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DayVectors

apr 2022 / last mod sep 2022 / greg goebel

* 21 entries including: 5th information revolution (series), INSAR scans the world (series), China's limits (series) , bioelectronic medicine (series), new COVID-19 vaccines, 2nd Russian offensive & Taiwan defense & Mallory McMorrow speaks out, Korean KF-21 Boramae fighter, pig coronavirus gone tame, Ukraine war on smartphone & Finland in NATO & clover lawn, DRACO space nuclear power, Taiwan considers Ukraine War & Trump investigations.

banner of the month


[FRI 29 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (26)
[THU 28 APR 22] WINGS & WEAPONS
[WED 27 APR 22] INSAR SCANS THE WORLD (1)
[TUE 26 APR 22] NEW COVID-19 VACCINES
[MON 25 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 17
[FRI 22 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (25)
[THU 21 APR 22] SPACE NEWS
[WED 20 APR 22] CHINA'S LIMITS (2)
[TUE 19 APR 22] KF-21 BORAMAE
[MON 18 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 16
[FRI 15 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (24)
[THU 14 APR 22] GIMMICKS & GADGETS
[WED 13 APR 22] CHINA'S LIMITS (1)
[TUE 12 APR 22] COVID & PIGLETS
[MON 11 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 15
[FRI 08 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (23)
[THU 07 APR 22] SCIENCE NOTES
[WED 06 APR 22] BIOELECTRONIC MEDICINE (3)
[TUE 05 APR 22] DRACO SPACE NUCLEAR
[MON 04 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 14
[FRI 01 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (22)

[FRI 29 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (26)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (26): The growth of the PC market in the 1980s led to a parallel growth in peripherals, most notably printers -- connected to PCs over RS-232, or the parallel "Centronix" interface, which was much easier to configure -- just plug in a cable, don't worry about the wiring, and it worked. Early on, printers were based on noisy impact technology, but in 1984 HP introduced the Laserjet, using laser printing technology. Laser printing had been invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, but to that time laser printers had been too expensive for the PC market. Other manufacturers, including IBM, offered laser printers, but HP took and maintained a lead in the technology, also offering a lower-cost line of "inkjet" printers -- though over the longer run, the laser printer would become a standard.

The rise of "personal printing" was accompanied by the emergence of office software packages, such as Apple Works and Microsoft Works, typically featuring a word processor, database manager, and other business utilities. Spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel also became popular, with Excel becoming a standard as well -- along with Intuit's Quicken, a person financial-management package. Word processors, which allowed editing of text before printing as well as spell checking, quickly rendered the typewriter obsolete. Paint programs were commonplace, while technical users could obtain the Autodesk AutoCAD package to create digital engineering models on a PC.

There was a proliferation of software for PCs, one eccentric branch being "pop-up" or "terminate & stay resident (TSR)" utilities that could be left on standby in memory while users worked with other software, to then be temporarily activated by pressing a control-key sequence. They were a cheap and very dirty approach to multiprogramming operation on PCs; trying to run two of them at once was asking for trouble.

The explosion of software included programming languages, with dialects of traditional languages along with new languages proliferating. In mid-decade, Microsoft introduced QuickBASIC, which was a major rethinking of the traditional BASIC language, being much cleaner and modern. It became widespread because a slightly detuned version named QBASIC was shipped with DOS.

More professionally, there was a push towards "object-oriented programming (OOP)" -- in simple terms, a scheme in which program functions could be encapsulated in modules, with modules then used to build new modules. The fundamental ideas traced back to the Simula language, but were refined by Xerox PARC in the 1970s through a "graphical programming language (GPL)" named "Smalltalk". GPLs were pure PARC: instead of writing programs as text, a mouse was used to plug together blocks to wire up programs. GPLs attracted a lot of attention in the 1980s, but they would end up being a niche technology. As far as OOP went, the predominant programming language would become "C++", an extension of Bell Lab's C language.

Modems were used for communications over the phone network, often in the form of "acoustic couplers", in which a phone handset was plugged into. Early in the decade, data rates were painfully slow, from 300 bits per second (BPS), reaching up to 2,400 BPS by the end of the 1980s. Communications with other computers were typically using "terminal emulator" software that made a PC look like a text-only computer terminal, the DEC VT-100 being the standard of reference. Lacking graphics, users developed a culture of "ASCII art", using text characters defined under the ASCII encoding scheme, to create simple illustrations.

People dialed into "bulletin board systems (BBS)" that allowed cliques of like-minded individuals to chat among themselves. They also exchanged electronic mail or "email" -- which at the time, was not in general use, with few people having email addresses, though a general addressing scheme was in place for future expansion. The decade saw the rise of "online service providers", one of the most memorable being Compuserve; subscribers could log into these services via modem to send and receive emails, get news and stock quotes, and make use of other services.

The French did that one better with the "Minitel" system, established by the French postal, telegraph, & telephone (TPP) authority, in which users obtained cheap dumb text terminals with phone-line modems and then access a national network with online services. [TO BE CONTINUED]

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[THU 28 APR 22] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from AIRRECOGNITION.com ("Turkey To focus On TF-X Jet Fighter After F-35 Programme Exit", 10 May 2021), Turkey was long a partner in the international Lockheed Martin F-35 program -- but tensions with the Turkish government led the US to cut Turkey out of the effort in 2019.

Turkey, however, has an advanced defense industry, and is going ahead with development of their own 5th-generation fighter, the "TF-X". It will be a twin-engine aircraft, of roughly the same general configuration as the US F-22 Raptor, capable of both air-to-air and attack missions. It will be 21 meters (68.9 feet) long, have a wingspan of 14 meters (45.9 feet), and a height of 6 meters (20 feet), with a top speed of Mach 1.8.

There's talk of first flight in 2025, and introduction to service in the 2030s. However, the program has not been moving along smoothly and has been delayed; it may be more than the Turkish aerospace industry can handle, particularly if there are constraints on foreign assistance.

* As discussed in an article from NAVALNEWS.com ("USMC's Ship Killing NMESIS to Become Operational in 2023" by Xavier Vavasseur, 02 Sep 2021), the US Marines have become very enthusiastic about the Naval Strike Missile (NSM) -- a cruise missile designed for antiship and land attack, developed by Kongsberg of Norway.

They are now working towards deployment of the "Navy/Marine Corps Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS)", which will to become operational in 2023. In 2021, during a large-scale exercise, a NMESIS vehicle was deployed by a C-130 transport, then fired NSMs to sink the decommissioned guided-missile frigate INGRAHAM. NMESIS integrates a robot variant of the Joint Lightweight Tactical Vehicle, the NSM, and the NSM fire control system used by the Navy.

NMESIS is linked "Light Amphibious Warship (LAW)" program. LAW will be the "new strategy and tactic" to countering the Chinese Anti-Access/Area Denial island chains around the South China Sea. LAW will be a high-value platform, deploying NMESIS on islands across the Pacific in order to deter the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surface ships. Under the LAW program, the Navy plans to acquire 24 to 35 new amphibious ships, with procurement from 2023.

NMESIS

In related news, the US Navy's Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) will be fitted with twin quad mounts for Kongsberg RGM-184 Naval Strike Missiles (NSM). The NSM has a range of at least 185 kilometers (115 miles / 100 NMI); the missile has counter-countermeasures to penetrate ship defenses, and can target specific sections of a ship.

This compares with the current version of the long-enduring Harpoon antiship missile, the "RGM-84Q-4" or "Block II+", the product of an upgrade kit. It has a range of 250 kilometers (155 miles / 135 NMI), an improved seeker system, and a lighter but more effective warhead. Somewhat puzzlingly, the NSM and Harpoon are seen as complementary, with no plans at present to have the NSM replace the Harpoon.

* As reported by an article from JANES.com ("Rafael Networks Python-5 Short-Range Air-To-Air Missile With Global Link SDR" by Robin Hughes, 18 June 2021), the Israeli Rafael Python air-to-air missile (AAM) has been in service for decades and has been continuously refined, up to the current "Python 5" variant. Now, the Python 5 has acquired another new trick: a wireless networking connection, allowing it to acquire targets from any platform equipped with the company's Global Link software-defined radio (SDR) system.

Global Link is an advanced airborne multiband (VHF/UHF+L) IP MANET (mobile ad-hoc network) SDR, designed to facilitate the exchange of secure information between modern fighter aircraft in tactical operations. MANET is a multihop, self-configuring, and autonomous network that uses intermediate mobile nodes as a router, and transmits data between mobile devices. A modern fighter aircraft equipped with Global Link can launch a Python-5 AAM towards a target that is derived from the tactical network and not from its own radar.

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[WED 27 APR 22] INSAR SCANS THE WORLD (1)

* INSAR SCANS THE WORLD (1): As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Fleets Of Radar Satellites Are Measuring Movements On Earth Like Never Before" by Julia Rosen, 25 February 2021), space satellites have provided a highly detailed view of the face of the Earth. As an example, Juliet Biggs -- a geophysicist at the University of Bristol in the UK -- and her colleagues decided to measurements from radar satellites to search for geological activity in East Africa.

The researchers used a technique known as "interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)" to detect tiny movements of the land from space, focusing on East African volcanoes. According to the latest results, 14 have been almost imperceptibly growing or shrinking in the past five years, hinting that the volcanoes are not completely asleep. Biggs says: "It's really changed the way these volcanoes are viewed, from something that's kind of dormant to really very active systems." The Corbetti Volcano, adjacent to the growing city of Hawassa, Ethiopia, is inflating at a rate of 6.6 centimeters per year; Ethiopian researchers have now included it in the country's geological hazard monitoring network.

Ground-based GPS measurement can track surface motions of less than a millimeter, but only at individual sites. InSAR isn't quite as precise, but it can track shifts over swaths hundreds of kilometers wide. Biggs says: "We tend to think of the ground as this solid platform -- and actually, it's really not."

Using InSAR, researchers are tracking how ice streams flow, how faults slip in earthquakes, and how the ground moves as fluids are pumped in or out. Paul Rosen, an InSAR pioneer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is enthusiastic about the potential of the technology: "It's a little bit like kids in a candy store."

There's more coming all the time, the number of civil and commercial SAR satellites having doubled since 2018, with more on the way. Systems to handle the floods of data have advanced in pace; the satellites should soon be able to spot daily or even hourly surface changes at almost every location on Earth. Geoscientists aren't the only ones cashing it, either: railroads are using InSAR to monitor the condition of their tracks, while cities are monitoring shifts in buildings caused by construction. Advocates see significant applications, from measuring the water stored in mountain snowpacks to supporting fast response to natural disasters. Cathleen Jones -- a science team leader for NISAR, an upcoming joint SAR mission from NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) -- says: "I want it to become so socially relevant that they can't go back to not having this data."

SAR has its roots in "side-looking airborne radar (SLAR)", a scheme in which an aircraft sent radar scans out to the sides, and recorded the returns on a moving filmstrip. There had been work in parallel on an electronic approach to the same task, but SAR wasn't really practical until the introduction of large-scale integrated digital circuitry in the late 1970s, with the side-looking scans stored in digital memory and integrated in real time.

One of the big advantages of SAR over SLAR is that the summing of the radar scans as the aircraft flies along results in a longer effective aperture of the receive antenna -- hence the "synthetic aperture" in the SAR name. The result is high-resolution, day-night, all weather radar imagery. What InSAR does in addition is check for slight phase changes in the return, allowing detection of changes down to a few millimeters. That isn't a particularly useful capability in a lot of applications, but it's very useful in detecting slight shifts in the ground. [TO BE CONTINUED]

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[TUE 26 APR 22] NEW COVID-19 VACCINES

* NEW COVID-19 VACCINES: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New Crop of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Could Be Easier To Store, Cheaper To Use" by Jon Cohen, 5 April 2022), mRNA vaccines were the big stars in the otherwise dismal COVID-19 pandemic, being able to provide a high level of protection against severe disease and having minimal side effects. The problem with the two mRNA COVID-19 vaccines -- one from a Pfizer-BioNTech partnership, the other from Moderna -- had two big disadvantages: they were expensive, and they had to be stored at dry-ice temperatures. The result was that they were not widely used in middle- and lower-income countries.

Now more than a dozen new mRNA vaccines from ten countries are in the pipeline, including one from China in phase 3 trials. Many will be cheaper, and some will be easier to handle. They face an obstacle, in that much of the world's population has either been vaccinated or has had COVID-19, making testing more difficult. However, there are still many people on the planet who are vulnerable and could benefit from an improved mRNA vaccine.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots use mRNA to program cells to produce "spike", a protein on SARS-CoV-2's surface. Almost two dozen COVID-19 vaccines are now in use around the world, including some based on inactivated SARS-CoV-2, and cold viruses engineered to carry the spike gene -- but the two mRNA vaccines account for almost a third of the over 13 billion doses produced so far. The two companies have been reluctant to share their intellectual property (IP) and know-how, which would allow manufacturers in poorer countries to produce the shots.

BioNTech and Moderna both plan to develop production plants in African countries, and offer reduced rates for undeveloped nations. In parallel, the World Health Organization (WHO). Unfortunately, it may take years for these efforts to pay off. The new candidate vaccines in development could reach the marketplace much faster. IP protections are still a challenge, But the new mRNA developers have managed to dodge some of the showstoppers.

A Chinese mRNA vaccine is the closest to delivery. This vaccine is being developed by Walvax Biotechnology in Kunming, working with Suzhou Abogen Biosciences and the Chinese Academy of Military Science. Walvax is staying quiet about specifics, but a paper on a phase 1 trial of the vaccine revealed that instead of encoding the entire spike protein, the Walvax team only included the sequence of a key portion known as "the receptor binding domain". In July 2021, the company launched a placebo-controlled phase 3 trial in 28,000 people in Mexico, Indonesia, Nepal, and China. The vaccine can be kept in ordinary refrigerators, and the company says it can produce 400 million doses a year.

In Thailand, a team led by Kiat Ruxrungtham at Chulalongkorn University has developed an mRNA vaccine, to be produced by the French-Thai company BioNet-Asia, that has been through phase 1 & 2 studies. The team followed a key step in the playbook used by the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration and Moderna: replacing uridine -- one of the four basic building blocks of RNA -- with methylpseudouridine, which reduces the toxicity of mRNA and increases the amount of spike protein cells produce. This tweak was not subject to IP restrictions.

The Thai vaccine differs from the two mRNA vaccines on the market in other ways, however. It doesn't feature two mutations in spike that stabilize the protein, codes cells to secrete the spike protein, instead of leaving it bound to the membrane. These choices were made to avoid IP problems. Trials suggest the Thai vaccine remains potent with the changes. Kiat says that BioNet-Asia can make up to 100 million doses a year, and more cheaply than the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration and Moderna. Japan's Daiichi Sankyo and Canada's Providence Therapeutics have mRNA vaccines at similar stages of development.

About half of the new candidates are "self-amplifying": they include harmless genes from an alphavirus that code for an enzyme used in RNA replication, enabling the spike mRNA to make additional copies of itself. That means a smaller dose can still generate a robust immune response. Some of the developers haven't got good results from this approach, but a candidate vaccine GlaxoSmithKline solidly protected hamsters against SARS-CoV-2 infection. That vaccine is now in a phase 1 trial.

Trials are complicated, as mentioned, by the fact that much of the world's population already has some degree of immunity from COVID-19, making it troublesome to find good test subjects. Worse, it is ethically dodgy to test new vaccines on subjects who haven't acquired immunity, when effective vaccines are already available.

Kiat hopes to test his candidate based on a proxy measure: how well it boosts antibody levels in people who are fully vaccinated. Past studies of the marketed mRNA vaccines have shown that specific levels of neutralizing antibodies are correlated with protection from disease, and BioNet-Asia and other manufacturers hope regulators will accept similar data to authorize use of their vaccines. The European Medicines Agency and regulators from several countries have indicated they have some willingness to accept such "immunobridging", though the US FDA is more reluctant -- one problem being that antibodies are only one indicator of a useful immune response. The FDA is willing to accept antibody data for emergency-use authorization, but expects that proper studies will be made after an authorized vaccine goes into use.

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[MON 25 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 17

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Russia launched a new assault in Ukraine this last week, the objective being to seal off Ukraine from the Donbas and coastal regions. Weapons and munitions from the West have been pouring into Ukraine, and while it's too early to know how the battle will turn out, there's cause for optimism. Retired US Army General Mark Hertling, cited here last week, commented that this will be a battle of logistics, and Ukraine will win.

That makes sense: Ukraine is operating on internal supply lines, while the Russians are at the end of external supply lines -- and their logistics are poor anyway. Add to that new options available to Ukraine, US President Joe Biden having mentioned sending 121 new "Ghost" kamikaze drones to help the defense. Nothing was said about what made them special, other than that they were tailored to Ukrainian requirements, but we'll find out soon.

There's talk that the war could drag on, and the Russians could win by attrition. That might be true -- but then again, the Russians have lost well more troops in Ukraine than they did for all the time they were in Afghanistan. Besides, so far the Russian war effort has been a parade of incompetence. They may improve, but they're working from a low level. The offensive seems to be bogging down, and the Ukrainians hit a field headquarters -- it is not clear what weapons were used -- to kill two Russian generals and badly wound a third. Some observers have suggested that this is the last gasp of the Russian assault on Ukraine: if it fails, they won't have the resources to try again.

One puzzling item that came to light was a propaganda video with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in a staged interview. What was strange was that Putin was sitting at a table, and kept his right hand clutching the table at all times. The general suggestion was that he is suffering from Parkinson's disease, and was trying to suppress trembling. He left his left hand passively dangling, with some suggestions that he'd had a stroke. In short, he doesn't look healthy. Another puzzle was reports of major fires at installations across Russia. Could there be a campaign of sabotage in progress? Or is this nothing out of the ordinary?

* Malcolm Nance -- a retired US Navy senior petty officer, with background in intelligence and counter-terrorism -- has made a name for himself as a military pundit on Twitter and elsewhere. He just made a big splash by announcing that he had joined the Ukrainian Foreign Legion, and appeared before camera in his combat togs and with a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Not bad for age 61.

That agitated the nutjob Right, with retired Army General Mike Flynn saying on Right-wing TV: "Is he fighting for a fascist dictator, or is he fighting communism? Whose side is he on here? ... Is he supposed to be a journalist reporting the news, or is he out there trying to make the news? What kind of ploy is that?"

Of course, that got a very negative reaction on Twitter, with pictures of Flynn at dinner with Vladimir Putin making the rounds. None were more negative than the reaction of Nance, who replied:


Malcolm Nance / @MalcolmNance: Tell Mike Flynn that I fight for DEMOCRACY. Flynn LITERALLY ate Putin's bread SEATED AT HIS RIGHT HAND. He LOVED Moscow's cash & spent years nestled deeply in Vlad's cold, white KGB ass. Now he supports Russia's murder of a free people?! Fuck you, Mike Flynn. FUCK! YOU!


There's no real doubting Nance's sincerity, but he won't be financially hurting for the exercise. He's likely to have an interesting story to tell once this is all over, and the public prominence to sell it. Who will play him in the movie version? As for Flynn, it's impossible to figure out where he's coming from. It's easy to read Donald Trump: he's just a greedy pig. What motivates Flynn? All that can be said is that, whatever he wants, it's crazy. He needs to be locked up, and probably will be.

* As reported in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("What Taiwan Can Learn From Russia's Invasion of Ukraine", 23 April 2022), the war in Ukraine is being followed with great interest in Taiwan. Vladimir Putin regards Ukraine as part of Russia, and is willing to use force to retake it; similarly, Xi Jinping regards Taiwan as part of China, and wants to bring it back into the fold -- without war, if possible, with war if not.

Taiwan's defense budget, however, has been steadily shrinking, in part because of fatalism, in part because Taiwan was effectively a military dictatorship for too long. Taiwan's ties with the USA were seen as the best defense against Chinese aggression. The war in Ukraine has led to reconsideration. Vladimir Putin went ahead with the invasion of Ukraine, regardless of Western sanctions, and his threats to go nuclear meant Western powers could not directly intervene against him. China is economically much stronger than Russia, making it able to withstand sanctions better, and China has an effective nuclear force, too.

The Chinese have not relented in their ongoing probes of Taiwan's defenses -- "gray-zone" attacks short of war, involving air incursions and cyber-warfare. However, a full-scale military operation remains problematic:

China could use nuclear intimidation to block intervention, but that's a two-edge sword: the threat of China going nuclear is balanced by the threat of the USA going nuclear in return. Vladimir Putin has been playing the game of bluff, and finding it offers only limited returns.

Taiwan is focusing on an "asymmetric" defensive strategy, in which the weaker side uses defensive weapons, concealment, and misdirection to frustrate its adversary. The USA has been encouraging Taiwan to develop a "porcupine" doctrine. The concept has gone by various names and the "Overall Defense Concept (ODC)" -- with ODC promoted by a former Taiwanese military chief, Lee Hsi-Ming, who suggests that:

Although Taiwan's government does embrace the porcupine strategy, it seems to be slow to sink in. Taiwan's military appears to be inclined to buy expensive combat platforms at the expense of large numbers of relatively cheap weapons. Lee sees that as a mistake. Taiwan, after all, could build hundreds, even thousands, of cheap long-range kamikaze drones that would be very difficult to intercept, and would be able to inflict massive damage on China. They could also obtain long-endurance drones and fit them with air-to-air missiles to deal with air attacks. The numbers of expensive fighter jets that Taiwan could field would, in contrast, be quickly overwhelmed by China's superiority in brute force, and they would not represent much of an offensive threat to China either. Phil Davidson, the former commander of American forces in the Indo-Pacific, says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

There's too much discussion of an amphibious assault. China has a lot of other ways to pound Taiwan into submission, including missiles and cyber-attacks. If the Chinese don't know their forces or points of departure are at risk, you cannot deter them. You can't win at soccer only in defense. You have to be able to score a goal.

END_QUOTE

For now, the first line of defense remains the USA. The Taiwanese also can expect some help from Japan, which recognizes that China is a threat, and that Taiwan is key to containing that threat. Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said late in 2021: "A Taiwan contingency is a Japanese contingency, and therefore a contingency for the Japan-US alliance. Beijing, President Xi Jinping in particular, should not have any misunderstanding in recognizing this."

How much the USA and Japan could help is unclear, but the lack of clarity cuts both ways. The defense of Taiwan needs a strategy, in which ambiguity plays a role. Davidson says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

Every day, when Xi Jinping draws back the curtain, he should see the capability that Taiwan, America and the other allies have deployed and tell himself: "Today is not the day for an invasion." We had to run a deterrence strategy for 40 years during the Cold War. That may be what winning looks like.

END_QUOTE

In warfare, it is necessary to get a step ahead of an adversary. If Xi Jinping feels encouraged in aggression against Taiwan by the invasion of Ukraine, will he feel so encouraged if the invasion is a disaster for Russia? That seems unlikely, and so it is in Taiwan's interests to help that disaster happen.

* In domestic news, one Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator in Michigan, went viral online, after McMorrow had been attacked by Republican State Senator Lana Theis -- who sent out a campaign fundraising email to claim McMorrow wanted to "groom and sexualize kindergartners." On 19 April, McMorrow took the floor to respond, saying to Theis:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

I am the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme -- because you can't claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of "parental rights" if another parent is standing up to say NO. You say: "She's a groomer. She supports pedophilia. She wants children to believe that they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they're white."

I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense.

No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one in this room is responsible for slavery. But each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history ... We are not responsible for the past. We also cannot change the past. [But] we can't pretend that it didn't happen, or deny people their very right to exist.

END_QUOTE

Democratic strategist James Carville -- well-known for his acid criticisms of the poor messaging by Democrats -- was impressed by McMorrow's response, saying: "Enormously effective piece of communication. There's really no comeback to it."

McMorrow didn't come on as defensive, or try to reply with hairsplitting fact-checks -- she didn't let Theis frame the debate. Instead, McMorrow laid out her fundamental deepest convictions and explained how they lead her to her positions on gay and trans rights, and why simple decency demands them. McMorrow wasn't the one with the problem: it was Theis.

Carville said: "She spoke English. She wasn't defensive at all." She simply said "what every Democrat believes." The nutjob Right has adopted the posture that all those to the Left of them -- that is, the substantial majority of Americans -- are indistinguisable crazy Leftist radicals. On the contrary, what the Right denounces as "extreme Left" is actually the American mainstream, which supports gay rights, abortion tolerance, environmental action and in general, sanity. It is the Right that is in the weak position.

* This was underlined this last week by a flurry of absurdities on the Right. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis pushed a bill through the legislature, stripping Disney World of its self-governing status, in retaliation for Disney's withdrawing political support after the legislature passed an anti-gay-rights bill. The attack on Disney seems very poorly thought out, and is likely to backfire.

In addition, conspirobot Alex Jones was contacted by the Justice Department, who wants to ask him some questions about the 6-1-21 Capitol riot and his role in it. Jones all but demanded immunity; he won't get it. Finally, Right-wing troll Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene found herself the subject of a hearing in Georgia, to decide if she should be denied the right to run for office because she advocated insurrection.

The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution disallows those who advocate insurrection from running for office. MTG's entire testimony amounted to: "I don't recall." The prosecution kept running video clips of her advocating revolution in response. Even if she dodges the bullet, the hearing has greatly undermined her credibility, and is useful to that end. Presumably, other subversive Members of Congress can expect the same treatment.

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[FRI 22 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (25)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (25): It was the appearance of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981 that really got the PC revolution going. The IBM PC was based on the 8088 CPU, with the base system featuring 16 KB of RAM, expandable to 256 KB. It had 5.25-inch floppy drives and could accommodate a hard disk, 20 MB becoming the norm at the outset. It also had a low-resolution color graphics display. Significantly, it also had the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS), devised by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

MS-DOS resembled CP/M, but would gradually acquire UNIX-like features. Ironically, when IBM originally approached Gates about an OS, he steered them to Gary Kildall -- who snubbed the company. When IBM came back to Gates, he obtained a disk operating system from a local company in Seattle, then polished it into MS-DOS. Gates was particularly shrewd in arranging deals with PC manufacturers to bundle MS-DOS with their hardware, instead of selling it to end users. End users got MS-DOS with their PCs by default.

IBM didn't succeed just because of its stature; the product was also well thought out, using an open architecture for plug-in cards to allow other vendors to supply hardware, and with IBM also encouraging the development of software for the PC. IBM also sold the PC through computer dealers and in department stores, something Big Blue had never done before.

Apple struck back, introducing the "Lisa" computer in 1982. It featured the Motorola 68000 processor, which was a generation ahead of the 8-bit processors then running other PCs. The 68000 was a 16-bit processor, influenced by the DEC VAX architecture, and had a huge (by the standards of the time) 16-megabyte address space. The Lisa also introduced a graphical user interface (GUI or "gooey"), based on concepts explored at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Steve Jobs had visited PARC and played with a GUI; with his intuitive grasp of user design, he immediately recognized the potential of the concept. For various reasons, the Lisa was not a success -- a big problem being that it was too expensive -- but Apple was undiscouraged, rethinking the product to correct its mistakes.

In 1983, IBM introduced the PC/AT, with the Intel 80286 processor -- a 16-bit processor, providing more horsepower to users. By that time, many manufacturers were building "PC Clones" -- HP was one of them -- and MS-DOS had become an effective standard. Hundreds of applications were developed for the MS-DOS platform. The PC was a big step forward, but it still left a lot to be desired -- limited to a megabyte of memory, though "bank-switching" could be used to extend the limit somewhat, and trying to get multiple plug-in cards to work together could be a nightmare. As it turned out, the IBM PC was a double-edged sword for IBM; the company ended up introducing a product that it couldn't control; that was great for the market, but not so great for IBM. Microsoft, in comparison, went from strength to strength.

Companies that didn't jump on the MS-DOS PC bandwagon either went out of the business or survived in niches -- with the exception of Apple. In 1984, Apple introduced the "Macintosh" PC, which was an evolved and cost-reduced derivative of the Lisa, based on the 68000 CPU, and using the proprietary Mac operating system, with a mouse-driven GUI. It also used the new 720 KB floppy disks, which had more capacity and were more convenient than the 5.25-inch floppies that had been standard. The Macintosh was very well thought out and easy to use, much better suited to customers who didn't really know how to use a computer and weren't very motivated to learn. The "Mac" made computing fun, and sales were brisk.

It set the pattern for Apple's future strategy, in which the company was reluctant to adopt any standards but its own, providing a neatly-tailored solution for customers, and charging a premium price. The company obtained strong, in some cases fanatical, customer loyalty -- but was nonetheless under great market pressure. Wozniak, who wasn't particularly happy running a big business, left in early 1985; Jobs was forced out later in the year.

Microsoft responded to the Macintosh PC by introducing "Windows", which at the time was no more than a user-interface shell on top of MS-DOS. Programming languages acquire GUI "toolkits" to allow programmers to build programs with graphical interfaces. It was a sign of the divide between Microsoft and Apple that Microsoft used a two-button mouse, while Apple used a one-button mouse, with a dispute over the relative merits of the two. [TO BE CONTINUED]

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[THU 21 APR 22] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for March included:

-- 01 MAR 22 / GOES T -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2138 UTC (local time + 5) to put the "GOES S" AKA "GOES 17" into orbit, this being the second next-generation geostationary weather satellite for NASA and NOAA. GOES T was built by Lockheed Martin and was based on the company's A2100 satellite bus; it had a launch mass of 5,192 kilograms (11,466 pounds) and a design life of 15 years. It was the third of four to be launched through 2024, and the 19th GOES satellite. The booster was in the "541" vehicle configuration with a 5-meter (16.4-foot) fairing, four solid rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.

The GOES satellite constellation is a NASA and NOAA joint weather constellation providing continuous weather observations of the US and its surrounding areas. GOES has its roots in the 1960s with the "Applications Technology Satellite (ATS)" program. ATS was NASA's program to test satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) that could be used to observe the weather. The six-satellite program was successful and led to the "Synchronous Meteorological Satellite (SMS)" Program.

The SMS program was NASA's operational program to have continuous weather observations of the US. NOAA later became involved with the program, and it was renamed GOES. Since then, NASA and NOAA have continued to work together on the GOES program. NASA manages the design and construction of both the spacecraft and instruments. NASA also selects the launch vehicle for the GOES spacecraft. NOAA manages the overall program while operating the satellites in orbit.

-- 03 MAR 22 / STARLINK 4-9 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1425 UTC (local time + 5) to put 47 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).

-- 05 MAR 22 / YINHE 2 x 6 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched at 0601 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Xichang launch center to put six "Yinhe 2" commercial "internet in the sky (I2S)" satellites into orbit for Galaxy Space of Beijing. Each satellite had a launch mass of 190 kilograms (420 pounds) and a bandwidth of 40 GBPS.

-- 08 MAR 22 / NOOR 2 -- A Qased booster was launched from Iran's Shahroud missile range in the northeast region of the country to put the "Noor 2" surveillance satellite into orbit. The Qased features of three stages, with a first stage based on an Iranian ballistic missile. Details of the Noor 2 were not announced, but it likely weighed less than 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

-- 09 MAR 22 / STARLINK 4-10 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1345 UTC (local time + 5) to put 48 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds).

-- 15 MAR 22 / S4 CROSSOVER: A commercial small satellite launch vehicle developed by Astra performed a launch at 1622 UTC (local time + 4) from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska.

The mission's customer was Spaceflight, a commercial launch broker and an arranger of rideshare launch services. Spaceflight said it had three of its customers flying on Rocket 3.3. The customers were Swarm, Portland State Aerospace Society, and NearSpace Launch.

Swarm flew 20 0.25-unit "SpaceBEE" CubeSats. Portland State Aerospace Society's payload, named "OreSat0", was a student-built nanosatellite developed at Portland State University in Oregon. NearSpace Launch's payload, named S4 CROSSOVER, remained attached to the Astra rocket's second stage after entering orbit, testing communications instruments and gathering data on the space environment.

SpaceBEE satellites

-- 17 MAR 21 / YAOGAN 34-02 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0709 UTC (local time - 8) to put a secret "Yaogan 34-02" payload into orbit. It was apparently a military surveillance satellite.

-- 18 MAR 22 / SOYUZ ISS 67S (ISS) -- A Soyuz booster was launched from Baikonur at 1555 UTC (local time + 6) to put the "Soyuz ISS 67S" AKA "MS 21" crewed space capsule into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) mission.

Soyuz MS-21 was the first time in the ISS's history that a Soyuz crew mission launched with three Roscosmos cosmonauts and no international partner astronauts. Soyuz MS-21 was commanded by cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev (third space flight), along with Denis Matveev (1st space flight) and Sergey Korsakov (1st space flight).

-- 19 MAR 22 / STARLINK 4-12 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0442 UTC (local time + 4) to put 53 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The launch brought the number of Starlink satellites placed into orbit to 2,335, with about a tenth of them out of service. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on the SpaceX recovery barge; it was the 12th flight of the booster.

-- 22 MAR 22 / MERIDIAN M10 -- A Soyuz 2.1a booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1248 UTC (local time - 4) to put the "Meridian M10" military comsat into Molniya elliptical orbit.

-- 29 MAR 21 / PUJIAN 2, TAIKUN 2 -- A Long March 6A booster was launched at 0950 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Taiyuan launch center to put the "Pujiang 2" and "Tiankun 2" satellites into orbit. Pujiang 2 was developed by the Shanghai Academy of Space Technology. It followed the launch of the refrigerator-sized Pujiang 1 satellite in 2015, a mission designed to promote “smart city” development in China by monitoring weather, traffic, and population density. Tiankun 2 demonstrated a small spacecraft bus developed by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation. It followed a small spacecraft named Tiankun 1, launched in 2017.

-- 30 MAR 21 / TIANPING 2A,2B,2C -- A Long March 11 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0229 GMT (local time - 8) "Tianping 2A / 2B / 2C" satellites into orbit. They were apparently calibration targets of some sort.

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[WED 20 APR 22] CHINA'S LIMITS (2)

* CHINA'S LIMITS (2): China's development of its semiconductor industry faces a problem much like that afflicting China's aircraft industry: the semiconductor business is complicated and dominated by the US, along with its allies. China's vulnerability to tech sanctions became clear in 2018, when Donald Trump's administration halted the sales of sensitive hardware that used American technology to two Chinese telecoms-equipment makers, ZTE and Huawei.

To make sure that nothing like that happens again, China's latest five-year plan requires that China produce 70% of the chips it consumes by 2025, up from less than 20% in 2021. As in the other areas, the country is making some progress towards that goal: the government is pumping money into the sector, with more indigenous research and new factories being built. However, Chinese chips are not leading-edge, being based on nanometer design technology -- an order of magnitude behind the most advanced current chips, a few generations behind TSMC of Taiwan and Samsung of South Korea. China doesn't yet have the ability to produce the lithography machines needed to make such chips.

As for the last two items in the list of critical technologies -- operating systems and payments networks -- China's problem has less to do with mastering a technology or recreating supply chains, and more with overcoming users' lack of trust in its alternatives. The operating systems that power personal computers and smartphones are a prime example. When the Trump administration banned American firms from working with Huawei in 2019, a generation of the Chinese firm's phones were deprived not just of chips but also of Google's Android operating system. Together, these restrictions contributed to the decline of about 30% in Huawei's revenues in 2021.

Chinese companies have invested billions in the development of alternative operating systems, such as Huawei's Harmony OS -- but it's hard to find a market for an operating system that is no real improvement on those in popular use. Users don't want to learn how to use something else, and availability of apps is a problem. Virtually all Chinese smartphones continue to run on Android and Apple's iOS, and nearly all Chinese desktops are powered by Apple's Mac OS or Microsoft Windows. The Chinese do have some interest in open-source alternatives, since nobody can shut off Chinese access to them -- but the Chinese can't control them, either.

A similar chicken-and-egg problem afflicts China's effort to create a worldwide payments network. Most of global money transfers are processed through SWIFT, a Belgium-based interbank messaging system, and CHIPS, America's domestic clearing system. These, along with the dominance of the dollar in international finance and trade, give the USA power over the global financial system. China has become keen on getting around US financial dominance as protests against its crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong and its human-rights abuses in Xinjiang have increased, with the accompanying threat of sanctions on China.

Since 2015, China has been spending great amounts on a system for yuan payments known as CIPS, but with meager results. CIPS' 80 or so connected institutions are dwarfed by SWIFT's 11,000-plus. Although the cross-border use of the yuan has been increasing, it's not because of foreign demand for the yuan, but because of the overseas expansion of Chinese state firms. Trying to get foreigners to deal in Chinese currency while the same foreigners are increasingly annoyed with Chinese human-rights abuses is not a winning game.

The CCP is unlikely to be deterred by such difficulties, instead seeing them as granting even more motivation to get out from under the thumb of the USA and its friends. The end result, however, is that China will have to satisfy itself with being second-best, a power unto itself, but a laggard with the rest of the world. Xi Jinping may see that a price worth paying -- but is it a sustainable policy over the longer run? Just as China has hitched itself to a losing horse by backing Vladimir Putin's lunatic war against Ukraine, the CCP may regret taking the road towards decline. [END OF SERIES]

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[TUE 19 APR 22] KF-21 BORAMAE

* KF-21 BORAMAE: On 9 April 2021, Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) rolled out the first of six prototypes of the "KF-21 Boramae" 5th-generation multirole fighter aircraft, being developed for the Republic of Korea Air Force (RoKAF) under the "Korean Fighter eXperimental (KF-X)" program. It is planned as a replacement for the RoKAF's fleet of F-4D/E Phantom II and F-5E/F Tiger II jet fighter aircraft, with at least 120 to be obtained. In service, it will fly alongside the RoKAF's existing fleets of Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon multi-role fighters and KAI FA-50 Golden Eagle light combat aircraft. The Republic of Korea may also obtain 20 Lockheed Martin F-35B short take-off fighters.

Configurationally, the KF-21 is very similar to the US Lockheed Martin F-22, if more compact. It has stealthy fighter lines, with set-back high-mounted cockpit, sloped box engine inlets, and tricycle landing gear -- all with single wheels, the nose gear retracting backward, the main gear tucking forward into the sides of the fuselage. The KF-21 is 16.9 meters (55 feet 5 inches) long, 4.7 meters (15 feet 5 inches) high, and has a wingspan of 11.18 inches (36 feet 8 inches). Unlike the F-22, a two-seat version will be offered along with the baseline single-seat version.

KF-21

The KF-21 is powered by a pair of GE Aviation F414 afterburning bypass jet engines, also used on the Boeing Super Hornet naval fighter. Top speed is about 2,255 KPH (1,400 MPH / 1,215 KT), with a ferry flight range of about 2,870 kilometers (1,780 miles / 1,550 NMI). It has ten hardpoints, including three on each wing and four in the belly of the fuselage, with a maximum external load of 7,700 pounds (14,000 pounds). Potential stores include:

The KF-21 will feature an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, plus an infrared search and track (IRST) system, both of which are currently being developed by Hanwha Systems. Hanwa is also providing the fighter's electro-optical targeting system; mission computer; and multifunction displays (MFDs). LIG Nex1 will provide the aircraft's datalinks; flight control computer; communication, navigation and identification (CNI) system; and ALQ-200K external jammer pod. Hanwha and LIG Nex1 are collaborating on a stores management computer for the fighter.

The aircrew will sit on a Martin-Baker Mark 18 ejection seat, which is used on other KAI products, including the KT-1 turboprop-powered trainer, and the FA-50 Golden Eagle.

Initial flight of the KF-21 is expected in 2022. Six prototypes will be built in all, two of them being two-seaters. Development of the KF-21 began in 2015 and is expected to be complete by 2026, with the RoKAF set to acquire 40 units by 2028 and another 80 units by 2032.

Indonesia is the only foreign partner in the approximately $7.9 billion USD KF-X development program, which is known as the "Indonesian Fighter eXperimental (IF-X)" program in that Southeast Asian country. Indonesia is contributing 20% of the funding, with technological support through the state-owned aerospace company, PT Dirgantara Indonesia (PTDI). Indonesia will also obtain a prototype and shared production. The status of Indonesian involvement is somewhat uncertain, however, with Indonesia re-negotiating the project.

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[MON 18 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 16

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: It was obvious that the Ukrainians needed to come up with some surprises in their war with Russia to get inside Vladimir Putin's turning radius -- to make him the hunted and not the hunter. A big one was dropped this last week, when the Russian cruiser MOSKVA, flagship of the Black Sea fleet, was hit by two Ukrainian Neptune antiship missiles, and went to the bottom. Rumor has it that the captain went down with it.

Retired US Army General Mark Hertling commented on the incident on Twitter, starting out by dismissing reports that the loss of the MOSKVA was an accident. US intelligence indicates it wasn't, and the Russians reacted with air strikes on Kyiv and Lviv -- which was hardly consistent with an accident. Hertling pointed out that Russian intelligence should have known the Ukrainians were fielding the Neptune missile, and that the Russian Navy seems to have been caught fatally napping, the loss being a significant blow to Putin's ambitions:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

[MOSKVA was] the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet -- but this ship was also the flagship during the 2008 invasion in Georgia, and it's named for MOSCOW! This ship was tasked to provide overall fleet command and control (C2), as well as air defense -- being loaded up with surface-to-air missiles -- and could have discharged Russian Naval Infantry (Marines) on an amphibious assault near Odesa.

As Putin revised his plan for "eastern & southern attacks" after failing to take Kyiv, the seizure of the Black Sea coast -- and perhaps the continued attack toward Transnistria in Moldova -- was likely part of the "new" plan. It will be hard to execute that western assault now.

But there's more: the Ukrainians did not just "get lucky", they've been consistently kicking the Russians around, for example:

All this is getting harder to explain to the Russian people. Matters will get worse as troops go back to their hometowns, to tell parents and friends the truth about the war. I've learned never to underestimate my enemies, but it's going to be VERY hard for Russian General Dvornikov, now in charge of the "special operation", to turn this around.

END_QUOTE

* The use of the Neptune antiship missile was a surprise. It's apparently based on the Russian Kh-35 antiship missile, which is so configurationally similar to the US Harpoon missile that it has been nicknamed the "Harpoonski".

Not surprisingly, the Russians tried to destroy the factory that makes the Neptune, but it's a good bet the Ukrainians have distributed production across a number of small sites, some of them dug in. The US Harpoon, incidentally, has a land-attack cruise missile derivative called SLAM, and it would not be so difficult to come up with a Neptune land-attack derivative. It would need a modified guidance system, terminal attack seeker, and possibly warhead.

Working from there, no doubt the Ukrainians took notice of the way Yemen's Houthis beat up the Saudis with long-range kamikaze drones, made by Iran. It would not be so difficult to build small drones that were almost invisible to radar that could hit Moscow or beyond. The Houthis demonstrated how effective the drones were against Saudi oil infrastructure, using cheap weapons.

Along roughly parallel lines, the latest US arms package for Ukraine included 18 155-millimeter guns and 40,000 rounds of ammunition. That was a bit of a puzzle, since the Ukrainians have 152-millimeter guns, and it seemed to make no sense to provide them with incompatible weapons. On consideration, the trick is that the US 155-mm guns can fire rocket-boosted guided shells. In other words, the US guns deliver precision guided weapons.

The latest US rocket-boosted 155-mm shells have a maximum range of 40 kilometers (24 miles). What gets more interesting is that Norwegian arms manufacturer Nammo has been developing a ramjet-boosted 155-mm round with a range of more than 100 kilometers (60 miles). A small long-endurance drone, effectively invisible to radar, could be sent deep behind Russian lines and designate precision attacks for laser-guided shells. Infrared-guided shells could hammer shipping. What happens next? No way of knowing, but expect surprises.

* Discussion of the investigations into the 6-1-22 Capitol riot and associated effort to overturn the 2020 election necessarily continues, the investigations being complicated and protracted. One comment reflected on the fact that those planning the demonstration that led to the riot didn't get a permit, downplaying the event, with me replying:


BarrDeceivedForTrump / @darinp2: This also bolsters the case that Trump’s side would try to get people to go to the Capitol, but didn’t apply for a permit that could have resulted in more protection being present. Trump’s side wanted the crowd to be huge and the number of defenders to be small,

Wily_Coyote (MrG) / @gv_goebel: The bizarre thing is that, on 1-6, many of the people who planned this were desperately trying to persuade Trump to make it stop. It was like they were planning an insurrection, but didn't understand what the word meant.


My reply went a bit viral. One reply back to me suggested that the supposed distress of the plotters was a just a cover, to which I replied: "Then again, maybe they were as clueless as they were crooked -- we're not dealing with Einsteins here."

Some people get agitated at the idea that crooked people are more likely to be clueless than clever -- which is puzzling, because it's not like being clueless makes them look better, it's more like it makes them look worse. Anyway, it's hard to say too much about the investigations, since they are ongoing and not completely transparent. I'm not troubled by that; by all evidence, things are going well. There are still some claims that the DOJ is doing nothing, but they are increasingly only made by MAGAbots, Kremlin Stooges, and other fakes.

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[FRI 15 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (24)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (24): Artificial intelligence stalled in the 1970s. Early in the decade, the AI community was highly optimistic. In 1970s, Marvin Minsky told LIFE magazine that "from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being." In hindsight, Minsky was completely off the mark: the computer systems available at the time would have been hard-pressed to match the brain of a honeybee, with about a million neurons.

The excessive optimism of the era was compared to climbing a tree to get to the Moon: progress was quick at first, but then stopped. Hans Moravec, a doctoral student of McCarthy in the era, later said that "computers were still millions of times too weak to exhibit intelligence." In mid-decade, funding for AI research came to a near halt, with this "first AI winter" lasting into the 1980s.

* The rise of the integrated circuit in the 1970s led to the introduction of the mobile phone. Mobile phones were not an entirely new idea; Bell had introduced the Mobile Telephone Service in 1946. It was based on VHF radio technology, with a user getting in touch with an operator via the radio link, and being patched into the land-line phone network. It was very expensive, being essentially a toy for the rich.

In 1973, John Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola demonstrated the first "cellphone". It was effectively a proof-of-concept device, weighing two kilograms (4.4 pounds); it was useless without a network of cellphone towers to support roaming communications. The first operational cellphone network was established in by Nippon Telegraph & Telephone in 1979, being followed by other networks elsewhere. These first-generation (1G) networks only supported analog voice communications.

As far as TV went, the 1970s saw the introduction of cable TV. Cable TV was actually nothing new, having been around since the beginning of broadcast TV, at first being used to send video to communities in the hills that couldn't pick up broadcast. It gradually expanded to cable services in urban areas, but broadcast TV stations pushed back against them, with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implementing regulations that limited what cable TV providers could do.

From 1972, the FCC began to loosen up the rules, and cable TV began to come into its own. In that same year, Charles Dolan and Gerald Levin of Sterling Manhattan Cable launched America's first pay-TV network, Home Box Office (HBO). The rise of cable was enabled by communications satellites -- which had been around for a decade, but had primarily served priority communications channels. The new cable providers helped drive the use of "comsats" for distribution of TV programming. A local TV station in Atlanta, Georgia, designated WTBS and owned by R.E. "Ted" Turner, that broadcast mostly sports and classic movies, used comsats to feed cable TV services across the country, with WTBS becoming the first "superstation".

* The personal computer market, which had been established by the Apple II PC, was booming in 1980, though that wasn't saying everything was going smoothly. In that year, Apple introduced the "Apple III", a follow-on to the Apple II, but it was a stumble. It had a new operating system that was not compatible with Apple II software; it featured an emulation mode to allow it to run the older programs, but the emulation was slow. The Apple III was buggy as well, having to suffer a product recall, and never really caught on.

That hardly slowed down the PC boom, with bigger players starting to get involved. Also in 1980, Hewlett-Packard introduced its "HP-85", a desktop machine with a small CRT display and a fast tape drive. It was on the expensive side, and it was effectively just a BASIC machine: its chipset was derived from HP's handheld calculators, and not many software developers were willing to port software to it. However, it was mostly targeted at HP's instrument customers; it had a proprietary "HP Interface Bus (HP-IB)" connector on the back that allowed it to be cabled in a daisy chain to instruments and disk drives, with its BASIC language including facilities for communicating with instruments over HP-IB. It wasn't really competing with the Apple II. [TO BE CONTINUED]

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[THU 14 APR 22] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Submersible Snake-Inspired Robot Can Inspect Ships And Infrastructure" by Nick Lavars, 13 April 2021), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh PA has long been a hotspot for robotics innovation. In recent years, researchers there have been working on "snake" robots that can crawl through pipes, or into other tight places. They have featured elements such as force-sensing feet, tank-style treads, cameras to investigate pipes in nuclear power plants, and surgical tools to grasp and cut tissue in human patients.

Now CMU has developed the "Hardened Underwater Modular Robot Snake (HUMRS)". As its name implies, it introduces underwater capability into the series, and features a modular, reconfigurable design. Elements include thrusters, buoyancy control systems, rotary articulation devices, inspection sensors, and manipulation grippers.

HUMRS

Howie Choset, CMU professor of robotics, says: "We can go places that other robots cannot. [HUMRS] can snake around and squeeze into hard-to-reach underwater spaces." The researchers see one of the prime applications of HUMRs as carrying out inspections of navy ships out at sea. Currently, if one of these vessels is damaged, a diver has to be dispatched to inspect the damage; using a robot would be far more efficient.

Project team member Matt Fischer, who served in the Navy for three years, says: "If they can get that information before the ship comes into a home port or a dry dock, that saves weeks or months of time in a maintenance schedule. And in turn, that saves money." Other potential applications include inspecting underwater pipes or tanks, or offshore oil rigs.

* A video from TECHNINSIDER.com presented the "Smartflower" solar array, an unusual take on solar panels. Instead of a fixed panel, it has solar "petals" that fold up like a fan, and then unfold into a sunflower-like array, which tracks the Sun. It can automatically fold up in high winds, with some installations pivoting down into a ground shelter. It's fun, but also more expensive than a fixed array of similar power output. The Smartflower company, incidentally, is an Austrian firm, now an arm of US corporation Energy Management.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Lasers Beam High-Speed Internet Between Cities Through Open Air" by Michael Irving, 16 September 2021), Google's parent company Alphabet had a scheme named Project LOON to use high-altitude balloons to provide internet connectivity to underserved regions. LOON turned out to be economically infeasible and was abandoned, but laser communications links developed for the project live on.

Project TAARA

Alphabet's moonshot company X is now working on Project TAARA, to demonstrate ground-based laser communications links for underserved regions. TAARA has conducted a demonstration in which a laser link connected Brazzaville, in the Republic of the Congo, to the neighboring city of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although the two cities are only 4.8 kilometers (3 miles) apart, they are divided by the Congo River, making an optical-fiber connection difficult.

Over 20 days, the link delivered almost 700 TB of data at speeds of up to 20 GBPS, with 99.9% availability. Since the beam can be disrupted by weather and, momentarily, by birds, that level of availability is impressive. The receiver has sensors to track the laser beam from the transmitter, and automatically adjust a mirror to maintain the connection. The laser beam is invisible and eye-safe.

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[WED 13 APR 22] CHINA'S LIMITS (1)

* CHINA'S LIMITS (1): As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Techno-Independence Movement", 26 February 2022), China is engaged in a technological battle with the West that has intensified as antagonisms between the two camps have increased. In January 2021, the Institute of International & Strategic Studies (IISS) -- a Chinese think tank at Peking University -- released a paper on the IISS website arguing that China was at a disadvantage in the contest, saying that China lacked control over core computing systems, and is far behind the USA in a number of important areas such as semiconductors, operating systems and aerospace.

The document was removed without explanation within a week. Exactly why is hard to say, but it was clearly embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping. Xi was to project an image of a strong China, calling for "self-strengthening" against the "chokeholds" that the West exerts over access to critical technologies, from seeds to semiconductors. China's 14th five-year plan, a strategic blueprint published in 2021 that covers the years until 2025, makes self-reliance in science and technology a cornerstone of economic policy.

The plan's deadlines are fast approaching. The government is pouring billions of Yuan into the effort, and strongly encouraging Chinese companies to do the same. Combined public and private research-and-development spending skyrocketed to a record 2.8 trillion yuan ($440 billion USD) in 2021 as China scrambles to catch up with foreign rivals. That runs to 2.5% of GDP, still well below from America's 3% or so, but up from just over 2% five years ago.

THE ECONOMIST examined six areas of technological development high on the Chinese priority list: mRNA vaccines, agrochemicals, civilian aerospace, semiconductors, computer operating systems, and payments networks. Their conclusions matched those of the IISS paper: yes, there has been progress, but self-reliance is not right around the corner.

Chinese progress has been most noticeable in fields that, though themselves technologically sophisticated, require less extended and complex supply chains. Start with the vaccines. Much of China's progress in mRNA technology used in Western jabs such as Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna has been linked to one man, Ying Bo. For several years, Ying worked on mRNA at Moderna, before returning to China from Boston at the start of the pandemic. His homecoming was praised in state media as a patriot patriotic act. His company, Abogen Biosciences, has worked with the People's Liberation Army to develop the country's most advanced mRNA shot, and was part of a program that has invested at least $2.3 billion USD in developing local vaccines.

Abogen's jab, known as ARCoVax, was a year and a half behind the Western vaccines. The delay was not such a problem; what is a problem is that ARCoVax's projected production quantities are only a fraction of the billions of doses of the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine. BioNTech offered to provide its shot to China in a partnership with Fosun, a local conglomerate, in 2021, but the offer was rejected. Although the Chinese are approving Western COVID pills, presumably because they have nothing to compete with them, it appears that Xi is placing self-reliance over public health.

Much the same thinking is evident in Chines agrotech. Foreign genetic-modification and seed-editing methods have been banned from domestic use out of a long-held fear that this would grant foreign firms control of China's grain supply. Chinese companies have been developing home-grown alternatives; Dabeinong Biotechnology, a big feed producer, is investing heavily in research. There have also been a series of acquisitions. Nonetheless, China is still dependent on crop imports. In 2021, China spent at least 400 billion yuan on imports of soya, corn, and cotton -- much of it genetically modified.

The Chinese don't spend nearly that much on imported aircraft and parts -- $19 billion USD in 2021. However, the Chinese government still wants independence of foreign tech, with the COMAC C919, a narrow-body jetliner, about to begin deliveries. Chinese airlines have ordered hundreds of them.

Alas, the C919 is loaded with foreign subsystems and parts. Chinese efforts to build high-bypass turbofan engines have faltered -- they are not easy to make -- and so the C919 is being powered by engines from a joint venture between France's Safran and America's GE Aviation. Much other technology in the C919 is obtained from abroad -- with the end result being a generation behind Airbus's fuel-efficient A320neo. [TO BE CONTINUED]

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[TUE 12 APR 22] COVID & PIGLETS

* COVID & PIGLETS: As discussed in an article from SCIENCE.org ("A Coronavirus Variant Once Helped The Global Pork Industry -- Could One Protect Us?" by Jon Cohen, 4 February 2022), from 2020 everyone on the planet knew what a coronavirus was. However, they're not really news; in fact, a coronavirus disease was discovered in 1946, with the discovery having hidden implications now visible in hindsight.

In that year, veterinary researchers at Purdue University reported that something invading the guts of young pigs was causing diarrhea, vomiting, and weight loss, with a high level of mortality and disastrous effects on US pig farms. Lacking the tools we have today, the researchers didn't know what caused the disease, but they did learn that they could feed ground-up bits of the guts of infected pigs to healthy pigs, and make them sick in turn. Eventually, the nature of the pathogen was discovered, to be named "transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV)".

TGEV has never proven a threat to humans, and its relationship to SARS-CoV-2 is distant. What makes TGEV interesting today is how it evolved. It spread around the world in the 1970s, and then effectively disappeared into the background. What happened was the emergence of a TGEV variant that was more infectious but less dangerous, with its spread immunizing pigs against it. Stanley Perlman, a veteran coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa, says: "The very best coronavirus vaccine was done by nature."

The emergence of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2021 led some researchers has led some researchers to wonder if it might have a similar effect in the current global pandemic. Omicron is still a bad actor, being highly infections and still causing huge numbers of deaths -- but might it still turn out to be a "natural vaccine" that finally ends the pandemic?

Highly effective vaccines have been developed against SARS-CoV-2. Attempts to develop veterinary vaccines for TGEV did not go well, and the livestock industry suffered badly until the late 1970s, when the disease faded and then disappeared. Maurice Pensaert -- an emeritus professor at Ghent University who was then one of a handful of scientists in the world who studied TGEV -- says: "We didn't quite understand what was going on."

Pensaert had become interested in TGEV while doing graduate work at Purdue in the 1960s. By the late 1970s, he had access to antibody tests that could detect TGEV, to find that they were positive for litters of piglets that seemed perfectly healthy. Pensaert and his colleagues suspected that the piglets were infected with a new variant of TGEV.

Pensaert had become interested in TGEV while doing graduate work at Purdue in the 1960s. By the late 1970s, he had access to antibody tests that could detect TGEV, to find that they were positive for litters of piglets that seemed perfectly healthy. Pensaert and his colleagues suspected that the piglets were infected with a new variant of TGEV.

Just as Omicron has a different "tropism" than earlier variants of SARS-CoV-2 -- it targets the bronchi in the upper respiratory tract, not the lungs -- the TGEV variant attacked different tissues from its relative. Although originally TGEV targeted the cells of the gastrointestinal tract, the mutant favored the trachea, bronchi, and lungs. The researchers accordingly named the variant the "porcine respiratory coronavirus (PRCV)", announcing its discovery in 1984.

The discovery did not make much of a splash. TGEV wasn't a big threat to pigs any longer, much less to humans, and so it didn't attract attention. However, in 1989 PCRV was discovered in American piglets; again, it was highly infectious, targeted the respiratory system, and was generally asymptomatic. What was particularly interesting was that the PCRV strain found in the USA was not derived from the PCRV strain found in Europe. It had emerged independently.

Pensaert and his colleagues had worked on an "attenuated live virus" vaccine against TGRV, running the virus through generations in cell cultures and gradually weakening its pathogenicity. Could the vaccine have led to PCRV? Sequencing of PCRV showed the two variants were not derived from the vaccine.

Sequencing of TGEV and PRCV revealed a significant difference between the original and derived virus strains: in the gene for the surface protein "spike", used by the virus to penetrate host cells, PRCV had a deletion of more than 600 nucleotides. The deletion did not affect spike's receptor binding domain, the small portion of the protein whose shape plays a key role in the action of spike. Linda Saif -- a veteran coronavirologist at Ohio State University, Wooster, who developed TGEV vaccines in the 1970s -- says: "That was a surprise to everyone."

Research into TGEV and PRCV obtained much more funding after the emergence in 2002 of the "severe acute respiratory syndrome", a deadly coronavirus disease that put the virus family on the map. Investigation showed that the nucleotide sequence deleted in PRCV had allowed TGEV to bind to gut "mucins", proteins that are a significant component of mucus. Without that sequence, PRCV was washed away before it could infect gut cells. Saif says that, with the emergence of PRCV, "suddenly we had a mild respiratory infection, we developed widespread herd immunity, and that virus was able to out compete some of the other strains."

It isn't completely clear that PRCV put a stop to TGEV's reign of terror among piglets, since pig farmers were also improving their hygienic measures at the time. Said nonetheless believes it played a role, and adds: "Everyone's hope is that is going to be the case with Omicron."

Possibly, but it is still important to realize that Omicron, though not as bad as earlier COVID-19 variants, is still dangerous, and it is also possible that it will not convey immunity from new dangerous variants of COVID-19 coming down the road. There is nonetheless the possibility that a new variant of COVID-19 will emerge that is highly infectious, but causes little or no distress to its hosts. One way or another, however, we are not going to be under the thumb of COVID-19 forever.

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[MON 11 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 15

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Russia's Lies May Be Catching Up With It Faster Than It Ever Imagined" by Nic Robertson, 7 March 2022), the Russian war against Ukraine is being exposed by satellite imagery, smartphones, and global internet connections.

To be sure, surveillance satellite imagery is nothing at all new, but now high-resolution, up-to-date imagery is being provided on a commercial basis. Satellite images of murdered civilians that match videos, recorded weeks later, of bodies at the roadside have provided compelling evidence of Russian war crimes. Russia has proved behind the curve on the battlefield; now it is behind the curve in the information war.

Russian defense officials claimed photos and videos that emerged on 2 April -- showing the bodies of civilians shot in the head, some with their hands and legs bound -- were fake, saying their troops left before the killings occurred. However, publicly available satellite images from space-tech company Maxar, taken on 18 March while Russian troops were in control, showed the civilians lying dead at the roadside in exactly the same locations as Ukrainian forces discovered them when they re-entered the town in early April. Similarly, a drone video shot before March 10 showed a cyclist being gunned down by Russian troops. Ukrainian forces found his body weeks later, exactly where he fell.

This is the new world of "open-source intelligence (OSI)". Thanks to commercial satellite imagery, smartphone cameras, geolocation technology, and sophisticated drones, the world's public has a fronts-seat view of the conflict. Less visibly, there's also analysis software that can sort through the floods of data to hunt down details and analyze the big picture. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky went from being a video entertainer to the presidency, and has an intuitive grasp of what OSI can do. Zelensky says: "It is 2022 now. We have conclusive evidence. There are satellite images. And we can conduct full and transparent investigations."

Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to shroud his war of aggression in Ukraine in lies -- while Zelensky is telling Putin, through the media, that he can't get away with it, proclaiming: "This is what we are interested in, maximum access for journalists, maximum cooperation with international institutions, enrollment of the International Criminal Court, complete truth and full accountability." Even if Putin never answers for his crimes, he won't be able to ignore the global spotlight glaring down on him.

* One of Putin's stated goals in the war is to restrict the expansion of NATO. As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Finland Is Hurtling Towards NATO Membership", 8 April 2022), it appears that Putin has once again miscalculated. In January, when the massing of Russian forces on Ukraine's border could be thought a bluff, Sanna Marin -- Finland's prime minister -- said it was "very unlikely" that Finland would join NATO while she was in office. On 2 April, she sounded a different tune, saying Finland would have to make a decision "this spring." She explained: "Russia isn't the neighbor we thought it was."

Through the Cold War, Finland maintained a careful neutrality, buying arms from both sides, but avoiding alliances. The Soviet Union cast a long shadow over Finland and the consciousness of Finns, the process being mocked as "Finlandization". When the USSR collapsed, the Finns, along with the Swedes, were willing to join the European Union, but continued the policy of military neutrality. That began to shift in 2014, when Russia first attacked Ukraine, with Finland and Sweden intensifying joint exercises and other forms of co-operation with NATO.

In 2019, a bare majority of Finns were opposed to NATO membership. A poll at the end of March 2022 revealed 61% in favor, 16% against, and 23% undecided. All Finnish political parties support it, except for the Left Alliance. It is widely believed that if Sauli Niinisto, Finland's popular president, were to give his formal endorsement, support would grow further.

Both Marin and Niinisto are maintaining a quiet neutrality of their own for the time being, to allow the public discussion to play out. An official report on Finland's security position is to be released, with debate in Parliament following. Assuming the debate is favorable to NATO membership, Parliament and the government will then begin a formal process to that end. President Niinisto believes that a public referendum will not be needed. A decision will be made no later than the end of June, when the NATO summit in Madrid takes place.

There would be no problem on the NATO side, NATO officials saying that that Finland is in fact more "NATO interoperable" -- capable of conducting joint operations alongside other allies -- than some actual members. A special procedure set up in 2014 and activated after Russia's invasion means that Finnish and Swedish envoys now sit at the North Atlantic Council, the alliance's decision-making body, for every meeting relating to the crisis. No NATO member nation, not even Hungary, is expected to vote against Finnish membership.

In Sweden, the debate is moving more slowly -- but Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, believes Sweden will follow the Finnish lead: "For me, it is inconceivable that we would end up in a situation where the two countries come to different conclusions."

If Finland does join NATO, Russia's border with NATO will more than double. Putin is unlikely to take kindly to that idea, but the Russians would also have to reconsider the security of the Gulf of Finland and the strategic ports around Murmansk. He is certainly aware that NATO, even without US military might backing it up, is more powerful than Russia. Putin, by all appearances, wanted to fragment NATO -- but instead, it is becoming that much more powerful.

* Twisted Sister's rock classic "We're Not Gonna Take It" has become a MAGA anthem of sorts -- the problem with that being that Dee Snider, the center of the group, has no sympathy with MAGA. One MAGAbot wrote on Twitter:


Bummed to learn that @deesnider, the man with the perfect song written decades ago about the attack on traditional, conservative American values, "We're Not Gonna Take It", is riding the train in the wrong direction. How could it be that he sang for us but now fights for them?


With the reply:


Dee Snider @deesnider: You think I wrote a song in support of "traditional American values"? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! You funny.


Commenters pointed out that MAGA has an inclination to embrace pop anthems that are anti-MAGA, Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA" being the most visible example. I replied:


Wily_Coyote (MrG) @gv_goebel: Yep. If "Born In The USA" is a patriotic tune, it's in the mold of Woodie Guthrie.


* After the drought here last year, my lawn looks shabby, and it's not recovering well. We're likely to have more droughts in the future, and I could never get bluegrass to grow anywhere near as well as I liked anyway -- so I decided to look into alternative lawns.

Investigations into alternative grasses weren't promising. I don't like fescue grasses, they look way too weedy, and my investigations showed they formed tough clumps that made them look worse -- oh right, I know about those things. I finally figured out white / dutch clover would do the job. It doesn't need much watering, it's a legume and self-fertilizing, and it doesn't need much mowing; it can use the lawn clippings for self-fertilization. Also, clover looks pretty and attract pollinators when in bloom, though it doesn't bloom until the second year after planting.

I was thinking crimson clover would look nice, but it has to be reseeded regularly, while white clover reseeds itself. Clover is not durable for foot traffic, but it's okay if there's still plenty of grass to reinforce it. I went to Home Depot and bought two bags of white clover seed. I'm doing yard prep for the moment, with the intent to lay down seed in the bare and rough spots in mid-month. I'll see what happens to the end of the month, and if it looks promising, I think I'll buy two more bags to get better coverage.

Assuming all goes well, I expect it will take like three years to get the lawn up to speed. It would be nice if, for the first time, work on my lawn pays off better than I expect, instead of the other way around. It appears that up to the 1950s, clover lawns were nothing unusual, but people decided they were too weedy-looking. I have vague memories of that from when I was little -- but that was over 60 years ago, and nothing is certain in memories that old.

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[FRI 08 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (23)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (23): Bell Lab's C language, used as the backbone of production UNIX, proved highly popular from the 1970s: it was efficient and highly capable, but somewhat cryptic and not for novices. Like UNIX itself, it suffered from "versionitis", though it would eventually be nailed down by a standard devised by the American National Standards Institute as "ANSI C".

The most significant language introduced in the 1970s was Pascal, a descendant of ALGOL-60 developed by Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth. It was a neatly structured language, focused on teaching students computer programming, and became popular in computer science departments, being used on timesharing terminals. It was less cryptic than C but also more limited.

A group at the University of California in San Diego wrote a version that ran on the limited PCs of the era. The "UCSD P-System" was noteworthy in that Pascal ran on a "virtual machine"; it could be ported to any computer, just by writing a new virtual machine. The P-System was seen as slow and it wasn't commercially successful, though the idea of a language running on a virtual machine didn't go away. However, Philippe Kahn, a French-American software entrepreneur, made a successful business out of a PC version of Pascal, with his Borland company's Turbo Pascal product.

* The biggest innovation in business computing in the 1970s was the introduction of the magstrip card -- a digital extension of the traditional credit card, a big step forward in the evolution of electronic money, and towards the digitization of transactions in general.

The development of the magstrip card was driven by the need to automate transactions -- the prime movers being banks, to support their normal business, and airlines, which were confronted with ever-increasing passenger loads as "jumbo jet" airliners arrived. Of course, IBM took up the challenge, with Big Blue's Advanced Systems Division, developing a plastic card with a magnetic strip across the back to store data, as well as defining data formats and use protocols.

In operation, when a magstrip card was swiped through a reader at the point of sale, the card reader grabbed the card data, then networked to the bank handling the card. The bank in turn networked to the card provider -- VISA, Mastercard or whatever -- with the provider then either approving or disapproving the transaction, and the bank forwarding the response back to the point of sale. Even if the transaction was authorized, the card provider still ran checks for fraud to see if the transaction should be then canceled.

IBM didn't patent the machine-readable card scheme, instead giving the technology away to anyone who wanted it. The trick was that the machine-readable cards implied computer systems to handle with them, and IBM was then the vendor of choice for such systems. It would turn out a wise decision on IBM's part.

In January 1970, American Express issued 250,000 magstrip cards to its Chicago-area customers, and installed self-service ticketing kiosks at the American Airlines counter at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. Cardholders could opt to get their tickets and boarding passes from the kiosk, or from a human agent. They liked the kiosks. In fact, United Airlines customers walked to American Airlines -- at the other end of the terminal -- to use the kiosks. Adoption of magstrip cards boomed from there. With the magstrip card in widespread use, automatic teller machines (ATM) and other reader-equipped devices, such as ticket kiosks, gas pumps, and vending machines, proliferated.

Industrial and military use of computer power also picked up during the 1970s, particularly with the introduction of the microprocessor. New, more dextrous and cheaper, industrial robots were introduced, while the military began to integrate digital computers into increasing numbers of weapons platforms. Wireless datalinks for military systems were nothing new, with analog datalinks going back to late in World War II, but now the military began to consider digital datalinks, with the distant prospect of networking combat systems.

Work on computer security also advanced during the decade, with IBM setting up a "cryptography group" to provide improved data security for the company and its clients. The result was the development of a digital cipher, the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which did indeed become a standard. Just as importantly, though it wouldn't be obvious right away, in 1976 Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, two cryptographers, published a paper on "asymmetric-key" ciphers that would have major impact.

A traditional cipher uses a "symmetric key", in that the cipher key used to encrypt a message is the same as the key used to decrypt the message. This had the difficulty in that if a company wanted to exchange encrypted information with a large number of clients, the company would have to give each customer a different cipher key -- which would be clumsy and insecure. In an asymmetric-key cipher, the company could issue the same "public key" to all its clients; the public key could be used to encrypt a message, but it could not decrypt it again, with the company having a "private key" that could. If clients wanted to get encrypted messages from the company, each could give their own public key to the company, and read encrypted messages from the company using their own private keys. [TO BE CONTINUED]

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[THU 07 APR 22] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Traced To Spiral Galaxy Arms" by Ashley Strickland, 21 May 2021), in 2007 astronomers began to spot millisecond-long radio blasts in the cosmos, which became known as "fast radio bursters (FRB)" -- last mentioned here in 2020. FRBs are very powerful, generating energies about equivalent to a year's output of our own Sun. Although about a thousand FRBs have been spotted so far -- but they are very transient, and so hard to track down to any source. Now, an international team of astronomers has been able to pin down the locations of eight FRBs, using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Five of the radio bursts came from spiral galaxies, resembling our own Milky Way Galaxy, with spiral arms where star formation takes place. The five radio bursts were located in the spiral arms of these galaxies, which are about 400 million to 9 billion light-years away, suggesting that FRBs are associated with star formation. Observations were performed in the visible light, ultraviolet and near-infrared bands. Research lead Alexandra Mannings -- a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz -- says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

This is the first high-resolution view of a population of FRBs. Most of the galaxies are massive, relatively young and still forming stars. The imaging allows us to get a better idea of the overall host galaxy properties, such as its mass and star-formation rate, as well as probe what's happening right at the FRB position.

END_QUOTE

Where the FRBs are located in the spiral arms may give clues as to their origin. The brightest regions in spiral arms contain young, massive stars, while the dimmer regions contain smaller arms. Analysis of the Hubble data suggests that FRBs are not associated with particularly young or particularly old stars. There are speculations that FRBs are associated with "magnetars", which are superdense neutron stars with vastly powerful magnetic fields, being flares on young magnetars. One FRB in our Milky Way Galaxy was from a region where a magnetar is known to exist. However, as data is collected, it is becoming apparent that FRBs are a diverse phenomenon, and may have different origins.

* As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Astronomers Spy Possible Moons In The Making In A Distant Star System" by Daniel Clery, 22 July 2021), over the past three decades, astronomers have spotted thousands of planets orbiting other stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. Obviously, some have moons, but being smaller than planets, they are harder to spot. However, astronomers have now spotted an exoplanet that may have a moon, or moons, orbiting it.

The finding was in a youthful star system designated "PDS 70", only ten million years old, containing two protoplanets, in the process of formation. In 2018, a team under Myriam Benisty of the University of Grenoble used the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to spot the first of those planets, named "PDS 70b", orbiting in a gap in the disk of dust and gas around the star. They didn't see the planet, they saw the gap it left rotating through the dust disk. In 2019, another team using the VLT found a second planet -- "PDS 70c" slightly farther out than the first. Both planets are gas giants several times more massive than Jupiter.

To investigate further, Benisty's team focused more instruments on the system. In 2020, they found hints of dust around PDS 70c using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 short-wavelength radio dishes in Chile. However, it was hard to tell the planet's dust from the nearby bright disk of dust orbiting the star. A later observation with ALMA -- after the mobile dishes had been dispersed to their maximum extent to provide best resolution -- gave a clear picture of the circumplanetary dust disk around PDS 70c. Benisty says: "It seems to still have dust available to form satellites. They may have formed already, but we can't see them with ALMA."

PDS 70c's partner, PDS 70b, seems not to have accumulated as much dust, with Benisty suggesting that dust falling into the star system is primarily accumulated by PDS 70c, and doesn't get farther inward to PDS 70b. The system is supplying plenty of raw data for theorists working on planetary formation, suggesting so far that they're on the right track. ESO's 39-meter (128-foot) Extremely Large Telescope, now under construction in Chile, might just be able to spot any protomoons swirling in the dust, to the excitement of the theorists.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Are Some People Genetically Resistant To COVID-19?" by Rich Haridy, 21 October 2021), COVID-19 is unpredictable: many people who get infected for the first time hardly notice it, others will get very sick, and a few will die -- including, in a few cases, otherwise healthy young people who nobody would think were vulnerable.

It isn't unknown for diseases to behave that way, but it does present the question of why the variation exists. Is it because some event, such as infection by a related but harmless virus, gave them immunity? Or were they born with that immunity? An international collaborative effort named the "COVID Human Genetic Effort" has begun investigating whether specific genetic characteristics can make someone resistant to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

There's a precedent from the AIDS pandemic. In the late 1970s, a partner of New York artist Stephen Crohn died from what would become known as AIDS, and later other of Crohn's associates became infected with HIV -- but he never did. In the mid-1990s, a team of researchers conducted an investigation focused on subjects who seemed HIV-resistant, with Crohn taking part in the investigation. In the end, the researchers found a single genetic mutation that seemed to be the source of Crohn's resistance. That helped in the development of drugs to treat HIV.

Attempting to track down genetic resistance to COVID-19 is tricky, however. Trying to deliberately infect test subjects with the pathogen to see how easily they get infected is not an acceptable practice. One lead is from "discordant couples", or couples who live together, but only one gets sick. A study of 86 discordant couples relative to COVID-19 suggested that, unsurprisingly, resistance to the disease is not a factor of a single gene, but of a combination of them. 86 was a small sample size; the COVID Human Genetic Effort has already enrolled more than 400 people, and is seeking more.

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[WED 06 APR 22] BIOELECTRONIC MEDICINE (3)

* BIOELECTRONIC MEDICINE (3): Once neural pathways in the human body have been identified, then there's the issue of stimulating them. Implants have to be compact and able to function safely in the body for years, as well as communicate to allow doctors or patients to monitor or control them. At Galvani, Kris Famm's team has spent over three years working on an implant design, with several more years of work before it will be ready for safety and efficacy tests in human patients. Famm is confident that their work will pay off, saying: "What is beautiful about electroceuticals is that they can get on a nerve right by the organ you are interested in, and it has exquisite potential for precision."

Kyrana Tsapkini -- an assistant professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins -- wants to see how BioEM can tap into the functions of the brain. For the past decade, she and her team have been putting together one of the world's largest databases on the ways electrical stimulation can affect a variety of neurodegenerative disorders, with encouraging results. In a study of 36 people with Alzheimer's disease, those who received electrical stimulation showed improvement in their ability to remember words, compared with people who did not get the treatment. Tsapkini is building a database of patients with not just Alzheimer's but also other neurodegenerative disorders to get a better sense of who might benefit most from BioEM to keep their cognitive functions intact.

Kelly Owens is certainly a believer. In 2017, With nothing at hand to help her with Crohn's disease, she scanned through Facebook to see if she could find alternatives. She found a video interview with Dr. Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, who had recently just published a study to show how the body's inflammatory response was regulated by the vagus nerve. Tracey had founded SetPoint Medical to test the idea that manipulating the electrical signals running along the vagus could control inflammation in auto-immune disorders like Crohn's.

Since Crohn's is caused by an overactive inflammatory response in the gut, the idea was to inhibit the inflammation by dialing down the electrical impulses in the gut so that the inflammatory response dies down and aggravated gut tissue can start to heal. Tracey hadn't convincingly demonstrated that it would work at the time, but Owens felt she had nothing to lose. The therapy was not being tested in the U.S., so she and her husband started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to join SetPoint's initial trials to treat Crohn's in Amsterdam.

Owens is now in her second year of clinical remission. She no longer takes any medications for her Crohn's disease, and instead of being a near-cripple, she works out regularly at the gym and goes on long runs. She is back to work as director of education and outreach at the Feinstein Institute, helping patients like her learn more about new therapies such as BioEM therapy for treating their autoimmune diseases. Her latest colonoscopy showed that half of the damaged tissue in her colon had healed. She says: "Now my body just works and I don't have to think about using it; it just does what it's supposed to do. That's still mind-blowing for me."

She now turns on the regulator in her chest for only five minutes in the morning and five minutes before going to bed. She started with four sessions of electrical stimulation a day, but found herself forgetting the ones at noon and dinnertime, and discovered she didn't need them. Yes, she's perfectly aware her therapy is still experimental and unproven. To be sure, BioEM is known to be effect in some cases, but that doesn't guarantee it will be effective in others -- and electric medicine is still tainted by a long history of quackery. Nonetheless, like Famm, she is confident: "Patients are just really eager to have a new option. And if it's a placebo effect, all I can say is that it's a hell of a placebo." [END OF SERIES]

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[TUE 05 APR 22] DRACO SPACE NUCLEAR

* DRACO SPACE NUCLEAR: As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("DARPA Embarks On Quest To Revive Nuclear Space Propulsion" by Steve Trimble, 27 April 2021), the US government is in the process of defining a "National Defense Space Architecture". One of its elements is the possibility that Russia or China may attempt to militarize the region between geostationary and Moon orbit. The Pentagon believes that, accordingly, an "advanced maneuvering vehicle (AMV)" may be needed that will be able to police this space.

The Pentagon's Space Development Agency (SDA) is now working on an AMV. As a critical element, the AMV will require an advanced propulsion system that has high thrust, but is well more efficient than contemporary chemical rockets. That's the target of the "Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO)" program.

DARPA has selected Lockheed Martin and Blue Origin to develop designs for a demonstrator spacecraft and follow-on operational system powered by nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) -- in which a nuclear reactor heats hydrogen propellant to a high temperature, with the hydrogen expelled through an exhaust nozzle to generate highly efficient thrust. The agency also has selected General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) to design the nuclear reactor for DRACO. The DRACO demonstrator is to launch in 2025.

Space nuclear reactors are not a new concept for the US military. The US Air Force flew the operated the 430-kilogram (950-pound) "Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power (SNAP) 10A" satellite, which used an onboard nuclear reactor to generate at least 500 watts of electricity for 43 days in 1965, until a component failure rendered it inoperable. The SNAP 10A reactor is expected to remain in orbit for the next 3,000 years.

Two decades after the launch of SNAP-10A, the US Strategic Defense Initiative revived the nuclear-powered rocket concept as a proposal for the upper stage of a boost-phase interceptor that could shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles over the Soviet Union from Alaska. As the Cold War ended, the "Timberwind" project was transferred to the Air Force to pursue as a science experiment, but it was canceled in 1994 before a reactor could be tested. It was never more than a paper program.

Leveraging off ground-test data from the NASA "Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA)" program -- which started out in 1955 as the Air Force's Project Rover -- few see flying an NTP vehicle as a massive technical challenge. Bill Pratt, a Lockheed senior program manager for DRACO, says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

I like to joke that the 'DARPA-hard' part about DRACO is actually not so much the spacecraft or the technology, although there is some hard stuff there -- it's actually the regulatory piece of getting approval to fly a nuclear reactor.

END_QUOTE

There do remain technical issues, one big one being materials. Pratt says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

You've got a giant tank with liquid hydrogen in it, and bolted to the bottom of it is a reactor that's generating thousands of degrees Kelvin. So how do we isolate that heat from our propellant, which really hates to get warm? You can use that warmth to a certain degree, to help pressurize tanks and things like that, but there are some serious challenges there in the material science domain.

END_QUOTE

In the NERVA ground tests and SNAP 10A orbital tests, NASA and the military used a fission reactor fueled by highly enriched uranium (HEU), more or less weapons-grade material, enriched to 80%. For DRACO, DARPA has specified the use of high-assay, low enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel. By definition, HALEU is only enriched between 5% and 20% -- although DARPA has not announced the actual level of enrichment. HALEU in the form of uranium metal will be furnished by the government to GA-EMS for the DRACO reactor.

DRACO NTR

From the point of view of NTR propulsion in itself, HEU is better than HALEU, but HEU creates political problems. Launching a nuclear reactor into orbit is controversial in itself. Although SNAP 10A has remained safely in orbit since 1965, a nuclear reactor on the Soviet Union's Kosmos 954 failed to separate before the satellite re-entered the atmosphere in 1977. The reactor spread radioactive debris across a remote part of northwest Canada, forcing a cleanup effort partially funded by the Soviet government.

Christina Back, vice president of nuclear technologies and materials at GA-EMS, says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

You try and engineer the design so that there are things in place that keep it from being a big problem. So that might be different materials; that might be the way it's packaged. You must be familiar with nuclear weapons. You can't just have an accident with a weapon, even if a truck barrels into some shipping container. The same kind of things apply in this kind of scenario.

END_QUOTE

DARPA is working to make sure that there will be no accidents with the DRACO demonstrator. The nuclear reactor will not be separable from the propulsion system, and the demonstrator will be launched into an orbit similar to that of SNAP 10A -- with no chance of an atmospheric re-entry for thousands of years, if ever.

There's been research into NTP for decades, but it's never resulted in an operational system. However, while they are designing a demonstration system for DRACO, Lockheed, Blue Origin and GA-EMS also will be designing an operational system based on the same technology. Back says:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

If you want to go from a demonstration system to an operating system, you want to change as little as possible. If you do put up a demonstration system, you want to be able to go straight to the operating system.

END_QUOTE

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[MON 04 APR 22] THE WEEK THAT WAS 14

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Taiwan Studying Ukraine War Tactics, Discussing With US", 30 March 2022), Taiwan is unsurprisingly taking a close interest in Russia's war on Ukraine. Russia is attempting to conquer another country whose legitimacy Russia denies; similarly, China is taking aggressive actions against Taiwan, whose legitimacy Beijing denies.

Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuocheng said they had had "contact" with foreign countries to discuss the war, and had set up their own working group to study it. Chiu added that the war "is not only discussed in exchange meetings between the United States and Taiwan, but also discussed with other countries that have regular contacts with Taiwan."

Taiwan's military is on enhanced alert, though there hasn't been any noticeable change in China's actions. One wonders if there is any consideration of Taiwan supplying advanced weapons, such as antiship missiles, to Ukraine -- Taiwan having a sophisticated arms industry. Russia has made threatening noises against NATO countries supplying such weapons, but is not in a position to seriously threaten Taiwan. A covert Ukraine-Taiwan alliance might well help Taiwan establish greater global influence.

The Chinese seem to be ambivalent about Russia's war, willing to back the Russians, but not comfortable with Russia invading a neighbor -- China and Russia have faced off in the past -- and similarly uncomfortable with how badly the war has gone for Russia, lending uncertainty to China's designs on Taiwan.

* The US government investigations into the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot and the underlying effort to overturn the 2020 election seem to be heating up as of late. Democratic House Member Stephanie Murphy told CNN: "We're triangulating basically from a lot of different angles, and we are getting a fulsome picture of what happened in the run-up to and on the day of January 6."

One of the latest items to drop was that there was a seven-hour gap in White House call logs on 6 January. As it turns out, Trump generally attempted to suppress call logging, and was inclined to evade it by using borrowed phones or throwaway burner phones. The 1-6 Committee is not discouraged, however, Murphy saying:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

What I always say is whether it's a witness who is unwilling to cooperate with us or whether there are gaps in documentation that we have received, we will get that information some other way. Those conversations weren't one-way conversations. There was somebody on the other side of those conversations, and we'll get that information that way.

END_QUOTE

There's been fuss among the critics of the 1-6 Committee from the Left that too many people have been "pleading the 5th" -- 5th Amendment, that is -- and refusing to testify. However, if the committee gets their hands on call records, pleading the 5th simply means that those under suspicion are refusing to defend themselves. They aren't beating the game, they're simply dealing themselves out of it, without being able to stop it.

* In closely related news, it turns out that Virginia "Ginnie" Thomas, wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, has been implicated in the 1-6 plot. She is a conservative activist and had been active in working to set up the 6 January public event that led to the Capitol riot. Citations show that she had fully bought into the "Big Lie" of election fraud spread by Trump to justify his subversion of the election.

Justice Thomas is now in a difficult position, being under pressure to recuse himself from Supreme Court decisions relevant to the 6 January riot. There's been talk of impeaching him, but that's absurd -- it isn't likely Senate Republicans would cooperate with an impeachment, rendering it futile. However, it does lead to the interesting question of what will happen if Ginnie Thomas is indicted, and then presumably cops a plea.

Who knows? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi framed the matter neatly in a response to reporters, who asked her if she thought Justice Thomas should resign. She neatly sidestepped the question and skewered Thomas at the same time, saying: "I don't think he should have ever been appointed." -- and then applied heat to Thomas over recusal: "If your wife is an admitted and proud contributor to a coup of our country, maybe you should weigh that in your ethical standards."

Justice Thomas has been quiet so far. He has apparently been ailing as of late. The controversy over his wife can't have made him feel any better.

* In other lunacies of the ongoing Era of Trump, the government of the state of Florida has passed a tapdancing anti-gay-rights bill, leading to pushback from big corporations such as Apple and, notably, Disney -- with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis calling for the state to revoke Disney's special rights there. Fox News propagandist Laura Ingraham chimed in:

BEGIN_QUOTE:

When Republicans get back into power, Apple and Disney have to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table, your copyright/trademark protection, your special status in certain states, and even your corporate structure itself ...

END_QUOTE

On Twitter, one Joe Trippi replied: "... and then they came for Mickey Mouse." How much longer can this go on?

In more good-natured news, an English bulldog named Chowder, an Oregonian, has gone viral online, by being an ace skateboarder. I thought it was an April Fool's prank at first, but the videos are convincing, and he's been viral for months.

When he was a youngster, he showed a fascination with skateboards, so his owners bought him one. He would scoot around the driveway on it, lying on the skateboard, but got frustrated with that after a few years. His owners then started taking him to empty parking lots to practice, and skateboarded along with him. Given instruction, he eventually decided to stand up on the skateboard. He can kick up to speed and maneuver, and it apparently even go over curbs. It seems a number of bulldogs have learned how to skateboard; other breeds of dogs don't seem so inclined to the sport, possibly because they have a higher center of gravity, and aren't such slow runners as bulldogs.

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[FRI 01 APR 22] 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (22)

* 5TH INFORMATION REVOLUTION (22): The most significant software development of the 1970s was the UNIX operating system, developed at AT&T Bell Labs, and revealed to the world in 1973. As it emerged, it was a multi-user operating system, with a number of innovative features:

UNIX had been specifically written for the DEC PD-11, and would later become associated with the DEC VAX series -- to the annoyance of Ken Olson, who preferred the company's VMS OS. However, UNIX was not only relatively easy to port to different computers; the AT&T licensing terms were liberal, and there was considerable interest in porting it to different systems. That also led to a degree of "versionitis", with variations of UNIX proliferating. In any case, UNIX would become firmly entrenched in academia, with the result that computer scientists would think in UNIX terms, with UNIX also promoting the idea of an OS that could be used by different vendors.

Another major advance during the 1970s was the rise of the "ARPANET", a computer networking system developed by the US government ARPA research office. The initial ARPANET went into operation in 1971, linking a handful of computers. It steadily grew, linking government research establishments and academic research groups tied to the government. By 1975, it was no longer a lab toy, being passed on to the US Defense Communications Agency for operation.

In any case, the ARPANET proved to be a foundry for the development of "internetworking" and related technologies, such as email, and the "File Transfer Protocol (FTP)" -- FTP being a means of logging into a remote computer and copying files to or from it. ARPANET was based on a "packet-switching" scheme, where messages sent from one computer to another were broken down into small "packets", with each packet possibly using a different route, to be reassembled at the destination. The packet-switching scheme was eventually standardized as the "Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)". [TO BE CONTINUED]

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