* 20 entries including: capitalism & socialism (series); my Ohio & Disney trips (series); Singapore tunnels; Biden in Kyiv / Altasia; interceptor drone | MRC missiles | Themis combat robot; mobnik suicide | fake DeSantis | NAFO funnies; Ediacaran extinction; superfocus camera; Biden's SOTU speech | Twitter bias confusion | smart lights; quantum diamond microscope; Chinese balloon | Hunter Biden's laptop | NYT Pitchbot; protein universe | bats mimic wasps.
* GOING UNDERGROUND: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Why The Future Of Our Cities Might Be Headed Underground" by Samantha Bresnahan, 21 December 2022), big cities have always had an underground component -- and now it's becoming more significant. In Singapore, a network of tunnels is being bored into the earth some 60 meters (195 feet) down, even below the subway system.
Originally conceived in the 1990s, the "Deep Tunnel Sewerage System (DTSS)" is an underground "superhighway" being built by PUB, the national water agency. It's intended to conserve two resources: space and water. Woo Lai Lynn, chief engineer, said:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
We were faced with the challenges of a rising population and also increasing developments for industries. With this added demand, we couldn't keep on relying on expanding the existing wastewater infrastructure. We had to find a solution that was more sustainable and gave us greater resilience for our water supply.
END_QUOTE
He adds: "The uncertainties excite me the most with this project. You can't quite tell what you're going to encounter underground."
The first phase, which was complete in 2008 and cost an estimated 3.4 billion Singapore dollars ($2.5 billion USD), included 48 kilometers (30 miles) of deep sewer tunnels and a new centralized water reclamation plant. Phase two broke ground in 2017 and is expected to be finished by 2026. In completion, roughly 200 kilometers (125 miles) of tunnels will transport wastewater to underground treatment plants. DTSS will be able to treat up to two million cubic meters (2.6 million cubic yards) of wastewater per day, and will free up around 150 hectares (0.6 square miles) of land above ground.
PUB learned lessons from the phase-1 effort to apply in phase 2 -- for example, using a type of concrete that resists microbiological-induced corrosion, and embedding fiber optic sensor cables within the tunnel linings to monitor structural integrity. Overall, DTSS is providing critical knowledge about subterranean development for Singapore and elsewhere.
Singapore has a land area of about 725 square kilometers (280 square miles), and so in recent decades there's been a drive to go underground. JTC, a government agency responsible for industrial development, is now storing liquid hydrocarbons such as crude oil in five huge underground caverns. Known as the "Jurong Rock Caverns", they hold the equivalent of 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Traditionally, metropolitan underground development has been "ad hoc", focused on implementing a subway network or sewer system. As part of the underground master plan, Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) commissioned Arup -- an independent firm of engineers, designers and planners -- to generate a wide-ranging underground development plan. One of the key takeaways was a focus on sustainability "very early" in these projects, said Peter Stones, associate engineer at Arup and one of the authors of the report. According to Stones:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Space is a resource, and in our urban cities, it's a scarce resource, so we need to manage and consume that resource in a sustainable way. That means having established practices around planning and managing those spaces.
END_QUOTE
He adds that by getting engineers crucial information before starting a project, they can mitigate risks and improve the longevity and sustainability of subterranean development. That knowledge can also be applied to urban planning and development above ground.
Singapore isn't the first place to explore using its underground space. Helsinki, the Finnish capital, has an expansive underground development, complete with subterranean church and swimming pool, originally intended as a space to house the city's entire population in the event of a nuclear attack. A design firm in Mexico City even developed the concept of "The Earthscraper" -- an inverted, underground skyscraper. However, people generally don't want to live underground. Stones says:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
We see an interesting layer cake of the underground space development, where those human-centered uses are really prioritized at the shallowest levels, and the deeper levels are reserved for those uses which require less human contact.
Globally, as our cities grow in terms of population [and] density ... we are going to see more underground space development. I envisage a future where the topside is prioritized for people, for ecology, for nature -- and underground space can service that topside through infrastructure and through other uses.
END_QUOTE
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Last Monday, US President Joe Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine, walking the streets with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy even as air-sirens were blasting out an alert. Biden delivered a speech promising support to Ukraine:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
... thanks to a bipartisan support in Congress, this week we're delivering billions in direct budgetary support -- billions in direct budgetary support -- which the government can put to use immediately and help provide for basic services of citizens.
The cost that Ukraine has had to bear has been extraordinarily high, and the sacrifices have been far too great. They've been met, but they've been far too great. We mourn alongside the families of those who have been lost to the brutal and unjust war. We know that there'll be very difficult days and weeks and years ahead.
But Russia's aim was to wipe Ukraine off the map. Putin's war of conquest is failing. Russia's military has lost half its territory it once occupied. Young, talented Russians are fleeing by the tens of thousands, not wanting to come back to Russia. Not just fleeing from the military, fleeing from Russia itself, because they see no future in their country. Russia's economy is now a backwater, isolated and struggling.
Putin thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided ... he's counting on us not sticking together. He was counting on the inability to keep NATO united. He was counting on us not to be able to bring in others on the side of Ukraine. He thought he could outlast us. I don't think he's thinking that right now. God knows what he's thinking, but I don't think he's thinking that. But he's just been plain wrong. Plain wrong. And one year later, the evidence is right here in this room. We stand here together.
... You and all Ukrainians, [President Zelenskyy], remind the world every single day what the meaning of the word "courage" is -- from all sectors of your economy, all walks of life. It's astounding. You remind us that freedom is priceless; it's worth fighting for as long as it takes. And that's how long we're going to be with you, Mr. President: for as long as it takes.
END_QUOTE
Last Friday was the 1-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Russian President Vladimir Putin delivering his own speech to Russians -- the speech being longer and simply pathetic, at best delusion, at worst lies. Biden upstaged Putin, who seems to shrink by the month.
* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Global Firms Are Eyeing Asian Alternatives To Chinese Manufacturing", 20 February 2023), in 1987 Panasonic, one of Japan's major consumer-electronics makers, began a joint venture in China to produce cathode-ray tubes. At the time, China was seen as economically backwards -- but other manufacturers also liked China's low labor costs, and they poured in.
By 2021, China had become the hub of the global consumer-electronics industry, exporting a trillion USD of electronics goods and components, out of a global total of $3.3 trillion USD. However, by that time the infatuation was fading. The leading reason was that Chinese labor was no longer as cheap; the more significant reason over the longer term was that the USA was growing much more suspicious of Chinese intent, with other of China's trading partners following.
Between 2020 and 2022 the number of Japanese companies operating in China fell from around 13,600 to 12,700. In early 2023, Sony of Japan announced plans to move production of cameras sold in Japan and the West from China to Thailand. Samsung of South Korea has slashed its Chinese workforce by more than two-thirds since its peak in 2013. Dell of the USA is reportedly aiming to stop using Chinese-made chips by 2024.
Bailing out of China leads to the question of where better to make stuff instead? No one country, it turns out -- but a patchwork of economies across Asia presents a formidable alternative. It stretches in a crescent from Hokkaido, the northern big island of Japan, through South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh, all the way to Gujarat, in northwestern India. Its members have strengths of their own, from Japan's high skills and deep pockets to India's low wages. No one of these countries could match China, but they could achieve a division of labor, with some countries making sophisticated components and others assembling them into finished gadgets.
On paper, this alternative Asian supply chain -- call it "Altasia" -- looks at least evenly matched with China in heft. Its collective working-age population of 1.4 billion souls dwarfs even China's 980 million. Altasia is home to 154 million people aged between 25 and 54 with a college education, compared with 145 million in China -- and, in contrast to ageing China, their ranks look poised to expand. In many parts of Altasia wages are considerably lower than in China: hourly manufacturing wages in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are below $3 USD, around one-third of what Chinese workers now demand. In addition, the region is already an exporting power: its members sold $634 billion USD's worth of merchandise to America in the 12 months to September 2022, edging out China's $614 billion USD.
Altasia has become more economically integrated; all of it except India, Bangladesh and Taiwan have signed on to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP, which also includes China). By harmonizing the rules of origin across the region's various existing trade deals, the pact has created a single market in intermediate products.
Most Altasian countries are members of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a relatively new American initiative. Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam belong to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which also includes Canada, Chile, Mexico and Peru.
Japan was a pioneer in revving up the Altasian economy, Japanese companies having been building supply chains in South-East Asia for decades. More recently, South Korea has followed the Japanese example, with investments in Altasia having outgrown South Korean investments in China. Samsung is the biggest foreign investor in Vietnam. In 2022, South Korean carmaker Hyundai opened a factory in Indonesia to make electric vehicles.
Now more non-Altasian firms are interested in the region, often through their Taiwanese contract manufacturers. Taiwan's Foxconn, Pegatron, and Wistron, which assemble gadgets for Apple and others, are investing heavily in Indian factories. The share of iPhones made in India is expected to rise from around one in 20 last year to possibly one in four by 2025. Two Taiwanese universities have teamed up with Tata, an Indian conglomerate with ambitious plans in high-tech manufacturing, to offer courses in electronics to Indian workers. Google is shifting the outsourced production of its newest Pixel smartphones from China to Vietnam.
More sophisticated manufacturing, especially of geopolitically fraught semiconductors, is also moving to Altasia. Malaysia already exports about 10% of the world's chips by value, more than America. Qualcomm, an American "fabless" chipmaker, which sells microprocessor designs for others to manufacture, opened its first research-and-development center in Vietnam in 2020. Qualcomm's revenues from Vietnamese chip factories, many of which belong to global giants like Samsung, tripled between 2020 and 2022.
China's huge advantage has traditionally been its vast single market, knit together with decent infrastructure, where value could be added without suppliers, workers, and capital crossing national borders. That means that for Altasia to truly rival China, barriers across borders have to be reduced further, and the infrastructure has to be improved. Movement towards these ends is not rapid: India, although part of the Indo-Pacific framework, is in no hurry to sign up with RCEP.
Signals from the USA are mixed, the Biden Administration being in a protectionist mood. There is the question of just how deep American protectionism goes; it certainly is sincere in the case of China, but otherwise it seems to have a theatrical element, intended to convince Americans that any trade deals the USA signs up for are really in their interests. Things seem likely to happen, but may not be all that visible.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (35): Galbraith's career was roughly paralleled by that of another American economist, James M. Buchanan JR (1919:2013), whose viewpoint was effectively reversed from Galbraith's. Buchanan had grown up as a poor farm boy in Tennessee, and had flirted with socialist ideas in his youth. The flirtation was superficial, his family upbringing having given a distrust of social elites, particularly those with Ivy-League educations. Buchanan's youthful mix of thinking finally found a direction while he was getting an economics degree, when he found a book by a Swedish economist Knut Wicksell (1851:1926).
Under the influence of Wicksell, Buchanan decided that the idea of a government working for the common good was nonsense. In reality, politicians and government officials were concerned with maintaining and exploiting their positions. Economically, they were "rent-seeking" -- that is, they wanted to bring in "easy money" that could be used to keep them in power, and possibly enrich themselves as well. Businesses tended to collaborate with politicians and officials in seeking rents, obtaining carveouts and preferences in laws and regulations so they could make more money.
Buchanan regarded government as essentially illegitimate, seeking a "constitutional revolution" to make passing new laws very difficult, only allowing laws passed with unanimous consent:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
Where the relevant set of choices are those relating to changes in the law, in the rules that constrain both private and public activity, there is no place for majority rule or, indeed, for any rule short of unanimity.
END_QUOTE
Buchanan was one of the founders of modern libertarianism, the belief that "a government that governs least governs best". He distrusted Keynesian economists, believing that government leaders were likely to exploit and maintain deficit spending. He devised a theory of economics called "public choice", in which the government was to do as little as possible to restrict the rights of citizens to do what they wanted. He made the case for "public choice" in his 1962 book THE CALCULUS OF CONSENT, written with fellow scholar Gordon Tullock (1922:2014).
Like Galbraith, Buchanan distrusted econometrics, but for very different reasons. It is true that economic statistics, particularly those being used for policy advocacy, have to be taken with a grain of salt and skeptical examination -- but he went beyond skeptical consideration to completely reject them, simply because they could be inconvenient to his agenda. Unlike Galbraith, Buchanan never became a public face, though he did with the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986. He wasn't interested in courting the public, instead working with humorless evangelical zeal to promote a libertarian school of thought, while fostering libertarian institutes and advocacy organizations. He would never be all that prominent among libertarians, though he would receive the Nobel Prize for economics in 1986 -- in an era when the Nobel Prize committee seemed to be infatuated with libertarianism.
Buchanan believed himself a "true liberal", devoted to the principles of liberty, with his rejection of progressive thinking consistent to his vision. In practice, there was nothing much honestly liberal in his thinking, as demonstrated in a 1959 public letter written by him and Nutter to denounce desegregation:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
We believe every individual should be free to associate with persons of his own choosing. We therefore disapprove of both involuntary (or coercive) segregation and involuntary integration.
END_QUOTE
This was a revealing comment both about Buchanan and libertarianism in general, in that it piously denounced segregation while simultaneously insisting that nothing with legal teeth should be done about it. To Buchanan, the rightful rule of law should not be allowed to correct the unjust rule of law. If it had been up to Buchanan -- it wasn't -- Jim Crow would have never gone away.
Indeed, Buchanan was fundamentally anti-democratic in his absurdist insistence on unanimity in laws, saying that any fringe group should have the right to deny the popular will. Minorities do necessarily have rights in a democratic society, but such a right to absolute power is not one of them. What Buchanan was advocating was the elimination of all laws, a notion of "liberty" very agreeable to pirates, not agreeable to their victims. What Buchanan wanted could not happen, it would not happen. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: The use of drones to take down adversary drones was mentioned in this column last month. It turns out that Ukraine is now obtaining interceptor drones from Fortem Technologies, a Utah-based firm. The company's "DroneHunter F700" hexcopter is smarter than other interceptor drones, using a net to snag its prey. If the victim drone weighs less than 6 kilograms (13 pounds), the hexcopter will take it back to base, otherwise the net will deploy a parachute to force the victim down.
The F700 has a tiny radar, the TrueView R20, to allow it to target its victims, with the F700's onboard smarts autonomously determining how best to engage it. Since the F700 is designed to capture instead of destroy adversary drones, that gives the possibility of capturing kamikaze drones and sending them back where they came from. That might not be practical, but it's a fun idea.
* As discussed in an article from JANES.com (US Army To Receive Four Mid-Range Capability Battery Prototypes" by Ashley Roque, 15 August 2022), as part of its Long-Range Precision Fires effort, the US Army is now expecting to receive four initial "Mid-Range Capability (MRC)" weapon system batteries to the US Army from Lockheed Martin by the end of 2022, to be fielded before the end of 2023.
The MRC is intended to provide a capability to strike targets somewhere in the 500 to 1,800 kilometer (310 to 1,120 mile) range. That is more than the future "Precision Strike Missile (PrSM)" but shorter than the projected "Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW)" system.
The Army's "Rapid Capabilities & Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO)" awarded a contract to Lockheed Martin for a prototype of what is now known as the "Typhon", based on the Navy SM-6 surface-to-air missile and the Tomahawk cruise missile. The SM-6, it appears, will be modified for more range and possibly more hitting power, being primarily be used for surface attack. The Army wanted the capability quickly, and so worked with the Navy to exploit existing Navy weapons -- as well as leverage off the Navy Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) for firing these missiles.
The system includes transporter / erectors / launchers (TEL), missiles, a battery operations center, and support vehicles. The TELs carry a quadruple launcher based on the VLS, raising it to the vertical position for launch. The SM-6 already has a multirole capability, being able to engage air, sea, and land targets; the warhead is only 64 kilograms (140 pounds), but that's about half again as big as a 155-millimeter shell. Range is about 240 kilometers (150 miles), but it appears the Army wants a better booster.
* There has been tinkering with battlefield robots for decades. Now a battlefield robot named "Tracked Hybrid Modular Infantry System (THeMIS)", from Milrem of Estonia, has been fielded to the Ukraine War. It's a small tracked vehicle with a weight of 1,630 kilograms (3,590 pounds) and a payload capacity of 1,200 kilograms (2,600 pounds), with hybrid-electric propulsion. Range is only about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles), but it's intended for frontline support. It uses encrypted wireless communications for status and control, and can carry a range of sensors.
It has an open architecture that allows it to carry a wide range of weaponry, such as machine guns, automatic grenade launchers, anti-tank guided missiles, and so on. It can also be used for mine clearance, frontline resupply, and casualty evacuation -- it appears the Ukrainians are using it in the resupply and casevac roles.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THERE & BACK (10): I ate breakfast the next morning -- Friday, 4 November -- at the Hampton Inn. There were a lot of families there doing the Disney trip, with kids eating breakfast in their pajamas, which I found very amusing. That done, I killed some time and went over to Disneyland, checking in to the south California Adventures park with a barcoded printout, and going through the security screening. First up was a visit to the Marvel Avengers Campus, which was sited on where the old A BUG'S LIFE attractions used to be -- and also took over the TOWER OF TERROR attraction from the Hollywood Land area to turn it into the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY drop ride.
I made a beeline to the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY ride. I'd spent an additional $25 USD to get a "fast pass" to the front of the line, but it turned out to be not a good use of money: I could only get ahead once every two hours, and I could use the "Single Rider" line anyway, so no big deal. As it turned out, the drop ride wasn't a big deal either, not being very memorable -- might have helped if I had seen GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY -- and leaving me queasy. I talked with one of the staff on going out, saying I remember the TOWER OF TERROR ride didn't go just up and down, it moved around a bit, with the reply that was the version in Orlando.
The Avengers Campus was actually more interesting, particularly with the staff in high-grade Marvel superhero outfits -- Iron Man, Ant-Man & Wasp, & so on. However, I didn't stay long, going over to the Pixar Pier area, first riding the "Goofy's Sky School" coaster, which was a "wild mouse" coaster, back-&-forth hairpin turns, and then the magrail "Incredicoaster". I endured both of them well enough, but they just made me more queasy.
Next visit was to the "Grizzly Mountain" area. I wanted to run through the "Squirrel Scramble" attraction, which is log towers connected by rope runways and the like -- but it was down for maintenance. I shrugged and went on to the "Grizzly River Rapids" ride. There was hardly a line; I ended up on a float with a white dad and his half-black son -- making me curious about the absent mother, but we didn't chat. It was fun, but obvious as to why there was no line, since it was too cool a day to get very wet.
Incidentally, I had been wondering before I left Loveland what Disney was doing about lawns. California is suffering from monster drought, and the authorities have been trying to get rid of water-intensive lawns. Was Disney planting buffalo grass that didn't need much water? In reality, I didn't notice any lawns at all there. Disney was instead planting green ground cover plants of various sorts suited to a dry climate.
Anyway, after Grizzly Mountain, it was time for lunch. I'd scoped out the various park restaurants online before I went on the trip, and was told "Flo's V8 Cafe" had a nice fried chicken dinner for like $20 USD, which seemed reasonable enough. I ordered through the smartphone app, and was notified to pick up through the app. It was in fact an excellent fried chicken dinner, but it was more than I could eat, and not the best for me given that I was still feeling queasy. Incidentally, playing with the app was probably the most fun I had on the trip. It was very well thought out, and when I had any questions, I could ask any park staff, and they'd tell he how to get it to work. I was curious about how long a training course they got when they hired on, but I didn't ask.
It was afternoon by the time I was done eating. I had bought a "park hopper" ticket so I could go over to the older Disneyland resort, but I wasn't allowed to do so in the morning. I went over and made a beeline to the STAR WARS Galaxy's Edge area and took pictures, as well taking a ride on the "Smuggler's Run" attraction, riding on the Millennium Falcon. Having got my pictures, I was thinking of riding on the classic "Space Mountain" coaster -- but though I wasn't quite sick yet, I knew I would be if I did.
I went back to California Adventures instead, getting a bit disoriented -- not a good sign. I figured I'd ride on the "Radiator Springs" ride in "Cars Land", so I went straight to it, and found it entertaining. It was a giant slot car ride, but ran people through an animated CARS story before ending in a staged dual race. That done, enough already, I took a long walk back to the hotel, killed time there, and went to bed. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* EDIACARAN EXTINCTION: There have been periodic "extinction events" in the Earth's long history. A press release from Virginia Tech ("Researchers Shine New Light on Earth's First Known Mass Extinction Event", 30 December 2022) discussed evidence of the first known such event -- about 550 million years ago, during the Ediacaran Period, which lasted from 635 million to 540 million years ago.
Scott Evans -- a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geosciences and one of the research leads -- says the study showed that about 80% of the animal life died out in the event. Evans says:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
This included the loss of many different types of animals. However, those whose body plans and behaviors indicate that they relied on significant amounts of oxygen seem to have been hit particularly hard. This suggests that the extinction event was environmentally controlled, as are all other mass extinctions in the geologic record.
END_QUOTE
The study itself states:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
... we find support for decreased global oxygen availability as the mechanism responsible for this extinction. This suggests that abiotic controls have had significant impacts on diversity patterns throughout the more than 570 million-year history of animals on this planet.
END_QUOTE
What caused the drop in oxygen? Evans isn't sure:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
The short answer to how this happened is we don't really know. It could be any number and combination of volcanic eruptions, tectonic plate motion, an asteroid impact, ETC -- but what we see is that the animals that go extinct seem to be responding to decreased global oxygen availability.
END_QUOTE
There are five known mass extinctions in the history of animals, nicknamed the "Big Five," including the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction (440 million years ago), the late Devonian Extinction (370 million years ago), the Permian-Triassic Extinction (250 million years ago), the Triassic-Jurassic Extinction (200 million years ago), and the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction (65 million years ago). Evans suggests the Ediacaran extinction was particularly significant:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
[Ediacaran organisms] occur so early in the evolutionary history of animals that in many cases they appear to be experimenting with different ways to build large, sometimes mobile, multicellular bodies. There are lots of ways to recreate how they look, but the take-home is that before this extinction the fossils, we find don't often fit nicely into the ways we classify animals today. Essentially, this extinction may have helped pave the way for the evolution of animals as we know them.
END_QUOTE
Of course, to say the organisms were "experimenting" is misleading; they were just trying, in many cases failing, to make a living. It might be better said they were "experiments" -- but all organisms are, some working out better than others.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine did not go as Putin expected. Instead of a 72-hour lighting occupation against little resistance, he got a grinding war -- and, in desperation, has dragged citizens into his army, with these "mobniks" sent into combat with little training, often to die.
A 20-year-old mobnik named Sergei Gridin, on being told he was to be sent off to the battlefield from his mobilization base near Moscow, hanged himself, leaving a suicide note. His superiors quickly took the body and the suicide note in hopes of sweeping it all under the rug, but his squadmates managed to get a picture of the note. Although there was clearly despair in Gridin's decision to take his own life, there was also defiance. He said he'd refused to go to the war, and was not surprisingly brutalized for it. He wrote:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
I don't want to submit to people who inspire nothing but fear and disgust. You didn't manage to break me and you already never will. That's why I decided to die here on native land without others' blood on my hands.
END_QUOTE
His family said military brass gave them no cause of death, and didn't inform them of the suicide note -- which they later found out about from other service members. Family members taking the body suspected he had been beaten. There are reports of other mobniks committing suicide, and also reports of growing discontent in the ranks, along with tales of Russian soldiers sabotaging their own equipment to keep them out of combat.
* Last year, I reported on the efforts of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to take on Disney Corporation for having the nerve to stop giving the Republicans donations after he pushed gay-bashing laws. Since that time, he also shipped migrants to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts and dumped them there, and took on African studies in academia. This last week, Rex Huppke of USA TODAY stuck a pin into DeSantis:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
If you're into combatting wokeness, the imaginary villain that haunts Republican fever dreams, then Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is your superhero du jour. He took on Woke Disney and won! He flew migrants to Woke Martha's Vineyard and owned the libs! He singlehandedly de-woke-ified the Woke College Board's planned AP African American studies course!
The mighty DeSantis is surely the Anti-Woke Warrior conservative America needs, right? Well, let's put it this way: If you're into combatting wokeness, you're also into getting conned, so embracing DeSantis as a blustery David defeating this perceived Goliath of liberalism is perfectly on brand. But if you've got at least one oar in the waters of reality, it's a short paddle to see behind the curtain of Florida's Great and Mighty Despoiler of Woke. And there ain't much back there. Florida's governor bravely takes on ... Disney?
Take DeSantis' war on Disney, which began after the corporation -- one of the largest private employers in the state -- spoke out in opposition to Florida's "don't say gay" law restricting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. The governor struck back at the "woke" theme park and entertainment giant last year by pushing for and then signing a bill abolishing the company's longstanding status as a special tax district. In theory, that meant an end to significant tax breaks the company has enjoyed for more than 50 years.
However, right-wing exclamations of: "WAY TO GO, RON!" -- were premature. Turns out that just doing away with Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District, which put the company in control of the sprawling area it inhabits, would force taxpayers in surrounding counties to shoulder the costs of running the Disney-occupied area -- think emergency services, road repairs ETC -- and take on the special tax district's roughly $1 billion USD in debt.
So the Florida legislature that does DeSantis' bidding swooped into a special session this month to clean up the governor's mess. Lawmakers passed a new bill that lets DeSantis pick who sits on the Disney tax district's board. As THE NEW YORK TIMES reported: "This time, Disney would be allowed to keep the special tax district -- which never went away -- and almost all its perks, including the ability to issue tax-exempt bonds and approve development plans without scrutiny from certain local regulators."
So ... DeSantis stuck it to woke Disney by taking control of the board that oversees the company's special tax district while leaving all the perks and tax breaks in place. The bill's sponsor in the House, Republican Representative Fred Hawkins, was asked how it changes anything happening in the district and said: "That I can't answer." -- translating to: "I don't know."
Even some conservatives saw through DeSantis' fake victory. Anthony Sabatini, chairman of the Lake County Republican Party in Florida tweeted: "So basically Woke Disney gets to keep its nearly tax-free, regulation-free status -- but with a different Board. ... What a massive capitulation this is. HUGE win for Woke Disney. BIG loss for conservatives."
... That's far from the only example of the governor's "all talk no actual destruction of wokeness" grift. DeSantis said he forced changes to an Advanced Placement (AP) course -- but he didn't.
The governor recently took credit for the College Board making changes to an AP African American studies course he had rejected as too "woke" and "historically fictional." The board clapped back, saying any claim that the board "was in frequent dialogue with Florida" about the content of the course is "a false and politically motivated charge."
Last year, DeSantis fancied himself a true master of "owning the libs" after using Florida taxpayer money to lure migrants in Texas onto a plane and dump them in Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. The stunt might have pleased a cruel swath of the governor's base, but it was largely met with derision and viewed as an inhumane waste of money.
It also, according to at least one of several lawsuits, might have violated state law because the state money earmarked for transporting migrants specified they had to already be in Florida, not Texas or any other state. And, of course, the whole stunt had zero impact on immigration, or really anything else.
The aforementioned Republican Florida lawmakers who recently cleaned up DeSantis' Disney mess also tried to fix his migrant transport problem this month by passing a bill that declared "all payments made pursuant to (the original law) are deemed approved." It's good to have powerful friends devoid of ethics, apparently.
DeSantis is fighting woke gun-control advocates by pushing legislation that would allow Floridians to carry guns without safety training or permits. But at an election night party in Tampa last year, THE WASHINGTON POST reported, the governor's campaign banned guns at the event -- while asking city officials to say it was their decision.
It seems rumors of DeSantis' success at battling the liberal "woke mind virus," or whatever it is they're calling it these days, may be greatly exaggerated. I imagine that's of interest to another alleged enemy of wokeness down in South Florida -- one Donald J. Trump. Rumor has it the former president and current presidential candidate is sitting around pondering possible nicknames for DeSantis, who many expect will enter the Republican presidential primary.
How about "Paper-Tiger Ron"? Or maybe "Ron FakeSantis"? Ron "All Woke Sizzle, No Woke Steak" DeSantis? I dunno, I'm just spitballing here. I'll leave it to Trump to figure a good name for DeSantis, it's literally the only thing Trump's good at -- which means he's good at one more thing than Florida's "all show no go" governor.
END_QUOTE
The trolls on Twitter have of course pushed back on the claim that DeSantis had caved in on Disney, saying he had really struck a blow. I replied:
The new board will either rubber-stamp the decisions of the Disney municipal office, or will be an ineffectual nuisance. It has no real power; Disney is still in the driver's seat.
DeSantis is lining himself up for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, sidelining Donald Trump. Good luck with that. As I also said on Twitter:
DeSantis is Dull Trump: all of the nasty, none of the flamboyance. Trump was a trash-TV star who knew how to work the audience, while RDS just throws red meat to the mob.
South Carolina's Nikki Haley is also diving into the primary race, sounding much the same discordant notes as DeSantis. The GOP primary is shaping up to be a train wreck, in particular since Trump's legal troubles will be much deeper by the time it rolls around -- making him an even more dubious candidate than he already is, good for nothing but sabotaging the GOP's prospects. The Republicans are stuck with Trump: they can't embrace him without getting hurt, they can't reject him without getting hurt.
The GOP primary pack is jumping on the MAGA bandwagon just as it's falling to pieces. Never-Trumper Ron Filipkowski said on Twitter: "This is going to be a fun primary." I replied: "Followed by a general election in which the GOP gets run outa town."
* I've mentioned the "North Atlantic Fellas Organization (NAFO)" here in the past -- NAFO being a gang of Ukraine allies, taking on Russian "vatnik" trolls online, with NAFO mascot being the Japanese shiba inu (dog) in Ukrainian uniform. One NAFO Fella went viral on Twitter with what was claimed to be an intercepted phone call between US President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Hi Zelenskyy, this is Joe Biden. For the last year I -- together with Bill Clinton, the Reformed Orthodox rabbi, and my closest friend Soros -- have sponsored CIA, NSA, ABC, and FBI to create an army of brain-dead dog-faces on Twitter to harass the innocent peaceful Russians. In exchange for that, I require that you give me back the experiments that we have conducted in my biolabs located in Ukraine. This includes USA's top-secret Lowly pillows, the COVID Furry microchips, and my personal Pokemon card collection. Please call me back as soon as possible.
END_QUOTE
The audio had been run through a filter that duplicated Biden's voice, so I thought it was for real when I started listening to it. Reactions in comments were: "Seems legit!" -- and: "Oh no, not the Pokemon card collection!"
Along very similar lines, in parody of vatnik Twitter postings trying to paint Ukrainian troops as Nazis, a photo went around of a Ukrainian soldier with a shoulder patch -- which a blow-up inset showed to be a raised fist, with the text in English: JUDAEAN PEOPLE'S FRONT.
Huh? What? After a moment of disorientation, I recalled MONTY PTYHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN, in which the People's Front of Judea are breaking into Pontius Pilate's palace to kidnap his wife -- only to run into the Campaign for a Free Galilee, a rival organization with the same plan, to get into a brawl:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
BRIAN: People, we should be struggling together!
PFJ MEMBER [in a headlock]: We are!
BRIAN: No, we should be rising up against the common enemy!
ALL: The JUDAEAN PEOPLE'S FRONT!!!
BRIAN: NO, NO! The ROMANS!
ALL: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
END_QUOTE
Quite a few of those who replied just didn't get it -- which is maybe not surprising, since LIFE OF BRIAN was released in 1979, before they were born. Incidentally, I found that out by asking Google Assistant: "Hey Google, when was MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN released?"
"In the United States of America, it came out on August 17th, 1979." GA has no problem answering simple straightforward questions. That turns out to be one of its most useful capabilities; if I need a factoid while I'm writing, I just ask for it and get it right back, without otherwise interrupting what I'm doing.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (34): In the postwar period, the study of economics remained largely in the shadow of John Maynard Keynes. One of the most prominent economists of the 1960s was John Kenneth Galbraith (1908:2006), a Canadian-born Harvard scholar who had a secondary career in public service under Democratic administrations, most notably being the US ambassador to India during the JFK Administration. During the prime of his life, he was America's most prominent economist, thanks to his prolific writings -- he published 40 books -- marked by dry and sometimes edged wit. He was said to be an excellent lecturer.
Galbraith's first hit was AMERICAN CAPITALISM, published in 1952, in which he warned that big corporations had become predominant in the economy, and needed to be balanced by "countervailing power", for example unions. He would later see countervailing powers were not necessarily a match for corporate power.
His 1955 book THE GREAT CRASH 1929 was popular, analyzing the 1929 stock-market collapse as an example of a speculative frenzy rooted in a widespread "get rich quick" mentality. Uncontroversially, he saw such speculative bubbles as something that happens every now and then when greed got out of control, and recognized them as economically damaging.
Galbraith had actually written THE GREAT CRASH while he was working on a more ambitious book, which was published in 1958 as THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY -- which illustrated how, in a consumer society, grand private consumption was tended to coexist with public decay, or as he put it, "private opulence and public squalor". He wasn't exactly echoing the work of Thorsten Veblen to denounce "conspicuous consumption", though he admired Veblen. Indeed, Galbraith said that "an admirable case can be made" for servicing consumer wants that "have bizarre, frivolous, or even immoral origins." He simply thought that American society was not generous enough to its poor or sufficiently attentive to public needs, and suggested a rebalancing of private consumption against public spending.
His "magnum opus" was THE NEW INDUSTRIAL STATE, published in 1967, which held that producers held all economic power, and were able to successfully suppress competition, dictating terms to consumers. There was much truth in that, producers always having had a inclination towards monopoly -- but Galbraith failed to realize that the widespread corporate complacency of the era could not survive forever. The book was a big splash at the time, but it would not prove enduring.
Underlying Galbraith's mindset was a commitment to the liberal economics that had become "conventional wisdom" -- a phrase that he popularized in THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY -- during the FDR Administration. He had a skepticism of markets, with a belief that there needed to be a strong, well-managed government to balance them. In his 1973 book ECONOMICS & THE PUBLIC PURPOSE, he proposed to extend economic planning to small-business owners and to entrepreneurs, calling for a "new socialism," with more steeply progressive taxes; public support of the arts; public ownership of housing, medical, and transportation facilities; and converting a good number of big corporations and military contractors into public corporations.
Such "Galbraithian heresies" put him out of step with the economics community, which tended to filter out political considerations for the sake of impartial objectivity, with much more of a focus on the mathematical precision of econometrics. Galbraith was out of step because he chose to be, having no use for a purely theoretical approach to economics. He perceived that economics was hobbled by its "willful denial of the presence of power and political interests." The socio-political factors were not clutter obscuring economic realities; they shaped those realities, for better or for worse.
In any case, Galbraith was out of the mainstream of economic thought, some labeling him not an economist but an "economic sociologist". He would live to see the trajectory of economic thought veer away from his ideas, writing late in his long life that America had collectively decided to downgrade the "public purpose", instead deciding to pursue "private opulence and public squalor". [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for January included:
[03 JAN 23] USA-C CC / FALCON 9 / TRANSPORTER 6 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1456 UTC (local time + 5), on the "Transporter 6" mission, a rideshare flight to low-Earth orbit, carrying 114 payloads. The dedicated Transporter rideshare missions feature a payload stack of several rings that each contain circular attachment points, or ports, with a defined volume around them that can be filled with one or many satellites depending on customer needs. The payloads included:
The Falcon 9 first stage landed back in Florida.
[08 JAN 23] CN WC / LONG MARCH 7A / SHIJIAN 23 -- A Long March 7A booster was launched from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island at 2200 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Shijian 23" satellite into orbit. "Shijian" means "Practice", and generally implies a demonstrator satellite. Details were not released.
[09 JAN 23] CN JQ / CERES 1 / TIANQI 13 & -- A Ceres 1 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0504 GMT (local time - 8) to put five rideshare satellites into orbit, including:
Ceres 1 AKA "Gushenxing 1" is a launch vehicle made by the private spaceflight company Galactic Energy. It is based chiefly on three solid-fueled stages, with a fourth stage based on hydrazine for the final orbital adjustments. It can launch up to 400 kilograms (880 pounds) into low Earth orbit. This mission was its fifth flight, with all previous flights also being successes.
[09 JAN 23] UK SPC / LAUNCHERONE / STP & SATREV SMALLSATS (FAILURE): -- The Virgin Orbit "Cosmic Girl" carrier aircraft, a modified Boeing 747 jetliner, operating out of Spaceport Cornwall in the UK and flying off the coast of Ireland, dropped a "LauncherOne" booster attempted to put nine satellites into orbit at 23:08 UTC, the mission being named "Start Me Up".
"Prometheus 2A & 2B" were the primary payloads, both six-unit (6U) CubeSats, were flown by the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). They were built by In-Space Missions LTD in partnership with Airbus Defence & Space and are part of a joint venture between allied government agencies including the UK and the USA to demonstrate technologies for future military space missions, including the UK's Minerva program.
Prometheus 2A carried a hyperspectral imaging system, while Prometheus 2B carried a pair of cameras: one with a wide-angle lens for Earth imaging and another to test space situational awareness by monitoring Prometheus 2A. The Prometheus 2B satellite also carried a laser range finder, with 2A equipped with a detector, and both satellites carry GPS receivers. The other payloads included:
This was the sixth satellite launch to be conducted by Virgin Orbit and its LauncherOne rocket, with all five previous missions having been flown from the Mojave Air & Space Port in California. This was the first satellite launch attempt from the UK ever. The booster did not make orbit.
Britain did have a satellite launch program of its own decades ago, which led to the successful launch of the "Prospero" satellite in October 1971 aboard a Black Arrow rocket. These launches, however, were performed from Woomera, Australia.
[10 JAN 23] USA-C CC / FALCON 6 / ONEWEB 16 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2227 UTC (previous day local time + 5), to perform the "OneWeb 16" launch, with 40 OneWeb low-orbit comsats.
[10 JAN 23] US KIA / RS1 / VARISAT 1A,1B (FAILURE) -- A commercial "RS1" satellite launch vehicle attempted its first launch at 2327 UTC (local time + 9) from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska. It carried the two "VariSat 1A,1B"; the booster failed shortly after launch.
[12 JAN 23] CN XC / LONG MARCH 2C / APSTAR 6E -- A Long March 2C booster was launched at 1810 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Xichang launch center to put the "APStar 6E" geostationary comsat into orbit for APT Satellite of China. APStar 6E was based on the DFH3E satellite bus, developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), and had a total mass of approximately 2,090 kilograms (4,610 pounds), with a design lifetime of 15 years.
[13 JAN 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 2D / YAOGAN 37, SHIYAN 22A,B -- A Long March 2D booster was launched at 1810 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Jiuquan "Yaogan 37" & "Shiyan 22A,B" satellites into low Earth orbit. All three were classified payloads, believed to be surveillance satellites.
[15 JAN 23] CN TY / LONG MARCH 2D / SMALLSATS & 14 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0314 UTC (local time - 8) to put 14 payloads into orbit. The payloads included:
[15 JAN 23] USA CC / FALCON HEAVY / CBAS 2, LDPE 3 -- A Falcon Heavy booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2256 UTC (local time + 5) to put two payloads into orbit, including the "Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM (CBAS) 2"satellite, and the "Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE) 3A" space tug.
Very little is known about CBAS besides its role in augmenting existing military satellite communication capabilities and continuously broadcasting military data through space-based satellite relay links. LDPE 3A hosted five payloads:
The mission was designated "USSF 67" or "USA 232".
[18 JAN 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / GPS 3-05 (USA 320) -- A Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1224 UTC (local time + 5) to put the "GPS 3-06" AKA "USA 319" navigation satellite, named "Amelia Earhart", into orbit. It was the sixth of ten third-generation GPS satellites. The Falcon 9 first stage soft-landed on the SpaceX recovery barge.
[19 JAN 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 2-4 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 0743 UTC (local time + 8) to put 51 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. These were "Starlink 2" satellites; they were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The booster stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.
[24 JAN 23] US WI / ELECTRON / HAWK 6A,6B,6C -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from Wallops Island at 1800 UTC (local time - 5) to put the three "Hawk 6A,6B,6C" satellites into orbit for Hawkeye 360. These satellites provide global commercial radio frequency analytic services to government and private customers as part of a constellation that began launching in late 2018.
HawkEye 360's satellites fly in formation. The "Cluster 6" satellites on this launch featured eight antennas that collected data from across the electromagnetic spectrum in the UHF, VHF, X-band, L-band, and S-band range; one of the antennas is dedicated to GNSS (global navigation satellite services), while another can pick up GPS interference. The satellites are approximately 30 by 30 by 45 centimeters (12 x 12 x 18 inches) in size. They could observe signals from 144 MHz to 18 GHz through software-defined radios. The data gathered was processed on the ground.
The Cluster 6 launch brought the number of orbiting satellites in the HawkEye 360 constellation to 15, towards a total of 60, and permitted revisit times of an hour for any specific place anywhere in the world. These services can be used to locate electromagnetic emissions such as GPS jamming signals, electronic signals from vessels engaged in illegal fishing, or activated emergency beacons.
[26 JAN 23] JAPAN TG / H2A / IGS RADAR 7 -- An H2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0149 UTC (local time - 9) to put the "Information Gathering Satellite (IGS) Radar 7" military surveillance satellite into orbit. It carried a SAR radar with best resolution of 30 centimeters (a foot).
The IGS program was created in response to the 1988 North Korean missile test over Japan. The network is tasked, in large part, with providing early warning of impending hostile missile launches. Information from the satellites is also used as part of civil natural disaster monitoring and response.
[26 JAN 23] USA-C CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 5-2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0932 UTC (local time + 5) to put 56 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.
[31 JAN 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 2-6 & -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1615 UTC (local time + 8) to put 46 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. These were "Starlink 2" satellites; they were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). The booster stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship.
The launch also included an ION Satellite Carrier orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) or "space tug", developed and operated by the Italian company D-Orbit. ION SCV009, named "Eclectic Elena", carried four third-party payloads, all of them attached to the tug:
Starfield was ION's second mission in 2023. D-Orbit launched its first ION in September 2020 aboard an Arianespace VEGA launcher, then six further missions aboard SpaceX Transporter missions. With this launch, the Company had transported to space a total of more than 90 payloads.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THERE & BACK (9): After protracted tinkering with logistics, I got up very early on Thursday, 3 November, and drove down to Denver International Airport. I parked in one of the remote lots and took the shuttle to the terminal -- incidentally, it was supposed to rain that day, so I made sure I quick-waxed the car the day before.
I got a boarding pass at the United check-in using the automated kiosk -- I could have got one using my smartphone, but I didn't think much of the United app, and the kiosk worked slick. One thing I noticed that was different from the past was that somebody left their baggage idle, and a United staffer started shouting: "UNATTENDED BAGGAGE? UNATTENDED BAGGAGE?" I recall way back when having a staff guy trying to grab my suitcase when I set it down for a moment, and having a confrontation when I saw him walking off with it. Looks like they decided to exercise more consideration.
The flight out was uneventful, though I noticed I had a slight degree of motion sickness on take-off and climb -- not a great sign for going to a theme park full of thrill rides. I spent the time reading, playing games on my smartphone, and watching the aircraft track on the backseat video display. I really wish they had a cockpit camera so I could see where we were going.
Once I got to John Wayne Airport, I went to the transit area to pick up the OCTA bus. I was sitting next to a young black woman from Indiana who had preposterous long fingernails; no bus came, and the woman said she'd heard something about a bus mechanic's strike. Dang, I'd heard something about a strike and forgotten about it. I went back into the terminal and talked to the girl at the transit desk. She didn't know anything about that, but called up and found out it was so. "So what can I do?" "Take a cab." "OK."
I immediately got a cab, $50 USD fare -- which seemed reasonable enough under the circumstances. I was mostly disappointed that all my planning for riding OCTA was down the drain. It was a fairly quick drive to the Hampton Inn in Anaheim; I chatted with the driver, asking if California had taxes on food. He told me that they had taxes on prepared food but not unprepared food.
I got to the hotel even earlier than I had expected. I asked the desk clerk -- a neat young black woman named Nola -- if I could stash my baggage with her and go for a walk to kill time until I could check in, and she tagged it for me. One of the reasons I wanted to go for a walk there was to figure out just how far it was to the Disneyland gate, and also to determine what resources were available to me. What I definitely noticed was that the good number of indigents wandering around, some shouting in a deranged way at people, or for no apparent reason at all. They didn't accost people, however, hinting that the police strongly discouraged them from doing so.
I finally checked into my room at the hotel, and then went and got my dinner at the 7-11 across the street -- frozen lasagne and snacks. My plan to use the hotel microwave didn't work out well, however, since I hadn't realized that different microwaves have their own control panels, and there's a learning curve to using any one of them; I didn't manage to get the lasagne hot enough. Warming things up is easy with any microwave, however, and I should have got the two slices of pizza. Anyway, I played some video games on my notebook PC and crashed out.
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SUPERFOCUS CAMERA: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Record-Breaking Camera Keeps Everything in Focus" by Loz Blain, 29 April 2022), researchers at the US National Institute of Standards & Technology has now developed a "light field camera" that keeps everything from centimeters to kilometers away in focus at the same time. They got their inspiration from the ancient extinct arthropods known as "trilobites", distant relatives of horseshoe crabs that were common in the seas a half-billion years ago.
The NIST researchers were particularly interested in a species named Dalmatina socialis. As is typical of arthropods, it had compound eyes, each an array of simple eyes called "ommatidia". Atypically, its ommatidia had double-layer lenses, with a bulge in the center of the top layer that created a second focal point. That meant the trilobyte could see close-up and at a distance at the same time.
The NIST team wondered if the same concept would be useful in the development of a light field camera. While a conventional camera captures the color and luminosity of elements in a scene, a light field camera also obtains the direction of the light coming into the camera. When the complete light field is captured in such a way, the result is with enough information to reconstruct the scene in terms of color, depth, transparency, specularity, refraction and occlusion. It allows things like focus, depth of field, tilt and perspective shift once the photo's already taken.
The problem to date with light field cameras is that it's troublesome to extend depth of field without losing spatial resolution, or losing color information, or closing down the aperture so much that shutter speed becomes an issue. The NIST team, inspired by the trilobyte bifocal lenses, designed an array of "metalenses", in the form of a flat surface of glass studded with a set of tiny, rectangular, nano-scale titanium dioxide pillars. The nanopillars could bend light, but by a different amount depending on whether the light is left circular polarized (LCP) or right circular polarized (RCP). That means the metalens had two focal points.
The problem then was that the two focal points were in different places, and so couldn't use the same image sensor. For the next step, the NIST researchers adjusted the spacing of the nanopillars to generate two more focal points: one close up like a macro lens, the other with a distant focus like a telephoto lens. The adjustment was done, however, in such a way that the distant focus and the focus of LCP light combined were in the same place as the macro focus and the focus of RCP light -- meaning only one image sensor was required.
The researchers designed and built a 39 x 39 metalens array, with the near focal point set at just 3 centimeters (a bit over an inch) and the far point set at 1.7 kilometers (a bit over a mile). They also designed and coded a reconstruction algorithm using a neural network to correct all the many aberrations introduced by those 1,521 tiny double-purpose metalenses -- the aberrations being all the more troublesome, since it's hard to keep tight manufacturing tolerances at the nano-scale. After a simple calibration process and a training session, the algorithm could easily correct any defects in the image.
The end result is a camera that can, unlike a conventional camera, can sharply reconstruct any item placed from its near to far focal points. The NIST team says that fabricating the nanopillar array should be cheap, since the algorithm automatically compensates for variations in construction. They see the camera as applicable to a wide range of imaging applications, even consumer cameras -- but, since all they've got now is a proof of concept, such cameras are not likely to be on the market any time soon.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: American President Joe Biden delivered his State of the Union (SOTU) address to Congress this last Tuesday. It didn't seem likely the speech would get a lot of positive feedback from the Republicans in Congress -- but Biden, experienced politician that he is, came prepared, and prevailed. Columnist Rex Huppke of USA TODAY wrote a witty after-action report on the speech:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
President Joe Biden, at the ripe age of 80, came out with ample vim and vigor in Tuesday night's State of the Union address -- and proceeded to mop the House floor with the howling, discombobulated remains of the Republican Party.
Preaching populism and leaning hard on his noted skill as the empathizer-in-chief, Biden bounded through a speech that acknowledged the nation's struggles while remaining unerringly optimistic. He went off script regularly, parrying Republican lawmakers who heckled him, at one point backing the whole party into a corner and getting them to swear to protect Medicare and Social Security benefits.
I've never seen anything like it in a State of the Union speech -- they ran at him like a pack of lemmings and, with a wink and a grin, he politely directed them to the cliff.
... Biden, of course, will never be mistaken for a great orator. But his address relentlessly hit notes most Americans would cheer, putting the Republican lawmakers in a bind.
Biden said: "Our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken." Republicans kept quiet.
Biden talked about a boom in infrastructure projects. Republicans kept quiet. Biden quipped: "I'll see you at the groundbreaking." [ED: A shot at the inclination of some Republicans in Congress to take credit for infrastructure projects that they voted against.]
Biden said the unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in decades. Some offered tepid applause while others kept quiet. If you don't cheer for democracy, improved infrastructure and a low unemployment rate, people are going to wonder whose team you're on.
The Republican lawmakers' unwillingness to applaud popular accomplishments that help people, coupled with repeated acts of childish heckling that Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, seated behind Biden, tried and failed to shush, showed how weak and devoid of ideas their party has become.
Throughout the speech, McCarthy gave a clinic on squirming uncomfortably. At one point, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene shouted "LIAR!" at Biden. When the president was speaking about a man who lost his child to a fentanyl overdose, Republicans began shouting Biden down, one yelling: "It's your fault!"
Biden stayed a step ahead, responding by asking Republicans to join him and launch "a major surge" to stop fentanyl production and provide border agents with "more drug detection machines to inspect cargo." That, of course, shut the Republicans up, because they don't want to consider a solution, they just want to have something to holler about.
The midterm elections showed clearly that the American people are no longer buying the kind of performative outrage Republicans are selling. But on Tuesday night, while the older guy they routinely describe as "senile" was energetically promoting hope and ideas that might make the country a better place, performative outrage was, again, all GOP lawmakers had.
You could see it in McCarthy's face as he tried to silence the loudmouths in his caucus. He looked defeated. He looked like he was going to race home after the speech, write mournful poetry and enter a lengthy goth phase.
You don't have to love Biden or even like him to see why he was feeling peppy Tuesday night. The 80-year-old kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was facing opponents who couldn't stop punching themselves. C'mon, folks. This ain't fair.
In the Republican rebuttal to Biden's address, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: "The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy."
She's not wrong. But I don't think she understands which side the American people see as crazy. HINT: It's the side that let itself get outfoxed on live TV by a president they keep calling old and incompetent.
END_QUOTE
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on a TV forum that Biden's SOTU speech energized the Democrats in the room:
BEGIN_QUOTE:
On our side, there was excitement. I mean, people realized, Biden is hitting it out of the park. What I loved about the speech, it was true Joe Biden. The working family sitting in front of that TV said: "He's talking to me. He's talking about my needs, he's talking about my hopes, he's talking about my values."
I even liked, there was a particular part of it that showed that better than anything else -- not the big macro things that we did, as important as they are to working families, but he talked about small things you usually don't hear in a State of the Union, but that really bug people of. When you can't switch your cell phone company and they charge you $250, that really POs people. When you go to the hotel and they say the room is $300 and you get the bill, and it's $463. I do my Sunday press conferences on things like this. And it just showed just that Biden was talking to the average American.
And the contrast of these guys screaming and yelling and throwing junk on the wall, and not having a plan, just calling names is going to serve the president so well and serve the country well. He didn't say, we don't want to work with you, but he said, help us finish the job. He stuck to his values and what he believed in. The contrast will be remembered for quite a while, by anybody who watched it, and even people who read about it.
END_QUOTE
* The Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, with the MAGA faction among the House GOP promising a circus of dubious investigations, such as of Hunter Biden's Laptop -- discussed here last week. As discussed in an article from MSNBC.com ("Why The Hearing On Twitter, Hunter Biden Backfired On Republicans" by Steve Benen, 9 February 2023), that fit into a House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday concerning Twitter's alleged suppression of conservative on the social media service. Ahead of time, White House spokesperson Ian Sams said the hearing would inevitably be "a bizarre political stunt."
As it turned out, the Democrats involved in the hearing enjoying it far more than the Republicans -- as demonstrated when Representative Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrats, asked Anika Collier Navaroli, a former member of Twitter's content moderation team, about a September 2019 tweet from Chrissy Teigen, a prominent model and television host, criticizing Donald Trump. Connolly asked: "The White House almost immediately thereafter contacted Twitter to demand the tweet be taken down. Is that accurate?"
Navaroli replied: "I do remember hearing we'd received a request from the White House to make sure we evaluated this tweet, and they wanted it to come down because it was a derogatory statement directed at the president." The tweet was not removed, but the incident did demonstrate the Trump Administration's willingness to censor Twitter.
There was more. In response to queries from Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, former Twitter employees acknowledged that Trump published racist content not acceptable under the company's standards and policies, so Twitter altered its standards and policies to accommodate Trump.
Former Twitter employees also confirmed that the FBI did not direct the social media company to block a New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop, despite Republican claims to the contrary. James Baker, Twitter's former deputy general counsel, said, "I was not aware of and certainly did not engage in any conspiracy" with government or campaign officials to suppress the story. He added: "Moreover, I'm aware of no unlawful collusion with or direction from any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation."
It is known that Joe Biden asked Twitter to remove nude photos of Hunter Biden, but Twitter's own stated policies required that they do so. Republicans on the committee had to be reminded of what the First Amendment means and how it applies to private companies. They were also willfully unaware that, as anyone who frequents Twitter knows, great numbers of counterfeit Twitter accounts set up to push Russian propaganda and disinformation remain active on the platform. It is only some relief that they are laughably ineffective.
Donald Trump congratulated all the "Great Republican Patriots" on the House Oversight Committee, writing: "What an important and incredible job you are doing. ... Hope the LameStream Media is covering this historic event!" What to say, Trump -- like any good troll -- has weaponized cluelessness, but it isn't as effective a weapon as trolls think it is. We will see more of this, but it will amount to very little.
* In further adventures in home automation, I did get some smart bulbs for my existing lamps, and configured them to work with Google Assistant. It was a bit tricky, since I wanted to be able to individually turn my smart lights on and off. I knew I could, I just didn't know how.
I configured the new smart bulbs using the Smart Life app on a smartphone. Figuring out how to set up all the lights as individuals was tricky, but I finally figured out that I could get into the Google Home app on a smartphone and give names to each of them. That done, then I could say:
There was the problem that Alexa on my Fire TV Cube only needed to know about the smart lamp in my living room and not the others -- but that was easy to fix, I just got into the Alexa app on a smartphone and unlinked all the lamps I didn't want it to know about.
I configured GA to use a British female voice. I wish they had a more sensuous female voice, but no joy. One remaining problem is that I can't make phone calls out with GA using Google Voice, even though I can with Alexa on the Cube. I think it's because the smartphone I'm using doesn't have a SIM chip. When I get a bit of money, I think I'll get a renewed Chromebook from Amazon -- I can buy one for less than a hundred bucks -- and it should work better for the job. I've been wanting to play with a Chromebook anyway.
* This last week I set up an account on Spoutible -- which is just like Twitter, except moderated. Right now, there aren't many users and no high-profile users, but it's early yet. I'm posting on both Spoutible and Twitter right now, with the expectation that Spoutible will pick up on about a monthly basis. I'm hoping it will look more like a going operation on 1 June. Fingers crossed!
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (33): Along with social programs, the Johnson Administration also implemented an ambitious set of regulatory laws, including:
LBJ's regulatory programs clearly followed the Progressive tradition -- Teddy Roosevelt would have been flattered by the National Park Foundation Act, and applauded the product safety measures -- but the environmental legislation was something new. It was a consequence of growing environmental consciousness in the postwar period, the realization that human activities were indeed degrading the environment in a global way, to the detriment of the common welfare. Urban air pollution was the most prominent offender at the time, with the air in large cities often foul and hazardous to breathe.
LBJ's environmental measures, indeed all his regulatory efforts, unsurprisingly met with pushback from industry, the typical objection being that the government regulations were too ineffective, expensive, and troublesome to meet. Industry often claimed it could be "self-regulating", and so the government regulations were unnecessary. Sometimes the regulations could indeed be impractical and cumbersome -- but if industry were always "self-regulating", there wouldn't be problems that needed to be regulated.
An illuminating case in point was the car seat belt. The justification for it was obvious: the dominance of the automobile in postwar America had led to a number of people killed or injured in accidents every year comparable to war losses. Even from a strictly economic point of view, the costs in cleaning up after accidents and in lost labor resources meant that, though an auto-maker might have to raise the price of a car, over the broader scope it would save money for the entire economy.
In addition, if all auto manufacturers had to adhere to the same rules, none would suffer a competitive disadvantage by doing so. As it turned out in the case of seat belts, a clean solution was already available -- the modern 3-point seat belt, invented in 1959 by a Swedish safety engineer named Nils Bohlin (1920:2002). It wasn't very expensive to implement and proved highly effective, proving a great investment by saving many lives. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("All-In-One Solar Tower Produces Jet Fuel From CO2, Water And Sunlight" by Loz Blain, 20 July 2022), solar concentrator power systems -- in which mirrors focused sunlight onto a steam generator, to drive a power turbine -- were in competition with photovoltaic (PV) solar power arrays for decades. Ultimately, solar concentrators fell by the wayside, as PV arrays proved ever more cost-effective.
It turns out, however, that there may still be life in solar concentrator systems: to produce fuel from water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight. This is demonstrated by a system developed at ETH Zurich to perform this task, installed in Spain. 169 Sun-tracking mirrors, each about 3 square meters (32 square feet) in area, reflect sunlight into a 16-centimeter (6-inch) hole at the top of a central tower 15 meters (49 feet) tall. That delivers about 2,500 suns worth of energy, or about 50 kilowatts.
The heat drive a two-step reaction cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed to a reactor with a ceria (cerium oxide) catalyst, which converts them into "syngas" -- hydrogen and carbon monoxide, with the proportions determined by the rates at which water and CO2 are fed to the reactor. The syngas is then fed into a gas-to-liquid (GTL) chemical processor at the bottom of the tower, which given a syngas of good quality outputs a liquid phase consisting of 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, along with a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel.
This is a demonstration only, not close to a practical system. The researchers say the system's overall efficiency -- measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input -- was only around 4%, but it sees means of getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and modifying the structure of the ceria-based reactor.
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Pixel Keyboard Can Be Customized With Lego Bricks" by Michael Irving, 23 November 2022), the Melgeek company -- a manufacturer of specialty mechanical computer keyboards -- is now offering the "Pixel" -- which can be customized with Lego bricks around the rim, on the back or even on the keys themselves.
In itself, the Pixel is a fairly ordinary keyboard, with 88 keys, no numeric pad. It does offer a generous number of LEDs, and can operate over USB or bluetooth. On bluetooth, it can be paired with multiple PCs, the user selecting one with a button. It doesn't come cheap, at $199 USD, being apparently targeted at people who love Legos and have money to burn.
* To top that, a game-oriented peripherals company named FinalMouse is introducing the "Centerpiece" keyboard, with actually has a flat-panel display under the transparent keys, driven by its own processor system. Samples included visuals of a space shuttle launch, koi carp that swim away from keypresses, and explosions to punctuate typing. A knob on the side of the keyboard allows the display to be turned down. It is USB-only, no wireless, with options for mechanical or hall-effect keys. It features a fancy patterned aluminum case, and might as well: they're asking like $350 USD for it.
It's fun, but I presume that price has a huge profit margin: not many people are willing to spend that kind of money for something so magnificently useless. It might be useful for store displays, to attract customer interest. I have a little cheap bluetooth keyboard that has illuminated keys, with a range of color selections. It's really cute, but I usually just turn the illumination off. I later bought another keyboard like it from the same manufacturer, but didn't bother with the illumination because it was cheaper.
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Scientists Make Bioactive Glass 100 Times More Lethal To Bacteria" by Ben Coxworth, 25 February 2022), medtech researchers have developed an anti-microbial "bioactive glass" for applications such as medical implants, hospital surfaces, and wound dressings. Typically, bioactive glass incorporates nanoparticles of a specific antibacterial metal oxide -- and so it makes sense that, if two type of oxides were used, the antimicrobial effect would be multiplied.
Researchers at Aston University in the UK -- the research lead being Professor Richard Martin -- decided to tinker with multiple types of nanoparticles, fabricating samples of bioactive glass containing either zinc, copper or cobalt alone, along with samples that incorporated two of the metal oxides in different combinations. The samples were each ground into powder, sterilized, then added to colonies of toxic Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, as well as to cultures of Candida abicans fungus.
Checking the cultures a day later, glass that combined copper with either zinc or cobalt proved to be over a hundred times more effective at killing E. coli than samples containing only one oxide. The glass that combined copper with zinc was effective at killing S. aureus -- while glass made with a combination of cobalt and zinc was best at killing the fungus. Martin says: "We believe combining antimicrobial metal oxides has significant potential for numerous applications."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THERE & BACK (8): Next problem was getting from JWA to the hotel, which was much too far to walk. I assumed at the outset there would be a shuttle from the airport to Disneyland or the Convention Center for a modest rate -- but investigation showed no such thing, and that taking a shuttle bus would be very expensive. Hotel shuttle systems, it appears, are set up to cater to tour packages and conventions. On thinking about that reality, I then thought of taking the municipal bus, and that led me to researching the Orange County Transit Authority (OCTA).
I spent a lot of effort doping out OCTA, downloading bus schedules on PDF and looking them over. It was surprisingly complicated to do, but with a lot of reference to Google maps and repeated inspections of the schedule PDFs, I managed to piece together the bus schedules to get me there and back. One difficulty was that I would be flying back on a Saturday, and weekend bus schedules were, not really surprisingly, different from weekday schedules. Very conveniently, OCTA had a smartphone app; I could get a day pass for like five bucks, and the app would display a barcode for a reader on the bus. It seemed efficient, and I was looking forward to trying it out.
Yet another issue was eating at the hotel. I didn't notice anyplace near the Hampton Inn that looked promising, but there was a 7-11 convenience store across the street, and I wondered if I could piece together a meal there. I checked out a local 7-11 and determined that was a reasonable thing to do. I could heat up foods with the hotel room microwave. I got to thinking later that a supermarket might be a better option -- there was one near where I had to transfer buses going to the hotel -- but on inspecting my local King Soopers, it would have been less convenient and just as expensive.
All that being nailed down, there was the question of putting together a travel kit. Airline security wasn't as tight in the 1990s, and I wanted to make sure I didn't have any problems with the security checks, which turned out to mean taking absolutely NO sharp metal objects of any sort on an aircraft. Since I needed to take cutlery if I wanted to eat out of 7-11, I packed a plastic cutlery set that I'd stowed away years ago, sharpening the knife a bit with a file.
I had some difficulties figuring out how to pack my kit so I could fit in the carry-on luggage requirements, the notebook computer being a particular puzzle. I also decided not to bring my big Canon Powershot SX60HS camera, instead taking my Powershot SX150 pocket camera. It takes good 14.1-megapixel shots, and has 12x zoom -- the SX60HS has 60x zoom, but it usually doesn't give good results much above 10x anyway.
I wanted to be able to take the camera into Disneyland, which led to the next question of how to haul my gear around once I went in. After some fumbling around, I bought a cheap fanny pack, and attached two small camera cases to it. Those cases weren't big enough for the SX150, but I could put other kit in them, and put the camera in the belly pack. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* QUANTUM DIAMOND MICROSCOPE: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Diamond Microscope Reveals Slow Crawl of Earth's Ancient Crust" by Paul Voosen, 22 April 2020), it may seem a bit contrary to study Planet Earth under a microscope, but there's much to be learned probing into tiny samples of it.
The lab of Roger Fu -- a planetary scientist at Harvard University -- features a "quantum diamond microscope (DQM)". It's not so much to look at, being some electromagnetic coils wrapped around a camera, along with a small laser, focused on what appears to be a rose-tinted sample slide. However, it's not much like a conventional sample slide, being made of diamond and doped with defects sensitive to tiny magnetic fields. Using this diamond sensor, the microscope can map the fields imprinted in rock grains at scales smaller than the width of a human hair.
Such fine-scale inspection allows Fu's lab to probe meteorites for clues about the Solar System's earliest days; chronicle rainfall thousands of years ago from stalactites; and detect some of the earliest motions of Earth's tectonic plates in ancient lavas. The QDM is catching on, with Fu's lab making or having made at least four of them for labs elsewhere.
The QDM relies on tiny defects in diamond created when a nitrogen atom knocks two carbons out of the crystal lattice; the impurities do exist in nature, but can also be manufactured. The result is a void next to the nitrogen that traps electrons whose quantum states are easily adjusted: Laser light, microwaves, and magnetic fields can all manipulate their energy levels. Such diamond defects have been interesting to those working on quantum computers, but were seen as a nuisance for other physics studies.
About 15 years ago, Ronald Walsworth -- a physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park -- got to thinking: "If it's so sensitive, maybe that's a feature, not a bug?" Walsworth eventually hooked up with Fu, who enthusiastically picked up the idea and ran with it.
One of the first tasks for the QDM was analysis of zircon crystals more than 4 billion years old from the Jack Hills in Western Australia. Traditional paleomagnetic measurements using superconducting sensors had found faint fields trapped in the zircons, a clue that Earth had a magnetic field half a billion years earlier than expected. However, the superconducting sensors could only measure the average fields across the zircons, which were about the size of grains of dust.
The QDM could probe the magnetic fields at a finer level of detail. Fu placed the Jack Hill specimens on the diamond slide and illuminated the slide with a green laser. The nitrogen vacancy centers, primed by the electromagnetic coils, responded by emitting red light at a brightness that depended on the sample's magnetism. It turned out that the fields didn't come from the interior of the zircons, but instead from iron rims that presumable were formed much later. The observation threw the claim of an early magnetic field into doubt.
More recently, Fu and his colleagues applied the technique to other rocks from Western Australia -- its 3.2-billion-year-old Honeyeater Basalt. Using traditional superconducting sensors -- which remain superior to the QDM for overall sensitivity, they measured the magnetic field strengths and directions from in 235 samples of the rocks. However, it was not certain the fields were primordial: Over its lifetime, the Honeyeater Basalt had been deeply altered and buried under the sea floor, and its magnetic patterns could have been contaminated.
The QDM was used to probe further. The fine-scale magnetic map the instrument produced showed the fields came not from mineral grains, but from halos around them, which had formed underwater -- very soon after the lava likely oozed out of fissures in the sea floor. That confirmed that the magnetic fields were indeed about 3.2 billion years old.
Study of the tiny magnetic domains also provided hints on the latitude where the basalt formed. Earth's magnetic field lines pass through the ground at angles that increase from the equator to the poles, with the angle being a marker for latitude. A decade ago, another team of geologists analyzed ancient magnetism in nearby 3.35-billion-year-old rocks to show they formed at a different "paleolatitude" from that of the Honeyeater Basalt. The QDM was used to check angles in the samples examined by Fu's lab, to determine that the Earth's crust moved, at least 2 centimeters per year during this span of 150 million years -- a rate comparable to that of modern plate motion.
Jun Korenaga, a geophysicist at Yale University, suggests studies of even older rocks could pin down when plate tectonics began. Credible arguments based on how fast the infant Earth cooled put the start anywhere from 4.5 billion years ago, soon after Earth's formation, to 3 billion years ago. The QDM could be used to get a better estimate.
Meteorites, time capsules from the early Solar System, are another natural subject for the QDM. In another recent study, Fu used the microscope to zoom in on the sulfide rims of a crystallized droplet of primordial melt within a meteorite that likely formed beyond Jupiter. Just 100 micrometers wide, the rims are too small for older techniques to isolate and measure, but the QDM revealed a weak relic magnetism. Combined with past measures of a stronger field in a meteorite formed closer to the Sun, the finding indicates that 4.6 billion years ago, the disk of material that gave rise to the planets might have had a patchy magnetic field. That hints that magnetic fields may have played a role in planetary formation.
Back on Earth, researchers have long used cave formations to gauge rainfall, based on ratios of oxygen isotopes left in stalactites and stalagmites by seeping water. Unfortunately, the isotope ratios can be an unreliable indicator. The water is also known to deposit microscopic magnetic grains picked up from soil and rock, in amounts that vary with rainfall. In samples collected from the Brazilian rainforest, Fu's team found that the QDM appears capable of measuring those grain abundances over time as a proxy for rainfall.
Other researchers now want to make use of the QDM. Claire Nichols, a geologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has discovered magnetic fields in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks from Greenland -- another sign of an early magnetic dynamo on Earth. She believes that a QDM map would reinforce the claim: "It's now going to become the gold standard."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The big news this last week was a wayward Chinese balloon drifting over the USA, raising public consternation. It was called a "spy balloon", but it wasn't clear what it was supposed to be doing. The US tried to float spy balloons over the USSR in the 1950s, only to find it was ineffective and unworkable; besides, the Chinese fly spy satellites all the time, and it's hard to think the balloon could accomplish much more than antagonize the US government -- which it did.
After the balloon drifted off the shores of the US East Coast, a USAF F-22 fighter punctured it with a Sidewinder missile, and the pieces came floating down. Right-wing hysteria over the balloon remained at a shrill pitch, with ongoing denunciations of Joe Biden for being "weak on China". It appears, however, that Chinese balloons overflew the US several times during Trump's years in office, and there was no big concern over them. Enough already.
* As discussed in an article from WASHINGTONPOST.com ("Hunter Biden's Lawyers, In Newly Aggressive Strategy, Target His Critics" by Matt Viser, 1 February 2023), the Republican has had no greater concern than a laptop computer supposedly owned by Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden's son, with the GOP attempting to leverage the issue against President Biden. Hunter Biden has long simply rolled with the punches -- but now he's fighting back, with his lawyers exerting legal pressure on his critics.
Going back to the beginning, the story of the HB laptop began with John Paul Mac Isaac, owner of The Mac Shop, a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. In April 2019, Isaac claimed Hunter Biden dropped off a laptop computer at The Mac Shop for repair and then never picked it up. The first problem with that scenario is that Hunter Biden lives in California, and it's not clear he was in Wilmington in April 2019. Hunter Biden, who has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, admits he is not himself clear on exactly what he was doing at that time.
Isaac, so he says, got to poking around in the laptop and found incriminating files. He got in contact with Trump henchman Rudi Giuliani, with the story eventually being picked up and broadcast to the world by the Right-leaning NEW YORK POST, with investigations allegedly confirming that some of the emails on the laptop were indeed from Hunter Biden. In December 2019, the FBI took the laptop and related materials from Isaac, and that was the last anyone outside of the FBI saw it. Nothing of consequence has come out of the FBI about the laptop in over three years.
That is the sum of the facts in the case. Isaac has continued to beat the drum about the laptop, giving public speeches and writing a book about it. Isaac comes across as much like 9-11 Truthers, common 20 years ago but now blessedly forgotten, and it is difficult to see that anyone with sense would believe a word he says. Right-wing media has piled on to the supposed case, with the hysterical tone of their declarations not inspiring any confidence either.
It is particularly hard to believe that claims that the elements of the story have been validated, one online commenter saying:
Stop calling it a "forensic" examination. Forensics is picking up evidence at a crime scene, maintaining a chain of custody, and studying the evidence. This is studying a photoshopped picture of a crime scene that has been copied several times by unknown people.
To the extent that any of the emails on the laptop have been verified by digital signatures as provably written by Hunter Biden, none of what the trolls have played up tells us anything about him that we don't already know, and they can only provide vaporous innuendo to incriminate Joe Biden himself.
Hunter Biden has clearly had enough. Abbe Lowell, one of Biden's lawyers, sent letters to the Justice Department and Delaware's attorney general requesting investigations into several key players in the laptop frenzy. Bryan M. Sullivan, another lawyer now representing Biden, sent a separate communication to Fox News and Tucker Carlson of Fox News demanding that they correct falsehoods from his recent show or risk a possible defamation lawsuit. In yet another letter, Lowell wrote to the Internal Revenue Service challenging the nonprofit status of Marco Polo, a group run by conservative activist Garrett M. Ziegler, saying that its political activities violate its nonprofit status.
The lawyers are of course particularly targeting Isaac, but they also requested investigations of Rudy Giuliani; Giuliani's lawyer Robert Costello; and well-known Right-wing troublemaker Steve Bannon, who has helped promote the laptop controversy. Several other less prominent figures, such as Ziegler, were targeted as well. Where the story goes from here remains to be seen. What does seem significant, however, is that a legal cadre is now emerging that wants to take on Alex Jones, FOX, and the rest of the MAGA trolls. They've been nuisances for decades, but they have no future.
* In frivolous news, I just found "The New York Times Pitchbot" on Twitter, which generates fake headlines. They can sound subtly convincing:
We wanted to know what's going on with that Chinese spy balloon over Montana. So we talked to four unvaccinated Trump supporters at a Panda Express in Helena.
Stocks plummet on news that life is improving for working Americans.
An even deadlier pandemic could be here soon. Here's why that's good news for Ron DeSantis.
My four-year-old was reading the Wall Street Journal when he turned to me gravely and asked "daddy why are the companies sad about the low unemployment rate?" When I told him "because it makes the workers lazy and entitled," he started crying.
Strong economic report brings mix of hope and anxiety.
The ability of AI programs to regurgitate information from Wikipedia shows that the singularity is near.
We wanted to understand why some see the College Board's African-American Studies course as flawed. So we talked to three kids at a Nazi homeschool co-op in Coeur d'Alene.
College Board unveils Conservative Studies AP course, featuring creation science, crypto currency theory, and anti-vaccine literature.
When you consider that Teslas are poorly made cars that will soon be unable to compete with the big car companies' EVs on price or quality, Elon Musk's decision to appeal to the dumbest segment of the consumer market -- anti-vaxxers and crypto bros -- starts to look pretty savvy.
I have never been a supporter of Donald Trump, but if the Democrats don't get serious about securing the border, then I have no choice but to continue to serve as his campaign manager.
Whether it's conservatives tweeting out QAnon conspiracy theories, or liberals tweeting out information about the number of Covid deaths last week, both sides seem intent on scaring people.
We are not in a recession. So why does it feel like we are?
Trump: "I could assassinate George Santos on Firth Avenue and they'd still support me!"
* Concerning my ongoing tinkerings with virtual assistants, I finally decided to stop using my tablet for Google Assistant in my office / bedroom, and used an older smartphone instead. I was thinking the speaker in the smartphone wouldn't be loud enough, but it was just as loud as the speaker in the tablet, so no worries. I usually prefer to use touch to activate the phone for a query, that being simpler than asking: "Hey Google!". I bought a pack of cheap touchscreen styli, since they are more effective than a fingertip, and don't smudge the display.
I got to thinking that I should put another old smartphone in the kitchen to run Google Assistant -- but that was silly, since I had Alexa in my Fire TV Cube in the living room to do that job. Now I've got to explore what I can do with these virtual assistants.
I liked the smart lamps that I put in the living room and the kitchen so much that I got to thinking I should have a smart lamp for my office desk. I checked on Amazon.com for offerings, but didn't think any were superior to the desktop lamp I did have. I finally had a brainstorm: Why not just get a smart light bulb and put it in my existing lamp? I found a smart bulb that could be controlled by Alexa or Google Assistant; it only came in a four-pack, but it was still cheap, and I figured I could put the spares to use.
Oh, one other little thing ... my new desktop is now fully configured, but I did have one little annoying problem: when I put the desktop to sleep, it would always wake up every now and then for no perceptible reason. I got frustrated trying to figure out what was wrong, but then I found some clear instructions on how to fix it.
All I had to do was run a Windows command prompt in Administrator mode from the Start Menu, and then ask what was the event that woke up the desktop:
powercfg /lastwake
It turned out to be the network adapter. That done, I could bring up Device Manager from Settings, check the Network Adapters, and set the Properties of the offending device to ensure that Power Management didn't include the ability to wake up the PC. All fixed. Then again, things like this have an obnoxious tendency to come back.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (32): John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 by an unbalanced malcontent, and was replaced in office by his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson (1908:1973). In terms of traditional economic policies, there was nothing too startling about "LBJ's" presidency: he followed through on JFK's tax cuts, reducing the top rate of 91% to 70%, cutting the corporate rate from 52% to 48%, and introducing the standard deduction.
In a broader sense, however, LBJ was the most radical president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. His most significant single effort was pushing through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed in July of that year, which finally, after a decade of efforts, struck down segregation. The Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in housing, voting, education, and the use of public facilities, with an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) established to enforce the law.
LBJ had also declared a "War On Poverty" earlier in 1964, with two laws passed not long after the Civil Rights Act to get the effort rolling:
LBJ was challenged in the 1964 election by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater (1909:1998), who rejected progressive Republicanism, taking an uncompromising line against New Deal-style government programs. LBJ crushed Goldwater, partly because LBJ fought dirty -- but also because Goldwater's rhetoric appeared too extreme for most Americans, with his vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act being particularly held against him. LBJ showed up Goldwater by promoting a "Great Society" of ethnic egalitarianism and economic opportunity.
Having been given a mandate for change by his big win, LBJ drove through legislation to create the Great Society:
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to deal with the thorny problem of determining how proteins fold up has been discussed here in the past. An article from NATURE.com ("The Entire Protein Universe: AI Predicts Shape Of Nearly Every Known Protein" by Ewen Callaway, 28 July 2022) discussed how the prominent AlphaFold AI system has predicted the structures of roughly 200 million proteins from 1 million species, covering almost every known protein on the planet.
Demis Hassabis -- the CEO of DeepMind, Google's London-based AI company that developed AlphaFold -- said in a press conference: "Essentially you can think of it covering the entire protein universe. We're at the beginning of a new era of digital biology."
While it is not particularly difficult to determine the sequence of amino-acid building-block molecules in a protein macromolecule, trying to determine how a protein folds up into a 3D structure is difficult, because there are vast numbers of possible configurations. AlphaFold does the job by leverage off machine learning "educated guesswork", being trained with known 3D protein configurations to obtain suggestions for 3D structures of proteins that don't have known 3D configurations. The suggestions are then analyzed to see how well they fit.
An AlphaFold database was introduced in 2021, with 350,000 entries. The data dump has been made freely available on a database set up by DeepMind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge in the UK.
The AlphaFold database is not the first protein-structure database, but it is far more comprehensive than any other established to date. EMBL-EDI believes that about 35% of the more than 214 million predictions are highly accurate, while 45% are good enough for many applications. In other cases, researchers use AlphaFold predictions to validate and make sense of experimental data. Poor predictions are often obvious, and some of them are caused by intrinsic disorder in the protein itself that mean it has no defined shape, at least without other molecules present.
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCE NEWS ("These Bats Buzz Like Wasps And Bees" by Jake Buehler, 9 May 2022), researchers have found that some bats buzz like wasps and bees when attacked, and the sound appears to deter predatory owls.
From 1998 to 2001, animal ecologist Danilo Russo -- of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy -- conducted field studies on greater mouse-eared bats (Myotis myotis) in Italy, which involved capturing the live animals in mist nets. When he and his colleagues took the bats out of the nets, the bats made a buzzing noise that sounded like the noise of wasps or bees.
Did the buzzing noise serve a purpose? More recently, Russo and his team decided to test the idea that the buzzing was a type of defense mechanism called "Batesian mimicry" -- in which a vulnerable species protects itself by imitating another species that is hazardous or tastes bad. The researchers caught more bats, recording their buzzing cries as they were being handled. The team also recorded the buzzing sounds of four stinging insect species -- two wasps and two bees -- commonly found in European forests.
The audio profiles of the two audio sets were readily distinguishable, but it turned out that the ears of tawny owls (Strix aluco) and barn owls (Tyto alba) -- which often hunt bats -- can't pick up the full frequency range of the bat cries. When the two audio sets were filtered to match that range, they became much harder to tell apart, with the bat cries most closely approximating the buzzing of European hornets (Vespa crabro).
The team then played recordings of bat and insect buzzes, along with bat social calls, to eight birds from each owl species in captivity at a wildlife rehabilitation center. The owls reacted to the insect and bat buzzing the same way, by moving away from the speaker, obviously fearing being stung. In contrast, they approached the speaker when it played the social calls, it seems because they announced the presence of prey.
This was an interesting discovery because it was unusual. Most examples of Batesian mimicry involve visual signaling, though acoustic mimicry does happen: burrowing owls can imitate a rattlesnake rattle, Congolese giant toads can hiss like Gaboon vipers. However, it's very unusual that a mammal will mimic an insect.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THERE & BACK (7): The next day, I got organized and reflected on the trip. I always keep my sales receipts when I travel; they would come in handy as something of a log of the trip. Anyway, total cost of trip was less than $1600 USD, including the froot loops. I estimated it would cover 2800 miles, I covered 2,884, averaging 42.2 MPG. Logistically, it went well enough, and the occasional fumbles were both inevitable and not, over the longer run, particularly troublesome. Examination of the photos I took with my Samsung S21 Ultra at the USAF Museum showed them to be everything I could have wanted -- which was ironic, since I hadn't thought that would amount to much.
However, on consideration, I simply affirmed the conclusion I had come to on the trip: it was more bother than it was worth. I was, with some caveats, done with long road trips. That didn't mean I didn't want to travel any more, only that I had to rethink it. For example, I really wanted to go to the big Aviation Nation airshow at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, near Las Vegas, in November 2023. I figured out it would be a fairly easy and inexpensive trip. However, at the back my mind was that I wanted to see the new STAR WARS land in Disneyland, California; maybe I should drive on to California, too?
I immediately thought: NO WAY, it would become another big road trip -- but I knew it would bug me until I did see it. I had a brainstorm: Why not fly? Although I had reallocated some of the money in my travel fund, I still had plenty left, and could easily cover the trip. I thought: Do it and be done with it. The brainstorm continued, with the thought that I should go right away -- but that wasn't at all practical, so I decided to do it after the 1st of November.
* I hadn't flown in like two decades, so I had a learning curve on taking air trips again. I got tickets from Expedia, giving me the trip schedule:
I'd got air tickets online in the 1990s, so that was a familiar experience. I made a hotel reservation for the Hampton Inn near the Anaheim Convention Center, which was within reasonable walking distance of the Disneyland main gate. With my schedule nailed down, I then got a Disney ticket online for 4 November. The ticket was expensive, like $250 USD, and figuring it out was tricky, because Disney said that I had to get both a ticket and a park reservation. That didn't turn out to be much bother in practice, but I never did figure out the rhyme or reason to it. Disney also had a smartphone app for the ticket, with the app being used for attraction scheduling as well.
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