DayVectors

* 20 entries including: capitalism & socialism (series); networked warfare (series); loser Xi Jinping (series); Zenith kitbuilt aircraft | Polish WB Group weapons | quad Minigun; growth in renewable energy | Biden wind initiative; Japan & China | Fox settles Dominion lawsuit; green plastic synthesis; economically powerful USA; dual-turbine wave power | thermophotovoltaic | optical neural chip; raccoon dogs & COVID-19; Eastern Europe rising | Ukraine liberal democracy | Jooz run the world; mouse antlers | rain-mapper satellites | tetrataenite magnetic material; sleeping brain; & Disney 1 DeSantis 0 | Russian population implosion.

[FRI 28 APR 23] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (44)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (44): Jimmy Carter ran for re-election to the US presidency in 1980, to be beaten by Ronald Reagan (1911:2004) -- a movie star in the 1940s who became a corporate spokesman for General Electric, and then, in the wake of Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964, the flag-bearer for uncompromising Republicans who rejected progressivism.

When Reagan entered office, the economy was still faltering, with inflation and unemployment high, leaving him unhappy as the Fed continued to maintain high interest rates. Nonetheless, Reagan pushed ahead with a radical economic program that became known as "Reaganomics". It involved:

• Major cuts to top tax rates.
  
  
• Cutting or at least slowing down government spending.
  
  
• Deregulation.

Some add to this list the use of high interest rates to reduce inflation, but that was the Fed's idea, not Reagan's, and he wasn't so happy with it. Reagan also began a massive defense buildup to counter the Soviet Union, which was not exactly consistent with cutting taxes and government spending.

Reagan justified his reforms on the basis of what became known as "supply-side economics" or "trickle-down". The idea was that cutting taxes and spending would mean greater investment and economic development, leading to a more prosperous USA. The idea was represented in a graph drawn up by economist Arthur Laffer (born 1940), called of course the "Laffer curve", with taxes on the vertical axis, ranging from 0 to 100% of income, and government revenue on the horizontal axis. Government revenue was zero at both extremes of the vertical axis, reaching a maximum in the middle of the range.

The Laffer curve did make a certain amount of sense: obviously, government revenue would be zero at both ends of the tax scale, and maximum somewhere between the ends. The problem was that there was no realistic calculation to generate the curve. The tax revenue returned was not just a function of the tax rate, it was also dependent on two complicated factors:

• What the taxes were spent on. Investing tax money in useful infrastructure would likely boost the economy and so tax revenues. Failing to invest to protect American from widespread damage due to, say, air pollution, would tend to drain the economy overall and reduce tax revenues. However, that was an issue to society as a whole; it wasn't such an issue in the corporate bottom line, except to the extent of control measures reducing profits.
  
  
• How the taxes were proportioned. It was the old quandary of plucking the goose to get the maximum amount of feathers with the least damage to the goose. Progressive taxation had been seen as the accepted wisdom to that end for most of the 20th century up to Reagan, but now it was being challenged, without a good idea of a better way of doing things.

Critics accused Reagan of peddling "voodoo economics", with "trickle-down" mocked as a scam. It wasn't a new notion; early in the Great Depression, humorist Will Rogers (1879:1935) commented:

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The suspicions would never go away, but it gradually seemed as if Reagonomics was working, as inflation and unemployment fell while the economic entered into a persistent boom. Reagan was re-elected by a landslide in 1984, giving him fair cause to think he was on the right track. However, of course he was aware that the government was running deep budget deficits that weren't corrected even when the tax rates were moderately adjusted back upward -- and also found that cutting government spending was always difficult and often simply impractical. Nonetheless, his faith in Reaganomics remained unbroken. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 27 APR 23] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: An article from AIR INTERNATIONAL ("To Each Their Own" by Mark Broadbent, August 2022) took a look at aircraft kitbuilt manufacturer Zenith Aircraft of Mexico, Missouri. Kitbuilt aircraft are stereotypically either sportplanes or subscale warbird replicas; Zenith manufactures small short take-off / landing (STOL) "bushplanes" for utility use.

Zenith was founded by Chris Heinz, previously an engineer with De Havilland Canada, in his garage in 1974, with the operation originally named "Zenair" -- which lingers as a nickname -- and offering plans, not kits. It became Zenith in 1991, when the factory in Mexico MO was opened. Since then, Zenith has introduced over two dozen variants of their aircraft designs. While Zenith has produced ordinary sportplane kitbuilts -- such as the side-by-side CH 601 series and CH 650 follow-on -- the company's reputation has been established on its STOL utility machines -- beginning with the CH 701 "Sky Jeep", introduced in 1986.

Zenith aircraft are built largely of aluminum alloy, minimizing curved shapes, giving them a boxy appearance. They are designed to be easy to assemble with ordinary tools. The CH 701 is a single-seat aircraft, with a high strut-braced wing, tricycle landing gear, and a fix slat on the leading edge of the wing for STOL performance. The wings fold and landing gear can use spats, or "fat tires" for bush operations. Wing span is 8.23 meters (27 feet), length is 6.1 meters (20 feet), and empty weight is 208 kilograms (460 pounds).

The engine is not obtained with the kit, with buyers able to fit the aircraft with a variety of flat-four engines -- incidentally, instruments aren't part of the kit either. Range with standard fuel is 340 kilometers (210 miles / 180 NMI), though optional extra fuel tanks can double it. The CH 701 led to the two-seat CH 750, that line including the CH 750 Cruzer, with better performance, intended for airport use: and the CH 750 Super Duty, which can carry 60 kilograms (135 pounds) of load along with its passengers. Heinz says that the STOL machines sell well in the developing world, where airport infrastructure is weak.

* A Polish Twitter poster tipped me off to a combat system, developed by Poland's WB Group, that is in service with the Ukrainian Army. It integrates a range of different battle elements, including a set of drones:

• The FlyEye hand-launched tactical drone, with an imaging turret.
  
  
• The larger Warmate kamikaze drone, which can be fitted with different warheads.
  
  
• The FT5 surveillance drone, a larger rail-launched, twin-engine drone capable of carrying a variety of surveillance payloads, including a signals intelligence system capable of targeting "emitters" for attack by Warmates or other strike assets.

The drones are under the control of the TOPAZ distributed battle-management system, with nodes dispersed among battle forces down to the level of infantry. Through TOPAZ, warfighters can obtain intelligence, determine disposition of forces and assets, and direct attacks. The entire system is linked through a "Silent Radio Network (SRN)".

The SRN uses a coded frequency-hopping scheme, in which data transmissions jump from one frequency to another across a wide band, with both receiver and transmitter following the same pattern of jumps. It appears that the data is also encrypted. Exactly what security is used to prevent adversaries from using a captured node to penetrate TOPAZ is unclear. Incidentally, the Polish KRAB 155-millimeter self-propelled gun, one of the stars of the war, is also linked into TOPAZ.

* As discussed in an article from THEDRIVE.com ("This Quad Minigun-Armed WWII Turret Spewing Rounds Is Metal As Hell" by Joseph Trevithick, 25 October 2022), the well-known "MiniGun" machine gun is a modern six-barreled version of the classic Gatling Gun, firing 7.62-millimeter ammunition. It has seen combat from the Vietnam War.

Dillon Precision is the parent company of Dillon Aero, the best-known current manufacturer of Miniguns. DA decided to show off their product at the Big Sandy Shoot in Arizona in March 2022 with quadruple M134D Miniguns mounted on a World War II vintage Maxson M45 quadruple machine gun mount -- a low-tech turret, with an operator sitting in the middle of the array and aiming with an optical sight.

The M45 quad mount design goes back to the early 1940s and was originally intended to be fitted with four 12.7-millimeter (0.50-caliber) Browning M2 machine guns. The M45 is a small electrically-powered turret with a full 360 degrees of traverse. The operator, who sits inside and aims using a reflector gunsight, can elevate the guns up to 90 degrees or depress them down to negative five degrees. They were primarily intended as anti-aircraft systems, but of course could also be used against ground targets. They were extensively used by US allies, with some users -- like the Israelis and Taiwanese -- using them with twin 20-millimeter cannon.

Each of the four guns in the Quad Minigun fired at a rate of approximately 3,000 rounds per minute, for a combined rate of fire of 12,000 rounds per minute. Each Minigun was fed by a magazine that could hold up to 3,000 rounds. It is not clear if the Quad Miniun was developed just for fun and publicity, or if it was intended as a demonstrator for an application.

[WED 26 APR 23] BATTLEFIELD SENSING (3)

* BATTLEFIELD SENSING (3): Aerial observation of battlefields goes back to the invention of the balloon in the 18th century, though balloons weren't really used in earnest for the purpose until the First World War. Aircraft carrying film cameras were then used for reconnaissance and surveillance. Today, Earth satellites are the most prominent reconnaissance platforms, with drones being used for close-up observations.

Initially, reconnaissance satellites used film cameras, with the film returned to Earth in re-entry vehicles. They later went to electro-optic systems, with the imagery returned via datalink. They could observe in the optical and infrared wavelengths -- which was fine except when the target was cloudy, and at any one time, over two-thirds of the planet is cloudy. In the days of film-return satellites, militaries also flew weather observation satellites, one of the purposes being to determine when targets were clear, so a reconnaissance satellite could be launched. Darkness also didn't help, though infrared imagery could get results to an extent.

The rise of powerful digital processing led to what became known as "synthetic aperture radar (SAR)", which could use radio waves to obtain images through fog or clouds, day or night. Getting good image resolution with radar is tricky, requiring a large antenna, but SAR gets around that requirement by collecting radar data as it flies along, with its motion giving it a much larger effective aperture. Orbiting SARs can obtain imagery with best resolutions of a meter or less.

SAR satellites were used by the military and for environmental observations. Only a handful were flown until after the turn of the century, when refinements in technology allowed anyone who could build a sophisticated satellite could build one. In 2018 two startups, Capella Space in California, and ICEYE in Finland, launched the first commercial SAR satellites, both companies planning to set up satellite constellations to keep the Earth under observation 24:7:365.

Jack O'Connor, who retired from America's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2013, says that back when SAR satellites were scarce, the available SAR coverage was not sufficient for the sort of analysis that is now normal: "If you're in a professional intelligence agency, now you have additional sources and you can check the orbits to see: Do they give me coverage at times and in places I couldn't get before?"

With commercial SAR constellations in orbit, private organizations can conduct "open-source intelligence (OSINT)" as well, Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and his colleagues used SAR images provided by Capella to show preparations for Russian weapons tests in the Arctic regions. Military organizations are also obtaining satellite SAR data.

Orbital SAR doesn't have the resolution to properly identify say, a particular type of tank, but it can readily tally the numbers of tanks in a battle area. It is also good at spotting damage by air or missile attacks, with such "post-strike intelligence" revealing the effectiveness of the attacks before the defenders can clean up the mess.

In addition, SAR has a capability for "coherent change detection (CCD)", in which the phase changes of separate radar scans of the same site can be used to spot very small changes between the scans. When the USA discovered that it was losing more of its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to roadside IEDs than any other type of weapon, researchers at Sandia National Laboratory, a weapons lab, developed Copperhead, a drone-mounted SAR system that used this sort of change detection to spot tiny disturbances in the soil where insurgents might have buried IEDs or the command wires that triggered them. Similar techniques allow satellites to spot the slight surface subsidence which comes with the building of tunnels for nuclear tests.

Global SAR surveillance can observe events in near real time. Running archived of global SAR imagery can also work as a "time machine" to reveal what happened leading up to particular events. Payam Banazadeh, the founder of Capella, says that with the handful of satellites his company now has in orbit, every spot on the planet is scanned every six hours. Ultimately, the constellation will be able to check every spot on Earth every 15 minutes. Ground data systems are being developed that provide the SAR imagery to users as fast as it's downloaded from orbit. Competition in the field means costs to users are steadily dropping.

SAR is only one element, if an important one, in space-based surveillance. Along with optical and infrared imagery, there's also hyperspectral imagery, as well as radio emitter locating constellations. Work is underway on satellite constellations that could track aircraft or missiles and cue air-defense systems. Everything on the surface of the Earth and in the air is now or will be visible; it is not possible to keep any large-scale activity secret. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 25 APR 23] BOOMING RENEWABLES

* BOOMING RENEWABLES: As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Global Renewables Capacity Grew by 10% Last Year" by Nina Chestney, 21 March), according to the "International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)", global renewable energy capacity grew by 9.6% in 2022. 83% of all new power capacity in 2022 was from renewables.

Solar and wind energy dominated the renewable capacity expansion, together accounting for 90% of the increase in 2022. Almost half of the new capacity was added in Asia. China was the largest contributor, adding 141 gigawatts (GW) to Asia's new capacity. Renewables in Europe and North America grew by 57.3 GW and 29.1 GW respectively, while the Middle East recorded its highest increase in renewables on record, with 3.2 GW of new capacity commissioned in 2022 -- an increase of 12.8% from the previous year. IRENA's Director General Francesco La Camera said:

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* As far as prospects go, as discussed in an article from THEVERGE.com ("Renewable Energy Forecast To Dominate Global Power Sector Growth By 2025" by Justine Calm, 8 February 2023), while renewable energy is still a small player in the global energy system, it is on a growth track. According to a new analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the great majority of the world's new electricity supply in the near term will come from renewable and nuclear energy.

Emissions-free sources of energy are expected to meet more than 90% of global new electricity demand through 2025. Most of that will come from renewables, including solar, wind, and hydropower; however, nuclear energy is also seeing a modest resurgence. After peaking in 2022, carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector could finally start to plateau or fall. IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a press release: "We are close to a tipping point for power sector emissions,"

By 2025, the IEA estimates that renewable energy will account for 35% of the world's electricity production. At that time, coal will decline to 33% of the total, while nuclear energy will grow slowly to 10%, and gas remains stable at 20%. In the meantime, climate change is getting worse, with weather extremes imposing more strain on energy production.

* As discussed in a press release from the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Biden Administration has now created the "Federal-State Offshore Wind Implementation Partnership", with the intent to draw up an offshore wind supply chain roadmap.

The partnership will be led by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and include 11 East Coast governors, along with administration officials. The intent is to advance the industry's rapid development and help accelerate President Joe Biden's goal of 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 and 100% clean electricity by 2035.

To achieve the goal of 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030, about $12 billion USD in yearly investment in offshore wind projects is needed. This will lead to the construction of up to 10 manufacturing plants for offshore wind turbine components and new ships to install the turbines. Overall, the offshore wind goal will also support nearly 80,000 jobs in the industry and surrounding local communities, power more than 10 million homes, and cut 78 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

The Federal and state partners will work together to further grow U.S. offshore wind energy, anticipate needs -- as well as consolidate and expand key offshore wind supply chain elements, such as domestic manufacturing, logistics, transmission, and workforce development.

[MON 24 APR 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 16

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("On China, Japan's PM Wants Diplomacy, Not War", 22 April 2023), China's belligerence toward Taiwan has led to pushback from the USA and America's allies in the East Pacific. Even notoriously pacifistic Japan has made its commitment to the defense of Taiwan clear, and is engaged in a major arms buildup.

Nonetheless, the Japanese regard the military option as the last resort. In an interview, Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio was asked what Japan was doing militarily to contain China. With Japanese indirectness, he replied: "What must be prioritized is proactive diplomacy." He stated that Japan wants a "constructive and stable" relationship with China. Japan has been successfully ramping up diplomacy with China, even recently having established a defense hotline. Parliamentarians in Japan's Diet are also taking a soft line on Beijing, avoiding the shrill denunciations coming out of America's Congress.

The Japanese still remain very wary of China, Kishida asking for "peace and security in the Taiwan Straits", and saying Japan was unwilling to tolerate "changes to the status quo through force" -- of course, meaning Chinese action against Taiwan. The Japanese do regard China as a dangerous threat; Americans can talk excitedly of a war with China, but Japan is in the line of fire, and is likely to do the suffering if the shooting breaks out. Japan has good cause to tread carefully. Japanese officials have talked with their American counterparts, and the Biden Administration is now trying to lower the rhetorical temperature -- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen saying recently that America wants "constructive and fair" ties with China.

Unfortunately, temperature control will only get harder as America's 2024 election approaches; the fact that the election is going to be noisy and chaotic won't help matters. In addition, Beijing has not demonstrated much interest in Japanese diplomatic overtures, the general belief being that China wants to drive a wedge between Japan and the USA, which is not going to happen. Japan, however, has nothing to lose and much to gain by playing the diplomatic card. Either Beijing can play along, or take action with its shoelaces tied together diplomatically -- and find out pacifistic Japan can and will fight.

* This last week, a billion-dollar defamation suit being pressed by Dominion Voting Systems on Fox News -- Fox having falsely claimed that Dominion voting machines were implicated in election fraud -- was about ready to go to court, when the two sides announced they had a deal, Dominion settling for a $787 million USD payoff.

That would seem like a serious blow to Fox, but there was much complaint in social media about the settlement, which was actually labeled as a Fox win. That was nonsense; Fox was taken down a peg, even if it wasn't put out of business. The negative response to the settlement gave the impression of being orchestrated by unknown bad actors. It mattered not, Fox took a hit, and is not out of trouble by any means -- Dominion's lawyers publicly saying they weren't done with Fox yet. It's just getting started.

How contrite Fox is hasn't become clear, but that didn't stop THE DAILY SHOW from taking clips of Fox News propagandist Tucker Carlson, and generating an apology out of them:

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I usually can't stand to listen to Tucker Carlson, but this time I didn't mind.

[FRI 21 APR 23] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (43)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (43): Along with the understanding of rational expectations, the 1970s saw a revision of the banking business. Bankers had traditionally been seen as low-key and conservative, pillars of the community -- but in the 1970s, bankers became enthusiastic about speculation, such as dealing in futures: buying a commodity on the gamble that it will increase in price, allowing it to be sold for a profit. Banks set up teams devoted to devising speculative schemes to bring in money. Businesses, known as "hedge funds", were set up solely for the purpose of speculation. One of the most successful hedge funds was the Quantum Fund, set up by a Hungarian-born banker named George Soros (born 1930), who became fabulously wealthy in the business.

Currency trading proved a particularly attractive and profitable option for speculators. Different currencies typically fluctuate in relative value; the number of, say, Mexican pesos equivalent to a US dollar can vary. Some countries just shrug and don't worry much about it, allowing their currencies to "float" -- but sometimes they "peg" their currencies at a fixed exchange rate, often to the US dollar. Maintaining the peg becomes an exercise in controlling the money supply: if the demand for pesos is higher than usual, the Mexican government can issue more pesos to keep the price down to the peg -- and if the demand for pesos is soft, the government can buy pesos using a stock of dollars to keep the price up to the peg.

In the 1970s, the Mexican government pegged the peso to the dollar. The government spent lavishly on social programs, preferring to issue more money than raise taxes. Putting more pesos into circulation would have devalued the peg to the dollar, so the government bought back pesos using its stock of dollars. That worked, until the government ran out of dollars, with the peso falling as a result.

Actually, as determined by the American economist Paul Krugman (born 1953), thanks to speculators, the crisis would occur before the government runs out of pesos. Speculators would know when the government would run out of dollars, and realize the peso was on the verge of being devalued. Rather than taking a loss on the peso when it went soft, they would sell off their pesos -- tacitly "attacking" the peg. That's what happened to Mexico in 1976, the result being a "currency crisis", and then an economic recession.

The American economist Maurice Obstfeld (born 1952) later showed how countries could have a currency crisis even when they're not issuing money. In the early 1990s, the currencies of a number of European countries were pegged to the German Deutchmark, Germany having the strongest economy in Europe. Britain was one of the countries pegged to the D-mark, though the British leadership had mixed feelings about the peg. To maintain the peg, the British government kept interest rates high, which made lenders happy to buy up British pounds and maintain the peg -- but the high interest rates made debtors, particularly homeowners, unhappy.

In September 1992, speculators -- including Soros -- got the idea that the British government would not be able to maintain the peg much longer, and began to sell off their pounds. The government reacted by steeply raising interest rates, but the speculators continued their attack on the peg. Finally the government abandoned the peg, having burned up billions trying to maintain it. Soros walked with a profit of a billion pounds.

Speculation has always had a bad odor to it, being seen as nothing more than a form of high-stakes gambling. However, some economists don't see speculators as the problem -- the problem, as they see it, instead being bad government policies, such as issuing too much money or raising interest rates sky-high, leading to an economic crash. The fact that speculators walk off with a bundle is irrelevant.

Other economists say: "Not so fast." At the end of the decade, Thailand's economy crashed, which was bad enough; the problem was the fear of speculators that the crash would then infect other East Asian countries, in a sort of economic "contagion". Although there was nothing in particular wrong with the economies of neighboring countries, speculators began dumping local currencies, with a wave of economic calamities sweeping the region. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed (born 1925) called speculators "criminals", described Soros a "moron", and said currency trading needed to be banned. Soros shot back, calling the prime minister a "menace" and saying he shouldn't be taken seriously.

Incidentally, Soros became a major contributor to liberal causes, with the result of greatly antagonizing the Right; being Jewish, he became a bogeyman to antisemites, accused of being the mastermind of endless conspiracies, many of them wild to the point of lunacy -- with the name "Soros" becoming a "dog whistle" for "the scheming Jews". However, this is all getting ahead of the chronology. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 20 APR 23] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for March included:

[02 MAR 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / SPACEX CREW DRAGON ISS 5 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0534 (local time + 4), The crew consisted of commander Stephen Bowen of NASA, pilot Warren "Woody" Hoburg of NASA, mission specialist Sultan al-Neyadi from the UAE, and mission specialist Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos. Bowen was the only crew member who has previously flown to space, while Sultan was the second Emirati in space and the first to go to the ISS. This was the fourth flight of this particular Crew Dragon capsule, named "Endeavour". The Falcon 9 booster landed on the SpaceX recovery barge.

[03 MAR 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 2-7 & -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1838 UTC (local time + 8) to put 51 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. Unlike the previous Starlink launch, these were v1.5 satellites. With this launch, SpaceX had launched 3,814 satellites in support of Starlink's first generation constellation and 239 satellites for Starlink Gen 2 for a total of 4,053 satellites overall. Of these, 298 satellites had re-entered, with 3,194 satellites in operational orbits. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on the SpaceX drone barge; the payload fairing halves were recovered as well.

[26 MAR 23] JP TG / H3 / ALOS 3 (FAILURE) -- A JAXA H3 booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0137 UTC (local time - 9) to put the "Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) 3" optical Earth remote sensing satellite into orbit. ALOS 1, an optical satellite, was launched in 2006 and served until 2011; ALOS 2, a radarsat, was launched in 2014 and is still operational.

This was the first launch of the H3 booster; it did not make orbit. There are multiple variants of the H3 rocket. For this launch, it flew in the "H3-22S" configuration. The first of the two numbers represents the number of LE-9 engines on the main stage, in this case two. The second number indicates the number of solid rocket motors attached to the core stage. The letter after the numbers indicates the fairing used for the mission: "S" represents a short payload fairing, while "L" indicates a long payload fairing. A future W type will expand the width of the payload fairing to 5.4 meters.

Depending on the configuration of the booster, it can loft a payload of at least 4,000 kilograms (8,800 pounds) into Sun-synchronous near-polar orbit, with a maximum capacity of 6,500 kilograms (14,330 pounds) into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO). Down the line, triple-core variants of the rockets are possible, similar to the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy or the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. These would be used to support the Artemis program's Gateway project, launching the HTV-X cargo resupply spacecraft.

The first stage is powered by two LOX/LH2 LE-9 engines for this flight. Most of the thrust during the beginning of the flight was provided by the two SRB-3 solid rocket boosters. The upper stage uses an upgraded LE-5B LOX/LH2 engine called the LE-5B-3. This is an improved version of the H-IIA's upper-stage engine. The LE-5B-3, like most of the H3's components, was designed to lower costs and difficulty of assembly.

[09 MAR 23] USA-C CC / FALCON 6 / ONEWEB 17 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1913 UTC (local time + 5) to perform the "OneWeb 17" launch, with 40 OneWeb low-orbit comsats.

[09 MAR 23] CN TY / LONG MARCH 2D / TIANHUI 6A & 6B -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 2241 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Tianhui 6A & 6B" cartographic satellites into Sun-synchronous orbit. Tianhui translates to "sky-drawing", and is a series of unclassified cartography satellites operated by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CAST). With the mission patch featuring a dolphin, there is some speculation that the satellites might be related to ocean surveillance and mapping.

[12 MAR 23] RU BK / PROTON M BREEZE M / OLYMP-K 2 -- A Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur at 2312 GMT (next day local time - 6) to put the "Olymp-K 2" AKA "Luch 5X 2" geostationary spacecraft data relay comsat orbit. The spacecraft was built by the Reshetnev organization of Russia.

[13 MAR 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 2C / HORUS 2 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched at 0402 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Jiuquan space center to put the "Horus 2" remote sensing satellite into orbit for the Egyptian Space Agency.

[16 MAR 23] US WI / ELECTRON / CAPELLA 9 & 10 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from Wallops Island at 2238 UTC (local time - 4) to put the "Capella 9 & 10" commercial radarsats into orbit for Capella Space -- a company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that specializes in building satellites used for Earth observation and imaging. They each weighed about 100 kilograms (220 pounds).

[15 MAR 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 11 / SHIYAN 19 -- A Long March 11 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 1141 GMT (local time - 8) to put the "Shinyan 19" satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit. Shiyan satellites are demonstrators; this one was described as an Earth remote sensing satellite.

[17 MAR 23] CN XC / LONG MARCH 3B/E / GAOFEN 3-03 -- A Long March 3B/E booster was launched from Xichang at 0833 UTC (day local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 13-02" civil optical remote sensing satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit.

[17 MAR 23] USA VB / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 2-8 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1926 UTC (local time + 8) to put 52 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.

[17 MAR 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / SES 18 & 19 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2338 UTC (local time + 5) to put the "SES 18 & 19" geostationary comsats into orbit for SES of Luxembourg.

These two satellites were half of a four-satellite order that SES announced in 2020, with Northrop Grumman and Boeing splitting the order. The Boeing-produced satellites, SES 20 & 21, were launched by an Atlas V booster in 2022. Northrop Grumman built SES 18 & 19 and based on the GEOSTAR 3 satellite bus -- developed by Orbital ATK before it was bought up by Northrop Grumman. They each had a payload of 10 C-band transponders. SES 18 was placed in the geostationary slot at 103.05 degrees west, while SES 19 was placed at 134.9 degrees west.

[22 MAR 23] CN JQ / KUAIZHOU 1A / TIANMU 1 3-06 -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A (KZ1A) booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0909 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianmu 1 3-06" satellite into orbit.

[17 MAR 23] USA CC / TERRAN 1 / TEST FLIGHT -- A Relativity Space "Terran 1" booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0325 UTC (next day local time + 4) on a test flight. The first stage worked properly, the second stage failed. Company officials were happy, the flight having been more successful than expected.

Terran 1 is a two-stage fully expendable small-lift launch vehicle capable of delivering a maximum payload of up to 1,250 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO), and up to 900 kg of payload to a Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). The booster stands 33.5 meters (109 feet 11 inches) tall, with a diameter of 2.28 meters (7 feet 6 inches) and a dry mass of 9,280 kilograms (20,460 pounds). Terran 1 is unique compared to other launch vehicles as it is predominantly 3D-printed -- and was aiming to be the first vehicle of its type to reach orbit. The vehicle used for the GLHF mission was 85% 3D-printed by mass, with Relativity hoping to increase that proportion to 95% in the future.

Both of Terran 1's stages are fueled by liquid methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen (LOX). The first stage is powered by nine Aeon 1 engines, built in-house at Relativity. Aeon 1 is the first engine to have been developed by Relativity and was designed for use on Terran 1. It uses a gas generator cycle and produces approximately 100 kN (10,190 kgp / 22,475 lbf) thrust at sea level, increasing by about 10% in a vacuum. Like Terran 1 itself, Aeon 1 is almost entirely 3D printed. Terran 1's second stage supports a single vacuum-optimized Aeon Vac engine, which is also 3D printed.

Relativity is currently developing the more powerful Aeon R engine for its upcoming Terran R launch vehicle; ,after development is complete, it is also expected to be used on Terran 1. A planned block upgrade to Terran 1 will see the nine Aeon 1 engines on the first stage replaced with a single Aeon R.

[23 MAR 23] RU PL / SOYUZ 2-1A / COSMOS 2567 (BARS-M) -- A Soyuz 2-1a booster was launched from Plesetsk at 0640 UTC (local time - 4) to put what the fourth "Bars-M" optical spy satellite into orbit for the Russian military. The spacecraft was designated "Cosmos 2567".

[24 MAR 23] NZ / ELECTRON / BLACKSKY GLOBAL 18 & 19 -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula at 0914 UTC (local time - 13) to put two "BlackSky Global" remote sensing satellite into orbit.

Each BlackSky satellite weighed about 55 kilograms (121 pounds). The satellites were built by LeoStella, a joint venture between BkackSky and Thales Alenia Space. LeoStella's production facility is located in Tukwila, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. BlackSky, with offices in Seattle and Herndon, Virginia, is deploying a fleet of small remote sensing satellites to provide high-resolution Earth imagery to commercial and government clients. This launch expanded the company's fleet to 16 satellites.

[24 MAR 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 5-5 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1543 UTC (local time + 5) to put 56 SpaceX "Starlink v1.5" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship. The payload fairings were also recovered.

[26 MAR 23] IN SR / GSLV MK3 / ONEWEB x 36 -- An ISRO Launch Vehicle Mark 3 booster -- previously the Geostationary Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark 3 -- was launched from Sriharikota at 0330 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put 36 OneWeb comsats into orbit. This was the "OneWeb #18" launch.

[28 MAR 23] IS PA / SHAVIT 2 / OFEQ 13 -- A Shavit 2 booster was launched from Palmachim at 2310 UTC (next day local time - 3) to put the "Ofeq (Horizon) 13" military radar surveillance satellite into orbit.

[29 MAR 23] RU PL / SOYUZ 2-1V / COSMOS 2568 (EO MKA 4) -- A Soyuz 2-1v booster was launched from Plesetsk at 1957 UTC (local time - 4) to put the "EO MKA 4" surveillance satellite into orbit. The satellite was designated "Cosmos 2568".

[29 MAR 23] USA CC / FALCON 9 / STARLINK 5-10 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2001 UTC (local time + 4) to put 56 SpaceX "Starlink v1.5" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage landed on the SpaceX drone ship. The payload fairings were also recovered.

[30 MAR 23] CN TY / LONG MARCH 2D / PIESAT 01A:01D -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 1050 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "PIESAT-1 01A:01D" satellites into orbit.

[31 MAR 23] CN JQ / LONG MARCH 4C / YAOGAN 34-04 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0709 UTC (local time - 8) to put a secret "Yaogan 34-04" payload into orbit. It was apparently a military surveillance satellite.

[WED 19 APR 23] BATTLEFIELD SENSING (2)

* BATTLEFIELD SENSING (2): Communications have always been vital to warfare. First, there were signal flags and optical blinkers, then the telegraph, and wireless. However, the idea of a "kill chain" in a battlefield network environment came of age in the 1970s, when Soviet military theorists began to talk of what they called the "reconnaissance-strike complex" -- envisioning a networked system in which, for example, a fighter jet might transfer data on a target it could not hit itself to a cruise missile fired from a warship which could.

Military datalinks were nothing new -- in particular, air-defense interceptor aircraft had been directed to targets via datalinks from ground-control stations from the 1950s -- but these were analog and single-function. Generalized digital datalinks arose, most significantly the NATO-standard Link-16 scheme. Today, the US F-35 strike fighter not only has an advanced sensor suite, along with Link-16 it has an advanced stealthy "Multifunction Advanced Data Link (MADL)". The "kill cycle", the time between detecting an attack and a response, is now down to tens of seconds. It is likely to get even faster: hypersonic missiles and speed-of-light weapons such as laser beams and microwaves are all the rage.

The technologies have become more affordable and have been spreading; even small military forces have got their hands on the Bayraktar TB2 drone. They lead to changes in operational mindset. A few drones can replace a few piloted aircraft, but a lot of them can be used to implement a wide-ranging, persistent battlefield surveillance network. Nothing moves without being seen, and when seen, is then attacked.

The technology has plenty of room for improvement. The modern smartphone provides an instructive example: a high-end smartphone not only has an array of capable cameras, but also photometers, accelerometers, microphones, and a fingerprint reader. It also has radio antennas to pick up GPS signals, wi-fi and bluetooth connections, payment terminals, plus -- believe it or not! -- sometimes even mobile phone towers. It's got plenty of processing power, including artificial intelligence (AI) software to make it highly intelligent. Smartphones also link into the computing cloud, giving them access to unlimited resources.

That sort of cheap, powerful tech can now be built into artillery shells, or into battle togs, or just scattered around the combat zones. Sci-fi stories have long envisioned battlefields with killer robots; the reality isn't quite so dramatic, but it's at least as frightening. A British infantry officer -- who completed an exercise involving cheap, off-the-shelf camera technology capable of recognizing humans at long ranges -- concluded: "I'm going to have to think very hard about how I can get to within three kilometers of an objective."

The scenario renders down to an "intense competition between hiding and finding", using a phrase from the new "operating concept" for Britain's armed forces announced in 2020. It means improved sensing technology; better ways to collect and assess the information obtained; as well as stealth, electronic warfare, cyber-attacks and other that hiders can use to stay hidden.

The combat implications of a "transparent battlespace" are profound. Traditionally, military officers wanted to mass forces so they could overpower an adversary. Now, concentrating forces makes them better targets, with the drive towards smaller, more dispersed units. The new battlefield tech makes these dispersed units easier to coordinate, allowing them to operate as "swarms" instead of a mass.

What's harder to consider is the impact of the transparent battlespace on maneuver, since whatever moves can then be detected. The element of surprise is also lost. Some believe that military offensives, at least against well-armed opponents, are no longer practical. Others suggest that the technologies of concealment and deception will be updated in pace. We are currently seeing the transparent battlespace implemented in Ukraine: the Ukrainian military obviously has, thanks to its NATO allies, a comprehensive, real-time picture of the activities of Russian combat elements on Ukrainian soil. Nobody's talking much about the tools the Ukrainians have to exploit that capability. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 18 APR 23] GREEN PLASTIC SYNTHESIS

* GREEN PLASTIC SYNTHESIS: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Chemists Close In On Greener Way To Make Plastics" by Robert F. Service, 24 February 2021), we could hardly do without plastics, but they pose environmental problems. Not only do they create persistent litter, making precursors such as ethylene and carbon monoxide (CO) uses fossil fuels and releases a lot of carbon dioxide. In recent years, chemists have developed bench-top reactors known as "electrochemical cells" that can use water and CO2 to turn them into feedstocks, the process to be driven by renewable energy. There is one big stumbling block to date: the cells often consume highly alkaline additives that themselves take energy to make.

Yang Peidong -- a chemist at the University of California in Berkeley -- says: "This has been a very challenging scientific problem." He and other researchers have been working on ways to solve the problem. One approach links two electrochemical cells in tandem to bypass the problem, while another uses an enzymelike catalyst to generate a desired chemical without consuming alkaline additives. The work is not very far along, but it is picking up steam.

Ethylene -- a clear, sweet-smelling gas -- is currently produced as a step in oil refining, with superheated steam "cracking" the larger hydrocarbons in the oil. The process is efficient, capable of producing ethylene for about $1,000 USD a tonne, but it generates about 0.6% of the world's emissions.

Electrochemical cells operate like batteries in reverse. Both kinds of devices have two electrodes, an anode and a cathode, separated by an electrolyte that ferries charged ions between the electrodes. In a battery, chemical reactions at the electrodes drive electrons through an external circuit; in a cell, electricity is pumped through the electrodes to drive chemical reactions.

In electrochemical cells designed to convert CO2 to more valuable chemicals, the dissolved gas and water react at the cathode to form ethylene and other hydrocarbons. The electrolyte is typically spiked with potassium hydroxide (KOH), which allows the chemical conversions to occur at a lower voltage, thereby boosting the overall energy efficiency. The KOH also helps channel most of the added electricity toward creating hydrocarbons instead of hydrogen gas, a less valuable product.

However Matthew Kanan, an electrochemist at Stanford University, says the hydroxide carries an energy penalty of its own. The hydroxide ions react with CO2 at the cathode, forming carbonate, which precipitates out of solution as a solid. As a result, the hydroxide must be continually replenished; since the hydroxide itself takes energy to make, the overall process loses instead of gains energy.

In 2019, Kanan and his colleagues reported a partial solution. In place of CO2, they fed their cell CO, which doesn't react with hydroxide to form carbonate. The cell itself was highly efficient: 75% of the electrons they fed their catalyst -- a metric referred to as the "faradaic efficiency (FE)" -- went to making acetate, a simple carbon-containing compound that can be used as a feedstock for industrial microbes. The problem was that traditionally CO was derived from fossil fuels.

A team led by Edward Sargent, a chemist at the University of Toronto, took the approach a step further. They began with a commercially-available device called a "solid oxide electrochemical cell", which uses high temperatures to convert CO2 to CO, and could be powered by renewable electricity. The CO flows into another electrochemical cell whose catalysts are tuned to favor the production of ethylene, a more widely used commodity chemical than acetate. The tandem reactor no longer consumes hydroxide and has an FE of 65% for energy stored in ethylene produced by the device.

Yang and his team have taken a different approach to getting around the alkalinity problem. They redesigned an alkaline electrochemical cell with a modified catalyst that excludes water and hydroxide ions at the sites where it splits CO2. The device can convert the gas into CO without generating carbonate -- but it still has to drive the CO to another cell to produce ethylene and other hydrocarbons. Those working on such schemes that steadily dropping prices for renewable energy mean that, in maturity, their tandem electrochemical cells could make them competitive with the traditional fossil fuel approach to synthesizing ethylene.

[MON 17 APR 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 15

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("From Strength To Strength", 13 April 2023), Americans seem addicted to proclaiming the decline of the USA:

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Well, yes and no. It is true that, by the measure of national purchasing power parity -- "PPP", in effect what the people of a country can afford to buy -- China represents 18% of the global economy, leading the USA at 16%. In 1990, China's was over four times smaller than the USA. However, America's $25.5 trillion in GDP in 2022 represented 25% of the world's total, almost the same share as it had in 1990. On that measure, China's share is now 18%. More significantly, by a range of measures, the USA has moved ahead of other developed nations economically:

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To be sure, much of the growth in income in the USA was among the ultra-rich, but most other Americans have done pretty well, too. It can be and is replied that Europeans enjoy benefits outside of simple pay not enjoyed by Americans: they have longer holidays, generous maternity leave, and less expensive health-care systems. Still, Americans have been pulling ahead in monetary terms -- one reason being that the USA has a higher fertility rate and a more open immigration system than Western Europe, meaning a bigger workforce. Americans are also more productive:

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Much of the productivity boost was in America's booming information-technology sector, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, with its knock-on effects in other industries. At the peak, productivity growth of American businesses doubled to more than 3% annually. Nowdays it's back to its long-term average of about 1.5%, but that's still above the average.

There are fundamental strengths underlying American economic power. First, somewhat surprisingly, American works are, on the average, highly skilled. Ignoring the uneven quality of schools, the USA roughly 37% more per pupil on education than the average member of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. When it comes to post-secondary students, it spends twice the average. As a share of its working-age population, roughly 34% of Americans have completed tertiary education. America is home to 11 of the world's 15 top-ranked universities in the most recent Times Higher Education table. The universities also help introduce bright and energetic immigrants to the US workforce, with industry putting its educated employees to good use.

Second, America is a big country, with a unified internal market that drives the economy. Neither Europe nor Japan can compete in that regard; China did for a time, but now seems to be slowing down. The USA also has vast natural resources to exploit -- as demonstrated by the fracking boom, which has made the USA a net energy exporter. Fracked gas has also reduced America's carbon emissions and driven the decline of coal. Growing American efforts to develop renewable energy are likely to accelerate the decline of emissions.

Third, America is dynamic, with a sizeable fraction of the working population willing to relocate to where the jobs are, or at least where the jobs are most attractive. In addition, the USA also has the world's most powerful financial systems. Half of the world's venture capital goes to firms in America. Americans energetically start new businesses; many fail, but an OECD measure of the personal cost of failure for entrepreneurs consistently puts America and Canada at the bottom of the pain scale. Finally, despite their sometimes deservedly-bad public reputations, America's corporate bosses are well more effective than their counterparts elsewhere.

The greater effectiveness of the bosses does translate into a greater willingness to fire employees, and America's assistance to the unemployed is not generous. The USA has other drawbacks as well, a big one being that America has the most unequal income distribution in the G7. Worse, the life expectancy of Americans is 77, about five years less than for Western Europe. For the poor, with less access to medical care and more violence around them, the deficit is particularly obvious.

This inequality was the consequence of deliberate decisions, most notably by the Reagan Administration in the 1980s. Conservatism has only become more extreme since then, with efforts to restrict immigration, and to punish companies judged to be "woke". Trade policy has become increasingly protectionist and with bipartisan support: the Biden Administration has been pushing for bringing jobs home in semiconductors, electric vehicles, and renewable energy. Partly that's been driven by an urge to cut economic dependency on authoritarian states like Russia and, to a lesser degree, China; but it remains unclear that America's allies are seen in a much better light.

America has been an economic powerhouse for a long time -- but it is not inevitable that it should stay that way. On the other hand, there's no reason to assume that will fix the downsides of the system and emerge even more powerful.

[FRI 14 APR 23] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (42)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (42): Milton Friedman was one of the most significant economic scholars of the 1970s, but he wasn't alone. Another major economic thinker of the time was Eugene Fama (born 1939), also associated with the University of Chicago. Fama's most significant work was on "rational expectations".

It was known long before Fama that economic activity is based on expectations: workers hire onto a company with the expectation of getting a certain wage and benefits, employers start a firm to bring in profits on its products, investors pump money into ventures in expectation of getting a return on their money. Of course, things may not go as well as planned, or may go better than planned, or another plan may prove more attractive. Economists referred to this as "adaptive expectations".

In the 1960s, an American mathematical economist named John Muth (1930:2005) suggested that "adaptive expectations" was, as it stood, a simplistic idea. People acquired their expectations from past experience and data directly available to them. Muth proposed a modified approach he called "rational expectations", in which expectations were based on modeling all significant available aspects of an economic activity. Workers would be better off to go beyond merely using wage and benefits to search for employment, but also the future prospects of the employer, the business the employer was in, and the overall trajectory of the economy. Employers and investors needed to perform the same sort of modeling.

Muth was a low-key person and didn't push his ideas, but in the 1970s other economists, notably Fama, picked them up and ran with them. Fama, however, realized that rational expectations led to counter-intuitive conclusions. While he was an undergraduate, one of his professors assigned him a task: to determine how to predict future stock prices. It might be thought that rational expectations would imply investors doing a thorough job of investigating a stock's prospects to determine if it's the most profitable option. The problem is that such a rational expectations approach would lead investors to buying the same stocks -- which would drive up their price, and so diminish their value as an investment.

Fama concluded that it was no way to predict the prices of stocks over the longer run, since efforts to do would affect the sales of stocks and so their prices. Dismissing a stock would cause its price to fall, while promoting it would cause it to rise -- which potentially could lead to a stock price bubble, with rational expectations being shoved to the side in favor of "greater fool" thinking, buying an overpriced stock in the belief that it can be sold at a markup to a greater fool. Eventually, greater fools dry up and the stock price collapses drastically.

The inherent unpredictability of stock prices has become accepted wisdom, with financial journals sometimes putting together "dart board funds" -- that is, listing all acceptable stocks on a sheet of paper, sticking the sheet on a dart board, and then selecting stocks by throwing darts at the board. Sometimes dart board funds have beaten stock market averages.

However, ignoring the inconvenience of price unpredictability, Fama believed rational expectations remained in effect, leading to his "efficient markets hypothesis", which said that prices in markets reflect all available information -- and, more obliquely, that the randomization of prices actually made markets more efficient at shuttling money around in an economy, by preventing markets from being channeled down dead-end streets. In any case, the efficient markets hypothesis won Fama the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 13 APR 23] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Counter-Spinning Turbine Design Draws Double The Energy From Ocean Waves" by Nick Lavars, 17 August 2021), there's considerable interest in wave power these days. Researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have come up with an innovative design for a wave-power generator that doubles the conversion efficiency through the conceptually simple idea of using a two-stage, contra-rotating turbine system.

Various schemes have been used to obtain energy from waves, including rotating systems that extract power from wave-induced movement, blowhole-type generators that capture energy as waves push water and air through concrete chambers, and squid-type generators with buoyant arms that rise and fall with the motion of the waves.

One popular scheme is the "point absorber buoy (PAB)", which is based on a flotation device that bobs on the surface and tethered to the seafloor. As it bobs up and down in the wave, the vertical motion drives an energy converter mechanism hung on the tether below the water surface. A PAB typically requires sensors to track wave motion, but the sensors add expense and maintenance overhead. The RMIT researchers developed a converter with a dual turbine that coverts the bobbing motion into shaft drive, coupled to a generator mounted on the surface buoy. So far, they've only built a demonstrator, with the intent being to build a full-size version, and evaluate it in a tank before operational testing.

* As discussed in a press release from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("Thermophotovoltaic Cell Converts 40% Of Heat Energy To Electricity" by Steve Dent, 14 April 2022), MIT researchers, working with the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), have now developed a highly efficient thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, with applications in renewable energy.

Thermophotovoltaic cells are based on semiconducting materials that will produce electrons from combined heat and light, with the input energy driving electrons across an energy "bandgap" to generate current flow. To now, TPV cells have achieved no more than 32% energy conversion efficiency. The new design from MIT-NREL improves on that by extracting energy at higher temperatures -- producing power from heat sources between 1,900 to 2,400 degree Celsius (3,452 to 4,352 degrees Fahrenheit).

To pull off that trick, it uses high-bandgap metal alloys sitting over a slightly lower-bandgap alloy. The high-bandgap layer captures the highest-energy photons from a heat source and converts them to electricity, while lower-energy photons pass through the first layer and add to the voltage. Any photons that run the two-layer gauntlet are reflected by a mirror back to the heat source to avoid wasting energy.

Measuring the efficiency using a heat flux sensor, the researchers found that power varied with temperature. Between 1,900C to 2,400C, the new TPV design produced electricity with about 40% efficiency. Steam turbines are comparable in efficiency, but are much more complicated -- lots of moving parts -- and don't operate at such high temperatures.

In a grid-scale thermal storage unit, the system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources and store it in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When needed, the TPV cells would then convert that heat to electricity and feed it to the power grid. It would take about 930 square meters (10,000 square feet) of TPV cells to do the job, but the researchers say the technology is scalable.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Optical Brain-Like Chip Processes Almost 2 Billion Images Per Second" by Michael Irving, 7 June 2022), most artificial intelligence (AI) technology is based on silicon technology -- but there has long been work on optical approaches as well.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have now developed a powerful new optical neural-network chip that can process almost 2 billion images per second. The chip was tested by using to categorize a series of handwritten characters that resembled letters. After being trained on relevant data sets, the chip was able to classify the images with 93.8% accuracy for sets containing two types of characters, and 89.8% percent accuracy for four types. The chip was able to categorize each character within 0.57 nanoseconds, equivalent to processing 1.75 billion images per second. Firooz Aflatouni, the research lead, says:

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Of course, the inputs and outputs of the chip are electrical, but the internal processing is not. The internal processing does not need to store intermediate results either, resulting in a faster and more compact chip. The researchers are now working on scaling up their design, and determining how it can be used with other types of data.

[WED 12 APR 23] BATTLEFIELD SENSING (1)

* BATTLEFIELD SENSING (1): As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Like Smartphones, But Lethal", 29 January 2022), 21st-century technology has changed the rules of warfare. To show how, consider the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia.

The two countries had fought a war before, from 1988 to 1994 -- the result leaving Armenia occupying Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. On 27 September 2020, Azerbaijan attacked Armenia. The war lasted 44 days, ending with a victory for Azerbaijan, with three-quarters of the Azeri land held by Armenia retaken.

The rights and wrongs of this nasty little war -- over 7,000 killed -- can be debated, but it's clear that the Azeris were smarter on how to fight a modern war. True, Azerbaijan had some big advantages: a larger population, a more generous military budget, much more artillery, and a better air force. However, most of the Azerbaijani equipment was dated Soviet gear, and Azerbaijan's advantages hadn't prevailed in the earlier fight. Besides, it's a military rule that an attacking force has to be several times larger than the defending force in order to prevail.

The difference was where the Azeris had spent their money. They had obtained a fleet of Bayraktar TB2 drones from Turkey, capable of carrying a set of small smart bombs, as well as Harop anti-radar kamikaze drones from Israel. The drones destroyed dozens of air-defense sites, scores of artillery pieces, and hundreds of armored vehicles. Bayraktars flown by the Turkish military had similarly slaughtered the Syrian tank corps the year before.

Military leadership elsewhere took note, with General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith -- Britain's chief of general staff -- telling a 2021 conference: "The hallmarks of a different form of land warfare are already apparent. Small wars ... are already throwing up some quite big lessons."

Much attention was paid to the drones, but they were no more or less than offensive elements in a command, control and communications network that gathered target information, set priorities, and implement attacks. Warfighters could see what the drones saw through satellite communications feeds, and pass the drones targeting information obtained by other platforms. In Azerbaijan, Turkish radar-spotting spy planes seem to have been provided by Turkey; Turkey's operations in Syria were aided by the ground-based KORAL system, which detects and jams enemy radars.

This kind of highly networked warfare is something military organizations have been working on for decades, the vision being a coordinated "battlespace" covering three dimensions up to Earth orbit, with a wide array of sensing technologies, with digital data accumulation, processing, and analysis giving a real-time image of events in that battlespace -- and communications links telling "shooters" what to destroy next. General Mark Milley, America's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put in 2021: "You've got an ability to see and an ability to hit at range that has never existed before in human history."

Such capabilities didn't really help the Americans much in their war in Afghanistan, since they were up against insurgents who had little heavy combat gear, and were hard to pick out of the population. The 2020 Azeri-Armenian War involved a fight between two armies with a full range of equipment, with the networked battlespace concept proving its worth -- even though the Azeris only had a cheap and puny implementation of the concept. As Carleton-Smith put it, it presented the vision of a "transparent battlespace [that is] effectively one giant sensor." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 11 APR 23] TANUKI TROUBLE

* TANUKI TROUBLE: As discussed in an article from BBC.com ("Have We Found The Animal Origin Of COVID?" by Victoria Gill and Roland Pease, 25 March 2023), from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, there's been controversy over where the disease came from. It is believed to have come out of animal markets in the Chinese city of Wuhan, but some insist that it must have been caused by a leak from a Chinese biolab.

The "lab leak" theory was discussed in an article here in 2021, and shown not to be supported by substantial evidence. It was revived recently, however, though nobody can point to any new evidence that makes it more credible. That still leaves the question of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that causes COVID-19 -- hanging. Now, an analysis has pointed to a particular species as the likely animal origin of the virus. That analysis is based on evidence that was obtained three years ago from the Huanan Wildlife Market in Wuhan, a focal point of the initial outbreak.

In early 2020, when COVID-19 was still very mysterious, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control (CCDC) took samples from the market. The genetic information contained in those samples has only recently been made, briefly, public; a team of researchers decoding them and found that raccoon dogs may be the "intermediate host" from which the disease spilled over into people.

Raccoon dogs resemble raccoons, but they are canines, more closely related to foxes. They are found across northern Asia and Siberia, and can be found from Finland to Japan -- with the Japanese calling them "tanukis", and Japanese mythology describing them as shape-shifters and tricksters. In any case, the genetic analysis showed that DNA from raccoon dogs, which were being sold live in the Wuhan more for meat, was found in the same locations as swabs from the market that genetically matched to SARS CoV-2. However, that's as far as the evidence trail goes, since the market has long been closed and the animals sold there have been killed. Some researchers have described the three-year delay in releasing the data as "scandalous".

The genetic study was performed by a team under Dr. Florence Debarre, a senior researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences in Paris. Having found and downloaded the codes on a genetic database called GISAID, and her colleagues set out to find out which species matched the samples that were found in the same locations as the virus. Debarre says:

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Professor Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney, who was also involved in the study, says this is the "best evidence we will get" of an animal origin of the virus, adding:

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Holmes cautions that but finding the actual virus in an animal will be very hard. Nonetheless, he believes it is even harder to make a case for the lab-leak hypothesis, saying:

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Conspiracists continue to promote the lab-leak hypothesis, however, since it can't be disproven, and they don't care that it involves making a set of contrived assumptions to get it to work. Holmes is exasperated with the manufactured controversy:

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ED: Incidentally, I got to wondering if tanukis were ever kept as pets. It turns out that they can be penned up, but they cannot be made into housepets: they can't be housebroken, and they chew everything up.

[MON 10 APR 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 14

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The War In Ukraine Has Made Eastern Europe Stronger", 27 February 2023), the war in Ukraine has led to Eastern European nations becoming more conscious of their strength. As the peoples there see it, power is shifting from the "old Europe" -- discredited by having been so wrong for so long about Russia -- towards countries now doing their all to push back against President Vladimir Putin's aggression. The war presents an opportunity for fresh thinking and new leadership. Some see a new axis emerging between Warsaw and Kyiv that could provide a counterweight to the one between Paris and Berlin.

The strength of the mood is obvious, but is it more than a mood? It is not so clear that the influence of the "Bucharest Nine" club of Eastern European nations -- the three Baltics, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, with Bulgaria and Romania following in 2007 -- will prove enduring. The region has wasted opportunities for a greater EU leadership role before.

Even Western Europeans do accept that this is Eastern Europe's moment. Warnings from former Soviet satellites about the risk of relying on Russia for gas used to be seen in Germany as neurotic; now they are accepted as having been wise. There is widespread admiration for the way central European countries took in millions of Ukrainians fleeing war, and have done their all to provide military aid to Ukraine. That has given Eastern Europe a degree of moral leadership, and a louder voice at the EU table. One Western European diplomat says: "We always listened to them. Now perhaps we listen a little more."

That doesn't mean a perfect meeting of minds. Leaders in Eastern Europe despise and fear Putin as a mortal threat; while Western Europeans are supporting Ukraine's fight, they see Putin as no more or less than one challenge among many. Life goes on despite the war. Energy systems have been rewired. The EU has faced lots of challenges in the past decade, whether around the euro zone, migration or Brexit -- and will face more in coming years. They do not share the belief that the war in Ukraine overshadows all other issues.

Western European governments have certainly not changed their assessments of their Eastern European counterparts. The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, has accused Poland of flouting basic principles of the rule of law and of the EU -- with the result that EU funding to Poland has been held up. In addition, influence in the EU is rooted from population size and economic heft. Failing that, smart diplomacy can help. Small countries like Denmark and Ireland, and some bigger ones like the Netherlands, can make up for their smaller size by crafting alliances and generating new ideas for the EU.

Eastern Europe lacks weight. Taken together, the Bucharest Nine have a population of 95 million, around a fifth of the EU total; their combined GDP is only about a tenth of the EU's. The group's economic weight has been rising, with living standards gradually closing the gap with Western Europe. The need for Europe to pull back some supply chains from China could give it further heft. But a lack of financial integration -- Poland is not in the euro zone -- somewhat limits its clout there, too. Worse, all nine Bucharest countries get more from the EU budget than they pay in.

There's no edge in diplomacy, either. One EU diplomat says of the Poles: "On any topic other than Ukraine, they don't even pretend to care." The current Polish government also has been picking fights with Germany, demanding WW2 reparations so huge that the Germans have brushed them off. As discussed a few weeks back, the French have been pushing for European "strategic autonomy" -- but the Bucharest club see NATO, meaning effectively the USA, as their guarantor of autonomy. The war in Ukraine is certain to lead to great changes, but many things may well still remain the same.

* The Muslim Ramadan is now in progress, with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy announcing that the government would host "iftar", the meals breaking the daily fast of Muslims. A Ukrainian-American named "Barwin", from Long Island, that I follow on Twitter passed on an article about it, commenting:

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I replied:

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He came back with:

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In other Ukrainian news, a wealthy Ukrainian is hosting a contest to develop a drone that will land on Red Square in Moscow on 9 May, when the Victory Day celebrations take place. There were suggestions on what it would carry. I commented:

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* In other items on Twitter, a Twitterer named "Davram" posted a news video in which he starred. It was a news camera video at a demonstration in New York City, concerning Trump's recent indictment at the hands of Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. A reporter talked to a protester with a sign denouncing "BRAGG'S JEWS", the reporter asking: "You think Jews control the country?"

The protester replied: "Yeah. They control the fucking country!"

"Oh, interesting."

"They control Wall Street! They control the banks! They control Hollywood! EVERY FUCKING BUILDING in New York City is owned by Jews!"

Davram walked up to the protester: "Hey -- I'm Jewish."

"I don't give a fuck!"

"You gotta get out of here."

"I ain't goin' noplace!"

"I control everything. You gotta go."

"I'm not goin' no fucking where!"

"You gotta go, I'm Jewish."

"Fuck you!"

"But I control everything, so you gotta go."

"Move me."

"I'm just sayin' ..."

"Aw, fuck you." The protested walked off.

Davram faced the camera and said: "So there you have it. Jews control everything. I was able to clear the square there. I just commanded him to leave, and he left."

I replied with a GIF of Hugh Laurie as Dr. Greg House, saying: YOU ARE GOOD.

[FRI 07 APR 23] CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (41)

* CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM (41): The 1970s saw the first stirrings of the digital economy. From the time of the introduction of the first solid-state computers around 1960, semiconductor device manufacturers had been working to develop "integrated circuits" that put multiple electronic devices on a single chip. By 1970, computers were being made of assemblies of "small scale integration (SSI)" chips, with dozens of solid-state devices each, and "medium scale integration (MSI)" chips, with hundreds of devices. The next step was to go to "large scale integration (LSI)", with thousands of devices on a single chip.

The first big consumer splash with LSI was the pocket calculator, which had become firmly established by mid-decade. Roughly in parallel, the first one-chip computer processors, or "microprocessors" became available, leading to the first personal computers (PC), most notably the Apple II, as well as to game machines. Game machines were dominated by arcade systems at the time; there were some home game systems, but they were much more primitive. Many of the PCs were oriented towards playing simple games. For the moment, the PC revolution had limited impact.

* In the meantime, the rebellion against Keynesian economics and the push towards libertarian economics continued, most notably in the person of Milton Friedman (1912:2006), an economist associated with the University of Chicago.

Friedman outlined his philosophical ideas in his book CAPITALISM & FREEDOM, a collection of popular essays published in 1962, which promoted "free markets" unfettered by regulation, with his essays focusing on subjects such as the role of government, money supply, social welfare programs, and even occupational licensing. More generally, he challenged "naive Keynesian theory", devising a new theory of consumption that proved influential.

Although Friedman adopted a libertarian philosophy, that's all it was: a philosophy. In practice, he was much more nuanced than James Buchanan, being more of a classic conservative, a believer in limited government, with distrust of big budgets and deficit spending, and with a suspicion of government social programs. That suspicion didn't amount to rejecting such programs completely: for example, he believed that welfare programs should to be replaced with a "negative income tax", effectively a basic guaranteed income -- a notion that libertarians would generally smear as "socialist". He was also an opponent of the "war on drugs" begun in the Nixon Administration, and an early advocate of drug liberalization. His analysis of stagflation was astute and influential. In 1963, Friedman and his colleague Anna Schwartz published A MONETARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, which was regarded as one of the best histories of the Federal Reserve.

Friedman was the effective founder of the "Chicago school" of economics, which promoted practical economics with a libertarian bent. The Chicago School faced off against the "Austrian school" of Austrian-born economist Ludwig von Mises (1881:1973), who was associated with New York University, built around a dubious philosophy called "praxeology", and with thinking much more on the lines of that of James Buchanan. The Chicago school became politically influential, with Friedman winning the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976, and now being ranked as one of the most important economists of his era. The Austrian school became the root of modern libertarian philosophy, and its influence would be less than benign. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 06 APR 23] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: In a recently-published study, Chinese researchers have announced that they have genetically modified mice to grow something like antlers. No, this is not an April Fool's prank; it was done for a specific reason, to investigate the biology of regeneration.

Deer antlers are among the fastest-growing tissues in the animal kingdom, growing at almost 2 centimeters a day at their most rapid, with antlers capable of coming to full size in a few months. The researchers transplanted deer stem cells onto hairless lab mice's foreheads, with tiny stumps appearing after about 45 days.

The transplanted cells were obtained from Sitka deer. The researchers began by decoding the genomes of cells within and by the antlers. They performed the analysis before, after, and during the shedding of antlers -- allowing them to pinpoint the exact "precursor blastema" cells that initiated the regenerative effects, and observe them in operation. They cultivated the precursor blastema cells in the lab, then transplanted them onto the heads of mice, who then grew stumps of bone and cartilage. Study leader Tao Quin believes the work may have clinical applications in the repair of bones, with some believing it could open the door to limb regeneration.

* In 2021, the US Air Force (USAF) signed a deal with startup Tomorrow.io to develop a constellation of small, relatively cheap satellites with rain-mapping radar. At present, there is only one platform in orbit doing that job: the "Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory" satellite, launched in 2014 by a collaboration between the US NASA and Japanese JAXA space agencies. GPM has the ability to observe inside cloud layers to help determine when and how much precipitation will fall.

The USA and many other countries have networks of ground-based precipitation radars, but many other countries do not. Rei Goffer, a former pilot in the Israeli Air Force and the cofounder of Tomorrow.io, says:

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Tomorrow.io's first satellites are scheduled to launch by the end of 2022, and the company hopes to have the full constellation of approximately 32 small satellites operational by the end of 2024. It takes the GPM's core satellite, two to three days to "refresh" a scan of the entire planet. Tomorrow.io is aiming to get that refresh rate down to once an hour. The weather data will fill in the gaps in coverage, and also permit better forecasts.

* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Cosmic Magnet Recreated In Lab As Alternative To Rare Earths" by Michael Irving, 25 October 2022), the rare-earth minerals are important in the production of magnets for electric motors, notably for electric cars. Lindsay Greer, a materials researcher at Cambridge University in the UK, comments that rare earths pose problems -- most notably because China has a chokehold on the supply at present, but also because of other issues:

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Greer's research group at Cambridge has investigated a promising alternative named "tetrataenite". This mineral is an alloy of iron and nickel arranged in a stacked crystalline structure, with magnetic properties similar to those of rare earth magnets. Iron and nickel are of course more common than rare earths and easier to process -- but tetrataenite itself is not common, mostly being found in meteorite samples.

Trying to synthesize tetrataenite has proven difficult, the material being formed at a very slow rate. The Cambridge group did a careful analysis of tetrataenite and found it contained traces of phosphorus. They then mixed iron, nickel and phosphorus together in specific quantities, and found that tetrataenite formed up to 15 orders of magnitude faster. Greer says:

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There still remains the question of how well tetrataenite will work in making permanent magnets. Research continues.

[WED 05 APR 23] LOSER XI (5)

* LOSER XI (5): In a related article from BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK ("An Unhinged Putin Is A Warning to China and Xi" by Clara Ferreira Marques, 6 October 2022) began by discussing Putin's 70th birthday in October:

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There are parallels between Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Xi is only a few months younger, and now has been given a third term in office -- breaking a precedent that was established precisely to head off a cult of personality and over-centralization. Is China headed down the same path as Russia?

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Xi may be able to leverage off the ingenuity of the Chinese in a modern information-based society to keep the country afloat, and there does seem to be a major element of theater in his belligerence against Taiwan. China has not fought a shooting war in decades, and the wretched performance of Russian forces invading Ukraine has made it clear to Xi that the conquest of Taiwan would be very expensive. However, he shows no sign of giving up that ambition -- even though Taiwan is being armed and reinforced at a rate ensuring that an invasion becomes ever less practical.

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Crackdowns on big Chinese corporations don't encourage economic growth, but Xi clearly believes that compliance is more important. There was little hint of contrition for the crackdown on the private tutoring industry, as well as the extreme pandemic lockdowns. There was a time when it seemed like China was unstoppably going from strength to strength. Now it hardly seems so unstoppable. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 04 APR 23] SLEEPING BRAIN

* SLEEPING BRAIN: As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("One Brain Region Teaches Another During Sleep", 11 November 2022), much about the human brain remains mysterious. We know how its basic elements, the neurons work, and have a general understanding of the functioning of the brain's different regions -- but all the details in the middle remain obscure.

Using a neural network computational model, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have been probing how the brain processes new experiences during sleep time. They have discovered that between "rapid eye movement (REM)" and "slow [brain] wave" sleep cycles, sections of the brain interact in ways that are key to memory formation.

Anna Schapiro -- a neuroscientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania -- studies learning and memory in humans, specifically how people acquire and consolidate new information. She's long believed that sleep played a part in that process, with she and her colleagues performing lab experiments, recording what happens in the brain as test subjects sleep. Her team also builds neural network models to simulate learning and memory functions. Schapiro says:

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However, not much was known about why that happened. To investigate, the researchers used their observations of test subjects to put together a neural network model composed of a "hippocampus" -- the brain's center for new memories, tasked with learning the world's day-to-day, episodic information -- and the "neocortex" -- responsible for facets like language, higher-level cognition, and more permanent memory storage. During simulated sleep, the researchers can watch and record which simulated neurons fire when in these two areas, then analyze those activity patterns.

The team ran several sleep simulations using a brain-inspired learning algorithm they built. They report that as the brain cycles through REM and slow-wave sleep, which happens about five times a night, the hippocampus teaches the neocortex what it learned, transforming novel, fleeting information into enduring memory. The simulations revealed that during slow-wave sleep, the brain mostly revisits recent incidents and data, guided by the hippocampus, and during REM sleep, it mostly reruns what happened previously, guided by memory storage in the neocortical regions.

Dhairyya Singh, a doctoral student involved in the research, says:

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He adds that the alternation between states is important in the process:

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Schapiro says the work still needs to be experimentally validated, and that the model was based on an adult who got a good night's sleep. It may not reflect people who have anomalous or bad sleep habits. It also doesn't say much about children, who generally don't have the sleep habits of adults. Nonetheless, she feels the work is significant:

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The researchers believe that a better understanding of the role of sleep stages in memory could help inform treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders for which sleep deficits are a symptom -- and, on the other side of the coin, give hints for improvement of artificial intelligence system. Research continues.

[MON 03 APR 23] THE WEEK THAT WAS 13

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As discussed previously in this column, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been engaged in a contest of wills with Disney Corporation, whose Orlando Disney World is a major attraction, and employer in the state. DeSantis threatened to take over Disney's self-run Reedy Creek Municipal Improvement District -- but that proved impractical, since it meant the state or some other Florida municipality assuming Disney's big municipal debt. That failing, DeSantis satisfied himself by appointing a new state oversight board, made up of Right-wing culture warriors, to ride herd on Disney.

That immediately led to the question of how a state oversight board focused on the operation of the Reedy Creek District could have any influence on Disney policy. Apparently, the new board could in principle make trouble for Disney -- and so in February, Disney worked with the then-existing board to mark out what the board could do and what Disney could do. The result was to give Disney total control over the development of the district, and also denied the board to make use of any "fanciful characters", such as Mickey and Donald and Goofy.

Brian Aungst, a member of the new board, called Disney's actions "a naked attempt to circumvent the will of the voters and the will of the Florida legislature ... We're going to have to deal with it and correct it."

Good luck with that, since it is unlikely that Florida courts will regard attempts by state officials to whimsically control a private company as legitimate. Incidentally, the agreement obtained by Disney is, as per its verbiage, valid until "21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England." Such "royal lives" clauses have been found in legal documentation since the late 17th Century, and they are still found in some contracts in the UK, though rarely in the USA. It appears to have been added as a lawyer's prank.

* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Russia's Population Nightmare Is Going To Get Even Worse", 6 March 2023), Russia's invasion of Ukraine has proven a disaster for both countries. Even though the war has not done much damage to Russia on its own territory, it substantially accelerated an ongoing population decline.

Over the past three years the country has lost around 2 million more people than it would otherwise have done, as a result of war, pandemic, and exodus. The life expectancy of Russian males aged 15 fell by almost five years, to the same level as in Haiti. And because so many men of fighting age are dead or in exile, women now outnumber men by at least 10 million.

The country reached peak population in 1994, with 149 million people, dropping to 145 million in 2021 -- and on the trendline, will be only 120 million in 50 years. Population decline is not unique to Russia: most post-communist states have seen dips, though not like this. Their declines have been slow but also manageable. Russia's population in recent decades has seen a precipitous slump, then a partial recovery, followed by a renewed fall. The decline was largest among ethnic Russians, whose number, a 2021 census said, fell by 5.4 million. Their share of the population fell from 78% to 72%.

That was before the war and the COVID-19 pandemic. Exact Russian casualties of the Ukraine War are not really known, but could be as high as 250,000 -- while from 500,000 to a million fled the country. Official Russian statistics give the number of COVID-19 deaths as less than 400,000, but nobody believes the official statistics, with estimates giving three to four times that number. Russia may have had the largest death toll in the world after India, and the highest mortality rate of all, with roughly deaths per 100,000 people.

It is not so surprising, then, that the Russian invaders have taken to kidnapping Ukrainian children, though it is still appalling. There is no prospect of conditions for Russia improving as long as Putin remains in power -- and even his eviction is unlikely to change the grim realities faced by what was once a great power.