DayVectors

* 21 entries including: SOCOM Armed Overwatch aircraft, 5th information revolution (series), slow BRICS (series), Arab muddle (series), invasion of Ukraine, Russia threatens Ukraine & Britain's Tories in trouble, Trump in more trouble over documents & gerrymandering, Canadian trucker's blockade & Pence denounces Big Lie, Armed Overwatch aircraft, AI image noise removal, Webb Space Telescope, & bringing down Trump.

[MON 28 FEB 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 9

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Of course, the big news this week was the expected invasion of Ukraine by Russia. For the moment, everything's a fog, too much misinformation going around. A video was circulating of a Ukrainian MiG-29 shooting down a Russian Su-35; turned out it was a clip from a combat sim. Other bogus videos are at large.

What is known is that there's a lot of fighting, with large numbers of long-range missiles launched against Kyiv and other targets. It appears the Russians are not getting a free ride, with the Ukrainians fighting back furiously. There were mass protests against the war in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, with mass arrests. It also appears that Russian grunts have no enthusiasm for shooting at Ukrainians, much less for being shot at by them. A Ukrainian general said: "We have captured around 200 Russian soldiers, some around 19 years old. Not trained at all. Badly equipped. We allow them to call their parents. Parents completely surprised."

A video, apparently authentic, went viral of a woman berating an obviously uncomfortable Russian soldier:

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Although Kyiv is being encircled, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is defiantly remaining, visiting the troops wearing combat helmet and flak vest. In response to a suggestion that he be evacuated, he said: "The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

He's become an international hero -- not bad for a stand-up comic who rose to fame by playing a Ukrainian president in a video series. Twitter has been playing him up:

David Carroll @profcarroll: Putin’s miscalculations included taking on some kind of real-life superhero who delivers lines as if written by a Marvel screenwriter.

Whether Zelenskiy survives or not is another question; Russian President Vladimir Putin has all but declared he wants him dead. Putin, of course, comes on like a real-life Marvel supervillain. He thinks he's another Stalin, but he's more like another Saddam Hussein.

The West is responding with escalating sanctions and funneling more arms to the Ukrainians. There's talk of a full-scale cyberwar breaking out, but for the moment the talk is muted. There's also talk of NATO enforcing a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine, but that seems unlikely, since it's too much like going to war with Russia. Certainly, a lot of thought and effort is being invested in the response, and it will be interesting to see what comes of that. The Russians will not like it.

In the USA, Trump originally sided with Putin -- but having seen the wave of public support for Ukraine, Trump and the GOP have taken to praising Ukraine, and blaming the situation on Joe Biden. Lame.

* Retired US Army General Mark Hertling commented on Twitter that the contest between Ukraine and Russia is not that unequal -- some editing added:

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* Speaking of obnoxious Republicans, Texas Senator Ted Cruz shot a sneer at White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, referring her to "Peppermint Patty", the old PEANUTS comic-strip girl. All I could think was: Hey, she does kinda look like Peppermint Patty!

Psaki was hardly offended. She's looking forward to ending her stint as spokesperson; it appears that news outlets like MSNBC and CNN are in a bidding war to see who can enlist her. Hey, maybe she'll get a Hollywood deal, too.

In more bizarre news, a man in Salt Lake City drove to a McDonald's, and was given a wrong order. He started ranting and waving a pistol around; the staff went to fix the order, and called the cops. The cops arrived and told him to get out of the car -- but when he did so, one of the cops was shot at from the back seat. It turned out to be the man's four-year-old son, the man having handed him the pistol and told him to shoot at the cops. "Huh?"

[FRI 25 FEB 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (17)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (17): Outside of the computer arena, there wasn't that much progress in information technology in the 1960s. Telephone technology was largely unchanged from the 1950s, though the introduction of communication satellites in the mid-1960s did offer a new option for international communications. Television became more pervasive, with color TV gradually crowding out black & white. TV remote controls also became more common; in fact, they had been around from the mid-1950s, but they weren't very practical with vacuum-tube electronics. The switch to solid-state electronics was a major advance for all consumer electronics, with vacuum-tube televisions and radios reduced to obsolescence by the end of the decade.

Solid-state portable and car radios proliferated, with stereo FM broadcast -- introduced at the beginning of the decade -- enhancing the listening experience. Stereo phonograph equipment also became a standard, as did reel-to-reel audio tape recorders -- complemented by the "compact cassette" tape recorder / player, introduced by Philips Corporation in 1963. The plastic-cased compact cassette was much easier to handle than reel-to-reel tapes, and became the basis for ubiquitous portable tape players.

The 8-track tape module, developed by colorful American inventor Bill Lear in the mid-1960s, made playing prerecorded music in cars practical for the first time. It also made music counterfeiting much easier. "Pirating" music hadn't been very practical before that, but anybody could run off copies of 8-track tapes, with piracy becoming widespread. The 8-track tape didn't last very long; it was a dubious technology, using only a single reel with the tape in a loop, the tape being fed to a reader head, and then looping back to the center of the reel. 8-track tapes rarely lasted very long, with the tape stuck in the drive when the module was ejected, resulting in a tangle of tape all over the car. The 8-track tape was soon replaced by the compact cassette.

* At the beginning of the 1970s, computing remained in the province of computing centers, under the supervision of experts -- though DEC minicomputers did appear in industrial and technical environments, as did PLCs. IBM introduced the System / 370 series of mainframes in 1970, which was an incremental improvement on the System / 360 computers, being based on IC technology, most models using transistor memory instead of core. It was "upward compatible" with the System / 360, meaning code written for the System / 360 could run on the System / 370, but not necessarily the other way around. The System / 370 introduced "cache memory", what IBM called a "buffer", which was a high-speed transistor memory intermediate between the processor and the slower main memory. The System / 370 was designed with dual processors in mind, and tailored to support a multi-user environment.

IBM dominated the computer market globally during the 1970s, though competitors survived -- including foreign competitors that had emerged, such as Siemens and Telefunken in Germany; ICL in the UK; Olivetti in Italy; plus Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and Oki in Japan. There was no competition from the East Bloc; the Soviets could do no more than copy older IBM computer models.

DEC, however, dominated the minicomputer market -- to entrench its position with the introduction of the VAX series of minicomputers in 1977, the first being the VAX-11/780. It provided more processing power and a greatly expanded memory space compared to the PDP-11, but was most noteworthy for its tidy processor architecture, well-thought-out complex instruction set, and in particular for its relatively easy-to-use operating system, VMS, designed by a team under DEC's Dave Cutler. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 24 FEB 22] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: Russian pressure on Ukraine has led to a rapid arms buildup there, with NATO powers providing the country with such advanced weapons as the Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles, as well as Stinger and Grom light anti-aircraft missiles. As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Needy Ukrainian Reserve Units Could Be Armed With Pre-World War II DP-27 Machine Guns" by Joseph Trevithick, 26 January 2022), the Ukrainians are digging into stockpiled weapons as well -- with the antique DP-27 machine gun going into the hands of under-armed Territorial Defense Unit forces.

Soviet small arms designer Vasily Degtyaryov led the development team that generated the DP-27 in the late 1920s, with the design, as its name implies, being formally accepted for trials in 1927. It went into service in 1928. It is a classic Soviet weapons design, being simple, sturdy, reliable, and effective. It features a distinctive top-mounted pan-shaped magazine holding 47 7.76x54-millimeter rimmed cartridges and has a rate of fire of around 550 rounds per minute. Vehicle and aircraft-mounted versions were later developed, as was a belt-fed derivative, the RP-46. It was widely exported after World War 2.

An instructor in a recent Ukrainian training video said: "In my opinion, there are no old machine guns at all. And the main tactical and technical characteristic of any weapon is the head of its owner and what is invested in this head." Obviously, the instructor was attempting to reassure trainees that they could have confidence in an old, but that was the truth. It appears some Maxim 1910 machine guns are still in Ukrainian service; they predate World War I, but they also are effective weapons. They are similarly chambered for 7.76x54-mm ammunition, which is still in use. Ukrainian troops are also obtaining the WAC-47, an M-16-type automatic rifle firing Russian 7.62x39-mm ammunition.

Currently, Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces consist of around 80,000 volunteers, in total, organized in 25 separate brigades across the country.

* According to an article in NAVALNEWS.com ("NavyPODS Aims To 'Modularise' Fleet Payloads & Capabilities" by Richard Scott, 16 September 2021), Britain's Royal Navy is now working on a scheme for a deployable and interchangeable suite of mission modules that adapt a range of ship platforms to new missions. The "Navy Persistent Operational Deployment System (NavyPODS)" system is based on standard 6-meter (20-foot) cargo containers, allowing NavyPODS to be conveniently warehoused, transported, and installed. The RN envisions applications for NavyPODS in mine hunting, survey, air systems, communications, lethality, medical and other missions.

Possible platforms include the new Type 26 and Type 31 frigates, amphibious ships, offshore patrol vessels, auxiliary ships, and Future Commando Force elements ashore. It is envisaged that delivery, either ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore, will be via autonomous stabilized platforms, or using a heavy-lift unmanned air system. Examples discussed so far include communications for the control of drone systems, an aviation support module, and a "factory in the box" additive manufacturing facility.

* As reported in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("Let's Take Our First Look At Kratos' Airwolf Tactical Drone" by Joseph Trevithick, 2 September 2021), the Kratos company of the USA has established a niche for itself in the manufacture and sale of target drones, including the "BQM-167 Skeeter" and smaller "MQM-178 Firejet". Kratos has expanded its niche by updating its target drones to become attack drones, with the BQM-167 becoming the armed "UTAP-22 Mako", and the MQM-178 now similarly becoming the "Airwolf" AKA "Tactical Firejet", with first flight in the summer of 2021.

The MQM-178 is powered by two small JetCat C81 turbojets. It has a length of 3.3 meters (10.8 feet), a wingspan of 2 meters (6.5 feet), a maximum take-off weight of about 145 kilograms (320 pounds). It can carry about 32 kilograms (70 pounds) of payload internally, plus about 15 kilograms (35 pounds) under each wing and 9 kilograms (20 pounds) on each wingtip. It is launched by catapult and recovered by parachute.

Other than mentioning an autonomous / AI control system, not much has been said about the Airwolf. It would be able to carry various kinds of intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance (ISR) sensor packages, electronic warfare systems, communications relay nodes, and even small smart munitions -- though it wouldn't be able to carry a very strong attack punch. The development program is company-funded, though it seems Kratos is working with a customer on it. [ED: I can't read this without having the snappy theme song from the old AIRWOLF TV show running through my head.]

[WED 23 FEB 22] SLOW BRICS (3)

* SLOW BRICS (3): China's failure to import manufactured goods on the scale that might have been expected illustrates what Dani Rodrik of Harvard University has called "premature de-industrialisation". Producing goods for export no longer seems able to drive a developing economy as far down the road towards rich-world incomes as was once the case. Low Chinese demand is far from the only factor. Greater manufacturing productivity, in large part due to automation, has pushed the global price of manufactured goods down. Instead of becoming producers, even low-income countries are becoming importers of manufactured goods.

The poorest countries in Africa could still get a big boost to productivity and incomes by increasing the role of manufacturing in their economies. But as CGD's Subramanian comments, the development of machines that can handle ever more of the tasks now done by human workers at ever lower costs necessarily limits the scope for convergence via industrialization.

With the boosts provided by high commodity prices and trade growth no longer in effect, what about the third factor that kicked off the boom times of the 2000s? -- that is, interest rates, which remain low, which is a good thing. However, a rich-world boom following the COVID-19 pandemic does pose risks, possibly leading to inflation in the USA, which would be countered by the Fed raising interest rates, possibly sharply. That could generate shockwaves, leading to crashing asset prices and drawing a lot of capital away from the emerging world. Even a modest rise in American interest rates in coming years, prompted by healthy growth and falling unemployment, could trip up some overstretched governments.

For now, however, the risk of calamity seems low. Interest rates are an unreliable guide to future inflation, but yields on US government bonds have actually declined in recent weeks at all maturities. A robust recovery across advanced economies without a long-term shift towards higher interest rates is perfectly possible, and highly desireable.

Even if the pandemic doesn't skew rich-world monetary policy, its overall effect on the developing world has been dire. In 2020 output across the emerging economies fell by 2.1%. That average is skewed upwards, however, by the fact that China, having managed to contain its initial outbreak, actually saw its economy expand. Other major emerging markets did much worse: India's economy shrank by 7.3%, Brazil's by 4.1%, South Africa's by 7%. The World Bank estimates that the numbers of those living in extreme poverty are likely to have risen by 150 million. Hopes for an economic boom in 2021 faded on the spread of the Delta variant and the slow pace of vaccination outside rich countries.

There will also be long-term effects. One of the conditions for catching up with the rich world is investment in human capital; that has been badly hit by the pandemic. Although students around the world lost schooling time to the interruptions caused by the pandemic, those in the poorest nations were hit the hardest. While children in advanced economies missed the equivalent of 15 or so days of instruction on average in 2020, those in emerging markets missed about 45, while children in the poorest countries missed 70. The pandemic has also aggravated problems of governance and political instability in much of the emerging world.

In the 1990s and 2000s, rapid growth in trade and output was associated with a decline in inequality between countries but a rise in inequality within them, emerging markets very much included. When growth slowed in the 2010s, the distribution of economic gains within economies led to internal problems, with more fractious politics becoming the norm and more countries sliding towards or into autocracy. The democracy index produced by The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company, has declined every year from 2015 to 2020.

Politicians from the political fringes have been on a roll, often boosted by selling economic fantasies, generally on the back of unrealistic promises. Misgovernance feeds the economic stagnation, with leadership unwilling or unable to pursue sensible economic policies, much less reform. Nationalism works against international collective efforts to deal with global problems, which invariably have economic impacts. Add to this climate change, which is already making its costs felt. It will only get worse over the short run, and the pain will be disproportionately inflicted on poor countries. Both political instability and interstate tensions will increase.

The first two decades of the millennium demonstrated that sustained, broad-based growth in developing economies was possible -- but now it has slowed, and is struggling against the pandemic and climate change. There is no need to give up hope, however. If things do not continue to get worse, it is still possible for the BRICs to match the output of the G6 by 2040. The gate which was opened at the end of the 20th century has narrowed, but it has not shut -- though getting through is now clearly more difficult than it was. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 22 FEB 22] ARMED OVERWATCH

* ARMED OVERWATCH: As discussed in an article from DEFENSENEWS.com ("Special Ops Still Bullish On New Armed Overwatch Plane" by Valerie Insinna, 16 February 2021, the US Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) is now seeking an "Armed Overwatch Aircraft (AOA)" -- defined as a reconfigurable, multi-mission aircraft that will conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, as well as perform close air support of ground forces. The AOA will be flown only in uncontested environments such as in Africa; it will be able to operate in austere conditions using a very minimal logistics footprint.

Currently, AFSOC operates the U-28 Draco, a variant of the Swiss Pilatus PC-12 single-engine turboprop executive aircraft in the ISR role -- but the U-28 is not armed, and it isn't seen as suitable for the AOA role. USAF LTGEN James C. "Jim" Slife, commander of AFSOC, says: "The armed overwatch platform will be less expensive to operate [than the U-28]. It will be more versatile than the U-28, and frankly, we'll have greater capacity to operate in those small disaggregated kinds of teams."

The AOA will be an off-the-shelf item, with modifications as per AFSCOM spec. Five vendors are competing:

• Leidos INC: Bronco II, a pusher turboprop "bushwar" aircraft developed by a South African group.
  
  
• MAG Aerospace: MC-208 Guardian, an armed combat version of the Cessna Caravan utility aircraft.
  
  
• Textron Aviation Defense: AT-6E Wolverine, an armed combat variant of the T-6 Texan 2 trainer, which is in turn a derivative of the Swiss Pilatus PC-21 trainer.
  
  
• Sierra Nevada Corporation:’s MC-145B Wily Coyote, an armed combat version of the Polish PZL M28 Skytruck twin-turboprop utility aircraft, itself a derivative of the Russian An-28. AFSOC already has operated unarmed versions of the M27.
  
  
• L-3 Communications Integrated Systems: AT-802U Sky Warden, an armed combat version of the classic Air Tractor cropduster.

Aircraft may be selected from more than one vendor. AFSOC is after five machines, with a requirement of up to 75. Slife says: "The whole reason we're doing this is because the national defense strategy talks about the need to do cost-effective [counter-violent extremist organization] operations, cost-effective irregular warfare. So the operating environment where we currently operate U-28s is about the same operating environment where we would envision operating armed overwatch platforms."

Slife emphasized that the armed overwatch program is not a "rehash" of the Air Force's light attack experimentation campaign -- in which the USAF evaluated a set of light attack aircraft, including some now being evaluated for the AOA program. OK, yes and no; AOA is another iteration of the light attack evaluations, but it's defined for a different mission. Hopefully, it will do better than the light attack program, which went completely off the rails, which is why Slife was distanced himself from it.

* As discussed in an article from JANES.com ("SOFIC 2021: USSOCOM Touts Amphibious MC-130" by Andrew White, 19 May 21), at the virtual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC), Colonel Ken Kuebler -- an officer with the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) in charge of fixed-wing aircraft -- said that SOCOM was interested in acquiring an amphibious version of the venerable Lockheed Martin MC-130 Hercules tactical cargolifter.

The AFSOC already flies the MC-130J Commando II for special missions, including "clandestine, or low-visibility, single or multiship, low-level infiltration, exfiltration, and resupply of special operations forces". The Commando II is optimized for night operations, with an electro-optic / infrared sensor turret, advanced cockpit avionics, and defensive countermeasures.

The "MC-130 Amphibious Capability (MAC)" concept would give the Commando II greater operational flexibility. Apparently, this is not the first time a floatplane Hercules has been proposed, but Kuebler says there was "enough command interest" at USSOCOM to make it happen today. Later reports indicate that SOCOM has committed to the project.

[MON 21 FEB 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 8

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: We appear to be on the threshold of war between Russia and Ukraine, there being a stream of incidents on the front lines of the break-away Donbas region that appear to be provocations for war. Civilians are being evacuated from Donbas, clearly to get them out of the line of fire.

The US has been putting up a strong front against the Russians, with blunt warnings from President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris, who has tended to suffer from PR problems, has never looked better; she's tough-minded, and does well when she can play tough. In the meantime, the MAGA Right in the USA is cheering on Putin.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put out an articulate brief video suggesting that Vladimir Putin's game demonstrates more much more weakness than strength. Russia has never really accepted Ukrainian independence; it was tolerable when the government in Kyiv was pro-Russian, but the Maidan Revolution of 2013:2014 overthrew that government, and installed one that was more responsive to the public will, less responsive to the Kremlin. Officials of the old regime were cleared out of government, and Kyiv grew closer to the EU.

It appears that Putin believed intimidation would result in the collapse of the Ukrainian government and create divisions in NATO. In reality, it's had the reverse effects, solidifying support for the government and causing NATO to close ranks. It does not seem like this will work out well for Putin, and indeed there may be some dissension in the Kremlin over the push for war.

The thought arises: what if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election? Trump was always friendly to Putin and noisily hostile to NATO, and Putin's game might have worked better. Of course, the idea of Trump being re-elected is the stuff of nightmares; as has been said, America could handily survive four years of Trump, but not eight years. Given that time, he would have installed his stooges all through government, and there would be no getting him out.

* Across the Pond, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been under fire for serial infractions of the rules. An editorial from ECONOMIST.com ("The Tories' Problems Go Deeper Than Just One Man", 19 February 2022) suggesting that Britain's Tories are suffering from problems much like those of America's Republicans:

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Once the Brexiters took power, they evicted Remainers from government, to then make the "shining ideal" of Brexit an exercise in posturing and muddle:

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There is no agreement among the Tories and no push for a consensus. They chose Boris Johnson as prime minister, one reason being that he lacked the strength to impose his will on the party:

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After the election defeat of 2019, it seemed as if Labour was so lost that it could never make up the lost ground. Under Keir Starmer, Labour has been making it up rapidly, first sidelining Corbyn and then challenging Johnson. Labour's prospects of regaining power are bright -- but we're not out of the woods yet. From 2016, both the UK and the US suffered an inversion of sensibilities, in which politicians rejected propriety to gain the approval of voters. This is not a stable situation, but isn't clear when it's going to go away.

* Heard on Twitter: Jimmy Kimmel commented on Trump's new social media platform: "Basically, they made Donald Trump a pretend Twitter to post on. See, that's what we should be doing: Build him a fake Oval Office, tell him he's president again, and everybody wins." Another Twitterer made a vaguely related comment:

On a less global scale, one Moira Donegan (@MoiraDonegan) said: "I adore my dog, but I respect my cat. A dog is like a happy, dependent toddler. A cat is a tiny god that lives in your apartment."

Yes, despite my intent to get away from Twitter, I'm back there and posting again. It's not the same as it was, however, since I've become adept at dodging trolls. I've got particularly exasperated with the crowd that is demanding that Donald Trump be locked up yesterday, and denouncing Attorney General Merrick Garland for not doing so. I reply:

Sometimes I get a reply, but I never read it, since I already know what it says. Yes, I would be happy to see Donald Trump stand trial, but it can't happen quickly; his 5-alarm-fire, 3-ring-circus, clown-car conspiracy is just too big of a wreck to unravel quickly. Cutting corners with someone as experienced with gaming the law as Trump is not a good idea. I like to post a GIF of OJ Simpson trying on gloves: "If it does not fit, you must acquit!" I don't argue with them, though. I usually just tell them GET A LIFE, and leave it at that.

* I've talked about Windows / Steam game PC in my living room in the past. For the last month or so, I've been stalled with it, because I couldn't get the bluetooth game controller to work consistently. Sometimes it would work fine, other times it would give anomalous results. With gradual tinkering, I finally figured it out.

First, I was using a little bluetooth keyboard to log in. I finally realized that could cause confusion with the bluetooth controller, and that I should use my Logitech wireless keyboard instead -- which has a dedicated wireless connection instead, via a USB plug module. That helped a lot, but I kept having problems with low batteries, so instead I plugged in an old USB keyboard I had stowed away. The USB keyboard, unlike the Logitech keyboard, didn't have a touchpad, but I found that I could use keyboard commands to navigate and modify Windows. [ED: Later, I got a USB touchpad, and everything worked fine then.]

Second, as Steam recommends, now I always run the Steam environment in full-screen mode before I start a game. I had been trying to run games from shortcuts on the Windows desktop, but that doesn't work reliably. I have to run the game from the Steam environment so it can make sure the controller configuration for the particular game is correct. I need to figure out how to boot the PC into the full-screen Steam environment.

Third, if the controller suddenly stops working right -- it appears, on some games, certain input combinations create confusion somewhere along the line -- all I have to do is bail out of the game, go back to the Steam environment, and start the game again to configure the controller once more. With some games, I start over from where I left off.

I just bought a new 8BitDo Pro 2 controller from Amazon; I currently have a Y-Team controller that's compatible with the Nintendo Switch, as is the 8BitDo Pro 2, but the 8BitDo Pro 2 controller supports pushbutton reconfiguration.

I'm hoping that means I can use motion control with it. I've already got an 8BitDo M30 controller that I used to play games on my Amazon Fire TV Cube; it's a simple controller, thumbpad and buttons only, compatible with the Sega Genesis controller. It seems 8BitDo tends to make retro or retro-style controllers. Sigh, I'm becoming a gaming nut without intending to. I'm thinking strongly about buying a Steam Deck handheld game machine later this year, probably in the summer. The Steam Deck can run my existing games library -- I'm wondering if I can watch videos on it, too. "Only difference between men and boys is the price of the toys."

[FRI 18 FEB 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (16)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (16): Scientific and engineering simulation advanced in the 1960s with the arrival of tools for the job. One of the pioneering tools was what became known as the "General Purpose Simulation System (GPSS)", developed by Geoffrey Gordon of IBM in 196O:1961. It was a "discrete event simulator", allowing the simulation of processes that consisted of separate events connected in a network. GPSS was programmed using block diagrams, Gordon believing that would be a more natural interface for engineers than a programming language. It was used in simulations of, for example, urban traffic systems, telephone networks, airline reservation handling, and steel-mill operations.

Another tool was SIMSCRIPT, developed by Harry Markowitz and Bernard Hausner of the RAND Corporation and introduced in 1963. It was a computer language for discrete event simulation, with SIMSCRIPT code translated into FORTRAN code for execution. It led to a refined simulation language, SIMULA, developed by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl of the Royal Norwegian Computing Center. SIMULA was an extension of the ALGOL 60 language, most significantly adopted a "modular" approach to program that would seed later "object-oriented" languages.

Simulations continued to be developed using systems of differential equations or stochastic methods, but developing general tools for such systems was troublesome. Improved methods were of course developed, and distributed through the simulation community.

* Since computers were big and expensive in the 1960s, they weren't of that much use for games. Who would pay so much for such a trivial use? To be sure, as mentioned earlier, there was work on chess and other traditional strategy games, as research projects, from the 1950s, and improved versions of such games were introduced through the 1960s.

There had been tinkerings with purely computer games from the outset, but the first computer "video game" that caught on was SPACEWAR!, developed by a group of researchers at MIT in 1962, running on a DEC PDP-1. It had two spaceships -- just cursors, really -- orbiting a star and taking pot-shots at each other. It became popular among the computing community, being continuously refined, and giving ideas for what else might be done.

Computer crime and computer security were in an equally primitive state in the 1960s. Crimes were performed, but they were often "inside jobs" by people running computer systems, not different from traditional accounting scams and the like. Only a small staff had access to any computer; in an era where computers had limited connectivity and often ran batch programs from stacks of punch cards, computer break-ins were not a big deal.

Multi-user systems did provide opportunities for misconduct by users, with password security being invented at MIT in 1962 -- if essentially just to ensure student privacy and track accounts, user time on such systems being allocated. It wasn't long before a student named Allan Scherr decided to prank the system, devising a punchcard that commanded the system to print out all user passwords. With student computer pranking becoming something of a custom, more thought was given to computer security.

Work was certainly also done on using computers for encryption in the 1960s, -- and of course cryptographic organizations like the US National Security Agency (NSA) used computers for decryption tasks, following up the earlier use of Hollerith card readers for that purpose. This work being largely secret, of course, there's not much of a historical record of it.

* As far as artificial intelligence went, it remained in the domain of research, not application. In 1961 James Slagel, an MIT student working with Marvin Minsky, developed the "Symbolic Automatic Integrator (SAINT)", which solved symbolic integration problems in freshman calculus. It was an early example of a "rule-based system" or "expert system", using an elaborate set of IF-THEN-ELSE rules to perform its tasks.

In 1964 Daniel Bobrow, another student of Minsky at MIT, created STUDENT, an AI program written in LISP that could take algebraic word problems, of the sort that long plagued elementary-school students, and generate answers for them. It was another rule-based system, but also added limited comprehension of the English language, becoming one of the first "natural language processing (NLP)" tools.

In 1965, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT took NLP a step further by developing ELIZA, a "conversational" system that could chat with users -- or more appropriately, poorly fake a conversation, since all it did was pick out certain phrases or patterns in user text, and regurgitate a set of nonspecific answers. ELIZA programs can be found online today, and they are annoying to use. In hindsight, ELIZA can be seen as a prank, but nothing near that capable had ever been made before, and it would lead to much more sophisticated "chatbots".

In 1966, a team of investigators at Stanford Research International (SRI) in Menlo Park, California -- the team including Charles Rosen and Nils Nilsson -- developed a robot named "Shakey" that could navigate through a small controlled world. It was not very capable, but it was a pioneering effort in robotics, incorporating advances in logical analysis, NLP, and machine vision. It was a start. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 17 FEB 22] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for January included:

-- 06 JAN 22 / STARLINK 4-5 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2149 UTC (local time + 4) to put 49 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).

-- 13 JAN 22 / TRANSPORTER 3 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1525 UTC (local time + 5), on the "Transporter 3" mission, a rideshare flight to low-Earth orbit, carrying 105 payloads. The dedicated Transporter rideshare missions feature a payload stack of several rings that each contain circular attachment points, or ports, with a defined volume around them that can be filled with one or many satellites depending on customer needs. The payloads included:

• 44 "Superdove" Earth-observation satellites from Planet, being 3-unit (3U) CubeSats.
  
  
• 3 Lemur 3U CubeSats from Spire, to perform GPS occultation observations.
  
  
• Six comsats from Kepler Communications.
  
  
• SAR satellites from Capella Space, Iceye, & Umbra.
  
  
• Five CubeSats from Italy-based launch integration company D-Orbit, including 3 for SatRevolution of Poland, plus one each for Aistech Space and Czech Aerospace Research Center (VZLU).
  
  
• A number of payloads from Exolaunch, a German launch services company.
  
  
• A nanosat named "DEWASAT 1", from Dubai's Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA).

This was the tenth flight of the Falcon 9 first stage. It performed a soft landing in Florida.

-- 13 JAN 21 / STP & SATREV SMALLSATS: -- The Virgin Orbit "Cosmic Girl" carrier aircraft, a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, operating out of the Mojave Air & Space Port in California, performed the third launch of the "LauncherOne" air-launched booster over the Pacific Ocean. The launch took place at 2251 UTC (local time + 5). It carried 11 payloads:

• Eight of the satellites made up the US Space Force's STP-27VPB mission. These included the Ignis Hall-effect propulsion technology demonstrator, being a 6-unit (6U) CubeSat; a pair of 3U CubeSat autonomous docking demonstrator satellites (PAN A/B), and a university payload sponsored by NASA.
  
  
• The other three were from commercial customers. The Polish company SatRevolution flew two payloads: STORK 3, a 3U CubeSat for Earth observation, and SteamSat 2, a 3U CubeSat demonstrator to test water thrusters. Adler 1 -- a 3U CubeSat -- was flown for Spire Global, in partnership with the Austrian Space Forum and Findus Venture GmbH, to study space debris. It was derived from the Spire Lemur CubeSats.

The "Above the Clouds" launch, named to honor the hip hop album Moment of Truth–and specifically the fifth song on that album, "Above the Clouds".

-- 17 JAN 21 / SHIYAN 13 -- A Long March 7A booster was launched at 1751 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Taiyuan launch center to put the "Shiyan (Experiment) 13" geostationary satellite into orbit. It was described as a "technology demonstration satellite", but appears to have been a military payload.

-- 19 JAN 22 / STARLINK 4-6 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0202 UTC (previous day local time + 5) to put 49 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).

At the time, the company had 1,469 active Starlink satellites, plus 272 spacecraft still maneuvering to their operational orbits. More than 200 Starlink satellites had failed or been decommissioned. Some of those Starlink spacecraft were earlier models, either used as test versions or obsolete. This was the 35th dedicated Falcon 9 launch to build out the network. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX recovery barge. It was its tenth flight.

-- 21 JAN 22 / USSF 8 (GSSAP 5 & 6) -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1900 UTC (local time + 5) to put the USAF "AFSPC 8" payload into space, consisting of the fifth and sixth satellites for the US Space Force's "Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP)", designed to help the military track and observe objects in geosynchronous orbit. The Atlas booster was in the "401" configuration with a 4-meter (13.1-foot) diameter fairing, no solid rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.

GSSAP allows the Space Force to study foreign satellites and monitor their operations in orbit. This likely builds on the earlier experimental "Microsatellite Technology Experiment (MiTEx)" satellites that performed an array of experiments, including satellite inspections, during their time in geostationary orbit in the 2000s. Other missions to support space situational awareness have included "Automated Navigation and Guidance Experiment for Local Space (ANGELS)" satellite that shared a ride to orbit with the first two GSSAP spacecraft, and the "Mycroft" satellite launched in 2018.

The GSSAP satellites were manufactured by Northrop Grumman, formerly Orbital ATK, and were based on the lightweight GeoStar 1 bus. This is a three-axis stabilized platform incorporating the systems that enable the satellite to carry out its mission. Each satellite is powered by a pair of deployable solar arrays and are capable of maneuvering on-orbit to set up inspection passes of other spacecraft.

The first GSSAP launch took place in July 2014, designated "Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) 4). Another pair of spacecraft were launched by another Delta IV rocket in August 2016 as AFSPC 6. The USSF-8 launch came not long after the retirement of the first two GSSAP satellites, with GSSAP 1 being decommissioned and moved to a "graveyard" orbit above the geostationary belt around the start of February 2021. GSSAP 2 joined it in retirement in early October 2021. The first pair were designated USA 253 and 254, while the second pair were USA 270 and 271, with the latest set designated USA 320 and USA 321.

-- 25 JAN 22 / L-SAR 01A -- A Long March 4D booster was launched at 2344 UTC (next day local time - 8) from the Chinese Jiuquan launch center to put the "Gongjian Ludi Tance 1 01A (L-SAR 01A)" into Sun-synchronous orbit. The satellite had a launch mass of about 3,200 kilograms (7,055 pounds) and carried an L-band, multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) payload.

-- 31 JAN 22 / CSG 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2311 UTC (local time + 5) to put the second "COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation (CSG 2)" radar remote sensing satellite for ASI, the Italian space agency. The satellite was built by Thales Alenia Space and carried an X-band SAR.

[WED 16 FEB 22] SLOW BRICS (2)

* SLOW BRICS (2): The rise of the BRICs seemed to restore confidence in development of emerging economies. However, their successes didn't occur overnight. In the late 1970s, following the chaos of the Mao era, China began a long process of economic liberalization; India started relaxing state control over its economy in 1991. Debt and financial crises that had set back growth from the 1970s were followed by changes in policy across the developing world, towards what became known as the "Washington consensus": opening their economies to trade, while keeping government borrowing and inflation in check. Three other factors contributed to the growth of the BRICS:

• The arrival of persistently low interest rates and globalized finance, resulting in a lot of money invested to seek out opportunities in emerging markets, seen as more stable than they had been.
  
  
• A broad and sustained rise in commodity prices, which was a great benefit to many developing-world economies.
  
  
• An explosive growth in trade. Manufacturing for export, a long-standing means of economics growth, had once required the slow and laborious process of building up an indigenous industrial base. However, the creation of global supply chains, in which production processed were broken down into sets of modules, meant that poorer economies could star producing for export by setting up small pieces of production networks, instead of recapitulating everything.

As a share of global GDP, trade rose from 39% in 1990 to 51% in 2000, eventually reaching a peak of 61% in 2008. China, the central node for most of the new supply chains ran, saw its share of global exports rise from about 2% to 9% over the same period, while its share of global GDP rose from 4% to 12%.

The effects of the commodities boom and the boom in trade wore off after 2010. Commodity prices began to fall after 2011, with economies dependent on their export no longer obtaining higher prices or easy credit. Trade growth also slowed from the mid-2010s. There were a number of reasons for that, but a big one was a major shift in Chinese economic policy. The government began to exert more control over businesses, in pursuit of economic self-sufficiency. The Chinese Communist Party became interested in state-owned enterprises again; such firms generate lower returns on their assets than their private cousins, while carrying higher levels of debt.

China's decision to backtrack on liberalization has slowed economic development for the rest of the emerging world. If China's growth had been greater and its consumption patterns become more like those of the rich world, it would have presented a growing market for developing countries. However, inadequate reform left consumption even below that of economies with similar incomes -- like Mexico and Thailand -- and not close to that of the rich world.

China's domestic market is still enormous, but it is much smaller than it might have been, with imports limited accordingly. To aggravate matters, China remains very dependent on manufacturing. Countries typically begin to reduce industrial production as incomes rise, and producers seek out low-wage workers elsewhere. China, however, hasn't followed that trend, partly thanks to its stalled progress on reform, and partly to a deliberate effort to become more self-sufficient.

An analysis by Shoumitro Chatterjee of Pennsylvania State University and Arvind Subramanian of the Center for Global Development (CGD) notes that, though China has not given up ground in terms of manufacturing exports in sum, it has pulled back in particularly labor-intensive manufacturing industries such as production of footwear, clothing, and furniture. That pullback hasn't amounted to much, leading to only limited and concentrated gains in export-market share for other economies. Reductions in Chinese footwear production have been modest, as have the increases in Vietnamese footwear production. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 15 FEB 22] CUTTING THROUGH THE NOISE

* CUTTING THROUGH THE NOISE: As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("Sharper Signals" by Amber Dance, 11 January 2021), machine learning (ML) is proving to have substantial applications in image processing, in particular being very useful for scientific research.

Saskia Lippens -- of the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) in Belgium, and the director of VIB's microscopy center in Ghent -- had been using conventional software to analyze images of cells, obtained by an electron microscope. When graduate student Joris Roels suggested that she use an algorithm he had to devised to filter out noise, she was a little dubious: "An electron microscopist is always a little bit cautious when people talk about restoration of images. What if we're changing data? What if we make mistakes?"

Roels, now a postdoc researcher at the VIB, reassured her that the original imagery would still be available for comparisons. Lippins tried it, and was impressed: "This was really a much better starting point."

Noise is effectively any component of an image that isn't really supposed to be there. Anybody who takes pictures in low-light conditions knows that the darker the environment, the grainier and noisier the image. Photomicrographs are not taken in optimum lighting conditions, so they are prone to noise.

There's always a bit of noise in any image. Michael Elad -- a computer scientist at the Technion / Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa -- says: "It's always there." Researchers have long had de-noising algorithms, including tools with names like Top-Hat, but they had limitations, one tool working well in some circumstances, not so well in others. Elad says: "Then came the deep-learning era."

The basic idea is simple: hand an ML system a set of images, along with the same images with the noise removed, with the system then learning how to remove the noise. The results are impressive, but the approach has limitations:

• The ability of the system to filter out noise is proportional to the size of the training set it is provided. To do a good job means a big training set, which means a lot of work.
  
  
• Training the system is very computing-intensive. Once the trained system is completed, though, the run-time version doesn't require heavy hardware.
  
  
• There is the problem that an ML system links inputs to specific outputs, without any way -- at least for now -- of knowing what happens in between. That makes its behavior unpredictable. No researchers want a system that will throw away data while it's throwing away noise.

Such a "supervised" ML system gets more reliable as the training set gets bigger, but the bigger the training set, the more of a burden it imposes. The push, then, is to create systems that "bootstrap", that train themselves. According to Xu Jun, a computer scientist at Nankai University in Tianjin, China: "The new direction of this field is the development of self-supervised algorithms."

One brute-force approach is to generate images and make them noisy, generating a training set that is much larger than any that could be provided. This demands a good understanding of how to accurately generate both the images and the noise, with the end results dependent on the accuracy. No matter how the system is created, the end results can look very impressive -- but are they accurate? To be sure, gross errors will usually be quickly found, but subtle errors present more of a challenge. The noisier the images, the greater the challenge to the system, Elad saying: "When the noise becomes very strong, so strong that you hardly see the image, then the results are sort of hallucinations."

Rupali Mankar, who works with infrared imaging data at the University of Houston in Texas, says that she checks for "hallucinations" by taking multiple pictures of the same sample. If the output changes widely between images, she says, "it's not a good signal, it's just noise."

However, those working with the systems say that the "hallucinations" are typically easy to spot, since they look blurry or weird. In any case, researchers are generally smart enough to make the noisy data set available along with the cleaned-up data set. More schemes are also becoming available, allowing researchers to pick between them to find the one that seems most satisfactory. Everyone dealing with the technology knows better than to place blind trust in it.

The technology available now is hardly the last word in image de-noising, with improvements to be expected. Elad says: "It's an ever-running Olympics: everybody trying to beat everyone else."

[MON 14 FEB 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 7

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Donald Trump had a particularly bad last week, focused on mishandling of documents. It appears there were boxes of official documents, including classified documents, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. It is a serious crime to walk off with secret government documents. Compounding this were multiple reports of Trump tearing up documents, flushing them down the toilet, and even eating them.

The cry went out for Trump to be arrested immediately, but that wasn't going to happen. The Justice Department would not move on a relatively petty case against Trump while preparing a much bigger one. The odds of success would be smaller, and the relatively petty case would get in the way of the bigger case. A trial of Donald Trump will be inevitably protracted.

To be sure, after the way Trump abused Hillary over her home email server, taking him to task for gross mishandling of government secrets would only be just, but we'll have to wait. There are still questions to be answered anyway, the first one being: was Trump selling government secrets to America's enemies? That would seem preposterous, but with Trump, who can tell?

* As discussed an editorial from CNN.com ("Voters' Power Is Being Stripped Away" by David Daley, 8 February 2022), with the reshuffling of Congressional districts from the latest census, Democrats feared a debacle, with representation stacked towards Republicans by intense gerrymandering.

As it turns out, that's only sort of happening. Indeed, some believe that Democrats will come out ahead, gaining three seats going into the midterm elections. In fact, the Congressional map may end up being as balanced as it has been, since the Supreme Court began the reapportionment revolution in the 1960s. Not all the states have completed their reapportionments, and legal challenges are clouding the issue, so exactly how it all turns out is unclear.

In any case, in the face of Republican gerrymandering, the Democrats have struck back effectively, one study showing the House map is more favorable to Democrats than it was ten years ago. However, this is not such good news, since the House remains biased to Republicans. Worse, in no way does this sort of feuding between the two parties help the USA; the elimination of competitive seats means that primary battles become all-important, with extremists gaining an edge. There's still some hope; Colorado and some other states have established bipartisan commissions to perform reapportionment, and they've worked. Hopefully, that's the beginning of a trend.

* As discussed in earlier weekly installments, I've been working to properly establish my online ID, having acquired the MyColorado ID app, new phone numbers and a minimal phone contract, plus FIDO keys. The core issue was to get authorized through the ID.me online service so I could access my Federal government accounts.

One big obstacle was getting a new Social Security card, and simultaneously correcting a long-standing bug in my SS account -- wrong birthdate, an error going back a half-century. In the world of online validation, two different birth dates were certain to cause me trouble, so I had to fix that. I had to drop off a form for a new card, along with a letter explaining the birthday bug, plus my birth certificate and my driver's license; I was relying on the license in the MyColorado app in the meantime.

I got the new card and my documents back in the mail, but with no explanation if they updated the birthdate. I called up the SS office, and they said it was updated. I asked if the new birthdate would propagate through to Medicare and to the Internal Revenue Service; yes, but it could take some time. I was further told that Medicare doesn't fuss about minor errors in birthdates, assuming they're just typos, which left the IRS to worry about. I called them up as well, and was told it was updated. It wasn't a real strong reassurance, but nothing else to say. All that done, I called up my healthcare provider and gave them the right birthdate.

Now I was ready to get onto ID.me. I had to get onto a video call to confirm my ID -- which was a bit tricky, since I don't have a webcam. No problem, I found an Android app named "DroidCam" that allows a smartphone to be used as a webcam over wi-fi. I struggled with the free version for a time, but decided it was too braindead, and got the paid version for $5.50 USD. It works as well as I could wish. Incidentally, I was concerned that I wouldn't really be able to communicate with it, but fortunately it's easy to find "webcam test" sites online.

Anyway, appropriately armed, I tried to log in to ID.me for my video. It started out announcing a 2-hour wait period -- but when it went down to a few minutes, it effectively froze, all the day. I tried very early the next morning, same result. It finally dawned on me that the reason it was frozen was because the system was overloaded: the queue was so deep that it couldn't keep count any longer.

This was only like about a week after a political fuss over ID.me's use of face recognition hit the streets. The IRS and other government agencies had adopted a commercial ID service out of lack of money to build their own, with ID.me officials failing to realize they were biting off far more than they could chew. The system is reliant on face recognition, but it doesn't always work right -- it didn't with me -- and that meant video calls. With the flap over face recognition, the IRS and other agencies backed off of ID.me in confusion, with chaos following.

Given that ID.me's status is now entirely uncertain, I had no reason to proceed further. I'll have to wait for everything to settle out; I might end up trying to get onto ID.me again, but it won't be under the same rules, and I've got all the tools now anyway. I didn't have that much trouble getting onto the MyColorado app, and I suspect ID.me will relax its requirements to a similar level of difficulty. It won't be as bullet-proof, but even a moderate amount of hassle slows down scammers considerably. An AI system could be used to identify accounts that seem suspicious, and require more validation.

I'll try again at the end of summer. I don't think I'm going to make very much use of my new ID tools over the short run, but over the longer run, they'll buy me a lot. In ten years, we'll wonder how we could have put up with the insecure online environment we have now. Incidentally, the flak thrown at ID.me included tales of people still faking the system and defrauding the government of big bucks. That's no surprise; the only system that can't be gamed can't be used, and it requires substantial effort to game the system.

[FRI 11 FEB 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (15)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (15): Digital systems had an increasing impact on manufacturing during the 1960s. The most visible example was the "Unimate" industrial robot, designed by American inventor George Devol, derived from a 1954 patent on a "Universal Automation (Unimation)" system. Devol was after an automation system that could be used in different applications, instead of being purpose-designed for each, and in particular could be used in work that was difficult or dangerous for humans.

Devol joined forces with businessman Joseph Engelberger to produce the robot. General Motors obtained the first Unimate in 1961, using it for spot-welding and die-casting. Other auto manufacturers obtained Unimates as well, and by the mid-1960s, industrial robots were common. They typically had one arm, and were used for applications that required precision, but not an extreme amount of dexterity: welding, handling large assemblies, spray-painting.

Roughly in parallel, "computer numerical control (CNC)" systems took root in manufacturing as well, in which a "cell" of machine tools turned out parts under computer control. It wasn't really a new idea, numerical control systems running on punch cards or paper tape having been around for decades. One of the objectives of building the MIT Whirlwind I computer was to support NC by generating paper tapes for the purpose. The US Air Force backed that research, which led in the late 1950s to the emergence of the "Automatically Programmed Tool (APT)" programming language -- designed under a collaboration between a number of government entities, universities, and industry -- and the emergence of the first fully computerized numerical control systems.

Such CNC systems began to catch on with the introduction of solid-state minicomputers that were more suitable to industrial environments than the old clunky vacuum-tube computers -- the DEC PDP-8 and the Data General Nova series proved particularly popular in CNC and other industrial applications. Work proceeded in parallel on "computer-aided design (CAD)" systems, seeded by research at MIT, following up Ivan Sutherland's pioneering Sketchpad demonstrator system. The CAD effort was a subset of more general research into "computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)".

Minicomputers like the PDP-8 were useful for general factory-control applications, but they tended to be overkill. The result was the development of the "programmable logic controller (PLC)" -- which was a ruggedized small computer with a set of inputs and outputs. The grandfather of them all was the Modicon from Bedford Associates, introduced in 1968. They were specifically designed to emulate the old relay-logic industrial systems; early on, they were programmed in a simple boolean logic language, but later they would have displays for graphical input, with users laying out relay-ladder logic diagrams to program them.

* As for the military, during the 1960s, digital computers became important for administrative purposes, as well as for SAGE and other command & control (C&C) systems -- particularly the nuclear-strike C&C system. Computers being big at the time, field use was generally limited to ships and submarines. The US Navy developed a "Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS)", based on UNIVAC militarized computers, that was fielded in the early 1960s, automating the naval combat information centers of World War II.

A particularly ambitious exercise in computerizing the battlefield was conducted in the IGLOO WHITE program from 1968. The US, in fighting the Vietnam War, wanted to choke off military supplies being funneled from North Vietnam to South Vietnam over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads running through Laos and Cambodia. Under IGLOO WHITE, aircraft would drop acoustic sensors over the trail, the sensors typically being in the form of darts that buried themselves on impact. They would pick up the sounds of the movement of trucks using an acoustic sensor, and relay the data through an antenna, disguised as a plant, to an orbiting radio-relay aircraft.

The data was collected at a center set up at Korat Air Force Base in Thailand, where it was analyzed by two IBM 360 computers. Strike aircraft would be dispatched to attack truck convoys. IGLOO WHITE worked on a technical basis, but it failed to stop the flow of supplies, and it was fearsomely expensive. The computerized battlefield was something for a later generation.

Penetration of computers into the military domain during the 1960s was otherwise limited. There were substantial refinements in guided weapons, radar, and countermeasures systems, but they were mostly based on analog electronics. The US made extensive use of "Lightning Bug" drones to perform reconnaissance over North Vietnam, but their autopilots were simple. A Lightning Bug would be set to fly at a given gyrocompass direction at a given altitude for a given amount of time; once the time was up, the drone would reverse direction, and fly back the way it came. At the end of the mission, it would deploy a parachute and be snagged out of the air by a helicopter. The Lightning Bugs proved useful and effective, but they were pretty dumb robots. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 10 FEB 22] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As reported by an article from NEWATLAS.comn ("Microbes Anyone? Study Outlines Huge Potential Of Solar-Powered Protein" by Michael Irving, 4 August 2021), modern agriculture is highly productive, but still straining to keep up with the food demands of growing human population. It is heavily dependent on land and other resources that are under stress.

A team of researchers at Goettingen University in Germany suggests that microorganisms could help -- produced in bulk to be refined into an edible powder rich in protein and other nutrients. It could be made into food for humans, or animal feed. Dorian Leger, the research lead, says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

The researchers put together a model of large-scale microbial food production, examining the resource requirements involved, as well as investigating different approaches and types of microorganisms. Carbon dioxide would be captured from the air outside and, using renewable electricity, fed into a bioreactor to grow microorganisms. The microorganisms would then be "harvested" and processed. The study found that per kilogram, producing microbial protein only required 10% of the land needed for soybeans, the most efficient plant crop. Water use is also reduced, and there's no need for fertilizer.

Microbial farms could make use of areas that aren't suited for traditional agriculture, such as deserts. The model showed that they even worked well in high latitudes, where sunlight is scarce. Obviously, genetic modification could be used to optimize the food value of the microorganisms, possibly along multiple lines. The researchers don't believe microorganisms would completely replace conventional crops, but they could take a major role in food production -- particularly in the era of synthetic meats.

* As reported by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Cheap Material Converts Heat To Electricity" by Robert F. Service, 2 August 2021), there's nothing new about devices that convert heat to electricity -- but it's never been a particularly cost-effective thing. Researchers have now development a new thermoelectric scheme that is much cheaper than earlier technology.

Modern thermoelectrics are semiconductor devices made to be placed on a hot surface, like an internal-combustion car engine. Heat flowing from through such devices causes electrical charges to flow through them. One difficulty with them is that, once such a device becomes warm from bottom to top, of course electrons stop flowing. The ability of a thermoelectric device to maintain a temperature gradient, as well as its ability to conduct electrons, is indexed by a score known as the "figure of merit" or "ZT".

Over the past 2 decades, researchers have devised thermoelectric materials with increasing ZTs. The record was established in 2014 when Mercouri Kanatzidis, a materials scientist at Northwestern University, and his team came up with a single crystal of tin selenide with a ZT of 3.1. However, the material was difficult to work with, and fragile. Kanatzidis say: "For practical applications, it's a non-starter."

His team shifted towards thermoelectrics made with readily available tin and selenium powders that, once processed, become grains of polycrystalline tin selenide instead of the single crystals. The polycrystalline grains are cheap and can be heated and compressed into ingots that are 3 to 5 centimeters long (up to 2 inches), which can be made into devices. The polycrystalline ingots are also more robust, while Kanatzidis expected the boundaries between the individual grains should slow down the heat flow through the devices. However, the result was much the opposite, yielding ZT scores as low as 1.2.

In 2016, the Northwestern team identified the problem: an ultrathin skin of tin oxide was forming around individual grains of polycrystalline tin selenide before they were pressed into ingots. That skin had high thermal conductivity, allowing heat to rapidly flow through the material. The researchers then figured out a scheme in which they used heat to drive oxygen away from the powder precursors, to then obtain pristine polycrystalline tin selenide. They got a ZT of 3.1, and even had a thermal conductivity lower than single-crystal tin selenide. Kanatzidis says: "This opens the door for new devices to be built from polycrystalline tin selenide pellets and their applications to be explored."

There are still obstacles to be overcome before applications arrive. The polycrystalline tin selenide the team makes is spiked with sodium atoms, creating what is known as a "p-type" material that conducts, in effect, positive charges. Working devices will also need an "n-type" version to conduct negative charges. Work is now being conducted toward n-type tin selenide materials. Given thermoelectric converters that are cheap enough, they could be installed in everything from automobile exhaust pipes to water heaters and industrial furnaces to scavenge some of the 65% of fossil fuel energy that is lost as waste heat.

* As discussed in a report from Martin Luther University (MLU) at Halle-Wittenberg in Germany ("Special Dyes Could Prevent Unnecessary Motor Replacements", 18 May 2021), MLU researchers -- working with ELANTAS, an arm of the specialty chemicals group ALTANA -- have developed a scheme in which dyes are incorporated into the insulation around wires, such as those in an electric motor. In use, the dyes would change color as the insulation degraded, giving service techs a hint that the motor needs to be changed.

Professor Wolfgang Binder from the Institute of Chemistry at MLU says that electric motor "insulation changes over time. It becomes brittle as it degrades dues to heat and chemical processes. It is not possible to tell from the outside whether the insulation around the wires inside is still intact, or whether the entire motor needs to be replaced."

MLU researchers devised a test rig to monitor the long-term degradation of four different insulating resins under varying thermal conditions. They found that the resins generated alcohols as they degraded, and so tried to find a "sensor molecule" that would change color in response to the alcohol. The sensor molecule had to be stable under high temperatures and through production processes, while doing nothing to impair the insulating material.

They ultimately selected a dye that normally glows reddish orange under UV light; but when alcohol binds to it, the color shifts to a light green. The color could then be monitored by sensors built into the electric motor, with the vehicle diagnostic system reporting when the motor needed to be replaced.

[ED: When presenting a thesis at Martin Luther University, does it need to be nailed to a door?]

[WED 09 FEB 22] SLOW BRICS (1)

* SLOW BRICS (1): As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("A Mixed-Up Slowdown", 31 July 2021), at the turn of the century, about 28% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty, translating to incomes of $1.90 a day. Almost a billion of those 1.7 billion people lived in India and China.

In 2001 Jim O'Neill -- at the time the chief economist for the bank Goldman Sachs -- grouped India and China, plus Brazil and Russia, into a group, with the snappy label of the BRICs. At the time, the BRICs only accounted for 8% of global economic output, but O'Neill argued that their large populations meant that even modest growth in their output per person would mean a significant increase in their share. Investors and governments took heed.

In 2003, Goldman Sachs researchers were estimating that by 2025, the BRICs would have a combined GDP at least half of the G6 -- meaning America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan -- with the BRICs dominant in overall economic might by 2040, though still not equal in income per person. Indeed, from 2000 to 2011 the BRICs grew on average by a remarkable 17% per year, while the G6 grew at just 4%. They reached half the G6's GDP by 2017, not 2025.

In 2021, the IMF projects, BRIC GDP will be worth about 57% of the G6's. In 2020, China announced that it had eradicated extreme poverty, with India making great gains as well. Then, in the 2010s, global growth went into slowdown. From 2011 to 2019, G6 growth fell by more than half to below 2% per year -- while growth across the BRICs dropped by nearly 70%, to just 5% per year.

In the realm of other low- and middle-income countries, the story was similar. From 2000 to 2011, the weighted average annual growth rate of GDP in emerging economies outside of the BRICs was 9% a year, which real income per person growing even faster, reaching almost 18% in 2011. However, by 2015, incomes in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America were already falling relative to those in the USA, with Africa losing ground from the next year. Only South and East Asia and the emerging parts of Europe kept gaining on American incomes. There was plenty of growth in the emerging economies in the 2010s, but not nearly a match for the previous decade. The question remains of whether they can start soaring again, or merely tread water, or decline.

Economists once assumed that poorer countries would quickly catch up with richer ones. Getting rich, it was thought, was just a matter of borrowing technologies from more mature economies and boosting workers with more capital, of both the physical and human sort. However, following World War 2, progress of the undeveloped world was disappointingly slow. Investors occasionally got excited about the prospects of poorer countries -- for example, in 1981, when a World Bank employee named Antoine van Agtmael coined the term "emerging markets" as a snappy name for a new third-world investment fund. In reality, only a few countries made, such as South Korea and Taiwan, the leap from poor to rich in the later decades of the 20th century. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 08 FEB 22] JWST IN SPACE

* JWST IN SPACE: The NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched on Christmas Day 2021 on an ESA Ariane 5 booster from Kourou in French Guiana. It took a month for the JWST to reach its final destination, the second Lagrange point (L2), 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) beyond the orbit of the Moon, along the line from the Sun to the Earth. The L2 point is a stable position, where the telescope can keep its back to the Sun and peer off into deep space. The JWST will perform a "halo" orbit around the L2 point; there are other observatories at the L2 point, and they can't be crowded together.

The JWST is to make observations from the red visible into the mid-infrared region of the spectrum. That means it has to be cooled, and it primarily uses passive cooling, in the form of a sunshield the size of a tennis court. The sunshield consists of five separated layers of kapton, each in the shape of a kite, and has to be deployed in a precise fashion over several days. It will cool the observatory from 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit) on its Sun-facing side to -235C (-455F) on its space-facing side.

While en route to L2, the JWST will deploy its small secondary mirror, and then swing the two hinged sections of the primary mirror into place. Using exacting optical techniques, 132 micro-motors will perform precision adjustments of the mirror segments to ensure precision optics. The primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal segments and is 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) wide. Its collecting area is 5.6 times as great as the Hubble Space Telescope's. The mirror segments are made of beryllium and coated with gold. It will observe the sky with four instruments:

• Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam): Sensitive from the reddish visible to the near infrared range, NIRCam has ten imaging arrays with 4 megapixels each.
  
  
• Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec): A spectrographic equivalent to NIRCam, with three operating modes. It was provided by the ESA.
  
  
• Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI): A combination imager and spectrograph operating in the mid / long-infrared range, using a helium cryocooler. It was provided by NASA, working with a collaboration of European countries.
  
  
• Near Infrared Imager & Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS): A combination imager and spectrograph, operating in the near-infrared range. It was provided by the Canadian Space Agency.

There is also a "Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS)" to control spacecraft orientation and direction. It is mounted alongside NIRISS, and the two are regarded as a single system. The JWST spacecraft bus provides hydrogen thrusters for propulsion and station-keeping, with reaction wheels uses for redirection. The bus also provides power -- using a solar panel -- as well as command / control and communications functions.

The JWST is expected to last for 20 years, though the hydrazine thruster system needed for station-keeping is likely to run out of fuel in no more than 10 years. It does have modest provisions for robotic repair, but no repair missions are being contemplated at present. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center managed the development program, with Northrop Grumman as the prime contractor. The Space Telescope Science Institute is in charge of JWST operations. The JWST is named after James Webb, who was the NASA administrator in the era of the Apollo program.

[MON 07 FEB 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 6

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: While resistance against measures to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic have been particularly strong in the USA, they aren't unknown elsewhere. North of the border, a big gang of truck drivers, objecting to Canadian vaccination mandates, has paralyzed Ottawa for a week.

Exactly what they really hope to accomplish is not clear. Their specific target is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau -- but though the blockade of Ottawa is clearly a headache, almost 80% of Canadians have been vaccinated, and there's little sympathy with COVIDiots. In addition, along with the inconvenience of paralyzing the city, the truck drivers have occasionally broken windows, made liberal use of racial slurs, and generally acted like MAGAmericans. Some members of the Canadian Conservative Party have suggested that the blockade could be used to embarrass Trudeau, but senior leadership went on to denounce it, knowing it could hurt the Conservatives more than Trudeau.

There were rumors that troops were going to be sent in, but Trudeau made it clear that wasn't going to happen. Ottawa police officials also made it clear that patience is running out. In the meantime, however, small demonstrations have popped up elsewhere in Canada.

* The House committee investigating the 6 January 2020 Capitol riot has been rolling along methodically, notably interviewing members of ex-Vice President Mike Pence's staff, who have been cooperative. Obviously, Pence was wavering himself; after Donald Trump released a statement saying that Pence could have "overturned" the election, in a speech to the Federalist Society -- a notoriously Right-wing legal association -- Pence said:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Pence called 6 January a "dark day", rejecting the narrative that it was a peaceful demonstration. He had been following a strategy of trying to distance himself from Trump without rejecting him. That wasn't workable, and Pence finally realized it. It appears that he has a plan, attempting to position himself in the post-Trump Republican Party -- there will be one, sooner or later -- but it's not easy to see that he has one that makes any sense. If he waffles in his repudiation of Trump, he will make people even unhappier with him than he would in fully repudiating him. Does Pence believe he's got a future in politics? He is deluded. Trump quickly came back with an incoherent and angry reply, concluding: "I was right and everyone knows it."

In the meantime, the Republican National Committee issued a denunciation of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for working on the 1-6 Committee, RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel saying: "They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with the violence at the Capitol."

This was such a howling fraud that it was denounced by a number of prominent Republicans, notably Senator Mitt Romney. The Trump Big Lie is becoming ever more tattered -- but yet it persists. It will certainly not end well for the Republicans, but it's hard to see the end just yet.

[FRI 04 FEB 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (14)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (14): In the 1960s, computer mass storage relied on tape and hard disks. The IBM 2400 tape drives introduced for the System / 360 could store up to about 175 megabytes of data; the IBM 2302 HDD featured one or two modules with 25 disk platters in each module, with a module capacity of 112 megabytes. In other words, a module had about two orders of magnitude less storage capacity than a cheap modern flash memory stick. Interface to such drives was proprietary.

The teletype in various forms remained the standard terminal technology, the ASR-33 being more or less a default, though various models of the IBM Flexowriter series were popular as well. Typically, a teletype would also feature a paper-tape punch. Electromechanical printers were also common. As primitive as it sounds, paper-tape and punch-card readers remained in widespread use. CRT-based display systems -- "video display units (VDU)" -- were around from early on, but they weren't the norm; they often emulated terminals.

Computer communications were performed over phone lines via "modulator-demodulator (modem)" units. The first computer modems were developed for use with the SAGE defense network, linking the various sites that made up the network. Bell commercially introduced the SAGE modem technology as the "Bell 101" in 1959, with a speed of 110 BPS. It was followed by the "Bell 103A" in 1962, which became an effective standard. The Bell 103A provided "full-duplex" (bidirectional) communications at 300 BPS.

Modems were typically hooked up to computers over a serial-data interface scheme designated "RS-232", with a spec released by the Electronic Industries Association in 1962. It was the first computer interface "standard", being used to connect not only modems but terminals, printers, and such to computers, and it would persist for a long time. It was really not much of a standard; it was based on a 25-pin connector -- with a 9-pin variation eventually appearing -- featuring wildly inconsistent wiring that made mixing and matching hardware from different vendors very exasperating.

Variations on RS-232 later emerged, most notably a "fast" variant designated "RS-422". Instruments and control systems were often hooked up to computers in those days, but except for those that used RS-232, connections were proprietary or custom.

* There was considerable evolution of programming languages during the 1960s, but the focus remained on assembler for systems programming, COBOL for business work, and FORTRAN for science and technology -- with BASIC establishing a niche for casual or student use. Business computing remained focused on routine functions such as accounts, billing, and payrolls -- though database management was introduced with the "Integrated Data Store (IDS)", released by GE in 1964. It was a "navigational" database system, meaning that any record in the database was accessed through a tree (or network) of connections between records. It was somewhat clumsy to use, but efficient in implementation -- an important factor when computer hardware was still so limited.

The biggest advance in business computing during the decade was the introduction in 1960 of the "Semi-Automated Business Research Environment (SABRE)" system, a flight reservation system put together by IBM for American Airlines. As its name suggests, it was derived from the military SAGE system, and became the ancestor of reservation systems for other airlines, or for that matter hotels and the like. Today, it is so taken for granted that computers handle reservations that it is somewhat nightmarish to consider how reservations were handled before computers. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 03 FEB 22] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Planets Similar To Those In Our Solar System Found Around Nearby Star" by Ashley Strickland, 5 August 2021), astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile have found a set of extrasolar planets that resembles our own Solar System to a degree. They orbit a star designated "L 98-59", which is 35 light-years from Earth.

There appears to be at least five planets in the system. Observations showed that three of the planets include some type of water content. The two planets closest to the star are likely dry and rocky with just small amounts of water. These planets, like Earth or Venus, are close enough to the star to be warmed by it. The third planet's mass could be 30% water -- hinting that it could be an ocean world, similar to some of the moons found across our solar system.

These three planets were first spotted in 2019 using NASA's planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which detected extrasolar planets from their transits across the face of a distant star. Another trick astronomers use is to detect subtle variations in the motion of an extrasolar planet as it moves towards or away from Earth, with the changes in "radial velocity" helping determine subtleties in its orbit. In this particular case, radial velocity measurements showed that the planet closest to the star is about half the mass of Venus -- making it the lightest exoplanet ever detected using radial velocity.

Through radial velocity analysis, the researchers also discovered a fourth planet and hints of a fifth planet that wasn't noticed in TESS data. That fifth planet may be at the right distance from the star to allow liquid water to form on the surface, meaning it's in the star's "habitable zone". Maria Rosa Zapatero Osorio -- an astronomer at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, and the research leader -- commented: "The planet in the habitable zone may have an atmosphere that could protect and support life."

This planetary system is a likely target for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch into orbit around Earth in October, as well as the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope, which will begin observations from Chile in 2027. These two instruments may be able to determine the compositions of the atmospheres of this set of planets, and spot "biosignatures", or traces of life activity.

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("European Plan For Gigantic New Gravitational Wave Detector Passes Milestone" by Adrian Cho, 2 July 2021), the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) has endorsed proceeding on a new gravitational-wave observatory (GWO) named the "Einstein Telescope". ESFRI is run by the European Council and consists of representatives from the national scientific funding agencies, its purpose being to advise the EU on funding new science infrastructure. This was not a commitment to funding, but it did allow preliminary work to go ahead.

GWOs are based on lasers shooting down long reflector tubes, two arranged at right angles. Through a technique known as "laser interferometry", they can detect the slightest change in the length of the tubes, due to the passage of gravitational waves -- due to cosmic events, such as the merger of black holes and neutron stars. Currently, there are two major GWO facilities:

• The twin LIGO arrays in the USA, one in Louisiana and Washington State, each with arms 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) long.
  
  
• The Virgo array in Italy, with arms 3 kilometers (1.85 miles) long.

They have proven their worth, being able to sense black hole mergers more than 10 billion light-years away. However, if detectors ten times more sensitive were available, such events could be found all the way out to the edge of the Universe, 45 billion light-years away. US astronomers would like to build another GWO, the "Dual Explorer", with L-shaped arms 40 kilometers (25 miles) long. In contrast, the European Einstein Telescope would be an equilateral triangle with 10-kilometer (6.2 miles) long.

The intent is to get the super-GWOs in operation by the mid-2030s. In putting the Einstein Telescope on the science infrastructure roadmap, ESFRI has taken the Einstein Telescope out of the lobbying phase and into the planning phase. The team backing the Einstein telescope now has to create a detailed plan and a formal organization. Currently, the project has support in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. US astronomers believe that the ESFRI decision should help advance the Dual Explorer.

* According to a NASA press release, researchers at the University of Michigan have figured out a scheme to use satellite data to track the movement of "microplastic" contamination in the ocean. Plastic trash floating in the sea tends to break down into small particles from the Sun's rays and wave action.

Sampling has been used to determine the distribution of microplastics over the oceans, but more comprehensive surveys would be desireable. The researcher looked to NASA's Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) for a solution -- CYGNSS being a constellation of eight small satellites that measures wind speeds above the oceans. CYGNSS can also measure ocean roughness, which is affected by several factors including wind speed and, significantly, debris floating in the water.

The team looked for places where the ocean was smoother than expected given the wind speed, which they thought could indicate the presence of microplastics. They then compared those areas to data and model predictions of where microplastics are known or believes to congregate in the ocean. This data allowed the researchers to construct oceanic maps of oceanic microplastic contamination. Samplings can be used to validate the maps.

[WED 02 FEB 22] ARAB MUDDLE (10)

* ARAB MUDDLE (10): As with so many modern Arab republics, Egypt's military regimes protect domestic security with a well-funded apparatus. The state-security agency is thought to have had more than 100,000 employees, three times the size of America's FBI, with a network of informants numbering millions. Foreigners living in Cairo during the Mubarak years knew the doorman was on their payroll. Sisi has updated the system: a 2018 low required ride-sharing apps to share data with the government. In 2019, the government signed a contract with US tech giant Honeywell to install 6,000 cameras across the new capital, linked to a "command center" run by the army.

Egyptian officials admire the Chinese government for its ability to deliver growth and development while keeping the party in power. Sisi has launched a program called "Itnayn Kifaya (Two is Enough)", in imitation of the birth-control policies long pursued by China -- though there they have proven a bit too successful, leading to population decline, and been reversed.

Early on in his presidency, Sisi seemed more interested in Africa, neglected under Mr Mubarak, than in the Arab world -- seeing economic opportunity south of the Sahara, but only headaches in the Middle East. However, Sisi has become a prominent player in Arab diplomacy. There's outreach to Lebanon, which Egypt has long ignored.

Egypt brokered the ceasefire that ended a brief war between Israel and Hamas in the spring of 2021. It has played a big part in the civil war in neighboring Libya. In the summer of 2021, Sisi's spy chiefs even held talks in Cairo with their Iranian counterparts -- an unusual step, since Egypt has long avoided getting involved in Arab-Iranian disputes.

Sisi of course is most interested in the interests of Egypt, having a narrow set of priorities. He wants stability in bordering Gaza and Libya, and has been cultivating the Gulf States, in large part to get support in a dispute with Ethiopia, which is working to dam the Nile. The dam is a major threat to water-poor Egypt. However, he refused to join into the Saudi war in Yemen and also backed Syria's Assad, neither of which has endeared him to Gulf Arabs.

Nasser was a gifted orator, focused on grand issues. Sisi, in contrast, browbeats Egyptians to exercise more and work harder; he has none of the charisma of Nasser. However, that makes him an apt model for 21st-century Arabism: a leader who aspires not to reshape the region, but merely to hold his own country together.

* Today, Arabism is unfocused. Nationalists want a return to a time when Arab states fought for a cause and stood up to foreign powers. Islamists look back further, to a time when the caliphates were global centers of learning and culture. Those not so political want to return to a past when the supply of electricity was more stable.

Nobody has great hopes for the region today; there's been too much disappointment, too much civil war, too much repression. Neither pan-Arabism nor Islamism delivered. Foreign powers are not going to abandon the region, but they have greater interests elsewhere, and don't want to be dragged into the region's problems any more than they have to be. They try to influence politics, while providing military and humanitarian aid, the two types of aid tending to work at cross purposes. Ironically, foreigners still remain convenient bogeymen for Arabs, for which all problems can be blamed.

Foreigners do bring problems, but most of the problems are home-grown. Ghassan Salame, a Lebanese academic and diplomat, says: "Neither Nasser nor Assad nor certainly Saddam, all of these guys were not democrats. Arab nationalism has been tainted by its very intimate association with authoritarianism." Islamism has done no better. There is no real interest in trans-national unity, Salame saying of the Arab League: "It was an attempt, so far a failed attempt, to translate a cultural concept into a political one and a strategic one."

Is there any way out of the impasse? If so, it will require leaders who want to lead instead of cling to power, concerned with human rights, civil society, and economic reform. Factional warring has been to no one's real advantage, and there would be advantages to coming to compromises to ensure peace. Pan-Arabism isn't really necessary; it should be good enough that Arabs live in peace with each other, work toward common goals when they can, with Arabs having civil rights and the ability to travel and trade freely. Whether such things happen is not clear; what is clear is that booming young populations, the decline of the dominance of oil, and climate change will further strain political and social systems that are already dysfunctional. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 01 FEB 22] BRINGING DOWN TRUMP

* BRINGING DOWN TRUMP: On 6 January 2021, American President Donald Trump made history. He had lost the 2021 election by a clear margin, but refused to admit it, claiming without persuasive evidence that Joe Biden had stolen the election from him. On the 6th, Congress was going to certify the vote; Trump called a protest rally in Washington DC for that day, to pump the people attended up to a fury and send them over to ransack the Capitol Building.

The protesters were dispersed, with many arrested, and Biden was certified. There was indignation on both sides of the aisle in Congress, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi working to organize a joint commission to investigate the riot and the circumstances that led to it. Republicans in Congress soon realized that their voters didn't have much problem with the riot, and so their enthusiasm cooled. In the end, the Senate voted the commission down.

Pelosi had already said she would set up a House committee to investigate if the commission were voted down, and she did so. She wanted House Republicans on the committee, but only two -- Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney -- agreed to it. Pelosi played her cards well; Republicans could not credibly claim that the 1-6 Committee, as it became known, was partisan when they had rejected a partisan commission.

After an opening session in which Capitol police testified about the riot, the committee went quiet, interviewing witnesses and collecting information. As of late, the committee apparently has obtained enough of a story to subpoena central figures in the incident, including Trump crony Steve Bannon and Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Bannon wasn't cooperative, and was charged by the Justice Department with contempt of Congress; Meadows appears to be going the same route.

There's been much public frustration over the 1-6 Committee, there being a perception that it is moving much too slowly and ineffectually. Why, the question is asked, doesn't the DOJ just indict Trump? His guilt is obvious, why should there be any difficulty in the matter?

This is greatly underestimating the difficulty of the case. In the first place, the Biden Administration has a constructive agenda to carry out, and going after Trump would derail it. Joe Biden has made it clear that Trump is the business of Congress. The White House is being cooperative, for example working towards release of White House data from the Trump Administration, but Congress is in the driver's seat.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is being given independence to do as he sees fit, but so far he has been no more than cooperative with Congress, too. It may seem baffling that he's no hurry to bust Trump, but it would be unwise for him to do so at this time. If the DOJ were to indict Trump now, the organization would be under continuous attack from the Right -- and, since the DOJ doesn't conduct its investigations in public, would have no way to defend itself.

Trump is not an easy target. Along with his extensive political and economic support, he is also a champion gaslighter, skilled at sowing confusion. He broke rules that nobody was really expecting anyone to break, meaning the legal system doesn't have strong precedents to fall back on. In addition, the sheer magnitude of his wrongdoing makes it very laborious to assemble a credible case. A trial would be highly problematic, the worst problem being that it would be very hard to get an unbiased jury. The trial would be a bigger farce than the OJ Simpson trial.

The 1-6 Committee, in contrast, is conducting its investigation in public view, and has not been the target of much resistance from the Right. That seems to be partly because many Republicans in Congress privately sympathize with the committee, and because others fear they will be targeted by the committee if they try to take it on. In any case, the committee understands that Trump is nothing without the human pyramid of enablers holding him up, and bringing him down means dismantling the pyramid. The goal is to get the enablers to turn on Trump; if they won't turn, then they're indicted, and pushed to cop a plea. If they don't cop a plea, they go to jail.

The final goal will be to get Trump to cop a plea himself, a trial being problematic. He will be inclined to do so if his enablers have abandoned him -- in their own worst case, by being in prison -- and he's facing monster charges. Of course, to get him to plead guilty, he would have to be given a much softer alternative, for example long-term house arrest instead of a prison stay. As long as he doesn't contest the charges, that would be good enough, and he would get into trouble with his custodians if he tried an about-face. His shaky business empire appears headed for collapse on its own.

Certainly, after the 1-6 Committee gives its report, presumably no later than the start of summer, Congress will be able to vote to deny Trump -- and possibly some of his stooges in Congress -- the right to run for office again.

The report will be sent over to DOJ for action. What happens to it then is not clear, but it is likely action will be taken: the case will already have been made for the DOJ, and all of Trump's legal delaying tactics disposed of. There are no certainties, of course; how could there be? We never had a president attempt to overthrow an election before, so we are in unknown territory, and are feeling our way. Given the enormity of Trump's crimes, however, we can have some confidence of bringing him down.