if it went away, the brain or the clock would visibly not work right any more. If it is then stated that there would be a change, but we couldn't see it -- then how would we say there was any change? We can't.

If people want to believe that the Universe is conscious, without being able to point to observational evidence that it is, they are free to do so. The difficulty is that they are no wiser about a single material fact of the Universe whether they believe it is conscious or not. Take it or leave it.

[MON 10 JAN 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 2

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The anniversary of last year's Capitol riot came and went. Predictions of Right-wing violence, to no surprise, turned out to be wrong. Gratifyingly, Donald Trump wanted to have a press conference on that day, but was convinced it would be a bad idea. Trump is in decline.

President Joe Biden delivered a speech at the Capitol Building on 6 January, lighting into Trump, without naming him. Significant excerpts of the speech included:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Echoing last week's installment, there's still a lot of complaint on Twitter that Trump hasn't been busted yet. It is particularly ridiculous that the House January 6th Committee is denounced as worthless, when it seems to be going literally gangbusters. Anyone who thinks that taking down Donald Trump is going to be quick and easy is not living in the real world.

* French President Emmanuel Macron made a bit of a stir this last week by throwing down the gauntlet to French COVIDiots:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The term he used was "emmerder", from "merde" (shit), which can be translated in a number of ways, being at best informal, at worst rude. It seems in this context it means "screw with them". The French Right howled at the comment, but Macron lost nothing from it: they hate him anyway. Certainly, here in the USA, there is little sympathy for COVIDiots, the general feeling being that they need to be deported to Mars.

As a case in point, one Dr. Robert Malone -- who apparently did some research on mRNA vaccines in the past -- attacked the conventional wisdom on vaccination against COVID-19, claiming it was the product of, ahem, "mass formation psychosis". This is the classic conspirobot mindset: "I'm not going the wrong way on this street, everyone else is." Malone is a silly person.

* Having got booted out of Twitter and got back on by jumping through some hoops, I was startled this last week when Twitter asked me to verify that I was a real person. The problem was that they wanted to send a verification code to my phone -- and the phone number, a Google Voice number, was linked to my old banned account.

It didn't take much tinkering to discover I was locked out again. Twitter would not accept my free Textfree number as an alternate, which is what I expected. This was very bad news, since Twitter is key to my current writing efforts. After some stressed-out thinking, I thought: Maybe I could get another Google Voice number?

It turned out to be straightforward. I couldn't get a second number, but I could get a replacement number for $10 USD without any hassles, so I did. My old number was forwarded to the new number; I could get calls on it, but not make any calls with. It would go away in 90 days, but I could pay $20 USD and it would persist; I did that, too.

To test the new Google Voice number, I sent a message to it from Textfree. That's why I have a Textfree number, just to run tests. Even though I'd just set up the number, the message went through fine. I used the new Google Voice number on Twitter, and was back in operation. I was relieved, all the more so because, having got rid of the old number, Twitter was unlikely to make more trouble for me. $30 USD was nothing, worth the money just for that.

My Signal secure messaging app on my Android phone needed to be updated to the new Google Voice number. It was slightly tricky; I had to delete my Signal account and then re-install the app, but that didn't take any time. Now I've got to make sure my contact number is updated with the bank and other places.

* Another reason for feeling safer on Twitter is that I take few chances there. I've come to realize that the discussions on Twitter tend to be like shouting haphazardly inside of a mob -- and some large component of the mob is simply there to spread disinformation and propaganda. Sometimes they're obvious fakes, but does it matter if they're fake or not? No. There's no real communications, I could just as well talk back to the TV.

I've become much more cautious. In the meantime, I've expanded my posting of ads for my ebooks to add replies to other tweets. The trick is in figuring out whose tweets make sense to use to carry along my ebook ads. US Air Force tweets are no problem; a big organization like that won't care about, will hardly notice, my ads. Other tweeters may be more problematic. Replying to tweets from professional societies? I don't think so, they won't be receptive to amateurs. I'm still trying to figure out the best strategy.

* I've got into the custom of regularly sending out holiday emails to family and friends, and I got to wondering if I could find a holiday for every month. Some US holidays, like President's Day, Labor Day, and Memorial Day won't do, because they're just days off, not celebrations. So what about joke holidays? Star Wars Day? "May the 4th be with you!" Which is, of course, followed by: "Revenge Of the 5th". On that cue, I put together a list:

• JAN: New Year's Day
  
  
• FEB: Groundhog Day (2)
  
  
• MAR: Pi Day ("3.14")
  
  
• APR: April Fool's Day
  
  
• MAY: Star Wars Day
  
  
• JUN: Superman Day (12)
  
  
• JUL: 4th Of July
  
  
• AUG: Planetary Federation Day (12)
  
  
• SEP: International Talk Like A Pirate Day (19)
  
  
• OCT: Halloween
  
  
• NOV: US Thanksgiving
  
  
• DEC: Winterfest AKA Christmas

Apparently, there is some dispute over the exact date of the founding of the United Federation of Planets in 2161. I'm voting for 12 August. It's about as interesting a holiday as there is in August anyway.

[FRI 07 JAN 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (10)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (10): The solid-state electronics revolution was heavily funded by the US government, most notably through the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. However, transistors quickly obtained a growing foothold in consumer electronics as well, most noticeably in the form of pocket-sized Japanese-made transistor radios, powered by penlight batteries. The first serious computer using transistors instead of vacuum tubes was the UNIVAC Model 80, introduced in 1958.

This new generation of computers had other improvements, most notably support for "interrupts" -- that is, the capability to temporarily divert the operation of a computer in response to an external event, such as a fault or some action of an I/O device. There were tinkerings with the idea through the 1950s, but the first computer with a proper interrupt system was the TX-2, an experimental transistor-based computer built by MIT Lincoln Labs that went into operation in 1958. In response to an interrupt, it could suspend the running program, determine the source of the interrupt, run a routine to take care of it, and then return to the original running program where it left off.

The TX-2 was a ground-breaking system, most notably demonstrating the first computer-graphics program, named "Sketchpad", in 1963. Sketchpad was the brainchild of Ivan Sutherland, being the basis for his doctoral thesis at MIT, and allowed a user to draw simple objects on a CRT display using an input device called a "light pen". It was the ancestor of computer-aided drawing and imaging.

It was IBM that took the most advantage of the transistor revolution, with the company achieving particular success with the IBM 1401. It leveraged off two IBM inventions, the chain-drive printer and the magnetic disk, integrating them into the total customer solution.

By modern standards, the 1401 was still pathetic: it could have up to 32K of 6-bit words of core memory, and even that much was only available on special order. It didn't use ICs, instead being based on stacks of little circuit boards with transistors, resistors, and diodes. Nonetheless, IBM sold an unprecedented 12,000 of them.

IBM developed multiple lines of computers, developed by separate groups within the company: a scientific-technical line, a commercial data-processing line, an accounting line, a decimal machine line, and a line of what passed for "supercomputers" in those days. This product "balkanization" was obviously unsatisfactory, and so IBM decided to come up with a single architecture for all its products. At a cost of billions of dollars, IBM came up with the System/360 series -- the primary designer being the company's Gene Amdahl -- with the first delivered in 1965.

The IBM 360 was, again, an architecture, not a particular computer model in itself, and could be adapted to all IBM customer applications environments. Early models used both transistors and some ICs, but later models generally got rid of the stand-alone transistors, using a variant of BJT IC technology known as "emitter-coupled logic (ECL)". They added features such as "buffer memory", in which a solid-state memory was loaded up from core memory for faster access; and a "floating-point unit (FPU)" that could perform floating-point calculations in hardware, instead of more slowly in software.

One of the big innovations of the System/360 was that all the machines used the same operating system, OS/360. Anybody who could operate one machine in the 360 line could, with not too much difficulty, operate another. A particular innovation was that OS/360 had a "protected" mode, in that applications programs had no ability to influence the supervisory system. That was done simply to ensure orderly operation, but later the same idea would become very important to computer security. In any case, after the introduction of the System/360, computers were less classified by their hardware than by their operating systems. Nobody wanted to buy a computer and then have to start from the ground up again in operating it.

During the 1960s, IBM had about two-thirds of the market share of computers, the rest being fought over by the "BUNCH" of five, including:

• B: Burroughs
  
  
• U: Sperry-Rand UNIVAC
  
  
• N: National Cash Register (NCR)
  
  
• C: Control Data Corporation (CDC)
  
  
• H: Honeywell

RCA and General Electric were in the race early on, but dropped out. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 06 JAN 22] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Largest Known Comet Is Heading Close Enough To Us To Become Visible" by Ashley Strickland, 29 July 2021), the biggest comet ever spotted is now falling inward into the Solar System.

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein -- discovered by University of Pennsylvania department of physics & astronomy graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and Professor Gary Bernstein, who announced their find in June 2021 -- is from 100 to 200 kilometers (60 to 125 miles) across. That makes it about a thousand times bigger than any other comet ever discovered.

The giant comet, formally designated "C/2014 UN271", is from the far reaches of the solar system, with an apogee -- furthest distance from the Sun -- of about 6 trillion kilometers (3.7 trillion miles). That's about 40,000 astronomical units (AU), where an AU is the distance from Earth to Sun. It has an orbital period of about 7.5 million years. For reference, Pluto is 39 AU from the Sun, and has a period of 248 years.

The comet is currently about 3 billion kilometers (1.8 billion miles) from the Sun, roughly near the orbit of Neptune. At its closest approach in 2031, it will be at about the distance of Saturn's orbit. It will require a fair-sized amateur telescope to be seen even then.

It was discovered in six years of data collected by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The data was collected as part of the Dark Energy Survey, a collaboration of more than 400 scientists across seven countries and 25 institutions. DECam's primary mission is to help map 300 million galaxies across the night sky -- but of course, its imagery contains traces of comets and trans-Neptuninan objects.

Bernardinelli and Bernstein hunted through the data with the help of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to spot trans-Neptunian objects. During their work, the astronomers traced 32 detections to one object, which turned out to be the giant comet. Observations made using the Las Cumbres Observatory network of telescopes around the Earth helped confirm the find.

Images of the object taken between 2014 and 2018 did not show a cometary tail, but it has been displaying one since then. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein came from the Oort Cloud of objects, an isolated group of icy objects, located between 2,000 and 100,000 astronomical units from the Sun. The Oort Cloud is so distant that nobody's ever spotted an object in it, but we can see comets falling inward from it.

* As discussed in an article from TIME.com ("A Comet May Have Exploded Over Chile 12,000 Years Ago" by Jeffrey Kluger, 3 November 2021), in modern times the Atacama high desert of Chile is the driest place on Earth. However, 12,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene era, it was a grassland, roamed by sloths and early horses, with humans beginning to settle the area.

Shifting trade winds and ocean currents eventually shut off the rain, but 12,000 years ago, the Atacama was wracked by a more abrupt calamity -- when, according to new research, a comet exploded over the region, leaving a 75-kilometer (45-mile) wide area littered with green and black glass.

The glassy corridor was discovered in 2012, the glass being carbon-dated to 12,000 years ago, and the glass attributed to the work of intense wildfires. Peter Schultz -- planetary scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island -- wasn't so sure. Schultz and his colleagues collected 300 samples of glass from multiple sites separated by tens of kilometers and ran them through analysis.

One telltale was that the samples contained metallic minerals known as "zircons" that had decomposed under heat to an oxide form known as "baddeyelite". That can only happen at temperatures higher than 1,700 degrees Celsius (3,000 degrees Fahrenheit), a far higher temperature than might be found in a wildfire. In addition, the glass showed signs of shearing, folding, tearing and rolling, consistent with their creation in an explosive event.

Even more revealing was the presence of other materials in the glass samples, especially the iron sulfides known as "cubanite" and "troilite", and a phosphate mineral known as "chlorapatite". These minerals are rare on Earth, but common in asteroids and comets. In 2004, NASA's Stardust spacecraft flew by Comet Wild-2, collected samples of its dust and mineral grains and returned them to Earth in 2006. Schultz and his team found out that the glass particles were minerologically very similar to the Stardust samples.

There are hints of a local extinction event corresponding to the comet collision. There are actually other, similar glassy expanses at distant locations elsewhere in Chile. Schultz says they may in fact be found around the world: "There should be more examples. The difficulty is that such glasses can be easily destroyed with time. In addition, we found that only certain soils—fine dust—will form the glasses."

* As discussed in an article from SMITHSONIANMAG.com ("Scientists Discover Bevy of Black Holes in Our Own Galaxy" by David Kindy, 13 July 2021), about 80,000 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way's inner halo, a sparse collection of stars named "Palomar 5" has long puzzled astronomers. The star cluster's total mass is somewhat smaller than expected, and it is trailed by very thin streams of stars stretching some 22,800 light-years behind it. New research suggests that more than a hundred black holes may be lurking in Palomar 5, which may explain some of its peculiarities.

A research team led by astrophysicist Mark Gieles of the University of Barcelona in Spain, created a digital model of the evolution of star clusters to find out how Palomar 5 formed. The most important factor in the life of Palomar 5 turned out to the presence of black holes. From the known abundance of black holes, Palomar 5 was expected to have about 30 of them -- but as it turns out, it has as many as 124 black holes. Gieles says:

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One of the keys to the high concentration of black holes is the fact that Palomar 5 is "fluffy" -- it is ten times less massive and five times more spread out than most clusters of its kind. Star clusters of greater density tend to eject their black holes over time through stellar slingshot encounters. Similar clusters have, over the history of the Milky Way, already dissolved into thin stellar streams. At 11.5 billion years of age, Palomar 5 is likely to dissolve itself in about a billion years, with visible stars ejected -- to leave a black hole cluster.

[WED 05 JAN 22] ARAB MUDDLE (6)

* ARAB MUDDLE (6): A decade ago, Turkey seemed an oasis of stability and prosperity in the Muslim world. It was a tourist magnet, and the source of popular soap operas, dubbed into Arabic. It had a moderate Islamist government, a booming economy, and a high reputation. Many Arab activists saw it as the kind of country they aspired to.

Being controlled by Islamists, Turkey backed Islamists in the wake of the Arab Spring, being one of the few states to publicly denounce the overthrow of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt. As Islamists were chased out of power, many found safe haven in Turkey. Turkey gives protection to the enclave run by HTS Islamists in Syria. After the Tunisian revolution Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda party, explicitly cited Turkey as a model.

That sort of talk is not heard today, Turkey having lost its shine. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's ruler since 2003, has continually enhanced his authoritarian control, with the government stepping on protesters and the press. His economic policies debased the currency and fueled high inflation. A foreign policy once described as "zero problems with neighbors" has flipped into one of zero neighbors with no problems.

Arab countries have fired back at Turkey for its support of Islamists. The Saudis have run historical TV series unflattering to Turkey, and more substantially imposed an informal embargo on Turkish goods in 2020. Exports from Turkey to Saudi Arabia have slowed to a trickle.

Erdogan has got the hint. The government has recently told TV channels linked to the Muslim Brotherhood to tone down their rhetoric, with some of the more inflammatory journalists pulled off the air. In April 2021, an advisor to Erdogan said Turkey was eager to repair relations with Saudi Arabia -- and even praised the Saudi legal system for how it handled the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist butchered inside the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Arab dissidents living in Turkey have become very insecure.

When Islamists did achieve power elsewhere, again they didn't know how to drive. In the fall of 2012, the Brotherhood-led Egyptian government oversaw an effort to draft a new constitution. One of the most troublesome articles concerned the role of sharia, Islamic law, in Egyptian courts. It was asking for trouble, leading to confused and confusing disputes over the nuances of law and religion; liberals thought it went too far, conservatives not far enough. In the meantime, the economy was tanking -- not that the Islamists had much to offer there, even if they hadn't been distracted. Although Islamist parties tend to be capitalist, in contrast to the socialism often promoted by nationalist parties, Islamist economic philosophy rarely goes beyond a vague faith in markets.

The Ennahda Party in Tunisia has continued to exert political influence there, but it hasn't amounted to much. Ennahda has generally avoided playing the religion card, since there is an influential secular population that takes their philosophical cue from France; the party's economic policies are hard to tell from those of the old regime. It struck a deal with the IMF, imposed austerity, and clashed with the country's powerful trade unions.

Ennahda's flexibility led to the shrinking of its influence. Kais Saied, the political outsider elected as president in 2019, staged a sort of coup, stretching the constitution to invoke emergency powers, sack the prime minister and suspend parliament. Many Tunisians, fed up after a decade of political paralysis and economic pain, supported it, or didn't care. Ennahda denounced the coup at first, but then toned down its rhetoric.

The bottom line was that Islamists had played their cards and lost -- while they faced a wall of opposition from other Arab states, which see political Islam as a dangerous threat. In practice, it hardly seems that dangerous, but makes a convenient enemy for governments trying to reinforce their own control. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 04 JAN 22] USA 2022

* USA 2022: 2021 was not a year that the USA can look back on fondly. Everything was under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic; coupled to this was a general state of public contention and disorder, more or less focused on Donald Trump -- whose attempts to overturn the 2020 election got last year off to a particularly ugly start. Coupled to that is a sense of gridlock in Congress, focused primarily on West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who has been determined to confront Democratic policy initiatives with his contrarian view.

What then, can be expected of 2022? That's not suggesting predictions, just examining the prospect and considering the options. As for the pandemic, as of the new year things are looking grim, with the highly contagious Omicron variant of the virus raising hell around the world. On a closer look, Omicron hasn't left us that much worse off: vaccines are still effective against it, at least to the extent of reducing hospitalizations, while the new Pfizer and Merck antivirals look highly promising. In addition, the evidence coming in suggests Omicron isn't as brutal as earlier COVID-19 strains. A lot of Americans will still be getting sick, but mortality rates will go way down.

There is the concern about getting Americans vaccinated, in the face of pig-headed resistance from the Right. The Biden Administration is working to establish far-reaching vaccine mandates, though for the moment the courts are stalling the effort. Hopefully, the mandates will get a green light, otherwise we're in for more trouble. Even with the trouble, one has to wonder if the stubborn pushback against pandemic-control measures from Red state governments will do them much good over the longer run. It is hard to see how Republicans can confidently run election campaigns on the slogan: WE DON'T CARE HOW MANY DIED. If they don't say it, their opponents will say it about them.

It does seem like the Right is on the defensive -- and certainly Trump is much diminished. The January 6th Committee in Congress is moving right along. Skeptics blast it as ineffectual, but by all appearances it's running like clockwork. The few who are refusing to cooperate with the committee are surrounded by hundreds who are cooperating, and confronted with embarrassing document trails. The holdouts are not stalling the committee, they are being legally encircled. Their legal stalling tactics are being methodically broken down until they won't work any more.

The 1-6 Committee doesn't mean business? It is the creation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is old and shrewd; she says little about Trump, but she is determined to and will bring him down. The investigation itself is obviously under the direction of Adam Schiff, an experienced Federal prosecutor; while Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, knows exactly what can and cannot be done; and Liz Cheney has wielded the hatchet with enthusiasm.

It appears the committee will issue a report by early summer. What happens then? One strong possibility is that Congress will vote to convict Donald Trump of insurrection, so he won't be able to run for office again; some members of the House may suffer the same fate. The report will be passed on to the DOJ, which is likely -- after deliberation -- to act on it. The skeptics of the effort, not incidentally, don't all seem to be on the level, some of them suspiciously sounding like fakes.

As far as the gridlock in Congress goes, it seemed to reach an intolerable level when Senator Manchin announced on FOX News that he could not vote for the Biden Administration's Build Back Better (BBB) social-spending bill. Those familiar with Manchin know better than to take him at face value; these days, he actually votes the Democratic Party line about 85% of the time. Indeed, to those who observe Manchin, he seemed to be trying to come in for a landing on BBB -- if on his terms. Hopefully, matters will be decided in January.

One of the reasons for believing that is that the Democrats have a big agenda, and can't afford to stall on it any longer. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said the Democrats will push a voter-rights bill -- and if the Republicans try to block it, then filibuster reform will be discussed. Manchin has notoriously made it clear he will not vote to kill the filibuster, but he's also made it clear all along that he was in favor of reforming it. Manchin and a group of other Democratic senators have been laying the groundwork.

Once the filibuster is taken care of, one way or another, and the voter rights act passed, then that opens the door to other major laws. The attacks on ROE V. WADE have become impossible to disregard, so a reproductive-rights act is a possibility. If its scope is merely to establish the principles of ROE V. WADE in articulated law, it shouldn't be too hard to pass it, since the majority of Americans support RvW.

Another possibility is a gun-control act, banning private ownership of battlefield weapons and establishing some class of licensing requirements. Still another possibility is Supreme Court reform: while court-packing has no big public support, term limits do. There is also the question of how to prevent a Republican Senate from denying Biden appointments to SCOTUS.

And then there's foreign policy. Right now, the USA is confronting Russian aggression against Ukraine, and Chinese aggression against Taiwan; where that goes, nobody knows. Tensions with China are going to continue, with American responses being carefully calibrated. The Biden Administration, while not hostile to America's allies as Donald Trump was, is being cautious about coming to trade deals with them. It is not yet clear if that's a real disinterest in deals, or just keeping the deals on a low profile.

There is also the work on the nuclear deal with Iran. Both sides have been talking a tough line, but it seems both want a deal; they just don't want to be seen as soft. The Biden Administration certainly remembers how Trump beat up the Obama Administration for the original deal. One particularly interesting foreign-policy issue is Afghanistan under the Taliban. Diplomatically, the Taliban are generally isolated, and the USA wants them to stay that way. One of the quiet issues is whether the US will support anti-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan, or is already covertly doing so.

The economy doesn't sound like it's going to be a big problem for the Biden Administration. Yes, inflation is high, but GDP and employment are surging. Oil production should be in a glut early in the new year, while the supply bottlenecks and production backlogs should gradually cease to be a problem. The Biden Administration has been suffering in public-approval polls; there's some basis for believing that will turn around soon enough.

That links into the mid-term elections come next Fall. Right now, the media is making much of the problems of the Democrats, but there's good reason to believe those are temporary. The Republicans have much deeper problems, and once the 1-6 Committee moves in on Trump, those problems will be on full display. What will happen in the mid-terms? It's a toss-up.

[MON 03 JAN 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 1

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The complaints about the ineffectualness of the House January 6th Committee and the indifference of the Department of Justice to the Capitol riot on that day continues on Twitter. John Dean -- one of the big players in the Watergate scandal during the Nixon Administration -- had astute comments on current events versus Watergate, which are worth reprinting here.

Before proceeding, here's a timeline of Watergate events:

• Watergate break-in of DNC office: 17 June 1972
  
  
• Indictment of White House Plumbers: September 1972
  
  
• Conviction of White House Plumbers: January 1973
  
  
• Indictment of Watergate Seven White House officials: March 1974
  
  
• Resignation of Richard Nixon: August 1974

So ... over two years from the crime to the major consequence. Dean elaborated:

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I would add that there's never been a more significant Congressional investigation than that of the January 6th Committee. It's the biggest deal in Congress since the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. The committee members know exactly what they are doing, and they don't miss any tricks. The committee is playing chess; those trying to defy it are playing checkers, and aren't very good at it.

Incidentally, January 6 is coming up, with warnings going around that there may be trouble then. Possibly, but I wouldn't bet on it. The MAGAbots are mostly mouth, and are losers. As I keep saying, the current national lunacy isn't for real, it isn't sustainable. The problem is, how long will the illusion persist?

* In another Twitter thread, one Craig Spencer MD (@Craig_A_Spencer) commented:

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* I mentioned getting a free forum from Bravenet a few weeks back for use as a scratchpad for casual postings, to be linked to Twitter postings. I figured that one free forum would do just as well for that purpose as any other, but the Bravenet forum was weak, ugly, and not easy to administer. I got to thinking I had a better deal at one time, and after some puzzling around, realized what I had was a Proboards free forum.

That was like ten years ago. I looked up Proboards and signed up for a forum again. It's much more capable, prettier, and easy to administer. I just got it minimally set up; to my surprise, I found out that a simple menu entry that generated a cross-post to my Twitter account. "This just looks better and better!"

I also mentioned a week ago that I'd got the GARFIELD KART game for my Windows game PC for cheap. I liked the kart racing enough to see if I could find a kart racing game for my Android phone. Some hunting around led me to a free BEACH BUGGY RACING (BBR) game, which I downloaded and found entertaining. Controls for smartphone games tend to be troublesome, but BBR uses tilt for steering, and is easy to play.

Working from there, I wondered if I could find BBR on the Steam game website, and sure enough I did, buying BEACH BUGGY RACING 2 with the HOT WHEELS EXPANSION pack for $13.50 USD total. I can play with a bluetooth game controller, and I have a lot more different racetrack options. Pity I don't have so much time to play it.